February 2017

Questioning the Ethno-Nationalist Backlash

bambamramfan:

balioc:

bambamramfan:

One of the popular frames in 2016 was crystalized by NYT columnist Ross Douthat of a new political divide, which pits Cosmopolitisan Finance Capitalism vs the Ethno-Nationalist Backlash, defining Brexit and Hillary v Trump. It was understandable, as there seemed to be rich anti-racists dominating coverage of one side, and poor racists dominating coverage of the other.

But this framing actually never seemed right to me.

Here’s a weird thing: both campaigns were run out of New York City (the two hippest boroughs even.) In the past this would have been unconscionable for a Presidential campaign: you put your HQ in some state your candidate has “roots” with to show they aren’t just big city coastal elites. Republicans run their campaigns from Texas or Michigan, Democrats from Tennessee or Illinois.

And there was a sense in which… this pretense just didn’t matter anymore. The “New York celebrity” aspect of both HRC and DJT were treated as assets and rewarded lavishly, by voters in Donald’s case and by fundraisers and art producers in Hillary’s.

If there was an Ethno-Nationalist Backlash , why did a field of Republicans from every type of conservative state get creamed by a financier who sits in a golden tower in New York City and had a public history of divorce and adultery?

Mumble mumble, something about how the ENB voters were so angry, only an idiot as offensive as Trump could satisfy them. He was the most blunt in proposing racist policies, so he ran away with the voters.

Why not the Duck Dynasty guy? Why not Mike Huckabee? Why not anyone with some sort of connection to the supposed parochial tribalists who only like people who share their cultural signifiers? Traditionally a parochial candidate should be a non-ideological, pragmatic wiseman who has the trust of their community and the free hand to follow whatever policies and allies he deems wisest.”

The much more parsimonious explanation seems not that Trump succeeded because “there’s Molochian drift towards the centralized elites in this country and now a backlash from the dispossessed decentralized is taking the most monstrous form it can find” but rather “there’s Molochian drift towards the centralized elites in this country and Trump is one such elite.”

He’s not part of some Southern network of established donors, like Jeb Bush was. He’s not the successful governor of a rust belt state, like John Kasich was. He was a star from the finance center of the universe, and he played the game like one.

And what’s interesting is that while there was undoubtedly some ENB sentiment, it was channeled into the system created by a CFC hegemony: celebrity, centralization, and ultimately economic deregulation. If both your candidates identify with New York City, then no surprise that both candidates would appoint Goldman Sachs officers to high economic positions.

Cute and clever, but ultimately not strong enough. 

The nature of Trump’s base makes it impossible to frame this setup as pure “Molochian drift towards the centralized elites.”  It’s not like we got a fight between two elite factions – say, startup-culture tech-bro libertarians versus social-justice-y Ivy League progressives – and everyone else in the country was just swept along for the ride.  I can imagine that world, but it’s not what happened.  All the elites were on one side.  (Not literally true…but more so than in any other election I can remember, because so many traditional Republican elites held their noses and fled screaming from Trump.)  The Donald may have been a New York real estate tycoon running his campaign out of New York, but in the end, no one in New York voted for him.   

And, well, if you listen to what Trump voters actually have to say, it’s very hard not to understand it as something like an ethno-nationalist backlash.  This is not an idea that the pundits are pulling out of nowhere. 

Now, all that said: why is a New York real estate tycoon best-situated to become the standard-bearer of our ethno-nationalist backlash?  That is a damn good question, and probably one that hasn’t gotten enough attention.  I bet there’s a really good essay to be written about the ways in which all the various American cultures have been hollowed out and redefined by (urban corporate) media, such that a professional TV nasty-man is much better at projecting “I am the culture hero who will save you from the nasty liberal bigwigs” than any actual bona-fide exemplar of non-urban culture could be.  Or maybe it mostly boils down to “Trump is a fluke; you’d have to be cuckoo-nuts to think that it’s worth investing in a presidential campaign if you’re actually not any kind of politician, but right at this moment it turns out that large numbers of people really really wanted Actually Not Any Kind of Politician, and Trump is in fact both cuckoo-nuts and extremely rich.”  I dunno.  Lots of theories seem plausible.  

I am talking more about the first half of your last paragraph:

Now, all that said: why is a New York real estate tycoon best-situated to become the standard-bearer of our ethno-nationalist backlash?  That is a damn good question, and probably one that hasn’t gotten enough attention.  I bet there’s a really good essay to be written about the ways in which all the various American cultures have been hollowed out and redefined by (urban corporate) media, such that a professional TV nasty-man is much better at projecting “I am the culture hero who will save you from the nasty liberal bigwigs” than any actual bona-fide exemplar of non-urban culture could be.

Which is to say independent of people’s motives and desires, there is a systemtic pressure towards centralization and inequality in the First World right now. No one particularly wants more super rich based around CFC, it’s just the incentives are all set up to build and reinforce that.

And the ENB is not because of things individual rich liberals have done or want, but pretty understandable frustration with the overall system dynamics that led to CFC (your jobs get outsourced, media stars insult you for being poor and parochial, the cool food is ethnic food and the affordable food is fast food burger joints that only offer minimum wage.)

But the key thing is that this ENB just gets funneled right back into the CFC system: Breitbart farms your clicks for articles, your voters can only coordinate around a reality TV star from New York, and the guy you elect is so ignorant he can only think to hire other flashy names, including the centralized finance guys he already knew from seeing them have big money in New York.

Ah.  Well, yes, that’s all very true.

(…and then what?  It’s not like the ethno-nationalist backlash is going to go away just because it turns out that Trump won’t actually do anything to achieve its goals.  I can see only three ways this can go from here.  Either the exact same thing happens over and over in a cycle, with an increasingly-frustrated ENB population taking ever-more-destructive political action that always seems to end up with amoral CFC liars in charge; or the ENB population gets its act together and finds an actual for-serious champion who will honestly work towards its [terrible] goals; or we get some kind of culture shift that allows all that ENB energy to be channeled towards different ends.)

(And people wonder why I’m obsessed with culture engineering…)

Questioning the Ethno-Nationalist Backlash

bambamramfan:

One of the popular frames in 2016 was crystalized by NYT columnist Ross Douthat of a new political divide, which pits Cosmopolitisan Finance Capitalism vs the Ethno-Nationalist Backlash, defining Brexit and Hillary v Trump. It was understandable, as there seemed to be rich anti-racists dominating coverage of one side, and poor racists dominating coverage of the other.

But this framing actually never seemed right to me.

Here’s a weird thing: both campaigns were run out of New York City (the two hippest boroughs even.) In the past this would have been unconscionable for a Presidential campaign: you put your HQ in some state your candidate has “roots” with to show they aren’t just big city coastal elites. Republicans run their campaigns from Texas or Michigan, Democrats from Tennessee or Illinois.

And there was a sense in which… this pretense just didn’t matter anymore. The “New York celebrity” aspect of both HRC and DJT were treated as assets and rewarded lavishly, by voters in Donald’s case and by fundraisers and art producers in Hillary’s.

If there was an Ethno-Nationalist Backlash , why did a field of Republicans from every type of conservative state get creamed by a financier who sits in a golden tower in New York City and had a public history of divorce and adultery?

Mumble mumble, something about how the ENB voters were so angry, only an idiot as offensive as Trump could satisfy them. He was the most blunt in proposing racist policies, so he ran away with the voters.

Why not the Duck Dynasty guy? Why not Mike Huckabee? Why not anyone with some sort of connection to the supposed parochial tribalists who only like people who share their cultural signifiers? Traditionally a parochial candidate should be a non-ideological, pragmatic wiseman who has the trust of their community and the free hand to follow whatever policies and allies he deems wisest.”

The much more parsimonious explanation seems not that Trump succeeded because “there’s Molochian drift towards the centralized elites in this country and now a backlash from the dispossessed decentralized is taking the most monstrous form it can find” but rather “there’s Molochian drift towards the centralized elites in this country and Trump is one such elite.”

He’s not part of some Southern network of established donors, like Jeb Bush was. He’s not the successful governor of a rust belt state, like John Kasich was. He was a star from the finance center of the universe, and he played the game like one.

And what’s interesting is that while there was undoubtedly some ENB sentiment, it was channeled into the system created by a CFC hegemony: celebrity, centralization, and ultimately economic deregulation. If both your candidates identify with New York City, then no surprise that both candidates would appoint Goldman Sachs officers to high economic positions.

Cute and clever, but ultimately not strong enough. 

The nature of Trump’s base makes it impossible to frame this setup as pure “Molochian drift towards the centralized elites.”  It’s not like we got a fight between two elite factions – say, startup-culture tech-bro libertarians versus social-justice-y Ivy League progressives – and everyone else in the country was just swept along for the ride.  I can imagine that world, but it’s not what happened.  All the elites were on one side.  (Not literally true…but more so than in any other election I can remember, because so many traditional Republican elites held their noses and fled screaming from Trump.)  The Donald may have been a New York real estate tycoon running his campaign out of New York, but in the end, no one in New York voted for him.   

And, well, if you listen to what Trump voters actually have to say, it’s very hard not to understand it as something like an ethno-nationalist backlash.  This is not an idea that the pundits are pulling out of nowhere. 

Now, all that said: why is a New York real estate tycoon best-situated to become the standard-bearer of our ethno-nationalist backlash?  That is a damn good question, and probably one that hasn’t gotten enough attention.  I bet there’s a really good essay to be written about the ways in which all the various American cultures have been hollowed out and redefined by (urban corporate) media, such that a professional TV nasty-man is much better at projecting “I am the culture hero who will save you from the nasty liberal bigwigs” than any actual bona-fide exemplar of non-urban culture could be.  Or maybe it mostly boils down to “Trump is a fluke; you’d have to be cuckoo-nuts to think that it’s worth investing in a presidential campaign if you’re actually not any kind of politician, but right at this moment it turns out that large numbers of people really really wanted Actually Not Any Kind of Politician, and Trump is in fact both cuckoo-nuts and extremely rich.”  I dunno.  Lots of theories seem plausible.  

fierceawakening:

balioc:

fierceawakening:

I’m not saying Suicide Squad was a good movie, because it wasn’t… but I don’t understand the sheer degree of hatred for it. I enjoyed it and thought it had potential.

Is it just because Leto was a terrible creep?

…people hated Suicide Squad because of basic cultural and ideological promptings.

I mean, OK, that’s not the whole of it.  Apart from anything else, it was a bad movie in a normal evaluation-of-narrative sense, as it turned out.  Characters made decisions for incomprehensible reasons or for no reasons at all.  Plot points were justified with paper-thin unconvincing explanations.  All that jazz. 

But you didn’t need to know any of that to know that people would hate it.  You could tell what would happen as soon as you saw the first promotional picture of Harley decked out in hot pants and fishnets and tattoos and that Uncomfortable Shirt.  Everything about her presentation screamed: this is a sexualized hot chick and you should totally leer at her.  In the cultural zeitgeist of the chattering class, images like that are the symbols of the Problematic (whether or not we’re talking about the sectors of the chattering class that would actually use that word), and they don’t show up in Good Art. 

And then the actual movie did that same kind of thing over and over and over.  Killer Croc and Diablo present as straight-up black and Hispanic tough-guy stereotypes out of Central Klansman Casting.  Boomerang is a gleeful monster who tramples (ahem) bourgeois morality and etiquette with every line of dialogue.  We get a brief look-see into Joker and Harley’s relationship, and it turns out to be a trailer-trash swinger fantasy.

This was, in actual fact, the film’s main redeeming feature.  It faced up squarely to the fact that it was centrally a story about heroism amongst the lowly, the outcast, the dispossessed – and also faced up to the fact that the dispossessed, by virtue of being dispossessed, lead lives that often are not acceptable within the culture of their alleged betters.  Which is not just a matter of being kinda dirty and using a picturesquely lower-class accent.  They do not necessarily shy away from the norms and tropes that the middle class deems Problematic.  Sometimes they embrace those norms and tropes, for defiance if for no other reason.  Sometimes they talk and act like thugs.  Sometimes they dress up like tarts.  And either you’re willing to acknowledge their humanity, despite the affront to your cultural mores, or you’re not. 

But the chattering classes these days prefer their monsters defanged, and resent being reminded of the discrepancies between their desire to honor the oppressed and their non-oppressed-person-friendly codes of conduct.  So, no, they are not going to like a movie like Suicide Squad.

Of course, not everyone is a member of the chattering class.  Which may have something to do with the $750 million global box office, all the hate notwithstanding. 

“It faced up squarely to the fact that it was centrally a story about heroism amongst the lowly, the outcast, the dispossessed – and also faced up to the fact that the dispossessed, by virtue of being dispossessed, lead lives that often are not acceptable within the culture of their alleged betters.”

That’s part of what I liked about it. I felt that aspect of it could have been written much better–I think it was stereotypical in many places, and stereotypes are uninteresting unless your character is fitting them for interesting reasons. But the basic idea, I liked.

Also, re the endless and boring culture war stuff, my brain keeps going back to “the leader of the team–and one of the most interesting characters–was a black man. Did no one catch that? Or does ‘representation’ not ‘matter’ unless you like the thing?“

(I hate the fact that I’m being driven to defend Suicide Squad, but…)

In the context of a movie like this, I think that there is a general-purpose “interesting reason” for characters to be portrayed stereotypically.  The stereotypes make people viscerally uncomfortable.  That’s it.  That’s enough, in this particular situation.

Suicide Squad is supposed to be a story about despised, dreadful monsters being given a chance to show their worth.  That’s the whole point.  From a storycraft perspective, this is a setup where the abstraction and distance generated by narrative are working against you.  Especially if the characters in question are memorable and charismatic, as they basically have to be here for the movie to work at all, and especially especially if they’re serving as the protagonists. 

It would have been easy to make a team full of weird, offbeat, highly-individualized super-criminals – and then what?  Then we would have a band of Adorably Quirky Misfits, like the Avengers with a thin layer of goth on top.  Every fanfic author could have her own special favorite!  The text could tell us that these people are human filth, that we should loathe and fear them as we loathe and fear the worst parts of our own world, but it’s actually really hard for an author to make that stick in a visceral way.  Story-framing cleans things up and makes them pretty.  The title character of Hannibal is a super-cool dude, and two-thirds of the audience wants to be him or bang him or both.  Something something Tony Soprano Walter White Tyler Durden. 

But it turns out that decades of American cultural struggle has equipped us with these handy emotional buttons labeled VISCERAL DISGUST.  Images we associate with racist and sexist attitudes, like “lazy violent BET-watching black thug” and “chick dressed like a stripper who lives to please her man,” make us want to vomit.  This is transgressive, immoral, foul!  Which is exactly how we need to be reacting to the Suicide Squad, on a gut level, so that appreciating their humanity can feel realistically like a struggle. 

…because it is a struggle, when we try to do it for reals.  Everyone deserves dignity, sure, but not everyone got the memo about what dignity is supposed to look like this week.  Not everyone’s story is some surprising, heartstring-tugging, photogenic thing; lots of people are living exactly the stories you would expect from their circumstances, including stories that you find ugly and contemptible.  For every little girl who wants to be Ada Lovelace, there’s another who wants to be Harley.  And what then, dude?  Having second thoughts about that “dignity for everyone” plan?

All right.  Enough.  I am rambling, and as you say, culture war is boring.  I apologize.

*****

I think that we may have arrived at some bizarre cultural consensus that Will Smith doesn’t actually count as a minority.  As far as I can tell, (white) people from all sides of the culture war are willing to agree on this.  Don’t ask me, man.  I didn’t do it.

fierceawakening:

I’m not saying Suicide Squad was a good movie, because it wasn’t… but I don’t understand the sheer degree of hatred for it. I enjoyed it and thought it had potential.

Is it just because Leto was a terrible creep?

…people hated Suicide Squad because of basic cultural and ideological promptings.

I mean, OK, that’s not the whole of it.  Apart from anything else, it was a bad movie in a normal evaluation-of-narrative sense, as it turned out.  Characters made decisions for incomprehensible reasons or for no reasons at all.  Plot points were justified with paper-thin unconvincing explanations.  All that jazz. 

But you didn’t need to know any of that to know that people would hate it.  You could tell what would happen as soon as you saw the first promotional picture of Harley decked out in hot pants and fishnets and tattoos and that Uncomfortable Shirt.  Everything about her presentation screamed: this is a sexualized hot chick and you should totally leer at her.  In the cultural zeitgeist of the chattering class, images like that are the symbols of the Problematic (whether or not we’re talking about the sectors of the chattering class that would actually use that word), and they don’t show up in Good Art. 

And then the actual movie did that same kind of thing over and over and over.  Killer Croc and Diablo present as straight-up black and Hispanic tough-guy stereotypes out of Central Klansman Casting.  Boomerang is a gleeful monster who tramples (ahem) bourgeois morality and etiquette with every line of dialogue.  We get a brief look-see into Joker and Harley’s relationship, and it turns out to be a trailer-trash swinger fantasy.

This was, in actual fact, the film’s main redeeming feature.  It faced up squarely to the fact that it was centrally a story about heroism amongst the lowly, the outcast, the dispossessed – and also faced up to the fact that the dispossessed, by virtue of being dispossessed, lead lives that often are not acceptable within the culture of their alleged betters.  Which is not just a matter of being kinda dirty and using a picturesquely lower-class accent.  They do not necessarily shy away from the norms and tropes that the middle class deems Problematic.  Sometimes they embrace those norms and tropes, for defiance if for no other reason.  Sometimes they talk and act like thugs.  Sometimes they dress up like tarts.  And either you’re willing to acknowledge their humanity, despite the affront to your cultural mores, or you’re not. 

But the chattering classes these days prefer their monsters defanged, and resent being reminded of the discrepancies between their desire to honor the oppressed and their non-oppressed-person-friendly codes of conduct.  So, no, they are not going to like a movie like Suicide Squad.

Of course, not everyone is a member of the chattering class.  Which may have something to do with the $750 million global box office, all the hate notwithstanding. 

Speaking of which…

I am something of an evangelist for theater LARPing, especially for my own games.  If anyone reading this is interested in the medium, or in being evangelized-at – even to the extent of “explain to me why anyone would do this stupid thing!” – just let me know, and I will be happy to chat / answer questions / pontificate at pretty much any length. 

This goes double if you live in the NY area, meaning that I might actually be able to pull you into a game without very much logistical trouble. 

theunitofcaring:

A popular right-wing complaint about immigration is that the left doesn’t want immigrants to integrate. I don’t think this is true. Both the left and the right want new arrivals to their culture to share their values, they just aren’t on the same page about which values. 

I’m not actually sure where the misunderstanding comes from. You see a lot of conservatives making claims like ‘liberals think that beating your spouse should respected if it’s part of your (minority) culture’ and I’ve yet to run across a single liberal saying such a thing. Maybe they mean something more like ‘liberals think that diversity is great and more important than actual correctness, so when they embrace diverse viewpoints they end up embracing abhorrent ones’. Only elsewhere conservatives (reasonably) make the complaint that the left is not remotely concerned with viewpoint diversity, just with the ‘different sets of oppressions’ kind, and accordingly is hostile to underrepresented perspectives like the evangelical one or the Appalachian ex-coal-miner one. Do they think that the left is more tolerant of ‘sometimes beating your spouse is okay’? or ‘being gay is okay unless you’re Muslim’?

I think that’s part of it; the left is definitely less viscerally mad about Muslim oppression of LGBT people, mostly because how mad we are is related to our own experiences and most of us have dealt with intolerant Christians in positions of structural power and not with intolerant Muslims in same, and the right is right here passing laws right now while ISIS is very far away and everyone agrees they’re terrible so they’re hard to get too worked up about. 

But maybe most of the difference is in where the attribution lies for the bad beliefs. The left will tend to say that the beating spouses is patriarchy and the oppression of LGBT people is homophobia and transphobia, and the conservative will say they are both Islam. Then the liberal interprets the conservative as trying to dodge responsibility for the much more rampant sexism and homophobia and transphobia of the Christian right, and the conservative interprets the liberal insistence that it’s nothing to do with the actual religion which the people in question would cite as the  basis for their beliefs as proof they don’t actually care about fixing those things, or why would they ignore the obvious cause staring them in the face?

And the difference lies in which things they want erased by integration: conservatives want immigrants to have conservative values, like learning English and being a reliable voting bloc against abortion and not relying on handouts and not wearing hijabs and eating American food, and liberals want immigrants to have liberal values like diversity of foods and clothing styles and languages and supporting Palestine and hating the right.

But there’s still a problem. As far as I can tell, Hispanic immigrants are that ideal conservative immigrant: Christian, socially conservative, no hijabs, integrating fast, and so forth. And conservatives can’t stand them either. I’m not sure if that means that integration is a red herring and not actually what anyone cares about, or if it’s another weird artifact of the way the American immigration debate borrows talking points from the European one despite totally incomparable situations or what. But I think firm commitment to immediate total integration would do very little about conservative opposition to immigration.

I’m pretty sure that this debate does not actually cash out into a coherent abstract ideology-of-integration.  For either side.  And if you try to force it into that framework, you will end up with a garbled mess. 

For the conservatives:

So…the (obvious) thing about traditional tribal loyalist worldviews is that absolute specifics are important.  It’s not like “I’m an ethno-nationalist who will die for God and country, and you’re an ethno-nationalist who will die for God and country, so clearly we agree on all the fundamentals and we should get along great!”  What matters is the particular group and flag and rallying-cry to which you give your allegiance, and in fact the people you hate and fear most are probably the people who have feelings-identical-to-yours but happen to be affiliated with some other group and flag and rallying-cry.  To those who idolize the tough-guy warrior ideal, foreign limp-wristed egghead liberals may be contemptible, but foreign tough-guy warriors are much more the real problem. 

If you want to be cynical, you can say that most American conservatives are going to be super unhappy about Markedly “Other” Immigrants no matter what, and that all their talk about integration is just political fig-leafing.  There’s probably some level of truth to that.  But even to the extent that they really mean it, “integration” doesn’t translate to “they’re proud and strong and religious and big-family-having just like us!”  It translates to “they bow to our sovereignty, they see themselves as being fundamentally Us, they don’t belong to any other team with which we might have to compete.” 

And by that standard – from the standpoint of an American conservative, who views white-working-class heartland Republican life as “real America” – there is no sizeable non-white minority community in the country that has integrated, or that displays any real interest in integrating.  Minority communities here, especially in the last twenty years or so, tend to be big on identity-pride and tend to maintain a sort of defensive group consciousness.  (Gosh, I can’t imagine why.)  A proud strong religious big-family-having population of Hispanic immigrants isn’t an integrated part of the polity, it’s an embedded threat, at least so long as the immigrants in question continue to stick together and to define themselves against the whites surrounding them.

…yes, there is an obvious death spiral here. 

For the liberals:

Sometimes, it doesn’t really matter what the precise contours of your beliefs are, so much as which parts of those beliefs you reliably choose to emphasize.

American leftists believe in multiculturalism, they support identity-pride, and they hate anything smacking of the “melting pot” or assimilation-pressure.  If you get them talking, they’ll tell you exactly that, loudly and at length. 

…and, yes, in fact, there’s only a limited extent to which they really mean it.  The vast majority of the time, they don’t actually approve of wife-beating – or forced arranged marriages – or honor killing – or other noxious behaviors that have solid pedigrees as Very Traditional Minority Culture.  They hate it when oppressed peoples do those things, almost as much as they hate it when rich straight white men do those things. 

But somehow they keep taking the side of the oppressed peoples in every social fight, even in circumstances where the oppressed peoples are obviously doing these noxious things way more than anyone else, and they often downplay the destructive manifestations of Very Traditional Minority Culture as much as they possibly can.  Conservatives who bring up those problems tend to get dismissed and ridiculed whenever possible.  Because arguments are soldiers, and no one trusts in anyone’s good faith.

(Rotherham!  Black-on-black crime!  Every pundit and Tumblrina who openly admits to hoping that any given crime/atrocity has a white perpetrator!)

A sufficiently-suspicious conservative can find ample reason to decide that maybe leftists care less about their egalitarian anti-harm principles than they do about standing behind their Delightfully Ethnic Political Allies.

bambamramfan:

ranma-official:

wokeman beardson watching fight club: it superficially appears that this movie glorifies going to basement to punch people but it’s actually criticizing this mindset and toxic masculinity in general! stupid dudebros don’t understand art critique! it’s so obvious! no wonder they are so stupid, they don’t even pay attention to movies they watch!

wokeman beardson watching inglorious basterds: this movie tells us an important moral lesson that all nazis need to be shot which is good and cool with no ambiguity

endorsed, minus the beardjoke.

Yeah, OK, derailing to ask:

How is it that “beard” has become a metonymic stand-in for “woker-than-thou young urban progressive dude?”  I see this with surprising frequency, from @raggedjackscarlet etc.  But I don’t think of that demographic even as being more bearded than average, let alone as being The Main Bearded Ones.

…of course, I have a beard, so my perceptions may be biased here. 

It’s weird, though.  Don’t the nerdy gamergater anti-SJ types go in for beards just as much, if not more?

bambamramfan:

balioc:

Goddamn it, people.

I understand that you want to build your own tame ideologically-useful religions to serve as social bonding glue, and I’m even prepared to acknowledge that this may be a good idea…

…but you understand that saying “hey, come worship this false idol that I built to serve as social bonding glue!” just isn’t going to work, right?

I’m curious who you are responding to here, but I’m not entirely sure you’re right.

Like yes if you outright say “join our cult not because it’s right but because we have cookies”, then no you won’t get many believers.

But anything short of that, “People who worship Hastur are happier, they fight less, they make better communities, they get more stuff done, and they have beautiful ceremonies that feel meaningful” actually works pretty well, even though you’ve said almost nothing about the truth value of Hastur worship.

Most people just aren’t invested in terminal values. Tell them a religion makes their life better, and let them have some lip service belief that it’s because it is Cosmically Right, they’ll go along and judge the religion primarily on the happiness and social status of its other members.

You do probably need a few true believers at the heart of it, but eh, geeks and mops. Switching early on to purely mercenary sales pitches is not necessarily dumb on a tactical level.

…I was about to say that I don’t think we have an object-level disagreement here, but on reflection, we probably do.

It is true that the long-term survival power of communities largely depends on their ability to provide Satisfying Prosperous Lives in the Normal Sense.  And it is also true that the short-term recruiting power of a community doesn’t really hinge on anything like “reasoned appeals to change your beliefs,” so much as it hinges on the community’s ability to provide love-bombing and other emotional rewards that are viscerally real in the short term.  But those things are not the same.  Cults and tournament-careers are in fact good at sucking people in.  “Join us, and your life will blaze like a star!” is an excellent sales pitch.  “Join us, and you’ll have a dental plan and a low-conflict social experience!” mostly isn’t.  

ALL THAT SAID:

The phenomenon to which I’m responding would be less stupid if in fact it were billing itself as better, on a boring mercenary level, than the Default Plan.  “Our fake church will make you happier and healthier and less stressed than your normal leading-brand church” – OK, fine, you’d probably get some takers for that.  But of course that’s not what’s going on, because the leading-brand church has been providing social benefits to lots of people for a long time, and the fake church doesn’t even exist yet.  Instead the pitch is [something like] “religion is a pack of lies to be sold to dumb babies, but it turns out that it comes with some social benefits, so maybe we can pretend to believe in a God-like object and it will be kind of like belonging to a real church!”  Anyone who would find this appealing would be much happier just practicing a normal religion. 

dndnrsn:

multiheaded1793:

balioc:

This is probably very obvious to everyone else, but it just clicked for me, so…

The Angry Identitarian Left is the way it is, in part, because its practices are optimized specifically for college campus activism. 

Within a university, the world is controlled by a nigh-omnipotent authority.  If you are a student, it is probable that the authority basically likes you and wants you to succeed; even if the administrators find you annoying, they fundamentally regard you as community members who should be receiving a good education, not as vermin or monsters or fifth-columnists.  If you are a leftist or liberal, it is probable that the authority basically shares your fundamental values; the administrators are basically you, thirty years down the pike.  But the authority is lazy and venal and (especially) worried about disruptions and embarrassments.  By default, you will be denied a lot of the political things you want, because that’s the easiest and cheapest thing, because the most convenient way to keep donors happy usually involves sweeping problems under the rug and not shelling out money. 

Under these circumstances, the most flexible strategic plan seems to involve a two-pronged social assault, with the prongs consisting of “moral suasion” and “extortion.”  You speak with as much holiness and self-righteousness as you can muster, in hopes that you can guilt the administrators into acknowledging the merit of your points, which has a good chance of working because deep down the administrators probably do see the merit of your points.  (They really, genuinely don’t want to be racist or sexist either!)  And you make yourself as annoying and obstreperous as you can, with the implicit promise that you’ll stop as soon as you get what you want, in hopes that appeasing you becomes the easy way out. 

There’s not much to be gained by persuading anyone of anything, or by looking to compromise with anyone, because there’s not really any principled opposition with whom to engage.  There’s also no real downside to using nasty rhetoric and dirty tactics.  In the wider world, that shit causes people to hate and fear you, it alienates potential allies and cements the resolve of your enemies…but within the college, you have no genuine enemies and you don’t have much use for allies.  All that matters is whether you can break through the sloth and self-interestedness of the decision-makers. 

Damn, I feel like that nails it.

So, this does nail one part of the dynamic. I think this kind of US-specific though. Example: in Canada there’s more government funding, so “keeping donors happy” is less important.

Also, who is doing the student activism probably varies. In Canada the student unions do a lot of the left-wing activism, and they are quite organized, up to the national level. They’re not “naive kids whose actions won’t work in the real world”, they’re fairly sophisticated operators who go on to get jobs in (mostly academic-related) public sector unions and so on, while hand-picking their successors, who usually win election based on single-digit turnout. They are, not to put too fine a point on it, sleazy kleptocrats. I’d take “shouty kids who don’t know this isn’t the real world” any day.

Well, the important question is what happens afterwards, isn’t it? 

To be sure, even naive shouty kids can do some real damage under the right circumstances.  It’s scary to see some of the most venerable universities in the US shutting down free speech norms because students got offended by Halloween costumes.  University environments matter.  But if the damage here were limited to the fruits of campus activism, it would not be that big a deal.

What we have – as far as I can tell – is a situation where those shouty naive kids go on to define the strategy and culture of American liberalism generally, without ever really being pushed to adopt a different mindset.  The left here has long fetishized and exalted the college radical; since the ‘60s at least, campus radicals have provided the movement’s passion and protesting-power.  The internet provides many ways for people to “do politics” without having to be absorbed by the big inertia-laden party apparatus and its Kinda-Corrupt But Realistic Norms.  The campus-activist zeitgeist is present, not just on campus, but wherever people are concerned about fighting for the left.  And so we wind up in a place where celebrities and pundits are pandering directly to the tastes of the shouty naive kids, and where even a hard-nosed veteran pol like Hillary thinks it makes sense to spend a lot of her time acting like a shouty naive kid herself.

Result: everyone in America, not just a few irritated deans, get to see liberalism and leftism being furthered largely by means of self-righteous grandstanding. 

I could certainly imagine reasons to prefer the kleptocrats.

The Unfreedom of Scarcity

bambamramfan:

One of the real problems of the liberal model of freedom is in situations of extreme scarcity, where there is not enough for not only everyone, but for only a few people at most.

This is most common in “lottery” professions, where a few very successful people present the face of the profession, and the vast majority are exploited and holding out for their one shot at greatness. So we’re talking Academia, Startups, Acting, Professional Sports, Publishing, Politics… really way too many fields that define success in our world.

Only some people can make it. To some degree this will be determined by merit, but luck and networking play a very large role in that. Ask anyone in that field and getting a mentor is a HUGE HUGE deal (okay I don’t know much about pro sports, but I know people in every one of the other listed fields.) To go from toiling in obscurity and starving to “this one person you respect actually likes your work and wants to help you” is the biggest relief you can imagine.

And the mentor, or any networking connection like that, really does help. They introduce you to people who can help your career get started a little, who are happy to help you if it means impressing Big Name Mentor. It makes you feel like you actually have a shot to prove yourself, and it can not be underestimated how psychically valuable this is.

It’s kind of nice, sure, but it exists entirely outside formal ethical networks and so there is nothing obligatory about it. A mentor has the right to be friends with whoever they want, and to introduce their friends to whoever they want, and they haven’t crossed any moral lines. And they have the freedom to NOT be friends and not introduce you around as well.

You can see where the power dynamics of this go.

If you displease your mentor in any way whatsoever your ladder out of the abyss will just curl up and disappear. If you disagree politically with your mentor, they may not introduce you to that photographer. If you stop laughing at their boring jokes, they may not use their leverage to get you that internship. If you don’t sleep with your mentor, they may stop returning your calls (and soon everyone else will too.)

And this can all happen without any malice! To the famous mentor, you were a fun person to pal around with, things cooled down, and they’re moving on with their life. What’s wrong with that? In fact if you were to criticize their behavior, you’d be criticizing their liberal freedom to do whatever they want so long as “their fist doesn’t reach someone else’s face.” You’d be putting some sort of unasked for moral obligation on them. (Ew.)

But losing them means giving up on your dreams, just as they are in sight. Hell, it means finding an entirely new professional identity to base the rest of your lifepath on.

So instead you know you have to keep the mentor interested in you. What was initially a fun flirtation with someone impressively accomplished (and success is HOT in any field) can evolve into unending attempts to keep them “interested” in you, and the sort of joyless, obligatory sex no one benefits from. Or an unwillingness to even consider political points of view that may be uncool to the people you are trying to impress.

This is where the sex scandals in a lot of the lottery professions seem to come from (start with Bill Cosby and google any of the above fields.) It’s not superiors saying “sleep with me or else”, but famous people assuming all the young hot things want to sleep with them, and the young exploited proles going along with it until things have gone so far they explode from the tensions (which are complete surprises to the increasingly dense mentors, who don’t think there’s anything wrong with all the people desperate for their approval.)

And I think these scandals are just the tip of the iceberg, the rare cases where someone is so hurt by the affair that they go public and potentially give up any career in that field. Much more often is the case when the junior person goes along with it, gets in too deep, has a shitty few months of feeling used, and then pulls away or is kicked away, to a diminished future. (Of course, this pattern probably plays out often with every party feeling satisfied afterwards as well.)

Like this sort of power imbalance is just unhealthy and wrong. Marx wrote that no one is free when they are hungry, and I don’t think that just means “hunger is really bad” but that “people will do anything, give up anything when they are truly desperate.” They’ll give up their sexuality, their political independence, their dignity, anything to just get a bit of hope - and no one has to force it away from them, people do it wholly willingly under extreme scarcity. So what does free speech, or consent, or private property even mean in such situations?

(Even the masters are fucked over, because it’s impossible for them to have equal, healthy relations under a system of oppression. Imagine not being able to be friends with anyone because you don’t know if their laughter at your jokes is ever genuine? So they become emotional idiots who have to convince themselves that no one needs them that much and no one is trying to use them, exploding at the slightest narcissistic injury to this illusion.)

You can’t just make up a bunch of rights that people have protecting them, when there’s a power structure that asks people to give up anything for just a bit of hope. Class power analysis matters, or else you just end up like the Hollywood dating scene.

This seems correct.

And very very very hard to solve, from a cultural-engineering perspective, short of sledgehammer solutions like “we are going to clamp down on technology so hard that no one knows anyone outside his own little hunter-gatherer tribe.”  You can redistribute resources all you want, you can work your ass off to make the masses more materially secure…but it’s not like people are desperate to break into movies or publishing for the material security.  So long as there are large human networks, there are going to be implicit social hierarchies, with the concomitant incentives to rise.  That’s pretty damn fundamental. 

…I guess there are a lot of proposed solutions that amount to “make people more enlightened so that they don’t feel the urge to climb.”  I tend to be skeptical that anything in this vein is at all plausible.

And then there’s my pet “solution,” which involves reconstructing such urges (rather than eliminating them) so that they can be more easily satisfied by low-level personal interactions.  But even to my fond eyes that’s obviously going to work only to some extent, some of the time.

Bluh.  I dunno.  This is hard, man.  Let’s go shopping.

This is probably very obvious to everyone else, but it just clicked for me, so…

The Angry Identitarian Left is the way it is, in part, because its practices are optimized specifically for college campus activism. 

Within a university, the world is controlled by a nigh-omnipotent authority.  If you are a student, it is probable that the authority basically likes you and wants you to succeed; even if the administrators find you annoying, they fundamentally regard you as community members who should be receiving a good education, not as vermin or monsters or fifth-columnists.  If you are a leftist or liberal, it is probable that the authority basically shares your fundamental values; the administrators are basically you, thirty years down the pike.  But the authority is lazy and venal and (especially) worried about disruptions and embarrassments.  By default, you will be denied a lot of the political things you want, because that’s the easiest and cheapest thing, because the most convenient way to keep donors happy usually involves sweeping problems under the rug and not shelling out money. 

Under these circumstances, the most flexible strategic plan seems to involve a two-pronged social assault, with the prongs consisting of “moral suasion” and “extortion.”  You speak with as much holiness and self-righteousness as you can muster, in hopes that you can guilt the administrators into acknowledging the merit of your points, which has a good chance of working because deep down the administrators probably do see the merit of your points.  (They really, genuinely don’t want to be racist or sexist either!)  And you make yourself as annoying and obstreperous as you can, with the implicit promise that you’ll stop as soon as you get what you want, in hopes that appeasing you becomes the easy way out. 

There’s not much to be gained by persuading anyone of anything, or by looking to compromise with anyone, because there’s not really any principled opposition with whom to engage.  There’s also no real downside to using nasty rhetoric and dirty tactics.  In the wider world, that shit causes people to hate and fear you, it alienates potential allies and cements the resolve of your enemies…but within the college, you have no genuine enemies and you don’t have much use for allies.  All that matters is whether you can break through the sloth and self-interestedness of the decision-makers. 

Can someone show me a source or primer for this C-tribe / P-tribe terminology? I have too little information even to Google effectively.

Goddamn it, people.

I understand that you want to build your own tame ideologically-useful religions to serve as social bonding glue, and I’m even prepared to acknowledge that this may be a good idea…

…but you understand that saying “hey, come worship this false idol that I built to serve as social bonding glue!” just isn’t going to work, right?

57dimensions:

balioc:

bambamramfan:

balioc:

brazenautomaton:

fierceawakening:

brazenautomaton:

marzipanandminutiae:

beatrice-otter:

batmanisagatewaydrug:

for the next Reboot That Makes Men Angry I’d like to submit for your consideration Lupita Nyong'o as Indiana Jones

#can she be the kind of archeologist who takes the artifacts out of museums in london and puts them BACK where they CAME FROM

Indiana Jones and the Temple of NAGPRA Compliance

in case you forgot that it will never end and life will never be worth tolerating

art is for making unpopular people angry! take, for the explicit purpose of taking, out of the explicit love of taking!

it will never end and life will never be worth tolerating

Life will never be worth tolerating… because some people said on social media that they kind of want a black woman Indiana Jones?

You’re still allowed to write exhilarating new adventures for the white male one, you know.

This wasn’t “Hey, this would bea  cool character”.

This was “Hey, you know what would be a great way to take for the sake of taking?”

It is explicitly framed as good because it is about taking. It is good because it makes unpopular people angry. Its purpose is to make unpopular people unhappy. It is taking for the sake of taking. 

Taking for the sake of taking, for the purpose of taking, out of the sheer joy of taking, is something everyone agrees is wonderful and great and virtuous.

What would be the point of making a black woman character if we weren’t also making unpopular people unhappy? We align ourselves with diversity not because we believe it is good, but because that is an effective way to claim authority to make unpopular people unhappy!

That is why life will never be worth tolerating. Because that will never end. Malice will never stop being exalted as virtue. 

…I’m not especially on board with @brazenautomaton‘s broader framing here, but I do think he’s entirely correct on the object level, so let me try a slightly different construction…

It’s not about the #blacklesbian!Indy thing.  Almost entirely not-about-that, anyway.  You can think whatever you like about race-and-gender-twisted reboots, and there’s certainly plenty of cultural criticism to levy on that front, but…at the very least, the desire for them often arises from a sincere love of the property in question.  Those people clamoring for a canon female Doctor clearly take Doctor Who very seriously and are asking for something that they would find personally meaningful; whether or not you think they should get it, there’s at least something admirable about the motive from a fan-participation perspective. 

If you’re cracking jokes about temple-raiding being Bad Imperialism while talking about Indiana Jones, your motive is…not that.  Indiana Jones stories are stories about temple-raiding.  The people who like Indiana Jones want stories about going into the trackless depths of the jungle and finding the lost exotic wonders there.  If you didn’t want that, you wouldn’t like Indiana Jones.  It’s kind of the heart of the thing. 

It’s OK to feel that way.  You don’t have to like Indiana Jones, or anything.  You’re allowed to find jungle adventure boring.  You’re allowed to be really hung up on proper archeological practice.  You’re even allowed to think that temple-raiding stories are Bad and Imperialist and that we should stop telling them for ideological reasons, although I may roll my eyes at you.

But @brazenautomaton is correct to note that this kind of feeling often generates a sort of entryist impulse that is less OK.  The thing that says, not “let’s not watch Indiana Jones movies” or even “let’s try to destroy the franchise and make sure that no one watches Indiana Jones movies,” but “let’s gain influence over the franchise, and make Indiana Jones about Our Thing instead of about the themes of the original property, and ensure that the new movies will serve to mock and discomfit the people who liked the old ones.”  That is cruel and philistine.  That is perverting an artistic tradition for the sake of your particular axe-to-grind. 

(…if you’re looking for a concrete example of this playing out successfully, check out the way that recent years have seen a Massive Ongoing Shift in the role of romance in the Disney Princess franchise.) 

If new!Indy’s shtick were “returning artifacts from the museums that held them to ancient primitive temples,” it would be really hard to read that as anything other than “ha ha, remember back when we were so STUPID and UNENLIGHTENED and SHITTY that we actually had our hero be a temple-raider?”.  It would be a repurposing of the fundamental project, taking the franchise away from the people who actually like it for the sake of…well, for the sake of people who like seeing their media land ideological jabs, mostly. 

Yes, I understand that @beatrice-otter‘s comment was a joke, and (for that matter) a joke that comes from a place of sincerely caring about something worthwhile.  But it’s not hard to understand why people aren’t inclined to find that kind of joke funny at this point.

So you’re not wrong… but the situation is more complex than that. (And I appreciate you find a non-cynical motivation behind the OP.)

Art can after all, have more than one theme. Or there can be a broader theme underlying the more superficial theme. And fans can be really attached to that more fundamental concept, and willing to uproot the more concrete concepts in order to create work that is more true to the thing they value.

Wow that was abstract and dry. Okay lets talk about Disney princesses.

You could say that the consistent theme of Disney princess movies was the romantic ending. Except this is kind of weird. Why would romance be such a standard of children’s movies? They’re not even particularly good romance stories most of the time.

But in the language of Hollywood, this romance is “the production of the couple.” The world was sundered in some disruption, and by the end everything is joined whole again. Man and woman come together and form a family, and you know all is well. This is much more fundamental to the logic of Disney movies than the particularity of a romantic story (with its stages of relationships, and sexual intimacy, and whatnot.) 

As a representation of harmony though, this has become somewhat outmoded. Our society no longer sees romance as the correct way to represent “and all was well and happy, the different have been joined together.” Instead we now have the DANCE PARTY that ends so many movies. Amorphous dancing is the replacement for heterosexual romance as our culture’s understanding of harmonious relations and god you could write a lot about that.

Now, fans can still be attached to the old interpretation of the themes. But it seems equally legitimate to say “I want a modern interpretation of the themes, which means significant changes to the motifs we use to represent them.”

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… also, since when is Indiana Jones about the theme of stealing treasures from dead civilizations? Going just by the original trilogy, the message seems pretty strongly “Leave Well Enough The Fuck Alone Or God Will Strike You Down.” 

This analysis is too glib to work.  By which I mean “it assumes, and elides, the heart of the matter under consideration.”

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(There’s a long, long discussion to be had about the extent to which one can understand a text – and, especially, about the extent to which one can understand its broader social relevance – by looking at it in the symbolic-critical plane.  But for now I’m happy to agree that we’re doing that.  I just wanted to register that this is not necessarily the most productive methodology.)

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So – yes.  The traditional Disney Princess story is absolutely 100% about creating a model of the world in which and so it came to pass that all that was wrong was made right again is precisely equivalent to the prince and princess got married and lived happily ever after.  The meta-message of those texts is the message of romantic-pair-bonding-as-ultimate-fulfillment.   Disney even created, or at least reified, the distilled concentrated spiritual-crack-hit version of that message: the Romantic Ballroom Scene, as experienced by Cinderella and (especially) by Belle, is a really powerful encapsulation of “this moment right here is EXACTLY what you want out of life.” 

Most of the most recent non-remake Disney Princess films have, in some way, strongly subverted and/or abandoned that model.  You can see strong hints of it as early as The Princess and the Frog, but Tangled pretty much went back to the traditional mold, so we should probably count Brave as the beginning of the process.  After which we get: Frozen, Maleficent, and recently Moana.  Yeah.  Ain’t no Ballroom Scene happily-ever-after up in here.  And it’s not hard to see why.  Disney bows to cultural pressure, and as you say, there’s been a lot of cultural pressure not to push the old message of romantic fulfillment.

This is not an accident.  This is not a historical fluke.  And this is not a representation of some untraceable will-less change in the zeitgeist.  This is a manifestation of a political struggle. 

---

I mean, we all know how this story goes, right?  Back in the day, a bunch of cultural liberals and leftists decided that girls’ media was Too Romance-Saturated (which was both a cause and an effect of the macro-scale issue that girls and women were Too Hung Up on Romance Generally).  They were right about that, as it happens.  The previous generation of girls’ popular media was kind of a wasteland of floofy pink dresses and prom invitations.  Having a greater available diversity of fulfillment narratives for girls was desirable. 

Then the broader movement with which those people were associated got more and more and more traction, and became more and more and more successful on a variety of fronts.  By the end, real-life women in elite circles started feeling embarrassed by any sincere (heterosexual) romantic devotion that they might feel, because that’s not supposed to be the wellspring of fulfillment; the idea that it might be is retrograde and shameful.  And in media*, alternatives to the old romantic Disney model started pushing out the old romantic Disney model itself, until finally even the Disney Princess movies themselves succumbed.  You’d be hard-pressed, these days, to find any kind of well-regarded media piece where the “production of the couple” gets to assume its old nigh-ubiquitous role as the marker of narrative fulfillment.  

* Here I mean “well-marketed elite-driven media that’s expected to be popular in mainstream circles.”  You can certainly find plenty of lower-tier shlock that runs on the old tropes.

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So what are we to make of the people who are driving and fueling that transition?

Well, as with any large amorphous group of people, they’re going to represent a wide range of mind-states and motivations…

Overall, I’m inclined to say that romance has been treated shabbily of late in the world of media.  It’s not a Perfect Resolution to All Problems, because in real life nothing is, but (for men and women both!) it’s probably as close as most people get to come to a real wellspring-of-fulfillment.  It was narratively over-dominant for a while, but we’re in full-blown Massive Overcorrection Mode now, and it pains me to think how much love is being drained out of stories because Really Caring About Traditional Romance is Conservative and Icky.  Certainly it has more to offer than the dance party.  I wish the culture warriors would back off and make some room.  This is its own fight, though; as you say, you could sure write a lot about it. 

There’s no conspiracy, of course.  No easily-identifiable group of specific people is responsible for the shift in Disney Princess narratives.  But, as with this thread’s OP, you can certainly find a lot of specific people who at least fantasize about taking over popular media properties and remaking them.  And such fantasies can be productively examined. 

For starters, there’s a difference between “really caring about some aspect of the original text” (even if it’s a seemingly-minor aspect) and “wanting access to the cultural traction and popularity of the original text.”  For both artistic and social reasons, I’m much more willing to be harshly judgmental towards the latter.  It wasn’t hard to tell the difference between “women who’d dreamed of being Ghostbusters when they were little girls and found joy in a latter-day depiction of their dream” versus “women who didn’t give a shit about Ghostbusters but knew that an all-female Ghostbusters team would be a splashy culture-war victory.” 

And beyond that, it’s helpful to ask “how much are you actually taking away people’s toys?”  As I said, the Disney Princess meta-franchise is in many ways at the heart of the pretty-dress-and-ballroom-dancing paired-off romantic vision of happiness.  A subversion of the property is pretty much an attack on that whole memeplex, one that doesn’t leave an awful lot of compelling alternatives. Write your own goddamn fairy tales to suit your own preferences, or take over some less-central part of the cultural dialogue, or something. 

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As for Indy and the messages of his movies: well, this is where detail-driven symbolic criticism starts to show its weaknesses.  Yes, Indy’s temple-raiding keeps being “punished,” in the sense that the supernatural forces of Plot keep responding to it with exciting obstacles that require him to show off his manly daring.  But the structure of the work as while presents him as a tremendously admirable and appealing figure, and his activities are all rooted in temple-raiding.  Your average kid watching Raiders or Temple of Doom walks out saying “wow, I want to be awesome and wear a cool hat and plunder ancient tombs!”  If your new text makes a point of saying PLUNDERING ANCIENT TOMBS IS FOR IMPERIALIST JERKFACES, it’s a nasty subversion.

I don’t find your argument that media and movies have completely turned their back on “romance” plot lines very convincing. Has the importance of romance in stories lessened? Probably. But I think more than anything the way we tell romance stories has changed. I mean La La Land is the critical darling of this movie season and it was all about romance, even if there was no happily ever after. And I also think you are underestimating the importance of romance/marriage/love to the general public, while placing a great deal of importance on your romantic life may be seen as archaic in some very progressive and elite communities–most people are still very much pro-heterosexual romantic bliss.

I don’t think we’re disagreeing about anything here.  At least, everything you say seems like it’s bolstering my arguments in a very direct way.

You’re absolutely right about La La Land.  It is a movie that is literally all about romance, in a genre/medium (the movie-musical) that is traditionally a home for the sappiest of sappy romantic stories, being marketed to people who like romance and stories-about-romance.  So why on Earth would such a film, of all films, fail to give its audience a traditional production-of-the-couple happy ending?  Why, at the last minute, did it duck into “nope, sorry, things are more complex and difficult and bittersweet than that?” 

I would say: it did that precisely because it wanted to be a critical darling, and it wanted to be a hit with the smart set, and its authors knew perfectly well how that audience has changed since the heyday of the romantic movie musicals.  The elites don’t want a fade-to-black on a kiss and a sunset, not even when it comes to fare like this; it’s icky and weird and retrograde. 

As for the importance of romance/marriage/love to the general public – this is precisely, 100% what I mean when I say “political struggle.”  You’re damn right that most people are still very much into heterosexual romantic bliss.  But there’s a slice of the population that isn’t, and that slice of the population contains all the people who write scripts for Disney and all the cultural critics who write thinkpieces about Disney movies and all the execs who make the final decisions and all the people those execs talk to at parties.  Those people, together, have the clout to steamroll the great unwashed masses – certainly when it comes to media content.  And so it is we end up with a series of increasingly-non-romantic Disney Princess movies, even though there are so many people who value Disney Princess stuff for its romance.

bambamramfan:

balioc:

rasienna:

balioc:

rasienna:

balioc:

bambamramfan:

balioc:

brazenautomaton:

fierceawakening:

brazenautomaton:

marzipanandminutiae:

beatrice-otter:

batmanisagatewaydrug:

for the next Reboot That Makes Men Angry I’d like to submit for your consideration Lupita Nyong'o as Indiana Jones

#can she be the kind of archeologist who takes the artifacts out of museums in london and puts them BACK where they CAME FROM

Indiana Jones and the Temple of NAGPRA Compliance

in case you forgot that it will never end and life will never be worth tolerating

art is for making unpopular people angry! take, for the explicit purpose of taking, out of the explicit love of taking!

it will never end and life will never be worth tolerating

Life will never be worth tolerating… because some people said on social media that they kind of want a black woman Indiana Jones?

You’re still allowed to write exhilarating new adventures for the white male one, you know.

This wasn’t “Hey, this would bea  cool character”.

This was “Hey, you know what would be a great way to take for the sake of taking?”

It is explicitly framed as good because it is about taking. It is good because it makes unpopular people angry. Its purpose is to make unpopular people unhappy. It is taking for the sake of taking. 

Taking for the sake of taking, for the purpose of taking, out of the sheer joy of taking, is something everyone agrees is wonderful and great and virtuous.

What would be the point of making a black woman character if we weren’t also making unpopular people unhappy? We align ourselves with diversity not because we believe it is good, but because that is an effective way to claim authority to make unpopular people unhappy!

That is why life will never be worth tolerating. Because that will never end. Malice will never stop being exalted as virtue. 

…I’m not especially on board with @brazenautomaton‘s broader framing here, but I do think he’s entirely correct on the object level, so let me try a slightly different construction…

It’s not about the #blacklesbian!Indy thing.  Almost entirely not-about-that, anyway.  You can think whatever you like about race-and-gender-twisted reboots, and there’s certainly plenty of cultural criticism to levy on that front, but…at the very least, the desire for them often arises from a sincere love of the property in question.  Those people clamoring for a canon female Doctor clearly take Doctor Who very seriously and are asking for something that they would find personally meaningful; whether or not you think they should get it, there’s at least something admirable about the motive from a fan-participation perspective. 

If you’re cracking jokes about temple-raiding being Bad Imperialism while talking about Indiana Jones, your motive is…not that.  Indiana Jones stories are stories about temple-raiding.  The people who like Indiana Jones want stories about going into the trackless depths of the jungle and finding the lost exotic wonders there.  If you didn’t want that, you wouldn’t like Indiana Jones.  It’s kind of the heart of the thing. 

It’s OK to feel that way.  You don’t have to like Indiana Jones, or anything.  You’re allowed to find jungle adventure boring.  You’re allowed to be really hung up on proper archeological practice.  You’re even allowed to think that temple-raiding stories are Bad and Imperialist and that we should stop telling them for ideological reasons, although I may roll my eyes at you.

But @brazenautomaton is correct to note that this kind of feeling often generates a sort of entryist impulse that is less OK.  The thing that says, not “let’s not watch Indiana Jones movies” or even “let’s try to destroy the franchise and make sure that no one watches Indiana Jones movies,” but “let’s gain influence over the franchise, and make Indiana Jones about Our Thing instead of about the themes of the original property, and ensure that the new movies will serve to mock and discomfit the people who liked the old ones.”  That is cruel and philistine.  That is perverting an artistic tradition for the sake of your particular axe-to-grind. 

(…if you’re looking for a concrete example of this playing out successfully, check out the way that recent years have seen a Massive Ongoing Shift in the role of romance in the Disney Princess franchise.) 

If new!Indy’s shtick were “returning artifacts from the museums that held them to ancient primitive temples,” it would be really hard to read that as anything other than “ha ha, remember back when we were so STUPID and UNENLIGHTENED and SHITTY that we actually had our hero be a temple-raider?”.  It would be a repurposing of the fundamental project, taking the franchise away from the people who actually like it for the sake of…well, for the sake of people who like seeing their media land ideological jabs, mostly. 

Yes, I understand that @beatrice-otter‘s comment was a joke, and (for that matter) a joke that comes from a place of sincerely caring about something worthwhile.  But it’s not hard to understand why people aren’t inclined to find that kind of joke funny at this point.

So you’re not wrong… but the situation is more complex than that. (And I appreciate you find a non-cynical motivation behind the OP.)

Art can after all, have more than one theme. Or there can be a broader theme underlying the more superficial theme. And fans can be really attached to that more fundamental concept, and willing to uproot the more concrete concepts in order to create work that is more true to the thing they value.

Wow that was abstract and dry. Okay lets talk about Disney princesses.

You could say that the consistent theme of Disney princess movies was the romantic ending. Except this is kind of weird. Why would romance be such a standard of children’s movies? They’re not even particularly good romance stories most of the time.

But in the language of Hollywood, this romance is “the production of the couple.” The world was sundered in some disruption, and by the end everything is joined whole again. Man and woman come together and form a family, and you know all is well. This is much more fundamental to the logic of Disney movies than the particularity of a romantic story (with its stages of relationships, and sexual intimacy, and whatnot.) 

As a representation of harmony though, this has become somewhat outmoded. Our society no longer sees romance as the correct way to represent “and all was well and happy, the different have been joined together.” Instead we now have the DANCE PARTY that ends so many movies. Amorphous dancing is the replacement for heterosexual romance as our culture’s understanding of harmonious relations and god you could write a lot about that.

Now, fans can still be attached to the old interpretation of the themes. But it seems equally legitimate to say “I want a modern interpretation of the themes, which means significant changes to the motifs we use to represent them.”

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… also, since when is Indiana Jones about the theme of stealing treasures from dead civilizations? Going just by the original trilogy, the message seems pretty strongly “Leave Well Enough The Fuck Alone Or God Will Strike You Down.” 

This analysis is too glib to work.  By which I mean “it assumes, and elides, the heart of the matter under consideration.”

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(There’s a long, long discussion to be had about the extent to which one can understand a text – and, especially, about the extent to which one can understand its broader social relevance – by looking at it in the symbolic-critical plane.  But for now I’m happy to agree that we’re doing that.  I just wanted to register that this is not necessarily the most productive methodology.)

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So – yes.  The traditional Disney Princess story is absolutely 100% about creating a model of the world in which and so it came to pass that all that was wrong was made right again is precisely equivalent to the prince and princess got married and lived happily ever after.  The meta-message of those texts is the message of romantic-pair-bonding-as-ultimate-fulfillment.   Disney even created, or at least reified, the distilled concentrated spiritual-crack-hit version of that message: the Romantic Ballroom Scene, as experienced by Cinderella and (especially) by Belle, is a really powerful encapsulation of “this moment right here is EXACTLY what you want out of life.” 

Most of the most recent non-remake Disney Princess films have, in some way, strongly subverted and/or abandoned that model.  You can see strong hints of it as early as The Princess and the Frog, but Tangled pretty much went back to the traditional mold, so we should probably count Brave as the beginning of the process.  After which we get: Frozen, Maleficent, and recently Moana.  Yeah.  Ain’t no Ballroom Scene happily-ever-after up in here.  And it’s not hard to see why.  Disney bows to cultural pressure, and as you say, there’s been a lot of cultural pressure not to push the old message of romantic fulfillment.

This is not an accident.  This is not a historical fluke.  And this is not a representation of some untraceable will-less change in the zeitgeist.  This is a manifestation of a political struggle. 

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I mean, we all know how this story goes, right?  Back in the day, a bunch of cultural liberals and leftists decided that girls’ media was Too Romance-Saturated (which was both a cause and an effect of the macro-scale issue that girls and women were Too Hung Up on Romance Generally).  They were right about that, as it happens.  The previous generation of girls’ popular media was kind of a wasteland of floofy pink dresses and prom invitations.  Having a greater available diversity of fulfillment narratives for girls was desirable. 

Then the broader movement with which those people were associated got more and more and more traction, and became more and more and more successful on a variety of fronts.  By the end, real-life women in elite circles started feeling embarrassed by any sincere (heterosexual) romantic devotion that they might feel, because that’s not supposed to be the wellspring of fulfillment; the idea that it might be is retrograde and shameful.  And in media*, alternatives to the old romantic Disney model started pushing out the old romantic Disney model itself, until finally even the Disney Princess movies themselves succumbed.  You’d be hard-pressed, these days, to find any kind of well-regarded media piece where the “production of the couple” gets to assume its old nigh-ubiquitous role as the marker of narrative fulfillment.  

* Here I mean “well-marketed elite-driven media that’s expected to be popular in mainstream circles.”  You can certainly find plenty of lower-tier shlock that runs on the old tropes.

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So what are we to make of the people who are driving and fueling that transition?

Well, as with any large amorphous group of people, they’re going to represent a wide range of mind-states and motivations…

Overall, I’m inclined to say that romance has been treated shabbily of late in the world of media.  It’s not a Perfect Resolution to All Problems, because in real life nothing is, but (for men and women both!) it’s probably as close as most people get to come to a real wellspring-of-fulfillment.  It was narratively over-dominant for a while, but we’re in full-blown Massive Overcorrection Mode now, and it pains me to think how much love is being drained out of stories because Really Caring About Traditional Romance is Conservative and Icky.  Certainly it has more to offer than the dance party.  I wish the culture warriors would back off and make some room.  This is its own fight, though; as you say, you could sure write a lot about it. 

There’s no conspiracy, of course.  No easily-identifiable group of specific people is responsible for the shift in Disney Princess narratives.  But, as with this thread’s OP, you can certainly find a lot of specific people who at least fantasize about taking over popular media properties and remaking them.  And such fantasies can be productively examined. 

For starters, there’s a difference between “really caring about some aspect of the original text” (even if it’s a seemingly-minor aspect) and “wanting access to the cultural traction and popularity of the original text.”  For both artistic and social reasons, I’m much more willing to be harshly judgmental towards the latter.  It wasn’t hard to tell the difference between “women who’d dreamed of being Ghostbusters when they were little girls and found joy in a latter-day depiction of their dream” versus “women who didn’t give a shit about Ghostbusters but knew that an all-female Ghostbusters team would be a splashy culture-war victory.” 

And beyond that, it’s helpful to ask “how much are you actually taking away people’s toys?”  As I said, the Disney Princess meta-franchise is in many ways at the heart of the pretty-dress-and-ballroom-dancing paired-off romantic vision of happiness.  A subversion of the property is pretty much an attack on that whole memeplex, one that doesn’t leave an awful lot of compelling alternatives. Write your own goddamn fairy tales to suit your own preferences, or take over some less-central part of the cultural dialogue, or something. 

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As for Indy and the messages of his movies: well, this is where detail-driven symbolic criticism starts to show its weaknesses.  Yes, Indy’s temple-raiding keeps being “punished,” in the sense that the supernatural forces of Plot keep responding to it with exciting obstacles that require him to show off his manly daring.  But the structure of the work as while presents him as a tremendously admirable and appealing figure, and his activities are all rooted in temple-raiding.  Your average kid watching Raiders or Temple of Doom walks out saying “wow, I want to be awesome and wear a cool hat and plunder ancient tombs!”  If your new text makes a point of saying PLUNDERING ANCIENT TOMBS IS FOR IMPERIALIST JERKFACES, it’s a nasty subversion.

So I feel like it doesn’t really work to compare movies that are not the Disney animated features with the other Disney stuff like Maleficent.  Maleficent seems to be we will take fairy tales and play them in a separate thing - which I feel like is the thing you want people to do - vs. going into the animated feature movies line and saying no more fairy tales with romantic ends for you.  
Curious how you think of Aladin or Lion King with in this - on one hand there is a romance plot to some degree or the other - but with male leads which makes it take on a somewhat different emphasis (especially in the case of the Lion King).  

In re Maleficent: I don’t buy it.  For one thing, let’s be honest, the mere fact of it being Disney carries a huge amount of weight and a huge amount of cultural bias.  (On some level, Moana is in fact exactly what I’d been asking for – not a jab, not a snipe, just a story for girls with a totally different focus – but the fact that it’s marketed as a Disney Princess movie makes the lack of romance a jab and a snipe.)  But Maleficent is more than just a Disney product, it’s a fix fic with all the budget and cachet and canon-power of the official producers behind it.  It’s a giant middle finger to everyone who actually liked the story of Sleeping Beauty.  “Ha ha, you thought that something as LAME as heterosexual romantic love could heal the curse?  GET REKT SCRUB, real love is for badass women only.” 

In re Aladdin and Lion King: there are a lot of Disney Princess movies that play around with the straight-up romantic fairy-tale setup in one way or another.  More of them that do than that don’t, really.  Those two have their own thing going on, and so does Hunchback, and so does Pocahontas (she doesn’t actually end up with the guy!), and so does Mulan (at least to the extent that making the heroine an action star is different), etc. 

(Also, Lion King isn’t actually a Disney Princess movie.  Which probably has more to do with the fact that you can’t put Nala in a dress than anything else, but still, worth noting.) 

Yet all of these films at least gesture at the idea that happiness and resolution are properly manifested in marriage or the equivalent, even if most of their energy is spiraling off elsewhere.  You can play Prince and Princess Have Happily Ever After with all of them, without having to blatantly ignore or rewrite the text.  This is not so with any of the most recent ones.  Even Frozen, which actually does have a happy romantic pairing, but makes a point of how that’s not the metaphysically-empowered curse-breaking kind of love.

Well right but I think the fact that the Lion King isn’t a Disney Princess movie - but is arguably one of its more iconic works sort of gets at the problem of identifying what is the “key” Disney movie thing people care about and want to have different themes.  If its really Disney Princesses than I think maybe you are right that its weird for people to sort of want to take all the fairy tell stuff you are talking about away and insist on these other sorts of themes.  On the other hand Disney animated movies include things like 100 Dalmatians, Pinocchio, Rescuers, Bambi and the Lion King in which case I think Frozen isn’t so weird a shift in themes.  I guess to me the “Disney Princess” thing is actually new in how I understand “Disney Movies” and so seems like a weird marketing construct.   Disney movie ™ to me means the once a year animated movies that were ½ of the total movies that I saw as a kid (and horrified a certain type of purist like my grandmother for not being accurate to the book).   It really had very little to do with Princesses.  Would you feel better if people were more “I remember when Disney (animated) movies were not all princess” rather than sort of weirdly buying into the Princess thing but wanting a different sort of Princess ™?  

I think it’s not too hard to square this circle.  Even when you strip away the Narrative Fulfillment Through Romance, it’s not hard to identify key features of a Disney Princess movie (as opposed to any other Disney movie) – it’s animated, there’s a heavily-featured young human woman who is glamorously attractive in some way, she gets to sing the sort of catchy pop tunes that will do really well with kids, there’s a lot of focus on having a very attractive visual setting, etc.  If you like, you can say “I wish Disney would make more non-princess-y movies like The Jungle Book or 101 Dalmations or whatever,” but that’s almost totally orthogonal to the phenomenon under consideration.  It’s the princess stuff that’s serving as a cultural football here.

So I think your bringing up of Maleficent here is what led to the discussion disintegrating into boundary-defining. Maleficent really wouldn’t fit this for a number of reasons.

I think the delineation between “Disney Princess movies” and their other standards is not that clear. You can draw a line, but its not entirely natural.

(For instance, either True Love is a key element of Princess story, or not. If it is, why are these still considered Princess stories? If it’s not, then why is it a problem to get rid of it?)

And this matters because all the Disney movies (and animated movies in general) are moving in the direction I reference, of away from marriage and towards the dance party. And if you can see that there is a compelling reason for that besides “let’s show we’re over the patriarchy,” then it becomes less antagonistic that they do this to one subset of those movies under their umbrella.

OK, this may be a side point, but at this point I think it’s worth saying: the dance-party ending is not actually a Disney princess thing.  It has not been pressed into service to fill the gap left by the loss of the romantic-fulfillment narrative.

…I guess you can sort of make a case for Frozen and its ice-skating party, which doesn’t feel at all the same from my perspective, but at least has some clear identifiable features in common.

But apart from that, we have –

* Brave: Merida looks out over a cliff while her narrator-voice says some inspiring things about courage and so on

* Moana: the tribe heads out into the Great Archipelagic Unknown on its massive fleet of mega-canoes

* Maleficent (if we’re counting it): Aurora is crowned, Maleficent abides in harmony with nature

The dance party belongs to shlockier fare like Shrek and Hotel Transylvania (which, notably, do feature standard romantic-bliss narratives).  It’s hard to stake the claim that it’s really serving as a competitor, let alone a successor. 

Yeah, Maleficent isn’t a central part of the Disney princess media line.  True facts.  I would argue that its content is very relevant to this discussion anyway: it’s a Disney-endorsed “canon fix fic” of a prototypical Disney princess story.  In some real way it’s the “author” commenting on what is and isn’t OK to think about Sleeping Beauty at this juncture.

(If the live-action remakes of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast were similarly subversive, it would have been a huge fucking deal on this front.  Cinderella absolutely wasn’t, though, and Beauty and the Beast looks as though it won’t be, so that is at least some evidence that the anti-romance cultural pressure isn’t totally all-encompassing.)

rasienna:

balioc:

rasienna:

balioc:

bambamramfan:

balioc:

brazenautomaton:

fierceawakening:

brazenautomaton:

marzipanandminutiae:

beatrice-otter:

batmanisagatewaydrug:

for the next Reboot That Makes Men Angry I’d like to submit for your consideration Lupita Nyong'o as Indiana Jones

#can she be the kind of archeologist who takes the artifacts out of museums in london and puts them BACK where they CAME FROM

Indiana Jones and the Temple of NAGPRA Compliance

in case you forgot that it will never end and life will never be worth tolerating

art is for making unpopular people angry! take, for the explicit purpose of taking, out of the explicit love of taking!

it will never end and life will never be worth tolerating

Life will never be worth tolerating… because some people said on social media that they kind of want a black woman Indiana Jones?

You’re still allowed to write exhilarating new adventures for the white male one, you know.

This wasn’t “Hey, this would bea  cool character”.

This was “Hey, you know what would be a great way to take for the sake of taking?”

It is explicitly framed as good because it is about taking. It is good because it makes unpopular people angry. Its purpose is to make unpopular people unhappy. It is taking for the sake of taking. 

Taking for the sake of taking, for the purpose of taking, out of the sheer joy of taking, is something everyone agrees is wonderful and great and virtuous.

What would be the point of making a black woman character if we weren’t also making unpopular people unhappy? We align ourselves with diversity not because we believe it is good, but because that is an effective way to claim authority to make unpopular people unhappy!

That is why life will never be worth tolerating. Because that will never end. Malice will never stop being exalted as virtue. 

…I’m not especially on board with @brazenautomaton‘s broader framing here, but I do think he’s entirely correct on the object level, so let me try a slightly different construction…

It’s not about the #blacklesbian!Indy thing.  Almost entirely not-about-that, anyway.  You can think whatever you like about race-and-gender-twisted reboots, and there’s certainly plenty of cultural criticism to levy on that front, but…at the very least, the desire for them often arises from a sincere love of the property in question.  Those people clamoring for a canon female Doctor clearly take Doctor Who very seriously and are asking for something that they would find personally meaningful; whether or not you think they should get it, there’s at least something admirable about the motive from a fan-participation perspective. 

If you’re cracking jokes about temple-raiding being Bad Imperialism while talking about Indiana Jones, your motive is…not that.  Indiana Jones stories are stories about temple-raiding.  The people who like Indiana Jones want stories about going into the trackless depths of the jungle and finding the lost exotic wonders there.  If you didn’t want that, you wouldn’t like Indiana Jones.  It’s kind of the heart of the thing. 

It’s OK to feel that way.  You don’t have to like Indiana Jones, or anything.  You’re allowed to find jungle adventure boring.  You’re allowed to be really hung up on proper archeological practice.  You’re even allowed to think that temple-raiding stories are Bad and Imperialist and that we should stop telling them for ideological reasons, although I may roll my eyes at you.

But @brazenautomaton is correct to note that this kind of feeling often generates a sort of entryist impulse that is less OK.  The thing that says, not “let’s not watch Indiana Jones movies” or even “let’s try to destroy the franchise and make sure that no one watches Indiana Jones movies,” but “let’s gain influence over the franchise, and make Indiana Jones about Our Thing instead of about the themes of the original property, and ensure that the new movies will serve to mock and discomfit the people who liked the old ones.”  That is cruel and philistine.  That is perverting an artistic tradition for the sake of your particular axe-to-grind. 

(…if you’re looking for a concrete example of this playing out successfully, check out the way that recent years have seen a Massive Ongoing Shift in the role of romance in the Disney Princess franchise.) 

If new!Indy’s shtick were “returning artifacts from the museums that held them to ancient primitive temples,” it would be really hard to read that as anything other than “ha ha, remember back when we were so STUPID and UNENLIGHTENED and SHITTY that we actually had our hero be a temple-raider?”.  It would be a repurposing of the fundamental project, taking the franchise away from the people who actually like it for the sake of…well, for the sake of people who like seeing their media land ideological jabs, mostly. 

Yes, I understand that @beatrice-otter‘s comment was a joke, and (for that matter) a joke that comes from a place of sincerely caring about something worthwhile.  But it’s not hard to understand why people aren’t inclined to find that kind of joke funny at this point.

So you’re not wrong… but the situation is more complex than that. (And I appreciate you find a non-cynical motivation behind the OP.)

Art can after all, have more than one theme. Or there can be a broader theme underlying the more superficial theme. And fans can be really attached to that more fundamental concept, and willing to uproot the more concrete concepts in order to create work that is more true to the thing they value.

Wow that was abstract and dry. Okay lets talk about Disney princesses.

You could say that the consistent theme of Disney princess movies was the romantic ending. Except this is kind of weird. Why would romance be such a standard of children’s movies? They’re not even particularly good romance stories most of the time.

But in the language of Hollywood, this romance is “the production of the couple.” The world was sundered in some disruption, and by the end everything is joined whole again. Man and woman come together and form a family, and you know all is well. This is much more fundamental to the logic of Disney movies than the particularity of a romantic story (with its stages of relationships, and sexual intimacy, and whatnot.) 

As a representation of harmony though, this has become somewhat outmoded. Our society no longer sees romance as the correct way to represent “and all was well and happy, the different have been joined together.” Instead we now have the DANCE PARTY that ends so many movies. Amorphous dancing is the replacement for heterosexual romance as our culture’s understanding of harmonious relations and god you could write a lot about that.

Now, fans can still be attached to the old interpretation of the themes. But it seems equally legitimate to say “I want a modern interpretation of the themes, which means significant changes to the motifs we use to represent them.”

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… also, since when is Indiana Jones about the theme of stealing treasures from dead civilizations? Going just by the original trilogy, the message seems pretty strongly “Leave Well Enough The Fuck Alone Or God Will Strike You Down.” 

This analysis is too glib to work.  By which I mean “it assumes, and elides, the heart of the matter under consideration.”

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(There’s a long, long discussion to be had about the extent to which one can understand a text – and, especially, about the extent to which one can understand its broader social relevance – by looking at it in the symbolic-critical plane.  But for now I’m happy to agree that we’re doing that.  I just wanted to register that this is not necessarily the most productive methodology.)

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So – yes.  The traditional Disney Princess story is absolutely 100% about creating a model of the world in which and so it came to pass that all that was wrong was made right again is precisely equivalent to the prince and princess got married and lived happily ever after.  The meta-message of those texts is the message of romantic-pair-bonding-as-ultimate-fulfillment.   Disney even created, or at least reified, the distilled concentrated spiritual-crack-hit version of that message: the Romantic Ballroom Scene, as experienced by Cinderella and (especially) by Belle, is a really powerful encapsulation of “this moment right here is EXACTLY what you want out of life.” 

Most of the most recent non-remake Disney Princess films have, in some way, strongly subverted and/or abandoned that model.  You can see strong hints of it as early as The Princess and the Frog, but Tangled pretty much went back to the traditional mold, so we should probably count Brave as the beginning of the process.  After which we get: Frozen, Maleficent, and recently Moana.  Yeah.  Ain’t no Ballroom Scene happily-ever-after up in here.  And it’s not hard to see why.  Disney bows to cultural pressure, and as you say, there’s been a lot of cultural pressure not to push the old message of romantic fulfillment.

This is not an accident.  This is not a historical fluke.  And this is not a representation of some untraceable will-less change in the zeitgeist.  This is a manifestation of a political struggle. 

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I mean, we all know how this story goes, right?  Back in the day, a bunch of cultural liberals and leftists decided that girls’ media was Too Romance-Saturated (which was both a cause and an effect of the macro-scale issue that girls and women were Too Hung Up on Romance Generally).  They were right about that, as it happens.  The previous generation of girls’ popular media was kind of a wasteland of floofy pink dresses and prom invitations.  Having a greater available diversity of fulfillment narratives for girls was desirable. 

Then the broader movement with which those people were associated got more and more and more traction, and became more and more and more successful on a variety of fronts.  By the end, real-life women in elite circles started feeling embarrassed by any sincere (heterosexual) romantic devotion that they might feel, because that’s not supposed to be the wellspring of fulfillment; the idea that it might be is retrograde and shameful.  And in media*, alternatives to the old romantic Disney model started pushing out the old romantic Disney model itself, until finally even the Disney Princess movies themselves succumbed.  You’d be hard-pressed, these days, to find any kind of well-regarded media piece where the “production of the couple” gets to assume its old nigh-ubiquitous role as the marker of narrative fulfillment.  

* Here I mean “well-marketed elite-driven media that’s expected to be popular in mainstream circles.”  You can certainly find plenty of lower-tier shlock that runs on the old tropes.

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So what are we to make of the people who are driving and fueling that transition?

Well, as with any large amorphous group of people, they’re going to represent a wide range of mind-states and motivations…

Overall, I’m inclined to say that romance has been treated shabbily of late in the world of media.  It’s not a Perfect Resolution to All Problems, because in real life nothing is, but (for men and women both!) it’s probably as close as most people get to come to a real wellspring-of-fulfillment.  It was narratively over-dominant for a while, but we’re in full-blown Massive Overcorrection Mode now, and it pains me to think how much love is being drained out of stories because Really Caring About Traditional Romance is Conservative and Icky.  Certainly it has more to offer than the dance party.  I wish the culture warriors would back off and make some room.  This is its own fight, though; as you say, you could sure write a lot about it. 

There’s no conspiracy, of course.  No easily-identifiable group of specific people is responsible for the shift in Disney Princess narratives.  But, as with this thread’s OP, you can certainly find a lot of specific people who at least fantasize about taking over popular media properties and remaking them.  And such fantasies can be productively examined. 

For starters, there’s a difference between “really caring about some aspect of the original text” (even if it’s a seemingly-minor aspect) and “wanting access to the cultural traction and popularity of the original text.”  For both artistic and social reasons, I’m much more willing to be harshly judgmental towards the latter.  It wasn’t hard to tell the difference between “women who’d dreamed of being Ghostbusters when they were little girls and found joy in a latter-day depiction of their dream” versus “women who didn’t give a shit about Ghostbusters but knew that an all-female Ghostbusters team would be a splashy culture-war victory.” 

And beyond that, it’s helpful to ask “how much are you actually taking away people’s toys?”  As I said, the Disney Princess meta-franchise is in many ways at the heart of the pretty-dress-and-ballroom-dancing paired-off romantic vision of happiness.  A subversion of the property is pretty much an attack on that whole memeplex, one that doesn’t leave an awful lot of compelling alternatives. Write your own goddamn fairy tales to suit your own preferences, or take over some less-central part of the cultural dialogue, or something. 

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As for Indy and the messages of his movies: well, this is where detail-driven symbolic criticism starts to show its weaknesses.  Yes, Indy’s temple-raiding keeps being “punished,” in the sense that the supernatural forces of Plot keep responding to it with exciting obstacles that require him to show off his manly daring.  But the structure of the work as while presents him as a tremendously admirable and appealing figure, and his activities are all rooted in temple-raiding.  Your average kid watching Raiders or Temple of Doom walks out saying “wow, I want to be awesome and wear a cool hat and plunder ancient tombs!”  If your new text makes a point of saying PLUNDERING ANCIENT TOMBS IS FOR IMPERIALIST JERKFACES, it’s a nasty subversion.

So I feel like it doesn’t really work to compare movies that are not the Disney animated features with the other Disney stuff like Maleficent.  Maleficent seems to be we will take fairy tales and play them in a separate thing - which I feel like is the thing you want people to do - vs. going into the animated feature movies line and saying no more fairy tales with romantic ends for you.  
Curious how you think of Aladin or Lion King with in this - on one hand there is a romance plot to some degree or the other - but with male leads which makes it take on a somewhat different emphasis (especially in the case of the Lion King).  

In re Maleficent: I don’t buy it.  For one thing, let’s be honest, the mere fact of it being Disney carries a huge amount of weight and a huge amount of cultural bias.  (On some level, Moana is in fact exactly what I’d been asking for – not a jab, not a snipe, just a story for girls with a totally different focus – but the fact that it’s marketed as a Disney Princess movie makes the lack of romance a jab and a snipe.)  But Maleficent is more than just a Disney product, it’s a fix fic with all the budget and cachet and canon-power of the official producers behind it.  It’s a giant middle finger to everyone who actually liked the story of Sleeping Beauty.  “Ha ha, you thought that something as LAME as heterosexual romantic love could heal the curse?  GET REKT SCRUB, real love is for badass women only.” 

In re Aladdin and Lion King: there are a lot of Disney Princess movies that play around with the straight-up romantic fairy-tale setup in one way or another.  More of them that do than that don’t, really.  Those two have their own thing going on, and so does Hunchback, and so does Pocahontas (she doesn’t actually end up with the guy!), and so does Mulan (at least to the extent that making the heroine an action star is different), etc. 

(Also, Lion King isn’t actually a Disney Princess movie.  Which probably has more to do with the fact that you can’t put Nala in a dress than anything else, but still, worth noting.) 

Yet all of these films at least gesture at the idea that happiness and resolution are properly manifested in marriage or the equivalent, even if most of their energy is spiraling off elsewhere.  You can play Prince and Princess Have Happily Ever After with all of them, without having to blatantly ignore or rewrite the text.  This is not so with any of the most recent ones.  Even Frozen, which actually does have a happy romantic pairing, but makes a point of how that’s not the metaphysically-empowered curse-breaking kind of love.

Well right but I think the fact that the Lion King isn’t a Disney Princess movie - but is arguably one of its more iconic works sort of gets at the problem of identifying what is the “key” Disney movie thing people care about and want to have different themes.  If its really Disney Princesses than I think maybe you are right that its weird for people to sort of want to take all the fairy tell stuff you are talking about away and insist on these other sorts of themes.  On the other hand Disney animated movies include things like 100 Dalmatians, Pinocchio, Rescuers, Bambi and the Lion King in which case I think Frozen isn’t so weird a shift in themes.  I guess to me the “Disney Princess” thing is actually new in how I understand “Disney Movies” and so seems like a weird marketing construct.   Disney movie ™ to me means the once a year animated movies that were ½ of the total movies that I saw as a kid (and horrified a certain type of purist like my grandmother for not being accurate to the book).   It really had very little to do with Princesses.  Would you feel better if people were more “I remember when Disney (animated) movies were not all princess” rather than sort of weirdly buying into the Princess thing but wanting a different sort of Princess ™?  

I think it’s not too hard to square this circle.  Even when you strip away the Narrative Fulfillment Through Romance, it’s not hard to identify key features of a Disney Princess movie (as opposed to any other Disney movie) – it’s animated, there’s a heavily-featured young human woman who is glamorously attractive in some way, she gets to sing the sort of catchy pop tunes that will do really well with kids, there’s a lot of focus on having a very attractive visual setting, etc.  If you like, you can say “I wish Disney would make more non-princess-y movies like The Jungle Book or 101 Dalmations or whatever,” but that’s almost totally orthogonal to the phenomenon under consideration.  It’s the princess stuff that’s serving as a cultural football here.

So, here’s a fun fact about social dynamics: there is a huge difference between

(1) doing a favor that someone has asked of you, and

(2) doing a nice thing for someone that you proposed/offered on your own initiative.  

rasienna:

balioc:

bambamramfan:

balioc:

brazenautomaton:

fierceawakening:

brazenautomaton:

marzipanandminutiae:

beatrice-otter:

batmanisagatewaydrug:

for the next Reboot That Makes Men Angry I’d like to submit for your consideration Lupita Nyong'o as Indiana Jones

#can she be the kind of archeologist who takes the artifacts out of museums in london and puts them BACK where they CAME FROM

Indiana Jones and the Temple of NAGPRA Compliance

in case you forgot that it will never end and life will never be worth tolerating

art is for making unpopular people angry! take, for the explicit purpose of taking, out of the explicit love of taking!

it will never end and life will never be worth tolerating

Life will never be worth tolerating… because some people said on social media that they kind of want a black woman Indiana Jones?

You’re still allowed to write exhilarating new adventures for the white male one, you know.

This wasn’t “Hey, this would bea  cool character”.

This was “Hey, you know what would be a great way to take for the sake of taking?”

It is explicitly framed as good because it is about taking. It is good because it makes unpopular people angry. Its purpose is to make unpopular people unhappy. It is taking for the sake of taking. 

Taking for the sake of taking, for the purpose of taking, out of the sheer joy of taking, is something everyone agrees is wonderful and great and virtuous.

What would be the point of making a black woman character if we weren’t also making unpopular people unhappy? We align ourselves with diversity not because we believe it is good, but because that is an effective way to claim authority to make unpopular people unhappy!

That is why life will never be worth tolerating. Because that will never end. Malice will never stop being exalted as virtue. 

…I’m not especially on board with @brazenautomaton‘s broader framing here, but I do think he’s entirely correct on the object level, so let me try a slightly different construction…

It’s not about the #blacklesbian!Indy thing.  Almost entirely not-about-that, anyway.  You can think whatever you like about race-and-gender-twisted reboots, and there’s certainly plenty of cultural criticism to levy on that front, but…at the very least, the desire for them often arises from a sincere love of the property in question.  Those people clamoring for a canon female Doctor clearly take Doctor Who very seriously and are asking for something that they would find personally meaningful; whether or not you think they should get it, there’s at least something admirable about the motive from a fan-participation perspective. 

If you’re cracking jokes about temple-raiding being Bad Imperialism while talking about Indiana Jones, your motive is…not that.  Indiana Jones stories are stories about temple-raiding.  The people who like Indiana Jones want stories about going into the trackless depths of the jungle and finding the lost exotic wonders there.  If you didn’t want that, you wouldn’t like Indiana Jones.  It’s kind of the heart of the thing. 

It’s OK to feel that way.  You don’t have to like Indiana Jones, or anything.  You’re allowed to find jungle adventure boring.  You’re allowed to be really hung up on proper archeological practice.  You’re even allowed to think that temple-raiding stories are Bad and Imperialist and that we should stop telling them for ideological reasons, although I may roll my eyes at you.

But @brazenautomaton is correct to note that this kind of feeling often generates a sort of entryist impulse that is less OK.  The thing that says, not “let’s not watch Indiana Jones movies” or even “let’s try to destroy the franchise and make sure that no one watches Indiana Jones movies,” but “let’s gain influence over the franchise, and make Indiana Jones about Our Thing instead of about the themes of the original property, and ensure that the new movies will serve to mock and discomfit the people who liked the old ones.”  That is cruel and philistine.  That is perverting an artistic tradition for the sake of your particular axe-to-grind. 

(…if you’re looking for a concrete example of this playing out successfully, check out the way that recent years have seen a Massive Ongoing Shift in the role of romance in the Disney Princess franchise.) 

If new!Indy’s shtick were “returning artifacts from the museums that held them to ancient primitive temples,” it would be really hard to read that as anything other than “ha ha, remember back when we were so STUPID and UNENLIGHTENED and SHITTY that we actually had our hero be a temple-raider?”.  It would be a repurposing of the fundamental project, taking the franchise away from the people who actually like it for the sake of…well, for the sake of people who like seeing their media land ideological jabs, mostly. 

Yes, I understand that @beatrice-otter‘s comment was a joke, and (for that matter) a joke that comes from a place of sincerely caring about something worthwhile.  But it’s not hard to understand why people aren’t inclined to find that kind of joke funny at this point.

So you’re not wrong… but the situation is more complex than that. (And I appreciate you find a non-cynical motivation behind the OP.)

Art can after all, have more than one theme. Or there can be a broader theme underlying the more superficial theme. And fans can be really attached to that more fundamental concept, and willing to uproot the more concrete concepts in order to create work that is more true to the thing they value.

Wow that was abstract and dry. Okay lets talk about Disney princesses.

You could say that the consistent theme of Disney princess movies was the romantic ending. Except this is kind of weird. Why would romance be such a standard of children’s movies? They’re not even particularly good romance stories most of the time.

But in the language of Hollywood, this romance is “the production of the couple.” The world was sundered in some disruption, and by the end everything is joined whole again. Man and woman come together and form a family, and you know all is well. This is much more fundamental to the logic of Disney movies than the particularity of a romantic story (with its stages of relationships, and sexual intimacy, and whatnot.) 

As a representation of harmony though, this has become somewhat outmoded. Our society no longer sees romance as the correct way to represent “and all was well and happy, the different have been joined together.” Instead we now have the DANCE PARTY that ends so many movies. Amorphous dancing is the replacement for heterosexual romance as our culture’s understanding of harmonious relations and god you could write a lot about that.

Now, fans can still be attached to the old interpretation of the themes. But it seems equally legitimate to say “I want a modern interpretation of the themes, which means significant changes to the motifs we use to represent them.”

---

… also, since when is Indiana Jones about the theme of stealing treasures from dead civilizations? Going just by the original trilogy, the message seems pretty strongly “Leave Well Enough The Fuck Alone Or God Will Strike You Down.” 

This analysis is too glib to work.  By which I mean “it assumes, and elides, the heart of the matter under consideration.”

---

(There’s a long, long discussion to be had about the extent to which one can understand a text – and, especially, about the extent to which one can understand its broader social relevance – by looking at it in the symbolic-critical plane.  But for now I’m happy to agree that we’re doing that.  I just wanted to register that this is not necessarily the most productive methodology.)

---

So – yes.  The traditional Disney Princess story is absolutely 100% about creating a model of the world in which and so it came to pass that all that was wrong was made right again is precisely equivalent to the prince and princess got married and lived happily ever after.  The meta-message of those texts is the message of romantic-pair-bonding-as-ultimate-fulfillment.   Disney even created, or at least reified, the distilled concentrated spiritual-crack-hit version of that message: the Romantic Ballroom Scene, as experienced by Cinderella and (especially) by Belle, is a really powerful encapsulation of “this moment right here is EXACTLY what you want out of life.” 

Most of the most recent non-remake Disney Princess films have, in some way, strongly subverted and/or abandoned that model.  You can see strong hints of it as early as The Princess and the Frog, but Tangled pretty much went back to the traditional mold, so we should probably count Brave as the beginning of the process.  After which we get: Frozen, Maleficent, and recently Moana.  Yeah.  Ain’t no Ballroom Scene happily-ever-after up in here.  And it’s not hard to see why.  Disney bows to cultural pressure, and as you say, there’s been a lot of cultural pressure not to push the old message of romantic fulfillment.

This is not an accident.  This is not a historical fluke.  And this is not a representation of some untraceable will-less change in the zeitgeist.  This is a manifestation of a political struggle. 

---

I mean, we all know how this story goes, right?  Back in the day, a bunch of cultural liberals and leftists decided that girls’ media was Too Romance-Saturated (which was both a cause and an effect of the macro-scale issue that girls and women were Too Hung Up on Romance Generally).  They were right about that, as it happens.  The previous generation of girls’ popular media was kind of a wasteland of floofy pink dresses and prom invitations.  Having a greater available diversity of fulfillment narratives for girls was desirable. 

Then the broader movement with which those people were associated got more and more and more traction, and became more and more and more successful on a variety of fronts.  By the end, real-life women in elite circles started feeling embarrassed by any sincere (heterosexual) romantic devotion that they might feel, because that’s not supposed to be the wellspring of fulfillment; the idea that it might be is retrograde and shameful.  And in media*, alternatives to the old romantic Disney model started pushing out the old romantic Disney model itself, until finally even the Disney Princess movies themselves succumbed.  You’d be hard-pressed, these days, to find any kind of well-regarded media piece where the “production of the couple” gets to assume its old nigh-ubiquitous role as the marker of narrative fulfillment.  

* Here I mean “well-marketed elite-driven media that’s expected to be popular in mainstream circles.”  You can certainly find plenty of lower-tier shlock that runs on the old tropes.

---

So what are we to make of the people who are driving and fueling that transition?

Well, as with any large amorphous group of people, they’re going to represent a wide range of mind-states and motivations…

Overall, I’m inclined to say that romance has been treated shabbily of late in the world of media.  It’s not a Perfect Resolution to All Problems, because in real life nothing is, but (for men and women both!) it’s probably as close as most people get to come to a real wellspring-of-fulfillment.  It was narratively over-dominant for a while, but we’re in full-blown Massive Overcorrection Mode now, and it pains me to think how much love is being drained out of stories because Really Caring About Traditional Romance is Conservative and Icky.  Certainly it has more to offer than the dance party.  I wish the culture warriors would back off and make some room.  This is its own fight, though; as you say, you could sure write a lot about it. 

There’s no conspiracy, of course.  No easily-identifiable group of specific people is responsible for the shift in Disney Princess narratives.  But, as with this thread’s OP, you can certainly find a lot of specific people who at least fantasize about taking over popular media properties and remaking them.  And such fantasies can be productively examined. 

For starters, there’s a difference between “really caring about some aspect of the original text” (even if it’s a seemingly-minor aspect) and “wanting access to the cultural traction and popularity of the original text.”  For both artistic and social reasons, I’m much more willing to be harshly judgmental towards the latter.  It wasn’t hard to tell the difference between “women who’d dreamed of being Ghostbusters when they were little girls and found joy in a latter-day depiction of their dream” versus “women who didn’t give a shit about Ghostbusters but knew that an all-female Ghostbusters team would be a splashy culture-war victory.” 

And beyond that, it’s helpful to ask “how much are you actually taking away people’s toys?”  As I said, the Disney Princess meta-franchise is in many ways at the heart of the pretty-dress-and-ballroom-dancing paired-off romantic vision of happiness.  A subversion of the property is pretty much an attack on that whole memeplex, one that doesn’t leave an awful lot of compelling alternatives. Write your own goddamn fairy tales to suit your own preferences, or take over some less-central part of the cultural dialogue, or something. 

---

As for Indy and the messages of his movies: well, this is where detail-driven symbolic criticism starts to show its weaknesses.  Yes, Indy’s temple-raiding keeps being “punished,” in the sense that the supernatural forces of Plot keep responding to it with exciting obstacles that require him to show off his manly daring.  But the structure of the work as while presents him as a tremendously admirable and appealing figure, and his activities are all rooted in temple-raiding.  Your average kid watching Raiders or Temple of Doom walks out saying “wow, I want to be awesome and wear a cool hat and plunder ancient tombs!”  If your new text makes a point of saying PLUNDERING ANCIENT TOMBS IS FOR IMPERIALIST JERKFACES, it’s a nasty subversion.

So I feel like it doesn’t really work to compare movies that are not the Disney animated features with the other Disney stuff like Maleficent.  Maleficent seems to be we will take fairy tales and play them in a separate thing - which I feel like is the thing you want people to do - vs. going into the animated feature movies line and saying no more fairy tales with romantic ends for you.  
Curious how you think of Aladin or Lion King with in this - on one hand there is a romance plot to some degree or the other - but with male leads which makes it take on a somewhat different emphasis (especially in the case of the Lion King).  

In re Maleficent: I don’t buy it.  For one thing, let’s be honest, the mere fact of it being Disney carries a huge amount of weight and a huge amount of cultural bias.  (On some level, Moana is in fact exactly what I’d been asking for – not a jab, not a snipe, just a story for girls with a totally different focus – but the fact that it’s marketed as a Disney Princess movie makes the lack of romance a jab and a snipe.)  But Maleficent is more than just a Disney product, it’s a fix fic with all the budget and cachet and canon-power of the official producers behind it.  It’s a giant middle finger to everyone who actually liked the story of Sleeping Beauty.  “Ha ha, you thought that something as LAME as heterosexual romantic love could heal the curse?  GET REKT SCRUB, real love is for badass women only.” 

In re Aladdin and Lion King: there are a lot of Disney Princess movies that play around with the straight-up romantic fairy-tale setup in one way or another.  More of them that do than that don’t, really.  Those two have their own thing going on, and so does Hunchback, and so does Pocahontas (she doesn’t actually end up with the guy!), and so does Mulan (at least to the extent that making the heroine an action star is different), etc. 

(Also, Lion King isn’t actually a Disney Princess movie.  Which probably has more to do with the fact that you can’t put Nala in a dress than anything else, but still, worth noting.) 

Yet all of these films at least gesture at the idea that happiness and resolution are properly manifested in marriage or the equivalent, even if most of their energy is spiraling off elsewhere.  You can play Prince and Princess Have Happily Ever After with all of them, without having to blatantly ignore or rewrite the text.  This is not so with any of the most recent ones.  Even Frozen, which actually does have a happy romantic pairing, but makes a point of how that’s not the metaphysically-empowered curse-breaking kind of love.

bambamramfan:

balioc:

brazenautomaton:

fierceawakening:

brazenautomaton:

marzipanandminutiae:

beatrice-otter:

batmanisagatewaydrug:

for the next Reboot That Makes Men Angry I’d like to submit for your consideration Lupita Nyong'o as Indiana Jones

#can she be the kind of archeologist who takes the artifacts out of museums in london and puts them BACK where they CAME FROM

Indiana Jones and the Temple of NAGPRA Compliance

in case you forgot that it will never end and life will never be worth tolerating

art is for making unpopular people angry! take, for the explicit purpose of taking, out of the explicit love of taking!

it will never end and life will never be worth tolerating

Life will never be worth tolerating… because some people said on social media that they kind of want a black woman Indiana Jones?

You’re still allowed to write exhilarating new adventures for the white male one, you know.

This wasn’t “Hey, this would bea  cool character”.

This was “Hey, you know what would be a great way to take for the sake of taking?”

It is explicitly framed as good because it is about taking. It is good because it makes unpopular people angry. Its purpose is to make unpopular people unhappy. It is taking for the sake of taking. 

Taking for the sake of taking, for the purpose of taking, out of the sheer joy of taking, is something everyone agrees is wonderful and great and virtuous.

What would be the point of making a black woman character if we weren’t also making unpopular people unhappy? We align ourselves with diversity not because we believe it is good, but because that is an effective way to claim authority to make unpopular people unhappy!

That is why life will never be worth tolerating. Because that will never end. Malice will never stop being exalted as virtue. 

…I’m not especially on board with @brazenautomaton‘s broader framing here, but I do think he’s entirely correct on the object level, so let me try a slightly different construction…

It’s not about the #blacklesbian!Indy thing.  Almost entirely not-about-that, anyway.  You can think whatever you like about race-and-gender-twisted reboots, and there’s certainly plenty of cultural criticism to levy on that front, but…at the very least, the desire for them often arises from a sincere love of the property in question.  Those people clamoring for a canon female Doctor clearly take Doctor Who very seriously and are asking for something that they would find personally meaningful; whether or not you think they should get it, there’s at least something admirable about the motive from a fan-participation perspective. 

If you’re cracking jokes about temple-raiding being Bad Imperialism while talking about Indiana Jones, your motive is…not that.  Indiana Jones stories are stories about temple-raiding.  The people who like Indiana Jones want stories about going into the trackless depths of the jungle and finding the lost exotic wonders there.  If you didn’t want that, you wouldn’t like Indiana Jones.  It’s kind of the heart of the thing. 

It’s OK to feel that way.  You don’t have to like Indiana Jones, or anything.  You’re allowed to find jungle adventure boring.  You’re allowed to be really hung up on proper archeological practice.  You’re even allowed to think that temple-raiding stories are Bad and Imperialist and that we should stop telling them for ideological reasons, although I may roll my eyes at you.

But @brazenautomaton is correct to note that this kind of feeling often generates a sort of entryist impulse that is less OK.  The thing that says, not “let’s not watch Indiana Jones movies” or even “let’s try to destroy the franchise and make sure that no one watches Indiana Jones movies,” but “let’s gain influence over the franchise, and make Indiana Jones about Our Thing instead of about the themes of the original property, and ensure that the new movies will serve to mock and discomfit the people who liked the old ones.”  That is cruel and philistine.  That is perverting an artistic tradition for the sake of your particular axe-to-grind. 

(…if you’re looking for a concrete example of this playing out successfully, check out the way that recent years have seen a Massive Ongoing Shift in the role of romance in the Disney Princess franchise.) 

If new!Indy’s shtick were “returning artifacts from the museums that held them to ancient primitive temples,” it would be really hard to read that as anything other than “ha ha, remember back when we were so STUPID and UNENLIGHTENED and SHITTY that we actually had our hero be a temple-raider?”.  It would be a repurposing of the fundamental project, taking the franchise away from the people who actually like it for the sake of…well, for the sake of people who like seeing their media land ideological jabs, mostly. 

Yes, I understand that @beatrice-otter‘s comment was a joke, and (for that matter) a joke that comes from a place of sincerely caring about something worthwhile.  But it’s not hard to understand why people aren’t inclined to find that kind of joke funny at this point.

So you’re not wrong… but the situation is more complex than that. (And I appreciate you find a non-cynical motivation behind the OP.)

Art can after all, have more than one theme. Or there can be a broader theme underlying the more superficial theme. And fans can be really attached to that more fundamental concept, and willing to uproot the more concrete concepts in order to create work that is more true to the thing they value.

Wow that was abstract and dry. Okay lets talk about Disney princesses.

You could say that the consistent theme of Disney princess movies was the romantic ending. Except this is kind of weird. Why would romance be such a standard of children’s movies? They’re not even particularly good romance stories most of the time.

But in the language of Hollywood, this romance is “the production of the couple.” The world was sundered in some disruption, and by the end everything is joined whole again. Man and woman come together and form a family, and you know all is well. This is much more fundamental to the logic of Disney movies than the particularity of a romantic story (with its stages of relationships, and sexual intimacy, and whatnot.) 

As a representation of harmony though, this has become somewhat outmoded. Our society no longer sees romance as the correct way to represent “and all was well and happy, the different have been joined together.” Instead we now have the DANCE PARTY that ends so many movies. Amorphous dancing is the replacement for heterosexual romance as our culture’s understanding of harmonious relations and god you could write a lot about that.

Now, fans can still be attached to the old interpretation of the themes. But it seems equally legitimate to say “I want a modern interpretation of the themes, which means significant changes to the motifs we use to represent them.”

---

… also, since when is Indiana Jones about the theme of stealing treasures from dead civilizations? Going just by the original trilogy, the message seems pretty strongly “Leave Well Enough The Fuck Alone Or God Will Strike You Down.” 

This analysis is too glib to work.  By which I mean “it assumes, and elides, the heart of the matter under consideration.”

(There’s a long, long discussion to be had about the extent to which one can understand a text – and, especially, about the extent to which one can understand its broader social relevance – by looking at it in the symbolic-critical plane.  But for now I’m happy to agree that we’re doing that.  I just wanted to register that this is not necessarily the most productive methodology.)

So – yes.  The traditional Disney Princess story is absolutely 100% about creating a model of the world in which and so it came to pass that all that was wrong was made right again is precisely equivalent to the prince and princess got married and lived happily ever after.  The meta-message of those texts is the message of romantic-pair-bonding-as-ultimate-fulfillment.   Disney even created, or at least reified, the distilled concentrated spiritual-crack-hit version of that message: the Romantic Ballroom Scene, as experienced by Cinderella and (especially) by Belle, is a really powerful encapsulation of “this moment right here is EXACTLY what you want out of life.” 

Most of the most recent non-remake Disney Princess films have, in some way, strongly subverted and/or abandoned that model.  You can see strong hints of it as early as The Princess and the Frog, but Tangled pretty much went back to the traditional mold, so we should probably count Brave as the beginning of the process.  After which we get: Frozen, Maleficent, and recently Moana.  Yeah.  Ain’t no Ballroom Scene happily-ever-after up in here.  And it’s not hard to see why.  Disney bows to cultural pressure, and as you say, there’s been a lot of cultural pressure not to push the old message of romantic fulfillment.

This is not an accident.  This is not a historical fluke.  And this is not a representation of some untraceable will-less change in the zeitgeist.  This is a manifestation of a political struggle. 

I mean, we all know how this story goes, right?  Back in the day, a bunch of cultural liberals and leftists decided that girls’ media was Too Romance-Saturated (which was both a cause and an effect of the macro-scale issue that girls and women were Too Hung Up on Romance Generally).  They were right about that, as it happens.  The previous generation of girls’ popular media was kind of a wasteland of floofy pink dresses and prom invitations.  Having a greater available diversity of fulfillment narratives for girls was desirable. 

Then the broader movement with which those people were associated got more and more and more traction, and became more and more and more successful on a variety of fronts.  By the end, real-life women in elite circles started feeling embarrassed by any sincere (heterosexual) romantic devotion that they might feel, because that’s not supposed to be the wellspring of fulfillment; the idea that it might be is retrograde and shameful.  And in media*, alternatives to the old romantic Disney model started pushing out the old romantic Disney model itself, until finally even the Disney Princess movies themselves succumbed.  You’d be hard-pressed, these days, to find any kind of well-regarded media piece where the “production of the couple” gets to assume its old nigh-ubiquitous role as the marker of narrative fulfillment.  

* Here I mean “well-marketed elite-driven media that’s expected to be popular in mainstream circles.”  You can certainly find plenty of lower-tier shlock that runs on the old tropes.

So what are we to make of the people who are driving and fueling that transition?

Well, as with any large amorphous group of people, they’re going to represent a wide range of mind-states and motivations…

Overall, I’m inclined to say that romance has been treated shabbily of late in the world of media.  It’s not a Perfect Resolution to All Problems, because in real life nothing is, but (for men and women both!) it’s probably as close as most people get to come to a real wellspring-of-fulfillment.  It was narratively over-dominant for a while, but we’re in full-blown Massive Overcorrection Mode now, and it pains me to think how much love is being drained out of stories because Really Caring About Traditional Romance is Conservative and Icky.  Certainly it has more to offer than the dance party.  I wish the culture warriors would back off and make some room.  This is its own fight, though; as you say, you could sure write a lot about it. 

There’s no conspiracy, of course.  No easily-identifiable group of specific people is responsible for the shift in Disney Princess narratives.  But, as with this thread’s OP, you can certainly find a lot of specific people who at least fantasize about taking over popular media properties and remaking them.  And such fantasies can be productively examined. 

For starters, there’s a difference between “really caring about some aspect of the original text” (even if it’s a seemingly-minor aspect) and “wanting access to the cultural traction and popularity of the original text.”  For both artistic and social reasons, I’m much more willing to be harshly judgmental towards the latter.  It wasn’t hard to tell the difference between “women who’d dreamed of being Ghostbusters when they were little girls and found joy in a latter-day depiction of their dream” versus “women who didn’t give a shit about Ghostbusters but knew that an all-female Ghostbusters team would be a splashy culture-war victory.” 

And beyond that, it’s helpful to ask “how much are you actually taking away people’s toys?”  As I said, the Disney Princess meta-franchise is in many ways at the heart of the pretty-dress-and-ballroom-dancing paired-off romantic vision of happiness.  A subversion of the property is pretty much an attack on that whole memeplex, one that doesn’t leave an awful lot of compelling alternatives. Write your own goddamn fairy tales to suit your own preferences, or take over some less-central part of the cultural dialogue, or something. 

As for Indy and the messages of his movies: well, this is where detail-driven symbolic criticism starts to show its weaknesses.  Yes, Indy’s temple-raiding keeps being “punished,” in the sense that the supernatural forces of Plot keep responding to it with exciting obstacles that require him to show off his manly daring.  But the structure of the work as while presents him as a tremendously admirable and appealing figure, and his activities are all rooted in temple-raiding.  Your average kid watching Raiders or Temple of Doom walks out saying “wow, I want to be awesome and wear a cool hat and plunder ancient tombs!”  If your new text makes a point of saying PLUNDERING ANCIENT TOMBS IS FOR IMPERIALIST JERKFACES, it’s a nasty subversion.

brazenautomaton:

fierceawakening:

brazenautomaton:

marzipanandminutiae:

beatrice-otter:

batmanisagatewaydrug:

for the next Reboot That Makes Men Angry I’d like to submit for your consideration Lupita Nyong'o as Indiana Jones

#can she be the kind of archeologist who takes the artifacts out of museums in london and puts them BACK where they CAME FROM

Indiana Jones and the Temple of NAGPRA Compliance

in case you forgot that it will never end and life will never be worth tolerating

art is for making unpopular people angry! take, for the explicit purpose of taking, out of the explicit love of taking!

it will never end and life will never be worth tolerating

Life will never be worth tolerating… because some people said on social media that they kind of want a black woman Indiana Jones?

You’re still allowed to write exhilarating new adventures for the white male one, you know.

This wasn’t “Hey, this would bea  cool character”.

This was “Hey, you know what would be a great way to take for the sake of taking?”

It is explicitly framed as good because it is about taking. It is good because it makes unpopular people angry. Its purpose is to make unpopular people unhappy. It is taking for the sake of taking. 

Taking for the sake of taking, for the purpose of taking, out of the sheer joy of taking, is something everyone agrees is wonderful and great and virtuous.

What would be the point of making a black woman character if we weren’t also making unpopular people unhappy? We align ourselves with diversity not because we believe it is good, but because that is an effective way to claim authority to make unpopular people unhappy!

That is why life will never be worth tolerating. Because that will never end. Malice will never stop being exalted as virtue. 

…I’m not especially on board with @brazenautomaton‘s broader framing here, but I do think he’s entirely correct on the object level, so let me try a slightly different construction…

It’s not about the #blacklesbian!Indy thing.  Almost entirely not-about-that, anyway.  You can think whatever you like about race-and-gender-twisted reboots, and there’s certainly plenty of cultural criticism to levy on that front, but…at the very least, the desire for them often arises from a sincere love of the property in question.  Those people clamoring for a canon female Doctor clearly take Doctor Who very seriously and are asking for something that they would find personally meaningful; whether or not you think they should get it, there’s at least something admirable about the motive from a fan-participation perspective. 

If you’re cracking jokes about temple-raiding being Bad Imperialism while talking about Indiana Jones, your motive is…not that.  Indiana Jones stories are stories about temple-raiding.  The people who like Indiana Jones want stories about going into the trackless depths of the jungle and finding the lost exotic wonders there.  If you didn’t want that, you wouldn’t like Indiana Jones.  It’s kind of the heart of the thing. 

It’s OK to feel that way.  You don’t have to like Indiana Jones, or anything.  You’re allowed to find jungle adventure boring.  You’re allowed to be really hung up on proper archeological practice.  You’re even allowed to think that temple-raiding stories are Bad and Imperialist and that we should stop telling them for ideological reasons, although I may roll my eyes at you.

But @brazenautomaton is correct to note that this kind of feeling often generates a sort of entryist impulse that is less OK.  The thing that says, not “let’s not watch Indiana Jones movies” or even “let’s try to destroy the franchise and make sure that no one watches Indiana Jones movies,” but “let’s gain influence over the franchise, and make Indiana Jones about Our Thing instead of about the themes of the original property, and ensure that the new movies will serve to mock and discomfit the people who liked the old ones.”  That is cruel and philistine.  That is perverting an artistic tradition for the sake of your particular axe-to-grind. 

(…if you’re looking for a concrete example of this playing out successfully, check out the way that recent years have seen a Massive Ongoing Shift in the role of romance in the Disney Princess franchise.) 

If new!Indy’s shtick were “returning artifacts from the museums that held them to ancient primitive temples,” it would be really hard to read that as anything other than “ha ha, remember back when we were so STUPID and UNENLIGHTENED and SHITTY that we actually had our hero be a temple-raider?”.  It would be a repurposing of the fundamental project, taking the franchise away from the people who actually like it for the sake of…well, for the sake of people who like seeing their media land ideological jabs, mostly. 

Yes, I understand that @beatrice-otter‘s comment was a joke, and (for that matter) a joke that comes from a place of sincerely caring about something worthwhile.  But it’s not hard to understand why people aren’t inclined to find that kind of joke funny at this point.

fierceawakening:

thingsfandomshavetaughtme:

why do people make shit arguments against queer representation by saying things like “the percentage of lgbt people in the population isn’t that high” well neither is the percentage of vampires but we see plenty of them in our media dont we

I dislike a lot of weirdly snarky pro-representation arguments but i am kind of okay with this one

Today, in Serious Answers to Not-That-Serious Questions:

It’s true, the vampire demographic is not large.  Vampires are fake.  Therefore they can be whatever we want and need them to be; therefore it’s not a problem when we use them to tell the stories that are relevant to us, all of us, in any circumstance where the “vampire” metaphor seems to pack any punch. 

It turns out that comes up a lot.  “Vampire” can mean “sexy predatory man” (or, less often, “sexy predatory lady”).  “Vampire” can mean “glittering untouchable elite who’s part of a secret conspiratorial world.”  “Vampire” can mean “leech who is stealing our Precious Essence.”  Those all seem to be stories we really like telling, right now.  And when we tell such a story, and slap the “vampire” label on it, nobody gets hurt and nobody gets mad. 

We could totally do that thing with LGBT people.  In fact, within certain genres, we totally do.  Not so much in mainstream American media, but…

Yuri anime is huge.  This is partly a fetishization thing, but it’s also partly because male geeks want stories about complex emotional interactions between sympathetic compelling characters, and for that audience it’s easier to keep all the characters sympathetic and compelling within the fantasy of “they’re all cute girls, no really, all of them, your defensive social instincts don’t have to kick in here.”  Yaoi, which is also huge, does precisely the same thing for a different audience.  Hell, even classic Western slash fiction runs on a roughly-similar engine. 

Of course, this is not any kind of real representation.  All those gay characters aren’t very much like actual gay people, and if ever they are, it’s mostly by accident.  They’re like vampires or elves or orcs: they represent fantastic unreal character-types being used to construct myths that are meant to resonate, at least amongst a specific audience.  Real-life gay folks, unless they happen to be into the relevant genres for independent reasons, tend not to be very impressed. 

If you’re willing to be folded-spindled-and-mutilated into something mythical, you can get a lot of widespread traction.  I bet, with proper marketing, you could get some yaoi-like or yuri-like genre to catch on in the West.  Y’know, in the same way that we got Low Fantasy and Paranormal Romance and Softcore BDSM Erotica to catch on.  

But if you really care about representation, you probably care about it being halfway decent.  You probably don’t want your subjects to be folded, spindled, and mutilated for the sake of fitting into easily-accessible narratives. 

And good representation, on its own, does not have tremendous widespread appeal.  The appeal is mostly limited to…members of the group being represented, and their closest associates / fans.  So, yeah, it makes sense to take note of the size of the relevant demographics.

(NOTE: This doesn’t mean representation can’t be popular, or that it can’t be good in a mainstream-ish way!  Obviously it can.  But the representation itself probably isn’t contributing much to the popularity or to the mainstream quality.)