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I want to talk a little bit about film and television adaptions, and why, at least in the last ten to fifteen years, they've done such a bad job at adapting the source material. The first guilty party on this front, is of course Nolan's Odyssey, which I saw this past Tuesday. While entertaining and beautiful to look at, this film failed completely to capture the experience of reading or listening to the poem it's based on. The dialogue was flat, wooden, and filled with exposition dumps. The gods aren't present in any meaningful way, other than through storms and other weather events, which can easily be interpreted through the eyes of atheist Christopher Nolan as natural phenomena. And most importantly, the characters and themes are unrecognizable. Odysseus is just Matt Damon who feels bad about being Matt Damon: there's none of the flirtatious, prideful intelligence that defines his character in the poem. Because of this subversion of Odysseus, Telemachus's character also falls flat— how can you have an effective coming of age story when you subvert and deconstruct every part of what it means to be a man/king/father figure by tearing down Odysseus?
I don't think this phenomena is limited to the Odyssey. The newest version of Wuthering Heights is basically a porno. The final seasons of Games of Thrones devolved into a nihilistic gore-fest, which the source material most certainly is not. Even the Hobbit all the way back in 2012-2014 tried to make the charming, relatively low stakes kids book into another version of The Lord of the Rings.
It's tempting for me to blame woke for a lot of these changes, and that's undoubtedly part of it. If many of the values that were historically important in Western Civilization are now taboo, of course there will have to be heavy modification of the source material. However, I don't think this is the full picture. Many of these movies are doing really well at the box office, and I don't think woke has that much cultural appeal to the average American. Rather, I think a combination of the inherent limitations of visual storytelling and the dumbing down of stories in general because of reductions in attention spans is a more likely set of culprits.
Neil Postman wrote extensively about the first problem in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Visual media neither gives us the interiority that allows us to understand a point of view from the inside, nor really forces us to engage with an artists arguments: the movie will play on with or without our engagement in it.
I don't think this critique is entirely fair. You can certainly do a lot of subtle storytelling with television and film. The problem is now that people's attention spans are so fried that you need to beat them over the head with the themes of the work through dialogue and exposition dumps. The Odyssey is extremely guilty of this, which is probably part of the reason I had such a hard time watching it.
Why do you think visual media, specifically adaptions, have declined in quality over the past decade?
I have a vague theory that it's because the writer's room is now part of the establishment.
The 1950s and 60s are generally considered to be the golden age of sci-fi. A lot of the writers during that period were some form of communist at a time when it was not a good idea to publicly be a communist. (I'll get to Heinlein. Take your hands off the keyboard and let me finish.)
Heinlein is an interesting case, because he also had some fairly controversial and unorthodox opinions for the time - just in the other direction.
The 1980s and 1990s are generally considered to the the golden age of syndicated network TV. The writers at the time were disproportionately into gay rights at a time when it was not a good idea to be publicly into gay rights.
There's also the area of literature and film outside of samizdat in Soviet Russia.
In all three of these cases, a large contingent of writers were activists in times when being an activist carried real and significant negative consequences. This had two impacts on writing quality:
These days, the writer's room aligns with the broader mores and taboos of the neoliberal elite. There's no risk, and anybody who has opinions that go against the grain get self-policed before they can produce popular content.
In the absence of risk, the stories don't have selective pressure forcing them to be nuanced and well written, so we get what you describe instead.
Starship Troopers and opposition to actual Communism notwithstanding, a lot of Heinlein's beliefs were progressive for the time, and a lot of Heinlein's other beliefs (like the gun rights) would be normal for his time. They just don't seem that way now because of changes in society.
(Consider George Orwell, who was a socialist, even though he wrote Animal Farm.)
Were the gun rights positions normal for the time? I've always understood 1940-1990 to represent the nadir of pro gun stances in the US.
If you strech the time period back to 1930, you could make an argument that 1930 to 1990s represents a solid degradation on gun rights, from the twisted origins of the NFA Tax Stamp in 1934, the Gun Control act of 1968, the fucking Hughes Amendment, and culminating in the assault weapons ban in the 1990s.
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