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Into the Spider-Verse was my favorite movie of 2018. I only found out this year that one of the film's directors was someone whose values are antithetical to everything I believe and as harmful to me as ideas can be. I knew he wasn't returning to direct the sequel, so I thought that meant I could go see it without feeling shame, but I just found out (again, surprisingly late) that he's an Executive Producer on it. This likely means he gets a share of the box office gross, though I don't know how big that share would be.
This presents an e̶t̶h̶i̶c̶a̶l̶ psychological dilemma that feels as though it's ethical for me. This is one of the few movies where seeing it in the theater is very important to me, and I do feel that I'd be missing out by seeing it on my tiny laptop screen several months after release. However, I would feel emasculated if I gave this person any more money than I already have. Is there a way I can have my cake and eat it too here?
I know it's unlikely that anyone here has a better idea "than stop giving a crap about what filmmakers believe," but I'm asking anyway, just in case. There's nobody else on the internet where I'd expect people to be sympathetic to my problem in a way that's more than superficial. Left-wing spaces (as I've experienced them) would say "you should only care about political violence and life ruination if you're the kind of person we'd be using it against," and right-wing spaces (as I've experienced them) would say "these tactics are actually good and we should use them against left-wingers when we're in power" after making fun of me for liking children's movies. I do not mean to imply all left-dominated or right-dominated spaces are like the ones I describe, but that's my expectation of them based on experience, and it's always demoralizing to get those kinds of reactions, so I don't want to go seek them out.
I fully endorse voting with your money with regard to woke art, but if the movie isn’t ideological (which remains to be seen), why do you care about the producer? I don’t know about film crew ranks, but if the best boy (whatever that is) held values antithetical to yours would you be bothered? What about the key grip (again, whatever that is)? Costume designer? Casting director? Keep moving up the chain until it matters. Why is that the point where a worker’s political beliefs ruin the movie for you?
In the old Christian view of the world, everyone was equally evil and equally deserving of damnation, but I think that worldview allowed for greater nuance in weighing people’s moral worth. You either had to bite the bullet and say that no one had any moral worth, or make pretty fine distinctions, along the lines of “OF COURSE we’re all equally bad, but we kill people in battle, and that other guy kills prisoners.” Nowadays, though, without that blanket condemnation of every human, it’s easy to fall into “but that guy is BAD and I don’t want to help him/pay him/give him a platform/etc.”
My brother in Christ, EVERYONE is bad. Your plumber cheats on his wife, your mechanic watches child porn, your hairdresser spreads rumours, your kid tortures frogs. You give them all money without a second thought. It sucks, but it is the fallen nature of humanity. If the movie is a wokefest, skip it no matter what the producer thinks, but if this specific bad executive producer can executively produce a good movie, why the isolated demand for purity?
On another note, yousaid it was an ethical dilemma, but ethical dilemmas involve competing obligations. You have only one obligation- to not support this guy, but mentioned shame and feeing emasculated. That’s not an ethical dilemma, it’s a psychological one. It sounds (sounds, that’s all), like you’re trying to preserve an ideal of who you are as resisting in some measure the decline of western society. A noble goal, but we’re fretting over a spiderman cartoon, so the battle is lost. They’ve gotten into your head, and whether you see the movie or not, you think watching spider man movies is really important, which is a win for Marvel marketing over the long run. Do not resist the decline, propel the recovery. Step one is to stop watching marvel movies and go out and act on the world. . If you already act, act more.
Oh my god, you've made me realize something. Rightists often talk about white privilege as though it's the rhetoric of original sin, but it ISN'T original sin, because original sin implies nobody is absolved, doesn't it? That we are all born racist/sexist/ableist/etc and we shouldn't cast the first stone?
I have limited exposure to religious people so I don't know if they were less harsh towards their enemies when they were in power. I just assumed that they were, and that any ideological faction that gains power becomes like this, because power corrupts people.
Oh, they still cast a lot of stones back in the day. But nowadays there's a much more pernicious sense of self-righteousness that I think comes from the loss of the idea that everyone is evil/fallen.
I thought of your comment when I saw these heartless cretins celebrate somebody's suicide because he walked around holding a torch and said some offensive things.
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