QuietBeef said:Do you mean the movie, or the tweet? I suppose the answer is yes in either case, but in different ways.The Tweet.
QuietBeef said:It seemed pretty mocking to me. I mean, it's comparing the gravity of feminism to the gravity of a slight temperature adjustment. I assumed that that trivializing was supposed to be the joke. If that was meant to be a feminist tweet, it's..... odd. lol But okay. People are odd.
Still, that's kind of beside the point, since you posted it in this thread for a reason, while saying your complaint has nothing to do with feminism. Unless you felt it related to the topic in some other way?It came from Trudeau (liberal PM of Canada), it was meant to be earnest and positive. Though the delivery was rather awkward. Reason for posting it: Seemed like painful virtue signaling.
Ah. In that case perhaps I misunderstood your intention. However, while I could argue that the tweet is technically virtue signaling, I wouldn't really look at it that way. I mean, he's a politician. Taking a side on social issues and making that opinion known to the wider public is literally part of his job. Hence, that tweet alongside your original post, looks more like a commentary on the social issue itself, rather than virtue signaling.
QuietBeef said:That's a strange thing to have contempt for. lol Artists toy with the reversal of concepts in media all the time.The contempt comes more from how journalism has been pumping out material that falls in line with mainstream critical race theory, and the overall tendency of the tabloid format to contradict itself. Particularly in the last few years, somewhere around the end of Bush's term and the beginning of Trump's, the media started to become a prismatic source of sentiments that would evolve into cancel culture, more extreme levels of divisiveness, and levels of political correctness that has a pervasive reach as far as into stand-up comedy.
Oh, I thought you meant the reversal from the original content of the media franchise. Nevermind on my previous statement then, your contempt is not strange. lol I think we can all agree on the meaninglessness of tabloid swill.
However, I would hardly chalk any of that up to political correctness.
QuietBeef said:I could just as easily see the directors saying that sort of thing for, as you said yourself, virtue signaling. If you're going to be blatant about the political baiting, you may as well market it, right? They may have even believed they were doing something good. Granted, I haven't seen that show, so I don't know how sloppy or superficial the attempt at moral messaging was, but if it was as you say, then I doubt it's a subject the director and other major contributors truly cared about. Someone who's given real thought and care to a cause and aims to make changes through their art, can typically represent it better than creating a piece of media that has nothing to do with it and then awkwardly inserting some childishly superficial commentary on the subject. It betrays how little thought they actually gave it, how little it mattered to the story they were telling. Rather than it being a feminist or anti-racist piece of media, it's just a regular piece of media with a feminist or anti-racist logo slapped on it.It is possible that the directors were baiting, but their words at least matched their output. It's easiest to illustrate with quotes:
Damon Lindelof said:Given the racial and gender politics of the show, I didn’t want this to just be a conversation between two white men. So I reached out to a group of women of various ethnic backgrounds who wrote a series of essays called “Women Watch the Watchmen” to ask them what they’d want to ask you. The first question comes from Chloe Maveal: “Do you feel like this show is something that can help redeem Watchmen to literally anyone who’s not part of a straight white male audience? Do you, as both a fan of the comics and showrunner of the TV series, feel like the comic books here need redeeming in the first place?”
Because I’m not Alan Moore, I get to make a Watchmen that’s like, “Here’s how I feel about female characters. Here’s how I feel about characters of color. Here’s how I feel about Rorschach.” I get to have those debates in the writers’ room. Those other writers get to say, “Well, here’s how I feel about it.” Of course, in the writers’ room, there was a wide range of whether or not Rorschach was a white supremacist. Rorschach, a.k.a. Walter Joseph Kovacs, is a costumed vigilante with a lethal streak and an unshakeable sense of right and wrong. Speaking of right: He’s profoundly socially conservative and an avid reader of a trashy right-wing magazine. In his diary, he writes about his distaste for queer people and other marginalized groups.. I said, “That’s not relevant. He’s dead. What’s interesting is that you can make a compelling argument that he was and I can make a compelling argument that he wasn’t.”
Sounds like good intentions without much thought put in.
But I'm also disinclined to trust anything someone says publicly when their money is on the line, so who knows.
The show was generally well-received; I'm probably in a marginal opinion that it was used as social propaganda. The series starts off with a KKK assault on Black Wall Street from way back, and ends with the modern villains being a white supremacy sect. This was well-received for its progressive notions. I was left feeling like someone was trying to "educate" me.
There definitely are shows where there are slightly similar sentiments, but the execution doesn't muddy the plot, and the issues aren't just a logo slapped on it, like you said. The Boys comes to mind.
I'm sure you're not the only one who's aware that it's social propaganda. I mean, it sounds like the creators basically said as much themselves. However, people can know it's propaganda and still enjoy it as a piece of media.
I feel like the problem with art that makes us uncomfortably feel like it's trying to educate us isn't really the education itself. We tend not to have that reaction to good media that's trying to educate us in some way. Even when it's quite blatant that it's attempting to send a certain moral message. I think this is probably the case because wrapping a sermon in good art makes both the sermon and the art feel more meaningful, while wrapping a sermon in bad art has sort of a latent insult to it. That such cheap, unintelligent media is trying to tell us what to think. Just as people can take a message very differently from someone eloquent, than someone aggressive and inarticulate. Their point may be the same, but we often act like it's not. Knowledge and understanding have a somewhat hierarchical implication in our culture. We don't like the idea that we could learn from something that appears to be so much dumber than we think we are. People don't want to be educated by bad art.
