Media: a culture of contempt
By Pete North - December 7, 2021
I’ve been watching a lot of Youtube film reviews lately. Most of it is meaningless being that I haven’t followed Hollywood output for many years. It has nothing to say to me. What one tends to notice about Hollywood films is that they’re written by children for children. Seldom do you see a cast of actual adults. The heroes are all clean cut early twenties master race types with no grit or gravitas. They lack credibility.
For the life of me I don’t know why they do this. When I think back to my childhood heroes, they were all fully developed adults who skills were believable because they were adults. Hollywood seems to think that in order to make a character relatable, they have to look and sound like their audiences. If they made Event Horizon today (one of the greatest horror films of all time), the crew would all be immaculate youngsters with improbable talents and expertise for their ages. They’d no doubt throw in a completely pointless and graphic sex scene that does nothing at all to progress the story.
Over the last decade Hollywood has substantially lowered the bar for what constitutes a good film. There’s an occasional gem but if it means sifting through the hours of dross, you might as well give up. There will never be another Indiana Jones. We’ll never see organic screen chemistry like Ghostbusters ever again. There will never again be a compelling antagonist like Darth Vader. There will never again be a genuinely threatening alien like the Xenomorph. Film makers no longer know what it takes to make a classic.
It can be argued that production companies have become over reliant on CGI and the measure of a film ought to be whether it can stand on its own without it. It’s ultimately just about storytelling. For all that Babylon 5 had poor CGI even for its time, a hammy script and cheap production, it became a cult classic by way of an intricate story arc with likeable, well developed characters. There are scenes that would easily translate to the theatre stage and not lose anything.
The Hollywood conveyor belt doesn’t think about these things, primarily because it doesn’t have to. So long as they hijack an existing franchise, they have an inbuilt audience who’ll tolerate no end of insults. The Terminator franchise never managed to top T2, but they won’t let it die with dignity. They’ll keep violating it for as long as it makes a buck. It doesn’t even matter if it gets panned by critics.
There are multiple reasons why the industry is failing, but the final nail in the coffin of Hollywood appears to be wokery, whereby storytelling is secondary to pushing social agendas. Every classic hero has to be replaced by a woman or an ethnic minority and, where possible, turned gay. We’re not allowed our heroes as they were. They have to be deconstructed or diminished to make way for the new, better versions. The more politically correct versions. To hell with tradition, to hell with canon. All must be sacrificed on the altar of social justice.
Essentially this is an industry all too used to treating audiences with contempt and getting away with it. On a long enough timeline they’ll completely erase the original Star Wars trilogy, and Luke Skywalker with be a black trans-woman and Darth Vader will be a bumbling incompetent white man with no menace whatsoever. The Terminator will be played by a famous drag queen. They no longer need to respect the originals now they’re so diluted by endless reboots and spinoffs. Original fans have long been alienated. They can get away with anything. For now.
If there is one clear cut benefit to a global pandemic then it’s the impact on the film industry. If it wants to survive it will have to work harder, especially when television is now rivalling Hollywood for visual impact. Advances in CGI and production technology have made it cheaper and easier than ever to churn out disposable pap. If you want the public to don a mask and stand in a socially distanced queue to consume your product, you have to make it worth their while. Each new rape of a cherished franchise serves only to remind us how good we used to have it and how little the Hollywood establishment has to say for itself now.
That, though, is not what this article intended to say. Hollywood’s demise is really just symptomatic of an overall complacency in Western culture. Complacency and cynicism. It is mirrored in our politics and news media. There is no reason to strive for excellence when mediocrity passes.
Take, for example, the political interview. It’s a long time since we saw the titans of political inquisition at work. Not since the late eighties have we seen deep and comprehensive exploration of the issues. There is a belief that we lack the intellect and the attention span to grapple with the philosophies at the heart of any issue. They serve up pap because that’s their fullest estimation of us.
For all that Brexit occupied endless hours of airtime, I don’t recall even once seeing a thorough and robust exchange of views the likes we saw in 1975. We saw television debates set up in a similar fashion to game shows, with each side represented by those with only the slenderest grasp of the issues, who still sought to dumb it down further.
Though the Brexit issue remains deeply divisive, the one thing all can agree on was how poorly we were served by our media. Following our departure, you would think the media would take some interest as to what is happening and why, yet the issue is already yesterday’s news. If the issue appears on the radar at all it falls to the imbecilic Jeremy Vine and Femi Oluwole.
On more broader issues, news media will deliberately misrepresent issues with a view to inflaming tensions, largely for their own amusement, capitalising on the fallout. Parasiting off the discord they create. Not even the public broadcaster sees its role as one of informing and exploring. BBC Radio 4 lately has become wall to wall climate change propaganda, and a mouthpiece for the NGOcracy on matters like immigration. The persistent theme in our media is a contempt for their audiences. The power is theirs to abuse any way they see fit.
They do it because they know they can. Just the same as the Tories can pivot practically overnight from being a Brexit government to eco-evangelists. Nothing threatens their incumbency and they know how to disarm anything that might. The same is also true of big tech. When it looked like a genuine threat to Twitter’s monopoly on live political discourse would emerge, it was erased from the internet. Again it comes back to that famous Noam Chomsky quote. “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum”.
Whichever media channel you turn to, you’re looking at an abuse of power born of a belief that they’re untouchable infallible and entitled to our obedience. Each time they lower the bar they’re probing to discover what else they can get away with without consequence. Unless we’re willing to avert our attentions from their output and set our own agendas, they’ll continue to spit on us and rub our faces in it.