Pushing Our Buttons: Comply
(2025)
Over the coming weeks, I will be writing about some films which I enjoyed at the Moviate Underground Film Festival in May 2025.
Comply, a 3 minute found footage film by Padrick Ritch, effectively weaves together snippets from vintage war propaganda, sports docs, and cartoons, creating a whiplash ride through manipulative media tropes. The film’s rapid pace quickly induces the sensation of drowning in a sea of loaded images, a media environment designed to mold us into pliant, obedient consumers and enablers of the military industrial complex. Ritch juxtaposes his visual materials to one another in subtle, metaphorical ways, a technique which has the effect of rapidly enhancing our consciousness of how we’re being played.
The visual and sound textures of Comply are rich with counterpoint and nuance. Ritch hand-processes most of the original 16mm source footage, painting on the filmstrip, scratching and superimposing to create rich, multi-leveled textures, through which images from the original footage are occasionally glimpsed, peeping out: bomber planes overhead, scared faces of children, a gospel choir. The soundtrack, as well, is a highly processed and mixed collage, drawn from the source footage. The media in Comply are all drawn from the pre-internet age, but Ritch’s intent, to heighten our awareness of how consciousness in the internet age is shaped by social media and its algorithms, is unmistakable. The scientific mass deployment of propaganda is as old as mass media itself, but like many things in our world, online culture turbocharges it. Ritch’s strategy of mixing old media with new content is even seen in his fleeting use of vintage Dymo-style embossed labels, emblazoned with hashtag memes. (For a film primarily concerned with the power of subliminal messaging, it’s striking that Ritch includes a few subliminal messages of his own within the mix.) His use of hand-made cinema techniques is both an act of resistance to digital coercion and a way of calling attention to the long history of manipulative media techniques.
The sheer speed of the editing, the constant shifts and transitions, demonstrates the emotional power of stringing together hot button images without giving us time to think about how they’re manipulating us. One moment we hear a polemic from a war film about the evil deeds of the enemy: “the attack he carries out is like no war or attack in history…” We immediately see bombs released from planes, and then the frightened face of a young child. Fear of the foreign enemy is effectively and instantly fused with our love for our children. At the same time, the fact that the child shown is Asian highlights what this propaganda, aimed at an American audience, hides: that it is in fact the US whose use of nuclear bombs on civilians was “like no attack in history.” Then, without a pause, we are presented with a superhero, come to save the day. In this case, the footage comes from a bottom-of-the-barrel TV cartoon show from the early 1960s, The Mighty Hercules, but the Greek hero in this series is basically Captain America in a chiton. With the mighty hero poised to swoop in and defeat the foe, we’re all set to lend our wholehearted support to whatever horrifying adventure the military industrial complex has cooked up for us this time. Comply.
A soothingly mechanistic female voice repeatedly intones “You are the product.” We briefly cut to a man who dismissively replies “big deal.” Our transition from a nation which enshrines the right to privacy in our constitution to a nation sleepwalking our way into a total surveillance police state is accomplished without a murmur of protest.
Disturbingly, this repeated phrase accompanies a panning shot of a group of pensive children, who might be war refugees or immigrants. The phrase “you are the product” has become a meme, shorthand for the way that social media companies profit from our engagement and addiction. But the juxtaposition of this phrase over a group of war orphans suggests that, for people living in the countries where the bombs are falling, you are the product in a much more chilling and final sense. Part of the job of the propaganda is to encourage Americans, whose taxes pay for the bombs in overseas conflicts, to avoid thinking about the death, destruction and chaos we are funding.
The film begins with disturbing footage of a young boy, his nose seemingly pressed up against a glass window. His flattened nose looks like a pig snout as he leans towards us. This image is rapidly intercut with shots of the same boy smothered inside of a gas mask. While the gas mask connects this sequence to the war propaganda that follows, the image of this suppressed, smothered child inevitably reminds me of the recent sight of toddlers forced to wear face masks by school officials and their parents. Then, as now, it’s an act of child abuse. The pandemic provides us with only the most recent, vivid example of how a mass, orchestrated media campaign manufactures willingly compliant torturers, even when the victims are our own kids. The film reveals how easy it is to push the “we must protect the kids” button. I remember, at the height of the pandemic propaganda campaign, having hysterical parents scream at me that we have to “protect the kids,” seemingly unaware that covid isn’t dangerous for kids. The fear of the foreign enemy and the fear of the foreign pathogen are one and the same, and Ritch generously spreads images of these scary monsters throughout the montage, utilizing footage from Creature from the Black Lagoon.
The final moments of the film revolve around sports: a badminton game, a baseball player sliding into base, the ecstatic cheering. The effort of propaganda, it seems, is to turn the horror and terror of war into something like a triumphant sports documentary. It’s all a game, and guess what: we’re going to be the winners. Sign me up.
Throughout, the soundtrack is mixed with a peculiar clock-like music, like the music from the earliest generation video games, which emphasizes the game-like way in which propagandists and algorithm writers play with us, as well as their effort to make us view everything as a game, as entertainment. The tick-tock (or TikTok) of the soundtrack also adds a doomsday feeling of time running out. At the film’s climax, this ticking greatly accelerates, along with a rapid montage of all the film’s visual themes, mushed into one thoroughly compromised, crazy-making state of mind. “Congratulations,” intones the voice, repeatedly. They have driven us completely nuts, and, in the bargain rendered us harmless.
Comply is a breathtaking plunge into the coercive power of media. Its compressed duration and accelerated pace are key parts of the critique which the film is making. The film makes a persuasive argument against media which aims at making persuasive arguments, but Ritch meticulously avoids the trap of using the same polemical tricks he is criticizing. Instead, he allows the source footage to critique itself, by using the more poetic strategy of artfully layering and juxtaposing moments of the footage so that they resonate with one another in unexpected ways, revealing their underlying dynamic and messaging. It’s a sophisticated, subtle approach, and one that opens up our minds, the very opposite of what propaganda tries to do.
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