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you pesky kids rule (startrek.website)
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[-] MalikMuaddibSoong@startrek.website 5 points 12 hours ago

Dare I ask you to go further?

What’s an extreme example of a crypto-rightwing-coded-80s-flick?

[-] MudMan@fedia.io 8 points 11 hours ago

I don't know, man, Die Hard is pretty far out there.

The Rambo and Rocky sequels are what they are as well. They are almost naive about it in a way that supports ironic appreciation, though.

Dirty Harry tracks, but that's back in the early 70s. I never went deep enough into the sequels to see if it got really bad down the line.

I've heard some stuff about Field of Dreams, but I don't think I've watched that in one sitting.

I don't know it's often the action stuff. Your Commandos and Death Wishes and so on. Does stuff like Red Dawn and Invasion USA even count as "crypto"? Those are pretty overt.

If you let me break the time frame I will say that I think The Incredibles flies over people's heads as being aggressively conservative. Forrest Gump used to, but I think people got wise to it over time. Another Zemeckis joint, too. Maybe it's Roger Rabbit that was the accident.

[-] Genius@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 hours ago

The Incredibles flies over people's heads as being aggressively conservative.

Superheroes are a metaphor for minorities. There's the immigrant experience in constantly moving house, the queer experience in hiding who you are, the neurodivergent experience in being told not to stick out in school.

The villain is a capitalist billionaire who wants to appropriate a minority's culture without understanding what it means. If you're an indigenous minority you've been through that.

There's a scene where the mum has a talk with her kids about treating authority figures they've been trained not to fear as threats to their lives. That talk is familiar to any black family in the USA.

There's a struggle between parents and their children about how to navigate assimilating into the majority culture while retaining their own identity. Many immigrants go through what Dash and Violet did.

[-] SCmSTR 4 points 9 hours ago

Don't forget any movie that includes a fleet of Chevrolet Suburbans being driven as a government vehicle!

[-] MudMan@fedia.io 4 points 8 hours ago

Oh, man, way too new for the conversation.

But I guess we can add Bad Boys 2 to the list. I mean, all of Michael Bay's oeuvre, but holy crap, Bad Boys 2. That MUST have been some form of weird Florida-lobby/CIA psyop, there is no other explanation.

[-] MalikMuaddibSoong@startrek.website 3 points 10 hours ago

Ahh Deathwish I haven’t thought about that in years but yeah it does have white flight, brown gangs, and one NYC architect-cum-vigilante savior.

[-] idiomaddict@lemmy.world 3 points 10 hours ago

Even the incredibles thinks the insurance industry is predatory. It flew over my head completely in being right wing, but I’m autistic and often miss really, really obvious subtext (though I can generally predict entire plots from the first few minutes, so it’s a weird combination). I could tell that zootopia was a heavy handed allegory, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it referencing racism, for example.

[-] MudMan@fedia.io 5 points 10 hours ago

In fairness, Zootopia is... kinda muddy on that front.

The Incredibles is very overt about the whole objectivist "if everybody is special the nobody is" and how the supes are better because they were born better but the wannabe sidekick has no business trying to be one of the special people by inventing stuff. And how the government and society are regulating these people who are intrinsically better into normalcy when they should be allowed to freely express themselves.

But not the guy who isn't born into it. That's evil.

I mean, I'm pushing it, but it's not really a secret. And man, does it set people off. Not just on the Internet. There are full on thinkpieces that have been printed on paper about how he's subtly different from a true Objectivist and so his ideas that some people are exceptional and superior are fine.

[-] Genius@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 hours ago

The Incredibles is very overt about the whole objectivist "if everybody is special the nobody is"

The villain says that. When Thanos said half the population should be randomly killed, did you think that was the message of that movie? The Incredibles is about Bob navigating his relationship with his own biases. Syndrome is Bob's dark foil; a villain made of all the worst parts of Bob. Bob can only defeat Syndrome after learning to fight for something more than himself. He can only defeat Syndrome with help from other people who he loves. He has to stop believing that superheroism is about being better than everyone else.

the wannabe sidekick has no business trying to be one of the special people by inventing stuff

Because he's not trying to help people! Superheroism is meaningless without empathy. That's the thesis of the movie

the government and society are regulating these people who are intrinsically better into normalcy when they should be allowed to freely express themselves.

The government banning people who are different from freely expressing themself is bad... Wonder whether that's a left or right opinion.

[-] pory@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

The villain saying "I want to make everyone Super, so that it's not just natural Supers that get to have powers" is absolutely an objectivist-adjacent plot. The fact that Syndrome also wants to murder (genocide?) Supers with his droids and "spend his life getting all his kicks from being the only (artificial) Super until he gets bored and then shares the tech with the public" is a classic example of attaching blatant evil to the ideology you want to villainize.

It's not the movie saying "if everyone's super, no one is", it's the movie saying "the dude who wants everyone to be super instead of only the genetic lottery winners is evil bad murder villain, look, we wrote him doing so much evil bad murder!"

Like, let's say you want to have themes of anti-environmentalism in your movie. What's your villain? Eco-terrorist that bombs coal power plants to stop them from polluting the earth. It's the oldest framing technique in the book, especially for all-ages media: just have the character that expresses the ideology you want to defeat also be a mean bad murder villain. Bonus points if you can somehow make the murder bad villain evil plan relate to the ideology in some superficial way.

[-] Genius@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 hour ago

Syndrome doesn't want to give everyone powers so he can help people. He wants to give everyone powers to spite his enemy and make money. He's Elon Musk. The idea of helping people is just a marketing line and an ego trip. He's not actually making anyone's lives better. He's doing the opposite; selling advanced weapons to world governments under the table. Arms dealing isn't equality! You think things will be more equal when rich people can buy flight and super strength? Syndrome does. Because he's a capitalist villain who doesn't understand any of the leftist rhetoric he's co-opting.

You fell for a billionaire's self-aggrandising lies.

this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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