The death of American softpower.

When a phone is held in the normal orientation, upright, the screen is much higher than it is wide. This is because it is designed for the normal use case, where one person is talking to another person over the phone. A person is, roughly, a rectangle higher than he is wide.

When, however you watch a movie, the screen is much wider than it is high, and you have put your phone on its side. And this is because, in a good movie, you are watching a protagonist interact with what is in the movie, not with you, so he is almost always on the left or right third of the screen, and the remaining two thirds of screen are what he is interacting with.

Your phone is the shape that it is because its primary use case is showing someone talking to you, and the movie screen is the shape that it is because primary use case is showing someone dealing directly with events in his life, not talking to you about them, and not giving you a lecture.

If you watch a progressive movie, which is always a very bad movie, you will notice that the protagonist is frequently in the centre third of the screen, directly facing the audience, and you could throw away the left third and right third and not lose much.

When this happens, the character in centre third is a writer avatar for the writer as professor standing at the pulpit giving the wicked stupid inferior students a lecture on their sins.

This is because whoever is speaking is an insert character for the writers, and they don’t actually care about story, plot, the heroes journey, and all that, they just want to tell the audience that the audience is horrible, hateful, and should just go away and die. So even though the character is ostensibly talking to other characters in the movie about events in the movie, he is facing directly at you, speaking directly to you, and the subtext of what he is saying is always that you are wicked, no good, despicable, and inferior because you are not leftist enough.

SheHulk was an infamous example of this, because she said it so plainly. There is usually a bit more deniability.

Hollywood executives and video game companies have finally realised that that audiences don’t like political lectures. So they tell their staff, who are gay men and childless women “Cut the politics”. And the staff do as they are told, yet still the movie is the writer lecturing the audience with complete disregard for story and plot.

Elio is a wonderfully bad example of this.

As originally written and originally filmed, it was a coming out gay movie about an eleven year old boy. And it is all a character, primarily Elio, in the center third of the screen, ostensible speaking to another character, but he is facing directly at the audience, so he is actually a writer insert lecturing the audience directly, the professor at the pulpit.

And, in the context of the original movie the subtext of what he is saying is that we, the audience, are very bad people because we don’t let men fuck little boys. Elio is bitter, angry, hostile, unhappy and resentful, his life disrupted and destroyed, because we don’t let men fuck little boys. You, the audience, have terribly damaged and hurt poor little Elio.

To my audience, this might seem a little bit over the top, open demonic evil beyond parody. You are out of touch. Obama recently gave us the same lecture, and received very little pushback. This was a completely neutral non political movie by current year standards, and Havel’s Greengrocer finds nothing odd or distrubing.

Well, Disney, your family values movie producer🙃, showed this movie to test audiences in its original form, and, surprise, surprise, to their genuine surprise, the audience did not much like a two hour political lecture in favor of letting men fuck little boys. It was not that they disagreed with the totally non political message, which was completely political neutral in that it is totally in line with the values of “””the modern audience”””. Being good Havel’s greengrocers, they all totally agreed with and supported the movie message one hundred percent. It was just that no one wants to pay to be politically lectured for hours.

So Walt Disney took out all the gay stuff.

But despite the purge, the movie is still Elio speaking directly to the audience telling the audience that he is angry, unhappy, and resentful, it is just that the audience now has absolutely no idea what he is angry and resentful about.

Hollywood was always the mass propaganda arm of the Cathedral, but when the Cathedral took it over directly, they wrote as a professor composing lectures for the laity, not as writers who want to entertain.

When the King took over Shakespeare’s Globe, we can infer from the stories of Shakepeare’s plays, and from what happens when a King stages a play within one of Shakespeare’s plays, that the King would give him one plot point, or one aspect of one scene, and then let him get on with the rest. The Kingly plot point of Shakespeare’s series of four plays on the Wars of the Roses was that even if you have a wicked, weak, and incompetent King, to overthrow him would open the gates that anyone could be King, with dreadful consequences, and we should sympathise with a King who has lost what is rightly his, even if it is largely his own fault. And all the rest is clearly the untrammelled voice of Shakespeare, except for the excessively heavy handed demonization of Richard the Third. King James took charge of the best writer he could find, and let him write.

But the Cathedral fired anyone who could write, because anyone who can write can notice things he is not allowed to notice, and gave us the professor at the pulpit lecturing us.