We keep coming back to the dearth of quality and that is due to the capture of the industry by half a dozen corporations. Pick a decade prior to the '80s, and you will several landmark films, many of which weren't successful at the time of release, that changed the audience and the industry and none of which would ever get made today. The people who have the talent to make those films can't get work anywhere near the industry because they aren't related to or having sex with anyone that can give them the opportunity. The industry has been neutered in every aspect by the companies that own it, and that is because making films is not the objective. It's always been about the money, but the product is no longer the vehicle by which the money is made.
The problem with Sandman is the first six episodes were originally a series of pretty good self contained stories with a fairly weak umbrella arc (the arc being the sandman needs to recover lost tools that at the end he decides he never needed anyway. As an arc it's a waste of time; you're supposed to enjoy the individual stories - a bit like life really - don't let knowing the ending spoil it for you because the ending is not the best bit) that unfolded episodically on a monthly basis over six months, and once you condense that into a series that can be binge watched in less than a week the weakness of the overall arc becomes more obvious than the beauty of each individual story. This is the problem of thinking what works in one medium will work equally well in another completely different medium without much in the way of adaptation.
I'm not sure this media strategy makes a lot of sense. The title seems designed to attract right-wing viewers, but the critique being offered relies heavily on understanding concepts that are way in the weeds, even for some socialists. Judging from this comment section, it's pretty clear that a lot of people don't understand the criticism being offered.
It attracts people who like free speech and controversy in art. Less popular with people who like being comfortable and PC and have the luxury of both.
That MUC shit like miss marvel is most stunning example. "the British empire was bad becasue of the partition of India, but the American Empire is good"
I did have to think about "Don't Look Up". I was genuinely surprised how much they weren't pulling their punches for such a big budget movie. I'm curious what other leftists think about it, maybe I'm not seeing the liberalism into it, but it genuinely sounded like it had a message that couldn't be turned into something that's beneficial for billionaires.
'Interpassivity' is used in cinema to perform our anti-capitalism, anti-establishment-ism for us. It functions to satisfy our emotions upon our experiencing something we agree with, thus permitting us to go on with our lives, feeling satisfied, instead of working toward enacting necessary change.
@@elonmusksellssnakeoil1744 David Foster Wallace wrote some interesting stuff even back in the 90s about the power of ironic humor to drive complacency, particular among elite coastal liberals.
@@elonmusksellssnakeoil1744I know this is 6 months later, but what would be the difference with media/art that does incentivize people to act? For all I know "Don't Look Up" did not have a message that said "it's all useless, let's stop trying". It didn't have an explicit activist message either. Similar to "The Wolf of Wall Street": It shows how things are, and leaves you to take a conclusion from it about what should be done. But you can't say of these movies that they actively try to make people complicit and inactive. At least for me, they didn't have this effect on me, quite the opposite.
Culture is a tremendous force for imperialism. Being a lover of sci-fi (which is almost always propaganda) I never watch a movie without trying to figure out the message. And there's always a message.
There is an important distinction between corporate "wokeness" and activist "wokeness". Confusingly they are both trying to ride the coattails of each other. Actually there's three or four since there can be a difference between those who have thoroughly educated themselves, those who support those movements but are less passionate, and those who only care because they are afraid of Trumpists. In the wake of Trump concerns of racial and gender representation have become mainstream and corporations are following that current. Regardless of what the corporations do now that they have taken control of "wokeness" it is still based around the narrative of "oppressor" and "oppressed" those with power and privilege, and those without and Marxism fits extremely nicely into that. People already know the phrase "the 1%" and "the 99%". It's just that obviously the corporations are not going to do that work for you, and millionaire talk show hosts will probably come up with some BS as to why you shouldn't listen to socialists. It is cliche, but racism is used to divide the working class. Anti-racism that simply blames poor white people can do the same thing, but the hardcore knows-what-they-are-talking-about "woke" understand it is not as simple as blaming one group or another, and that those with power are far more responsible than those without.
you three chicks are the BEST!!!! i'm a 70 (going on 17) year old musician filmMaker/sculptor/life long communist. born in chicago, grewUp in Frisco/westOakland (in the 1960's, obviously), and have lived in self-imposed exile for the past 40 years across europa (preWallComeDown berlin, ibiza 1979-80, now in the people's republic of Hackney/London E5), i am planning a winter camping trip across the Dombass on my eRecumbentTrike to shoot a doc. PLEASE!!! PLEASE!!! PLEASE!!! get in touch. peace love and all the best. yourz, misha
Ty West X? please. that's not a film, it's a copy product that wants to be a film. also "period piece"? come on, it's a 70s wannabe. but i'm just being nit-picky. Thank you for this conversation, it's so great to hear you all share your minds.
Jordan Peele's Us (2019) is a good recent example of political horror. As for 2022 so far: We're All Going to the World's Fair, Crimes of the Future, Dashcam.
I already relayed this anecdote on the previous video with these to but I figure it's more suited to this one. We watched Sweet Sweetback's Badaaasss Song in an intro to film theory when I was in art school a few years ago, and some people were very upset and all they took away from it was that it was irresponsible for the prof to show us a movie with a 12-13 year old Mario Van Peebles in a sex scene with an adult woman because that is triggering to them.
This conversation being a couple years old now. I have to say that rings of power was really horribly slow in the first season. As someone who swore it off I've been reconverted by the new season. Absolutely unmatchable atmosphere when it comes to shows.
The horror genre has historically been a low budget B movie grindhouse genre. That very fact has made it accessible to renegade producers/directors who want to incorporate subversive messages and can't attract high-budget investors or superstar actors. . The People Under the Stairs, The Hills Have Eyes, Deadly Blessing, Tales From the Hood, all fine examples. But now we are overwhelmed with pinche comic book superhero films that are almost invariably pro-establishment, pro-cop, crap.
Everyone who talks about writers rooms talk about woke self censorship. People are afraid to even spitball jokes. On a separate note, the problems w film is the economics of the industry has changed. Even before COVID theaters were getting crushed. DVD revenue is dead. Where do financiers get their money back? It forces the dumb super hero/tent pole genre. BTW, huge numbers of 70’s independent films were tax shelters… also a long dead financing tool!
Because some people who claim to be woke are in fact not woke, does not change the meaning of woke. Woke means not bigoted, the rest is just fluff or authoritarian trolls projecting. Yea, putin's troll farms do attack liberals (I don't mean nei-libs who are themselves authoritarians in reality) and egalitarians, not just authoritarian bigots.
To liberals, culture _is_ politics. It's the stuff that surrounds our lives but doesn't materially affect our circumstances, especially not the material circumstances of our labor. The very last thing liberals want to change are the material structures of capitalism.
Giving birth to a bloody iPhone has to be the stupidest most on-the-nose horror device I’ve heard of. On par with the most cliche parody of something like Black Mirror. Safe to say that Catherine and I have different tastes.
I don't have the patience to watch to the end. Cultural production died when Bretton Woods died. Think about how the difference between decades was gigantic before 1973. After, the difference began shrinking until we are at the point where we have no more stories to tell.
So what is their solution for this alleged problem in culture and entertainment? Is it not to include/highlight concepts or themes about marginalized/disenfranchised people (as if that never happened in thr past)?
Some historicity would be nice. A bit of cultural verismilitude, rather than the habitual imposition of present day mores and attitudes onto historical periods and other continents and fantasy worlds. There is an abundance of stories about historical injustices which should be told, most centring on the working class and peasantry, who either never appear, or only appear to be rescued or hectored at by the modern middle class self-inserts. How many shows do we get about union strikes, and the brutality towards workes and peasants of owners, cops and soldiers? They are the vast majority of humanity, then and now. Where is their representation?
@@patrickholt2270 Yeah, there definitely should be more stories involving the global working class and impoverished people. Also, less stories where the actions of villains against society are motivated by generalized anarchist sentiments or nihilism instead of principled criticisms or issues with the capitalist system writ large. I thought the 2019 Joker film did a great job with the backstory of the villain (who is also the protagonist). The whole plot literally is set off by the fact that the Joker's state funded mental health services (which he was successfully using to manage his mental health conditions) were ended due to lack of government funding! As it relates to the fantasy or sci-fi genres, arguments against the inclusion of people from marginalized groups make no sense. If it's fiction, literally anyone can be included b/c ...spoiler... it's not real! People that are raising their unfounded grievances are really just self-reporting. To be clear, I'm referring to content where a specific culture is not at all relevant to the characters. Not stories like Black Panther, Shang Chi, or even Black Widow where the cultural backgrounds of the characters are germane to their identities (even though there have been noted cases such as Ghost in the Shell where the cultural background has been conveniently ignored lol). In general, it's really a non-issue, at least in the case of people from marginalized groups taking roles where a character's identity is defined by a specifically different cultural background. It's not like you saw the casting directors for the movie Belfast floating the idea of casting Native Alaskans for that movie. But overall, yeah there should definitely be more stories about the working class struggle and criticisms of capitalsim (like the Joker movie) and less where wealthy or even middle class saviors are depicted swooping in and saving some lower income miscreant from their misfortunes, glorifying the philanthropy of the wealthy (which shouldn't be necessary for people to survive in a modern society).
I wonder about fallout, or the return of Rome to Prime? How did those sneak into these propagandistic times? I loved both - ancient history, post apocalypse. Same as it ever was.
I am DESPERATE to know what Prof Catherine Liu’s thoughts on Bill Maher’s politics are T__T yes, I know he’s a comedian, but he’s also a public figure on TV/media and it seems like he’s anti identity politics AND anti left! ??? Who is he? What is he??
I watched the first episode of The Sandman. I turned to my wife halfway through and said, "You know what's missing from this show?" And she replied "women?" That's exactly what I was going for. By the end of that episode there was a woman or two, but by that point we were beyond caring. The plot was totally banal. We skipped the rest of the episodes.
Wait. What? "...the culture industry...?" The entertainment industry may be the most impactful on whatever culture might be on any given day, but conflating the two (culture and entertainment) just cedes dominion to the entertainment industry.
I know it’s a little pompous to call it the culture industry but as I understand it they’re using a broader term than entertainment industry because it isn’t just Hollywood or broadway or news media, it’s also museums, poetry, educational institutions, etc
@@jakubLonghorn True but then you are talking about something incredibly broad. Thinking of it as a distinct entity is misleading. This is how you get movements that gets some steam and then suddenly get derailed because the leaders assumed that all working class people think the same (again by treating a huge category as a monolith).
Culture and entertainment are the same thing, there is no difference. The idea that there’s a difference us just elitist nonsense. Traditional high culture is a form of entertainment as well - modern people might not find it particularly entertaining, but that is irrelevant. I read The Iliad and The Odyssey because it was entertaining; I wouldn’t have done it otherwise.
@@ludviglidstrom6924 it has nothing to do with high culture vs “low culture” only the additional categories of media and means of distribution implied. Culture industry also includes social media, fashion, print news, private educational contexts etc. None of these would consider themselves part of the entertainment industry.
Y’all at Jacobin are LAME for this title. I watched your premiere of this interview with both Catherine and Eileen. The issue is COMMODIFICATION AND CAPITALIST EXPLOITATION of the arts. Not wOkE. And when you butcher a term to make a fallacy it delegitimizes the initial term’s definition until it means nothing and everything in between. I hate when y’all use Black terminology like this. Woke has been a term in Black organizing spaces before the internet was a thought. Now with liberals AND conservatives controlling culture war shenanigans to divide the working class into single issue warriors, the populous thinks woke means the literal decline of society or weaponizing societal norms for snowflake reactionary self absorbed cash grabs. When in actuality woke is akin to decolonize your mind, critical thinking, subjective secular material dialectic analysis than it is to culture war. If anything woke is counterculture and NOT whatever the fuck y’all made it out to be.
That is correct. Woke = not a bigot. Bigotry is the tool of division the elite have used to dominate and oppress The People for literally thousand of years. I'm on the verge of unsubbing to this channel.
Unfortunate as it is that it no longer means what it was intended to mean, that's what language does. We all know what cultural trend we are talking about that the term has come to describe. I do know a lot of commentators will say "I don't like using the word, but for want of a better one..."
@@markpostgate2551 It's no different than bigots that complained about "political correctness" or "affirmative action" in the 90s....bigotry with a new coat of paint.
What the left doesn't understand is that the right wing in the US has their own twisted definitions of words. The left is full of academics who assume everyone uses the dictionary definition of a word. The right is full of ideologues who twist words to rile up emotions. When a left winger says "woke" in a pejorative it is a critique on the fake virtue signaling of corporations. When the right wing says "woke" it simply means black/brown/liberal culture that we don't like. The right uses the word "woke" because they can't use the N word and remain a member of polite society anymore
I thought chainsaw was an awful movie . no redeeming value what's so ever. In general I'm usually disappointed by the left 's critique of movies and TV series ,
Exactly, what is wokeness in this case? There are so many people who enjoy the content being created today. The only ones complaining are the grievance politics people and I guess old people longing for the "glory days" of cinema/TV which ...spoiler ...never existed. Art is subjective lol
@@claborn79 I think its clearly that woke = postmodernists its just unpackaging a set of philosophical ideas that have been interwoven with social activism and virtue-based grandstanding is hard to do...... so now we all just say woke because thats the umbrella concept that the largely white, uppper middle class, postmodernists overreactive SJW's decided to use for their rhetoric. Or we can pretend like we dont all know what we are talking about and say things like we "dont know what woke means" or "define the term" to get around the growing uncomfortable reality that whats happening in left culture is antithesis to the world it says it says it wants to create.
@@claborn79 well I would say I appreciate some of the critiques of postmodernism, but taken to its extreme of absolute relativism and the erosion of classical liberal values I do not. The Frankfurt school had some interesting analysis but contemporary postmodernism appears divorced from class. So in "my definition", and the "for the lack of a better term", more culturally aligned marxists of today I would say are not marxists. Otherwise we would be outraged by the capitalist class and have a multiracaial uprising for labor.... instead we have a cultural and political class (largely educated well-off SJW types and resistance libs) deflecting to identity to avoid difficult conversations about class and economic structure.... A feint towards ever increasing fragmentation of identity into multiple subcomponents that take precedence over collectivism and then projecting over those identities a matrix of oppressor victim analysis. We will kill eachother before we solve anything major with this approach. But feel free to disagree while we both watch our society decline in the face of ever mounting cultural, economic, and environmental issues.
I was an active participant in the civil rights movement back in the 1960s. And I am not woke. In fact, I categorically reject wokeism. The only identity I care about is class identity. I strongly support the multiracial working class, I love people of color, but I don't hate white people. I love women, but I don't hate men.
@@portalarizona Being "woke" or supporting civil rights is not about hating white people and that's a warped narrative to muffle truthful discussions about racial issues in this country.
@@Based_Proletariat : _"and stuff that Whyte people don't like."_ Woke = not a bigot. Racism is one of the major forms of bigotry. The word racist is not itself "a" racist. It's just a word that itself does not condone racism. Be a part of the solution, not a part of the problem. Stop being a racist hypocrite. You only do more harm to all of your fellow Earthlings.
@@aylbdrmadison1051 I don't have that problem, go to a Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh or Steven Crowder comment section and tell that to them. Critiquing racism and this country racist history, and the fact that racism was committed by Whyte people is not "racist".
This was disappointing. I can appreciate the pragmatism of clickbait titles, but only if it's supported by systemic analysis in the actual content. This was just out-of-touch intelligentsia complaining about the degeneracy of modern culture and how young people these days are making comedians feel bad for being shitty to marginalized folks. Name-dropping a few lefty intellectuals is not analysis, or even meaningful commentary. What you've produced here is clickbait that makes reactionaries go "look, even these old ladies agree that there shouldn't be accountability for influential celebrities" without a class conscious thought entering their heads. Liberal identity politics sucks, sure, but we would all be better off if you went for leftist class conscious arguments for supporting minorities instead of catering to culture war reactionaries out of spite (which is how it appears now).
If you're woke then you cannot be a leftist. The woke are brainwashed rich, neoliberal puritan death cult devoid of personality or a soul. Furthermore, the woke are corporate shills who worship the federal police security state. Woke people like you should leave us normies alone and go out more pronouns, and mental illness in your Twitter bios. Normies love life, families, children, air, earth, comedies, movies, human interaction and all the drama that comes with life. The woke are insane. Leave people alone and stop trying to find meaning in your evil life on the backs of whoever you deem for the moment has oppressed or marginalized.
@@dannyevilcat : Woke = not a bigot. Just because some who claim to be woke are themselves bigoted in reality does not even remotely imply the meaning of the term has changed to mean whatever they claim it does. Some people think being racist towards white people is "woke." But that only proves those people are racists and therefore are the opposite of woke.
@@tmsphere : Nice copy pasta. Are you seriously that lazy-brained you can't even come up with a different way of saying _"No"?_ I must admit though that _"No"_ all by itself is a truly compelling argument. 🙄
I hope y'all aren't slipping to the right with these Rightwing adjacent talking points. What's the point of the left if they're going to placate to the far right with their talking points.
Okay, now I 100% agree with you. Glad to see you're not so bigoted you don't understand that woke = not a bigot. Just stop being racist against all white people by being to lazy to type the word "some."
It's a left-wing critique of a phenomenon that the right wing focuses on. I actually agree with their critique, but I'm not sure if their media strategy is effective. The title seems designed to attract right-wing viewers through the algorithm, but when they get here the discussion uses terminology and makes references to Concepts that are way in the weeds for a particular kind of socialist. Even some left-wing people probably don't know what they're talking about when they use terms like " professional managerial class" or "liberal superego." In fact, having watched a fair amount of MSNBC and some CNN, I can definitely say that they are criticizing that type of commentary.
This is one of the best Jacobin interviews on their channel.
Hah this panel is awesome, love listening to them talk about anything at all
Thank you, Catherine Liu, Eileen Jones, and Jen.
We keep coming back to the dearth of quality and that is due to the capture of the industry by half a dozen corporations.
Pick a decade prior to the '80s, and you will several landmark films, many of which weren't successful at the time of release, that changed the audience and the industry and none of which would ever get made today. The people who have the talent to make those films can't get work anywhere near the industry because they aren't related to or having sex with anyone that can give them the opportunity.
The industry has been neutered in every aspect by the companies that own it, and that is because making films is not the objective. It's always been about the money, but the product is no longer the vehicle by which the money is made.
The world needs a remake of 'Society'
The problem with Sandman is the first six episodes were originally a series of pretty good self contained stories with a fairly weak umbrella arc (the arc being the sandman needs to recover lost tools that at the end he decides he never needed anyway. As an arc it's a waste of time; you're supposed to enjoy the individual stories - a bit like life really - don't let knowing the ending spoil it for you because the ending is not the best bit) that unfolded episodically on a monthly basis over six months, and once you condense that into a series that can be binge watched in less than a week the weakness of the overall arc becomes more obvious than the beauty of each individual story. This is the problem of thinking what works in one medium will work equally well in another completely different medium without much in the way of adaptation.
I'm not sure this media strategy makes a lot of sense. The title seems designed to attract right-wing viewers, but the critique being offered relies heavily on understanding concepts that are way in the weeds, even for some socialists. Judging from this comment section, it's pretty clear that a lot of people don't understand the criticism being offered.
It attracts people who like free speech and controversy in art. Less popular with people who like being comfortable and PC and have the luxury of both.
Thanks y'all! That was fun!
Why isn't this longer!!
Liu spitballs the perfect horror movie 🍿 I love it
That MUC shit like miss marvel is most stunning example. "the British empire was bad becasue of the partition of India, but the American Empire is good"
I did have to think about "Don't Look Up". I was genuinely surprised how much they weren't pulling their punches for such a big budget movie. I'm curious what other leftists think about it, maybe I'm not seeing the liberalism into it, but it genuinely sounded like it had a message that couldn't be turned into something that's beneficial for billionaires.
It is convenient to speak in terms of cinemas, lets you remain vague, yet hiding your intentions is ominous.
'Interpassivity' is used in cinema to perform our anti-capitalism, anti-establishment-ism for us. It functions to satisfy our emotions upon our experiencing something we agree with, thus permitting us to go on with our lives, feeling satisfied, instead of working toward enacting necessary change.
@@elonmusksellssnakeoil1744 David Foster Wallace wrote some interesting stuff even back in the 90s about the power of ironic humor to drive complacency, particular among elite coastal liberals.
@@elonmusksellssnakeoil1744I know this is 6 months later, but what would be the difference with media/art that does incentivize people to act? For all I know "Don't Look Up" did not have a message that said "it's all useless, let's stop trying". It didn't have an explicit activist message either. Similar to "The Wolf of Wall Street": It shows how things are, and leaves you to take a conclusion from it about what should be done. But you can't say of these movies that they actively try to make people complicit and inactive. At least for me, they didn't have this effect on me, quite the opposite.
I can really recommend The Empty Man, a very good and very scary horror movie that came out recently, very philosophical. It deserves a big audience.
Culture is a tremendous force for imperialism.
Being a lover of sci-fi (which is almost always propaganda) I never watch a movie without trying to figure out the message. And there's always a message.
For instance, I used to enjoy the zombie schlock movies until I realized that the zombies represent *protesters.*
@@LongDefiant Or the unwashed masses.
Didn’t the movie Don’t look up reflect where we are?
Solving 9-11 By Christopher Bollyn .
Horror Short by Allison Miller called "Growth"
Why didn’t they mention Safe with Julianne Moore
70s: NETWORK was pretty good.
There is an important distinction between corporate "wokeness" and activist "wokeness". Confusingly they are both trying to ride the coattails of each other. Actually there's three or four since there can be a difference between those who have thoroughly educated themselves, those who support those movements but are less passionate, and those who only care because they are afraid of Trumpists. In the wake of Trump concerns of racial and gender representation have become mainstream and corporations are following that current.
Regardless of what the corporations do now that they have taken control of "wokeness" it is still based around the narrative of "oppressor" and "oppressed" those with power and privilege, and those without and Marxism fits extremely nicely into that. People already know the phrase "the 1%" and "the 99%".
It's just that obviously the corporations are not going to do that work for you, and millionaire talk show hosts will probably come up with some BS as to why you shouldn't listen to socialists. It is cliche, but racism is used to divide the working class. Anti-racism that simply blames poor white people can do the same thing, but the hardcore knows-what-they-are-talking-about "woke" understand it is not as simple as blaming one group or another, and that those with power are far more responsible than those without.
"Wokeness" is postmodernist, which is why the ruling class loves it. It is anti-Marxist.
you three chicks are the BEST!!!! i'm a 70 (going on 17) year old musician filmMaker/sculptor/life long communist. born in chicago, grewUp in Frisco/westOakland (in the 1960's, obviously), and have lived in self-imposed exile for the past 40 years across europa (preWallComeDown berlin, ibiza 1979-80, now in the people's republic of Hackney/London E5), i am planning a winter camping trip across the Dombass on my eRecumbentTrike to shoot a doc. PLEASE!!! PLEASE!!! PLEASE!!! get in touch. peace love and all the best.
yourz, misha
Can we be friends? Im an artist too and go to Hackney a lot
Ty West X? please. that's not a film, it's a copy product that wants to be a film. also "period piece"? come on, it's a 70s wannabe. but i'm just being nit-picky. Thank you for this conversation, it's so great to hear you all share your minds.
Pearl was a great prequel to X
Jordan Peele's Us (2019) is a good recent example of political horror. As for 2022 so far: We're All Going to the World's Fair, Crimes of the Future, Dashcam.
I already relayed this anecdote on the previous video with these to but I figure it's more suited to this one. We watched Sweet Sweetback's Badaaasss Song in an intro to film theory when I was in art school a few years ago, and some people were very upset and all they took away from it was that it was irresponsible for the prof to show us a movie with a 12-13 year old Mario Van Peebles in a sex scene with an adult woman because that is triggering to them.
This conversation being a couple years old now. I have to say that rings of power was really horribly slow in the first season. As someone who swore it off I've been reconverted by the new season. Absolutely unmatchable atmosphere when it comes to shows.
The horror genre has historically been a low budget B movie grindhouse genre. That very fact has made it accessible to renegade producers/directors who want to incorporate subversive messages and can't attract high-budget investors or superstar actors. . The People Under the Stairs, The Hills Have Eyes, Deadly Blessing, Tales From the Hood, all fine examples.
But now we are overwhelmed with pinche comic book superhero films that are almost invariably pro-establishment, pro-cop, crap.
Everyone who talks about writers rooms talk about woke self censorship. People are afraid to even spitball jokes.
On a separate note, the problems w film is the economics of the industry has changed. Even before COVID theaters were getting crushed. DVD revenue is dead. Where do financiers get their money back? It forces the dumb super hero/tent pole genre. BTW, huge numbers of 70’s independent films were tax shelters… also a long dead financing tool!
Because some people who claim to be woke are in fact not woke, does not change the meaning of woke. Woke means not bigoted, the rest is just fluff or authoritarian trolls projecting. Yea, putin's troll farms do attack liberals (I don't mean nei-libs who are themselves authoritarians in reality) and egalitarians, not just authoritarian bigots.
Interesting!
What is PMC
Professional Managerial Class
What I am........unfortunately....
Midnight Sky captured my feelings during the pandemic
To liberals, culture _is_ politics. It's the stuff that surrounds our lives but doesn't materially affect our circumstances, especially not the material circumstances of our labor. The very last thing liberals want to change are the material structures of capitalism.
Is this Tim Cast now?
No The Exorcist?
No mention of dystopian movies being produced and being box office hits?
Hunger Games, Squid Game etc
For horror really recommend The Lighthouse. Feel like these peeps might be into that one.
agreed. That movie made me very uncomfortable.....and I loved every minute of it.
Giving birth to a bloody iPhone has to be the stupidest most on-the-nose horror device I’ve heard of. On par with the most cliche parody of something like Black Mirror. Safe to say that Catherine and I have different tastes.
I don't have the patience to watch to the end. Cultural production died when Bretton Woods died. Think about how the difference between decades was gigantic before 1973. After, the difference began shrinking until we are at the point where we have no more stories to tell.
So what is their solution for this alleged problem in culture and entertainment? Is it not to include/highlight concepts or themes about marginalized/disenfranchised people (as if that never happened in thr past)?
Some historicity would be nice. A bit of cultural verismilitude, rather than the habitual imposition of present day mores and attitudes onto historical periods and other continents and fantasy worlds. There is an abundance of stories about historical injustices which should be told, most centring on the working class and peasantry, who either never appear, or only appear to be rescued or hectored at by the modern middle class self-inserts. How many shows do we get about union strikes, and the brutality towards workes and peasants of owners, cops and soldiers? They are the vast majority of humanity, then and now. Where is their representation?
@@patrickholt2270 Yeah, there definitely should be more stories involving the global working class and impoverished people. Also, less stories where the actions of villains against society are motivated by generalized anarchist sentiments or nihilism instead of principled criticisms or issues with the capitalist system writ large. I thought the 2019 Joker film did a great job with the backstory of the villain (who is also the protagonist). The whole plot literally is set off by the fact that the Joker's state funded mental health services (which he was successfully using to manage his mental health conditions) were ended due to lack of government funding!
As it relates to the fantasy or sci-fi genres, arguments against the inclusion of people from marginalized groups make no sense. If it's fiction, literally anyone can be included b/c ...spoiler... it's not real! People that are raising their unfounded grievances are really just self-reporting. To be clear, I'm referring to content where a specific culture is not at all relevant to the characters. Not stories like Black Panther, Shang Chi, or even Black Widow where the cultural backgrounds of the characters are germane to their identities (even though there have been noted cases such as Ghost in the Shell where the cultural background has been conveniently ignored lol). In general, it's really a non-issue, at least in the case of people from marginalized groups taking roles where a character's identity is defined by a specifically different cultural background. It's not like you saw the casting directors for the movie Belfast floating the idea of casting Native Alaskans for that movie.
But overall, yeah there should definitely be more stories about the working class struggle and criticisms of capitalsim (like the Joker movie) and less where wealthy or even middle class saviors are depicted swooping in and saving some lower income miscreant from their misfortunes, glorifying the philanthropy of the wealthy (which shouldn't be necessary for people to survive in a modern society).
Sorry to Bother You?
I wonder about fallout, or the return of Rome to Prime? How did those sneak into these propagandistic times?
I loved both - ancient history, post apocalypse. Same as it ever was.
I am DESPERATE to know what Prof Catherine Liu’s thoughts on Bill Maher’s politics are T__T yes, I know he’s a comedian, but he’s also a public figure on TV/media and it seems like he’s anti identity politics AND anti left! ??? Who is he? What is he??
Damn wokeness is misdirected? The cultural turn was a mistake? Guhhhh! Thanks Jacobin! Excited to tune in for the same critique for the next 10 years
Oh no. you sound hurt......
glad you keep supporting with your engagement.
@@tmsphere sarcasm?
fair point. I am also glad you engaged with me.....
I watched the first episode of The Sandman. I turned to my wife halfway through and said, "You know what's missing from this show?" And she replied "women?" That's exactly what I was going for. By the end of that episode there was a woman or two, but by that point we were beyond caring. The plot was totally banal. We skipped the rest of the episodes.
nah, THE best iconic 70s horror image was Regan MacNeil
Yes, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”! Creepy. Classic.
Does Zero Dark Thirty really propagandize US imperialism?
great recent horror movie: the vast of night
Wait. What? "...the culture industry...?" The entertainment industry may be the most impactful on whatever culture might be on any given day, but conflating the two (culture and entertainment) just cedes dominion to the entertainment industry.
I know it’s a little pompous to call it the culture industry but as I understand it they’re using a broader term than entertainment industry because it isn’t just Hollywood or broadway or news media, it’s also museums, poetry, educational institutions, etc
Thank you for pointing it out, I could not agree more
@@jakubLonghorn True but then you are talking about something incredibly broad. Thinking of it as a distinct entity is misleading. This is how you get movements that gets some steam and then suddenly get derailed because the leaders assumed that all working class people think the same (again by treating a huge category as a monolith).
Culture and entertainment are the same thing, there is no difference. The idea that there’s a difference us just elitist nonsense. Traditional high culture is a form of entertainment as well - modern people might not find it particularly entertaining, but that is irrelevant. I read The Iliad and The Odyssey because it was entertaining; I wouldn’t have done it otherwise.
@@ludviglidstrom6924 it has nothing to do with high culture vs “low culture” only the additional categories of media and means of distribution implied. Culture industry also includes social media, fashion, print news, private educational contexts etc. None of these would consider themselves part of the entertainment industry.
Station 11 was great. Parasite?
Y’all at Jacobin are LAME for this title. I watched your premiere of this interview with both Catherine and Eileen. The issue is COMMODIFICATION AND CAPITALIST EXPLOITATION of the arts. Not wOkE. And when you butcher a term to make a fallacy it delegitimizes the initial term’s definition until it means nothing and everything in between. I hate when y’all use Black terminology like this. Woke has been a term in Black organizing spaces before the internet was a thought. Now with liberals AND conservatives controlling culture war shenanigans to divide the working class into single issue warriors, the populous thinks woke means the literal decline of society or weaponizing societal norms for snowflake reactionary self absorbed cash grabs. When in actuality woke is akin to decolonize your mind, critical thinking, subjective secular material dialectic analysis than it is to culture war. If anything woke is counterculture and NOT whatever the fuck y’all made it out to be.
Thank you! They really keep beating this imaginary dead horse.
That is correct. Woke = not a bigot. Bigotry is the tool of division the elite have used to dominate and oppress The People for literally thousand of years.
I'm on the verge of unsubbing to this channel.
Unfortunate as it is that it no longer means what it was intended to mean, that's what language does. We all know what cultural trend we are talking about that the term has come to describe. I do know a lot of commentators will say "I don't like using the word, but for want of a better one..."
@@markpostgate2551
It's no different than bigots
that complained about
"political correctness" or "affirmative action" in the 90s....bigotry with a new coat of paint.
What the left doesn't understand is that the right wing in the US has their own twisted definitions of words. The left is full of academics who assume everyone uses the dictionary definition of a word. The right is full of ideologues who twist words to rile up emotions.
When a left winger says "woke" in a pejorative it is a critique on the fake virtue signaling of corporations. When the right wing says "woke" it simply means black/brown/liberal culture that we don't like. The right uses the word "woke" because they can't use the N word and remain a member of polite society anymore
I thought chainsaw was an awful movie . no redeeming value what's so ever. In general I'm usually disappointed by the left 's critique of movies and TV series ,
there is no end times all you are living thru is change ..get a grip..we were monkeys once
I suppose that the fall of the roman empire was an end time....
Change is often deadly and painful.
If it was me, I would retitle this.
Just saying
define wokeness, what is the connotation in which you're using it here lol would seem yours is parallel to how the right uses it
Exactly, what is wokeness in this case? There are so many people who enjoy the content being created today. The only ones complaining are the grievance politics people and I guess old people longing for the "glory days" of cinema/TV which ...spoiler
...never existed. Art is subjective lol
@@raiga98 Same here. Their concept of wokeness sounds like the right's. They don't define it. I don't understand what their critique is.
@@claborn79 I think its clearly that woke = postmodernists its just unpackaging a set of philosophical ideas that have been interwoven with social activism and virtue-based grandstanding is hard to do...... so now we all just say woke because thats the umbrella concept that the largely white, uppper middle class, postmodernists overreactive SJW's decided to use for their rhetoric. Or we can pretend like we dont all know what we are talking about and say things like we "dont know what woke means" or "define the term" to get around the growing uncomfortable reality that whats happening in left culture is antithesis to the world it says it says it wants to create.
@@jeffm.5071 I don't understand your definition of woke. I'm a Marxist, so postmodernism does not have a negative connotation to me.
@@claborn79 well I would say I appreciate some of the critiques of postmodernism, but taken to its extreme of absolute relativism and the erosion of classical liberal values I do not. The Frankfurt school had some interesting analysis but contemporary postmodernism appears divorced from class. So in "my definition", and the "for the lack of a better term", more culturally aligned marxists of today I would say are not marxists. Otherwise we would be outraged by the capitalist class and have a multiracaial uprising for labor.... instead we have a cultural and political class (largely educated well-off SJW types and resistance libs) deflecting to identity to avoid difficult conversations about class and economic structure.... A feint towards ever increasing fragmentation of identity into multiple subcomponents that take precedence over collectivism and then projecting over those identities a matrix of oppressor victim analysis. We will kill eachother before we solve anything major with this approach. But feel free to disagree while we both watch our society decline in the face of ever mounting cultural, economic, and environmental issues.
"woke" just means "supports the civil rights movement"
True, and having black representation in American media as well, and stuff that Whyte people don't like.
I was an active participant in the civil rights movement back in the 1960s. And I am not woke. In fact, I categorically reject wokeism. The only identity I care about is class identity. I strongly support the multiracial working class, I love people of color, but I don't hate white people. I love women, but I don't hate men.
@@portalarizona
Being "woke" or supporting civil rights is not about hating white people and that's a warped narrative to muffle truthful discussions about racial issues in this country.
@@Based_Proletariat : _"and stuff that Whyte people don't like."_
Woke = not a bigot. Racism is one of the major forms of bigotry.
The word racist is not itself "a" racist. It's just a word that itself does not condone racism. Be a part of the solution, not a part of the problem.
Stop being a racist hypocrite.
You only do more harm to all of your fellow Earthlings.
@@aylbdrmadison1051
I don't have that problem,
go to a Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh or Steven Crowder comment section and tell that to them.
Critiquing racism and this country racist history, and the fact that racism was committed by Whyte people is not "racist".
This was disappointing. I can appreciate the pragmatism of clickbait titles, but only if it's supported by systemic analysis in the actual content. This was just out-of-touch intelligentsia complaining about the degeneracy of modern culture and how young people these days are making comedians feel bad for being shitty to marginalized folks. Name-dropping a few lefty intellectuals is not analysis, or even meaningful commentary.
What you've produced here is clickbait that makes reactionaries go "look, even these old ladies agree that there shouldn't be accountability for influential celebrities" without a class conscious thought entering their heads. Liberal identity politics sucks, sure, but we would all be better off if you went for leftist class conscious arguments for supporting minorities instead of catering to culture war reactionaries out of spite (which is how it appears now).
If you're woke then you cannot be a leftist. The woke are brainwashed rich, neoliberal puritan death cult devoid of personality or a soul. Furthermore, the woke are corporate shills who worship the federal police security state. Woke people like you should leave us normies alone and go out more pronouns, and mental illness in your Twitter bios. Normies love life, families, children, air, earth, comedies, movies, human interaction and all the drama that comes with life. The woke are insane. Leave people alone and stop trying to find meaning in your evil life on the backs of whoever you deem for the moment has oppressed or marginalized.
Mind numbing irrelevant waffle.
why is the title of the video unrelated and racist clickbait
What!?
No. Saved you 20 minutes
Wrong. Try again.
You are correct.
@@dannyevilcat : Woke = not a bigot. Just because some who claim to be woke are themselves bigoted in reality does not even remotely imply the meaning of the term has changed to mean whatever they claim it does.
Some people think being racist towards white people is "woke." But that only proves those people are racists and therefore are the opposite of woke.
False, place another 5 coins into the console to try again.
@@tmsphere : Nice copy pasta. Are you seriously that lazy-brained you can't even come up with a different way of saying _"No"?_
I must admit though that _"No"_ all by itself is a truly compelling argument. 🙄
I hope y'all aren't slipping to the right with these Rightwing adjacent talking points. What's the point of the left if they're going to placate to the far right with their talking points.
What's the point of a left that alienates everyone not already on board?
Okay, now I 100% agree with you. Glad to see you're not so bigoted you don't understand that woke = not a bigot.
Just stop being racist against all white people by being to lazy to type the word "some."
Consider this their MSNBC audition tape.
It's a left-wing critique of a phenomenon that the right wing focuses on. I actually agree with their critique, but I'm not sure if their media strategy is effective.
The title seems designed to attract right-wing viewers through the algorithm, but when they get here the discussion uses terminology and makes references to Concepts that are way in the weeds for a particular kind of socialist. Even some left-wing people probably don't know what they're talking about when they use terms like " professional managerial class" or "liberal superego."
In fact, having watched a fair amount of MSNBC and some CNN, I can definitely say that they are criticizing that type of commentary.
@@dameongeppetto definitely not. Have you seen msnbc? This whole video is about criticizing that particular strain of politics.