Quote: (04-30-2017 03:39 AM)Zelcorpion Wrote:
That is the problem there - the makers are tasked with showing the traditional family system as oppressive, but they fail despite their tries. They make it look like the wives are trapped in those great houses and cannot experience the liberating cubicle world out there.
They also try to show that the new German generation is becoming ever more liberal and "free". But of course the reality is that the our current degeneration was state-sponsored and promoted in media, entertainment, education and even politics. Even if a few German Nazi politicians were privately degenerate, a shift on all fronts would be utterly impossible in such a Nazi world....
I'm still not convinced that they actually are trying to pass off the usual message of 'families are stifling', 'degeneracy is great', 'tradition is oppression', etc. and not the opposite.
The young Berliners were presented like the Nazi analogue of hippies: messianic, arrogant, entitled, yet decadent. They were confident in the fact that their generation was special and called by history, and would soon take over the reins of the state and use it to do good (one specifically mentions "saving the environment"). They would repair the mistakes of their preceding "greatest generation" made in building the world around them. But these grand pronouncements are no sooner made by the blonde girl and her friends than they're demonstrating their unsuitability to such grand aims through their degenerate behavior - specifically the drugs, orgies, promiscuity, homosexuality, nihilism, mysticism, etc. that we associate with the Weimar period against which Naziism was in part a reaction.
I look at how that story arc was handled and just can't see it as in any way
glorifying their decadence, the way one would expect it to be presented. Joe seems to waver between cautious curiosity and disgust, and ends up rejecting them by clinging sincerely to his good-girl image of Julianna. The blonde in fact comes across as dangerous - where one would expect her to be presented as a stereotypical free spirit hippie chick trying to open Joe's mind to spiritual and sexual liberation (how many times have we seen this stock character in movies and television shows set in the 1960s?), to me she came across as a temptress. And I don't only mean the possibility that she was a Gestapo or factional double-agent attempting to compromise him (a la Julia in "1984"), but in the mythological sense of a Satanic figure trying to entice him to the "dark side".
Likewise, the proto-SJWs portrayed in Tagomi's alternate timeline as working to ban the Bomb come across (through the use of Tagomi as the POV character) as naive, entitled, self-important, and
insufferably earnest crusaders. While that fits with Gen Xers like me actually see Boomers, and I strongly suspect is one of the most objectively accurate portrayals of Boomers ever broadcast, you rarely if ever see Boomers (and in particularly their 1960s activism period) portrayed that way in film and television.
If you had told me Tagomi would jump timelines to something resembling ours and encounter a group of young Boomer activist college students, I'd have naturally expected them to be shown as heroic, courageous, and right about everything both factual and moral. I'd have expected them to be presented as wise beyond their years, certainly wiser and more enlightened than the old fuddy-duddy Tagomi-san with his outmoded and ridiculous Imperial militarism and traditional gender and generational roles and expectations. They're 1960s Boomer political activists, after all, full of boundless hope for the future and glorious progressive ideas, their not-quite-visible halos not yet bent by the assassinations of their secular gods and the corrosive effects of The Only War In History That Has Ever Happened Or Mattered. Instead, they come across as insufferable (apart from alt-Julianna). Tagomi is actually put off by his son's attitudes and beliefs, and it's not the moral arguments and precocious wisdom or elven goodness of these obnoxious twats that gets through to Tagomi in the end, but the hard reality of the hydrogen bomb shown in the newsreel. (And even then he isn't persuaded to the kids' position - he averts war, yes, but by using the film as a bluff concerning what the Empire has in hand, rather than the route a stereotypical Boomer would take of using it for purposes of emotional manipulation by showing the immoral end result of a nuclear arms race and the threat to all humanity and the little babies and puppies and such.)
Even the interracial marriage element isn't presented in the usual or expected way - Tagomi (the functionary of a highly racist regime) eventually does come around to accepting his son's marriage and mixed-race child, but it's clearly not because he's been magically persuaded by the saintly Boomer Kidz and their impeccable moral superiority to abandon his racist ways and join the Right Side of History, it's that he has a personal daughterly fondness for Julianna, particularly this alternative Julianna who is happy and innocent in contrast to the troubled and tragic one he knows from his "real" world (ie: he accepts it for personal rather than progressive political or virtue-signalling or conforming-with-social-mood reasons). He is portrayed as being highly disappointed and dismayed with his son, to the point that the original alt-Tagomi threw himself off a bridge, and this is treated (amazingly) as reasonable and understandable rather than with the "you just don't understand,
Dad" contempt one would expect. It's almost as though his acceptance involves seeing Julianna as his actual daughter with his biological son as some obnoxious activist dickweed she married.
tl;dr: The German youth are shown as arrogant degenerates and the alternate-American youth as naive fools, exactly the opposite of how Hollywood would usually portray Boomers (or in this case, their analogues).
If MITHC is aiming to sell the usual dyscivic narratives, they're doing a poor job. Thankfully.
