I was listening to some pretentious film critic yesterday complain that modern films have stopped being artistic or intellectually challenging, because there’s a huge audience of people who are exhausted all the time. They don’t want media that makes them think, that challenges their assumptions, or even requires their full, sustained attention. Comfort media, like mac & cheese for the brain.
Fallout has become exactly that - some vague, nefarious organization as antagonist; raiders & feral ghouls as unambiguously bad cannon fodder. Just move it to a new city, put in some iconic landmarks, and let the money roll in. I can’t honestly think of a franchise that gets past 2 without falling into that trap, but I just started another run through FO4.
Comfort media, yeah. But also: “A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity”.
So it’s not just a problem with media having no artistic ambitions, or being entirely valued in terms of box office or binge metrics - it’s that even the media which seems to share and extoll our values are simply part of maintaining our compliance with the status quo.
Art is always being constrained in these ways because good art is subversive. Fallout 1 was good art.
I was listening to some pretentious film critic yesterday complain that modern films have stopped being artistic or intellectually challenging, because there’s a huge audience of people who are exhausted all the time. They don’t want media that makes them think, that challenges their assumptions, or even requires their full, sustained attention. Comfort media, like mac & cheese for the brain.
Fallout has become exactly that - some vague, nefarious organization as antagonist; raiders & feral ghouls as unambiguously bad cannon fodder. Just move it to a new city, put in some iconic landmarks, and let the money roll in. I can’t honestly think of a franchise that gets past 2 without falling into that trap, but I just started another run through FO4.
Comfort media, yeah. But also: “A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity”.
So it’s not just a problem with media having no artistic ambitions, or being entirely valued in terms of box office or binge metrics - it’s that even the media which seems to share and extoll our values are simply part of maintaining our compliance with the status quo.
Art is always being constrained in these ways because good art is subversive. Fallout 1 was good art.