They say the arc of history inherently bends towards justice, but truth be told, that’s a load of nonsense. ‘We’ (however you want to define that) have made immense progress since [insert arbitrary time/date/era], it’s true, but that’s only through the tenacious, bloody struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors. It takes effort. There’s nothing inevitable about it. We can always slide backwards.
The forces of repressive reaction are only ever dormant, never extinct. Case in point: The 21st century rise of nu-fascism, nu-misogyny, and nu-racism (all really the same thing, and unchanged at its core since before the ‘nu-’ prefix). For every step forward we’ve made in acceptance and tolerance, we’re now seeing capitalist-tech-enabled steps being taken backwards—the barrage of rampant TERFism and MRA nonsense online being just two examples.
Take YouTube as just one example. The sheer amount of hateful, racist, misogynistic garbage on there, masquerading as film theory, boggles the mind. The way some of these people talk about cinema, you can’t help but think we’ve gone backwards. It’s difficult to untangle whether those people have always been around and they only seem prominent now because they have a platform, or if the platform itself is helping to create them (it’s probably a bit of both), but what can’t be denied is the scale of their reach and the danger they pose.
Anyway, all that is to say, here’s an inspired and quite frankly scarily plausible parody of what those people would sound like if two of the greatest action movies of all time—both released in a time often seen (rightly, still) as far more regressive than now—came out today: