American Society & Hegemonic Power

We began with The End of Poverty (Philippe Diaz, 2008), which takes us back to 1492 to ground the U.S. economic order in its imperialist origins. By linking conquest, colonialism and slavery to modern poverty, the film reminds us that wealth is always political — first through land and empire, later through markets and capital. This history feels topical, when the richest people in the U.S. (and by extension the world) are not only shaping markets but installing their own kind into political office (remember Elon Musk buying Twitter for 44 billion dollars to help install Trump as the US President). The billionaire class has become both sovereign and subject, ruling as oligarchs while presenting themselves as populist saviours. Closer home, we see how India’s 'Billionaire Raj' may be more unequal than the British Raj, as wealth concentration grows hand in hand with authoritarian politics, evident in Thomas Piketty’s research on inequality.

From there, Merchants of Doubt (Robert Kenner, 2014) and Starsuckers (Chris Atkins, 2009) brought into focus the industries of persuasion that sustain neoliberal power. These films show how advertising, public relations, and celebrity culture transform politics into spectacle. Citizenship dissolves into consumerism, while public opinion is engineered not by deliberation but by distraction. The convergence of corporate media and political theatre is now impossible to miss: leaders emerge less as representatives and more as brands, avatars through which neoliberal capital speaks. This is why political charisma is increasingly indistinguishable from celebrityhood, and why campaigns around the world resemble product launches.

Layering this further with The Corporation (Joel Bakan & Harold Crooks, 2003), we encounter the central institution of modern life. By granting corporations the legal rights of 'persons' without the responsibilities of citizens, modern capitalism has birthed an entity that dominates every sphere: healthcare reduced to profit margins, education commodified and the environment plundered. The documentary lays bare what we now see playing out daily: the Oligarchs of the 21st century preside over a system where populism and fascism function not as contradictions but as complements — one distracting, the other disciplining, both preserving capital’s rule – using corporation as an entity to organise and control.

In American Dharma (2018), Errol Morris dissects the project of Steve Bannon, a political strategist, who weaponised cinema itself to craft narratives of resentment, paranoia, and messianic nationalism. Here, the Right’s objective becomes clear: to manufacture an “enemy within,” to cultivate conspiracy as a form of common sense, and to channel public misery into racialised violence. Errol Morris demonstrates how Bannon and his network use mass and social media tools to manufacture a worldview based on fear and hate. This culture of fear has travelled far beyond America. Alison Klayman’s The Brink (2019) follows Bannon in his daily life, meetings, and his briefing with global leaders - Nigel Farage, Georgia Meloni, Viktor Orban and other luminaries of the far right spectrum across the world. The eerie moment in the film is when Bannon remarks why muslims own so many businesses in London – remarking about banks running on the principles of Islamic finance. Bannon as a phenomenon is examined and the intricacies of the American right wing ecosystem and its linkages to the reactionary international is brought to the fore.

In India too, the 'Other' is constantly invoked, every year the harshness has increased post 2014 whether in campaigns against minorities or in the rewriting of books, even as structural crises of debt, unemployment and hunger deepen.

Other films — Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job (2010), and Robert Reich’s Inequality for All (Jacob Kornbluth, 2013) — show the American Dream collapsing under the weight of financial crises, corporate corruption, and historic inequality. They remind us that when bubbles burst, when recessions hit, it is always ordinary people who are left to pay. The echoes in India are unmistakable. The 2024 election season, electoral bond revelations showed mining giants like Vedanta and billionaires like A***i & A****i underwriting the ruling party’s dominance. The nexus between capital and politics is no longer hidden; it is flaunted. What is sold as an entrepreneurial free market is, in reality, an incentive structure for greed, rewarding monopolies while dismantling welfare states and democracy alike.

These lessons are not abstract. In Odisha, Adivasi families excluded from food security schemes continue to battle hunger (close to 80% of our population is dependent on food aid); some have resorted to eating poisonous mango kernels last year and losing their lives. Unemployment and distress migration persist in the face of glossy narratives of development. Farmers and workers, recognising their shared dispossession, mobilise together against a state that increasingly serves corporations rather than citizens. The neoliberal script of endless growth has only deepened our vulnerability to cyclones, famines, and displacement, while our political parties — regardless of colour — protect the billionaire class as guardians of 'progress'.

Globally, the patterns repeat. Reports speak of Elon Musk and Nigel Farage plotting new alliances in Britain, of Trump preparing his second act with McCarthyite zeal, of tech billionaires strutting into the corridors of power from Silicon Valley to Brasília. Commentators describe this as a 'new era', but the films we watched remind us that the script is an old one: wealth seeks power, power manufactures spectacle, and spectacle justifies inequality. What changes is only the mask.

The documentaries viewed and discussed in this series sharpen our sight. They help us connect dots between the streets of Wall Street and the paddy fields of Odisha, between the disinformation campaigns of American elections and the hunger of Adivasi villages. They reveal that neoliberalism is not just a global order but an intimate one: present in our ration shops, our universities, our debt traps, and our silences. And they leave us with a pressing question: if citizenship is reduced to spectatorship, how long before the moment passes us by?

This viewing also becomes a collective meditation on how Odisha’s position within India mirrors India’s position within the global economy—marginal, extractable, dispensable, yet constantly being told that it can be more if it just integrates better, reforms faster, competes harder. And here too, we find the cultural scaffolding of the empire: the illusion of democracy in an atmosphere of spectacle, the hollowing of institutions, the constant framing of dissent as chaos. Watching these films from this landscape made it impossible to treat them as warnings for elsewhere. They are a grammar we already speak, often without realizing it. They map how consent is manufactured, not just through state repression but through images, aspirations, and everyday forms of forgetting.

In a time where cynicism is easy and forgetting is encouraged, this act of collective watching, remembering, and naming felt quietly liberating. It allowed us to not only trace the routes of power, but to locate ourselves within them—not as passive observers, but as those who must imagine, and fight, for another world.