A Topic of Which I Never Tire
Some day I will discover the source of my obsession with this topic, and need impose no longer on weary readers who have heard me hold out my opinions before.
Each time I think I have a clear answer to the question, something happens to provoke me to puzzlement again.
In this case, I heard a man I once respected publicly denounced the film SOUND OF FREEDOM, on that grounds that it is associated in his mind with the anonymous internet troll Q, also called Q-Anon, who propounded alleged insider knowledge that Trump, cooperating with the military, would rise up and overthrow the international Satanist pedophile slaver-ring currently running the country.
This man — courtesy forbids I give his name — nowadays regards me and all conservatives as Q-Anon terrorist insurrectionists, cult members, and sociopaths.
And therefore he runs interference for pedophile slavery rings.
He protects child-rapists gangs from criticism, in order to quell the greater and deeper threat to all that is holy, namely, me, the dread and dreaded Trump voter.
He is a Pharisee.
He is holier than thou. To preserve his holiness, he is not allowed to touch anything ritually unclean.
To be frank, the sight of his descent into madness disturbs me, for I see disturbing tendencies to pharisaism in myself. I routinely accuse my political adversaries of the same time of dark-hearted sociopathy in terms much the same as his, merely with the values reversed.
If Trump voters like a film, for the Pharisee, the film is unclean.
Any merit or demerit the film might possess as a timely warning on a matter of pressing public interest is dismissed as a distraction from more pure and sincere political efforts, that is, efforts untainted by Trump; no merit or demerit in storytelling craft need be addressed, or, rather, all are determined by political stance.
Whatever Trumpsters like must be accused of being bad not in some ways, but in all ways, since (of course!) having any opinion not entirely condemnatory of Trumpsters, and all our works and all our ways, is ritually unclean.
A sane man can have an opinion about the good aspects of an evil man — you or I find things to admire in Caesar, for example, or salute Herod’s taste in architecture — but to a Pharisee, the unclean are unclean in every respect, aspect, and part.
Now, I have not seen the film, and voice no opinion about it, but by all accounts it is well made and well acted.
But not to the Woke.
Tropes perfectly acceptable in any other film with any other theme are allowable and acceptable: here, they are a danger to democracy! Q-Anon terrorist will start shooting pizza parlors at any moment, homosexuals rounded up into deathcamps, women denied the vote, and Negros put in chains. (Fortunately, the world will freeze due to global warming long before that.)
The point is that, thanks to their political bias, the Woke not only cannot make good films, they cannot see what is good or bad in films. All they can see is Woke and Nonwoke, Clean and Unclean, Elect and Reprobate.
All men are either Enlightened (them and theirs) or Benighted (you and yours). To be Enlightened means to be immune to criticism in all things; to be benighted means to be condemned in all things.
As longtime readers know, I have for a long time, far too long, been puzzling about the inability of modern films and novels even to adhere to the basic elements of story telling.
While I think men of genius crop up once a generation, I also think any journeyman writer should be able to craft a workmanlike product and make it entertaining: and the Woke cannot even seem to do that.
Worse, they blame the audience for their failure, and not just because the audience is vulgar and dull, but because we are evil: racist, sexist, phobic or what have you. We are accused, not of an aesthetical failure, but a moral one.
Nor do I think this is because the film is meant as propaganda. Propaganda can be entertaining: look at the film ALEXANDER NEVSKY, made in Soviet Russia as part of the effort to gin up support for the war.
SOYLENT GREEN was meant as pro-contraceptive hence Anti-Catholic propaganda, as ANIMAL FARM is anticommunist, as UNCLE TOM’S CABIN is abolitionist. I call into question the judgment of any man who says they are not constructed by proper story-telling principles.
Woke films are meant as virtue-signaling. They are tearing down statues, trampling the monuments of the older generation, to make room for the utopian vision, the world-revolution, of what amounts to a political cult.
The story telling is bad because their morals are reversed; the character arcs are static because characters are treated as allegorical symbols of whatever political identity-group they tokenize; the plots are static because the writer’s worldview only allows for victim-groups and oppressor-groups, without any normal cycles of failure and success; no one, hero or villain, is responsible for his actions, because this worldview denies objective reality, i.e. responsibility.
The writers suffer psychological malfunction because their worldview cannot fit the world. Writing reflects one’s worldview. If one believes nonsense, one can only write nonsense.
If one admires and promotes evil, one can only write evil. And, despite what you may have read, villains are usually unpleasant, boring, self-absorbed, self-centered, self-obsessed people: Boring.
And so their stories are boring.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
