In the two years I have been running the Who Critiques the Critics? segment of Indy Film Library, I have perhaps been guilty of a little snobbishly overlooking micro-video. But while I stumble over three-thousand-word essays about Christopher Nolan’s conservatism, ReelTakesReviews’ Dan Monaghan is taking politics and pop-culture in his stride, to show that the future may well be short.
At the end of my review for Indy Film Library, I questioned who Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey was really speaking to. While it is certainly a reflection of conservative mythmaking, many of its warnings could just as easily be interpreted as offering the masses a subversive insight into the playbook of dominant ideology, as a means to counter it.
I was having a little too much fun with my interpretation, I have to acknowledge. Now, I am in little doubt that Nolan is actually the honest conservative he is so often accused of being– thanks to what I have since learned about the film’s production. A portion of the production took place in the Western Sahara – an area of occupied land, annexed by Morocco following the exit of Spanish colonial authorities, and held onto for the extractive enrichment of Morocco’s own ruling class. That Nolan would countenance treating the area’s vistas as just another material to extract for profit – alongside its natural minerals and fishing rights – for shots which could have easily been replicated elsewhere, is indicative of a businessman who is far more interested in easy plundering, and less interested in introspection of that process, than his film would suggest.
But how did I hear about this? There is an excellent Guardian article that has been doing the rounds – but for whatever reason, that was buried in my news feed. No, my first contact with the story was on ReelTakesReviews – the short-form video blog masterminded by US critic and creator Dan Monaghan. Monaghan’s video highlights the article, and relates it back to his own review of The Odyssey, noting a disappointment that a film so heavily centring on the violence of colonialism undermines itself seriously, by normalising the occupation that leaves around 200,000 displaced Sahrawi people living in refugee camps, and those who remain in the Western Sahara forbidden to make their own films.
This is the take which made me decide to finally write a ‘Critiquing the Critics’ on Monaghan’s work – not just to think about his work, but to explore how his work highlights some of the ways the rest of us occasionally let ourselves down. When we talk about the politics or meaning of a cinematic project, we often stop at what has literally been in front of us – the movie, its texts and subtexts. We interpret what is on show, in what can be an incredibly subjective process of analysis – and that subjectivity often leaves us open to being written off (frankly sometimes in bad faith) with takes that claim, as we cannot really know what a filmmaker hoped to mean with any given text, it is better to abandon this attempt at deconstruction, and simply enjoy movies as entertainment, or escapism.
The thing is, movies don’t just happen in a vacuum. They are (at least in the mainstream) the result of asymmetrical socio-economic relations, where thousands of artists are forced to sell their labour at less than its value, to studios who profit from that energy. In this case, every film is in itself political – because the enrichment of those people, who own large parts of their means to production and distribution, hinges on exploitation. It therefore follows that there are obvious stories and interests which are given priority within that system – either in the hegemonic sense, where the norms of that billionaire ownership class are inherently treated as natural and desirable (because “how else could they have become so powerful, they must be getting something right”) or in a directly oppressive sense, where capital defunds its own critiques.
Production is political
ReelTakesReviews keeps the political nature of the production of movies at its heart – and so while Monaghan does happily engage in picking apart the ideas and constructs of Hollywood’s output (excellent on-going threads include Hollywood’s repeated de-radicalisation of Robin Hood, and the Israeli history underpinning the X-Men comics), he underwrites it with regular analysis of the material relations at the heart of every production. This yields a comprehensive critique that is rare across any cultural criticism – but especially in the short-form sphere where he has come to prevalence.
The ReelTakesReviews label boasts 116,000 subscribers on YouTube, 224,000 followers on TikTok, and 56,000 on Instagram. Those might not sound like ‘big numbers’ in a world where many influencers are in the millions, but how many followers do most of us have on those spaces? We’re lucky to scrape and scrounge our way out of the 100s. So, to have brought in hundreds of thousands of regular viewers with unashamedly cerebral takes on popular culture is no mean feat – indeed, it should make Monaghan a celebrated figure for progressives.
Not least, because the ability to explain production politics or cinematic analysis in a couple of written sentences is challenging for most of us, to put it kindly. But the ability to do so in seconds, during a micro-video, is truly miraculous. Monaghan has managed this, though: in part because of his prolific output, meaning he can expand upon or make reference to his sweeping body of work – meaning viewers can happily fall down a rabbit-hole whenever something a video touches upon piques their interest – but just as importantly, because he has an excellent understanding of how to break up these points of theory and practice, and relate them to topical cultural moments which resonate with both casual and dedicated movie-goers.
Admittedly, there are restrictions to this format. Sometimes, Monaghan can come across as slightly flat, and impersonal in his delivery. I have maintained with my fellow critics at Indy Film Library that if we are to critique the failings of others, we should be willing to offer a little insight into our own fallibility – which can humanise our messaging, make it clear our criticism is grounded in lived experience rather than an ivory tower, and also help the audience to understand the subjective angles from which we are reading a text. The time each ReelTakesReviews episode takes means any such fat is trimmed out, however, and leaves what can feel like a rigid and cold narration. That’s something which Monaghan clearly breaks free from in Good Will Podcasting, which he co-hosts; as well as in a fantastic, wide-ranging interview he gave on Get Your Popcorn (an under-appreciated show I’ll be talking about in the near future) – and could really add an extra dimension to ReelTakesReviews by doing some less scripted takes on there too.
Even so, that’s rich coming from someone who has never broken a subscriber count of 400 on any platform, and whose voice is regularly compared unfavourably to Richard Ayoade. What is more important than this discussion around form, is the content the current mode of ReelTakesReviews is popularising successfully. And, again, showing the political process behind the culture, as a means to getting us to think about similar processes which shape our everyday lives, it is positively revolutionary.
As mentioned, this is amply illustrated by the production-centred take on The Odyssey, which follows on from several others outlining the film’s ideas. Elsewhere, after walking us through movies like The Backrooms, he takes aim at A24 – a company which has cultivated a reputation as an indie-darling, committed to storytelling and art, but is ultimately a for-profit company, willing to exploit and undermine anyone necessary in order to deliver on that front. With “a Kushner on the board”, with huge amounts of capital being poured into the firm for ‘innovation’, Monaghan reminds us that it should not be a surprise that A24 is throwing in its lot with the AI bubble now. Nor should it shock us that since A24 is firmly part of this production system, it has not been forthcoming in picking up Luca Guadagnino’s completed film – billed as a Social Network style portrait of OpenAI’s petulant baby of a CEO Sam Altman – which is without a distributor.
Beyond film
Monaghan also admirably uses his platform as a gateway, to prime his audience for thinking critically about politics beyond the silver-screen. Considering the new ownership of TikTok, or the increasing meddling of YouTube in content it feels advertisers may object to, this risks the comfortable life which – should he continue to build his following – might present itself to Monaghan. That’s a siren’s song that has seen many other critics baulk at the idea of commenting on real-world politics.
In contrast, coverage of stories around the US bombing of Iranian civilian targets has led him to face censure on TikTok – his largest presence. In one post with the description “The ICJ attacks from the U.S. aren’t a coincidence, because more of this is coming”, Monaghan uses an atrocity committed during the bombardment of Iran as an opportunity to detail a litany of civilian massacres also committed by American troops, spanning decades. A comment on his own video notes, “This was immediately taken down on TikTok, and got me a community guidelines violation.”
In another, he sticks his neck out to support New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who correctly described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Nettanyahu as a war-criminal. That speech has led Mamdani to face threats of prosecution and arrest from the Trump administration and the ‘Department of Justice’ – while US Congress pushes forward measures that will criminalise all such sentiment. This is a platform on which if you speak freely, you can lose everything – and that has cowed many cultural commentators into silence – but he is not afraid to risk that, and to help introduce these talking points to his followers.
It would be wrong to say he uses Hollywood as a Trojan horse, because the Hollywood aspect is part of the same ideological struggle – it’s just one particular place where people are still engaged in having an active opinion, in the years since the rolling back of their enfranchisement. It’s meeting the people where they are. And being willing to do that, rather than simply settling for building a large enough following to meekly plug VPNs and mobile phone games between movie reviews, is commendable.
The problem that he faces is an age-old one, though, which is where to go from here, when it comes to approaching Hollywood through a radical lens. It is all too easy to treat the commentary as the action – and for deconstructing culture to become the aim, rather than inspiring wider community application of the ideas discussed.
So far, I’ve not found a moment where ReelTakesReviews really offers a suggestion of what is to be done. All these issues are broadly something to be mindful of, to remember when voting in one form or another. Don’t pay to go to see a movie. Don’t put your mark next to this representative at the ballot-box. The focus on primarily elite discourse, of films and culture distributed by society’s rich and powerful, is that you limit the amount of grass-roots engagement you can expose your audience to.
In the short-term, offering up the tools to help audiences see the world in a new way does not empower his audience in the way it might. But – with such a gift for quickfire explanations, and tying popular culture, production and politics together – in the long-run, I suspect there is more to come from Monaghan on this front.
