I've been watching a lot of "Hacks", a TV show following Ava, a gen-Z writer and Deborah, a legendary comedian of yesteryear. They're both women and the show does not pull punches about writing sexism and The Patriarchy into the narrative, both in terms of the conflicts which drive the plot but in each character's backstory and motivation.
But Hacks is not a "feminist" series, in the sense that it does not carry the distinctive Flavor you'd expect from something written through the lens of feminism. It's something I can't describe. (As an aside, there is a character named Jimmy who is written in a way that feels like an expression of second-wave feminist narratives, but that's a whole other story.)
Having had caught up with Hacks, I found myself wanting another TV show. Perhaps one with more gravity, one which gets more creative with the tools of cinematography, one which drives a bit deeper into making viewers interact with and feel the viscera of the day-to-day of their characters lives.
By serendipity, that show was Kevin Can Go Fuck Himself. I clicked it knowing nothing. It has influences that are easy to see: Gbb Znal Pbbxf, Gur Gehzna Fubj, Snzvyl Thl. I rot-13'ed those names, so that you go into it similarly knowing very little.
This is another show that focuses on financially-stable white women, but unlike Hacks, this show seems very intentional about that in a way that I can't express without spoiling it. I encourage you to finish the first episode.
The tone of the show has a bit stronger splash of the "feminist flavor", and it's at this point I want to clarify, that's not a bad flavor. Sometimes, things just give you Feminist Vibes. Do you know what I mean? It's feminist in the way that it depicts patriarchy almost like a horror movie monster. It's so rare for oppression to be depicted on television with a commensurately overbearing atmosphere.
It really feels like something that could be written from an era when "Free the Nipple" or "Me Too" were in the mainstream. Now, Trump's looming second term, and national figures saying things like "Your Body My Choice", it feels like the pendulum of conservatism is swinging again.
If we're leaving a peak, if the culture is turning for the worse from a local maxima, it makes me think... Yeah, 2020 might have been where things started getting a lot worse. And given things take a few years to create and publish, it makes sense that the good lags the bad.
And, hey, Hacks and this show came out in 2021. What else came out in 2021? Don't Look Up. But also The Batman.
You'd think that another fucking Batman would be superfluous. But this movie mercifully skips his origin story -- a lesson taken from the most recent Spiderman, I'm sure -- and depicts Batman in a different way this time. If the Nolan films portrayed Batman as a fascistic fantasy of the unity of "justice" and "policing", The Batman (2022) both depicts Batman as virtuously in conflict with the police and criticizes Batman as a reactionary fantasy.
But... Batman still remains as an ultimate realization of the most virtuous ideals of masculinity.
I'm really sleepy so I'm going to finish up this post: The Penguin is released in the same universe as The Batman, and depicts a story that's also feminist but totally lacking any Feminist Flavor. You could almost watch The Penguin and not catch a whiff of Feminism. But what's it about? Mostly white people again.
Back to the verbosity of the pose:
This post ends with, hey, why is everyone White? Even in my bumblingly unintentional cultural consumption, I feel like I saw a lot more people of color in my 2010s consumption of American media. Outside foreign films (like those by Park Chan Wook) or those by filmographers who usually explicitly deal with race and racism (like those by Jordan Peele or Spike Lee), I feel like... Almost everyone I see in everything I watch is white?
Are my tastes changing? Is the world changing? Can't this just be chalked up to coincidence, given I don't watch a lot of shows in the first place? How much of this is worth worrying about? It takes a dozen minutes to commit this stream of consciuousness to prose, but I've usually gone through this in several seconds. Is it worth the time to write this down?
What am I saying-- this is a post. And there is nothing more important than posting.
All that is to say, "Hacks", "Kevin Can F**k Himself", and "Batman" are good.
TLDR: Play Outer Wilds. I can't stop thinking about it. You're lucky it didn't get its own several paragraphs.