Well, youād 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 wasnāt 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 heās now upper class and has a 4x4. Itās a lot less hardcore, but the reagonomics are running underneath the whole thing. Iād take that itās accidental, because the same team went much more leftward in Roger Rabbit, so I think itās 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 āfifteightiesā 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.
Thatās 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. Thatās a very time-specific one, like Rambo praising the Taliban.
I donāt 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 thatās back in the early 70s. I never went deep enough into the sequels to see if it got really bad down the line.
Iāve heard some stuff about Field of Dreams, but I donāt think Iāve watched that in one sitting.
I donāt know itās often the action stuff. Your Commandos and Death Wishes and so on. Does stuff like Red Dawn and Invasion USA even count as ācryptoā? Those are pretty overt.
If you let me break the time frame I will say that I think The Incredibles flies over peopleās heads as being aggressively conservative. Forrest Gump used to, but I think people got wise to it over time. Another Zemeckis joint, too. Maybe itās Roger Rabbit that was the accident.
Even the incredibles thinks the insurance industry is predatory. It flew over my head completely in being right wing, but Iām autistic and often miss really, really obvious subtext (though I can generally predict entire plots from the first few minutes, so itās a weird combination). I could tell that zootopia was a heavy handed allegory, but I couldnāt quite put my finger on it referencing racism, for example.
In fairness, Zootopia isā¦ kinda muddy on that front.
The Incredibles is very overt about the whole objectivist āif everybody is special the nobody isā 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 isnāt born into it. Thatās evil.
I mean, Iām pushing it, but itās 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 heās subtly different from a true Objectivist and so his ideas that some people are exceptional and superior are fine.
The Incredibles is very overt about the whole objectivist āif everybody is special the nobody isā
The villain says that. When Thanos said half the population should be randomly killed, did you think that was the message of that movie? The Incredibles is about Bob navigating his relationship with his own biases. Syndrome is Bobās dark foil; a villain made of all the worst parts of Bob. Bob can only defeat Syndrome after learning to fight for something more than himself. He can only defeat Syndrome with help from other people who he loves. He has to stop believing that superheroism is about being better than everyone else.
the wannabe sidekick has no business trying to be one of the special people by inventing stuff
Because heās not trying to help people! Superheroism is meaningless without empathy. Thatās the thesis of the movie
the government and society are regulating these people who are intrinsically better into normalcy when they should be allowed to freely express themselves.
The government banning people who are different from freely expressing themself is badā¦ Wonder whether thatās a left or right opinion.
But I guess we can add Bad Boys 2 to the list. I mean, all of Michael Bayās oeuvre, but holy crap, Bad Boys 2. That MUST have been some form of weird Florida-lobby/CIA psyop, there is no other explanation.
The Incredibles flies over peopleās heads as being aggressively conservative.
Superheroes are a metaphor for minorities. Thereās 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 minorityās culture without understanding what it means. If youāre an indigenous minority youāve been through that.
Thereās a scene where the mum has a talk with her kids about treating authority figures theyāve been trained not to fear as threats to their lives. That talk is familiar to any black family in the USA.
Thereās 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.
Thatās not an invalid read. My problem with it is that the movie doesnāt show the supes as being inherently feared or hated. This isnāt 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 didnāt 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 isnāt rehashing any of those, theyāre doing the Fantastic 4. Superheroes-as-family. Bit of a different tack.
And when theyāre suppressed they arenāt 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 donāt 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 donāt think Bird has a Randian āyou should be an asshole if you want toā 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. Itās why the slightly token black guy is there in the first place.
I should say I also think itās undermined because the one instance of someone even appearing to have a recognizable trait of those things in the main family, which would be Viās 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.
Bob is marginalised in a way invisible to the people around him, but itās there. As a plus size person, he doesnāt fit in his cubicle or his car. When he stops paying attention, the world around him crumbles. World of cardboard. Being huge and super strong isnāt easy for him.
But whatās even harder is having Bobās justice sensitivity. Justice sensitivity is a symptom of autism in which neurodivergent people are more sensitive to social problems. Bob gets fired because his sense of right and wrong is too strong to fit into the world around him.
Dash also struggles with the same problems as neurodivergent people. Dashās allegory is ADHD. Heās not allowed to participate in the parts of school life that interest him; that heās good at. Heās constantly holding himself back. I was a gifted kid too, and my giftedness has caused consequences for other students when I dominated a classroom discussion. When I was moved to a gifted school and surrounded by peers, life got better for me. I see myself in Dash.
Violetās marginalisation is more of an immigrant/racialised/misogyny problem. Sheās accepted the mainstream narrative that her powers make her a freak. That sheās different and thatās bad. That normality is an ideal to aspire to. She becomes confident in herself after sheās allowed to engage with her own native culture and see that itās not bad. She gets a talk from Mum and forges a new relationship with her minority identity. The fighting is secondary. The story isnāt about it.
There are queer or disabled people in white middle class nuclear families, and they have problems. I think Brad chose to make the story relatable to everyone by using a cultural image weāre very familiar with. But then he showed problems that happen when someone, even someone in that social role, is different from what society expects.
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
Not true. The government shut down the superhero program because of public pressure. The catalyst was the suicide jumper that Bob saved. But around that time there were a lot of incidents of property damage and lawsuits that made it too expensive for the government to have superheroes, because of what the people were doing.
Iāll say that itās still a great movie. I love it. Thatās something modern culture warriors just wonāt acknowledge. You can engage with a piece of art or entertainment pushing politics you despise. Itās fine.
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Well, youād 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 wasnāt 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 heās now upper class and has a 4x4. Itās a lot less hardcore, but the reagonomics are running underneath the whole thing. Iād take that itās accidental, because the same team went much more leftward in Roger Rabbit, so I think itās 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 āfifteightiesā 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.
Thatās 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. Thatās a very time-specific one, like Rambo praising the Taliban.
Dare I ask you to go further?
Whatās an extreme example of a crypto-rightwing-coded-80s-flick?
I donāt 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 thatās back in the early 70s. I never went deep enough into the sequels to see if it got really bad down the line.
Iāve heard some stuff about Field of Dreams, but I donāt think Iāve watched that in one sitting.
I donāt know itās often the action stuff. Your Commandos and Death Wishes and so on. Does stuff like Red Dawn and Invasion USA even count as ācryptoā? Those are pretty overt.
If you let me break the time frame I will say that I think The Incredibles flies over peopleās heads as being aggressively conservative. Forrest Gump used to, but I think people got wise to it over time. Another Zemeckis joint, too. Maybe itās Roger Rabbit that was the accident.
Even the incredibles thinks the insurance industry is predatory. It flew over my head completely in being right wing, but Iām autistic and often miss really, really obvious subtext (though I can generally predict entire plots from the first few minutes, so itās a weird combination). I could tell that zootopia was a heavy handed allegory, but I couldnāt quite put my finger on it referencing racism, for example.
In fairness, Zootopia isā¦ kinda muddy on that front.
The Incredibles is very overt about the whole objectivist āif everybody is special the nobody isā 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 isnāt born into it. Thatās evil.
I mean, Iām pushing it, but itās 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 heās subtly different from a true Objectivist and so his ideas that some people are exceptional and superior are fine.
The villain says that. When Thanos said half the population should be randomly killed, did you think that was the message of that movie? The Incredibles is about Bob navigating his relationship with his own biases. Syndrome is Bobās dark foil; a villain made of all the worst parts of Bob. Bob can only defeat Syndrome after learning to fight for something more than himself. He can only defeat Syndrome with help from other people who he loves. He has to stop believing that superheroism is about being better than everyone else.
Because heās not trying to help people! Superheroism is meaningless without empathy. Thatās the thesis of the movie
The government banning people who are different from freely expressing themself is badā¦ Wonder whether thatās a left or right opinion.
Donāt 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 Bayās oeuvre, but holy crap, Bad Boys 2. That MUST have been some form of weird Florida-lobby/CIA psyop, there is no other explanation.
Superheroes are a metaphor for minorities. Thereās 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 minorityās culture without understanding what it means. If youāre an indigenous minority youāve been through that.
Thereās a scene where the mum has a talk with her kids about treating authority figures theyāve been trained not to fear as threats to their lives. That talk is familiar to any black family in the USA.
Thereās 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.
Thatās not an invalid read. My problem with it is that the movie doesnāt show the supes as being inherently feared or hated. This isnāt 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 didnāt 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 isnāt rehashing any of those, theyāre doing the Fantastic 4. Superheroes-as-family. Bit of a different tack.
And when theyāre suppressed they arenāt 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 donāt 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 donāt think Bird has a Randian āyou should be an asshole if you want toā 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. Itās why the slightly token black guy is there in the first place.
I should say I also think itās undermined because the one instance of someone even appearing to have a recognizable trait of those things in the main family, which would be Viās 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.
Bob is marginalised in a way invisible to the people around him, but itās there. As a plus size person, he doesnāt fit in his cubicle or his car. When he stops paying attention, the world around him crumbles. World of cardboard. Being huge and super strong isnāt easy for him.
But whatās even harder is having Bobās justice sensitivity. Justice sensitivity is a symptom of autism in which neurodivergent people are more sensitive to social problems. Bob gets fired because his sense of right and wrong is too strong to fit into the world around him.
Dash also struggles with the same problems as neurodivergent people. Dashās allegory is ADHD. Heās not allowed to participate in the parts of school life that interest him; that heās good at. Heās constantly holding himself back. I was a gifted kid too, and my giftedness has caused consequences for other students when I dominated a classroom discussion. When I was moved to a gifted school and surrounded by peers, life got better for me. I see myself in Dash.
Violetās marginalisation is more of an immigrant/racialised/misogyny problem. Sheās accepted the mainstream narrative that her powers make her a freak. That sheās different and thatās bad. That normality is an ideal to aspire to. She becomes confident in herself after sheās allowed to engage with her own native culture and see that itās not bad. She gets a talk from Mum and forges a new relationship with her minority identity. The fighting is secondary. The story isnāt about it.
There are queer or disabled people in white middle class nuclear families, and they have problems. I think Brad chose to make the story relatable to everyone by using a cultural image weāre very familiar with. But then he showed problems that happen when someone, even someone in that social role, is different from what society expects.
Not true. The government shut down the superhero program because of public pressure. The catalyst was the suicide jumper that Bob saved. But around that time there were a lot of incidents of property damage and lawsuits that made it too expensive for the government to have superheroes, because of what the people were doing.
Ahh Deathwish I havenāt thought about that in years but yeah it does have white flight, brown gangs, and one NYC architect-cum-vigilante savior.
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Whatās so right wing about those? Honestly, itās been a while but I donāt really remember any clear examples.
Somebody else just asked, so see above.
BTTF I can get, but Die Hard flying under peopleās radar is always surprising.
Thanks! Today I learned I donāt really remember any details about die hardā¦
Hah! It happens. Thatās when the shock comes.
Iāll say that itās still a great movie. I love it. Thatās something modern culture warriors just wonāt acknowledge. You can engage with a piece of art or entertainment pushing politics you despise. Itās fine.