“What about Thanos?”
A strange question, I’ll concede, to emerge from an impassioned conversation about the transformative systemic overhauls required to our energy policy, our health care, and our economic ideology in the wake of the coronavirus—
—because what could the cartoon villain from the Avengers movies possibly have to do with any of that?
The answer, frustratingly, is: More than you may realize.
During a recent online confab with the leadership team of the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the Climate Reality Project, the discussion drifted momentarily from existential matters to televisional ones: What’s everybody been binge-watching?
Now, anyone who knows me—in person or through this blog—is peripherally aware of my immedicable disdain for movies and television. Yet… with no baseball this spring to occupy my time, I’ve been reluctantly compelled to sample quite a bit of scripted media to which I’d have otherwise turned up a nose. And, to my surprise, I find myself excited to share a handful of programming that, in my view, embodies creativity with a conscience. (We’ll get to those coveted endorsements shortly.)
To that end, one of our Climate Reality Leaders recommended Schitt’s Creek: “The evolution of the self-absorbed yet well-meaning characters as they deal with the adversity that helps them discover what it really means to love is quite endearing,” my colleague said, “and I believe has left an impact on many who are out there now hoping for the world to refashion itself in that way.”
Schitt’s Creek is one of those shows that got away from me in our era of Peak TV, but I second the motion for more prescriptive fiction that both challenges us to be better—individually and collectively—as well as provides a model to do so. Hard as this may be to fathom for those born into a postnarrative world, but our popular entertainments used to reliably perform that public service. To wit: Earlier this month, this unflinching indictment of white privilege from a 1977 episode of Little House on the Prairie resurfaced on Twitter to considerable gape-mouthed astonishment:
Bet you didn’t recall that show being so edgy. Thing is, the stories we tell about the world in which we live are only as aspirational—and inspirational—as the moral imagination of our storytellers. Alas, ever since meaningless worldbuilding supplanted purposeful storytelling, the function of popular fiction has shifted from lighting a path forward to drawing us down a rabbit hole of “Easter eggs” and “spoilers” that lead only to the next installment of a given multimedia franchise (meaning: keep your wallet handy). As the late Neil Peart wrote forty years ago:
Art as expression – Not as market campaigns Will still capture our imaginations Given the same State of integrity It will surely help us along
Talk about advice unheeded. Consequently, our commercial entertainment is often embedded—however unconsciously—with culturally pernicious values, from glorifying vigilante justice (superhero sagas; revenge thrillers), to undermining trust in public institutions (the self-serving White Houses of Scandal and House of Cards were a far cry from the empathetic Bartlet administration), to romanticizing criminal sociopathy (the street-racing “rebels” of Fast & Furious) and—bonus!—thereby validating a mindset in which “environmental degradation is not only a given but a goal” (robin, “The Fast and Furious Films and Mad Max Fury Road,” Ecocinema, Media, and the Environment [blog], September 20, 2019)
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