re: never watching morally-bad media ever again.
idk. It’s possible to acquire problematic media without financially or socially benefiting the people who created it, and I argue problematic media is part of a balanced media diet. I listen to podcasts like Knowledge Fight - a show that keeps tabs on what’s happening in InfoWars and Alex Jones’ public life - not because I enjoy Alex Jones, but because it’s actively helpful to understand how shitheads like him operate and continue to operate while I’m in my safe little social media bubble of hot trans people and goofy Trigun posts. One of the first things I acquired for my local media server is the movie about the Titanic sinking produced by Nazis. People raise an eyebrow when I say “I have the Nazi Titanic” but then you watch it and the propaganda is as insidious as it is simplistic. They literally wrote a German OC into a real-world tragedy and decided the builder of the Titanic was Jewish. The final shot of the movie is a wall of text about how capitalistic greed wins once again. It damn near asks the audience to go enlist. I argue having that/showing people that is as important - if not more - than showing people Triumph of the Will in college. TotW or Birth of a Nation are categorically evil documents. Even if you’re not prompted beforehand, you walk out of that rolling your eyes and saying “I GET it, sheesh.” Titanic (1943) is a disaster movie that happens to also be a recruitment tool to the bullshit ideology of a fascist movement. That movie is a (only slightly) more intense version of how Marvel’s scripts are blessed by the US Army. Finger-waggling that someone watches a used DVD of the wizard boy movies achieves nothing. Watching that as an adult and seeing all the shit you missed is a kid is much more useful than just pretending the whole goddamn thing is a writeoff. Examine WHY it sucks. I’d much rather millennials attempt to rekindle old nostalgia and find the hook-nosed goblins and knowledge several of the adult cast members endorse/defend JKR a bitter ingredient that ruins the dish. When you watch something with dark undertones, you can break apart the inherent pieces and figure out why you liked it initially. For all the bullshit thinkpieces about how HP was kid-power, the true answer for the movies, at least, is the environment. The music. The locations. Columbus made a warm kids’ movie set in a castle and it had a John Williams score to spackle over the cracks of the shitty underlying story. It may not be literal nazi propaganda but there’s utility to occasionally dipping into media made by shitty people with shitty opinions. Black-and-white knee-jerk shit like frustratedly shouting “just watch SOMETHING ELSE” so you get 30k notes doesn’t actually accomplish anything.
