Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3d ago
The people making these movies are not trying to impress you, the jaded 115+ IQ critical viewer who will pick apart the plot and complain about the action sequences. They’re much too busy optimizing their films for the international market, where their films will be eagerly lapped up by foreign audiences who’ll be watching them with subtitles. Those audiences are not especially concerned with the snappiness or verisimilitude of the dialogue, because they’re going to miss half of it anyway as they try to shift their eyes between the subtitles and the action taking place above them. (Or, if they’re watching a dubbed version instead, they’re just going to get localized, rewritten dialogue anyway, so the talent of the American scriptwriters is irrelevant.) These audiences want to see a bombastic series of visually-compelling sequences, populated by beautiful American celebrities; if they wanted to watch emotionally-stirring slice-of-life stories, they’d watch media made in their own countries.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4d ago
Okay, so, this is all a fairly decent summary, but all it demonstrates is that the Democrat-Republican split basically failed to map in any coherent way onto a liberal-conservative axis well into the 21st century. You’re correct that Bob Dole and Jerry Falwell would have been horrified if their daughter had been caught dating Dimebag Darrell Abbott; however, a good mainstream 90’s liberal like Phil Donahue would be equally horrified, because Dimebag was the kind of guy who proudly displayed Confederate imagery. (And, again, he’d be far more mortified by his daughter dating Phil Anselmo, especially after seeing this clip of Phil throwing a Roman and shouting “White power!”)
And hell, even if you want to stick to country music and you want to claim Jennings as a “liberal”, how about guys like Travis Tritt? An openly Republican Bush-voting conservative, who had long hair and a beard throughout the whole period you’re referring to? I don’t think Southern guys at the time would have thought Tritt looked out of place at a honky-tonk — let alone that he looked like a leftist academic.
Basically what I’m saying is that beards and long(ish) hair could pattern-match to “working-class Southern man who drinks a lot and doesn’t act like Ned Flanders, but who also doesn’t like faggots or egghead professors” just as easily as it could pattern-match to “ex-hippie with proper NPR-approved beliefs” during the time period OP referred to.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4d ago
Once upon a time, having a beard or long hair meant Something, and usually meant being a leftist/liberal. Even by the early 2000s when I was in college, facial hair was still coded as an academic/liberal kind of thing. Outside the university, anyone who had either was definitely left-of-center.
This seems like total nonsense to me. Maybe it’s just because I grew up immersed in the metalhead subculture, but I can think of a massive number of guys with beards and long hair from the 90’s and 00’s who were not remotely associated with academics or leftist politics. The guys from Pantera, for example, were all extremely working-class Southerners, and their politics ranged from generic tits-and-beer centrism (the Abbott brothers) to generic Southern conservatism (Rex Brown) to basically White Nationalism (Phil Anselmo).
I agree that they signaled “not a middle-class guy with a full-time white-collar job”, but past that I don’t think there was much of a political connotation at that time, nor even a couple of decades before that. (Nobody would have mistaken Waylon Jennings for a college professor either.)
That’s not Eddie Murphy. It’s Nigerian-British actor Kayode Ewumi, portraying his character Roll Safe from the BBC series Hood Documentary.
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