To not be able to stand film and TV nowadays because it always has an agenda?

[mintlily]

I've noticed that I can only bear to watch TV shows and films produced until roughly 2008.

It feels like everything nowadays has some kind of moral or political agenda. The writers are either trying to show off how enlightened they are, or condition you to accept their certain neo-Marxist world view. Virtually ALL dramas have an LGBT, feminist or anti-racist agenda, delivered with 0 subtlety or nuance. And the way it is done is so patronising and disrespectful to historical writers and figures - as if we 21st century people are the moral arbiters of history, and must overlay our more enlightened worldview on their bigoted work, which was surely produced in ignorance. It's also patronising to the intelligence of viewers, as if we need everything censored for our innocent eyes and can't make our own moral judgements. There is something puritanical and unartistic about it, like the Victorians censoring art to not corrupt the masses.

For example:

The new Little Mermaid deleting the line "men don't like women who blabber" from Ursula's songs. Ursula is a villain. We can cope with her being sexist, for goodness sake - we know that we're supposed to think she's wrong. The writer didn't need to fret that children would internalise the worldview of the villain.

Anne of Green Gables and her gay best friend. Why? This is not the genre to deal with LGBT issues. The author had no interest in this subject (as far as I'm aware).

Call the Midwife and it's pro-abortion stance. As if CATHOLIC MIDWIVES IN THE 1970s would have been pro-abortion?!

It's nothing to do with your actual views on these subjects. I just find that TV and film lacks the nuance and intelligence that it used to and I actually can't bear to watch any of it anymore, as it just feels so soulless.

When a show like Call the Midwife can't get a reasonably accurate portrayal of social attitudes, at a time that is recent enough that many people still remember it, that suggests that the problem isn't what you are suggesting.

We have lots of books and other historical material from the Victorian or even the Tudor period, we have some sense of how people thought and spoke.

Historical dramas are never accurate.
I love it when I see someone who looks like me or has my background in them. I don't need my race regulated to cowboy and Indian movies. Nor does my son need to see black people as only servants and slaves. It's just a movie.

I have a question for you: why do you think we have to keep re-living the attitudes of those times? When people express attitudes we now consider offensive what do you get out of it? How does it help you or anyone?

I agree OP - it's not so much that it's political it's that it's so heavy-handed. They don't trust readers and viewers to understand nuance. And children's programmes which are overtly educational are DULL.

My point wasn't really at all about diverse casting. Not sure why people think that's what I'm talking about

Probably because there are people in this thread complaining about things like the little mermaid being black and Idris Elba possibly playing Bond and too many black people in adverts. Not that they're racist or anything.

Re Henry viii, he went from being ' the hansomest prince in ChristenDom' to being an obese, miserable, bloated, impotent, stinking tyrant. It was part of his problem, so surely that should be reflected in films.

For many reasons. For one thing, I don't think that morality and attitudes inevitably get better as time moves forward, and I think it is extremely arrogant for producers to think that we enlightened 21t century people are the moral arbiters of history. I think that there is a lot that we condone nowadays which, in the future, will be considered horrifying. I am not saying everything was better in the past, just that there were a number of positive values which people held dear in the past which we have now lost. And I like to relive times when these things were valued.
Secondly, the main reason I watch something set in the past is to immerse myself in that time. I want to understand how people thought, what they were really going through, what were the hot topics of the day, how people's worldviews were conditioned by the politics of the time. I already know what the hot topics are for now - if I want to think about that, I'll turn on the news or have a conversation with a friend.

I kind of get what you are saying OP. I was watching a crime drama involving an asylum seeker and the moralising was so clumsy it was off putting. I’m 2nd gen immigrant and I was rolling my eyes and wondering when the hell we were going to get to the bit about the murder. It was the heavy handness that distracted from the actual storyline. I love a good morality tale but it should be prickly your brain lightly to carefully nudge you on your perceptions not bashing you over the head.

Done well with nuance and subtlety good tv/films make you question your own prejudices without dragging you there. “Unthinkable” for example was excellent on torture or homosexuality in “The imitation game”.

I’m fine with diverse casting, it’s fictionalised history not a documentary or a news broadcast.

But don't you understand that the past may not be what you think it is. It sounds as though you want the past to be represented in a way that you imagine it to be, but others aren't allowed to use their imagination in the same way. Often people (I'm not saying this is you) like to imagine an England before immigration, before the "wokeness" etc fantasising that it was a better time then, but you only have to read the memoirs of ordinary people to see that it was great for an elite and shit for everybody else.

I don't think the past of the UK that you want to immerse yourself in never existed in the way that you think it did - except in Dickens novels and on chocolate boxes. Perhaps what you mean is that you want to immerse yourself in a fantasy world - much like the people who love Bridgerton do.

I think you need to read some of the posts again because they say exactly that. They say that the dramas an not as well written as they used to be in the past because the writers are pursuing an agenda. You can't get any clearer than that, can you?

I don't think "xi s a diversity hire" because I can see with my own eyes that Television companies are now getting wise to the wealth of talent in the (for want of a better phrase) black community. Talent that was overlooked for generations.

I don't think the past of the UK that you want to immerse yourself in never existed in the way that you think it did - except in Dickens novels and on chocolate boxes. Perhaps what you mean is that you want to immerse yourself in a fantasy world - much like the people who love Bridgerton do.
You seem to have completed misinterpreted what the OP has said - and I mean completely. You seem to have understood the exact opposite!

Go and watch Annika - on BBC and iPlayer now- brilliant.

Often people (I'm not saying this is you) like to imagine an England before immigration

We don't need to imagine it we remember it. Good and bad. And it's not that we want a quaint or happy fantasy - we want truth not a lesson.

No you bloody don't.

You just grew up in a very white area.

It’s not the agenda though, it’s the obvious shoehorning. At school, my children were advised to “show, don’t tell” with their writing.

I like the author Curtis Sittenfeld, she wrote Prep. That covers gay relationships, racism, social class divisions deftly, within the actual plot. I thought her book Rodham ended brilliantly, emphasising that misogyny is ubiquitous across men in political parties.

Her latest one is based on a script writer for SNL and for me, it doesn’t work, it’s insipid. It’s like she tried to shoe horn in everything- BLM marches, same sex couples having babies, black women and higher rate of complications during labour, non binary presenters etc.

It’s not that these topics aren’t worthy (although non-binary is a load of crap) but I miss the writer’s satirical, funny edge evident in her previous novels. I don’t want to feel as though I’m being “educated” when I read.

This. I happen to prefer realism, but i’m perfectly aware (I’m a historian 😂) that it only goes so far. We never get a truly accurate portrayal of even the recent past (just think of how many men in historical dramas are clean-shaven: in reality, most would have had facial hair in the majority of historical periods). But then, artistic and cultural productions always take some licence: with makeup, with the lighting, with the way reality is represented, whether they’re historical or contemporary.

The issue that the OP is talking about is not diversity, but the heavy-handedness of too-obvious preaching on social issues. There are examples of doing it well, just as much as of doing it badly. The current CBBC Malory Towers, which my DD loves (and I find really enjoyable too), has a diverse cast, for example, which is completely unrepresentative of the books or of the time period; but it’s done so well and without preaching, that it just becomes another way of telling the story in the books but subtly updating it, to make it fresh and relevant to today. It isn’t really, in that at least, very accurate to the original time period at all, but this doesn’t matter because the actual plots are adapted very well. (Thankfully, though, in the scene in which Bill the tomboy doesn’t want to wear a dress to practice dancing, she firmly says that she’s still a girl even if she doesn’t want to dress like one - no nonbinaryness so far! 😂)

There’s room for adaptations that are more historically accurate, and also those that take more obvious liberties — but surely it’s the uniformity of the preaching and turning everything as a vehicle for an Issue that’s the annoying thing?

(NB pp were referring to Dickens - but he was also the popular middlebrow writer of his day, and hugely sentimentalist! There were other nineteeenth-century novelists who were far more interested in social realism — for example, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda; or Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. Certainly there is a huge proportion of Dickens which is not remotely plausible social commentary, but sensationalist fantasy for the middle classes — think of A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, in which even the depictions of poverty are cranked up to the max — and not to make them Issues so much, but to make them titillating as plot devices. And even then, lots of readers could never stand the preachier bits of Dickens!)

To elaborate on this: the “old” Sittenfeld would’ve had a character who cared strongly about racial injustice, went on BLM marches but whilst there, felt awkward, met some people she didn’t like, maybe got the chants wrong.

With her latest book it’s like the story is actually stopped every now and then for the reader to be “educated”.

It depends what you're doing doesn't it? For example, if you cast Call the Midwife I a completely colour blind way, then you couldn't have some of Lucille's storylines. There were some related to her coming from the West Indies, and being black. And I think based directly on some Windrush generation nurses/midwives experiences.

You wouldn't be able to write that storyline if all the characters were different races from the beginning because it wouldn't make sense to single her out. Pride and Prejudice wouldn't be historically accurate if the Bennets were played by mixed race actors but it wouldn't affect the plot.

I don't quite understand your point. A film about past events is a film about the past.

I do still think a fair approximation of a particular dialect is going to be less jarring than using modern speech. It's not like the vast majority of people will care or be able to tell if it's 100% accurate. Most, however, would find it a bit odd if Mr Darcy uttered the phrase "innit bruv".

Usually people like historical dramas because they are interested in history. Otherwise it's basically a random setting with no relevance to the story. Shitty writing.

But if you want an argument for it being a good thing, one reason is that it helps protect us from the very dangerous assumption that we are at the end of history.

The kinds of political cultures that are desperate for people to forget the past take that approach because they want to control people's thinking and prevent them from questioning current orthodoxies.

If you don't like historical settings, or understanding how people in other times and places thought, that's your business, but it rather disqualifies you from having any kind of useful POV on historical dramas.

This in a nutshell.

I have always thought The Little Mermaid was a cautionary tale about female sexual desire, rather than having a moral per se.

TLM is a teen girl, yearning for an attainable man. She knows she is what the Prince is looking for (she saved him and all that) and all she needs to do is show him that she’s “the one” and they will be together.

In return for legs (and the part in between) the Sea Witch chops out her tongue and ensures that every step she takes will feel like knives are stabbing her. She loses her voice, her status and her family in order to pursue her desires.

Once on land, TLM pretty much makes it obvious she is available to the Prince, including refusing to sleep in her own bad but sleeping on the floor outside his room. IIRC he is responsive to his charms, he fondles her and is affectionate but never treats her as an equal and certainly never appreciates that she is the one (who saved him).

Predictably, when he does fall in love it’s with a princess and when he marries her and dawn breaks TLM literally dissipates, dissolving into foam.

The moral could be: Girls and women, don’t think that making yourself sexually available to powerful men will make them love you. They’ll play around with you but marry a woman who’s similar to them, and you’ll be discarded 😀. Not very Disney though

*unattainable, not attainable