I was rewatching the Fargo series last night and it got me thinking about how a lot of US media these days, especially media aimed at young adults in their 20s and 30s, tries to address existential questions. I think that's to be expected in a society that most everyone agrees is moribund, and in which religious influence over most young people is at a low ebb.
But the answer to the question of purpose that all these shows and movies and games provide usually just amounts to "live for the moment." Live for your hobbies, your little joys, maybe an especially pretty sunset. A show that tries to be a more explicit morality tale like Bojack Horseman may go an extra mile and say, live for your friends and family.
That all sounds nice at first, but think about it for more than five seconds and you realize it's deeply unsatisfying. Mostly because it's just a kinder, gentler hedonism. Different in degree but not in category from saying that the meaning of life is found at the bottom of a bottle.
I think its indicative of our collective realization of how little agency we have in the world today. Of course we should want to live for the little moments. In between oppressive work and school schedules, childrearing responsibilities and the daily barrage of fresh horrors, the little moments are all we have. We can't dream of a future or what we coud collectively create in it. We don't have anything meaningful that we can give ourselves to, anything larger than ourselves that we can be a part of and in turn draw purpose from. We only have the present moment, and the present moment sucks. The only purpose we can hope to have here is the dopamine shot we get from eating our favorite sandwhich on a Tuesdsy afternoon.
:rust-darkness: True Detective has existentialist themes.
We can’t dream of a future or what we coud collectively create in it. We don’t have anything meaningful that we can give ourselves to, anything larger than ourselves that we can be a part of and in turn draw purpose from. We only have the present moment, and the present moment sucks.
Couldn't it be more like the media that has existential tinges tends to answer in a hedonistic or nihilistic manner because it's an individualistic answer?
Potato potahtoe I'd say.
Looking back I think the worst offender in recent years is Adventure Time. The show raises existential questions through its entire run but pretty much the only answer it offers to those questions is "don't worry about it, do what makes you happy."
Like the closing montage of the show is just the main characters doing a buch of inane bullshit set to ukelele musuc.
It's the dogshit Nitzschean influence on westoids. Turns their brains to mush. I think about how nonsensical, useless, and basically status quo-driven that piece of shit Kurszgegat (refuse to learn how to spell that channel) video called "optimistic nihilism." It summerizes a lot of what meat-eating, self-centered, destructive, unimpressive liberal subjects believe. It's the exact sort of pseudo-scientific, inverted and ruined form of hedonism that the imperial core subject requires to believe to both not really do anything to change the world, not feel bad about anything, and continue to serve the immoral project of the elites while dressing it up in fanciful pseudo-philosophical language.
https://redsails.org/really-existing-fascism/
Nietzsche is articulating widespread skepticism about the ability of socialism to deliver mass happiness, and his critique resonates powerfully with anyone who feels their individuality imperiled by a collective. Stalin (and his cohort) claimed Marx, while Hitler (and his cohort) claimed Nietzsche… and the majority of the Western world went on to claim Nietzsche too. Just take a trip to your local bookstore — everything Nietzsche ever wrote is now a classic that never goes out of print, finding its way into teenagers’ backpacks and academic seminars alike.
Accusing Nietzsche of being the ur-fascist, let alone a proto-fascist, has predictable consequences: his countless fans swarm to explain that he never actually endorsed the Nazi party because he was already dead, that any linkages to the Nazi project are the result of a conspiracy orchestrated by his German-nationalist sister, that he denounced German ethnonationalists and mocked antisemites, that his philosophy was in fact aesthetic and spiritual and anti-systematic and impossible to pin down, and that he grew out of any misguided ideas he may have held in his youth.
Domenico Losurdo examines each of these defenses in detail, including the conspiracy theory, in his critical biography of Nietzsche. Nietzsche comes across as a powerful and complex thinker, who indeed went through multiple phases and espoused contradictory beliefs, but Losurdo shows that one thing remains constant: Nietzsche never stopped experimenting to find the best way to oppose the egalitarian leveling tendencies of modernity that he despised. Funnily enough, after exposing the extent to which Nietzsche corresponded with out-and-out antisemites in his youth, Losurdo cedes some ground to Nietzsche’s apologists[.] . . . Liberal racism still feels the need to justify itself in scientific, i.e. universalist terms. As Nietzsche correctly observed, this is already a capitulation to socialism, which wins more the more people scientifically reason together. To truly condemn socialism, Nietzsche painted the issue of class domination as one of will, aesthetics, “freedom,” and spirit.
Just as the material conditions of capitalist countries vying for resources on an already-occupied planet helped us understand fascism as a geopolitical phenomenon rather than a psychopathology, Nietzsche helps us understand the real ideological appeal of fascism for ordinary, educated people. Nietzsche helps explain how fantasies of “slavery” and “extermination” could become respectable and even beautiful. Nietzsche was uniquely talented at making his readers feel special and strong as a reward for embracing his deep, misanthropic pessimism[.] . . . We see now why Chinese and Soviet masses generate such widespread revulsion among the would-be aristocrats of the West, how even Western proletarians feel comfortable referring to them as gullible “herds” and “insects.” Nietzschean thought, unlike Hitlerian thought, is widely respected and acknowledged as an influence by powerful people in just about every institution in our society: in an academic setting (Hannah Arendt, Jordan Peterson), in mass media (superhero movies, Breaking Bad, etc.), and on the Left (Emma Goldman, Mark Fisher, Contrapoints, etc.).
We see now why Chinese and Soviet masses generate such widespread revulsion among the would-be aristocrats of the West, how even Western proletarians feel comfortable referring to them as gullible “herds” and “insects.”
Hatred for the bourgeoisie is hard to keep civil :yea:
Looking back I think the worst offender in recent years is Adventure Time.
I think Rick and Morty was by far the worse offender there. The show has a half-baked premise that "because multiverse, because multiple versions of reality and multiple versions of you, literally nothing matters for some reason" which to me simply does not follow because if anything I'd be thrilled to know for sure that there are alternate realities that may be less doomed than the one I'm in now and I would wish the alternative reality counterparts well, but for the toxic fandom, the conclusion is often "be like Rick, be a selfish antisocial atrocity-committing asshole and feel very smart because of it."
Like the closing montage of the show is just the main characters doing a buch of inane bullshit set to ukelele musuc.
I HATE UKELELES :troll:
I HATE UKELELES :troll:
FUCK YOU STARTUP CULTURE FOR GIVING ME A BRAIN ALLERGY TO THEM
the conclusion is often “be like Rick, be a selfish antisocial atrocity-committing asshole and feel very smart because of it.”
That's a good point. Rick & Morty is definitely more toxic and provides exactly the worst answers to existential questions. I guess I meant for me that Adventure Time was just more frustrating. It drags up all this existential dread and then just brushes it off with some cutesy twee nonsense.
That's no good :no-copyright: , but between cutesy twee nonsense and a malignant narcissist presented as the Smartest Man In The Universe that murders countless sentient beings to power his car for a joke, I'd go for Adventure Time when pressed. :shrug-outta-hecks:
Rick and Morty is extremely critical of Rick's nihilism in nearly every episode it comes up. It's not subtle either. The guy is hated by everyone he cares about, including himself and the perspective that enables him to do shit like murder countless sentient beings to power his car brings him constant misery that outweighs any material gains.
Way way way too many "the curtains were fucking blue" consumers don't catch any of that or actually see their own misery and selfishness as a sign they are smart and superior like Rick. :brainworms:
Yeah, the people who identify with Rick because they think they're smarter than everyone else for being detached and uncaring, while watching Rick look directly into the camera and say "Half of the jokes in this show are mocking you viewers who cheered Pickle Rick and Sichuan Sauce or think a detached asshole who makes the world a worse place for everyone including themself is something to aspire to." are beyond satire, but you can't hold that against the show itself.
While someone who says they love Fight Club, Starship Troopers, or America Psycho can be a red flag, the existence of viewers who don't understand satire doesn't change the meaning of the movies.
Rick and Morty is basically "Great Man: the Series"
For what it's worth, that show had like the only representation of primitive accumulation I've seen in media.
I thought this is one of those thing where we exaggerate things to make it sound communist for comedic effect. But wow, this is legit marxist.
Answering existential questions with "live life to its fullest" is not much different than answering system sociopolitical questions that come up in comic book movies with "you have a point, but you have gone too far, Professor SkulHedFace."
Suddenly remembering that 007 game on Gamecube where you fight to stop a literal global communist revolution because the commies have a space laser.
The misogynistic rapist and domestic violence repeat offender that has a literal license to kill anyone he feels like killing with no legal consequences is the good guy against those damn commies. :galaxy-brain:
okay but some of those third person bond games were actually amazing.
Oh absolutley they were the shit. Those car chase levels with all the spy car gadgets? :chefs-kiss:
But also crawling with imperial brainworms.
played on a potato PC when I was like 14?... no driving sections: verdict, not cool.
Agent under fire I believe was before night fire but it had some super fun customization stuff for the splitscreen multiplayer where you could turn on low gravity, one shot kills, and the Q claw and basically do a claw fight and jump around like Spiderman lol
sounds like a fun fps, but personally more into rts and sims now. Have you played XIII? that was fun.
What is XIII? And tbh I wouldn't recommend agent under fire anymore except for nostalgia purposes. The game was fun for the time period but it was kinda clunky and a long time ago
The only reason to buy nightfire is because it let you softmod your console in order to play pirated games.
This inspired me to go and watch a playthrough of this game. Those maps are burned into a deep recess of my brain, especially the one where you fight the evil communist in the snow. Also, holy hell it's horny. Literally every cutscene is innuendo.
Was that the one where the villains' plot also included cloning world leaders?
Not sure tbh. I'm thinking of the one where the final boss is the leader of a revolutionary cell, and you fight him on a space station that has a big laser attached to it. The cell (phoenix something?) wants to use the laser to hold the world's capital cities hostage.
Edit: it was Nightfire.
I definitely remember a Bond game that ends on a space station with a laser, I just don't remember anything else lol
I just don't see the need for existentialist themes in anything anymore. Nier Automata already exists.
The first season (and I would also argue the second season) of Fargo is about as close to perfect as I have ever seen in a tv show.
And yes I understand it is laser focused at my generation.
Honestly I don't get why people need to look for existentialism in media, lmao just stare at your own hands for like a minute.
The only purpose we can hope to have here is the dopamine shot we get from eating our favorite sandwhich on a Tuesdsy afternoon.
It's an everything bagel with lox and cream cheese for lunch on Fridays, but yeah, I see your point
