Abstract
The paper analyses the buddy cop TV show Comrade Detective in the light of Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1994) to demonstrate how it launches a satiric critique of the American state and diplomatic machinery in the aftermath of the fall of the Second Bloc. I argue that this visual text, released in 2017, addresses three contemporary global concerns—the dominance of the USA in a unipolar world, the neoliberal celebration of consumerism, and finally, the rise of right-wing religious fanaticism—through a satiric recreation of the bygone regime of communist Romania of the 1980s.
Highlights
The 2017 Amazon original Comrade Detective directed by Rhys Thomas masquerades as a lost Romanian TV show of the 1980s remastered and dubbed in English for contemporary audiences
Comrade Detective features the story of buddy cop, Gregor Anghel (Florin Piersic Jr), fighting crime and American propaganda on the streets of Bucharest
After it has been unravelled that Nikita and Stan were conspiring to overthrow the Romanian government, in a dramatic turn of events, Gregor’s life is saved from a dagger aimed at his heart by a Karl Marx book that he keeps in the pocket of his overcoat
Summary
The 2017 Amazon original Comrade Detective directed by Rhys Thomas masquerades as a lost Romanian TV show of the 1980s remastered and dubbed in English for contemporary audiences. As Joseph catches his adolescent daughter in flagrante secretly listening to sexually-charged American pub music on the radio, he explains to her how the transmission of such music is propaganda aimed to indoctrinate Romanian children to the ideals of the free world, how it attempts to “make of all of us prostitutes” (25:21-25:40) In another scene, while telling Gregor about one of his subversive uncles who fled to America and opened a chain of car washes, Joseph does not miss a chance to critique capitalism: “Americans are so lazy that they can’t wash their own cars. We just pretend to convince a bunch of half-wits to vote for us” (28:24-28:31)
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