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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35035 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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What I find funny is it's almost certainly the "action" part of that formula that provides 90% of the appeal. I think that writers rooms are way to the left of the median American on values. The median American is still basically heterosexual, pro-family, pro-achievement, pro-justice, and generally in alignment with what we might call Western virtues, which cash out by starting as Aristotle described - courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, ambition, patience, friendliness, truthfulness, wit, modesty, and justice - and probably add some Nietzchean virtues on top of that: health, strength, and a will to power.

Make your show about a protagonist of any color that strives to achieve those virtues and you have a pretty solid foundation. What people are mostly not enjoying are shows that attack these virtues or celebrate vice. People do not enjoy the anti-social, the self-destructive, the celebration of weakness or bitterness or mediocrity. They generally don't sympathize with losers and incompetence.

I think this also explains the perennial unpopularity of Christian media even during periods when the vast majority of people consider themselves Christians. For many, their Christianity is a moral counterweight to the ancient virtues they actually implicitly believe in.

I think the explanation is a little more prosaic. Explicitly Woke and explicitly Christian both tend to suffer from the same defect as any ideological fiction: being sanctimonious and preachy, with quality taking a back seat to message. This means the finished product tends to not be very good and unlike more subtly written material it is hard to get past themes you don't like (or, indeed, achieve basic audience buy-in to begin with).

There's also probably an argument that the association flows backwards - if something is good, we downplay its ideological content. Stuff like Ben-Hur and Prince of Egypt are pretty well regarded.

I've certainly noticed that "woke" pieces of media that have action in them tend to be mediocre at best in terms of the action, though I never connected it to the idea that action films/TV shows implicitly have that sort of right-wing philosophical worldview. What stood out to me mostly was just how awful and disconnected from reality the choreography tends to be, with fights not showing the basic intent that's present in each and every blow that's thrown, or with physics breaking suspension of disbelief far beyond what's expected of an action film. Amazon's own Rings of Power which famously easily had enough of a budget to film top quality fight scenes, suffered from this according to clips I saw, and so did The Matrix: Resurrections and even the older arguably minimally "woke" film Wonder Woman. I just figured that if the creators considered the messaging a priority, they let other aspects falter such as hiring someone who understands how to put together a good action scene, but now I also wonder if there's some sort of subconscious distaste for action scenes that caused an intentional sabotage of those scenes.

What I find funny is it's almost certainly the "action" part of that formula that provides 90% of the appeal.

Yes, but the showrunners are mostly constitutionally incapable of doing an action show with "diverse" characters that doesn't try to shove the diversity in your face. And it's harder to do with female, homosexual or trans characters than with race because that sort of action is part of the formula also.

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