Iâm going to share with you guys a revelation Iâve had about why politics in fiction is so unbearable now, and Iâll probably go on a while, so Iâll just tl;dr right now.
Up until recently, âpolitical messagesâ in fiction were meant to give you a new perspective on real world issues. Now, political messages use real world issues as shorthand for the message theyâre already delivering.
Iâm going to give you about the most obvious example I can think of for the former.
Let That Be Your Last Battlefield is hardly Star Trekâs most subtle hour, but itâs still a thought experiment. Youâre invited to take the position of a third party and observe black-white race relations through the perspective of an alien being. And in a world of Gorn lizard people and energy beings and that one talking baby, itâs ridiculous that two people who are nearly identical canât get along because of (ba dum tssh) the color of their skin.Â
Youâre not meant to look at these Star Trek characters and go âoh, this is like black people and white peopleââyouâre meant to look at black people and white people and go âoh, this is like the characters who had a race war over petty differences on Star Trek. Howâd that work out for them?â
In contrast, letâs look at the more recent The Falcon And The Winter Soldier.
The villain and the general plot are meant as a metaphor for the refugee crisis, but itâs really poorly established and constructed and executed, in just about every way. You basically have to have a working knowledge of the refugee crisis to even understand what theyâre getting at. But the idea is⊠and I donât think they spelled this out until episode four or so, well into the plot, so you just could not understand the fundamentals of the conflict or what anyoneâs motivations were and anythingâŠÂ
but anyway, the idea was that after the Thanos Snap, half the population of Earth disappeared, so the developed world welcomed immigrants from the third world to help rebuild society in the wake of all that. But, five years later, when the Snap was undone, everyone came back, so they just kicked out all the immigrants and I guess gave all their property and land and money over to the people whoâd come back to life while putting the immigrants in camps. And the bad guy decided to fix that by blowing people up.
Now, I think that couldâve worked as a metaphor, but they didnât put any effort into it beyond âget it, these people are like refugeesâ. It didnât work as an analogy, it didnât work as a thought experiment, it didnât work as a parallel.Â
And they couldâve used the situation to make you identify with the Flag Smashers, to put you in their shoes and ask you to emphasize with themâbut they never did. We never saw what theyâd been through, what was motivating them, what they were hoping to accomplish.Â
They just had Sam Wilson deliver a cringe-as-hell speech about how the people weâd seen being terrorists for six hours shouldnât be called terrorists and the best way to prevent them from being terrorists was to give into all their demands.
The writers went at the story from the position that their audience already agreed with them (or, worse, that their audience was dumb and just needed a strong talking-to to get them to agree) and so they would just present the political message of their story and get happy nods. No effort to educate, no effort to inform, no effort to convince. The whole thing is more of an exploitation movie centered around the refugee crisis than an attempt to address it through fiction.
And thatâs the problem with a lot of writing these days. Instead of using a fictional character to explain why something Donald Trump does is bad, they invent a fictional character, say âlook, itâs Trump!â, thus heâs bad and they fight him. And it used to be they would have main charactersânoble, heroic, sympathetic charactersârepresenting the political positions that they were criticizing!
If Star Trek: Discovery had a good-natured character who was making a good-faith argument about why immigration should be restricted, and other characters opposed him, I donât think anyone would mind. But they donât do that. They take a character, heâs Space Hitler, heâs a straw-man for all the politics that the writers donât like, and they blow him up. Oh, and heâs a straight white man, natch.
