#which is a punishment fantasy for the christian fascists and also the leftists

[qqueenofhades]

Do you think we romanticize the concept of revolution (especially violent revolution) out of some weird offshoot of our tendency to romanticize and propagandize war/the military?

Like, we treat war/the military as a good thing, so when we turn against it, we basically just apply the REVOLUTION coat of paint over the "military is great and just" framework? or something?

There are a few reasons. First, America itself is totally beholden to the idea of the Glorious Populist Revolution that overthrows the tyrants and brings Freedom (TM), thanks to the American revolution. That is why the right wing has spent endless time cosplaying "1776" and "Founding Fathers" and all the other cosmetic trappings that they put on their fascism project, and keep threatening to have a "new revolution" or a "new civil war" if Trump isn't immediately reinstated to the presidency for life. Because they are steeped in the paradigm of "messianic militarism," which has a long and inglorious history in the West and is based in Christian imperialism and colonialism, they just think that The Right Kind of Violence will overthrow the Evil Oppressors and everything will then be glorious! Of course, this has been a recurrent theme in human history and it has never, ever worked.

Because the so-called progressive left often takes deeply theocratic and fascist/conservative concepts and then just changes the wording/rationale/costume dressing, they have therefore become attached to the idea of "guillotining" all the oppressors (like the French revolution, which famously worked out fine and was definitely not followed by the Terror and did not at all end with the country lapsing back into absolute imperialism under Napoleon barely a decade later!), like we can just kill all the right people and then the world will be fine! Which uh. Yeah, that's a hard no from me. I dream as fondly of Elon Musk getting into a Tesla and suddenly blowing up as anyone, but I don't subscribe to the repurposed genocidal fantasy that "killing everyone is right when My People do it!," and I don't think that this would remotely result in a better world the end, because again: Historian talking here. It literally never, ever has. There are no magic shortcuts to making things better. It only happens by doing the work and not fantasizing about how much easier it would be if all the bad things abruptly disappeared in a splendid shower of blood and gore. Because a) that's not gonna happen and b) we don't fucking want it to! What is wrong with you?! Do you think only the Deserving Sinners will die in your Progressive Rapture and everyone else will be fine??? Because! Yeah! NO!!!

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts #it is just thinly repurposed protestant evangelical apocalyptic eschatology #about the End of Days when All Sinners Are Destroyed #which is a punishment fantasy for the christian fascists and also the leftists #the only thing that changes is who is getting punished and how #but Destroying the Infidels And The World Is Now Perfect #is the common theme #and yeah uh. hard pass.

[nicklloydnow]

“Susan “the Explainer” Sontag might have seen through the Game of Thrones phenomenon — now extended into HBO’s prequel series House of the Dragon — and pronounced it “Ignorance as Metaphor.” Each show epitomizes the violence, profanity, and sex formula that HBO uses to sell its ancient-mythology programming.

HBO romanticizes the administrative state for the Millennium audience just as Sontag claimed that Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will romanticized Nazism — but without the “talent” and “art” that Sontag granted Riefenstahl. Each show is a costume-pageant version of the same decadent urban dramas that HBO peddled in The Wire and The Sopranos — guilty-pleasure nightmares of depravity favored by liberal media.

These ersatz history tales do not inform our present condition but exacerbate it. (Dragon’s presentiment of American civil war is intentionally cast for politically correct diversity.) Premiering Sunday nights, the episodes offer new immoral Sunday School lessons about the post-Christian world, teaching viewers to enjoy ruthlessness.

No doubt Sontag would have recognized that the series’ Anglophile novelty (despite rampant contempt for Western patriarchy) also plays into the inferiority complex that still oppresses Americans. Going back to medieval times (past Beowulf yet with a nod to Marsellus in Pulp Fiction), both Game and Dragon exploit the roots of epic warfare popularized in Peter Jackson’s dreadful Lord of the Rings trilogy — but based on George R. R. Martin’s bowdlerization of J. R. R. Tolkien. Now, Tolkien’s religious allegory is cheapened into secularism, meant to appease today’s politically confused consumers, thus fitting the metaphor of fascist art that Sontag expounded upon in her 1975 thesis Fascinating Fascism.

(…)

Jared Hess had definitively parodied this in Jemaine Clement’s hilarious lecture scene of Gentleman Broncos, unpacking florid, over-enunciated, quasi-sci-fi cult literature. But Dragon’s killings and birthing horrors celebrate cruelty without examining it the way Shakespeare, the Bible, or Sir Walter Scott did. So when media shills endow Dragon with wild significance, it perpetuates that unequal exchange of wills that Sontag warned would result from the production and dissemination of fascist art.

Fans of Dragon and Game, in thrall to monsters and monstrous behavior, don’t recognize how this demoralizing tendency appeals to the adolescent mindset — proving the dichotomy of power-worshipping media elites and the great unwashed binge-watchers that Sontag anticipated. This crisis prevents perfidious politicians, and authors of social disasters such as the televised J6 show trials, from ever being held accountable.

(…)

It’s unsurprising when reviewers praise Dragon because it “puts its female characters front and center like never before.” The show symbolizes the political fantasies that the leftist media forces upon the public.

(…)

All that prurience, violence, and political overreaching that HBO sells in the power struggles and sex wars of Dragon and Game fulfill what Sontag exposed as the essential appeal of fascist art, resembling “an anthology of pro-Nazi sentiments” (remember, Biden forbade the media to say “Antifa sentiments” when he asserted that “Antifa doesn’t exist”).

The tent-pole, multiverse excitement surrounding Game, Dragon, and the J6 proceedings is akin to “the vertigo before power,” a term Sontag used to describe irrational mass enthusiasm. It’s a good phrase for the illogical self-punishment of post-Obama, not-Hillary, anti-Trump America taking delight in HBO’s elaborate debauchery. Game and Dragon show us that “fascist aesthetics endorse two seemingly opposite states: egomania and servitude.””

“It's an object lesson in how not to do diversity casting, which has to be done right. If not, it's just as insulting as no diversity at all—perhaps more so. Forced and haphazard casting that changes character nuances and motivations as well as entire plot lines beyond recognition undermines both actor and viewer.

Doing diversity casting right means using it to enhance a work of fiction, rather than weaken its entire premise. Failing to do this right reduces Black actors to their skin color, rather than allowing them to inhabit a character that makes sense in its entirety.

But all too often, Black actors are cast in established franchises in a lazy way that tokenizes them for their race with no respect or credence paid to the subtext and historical and symbolic dimensions of the story.

(…)

But the truth is the exact opposite: When you're undermining a piece of history by casting a Black actor, you're making their race an inaccessible part of their character and their acting. After all, how free can a Black actor be when they are slotted into a role that was not intended for them? How much of the historical weight of a story is impacted by this "race-conscious" approach to storytelling, which ends up obfuscating the connotations and impact of race and power?

It's unnecessary at best. There exists a host of available stories that showcase Black lives through history and mythology, from Shakespeare's Othello to the story of England's first Black aristocrat, Dido Elizabeth Bell, to the slave rebellion leader Toussaint L'Ouverture. And yet, instead of creating great TV around these incredible stories, we get a lazy and desperate push to haphazardly insert people of color into traditionally European roles while dismissing those who take issue with these diversity casting choices as racist.

Haphazard diversity casting ends up objectifying Black actors, exposing them to needless backlash and hostility from confused and frustrated fans and disconnecting their race from their acting and characters.

But the clumsiness of bad diversity casting also exposes something dark about the audiences for these prestige TV dramas. In the cast of House of the Dragon, the message is clear: Your average woke, Hollywood liberal can still root for a ruling class portrayed as malignant despots, so long as they aren't all white.

It's a key feature of pop-wokeness: making it seem counter-cultural to side with the elite. Shonda Rhimes' hit Netflix show Bridgerton is another famous and recent example that features a diverse, rainbow cast of fawning aristocrats, despite being set in the Georgian period, the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. These desperate attempts to foster diversity blur the lines between aspirational fantasy and historical anachronism, which makes it hard to decipher how much of the impact of a story is lost when modern preoccupations with diversity and inclusion collide with unpleasant historical, mythological and symbolic truths.

Diversity casting in deeply hierarchical narratives reveals how comfortable we are with hierarchy, aristocracy, and even incestuous Aryan-like racists—so long as it's white servants waiting on Black queens and nobles, and so long as the eugenicist Aryans aren't all white.

It's a shame that showrunners aren't challenging these classist assumptions but catering to them with their own racialized decisions, which undermine Black actors and acting as well as viewers. And it's especially dispiriting because diversity that makes sense is not hard to find and can add incredible texture and richness to a story.

(…)

The challenges with diversity casting reflect the systemic problems and glaring lack of ambition and imagination in Hollywood. It's much easier for the highly-profit driven industry to slot token Black actors into already existing franchises that are guaranteed success, and much harder to take risks and tell new stories that feature prominent Black characters and myths and that showcase the full scope of the imagination and talent of people of color.

It is possible and important to do diversity properly. But it's also fine sometimes not to do it at all, especially when the occasion does not call for diversity casting and when the choice to do so impacts the subtext and symbolic dimension of a narrative.

Diversity casting out of some warped sense of moral obligation diminishes the impact of a project and also diminishes the dignity of the actors who are being slotted into shoes that were not tailored for them.”

“Turkey is not the word. No turkey, however bloated and stupid, could ever be big enough to convey the mesmerising awfulness of Amazon's billion dollar Tolkien epic.

(…)

Let's start with the budget: a billion dollars. Let that sink in. One thousand million bucks, about £860,000,000, such a colossal investment even for Amazon that industry rumour says the brand is gambling its entire future as a film production company.

(…)

Popular culture invents blether like this to replace real religion. It's scientology for the superhero movie era.”

#house of the dragon #game of thrones #hbo #the wire #the sopranos #susan sontag #armond white #fascism #fascist art #leni riefenstahl #triumph of the will #zack snyder