The return of #BrandZero has dissident creatives asking how they can use their art to counter the prevailing narrative. Taking the Death Cult-profaned entertainment industry back looks like a nonstarter since Hollywood is quickly falling to China.
Starting a parallel cinema scene might be a more feasible idea for dissidents. It’s easier and cheaper than ever to make your own movie. An enterprising director could feasibly crowdfund a slick little indie film. Professional grade editing software; even high-end hardware like a RED cam, is within a guerrilla production’s budget.
The real question is how to craft movies that effectively counter the Cult’s message.
Libertarians will argue that right-wing message fic is no different than left-wing message fic, and it’s film makers’ duty to simply tell a fun story.
This objection misses the point because it assumes that the Death Cult spread its message through heavy-handed propagandizing. That’s just the frog finally noticing the water is boiling. Hollywood has been a Death Cult vector since at least the late 60s, yet most people are only being turned off now.
The second mistake that thwarts counterculture art is more common among Conservatives. They likewise start from the false premise that overt message fic is how the Cult delivers its propaganda. Then they rush straight into the equal but opposite error of deliberately making their own message fic.
Both camps fail to understand how the enemy indoctrinated multiple generations without anyone noticing till it was too late. Their current overt skinsuiting is just a victory lap. Hollywood reached this point by using subtle storytelling techniques to erode audiences’ defenses.
To understand this method, one need only understand the archetypal trope of the protagonist. This is the character who drives the story by setting out on a quest to achieve a concrete goal against opposition.
Hollywood learned through long trial and error to make the protagonist as likeable and relatable to audiences as possible. The idea is to make audiences identify with the hero.
Nowadays, the studios have turned this approach on its head. The contemporary movie protagonist is an utterly inhuman Mary Sue with no compelling reason to pursue a goal since she’s already said to be perfect. Instead, she uses her screen time to deliver a series of lectures on Death Cult pieties.
Again, that is not the conditioning. That is a humiliation ritual meant to rub the remaining fans’ noses in it.
The conditioning came before that. And the way it happened was by Hollywood churning out decades of movies wherein heroes whom audiences identified with achieved their goals by acting according to the Death Cult’s morals.
That point bears repeating. To bring movie audiences around to your way of thinking, show characters they like being successful by acting in line with your moral standard.
Contrary to what anti-message fic purists say, this method does not have to involve hamfisted preaching. In fact, the subtler the delivery is, the better.
Ironically, the last movies to even halfway subtly counter the Death Cult’s conditioning were 80s slasher flicks. Contemporary feminist types love to gripe about how anybody who fornicated or lit up a joint received a death sentence, while only the virginal girl survived.
The slasher genre died out in the early 90s. If you look at teen sex and drug use statistics, both declined from their peak in 1980 and only started rising again in the 90s. That’s not to give all the credit for the reduction in degeneracy to slasher flicks, but it’s undeniable that those movies exerted considerable influence on the youth culture of the time.
To renew the culture, tell stories with appealing heroes who win using Christian moral principles.
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So they’ve lost the ability to tell an entertaining story because they don’t need it. That does leave an opening for those non-death cult artists who can tell an entertaining story. Such stories are always in fashion.
The tech to do this has actually been with us for quite a while. Before Viacom came down on them (to hide the flaws in their own product), there was a thriving Star Trek fan film community that produced (in some cases) stuff that was as good as the original. This was done on a shoestring budget, by amateurs, who had nothing going for them besides enthusiasm. A professional, well funded effort could certainly produce something entertaining.
Whatever you make, you have to animate it. Pop cult Millennials only understand cartoons.
Bonus points if you make the characters cute enough to inspire rule 34.
Millennials as a whole are a lost cause.
Their overconfidence has led to the decay of their art, but it hardly matters to them when they have control of every platform and no way to face failure or consequences.
They couldn’t even make a movie like Pleasantville these days, but they also don’t need to. This is what a lot of normal people don’t understand. They don’t need to work their black magic anymore.
What artists have to do is be the best they can and try to boost each other when they can. This isn’t a competition, but a way to create an ecosystem free of poison that can give people what they’ve been missing.
This is also going to require shattering both the false views of art from both sides of the old political spectrum–postmodernism taken as fact, and art as a babysitter and timewaster. Putting things back in their proper place will do a lot of good.
The hardest part of making decent movies isn’t the equipment or the expertise, it’s the distribution. Movie theaters aren’t even making profits for big studios anymore so getting a showing through that way would be difficult. There’s no longer local video stores which would be glad to sell local films. Online distribution would be the way to go, but the easiest sites to monetize are also likely to censor you. But I guess a neo-patronage model could work, though I can’t think of any successful models for movies that didn’t capitalize on an existing fanbase (ex. the Angry Video Game Nerd movie.)
That being said I’m hardly an expert in this area, and I do see a lot of small documentaries around on various streaming site (ex. the fun Small Town Monster films) so someone has figured out a way to make it work.
One of the things that the pandemic demonstrated is that people will watch first run movies from the comfort of their living room couch. They won’t pay 30 bucks for the privilege, but they’ll pay something. So I think that’s the future of distribution. The old Hollywood model is broken, they just don’t know it yet.
They might not face consequences in terms of jobs, but they face them from the audience. Increasingly, people are just tuning out, which is why their movies and tv shows have massive drop offs. Once comic based media is gone, they don’t have anything left for the general audience. If a movie staring an Avenger failed and the last successful comic movie was Joker (which wasn’t even about the Joker), that’s a good sign that things are going down. Currently, they are trying to pivot to more traditional fantasy properties,and trying to do it on the cheap with animated series that compete with anime, but those are niche and have even more dedicated fanbases than comic books. Importantly, unlike comic book fans, fantasy fans are not used to being subjected to constant retcons and revisions.
If the popularity of HAZBIN HOTEL or Friday Night Funkin’ are any indication, the next fad will be demons.
Literally. Just demons and romanticizations of Hell.
That’s just the natural consequence of 2000s goth teenage edgelords reaching their thirties.
I’ve been chewing on this concept since the last time you stated it. Then I look at my fanfiction, where I’ve been writing a moral hero who wins via Biblical morality. The stories are awash in theological discussions and Bible verses quoted verbatim. And I have hundreds of readers per month. None of them complain that the stories are ‘preachy’. In fact, at least one reader has praised the use of ‘spiritualism’. You want an untapped, unreached audience? Get on r/fanfiction. These are the ‘whale-readers’. These people read stories by the hundreds. They download in bulk. They don’t care what fandom they read, as long as it has the tropes they want. You know, like real books. But they want to read for free, and fanfiction is a vast ocean. It’s modern-day pulps where anybody can publish anything. I think we Christians ought to be looking at this genre as well as the others.
Fan fiction would provide valuable experience for new authors. They could focus more on details and on continuity than on creating settings from scratch, and they could anonymously embarass themselves before they master their craft.
Unfortunately, “free” won’t refurbish Brian’s Super Nintendo, so he is embracing neo patronage and teaching himself to game social media.
The religious right kept focusing on fiction portraying magic, ghosts, or some other supernatural element that 95-ish% of the general population (including Christians) doesn’t think is even real. They neglected the part where heroic kids became heroic by defying their authorities (parents and teachers), heroic couples became couples by having sex, and married people and Christians were, at best, boring (but were typically antagonists).
It’s always been fashionable to bash the religious right, regardless of the fact that all of their warnings have been vindicated.
They also willingly take the blame for schoolmarm soccer moms to this day, when even a careful bit of research would prove that their parents and grandparents weren’t even the ones who did the deed the actual culprits accuse them of doing.
Christians in the west placed themselves in this self-imposed ghetto and use excuses to keep themselves in it to this day.
I.E.: There is no such thing as Christian Music/Fiction/Film and there should be no dedicated industry dedicated to catering and pandering to this made-up and completely forged demographic.