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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   32887 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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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.

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