Didn't We See This Movie Already?

Following up on yesterday's post where I suggested that the news media is simply serializing a novel they want you to read and not actually reporting on the whole of reality, I'd suggest that it extends to the arts as well.

Back in the 1950s, the western reigned supreme. If you wanted to watch a sci-fi flick, for example, your choices were limited to giant monsters scaring teens and the very occasional rocket ship to Venus sort of thing. All of them were low budget efforts and never had any of the big names.

These days, it's all social justice all the time. Cute, skinny chicks beating up on big guys, people of varying alternative persuasions overcoming oppressive, white, cis-normal racists and the like. In many cases, the movies are set in the past so they can bring in Jim Crow and cultural sexism to make sure you get the point.

I've gotten to where I can't watch them any more because I can't tell them apart. In the civil rights movies, there's always a scene where the white racists come out of church and then a few minutes later are using the n-word or beating up the protagonist. There's always a scene where some big, white guy says, "You trying to cause trouble, boy?" to which the hero replies in an innocent, squeaky voice, "No, Mr. Johnson, I just want to be the best badminton player I can be!"

Last night, we watched an episode of The Bletchley Circle which is the story of the first Eskimo tennis star. Or maybe it's about a gay teen growing up in 1952 Kansas. Or it could be a group of women who worked together decrypting Nazi transmissions in WW II and now solving crimes as a group. I think it's the latter. I fell asleep pretty early, but not before one of the cis-gendered white men derisively dismissed the work of one of the women who had clearly solved a Nazi cryptogram.

Good Lord, haven't we seen this movie already about a thousand times?

So instead of Black Bart rustling cattle or Miss Ellen Sue losing her farm to the unscrupulous cloned sheep rancher, it's social justice morality plays over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. I don't have a problem with westerns or with social justice stories any more than I have a problem with oatmeal. I just don't want to eat it morning, noon and night.

Here we see either the small-town sheriff trying to fight off the bad guys or a Southern christian about to keep a transgendered Latinx off the women's water polo team.