January Meme: Consuming media in the The Darkest Timeline (or is it The Most Stupid Timeline
Good question. It does influence my viewing habits somewhat, though not always in the way I anticipated.
The anticpated bit: would be being incapable again to watch shows like The West Wing. I couldn’t watch that show during the Bush years and marathoned it only during the tail end, the last months, December/January, when I looked forward to the Obama years. Though these days there’s the added complication that not only is the gulf between fiction and reality even larger, but the most vicious satirist who ever wrote could not have come up with something like the current creatures in charge. I mean, they make Bond villains look subtle. And even in dystopias, there are at least some people with spine and/or morals around who can’t stand supporting their vile leaders anymore after a brief time. Basically, political satire looks tame when faced with reality.
(This doesn’t just apply to US based media. Haven’t touched something like Yes, Minister recently, either, because watching Britain sink into the lunatic Brexit abyss in real time takes the fun out of that with a vengeance.)
Now, you’d think this makes me stay away from dystopias in general and seek out fun and/or fluffy shows/movies/books utterly divorced from the current day as a distraction. And sometimes this is how it works. For example, I suspect that’s why I was in the market for Versailles, say (trashy history is fun, too), and greet stories celebrating the virtues of kindness and decency with a big cheer. (Which reminds me, if Amazon Video still refuses to give me Call the Midwife, I suppose I’ll have to tackle Itunes instead. Not that Call the Midwife is divorced from reality, au contraire, it tackles the social problems of its day pretty well and has had its share of tragedies, but it has a (changing) ensemble of likeable characters who all in their way are driven to help others for six seasons now, and I need that in my fannish life.)
However, and this is the not ancipitated part, sometimes I’m driven to consume media set in a dystopia. Or awful period of history. Common wisdom would have that’s what you do when your reality is doing pretty well, and so I thought, but: last year my major book discovery were the Bernie Gunther novels by Philip Kerr. Set both during the Third Reich and after (with flashbacks), with the (German) main character at times a cop, at times a P.I., and „morally compromised“ is putting it mildly if you work as a policeman in the Third Reich and survive, no matter how much you loathe your bosses. Partly I fell for these novels because they’re clever spin on the noir formula of cynical hero (with hidden or not so hidden ethics under veneer) in a corrupt world, and because Kerr does his research (with occasional glitches, but these things happen). Partly, though, because in an odd way it’s a comforting reminder that yes, we live in The Most Stupid Timeline, with a lot of people in all nations (including mine) seemingly bent on repeating the worst mistakes of the past, BUT compared with the true horror, we’re still far better off, circumstances are partly so different that there’s hope those who want to repeat the past will not succeed. The Orange Menace may be awful, his twin in hair style who currentlly serves as British foreign secretary a greedy buffoon doing damage every tiime he opens his mouth, bloody Viktor Orban may be bent on turning Hungary into a strong man, regime even more than it already is, with the PIS party (so aptly named) doing much the same for Poland, Erdogan may have turned Turkey into a gigantic prison for journalists, and some of our leading conservatives may adopt right wing extremist rethoric in the most disgusting manner in order to court voters - but it was worse. It was far, far worse. Somehow, reading fictional Bernie Gunther bearing witness to The Darkest Timeline helped, believe it or not.
Incidentally, the way this works on me seems to have parameters excluding a certain type of, how shall I put this, self congratulatory historical fiction from British and US media? Because I haven’t watched Dunkirk and am staying away from The Darkest Hour, and last year when I had to check some MCU canon for a ficathon, I found I couldn’t bear to rewatch the first Captain America movie (so I only rewatched the relevant scenes I needed to refresh my memory on). Meanwhile, when Robert Harris was in Munich last November to read from his new novel named, well, Munich in which he makes his case for Chamberlain (as some historians now do, for example, here), I had no problem listening and afterwards buying the book. (Not Harris‘ best novel of those I’ve read, nor the worst, but that’s not due to the subject. It’s more a case of the OCs never really coming alive that keeps me from praising it. Incidentally, Harris‘ was the first fictional take on the Munich Agreement to remind me that that it happened while the Oktoberfest was in full swing, which made Munich incredibly crowded, and the contrast between that and what was going on was extra bizarre.)
In conclusion: I’m ready for The Most Stupid Timeline to end any time soon, please. Meanwhile, I’ll try my best to survive on a fannish diet of comfort by media praising human decency, media consisting of entertaining trash and/or fluff, and media showing how it could be far, far worse.
The Other Days
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1267317.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
The anticpated bit: would be being incapable again to watch shows like The West Wing. I couldn’t watch that show during the Bush years and marathoned it only during the tail end, the last months, December/January, when I looked forward to the Obama years. Though these days there’s the added complication that not only is the gulf between fiction and reality even larger, but the most vicious satirist who ever wrote could not have come up with something like the current creatures in charge. I mean, they make Bond villains look subtle. And even in dystopias, there are at least some people with spine and/or morals around who can’t stand supporting their vile leaders anymore after a brief time. Basically, political satire looks tame when faced with reality.
(This doesn’t just apply to US based media. Haven’t touched something like Yes, Minister recently, either, because watching Britain sink into the lunatic Brexit abyss in real time takes the fun out of that with a vengeance.)
Now, you’d think this makes me stay away from dystopias in general and seek out fun and/or fluffy shows/movies/books utterly divorced from the current day as a distraction. And sometimes this is how it works. For example, I suspect that’s why I was in the market for Versailles, say (trashy history is fun, too), and greet stories celebrating the virtues of kindness and decency with a big cheer. (Which reminds me, if Amazon Video still refuses to give me Call the Midwife, I suppose I’ll have to tackle Itunes instead. Not that Call the Midwife is divorced from reality, au contraire, it tackles the social problems of its day pretty well and has had its share of tragedies, but it has a (changing) ensemble of likeable characters who all in their way are driven to help others for six seasons now, and I need that in my fannish life.)
However, and this is the not ancipitated part, sometimes I’m driven to consume media set in a dystopia. Or awful period of history. Common wisdom would have that’s what you do when your reality is doing pretty well, and so I thought, but: last year my major book discovery were the Bernie Gunther novels by Philip Kerr. Set both during the Third Reich and after (with flashbacks), with the (German) main character at times a cop, at times a P.I., and „morally compromised“ is putting it mildly if you work as a policeman in the Third Reich and survive, no matter how much you loathe your bosses. Partly I fell for these novels because they’re clever spin on the noir formula of cynical hero (with hidden or not so hidden ethics under veneer) in a corrupt world, and because Kerr does his research (with occasional glitches, but these things happen). Partly, though, because in an odd way it’s a comforting reminder that yes, we live in The Most Stupid Timeline, with a lot of people in all nations (including mine) seemingly bent on repeating the worst mistakes of the past, BUT compared with the true horror, we’re still far better off, circumstances are partly so different that there’s hope those who want to repeat the past will not succeed. The Orange Menace may be awful, his twin in hair style who currentlly serves as British foreign secretary a greedy buffoon doing damage every tiime he opens his mouth, bloody Viktor Orban may be bent on turning Hungary into a strong man, regime even more than it already is, with the PIS party (so aptly named) doing much the same for Poland, Erdogan may have turned Turkey into a gigantic prison for journalists, and some of our leading conservatives may adopt right wing extremist rethoric in the most disgusting manner in order to court voters - but it was worse. It was far, far worse. Somehow, reading fictional Bernie Gunther bearing witness to The Darkest Timeline helped, believe it or not.
Incidentally, the way this works on me seems to have parameters excluding a certain type of, how shall I put this, self congratulatory historical fiction from British and US media? Because I haven’t watched Dunkirk and am staying away from The Darkest Hour, and last year when I had to check some MCU canon for a ficathon, I found I couldn’t bear to rewatch the first Captain America movie (so I only rewatched the relevant scenes I needed to refresh my memory on). Meanwhile, when Robert Harris was in Munich last November to read from his new novel named, well, Munich in which he makes his case for Chamberlain (as some historians now do, for example, here), I had no problem listening and afterwards buying the book. (Not Harris‘ best novel of those I’ve read, nor the worst, but that’s not due to the subject. It’s more a case of the OCs never really coming alive that keeps me from praising it. Incidentally, Harris‘ was the first fictional take on the Munich Agreement to remind me that that it happened while the Oktoberfest was in full swing, which made Munich incredibly crowded, and the contrast between that and what was going on was extra bizarre.)
In conclusion: I’m ready for The Most Stupid Timeline to end any time soon, please. Meanwhile, I’ll try my best to survive on a fannish diet of comfort by media praising human decency, media consisting of entertaining trash and/or fluff, and media showing how it could be far, far worse.
The Other Days
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1267317.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.