A Venn diagram comparing my favorite childhood movies and books to the stories covered on this channel would be one simple round circle. A singular unity of nostalgic, late 70's and Reagan-era military sci-fi and cyberpunk. Honestly my only commentary is that I wish every episode was an hour! 😄
You have a greater cadence and intellectual curiosity than most lecturers I’ve ever had at university , your videos are a welcome treat in my sub inbox
Your style of video and they way you present your arguments are just awesome. You could make an hour long video analyzing sesame street and I'd watch the whole thing
Absolutely loved this movie as a kid! Something about the ending was so profound. A promise kept. A lineage secured. A memory that would be passed down for generations. It shows that despite being utterly alien to one other... In Culture, Religion, Morals, Language etc... That basic goodness & compassion is a universal language.
Ironically, it probably isn’t if they’re TRULY alien. I remember a sci fi story where these crystalline creatures eat their children if not strong enough to escape them, which is considered not only morally acceptable, they’re disgusted that humans and another involved species don’t do that, the main question is whether to just destroy the planet and raise the kids in a way we consider “normal” or just let the aliens have their way with them AND us, because they’re disgusted we aren’t happy all the time like them. (The third race, not the crystal things)
I had the advantage of reading the book before seeing the film. Though I agree with your compare/contrast of the book and film, I think that a miniseries would be difficult to do well.
Having read the short story and seen the largely faithful film adaptation, I found your critique of both to be spot on. The word "alienation" was constantly on my mind as I read the short story and felt the film lost something by using the ending it did. It was still a good movie and I understand why they went the direction they did. 1976's "The Man Who Fell to Earth" with David Bowie in the titular lead and 1984's "Dune" directed by David Lynch are fair examples of how badly the film industry is at adapting literary material that has any amount of internal narration.
Movie I thoroughly enjoyed as a kid, never occurred to me that the source material was a lot deeper and more fleshed out... the rushed climax of the movie should have been a hint in retrospect.
Definitely a good movie. I stumbled across it about 15 years ago, as an adult, and really appreciated it. It sounds like the book is even more intriguing.
"Now these guys are a lot bigger and a lot slower than most football players, say the Houston Oilers". The football scene is my favorite part of the movie.
The movie simultaneously suffers from the badly rewritten third act driven by budget and '80s Hollywood culture and yet is still Head and shoulders above 90% of current content written from scratch. I agree there should be more mini series as a dramatic form.
This has been a common motif in many movies. As mentioned a few times "Hell in the Pacific" is my favorite. As pointed out, the movie after the movie is what needs to be explored. but that is perhaps better as book material than movie or mini series material.
Enemy Mine was one of those movies that I caught on cable TV as a kid when I was surfing for documentaries on History and Discovery before they became The WW2 Channel and The Home Decoration Channel respectively. It didn't occur to me until a shamefully long time later that it wasn't made for TV. Totally off topic, but could you do a video on Sliders?
Brought back some memories 😂. I remember when The History Channel was basically the WW2 channel. A lot of people have complained how the History Channel has changed with lots of reality tv shows such as Pawn Stars and Axe Men, but I remember being annoyed at all the shows they did about WW2. Like that historical period is interesting, but they over did it constantly. I absolutely loved Modern Marvels though when it came on.
I just want to say, for the record, that I have watched a lot of your videos and I really like and appreciate their content. You bring philosophy to life using Science Fiction as a mirror to explain the concepts. Thank you very much!
I just found your channel and I gotta say I love the way you speak about things,the topics you choose and the fact that you read sci fi. This is some great work you're doing. And the style is honestly simple but it works so well. These type of videos feel as if they are from another time. And also I loved the movie too :D
Enemy Mine! One of my favourite sci-fi movies, and hardly well known I had thought. I hadn't known there was a book prior either, something to look out for.
Longyear's a great writer, and his Infinity Hold series is underknown. Second book 'Kill All the Lawyers', 3rd is Keep The Law. It's MadMax meets Con Air on an Australia-ish prison planet and the main idea that Justice has been lost in our modern era.
If i can make a recommendation i think you should definitely look at 'legend of the galactic heroes' ,its exactly the short of show id expect to see on your channel , a sci fi space opera ,dealing with totalatarian regimes ,free republics and the nature of war all wrapped in a neat bow ,i couldn't recommend it enough.
I read that book long ago. Barry Longyear is a great writer and that book was quite profound. You are correct. The film couldn't capture the moral of the story.
Enjoyed the book, the movie is just the 2nd act really...but it is a damn fine act, I still have it on DVD. Zamis reciting his family lineage at the end of the movie makes me choke up big time! It is beautiful.
I remember seeing this movie on paid cable channels dozens of times growing up! Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr. were two of my favorite actors back then, and to see them both do a movie together was a real treat. I get what you are saying about the third act and it's deviation from the source material, but I like the movie ending better. Fourteen year old Me needed all the rays of hope he could find back then!
Not sure is you ever heard of the British Tv show called The Tomorrow People. As a kid who grew up on really early cable Tv, i got exposed to this show along with Dr Who. The Tomorrow People is a reflection of its time. Early 70s British scifi that tries to comment on more than one thing at the same time. Growing up, the environment, technology, war along with chidren trying to cope with themselves internally. Would love to see someone bring this show into the light.
I wish you would do a video about nuclear war. Particularly the movies "Threads", "The Day After", "Testament" and the book, "A Canticle For Lebowitz". I think you could do these works real justice by talking about them.
@@feralhistorian Excellent. I love that book and the implications it suggests are the most realistic to me about what would happen in the aftermath of a nuclear war.
I remember this movie well, and liked the different approaches between the movie and the book. My main disappointment was I wanted MPC or Revell to bring out kits of the BTA and Drac Fighters, and I'm still waiting . . . . Thanks for making and sharing! 257th Like.
@@feralhistorian I don't know if you are familiar with a channel on this site called "Matteline 1967," but he has posted a series of videos titled, "What If... Fantasy Model Kit Box Art." They're all worth watching, but #6 features a hypothetical Airfix "Dogfight Double" kit of the "BTA Fighter and Drac Raider." In real life, there are resin kits of both - if you can find (and afford) them. But so far, no conventional, injection molded kits of these subjects are available. (As a sidebar, #4 shows a nice "What If . . ." featuring the MiG-31 Firefox.) Again, they're all worth watching. Just try not to drool . . . .
Louis Gossett Jr. Has a wonderful story about the time he played Jeri in Enemy Mine. ruclips.net/video/EfaBrovdOBA/видео.htmlsi=TmgV6iF2YQ2xYS9o I've also read the story and share your opinion. There truly was a lot lost in translation. But what was made was still one of the most wonderful progressive sci fi film ever. The fact that modern progressives aren't even talking about this film is criminal.
Drakas? It might be interesting instead or in addition. Drakon is pretty much the same story as Stirlings Terminator novels. Not bad but sort of a departure from the through line of the rest of the series.
@@Detson404 Yeah, Drakas!. It did a lot to expand on the universe in many interesting ways. The Greatest Danger especially is one of my favorites, an excellent little story.
I'd like to see stories like this, but where the generic white westerner is the one who shares his values with [insert alien / native]. In general, these stories are about the generic westerner learning something good and great while discarding his own. Not a lot is offered or learned. In "The Last Samurai" we have evil modern capitalist America bad, while feudal Japan is good and noble. In "Avatar" (blue aliens) we have evil modern capitalist America bad, while blue jungle natives good and noble. Nothing is really offered beyond saying that what we are, or what is being put forward to the audience, is bad. For an actual examination on culture, traditions, and how history is perceived, philosophy, and religion. It would have been great to see the main character teach of his own ways in a good and positive light. What he teaches will tell us a great deal about who this character is. And a large part of the story could be him, as he is teaching, he cleanses himself in a way of the bad and the muddled of his own, and in so he himself grows closer to what someone of his people (us as westerners) are supposed to be. The myth of the noble savage is a tiresome one. There is a lot of bad in our culture and ways of life. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater and opening your arms to something new simply because it is different and from the outside, is a really bad idea. Like feminists discarding Calvinism and Protestantism because it is misogynistic and patriarchal, only to turn around and embrace Islam and Hinduism, while at the same time super-empowering the State, is just not a good long term plan. As Sam says in the Two Towers movie, "That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo... and it's worth fighting for." Revolving door revolution is not a good idea for anyone.
Years ago I started writing something along these lines. The beta-readers were so uncomfortable it was equal parts hilarious and infuriating. Might have to revisit it one of these days.
Hollywood big-budget screenplays are not allowed to deviate that much from accepted norms. So you are partly correct. All we end up seeing in movies like Avatar is a generic watered-down message of "Capitalism not so good, maybe" instead of presenting any coherent alternative system to Capitalism. Imagine how many people's heads would explode if a big budget movie presented communism and Marxism in a positive light. Republicans would die of shock. You must understand that even Hollywood is a business at the end of the day. They know better than to bite the Capitalist hands that feed them.
I’d watch a straight-up Marxist version of something like Avatar, there’s a lot of ways to make that an interesting story. I do think it would get really clunky about halfway through and be unable to recover though, for two reasons. First because anti-capitalism doesn’t necessarily equate to Marxist. There were several pre-Marx schools of socialist thought but now Karl and his line dominate socialist thinking so much that they’re almost synonymous in common usage. While Marx has some good analysis of problems inherent to industrial capitalism in general and mid-19th Century capitalism specifically, the details are very different today and probably even more so in a future with interstellar travel. Which leads into that second problem. Most Marxist theorists writing through the 20th Century were, one way or another, grappling with why things didn’t happen the way Dialectical Materialism said they would. The Revolution didn’t come to industrialized countries like Germany or England but instead relatively backward Russia, wealth distribution didn’t lead to a squeezing out of the middle class as the rich become a smaller group and the poor larger while capitalism consumed its own markets; instead the middle class grew and more people became rich. Subsequent generations of Marxist thinkers have been tinkering with Marxism to account for that. The scientific aspect didn’t hold up. And of course it was also framed as a morally superior ideology that treated everyone with dignity and provided for all. The 20th Century put that to the test too, and found it wanting. So today Marxism is on one end an abstract analysis of how industrial capitalism exploits workers and appropriates societal wealth to a handful of people, which is absolutely a valid a criticism and Marx makes several good points about the mechanism behind it. But everything between that and “the state withers away” is a pile of failed experiments that academics keep trying to reassemble in a way that works and ground-level activists mostly just ignore. So back to the Avatar example, there’s a potentially good story in there about a human that sympathizes with these people that are being wiped out, he tries to help them but is just as condescending and paternalistic as the capitalist invaders (though in a less overt way) and rather than being idealized noble savages, the natives actually have a theoretical understanding of different social structures and know what is being done to their world beyond merely “they’re cutting down the trees.” Marxism doesn’t really work directly, since they aren’t at that 19th Century level of mass factories staffed by a wage-dependent proletarian class. But they are communal or collectivist in a sense, and they partially adopt industrial methods but along a more cooperative model. They skip the private ownership of capital stage altogether and through a synthesis of their pre-industrial social organization and the invading human “late capitalist” manufacturing technology that doesn’t require those sprawling factory complexes, they end up depicting one potential post-capitalist society that retains the material benefits without baking in the wealth stratification.
@feralhistorian That's actually a pretty good description of Marxism. It was a coherent and accurate analysis of Capitalism as it existed in Marx's lifetime. As for Marx's predictions of the future, they are just that. So he was wrong about events that occurred decades after his death. So what? There were events that transpired that he couldn't have foreseen, but he was also partially correct. There actually was a working-class revolution in Germany at the end of WW1. It was crushed by Capitalism. The Capitalist system did fall apart several times. In the 1870s and again in 1929. There was no way to predict that the worldwide Capitalist class would band together to survive or that Capitalism would give workers enough concessions after the great depression to keep them from revolting. There was also no way to predict the worldwide backlash to the Russian revolution. A dozen Capitalist nations banded together to invade and crush the newly formed USSR. In the leadup to WW2, the Great powers of Capitalism, Britain, France, and the USA, all actively supported Germany and shunned the USSR diplomatically, hoping that Germany and the USSR would simply destroy each other. Their plan backfired big time, but we are no longer taught the point of "appeasement" policy, simply that it was a foolish mistake. Talk about taking the wrong lessons from history! As a final insult, the USSR was once again shunned and vilified as soon as WW2 ended, even though the Soviet Union had suffered the most and done the most fighting to defeat Germany. Moving forward to the Cold War, independence movements in Korea, Vietnam, and Africa were intentionally thwarted and vilified by the Capitalist powers, whereas Communist nations chose to stand on the side of those freedom fighters. For all these reasons, I can't fault Marx for inaccurate predictions. He was on the right track even if history didn't play out the way he expected. Even Isaac Newton was wrong about a few things. We still remember him as a genius whose work is still taught in math and science classes around the world. Why are we so terrified to teach Marx's analysis of 19th century Capitalism? It was largely accurate and helps explain the state of the world in the late 1800s. Capitalists would never allow it to be taught because it is a violation of their ideological holy war against communism.
@@stephendaley266 Re: "There was no way to predict that the worldwide Capitalist class would band together to survive " Promoting an ideology all about class consciousness and how his favored class would band together against its oppressors, but somehow 'no way to predict' that that oppressor class, with better access to coordination tools, would itself band together to protect its own interests?
So I might not agree with everything you talk about, I'm sure we have some differences in political and social idealogy.... but you are by no means a man of poor taste. Also you fantastically display this movie and it's book very well, and I cant complain.
![[#2024MAMA] BIGBANG (빅뱅) - 뱅뱅뱅 (BANG BANG BANG) + FANTASTIC BABY | Mnet 241123 방송](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EQsYfiPR9uM/mqdefault.jpg)
Nature will heal when we start making movies like this again and people want to see them.
you missed the point
@@RussellB Heck. Back to the drawing board with me then.
Tf are you on about russel
Perhaps not healing, but it would be a slightly better place to live in.
A Venn diagram comparing my favorite childhood movies and books to the stories covered on this channel would be one simple round circle. A singular unity of nostalgic, late 70's and Reagan-era military sci-fi and cyberpunk. Honestly my only commentary is that I wish every episode was an hour! 😄
In a way it is very impressive he keeps these so lean and concise yet so substantive.
I just want to add that Louis Gossett Jr. performance through all that makeup and prosthetic work is fantastic.
You have a greater cadence and intellectual curiosity than most lecturers I’ve ever had at university , your videos are a welcome treat in my sub inbox
Your style of video and they way you present your arguments are just awesome.
You could make an hour long video analyzing sesame street and I'd watch the whole thing
Absolutely loved this movie as a kid! Something about the ending was so profound. A promise kept. A lineage secured. A memory that would be passed down for generations.
It shows that despite being utterly alien to one other... In Culture, Religion, Morals, Language etc... That basic goodness & compassion is a universal language.
Ironically, it probably isn’t if they’re TRULY alien. I remember a sci fi story where these crystalline creatures eat their children if not strong enough to escape them, which is considered not only morally acceptable, they’re disgusted that humans and another involved species don’t do that, the main question is whether to just destroy the planet and raise the kids in a way we consider “normal” or just let the aliens have their way with them AND us, because they’re disgusted we aren’t happy all the time like them. (The third race, not the crystal things)
I had the advantage of reading the book before seeing the film. Though I agree with your compare/contrast of the book and film, I think that a miniseries would be difficult to do well.
What would have been good would have been to have Lee Marvin do a cameo as a callback to "hell in the pacific ".
Lee Marvin makes most things better.
I'm not crying; you're crying.
Having read the short story and seen the largely faithful film adaptation, I found your critique of both to be spot on. The word "alienation" was constantly on my mind as I read the short story and felt the film lost something by using the ending it did. It was still a good movie and I understand why they went the direction they did. 1976's "The Man Who Fell to Earth" with David Bowie in the titular lead and 1984's "Dune" directed by David Lynch are fair examples of how badly the film industry is at adapting literary material that has any amount of internal narration.
Movie I thoroughly enjoyed as a kid, never occurred to me that the source material was a lot deeper and more fleshed out... the rushed climax of the movie should have been a hint in retrospect.
Definitely a good movie. I stumbled across it about 15 years ago, as an adult, and really appreciated it. It sounds like the book is even more intriguing.
I always loved the double meaning of the title.
In the beginning it refers to my enemy.
But by the end it refers to an enemy mining operation.
I loved this movie. Thanks for reviewing it and the book. I remember watching it as a child in the 80’s
"Now these guys are a lot bigger and a lot slower than most football players, say the Houston Oilers". The football scene is my favorite part of the movie.
I love this film! It's still one of my favorite sci-fi films out there.
The movie simultaneously suffers from the badly rewritten third act driven by budget and '80s Hollywood culture and yet is still Head and shoulders above 90% of current content written from scratch. I agree there should be more mini series as a dramatic form.
This has been a common motif in many movies. As mentioned a few times "Hell in the Pacific" is my favorite. As pointed out, the movie after the movie is what needs to be explored. but that is perhaps better as book material than movie or mini series material.
I love both versions of the story so much.
Enemy Mine was one of those movies that I caught on cable TV as a kid when I was surfing for documentaries on History and Discovery before they became The WW2 Channel and The Home Decoration Channel respectively. It didn't occur to me until a shamefully long time later that it wasn't made for TV.
Totally off topic, but could you do a video on Sliders?
I've been wanting to do a Sliders video for a long time now.
Brought back some memories 😂. I remember when The History Channel was basically the WW2 channel. A lot of people have complained how the History Channel has changed with lots of reality tv shows such as Pawn Stars and Axe Men, but I remember being annoyed at all the shows they did about WW2. Like that historical period is interesting, but they over did it constantly. I absolutely loved Modern Marvels though when it came on.
Was a great movie when I was a kid. This is one that AppleTV+ should remake in a 4 or 6 epsidoe miniseries.
Never watched it but since it was a big thing when I was a kid, but I had it retold to me by friends at least 10 times :)
I just want to say, for the record, that I have watched a lot of your videos and I really like and appreciate their content. You bring philosophy to life using Science Fiction as a mirror to explain the concepts. Thank you very much!
Thanks for this channel, all the great stories of my youth you discuss just make my day
Great video! I loved this movie when I was younger, never even crossed my mind it was based on a book. Now I have something new to read!
I just found your channel and I gotta say I love the way you speak about things,the topics you choose and the fact that you read sci fi. This is some great work you're doing. And the style is honestly simple but it works so well. These type of videos feel as if they are from another time. And also I loved the movie too :D
Read the book before I saw the movie. You are correct, the book is far better. "Nuance, thy name is NOT Hollywood."
Enemy Mine! One of my favourite sci-fi movies, and hardly well known I had thought. I hadn't known there was a book prior either, something to look out for.
Longyear's a great writer, and his Infinity Hold series is underknown. Second book 'Kill All the Lawyers', 3rd is Keep The Law. It's MadMax meets Con Air on an Australia-ish prison planet and the main idea that Justice has been lost in our modern era.
If i can make a recommendation i think you should definitely look at 'legend of the galactic heroes' ,its exactly the short of show id expect to see on your channel , a sci fi space opera ,dealing with totalatarian regimes ,free republics and the nature of war all wrapped in a neat bow ,i couldn't recommend it enough.
That was an amazing movie, I absolutely loved it.
I read that book long ago. Barry Longyear is a great writer and that book was quite profound. You are correct. The film couldn't capture the moral of the story.
Enjoyed the book, the movie is just the 2nd act really...but it is a damn fine act, I still have it on DVD.
Zamis reciting his family lineage at the end of the movie makes me choke up big time! It is beautiful.
I so wanted it to keep going with the high tech start of the film, however it does well on it's own ground.
I have this movie on dvd somewhere. Going to have to find it.
More Draka content. Excellent!
I remember seeing this movie on paid cable channels dozens of times growing up! Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr. were two of my favorite actors back then, and to see them both do a movie together was a real treat. I get what you are saying about the third act and it's deviation from the source material, but I like the movie ending better. Fourteen year old Me needed all the rays of hope he could find back then!
I was wondering when you were going to cover this one.
I was just rewatching some old videos. Will have to check this movie out.
Thank you again sir!
Darmak and Jelad at algorithm
used to come on Sunday afternoons a ton
I saw this movie many years ago and I liked it. It was a very moderate Robinson Crusoe movie in a Sci-Fi setting.
Truly one of my favorites!
I've loved this movie since I was a little boy. Not many ppl know of it
I liked this movie as a kid and even back then would check out in the 3rd act, now I know why!! thanks!!
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
oh boy, i have watched this movie years ago.
holy crap i just looked up the movie on IMDB and Bumper Robinson played Zammis. Way back in the day i named my Star Frontiers character Zammis
Thanks
Not sure is you ever heard of the British Tv show called The Tomorrow People. As a kid who grew up on really early cable Tv, i got exposed to this show along with Dr Who. The Tomorrow People is a reflection of its time. Early 70s British scifi that tries to comment on more than one thing at the same time. Growing up, the environment, technology, war along with chidren trying to cope with themselves internally. Would love to see someone bring this show into the light.
I'd completely forgotten about that one.
I wish you would do a video about nuclear war. Particularly the movies "Threads", "The Day After", "Testament" and the book, "A Canticle For Lebowitz". I think you could do these works real justice by talking about them.
I just wrote a piece on Canticle for Leibowitz yesterday, though coming at it a bit askew. I don't think it'll be the last time it comes up.
@@feralhistorian Excellent. I love that book and the implications it suggests are the most realistic to me about what would happen in the aftermath of a nuclear war.
I remember this movie well, and liked the different approaches between the movie and the book. My main disappointment was I wanted MPC or Revell to bring out kits of the BTA and Drac Fighters, and I'm still waiting . . . .
Thanks for making and sharing!
257th Like.
I definitely would have picked up a Drac fighter kit back then if they'd existed.
@@feralhistorian I don't know if you are familiar with a channel on this site called "Matteline 1967," but he has posted a series of videos titled, "What If... Fantasy Model Kit Box Art." They're all worth watching, but #6 features a hypothetical Airfix "Dogfight Double" kit of the "BTA Fighter and Drac Raider." In real life, there are resin kits of both - if you can find (and afford) them. But so far, no conventional, injection molded kits of these subjects are available. (As a sidebar, #4 shows a nice "What If . . ." featuring the MiG-31 Firefox.)
Again, they're all worth watching. Just try not to drool . . . .
Louis Gossett Jr. Has a wonderful story about the time he played Jeri in Enemy Mine. ruclips.net/video/EfaBrovdOBA/видео.htmlsi=TmgV6iF2YQ2xYS9o
I've also read the story and share your opinion. There truly was a lot lost in translation.
But what was made was still one of the most wonderful progressive sci fi film ever. The fact that modern progressives aren't even talking about this film is criminal.
Excellent essay. Have you read the rest of Manifest Destiny?
No. I read Enemy Mine in a compilation in the early '90s but Manifest Destiny has been in the queue for years.
@@feralhistorian Highly recommended.
Are you familiar with Gundam Hathaway? It feels like it shares a lot of recurring themes that appear on this channel?
I have not seen it, or much Gundam at all really.
@@feralhistorian I'd definitely recommend trying it
What about the mine?
Did i miss the part about it?
Yeah I thought it was essential to the pun-riddle of the title...maybe the author never thought of it?
Would an “enemy mine” be a hostile city?
Zammies get 4,5?
I never really cared for the movie, but I might try treading the book. The book is almost always better.
Where are you?? That looks beautiful
The Black Hills of South Dakota.
Whoa
My wife and I saw this when she was pregnant with our first son. We figured an SF story would be safe from bad pregnancies.
Oops.
Drakon? Oh no... Couldn't you focus on the short story compilation instead? 🤣
Drakas? It might be interesting instead or in addition. Drakon is pretty much the same story as Stirlings Terminator novels. Not bad but sort of a departure from the through line of the rest of the series.
@@Detson404 Yeah, Drakas!. It did a lot to expand on the universe in many interesting ways. The Greatest Danger especially is one of my favorites, an excellent little story.
I'd love it if you'd read the first draft of my book that I'm writing now. It will be done in December. Would you be interested?
I'm potentially interested, but I can't commit to it. I don't think I'd be able to do a proper beta read without letting something else slip.
@@feralhistorian Thxs for the response. If you get time let me know. Good or bad, your commits on my book would be greatly appreciated.
I think the movie ending was better.
I'd like to see stories like this, but where the generic white westerner is the one who shares his values with [insert alien / native].
In general, these stories are about the generic westerner learning something good and great while discarding his own.
Not a lot is offered or learned.
In "The Last Samurai" we have evil modern capitalist America bad, while feudal Japan is good and noble.
In "Avatar" (blue aliens) we have evil modern capitalist America bad, while blue jungle natives good and noble.
Nothing is really offered beyond saying that what we are, or what is being put forward to the audience, is bad.
For an actual examination on culture, traditions, and how history is perceived, philosophy, and religion. It would have been great to see the main character teach of his own ways in a good and positive light.
What he teaches will tell us a great deal about who this character is. And a large part of the story could be him, as he is teaching, he cleanses himself in a way of the bad and the muddled of his own, and in so he himself grows closer to what someone of his people (us as westerners) are supposed to be.
The myth of the noble savage is a tiresome one.
There is a lot of bad in our culture and ways of life. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater and opening your arms to something new simply because it is different and from the outside, is a really bad idea.
Like feminists discarding Calvinism and Protestantism because it is misogynistic and patriarchal, only to turn around and embrace Islam and Hinduism, while at the same time super-empowering the State, is just not a good long term plan.
As Sam says in the Two Towers movie, "That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo... and it's worth fighting for."
Revolving door revolution is not a good idea for anyone.
Years ago I started writing something along these lines. The beta-readers were so uncomfortable it was equal parts hilarious and infuriating. Might have to revisit it one of these days.
Hollywood big-budget screenplays are not allowed to deviate that much from accepted norms.
So you are partly correct. All we end up seeing in movies like Avatar is a generic watered-down message of "Capitalism not so good, maybe" instead of presenting any coherent alternative system to Capitalism.
Imagine how many people's heads would explode if a big budget movie presented communism and Marxism in a positive light.
Republicans would die of shock.
You must understand that even Hollywood is a business at the end of the day. They know better than to bite the Capitalist hands that feed them.
I’d watch a straight-up Marxist version of something like Avatar, there’s a lot of ways to make that an interesting story. I do think it would get really clunky about halfway through and be unable to recover though, for two reasons.
First because anti-capitalism doesn’t necessarily equate to Marxist. There were several pre-Marx schools of socialist thought but now Karl and his line dominate socialist thinking so much that they’re almost synonymous in common usage. While Marx has some good analysis of problems inherent to industrial capitalism in general and mid-19th Century capitalism specifically, the details are very different today and probably even more so in a future with interstellar travel. Which leads into that second problem.
Most Marxist theorists writing through the 20th Century were, one way or another, grappling with why things didn’t happen the way Dialectical Materialism said they would. The Revolution didn’t come to industrialized countries like Germany or England but instead relatively backward Russia, wealth distribution didn’t lead to a squeezing out of the middle class as the rich become a smaller group and the poor larger while capitalism consumed its own markets; instead the middle class grew and more people became rich. Subsequent generations of Marxist thinkers have been tinkering with Marxism to account for that. The scientific aspect didn’t hold up. And of course it was also framed as a morally superior ideology that treated everyone with dignity and provided for all. The 20th Century put that to the test too, and found it wanting.
So today Marxism is on one end an abstract analysis of how industrial capitalism exploits workers and appropriates societal wealth to a handful of people, which is absolutely a valid a criticism and Marx makes several good points about the mechanism behind it. But everything between that and “the state withers away” is a pile of failed experiments that academics keep trying to reassemble in a way that works and ground-level activists mostly just ignore.
So back to the Avatar example, there’s a potentially good story in there about a human that sympathizes with these people that are being wiped out, he tries to help them but is just as condescending and paternalistic as the capitalist invaders (though in a less overt way) and rather than being idealized noble savages, the natives actually have a theoretical understanding of different social structures and know what is being done to their world beyond merely “they’re cutting down the trees.”
Marxism doesn’t really work directly, since they aren’t at that 19th Century level of mass factories staffed by a wage-dependent proletarian class. But they are communal or collectivist in a sense, and they partially adopt industrial methods but along a more cooperative model. They skip the private ownership of capital stage altogether and through a synthesis of their pre-industrial social organization and the invading human “late capitalist” manufacturing technology that doesn’t require those sprawling factory complexes, they end up depicting one potential post-capitalist society that retains the material benefits without baking in the wealth stratification.
@feralhistorian That's actually a pretty good description of Marxism.
It was a coherent and accurate analysis of Capitalism as it existed in Marx's lifetime.
As for Marx's predictions of the future, they are just that. So he was wrong about events that occurred decades after his death. So what?
There were events that transpired that he couldn't have foreseen, but he was also partially correct.
There actually was a working-class revolution in Germany at the end of WW1. It was crushed by Capitalism.
The Capitalist system did fall apart several times. In the 1870s and again in 1929. There was no way to predict that the worldwide Capitalist class would band together to survive or that Capitalism would give workers enough concessions after the great depression to keep them from revolting.
There was also no way to predict the worldwide backlash to the Russian revolution. A dozen Capitalist nations banded together to invade and crush the newly formed USSR.
In the leadup to WW2, the Great powers of Capitalism, Britain, France, and the USA, all actively supported Germany and shunned the USSR diplomatically, hoping that Germany and the USSR would simply destroy each other.
Their plan backfired big time, but we are no longer taught the point of "appeasement" policy, simply that it was a foolish mistake. Talk about taking the wrong lessons from history!
As a final insult, the USSR was once again shunned and vilified as soon as WW2 ended, even though the Soviet Union had suffered the most and done the most fighting to defeat Germany.
Moving forward to the Cold War, independence movements in Korea, Vietnam, and Africa were intentionally thwarted and vilified by the Capitalist powers, whereas Communist nations chose to stand on the side of those freedom fighters.
For all these reasons, I can't fault Marx for inaccurate predictions. He was on the right track even if history didn't play out the way he expected.
Even Isaac Newton was wrong about a few things. We still remember him as a genius whose work is still taught in math and science classes around the world.
Why are we so terrified to teach Marx's analysis of 19th century Capitalism? It was largely accurate and helps explain the state of the world in the late 1800s.
Capitalists would never allow it to be taught because it is a violation of their ideological holy war against communism.
@@stephendaley266 Re: "There was no way to predict that the worldwide Capitalist class would band together to survive "
Promoting an ideology all about class consciousness and how his favored class would band together against its oppressors, but somehow 'no way to predict' that that oppressor class, with better access to coordination tools, would itself band together to protect its own interests?
so the dracans were a transgender socity lol
Don't make good sci-fi now .
So I might not agree with everything you talk about, I'm sure we have some differences in political and social idealogy.... but you are by no means a man of poor taste. Also you fantastically display this movie and it's book very well, and I cant complain.