Pfister, Joel

I unpack several American movies that shed light on a social system reliant on reproducing complicity. Besides making the Big Picture bigger and more complex, they spotlight the socially-transformative uses and scope of complicity critiques, provoke us to conceptualize systemic complicity, and dare us to imagine what Martin Luther King, Jr. meant by (keeping our eyes on) “the prize.” Also, they invite us to reconsider the ways in which some feel-good-about-feeling-bad attestations of complicity can be complicit—partners in crime—in perpetuating the social contradictions they seem to oppose. They include Selma (2014), Medium Cool (1969), and The Gladiator (2000), and four movies about the Great Recession: Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), Inside Job (2010), Assault on Wall Street (2013), and The Big Short (2015). These films help us heed Ona in Women Talking (2022, Sarah Polley), who focuses on remaking the system that produces complicity (hence the need for complicity studies): “Perhaps we need to understand more what it is we are fighting to achieve, not only what we are fighting to destroy.”