Kneel Before Zod

Turner Classic Movies’ online catalog entry for J.F. Lawton’s 1991 noir satire Pizza Man reads, merely: “The story of a jaded pizza delivery man.” Sure. And Ulysses is just some guy walking around Dublin. A perennial favorite of the early-1990s, pre-Jon Stewart, pre-South Park Comedy Central rotation, Pizza Man stars the porridge-faced American comedian Bill Maher as Elmo Bunn, a Los Angeles pizza deliveryman who, while desperately trying to recover $15.23 he’s owed for a large pie, unravels a massive real estate scandal, engineered by no less than Donald J. Trump (played by actor Simon Richards, whose sole listed IMDB credit is Pizza Man). Despite the contemporary, lamentable, cultural prevalence of figures like Trump and Maher, Pizza Man is the sort of movie that you don’t see very much anymore. One review called it “a sophisticated political satire,” and hailed Maher as “a hairy-chested macho guy with a great sense of humor,” both of which are pretty wishful thinking. Nevertheless, the very idea of audiences paying money to see Bill Maher square off against broadly caricatured figures like Trump, Michael Dukakis, Dan Quayle, Ronald Reagan, former LA Mayor Tom Bradley, and Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone feels like a notion zapped in not only from a bygone era, but some other, weird dimension.

Exhibit B: 1988’s The Naked Gun. The seminal action comedy by David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams opens in Beirut, with a meeting of conniving world leaders: Idi Amin, Fidel Castro, Mikhail Gorbachev, Muammar Gaddafi, Yasser Arafat and Ayatollah Khomeini, all rendered in slapstick, potentially offensive caricature. “Gentleman!” the Ayatollah barks over the din. “If we do nothing else this week, we must conceive at least one terrorist act!” The meeting is broken up by Los Angeles “Police Squad” officer Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen), who proceeds to capably (and extrajudicially) bust up the meeting, using the Supreme Leader’s face like a speedbag, before clumsily falling out of a Persian window. Compare this to Akiva Schaffer’s recent Naked Gun reboot, which sees Liam Neeson—playing the son of Nielsen’s boobish flatfoot—squaring off against a conniving technologist played by Danny Huston, who is scheming to use smartphones to engineer a great civilizational reset. Huston’s villain is an all-too familiar contemporary type: a vaguely Muskish, Thiel-like “tech bro” billionaire.

The ubiquity of this archetype has already been commented upon, extemporaneously. Of 2022’s Matrix: Revolutions, Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri wrote that, as contemporary pop culture bad guys go, “the tech bro is fair game because everybody despises him.” As far back as 2018, Guardian critic Angus Harrison noted that “the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos” have changed “the face of villainy.” It’s not just that the tech bro villain is by now cliché, it’s that they seem to have supplanted any alternative. You don’t much see movies where America’s real-life antagonists get bopped in the nose, smacked in the nutsack, or poked-in-the-eyes anymore. Wherefore the Stooges of yesteryear?

It may be that Hollywood cinema’s gaze no longer extends across the vistas of real-world geopolitics, or there may be no external foe to cast in these roles. There is no longer a foreign “elsewhere” where we can displace our anxieties. America is the imperial, authoritarian “Other.” We are—to paraphrase a bit from the British sketch comics David Mitchell and Robert Webb, in which two Nazi officers take inventory of all the skulls and lightning bolts on their uniforms and begin to question their own moral standing—the baddies.

Goofing on foreign power had been a top priority of Hollywood film comedy since at least the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup in 1933. Set in the imaginary, vaguely Central European-coded nation of Freedonia, the film tackled the vicissitudes of war and absurdities of international diplomacy in the so-called “interwar” period. More specifically, Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator and the Three Stooges’ You Nazty Spy both satirized the avaricious desires and madcap mannerisms of Hitler in 1940 (and, in the case of the Stooges, Mussolini and Hermann Göring too). This was still the period of American neutrality, and Der Fürher was typically depicted as an arrogant, barking-mad buffoon, not a genocidal maniac. Not that stupidity and evil (as we learn anew every day) are mutually exclusive.

Later, Cold War satire was practically a tool of American (or, more generally, western capitalist) soft power. Everything from Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) to Sly Stallone’s Rocky IV (1985) offered broad, even xenophobic depictions of the communist Eastern Bloc, ranging from the drunkenly sloven to the robotically cold and calculating. The first Gulf War saw Saddam Hussein satirized in everything from Hot Shots! (1991) and its sequel (1993) to the cottage industry of bootleg T-shirts depicting Bart Simpson squaring off against the Iraqi dictator. South Park, of course, made Hussein into a recurring villain: a perverse, power-mad gay man with a bisected, madly flapping head.

These examples are by no means exhaustive. But there was a time not so long ago that cartoon satires, Hollywood comedies, and even burly boxing dramas took direct aim at specific incarnations of foreign power. Contemporary villainy, by contrast, feels a bit queasier. As Ebiri wrote in Vulture, it may be a product of “a Hollywood understandably wary of offending international audiences . . . or unintentionally wading into hot-button political debates.” Early advertisements for 2022’s long-gap flyboy sequel Top Gun: Maverick riled Chinese authorities, thanks to the inclusion of a Taiwanese flag patch on Tom Cruise’s battered flight jacket. The worry within Hollywood was that Beijing would ban the film outright, substantially kneecapping its box office. Perhaps this is just a dismal (if relatively trifling) side effect of living in a multipolar world, where the “Pax Americana” feels increasingly brittle.

Even global espionage has been forced to revert to AI and billionaire bad guys. Instead of direct shots, or even broad satire, the realities of global power are framed in the abstract or with recourse to wistful nostalgia. The Mission: Impossible franchise (1996–2025) unfolds in a distinctly post-Cold War milieu, finding villains in generic arms dealers and, finally, in a rogue AI known only as “The Entity.” The films’ depictions of stealth Russian subs, or even a blockbuster sequence of the Kremlin exploding, feel vestigial, even a little sentimental. It’s even more pronounced in the post-Perestroika James Bond films, many of which are explicitly about the existential loss of meaning suffered by global spy agencies since the thaw. A rogues gallery of spurned Soviet generals and supervillains scheming to explode the global nuclear stockpile have been supplanted, in turn, by hackers, cold-hearted cardsharps, vengeful ex-MI6 agents, and madman media moguls conspicuously modeled after Rupert Murdoch. In a world where western democracy has engineered its great global triumph, the potency of meddling, oppositional historical villainy is drowned in the icy water of global neoliberalism.

Still, it’s not as though fresh ideological clashes never emerged through the fractures of the post-9/11 political world. Russia and China have returned, like rebooted movie bad guys, as global threats to American hegemony, and the very securities afforded by liberal democracy are themselves under siege by renewed strains of nativism and political “populism.” Francis Fukuyama be damned, good ol’ history is revving back to life with a vengeance, or else slowly sputtering towards its total exhaustion. If the 1990s were victim to a kind of “end of history” vogue, our current period exhibits a certain homesickness for this vogue. History may not be over—but boy, we sure wish it was.

Yearning for the end finds an ideal villain in billionaire heels and sentient supercomputers. They embody the values of the liberal, capital, highly technologized West in cartoonish excess. Their villainy is not a matter of ideology but of proportion. Global communism, as depicted across decades of spy thrillers and high-octane action blockbusters, was an existential menace to be completely uprooted or nuked to smithereens. Computers and their programmers just need to relax. A given do-gooder’s task is merely to rein them in: super-heroism as a kind of muscular government oversight.

Akiva Schaffer’s new Naked Gun is in clear conversation not only with the previous Naked Gun parodies but with Neeson’s own screen image, developed in films from Taken (2008) to Non-Stop (2014) to The Commuter (2018) to The Marksman (2021): a scowling, aging rogue with a special set of skills, administering extrajudicial justice hither and yon. A running joke of the original Naked Gun films was always that Nielsen’s bungling not-so-supercop did more harm than good. In the reboot, that subtext bubbles closer to the surface. Schaffer builds gags around Neeson’s Frank Drebin Jr. behaving badly under the watchful eye of his body cam; asked if he knows about Miranda Rights, Neeson’s character defers to Sex & the City: “I’m pretty sure it’s Carrie that writes. Miranda is a lawyer.” Or take this exchange, between Neeson’s cop and a bartender played by pro wrestler Cody Rhodes, which yokes the rat-a-tat humor of the Zucker/Abrams/Zucker comedies to an era where police ineptitude has greater significance:

Bartender: You don’t remember me, do you?
Frank Drebin, Jr.: Should I?
Bartender: My brother. You shot him in the name of justice.
Frank Drebin, Jr.: It can be literally thousands of people.
Bartender: You shot him in the back as he ran away.
Frank Drebin, Jr.: Hundreds.
Bartender: Unarmed.
Frank Drebin, Jr.: At least fifty.
Bartender: He was white.
Frank Drebin, Jr.: So you’re Tommy Roiland’s brother! How’s he doing?

Back in the days of Axis vs. Allies, when moral delineations were more clearly delineable, D.C. Comics’ Man of Tomorrow, Superman, stopped squaring off against local Metropolis gangsters, corrupt politicians, and venal mining moguls to do battle with America’s far-flung nemeses. Even before America entered WWII, Superman was zooming around Europe, plucking up Hitler and Stalin (still a Nazi ally at the time), and depositing them before a League Of Nations judge in Geneva. By 1942, Superman’s radio serials explicitly aligned him with what would become his longstanding trifecta of values: “Truth, justice, and the American way.” It was a slogan that, as Samantha Baskin has noted in the Smithsonian Magazine, explicitly foregrounded Superman’s “patriotic commitment to the values of his homeland.” It’s a commitment that seems be wavering.

James Gunn’s recent summer blockbuster reboot Superman was a welcome, somewhat unexpected, corrective to certain trends. For one, it’s the rare modern superhero film that dares to be stupid, in a Saturday morning cartoon way that fits the genre. For another, it staged Superman’s trembling American patriotism in the shadow of actual current events. The inciting incident sees Superman breaking rank with the American military to support the made-up nation Jarhanpur from its made-up, U.S.-backed neighbor, Boravia. With its rather obvious coding—Jarhanpur is impoverished, brown-skinned; Boravia boasts an advanced military and seems bent on steamrolling Jarhanpur from across rickety border fences—the film invited numerous comparisons to Israel’s American-backed military actions against Palestinians in Gaza. Boravia’s leader (played by Croatian-Danish actor Zlatko Burić, perhaps best known as a sociopathic crime boss from the Pusher films) evokes Benjamin Netanyahu. Supervillain Lex Luthor’s sub-plot to bulldoze Jarhanpur and turn it into his own fiefdom likewise chimes with President Trump’s stated plan to raze the Gaza Strip and redevelop it as a glitzy Middle Eastern Riviera resort. Professional commentators across the internet debated the subtext (or lack of), with socialist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker declaring it “two hours and, like, ten minutes of fuck Israel the entire time.” 

It’s probably a little credulous to look to comic book movies for coherent politics. But the new Superman at least gestured in the direction of blind patriotism being precisely the problem. Superman’s struggle is ostensibly against the unfathomably wealthy tech-psycho Lux Luthor and his deep bench of robots and genetically souped-up “meta-humans.” But the Big Bad is the American Way itself. Of course, during his first term, Trump was a minor pop culture villain. His likeness loomed in minor liberal kitsch canon entries like the Showtime miniseries The Comey Rule (2020) and Everything is Fine (2020), a Netflix special by comedian Sarah Cooper, who made her career merely lip-synching to Trump speeches. Elsewhere, more searching-if-quite-stupid critiques of American power have been relegated to the sleazier domain of B-movie, Dadcore action cinema. In David Ayer’s The Beekeeper (2024), a creaking Jason Statham plays a former government assassin roused out of retirement to bust up a complex phishing scam designed to bilk well-meaning seniors of their savings, which somehow goes all the way to the corrupt White House. Earlier, in The Marksman Liam Neeson played a Vietnam vet who loses faith in the motives of U.S. Border Patrol when he rescues a migrant child from Mexican cartels.

It’s an uncomfortable laugh, for sure. But Naked Gun’s depiction of a cop who is not just hapless and boobish but corrupt and racist as its supposed hero provides both critique and catharsis. It’s not Danny Huston’s mugging tech bro billionaire who stands as the film’s most reprehensible character. It’s Drebin the younger. And the film offers countless lustral images of his humiliation and degradation. Even film’s promotional trailers used rapper KRS-One’s “Sound of da Police” (“Woop-woop! That’s the sound of da beast! . . . The real criminal are the C-O-P!”) not as warning but as a kind of theme song.

Given the broader withering of American authority and its leaders’ seemingly inexhaustible capacity for both violence and buffoonery, is it any wonder that Naked Gun strikes a chord? As political satires go, it’s probably not quite as “sophisticated” as Pizza Man. But it’s a self-poke in the eyes, a blow to the nation’s nutsack. Naked Gun is the rare modern film to pronounce—through wall-to-wall jokes about Pam Anderson’s buttcheeks and unchecked police brutality—that, yes, we are the Freedonians, the Boravians, the baddies.