Ever Noticed How 'Weird' Modern TV and Film are?

There's a reason that every "critically acclaimed" TV show and film gives you creeper vibes. Hollywood and media companies seek out shows and films that create ever lower moral standards and less and less semblance to reality. This not only gives audiences cheap shocks, but purposefully breeds a lack of trust in the world and other people, and a belief in ubiquitous degeneracy.

00:00 They're all psy-ops. They're all sordid.
01:37 Overestimating Sex n Drugs to not be a dork
04:29 Life imitates Art. Game of Thrones.
05:56 Psychologically jarring media. The new "real world."
06:58 Psychological operations: governments, demons and geist
07:56 The American degeneracy is not universal.
10:44 I hecking love Marvel!

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[lsmithiv]

It seems today that all you see is violence in movies and sex on TV. But where are those good old-fashioned values on which we used to rely?

[AbduMad]

“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”
― Edward Bernays

[happytreefriends]

Adult actors portraying teens doing adult things and then passing it off as normal has always bothered me.

[dedwendell]

I think if you overindulge in this kind of wish fulfillment media from a very young age and those escapist fantasies become your expectation for reality, you will always be unhappy, unsatisfied with your conditions and unmotivated to create something better for yourself. I speak from experience.

[thecomicssectionchannel]

A summary of Luke's take: "it seems today, that all you see, is violence in movies and sex on TV. But where are all those good old fashioned values that we used to rely"

[ghenghiskha]

In Kazakhstan we dont allow reality tv and sexual content on tv, if it happens we throw stones at them.

[lautaro]

There's a famous movie here in Argentina, Wild Tales (Relatos Salvajes). It's an antagonist movie depicting short stories about everyday occurrences that end up going to the extreme. For example, one of the stories is a wedding where the bride ends up killing a lot of people because the husband was cheating on her and invited the other woman to the wedding. Another one was a guy that planted a carbomb because his car got towed and had to do a lot of infuriating government bureaucracy to get it back. It's actually a pretty good movie, a solid recommendation to anybody who likes foreign movies.

What struck me upon watching this video is remembering how during the premiere of said movie everybody went out to social spaces to say "omg I totally relate to *X character that resorted to murdering someone over mundane things*" while Szifron, the movie's director, said in multiple interviews that he intended the exact opposite feeling. The movie was about showing that extreme violence and psychopathy are totally incompatible with our societies, the movie was emphasizing the taboo aspect of violence while treating the PoV of the perpetrator.

I fully believe that there's a point to make in how guillible people are because of movies. There's certainly a point to make that nobody likes government bureaucracy, but virtually nobody ends up planting a bomb in response. And if someone does that, the popular opinion is vastly overwhelming against the actions. But if that same people watches the scene happen in a movie, they are able to "relate" and not afraid to clap and give an ovation.

[IndianBrah]

One of my favorite 'psy-ops' is how so many medieval fantasy settings either settle on the Knights Templar or the Catholic Church as the bad guys pulling the strings. It's such an unconscious swallowing of protestant and enlightenment era myths that have been popularized by the new atheists who like to talk about how the catholic church destroyed the classical world.
The other one is how male friendships are treated. There always has to be a gay subtext either inserted by fans or by the creators.

[micahsnyder]

Korean Dramas are a good example of this pure kind of storytelling that’s mostly dead.

They get a bad rep for being hammy and silly, but I tried watching one recently and was very pleasantly surprised by how positive and normal it was.
Basically just normal people living normal lives and perpetuating positive moral values.
It’s bizarre that this is basically dead in most modern media.

[slowcreep]

The innocent nature of older American movies is precisely why I love them. It took me a long time to work that out. I just knew that I walked away feeling cathartic and generally positive, whereas something like Requiem for a Dream, while objectively a good movie, left me feeling terrible.

[staticoverlay]

Growing up in the 90s the worst one was pop music radio, I'm completely serious, and it was hardly the music itself, it was everything else, the things the djs would say, the people they'd have on as guests in between songs, the "culture news" that gave this impression that all adults are going to nightclubs and having one night stands constantly, when in reality it's a tiny portion of people who even can live like this if they wanted to. Keep in mind it's not even teenagers hearing this we're like around 10 and it's creating this warped perception of how you're supposed to act when you're older
I'm not even a cultural conservative and you can't make an interesting movie about a guy who just goes to work and is kinda happy, there has to be some kind of conflict, but the same way you teach kids movies aren't real and you can't jump off the roof and fly like superman you have to about other media too

[ichster]

I tried to convince my parents to watch a scary movie with me. They refused because they didn't "Need that garbage in their heads".
What did we watch instead? John Wick 2, where a man goes on a brutal 90 minute murder spree.

[rothbardfreedom]

A content creator that adds YouTube Chapters is a good content creator.

[edmundironside]

10:35 "kids who are like eight... hooking up with each other"

Well, I don't know what films you've been watching...

[stencilman]

People who are upset about bad endings in TV-shows don't realize it's themselves they should be upset about.
It's the realization that they have thrown away a hundred hours of their life expecting some kind of divine inspiration as a payoff.

[jamesostrander]

Contemporary American writers often undermine human dignity. These days, I find myself really craving entertainment or IRL interactions that reinforce human dignity, but that's hard to find in cinemas unless you go back to pre 90s Hollywood. I think this is why the new Top Gun was so successful. It was just a well-made blockbuster that celebrated the humanity of its characters.

[qqqalo]

Most modern movies force sex scenes, where you can tell that the actors are uncomfortable, and which have very little to do with the actual plot.

[meingadget]

Find out the surnames of the producers of Hollywood movies and you'll start to notice a pattern. Every single time.

[MarkHalberstram]

Luke tricking me into thirst-clicking an Anya Taylor-Joy thumbnail shows he understands his audience.

It’s a great point about the lack of correlation between hedonism on TV and hedonism in real life, and it’s not really a new thing either. When I was a kid (mid 2000s) we had a show in Britain called Skins, which was effectively six series of 16 year-olds doing hard drugs, screwing everything that moved, crashing cars into canals etc. But what’s really odd is that the media coverage of it always emphasised how true to life it was, which couldn’t be less accurate to the lives of anybody I knew as a teenager in Britain. You see the same thing happening now for Americans with Euphoria.

There’s an appetite for the opposite of this, and ironically I think Game of Thrones is the best example of that. The sordid society depicted in the show was originally written by GRRM as a spiteful caricature of the Middle Ages, and the sexual violence in particular was ultimately satirical in nature. The idea that it’s meant to be a realistic world is a misunderstanding of George’s preoccupation with the minutiae of government and political life, best typified by his famous anecdote about wanting to know what Aragorn’s tax policy would be after the events of LOTR.

The book audience was sophisticated enough to understand this, and the essential layer of “irony” did survive the adaptation to TV for a few seasons. But ultimately the populism of the medium and vapidity of the showrunners and writers ensured that it ended up becoming exactly the moronic spectacle it was originally admired for not being. It’s a real shame, because I do love the books and did enjoy the TV show for the first three or four seasons.

[jacobmears]

The term you’re looking for is demoralization. I can hardly turn on the tv and watch a show or movie without needing to take multiple breaks because I start to feel physically unwell from that feeling that you described as feeling “off”. Media is demoralizing and anti-nature