Comment on Martin Scorsese urges filmmakers to fight comic book movie culture: ‘We’ve got to save cinema’
MudMan@kbin.social 11 months agoLook, I didn't love Guardians 3, it's a conservative, Christian movie and I don't agree with most of its premises.
But there wasn't a dry eye in the house by the end of that, and I'm pretty sure most of them know what "it meant", and it certainly wasn't "almost like AI making a film". Ditto for Across the Spider-Verse, whcih is a progressive movie I do agree with.
There's always been this argument that successfull movies are bad, and I've never liked it. It's never been true. There are tons of bad films that make their money back, but for every Air Force One there is a Die Hard or Back to the Future (more conservative movies I don't agree with but are very well made, go figure).
So yeah, I do agree that Oscar bait keeps Oscar baiting, and that superheroes aren't killing cinema, which is a hard take to roll with this year in particular. But no, I actively don't think superhero movies or genre movies are worthless or trash, any more than I think westerns are trash or action movies are trash.
Right on, those are some very fair points. I guess calling them trash is a bit far.
But out of genuine curiosity, could you expand on how the movies you mentioned are conservative Christian movies? I know Die Hard takes place on Christmas, but that’s all I’m picking up.
I have absolutely no idea what they mean by conservative/progressive movie. I too would like to know, because I’m utterly baffled.
Oh, boy. Should have guessed that's the bit that would get picked up.
I mean, I didn't think Guardians was very subtle about this at all. James Gunn doesn't seem to be an asshole, but you can be religious and not be a completely reactionary idiot. The movie features actual heaven, where a character tells another "there's the hands that made us and then there's the hands that guide the hands", and says that heaven "is beatutiful and it is forever". And then the villain yells "there is no God, that's why I stepped in", which is the tipping point for his allies turning on him. The entire diagnosis the movie has on the guy ends up being that "he didn't want to make things better, he just hated things the way they are", which is, for the record, a much, much better take on the equally conformist take in The Flash. It's a very well made, very emotional, very beautiful movie, but... you know, it's not very shy about spiritualism. If I had to sum it up I'd say it's... eh... Stephen Colbert Catholic? In that wavelength?
As for Back to the Future... well, I'm not the first to notice that the "good future" is a Reaganomics fever dream. Somebody points out the Trumpy bad guy in the sequel, which I guess when read from a modern day makes it read different, but... yeah, it's a very 80s franchise with very 80s sensibilities. Zemeckis has pushed back against this slightly, I think, and yeah, it's being a bit jokey about the weirdness of the americana he's clearly nostalgic for, but that doesn't change the text. I mean, he's also the guy that used "a black family lives here now" as shorthand for the town going to crap in the sequel. He also made the entirety of Forrest Gump, so... yeah, you don't have to present a worldview on purpose to have it color your stuff. Once again, the movie isn't mean about it, and it's certainly not dumb, but it's coming from a certain worldview and you can absolutely tell.
Die Hard is straight up MRA propaganda, though. Great film, love it to bits, but it's entirely about how the down-to-Earth cop feels emasculated by his wife having a career and rubbing elbows with all the California yuppies only to get himself vindicated when things turn violent and he's the only one with enough common sense and old school skills to fix the situation. Also, the government is fundamentally incompetent unless it's specifically the cops. And Reginald VelJohnson's entire arc is about how he should not stop shooting people just because he once killed a kid when he saw his toy gun, which is up there for "plot point that has aged the absolute worst in movie history" award. Still love it, though. Super conservative movie. The most political of this bunch, probably. Still good filmmaking.
Look, you don't have to dislike things just because they're built on implicit viewpoints that you don't agree with. Art is art, and it carries meaning and implications. You can notice them and still enjoy the result regardless of whether you agree with those viewpoints. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to enjoy anything made outside this century or... you know, your own culture. It's fine.
Wow, just wow. Are your arms sore from all of that reaching?
I wasn’t on board with you at first, but this write-up was thought provoking and I appreciated the read.
The second back to the future movie even turns the villain into a trump-like megalomaniac
A good guy with a gun kills bad guys with guns? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Just as Jesus commanded.
TIL that somehow it makes sense to consider the classic back to the future somehow a fucking conservative movie. LMAO might wanna lay off whatever heavy drug you’d been ingesting
Less conservative and more a product of its time, so let's say centre with a whiff of Reagan.
But yeah, hey, that's a thing. If you learned it today and you're curious about it there are decades of criticism and analysis about it. I am very far from being the first to point that out, among other things because I was a toddler when it came out.
Despite other people pointing it out I’m not really buying it.
There is a line “Ronald Reagan, the actor? President?” Which seems to indicate it’s a ridiculous idea.
Then as others have pointed out, Biff in BTTF 2 is basically exactly trump and they couldn’t paint that character in a worse light. He’s an evil villain.
The reality is probably that the movies have nothing political in them other than the joke about Reagan which likely actually wasn’t meant to be a real critique
That's not how meaning works, though.
Look, I get it, not everybody cares or knows how semiotics work, but it's always baffling how much people get invested in the notion of "no politics in art" no matter how often this comes up.
Yes, there are politics in Back to the Future, as in any other film where the worldview of the creators becomes the perspective from which the entire film is put together. Things in movies don't happen by accident, they get carefully written, acted and shot. Everything in a movie is something somebody is saying, and like any other thing you say it has both superficial and subtextual meaning.
So yes, BTTF does spend the entire movie boiling down maturity and success to being financially successful and self-confident. Because it's an American movie from the 80s and that's how young Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale saw being self-fulfilled looking like in 1985.
And yes, they poke good intentioned, light fun at Reagan being president. And they acknowledge some form of past racism in the form of Goldie being president, but also holy crap, the way Goldie is characterized also tells you a lot of how the Bobs saw race working and let's just say that nothing in BTTF2 and Forrest Gump was accidental.
Is it an active piece of propaganda? No, that's not where the bar is for containing a political or even politicized worldview. But it does present a worldview, and that is... a pretty centrist, eminently materialistic take on what was a fairly conservative world.
I promise that's not an insult.
_cerpin_taxt_@lemmy.world 11 months ago
How is Guardians 3 a conservative Christian movie? You know the director, James Gunn, is very outspokenly progressive, right?
MudMan@kbin.social 11 months ago
I responded to this above, but just to clarify on this point, I mean small c conservative here. Which is absolutely not inconsistent with Gunn being a normal person who is not an actual fascist.
I mean that it's a conservative movie in that it explicitly religious and does take the stance that science and technocratic "let's change the world" science is inherently equal to hubris and negative, while the positive flipside is enduring suffering, embracing spirituality and being rewarded with a happy afterlife. There is absolutely a progressive read of those beliefs, there has been for hundreds of years. Gunn seems to be explicitly aligning with it here, and that's fine, but that's still a (small c) conservative viewpoint.
Hell, I'll go one further: a lot of people on the opposite side of that argument are today, in fact, actual fascists. It's not hard to go find examples of atheist dicks online, or of technocratic tyrants. Turns out your religious beliefs are not connected to whether you're a good person. That doesn't mean the Catholic worldview isn't inherently conservative. I was using the word philosophically, not politically.
Mongostein@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
That’s a lot of mental gymnastics to make GOTG3 political.
It’s a movie about friendship, family, and a megalomaniac.
MudMan@kbin.social 11 months ago
How is it mental gymnastics? I'm starting to feel bad for Gunn, because he put all that stuff on the movie super on purpose and apparently people will not just miss it they will actively try to ignore it.
Eh... I may be late to this, but... yeah, these are extreme SPOILERS. This thing really needs a content warning system, a spoiler alert system or both.
Anyway, dude, Rocket goes to actual heaven. They flag it as actual heaven. We see it on screen. Lyla straight up says there is a God and a heaven and Rocket gets to go to it.
Normally you expect this argument to be about some subtextual reinterpretation or an allegory or whatever but... no, man, it's right there. Explicitly.
Hey, don't look now, but besides being pretty explicit about there being a God and an afterlife it's also super not on board with for-profit health care and animal testing. You may have missed how it's like 75% of the running time of the movie. You could argue about it being a religious film, but political? It's the story of a group of people whose friend's organs are hadlocked by a corporation, they go fight the corporation and end up freeing all their animal test subjects.
Every time this "it's not political" stuff comes up in online conversation I swear it's like an optical effect of some sort. It makes you question how subjective perception is and wonder how other people's minds are parsing the world in different ways.