you might want to cancel beloved comedic actor and prominent bristol alumni simon pegg for turning into a desperate sycophant of bourgeois class interests, but actually he didn't say he owes his success to a dead end job selling toys, he said it was alright to not have everything figured out post-graduation and that he does not consider his time as a toy salesman to be a waste. It's alright, you can watch Hot Fuzz another 10 times.
He also wrote a thesis analyzing Star Wars from a Marxist perspective, so he's probably not that bad.
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/feature-interview-simon-pegg/
Is it true that you wrote your undergraduate thesis on a Marxist overview of popular 1970s cinema and hegemonic discourses?
I did. The piece was actually called Base and Super Sucker which was a play on the phrase “Basic Super Structure”, which is a Marxist proposition, hegemony and consent in Star Wars and related works. Basically I was using Marxist modes of critical theory to address Star Wars. And the main thrust of it was that if you watch any kind of television or theatre or film that has certain kind of themes or opinions and you don’t critically recognize them, then you consent with them. So very simply put, if you watch a racist comedian and you laugh, then you are a racist. And there are various preoccupations and concerns that flow through popular cinema that reflect things that are going on in society, certain ideas and certain fears. The thesis suggested that by watching films like those you are participating in those fears and preoccupations.
What aspects of Star Wars did you apply that to?
Well, for instance at the time, in the late seventies and mid-eighties we were in the height of nuclear paranoia and we were feeling that we could be bombed at any second by the Russians, and a lot of films at the time reflect that sense of ill-ease, particularly Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. All those films are riddled with bomb paranoia and also with justifications for having bombs like that. So you have weapons like the Genesis Project in Star Trek, you have the Death Star, the Force, you have the Ark of the Covenant, all of which are fine in the hands of good people. Like the Ark is fine if it’s owned by the Americans, the Genesis Project is fine if it’s with the Federation, but with the Klingons it’s a weapon; the Death Star is a bad thing because bad people shouldn’t have big bombs. It was basically kind of saying that ultimate power is okay as long as it’s in the hands of the righteous. So yes we’re allowed to wield nuclear bombs, but they aren’t, that kind of thing. And also Raiders of the Lost Ark is the most brilliant one in that it’s saying “If you don’t look at it, it can’t hurt you.” Almost kind of like, leave it to us or leave it to the government. And Spielberg wasn’t saying that, but these things just float to the surface—these preoccupations that maybe if we don’t look at it it’ll go away. That’s how Indy and Marion survived all those avenging angels in the end of Raiders: they just closed their eyes. It’s indicative of how society was feeling at the time.
OK but it's Paul that I'll be watching another 10 times, that movie is posadist as fuck :posad:
Actor Simon Pegg says that drudge work made him the man that he is.
same :jokerfication: :marx-joker:
It’s true. Work made my grandfather the man he was. I’ll never forget his debilitating black lung
I met members of a coal-mining community once. It was really important to them that we understood that the people who actually lived there were real miners, as in, they weren't doing mountaintop removal or like the insane destructive modern practices. They wanted us to know that they were doing the works themselves. That they were proles essentially. And you know, they were reactionaries too. But it struck me at the time -- I was more of a lib then -- how they knew we probably didn't like coal and it was important to them to emphasize their own dignity. The little bit of dignity that you can still have in the rapidly atrophying small villages of Coal Appalachia.
if its so good simon why aren't you still doing it
Lol I feel like this could be an out of context quite from an interview.
Is survivor's bias an accurate way of looking at the world? This survivor thinks so.
I have seen absolutely no complaints from bougies about not being able to find workers here. I do not think so.
Oh hey, drudge work also made me the person I am today, and that person doesn't want to do drudge work!
If it's so good, Simon, why aren't you still doing it?
Also, you probably haven't done it for decades, why do these people think the working environment for these jobs hasn't changed?
This man works 18-hour shifts using mindfulness. Here's how:
Strangely, nobody writing this kind of drivel actually seems to have a shitty dead-end underpaid job themselves, despite thinking they are so wonderful. They all have cushy PMC jobs.
Probably right insofar that suffering likely leads to more interesting art. The thing is the overwhelming majority of people aren't going to become artists, I'd imagine most don't even have an interest in being public artists.
Weird how most people aren't Simon Pegg, guess they haven't done enough drudge work
Let me tell you about the job, I Deadend do.
It's stressful, hard, and I'm not sure what the future will be like and it gives me anxiety when I do more than think 1 minute ahead.
Drudge work only makes you better in that it gives you more empathy then you may have otherwise had, but we need to have a world where we don't have people who exist to suck up the misery.
British panel shows are actually funny, though I don’t know any of their politics
britain is a sad grayish country where the sun shines 3 cumulative hours per year that popularized grass lawns in the US and spread famine worldwide but also they made the thick of it so it;s impossible to say if there bad or not
Red dwarf is still funny almost 30 years later.
Edit: damn just double checked and its more then 30 years old.
Yeah! I started watching it again this summer and it's still good, better even because I get all the jokes! And yeah it's old af.
Give me two comedy shows that I know nothing about, one american one british and I'll pick the british one every time.
