Amazon’s Anti-Corporate Messaging In ‘The Boys’ Is F@cking Weird
Image; Amazon Prime Video
Amazon’s The Boy’s (2019–2025) has always been a delicious satire. The first season began by introducing viewers to a world where a superhero corporation named Vought International had huge sway over the US government. The company’s superheroes, which served as a de facto private military, were able to kill innocent civilians with relative impunity.
In fact, the superhero A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) having killed protagonist Hughie Campbell’s (Jack Quaid) girlfriend was the inciting incident for our lead’s journey to take down Vought and its fascistic mascot Homelander (Antony Starr).
As the seasons progressed, Vought took over more and more of the US government until, in the latest season, it all but performed an open coup. Homelander, as the head of one of the most powerful corporations on the planet, now has direct sway over the current president, and he is more than prepared to remake America in his image.
As the credits rolled, I had one burning question about this show’s brilliant anti-corporate messaging: who the f@ck does Amazon think it’s kidding?
This show is not a fan of Corporate America
Many critics have been rather quick to point out how The Boys this season parodied the American right’s move toward fascism — much to many real-life far-right commentators’ triggered outrage.
Yet Vought’s monopolistic and corrupt nature is also a running theme on the show—perhaps one of “thee” most prominent themes. In the first season, Vought executive Madelyn Stillwell (Elisabeth Shue) uses Baltimore’s political need for a superhero to extract millions of dollars. “We both know your city needs a hero,” Stillwell pitches to the mayor—a hustle that she is running across the entire country.
From the get-go, it’s evident that Vought’s heroes are simply a product—and not even a very “good” one at that. “Supes” only give Americans the illusion of safety, but these superheroes spend more time filming movies, talk shows and staged “saves” than they do actually helping society. The first season has the hero Starlight (Erin Elair Moriarty) disappointed that Vought has surveillance information better than the US government, and they use it selectively to enact saves that film better on camera. As one guy from Crime Analytics gloats:
“Where and when to find the bad guys. That's what my department does. We vet leads, crunch satellite data, COMP-STAT. Better intel than the police.”
By the time we get to the latest season, the mask has all but slipped, as we are repeatedly shown how much this company hates workers. In one example, our heroes—the black ops group “the boys,” not the supes of Vought—are hiding in a former Vought packaging plant, and it is filled with anti-worker messaging. Supes like Black Noir are juxtaposed with quotes such as “Unions can’t. We can.” or “Every Mother ‘Vought’ To Know…Nothing but the best for my family.”
It’s not subtle.
Vought is a hydra that has stakes in entertainment, pharmaceuticals, the military, and even the press, and it uses that power to routinely dump on the working class. As the coup is nearly coming to fruition in season four, the company puts out a Christmas propaganda video that doesn’t just critique “woke” gay people and other marginalized groups but also those with class consciousness, such as “socialists.”
The show is much more a critique of how corporate America can perpetuate fascism than just one deconstructing fascism alone. Homelander efficiently uses Vought’s resources to take over the US government, and that would not have been possible if the company’s naked pursuit of profit had not already eroded our democratic principles.
Everything Vought can do, Amazon can do better
It’s tough to swallow The Boy’s anti-corporate message alongside the fact that Amazon is, in many ways, a company just as terrible as Vought.
It has also engaged in anti-worker practices such as exploitation and union-busting, with reports as recent as this year of the company engaging in an array of tactics to stop a historic vote in Coventry, UK (e.g., anti-union seminars, hiring surges to dilute the vote, putting up posters with QR codes that, when scanned, sent out automatic emails that canceled the users’ union membership, etc.).
This behavior has been going on for years. I remember driving up to a Fulfillment Center in Baltimore back in 2018 to go on a “tour”—the ones the company had arranged after negative coverage of workers peeing in bottles—and the statements I collected from workers, “off the record,” were horrifying (see Amazon Warehouses: Perfecting The American Plantation). Workers described the company as being so intense that it “[worked] the sweat out of [them].” As one former worker commented on that article:
“On my first day at Amazon in West Columbia my feet were swollen and very painful…The job is painful. [After awhile] I couldn’t even bend over anymore to pick up totes and items that fell off the shelf. Standing up for 10+ hours is extremely difficult.”
The workers I talked to were afraid to organize because they felt like they had few options or that the company would retaliate if they did, but don’t take my word for it; there is a well-documented history of the company “suddenly” starting to terminate employees for minor offenses right after they “just so happen to start union organizing.” The American Prospect has an excellent piece describing how Amazon offloads the management of many of its workers to third-party firms, whose contract it simply terminates if and when workers there ever manage to organize.
And Amazon’s effects are far more wide-reaching than merely being shitty to its workers. Like Vought, the company is also gobbling up a lot of media properties. The most talked about is The Washington Post, which is owned by Nash Holdings and, ultimately, Amazon Chairman and Founder Jeff Bezos. An ownership decision that has undoubtedly shaped the ideological tendencies of that paper. As Robert W. McChesney told Dan Froomkin in the Columbia Journalism Review of Bezos’ stewardship:
“The values of the owner tend to be communicated subtly. [Those who don’t pick up the signals] get weeded out along the way.”
Yet the most significant avenue of media domination is its control of cloud services (AWS). Many providers, even market competitors such as Netflix and Disney+, require AWS on the backend to run their businesses. This fact gives the company a lot of leverage over the overall architecture of the web.
As a result, many media channels are now hosted directly on the Amazon Prime Platform. We are not just talking about entertainment properties such as Crunchyroll or Hallmark, but also the many news programs under Paramount+ (e.g., CBS Evening News and Specials), Discovery+, PBS, and more. This influence on that media is less direct — from what we currently know, Amazon is not censoring Paramount+ overtly — but this concentration does set the stage for a dizzying amount of media being directly managed by the company.
Lastly, the real-life parallels of the far-right, fascistic politicians so deeply criticized on The Boys are ones the company directly supports. Amazon donates to both major political parties every election season, receiving a grade of F on the American Democracy Score Card (via Accountable.US) for backing politicians who directly undermine our democracy, including ones who have supported regressive voting laws, opposed the January 6th investigation, and more.
Furthermore, it doesn’t just pay those politicians to maintain good relations. Amazon has one of the most aggressive lobbying arms in the United States. Most famously, it killed or undermined privacy protections in states nationwide and stopped anti-trust laws from advancing. Author Dana Mattioli has described the company’s culture as so toxic that even some bankers and CEOs of other companies (off the record) have expressed concern about their behavior.
And this is simply the stuff we are aware of. An entertaining part of The Boy’s is to see the “palace intrigue” of what executives at Vought are saying and doing behind the scenes. There are undoubtedly actions happening right now at Amazon we will not learn about until decades after the fact, if ever.
Sans the superheroes, Amazon is Vought. If it could create a Homelander to rule over the world, it would.
A super conclusion
It’s very frustrating to absorb a message about how corporate America can abet fascism and not feel nauseated by the hypocrisy of Amazon, one such fascist corporation, delivering that message. One that was more than willing to place product placements for Amazon packaging and its show, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, inside that alleged critique (see episode Life Among Septics).
Amazon is not the first company to coopt radical messaging for profit. I wrote a piece about Netflix, one of the biggest profiteers of exploitative crime documentaries, producing a critique of that genre while having no intention of changing its behavior (see Can Netflix Critique Itself?). This type of thing happens all the time. The Lego Movie (2014) was about overconsumption despite advertising Legos. The Barbie Movie (2023) is a feminist critique that just so happens to serve as a two-hour+ product placement for a pretty regressive product.
It’s not unusual for a company to finance a work that critiques a problem it helped cause.
I like The Boys. It’s going to be up there in my end-of-the-year rankings. I just hope that as we enjoy this anti-fascist and anti-corporate work, we do not lose sight of the problems coming from its very troublesome messenger.