RE: My beef with mainstream culture
Hollywood is pure evil.
They have really been defining what is good/bad, acceptable/unacceptable for a long while.
Place this on a... your home town, a tiny village where everyone knows everyone, and culture almost seems to be chiselled in stone. Where most people are afraid of change.
And in comes this force that changes the whole group, so that culture changed, and then locked into the new place. And very few even noticed.
I believe, today, that my entire outlook on Christmas was defined by watching christmas specials on TV. I feel the nostalgia i have for christmas as a child, is those shows playing. This past christmas, i tried to find the root of my feelings. I remember enjoying opening presents... but i can only remember a few presents from one single year.
So, the entire nostalgia was hollywood created.
In the future, people will be much more accepting of change. Many even relishing in it. Further, people will be coming together as "families" (something like self organizing tribes). And these families will create new cultures for themselves.
That is exactly what I want to see, and what motivates much of my work. Self organizing communities. They can believe in and practice whatever customs they want, as long as they are respectful of other tribes and members have the option to leave if they are unhappy.
I already feel this happening now, despite the resistance of old power.
I feel Hollywood is a mechanism of keeping old ideas alive and pushing new ideas in convenient directions. Directors probably have freedoms as long as they don't stray too far from the norm, or only stray in a way that allows the survival of certain narratives. I am always reminded of how our culture is shaped by the good and evil paradigm, mostly which comes from the black and white fictional stories we consume.