Abuse of Power Comes As No Surprise: A list of movies where the wrong people are in charge

Welcome to SENSUAL TERRORS: musings on creativity, movie culture, and some strange bits of life.

Like I said in my last film round-up, I spent my formative time in undergrad with art school lesbians — the kind that had dreads, wore Vans religiously and used SoundCloud. I spent a lot of time on Tumblr while in college. Chicken-or-the-egg type thing, right?

I got familiar with Cindy Sherman, Marina Abramović and Jenny Holzer of course. As I keep living through an APUSH textbook’s worth of unprecedented events every two months, especially in the information age, I keep thinking about the most iconic phrase from Holzer’s decades-long “Truisms” work: Abuse of power comes as no surprise.

I think there’s a reason why, like the equally punchy and thought-provoking work of Barbara Kruger, that Holzer’s truisms, including “Raise boys and girls the same way,” sticks out in my mind.

Writing for e-flux, ​R.H. Lossin points out that “making strange claims in the form of a brief declarative statement or maxim draws attention to the ways that sense becomes common (or doesn’t).”

Breaking down our main phrase in question, Lossin says that it’s obvious. “But then again, abuse of power is almost always a surprise or it wouldn’t be legible as abuse.”

Lossin goes on further to say: “And then we might ask: What power is not abusive?”

The following films remind us to ask that very question.

It’s ironic that a critical moment involving hegemonic structures of oppression IRL eclipsed the actual, serious press around the movie. And even then, the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregate for After the Hunt is overwhelmingly negative: