The end of lightness

[matrixmann]

In a dark age...

... why not let the darkness embrace you instead of practicing a happy-go-lucky culture?

Comments

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

I agree with you, but to answer as towards others motivation it is because the worst sin is to be not "liked" quoted from Facebook.

I think the smiling selfie guy that sells uzi's to terrorists is like an instance of the new face of evil. Evil used to be someone scowling, but now is someone that can't stop to consider what is moral and immoral and is only interested in pleasure and pleasing others.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

I think there are dozens of television series, made in the last twenty years, that are pretty to very good. Stuff like Breaking Bad, Penny Dreadful, Game of Thrones, Deadwood. A lot of the series made my HBO though maybe like twenty five percent of the series that are produced by them. There is a series based on the Phillip K Dick novel, the Man in the High Castle that Amazon Prime put out that I want to see.

New series like these have taken the place of the novel.

There are good movies like Philomena, Ex Machina, The Book Thief.

I share your general feeling in this post, but it is up to people to find meaning in things and just saying everything sucks means that you are guaranteed never to find anything you like.

A lot of the tv series nowadays that are long series that people watch multiple seasons of from the beginning to the end do seem like they are written by a team of writers that are looking for sensationalist ideas and a plot climax at the end of every episode that will drive ratings. But, this was how all of Dickens novels were done too, at least the part about written to have cliff hangers at the end of each part. They were published in weekly installments in newspapers.

There are some series that are great to look at and have good acting but don't really have much of a plot if you think about them too much like Penny Dreadful and Lost.

I think I can find things that are interesting if I look around and are a little forgiving.

Like Battlestar Galactica and American Horror Story have many bad parts, but have some really good parts too.

The problem with what you've said here is that you're guaranteeing that in the future you'll dislike everything. A lot of the techniques of film making are really good now. Even dumb films like this bad thing I saw where twenty somethings dive for treasure in the Bahamas last night for fifteen minutes before turning it off because the dialogue was insipid was great to look at.

Sometimes I feel like I can see a movie as part of the current cultural zeitgeist or moment and see something, like one scene, that is really profound saying something about the current human condition. At least, it's possible that it's there. The director of whatever might not even have thought about it much, but everything made currently or recently is like a future document of what it was like to live now.

That's an idea from structuralism of say Roland Barthes or Claude Levi Strauss or Theodor Adorno. They are all like cultural codes that can be deciphered many different ways.