Mike Watson
February 2026
Fisher is by now surely Britain's most impactful critical theorist, becoming a globally recognised figure and meme in the years shortly following his passing at just 48 in 2017. As the film’s narrator goes on to state, “He wasn’t just a theorist or a writer. He wasn’t just Capitalist Realism or K-Punk, or The Weird and the Eerie. He was a translator of frequencies most of us couldn’t hear. A listener. A teacher.” And teachers, while performing a collective public service are generally considered to exist in a personal rapport with the student. As such, any effort to collectivize his memory has to reckon with the fierce marshalling of his name by the many who have been touched by his work to the point of strongly identifying with it.
The success of the film -– which was made independently on “no budget” by Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter — in navigating this terrain will likely only be known after several years. Although several creative elements go in its favor, and may make it part of the eventual accepted canon of Fisher commentary.
We are Making a Film About Mark Fisher was shot across a variety of locations in the UK, featuring seascapes, cityscapes, railway scenes, and protests, while talking to an array of interlocutors from the UK and internationally. These include Andy Beckett, Tim Burrows, Simon Reynolds, Jodi Dean, and Miki Aurora among others. Its plethora of voices and claim to audience participation (i.e. “We are making…) along with its assembled feel — featuring frequent changes of location, collaged internet search screens and video browsers — give a rough around the edges, unfinished, feel that puts the viewer on the same level.
In addition to the Punk-DIY aesthetic, periodic search prompts suggest that the viewer seek further info in real time on a variety of topics. This engages smartly with the reality that audiences today often come with phone-in-hand, while breaking the fourth wall in a way that will ensure ongoing engagement with the film’s core themes of anti-capitalism and collectivity. Such a device does well to counteract the tendency for film and television to be dumbed-down with the smartphone user in mind. Repetitive plotlines and sparse scripts have in recent years taken televisual content to mind-numbing lows. In contrast, We are Making a Film About Mark Fisher encourages the viewer to bookmark key points for in-depth investigation.
This also allows the viewer to make up their own mind about complex and controversial topics. On this note, the film does well to dedicate a decent portion of its 65-minute running length to Fisher’s early involvement with the CCRU, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, a collective of theorists (including Sadie Plant, Nick Land, Ray Brassier, Mark Fisher) formed at Warwick University in the ‘90s around an appreciation for high-intensity dance music, philosophy, digital culture, and the occult. The unit dissolved in the early 2000s after causing consternation among more traditional Philosophy Faculty members and has since been the source of aspirant-edgelord drooling in dark corners of the internet ever since. While it is difficult to parse out fact from myth-making, what is known is that lots of partying, drugs, and madness crossed over with political accelerationism — often tending towards a kind of techno-fascism.
Interviewees Andy Beckett and Simon Reynolds both point out a leftward turn in Fisher in the years that followed the CCRUs decline. As Reynolds argues, Fisher “took a kind of humanist turn at some point, maybe ten years after the CCRU, where he decided that some things from the past were ok and that human potential was important and that digital technology might be too close to neoliberalism to feel like it was quite as thrilling as he felt it was when he was younger.”
In our despairing times, it is easy to imagine the fight between humanism and unchallenged techno capitalism are over. The Presidency of the world’s most powerful state and (albeit meagre-) democracy has been captured by populist right-wing forces. UK’s Labour Party echoes far-right policy agendas that would have been banned from political discourse in the ‘90s. Across the western world far right parties receive funding from tech billionaires with the intention of maneuvering them into power.
Against this backdrop We are Making a Film About Mark Fisher reminds us of a time when the possibility of real challenges to capitalist hegemony (the notion, following Thatcher that “That is no Alternative”) existed. While hope, ever a contentious crutch among the materialist left, starts to feel increasingly missed in its absence, there can be no substitute for the exhilaration that concrete changes to the power structure bring. As Fisher argued in a 2015 post on K-Punk:
We don’t need hope; what we need is confidence and the capacity to act. “Confidence,” Spinoza argues, “is a joy arising from the idea of a past or future object from which cause for doubting is removed.” Yet it is very difficult, even at the best of times, for subordinated groups to have confidence, because for them/ us there are few if any “future objects from which cause for doubting is removed.”
Beckett recalls the wave of protests during the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010-2011 as providing such confidence, in an inclusive way that often feels lacking today: “it was very multiracial, it’s not all men there’s lots of women and it felt like there was a vibrant kind of politics waiting to be born.”
Beckett later continues: “That felt like a moment of possibility, and obviously the students protests that Mark was involved in and very excited by had a similar feeling of like the conservatives are in power but a they haven’t got a majority, they’re in a coalition and there’s a lot of vibrancy and a kind of opposition already.”
While Beckett spoke of the vibe he picked up from Fisher, clearly having witnessed a close friend buzzing with energy and purpose, I recall a palpable sense of energy conveyed publicly online, as Fisher got behind Corbyn in 2015, a sense of purpose shared by many as the Corbyn movement coincided with Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2016.
Arguably, Fisher’s central premise was built around the notion (outlined in Capitalist Realism and his K-Punk blog) that while reality is essentially thought to be capitalist, there may just be an alternative. Further, while capitalism leads to epidemic levels of mental illness — Fisher focused on depression, but we could add anxiety, bipolarism, and a slew of personality disorders, as well as an exacerbation of existing neurodivergences — he leaves open the possibility that these very same conditions might be weaponised against the system. This finds parallels in Adorno’s melancholia leading to glimpses of reality within an otherwise unreal capitalist whole. In both cases the sleight of hand involves conceiving the possible cure as coming from the conditions of the sickness. If capitalism seems all but insurmountable we will need to overcome it on account of this selfsame malady. Hence, in Capitalist Realism’s last pages:
We must convert widespread mental health problems from medicalized conditions into effective antagonisms. Affective disorders are forms of captured discontent; this disaffection can and must be channeled outwards, directed towards its real cause, Capital.
Yet this possibility of channeling disaffection outwards relies on outward forces (financial, mediatric, juridical) not becoming too overwhelming. As Beckett argues, and as many have no doubt felt, something stood out about Fisher’s suicide. It came just prior to Trump’s inauguration as US President, which had followed Brexit, both of which presaged a rightward turn. If the “quite fragile but very perceptive” Fisher could become elated at favorable political events, perhaps unfavorable ones could lead to despair. And given this, what possible grounds for confidence might we have?
However, it would be unwise to lay this collapse of confidence at the political right’s door, (particularly, if we want the left to become relevant again). One of the film’s many devices is a quasi-narrative, quasi-poetic thread running throughout, involving a journey made by a Professor Parkins of Cambridge (played by Justin Hopper), who lands abruptly on a beach in Felixstowe (Fisher’s hometown) as if teleported ,and appears to then proceed to search for the truth about Fisher. Parkins is a character taken from an M.R. James ghost story Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad (1904), who experiences a series of terrifying hauntings after finding a brass whistle inscribed with the words ”Who is this who is coming?” upon it. In We are Making a Film About Mark Fisher the whistle is found again by Parker, allowing an exploration of hauntology (the notion that ontology is formed in part through a ghostly nostalgia), a key theme across Fisher’s work.
As Parker leads us through various UK locations, he finds himself stumbling wearied through a metropolitan foot tunnel, hearing disoriented, fragmented voices that appear to be the read messages by social media trolls. This scene coincides with a consideration of Fisher’s Exiting the Vampire Castle essay, which aimed to call out and temper identitarian trolling, calling for leftist unity.
Political identity is indeed a huge problem, though years into the right-wing populist turn, we can say that blaming left-identitarian politics often leads to a dominance of right-identitarianism. The aforementioned need for confidence often takes the form of scapegoating and exclusion, as we become haunted by a nostalgia for a past we never experienced (a not uncommon phenomenon across culture — the music and tv industries survive on cultivating nostalgia for time periods the audiences haven’t personally experienced).
In terms of fascism the ghost that haunts is that of an imagined golden age linked to an idealised nation. It’s a dream fed by the ruling elite as a distraction. A dream of part-ownership of something priceless. The spirit of a nation. Thatcher repackaged this in prosaic terms as part-ownership of the nation via real estate, thereby justifying selling off the council housing stock. And today people paint English flags on roundabouts as a means of staking out their portion of the promised, never materialised, motherland.
Across the way (across town, across the football terrace, across your dining table) people have different dreams. They are assured wealth (and property) ownership as a birthright, while blood and soil nationalism offers rewards that aren’t worth the sacrifice given the level of comfort they already enjoy. The ghost that haunts them is one of a lost cosmopolitanism. A kind of seamlessly rolling landscape moving from cultural chatter to idle enjoyment of creative offerings, to polite yet effervescent street protest, all populated with genial foreigners and the experiences they promise: above all, blissful for its absence of precisely the aforementioned nationalists.
Class and politics are amorphous and these categories blur within families and communities. Even within the same person from one moment to the next. What is certain is the dreams of both factions are a million miles from realisation and lead to conflict between them.
As the film makes clear, the target audience is haunted by the loss of this second “reality” and I would concur that this would certainly be personally preferable. Although I and most other people (including, I’d hazard, the film’s various creators) are at a loss for how to achieve this. We might begin by addressing the naivety of the proposition. As the film’s narrator at one point proffers. “The rejection of identitarianism can only be achieved by the reassertion of class.” If we start there, we might just end up with the cosy dream of multiculturalism as a consequence.
The film makes something else very clear, whether by design or in constellation with the harsh realities we face societally. Namely: we face a choice of either living a wistfully melancholic life ruminating on how well we understand the writing of Fisher while blowing smoke up our collective yet highly-atomised derrière, or realising the urgency of the situation and acting now!
Towards the film’s end Jodi Dean, who is interviewed throughout the states:
“More and more universities have capitulated to more and more extorting demands from the Trump administration and I keep thinking about what if more people in academia over the last 5 or 10 years had actually been honest and had refused forms of orthodoxy and had been brave enough and you know just intellectually coherent enough to not fall prey to trends or forms of soft or hard coercion?”
Being honest will involve many things, and clearly many people have shown themselves disappointingly cowardly in the last year or so, and not just in the US. One thing the recent period has shown us is just how easily people across the western world will fold and self-censor. For those who haven't yet, approaches from the juridical to the activist to mediatic and artistic all beckon with urgency. As the film ends, it focuses on AI, which Dean characterises as more dangerous than social media and “like junk food for the soul.”
In response to this, the film suggests Fisher’s “Acid Communism” (as outlined in the Introduction to his unfinished book of the same name) as a solution. Acid Communism, as Fisher lays out, suggests a dissolution of social and class boundaries, recapturing the promise of ‘60s and ‘70s psychedelic culture. On this note, interviewee, artist Miki Aurora suggests that in “looking for an out road from capitalism,” we apply a varied visual semiotic lexicon to connote “different parts of this emancipatory puzzle.” This instruction is simple for all its psychedelic-infused vagary: we must collectivize and create with no respect for the boundaries being forced upon us.
The film is a most welcome and necessary contribution to the creation of such a sign system. It might reignite interest in Acid Communism, a movement that has barely left Facebook and Instagram thus far. Whether or not it does, all our resources will require the most important act of the creative process — bravery.
As Parker says self-pityingly, shortly after enduring the above-mentioned tunnel of haranguing insults: “The bullies were in another part of the playground. I didn’t want to attract their attention.” The posturing era of cliquey Fisher-identification, accelerationist-edgelordism, and dark Deleuzian hipsterism are hopefully over. We need to traverse the playground and call out the bullies (ICE, Reform, etc). As We are Making a Film About Mark Fisher conveys, we have a window to act in the face of AI-engined techno capitalism. Let’s haunt it together.
REFERENCES
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative? (Winchester UK: Zer0 Books, 2009)
Mark Fisher, https://k-punk.org/abandon-hope-summer-is-coming/