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
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.
@MLClark 👍☺️thought provoking provokes thoughts.
@MLClark 😀my response is an “and” rather than a “but”. I don’t expect the major studios to be particularly challenging until McDonalds is willing to have Oskar Schindler action figures in a Happy Meal. I know you know what I mean I think.
@CanisPundit
(And thanks for
a. reading; and
b. offering counterpoints!
Always love that, and you do the latter so darned well.)