I hate so-called "cool, calm, and collected" characters being presented as superior beings that are shown being correct so often that the consumer take-away message is that being emotionally cold and abrasive makes them smart too. :reddit-logo: worshiped characters like that pretty much since Digg collapsed and also LARPed as being the same way in their own self-descriptions. The "misanthropic genius asshole flattered by the script and by total screen time" cliche is related to this too.
It's for reasons like that that the common dogma of "culture is always downstream from politics" rings hollow for me. It may usually flow in that direction but the absolutist position about that is dubious to me. The belief that people killed by copycat exorcisms would be killed pretty much the same way with or without a movie telling chuds how cool exorcisms are seems like an after the fact unprovable defensive claim for the sake of defending entertainment from all criticism.
At the college I went to, proto-bazingas set up "fight clubs" and had an unprecedented number of serious injuries that made the local news and got the medical center on site kind of busy handling the increased workload of bazinga-for-Brad-Pitt types. I was told, on Hexbear, that such "fight clubbing" would have happened exactly the same way with or without the Fight Club movie because something something culture downstream something something material conditions. :doubt:
Well there's a case to be made that these movies had such an impact because of specific material conditions. There's a good reason these copycats were focused on abusing young women with illnesses or giving an excuse to dudebros who want to prove their masculinity, instead of perhaps examining Catholic abuses or examining self-destructive dudebro behavior.
Like Squid game and Parasite are huge cultural successes, and yet I haven't seen them instigate any mass uprisings against the rich. Instead I've seen them inspire rich idiots to create their own little Squid Games.
Jurassic Park didn't cause widespread skepticism of corporate authority over stuff like patents or encroaching into wildlife. Instead it caused a kind of benign interest in dinosaurs and the impact of computer graphics in films.
You're probably right that cultural forces do shape how people behave, but what particular messages they took from these movies and what they did about those messaes was very much informed by their material conditions.
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