Ken Loach

Thanks! I’ll look into him.

Yes, yes! Embrace the power of the dark side!

After the past twenty years, coming of age during the Bush W years, I’ve tried hard to resist becoming a misanthrope. But good, goddamn is it harder than ever before. I thought it was bad (and it was) when W. was the president growing up, but the amount of insane and woefully misinformed and hateful people in this country has reached a fever pitch I never could have imagined back then. It’s truly awesome in the most negative sense of that word.

Sheldon S. Wolin talked about the fact that the US system was a “managed democracy” and a form of “inverted totalitarianism” in his book Democracy Inc about twenty years ago. In a managed democracy the pretense of democratic voting is maintained, but the system is so heavily managed as to render voting ineffective and largely irrelevant. The US voting system is so heavily gamed that to expect the average US citizen to have any power through the ballot box is laughable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_democracy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism

Right on. The small snippet I read was intriguing. I look forward to it.

Ooo, sweet. I enjoyed The Plague. I’ll take a look. Thanks ;)

Haha, thanks. I’m surprised there’s someone out there that isn’t even familiar with Rent in passing. My ex was a theater major and she looooved Rent, but even I had heard of it before that. I’m not sure I could survive watching the movie again. I think seeing a stage production of Rent would have been awesome though, especially if I knew someone in the play. I DO dig the overall perspective of it, from what I do remember of watching it years ago.

Will do, thanks for the reply!

Billy Elliot is one of those films I’d always meant to watch but never seem to finish when I start. I’ll have to seek it out again sometime soon.

It’s been awhile since I watched Firefly, so I can’t recall the show’s perspective on class, if any. I haven’t seen it in years, so maybe I’ll rewatch it. Although, I liked the show, I didn’t feel as strongly about it’s quality as others commonly do. I wonder if it’s worth a watch for me because of that.

Comic recommends are always welcome, I’ll take a look at Our Members.

Thanks for the suggestions ;)

Huh, I hadn’t picked up on that when I watched it. I’ve been meaning to rewatch it when I get the chance. I’ll be sure to keep an eyes out.

Thanks! Those all look pretty interesting. I’ll probably watch Vast of Night over the weekend.

Interesting, however sitcoms in general really aren’t my cup of tea as well. It was mentioned in other places that Roseanne was one of the few shows to depict working class life somewhat accurately, and with some dignity. A lot of the time the working class is shown in a shallow, stereotypical depiction of what upper-class people imagine it’s like.

Yes! Kids shows are particularly egregious about this. All the kids shows are about rich kids and their rich parents. That’s not to say that kids shows need to explicitly put the problems of class society front and center (although, some small discussion of class and social relations would be nice) but consistently showing kids living out these hyper-capitalist consumerist fantasies is pretty cringe-worthy.

Exactly. The thing that repulses me the most is the fake-y, artificial looking life that is so often represented in entertainment, and then that is what is spun as “normal”. Which I imagine is why these upper-class people even in real life look like the shallow Stepford Wives aesthetic that the movies and tv depict them as, life depicting art it seems.

In my initial short searches I did earlier, Antonio Gramsci comes up as addressing the issue of “cultural hegemony”, where art and entertainment tends to represent the dominant bourgeois culture, which makes a lot of sense. I’ve heard of Gramsci in passing, but haven’t read anything by him yet. I think it’s a good place to begin regarding a critical analysis.

Although, even without a thorough critical analysis, it’s pretty straightforward to realize that the economic barrier for art, entertainment and creating media in general leads to an over-representation of the wealthy since they have the money and means to create and distribute media to the masses, which in turn consolidates their dominance of the popular narrative.

What’s particularly sad about this, is that people that grow up working-class are absorbing messages from media that marginalize their narrative, and cause them to internalize a narrative that leads them to being oblivious towards their class standing and even hostile towards it. The whole “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” concept that causes people to denigrate the poor and working class, even if they themselves are a part of it.