Forgotten Discourse

One of the hazards of being in film circles is that you are constantly exposed to The Discourse. I’m sure all sorts of groups like that have similar Discourse; get spinosaurus fans started, is my advice. I know someone who has passionate feelings about whether or not Nanotyrannus is real or just miniature Tyrannosaurus. I’d like to hope, though, that Dino Discourse is less persistently toxic. I also feel as though Film Discourse starts anew with trailer drops, over and over again. And then we forget, and the cycle starts over again.

I’m not saying the gay community was wrong to say that Cruising was saying awful things about the, and it’s a real issue that people were doxxed before we even had a word for doxxing. For those people, it was a real-life problem, not just talk. And, of course, there’s the fact that Discourse heightened with the arrival of the internet. But it tells you something that there’s such a recency bias to the whole thing that a conversation about this was largely about movies within the last few years, because even we have forgotten what people got upset about a few years ago.

Let us take a moment to remember the existence of Emilia Pérez. Remember Emilia Pérez? Maybe. Maybe not. I, for one, haven’t seen it, because it looked terrible and everything around it was toxic. And I’m not saying we were wrong to call it out. There was a lot of racism and transphobia involved in that movie, and while I do think Zoe Saldaña is a talented actress, I wish she had won an Oscar for a different movie. But other than Saldaña’s Oscar, are there lasting ramifications of the movie? Or is it yet another Oscar winner that people in twenty years will have never heard of?

And, of course, it doesn’t always matter. I don’t think anyone will remember next year that internet losers got mad that Lupita Nyong’o was cast as Helen of Troy even though I think we’ll remember the movie. Remember how weirdos thought that Robert Downey Jr. was miscast as Tony Stark? Despite just kind of being Tony Stark? Those posts are still online, and I’m pretty sure that you can find overlap in people who complained about those two things. Because that’s how the whole thing works.

I’m not really in horror circles, but apparently this is a constant there, with films’ being hyped as the Scariest Movie Ever Made, released, and forgotten, over and over again. Everyone hypes the movie and talks it up until release day, after which it’s forgotten for the next upcoming film. Disney hyped up Wish as being the important celebration of their hundredth anniversary, and I’m mostly reminded of its existence by themed crayons for sale at Dollar Tree. Which I don’t buy. Of course, Wish is also terrible, which doesn’t help it to be remembered.

Joker didn’t inspire mass shooters. Licorice Pizza didn’t inspire—well, I don’t remember what it was supposed to inspire because I’ve been deliberately forgetting its existence since it was stalking me. Robert Downey, Jr. was very good as Tony Stark. I don’t remember as much about Eddington as I do about Licorice Pizza. We talked a lot about them, and then they went away or didn’t matter or were good, actually. And somewhere along the line Cruising got rewritten as a secret queer classic, and I don’t even know how you’d do that. Oh, well; there’ll be new Discourse next week.