Post-Liberal Cinema in Five Films

In 1964, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky published the novel Hard to Be a God, which was later adapted into a black-and-white film by director Aleksei German and released to critical acclaim in 2013. Hard to Be a God, both the book and film, follow Anton, also known as Don Rumata of Estor, an undercover operative from future Earth sent to the alien planet of Arkanar, as he attempts to uplift humanity. The humans of Arkanar are stuck in the late Middle Ages. Don Rumata’s mission is doom-driven. What we see of Arkanar is filthy, covered in grime, mud, and blood. Life is unimaginably cruel. Don Rumata tries to save intellectuals to advance society, and in doing so, brings himself into conflict with the ruling factions of the Blacks and the Grays. The Grays, led by Don Reba, use poverty and ignorance to maintain their military power over Arkanar. For the Grays, intellectuals impede power. The Blacks actively hunt intellectuals; they are not motivated by power, but by a genuine hatred of critical thought and intelligence. Slowly, the Grays are being replaced by the Blacks. Thus, Don Rumata, left alone on a planet of savages, trapping themselves forever in the twilight of the Middle Ages, proclaims it hard to be a god amongst men, and retires to live amongst the serfs in the mud.

Written in the aftermath of the Manege Affair, in which Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev launched a crackdown on cultural production he saw as decadent, surrealist, pornographic, and abstract— great crimes in the U.S.S.R. — Hard to Be a God arrived onto the literary scene as a controversial and critical work attacking the state’s crackdown on intellectualism. The most fervent critics of Hard to Be a God were other Soviet artists who saw Soviet science fiction as having fascist and abstract themes. Despite this, the Strugatsky brothers were “safe” to publish their work. Their writing, though critical of the Soviet system and attacked by others, was permitted to be released because their novels, though critical of communism, were always more critical of Tsarist feudalism. The heroes of their works, such as Roadside Picnic, which inspired the popular S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise, are well-meaning, grizzled men doing their best to save doomed societies.

The villain of Hard to Be a God, Don Reba, was originally named Rebia, a play on Beria (nodding to Lavrentiy Beria, the secret police chief and pedophile who led Stalin’s NKVD during World War II). This casts, through veiled criticism, the villain of Hard to Be a God as the old elite of the Soviet Union, who were safe to criticize. The hero, Don Rumata, is a stand-in for the true communists of the U.S.S.R., whose critique of Soviet society was that it was not communist enough, not enlightened enough. For these reasons, the Strugatsky brothers, unlike Mikhail Bulgakov, the author of The Master and Margarita, were safe to enjoy for most of their careers. They attacked safe targets of the old regime and not the actual artists in control of state media who actually sought to censor their work. They did not make Bulgakov’s mistake of openly supporting the White Russians and celebrating Christianity. Only in retrospect do they appear as dissidents; if the Soviet Union had not fallen, the Strugatsky brothers would still be successful artists. The Master and Margarita, although far more critical of the Soviet system, as the book expressly defended Christianity, was heavily restricted in circulation and adaptation, and the author died under stress and illness in no small part related to his persecution. If the Soviet Union had never collapsed, Bulkagov would still be remembered as a dissident. All this is to say, Hard to Be a God, one of the great works of Soviet dissident literature and post-Soviet film, is not dissident at all, and in fact, was regime propaganda.

Turning to American cinema, although post-liberalism emerged as a dissident ideology only over the past decade or so, we can find films that nonetheless convey artistic, moral, and political ideas that are decidedly post-liberal, even if they are closely aligned with the regime. Like the work of the Strugatsky brothers, which was a form of art that was both confused and sympathetic to the regime (and yet in tension with it), American post-liberal cinema is contradictory and undeveloped. And, just as no Soviet dissident in 1965 would want to proclaim themselves a dissident, no American producing post-liberal art would proclaim their art post-liberal. So let’s take a tour of American cinema’s most post-liberal, intentionally and unintentionally, films. Films that smudge the screen and fudge the script, smuggling oddly conservative and dissident messages into otherwise mainstream films; or which, like Hard to Be a God, capture political and cultural tensions within American liberalism, that only appear radical through the bent lenses of history in retrospect.

Christmas with the Kranks

In 2001, Skipping Christmas by Josh Grisham hit the New York Times Bestseller list despite being a graphic novel and releasing less than two months after the events of 9/11. Director Joe Roth was a fan of the book and decided to adapt it for the screen—seeing it as a perfect Christmas movie—using a script from Chris Columbus, the writer of Gremlins and Mrs. Doubtfire. Starring Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis as Luther and Nora Krank, the film follows the social and personal consequences of their decision to skip Christmas and embark on a cruise. Their plans unravel when their daughter unexpectedly returns home, forcing them to scramble and revive their Christmas traditions with the help of their friends and neighbors.

Christmas with the Kranks is a mundane, cynical, and irreligious parable about the meaning of community. The film features no fantastical elements and little religious symbolism. What we learn through the film is that the individual choice to go on a cruise is actually a social choice to abandon community. Through the cruise, Christmas with the Kranks critiques consumerism, vanity, and individualism. What motivates their cruise escape is the notion that after their child leaves the nest, the Luthers are free of all obligations. Their hopes are dashed by their daughter’s return. What gives the film an ironic twist that audiences frequently misunderstood is that, though the friends and neighbors of the Luthers devote cult-like attention to Christmas, Tim Allen is actually the antagonist. The cultish Christmas community is ultimately revealed to be the protagonist, holding Tim Allen’s Luther accountable to his duties to his wife, the Church, and his daughter. The community saves Christmas, thereby saving Luther from himself.

JD Vance, in How I Joined the Resistance, wrote, “I felt desperate for a worldview that understood our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral; that recognized that we are products of our environment; that we have a responsibility to change that environment, but that we are still moral beings with individual duties.” Is this not the thesis of Christmas with the Kranks? The lack of fantastical Christmas magic and divine intervention grounds the film’s message: social obligations may have no deep, divine meaning, but they are still moral obligations that, if fulfilled, improve life for everyone. For a publicly secular America of the 2000s, I imagine this unifying message resonated as it still resonates now for a sometimes less-than-devout New Right that nonetheless embraces Christianity as an organizing principle of society. Like most post-liberal cinema, the film is ambiguous and confused. The film insists upon the unsustainability of community in the face of individualistic dreams. There is no vacation from social roles, such as fatherhood or motherhood, or being a good neighbor, despite Carnival Cruise promising you there is. The film is critical of consumerism, but does not levy a full critique; the film is not religious, but negatively portrays nudity, tanning, and immodesty as vain sins against the Church. Tim Allen’s Christmas oeuvre is conservative, but Kranks stands out as the most post-liberal and the most direct commentary on consumerism, community, and family. Unlike the high fantasy of The Santa Clause, which simplifies the message at the heart of the film, Kranks stands apart as a strangely multi-dimensional commentary on our duties and responsibilities towards others.

The protagonist actually being the antagonist is a theme that will continue with our next Kino pick for post-liberal cinema: Jerry Seinfeld’s Bee Movie.

Bee Movie

Bee Movie follows Barry B. Benson, a bee who feels unfulfilled by life in the hive, and so ventures into the human world, befriending a florist, Vanessa Bloome. When he discovers that humans are exploiting bees for honey, Barry rallies his fellow bees to sue the human race, leading to unexpected ecological consequences that can only be averted with the heroic and collective efforts of the hive. A modern retelling of the Prodigal Son, the plot of Bee Movie is that an idealistic young man (read: bee) full of wanderlust is convinced by an alluring, self-righteous florist to collapse the global ecosystem in a deranged pursuit of justice. In escaping a life of admirable toil, hard work, and family, he selfishly pursues individual desires to the detriment of society. Ignoring his mother and father’s pleas for sanity and using accusations of racism as a weapon against the legal system, Barry Bee collapses the biosphere, and only through faith in collective action and a restoration of the conservative, honey-producing social order is the apocalypse prevented. If he had simply followed the rules, understanding the broader social, structural, and moral responsibilities he had inherited as a bee, none of this would have ever happened. Bee Movie is a strange, memetic masterpiece, whose appeal, I think, stems from the contrast between the genuinely paleo-conservative social and political message at the heart of the film, awkwardly in tension with late 2000s CGI and Jerry Seinfeld voicing a bee. The film feels too serious to be a CGI movie about a bee.

Jerry Seinfeld’s political views have changed as America has. Though he began his career as a Jewish comedian making headway in an avowedly Protestant majority-white country, he is now, just like American Protestants, on the back foot, increasingly isolated by mainstream culture for his conservative social views on masculinity, for his support of Israel, and for his distaste for PC comedy. Jews in America, like Protestants, have watched the nation radically change in their lifetimes. What would have been just another movie about heroic insects in 1997, similar to A Bug’s Life, instead became a deeply out-of-place movie about the value of the conservative order of the hive in 2007. I do not even think Jerry understood exactly what he was satirizing. Perhaps he did not consider that A Bug’s Life is adorably parochial and has no great stakes. A critical plot point in the film is that Barry B. Benson uses accusations of racism to win a pyrrhic victory in court, which, though cheered on by judges and journalists, nonetheless collapses the ecosystem.

Like Christmas with the Kranks, Bee Movie portrays individual bad behavior as simultaneously social and personal, structural and moral. Bee Movie is a far more confused film than Christmas with the Kranks. As one notable oddity, the film concludes with one of Barry’s friends opening a law firm for animals to sue humanity, despite the film’s demonstration of the literally apocalyptic consequences of tampering with the social order. Like Hard to Be a God, Bee Movie sympathizes with idealists who try to change the world; yet, as a film, it is incapable of recognizing that the regime actually in charge is an idealistic one, not a conservative one. The actual villain of Hard to Be a God is the idealistic human government that sends scientists on a doomed mission to build an enlightened society in hell; just as the actual villain of Bee Movie is not the conservative Southern lawyer, but the justice system, which prioritizes liberal rights over the actual functioning of life on Earth. One can see certain events in the summer of 2020 foreshadowed by Bee Movie. This is the most interesting element of Bee Movie: the conflict between social justice and having a functioning society, of bee-reparations in tension with the need for pollinated flowers. And this theme is left almost wholly unexplored. We are left with the vague notion from Barry B. Benson’s erstwhile human love that without work and order, beauty dies, and there will be no more flowers. And yet, Vanessa spent the entire film insisting that bees have the right to let all flowers die. I imagine a more legalistic mind than my own could write about 10,000 words on this topic alone, about how the “penumbras of the Constitution” have been bent in queer directions. I don’t think Jerry planned on making a film for Adrian Vermeule.

Gangs of New York

Liberal artists often fail to write compelling immigrant stories because they shy away from exploring the real cultural differences between Americans and immigrants. They treat differences as superficial markers, flags, and food, ignoring deeper divides in values, morality, governance, and the roles of the public and private spheres. Storytelling thrives on tension, yet liberals, by erasing these differences, struggle to depict the conflict inherent in immigration narratives. In Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese aimed to chronicle Irish migration to America, but inadvertently created a post-liberal critique of liberalism’s shallow view of American culture. In the film, Amsterdam Vallon returns to the Five Points seeking revenge against Bill the Butcher, the nativist gang leader who killed his Irish father. As Amsterdam infiltrates Bill’s circle, he navigates a brutal world of gang warfare, corruption, and betrayal, culminating in a violent clash during the 1863 Draft Riots, where he kills Bill at Bill’s request. Scorsese portrays Bill’s nativism as mere ethnic prejudice, driven by blood and soil rather than ideology or faith. Bill rules a hellish, impoverished underworld with no redeeming qualities, surrounded by Irishmen, Chinese, and transvestites. This depiction frames Bill not as a defender of American identity but as a deranged individualist in a chaotic favela. Scorsese suggests ethnic rivalries dissolved under federal power, yet this resolution feels hollow.

By portraying 1850s society as already multicultural—complete with transvestites and Chinese in Bill’s club—Scorsese implies the Irish-American conflict was merely about power and longevity, not religion or culture. This flattens the real historical tensions of education, religion, and corruption that divided Irish immigrants and Anglo-Germanic Americans. They were actually different and had distinct cultures. Scorsese’s liberal lens erases these differences, reducing the story to a cynical struggle for ethnic dominance. The film’s post-liberal critique emerges unintentionally: it depicts a morally vacant society where the state enforces unity, and individuals act amorally, driven by survival. Liberals, like Scorsese, avoid portraying one group’s morality as superior, fearing it strays into dangerous territory. Yet this avoidance reveals their view that society lacks moral character at all. Maybe they just do. Perhaps they are indifferent to the consequences of failed cultural integration because they lack a distinct cultural identity. How different is Bill the Butcher from Amsterdam if they both tolerate Chinese, transsexuals, and blacks in their clubs, and could live and work, day in, day out, next to each other without issue? In the real world, different people have real differences. In Scorsese’s telling, the point is that they are not really different, but actually, they were. Just as there were almost no Chinese in New York in 1850, and no transvestites at the Know Nothing clubs, the Irish and the Anglo-Germans were not actually the same. Scorsese imagines the past to be the present in disguise.

Post-liberalism emerged under pressure to defend American identity against liberalism’s escalating assaults on social life, the market, and public governance. Scorsese’s Gangs of New York communicates to the audience that there is nothing in America but a succession of ethnic conflicts, ended at different times by federal intervention. The film’s politics are deeply confused, portraying federal intervention at the end of the film less as the righteous fist of Lincoln’s government and more as the strongest tribe conquering other squabbling tribes. This is an incredibly cynical vision of a nation, but it is an accurate depiction of how liberals understand American history and themselves, and how they understand the moral logic of their project to engineer a multicultural elite. They view any resistance as merely white supremacy, as merely Bill the Butcher’s cold indifference to the Irish plight.

Pop culture’s admiration for Bill the Butcher reflects Scorsese’s failure, highlighting the film’s unintended dissidence. In the context of an atomized multicultural society of individuals, Butcher appears less as a nativist than as a Nietzschean hero, building a kingdom in the mud. Butcher appeals to the revanchist libertarianism and vitalism of the new right and is relatable to young men in America who feel that they have had to become brutal Americans to survive a more hostile country. Because he could not portray ethnic difference, and therefore could not portray ethnic conflict, Scorsese had to make his film a family drama of revenge, and in doing so, changed Bill from a nativist into a Nietzschean. Scorsese unintentionally portrayed the hollowness of the liberal narrative of immigration, assimilation, and the state, and in doing so, made an accidentally dissident film that affirmed the necessity of the brutal striver. Gangs of New York is a parody of how liberals imagine immigration and nativism, which nonetheless justifies the striving individualism of Bronze Age Pervert’s pirate lords, who form a kingdom in the atomized society that liberalism has left us. Is Bill not a man among the ruins?

Whereas Gangs was an accidental parody that nonetheless affirmed the Brutal American, our next film was accidentally a comedy intended to be a parody.

Starship Troopers

Most science fiction is, in some way or another, literally post-liberal. The films are set after the era of liberalism. Starship Troopers is even more post-liberal, depicting a world after a fascist coup. According to Verhoeven’s account, he interpreted Robert Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers as fascist, nationalistic, and totalitarian. Growing up in Nazi Germany, he sought to create a film that critiqued these themes through satire. Verhoeven made a critical error. He took fascism too seriously. Liberals and leftists sort of think that the right doesn’t understand that Starship Troopers is satire, that Verhoeven is making fun of them. Jean Raspail, in The Camp of the Saints, wrote that, “The true Right is not serious. This is why the Left hates it, rather like a hangman must hate a victim who laughs and jokes on his way to the gallows. The Left is a conflagration that devours and consumes in deadly earnest. All appearances notwithstanding, its parties are as grim as one of those parades of puppets in Nuremberg or Beijing. The Right is a flickering flame that gaily dances, a jack-o’-lantern in the gloomy forest reduced to ashes.” In the public discourse on Starship Troopers, we can see Raspail’s insight endlessly echoed: the left takes itself too seriously, the right does not.

Like many liberals in the postwar order, Verhoeven adopted the strange and excessively dour belief that any expression of nationalism or patriotism, from polite flag-waving to military parades, was indistinguishable from fascism. He misunderstood the self-concious irony in patriotism: that patriots don’t take themselves too seriously. Most people marching garishly in epaulets know it’s a bit silly. In trying to satirize something self-consciously and proudly silly, he simply created a fun comedy that fails as satire but succeeds as a film. He envisioned his film as a form of inoculation rather than a comedy. Like Scorsese’s Butcher, Verhoeven’s Rico is not meant to be a heroic figure, but they end up being heroic nonetheless. Both directors, in their attempt to capture right-wing culture and aesthetics, inadvertently parody liberalism because they lack an understanding of conservatism. Artistically, their parody can only express what they actually know: liberalism. Like Scorsese’s hollow portrayal of American history as a succession of ethnic rivalries, Verhoeven’s depiction of the horrors of fascism, which is that occasionally there are veterans without limbs and unnecessary wars, feels totally empty, given that a liberal regime gave us veterans without limbs and unnecessary wars. Hard to Be a God sought to portray the struggle of intellectuals in an authoritarian world, but in doing so, portrayed the authoritarians incorrectly, as Beria, rather than as the other Marxist artists who most fervently adhered to Kruschev’s crusade against bourgeois decadence and actually threatened the Strugatsky brothers. A true dissident Soviet film would have attacked the artists, but since the artists controlled state media, a true dissident film could not be made. Similarly, Scorsese and Verhoeven choose the wrong villains: nativists and “fascists,” but in so doing, tell us exactly how hollow the liberal and progressive imagination is. Scorsese’s nativists were actually multicultural liberals fighting over kingship of the favela, and Verhoeven’s fascists were actually Bush and Obama. As accidental critiques of liberalism, both these films are post-liberal masterpieces despite the authors’ intentions. Verhoeven and Scorsese, by way of failure, just like Anton and Boris Strugatsky, unintentionally communicate the hollowness of the regime they are nonetheless so comfortable being “dissidents” within.

The Ninth Gate

This is the least well-known of all these films, and is the most spiritual. In The Ninth Gate, Dean Corso, played by Johnny Depp, a rare-book dealer, is hired by a wealthy collector to authenticate a mysterious book linked to satanic rituals. His quest across Europe uncovers a trail of murders and occult conspiracies, leading him to question the book’s true power and his own role in a dangerous supernatural game. What begins as his journey to validate a book’s authenticity ends with his own descent into murder, lust, and mayhem, as he completes the rituals required to ascend to the ninth gate, opening a portal never meant to be opened.

As a political project, post-liberalism flirts with true belief in demons. I am not a believer, really. But neither is Johnny Depp’s character, Corso, in The Ninth Gate. And in the language of the film, that is exactly the perfect figure for temptation: the skeptic, drawn to mystery, incapable of restraining their curiosity. If post-liberalism is the notion that the state should govern with a moral vision of society, The Ninth Gate is a film about how evil functions in society. The worst evil is not the odd cult or even the devoted Luciferian, but the skeptic, the curious, who, in their quest for knowledge or liberation, become murderers or worse. In our world, the educated and elites can wreak social havoc very efficiently, far more comprehensively than any lone criminal or deranged freak. The worst abuses of liberalism do not come from the margins, but from the very centers of power, dominated by well-meaning, curious minds. Johnny Depp’s Dean Corso, driven by curiosity, becomes a murderer and opens a portal to a radiant, shriving hell. In Corso, we see the figures of Barry B. Benson and Luther Krank, two characters who, like Corso, were incapable of restraining their curiosity and selfishness, and as a result, almost lost the world and destroyed themselves. As political actors, post-liberals may be willing to consider that devilish machinations are at work in the world. Ninth Gate is thus a warning that what really poses a threat to a rightly ordered world is well-meaning, curious people, rather than murderers, cultists, or prostitutes. If the price of knowledge is murder, cults, and prostitution, the curious person will become all three in a day. The beast prefers good servants.

The camera work of The Ninth Gate is an artistic masterpiece that takes a neutral and distant point of view. This is because you are watching the film from God’s cold perspective, observing the fall of one of your children. And the child that should concern you the most is not the lustful or greedy or power-hungry one, but the curious one, who cares more for knowledge than human life. After all, what caused man’s fall to sin was not lust or anger or pride or greed but sheer, simple curiosity. The film is an observation of the fall and a commentary on the figure of Lucifer, as lightbringer. Whereas all our other films are empty of religious content, barring Barry B.’s Judaism and shallow nods to Catholicism in Gangs of New York, Ninth Gate is a deeply religious film. The Ninth Gate will resonate with the modern viewer who is sympathetic to post-liberalism, having known one or two Dean Corsos in their life. People who, in their pursuit of knowledge and liberation, have become estranged from normal humanity.

For a time, we lived in a more ironic and secular world, and many people who have adopted post-liberal attitudes have done so after a long journey through the barren fields of liberalism. For many, post-liberalism is less animated by faith than by a cold, hard-won awareness that religion is necessary for us to have any common, decent society. Post-liberals can, on purely secular grounds, arrive at the conclusion that Christianity is essential for the common good. And that is indeed where the secular Kranks and Bee Movie seem to arrive, affirming community and hive without any religious or moral depth, purely for the social good. But not Ninth Gate. The Ninth Gate arrives there by the belief that there is an actual beast at work in the world, and that without faith and so restraint, the beast wins. Make of it what you will that Roman Polanski was the director.

A Cinema of the Unintended

Post-liberal film does not exist. No director has set out to make a post-liberal film. Just as no Soviet director set out to make dissident Soviet cinema. Soviet cinema became dissident in retrospect because the Soviet Union collapsed. If our Master and Margarita is The Camp of the Saints, our Hard to Be a God is Christmas with the Kranks. We are not in a “post-liberal” moment, analogus to a post-Soviet moment, but many of our films nonetheless capture the irreconcilable tensions at the heart of American liberalism: the unsustainability of faith and family in the face of individualism and consumerism, the conflict between boundless rights and bounded nature, liberalism’s tendency to flatten the differences between people, all the while heightening ethnic tensions through mass migration, and the inability of the left to grasp the right, or make the barest concession to tradition.

And behind it all, the lurking fear, sharply felt in the American mind, which is a religious one, that there might be some greater forces at work, best left alone beyond what tattered veils remain.