Character complexity, or its pretence, is symptomatic of left wing ideas penetrating the film industry.
The assumption at the heart of the left’s psyche is that our minds are blank slates. Evil is not within us by this reasoning, but a product of the system. A character’s environmental exposure to “the system” is, in the mind of the ideologue, the most crucial aspect of character development.
But, much like the screenwriters who lament the “rubber duckie” explanation of human evil, I likewise find this approach hollow, as I do most things that are informed by ideology rather than thought.
My own observation of humans is that many have every excuse to be mean and malevolent but are nevertheless inexplicably kind, while many who have have every reason to be kind are inexplicably mean and cruel.
I think modern writers would do better to grapple with this baffling reality.
There is no evidence to suggest that anyone is a blank slate. Indeed, if we were, it would make us the first animal in the history of the animal kingdom to be so.
I agree with what you have written about humans being inexplicably kind and inexplicable mean but I don’t understand the link in your first sentence with left wing ideas. Could you enlarge on that please?
A certain dominant strand of the left believe that we are only products of our environment, which means, in effect, that we would all be the same person if exposed to the same factors, which is why nothing in this world view is inexplicable, either in kindness or wickedness
Thank you Hayden. I wonder why belief that we are products of our environment is linked with left views.
Claire D
2 years ago
Wicked characters have an important role to play in children’s stories particularly; they teach children that evil exists, it can destroy them if they make the wrong choices, but it can also be defeated by integrity and goodness. By watering down the moral lesson and getting wishy washy (or “rubber ducky”) children are being tricked and fooled for profit as the article points out, but it could also literally have lethal life consequences for them.
I think the book Thinking Fast and Slow has some input on this. Naturally, it seems most people are cognitively lazy. If somebody offers an excuse for negative behaviour traits, then people will tend to reach for that as an instinctive obvious explanation, rather than go through the effort of thinking it through. Working through a maze of confusing ideas would require resolving contradictions and a considerable amount of self-criticism.
Last edited 2 years ago by Antony Hirst
Galeti Tavas
2 years ago
Two things: Is this whole article not merely an extreme case of the cod-psychology the writer claims the Entertainment industry is up to with its output? Only the article is this grander and more complex rubber duck explanation of their simpler and uni-dimensional rubber duck which is Hollywood, and so is kind of Déjà vu all over again? And that is a common psychological trait – that we just see everyone being a mirror of our own psychoses., or we see another persons psychosis so come to believe we have them too….
But whatever… the question I care about is why the modern entertainment industry is so degenerate. If you used a simple metric: ‘Does watching this stuff make you a better person, or a less good a person’? Does this stuff reflect positive values, or negative ones? Because I find it is 95% negative values, and maybe 5% positive.
And what does that say about the people who make up the industry? Why do they not lift up, rather than bring down, the character of society and people? I mean, why are they and their message evil, or at least degenerate? I was reading about the rapper disaster and looking at pictures of the astoundingly grim and dark set and message…… and it made me think of the music I was exposed to as a young person – and I thought of ‘He aint heavy, he’s my brother’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl5vi9ir49g and then song after song of this vein….. then and now….
“”He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”
The road is long With many a winding turn That leads us to who knows where? Who knows where? But I’m strong Strong enough to carry him He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother So on we go His welfare is my concern No burden is he to bear We’ll get there For I know He would not encumber me He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother
If I’m laden at all I’m laden with sadness That everyone’s heart Isn’t filled with the gladness Of love for one another It’s a long, long road From which there is no return While we’re on the way to there Why not share? And the load Doesn’t weigh me down at all He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother
He’s my brother He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother”
And then Tavis Scott from the concert disaster:
““Bad Mood / S* *t On You”
[Bad Mood]
(I just have one question) F* *k outta my business I did things that most men will ask forgiveness Broke the code, the commandments from my descendants Who gives a f* *k? New children in the buildin’ We ride with no limits Shut the f* *k up, don’t you hear me tryna finish? I’m in a bad mood
Rob that dude, f* *k that couch, burn that house We the cause of the era, new ni* *as with new terror”
This is the sort of thing I wonder about with the entertainment industry, why is is so bleak and destructive of spirit…
At the rate things are going, there are probably more Elvis impersonators in Uzbekistan than in the whole of America.
Well, if there is still a good clutch of cheery entertainers in America, in the second- and third-tier categories, they are probably inconspicuous in the multichannel age. The present-day first-tier entertainers are all amok, with their pained expressions. That’s what is apparently cool. Do they resent their situation? Their trade?
You’d think the hounded, the weary and the poor who migrate to the West might prefer Elvis to some grim-laden rapper. Are the newcomers to western shores to be thumped with bad beats in the shops they go into? In order to make them feel welcome in their new district? Do their more conservatively religious peers or elders raise even more of an eyebrow at the silly, decadent, wayward Western civilisation?
That civilisation knows how to shoot itself in the foot. Parts of it may even be taking deliberate aim.
And as more and more teenagers move on to never-ending violent video games, the few among them who had picked up a guitar to try their hand at it are sucked into a world where a digital device is their daily crutch, not the clunky musical instrument.
Play apparently has no limits! Have you ever heard of such a dispiriting, self-serving advertising message? As if the company concerned offers an escape hatch for today’s overfed, well-dressed, spoiled-rotten youth. Who are being taught to hate their inheritance.
I imagine newcomers to America, in the 1950s, from the wastelands of Europe following WW2, must have been amazed by the arts and entertainments then in the mainstream of life. For their enjoyment and presented as a tonic.
Next, you’ll be telling us that Elvis is “wholesome” !
When, as all know, destroyed spiritually by the grim predestination Calvinism he was raised in, Elvis abandoned himself fatalistically to destroying himself with junk food and drugs, routinely raping girls in their early teens by way of variety.
I had never linked Elvis’ downfall with Calvinism. What an interesting idea! Why would that make him fatalistic? I had assumed he simply couldn’t cope with wealth, adoration and temptaton.
I mean, why are they and their message evil, or at least degenerate?
With regards to film, I think it is partly the infiltration of Hollywood by a critical social justice-critical theory mindset, bent on using the medium to project certain contemporary moral beliefs about the world – agitprop. The puerile forms of these appear degenerate, for they only portray a very narrow and cynical view of moral interactions between individuals.
In my view, a more contemporary, pernicious phenomenon, is the not so subtle subversion of the psychological for the political. Lumet says a character should be clear from his (let’s not forget her as well) present actions. Now, reality is clear from the political interplay between identities. And unfortunately the agitprop is within plain site on the screen, projecting an ideology that seems to pretend that is the way the real world works.
I can recall watching the first British television broadcast of The Wizard Of Oz in 1976. Quite an event, it was. Perhaps its relatively late broadcast, 37 years after being made, was due to a deliberate patient wait until enough households in the country had a colour television set.
Back then, folk would have gladly accepted any scrap of entertainment they could get. At the time, I’m sure nobody would have thought how the Wicked Witch came to be. Now they might have wondered how a wicked witch came to be. But the capitalisation of her moniker meant nobody needed to inquire.
Tony Taylor
2 years ago
The first series of Pennyworth was one of my favourites of the decade, although the second series is a bit dreary. Endeavour is one of my all-time favourite shows, probably because Allam and Lesser and to a lesser degree Strange and De Bruin, are brilliant. Oddly, though, I never had much time for the rest of Batman’s universe (Dark Knight is dead set over-rated tripe), and I have never liked Morse.
I was also thinking about Endeavour, I liked Morse and in fact am rewatching it at the moment, but the early series are quite ghastly. However, Endeavour is just beautiful and thoughtful and as you say the characters are so well-drawn.
N T
2 years ago
I think you’re overthinking this. The studio has a popular franchise, and a character that is already familiar to the audience. They are exercising/exploiting that character’s infamy for profit. Instead of producing another sequel, they are taking it in a different direction that might be more interesting to the audience.
By the way, Cruella was a surprisingly good film, and Lightyear has nothing to do with Buzz.
Last edited 2 years ago by N T
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago
I suppose Wicked must be the rubber-duckie extension to The Wizard Of Oz, as Cruella is to 101 Dalmatians.
Are the rubber-duckie extensions all crass? Are they examples of the desire of culture executives to reinvigorate interest in the original art? To link in relevancy to the old stuff? Bereft as they might be of any original ideas themselves? Or are they motivated by the desire to blur or undo the distinction between right and wrong? As a way to undermine traditional morals? If they want to make money, how do they see what impacts best on today’s young cinema audiences?
Take the late Eighties movie “Planes, Trains And Automobiles”. How much of the charming spell of that movie would have been punctured had a prequel followed, laying bare how John Candy’s character, shower-curtain-ring salesman for Industrial Light & Magic Del Griffith, came to grief and forever on the road with his trunk, staying in cheap motels? It’s too hard for him to admit to the loss of his beloved wife, that her tragic death has him on the road, that he is full of hot air besides. He puts out a big photo of his wife by his bedside seemingly every night – that’s all we know. And that’s all we ever really needed to know. For such a talkative guy, he is very reserved. His snooty advertising executive brief companion is outwardly very reserved himself. Most folk are. Or used to be. But now we live in the social media age where all must be laid bare. Maybe that in part lies behind the desire of film-makers to take apart a cherished character.
As for Planes, Trains, we surely would not want to know explicitly what eventually happened to the two main characters either, beyond movie’s end. But you can see that where there lies innocent charm, the modern entertainment industry has tended to see in that a great opportunity to rough it up.
Plains, Trains? It’s nearly Thanksgiving now, is it not?
Tony Buck
2 years ago
Western civilization no longer exists.
And that’s the fault of just about everyone in the West, not just campus radicals.
Since it no longer exists, ever less can be created from its embers – only the horrors of the Modern Movement in music and the arts or the horrors of rap music or the raked-over manure of prequels.
Character complexity, or its pretence, is symptomatic of left wing ideas penetrating the film industry.
The assumption at the heart of the left’s psyche is that our minds are blank slates. Evil is not within us by this reasoning, but a product of the system. A character’s environmental exposure to “the system” is, in the mind of the ideologue, the most crucial aspect of character development.
But, much like the screenwriters who lament the “rubber duckie” explanation of human evil, I likewise find this approach hollow, as I do most things that are informed by ideology rather than thought.
My own observation of humans is that many have every excuse to be mean and malevolent but are nevertheless inexplicably kind, while many who have have every reason to be kind are inexplicably mean and cruel.
I think modern writers would do better to grapple with this baffling reality.
We are not all blank slates…. And some have evil imprinted if we consider that 3% of the population are psychopaths.
There is no evidence to suggest that anyone is a blank slate. Indeed, if we were, it would make us the first animal in the history of the animal kingdom to be so.
Certainly the potential for evil. But even non-psychopaths can do evil.
I don’t think the Left is inclined to leave anything to the imagination.
I agree with what you have written about humans being inexplicably kind and inexplicable mean but I don’t understand the link in your first sentence with left wing ideas. Could you enlarge on that please?
A certain dominant strand of the left believe that we are only products of our environment, which means, in effect, that we would all be the same person if exposed to the same factors, which is why nothing in this world view is inexplicable, either in kindness or wickedness
Thank you Hayden. I wonder why belief that we are products of our environment is linked with left views.
Wicked characters have an important role to play in children’s stories particularly; they teach children that evil exists, it can destroy them if they make the wrong choices, but it can also be defeated by integrity and goodness. By watering down the moral lesson and getting wishy washy (or “rubber ducky”) children are being tricked and fooled for profit as the article points out, but it could also literally have lethal life consequences for them.
This is a great point
I think the book Thinking Fast and Slow has some input on this. Naturally, it seems most people are cognitively lazy. If somebody offers an excuse for negative behaviour traits, then people will tend to reach for that as an instinctive obvious explanation, rather than go through the effort of thinking it through. Working through a maze of confusing ideas would require resolving contradictions and a considerable amount of self-criticism.
Two things: Is this whole article not merely an extreme case of the cod-psychology the writer claims the Entertainment industry is up to with its output? Only the article is this grander and more complex rubber duck explanation of their simpler and uni-dimensional rubber duck which is Hollywood, and so is kind of Déjà vu all over again? And that is a common psychological trait – that we just see everyone being a mirror of our own psychoses., or we see another persons psychosis so come to believe we have them too….
But whatever… the question I care about is why the modern entertainment industry is so degenerate. If you used a simple metric: ‘Does watching this stuff make you a better person, or a less good a person’? Does this stuff reflect positive values, or negative ones? Because I find it is 95% negative values, and maybe 5% positive.
And what does that say about the people who make up the industry? Why do they not lift up, rather than bring down, the character of society and people? I mean, why are they and their message evil, or at least degenerate? I was reading about the rapper disaster and looking at pictures of the astoundingly grim and dark set and message…… and it made me think of the music I was exposed to as a young person – and I thought of ‘He aint heavy, he’s my brother’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl5vi9ir49g and then song after song of this vein….. then and now….
“”He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”
The road is long
With many a winding turn
That leads us to who knows where?
Who knows where?
But I’m strong
Strong enough to carry him
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother
So on we go
His welfare is my concern
No burden is he to bear
We’ll get there
For I know
He would not encumber me
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother
If I’m laden at all
I’m laden with sadness
That everyone’s heart
Isn’t filled with the gladness
Of love for one another
It’s a long, long road
From which there is no return
While we’re on the way to there
Why not share?
And the load
Doesn’t weigh me down at all
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother
He’s my brother
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother”
And then Tavis Scott from the concert disaster:
““Bad Mood / S* *t On You”
[Bad Mood]
(I just have one question) F* *k outta my business
I did things that most men will ask forgiveness
Broke the code, the commandments from my descendants
Who gives a f* *k? New children in the buildin’
We ride with no limits
Shut the f* *k up, don’t you hear me tryna finish?
I’m in a bad mood
Rob that dude, f* *k that couch, burn that house
We the cause of the era, new ni* *as with new terror”
This is the sort of thing I wonder about with the entertainment industry, why is is so bleak and destructive of spirit…
(edited to format)
At the rate things are going, there are probably more Elvis impersonators in Uzbekistan than in the whole of America.
Well, if there is still a good clutch of cheery entertainers in America, in the second- and third-tier categories, they are probably inconspicuous in the multichannel age. The present-day first-tier entertainers are all amok, with their pained expressions. That’s what is apparently cool. Do they resent their situation? Their trade?
You’d think the hounded, the weary and the poor who migrate to the West might prefer Elvis to some grim-laden rapper. Are the newcomers to western shores to be thumped with bad beats in the shops they go into? In order to make them feel welcome in their new district? Do their more conservatively religious peers or elders raise even more of an eyebrow at the silly, decadent, wayward Western civilisation?
That civilisation knows how to shoot itself in the foot. Parts of it may even be taking deliberate aim.
And as more and more teenagers move on to never-ending violent video games, the few among them who had picked up a guitar to try their hand at it are sucked into a world where a digital device is their daily crutch, not the clunky musical instrument.
Play apparently has no limits! Have you ever heard of such a dispiriting, self-serving advertising message? As if the company concerned offers an escape hatch for today’s overfed, well-dressed, spoiled-rotten youth. Who are being taught to hate their inheritance.
I imagine newcomers to America, in the 1950s, from the wastelands of Europe following WW2, must have been amazed by the arts and entertainments then in the mainstream of life. For their enjoyment and presented as a tonic.
Who’s looking for a mere tonic these days?
Today’s youth spoiled-rotten ?
When an ever-increasing proportion of them come from broken or conflict-ridden homes or only-children lacking a capacity for rapport with others ?
What do you think their “inheritance” is ? – it’s often unhappiness and loneliness, with toys, gizmos and drugs filling the inner void.
Why shouldn’t they hate the West, hate their inheritance, hate their elders ?
Who, it now turns out, have been destroying the Earth for their own selfish convenience.
Next, you’ll be telling us that Elvis is “wholesome” !
When, as all know, destroyed spiritually by the grim predestination Calvinism he was raised in, Elvis abandoned himself fatalistically to destroying himself with junk food and drugs, routinely raping girls in their early teens by way of variety.
I had never linked Elvis’ downfall with Calvinism. What an interesting idea! Why would that make him fatalistic? I had assumed he simply couldn’t cope with wealth, adoration and temptaton.
Reports are coming through that a nine-year-old boy, who had been severely injured at the event, has now died: the tenth fatality.
I mean, why are they and their message evil, or at least degenerate?
With regards to film, I think it is partly the infiltration of Hollywood by a critical social justice-critical theory mindset, bent on using the medium to project certain contemporary moral beliefs about the world – agitprop. The puerile forms of these appear degenerate, for they only portray a very narrow and cynical view of moral interactions between individuals.
Harvey Weinstein is a more typical product of Hollywood than any SJW.
Hollywood has always been a cesspit.
(And the lives of most of its actors even worse).
Now it’s merely more obviously so.
Is the twee racism of Gone with the Wind any better than today’s films ?
Different
In my view, a more contemporary, pernicious phenomenon, is the not so subtle subversion of the psychological for the political. Lumet says a character should be clear from his (let’s not forget her as well) present actions. Now, reality is clear from the political interplay between identities. And unfortunately the agitprop is within plain site on the screen, projecting an ideology that seems to pretend that is the way the real world works.
Usually, that’s the way the real world does work.
I can recall watching the first British television broadcast of The Wizard Of Oz in 1976. Quite an event, it was. Perhaps its relatively late broadcast, 37 years after being made, was due to a deliberate patient wait until enough households in the country had a colour television set.
Back then, folk would have gladly accepted any scrap of entertainment they could get. At the time, I’m sure nobody would have thought how the Wicked Witch came to be. Now they might have wondered how a wicked witch came to be. But the capitalisation of her moniker meant nobody needed to inquire.
The first series of Pennyworth was one of my favourites of the decade, although the second series is a bit dreary. Endeavour is one of my all-time favourite shows, probably because Allam and Lesser and to a lesser degree Strange and De Bruin, are brilliant. Oddly, though, I never had much time for the rest of Batman’s universe (Dark Knight is dead set over-rated tripe), and I have never liked Morse.
I was also thinking about Endeavour, I liked Morse and in fact am rewatching it at the moment, but the early series are quite ghastly. However, Endeavour is just beautiful and thoughtful and as you say the characters are so well-drawn.
I think you’re overthinking this. The studio has a popular franchise, and a character that is already familiar to the audience. They are exercising/exploiting that character’s infamy for profit. Instead of producing another sequel, they are taking it in a different direction that might be more interesting to the audience.
By the way, Cruella was a surprisingly good film, and Lightyear has nothing to do with Buzz.
I suppose Wicked must be the rubber-duckie extension to The Wizard Of Oz, as Cruella is to 101 Dalmatians.
Are the rubber-duckie extensions all crass? Are they examples of the desire of culture executives to reinvigorate interest in the original art? To link in relevancy to the old stuff? Bereft as they might be of any original ideas themselves? Or are they motivated by the desire to blur or undo the distinction between right and wrong? As a way to undermine traditional morals? If they want to make money, how do they see what impacts best on today’s young cinema audiences?
Take the late Eighties movie “Planes, Trains And Automobiles”. How much of the charming spell of that movie would have been punctured had a prequel followed, laying bare how John Candy’s character, shower-curtain-ring salesman for Industrial Light & Magic Del Griffith, came to grief and forever on the road with his trunk, staying in cheap motels? It’s too hard for him to admit to the loss of his beloved wife, that her tragic death has him on the road, that he is full of hot air besides. He puts out a big photo of his wife by his bedside seemingly every night – that’s all we know. And that’s all we ever really needed to know. For such a talkative guy, he is very reserved. His snooty advertising executive brief companion is outwardly very reserved himself. Most folk are. Or used to be. But now we live in the social media age where all must be laid bare. Maybe that in part lies behind the desire of film-makers to take apart a cherished character.
As for Planes, Trains, we surely would not want to know explicitly what eventually happened to the two main characters either, beyond movie’s end. But you can see that where there lies innocent charm, the modern entertainment industry has tended to see in that a great opportunity to rough it up.
Plains, Trains? It’s nearly Thanksgiving now, is it not?
Western civilization no longer exists.
And that’s the fault of just about everyone in the West, not just campus radicals.
Since it no longer exists, ever less can be created from its embers – only the horrors of the Modern Movement in music and the arts or the horrors of rap music or the raked-over manure of prequels.