“I always place my bet on Red”: Comrade Detective and the Spectre of Communism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.2218/forum.32.6470Abstract
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.