Author Topic: Wonder Woman  (Read 2243 times)

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Offline Michael Hardner

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Re: Wonder Woman
« Reply #15 on: June 11, 2017, 07:54:08 am »
Fair enough, perhaps the Bible was a poor choice of example.   Regardless, you can find myths and legends and folk-tales of fantastical and supernatural individuals and creatures and events everywhere. It's ubiquitous. Any culture, any time in history.

Ok, I am suddenly disarmed.  Now I'm not sure if my assessment of this genre is from being out of touch.

Certainly my facebook feed is FULL of status updates about superheroes, and this super lady in partcular.  I was ascribing that to the fact that most of my friends (Facebook friends that is) are liberal humanist moralists, but I realize that they are also much younger than me.

Are we indeed at a point where our cultural icons - even our FANTASY icons - matter ?  Or is this just a fad.  I'm considering it.

Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way.  Superhero people films are certainly more relevant today than sitcoms, which was the opposite case 25 years ago when Murphy Brown's character choices became an election issue.  And maybe group moral change is just brought on the winds of whatever people are paying attention to in these times.

IF that's true, then the moral changes will stay with us, and in 20 years we will be watching something else ... a new type of content ... which will reflect whatever societal questions are top of mind.

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You can look at the Chinese legend of the Five Brothers, or Gilgamesh, or Hercules, or Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, or Whiskey-Jack, or John Henry, or countless others...  why do so many cultures have these figures?

As Harold Innes said, and I paraphrase, why do we pay attention to the things we do ?

TV sitcoms in the 1960s turned escapist and fantastical (Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, My Favourite Martian, Gilligan's Island, Beverley Hillbillies) until the cultural zeitgeist couldn't run away from issues, or assign magical housewives to send them away.  Then, in the 1970s, sitcoms (starting with All in the Family) tackled social issues head-on.

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I think that our current love of superhero movies is just the latest expression of something that goes back a very long time, across many different cultures, and is somehow ingrained in our nature.   As I said before, I don't believe that the longevity and popularity of the superhero genre is an accident, I think it exists because it taps into something built into human nature.

Of course, my reluctance to accept them comes from my distaste for the genre but you are right.  They have always been with us.  They could also be a fad, though, and they are certainly an outcome of the underlying infrastructure that produces films.  ie. demographic tastes, cultural mining, potential for large revenue.

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In describing "value", what is the "value" in Amour?  What makes Amour more inherently worthy of my attention than say Gattaca or Westworld?

You used the term 'value', but I think we don't need to define 'value' and 'impact' since we're both exploring here.

I think that the value and impact of stories is unknowable, and I think that people will pay attention to what they will pay attention to.  I just have a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that pure fantasy would be as impactful to an adult as even a realistic drama such as 'Inherit the Wind'.  'Schindler's List', 'Birth of a Nation' or Philadelphia.

But again, I'm reconsidering this.

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Good acting or complex, realistic characters? Is there more?  A gripping emotional experience? A profound insight on human nature? What really makes a movie or a book "valuable"?

In terms of describing social impact, I think a real story with non super characters would have an advantage in making people see how social issues play out in the human arena.  You can see why I think that, right ?

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Gattaca doesn't exceed the grasp of the genre.  Gattaca demonstrates the possibilities of the genre. 

Yes, and speculative fiction of which science fiction is a part can answer the types of questions you describe.

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A tall thin grey shape surrounded by shorter thicker grey shapes in a sea of grey haze.  I was tremendously impressed, as you can imagine.
 

Yes, I agree it's fantastical.  It's like if God redesigned the Eiffel Tower to be better and also decided that it should be wonderful.  It looks like a giant grey olive on a stick.  They light it up at night now, so it can be pink or something during Pride.