Oscar season. In 2006 Crash won Best Picture, and in 2017 Moonlight won best picture, and people now generally agree Crash is pretty terrible and Moonlight is pretty rad. Is my preface to this.
What happened?
And how does it apply to me?
There seems to have been a shift in, heck how do I phrase this. Like, a pan-societal shift, in how issues of injustice are viewed. Crash is about racism and how it hurts people, or whatever; Moonlight is about coming to terms with one's own individuality. With race also happening to play some part, but not a major one because there aren't any non-black characters in that. You grasp the difference yet? The similarity?
Crash places societal evils on the shoulders of the individual, and Moonlight places societal evils on the shoulders of societal trends.
I'm not sure if it's a coincidence that Crash happened to come out a decade before Moonlight, but I'm willing to wager that it's not. It seems to be a generational thing. Gen X blaming individuals, Gen Z and probs Y as well seeing broken individuals as symptoms of a sick society.
This difference is, almost impossible to reconcile. In the older generation's view, society has the ability to take the flawed tragic individual and make them conform and contribute, if they're willing to compromise and reform into what the broader society needs them to be. In the younger generation's view, the individual, by being true to itself and not listening to society's more toxic morals, has the power to overcome the flaws of a broader society and heal that.
Lindsay Ellis has a video essay on how bad that Netflix Bright movie is, going in-depth on the problems inherent in Crash's viewpoint. It's 45 minutes long, and there's some uncensored swearing (analyzing, as it does, an R-rated film set in an urban environment); I can't remember where the Crash discussion takes place, but the whole thing is interesting enough to be worth its own sit-through:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLOxQxMnEz8
Just Write has a video essay on how technological advances play a role in this social evolution, by allowing children's movies to shift focus on what message they're telling. It's about 12 minutes long, and IIRC I think entirely free of objectionable content:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guQzTr1YK40
I think Just Write hit the nail on the head, though, when they said that it's good for kids to be able to see old films and new ones, receive old morals and new ones. The two temper each other.
The idea of society being the cause of injustice is nothing new; look at Thoreau leaving the world behind to live at Walden Pond. The idea of staunch individuality is nothing new; as uncomfortably extreme as some of Rand's conclusions may have been- focusing on the individual and allowing him to contribute nothing to society is the opposite of what we're talking about, the "purpose" of the individual within society. Should Reardon have been forced to share his, what was it, steel, technology? I guess not, but, heck, imminent domain, that's like a consent thing actually, and a whole different conversation on what society considers to be healthy...
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