Comment on Is the movie industry dead?

• SJ0@hilariouschaos.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s been busy but going well. Glad springtime is finally here.

  The nature of power is such that it isn’t self-sustaining. Many people see something that has been powerful for a long time and particularly neo-marxists think power is the lens through which everything is viewed, but such a lens ignores where power comes from.

  When I say “neo-marxist”, I’m referring to the ideology that all there is must be power and we must view everything through that lens. Marxism split the world into the working class and the owners, neo-marxism split the world instead into the powerful and the powerless. Neither viewpoint is accurate enough to be a useful model of reality, even if both do touch on truth. By basing your actions on these models then, you’re going to be acting wrong because your models predict things incorrectly.

  You can get power through raw force, but it never lasts. Examples exist all throughout history. The first imperial dynasty of china was extremely legalistic, the punishment for most crimes was death. The dynasty ended when one of the generals was late for a meeting, and when faced with death anyway chose to take his men and rebel. The Assyrians used brutal repression to become a powerful player in their region, but as a result every other player in the region banded together to take them out because they were too dangerous to be left. The same for the National Socialist Germans – they used a lot of force, and as a direct result everyone else ganged up on them and tore them to pieces.

  Lasting power comes from mutual service. Even dictators who last end up having to live by this playbook. Dictators who last end up building coalitions of people within the nation because to do otherwise will just mean the next person will use slightly more force and become the next one. China as an example was a dictatorship, but the people tolerate it because many people felt the dictatorship was working in the interest of the people (more or less), and did supervise the greatest increase in the middle class in china ever.

  All of this applies to the movie industry because people think the movie industry has power solely because it has power, when in reality it had power because it was producing films and TV shows people wanted to see and were willing to pay for. As the neo-marxists have come in and changed the industry into the left-wing equivalent of making those hokey Christian movies nobody likes it has lost much of its power because a screen nobody is watching is meaningless and powerless. Meanwhile, Japan as an example has lots of great media coming out of it because they’re making stuff people like first and foremost and then if they have other goals they come with that (and they’re great capitalists, using media to sell all kinds of stuff)

  People think the problem is diversity, but the real problem is that diversity has become the centerpiece of the western media landscape, when it’s a boring centerpiece. Just being a different race or sex or sexuality isn’t interesting by itself, and all these new priorities come at the price of making unwatchable tripe.

  To give further examples, there was a lot more popular media from black people in the 1990s, and A-list actors like Wil Smith came from those backgrounds. It worked because those black people were telling stories that involved them and were about them, helping audiences learn a bit more about the world around them while being entertained. By contrast, today we have black snow white, black little mermaid, and girlboss Aladdin. It’s a meaningless display of token diversity that is disrespectful to the source material as well as to the talent who could be doing something more relevant.

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  • Alice@hilariouschaos.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah I get what you’re saying dude, so you think that like this focus on diversity and shit has messed up movies? Cuz I do. Just make a movie and stop focusing on Race so much I guess I don’t know why they don’t do that. I don’t understand why everything has to be a political movement

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    • SJ0@hilariouschaos.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah, and it’s not because it’s diversity but because it’s more about the message than about the art – you remember ever watching one of those horrible Christian movies? Very few were even watchable because they were so busy literally sermonizing. That’s fine, but it makes for crappy movies.

      And on the other side of that, there’s lots of works out there that integrate Christianity as a theme that are first and foremost about making something good, and often they’re awesome.

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