In the past, I’ve mentioned that I had to defuse and remove some of the toxic expectations that media had trained into me during my youth. At the time, I was mostly referring to gender roles and relationship expectations. One specific example was the whole heroic entitlement bullshit, where the hero of the story gets the girl. Looking at it now, I’m realizing that there was way more poison than I’d ever realized in the media that I and my cohort had consumed.
I was thinking about how things that were intended as satire were absorbed without an understanding of the authorial intent. These were taken as high-energy fantasies. The problem is, there are people who have issues with that internal distinction being imagination and aspiration.
A big one that stands out to me, looking back, is Judge Dredd. It was just an action movie, not something to be taken seriously, and at the time, I didn’t understand it’s origins in satire. Some elements were obvious, but others weren’t. There’s a scene early on in the movie with the comic relief character is caught hiding from a fire fight in a vending machine, after he’d been delivered to his new living assignment, after his release from prison. This resulted in him being given a death sentence, partially because he’d committed it immediately after being released from jail. (IIRC, I haven’t watched it in a long time.) The whole Judge, Jury and Executioner thing, looking back, is clearly satire against extrajudicial killings. Though that’s from a modern view, where such things have become fairly common and fairly well known. I’ve no idea how common or well known such actions were back then.
This idea however, may have subconsciously inspired some of those killings that we see these days. Many of the folks committing them are of my generation, and would have seen movies of that era in their formative years. And instead of it being an outlandish idea, a piece of fiction, it may have taken root in the souls.
The punisher is another one, though I have less memories of those movies, I do see the logo being used in places that are contextually incongruent with the ideals of the character, but entirely in character with those who’d have appreciated the vigilantism, without understanding broken morality at the heart of it.
Folks have said plenty of times that the satire of Starship Troopers is lost on many of the folks who watched it. And now I’m wondering if media illiteracy has meant that much of the our consumption was of toxic ideas that have converted into toxic ideals though years of exposure and internalization.
Leave a Reply