No Other Choice and the Poverty of Cargo Cult Satire
Another entry in the growing genre of films that mistake the aesthetics of critique for critique itself
Park Chan-wook’s latest film, No Other Choice, is beautifully shot and frequently funny.
According to Rotten Tomatoes it’s also a “wickedly clever takedown of the corporate rat race.” RogerEbert.com says it “hides commentary on how workers are being forced to go to extremes to stay alive when they’ve been given no other choice.” For The Guardian, it’s about “economic and masculine insecurity—and the victims of neoliberal capitalism turning on each other rather than the real villains.” The Associated Press captures the sentiment repeated across reviews: “it puts capitalism in the crosshairs.”
But a close viewing reveals there is no “takedown of the corporate rat race.” Capitalism might be in “the crosshairs,” but no shots are ultimately fired.
The movie operates under a set of implicit assumptions—that capitalism is a social ill, that there’s something sinister about the desire to increase process efficiency, that there’s value in the labor it takes to produce a thing, but not in the thing produced—that are never developed, complicated, or even acknowledged. It’s all set dressing for a show that does not take place.
In the wake of World War II, some Melanesian communities saw an influx of cargo from warring Japanese and Allied powers, who had built military bases and airstrips on some of their islands. When those bases and airstrips shut down, some of those communities formed what came to be called “cargo cults,” building replica airstrips and control towers from wood and straw in the belief that this would bring back the cargo.
Today, the term is often invoked to describe something that replicates the aesthetics of a phenomenon without understanding its mechanism. No Other Choice does exactly this: it uses the aesthetics of satire to signal that social critique is happening—there is anger, violence, and injustice along class lines—but doesn’t actually offer any.
The result is another cargo cult satire: a burgeoning genre that includes films like Mickey 17, Bugonia, Glass Onion, and Triangle of Sadness. These movies—and the effusive praise they often receive—reinforce a dangerous kind of moral and economic illiteracy, perpetuating cartoonish notions of how the world works. Movies—like all art—shape how we see the world. We should want more.
Set in South Korea, No Other Choice follows a middle-aged, middle-class family man who loses his job managing a production line at a paper mill and, struggling to find employment, decides to go on a killing spree, tracking down and then eliminating the men more qualified than him in order to secure a job.
He has “no other choice,” he tells himself, just as the Americans who acquired his company had “no other choice” but to retrench him. After bumbling through three murders, our antihero Man-su succeeds. He is put in charge of a warehouse where almost all work has been automated by machines and AI. He is the last human-in-the-loop, walking the dark factory floor alone, gleeful to have made it.
Man-su does in fact have several other choices, which he mostly doesn’t explore. He could consider a career outside paper production, for example. Or he could swallow the masculine pride he spends most of the movie choking on and leave his gorgeous house for an apartment.
But these choices are inconceivable to him, since they threaten his identity as a provider and a company man. By the time he turns to murder, a series of smart directorial decisions have led us to empathize with his frustration: “murder is bad,” we might think, “but he kind of has a point—the real villains are the nameless men in suits, who caused all this pain to begin with.”
There is a real and fascinating tension between Man-su’s free will and the constraints placed on him by the capitalist system in which he lives. Park, the director, knows this. Asked by NPR whether it’s “the job market or even just capitalism” that leaves our protagonist feeling dehumanized, he responds: “This is not a movie that puts all of those responsibilities on the system. In fact, I want to push the audience more to look into the individual sense of morality, as well.”
But audiences mostly don’t seem to have done this, since—despite Park’s intentions—the film doesn’t really explore this tension. Instead, it briskly establishes that the men in suits couldn’t care less about workers, and then shifts focus to unfurl its (fun and pulpy) plot. The question “to what extent do structural forces constrain individual choice?” is abandoned early on and never returned to. As the Financial Times notes (in an otherwise positive review), “you do sometimes have the nagging feeling that once you know the premise, you have already half-seen the movie. And set against the screams and pratfalls, subtler ideas can have a hard time being heard.”
Now, movies are not under any obligation to engage in nuanced social analysis. Nobody wants didacticism. Ambiguity’s often best. While most great films help us see the perspectives of characters of all kinds, complicating our notions of right and wrong and broadening our capacity for compassion, plenty of movies don’t do that and are enjoyable all the same. But inferring from its content, marketing, and reception, No Other Choice seems to want to provoke questions around personal responsibility even while it tonally excuses that responsibility because of structural forces. The result is incoherent.
In The New York Times, Jenny Odell writes that the movie “demonstrates the tragedy of a once-morally-intact character who so fully internalizes the ruthlessness of a system that he believes he has no other choice than to kill his fellow unemployed.” How do we know this man was once morally intact? Yes, he loves gardening, and his family. But we also learn during an argument with his wife that for years he abused alcohol, occasionally beating his wife’s child. These facts are not damning, necessarily, but they complicate the idea that Man-su’s actions are entirely explained by him having “internalized the ruthlessness of a system.” Capitalism didn’t beat that child.
Man-su’s initial job was to manage an industrial production process, which itself was the product of prior automation. This irony is never addressed. Nor are questions of whether his paper company adopting more efficient processes could be good for others in the world, because it can produce paper more cheaply or at higher quality. Both the movie and most of its critics seem uninterested in entertaining the possibility that capitalistic systems can produce anything good.
Instead, the system is presented as inherently sinister: its emissaries are villains while its victims lack agency. This portrayal of the world has been commonplace for years now; No Other Choice has nothing new to say, and offers little to think about.
Once you notice it, cargo cult critiques crop up everywhere. Two weeks ago, for example, Jon Stewart interviewed Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler, asserting (incorrectly) that “economics doesn’t take into account what’s best for society” and that “the goal of economics in a capitalistic system is to make the most amount of money for shareholders.” As journalist Jerusalem Demsas wrote of the incident, Stewart seemed to have “conflated the entire field of economics with a half-remembered, left-wing caricature of capitalism.” This is “merely a recent and high-profile example of a broader phenomenon: the rise of economics denialism across the political spectrum,” she writes.
Stewart is saying words. He’s genuinely upset. But his unwillingness or inability to grasp the fundamentals of what he’s critiquing, and his posturing—as if righteousness obviates the need for expertise—produces commentary that is ignorant and hollow. He can’t provide a takedown of economics because he doesn’t understand what he’s critiquing. No Other Choice can’t provide a takedown of the corporate rat race for the same reason.
When you paint with too broad a brush, you misunderstand the phenomena you hope to address. You lose the ability to distinguish the people and institutions that improve the world from the ones that harm it. You obscure the fact that choices are not made by abstract systems but by specific people, who should be held accountable for them. And you relegate agency to the preserve of the rich, depriving everyone else of the capacity to make choices, and the dignity that entails.
No Other Choice is undeniably entertaining. It has a madcap spirit, a fantastic soundtrack, and contains a few legitimately great scenes (the slapstick struggle around the first murder is a highpoint.) But being entertaining—being beautiful, even—is not the same as being clever.
The many critics who treat the movie’s violence as an inevitable product of structural forces, ignoring the role of individual choice, seem more interested in channelling frustration with systems toward bloodlust than assessing what’s onscreen. And while the movie’s creator speaks about his work with nuance, there isn't much nuance in the work.
At their best, movies cut at something true. Parasite was fantastic because beyond its formal beauty, it had a point of view, and explored an idea to its conclusion. It developed its premises and its characters, vividly illustrating how it’s easy to be nice when you’re rich, when it costs nothing. The White Lotus and Succession are both compelling because they deeply understand the people they skewer, teasing out absurdity and humor without losing sight of their characters’ fragile humanity. No Other Choice contents itself with caricature. We don’t have to do the same.