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They're no longer trying to be subtle at all. Movies have become stuffed with outright political lectures, and always coming from the same view. I just want a m

They're no longer trying to be subtle at all. Movies have become stuffed with outright political lectures, and always coming from the same view. I just want a movie being itself without politics shoved into it.

saagarjha 3y ago
I have bad news to share with you if you think movies were never political.
- c_crank 3y ago
  The word 'subtle' was included.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    "shoved" was also included. And I don't even think there's a DreamWorks movie as heavy handed as Wall-E, which we considered part of the "Renaissance"
    - c_crank 3y ago
      Weird as it sounds, I would still describe the political message in Wall-E as more subtle than in Elemental, or even Strange World - another recent flop. Why is that? Wall-E, although clearly and one sidedly in favor of environmentalist or conservationist causes, still describes the problem and the solution in fantastic terms. The entire planet being covered in skyscrapers of toxic trash may have some parallels to the present, but those are just parallels. The message you can take away from Wall-E is not a literal solution (planting plants to rejuvenate things ignores the complexity of real life ecosystems - just consider invasive species!). Instead, the message must be more abstract - something like "Care more about the environment." The political situation in Elemental, by contrast, is barely abstract at all. There is a city, there are immigrants, and the elemental toothpaste commercial aesthetic is a thin veneer over real life racial and ethnic tensions. So any solution the movie suggests would be something that maps very closely to the real world.
      - gjsman-1000 3y ago
        Some critics brought this up, but the more overt message of Elemental actually makes things worse. Think about it. In real life, skin color doesn’t do… anything. It’s just a stupid way humans distinguish between each other. Elemental - the two “races” can literally annihilate each other on contact. It would be like if we had humans made from matter and antimatter. “Racism” in such a world is completely justified and a matter of survival - what message does that send if you are meant to read it as a racial allegory? It makes no sense.
        yowzadave 3y ago
        Zootopia had this same problem. I believe we were supposed to see the “predators” and “prey” as allegories to racial groups and the tensions between them. But predators were literally killing and eating the prey! The prey were right to be afraid! If you were a rabbit I would not counsel you to become best friends with a fox, regardless of the assurances he provides you.
        c_crank 3y ago
        An observation that will make Zootopia much more enjoyable is realizing that the predators and prey don't map onto racial groups and aren't intended to be seen that way.
        gjsman-1000 3y ago
        I don’t know, plenty of film critics as well as political review sites interpreted it that way; and no creative member behind the movie ever said that it was not meant to be somewhat correlated. Which as Vox pointed, is fairly problematic because the lack of an official statement means that not viewing it as a racial allegory is simply a matter of an opinionated interpretation that a true racist could disagree with, without any contradiction.
        c_crank 3y ago
        Without bringing highly opinionated interpretations into it, Nick Wild is voiced by a white man doing a white southern accent. The number of characters voiced by black men is not very high.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  Movies were political, but: A. This “it was always political” is a common intellectually dishonest crutch to defend the placement of politics you agree with, B. Some politics and light theming is very different than making it the core of the movie. One fart joke is not a fart jokes movie. C. The politics were never so explicitly partisan but just general themes such as the stupidity of being racist or being against teamwork - not jokes about widely-controversial modern issues.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    The stupidity of being racist: notoriously uncontroversial.
    - gjsman-1000 3y ago
      Depends on your definition of “racism.” I am referring to the classical definition of overt hatred based on skin color which almost everyone can understand compared to the modern subtle definition.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > This “it was always political” is a common intellectually dishonest crutch to defend the placement of politics you agree with, No, though, falsely claiming something is political in a way (other than the specific political viewpoint) other things are not is a common intellectually dishonest crutch to attack politics you disagree with while avoiding the meat of the disagreement. > Some politics and light theming is very different than making it the core of the movie. True, but irrelevant. Politics as the core is not any more common on any consistent-but-not-viewpoint-biased definition of “politics”. The common issue in complaints is status-quo bias. > The politics were never so explicitly partisan That’s somewhat true, in that for a long time (from the 1930s to the 1990s) the US was in an abnormally long political realignment, where the most highly salient political issues were not as clearly partisan
  - pfisherman 3y ago
    Sorry but this ignores a lot of history. The plot of the first feature film - Birth of a Nation - is literally the Klu Klux Klan saving the day by driving away the black people run amok during reconstruction. How is that lighthearted and apolitical?
- kaycey2022 3y ago
  A lot of people feel way more strongly about immigration and race and there is no majority consensus on these issues. On the other hand there is a majority consensus that littering and waste is bad and we have a responsibility to protect the Earth from it. This is different from climate change which is another issue with little majority consensus. It's not about presentation, but the underlying issues themselves.
- the_third_wave 3y ago
  Some movies were political but the politics were far less polarised within the "west" than they are now. Some movies - e.g. "Red Dawn" or "the Hunt for Red October" portrayed a clearly black-and-white division between the "good" west and the "bad" east with the dividing line being formed by the national borders. Outside of academia there was not much support for the "red" side so these movies did not create an internal division, you either liked them or you thought they were mostly over the top but otherwise harmless action flicks. Movies like "The Colour Purple" or "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" were critical of the US but this criticism did not cause division because nearly everyone agreed with it and the movies themselves did not portray the issues as "systemic faults with current society". The few die-hard bigots who might have railed against these movies were ignored as being relics of the past. How different it is today with movies which are not much more than thinly disguised moral lessons where the audience is lectured on issued of race, gender, "climate", environment, migration and more. The issues - whether real or imagined - are being portrayed as "current", "systemic" and "catastrophic", the "good" vs. "bad" divider goes straight through society where the "good" side is characterised by being "norm-critical" and in opposition to mainstream culture. Those who do not follow are portrayed as "bad" and labelled with a number of -isms and -phobias. Where earlier movies mostly portrayed "the other" - the "reds", the "filthy rich", the "criminals" - as being bad current "political" movies portray "us" as being ignorant, oppressive, wasteful, conservative "white" or "white-adjacent" bumpkins who really need to "be educated".
nielsbot 3y ago
Which political lectures? I haven't seen Elemental yet.
- jayd16 3y ago
  It's really not that political at all. It has depictions of recent immigrants butting heads with established ethnic groups but you end up liking both sides so I don't know what there is to complain about.
  - happytoexplain 3y ago
    The problem is that, the more divided a society is, the more fundamental elements of society (which are necessarily present in media) feel political, especially when presented in media, where the creator is necessarily making a choice to not avoid them. E.g. my conservative friends are pretty open about their opinion that a gay person merely being in a piece of media counts as "politics" (unless their gayness is an effective comedy element). Some of them will assert that they only feel this way when the character's gayness does not serve the story, but their bar for that distinction is always suspiciously high.
    - yowzadave 3y ago
      Bingo—like when the recent Buzz Lightyear came out, and there was a side character, non-critical to the story, who happened to be gay. There was outcry in the conservative community about how politics were being "shoved" into entertainment for kids.
    - nielsbot 3y ago
      It's all BS. This is really religious fundamentalism. The actual complaint is gayness cannot be normalized in any fashion. And just presenting gay characters as normal people crosses the line for these people.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
Were they ever? One of their most acclaimed movies featured a scenario about a society that litigated superheroes out of the public eye. Another featured a society powered through fear, and a lie to induce and justify said fear. And I can't even describe Wall-E as a metaphor so much as a blunderbuss shooting straight into it's audience.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  It’s almost like issues regarding sexuality are much more concerning to parents than other issues like environmentalism.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    If "parents" were the common audience making the critiques, I may agree. But parents don't tend to read much into a 5 second background prop of an NPC plot point, in my experience.
  - mcphage 3y ago
    > It’s almost like issues regarding sexuality are much more concerning to parents than other issues like environmentalism. Yes, there are some parents for whom the issue of "the existence of gay people" is very concerning.
BaseballPhysics 3y ago
Better not watch Dr. Strangelove, or Full Metal Jacket, or M*A*S*H, or The Birdcage, or Philadelphia, or The Colour Purple, or It's a Wonderful Life, or Erin Brockovich, or Dirty Dancing (yes, you read that right), or...
pfisherman 3y ago
You mean like Apocalypse Now or Birth of a Nation? Movies have been political lecture since the very first feature length film, and have never been very subtle about it either.
- D13Fd 3y ago
  I think in some cases the more distance in time you have from it, the less obvious the politics are.
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    Hell, even the New Testament was vehemently political at the time. Jesus was a political figure executed for political crimes. People like him popped up all the time and were quickly put down. The “Kingdom of Heaven” was not intended to be an abstract place, it was supposed to be a real kingdom to rival the Romans. When Jesus died he said “God why have you forsaken me” because Jesus expected to be the king of this kingdom, not to die naked at the hands of the Romans. All of Christianity that came later (introduced by Paul) watered down this hardcore power politics story into an abstract “spiritual” story. But the reality stands for itself if you just peek beneath the surface.

saagarjha 3y ago

I have bad news to share with you if you think movies were never political.

c_crank 3y ago
The word 'subtle' was included.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  "shoved" was also included. And I don't even think there's a DreamWorks movie as heavy handed as Wall-E, which we considered part of the "Renaissance"
  - c_crank 3y ago
    Weird as it sounds, I would still describe the political message in Wall-E as more subtle than in Elemental, or even Strange World - another recent flop. Why is that? Wall-E, although clearly and one sidedly in favor of environmentalist or conservationist causes, still describes the problem and the solution in fantastic terms. The entire planet being covered in skyscrapers of toxic trash may have some parallels to the present, but those are just parallels. The message you can take away from Wall-E is not a literal solution (planting plants to rejuvenate things ignores the complexity of real life ecosystems - just consider invasive species!). Instead, the message must be more abstract - something like "Care more about the environment." The political situation in Elemental, by contrast, is barely abstract at all. There is a city, there are immigrants, and the elemental toothpaste commercial aesthetic is a thin veneer over real life racial and ethnic tensions. So any solution the movie suggests would be something that maps very closely to the real world.
    - gjsman-1000 3y ago
      Some critics brought this up, but the more overt message of Elemental actually makes things worse. Think about it. In real life, skin color doesn’t do… anything. It’s just a stupid way humans distinguish between each other. Elemental - the two “races” can literally annihilate each other on contact. It would be like if we had humans made from matter and antimatter. “Racism” in such a world is completely justified and a matter of survival - what message does that send if you are meant to read it as a racial allegory? It makes no sense.
      - yowzadave 3y ago
        Zootopia had this same problem. I believe we were supposed to see the “predators” and “prey” as allegories to racial groups and the tensions between them. But predators were literally killing and eating the prey! The prey were right to be afraid! If you were a rabbit I would not counsel you to become best friends with a fox, regardless of the assurances he provides you.
        c_crank 3y ago
        An observation that will make Zootopia much more enjoyable is realizing that the predators and prey don't map onto racial groups and aren't intended to be seen that way.
        gjsman-1000 3y ago
        I don’t know, plenty of film critics as well as political review sites interpreted it that way; and no creative member behind the movie ever said that it was not meant to be somewhat correlated. Which as Vox pointed, is fairly problematic because the lack of an official statement means that not viewing it as a racial allegory is simply a matter of an opinionated interpretation that a true racist could disagree with, without any contradiction.
        c_crank 3y ago
        Without bringing highly opinionated interpretations into it, Nick Wild is voiced by a white man doing a white southern accent. The number of characters voiced by black men is not very high.
gjsman-1000 3y ago
Movies were political, but: A. This “it was always political” is a common intellectually dishonest crutch to defend the placement of politics you agree with, B. Some politics and light theming is very different than making it the core of the movie. One fart joke is not a fart jokes movie. C. The politics were never so explicitly partisan but just general themes such as the stupidity of being racist or being against teamwork - not jokes about widely-controversial modern issues.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  The stupidity of being racist: notoriously uncontroversial.
  - gjsman-1000 3y ago
    Depends on your definition of “racism.” I am referring to the classical definition of overt hatred based on skin color which almost everyone can understand compared to the modern subtle definition.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > This “it was always political” is a common intellectually dishonest crutch to defend the placement of politics you agree with, No, though, falsely claiming something is political in a way (other than the specific political viewpoint) other things are not is a common intellectually dishonest crutch to attack politics you disagree with while avoiding the meat of the disagreement. > Some politics and light theming is very different than making it the core of the movie. True, but irrelevant. Politics as the core is not any more common on any consistent-but-not-viewpoint-biased definition of “politics”. The common issue in complaints is status-quo bias. > The politics were never so explicitly partisan That’s somewhat true, in that for a long time (from the 1930s to the 1990s) the US was in an abnormally long political realignment, where the most highly salient political issues were not as clearly partisan
- pfisherman 3y ago
  Sorry but this ignores a lot of history. The plot of the first feature film - Birth of a Nation - is literally the Klu Klux Klan saving the day by driving away the black people run amok during reconstruction. How is that lighthearted and apolitical?
kaycey2022 3y ago
A lot of people feel way more strongly about immigration and race and there is no majority consensus on these issues. On the other hand there is a majority consensus that littering and waste is bad and we have a responsibility to protect the Earth from it. This is different from climate change which is another issue with little majority consensus. It's not about presentation, but the underlying issues themselves.
the_third_wave 3y ago
Some movies were political but the politics were far less polarised within the "west" than they are now. Some movies - e.g. "Red Dawn" or "the Hunt for Red October" portrayed a clearly black-and-white division between the "good" west and the "bad" east with the dividing line being formed by the national borders. Outside of academia there was not much support for the "red" side so these movies did not create an internal division, you either liked them or you thought they were mostly over the top but otherwise harmless action flicks. Movies like "The Colour Purple" or "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" were critical of the US but this criticism did not cause division because nearly everyone agreed with it and the movies themselves did not portray the issues as "systemic faults with current society". The few die-hard bigots who might have railed against these movies were ignored as being relics of the past. How different it is today with movies which are not much more than thinly disguised moral lessons where the audience is lectured on issued of race, gender, "climate", environment, migration and more. The issues - whether real or imagined - are being portrayed as "current", "systemic" and "catastrophic", the "good" vs. "bad" divider goes straight through society where the "good" side is characterised by being "norm-critical" and in opposition to mainstream culture. Those who do not follow are portrayed as "bad" and labelled with a number of -isms and -phobias. Where earlier movies mostly portrayed "the other" - the "reds", the "filthy rich", the "criminals" - as being bad current "political" movies portray "us" as being ignorant, oppressive, wasteful, conservative "white" or "white-adjacent" bumpkins who really need to "be educated".

nielsbot 3y ago

Which political lectures? I haven't seen Elemental yet.

jayd16 3y ago
It's really not that political at all. It has depictions of recent immigrants butting heads with established ethnic groups but you end up liking both sides so I don't know what there is to complain about.
- happytoexplain 3y ago
  The problem is that, the more divided a society is, the more fundamental elements of society (which are necessarily present in media) feel political, especially when presented in media, where the creator is necessarily making a choice to not avoid them. E.g. my conservative friends are pretty open about their opinion that a gay person merely being in a piece of media counts as "politics" (unless their gayness is an effective comedy element). Some of them will assert that they only feel this way when the character's gayness does not serve the story, but their bar for that distinction is always suspiciously high.
  - yowzadave 3y ago
    Bingo—like when the recent Buzz Lightyear came out, and there was a side character, non-critical to the story, who happened to be gay. There was outcry in the conservative community about how politics were being "shoved" into entertainment for kids.
  - nielsbot 3y ago
    It's all BS. This is really religious fundamentalism. The actual complaint is gayness cannot be normalized in any fashion. And just presenting gay characters as normal people crosses the line for these people.

johnnyanmac 3y ago

Were they ever? One of their most acclaimed movies featured a scenario about a society that litigated superheroes out of the public eye. Another featured a society powered through fear, and a lie to induce and justify said fear. And I can't even describe Wall-E as a metaphor so much as a blunderbuss shooting straight into it's audience.

gjsman-1000 3y ago
It’s almost like issues regarding sexuality are much more concerning to parents than other issues like environmentalism.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  If "parents" were the common audience making the critiques, I may agree. But parents don't tend to read much into a 5 second background prop of an NPC plot point, in my experience.
- mcphage 3y ago
  > It’s almost like issues regarding sexuality are much more concerning to parents than other issues like environmentalism. Yes, there are some parents for whom the issue of "the existence of gay people" is very concerning.

BaseballPhysics 3y ago

Better not watch Dr. Strangelove, or Full Metal Jacket, or M*A*S*H, or The Birdcage, or Philadelphia, or The Colour Purple, or It's a Wonderful Life, or Erin Brockovich, or Dirty Dancing (yes, you read that right), or...

pfisherman 3y ago

You mean like Apocalypse Now or Birth of a Nation? Movies have been political lecture since the very first feature length film, and have never been very subtle about it either.

D13Fd 3y ago
I think in some cases the more distance in time you have from it, the less obvious the politics are.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  Hell, even the New Testament was vehemently political at the time. Jesus was a political figure executed for political crimes. People like him popped up all the time and were quickly put down. The “Kingdom of Heaven” was not intended to be an abstract place, it was supposed to be a real kingdom to rival the Romans. When Jesus died he said “God why have you forsaken me” because Jesus expected to be the king of this kingdom, not to die naked at the hands of the Romans. All of Christianity that came later (introduced by Paul) watered down this hardcore power politics story into an abstract “spiritual” story. But the reality stands for itself if you just peek beneath the surface.