Who Warns Of Warners?
Simple action stories depict conflict with an outsider villain/monster. In fighting that monster, the hero often gets help from their usual social allies, such as friends, family, and local authorities. In a more “modern” story, however, the villain may be a friend, parent, boss, teacher, police, or government agency. The hero must now learn to distrust many usual authorities, and judge who are their real allies.
Such stories come from our usual cultural authorities, however, like those who make our movies, TV shows, novels, and songs. And so these can be seen at a meta level as the same simple hero story: our cultural authorities teaching us how to anticipate and deal with the real villains we may encounter in our modern world. So then a meta-modern story is when those cultural authorities become the villains. In such stories, heroes must learn to distrust many cultural authorities and decide which ones are their real allies.
Now there are some movies roughly of this form. But they typically warn against trusting conservative cultural authorities. For example, Breaking the Waves and Handmaids Tale warn against trusting religious cultural authorities. Videodrome, Natural Born Killers, and Starship Troopers warn against trusting authorities who promote violence. Pleasantville, Network, Stepford Wives, and They Live warn against trusting older-era cultures. Movies like The Matrix and Truman Show do warn against trusting appearances, they don’t warn about culture in particular.
However, as our cultural elites are now dominated by non-conservatives, such movies are now really just our usual cultural authorities warning against trusting rebels who defy their cultural dominance. They are not really warning against trusting dominant cultural authorities. Any movies that do this must be pretty far out into the long tail of niche products. But they might be the warnings we really need.
I appreciate the logic of this blog post. That logic suggests: Fictional narratives should exist (or may need to be created) that sound the alarm about harms done by the currently dominant liberal (or non-conservative) cultural elites.
I'm trying to think of possible harms to be warned against. It isn't easy to come up with anything. So, trying hard, I've thought of these 3:
"Feminists told me I could be both a mother and have a career, but I waited too long and am childless..." (this disappointment has been documented and parodied)
"Non-white males from historically marginalized groups are valued for all the important, high status jobs; as a white male I can't get ahead, therefore, I succumb to depression and substance abuse..." (the documented 'deaths of despair' of middle-aged white males, reported in PNAS 12 years ago approx.)
"Liberal educators told me that emotional regulation, social skills, learning-how-to-learn and finding out what I loved doing should be my educational goals. I did that, but now I don't have the math, writing and science skills to get a job, so I'm 32 and still making working as a waiter."
It is hard to think of harms or curtailments to happiness that are a consequence of liberalism (or the ideology of liberal elits now in power). Does anyone have any ideas?
Regarding: "Any movies that do this must be pretty far out into the long tail of niche products." --> Do you know of any movies that do this (even if they are very obscure, niche...)?
I think media still warns against itself. Major villains in American Gods and Hazbin Hotel are supernatural personification of TV and other modern entertainment. In The Boys, the evil Vought has an entertainment division similiar to Disney+(and ironically also Amazon Prime) that does blatant propaganda.