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Notes -
I agree with some of this and disagree with other parts.
Certainly we should never decide that we are just too out of touch to understand modern culture and can't meaningfully critique it any more; I don't mean to give that impression.
But when someone says 'I won't let my kid watch anything made after the 90s because it's all corrupted by socjust lunacy' or w/e, that's a pretty strong signal to me that they're not carefully considering each piece of media on its own merits and forming a reasoned critique. It looks like just being mad about the culture in general moving on from what was familiar and comfortable to you, which is what I was calling out.
Honest critical analysis is always important, but it's also always in danger of being biased by other influences, and you always have to be on guard against that bias. I'm trying to point out what I think is a pretty likely bias affecting this particular judgement that everything after the 90s is dangerous or bad.
I think the word 'politics' is ambiguous in a way that makes this point hard to talk about.
Certainly the two-party campaign-focused culture-war version of 'politics' is such a powerful influence that it can corrupt or derail any other messages that it is paired with. Note that I don't think that means you can't make good art motivated by that type of politics - I like West Wing, I like Rambo - but when you are trying to make art that's about something else but still let that type of politics influence it, it's easy for the politics to overwhelm your actual message.
But there's also the much broader understanding of politics form the phrase 'the personal is political' and so forth.
Whether the women in a piece of art are actual characters or sexy lamps is very much a core part of the artistic message, but it's also influenced by cultural and political trends that made one type of media more likely to get made or more appealing to audiences. An artist might legitimately be interested or uninterested in depicting non-heteronormative relationships or exploring minority cultures in their work, but politics and culture will influence how the audience reacts to those depictions.
This is my real objection to and point about OP"s post. It seems to come from a common perspective that, any time there's a gay character or more than one minority character in something aimed at wide audiences, any time something aimed at younger audiences acknowledges non-heteronormative relationships or flaws in the American justice system, any time a woman character exhibits the same power fantasies that male characters normally get or rescue themselves instead of waiting helplessly, this is obviously only due to the influence of political activists corrupting the culture and ruining the media.
And I think that's just wrong. Certain specific cases of it are that, for sure, but you can't paint with such a broad brush. More often, it's simply that the culture had 'straight white guy protagonist and the world reacting to him' movies and shows and games for a lot of decades (or centuries), and has simply gotten bored with that, realized that the actual world is more complex and interesting than that, and decided to move on to exploring more topics.
(not that we've even stopped featuring that story in tons of media, we're just adding additional elements and looking at new things too)
I agree with a lot of what you say. There's obviously a range of material from good to bad put out in any particular generation, a lot of it I'd suggest is pretty shit. But also gems.
Agreed also that most forms of art are molded by the societal norms of the time, as they act on the film makers/ producers and audience at large, and as those individuals interact/ react against those norms, while also being more or less aware of them.
These norms will include the politics of the time (the negotiation of norms), whether that be issues politics along tribal lines or political in the manner of 'the personal is political', which is a truism in the sense that a political act has to be done by an individual, who always acts 'personally'.
For example, an author may put specific political polemic into the mouth of their interlocutor, or they may seed their version of the norms in a more subtle but equally intentional way, therefore acting politically-- in addition to their other creative acts. Nothing precludes subconscious molding by social norms either, this is the sea we all swim in, but I'd argue this isn't the case for political acts, which seem to me to have a conscious intention by definition, operating at the level of polemical belief, in that politics involves a certain forcefulness, or righteousness.
I think it's this intentionality that gets at the root of why, beyond a certain threshold, it deteriorates the quality of the work down an exponential decay into the zone of 'forced', 'contrived', 'preachy' etc. While we can be a mindless milieu, we can also have a fine ear for being told what to do or think. This is most evidenced by the general reaction to most advice, which has an element of actual resentfulness.
This element of 'too much', or 'against the grain' will vary with each individual, so there does have to be a defense of why this should be more than just taste, pitching reactionary responses against early adopters of the political message or culture shift.
Or to frame it as another commenter, isn't this just the culturally new coming into being? With the usual railing against the wind kind of response?
This feels to me like a familiar relativistic slight of hand, along the lines of 'global warming is a hoax', temperature has always been changing. To find out if things are qualitatively different in the creative merit of a particular artistic work, or a trend in the production of them, we need to do some kind of analysis against some objective marker. An individual can have a sense of it, I would argue, but to prove it's not just taste, they have to demonstrate it somehow, with reference to the works themselves and a rubric.
But in this task we will quickly be flung into dealing with philosophical assumptions. If we were to adopt a relativistic stance, it would be quite hard to measure any differences over time, because there is no measure sufficiently privileged over its material, or it's own substrate, for it to be able to do the job. In contrast, if we adopt an aesthetic stance, we may be able to get somewhere, though it doesn't seem easy to bridge to the definitive answer on the matter.
I think, at the level of metaphysics, we come up against something like Judith Butler's problem. In her case, What is the space--that is Us--that allows for us to perform against the norms, despite being subject to them? Where does it come from and how does it resolve existentially?
If the performance is 'naturally adopted', then where then really was the subjection, or what is the extra element that allows for it? And if subjection rules, how is the reaction able to pass up and out and reconcile the existential split of being the subject and the performer against subjection? This is all just wank at this point- but I think it's something analogous to the current question of how we are molded by culture, which also arises from us as a collective, in this case problematizing the conception of 'right adopted' v 'wrong reactionary', or 'inevitable adoption' v 'railing against the wind', because there's some extra ingredient needed beyond just being washed over by culture, or reacting against? Is there the possibility we can definitely privilege a stance or are we stuck in an arbitrariness?
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