But "The Running Man" isn’t alone in its fulmination against fascism. It joined Yorgos Lanthimos’ "Bugonia" in theaters and follows Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterfully crafted thriller "One Battle After Another."

They were made for a different time, with Stephen King’s "The Running Man" and Thomas Pynchon’s "Vineland" (the inspiration for "One Battle After Another") both releasing in a United States that was coming to be defined by right-wing, Reagan-era policy. And yet the three movies join an ever-expanding list of contemporary movies being labeled as "timely."

They’re surprisingly unsubtle in their messaging. The two QAnon-esque, tin foil hat cousins in "Bugonia" frequently harp on the environmental damage imposed by CEOs like Emma Stone's Michelle Fuller, who they kidnap after suspecting her an alien (they end up being right come the end of the movie). To any real life corporate executive, the plot might seem like the kind of thing to pass up. 

But they don’t, and it’s because, with the exception of Anderson, these movies portray a fantasy United States — a "what if" scenario where America has reached a fascist tipping point and completely fallen off the deep end. They’re worlds where, while CEOs are destroying the planet, there are aliens among them; where people watch reality murder shows while driving on the highway. They’re clear enough representations of modern America to speak to the average viewer while still maintaining enough distance to get the thumbs-up from our corporate overlords.

Taken together, they could serve as a long-needed guide for the left.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Furgeson in "One Battle After Another" is a washed up former revolutionary who, long after the "glory days" with the militant group the French 75 are over, spends his time frying his brain with pot. Even when he’s called back into the fray to save his daughter, he spends the majority of the movie staying just behind the action.

Anderson’s leftist revolution is, if anything, an optimistic portrayal. It’s not a call to arms for gun-touting revolutionary groups like the French 75, nor is it necessarily a call to engage in the violence that’s already begun to grip America. It’s a call to do something. The revolution isn’t won by requiring strict adherence to books and texts (one character refuses to aid Bob in his rescue because he can’t remember a sequence of codes after 16 years), but by some kind of action.

The sentiment is echoed in the endings for Anderson and Wright’s films, the latter even going as far as to deviate from the book’s more cynical ending, where Ben Richards sacrifices himself for the cause, and instead giving him an ending where he’s able to reunite with his wife and daughter. They’re reminders that so long as there are people who can pass on revolutionary ideas to the next generation, then there will always be people to carry that thought on.

Lanthimos is less optimistic. He delivers a more misanthropic ending where humans are unable to recognize the disaster they’ve enacted on the world, leaving Emma Stone’s alien CEO (who reports to her own corpo-extraterrestrial board) with no choice but to end humanity. His ending reads like a prophecy: humanity is doomed if we continue to let this happen.

The messaging in these movies is nothing new, and the novels prove that people have been making these statements for decades before the current presidential administration. There isn’t a new wave of antifascist films, we’re just living under a wave of such intense fascist threat that people are beginning to turn to the answers given by artists.

And now, as Trump continues to expand his crusade against the arts and speech, the very act of watching and engaging with these films becomes revolutionary. They aren’t asking viewers to topple entire governments, but they deliver visions of an America that are further over the edge than it is now, leaving it in the viewers’ hands to decide if we want to do something about it.

Jack Williams is a junior studying english and political science and is the Opinion Desk Coordinator at The State News. The views in this article are his own and independent of The State News.