The Strange Comfort of Watching Propaganda That Doesn't Even Try

We've spent years now marinating in propaganda so slick you can't feel it working — algorithmic, personalized, buffed to invisibility. Which is exactly why there's an odd, almost restful pleasure in encountering the opposite: propaganda so clumsy, so nakedly one-note, that watching it is like taking a cold shower after a long fever. You know exactly what it wants from you. It isn't hiding a thing.

That's the peculiar gift of Unbroken: The Untold Story of Shen Yun, a documentary defending the touring dance spectacle you've seen advertised on a thousand billboards, all silk and leaping figures and the promise of "5,000 years of civilization." The film exists to answer accusations — of abuse, of exploitation, of cultishness — leveled at the organization behind the show. And it answers them the way a child answers a question they'd rather not: loudly, insistently, and by talking about something else.

Here's the thing worth carrying away. Sophisticated propaganda works by making you feel nothing — by disappearing into the texture of your own opinions until you mistake it for a conclusion you reached yourself. Crude propaganda does the opposite. It announces itself. Every swelling string cue, every testimonial delivered straight to camera with wet eyes, every villain drawn with a crayon — it all shouts feel this now. And precisely because it shouts, you can hear it. You retain your footing. You watch the machine try to move you and, in watching, you don't move.

There's a genuine relief in that, and it's not the relief of feeling superior. It's the relief of being reminded that persuasion is a thing being done to you — that behind every earnest, glistening frame someone made a choice about what you should feel and when. The sloppy version teaches you to see the choices. And once you can see them in the clumsy case, you start looking for them in the smooth one — the ad that seems to simply understand you, the feed that seems to simply reflect the world, the argument that arrives feeling like your own good sense.

That's the untold story, really. Not the one the film means to tell. Bad propaganda is a kind of public service: it hands you, for free, a working model of the thing you're usually too well-managed to notice. Watch enough of it done badly, and you get better at catching it done well.

Distilled from The Paris Review