gavinmcinns said:
No, I'm talking about the most important measure of quality, the quality of a film that makes you more curious, open, as opposed to more cloistered and xenophobic.
Didn't I mention Birth of a Nation earlier? You know, the first blockbuster film in American history being a love letter to the KKK? And how is early film an early example of work that isn't cloistered or xenophobic? Do you know what the first big sound film was? The Jazz Singer--featuring white people in blackface, because while they wanted stereotypical black jazz performers, they didn't feel it was "decent" to show real black people on screen. Most forms of media up until about the 70s when they really tried to start turning things around were INCREDIBLY prone to being racist, sexist, xenophobic, ethnocentric, and generally unenlightened. If you think media today is cloistered and xenophobic, you need to learn about early film history. It's a hoot.
One of my favorites was another of D.W. Griffith's: Broken Blossoms [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1NbA_eO7Es], or "The Yellow Man and the Girl." It was made in 1919, and it's the story of a HIGHLY stereotypical Chinese man (played by a white actor, of course--can't have any REAL asians in our films!) who falls in love with a white girl, but when the girl is beaten to death by her dad for loving him back, he commits suicide. To be fair, the father is played out to be the villain, but the way the Chinese characters are portrayed are at best stereotypical and at worst caricatured and patronizing. The tragedy D.W. Griffith had in mind to portray was the tragedy that the man the girl loved was Chinese, not that the loving couple couldn't escape the father in time.
However, even though this tripe was highly popular in its day with adults, that wasn't what kids were enjoying in the theater. When kids went to the theater, they went to see much more enlightened stuff.
And even after sound came into play Hollywood movies were still made with the white male in mind. Casablanca really pissed me off--I took it as the story of a woman who makes a choice about who she wants to be with, but is overruled by the jackass of a "man" who's decided it's his job to make sure she doesn't make the wrong choice with her fickle girly feelings. Hell there's a line in there where she literally says "Think for me, I can't think anymore." SO. ENLIGHTENED.
Seriously, just stop. You're only making this easy for me. At any point you could have pointed out that how socially progressive a person is does not necessarily affect how intelligent they are (Galileo probably was just as sexist as everybody else we know in that era--we just don't hold it against him because he never wrote extensively about it). But no, you've gone further down the rabbit hole and are now trying to argue that media TODAY is more cloistered and xenophobic than it was back then. Today's media certainly still has problems, but at least we aren't afraid to show black people on screen, and they're given roles other than being a caricatured African savage.
Lilani said:
Fact, youth read less than they used to, and the shit they read is more useless than it used to be.
It's impossible to know how many geniuses there are, but what is fact is that they are no longer appreciated as they were. Instead we elevate people like stephanie meyer to the level where I know her name, and that is discouraging.
Watching TV does lead to laziness.
I never said laziness = stupidity, but it does lead to stupidity. Laziness of thought, I should clarify. As soon as you settle into a single view of the world and stop asking questions about life and quit learning new things, you become a stupid backwards less than worthless dead weight on society.
"Youth read less than they used to?" As opposed to when? You mean the Victorian era, where only the rich could read things such as books and higher literature and being "literate" was being able to sign your name? And what were they reading back then, exactly? I'm certain even in the early 20th century children weren't reading the works of Charles Dickens. They were reading comic books and other media that catered to them. If you really think kids in the past were reading Shakespeare and Dickens in their spare time, you truly have no grasp on history or perspective. Just because those things existed doesn't mean that's what kids were reading and watching, just as just because we have A Brief History of the Time and Cloud Atlas doesn't mean kids or even the general population are enlightening themselves with them.
And watching TV does lead to laziness? Prove it. Lyndon Johnson could watch six TVs at once and know what's going on in all of them, and he was the VP who replaced JFK after his assassination. Also, please prove that TV is inherently "settling into a single worldview." Last I checked, on a single TV you can learn about wildlife in Africa, learn how to cook a mean taco soup, watch an adaptation of a Shakespearian play, listen to a concert, hear news from all around the world, and see politicians and pundits debate and verbally duke it out with each other. You can observe a hundred different worldviews in just a few minutes.