A brief piece to start off your week, reflecting on Civil War (2024) and the curious range of audience expectations placed on this film, leading to many viewers' disappointment over its hand-wringing about the complexity of war journalism.
What did we expect this film to do, in the middle of rising authoritarian threats? And did misguided expectations of resistance art detract from the lesson it instead advances?
#BetterWorldsTheory #CoSoFilm #Activism #War
https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/what-kind-of-resistance-art-do-we
@MLClark interesting take of âself-congratulatoryâ for Donât Look Up & Glass Onion. I smell what youâre cooking & on reflection perhaps theyâre both representative of our times; superficial hashtag/bumpersticker style activism of mere representational alignment. I saw âlookâ being âweâve met the enemy and he is usâ cynicism than self-congratulating.
Glass Onionâs pastiche wouldâve been spoiled by messaging heavier than the mostly one dimensional characters could deliver; they were the commentary
To be clear, I quite enjoyed Glass Onion!
But as you note, it can be self-defeating to take the work that film was doing as anything more than a kind of "superficial hashtag/bumpersticker style activism".
Then again, I'm naturally suspicious of any media that makes it too easy for the audience to feel better by contrast than most of the characters set up to be easy sites of ridicule. If a work is preaching to the choir, you can bet that I'll be checking for stains in the pews.