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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   27881 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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I haven't seen the movie, but your post is relevant to a concept I've been thinking about for a while: applause lights as entertainment.

In theory, a lot of the tropes of modern entertainment exist to prevent bad things. Strong female characters exist to correct male overrepresentation & sexist portrayal of women, ethnically diverse casts likewise for race, ineffectual & pathetic villains exist to avoid the danger of glamourizing & thus promoting the crimes they commit etc. I can at least see where this comes from, even if I think it's misplaced paternalism.

However, I feel like there is a growing trend to go much further, to the point of valuing these things as ends unto themselves, to the degree that they outstrip in importance more traditional terminal entertainment goals like good storytelling, characterization, acting, production values etc. If the cast is nonwhite, there is a transgender lead, the plot shoehorns in a critique of capitalism - this is sufficient for the movie to be good and enjoyable, for a not-insignificant portion of the moviegoing public. The applause lights come on, people clap, and they clap because they enjoyed the applause light.

The inverse is also true, political incorrectness being enough to make a movie unwatchably bad - possibly even without anything problematic happening on-screen, beyond the presence of an actor or actress associated with offscreen wrongthink. (Chris Pratt jumps to mind)

I'm not quite sure how or when this came to be, but it seems like a stark difference compared to 20 or even 10 years ago. (and almost reminiscent of Soviet film) Booing the outgroup has always been a popular passtime, and there's some of that here (every single white male antagonist with predictable non-problematic personality defects, etc) but the majority seems more like a feel-good righteousness, like attending church - the more boring the sermon, the more virtuous the believer who manages to stay awake.

Maybe I’m part of the problem, but I just won’t watch a Rian Johnson movie. Yes, I hated the last Jedi. But it was because Rian wanted to elevate politics over storytelling; indeed, he actively seemed to hate storytelling.

So why go watch a movie made by such a man?

The applause lights come on, people clap, and they clap because they enjoyed the applause light.

I do not remember it exactly, but I think comedian Bill Burr described similar phenomenon as "clap commedy". "Comedian" tells a joke and instead of people laughing, they just clap. Comedy is special in that even if the joke is maximally politically incorrect, the laugh is involuntary and it clearly shows if the joke was actually funny.

I believe the neologism is "clapter".

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