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DeimosRising posted:I've realized that people base a Football team's offense's backbone on the quarterback... I have to ask why. I can understand if he can run, block, and throw a 50 yard touchdown pass. But to give most the credit to a quarterback when someone catches a touchdown pass is a little rediculous. lol I've never seen that post, the football forum seems epic
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# ? Apr 7, 2017 05:40 |
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# ? May 13, 2024 10:04 |
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K. Waste posted:Suddenly, you have stopped writing about the fraught ideological space that the film occupies, to expressing concern that we would be behooved to extend our critical lens to all films. He's asking why the conceit of Chris imagining the conspiracy is even necessary when it just seems to explain something that's not only already intuitive, but also applicable to films in general. Why is the knee-jerk reaction to criticism of these critiques usually accusations that the person is against ideological critiques?
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# ? Apr 7, 2017 07:20 |
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K. Waste posted:I fail to see the "but" side to this. Without that qualification, what you have written above is a truthful and accurate statement. The "but" is that it doesn't need to be used to create some kind of theory for what Get Out is really "about". It's not a statement that's unique to Get Out, it goes without saying because it applies universally to every single movie. It's lazy critique disguised as something profound, that's why the "but".
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# ? Apr 7, 2017 15:37 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The policewoman doesn't see the truth; she's merely being objective. The truth is in the exploitation of 'Grandpa' and 'Grandma'. To be clear then, is Rod also a liberal who's concocting the fantasy?
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# ? Apr 7, 2017 15:49 |
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^^^ Rod and Chris's fantasies are not exactly identical, and I wouldn't say 'concocting', but yes. ThePlague-Daemon posted:He's asking why the conceit of Chris imagining the conspiracy is even necessary when it just seems to explain something that's not only already intuitive, but also applicable to films in general. For some reason this keeps happening. I say "Chris has an ideology." and people reply with "so you mean it's all in his head?!". No, that's not what that means. It is not all in his head. Chris is right insofar as something is wrong, beyond the policewoman's objective understanding of events. However, Chris also does not understand what the problem is. He doesn't know why he feels bad. He's not sure why the rich people are a threat. Chris is not exactly insane; he's merely stupid. Neither he nor the policewoman understand the truth of the situation. "The truth we are dealing with here is not 'objective' truth, but the self-relating truth about one's own subjective position; as such, it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation." (Zizek) In other words, I am criticizing how Chris reacts to the whole situation regardless of what is objectively happening. What does he do when his symbolic universe breaks down? How does he cope? The uncomfortable truth, as I've gone over, is that he's a mediocre artist who fears that success will reveal him to be a hack. The truth is that his hot girlfriend is bad because she has a boring fetish and that her family are bad because they're boring idiots. Instead of accepting this truth-beyond-objectivity, however, Chris chooses a poor subjective stance: one of paranoia. And the flipside of the paranoia is a cynical distrust of any public ideology. Again, the way to redeem the film is to read it as a satire of how it is impossible to imagine a police force that actually helps people, impossible to imagine solidarity with the monstrous figure of 'Grandma Georgina': Magic Hate Ball posted:If only he'd given her a Pepsi. If you take the Pepsi ad and subtract the Pepsi, then it's easy to see the spirit Pepsi was attempting to exploit. Why not have the same ad, but have the cops and protestors unite to attack Kendall Jenner? SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Apr 7, 2017 |
# ? Apr 7, 2017 16:58 |
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ThePlague-Daemon posted:He's asking why the conceit of Chris imagining the conspiracy is even necessary when it just seems to explain something that's not only already intuitive, but also applicable to films in general. Why is the knee-jerk reaction to criticism of these critiques usually accusations that the person is against ideological critiques? Again, nobody has claimed that Chris imagined the conspiracy. The claim is that the conspiracy is imagined, an extraordinary/absurd symbolic order standing in for the ironic banality of racism. Like Trash Fire, The Invitation, and You're Next, Get Out is a love story about a couple that trepidatiously attempts to 'move on' with their lives - to achieve a comfortable normality - only for it to blow up in their faces, when it turns out the conflict is irreconcilable. King Vidiot posted:The "but" is that it doesn't need to be used to create some kind of theory for what Get Out is really "about". It's not a statement that's unique to Get Out, it goes without saying because it applies universally to every single movie. You are the one claiming that a critique of Get Out needs must be unique to Get Out in order to clarify some "profound" meaning within it. But nobody engaged in the oppositional reading has claimed that they are doing so to uncover what the film is 'really about,' or how profound this would be, or how this is unique. I am not under the impression that a critique of Get Out needs to be unique, profound, or whatever. It merely needs to be truthful and accurate, and to deal frankly with the ideological and rhetorical functions of cinema.
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# ? Apr 7, 2017 17:18 |
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It's basically a mix of Stalker and Solaris.
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# ? Apr 7, 2017 17:35 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The truth is that his hot girlfriend is bad because she has a boring fetish What a world we live in where it's boring to want your hot young black boyfriend to meet up with an old white guy and get brain.
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# ? Apr 7, 2017 18:44 |
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Much like life, all films are a fantasy, it's your experience and interpretation of the fantasy that's real.
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# ? Apr 7, 2017 19:26 |
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Magic Hate Ball posted:Much like life, all films are a fantasy, it's your experience and interpretation of the fantasy that's real. But that of course results in competing realities - different realisms. That's why it is ultimately necessary to traverse the fantasy. Why does the film end with "no one will ever believe us"? And then Chris and Rod presumably go jerk off in a cabin somewhere until the cops eventually catch up them (the 'Christopher Dorner' outcome). There is copious, readily-accessible evidence that would exonerate Chris. All they needs to do is show up at the King household with a strobe light, and that's instant and objective proof that this guy Andre was kidnapped and subjected to medical experimentation. Plus, there are two bodies back at the house with brain-surgery scars - and presumably plenty of others readily tracked down. The disappearance of the original Mr. King and his replacement with an entirely different guy who happens to have the same name is going to raise some eyebrows. You can't do something like that without shitloads of paperwork. It probably counts as some kind of tax fraud. You think Mrs. King isn't going to crack under interrogation? The thing is that Rod could have saved Chris halfway into the movie, but instead started blathering about the intoxicating power of white lady vagina or whatever. The unavoidable conclusion is that is that Rod's jealously over Chris' white girlfriend outweighs his concern for Chris' wellbeing. We can even say that Rod sabotages himself and delays the rescue specifically so that he can say "I told you so" when Chris (literally) comes crawling back to him.
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# ? Apr 7, 2017 20:50 |
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K. Waste posted:Again, nobody has claimed that Chris imagined the conspiracy. The claim is that the conspiracy is imagined ahh, CD
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# ? Apr 7, 2017 23:23 |
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*carnival music*
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# ? Apr 8, 2017 02:16 |
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K. Waste posted:The claim is that the conspiracy is imagined, an extraordinary/absurd symbolic order standing in for the ironic banality of racism. I'm not actually sure what you thought my post meant if you read it thinking I didn't know this already.
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# ? Apr 8, 2017 02:30 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:That's the problem: multiple people ITT have insisted that the movie is an allegory, so it shouldn't be taken too seriously. Like we don't need to actually pay attention to the specifics of the narrative because we 'already knew', in advance, that white liberals are bad. So watching the film becomes an exercise in self-congratulation: "thank god that I'm not like them." Peele possibly didn't realize that Rian Johnson dropped an extreme burn on this film. "I'm not some sort of racist. I just want your eyes."
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# ? Apr 8, 2017 03:07 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:
Notice the smile on Roses face as she is being choked? She is so woke.
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# ? Apr 8, 2017 03:37 |
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K. Waste posted:truthful and accurate I'm getting a little tired of all these SMG puppet accounts.
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# ? Apr 8, 2017 03:42 |
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Escobarbarian posted:ahh, CD It's not too complicated. Let's say we make a movie with a nazi character who is very antisemetic, partly because he sees his Jewish coworkers in the schnitzel factory are being promoted over him. Whatever. When you read this synopsis, you do not say "oh so you mean being a nazi is all in his head?!?!", because being a nazi is simply what this character is. He is not insane. Antisemitic ideology is simply his way of explaining why he is dissatisfied with his career and so-on. And the kicker is that this is true even if the film presents a fantasy scenario where there literally is a Jewish conspiracy against this character (as in The Matrix, where the vampiric robots literally do exist). Pure ideology is impossible. There will always be traces of authenticity that betray the falsity of the scenario. King Vidiot posted:I'm getting a little tired of all these SMG puppet accounts. Rest assured that there is no conspiracy against you.
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# ? Apr 8, 2017 05:18 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Why does the film end with "no one will ever believe us"? Also, for the sake of clarity, would it kill you to cite Zizek a little more specifically than just "(Zizek)"? Like, could we get page numbers and book titles or whatever?
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# ? Apr 8, 2017 15:52 |
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Tycho, just wondering, were you aware of SMG before this thread?
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# ? Apr 8, 2017 22:44 |
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Escobarbarian posted:Tycho, just wondering, were you aware of SMG before this thread? Anyways, I like SMG's schtick, it's interesting, etc. but sometimes he's super wrong about stuff for whatever reason (maybe he just Googles Zizek quotes and tries to come up with a reading that makes them relevant), like in this thread.
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# ? Apr 8, 2017 22:56 |
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This is CD, you don't have to see a movie to debate it.
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# ? Apr 8, 2017 23:01 |
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TychoCelchuuu posted:I'm not sure if you didn't realize this, but Chris and Rod are both black people, and basically everyone who died was a rich white person. So that might go some way towards explaining why they might plausibly think that, even in the face of copious available evidence (most of which is going to evaporate immediately, really, once the rest of the white people realize what happened), they may have difficulty getting people to believe them. Like your claim that never in a million years would a legit white liberal ask about the size of a black guy's dick or touch a black person without permission, your reading of the film here is almost adorably naive about race relations, presumably because only by being so naive can you make the movie into what you want it to be for your reading. Ok. But this means you are not actually disagreeing with my analysis of the film; you're simply of the opinion that the cynicism and paranoia are very good. You're, again, endorsing the liberal ideology of the film while celebrating the attack on those corrupt liberals who touch black people without permission or whatever ("thank god I'm not like them!"). You've vocally rejected progressive politics, in favour of a postpolitical pragmatism/realism - where proletarian solidarity is "naive" and the best we can do is raise awareness and foster tolerance for when the next outbursts of Dorneresque violence unavoidably occur. So Get Out is to be celebrated because it helps white audiences to 'feel their pain' (Bill Clinton). I was already aware of this stance. I just rejected it as false.
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# ? Apr 9, 2017 03:19 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Ok. But this means you are not actually disagreeing with my analysis of the film; you're simply of the opinion that the cynicism and paranoia are very good. SuperMechagodzilla posted:You're, again, endorsing the liberal ideology of the film while celebrating the attack on those corrupt liberals who touch black people without permission or whatever ("thank god I'm not like them!"). SuperMechagodzilla posted:You've vocally rejected progressive politics, in favour of a postpolitical pragmatism/realism - where proletarian solidarity is "naive" and the best we can do is raise awareness and foster tolerance for when the next outbursts of Dorneresque violence unavoidably occur. So Get Out is to be celebrated because it helps white audiences to 'feel their pain' (Bill Clinton). SuperMechagodzilla posted:I was already aware of this stance. I just rejected it as false. TychoCelchuuu fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Apr 9, 2017 |
# ? Apr 9, 2017 15:09 |
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TychoCelchuuu posted:Clearly you never read my "Lucky Number Slevin is the worst movie ever made" megathread. Wait, was that the BECAUSE FOURTEEN YEAR OLD BOYS LIKE IT thing? e: TychoCelchuuu posted:That a movie fails to set back the clock a hundred years to "class explains everything" is not surprising. Your politics went the way of the dinosaur when we woke up one day and realized that class warfare isn't the beginning and end of every question. If you're just trying to give the movie a fair shake by making it as compelling (in your eyes) as it can be, maybe try not doing that for a moment and you'll realize how much easier the movie falls into a slot where it doesn't support your favorite world view. Maybe that makes it a worse movie in your eyes, but not every movie can be Strike, you know? Aren't these the exact same sentiments used to deny the existence of racism? I.e., it's in the past and doesn't affect every part of society? We just "got over" it, and only some cranks use it's memory to divide people? BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Apr 9, 2017 |
# ? Apr 9, 2017 15:28 |
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Wait, was that the BECAUSE FOURTEEN YEAR OLD BOYS LIKE IT thing? BravestOfTheLamps posted:Isn't this the exact argument used to deny the existence of racism? I.e., it's in the past and doesn't affect every part of society?
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# ? Apr 9, 2017 15:56 |
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TychoCelchuuu posted:No. I don't even know what you're talking about. I didn't say anything was only in the past or that anything doesn't affect every part of society. quote:That a movie fails to set back the clock a fifty years to "race explains everything" is not surprising. Your politics went the way of the dinosaur when we woke up one day and realized that racism isn't the beginning and end of every question. If you're just trying to give the movie a fair shake by making it as compelling (in your eyes) as it can be, maybe try not doing that for a moment and you'll realize how much easier the movie falls into a slot where it doesn't support your favorite world view.
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# ? Apr 9, 2017 15:58 |
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poo poo sorry, that sentence should read "classism isn't the beginning and end of every question." I'll edit it now. edit: wait a second motherfucker, that's not what I wrote. I wrote "class warfare," not "racism"! I didn't say class warfare was only in the past or that it doesn't affect everyone, I just said it doesn't explain everything. Really just read The Second Sex, that book has a great explanation of this with respect to gender. TychoCelchuuu fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Apr 9, 2017 |
# ? Apr 9, 2017 16:03 |
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TychoCelchuuu posted:wait a second motherfucker, that's not what I wrote. I wrote "class warfare," not racism! Yes, that is indeed
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# ? Apr 9, 2017 16:06 |
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This thread inspires me
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# ? Apr 9, 2017 20:34 |
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Reminds me of this poster from the Slevin thread, back when SMG's avatar was Louis-Dreyfus with a cigar:
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# ? Apr 9, 2017 20:54 |
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TychoCelchuuu posted:You're going to have to spell out to me what makes the liberals in this film "corrupt." Is it the fact that they do bad things? Clearly not - that just assumes your reading (these aren't true liberals, they're corrupt liberals!) rather than my reading (heck yes they're true liberals). So I'm just looking for anything in the film that suggests these people are "corrupt" liberals as opposed to just plain old liberals. Right now, the word "corrupt" strikes me as about as well justified as "time traveling." If you said this movie was about time-traveling liberals rather than plain old liberals I'd be like "well, people have made movies about time travelers before, so it's not impossible, but frankly I don't see the evidence in the movie that they're time travelers." Ditto for the idea that they're "corrupt." What makes them corrupt? You are getting mixed up between 'liberal' as, like, an identity and liberalism as an ideology. I have been critiquing the liberal ideology of the film, while your response has been that people who identify as liberal sometimes do bad things (microaggressions!) that go against the ideology. You are criticizing individuals, not performing any sort of ideological critique. Liberal multiculturalism is already about a hypersensitivity to even minor forms of harassment. You seem to be having trouble with the concept of ideology in general. When I critique the liberal ideology, you respond the 'post-ideological' assertion that everything about the characters' worldview is totally natural - "genuine and honest", "reasonable", etc. - while also putting this in postmodern, 'post-truth', relativistic terms. While you yourself do not share with the paranoia, you respect it as an essential part of black male culture or something. (The whole point of liberal-multicultural tolerance is that you can do anything, and so long as you do not harass...). In this view, my belief in the truth of egalitarian struggle is political. Not only is antiracism viewed as a relic of the time before history ended, it's a dangerous intolerance - a totalitarian imposition. What you promote instead is a postpolitical gradualism. So, again, you do not actually disagree with anything I have written. You simply agree with the film that liberal capitalist democracy is the best of all possible political systems, and these terrorist attacks and whatnot are simply minor malfunctions to be solved with better administration. Also: TychoCelchuuu posted:According to you, most of it was effectively in Chris's head, It was not all in Chris's head.
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# ? Apr 10, 2017 02:44 |
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SMG I dont believe you have actually seen this film and instead only read reviews and Wikipedia.
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# ? Apr 10, 2017 03:29 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:I have been critiquing the liberal ideology of the film, while your response has been that people who identify as liberal sometimes do bad things (microaggressions!) that go against the ideology. You are criticizing individuals, not performing any sort of ideological critique. Liberal multiculturalism is already about a hypersensitivity to even minor forms of harassment. SuperMechagodzilla posted:You seem to be having trouble with the concept of ideology in general. When I critique the liberal ideology, you respond the 'post-ideological' assertion that everything about the characters' worldview is totally natural - "genuine and honest", "reasonable", etc. - while also putting this in postmodern, 'post-truth', relativistic terms. While you yourself do not share with the paranoia, you respect it as an essential part of black male culture or something. (The whole point of liberal-multicultural tolerance is that you can do anything, and so long as you do not harass...). I don't think it's an "essential" part of "black male culture," whatever you mean by that. I just think it's a warranted response to growing up as a black guy in present day America. Do you contest that claim? Do you think that, if you were walking down the street and met a black person who thought stuff like "white people are out to get me," he'd likely just be one of those crazy, overly-paranoid guys, or that he'd have a point? Note that you're not alone if you'd answer the former: that's a super common response to paranoid black people. But the movie wants you to answer the latter, because the whole story is one according to which that guy you meet walking down the street is literally telling the truth, and in fact if anything he's sugar-coating it. I do think "the whole point of liberal-multicultural tolerance is that you can do anything, and so long as you do not harass..." is not a bad way of summing things up, and none of the people in the film think they are harassing anyone, which means I'm right, right? Your point here has to be that the people in the film do harass Chris and others, so they can't be true liberals, right? And my point has to be that they don't harass Chris, so they can be true liberals, right? (Note here that "harass" should probably be in square quotes, because as far as the people in the movie are concerned, asking about his dick or admiring his muscles isn't harassment - indeed, it's admiration!) SuperMechagodzilla posted:In this view, my belief in the truth of egalitarian struggle is political. Not only is antiracism viewed as a relic of the time before history ended, it's a dangerous intolerance - a totalitarian imposition. What you promote instead is a postpolitical gradualism. SuperMechagodzilla posted:So, again, you do not actually disagree with anything I have written. You simply agree with the film that liberal capitalist democracy is the best of all possible political systems, and these terrorist attacks and whatnot are simply minor SuperMechagodzilla posted:It was not all in Chris's head. TychoCelchuuu fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Apr 10, 2017 |
# ? Apr 10, 2017 15:02 |
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TychoCelchuuu posted:I agree that you are critiquing what you see as the liberal ideology of the film, although to make your critique work you have to say things like "someone is not a true liberal if they ask a black guy about the size of his penis," which is goofy. Let's focus on this for a second. You have, mid-sentence, switched from talking about liberalism as an ideology to talking about 'liberal' as an identity (focussing on the behaviour of 'someone' - some individual). You are still conflating these two things, even after being informed that the distinction is important. Because of mistakes like this, you are becoming confused. At this point you have completely lost track of the question, which was whether the film is authentically antiracist and/or effective as a satire of liberalism.
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# ? Apr 10, 2017 19:11 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Let's focus on this for a second.
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# ? Apr 10, 2017 22:59 |
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Q:TychoCelchuuu posted:I am merely saying that for what you say about the former to be true (viz. what you think the movie has to say about the former), then that thing I mentioned about the latter must be true. Do you agree or disagree with this? That is, does your reading of the film depend on the idea that someone who touches a black person without their permission is a corrupt liberal as opposed to a non-corrupt (pure, true, whatever) liberal? A: No. I'll put things as simply as possible, leaving out the word ideology because it is tripping you up. A film that criticizes people who commit microaggression is not criticizing the concept of microaggression itself. This film does not criticize the concept of microaggression itself. It straightforwardly illustrates/promotes the concept.
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# ? Apr 11, 2017 00:09 |
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Jesus, okay, so now I realize that when you wrote "You're, again, endorsing the liberal ideology of the film while celebrating the attack on those corrupt liberals who touch black people without permission or whatever ("thank god I'm not like them!")" there was literally nothing of your own reading of the film in there, that was entirely just meant to be a reconstruction of what I think. Your reconstruction was so bad I didn't realize it was supposed to be one: I thought it was your own description of what was going on. I think this whole thing is a dead end. (For the record, yes, that's what I'm doing, but no, that's not what I'm doing, insofar as "endorsing the liberal ideology of the film," on your view, carries a lot of baggage with it that I don't think is properly part of liberalism, which is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that, no, I don't think those people are corrupt liberals, they're just liberals.) If you want to keep talking, there's plenty of stuff in all my posts that you haven't responded to yet, and I'd be interested in continuing to talk about the rest of it (although tomorrow I go out of town for a week so I likely won't stop by for a while). TychoCelchuuu fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Apr 11, 2017 |
# ? Apr 11, 2017 00:16 |
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~~The five stages of Cinema Discusso~~ Stage 1: I will disprove SMG Stage 2: I will disprove Marxism as a critical lens Stage 3: Heh, checkmate, how can SMG's posts have meaning if I start refusing to recognize words have meaning Stage 4: Whatever you're all nerds anyway I'm leaving Stage 5: Acceptance (HIGHLY HYPOTHETICAL) HookedOnChthonics fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Apr 11, 2017 |
# ? Apr 11, 2017 02:12 |
HookedOnChthonics posted:~~The five stages of Cinema Discusso~~ Actually, the opposite interpretation is true.
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# ? Apr 11, 2017 04:04 |
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# ? May 13, 2024 10:04 |
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I thought the first stage of CD was a sane and rational discussion of the motifs and themes of the movie where everybody who loved the film can come and discuss it. The second stage is where SMG comes into the thread and completely derails it and makes it about him, then everybody either gets bored or keeps arguing with a brick wall. The movie is practically out of theaters now and there's nothing really left to discuss
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# ? Apr 11, 2017 04:37 |