Game of Thrones, Endgame, and Psycho

Hi, Steve Barnes here and welcoming you back to life writing live once again. If you enjoy these talks, please share them with your friends. The ones that get shared the most are the ones where I'm going to go back to those subjects. That's just the reality of it. So the weekend is here. And before I kick off for the weekend, I thought I'd do a more a little meatier topic today. It's gonna be the same thing that I posted earlier today, which has to do with Game of Thrones, Avengers Endgame, and a lesson to be learned from the original Psycho. And hi to everybody out there. You know, just. It's always so great to connect with you and I miss this when I don't do it, but life has just been so busy anyway, so here we go. So the question I've often heard is, you know, is it possible to die in a dream? Can you die in a dream? And what I tell you is, yeah, you can. It's a little odd. Say in your dream you fall off a roof, you know, you scream all the way down, then you hit the ground. Now there are limited number of choices that can happen then. I mean, you could continue to dream only as a corpse. You could wake up, you know, from the dream at the moment that you hit. You could become a ghost and move around. I've noticed that one thing that I do fairly frequently is I'll shift identity. I'll actually become a different person in the dream, change avatars, as it were. Now, this is. This has some relevance to the topic. I remember story structure guru Robert McKee, who I think is the best writing instructor I've ever seen in my life. He talking about how an audience seeks identification within a film. He was specifically talking about the Godfather at the time. I recall in the Godfather, we identified with Michael Corleone because although he was a vicious bastard, he at least he loved his family. So in a world of vicious gangster, he was a nice vicious gangster, the center of good within that universe, so to speak. And McKee also. Once you got that concept, McKee went further. He talked about the movie Psycho, where after the death of Janet Leigh, the audience was confused. I mean, wasn't she the viewpoint character? Imagine seeing that movie through her eyes. You think that she is the person you're supposed to identify with. You see it through her eyes and then she dies savagely. I mean, wow, that was shocking. As an audience, we now become disembodied. We have nobody to identify with. We sort of drift around looking for somebody to identify with. And who do we choose? Why Norman Bates? He's the one who's there. I mean, he may be a creep, but at least he loves his mommy, if you know what I mean. Once again, he's the center of good in that universe. When I was a kid, I would go see movies like the Dirty Dozen or Damnation Alley or Ice Station Zebra or the Wrath of Khan. And the other kids in my neighborhood would scoff at me and they'd say, how'd they kill the brother this time? Because they knew that this was the probable outcome. I've spoken about this and looking back over my life after hearing that lecture from Robert McKee, I wondered about the psychological effects of seeing a movie where you knew that the person who looked like you was likely to die. Do you identify him and accept that pain and anxiety? Do you? I remember a Mad magazine cartoon about a silhouetted family watching a western. A scene of cowboys slaughtering Indians. On the screen, the kids were cheering in a reverse angle. They turned that around in reverse angle. Show that the family was Native American. The adults sat stone faced watching this while the kids, looking for someone to cheer for, loved the cowboys. Of course, that's how human beings are. Same as I cheered for the British when I watched Zulu. Remember that? You know you don't want to die, so you find a safe place to stand, someone to identify with, where you can experience joy and triumph. Remember that civil rights case where the black kids are proven to prefer white dolls? After a lifetime of segregation and negative images, this is what struck down separate but equal, the fact that these kids had been damaged to the point where they did not see their own beauty. It's like that dying hurts. Identifying with those who will die hurts. We'll do anything to avoid that pain, even cheer for our own killers. I got a lot of agreement and a lot of pushback on the observation that the deaths in the movie Infinity War were. Were not randomly assigned and that the racial tilt, you know, just fun. Think about the fact that both the first and the last deaths in the movie were black men was a sign that all the decisions, all the decision makers had been white. And that that was the moment I decided that nothing but diversity was going to solve this problem. Diversity behind the camera, not just in front of it. Entirely too many white guys wanted to argue with me about this whole situation. I engaged with enough of them to realize that these were the same people argued about black death in films as a whole and black male asexuality in successful films. You know that thing about you know, can't get over $100 million. Curiously enough, they also tended not to be terribly sympathetic to Black Lives Matter. But that's another. Well, no, that's not necessarily another subject, is it? That could definitely be connected. Those things, the representation of film, those are matters of simple statistics. Anybody can look it up over IMDb or box office Mojo. You can actually look at the numbers. And if people are still going to argue after looking at the numbers, when the numbers are black and white now, you can argue about the interpretation, but if you argue about the numbers, then I'm not going to trust your judgment about things that are less clear cut. Does that make sense? Areas in which, yeah, there is some argumentation to be had there. If it's a subtler problem, the chance of convincing them, in other words, we're almost nil. And you even have to wonder, do they understand and are they deliberately pretending not to? Let's assume that people who are on the other side of this issue are not knaves or fools. Is my impression that if you have a position where your enemies have to be seen as either knaves or fools, you may not have thought through your position deeply enough. There's almost always another legitimate way to see things, or at least an honorable mistake to be made. So my answer to this, how could all this happen without people being knaves or fools? Is that it's primarily unconscious. It's just a human tribalistic tendency. My theory is that those unconscious images are indicative of deep value structures, beliefs and preferences on the part of artists and audiences. Yeah, yeah, I do that. I look at images and artwork as expressive of the artist's values and beliefs. I've been around enough artists, I've lived as an artist long enough to believe that, yeah, there's a connection there. You know, it may be. They may want you to, you know, don't look at the man behind the curtain. It's all about the art. But yeah, I mean, who else is creating it? You know what I'm talking about. Handwriting says things about you. Supposedly your art most certainly does. Now, in the popularity of that art is reflective of the audience's values and beliefs. You're willing to pay money to see this. It has to give you more pleasure than pain to see this or else you would not do this. Animals don't do things that cause them more pain than pleasure. It's very simple now. But interpreting why it gives pain or pleasure, that's soupier. That's. That's more complex. I don't claim to know that I. I'm going to have opinions and strongly held ones, and they have some explanatory capacity as well as predictive capacity, but that doesn't mean I'm right. Okay, so if you simplify all this and look at art, movies and things like this, specifically through the lens to a couple of different lenses that are interesting, let's say race and gender, because those are our topics that are very important in our culture right now. Things that I've observed to a certain degree most of my, you know, for instance, if you don't think I notice the sexual fantasies in Fifty Shades of Gray and how popular they are with women, I mean, it's not guys buying those books, you know, you're nuts. But what does it mean? I don't know. Everybody has a theory. And I might have a theory, too. In fact, I do. But that's for another time, you know, if you don't think I noticed that, you know, Captain Marvel would seem to have been the first wholly asexual comic book hero, you know, and you can't find any evidence in the movie to suggest otherwise, what might that mean? I don't know. I have some theories. But, you know, once again, for another time, or if you think I don't notice that the single black male character in Game of Thrones is a eunuch, you know, who's built pretty much like a teenage girl, you're nuts. And anyone thinks I don't have a conclusion draw about this hasn't heard the breeding circle theory. Basically, if you consider your tribe to be in competition with another tribe, you're going to be very uncomfortable, the sight of mating behavior in males of that tribe, you know, even with their women, not even, you know, let alone whether or not they're coming at your women. And so people who are concerned about this tend to be uncomfortable the sight of mating behavior in males of the. Of the opposing tribe, and will therefore prefer males who are not reproductively competitive. You know, the way I put it is too young, too old, too young, too fat, too gay, too asexual, or too dead to be considered reproductive competition. That's the usual pattern. If you don't think that I'm going to notice that, well, as Bugs Bunny, you know, was fond of saying, you don't know me too well, do you? Now, I can't prove anything about any of this, but it is very tempting to wonder what's going on in the unconscious minds of the filmmakers now this happened. You know, I think there's a difference between the unconscious and the conscious. For instance, take a look at Star Wars A New Hope. It had zero black characters except for the voice of the villain, Darth Vader. James Earl Jones. Somebody pointed this out to Lucas and you know, he's shifting it into the conscious category and bang. Next movie you get Billy Dee Williams. You know, he wanted. Once he saw it, he corrected it. That's. That's laudable. It really is. You know, we can notice also that the moment that Darth Vader turned good, he also turned white. But that's, you know, coincidence, I'm sure. If it's unconscious, it's a world that looks like you, integrated only by, you know, villains of the other tribe. If it's conscious, then, well, of course there's diversity in the galaxy far, far away. Same thing is true in a lot of science. F. Total exclusion, sacrifice, neutering or extinction until you call attention to it. And then boom. You know why we were planning that the whole time? It was just an accident. Yeah, right, an accident one can set your. Your watch by. I just recently watched about half of Logan's run before I got disgusted with it. It was so glaringly obvious that all the hundreds of actors, hundreds of actors and extras, all of them are white, but except for Roscoe Lee Brown, who's the voice of the villainous robot that, that, you know, we're having fun, aren't we? How about Blade? You know, it's a world of hyper sexualized vampires, you know, hell, even to make the point, they even hired a porn star, Tracey Lawrence, to play the lead female vampire. You know, Blade apparently has no genitalia. He has nothing. He snarls real nice though. And to consider there's a story that Wesley was promised a love interest in the third movie, only for the studio to renege once they had his name on the contract. That would certainly explain the troubles we heard on set, wouldn't it? Who knows? The fact is that no one will take responsibility for this stuff. Nobody. Everybody blame somebody else. The audiences blame the studios. The studios blame the filmmakers. The filmmakers say it was on accident or governed by the needs of the audience. You know, that audience that said it wasn't them. I've seen so many passionate notes from people claiming that they've never avoided a movie that had image X or Y. Never. They never bought or didn't buy a book based on racial images on the COVID Never. They never hired or fired anyone, never chose friends or lovers on that basis. No cop has ever admitted pulling somebody over for that. A bank manager admitting making a loan decision or A judge or jury admitting to convicting or sentencing based on skin color. Nobody ever. They just don't. And yet the statistics are all kind of skewed. Mysteriously. There was, I understand, a pattern in the British military or a habit in the British military. If something dishonorable had been done, say somebody stealing a pie and no one confessed, it was obvious that the pie hadn't stolen itself, Right. So it would be absurd not to suspect somebody's lying here. So the entire company was considered equally guilty and punished until the culprit confessed. It's kind of like that. My thought is that people do make the decision, make decisions on the basis of race or gender. They do have unpopular notions and positions and they lie about it, sometimes to themselves, sometimes to the world. Whenever you see something that no one will confess to but is clearly going on, dishonesty of some kind or another is often the simple answer. Now we can certainly do the firing squad thing and give one soldier a blank. You know, we can admit that some people are telling the truth. You know, that's inevitable. So calm down. I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the person sitting on your right and the person sitting on your left. Of course, the same goes for them. As we approach End Game the Avengers and Game of Thrones, I'm forced to remember last weekend when both Pet Sematary and Shazam Featured magical sacrificial Negroes. You know, I wouldn't mind it so much and I didn't mind it so much in Pet Cemetery because that whole movie is up, it really is. But I did lose all empathy for the family the instant the filmmakers did that. And I frankly sat back much popped popcorn and enjoyed watching the demons chew that family up and spit them out. Yeah, I laughed at the end. I said it, it's true. And with Shazam, it wasn't quite as bad. Really. It wasn't as bad as I'd feared because there were a couple of very minor other black male characters beside the wise old black wizard who was desperately searching for a white kid to give his power to before he died. Sob, sob. You could tell that the filmmakers were trying to do something good, but they got caught in their own blind spots. The movie really was quite sweet natured and good hearted in its way. I bear it no ill will, I really don't. But as I go into Game of Thrones, only the pirate Seledar San is a black man I'd want to be, or I'd want my son to be. He might have appeared on screen for 5 minutes out of 60 or so hours of Game of Thrones and he's disappeared from the narrative. If he returns, I'll certainly pick up perk up. Other than that, I can't help wishing they'd left us out. If the best they can do is an unsullied ex slave without a will of his own and no reproductive competition whatsoever, a eunuch. And sorry, but I have seen cheerleaders with more masculine physiques. I'm done with pretending not to see what I see. Sure, I'll watch and I'll enjoy the hell out of it, but I won't pretend the filmmakers aren't displaying their fantasies and the audience isn't appreciating their view of the proper order of the universe. And yes, I will take pleasure in watching some of those characters die. Yes, I will. And the people who enjoy and argue and get upset at Jordan Peele saying that no, he wasn't interested in making movies with white heroes because he's already seen that film. You're asleep at best, and some of you are slithering. You're welcome to enjoy the fantasies you love, but you don't get to pretend those images are meaningless. No, you don't. So I'll enjoy watching Game of Thrones because it is a once in a lifetime event. It's beautifully produced and performed and intricately designed, written and directed. It's exciting, it's wonderful television. Be wonderful film. But I'll have my filters up and I'll enjoy Endgame. Already have my tickets, already organized a theater party. And I'll sit in the audience with my popcorn and honey glazed almonds with no drink. And I'll be rooting for Thanos. No, that's not true. I won't be rooting for Thanos because poor crippled Rhodey survived bionic from the waist down. But hey, who's counting? I'll root for the heroes with my filters up. And I won't forget and I won't pretend. And no, if you bring us into it and kill us or emasculate us, no, I won't identify with your white characters instead. I won't do that. And remember, if you think this is unreasonable, just ask yourself why there is no American film where all the white characters die. Anyone else at all survives. Not a single one. Of course this isn't your doing. And of course you don't want it this way. And you wouldn't care. No one in the audience will. Or the studio or the filmmakers or the distributors. Nobody wants this. Nobody here. But us chickens, I see the game and I can live with it. And now you can either go back to sleep or see the game, too. I don't begrudge anyone the pleasures of their fantasies, but I won't collaborate in pretending they don't indicate the world as some of you wish it existed. Here's the good news. This stuff is universal. This isn't some special white perfidy. It's just an ugly, tribalistic aspect of human nature. In a reversed world, say the world of my own lion's blood, this would be reversed. And white characters would die nobly and sexlessly for the pleasure of black audiences who would swear up and down and sideways that, hey, they didn't ask for that and they don't want that. And hey, you're hallucinating if there's any kind of pattern. And I honestly don't know who I'd be in that world. I really don't. I don't know if I'd notice or believe what was going on or if I'd resented being pointed out to me as so many of you do. Right now, I'd like to think that I could hold that truth as self evident, but damn it, I don't know. I can only hope deep down inside, I wish to hell I'd had a chance to find out. Anyway, enjoy your weekend. Enjoy Game of Thrones. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to share it with your friends. It's the only way that we know. If you'd like to know more about this perspective of what happens in film and when art and social issues collide, you go to www.sunkenplaceclass.com and enter a world of interesting speculation and information in a broader view. Have a great weekend and thank you for listening. It's always a pleasure and honor to speak with you. Bye. Bye.