Everything you liked as a kid seems woke and politicized when you were a tiny kid because tiny kids are too dumb to think on purpose.
I’ll say, though, I was old enough to be mad at the James Gunn-written Scooby adaptations because they couldn’t resist doing actual supernatural stuff and lost this angle entirely.
And then those got reappraised as not being garbage when THOSE kids grew up and a lot of the newer stuff went with that angle as well.
You being too dumb to think on purpose doesn’t mean you’re not learning, for better and worse. I used to think that wasn’t the case when I was a kid because I was too dumb.
But Thorn isn’t actually a witch. She can’t do spells. She does the rituals for her own mental health, she doesn’t expect any magic to come out of them.
… But then she does a real magic spell that, because of her magic beliefs and/or bloodline, stops the real supernatural monster. There was even a bit about how someone else doing the exact same mumbo jumbo didn’t work because “you’re not a wiccan”
She didn’t know, but then the story happened and she learned that magic was real and she could do it because she was Wiccan and descended from a full blooded witch.
Well, you’d be surprised. Going through uni I definitely got to see a lot of left-of-centre young adults get through semiotics and discouse analysis courses and have an absolute fit at the realization that a bunch of the cool stuff they liked as kids had a clear right-wing bent.
I mean, they all had a lot of time to get attached to Back to the Future and Die Hard before they were forced to think about it too hard. Learning! Twice!
I would lie if I said I wasn’t baiting a little bit, but man, see? Cuts both ways.
Die Hard is extremely obvious. I mean, the whole movie is about this guy finding that his wife suddenly has a job, makes more money than he does and may be attractive to smarter, richer people, but then fate conspires to make his blue collar streetsmarts and prepper attitudes having him save the day for the foppish yuppies. The entire movie ends when they throw the eurotrash rich thief out of a building by literally unshackling Holly from the bonus gift her company job gave her, then wrapping her up in a comfort blanket and taking her home. The movie also finds time to clearly establish that all public servants are idiots except for street level cops.
Back to the Future is subtler, but also pretty straightforward. Kid thinks life with middle class parents in the 80s sucks, goes back to the 50s, which turn out to be as ideal as expected but also somehow cooler in a very 80s kind of way, teaches his dad self-assertion and comes back to the future to find he’s now upper class and has a 4x4. It’s a lot less hardcore, but the reagonomics are running underneath the whole thing. I’d take that it’s accidental, because the same team went much more leftward in Roger Rabbit, so I think it’s just that a lot of the cultural white noise of the mid-80s is baked into the assumptions. And the nostalgia is a massive driving force of conservatism anyway. BTTF is idolizing this “fifteighties” imagery the same way Grease was to suggest there is a perfect past to return to. Kind of in the way Stranger Things and a bunch of other stuff does to the 80s.
That’s maybe the most fun part of breaking down BTTF. The iconic slivers of the film set in the 80s are supposed to show it being run down, realistic and disappointingly drab by comparison.
Also, Lybian terrorists stealing plutonium but being so incompetent they get tricked by Doc and defeated by Marty. That’s a very time-specific one, like Rambo praising the Taliban.
I don’t know, man, Die Hard is pretty far out there.
The Rambo and Rocky sequels are what they are as well. They are almost naive about it in a way that supports ironic appreciation, though.
Dirty Harry tracks, but that’s back in the early 70s. I never went deep enough into the sequels to see if it got really bad down the line.
I’ve heard some stuff about Field of Dreams, but I don’t think I’ve watched that in one sitting.
I don’t know it’s often the action stuff. Your Commandos and Death Wishes and so on. Does stuff like Red Dawn and Invasion USA even count as “crypto”? Those are pretty overt.
If you let me break the time frame I will say that I think The Incredibles flies over people’s heads as being aggressively conservative. Forrest Gump used to, but I think people got wise to it over time. Another Zemeckis joint, too. Maybe it’s Roger Rabbit that was the accident.
The Incredibles flies over people’s heads as being aggressively conservative.
Superheroes are a metaphor for minorities. There’s the immigrant experience in constantly moving house, the queer experience in hiding who you are, the neurodivergent experience in being told not to stick out in school.
The villain is a capitalist billionaire who wants to appropriate a minority’s culture without understanding what it means. If you’re an indigenous minority you’ve been through that.
There’s a scene where the mum has a talk with her kids about treating authority figures they’ve been trained not to fear as threats to their lives. That talk is familiar to any black family in the USA.
There’s a struggle between parents and their children about how to navigate assimilating into the majority culture while retaining their own identity. Many immigrants go through what Dash and Violet did.
That’s not an invalid read. My problem with it is that the movie doesn’t show the supes as being inherently feared or hated. This isn’t the X-Men, which does work on that front.
Here the supes are suppressed by the government, not a societal issue. They are presented as being accepted in the past, in a world without intervention. Thriving, in fact. They are celebrities and have a whole James Bond-style support system. They didn’t come from a different place with a different culture like Superman or Wonder Woman. Superheroes-as-minorities is a very frequent trope, but The Incredibles isn’t rehashing any of those, they’re doing the Fantastic 4. Superheroes-as-family. Bit of a different tack.
And when they’re suppressed they aren’t suppresed into a marginal role in society. They are suppressed into suburban white middle class. Which, incidentally, is presented as less flashy than the life of the one explicitly black character, but that is probably a well-meaning accident.
I do think the concept of cultural appropriation is and has alway been iffy, but beyond that, while I think you can argue that read I don’t think it fits the movie particularly well.
And yes, in the moral space the movie is drawing it is explicitly including those characteristics as part of the exceptionality you are supposed to self-realize. As I told you on the other thread, I don’t think Bird has a Randian “you should be an asshole if you want to” approach to this. He sees it as moral and ethical and valuable for society when people can self express their exceptional, natural abilities, and I do believe there is an explicit attempt to include those things in the mix. It’s why the slightly token black guy is there in the first place.
I should say I also think it’s undermined because the one instance of someone even appearing to have a recognizable trait of those things in the main family, which would be Vi’s crippling social anxiety, is shown as getting better when she fully expresses her powers and self-realizes, which if a bit of an icky approach.
But I guess we can add Bad Boys 2 to the list. I mean, all of Michael Bay’s oeuvre, but holy crap, Bad Boys 2. That MUST have been some form of weird Florida-lobby/CIA psyop, there is no other explanation.
Even the incredibles thinks the insurance industry is predatory. It flew over my head completely in being right wing, but I’m autistic and often miss really, really obvious subtext (though I can generally predict entire plots from the first few minutes, so it’s a weird combination). I could tell that zootopia was a heavy handed allegory, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it referencing racism, for example.
In fairness, Zootopia is… kinda muddy on that front.
The Incredibles is very overt about the whole objectivist “if everybody is special the nobody is” and how the supes are better because they were born better but the wannabe sidekick has no business trying to be one of the special people by inventing stuff. And how the government and society are regulating these people who are intrinsically better into normalcy when they should be allowed to freely express themselves.
But not the guy who isn’t born into it. That’s evil.
I mean, I’m pushing it, but it’s not really a secret. And man, does it set people off. Not just on the Internet. There are full on thinkpieces that have been printed on paper about how he’s subtly different from a true Objectivist and so his ideas that some people are exceptional and superior are fine.
I’ll say that it’s still a great movie. I love it. That’s something modern culture warriors just won’t acknowledge. You can engage with a piece of art or entertainment pushing politics you despise. It’s fine.
Everything you liked as a kid seems woke and politicized when you were a tiny kid because tiny kids are too dumb to think on purpose.
I’ll say, though, I was old enough to be mad at the James Gunn-written Scooby adaptations because they couldn’t resist doing actual supernatural stuff and lost this angle entirely.
And then those got reappraised as not being garbage when THOSE kids grew up and a lot of the newer stuff went with that angle as well.
You being too dumb to think on purpose doesn’t mean you’re not learning, for better and worse. I used to think that wasn’t the case when I was a kid because I was too dumb.
The hex girls tho
That one’s okay because it taught me to respect people with unusual spiritual beliefs.
Ironically I got the opposite, it makes sense in worlds where magic is actually real, not in our reality though.
But Thorn isn’t actually a witch. She can’t do spells. She does the rituals for her own mental health, she doesn’t expect any magic to come out of them.
… But then she does a real magic spell that, because of her magic beliefs and/or bloodline, stops the real supernatural monster. There was even a bit about how someone else doing the exact same mumbo jumbo didn’t work because “you’re not a wiccan”
Didn’t she not know she was capable of that to begin with? Been years since I saw it.
She didn’t know, but then the story happened and she learned that magic was real and she could do it because she was Wiccan and descended from a full blooded witch.
But she already did wiccan rituals without knowing magic is real, and she’s valid for that. I respect her even if magic isn’t real.
…the “kids” in question being Republicans.
It’s fine, I also respond like this.
Well, you’d be surprised. Going through uni I definitely got to see a lot of left-of-centre young adults get through semiotics and discouse analysis courses and have an absolute fit at the realization that a bunch of the cool stuff they liked as kids had a clear right-wing bent.
I mean, they all had a lot of time to get attached to Back to the Future and Die Hard before they were forced to think about it too hard. Learning! Twice!
Interested in hearing about the right wing bent of Bttf and die hard
I would lie if I said I wasn’t baiting a little bit, but man, see? Cuts both ways.
Die Hard is extremely obvious. I mean, the whole movie is about this guy finding that his wife suddenly has a job, makes more money than he does and may be attractive to smarter, richer people, but then fate conspires to make his blue collar streetsmarts and prepper attitudes having him save the day for the foppish yuppies. The entire movie ends when they throw the eurotrash rich thief out of a building by literally unshackling Holly from the bonus gift her company job gave her, then wrapping her up in a comfort blanket and taking her home. The movie also finds time to clearly establish that all public servants are idiots except for street level cops.
Back to the Future is subtler, but also pretty straightforward. Kid thinks life with middle class parents in the 80s sucks, goes back to the 50s, which turn out to be as ideal as expected but also somehow cooler in a very 80s kind of way, teaches his dad self-assertion and comes back to the future to find he’s now upper class and has a 4x4. It’s a lot less hardcore, but the reagonomics are running underneath the whole thing. I’d take that it’s accidental, because the same team went much more leftward in Roger Rabbit, so I think it’s just that a lot of the cultural white noise of the mid-80s is baked into the assumptions. And the nostalgia is a massive driving force of conservatism anyway. BTTF is idolizing this “fifteighties” imagery the same way Grease was to suggest there is a perfect past to return to. Kind of in the way Stranger Things and a bunch of other stuff does to the 80s.
That’s maybe the most fun part of breaking down BTTF. The iconic slivers of the film set in the 80s are supposed to show it being run down, realistic and disappointingly drab by comparison.
Also, Lybian terrorists stealing plutonium but being so incompetent they get tricked by Doc and defeated by Marty. That’s a very time-specific one, like Rambo praising the Taliban.
Dare I ask you to go further?
What’s an extreme example of a crypto-rightwing-coded-80s-flick?
I don’t know, man, Die Hard is pretty far out there.
The Rambo and Rocky sequels are what they are as well. They are almost naive about it in a way that supports ironic appreciation, though.
Dirty Harry tracks, but that’s back in the early 70s. I never went deep enough into the sequels to see if it got really bad down the line.
I’ve heard some stuff about Field of Dreams, but I don’t think I’ve watched that in one sitting.
I don’t know it’s often the action stuff. Your Commandos and Death Wishes and so on. Does stuff like Red Dawn and Invasion USA even count as “crypto”? Those are pretty overt.
If you let me break the time frame I will say that I think The Incredibles flies over people’s heads as being aggressively conservative. Forrest Gump used to, but I think people got wise to it over time. Another Zemeckis joint, too. Maybe it’s Roger Rabbit that was the accident.
Superheroes are a metaphor for minorities. There’s the immigrant experience in constantly moving house, the queer experience in hiding who you are, the neurodivergent experience in being told not to stick out in school.
The villain is a capitalist billionaire who wants to appropriate a minority’s culture without understanding what it means. If you’re an indigenous minority you’ve been through that.
There’s a scene where the mum has a talk with her kids about treating authority figures they’ve been trained not to fear as threats to their lives. That talk is familiar to any black family in the USA.
There’s a struggle between parents and their children about how to navigate assimilating into the majority culture while retaining their own identity. Many immigrants go through what Dash and Violet did.
That’s not an invalid read. My problem with it is that the movie doesn’t show the supes as being inherently feared or hated. This isn’t the X-Men, which does work on that front.
Here the supes are suppressed by the government, not a societal issue. They are presented as being accepted in the past, in a world without intervention. Thriving, in fact. They are celebrities and have a whole James Bond-style support system. They didn’t come from a different place with a different culture like Superman or Wonder Woman. Superheroes-as-minorities is a very frequent trope, but The Incredibles isn’t rehashing any of those, they’re doing the Fantastic 4. Superheroes-as-family. Bit of a different tack.
And when they’re suppressed they aren’t suppresed into a marginal role in society. They are suppressed into suburban white middle class. Which, incidentally, is presented as less flashy than the life of the one explicitly black character, but that is probably a well-meaning accident.
I do think the concept of cultural appropriation is and has alway been iffy, but beyond that, while I think you can argue that read I don’t think it fits the movie particularly well.
And yes, in the moral space the movie is drawing it is explicitly including those characteristics as part of the exceptionality you are supposed to self-realize. As I told you on the other thread, I don’t think Bird has a Randian “you should be an asshole if you want to” approach to this. He sees it as moral and ethical and valuable for society when people can self express their exceptional, natural abilities, and I do believe there is an explicit attempt to include those things in the mix. It’s why the slightly token black guy is there in the first place.
I should say I also think it’s undermined because the one instance of someone even appearing to have a recognizable trait of those things in the main family, which would be Vi’s crippling social anxiety, is shown as getting better when she fully expresses her powers and self-realizes, which if a bit of an icky approach.
Don’t forget any movie that includes a fleet of Chevrolet Suburbans being driven as a government vehicle!
Oh, man, way too new for the conversation.
But I guess we can add Bad Boys 2 to the list. I mean, all of Michael Bay’s oeuvre, but holy crap, Bad Boys 2. That MUST have been some form of weird Florida-lobby/CIA psyop, there is no other explanation.
Even the incredibles thinks the insurance industry is predatory. It flew over my head completely in being right wing, but I’m autistic and often miss really, really obvious subtext (though I can generally predict entire plots from the first few minutes, so it’s a weird combination). I could tell that zootopia was a heavy handed allegory, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it referencing racism, for example.
In fairness, Zootopia is… kinda muddy on that front.
The Incredibles is very overt about the whole objectivist “if everybody is special the nobody is” and how the supes are better because they were born better but the wannabe sidekick has no business trying to be one of the special people by inventing stuff. And how the government and society are regulating these people who are intrinsically better into normalcy when they should be allowed to freely express themselves.
But not the guy who isn’t born into it. That’s evil.
I mean, I’m pushing it, but it’s not really a secret. And man, does it set people off. Not just on the Internet. There are full on thinkpieces that have been printed on paper about how he’s subtly different from a true Objectivist and so his ideas that some people are exceptional and superior are fine.
Ahh Deathwish I haven’t thought about that in years but yeah it does have white flight, brown gangs, and one NYC architect-cum-vigilante savior.
I still can’t tell if the original response thought I was actually calling Scooby Doo woke 😭
What’s so right wing about those? Honestly, it’s been a while but I don’t really remember any clear examples.
Somebody else just asked, so see above.
BTTF I can get, but Die Hard flying under people’s radar is always surprising.
Thanks! Today I learned I don’t really remember any details about die hard…
Hah! It happens. That’s when the shock comes.
I’ll say that it’s still a great movie. I love it. That’s something modern culture warriors just won’t acknowledge. You can engage with a piece of art or entertainment pushing politics you despise. It’s fine.