[Serious] What's Going On In Your Life

[Rev. Rye]

Things are going pretty well in my life at this point; I managed to get an A in my Business 101 class, my internship is going well, and I'm finally starting to feel better.

But I figure I may as well get this off my chest. There's a cinephile Youtuber I've been following for somewhere in the area of five years. And in the past few years, he's been getting... political. Granted, those political views tend to align with my own, and the rise of fascism in all but actual name in America is certainly something to be alarmed about. However, I've made abundantly clear that, as much as I consider myself a leftist, the state of the left online has led me to despair, and he's started to embody everything wrong with it: reflexive outrage, condescension, thin-skinnedness, and an utter refusal to acknowledge that those same things essentially turn the cultural landscape into a never-ending ouroborous of outrage that essentially ends with the left and right feeding off each other's hatreds, that often comes at the expense of actually being accurate about the films in question. One early example involved his being outraged at Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac for generally being an apologia for the director's edgelord sensibilities. A fair enough reason to dislike it, but at one point he acts like the film is pro-pedophile because A) at one point, the protagonist says a pedophile is laudable (he pointedly failed to mention that this laudability is specifically because the pedo in question REFUSED TO ACT ON HIS URGES), and B) because she seduces a 15-year-old girl and point-blank refusing to acknowledge that such things may actually be legal in other countries (including two of the three countries IMDb lists as filming locations; also, a rewatch shows that, no matter how ethically questionable the relationship in question remains, and it still does seem like she was grooming a girl a third her age, it is specifically stated to have become sexual after she reached the age of consent.) Things have gotten even worse in the year and a half since then, with him getting increasingly hung up on any potentially non-PC subject matter in a film, like spending an entire video talking about how Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri was borderline racist due to the joke about "the nigger-torturing business" and not once considering that maybe that joke was a commentary about how we're more concerned about the way we're perceived and not whether what we're doing is wrong (see Frankfurt's On Bullshit), and not just a way to make light of black suffering, and blatantly misinterpreting Dixon's character arc and trying to paint it as a normal unearned redemption arc when the reality is a lot more complicated than that. He does not really engage with viewpoints that differ from his own, instead just re-affirming his views and denouncing people who argue otherwise as fascist (if he doesn't just block them from his Tumblr or Twitter). I think the last straw came when he did the trailer for next year's reviews and it included titles like Thanos Was Wrong: Eugenics and Overpopulation (despite Thanos' M.O. specifically being random culling, pretty much the exact opposite of eugenics), and Rethinking Fahrenheit 451. I unsubscribed after that, because, honestly, it's getting in the way of producing insightful content. And the fact that his subscriber count is growing as he panders more to the perpetually triggered, in addition to his attitude, does not bode well for the prospects of his changing for the better.

The Fahrenheit 451 thing bears some explanation. I can remember Beatty's monologue about how book-burning grew out of people objecting to the content of certain books, “Coloured people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book.” But bringing in mind this change of attitude, well, it didn't take a genius to figure out out where it was going. Just looking at his Twitter feed confirmed my suspicions. It was another casualty of his "personal growth." He has taken to talking about how he's grown to dislike/hate things he used to like that seemed problematic , whether it's the work of directors like Edgar Wright, Wes Anderson, or Quentin Tarantino; shows he previously praised like Rick and Morty; or even movies like Ghostbusters (the 1984 version, not the recent remake). Not once, in all this talk of growth, has he used it to talk about things he used to dislike but now has grown to appreciate (except perhaps for The Purge trilogy, which was over two years ago, long before he got this insufferable.) I talked with my therapist about that, and she said "that's not growth." Dad disagrees; after all, cancer is technically a growth that acts that way. For whatever reason, the thought of what has happened started to get to me in the last few days of the last year, including giving me severe indigestion (which went from a knot in my stomach to mere heartburn to a simple belly ache; today is the first day in a while I haven't felt any stomach trouble, and I think finally talking about it with my therapist and my dad was a crucial step.) It could just be that this is the first time I've ever unsubscribed from a Youtube channel (I actually have a few subscriptions from channels that were banned that I refuse to clean up.)

Honestly, I've been putting off talking about this because, quite frankly, listening to myself talk about it, I don't know whether I'm just cutting off a former friend I used to legitimately respect because his attitude is becoming so toxic (even if it is toxicity on the side of the angels), or if I'm just as triggered as he is.