What Kind of Film is Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium

George Turner in reply to NewDealer says:

Longer version:

How can a movie challenge my worldview by presenting the worldview I abandoned when I was about twelve because it was childish and simplistic?

For example, do you really think there’s anyone out there who is challenged by the idea that maybe the demented people in Megacorp’s bio-weapon’s division who intend to unleash a plague of face-hugging aliens on the world’s population are not, in fact, nice people. What’s the target “challenge” audience for a plot like that, three six-year olds with Aspergers? Scripts like that probably even have “REVEAL” in big capital letters, as if Americans would be shocked to think that maybe the cartoon bad guys working for EvilCo are bad guys, and then go home and rethink everything they knew about Dave Thomas at Wendy’s.

There was an interesting recent psychological study (done by liberals, of course, since almost all psychologists are liberals), which found that conservatives could think like liberals and correctly replicate their moral arguments and reasoning process, but liberals could not do the reverse. This of course horrified the researchers, who were expecting the opposite.

Upon digging, they realized that conservatives had the entire panoply of liberal morality built right in, and could use it the same as liberals, but that they also had other more sophisticated moral reasoning added on, things like secondary and tertiary effects, broader societal effects, and whether the simpler liberal solutions carried a heavy potential for abuses, scams, exploitation, chaos, and whatnot.

In contrast, when liberals tried to guess at conservative positions or replicate conservative’s reasoning, they failed miserably, actually believing the cheap conservative caricatures were somehow real. “Well, a conservative is a racist, so they’ll reason this way. A conservative is greedy, so they’ll do that. A conservative doesn’t care about other people, so they’ll do this…”

This is probably why conservatives on the Internet don’t have the slightest problem debating liberals. A lot of them could just write in the other side’s best arguments, improve them, then refute them, and just save liberals the trouble of all that clickety typing. But that just wouldn’t be as much fun. When liberals try that it looks like Romper Room and all the conservatives immediately suspect that their new “fellow” is either an idiot, a liberal, or a master of parody.

This is not to say that conservatives are smarter, just that they are generally in full possession of the liberal thought process as standard equipment, but have lots of new subroutines sitting on top of the basics handling things like unintended consequences, the knowledge of how nasty and vicious people really are inside much of the time, though we suppress it, and long experience at watching people make the same mistakes over and over again.

However, keep in mind that the study was of college students, and even liberals make fun of liberal college students. Older liberals are surely not so naive or deluded about the nature of conservatives, but the iffy part is whether many of them become even more convinced that their silly college caricature’s were correct.

How does this apply to script writing and movies?

If confirms what many have long suspected. Conservatives can write three dimensional, well developed liberal characters, and even write nothing but if that’s the market. But when liberals try to write conservative characters the result is often a two dimensional caricature, the same ones used by liberal college kids (and high school and junior high kids), and the conservative audience sees right through it and ignores the silliness because after all, the movie is about a man with shaved armpits wearing tights and a cape. The liberal audience is probably thinking it’s somehow telling a profound truth.

Half the audience walks out wondering why Hollywood writers suck, and the other half walks out having all their lifelong misperceptions happily confirmed. The liberal audience was not challenged, and the first was at most mildly amused by what they would perceive as childish writing, because it presents a worldview they haven’t had since they were children, if even then.

When those liberal political caricatures leak through, it’s a clear sign of sloppy writing. Even a liberal (and Hollywood is full of them), when they’re trying to put out good work, won’t rely on such caricatures and will try to get a real understanding of each character, the motivations, the perspective, and work from there to flesh it out.

And sometimes you’ll have a bad conservative writer who who lets their own caricature’s bleed all over the page (Ayn Rand, *cough*).

But when you see a plot and a premise like Elysium, it’s a good bet you’ll be treated to some two-dimensional cardboard conservative villains whose motivations don’t make a lick of logical sense. But if enough stuff gets blowed up real good, conservatives will go anyway because it’s all just fun.Report