Comment on Martin Scorsese urges filmmakers to fight comic book movie culture: ‘We’ve got to save cinema’
MudMan@kbin.social 11 months agoI 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.
Mongostein@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
God and Heaven exist in the Marvel universe in the same way that Thor and Zeus exist. You’re reading way too much in to it.
MudMan@kbin.social 11 months ago
They do, but no, I'm not.
There's a difference between using Christian mythos as mythos and making a spiritual point. You pick what to pull and why, and things have meaning.
Ironically, in this context if they had made this more of an explicit heaven it'd have been less of a conscious choice (see also, Thor: Love & Thunder). The framing of the afterlife, who states the existence of a divine plan, paired with the role that scene plays in the movie are all important context cues.
Again, people worked really hard to not trivialize that scene as a fantasy setup and instead charge it with meaning and a point. It'd be a shame to purposefully ignore it, whether you agree with the implied philosophical take or not.