Real Life Fake Wizard is a critic of popular culture, and I am coming to appreciate his point of view. Take this short summary:
The problem IS the people making the stuff.
Hollywood writers used to come from everywhere. They were veterans, or had real careers before they ended up in LA. Today Hollywood writers come from a handful of coastal universities. They have no life experience. They haven't read classical literature. (That was written by dead, white men.) They have no life experience. They haven't even struggled with anything, more difficult that sobering up enough to attend classes on Monday.
This is the Real Life Fake Wizard video Hollywood Writers Hate The Audience
The American entertainment industry pulls almost exclusively from the same narrow funnel. A handful of MFA programs, in a handful of coastal cities, a handful of online taste maker circles where you have to say the right things to get the right gigs. The people who get hired share a world view before they ever write a single line of dialogue. The selection pressure runs on social connections and ideological alignment. Who you know and what you say in public matters more than whether you can write a story a stranger in Ohio will pay to watch.
Inside that funnel, a very specific worldview gets absorbed by everyone. Tradition is suspect. Religion gets recoded as hypocrisy. Working-class life is bigotry waiting to be exposed. Romance gets deconstructed into a power dynamic. Heroism is naive at best and complicit at worst. Beauty gets called regressive. Patriotism is embarrassing. The writers spend years marinating in this view of the world before they ever sit down to write a script for a mass audience.
The video is 20 minutes, but worth the time.
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