Citizen Vigilante (2026)
Now gather round, children, and let me tell you about the state of entertainment media in this year of our Lord 2026. I don't enjoy doing it, but I figure someone has to.
Like some ancient evil long thought vanquished, German director Uwe Boll rises from well earned obscurity, reanimated by the sinister magick of the all powerful right wing establishment. Now, there is a chance, at this point, the name Uwe Boll might not, or only very faintly, ring a bell. Boll made a name for himself in the 00's as a prolific director of licensed video game movies, releasing movies under titles such as House of the Dead, Dungeon Siege, Bloodrayne or Far Cry (Contrary to popular belief, he did not actually direct the old Doom movie with The Rock or the Max Payne movie with Mark Wahlberg ). Boll is remarkable, not for his work as a film maker, which he can hardly be considered one, but for his surprisingly canny business strategy. I read an in depth analysis once, that I can't find anymore, but the short version is, Boll utilized a combination of tax cuts, tax loopholes, government grants, creative accounting and studio financing to produce, on a shoe string budget, movies that could effectively turn a profit, well before they even went into production. Back then I was amused by how distintctly German this approach felt. In Germany, a culture where everyone thinks they're an entrepreneur and everyone ends up a middle manager, where producing art, of any kind, is considered to be "for queers", this approach to film making as an abstract business venture whose actual product is of no consequence , feels as natural as it is depressing.
In other words, Boll might be the quintessential German film maker. Does it cheap, does it quick, knows how to turn a profit, spares no thought on what is actually being made and makes sure to get paid before even lifting a finger. Accordingly, his name became synonymous with poor film making, lacking the sincere ambition and genuine investment in his own work of someone like Tommy Wiseau, he never managed to even make it as a cult figure. Not for lack of trying, of course, he tried to lean into the bit for a while, starting arguments with critics and challenging them to boxing matches. Attempting to reinvent himself as some lovable buffoonish tough guy who's in on the joke, except nobody cared, because the joke wasn't funny. So, as it stands, his reputation, even among famously talentless film makers, was somewhere at the bottom next to Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg. As the tax loopholes that allowed him his fordian (and I don't mean John) productivity closed, his name threatened to fade into obscurity.
That is, of course, until the current golden age for frauds, hucksters and con artists of any coloeur and the mass media establishment that welcomes them with open arms got started. Where the well for straight to video/DVD/BluRay/Streaming shovelware might have run dry, there's one that seems practically inexhaustible at the moment: Racism. So, Citizen Vigilante is the story about an American real estate mogul ("Lone Ranger" Armie Hammer) who kills non-white criminals in Europe and the government officials who protect them.
Citizen Vigilante is a fascinating movie, not as a work of art and entertainment, which Boll continues to show no significant understanding of, but as a manifesto for the currently dominant currents in the western culture industry and its social engineering efforts that are much more interesting than the load of amateurishly directed Boll-ocks that is the movie itself.
If one follows the news, definitely here in Germany, I imagine in most of Europe, one will find that there is a tremendous effort taken to frame violent crime as something inherently foreign. If one were to read a news article about any sort of violent assault, and if that article permits reader comments, the vast majority of them will be insisting most empathically, that the perpetrator will be of foreign origin, even if there is no actual information on the identity of the perpetrator given at all in the actual article. Whether we assume these comments come from real, flesh and blood people, which is, of course, dubious to begin with, what is being cultivated is a pavlovian association between violence and foreign (specifically non-white) origin, respectively victimhood and whiteness. This leads to a public discourse, or at least the perception thereof, where whiteness is synonymous with innocence, if not victimhood, and brown-ness with guilt. Tiered brown-ness, of course. East Asians are sometimes guilty, particularly the Chinese. Slavs are often guilty. Middle Easterners and Blacks are inherently guilty. Meanwhile, Western European Whites are always innocent and only capable of violence in self defense of violence commited by non-whites. As it happens, it is my personal belief that one of the only valid arguments against the ban of far right extremist political parties (the ban of which I support, make no mistake) is the fact that their promises of violence might serve as pressure valve to deter direct violence against women and minorities by European Whites. Although, as the increasingly regular racist pogroms in Britain show, it's hardly reliable as such. What is projected onto White Europe, however, be it Germany, France, Britain or Israel, is a Christ-like victimhood on the hands of a violent, barbaric horde whose darkness of character is reflected in their darkness of skin. So, when Boll frames his rampage of revenge of a white American, America here seen as an avenging angel that can retain the inherent righteousness of white Europe, while not being beholden to its peaceful nature, it's clear that he longs for violent purges.
Well. It should be of little surprise that a movie with this messaging, after being banned from distribution in some countries, like Germany and Britain, has now been picked up by Elon Musk to be watched for free on Twitter. Now, if you still maintain an active account on Twitter, I ask you to take a break from reading this post, request that accounts deletion, go to your bathroom, soak a towel in water and use it to flagellate yourself for about 40 minutes before continuing. It should also be no surprise that this single handedly catapulted Boll back into something like relevancy, if only as a shambling undead servant of the white nationalist plutocracy that controls the media. And there is something to be said that this plutocracy has such a holistic control of the media, that they can even drag an Uwe Boll movie into something resembling cultural relevance.
While Musk, certainly a better example of a criminal who can't be brought to justice by regular means than any of the ones depicted in Citizen Vigilante, definitely has a lot of leverage to draw attention to a movie that has no marketable qualities aside from pushing a pro-establishment narrative, it also speaks for that establishment's success in cultivating an audience that will not only accept, but ask for it.
In the past, propaganda, with varying degrees of success, was packaged with a thick layer of competently, sometimes even artfully, produced entertainment to make it palatable to audiences who expect to... well, be entertained, watching a movie. Someone like Boll being embraced as a purveyor of propaganda, is a clear sign that there now is an audience who will watch propaganda for the sake of propaganda, regardless of any entertainment value it might hold. Over the last 10 years, moreso than building up its own media apparatus, the rightist establishment has built up a closed ecosystem of media critics. Which here means, influencers which will assess a piece of media, mainly film, television and video games, not on any standards of production quality, artistry and engagement, but based on its conformitiy to the accepted party line, while convincing their audiences that these are synonymous. The current state of these audiences is best analyzed by their often repeated slogan "Go woke, go broke." On face value, this means the assumption that if a piece of media shows attributes they deem contrary to their philosophy, i.e. featuring positive and aspirational depictions of ethnic, sexual and gender minorities, or efforts to undermine the, in their view natural, supremacy of the white, the male, the heterosexual and the cisgender, these are predisposed to a lack of commercial success, as the regular audience recognizes these attributes as unnatural and therefore objectionable.
The reason this holds true occasionally, apart from overt cognitive dissonance, of course, being the fact that most people who would appreciate the attributes they define as "woke" in media, expects media that displays these qualities to still have artistic or at least entertainment merit, to have a professional production and compelling writing, direction and production. Meanwhile, audiences who see the absence of these attributes as a selling point, will consume any piece of media, regardless of its production and production value, as long as it maintains its, and by extension affirms their, ideological purity. To the point they will voluntarily sit through an Uwe Boll flick, not for wonder and entertainment and beauty, for it provides none, but for the satisfaction of having affirmed their own identity as loyal disciples of the white nationalist gospel, of letting their minds be cleansed and their brains be washed by divine truth of white victimhood, non-white guilt and liberal and leftist treason.
By modern standards, Uwe Boll might be the perfect purveyor of pro-establishment propaganda, as the quality and craftsmanship ceases to be a concern and ideological purity reigns supreme, his lack of skill, or interest in actual film making, and his ability to produce content in great quantities and at a low price, are valuable attributes for a creator of artless, propagandistic slop. Plentiful enough to satisfy an audience trained by the critical establishment to not only accept but embrace it. The only bitter pill, of course, being, that this process is becoming increasingly automatized. While the intended audience might appreciate his work as a novelty, both his audience and his wealthy patrons have thrown their weight behind AI content creation. Rightist philosophy, by and large, considers the humanity of art a flaw. they see the presence of the creator in the work, the expression of their personality, their aspirations, their interests and quirks, as a flaw of the product, rather than its essence. Modern rightist thought thinks of LLM's capacity to create sound and images and text based on the users description as a filter to remove that impurity, to remove that nasty, messy, gross component of the authors individuality that stand between them and the platonic ideal of content they were trained to enjoy to consume.
So, what is the future of Uwe Boll as a propagandist in the world of Musk and Trump and Thiel and Dugin, their ideals endlessly affirmed and imprintend onto the audience by CriticalDrinker and Asmongold and Joe Rogan? If the platonic ideal of "art", for them and their subjects, the only one that is still permitted to be made, is the image of a boot stamping on a black mans, a brown man's, a muslim man's face, what happens to the man holding the camera when he is no longer needed? When he might linger just a few seconds too long on that face, its expression of suffering, and provoke sympathy in whatever part deep inside the audience remains unmolested and retains some flicker of the capacity for compassion? Is he not, then, a liability easily cut off, replaced with an image generator that delivers exactly what it is told to? Is a human creator not a detriment to propaganda, when the message has become its own purpose and art is to be avoided whenever possible? When the generation of the image without that middle man is also a boon to the economic and anti-environmental (I'm writing this, dear reader, on a 40° C evening on the tail end of the most devastating heat wave in recorded European history... as of yet.) interests of his patrons? Does Boll not need them more than they need him? Or will they throw him a bone, give him a desk in some Ministry of Culture, for his dedication to the cause? Either way, no one needs Uwe Boll. He never was an artist and he will never be remembered as one, the best he can hope for is to be remembered as a sockpuppet, not a Joseph Goebbels, not a Leni Riefenstahl, hardly even a Hans Steinhoff. A pathethic man, poor in talent, poor in character and poor in legacy. Citizen Vigilante is a movie bereft of qualities past its capacity to reflect the absurd values deemed correct and admirable by the dominant forces of the society that produced it back at it.
I spent this entire blog post talking about its actual content as little as possible and frankly, that's the greatest favour I can do it. It serves as nothing more than a brutal insight in the creation and distribution of art in the time of modern fascism. An age that values uglyness and didacticism over beauty and critical thought. A grim perspective on a possible future where this will be the only "art" we're still allowed to have. Maybe one day we will look back at it as a grim testament to the spiritual poverty and moral depravity of the 2020's, but there will likely never be a day when it'll be watched for entertainment, sincere or otherwise.
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