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COLUMN | Isn't It a Little Weird That Amazon is the Villain In The Boys and Fallout? | by Darren Mooney
🕑 Added 2024-06-23 15:00:14 +0000 UTC
It is a little strange that the villainous corporations at the heart of popular Prime Video streaming shows like The Boys and Fallout are basically Amazon, right? This is just a weird thing for a gigantic corporation to do, surely? To build two gigantic and expensive series about how the streaming service’s corporate owner is basically evil incarnate?
The Boys might look like a classic superhero show. Indeed, many of the characters conform to recognizable superhero archetypes. The Deep (Chace Crawford) is essentially a single extended joke about how pathetic Aquaman (Jason Momoa) is. A-Train (Jesse T. Usher) is basically the Flash (Ezra Miller). Homelander (Antony Starr) is recognizably a classic Superman archetype, presenting as an all-American hero with the powers of flight, strength and laser eye beams.
Indeed, there is something darkly funny in the fact that, between The Boys and Invincible, Amazon has effectively produced two separate superhero television shows built around the twist that their Superman archetype is really a villain. There is a grim joke in there, particularly given Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos’ resemblance to a certain iconic bald billionaire supervillain. The Boys and Invincible are exactly the sorts of shows that Lex Luthor would commission for his streaming service.
Of course, The Boys is about more than just superheroes. Showrunner Eric Kripke has consistently argued that The Boys is “a dark comedy” about “late-stage capitalism.” As he explained in August 2021, “The crazy, gonzo moments are just what’s on the front of the cereal box. What we’re really interested in is late-stage capitalism and white supremacy cloaked in social media and systemic racism.” That idea finds expression through the show’s framing of Vought International.
Founded by a former Nazi, Vought International is a multinational corporation that has its tendrils in absolutely everything. In the context of the show, its most prominent product is superheroes, including Homelander. However, it also operates studios, streaming services, book publishers, clothing lines, food producers, energy companies and various defense subsidiaries. As Charles Pulliam-Moore pointed out during the show’s first season, “It’s Amazon.”
Sure, it might not literally be Amazon, but there is a strange sense of familiarity in watching Vought’s corporate machinations. Amazon also produces its own media, hosts its own fashion line, owns its own studio, has bought food distributors and has even signed defense contracts with the government. The company has invested heavily in Washington, increasing its lobbying spending by more than 460% between 2014 and 2019.
Amazon reported $143.3bn in revenue in the first quarter of 2024. It pays no federal corporate income tax. For point of contrast, twelve annual instalments of $8.1bn would be enough to end homelessness in the United States. Jeff Bezos earns over $23,000 every minute, meaning that he earns the average American annual salary every three minutes. The company has leveraged its massive power in the industry to completely quash any challenger or even seller under its heel.
Of course, Amazon isn’t in the superhero game, but there are echoes of that to be found at the edges of the company. In particular, Bezos is engaged in “biohacking” and is reportedly obsessed with transcending humanity in a more literal way, through expansion into space. Later episodes in fourth season even allude to the company’s infamous labor practices, with posters in an abandoned Vought International factory promising, “Unions Can’t. We Can.”
Interestingly, The Boys isn’t the only current Amazon streaming show that includes a corporate villain that evokes the parent company. Fallout takes place in a postapocalyptic wasteland, the result of the sinister machinations of the Vault-Tec Corporation. Like Vought, Vault-Tec is a very diverse company with many different interests. Its tendrils even reach into Hollywood, recruiting actor Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) as a spokesman for their line of exclusive doomsday shelters.
Once again, this is not subtle. Syrus Solo Jin noted that Vault-Tec is effectively “a private, unregulated capitalist body with every appalling feature of present-day American corporations rolled into one.” Noting the “irony, given that it’s on Amazon’s Prime Video”, Neil Armstrong noted that the show very aggressively satirized both Big Tech and late capitalism. Vault-Tec might not resemble Amazon quite as closely as Vought, if only because it has been less well developed, but it is certainly familiar.
On the surface, it would seem counter-intuitive that the fifth largest company in the world (by market cap) should invest so much in shows that are effectively about how companies like Amazon are evil. If Amazon is to present versions of itself on-screen, then surely it would make sense for those depictions to be propaganda for the company, positive or even neutral depictions like the company’s appearance in Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland.
There is maybe something darkly funny in this. This is the most absurd timeline after all. Last year, writer and director Sam Esmail closed his apocalyptic Netflix movie Leave the World Behind with what is effectively a loving ode to the importance and the joy of physical media. Naturally, Netflix is now selling popcorn but remains “actively hostile” to the idea of releasing its films and shows on home media. Sometimes irony is just irony.
However, it seems safe to say that there is a larger trend at work. A lot of contemporary pop culture is openly suspicious – if not outright contemptuous – of capitalism as a concept. Amazon is far from the only streaming service to get in on this. Apple produces Severance, a show that – according to Alison Willmore – depicts “how cultish postwar American capitalism can look to anyone outside its beating heart.” Apple is the largest company in the world by market cap.
It isn’t as if these themes sneak into these shows by accident. These companies are not so careless as to be unaware of the content of their content. These corporations often have to be more careful about what they produce, given their network of international relationships are far more complex than traditional movie or television producers. Apple parted ways with Jon Stewart when The Problem with Jon Stewart threatened to tackle potentially uncomfortable subjects for the company.
Still, capitalism is a central preoccupation of modern pop culture. It’s reflected with various shades of enthusiasm in the recent wave of “buy-o-pics” like Flamin’ Hot, Blackberry and AIR. It intersects with racism and misogyny in The Killers of the Flower Moon. It filters through the apocalyptic nightmares of Loki and the fascist dictatorships of Andor. Indeed, looking at the current pop culture landscape, it seems like it’s just good business to be anti-capitalist.
There is an inherent cynicism at play here. While these criticisms of capitalist excess undoubtedly play well to increasingly radicalized young audiences skeptical of the status quo, they also help prop up these gigantic faceless conglomerates. The Boys is one of the biggest shows on Prime Video and has transformed itself into a franchise worthy of Vought with spin-offs like Diabolical and Gen V. Fallout was the most-watched show on streaming in April 2024.
This has always been that way. “Capitalism devours everything,” argued Spanish museum director Ivan de la Nuez, “even its worst enemies.” He was talking, of course, about the ubiquity of the image of Che Guevera, the Communist revolutionary whose face adorns countless posters and t-shirts. In October 2007, Marc Lacey discovered that Che Guevera was a commodity even in Cuba, reporting that one local shop owner simply commented, “He sells.”
More recently, the mask from V for Vendetta has become indelibly associated with populist uprisings around the world. Time named the protesters wearing that mask as their “Person of the Year” for 2011. Of course, those masks have to come from somewhere. Rubies Costume Company reportedly sold “100,000 a year worldwide” at the height of the protests, which undoubtedly contributed significantly to “to the $28 billion in revenue Time Warner accumulated” in 2010.
To be fair, The Boys is smart enough to understand this. One of the most consistently hilarious (and grim) jokes in the show is the way that Vought International cynically and shallowly panders to progressive causes to boost its bottom line while actively facilitating the transformation of the United States into a dystopian authoritarian capitalist hellscape. The series has landed pitch-perfect parodies of the infamous Kendall Jenner Pepsi advertisement and corporate rainbow-washing.
Worse than this simple cynicism, there is a sense in which these shows might actively numb audiences to the very real horrors perpetuated by these massive corporations by reducing them to mere popcorn entertainment. After all, there are seemingly a lot of Star Wars fans that enjoy unironically rooting for the Empire. Amazon sells a line of Vought International products and even opened a Planet Vought restaurant. Maybe audiences just don’t care about this sort of thing.
There is perhaps a fear that these absurdist parodies of capitalist excess essentially serve the same function as all those self-aware jokes in modern superhero movies, a way of insulating these companies and services from criticism by demonstrating that they are “in” on the joke. Amazon doesn’t just know all of the criticism that a reasonable observer could make of them, it produces two smash hit streaming shows that hammer those points over and over again. Amazon gets it.
It’s a reflection of the contradictions and complexities of late-stage capitalism. Capitalism coopts even criticism of itself, finding a way to extract value from a broad sense of unease about its recent excesses. However, even neatly packaged and sold to boost the shareholders’ bottom line, criticism of capitalism is still criticism of capitalism. The Boys and Fallout give these criticisms one of the biggest and most accessible platforms imaginable. That’s a pretty big deal.
Comments
Susan Mace
You forgot to mention I’m a Vigo which is another Amazon show that uses superheroes as a scathing critique of capitalism. It is distinct from Fallout and The Boys in that it actually shows how people’s efforts towards change can actually succeed in making a difference—a message that Amazon clearly doesn’t feel threatened by.
Darren Mooney
Ha! Yep. As I mentioned, I’d been batting the idea around a while. But with your comment, I figured I should actually write it.
James Votypka
Great article, definitely answered my comment on the boys article lol
Darren Mooney
I do think a lot about the "Star Wars" hotel letting you LARP as a fascist... but also being afraid to have you meaningfully lose. There's a big speech at the end about how we all need to get along, as opposed to going, "It's fun to play this, but also fascists are bad, right?"
Darren Mooney
Yep. I honestly think they just see profit in it, and nothing else matters.
Darren Mooney
Yep. Ryallen references this quote above. It's a good one.
Darren Mooney
Oh, I love that. Should have mentioned it.
Jonny C
“Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead.” — Joyce Messier (Disco Elysium)
Aaron Von Seggern
Honestly, it's the 2024 version of Colonel Tom Parker's "I HATE ELVIS" pins
Aaron Von Seggern
And to be an even bigger pedant, Apple is #2 or 3 in market cap, depending where you look. Microsoft took back the top spot with NVIDIA vying for second with Apple.
marrington233
I believe there’s another factor to this, and it’s the nature of companies in general. By nature a company is not evil. It’s a complex machine with the goal of generating capital for shareholders, and are only as cruel as the people operating it. It’s why it can both appeal to progressives while also engaging in the worst of capitalism, both facilitate the end goal of generating revenue, and its happenstance that the people operating most of them are benign evil. There is also the role of a jester, someone who vents the grievances of the common folk through humiliation of the crown. Never going so far as to anger the king, but enough to belay the anger of the commonfolk, with the end goal to never encourage change the status quo.
HardRevenge
"Who roots for the empire wtf? ...Oh"
Darren Mooney
Fair, but I also think that the show and the game are different things. In the show, Vault-Tec's tendrils are clearly stretching in a variety of different directions, and they are the primary focus of the season's capitalist anxiety. (The game is not produced by Amazon, so it isn't part of the wave of ironic/self-aware hyper-capitalism critique that I'm discussing here.)
Skujat
Always a bit unsettling to think about why megacorporations are fine with a portrayal like that. Do they think they are "one of the good ones"? Do they get the jokes? Do they just not care? Do they want to control the opposition so to speak? Highly unlikely that we ever a concrete answer but it is a nice brainteaser to think about.
BobisOnlyBob
All the more bitterly ironic considering the fate of Disco Elysium and its ownership. I believe Amazon was briefly considering making a show based on it too.
Gage Eakins
I think comparing Vault-Tec to Amazon doesn't really make all that much sense. I get the general point of the article, but the comparison just doesn't work. First of all, Vault-Tec is not that big of a company in the Fallout Universe. It sells very specific products in a pretty narrow sector of the economy. It is dwarfed by companies like RobCo and RepCom. The Fallout Amazon series is a rather faithful adapatation of the games and the Vault-Tec corporation is from the first game released in 1999. Amazon was not yet such a big company in those days so the parallels don't really work.
Ryallen
>Amazon isn’t in the superhero game um ackshually *readjusts glasses* Stan Edgar admitted to Homelander in Season 2 Episode 1 The Big Ride that Vought is not a superhero company but a pharmaceutical company. In all seriousness, the video game Disco Elysium talked about this a while back. I don't know the context or anything, since I don't care for Disco Elysium, but a character in the game said "Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would *critique* capital end up *reinforcing* it instead." It's fashionable to be anti-capitalist, to point out the issues with the current system. Amazon can only benefit from allowing stories like this to be made because they're popular but can't/won't serve to actually fix anything, or at least that's their logic. Anticapitalism doesn't threaten them since they're too ingrained in American society for any real threat against their business to exist. There'd have to be some massive upset for any real progress to be made against them. But I digress, if I spoke at length about what I really thought about this topic I'd be typing for hours and pissing off a lot of people.
Nolan Barth
Your math is a bit off when talking about Bezos' earnings. He earns the average American salary every 3 seconds if he's making 23K/second. If he's making 23K/minute then he's earning the average salary every 3 minutes.
