rigorousintuition.ca

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No less than three posters on the subway today told me that rugged men of earned authority and honest heroism remain in a deep crisis of identity and purpose.


Told you! Reality isn't real.


I'm not even me.


I am me and no one believes me! Grrr!


I'm you, I'm me, I forgot, is any of this?
(Fuck, dead again: Repeat.)


Anyway, it's all a game.
(An important lesson about hubris is sure to come of it.)


Not Bourne. In this one I do remember and try not to forget.
(Damn if that poster couldn't be the best-selling cover for a romance novel.)


The shadow men robbed the color! They chase us through the shifting mazes of contested reality. I could be one of them! (Dude, whatever: Most of these are chick flicks.)


Do girls get to do the fragmented protagonist too?


Not so much.


Too busy for philosophy, they know just whom to shoot. (All of them.)


Is it poor taste to class this as a form of pornography?


This one's the fantasy escape world of an institutionalized sensitive, so curb your dirty mind.

"All you need to make a movie is a girl and gun." -- newly minted Lifetime Achievement Oscar(r) Winner Jean-Luc Godard (so often quoted and exemplified by his films that he must have said it!)

Or maybe things are simple after all, in the comics.

I love image-translation! Every once in a while I'll turn on the tv, without sound of course, just to see what's being sold. You ever watch sitcoms that way? Ugh.

Anyway, this post reminds me of this:

Patrice Oneal on "Fight Club"

Thor looks very simian in that poster.

What's that all about?

Chimpsy wrote:I love image-translation! Every once in a while I'll turn on the tv, without sound of course, just to see what's being sold. You ever watch sitcoms that way? Ugh.

Anyway, this post reminds me of this:

Patrice Oneal on "Fight Club"

That was very funny! And I see why you made that association. Currently being promoted as just released or coming soon among the above are Unknown, Source Code, Limitless and Adjustment Bureau (also Sucker Punch and Thor, which are OT). Haven't seen'em, just a million others giving me an idea of what's probably in there. They're all coming off Inception and running back to Matrix, Dark City and Fight Club. And I think the theme is the (white) hero-man's discovery (or delusion) that he is powerless, he doesn't matter any more, with a great sadness and nostalgia. Usually within the context of a hellish post-modernist corporate 1984 regime.

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JackRiddler wrote:And I think the theme is the (white) hero-man's discovery (or delusion) that he is powerless, he doesn't matter any more, with a great sadness and nostalgia. Usually within the context of a hellish post-modernist corporate 1984 regime..

Cf. w/ Mad Men, where our white hero is savvy, wealthy & powerful but doesn't matter and is painfully aware of being dead on the inside and spends his entire life anesthetizing himself with booze and sex from inside a 1960s corporate fish bowl, only to go home and put the only thing that he really has to show for his colorful life, his money, inside a shoebox locked in a drawer no one knows about. Literally, it's The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit 2K10, emphasis on "grey", because that's what his life looks like on the inside and he knows it. Hence, sleeping at the office. Also the white heroine (who is actually closer to the hero model than aging Oedipus), whose life revolves around office politics, a substantial part of which includes dodging the gender-role police-catfish both in the corporate world and the domestic eccentricity of Main Street (as depicted by 1960s Bay Ridge. Seriously?) nibbling at her fins in said 1960s fishbowl. Featuring occasional pseudo-OMG moments, like men and women in business attire smoking weed (duh).

Work: it's what America (and Mexico) does when it wants to avoid facing its problems.

Also the most critically acclaimed show on television. Which starts out its first season with all its characters, who sell ads, talking about how they hate TV. But cf. The Informant!, where Jason Bourne acts as a pathological liar and corporate multi-billion-dollar fraudster, listening to music and acting out tropes that would be popular on TV by the end of 1960s America, even though the story is set in the 1990s.

Not much later, wages start to stagnate. After 1968 or so, the only thing in America's dreaming is Taxi Driver (and the Warriors), followed by Mad Max, the Terminator, etc., etc. The future--it sucks, and we've known that for a while now.

Hence, the concern w/ these PKDickian not-quite-futures (like Wild Palms?) where everything looks the same, just with less color. Upper-middle-management types get caught in schemes they cannot fathom or control, to ends they cannot fathom or control. Compare with Syriana ("hero? well, uh, we have a fat, nihilistic white CIA contractor with a serious PTSD and homicidal tendencies whose home life sucks, and a high-powered black attorney (whose alcoholic father lives with him) who seems like a fraud investigator but is actually and wittingly crucial to the business end of an international assassination-for-oil attempt") and/or Magnolia (which, what with an ensemble cast, no one seemed to notice is an entire story set around child trafficking (with Freemasons!)! "If you do not let them go"?)

So, there you have it, to be a Real Man in 21st Century America you have to ruin your life for your occupation. No wonder all these guys have late-onset DID.

same as it ever was

It is astounding how welling people are to be duped into accepting these rridiculous and harmful stereotypes. Not only do they accept them, people will actively defend them, and then in the same breath rattle on about how open-minded they are. Completely blind to their own contradiction. Not only in the gender roles depicted in the movie posters above, but in other aspects and areas of society.

What does it take to get someone to look beyond the superficial; to actively engage in some critical thinking? Human beings naturally tend to categorize things, but as I see at the situation is getting extreme. There needs to be some method to shake the masses up from their comas.

I welcome all ideas.

freemason9 wrote:same as it ever was

Not quality-wise, that's for sure.

Yes:


No:

nathan28 wrote:So, there you have it, to be a Real Man in 21st Century America you have to ruin your life for your occupation. No wonder all these guys have late-onset DID.

I don't know if this is 100% true, but it definitely has much validity to it. I think now more than ever I've heard people say things like "I normally wouldn't do this but for fear of losing my job I will". Almost as if a job shortage was created to coerce workers into performing tasks they normally wouldn't have done, all for the purpose of self preservation.

Mr. Blissed wrote:It is astounding how welling people are to be duped into accepting these rridiculous and harmful stereotypes. Not only do they accept them, people will actively defend them, and then in the same breath rattle on about how open-minded they are. Completely blind to their own contradiction. Not only in the gender roles depicted in the movie posters above, but in other aspects and areas of society.

What does it take to get someone to look beyond the superficial; to actively engage in some critical thinking? Human beings naturally tend to categorize things, but as I see at the situation is getting extreme. There needs to be some method to shake the masses up from their comas.

I welcome all ideas.

Forget the semiotic bullshit for a moment.

Take a look (look. eyes. seeing.) at those posters in the OP. Do you notice any... similarities?

Let's see: similar color palettes (green + grey. orange + blue. red + deep blue + grey). Similar colors for similar moods/themes (oooh, green, something's not right! greyish blue, evil is about! Red = Exciting! etc.). Similar visual themes and poses (half-lit faces. turning catercorner. girls with guns pointed at you.). I'm sure there's others, like that Psychedelic Prog-Rock poster for Thor. What's up with the earth down on the bottom, is it the sequel to that Al Gore movie?

You've seen all of them a bajillion times. Why? It's because this stuff is mass-produced and there's digital post-production tech to increase the "productivity" they expect out of their workers. The guy who did that poster for Limitless? He's already billed out ten hours today and still hasn't met his deadline, you think he had enough time to bother switching out his color choices on Illustrator or Preflight or whatever you all in design use? Of course not. It looks a lot like the colors on the Transformers posters, too. To see how transparent this crap is, check out the Katy Perry Rolling Stone cover. A substantial part of her thigh just disappears, and as soon as you see it, it's one of those things where you think "how did I not notice that"?

How do you wake people up to this? I don't know. They're tropes. Everyone knows them after a while. Half the people post YouTube videos are going to start spoofing the green-tint thing sooner or later.

nathan28 wrote:Half the people post YouTube videos are going to start spoofing the green-tint thing sooner or later.

It's the "old polaroid" look.







In the future, the red plate is always washed out. I think perhaps it's a visual analogy for how we remember our dreams, or distant memories - desaturated.

Fuck, barracuda, that's a super interesting take. Thanks for that.

http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html

"Those of you who watch a lot of Hollywood movies may have noticed a certain trend that has consumed the industry in the last few years. It is one of the most insidious and heinous practices that has ever overwhelmed the industry. Am I talking about the lack of good scripts? Do I speak of the dependency of a few mega-blockbuster hits to save the studios each year, or of the endless sequels and television retreads? No, I am talking about something much more dangerous, much deadlier to the health of cinema.

I speak of course, of THE COLOR GRADING VIRUS THAT IS TEAL & ORANGE!!!"

The End of Men

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/

Project Willow wrote:The End of Men

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/

I've often wondered and never received an answer as to why blatant hatred of men is tolerated at RI.

But here we have a woman bragging about female achievement in start-supported education, although no doubt she thinks that when men were outperforming women it was due to discrimination. Bragging about women doing better in employment, although again she has claimed when it was reverse it was due to discrimination. Boasting even about feminist eugenic leanings against the production of male babies, which is one of the main evils held up by feminists as evidence of the oppression of women when the sexes are reversed in China and India. I generally consider the term "feminazi" to be hyperbole, despite the links between the feminist goddess movement and the Ahnenerbe, but in this case the promotion of eugenics justifies its use.