EDIT: On second thought, this is a bit of a derail. Should I link it to the Progressive Rage Thread? It's a bit more appropriate for there, except for the fact that its context is here.
Lysabild, I'm not really sure what the problem here is. I'm going to keep using 300 as an example, because it happens to be the flavor of the week, but this whole spiel can be readily applied to just about any movie that comes up in this sort of analysis. You like 300 because it is a ridiculous, over-the-top action movie. The violence is at once preposterous and preposterously awesome. That's okay! I like it for that reason, too. I actually am pretty sure I have a copy lying around somewhere, and maybe I will go watch it later. It's on par with Shoot 'Em Up for crazy-awesome violence. I don't want to take that away from you; I can't speak for anyone else here as far as that goes, but I'd guess that there aren't that many people here who do.
There's no contradiction here. I (and you) can appreciate what's impressive about the movie, even as we talk about what problems we have with it, or even about the problems we have with the implications. It's certainly ridiculous to insist that there's no greater meaning when one of the chief people involved with its creation (even with the comic precursor to the movie; I would be really interested to see what the people who made the film thought) insists that there is a message. You don't have to take that meaning from the movie, and you don't even have to participate in talking about it. If you feel this thread's gotten off-track, and I think at this point it probably has, that's also fine. You can try to rerail it, or you can ask us to take it to another thread, and I like to think we'll probably listen.
I certainly don't think people are stupid. Far from it! I think people are a lot smarter than they're given credit for. They're certainly smart enough to draw the conclusions the creators of the movie want them to. They're smart enough to take the message that these tough, strong, handsome guys narrating the story, defending freedom and making a heroic sacrifice to protect their families are the Good Guys. You'd have to be stupid not to recognize this. Manipulating people through the media requires them to be perceptive and clever, because you need them to recognize the message you're sending, and you need them to be able to contextualize it appropriately. People are smart, but we are in an environment that encourages us to avoid examining certain things too closely; usually by using that intelligence to make it uncomfortable to do so. Note that I said "we" there; I'm hardly immune to it. I possess no special perceptive powers. Somebody else drew my attention to something I hadn't consciously thought about before, but that I hadn't before considered it doesn't mean I never should.
This isn't about elitism; I would absolutely love to be proven wrong. There are as many triangular circles as I give fucks about who does it, or how educated they are. I care about their adherence to spelling, grammar, and formal logic only to the extent that I'm able to understand what they're saying. Political correctness is, at best, a band-aid. Nobody should ever do something because it's politically correct; that becomes its own form of racism/sexism/whatever discriminatory practice is relevant. "Being right all the time" is a gripe I don't really get; everybody wants to be right all the time, and nobody discards a belief without being convinced that it's wrong in some way. Claiming that it's a problem is either saying you don't want to bother to prove them wrong, or that whoever you're talking about is just stubborn (which isn't a problem with the ideology, it's a problem with the person you're talking to at the moment, and it's very, very important to keep the two separate).
But that's what really gets me about your post. You don't seem to be arguing that these analyses are wrong. You seem to be saying that we shouldn't even be thinking about them. Not that we can be shown incorrect, but that we shouldn't even consider rocking the boat. I'm all for dismissing ludicrous theories, but you have to show why they're ludicrous in order do that. What you seem to be upset with, though, is any theory at all. And that's a lot closer to the Thought Police scenario you seem to be afraid of, where nobody's allowed a dissenting voice, than anything I've advocated.
Because, ultimately, what this whole thing comes down to is a few people dissenting, and being told that they're wrong for doing it. Not that they're wrong because the reasons they disagree aren't accurate, but because they're apparently trying to force everyone to agree with them.
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Topic: Things that made you RRRRRRAAAAGGGGEEEE today: Trust-o-nomics Edition (Read 3785536 times)