L’Atelier du peintre. Allégorie Réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique (et morale) (1855) (via Wikimedia Commons)
Two years ago, I wrote an article for Damage magazine about the rise of politicized art criticism: a vague popular tendency to treat movies and TV shows as a symbolic reflection of—or allegory, metaphor, homology, etc. for—society.
This tendency takes for granted a kind of causal relationship between socio-economics and art, wherein art can be decoded as a kind of mirror of the institutions, practices, tendencies, or other dynamics of capitalism.
This perspective has a long and complex genealogy that connects it to, among other things, Marxist criticism. But whereas Marxist criticism was tied to a range of institutions and political projects—chiefly, the Actually Existing Socialist states—the new criticism reflected the anarchic and unprincipled nature of contemporary digital Leftism.
Back then, I observed that:
Reviews are flooding the culture sections of niche and mainstream publications, digital and hardcopy alike, as writers search out covert agendas in the latest blockbusters. Princess Peach is scrutinized for her contributions to feminism, Joker forgets to mention the proletariat’s revolutionary character, and The Creator is dismissed as “demented propaganda” for “the coming AI onslaught.” Everything, it turns out, is an elaborate metaphor for capitalism—if Vox is to be believed, Minions: The Rise of Gru is onto some seriously deep shit.
In the piece, I termed this tendency social-ish realism. In saying so, I was drawing an analogy between socialist realism, the historic tradition of Marxist art and criticism that treated art as a vessel for documenting and transforming reality. This tradition was formalized and named as such in the Soviet Union, which fostered a broad tradition of politically-minded art, characterized by nationalistic themes and attempts to capture the spirit of working-class revolution. But broadly, many of the Marxists of the early twentieth century, including influential non-Soviet writers like TW Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer, subscribed to some version of the doctrine of realism.
See Also: How to Tell if One Battle After Another Is a Psyop
Modern criticism has distorted echoes of this tradition. Like the critics of old, the new critics interpret movies and TV shows as containing traces of social reality. And similar to those earlier critics, the new generation castigates those movies that fail to demonstrate a correct worldview: to accept that art is transparently and unproblematically social, and therefore, to model, critique, and provide alternatives to reality as we know it.
In researching that article back in 2023, I came across some truly weird examples, like a Rolling Stone review that proclaimed Barbie to be “the most subversive blockbuster of the 21st century to date” or a takedown of Oppenheimer for not praising the women who helped build a weapon that killed 200,000 people.
While the old political establishment has imploded in the last two years, social-ish realism has only become more pervasive since I wrote my piece. In 2026, writers claim that Marty Supreme is a “cinematic rendering of the Age of Donald Trump” and warn us not to watch westerns that were released 70 years ago lest we feel uncomfortable. Social-ish realism forms the underlying logic of politicized commentary on One Battle After Another, which was varyingly castigated or lauded for the way they seemingly reflect the critics’ social analysis and political agenda.
Many of these critics would not call themselves Marxists, and plenty of the more hilarious examples of criticism I’ve come across are written by people who lack any specialized training in interpretive theory.
Even so, lots of these same people have a pseudo-Marxist tendency in their work. Social real-ish criticism adopts a materialist-realist perspective and blends it up with a jumble of incongruous things: a lean-in girlboss feminism cheers on military scientists; liberal euphoria lauds Paul Thomas Anderson for trying to provoke the Revolution by telling an inspiring father-daughter story; and so on.
One could certainly produce a better form of criticism through more rigorous analysis or disentangling liberal reformism from revolutionary rhetoric. Even so, my article argued that even the early models of realism could get us into trouble. This is because the very notion that art inherently resembles the social world—a key component of realist thinking—commits us to a series of often-untenable claims about society, art, and the specific objects we are considering.
Given that this debate has only become more pronounced, I wanted to return to two sections of my Damage piece. There, I provide some thoughts about what is problematic about realism—particularly the reliance on homology, or analogy, as a model of critique.
Read on, or consider checking out the full article on Damage.
Realism in the Balance
Contemporary criticism is rooted in a tacit assumption that all films have important covert political meanings. That is to say, critics take for granted that social reality is not only visible when characters explicitly make progressive/reactionary statements, but also when the critic locates themes encrypted in the very structure of the work. In this spirit, contemporary criticism challenges us to look beyond the surface, finding submerged truths lurking in the depths.
This view implicates modern criticism in historical debates about artistic realism. The idea of cinema as a mirror of social reality is an old one, dating back to the early years of Left film criticism. The German film critic Siegfried Kracauer was a strong believer that art mirrored society and revealed its truths. In a series of 1927 essays, he argued:
Films are the mirror of the prevailing society…. In order to investigate today’s society, one must listen to the confessions of the products of its film industries. They are all blabbing a rude secret, without really wanting to. In the endless sequence of films, a limited number of typical themes recur again and again; they reveal how society wants to see itself. The quintessence of these film themes is at the same time the sum of the society’s ideologies, whose spell is broken by means of the interpretation of the themes.
Kracauer compared these repetitious and specular cinematic products with the self-consciously realist film, contending, “Films come into their own when they record and reveal physical reality…. Films are true to the medium to the extent that they penetrate the world before our eyes.”
Realism as a socio-cultural revolutionary style was not accepted by all Marxists, particularly after socialist realism was adopted as the official artistic style of the USSR. Kracauer’s friend T.W. Adorno was especially critical. He denied that film could “integrate photography and its derivatives into art despite the limitations defined by their dependence on empirical reality.” Instead, Adorno highlighted montage technique, which “goes beyond photography immanently without infiltrating it with a facile sorcery, but also without sanctioning as a norm its status as a thing: It is photography’s self-correction.”
The debate about realism touched every major artistic medium. A musician by training, Adorno set his sights on musical forms like jazz and framed avant-garde modernism as the antidote to mass culture’s stilted realism. In a similar vein, Ernst Bloch lauded surrealism for reflecting the disfigurement of reality in the modern age. Meanwhile, realism found advocates across the world, with Frida Kahlo, characterizing her art as “revolutionary realism” and CLR James treating the narrative of Moby Dick as a fundamentally realist depiction of the paradigmatic capitalist subject.
A Metaphor for Capitalism
Looking back on these texts today, it’s easy to feel a pang of nostalgia for their rigor and intensity. Even so, they sometimes illustrate the pitfalls of an interpretive practice that is so popular and reified today.
A diverse set of Marxist critics rooted their interpretive models in homologies, or analogies between two different structures. (The term homology is most common in science, as when similarities in the structure of bird bones are cited as evidence of evolutionary relationships.) In the case of art, homologies are made when someone compares or draws out relationships between artistic forms and social forms. Adorno’s jazz analysis, for example, suggested there was a meaningful resemblance between the standardized musical forms of jazz and the formulaic nature of assembly line commodities.
In their best moments, Marxist cultural critics made convincing arguments about how art mirrors life and distorts it for ideological purposes. But one risk with readymade homologies is that they can end up being arbitrary, since everything—from bird bones and jazz standards to buildings and the global economy—can be talked about in terms of “structure.” Critics have an easy time creating analogies between any two structures, but they tend to stumble when it comes to establishing a causal relationship or spelling out what that comparison might mean for revolutionary practice.
There is seldom a way to demonstrate that the nature of capitalist reality caused specific plot details in specific artworks. In the case of Adorno’s jazz analysis, there wasn’t literally a connection between the music and the factory. Songs were not produced on a Fordist assembly line or regulated by socially necessary labor time; they were composed by songwriters under a handicraft model common to any number of artisan-produced objects.
Given the fuzzy nature of homology, it can also be tough to follow early critics on their more fantastical political proclamations. When pushed against the wall, the realist critic György Lukács doubled down on the implication that an afternoon spent perusing a Thomas Mann novel would inspire the masses to take to the streets in support of the Popular Front. As he maintained, “through the mediation of realist literature, the soul of the masses is made receptive for an understanding of the great, progressive, and democratic epochs of human history.”
Over time, left-wing cultural critics such as those who worked in the Birmingham School adopted homology as a core analytic technique. In the 1980s and ‘90s, their model was combined with a watered down form of Frankfurt School critique, leading to a form of neo-realism that cast films, music, and other artforms as simple reflections of society and popular taste. The new realism that emerged forgets the political movements and the class struggle that accompanied the rigorous historical debates, keeping only the homologies and the high-flying rhetoric.
But Adorno, Kracauer, and others were debating the merits of German culture as the Nazis were issuing dictates about German culture. As Jewish writers forced into exile by fascism, they had a concrete reason to believe totalitarianism was woven into everyday life. And defenders of the USSR’s socialist realism were defending the regime they believed was the working class’ last weapon against fascism.
Today, there is no Party that functions as a guide for political culture. It has never been easier to pluck analogies at random from the critical grab bag, leading to a carnivalesque range of social critiques. And without the paychecks that the Soviets sent to Marxist researchers, critics can’t be particularly bothered to ask why a given movie is a homology for anything at all.
Read the rest of my article on Damage.