If you spent any length of time on social media this weekend, you couldn’t escape seeing culture warrior Conservatives backsliding into the Pop Cult slop funnel en masse. Many of the same people who lamented the outrage marketing that turned Captain Marvel from a near-flop to a billion-dollar hit fell for a cynical ploy to recoup losses from a strike.
Here’s the uncomfortable yet inescapable reality driving the backslide: Most people – even social Conservatives – want an institution with perceived cultural authority telling them what to watch.
When someone says, “I just want Hollywood to make good, fun movies again,” he means “I want Hollywood to make my entertainment product consumption choices for me.”
It’s sad. And there’s no excuse.
Joining the counterculture entertainment scene has never been easier. There are enough independent books, movies, and comics to keep audiences entertained for life. And the advent of neopatronage makes it simpler than ever to fund and execute professional-quality projects.
But it’s another sad fact that much of the Conservative audience has been captured by parade jumpers like Daily Wire and Angel Studios.
As Logos Triumphant co-host Pinesap said the other day:
Do we really want to give out blue participation trophies for art? We don’t really want to do that.
We want to demand quality, right? And part of quality is, again, subtlety.
So the real question is how to craft stories that counter the ruling cult’s narrative.
Some 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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I don’t know who said it first, and I think the version I heard was a paraphrase of the original, but I’ve heard that a good rule of thumb for “message fiction” is to never allow the message to outpace or outshine the entertainment value of the story.
To your point, it shouldn’t be overt and obvious. And you’re right that there’s a responsibility beyond just telling an entertaining story.
Do you think an understanding of objective morals makes it easier to tell a good story? I suppose an author can’t just invoke an imaginary moral system that ignores reality, and declares evil things to be on the side of good. That can’t be compelling. I’m thinking of examples like The Golden Compass and Disney Star Wars.
Storytelling is how a society explains itself to itself. That’s what theme is when you get down to it.
Mainstream storytelling is garbage because the themes are now informed by the ruling Death Cult’s heretical anti-morals.
There is also a tendency for unearned elitism from some in this crowd to think that if it isn’t “on par with” Tolkien, Lewis, Heinlein, or whoever (it really is everyone and everything) then it isn’t good enough and the artist should gain no support.
I remember some nonsense from early in the PulpRev days from those who refused to give any support or lend a helping hand because fledgling independents didn’t have the education or experience people who lived 100 years ago had. Unless you’re putting out Dune or LOTR you should not succeed! All this complaining while people they hated were getting a free pass and a hand up in destroying the things they loved.
I’m sorry to say, but if you don’t like the way things are, then you have to work to change it. If you can’t get involved yourself, then try and support those who are.
It is baffling at the amount of people who don’t realize how much art and entertainment was spoon-fed to them back in the day and how they never had to work for it. It’s always just been expected that they will throw a rock and hit something made specifically for their tastes that they can devour like McDonalds hamburger whenever they feel like. Going out of their comfort zone, in contrast, is completely unknown to them.
But that’s what we have to do to build new things. The scene has come a long way since 2016 or so, a lot of new avenues opening up and fresh faces excitedly hopping on board. This never would have happened if we listened to the curmudgeons years ago. And now you have a new climate finally starting to take shape.
If you want to waste your time instead talking about the newest Hollywood middle-finger salute then you are beyond hopeless at this point.
100% agree — I think Heinlein said something to the effect of “if you want to write a great novel, you need to have done the time writing bad ones first.” So my thought has been that if I want to read 10/10 books I need to support authors while they are writing out their 4/10, 5/10, 6/10 books.
There is one hard and fast rule of writing, and it’s “You’ve got to get the suck out.”
“a cynical ploy to recoup losses from a strike.”
I assume you’re talking about ‘B*rbenheimer’, which honestly doesn’t sit right with me and I’m surprised by how many on the right just ate it up.
“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.”
I think it was EMJ who said that if was teaching a ‘sex-ed’ class, then he’d be showing the students nothing but slasher flicks.
Some Pop Cult-adjacent film buffs I used to pal around with used to be puzzled that the heyday of slasher flicks was during the Reagan era. They missed the fact that all the blood and guts served the subtext that traditional sexual morality was the winning behavior.