Artistic Responsibility

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Friday night I went out to the movies and watched the big screen adaptation of The Fall Guyand had a pretty good time with a summer popcorn movie.

Before the film there were of course 20 minutes of trailers, and one trailer really pissed me off.

Fly me to the Moon a romantic comedy set in the days before the moon landing between a PR hack (Scarlet Johannsson) and a flight Director (Channing Tatum) as the PR hack tries to boost public interest in the upcoming lunar landing.

I can ignore/forgive the historical inaccuracy about public interest. Leading up to the landing this nation went space happy and after the landings interest waned from the fickle public. However, in the trailer it is also shown that fear of a failed landing prompts the PR Hack to produce a faked landing on a sound stage. This is where my blood boiled.

I think it is grossly irresponsible of the production, which began in 2022, to depict the conspiracy theory that the moon landings were faked. Yes, I understand that this is a comedy, and should be viewed in that light but the world we live in is one riven with conspiracy theories. One should not inject into a culture already diseased with conspiracies about election and life-saving vaccines anything that supports, even as a jest, conspiratorial thinking. People are dying from the conspiracy that the COVID vaccines are dangerous this is not the time to buttress such thinking.

John Carpenter when he wrote and directed, They Live meant it as a satire of Reaganism and what he viewed as the culture of greed in encouraged. However, his simplistic world-building of a secret alien conspiracy controlling and directing the planet’s governments and culture were readily accepted and embraced by neo-Nazis who view the entire film as an allegory that buttressed their diseased antisemitism.

Director Greg Berlanti and screenwriter Rose Gilroy have failed to learn from this terrible lesson and stand to do damage to our nation and our world for the sake of a few cheap jokes.

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One thought on “Artistic Responsibility

  1. Brad

    Even though the movie “Fly Me To The Moon” toys with the Faked-Moon-Landing dumb conspiracy theories, even though that annoys me terribly, I have to sigh and let it go. The sins of Hollywood are so much worse and more destructive than any satirical flirtation with the dumbest hoaxes. The Moon Hoaxers are so stupid it’s right up there with the Flat Earthers, and about as immune to rational combat. The Moon Hoaxers and Flat Earthers will always be with us, but as humanity continues to expand out into space, there’s little danger of those fantasists expanding beyond the core believers (nor hope of contracting!) no matter what anyone does, including Hollywood!

    After what I’ve learned about NSDAP, I’m not surprised Neo-Nazis found so much to like in the movie, “They Live.” That they misinterpreted it as an anti-semitic allegory.
    Because the anti-Capitalism conspiracy-themes of They Live has a lot of overlap with NSDAP ideology. Because the core anti-semitism of NSDAP ideology is bound up with the anti-Capitalism and conspiracy-thinking of NSDAP. The fact that Jews occupied peak areas of Capitalist success in Germany, such as bankers, was a primary reason for NSDAP hatred and envy of Jews, and used buttress the insane NSDAP conspiracy-theory that a secret Jewish conspiracy controlled the world.
    The ugly truth is, despite Communists endless denunciations of NSDAP as some sort of final stage of Capitalism, NSDAP were more alike Marxist-Communism than different; NSDAP was just a different flavor of extremist Death-Cult Socialism than Marxist-Communism, aiming a genocidal hatred & envy at a different scapegoat than the Communists did. NSDAP wants to kill all the Jews, Communism wants to kill all the Capitalists. Both political-parties were poisonous utopian Death Cults. Both claimed to be science-based Socialism. Both promised that paradise on Earth would follow after all the hated enemy are exterminated.

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