Tanista
1d ago
Create a pro-American superhero narrative that gets released to the same theaters that Woke Marvel goes to
This implies that Hollywood (and academia) will be the last to flip because no one else* is going to make $200 million movies regularly. It's just not viable.
You basically have to wait until an AI-driven paradigm shift can let weird nerds like Lucas make non-horror blockbusters for ~$60 million that look world class again.
* Well, maybe barring the Chinese.
Tanista
1d ago
If it's just some token mentions then they've essentially created this problem by being furtive. Just bite the bullet. He was rich, famous and living in NY. Of course people like Epstein ran into him or tried to collect him.
It's from Hillbilly Elegy:
Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him.
President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.
Many try to blame the anger and cynicism of working-class whites on misinformation. Admittedly, there is an industry of conspiracy-mongers and fringe lunatics writing about all manner of idiocy, from Obama’s alleged religious leanings to his ancestry. But every major news organization, even the oft-maligned Fox News, has always told the truth about Obama’s citizenship status and religious views. The people I know are well aware of what the major news organizations have to say about the issue; they simply don’t believe them. Only 6 percent of American voters believe that the media is “very trustworthy.”To many of us, the free press—that bulwark of American democracy—is simply full of shit.
With little trust in the press, there’s no check on the Internet conspiracy theories that rule the digital world. Barack Obama is a foreign alien actively trying to destroy our country. Everything the media tells us is a lie. Many in the white working class believe the worst about their society. Here’s a small sample of emails or messages I’ve seen from friends or family:
- From right-wing radio talker Alex Jones on the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, a documentary about the “unanswered question” of the terrorist attacks, suggesting that the U.S. government played a role in the massacre of its own people.
- From an email chain, a story that the Obamacare legislation requires microchip implantation in new health care patients. This story carries extra bite because of the religious implications: Many believe that the End Times “mark of the beast” foretold in biblical prophecy will be an electronic device. Multiple friends warned others about this threat via social media.
- From the popular website WorldNetDaily, an editorial suggesting that the Newtown gun massacre was engineered by the federal government to turn public opinion on gun control measures.
- From multiple Internet sources, suggestions that Obama will soon implement martial law in order to secure power for a third presidential term.
The list goes on. It’s impossible to know how many people believe one or many of these stories. But if a third of our community questions the president’s origin—despite all evidence to the contrary—it’s a good bet that the other conspiracies have broader currency than we’d like. This isn’t some libertarian mistrust of government policy, which is healthy in any democracy. This is deep skepticism of the very institutions of our society. And it’s becoming more and more mainstream.
It's actually a bit harsher than I remember. I wonder if he still stands by the exact words.
Maybe the reason Trump doesn't understand why it keeps going is because he doesn't have an inferiority complex about class that drives him into fantasy about elite pedophile rings.
This is funny because Trump's own VP's explanation for birtherism (and I suppose it applies even more to the demands to see his university transcripts) was a class-driven inferiority complex.
So, at the very least, Trump should know his audience at this point.
If you're a leftist you can't actually grant that your opponents are on the same level.
Because many of the tactics they use are not things you can universalize, they're good because of who those things are being done to or for.
Granting that it's just a contest of will/a way to feel good is obviously very dangerous for what sees itself as a minority pushing society towards progress. Nihilism favors the majority.
Tanista
6d ago
There is also maxwellhill. Ghislaine Maxwell had a prominent hand in the general psy-opping of the giant psy-op that is Reddit. She was, maybe still is, an intelligence asset. What was Epstein, then?
This part of the theory was always baffling. Why would a known socialite working to pull off a psyop use her real name?
Tanista
10d ago
I mean, sure. But you'd really hope that such people would want reassurances that the woman was there willingly and weren't coerced, drugged, or blackmailed into it themselves. I think most 'normal' people would be sketched out, even if they don't immediately go to the cops.
This is topical again because of Diddy but, when people see people hanging around a rich, powerful guy and being used for sex, they assume "whore" not "sex slave".
Because, y'know, there are a lot of whores out there.
(3) Also, modern script writers are just bad. I know I've banged on here about "The Rings of Power" before, but you can tell that Payne and McKay are movie writers not TV writers.
Studios often seem to go for relatively inexperienced writers and directors which I suppose makes sense if you have idiotic inclusion standards like Disney or need to have an all-powerful producer like Kevin Feige but just seems baffling for a vanity project/streaming tentpole like Rings of Power.
People seem to love Tony Gilroy's Andor, so maybe that's going to change.
The problem with Snyder is that he takes two hits to make an okay movie. If every Snyder-fan defense is "watch the extended cut" then he's just awful as a theatrical director.
I think Man of Steel in particular was overly maligned for some of Snyder's choices (I'm just not wedded to Superman not killing), but the fact that everything he's done since has faced more or less the same reaction as BvS and his best works are things like 300 and Dawn of the Dead where he didn't have script control is telling. He was promoted way outside of his competence when he became the architect of the DCEU.
Tanista
11d ago
Or he was inspired by From Dusk Till Dawn, which had a similar genre shift with a similar subject matter.
Feck it, I'm starting to get interested in this dumb movie now. I've seen some clips of scenes on Youtube (the end fight) and the way Remmick is going after Sammie makes me think this is about cultural appropriation and exploitation; taking the products of black culture (songs, stories) and absorbing that into mainstream/white culture. Remmick literally tells Sammie he wants his songs and stories, and it seems that the memories of the thralls become part of Remmick's memories as well, so it really is "black culture being absorbed into white mainstream society and being altered and taken over as belonging there". White culture is vampiric on the culture of the minorities (black, Hispanic, what have you) and depends on 'fresh blood' to rejuvenate and perpetuate itself.
I think Coogler is slightly less hamfisted than this, or there'd be no point to having Remmick be Irish at all (and his first victims be white supremacists) or have the Rocky Road to Dublin scene.
Or, if he's hamfisted, it's in negatively contrasting mainstream society (which is apparently either racist if white or stiflingly Christian if black) to being eaten and turning into a thrall
Remmick is offering an alternative that theoretically has a place for everyone but strips them of their agency and rootedness. There's a lot of talk about equality and loving one another and yet everyone dances to his tune. At one point, he tries to get a woman to let him in using her husband's memories and he just disappears from the frame, not even an agent. Even after he's killed, you get agency but never get to go to your culture's heaven while Wunmi Mosaku's character - mocked for keeping up with her traditional beliefs/"Bayou bullshit"* - seems more or less correct about everything, including that dying normally lets you have an afterlife, as opposed to hanging around forever on Earth with a false solace and community, even if it is antiracist and cosmopolitan. Seems more like a criticism of assimilation and selling out.
Remmick is...Disney and Sammy is Coogler? How bad was the process on those Marvel movies? Is he trying to tell us something about Bob Iger?
* Hers are the only religious symbols that seem to offer any protection btw. Of course.
Academics did not adequately argue against the mass movement. It is not the case, for instance, that the experts in western history, literature, or philosophy were more likely to argue against the mass movement in any substantive way. This is problematic: if learning the best of western culture does not lead to protecting said culture in any genuine sense when it matters the most, then how great is the actual utility of such learning?
Probably shouldn't have let so many activists and grievance scholars critical of Western civ into the henhouse.
Maybe this is where being Western gets you into trouble. Others would accept that, while their beliefs are true, education is a matter of indoctrinating people into viewing those alleged facts through the right lens. Westerners think argument will lead to the correct conclusion so why does it matter? Some people allowed themselves to be anesthetized by claims of institutional neutrality.
Random people online were able to sense a threat that leading experts weren’t able to sense, and made arguments that leading academics did not make. Why?
People did sense it, the ones in spaces with the activists just had to be terrified. The "why not transracialism?" argument everyone uses online, for example, led to a huge shitstorm for Rebecca Tuvel. I think someone like Weinstein didn't know what he was getting into, and Peterson just has a personality type where he's prone to grandiosity about his positions and importance, and his ideology makes him very contemptuous of public shaming and struggle sessions (if you're charitable, his background in psychology makes him very suspicious of moral tyrants).
The other problem is that a lot of the more established people in institutions who could say something hate the enemies of the modern social justice movement more than they do the socjus types (agreeing with them on what they think are the important points and being baffled when it's not enough), and would rather be in denial than grant them an inch . Trace more or less summed up the dynamics when one set of consistent deniers ran into problems getting hired elsewhere (I suppose when you already have a job and seniority it doesn't seem worth it to rock the boat, instead of admitting you're a coward you cope by claiming it's no big deal)
What lesson can be taken from this? Don't fall asleep at the wheel while the pipeline for educating your kids and new elites is taken over by your enemies. That's about it.
Tanista
11d ago
It's not so much that I have a definitive stance on the question (which I can grant with no issue is interesting) and more that I don't think all forms of art are or need be set up to deal with that challenge.
I think I'm grokking your point but let's see: would you say that black American LARPing is basically a more intense and encouraged version of Americans LARPing as Irish come St Paddy's day?
No not at all. "Suspension of disbelief", as if you were hoping that you could be "taken for a ride" if you could only make yourself believe that the story really was a window to another world, is an immature way of approaching art (immature in the sense of pre-critical, pre-reflective, pre-self-consciousness).
The fact that a magic trick falls apart if you look at it too closely doesn't mean that wanting to see a magic trick is immature. Sometimes the point of an experience is the visceral immediacy of it.
Thinking that wanting to be immersed in a fiction is the same thing as that fiction being real is how a lot of media gets ruined by people who now feel they have to manage your perceptions.
I recently watched F1. The movie, like Top Gun before it, is bullshit in its specifics. And there's probably an interesting critical take to be written about what it says about the generational conflict in the West right now (both movies represent a rejection of the need to pass the torch, which is itself a backlash against "woke" reboots which also functioned as forced retirement for the Boomer celebrities and their IPs)
But I don't give a fuck about any of that, because I wanted to see fast cars and improbably skilled and handsome people in an IMAX theater. I wanted to be so engrossed I didn't care. And I was. Mission accomplished.
I believed Dr Dre … I don’t believe Kendrick Lamar.
This is actually funny (and I think a case in point), because there's no reason to think Dr Dre is any more credible about his subject matter than Kendrick. Dr. Dre grew up in a similar environment as Kendrick but he wasn't a gangster. He was just a musical talent. Ice Cube also wasn't a thug. Eazy E was probably the closest to living what he rapped, because he actually was a Crip.
In essence, Dr Dre and co. faked it till they made it: it was the money that brought in people like Suge and his affiliated Bloods.
As for Kendrick himself, at best he's about the same as Dre. Maybe, depending on how deep you dig into his old catalogue or random signs and hints he throws out, he was also affiliated. He's certainly cool with the gangs today, but he is massively famous.
Dre is not any more "real" than Kendrick, he's just not (publicly) woke and endlessly praised for it. But even Kendrick is just the latest in a long line of conscious rappers who've always been contrasted with the other strains of hip hop that are seen as hedonistic, anesthetizing and assimilationist (this tension is essentially why the hip hop community has basically contrasted him with Drake forever). What he says may not be true, but it resonates with people who already believe it to be true. That's why he's popular
I’ve always felt black Americans are Americans, just black. More recently I feel like they’re trying to be in some way more so.
A fraught relationship with the American identity isn't new. Artists like Coogler being suspicious about being assimilated or "selling out" isn't new. People pandering isn't new. The final act is pure pandering, but it's no different from the movies Tarantino is parodying when Leo DiCaprio's character roasts a bunch of Nazis in his 60s films.
I would sympathize if this was about playing the "black national anthem" or trying to move the founding date of America to revolve around slavery but what's the actual specific beef here? Was it the voodoo shit ? The Asians as middle-man minority? Characters pontificating on not being free in the 30s?
Because I have to wonder if, like @Skulldrinker, people are just fatigued with certain subject matter given everything that's happened since 2020 (I would also not trust movie reviews from people who sound like they'd wear a Notorious RBG shirt btw). The last thing was notable to me, but only because everyone still complains like that in movies made today. It's not that I don't expect people of the past to make certain noises (though my model for black southerners isn't particularly deep), it's that I hear it too much today when it clearly doesn't apply to not twinge in annoyance.
I'll give my own beef: I don't get Remmick. The movie tries to draw parallels between Remmick/the Irish and African-Americans and their relationship to Christianity but Remmick is implied and explicitly said to be very old, predating racial categories. If he was there during Ireland's original conversion it wasn't exactly like what happened to blacks. Or are we supposed to take him lamenting being forced to learn the Lord's Prayer to be about learning the English version?
Tanista
13d ago
don’t have or bring over children
I don't see how this is possible when you can't even stop birth tourism from people flying in. Are they only going to work for four months or so?
Tanista
15d ago
I don't think ICE officers lack a pension like legionnaires so it's a non-issue.
I just don’t know what’s happened since 2022 that would make such a big shift make sense!
Elon bought Twitter?
It feels like a pat explanation but now I'm honestly wondering why. Maybe an instinctive dislike of Great Man theory on my part?
There's an entire criticism going around right now from people who would know like Ezra Klein that Twitter was especially bad for progressives in that it made the links between journalists, activists and politicians way too tight and allowed very easy coordination (this is how you get people providing arguments that rioting is bad getting fired during the Summer of Floyd because ??) . This allowed liberal cancel culture to reach a fever pitch but also led to overplaying their hand on culture issues and it naturally backfired when someone else took it over.
It was the regime's coordination center and the rebels got it. Of course it should go badly.
In today's era of disposable pop culture, where Marvel Studios are delighted if people are still sharing GIFs of their latest capeshit instalment so much as one year after release, that kind of durable cross-demographic cultural staying power is hard to even wrap your head around.
What was the home video market like in the US? Because, for us, The Matrix was one of the first DVDs we got which gave it even more staying power but we were generally a bit behind the West (especially on TV)
If you can only own a few you pick movies that are either classics, have good special features or really "popped" on screen.
Nowadays you can cycle through terabytes of movies at will (hell, even if you had no internet 6-in-1 DVDs are common in any random street market in Africa) and I don't know that anyone cares about the BTS stuff. You can't sit with a movie for months to years.
As for gays, they've adopted a strict "no compromise" policy that I don't think is popular IRL
It's getting more popular amongst Republicans but I think that's wholly because the gays have either abandoned their movement or refused to Sistah Soulja the trans side.
If they totally surrendered today and treated trans like NAMBLA...maybe Republicans would give up and rebound. But that's impossible (the best they can manage is just silence) so who knows when the backlash will bottom out?
There are cases of people making movies with iPhones , so anything is possible. TV has gotten more ambitious and it may have made smaller movies cheaper to make. But VFX-heavy tentpoles seem to be another thing.
There's a ton of talent in this field, including some that are known for being very clear with their vision and so not prone to ballooning budgets. But even for people like Villeneuve who have shown they can work lean or allegedly modestly budgeted MCU flicks we end up ~180-200m. Given inflation that may be a cut but not as large as you'd need.
If anything, the big companies might be able to bully more work out of their contractors than a newcomer would. Victoria Alonso, who was recently booted from Marvel potentially as a scapegoat, was apparently notorious for wringing every bit of labour she could from VFX artists so she could get endless changes before she made a final decision
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