- Registrado
- 17 de Ene, 2018
For some reason, this makes me think of Star Trek: Picard, which shows a guy being tortured to death and his eyeball plucked out, and Kathy Griffin holding up a bloody effigy of the President's severed head.
There's a stronger undercurrent of meanness in Current Year popular culture than I've ever seen before. Doesn't seem that long ago the movie Saw was considered shocking. Now we've got TV shows, aimed at the mainstream, proudly showing us torture porn.
It would be easy and glib to blame it on TDS or GooberGrape or Brexit or something but this has been percolating through the media for a while. A kind of free-floating hostility manifesting itself in all kinds of strange ways in media you wouldn't expect (Captain Marvel attacking and humiliating some guy for trying to hit on her is another one).
Dunno what to make of it, but I get the feeling from a lot of modern TV and movies that they're made by hateful, angry people, who are using mass entertainment to live out violent or degrading revenge fantasies.
There's long been a bit of this (the old trope about callous high school Chads and Stacies getting their commeupance was and is a favorite figment of nerdy and poorly socialized writer's imaginations) but it's much more overt now.
Is Hollywood full of sociopaths now? Empathy seems to be rare in the stuff they make. If they're not actively hostile, they're passive-aggressive, like Rian Johnson and his "your Snoke theory sucks" smirking and gleeful trashing of a franchise that used to be optimistic and sincere.
Well, let's be real though: It's only certain kinds of meanness and torture-porn that's being given the thumbs-up.
SAW was considered shocking because it was innocent people being tortured because some psycho was dying and got bitter that they weren't appreciating life (I mean, that was the plot for the first movie and honestly they all kind of blend together after that). Sure, some of the characters in the films were flawed or downright bad, but the filmmakers found ways to humanize them. They made the characters into recognizable people that you could feel bad for even if you didn't approve of everything that they did.
The examples you mentioned (Hunters, Captain Marvel) are decidedly different in their approach, and there's a reason for that: Our culture has worked itself into a state where they think that Actual Fucking Nazis are patrolling the streets hanging minorities, and that we are literally a few steps away from the Handmaid's Tale becoming a reality for women in the U.S. Batshit as it sounds, there are people who seem to genuinely believe that these are realities- or close enough to become realities that they feel justified in their fear. Hence... Well, literally fucking everything shitty that Antifa does; they feel justified because they've convinced themselves that their enemy is that bad and the threat is that real.
Hollywood isn't full of sociopaths: It's full of strongly biased people (or at least, opportunistic ones who want to virtue-signal) who have figured out that Certain Groups are acceptable targets for violence, which translates well to screen. Hunters can get away with it because Nazis are acceptable targets; Captain Marvel can get away with it because men who tell women to smile are evil misogynists who are Asking For It. Personally, I see it as no different than the way cultists think:
"Everyone in our group is good, and everyone outside of our group is bad. We deserve everything good we get because we have The Right Way of Thinking, and they deserve everything bad that they get because they have The Wrong Way of Thinking . Maybe I feel a little bad laughing at someone who's getting hurt because I'm not a total monster, but I don't want my fellow group members knowing that I'm sympathizing with an outsider, so I'll laugh anyway- and really, honestly, it's the outsider's fault. If they just joined my group and started thinking and acting like me, they wouldn't be getting punished for having WrongThink."
That's basically what it comes down to. I mean, think of all the movies and books that have come out that have been criticized for empathizing with bad people or trying to understand their point of view- it really does come off as that knee-jerk "DON'T BE SEEN SYMPATHIZING WITH THE ENEMY" reaction. Loudly broadcasting your hatred and total lack of empathy for the right groups with earn you praise from people who share your mindset.