We’ve been having a long, long discussion in a thread titled “Does today’s generation “see/understand” TV and movies differently?” and it’s not going well for the young. It started off simply enough, as I’ll explain below the fold and then it devolved into dumb kids without the basic understanding of reality that anyone pretending to be an adult ought to have.
Why am I not surprised?
So it’s really a discussion forum for movies and TV, nothing philosophical, but a lot of us had started to realize that a certain number of posters lacked the capacity to speak intelligently about… well, much of anything. Their abilities when it comes to movies and TV shows seems to stop at “I like it!” Okay, why? What is it about that show or that movie that you like? What about the characters or the plot? Give us something!
But no, that’s about the limit of what they can manage. If it gets beyond “ooh, pretty colors!” or “it fulfills my ideology”, they’re lost and we all find that terribly sad. There’s no reason to even talk to people who are operating at that level. The problem is, they just don’t know how to shut up.
Eventually, the conversation drifted to old shows. I’d been watching The Bionic Woman, after having finished The Six Million Dollar Man and I had some reactions. Jaime Sommers wasn’t treated all that well throughout. Everyone manhandled her, called her “babe”, even in a professional setting and she drifted from boyfriend to boyfriend because they always had a guy who wanted a kiss from a pretty girl.
From today’s perspective, that would never fly, but my point was that it isn’t today’s perspective that mattered. Everything is a product of it’s time. That kind of soft sexism was a thing then. People need to deal with it. You have to accept the underlying values of the era in order to enjoy the show and if you can’t, then you’ve probably got some issues you need to address.
Enter all of the people with those issues. Big surprise there!
I did wind up pushing the discussion back into the 30s and 40s with the Charlie Chan movies. Granted, the earliest Chan movies had Chinese, Japanese and Korean actors in the lead role, but by the time the early 30s rolled around, we got white guys like Warner Oland and Sidney Toler in the role. Why? Because at that point in cinematic history, at that point in Hollywood, that’s how things were. You don’t have to like it but that doesn’t change anything. Reality and your feelings don’t have to coincide. Those movies remain excellent for what they were, regardless of who was in the lead role.
Of course, the children couldn’t get that through their heads. “THAT’S RACIST!” Well, not to the people who were making the movies, it wasn’t. Not to the people who were watching the movies, it wasn’t. It’s only racist to you, 80-90 years later, because you live in a different ideological reality.
That doesn’t make your reality right.
This is something that I’ve talked about before. Morality and ethics are transitory. What you think is moral today, invariably, it will be seen as immoral in the future. What the people in the 70s thought was perfectly acceptable, people today might disagree.
So what? Your moral views don’t retroactively eliminate those that you disagree with from the past. history doesn’t get rewritten just because you get a moral boner. Reality is what it is whether you like it or not.
These people are too dumb to figure that out.
Now I admit, and admitted there, that this strayed far afield from the purpose of the forum, but it makes a point. You don’t just get to declare the past “racist” or whatever other “ist” you don’t like, just because you changed your mind. History remains history. Deal with it, yet these people can’t. They have to constantly try to make reality their bitch, and both sides of the political spectrum do it. Hell, right now, Texas is trying to outlaw referring to slavery in history classes. That’s just dumb!
It’s like “watch our new WWII documentary, now with a much more comforting ending!” You don’t get to redefine reality because you don’t like it! It’s one thing to play “what if?” games and something entirely different to pretend your feelings override the facts. Yet that seems to be going on a lot, of late, doesn’t it? These people are just dumb.
What’s worse, they don’t even know they’re dumb. We have an entire generation of people right now who have been taught that if it makes you sad, it didn’t happen Everything they think right now is the pinnacle of moral thinking, just because they think it. Never mind the fact that history has shown clearly that moral patterns change dramatically every couple of years. In another generation, their children will look back and think their parents were idiots, and in this specific instance, they’ll be right. This is why these people don’t want to learn anything about history because they’ll potentially be disappointed by what they find. It’s much easier to just remain ignorant and self-absorbed.
Like idiotic little children.
These people don’t comprehend nuance or actuality, they’ve got their feelings on their sleeves and that’s all that matters. Anything else is too potentially distressing. Being happy is more important than being right. You know who else does that? The religious! So the most recent generation are just making their own religion, complete with their own blind faith, because they’re not mature enough to deal with the actual world in which they live.
That’s kind of sad, isn’t it? It’s disgusting where this kind of thing crops up, but I see it constantly.
What do you think?