Bite Me, Baby, For I Have Sinned Against The Secular Order And Toxic Masculinity - Oh, Yeah, Hate Mail

Anyone who tells you that entertainment isn't the most influential and almost uniformly malignant form of religious observance in the United States (especially if you include sports and hate talk TV and radio) is certainly missing the predominant feature of not only the degenerated entity called our "intellectual life" but also the commonly believed degenerated entity of our "folk culture".  I would bet that at least 50% of what is called "Christianity" in our country, at this time, would more honestly be considered an aspect of that church of Mammon.   

I have sinned against the central authority of that in the United States, the neo-pagan Roman style Temple city of Hollywood, yet again.  I delight in dissing the movies the way that a puerile pop-culture vulture or tenured university philosophy fop delights in repeating the rote-learned tropes of anti-Christian impiety but for what are more grown-up purposes.  I figure like with my blasphemy against the cult of the Founders and the Constitution and even the holy of holies, the Bill of Rights, someone's got to try to jar that frozen but broken bolt loose.


There are rare, very, very rare exceptions to the nearly uniform awfulness that the movies are.   I don't see the more recent ones because I don't go to the movies, I don't watch them on DVD very often, though I do see clips from time to time.  

That video I posted about the now ubiquitous use of male rape, especially prison rape as a comedy trope EVEN IN CHILDRENS' CARTOONS, FOR FUCKSAKE! - which in a decent culture would be as vile as jokes about lynching or the Holocaust are (that both have been, in the case of the lynching of Black People and, as I'm equally horrified and enraged to discover, is currently being entered into the sad sack of "comedy" topics, the Shoah) led to me watching more on the channel of its creator.  I was surprised to find that he also created the Buffy vs. Twilight video and the Donald Duck encounters Glenn Beck ones which are masterpieces of satire, the real thing, not the crap that gets called that.   

One of his other longer commentaries is The Fantastic Masculinity of Newt Scamander, about a movie spinoff of the Harry Potter series which I hadn't known about since, apparently, the stories aren't in novels but only in screen plays so I had missed J. K. Rowling's invention of a character who might lead me to watch the movies.   I watched two of the H.P. movies after having read the books and did not like the movies, at all though I quite liked the books.   If she wrote them as books, I'd probably go out of my way to read them, though my nieces who I read the books to are too old for that now.  

The excellent Jonathan Mcintosh who makes these points out that the movie critics largely disliked the character of Newt Scamander exactly because he wasn't the typical Hollywood type of manly man, pointing out that even the boy Harry Potter is more typical of the stereotypes that the movies love to recreate, endlessly, among the things that make the movies almost uniformly a deadening mind dulling waste of time and billions of dollars.  I am generally allergic to Brit, especially English heroic types but what I saw of Newt Scamander as played by this actor was extremely appealing and the description of the plot sounded fresh and a welcomed relief.   I think it's to Mcintosh's credit that he thought out his fresh take on these topics so well that it could make even a movie hater like me kind of think I might like to give this one a try.  

His other cultural criticism is pretty good, what I've sampled of it.