If you haven’t been paying attention to how neoliberalism is still making all the wrong choices for you, watch the 2015 Amazon Prime Video series Patriot. John Tavner (played by Michael Dorman) is a folk-singing intelligence officer tasked by his high-ranking father with effecting election interference in Iran via non-official cover at a piping firm. The series confronts workplace insecurity, downward social mobility, and neoliberalism’s threat to the family. It accomplishes this by relentlessly tormenting John.
As a cultural text, Patriot lays bare the fundamental contradiction of American identity in a still-thriving neoliberal order under the Obama administration. The series defies neoliberalism’s self-interest, manipulation, dehumanization, and loneliness by countering it with empathy and connection but ultimately indicates that these efforts are too little, too late.
Content
Created by Steven Conrad, who also wrote and directed most episodes, Patriot is beautifully written, structured, and executed. The series delivers wry humor and an appreciation for realistic absurdity while being quite moving. It also features a Beastie Boys motif throughout, and if the phrase “Beastie Boys motif” isn’t enough to get you to watch Patriot, I don’t know what is.
Across two seasons, John carries out the mission of preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, a self-obliterating covert job his father, a Director of Intelligence assigned to him. John holds down two jobs, both of which place burdens on him. In his covert role, he eliminates people who get in his way (which gives him moral agony) and pushes nonstop through feats of endurance, like jumping from a balcony onto a roof, knowing he’ll be out cold for 17 minutes. Meanwhile, John’s fake piping job requires an incredible specificity of domain knowledge and technical terms that he is expected to pick up and put to use with no prep time.
To deal with this, John writes and sings brutally transparent folk songs, usually alone in a park with a guitar. He also rides his bike at night, often directly into traffic and often through red lights—on purpose.
John’s cover job is housed within a Milwaukee-based pipefitting corporation called McMillan Industries, located in a bleak landscape marked by massive concrete pipe sections and rusted-out warehouse buildings—relics of the Eisenhower administration. McMillan engineers frequently travel to Luxembourg; the tiny grand duchy provides the international access John needs to carry out his mission and is a symbol of neoliberal-spurred corporate greed, and the gaping divide between the have- and have-nots with its Portuguese underclass. Patriot’s plot centers on a duality between John’s piping cover job, which involves “the simple delivery of an element from A to B”, and his covert work, which involves getting a red bag of money from point A to point B. Of course, the delivery of the cargo proves to be anything but simple.
Patriot illustrates the reality of neoliberalism—putting everything upon yourself and doing it all alone. In Invisible Doctrine (2024) George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison write that neoliberalism “assaults our mental health and drives deep into our social lives.” John works nonstop, with tiny pockets of singing in parks and riding his bike. He just keeps going, typically brandishing some sort of injury, doing what he thinks he has to do, all with a kind of melancholy doggedness.
As strategic advisor Charles Ferguson writes in 2012’s Predator Nation, “Over the last thirty years, an amoral financial oligarchy has taken over the United States, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population.” Ferguson adds, “America was turning into a rigged game.” Those born outside the top economic strata can see their reality expressed in Patriot, unlike any other show, and in a profoundly humane way.
How America Got Roped into Playing a ‘Rigged Game‘
In the McMillan Industries of Patriot, the phrase “shoddy goddamn piping” is frequently used to describe John’s inadequate work as an engineer. Indeed, a faulty pipe design could jeopardize the company’s core value proposition—helping customers move petroleum products from one place to another. Metaphorically, the notion of shoddy piping could also describe neoliberalism in that the faulty underpinnings of the neoliberal system mean that it fails at its essential purpose of enabling labor and other resources to be infinitely mobile, instead causing severe income inequality and other social ills.
A brief history helps illuminate how this came to be. The neoliberal “thought collective” began with the formation of the Mount Pèlerin Society in 1947. The ideology spread, and several decades later, in the 1970s, more of the wealthiest individuals and business leaders became frustrated with the stagnation of their assets and supported neoliberalism, which impacted public policy starting in the early 1980s. The result of deregulating finance, encouraging monopoly positions, and prioritizing self-interest in a zero-sum competitive world has been extreme inequality, labor exploitation, social isolation, and downward social mobility for all but the wealthy.
Since Reagan’s administration, every president on both sides has sold out the American people by doing his part to bolster this order. Neoliberalism has persisted, as adaptable as the liquid metal T-1000 of Terminator 2, ingraining destructive belief systems in work and family life in ways people don’t notice. The consequences of decades of inculcating a toxic mindset are now very clear.
Academic David Harvey defines neoliberalism as a “theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”. The lie of “individual entrepreneurial freedoms” in every aspect of everyday life has propagated via public policy, think tanks, business schools, corporations, management books, the media, cultural texts, and more. Neoliberalism became adamantine in the 1990s and emerged unscathed from the financial crisis of 2008. Like the alien lifeform in John Carpenter’s 1982 horror film The Thing, neoliberalism is highly adaptive: it masquerades as familiar and innocuous forms, and any attempts to kill it make it stronger.
Work Life Under Neoliberalism
Patriot illustrates the absurdity of workplace wellness benefits within the structural problems caused by neoliberalism. While corporations prioritize profits and bonuses at the expense of the health of the country, dehumanize and exploit their workers, and suppress both wages and organized labor, employees are pressured to accept individual responsibility to improve their lives. So-called wellness benefits like these serve only corporate PR and add insult to injury. Scholar Christina Scharff writes that with neoliberalism, “the entrepreneurial self only has itself to blame if something goes wrong,” and the “impact of socio-economic forces is disavowed and wellbeing presented as achievable through appropriate self-management.”
Late in season one, John is sitting outside in an orphaned section of pipe, where he’s often besieged by complaints, threats, insults, and bad news from his coworkers. Gregory Gordon (Antoine McKay), an HR staffer at McMillan, asks John how he’s doing. John says, “Pretty good” (his go-to response regardless of how much he’s suffering). Gregory asks John if he’s getting enough sleep, and John says, “Small windows.”
The 2015 APA Stress in America survey reported that just 33 percent of adults reported their sleep quality as good, down from 37 percent in 2014. Gregory asks how often John experiences stress, and John says, “More than average, probably.” The audience knows this is an understatement, but it’s surprising for John to admit even that much. Then Gregory asks John if he would use a fitness center membership, which is risible, considering John’s nearly unabating, extreme exertion. Gregory also suggests a wellness activity like card tricks. It’s obvious that John’s despair won’t be alleviated by joining a gym or practicing card tricks. Later in season two, Gregory asks if the card tricks are “stress-busting”. (They are not.)
Aside from getting drunk and spending one day off with friends, there’s just one activity that gives John a brief respite. When John’s McMillan colleague Peter Icabod (Julian Richings) tells John his demands in exchange for not revealing that John didn’t graduate from Penn State as it says on his resume, Icabod says: “John, what do you know about non-sexual, same-sex cuddling?”
Later, Icabod approaches John at a duck hunt and tells him, “John, I’d like to embrace you and send a non-verbal message to you saying, ‘I get you; I know how you feel. You’re just human. Hello, Club Member.’ That’s what cuddling’s about. I think you could use it.” They tentatively embrace, sitting side by side, foreheads touching. Still, John’s friends prove valuable only when they’re proximate to him, and he’s carried his burden alone for so long that it largely doesn’t make a difference.
Patriot shows that it’s a fool’s game to optimize your productivity in a system designed to create value only for a class composed of people who don’t have to work. While in Luxembourg during season one, John’s work friend Dennis McClaren (Chris Conrad) points out the day-planning feature on John’s BlackBerry. Aside from learning plate design for a McMillan presentation, John’s tasks for the day include abducting someone who stole a bag of money at the airport. Dennis sets this task for a duration of four minutes (later, we see that it takes John half that time to capture, tape, and bag the guy), then sets ‘Confront Barros brothers’ for 20 minutes.
Further, Dennis adds ringtone reminders to each task. For the remainder of the day, John suffers the additional indignation of hearing Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend” to signal a task, though it gives us hope for John that he can let a friend play a role in his life. A voice reminder tells John how many minutes he’s behind schedule as he trudges around Luxembourg carrying a hiker’s backpack stuffed with the (live) guy he captured. After the BlackBerry informs John that he’s 22 minutes behind schedule, he gets into a fight in a stairwell—while still carrying the human cargo on his back—where he falls many times and struggles to get back up. The Blackberry reminders pull John into the future with even more stress.
As an independent contractor under non-official cover, John finds himself in a position more precarious than many of his fellow employees. Economists Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger conducted a Contingent Worker Survey in 2015. They found that the percentage of workers engaged in alternative work arrangements (including independent contractors) rose as high as 15.8 percent in late 2015 from 10.7 percent in February 2005.
Monbiot and Hutchison write that the ostensible “freedom and independence” of the gig economy “often translates into no job security, no unions, no health benefits, no overtime compensation, no safety net, and no sense of community.” John is a contractor in his covert work and effectively one at his cover job; he isn’t a legitimate employee at McMillan. There isn’t enough in his budget to buy a chair for John’s spartan Milwaukee apartment. Nor are there funds to replace John’s soap and shampoo because he needs a different smell to avoid triggering memories of a coworker he pushed in front of a truck in the interest of the mission.
Patriot clearly illustrates the gap between John’s unofficial role and his brother’s official one. John’s brother Edward (aka Cool Rick, who wears tracksuits and loves the Beastie Boys) enjoys job security and an “official” status as a US congressman. While an overlapping combination of shitstorms bombards John as his humanity is further eroded, we see Edward in a zen-like state, reclined in a barber’s chair, receiving a face massage, relaxed and secure, talking about how glad he was to take his father’s old seat in Congress.
Someone is literally attending to Edward’s needs by grooming him. In this period of rest—something John rarely experiences—Edward is offered an official cover position of an attaché in a foreign relations subcommittee. In Patriot’s season one opening credits, we see one of the brothers wearing a deputy sheriff badge as a child. In the barbershop, Edward (Michael Chernus) immediately asks if he can get an attaché badge, wanting symbols of official roles to support his identity, while John’s identity is gradually erased.
Family Life Under Neoliberalism
With family life under neoliberalism, family members are individualists acting out of self-interest. In Ideology: A Very Short Introduction, Michael Freeden writes that the “ideological state apparatuses” were also located in the family, according to philosopher Louis Althusser. John’s father, Tom Tavner (Terry O’Quinn), prioritizes his career. He takes advantage of his influence over John to keep pushing him further without any regard for John’s mental or physical health—even after he knows that John is riding his bike into traffic. Tom seems to be a sympathetic character because he has some understanding of what John has been going through and how John’s been doing it alone—but his own career considerations always take precedence.
Nobel Prize winner F.A. Hayek’s concept of the “true individual”, defined in his book Individualism and Economic Order, is that people “ought to be allowed to strive for whatever they think desirable”, not be “exclusively guided by their personal needs or selfish interests”. Economist Milton Friedman writes in Capitalism and Freedom (2002) that the “interests of which I speak are not simply narrow self-regarding interests”. Yet neoliberalism’s values of competition and individualism directly lead to people being primarily guided by “personal needs and selfish interests”.
John’s nemesis at McMillan, Leslie Claret (Kurtwood Smith), wants the CEO to fire John for his “shoddy goddamn piping” and for being “a mysterious asshole”. Tom goes to the McMillan duck hunt to talk to Leslie, and they go out on the lake in a rowboat. Tom says that Leslie misunderstands John: “A lot was asked of him, and… maybe he was struggling to carry some weight, I think. He carried it a long way, alone, really.”
Neoliberalism’s insistence on people acting as entrepreneurial free agents, at liberty to fix problems themselves, place all burdens on themselves, and manage themselves to support the free market flow to benefit the wealthy means that working people carry their weight alone. Leslie refuses to let John back in at McMillan, adding, “I think your son is weak-willed and soft, and lets his daddy fight his battles”—which, of course, is the opposite of the truth and shows the extraordinary power and risk differentials between the ruling class and everyone else.
John is constantly forced to take risks; even if things go well, he derives no benefit. He bears all the exposure, and all the value accrues to someone else—namely, Tom. Hayek writes, “If the individual is to be free to choose, it is inevitable that he should bear the risk attaching to that choice and that in consequence he be rewarded.” The only people who are rewarded, however, are the ones who are already wealthy.
A core notion in neoliberalism is that taking risks is a part of being an entrepreneurial agent and leads to a non-zero chance of meaningful reward. The reality is that the exposures are very different depending on one’s situation. Big banks can take significant risks and earn large rewards without any downside due to government bailouts under the “too big to fail” doctrine. Conversely, individuals are often asked or required to take huge personal risks, while the upside is simply survival.
At one point, John purposely rides his bike in front of the Iranian physicist’s car, and we see someone else’s father express concern and take action in a way that John’s father does not. The physicist (Azhar Usman as Kkyman Candahar) drives John to the hospital and is very worried: “Did you strike on your head on the street, dear?” John asks why he’s talking that way, addressing him as “dear”, and the physicist says it’s “how we call our children,” he replies. “You’ll break your father if you don’t hold on.”
This Iranian father of two sons—men very similar to John and his brother—is a part of the group that John is working to stop. Scholar Mary V. Wrenn, writing about corporate mindfulness culture and neoliberalism, states that “neoliberalism teaches through the socialization process that each individual should be accountable to herself and in so doing, it also leads to the erosion of each individual’s responsibility to others and to the community as a whole.” Tom is shirking his responsibility to John as his son; Kkyman shows what that type of relationship should be.
Patriot shows that what Tom is asking John to do is a kind of de facto torture, and this is erasing him even more than actual torture would. The year before Patriot is set, John was subjected to a “fair dose” of “white torture”, otherwise known as “white room torture”. John says that it’s supposed to erase your sense of self. Historian and philosopher Philip Mirowski writes that “Neoliberalism thoroughly revises what it means to be a human person”; it “reduces the human being to an arbitrary bundle of […] temporary alliances” that include family.
One night in Milwaukee, when Tom and John are talking in a bar, Tom says that John will be arriving in Luxembourg one day early before he’ll be collecting the bag. John looks relieved, and says, “Good, I can get some rest.” Tom gently corrects him: “You’ll be killing the physicist’s wife.” Tom leaves right after that, and John breaks down crying for the first time. Don McLean’s “American Pie” plays; it’s the same song that John heard during his white room torture in 2011, and it explicitly connects the two situations.
Tom could find someone else to take over the work that John is doing; instead, he keeps sacrificing John. When John is in the hospital after riding his bike into traffic, Tom makes it clear that he expects John to keep going because John didn’t complete the task he was instructed to do, whereas Edward tries to get John to rest. Tom says that John can speak for himself. Edward lashes out with, “Yeah? Can he?” Edward tells his father, “You know what, fuck you,” denoting the breakdown of the family.
Political theorist Wendy Brown argues in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution that “neoliberalism […] morally fuses hyperbolic self-reliance with readiness to be sacrificed.” John exemplifies this self-reliance and willingness to be sacrificed for the ostensible good of the country and his father’s career.
John’s cultural capital is high, with a father who serves as a Director of Intelligence, and a mother who happens to be a cabinet member: the Secretary of Transportation. But John’s situation mirrors the economic disparity between boomers and their millennial children. Looking at economist Raj Chetty’s work on the declining American Dream, the “decline in absolute mobility is especially steep—from 95% for children born in 1940 to 41% for children born in 1984—when we compare the sons’ earnings to their fathers’ earnings.”
Neoliberalism makes choices for us disguisedly; it uses entrepreneurial agency as a fig leaf to obscure manipulation. Further, neoliberalism makes it seem as though there is still a democracy when it has been steadily eroding democracy for several decades; Brown states that “neoliberalism […] is quietly undoing basic elements of democracy.” We are discouraged from taking an active role as political citizens, community members, and union members while being manipulated into being mere consumers.
John wanted to be a musician, but Tom insisted it would be a hard life, making the choice for him. Tom tells John’s mother that “ultimately [John] has to make his own choices”—even though Tom and neoliberalism have made them for John. The system provides superficial consumer choices but constrains the most important decisions, such as whether to leave a toxic work environment and, thus, sacrifice one’s health insurance.
Tom is exploiting John, much like a neoliberal corporation does to its employees. Corporations—particularly in the post-financial crisis recovery period—manipulated employees by telling them they were part of a family, so they would work more, exhibit more loyalty, and be less likely to join organized labor. Edward talks about how when he was younger, Tom went to a Beastie Boys show with him and was such a good sport when they started prodding Tom with a giant penis on stage. This made Edward feel like a member of the Tavner family since Tom and John shared music.
Tom tells John that he (Tom) could go to jail and lose everything if John doesn’t get a job done. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu writes about neoliberal “techniques of rational domination that impose over-involvement in work […] and work under emergency or high-stress conditions.” The CEO of McMillan is also manipulating his employees: McMillan is heading towards bankruptcy; the engineers are being lied to about why they’re even in Luxembourg, and about the company’s stability.
John’s mother (Debra Winger as Bernice), brother, and wife are worried about him but aren’t aware of the extent of the problem. At the end of season one, John’s wife Alice (Kathleen Munroe) asks Edward if John kills people. Edward says, “Dad wouldn’t ask him to do that.” Alice says, skeptical by this point, “Why wouldn’t he?” Edward, taken aback, says, “Because that’s too much. To ask.” Later, Edward asks John, “Does Dad ask you to kill people, John?” After a long hesitation and internal debate, John says, “I’m killing a woman at 3 a.m. tonight. Do you want to help me?” Edward says, “Of course not.” John responds with, “Then what help are you, man?”
Patriot is not alone in shining a light on these patterns of abuse. In 2014, Damien Chazelle’s critically acclaimed and high-grossing film Whiplash was released. It centers on an ambitious teenage jazz drummer and his conservatory instructor, a father figure who drives his student much harder than is good for him. In Bill Pohlad’s film Love & Mercy, also released in 2014, the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson is under the thumb of his controlling therapist and legal guardian.
These hard-driving, patriarchal coaches and managers demand impossible levels of performance from their subjects while taking virtually no risk themselves. Historian and journalist Tom Frank points out that “Top managers were enriched in proportion to the amount of power and security that workers lost: This is the single most important point one needs to know to understand corporate thought in the nineties.” In Patriot, a Luxembourg detective tells John’s wife, Alice: “Your husband brutalizes anyone who interferes with the execution of his instructions. And he can’t stop doing this because of the identity of his instructor, despite all the harm it causes him.”
Neoliberalism During the Obama Era
Neoliberalism under Barack Obama’s presidency focused on entrepreneurialism, middle-class economics, and progress. However, aside from Obamacare, the progress that Obama was known for was progressing neoliberalism, mainly by his failure to levy a meaningful penalty against the people and institutions responsible for the financial crisis.
Ferguson writes, “When the banks were desperate and dependent in 2008 and 2009, the federal government had an unparalleled opportunity to finally bring them under control—an opportunity that both the Bush and Obama administrations completely wasted and ignored.” Manfred Steger and Ravi Roy state in Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction that once Obama was elected, “Obama would […] adopt a neoliberal agenda that, in some ways, was even more pronounced than those adopted by his predecessors.”
In his 2015 State of the Union address, Obama described “middle-class economics”, apparently without irony, as “the idea that this country does best when everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.” This statement is nonsensical in the context of the neoliberal order and the Obama administration. It’s disconnected from reality and a slap in the face to the American people in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The Kamala Harris campaign regurgitated this misguided rhetoric in 2024 with their so-called “opportunity economy”, wherein “everyone has the chance to compete and a chance to succeed.”
Obama told Americans they were expected to contribute to the nation-building project by exhibiting persistence and determination and leading “with persistent, steady resolve”—though he exhibited no persistence or resolve when penalizing the people responsible for the financial crisis. No amount of performing the tasks that Obama wanted would lessen the macroeconomic impact of neoliberalism and the fact that he was, as Ferguson writes, “just another oligarch’s president”.
As the Economic Policy Institute put it in 2015, “the economy remains far from fully recovered—and is still failing ordinary Americans, who have endured decades of stagnant wages despite working more productively than ever”. Obama emphasized this message since his first State of the Union in 2010, when he said Americans “share a stubborn resilience in the face of adversity”. He continued his tone-deaf rhetoric in that first address, “We do not give up. We do not quit”—and repeats this at the end: “We don’t quit. I don’t quit.
John exemplifies these qualities required of Americans, but Patriot reveals the despair and existential crisis underneath it. Beneath this unremitting persistence and resolve, John records and sends a song to his wife about how he’s been riding his bike “through red lights and stop signs and railroad tracks”, and says, “If I get hurt real bad, that would be okay.”
There’s a widely socialized lie that people are free agents and can leave a bad work situation if they want to. In reality, the hidden ideological influence of neoliberalism keeps people locked into jobs and work situations that they despise, and that damage them. According to the Economic Policy Institute’s Unequal Power initiative, “The assumption of equal power—the idea that if workers don’t like a job, they are free to work elsewhere and this prevents exploitation—enables employers to subject workers to private, authoritarian systems of power in the workplace.”
Employers typically have a large pool of workers to fill any job with, yet most employees seeking a new role will have to expend large amounts time to secure one. Additionally, how health insurance and retirement benefits are tied to full-time employment in the US creates a strong disincentive for workers to leave a job, even if they are unhappy with compensation and working conditions.
In season two of Patriot, John’s brother Edward says he’s thinking about quitting being a congressman: “I think it’s gonna feel real good, to quit doing something that I don’t really… not with all my heart, you know.” John looks sad here, and of course, he’s sad because he can’t quit, whereas his brother can easily do so. Edward can’t fully understand the situation John is struggling with.
Under neoliberalism, we are expected to “not quit” alone, as individuals, without any help or resources from anyone else. Scholar Patricia Ventura points out in Neoliberal Culture: Living with American Neoliberalism, “in neoliberal government, individuals feel solely responsible for their lives and come to believe that they are not entitled to assistance from the larger social structure.”
Obama’s administration made a performance out of helping the middle class. Yet, whilefar more billionaires were minted—America’s 800+ billionaires “own over 50% more wealth than does the entire bottom half of U.S. society”—people felt pressured to work even harder. Another element of Obama’s neoliberal rhetoric is the word “responsible”. In his 2012 State of the Union, Obama said, ”An America built to last insists on responsibility from everybody”—except, evidently, those responsible for the financial crisis.
Hayek wrote, “Responsibility, to be effective, must be individual responsibility.” In 2015, Brown stated, “Instead of being secured or protected, the responsibilized citizen tolerates insecurity, deprivation, and extreme exposure to maintain the competitive positioning, growth, or credit rating of the nation as firm.” The phrase “responsible homeowners” was heard in Obama’s 2012 State of the Union speech, and “responsible young families” in the 2013 speech. Again, the onus is put on individuals rather than on the system that preys on them.
Historian Gary Gerstle writes in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022) that “During Obama’s first term, the income of the top 1 percent of American income earners increased by more than 30 percent; the bottom 99 percent had to settle for a 0.4 percent raise.” Even if the many subgroups within the 99 percent worked as hard as Obama described, it was all for naught.
Survival, Dystopia, and Spycraft
The acute tension people were experiencing in response to the nation-building project was evident in the cultural discourse in 2015. Although Patriot has timeless elements—in the first season, John is like Odysseus trying to get back home to Penelope, and his toil is Sisyphean to the end of the series. It’s also a meaning-producing part of a discourse with other texts that reside in a specific sociocultural moment in time.
Many survival films were released in 2014 and 2015, namely Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant, Ridley Scott’s The Martian, and Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest, indicating that the pressures of working under neoliberalism near the end of the Obama administration were onerous. There was an acute contradiction between the individual responsibility and grind required for the neoliberal nation-building projects defined by the Obama administration and the realities for the middle and working class.
Journalist Annie Lowrey writes that in the 2010s, “beyond the headline economic numbers, a multifarious and strangely invisible economic crisis metastasized: Let’s call it the Great Affordability Crisis,” when “For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible.” The survival films dramatize the tension between the steadfast resolve that Obama was asking for—and promised good things in return for—and the reality that there were no rewards aside from living to fight another day.
Unbroken is centered on an Olympic runner and World War II bombardier who survives a plane crash, lives on a raft for nearly two months, then is tortured by the Japanese Navy. In TIME, critic Richard Corliss mentioned “Louie’s times of unbearable stress” and that he “remains a man of steel, reducing the stakes from “Will he crack?” to “How will he endure?” The Revenant is based on frontiersman Hugh Glass’ experiences in 1823, when he was mauled by a grizzly bear, left near death, and survived on his own in the wilderness. In Variety, critic Justin Chang called it a “potent study of human endurance and isolation.”
The Martian tells the story of an astronaut left behind on Mars, where he must survive for four years. Critic Matt Zoller Seitz writes on RogerEbert.com that The Martian is “about a man […] who summons all of his ingenuity and courage to endure a seemingly impossible situation, then must deal with loneliness on top of it all.” Everest is a biographical film about two expedition groups struggling to survive the 1996 Mount Everest disaster.
Additionally, a spate of dystopian films in 2014 (Snowpiercer, Divergent, The Maze Runner, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1, etc.) bled into 2015 with The Divergent Series: Insurgent, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 2, and Mad Max: Fury Road. In these works, people scrounge over a paucity of resources—and, in some cases, fight an elite ruling class.
In Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow (2014), Tom Cruise’s character relives the same day over and over, Groundhog Day style, only he’s brutally killed in each iteration. In his Mad Max: Fury Road review, critic Keith Phipps writes that Tom Hardy’s character is “driven, by his own reckoning, only by the urge to survive,” and “he seems emptied out”.
On television, there was the debut of the science-fiction drama 12 Monkeys, in which two strangers use time travel to stop an organization that wants to destroy time itself. If one wants to see how people felt about living and working under the ideology of neoliberalism a handful of years after the 2008 financial crisis, the cultural discourse gives a strong indication.
Covert spycraft was also part of the larger cultural discourse of 2015, particularly regarding the psychological toll and how family was integrated into work. In Anna and Jörg Winger’s miniseries Deutschland 83, a German-language drama, the young protagonist, Martin, is a soldier forced into covert work for the GDR. Much like in Patriot, Martin is recruited by a family member: his aunt.
In season 3 of Joseph Weisberg’s series The Americans, Matthew Rhys’ character, who subscribes to capitalist values and wants to be American, clashes with Keri Russell’s character, who is a true believer and wants to put their daughter to work for the Russian cause. In 2015, The Americans integrated family with spycraft and illustrated the dangers of mixing the two. In this way, Deutschland 83 and The Americans showed the potential damage of merging family with work.
In Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon’s Homeland’s fifth season, aired in 2015, another agent, Peter Quinn, comes to the forefront. The Homeland TV Wiki says that Quinn “possesses a remarkable level of agility, intelligence, and resourcefulness” but experiences a “constant internal struggle with the moral implications of his work”. Critic Scott Collura at IGN writes of Quinn, he “became a virtual punching bag and human target, taking bullets and beatings”. Additionally, about Clint Eastwood’s 2014 film, American Sniper, critic Justin Chang wrote in Variety that “this harrowing and intimate character study offers fairly blunt insights into the physical and psychological toll exacted on the front lines” and that the “visual and editorial choices discreetly reinforce the clash between the hell of modern warfare […] and the purgatory of middle-class American life.”
Finally, Conrad has written and produced two podcasts in the extended Patriot universe, and both have an exquisite, world-weary melancholy. An eight-episode masterpiece of a podcast called The Integral Principles of the Structural Dynamics of Flow tells the Leslie Claret backstory (narrated by Kurtwood Smith), from the perspective of someone who tore down a beautiful life, as Leslie tells Tom in Patriot. Additionally, the podcast New Techniques in Modern Practical Close Combat is narrated by the character Captain Dean Portis Love, who wrote the real-life training handbook that John uses—we actually see John consulting it in a flashback.
Ten Years After Patriot, the Neoliberal Machine Roars into a New Era
At the end of Patriot, John has to complete one final epic task. Once he reaches a location where he is physically safe, he’s relieved for only a moment—it’s far from his querencia. He becomes terrified at the thought of not having a mission anymore, of having lost this organizing principle. Paradoxically, he’s equally afraid of having to do something similar again and of having nothing like it to do. One could say facetiously that the ending shows the importance of maintaining overlapping projects at work. However, Patriot‘s meaning in 2015 is clear: Neoliberalism gives workers an external directive—keep going alone and without resources—which ultimately becomes internalized and damages us beyond repair.
Released nearly a decade ago, Patriot tells the story of an unlikely intelligence operative forced to complete one impossible mission after another while his humanity not-so-gradually fades away. As relevant now as it was then, the series illustrates the deep and lasting damage caused by America’s blind adoption of neoliberal policies. This phenomenon will likely worsen under the Trump regime despite its faux protectionist leanings.
In an increasingly dystopian near future, it will be crucial to become more aware of how ideology can so easily permeate our everyday lives and not to let others unduly influence our decision on what kind of life to lead.
Works Cited
American Psychological Association. “2015 Stress in America“.
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