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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26704 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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A prior comment I made about hollywood movies on Boomer relationship to history:

Forrest Gump is the most extensive and obvious on the topic, giving us Forrest as Thesis, Jenny as Antithesis, and Forrest Jr. as literal Synthesis. Forrest is basically ok throughout American history (it’s telling that the avatar of the Boomer generation is a savant-retard too stupid to know what’s going on but too talented to be prevented from succeeding). Jenny is the failure of Thesis-society, molested as a child and seeking freedom through various ultimately unsatisfactory rebellions (the abusive SDS boyf at the Black Panther Party). Ultimately, they finally come together, Jenny dies representing the passing of the 1960s Antithesis, while Forrest takes Forrest Jr. to raise him to preserve the spirit of the 1960s in a way that will lead to a better world.

There was a whole genre of "relitigating the sixties" movies from the 1980s to 2008 or so. It was the thing for a high concept thoughtful blockbuster. Forrest Gump is the classic, Field of Dreams fits as well, Grease, Gilmore Girls, Almost Famous, That Thing You Do. Even series like Rambo follow that pattern, First Blood is straight sixties rebellion against the squares, First Blood II is synthesis with the Boomer Rambo emerging from prison to be harnessed to relitigate Vietnam and rescue his brethren, and the progressively weirder sequels represent a rising confidence/arrogance of the Washington Consensus synthesis of 1950s establishment and 1960s rebellion.

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