Big

Welcome to the weekend!

It's finally February and, as the most recent post has shown, the year is already starting to roll along. 2024 is off to a strong start.

However, today I wanted to talk about scale and ambition a little bit. Let us think Big!

There is something about the Epic in storytelling that attracts us all, isn't there? We all want to be wowed and awed, even if we say we couldn't care less about such a thing. Though it's a feeling the mainstream entertainment industry and art world lost through the paint worship of the 20th century, preferring obsessing over aesthetics, disjointed parts, subversion, vague moralizing, and weird nihilism, we still appreciate the large than life more than ever before. There is something to the scale of even the most simple thing that inspires wonder and joy in all but the most cynical of all of us.

We all want to see the greater things in life reflected in even the smallest objects, but along the way we've lost the ability to not only imagine it--we've also lost the ability to even look up in the first place. Instead we've been trained to look at the mud and think ourselves superior to both our neighbor and the rest of the world that we can't even imagine higher things anymore.

When did this hope for greater things start to fall away? I would say it most likely began around the 1960s and rotted away in the 1970s to be replaced with crass commercialism in the 1980s and bottoming out into irony poisoning before the 1990s ended. By the 2000s, all that remained of wonder was perversion, emptiness, and a hatred for life. In half a century, art became the exact flipside of what it was meant to be.

I think this destructive bottoming out can be summed up in the subgenre created by the fallout of this vapid culture, dubbed "Reddit Carnage" by Mystery Grove Publishing, the former book publisher and now full-time newsletter writer.

It's a relatively new term, but I'm sure you have an idea of what it means. "Reddit" of course refers to the social media site, infamous for its trumpeting of group think, reinforcing of anything popular culture pumps out, and general misery of the sort that could only foster in such an echo chamber. "Carnage" is hyper violence. Put the two together and you get Reddit Carnage. Murder porn made for the terminally online, emptied of humanity.

If you've never heard the term before, here are some uses of it:

The long and short of the term is that is empty hyperviolence meant to desensitize you to the purpose of violence, the sanctity of life, and to demoralize you in general. There is no purpose to any of it accept to condition you to accept meaninglessness and think of other people as little more than meat sacks who explode real good. In essence, it's anti-human.

I should explain this further. It's not an easy idea to get across.

This is a sort of "genre" that did not exist before Millennials, because it couldn't have. Reddit Carnage is a story where everyone is a cartoon character who treats the lives of other people as disposable, especially if they are the generic bad guy (whose motivations themselves are usually vague beyond "the government/good guy/girl boss says so"). And you know it's all silly and meaningless because the title is silly and meaningless, the action sequences are silly and meaningless, the characters are 2D flat stereotypes that are silly and meaningless, and the costuming and accents are silly and meaningless. All that matters is the carnage of seeing Bad People ripped to shreds and the World Order run by the Good Guys preserved. There is something intentionally inhuman about this subgenre, and that is because it is an inversion of a style of film that used to be more prevalent before the 21st century. It's a warped misunderstanding and interpretation of what an action story is.

It is the 1980s action movie stripped of any pathos or sense of justice beyond vague shadows of what once used to be there. It is the anti-wonder approach to action storytelling, replacing the eternal with the temporal.

"Reddit Carnage" is a way to reinforce vapid bugmen consumerist morality through carefully prescribed dopamine releases not-so-secretly aimed by the producers of the film on groups of human beings they do not like and portray as "correct" targets to brutalize and dehumanize. This is different from casting villains as terrorist groups based on real life like action movies used to do, because they are frequently not based on real terrorist groups at all. These films are not even subtle about this, but for whatever reason modern movie-goers (however many of these that still exist at this point) cannot seem to see it beyond grinning at Bad People being diced up.

If you want to know why these projects are "still allowed" to be made by Hollywood when other types of action stories aren't, it is because they aren't true action movies. They are murder porn simulators where audiences can see Hollywood approved bad guys get their heads blown up by walking automatons that vaguely resemble what a person they think should be. It is every old parody of action movies on late night TV, but made real.

Reddit Carnage is the parody version of what people who hate action movies used to say they were, made by people who think those critics were right and aim to rub their noses in it. "Yeah, it's blatant murder porn! Who cares! Listen to that one-liner. It's so bad it's good, am I right?"

But that's not what action movie ever were. That's a fantasy concocted by people who hate you telling you what you should think about something you like, and you've let them infect the way you see not only your entertainment, but the world.

Over the years, Cannon has gone from being a joke to being beloved.

Take Cannon Films, the B-movie masters who were considered the makers of pure shlock back in the 1980s. They were considered bottom of the barrel and were hated by Hollywood despite (but actually probably because of) the fact that they only ever wanted to make movies that entertained, not lecture the audience. Finding an anti-human message in a typical Cannon movie is actually very difficult, despite the fact that they were hated so much by the establishment.

Watch a movie like Death Wish II. Yes, it's sleazy. Yes, it's grimy. Yes, it's violent and dark. Yes, there are horrible happening things in it. However, the film still has a point. Life is difficult, justice is not only real but is necessary for a safe society to function, and evil must be pulled out at the root. It's a heavier version of the original Death Wish meant to show the decay that occurs after nothing changed (and nothing did change) after the events of the first film. This goes even further into apocalyptic insanity with Death Wish 3, but I'm not getting into that one here. Regardless, I think the series deserves more credit than it gets.

The last theatrical movie Charles Bronson made with Cannon (he would retire not long after this) was called Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects which is about human trafficking and the dehumanization aspect of it on everyone involved. The movie isn't one of the strongest Bronson ever made (not even with Cannon) but its ending is still surprisingly powerful, asking what justice would have been in this situation. For a final theatrical release, Bronson still tried his best to create something. Meanwhile, Harrison Ford and Baby Boomer stars of the '80s and '90s have been spending their retirement years destroying everything they built up back then.

But that is a whole other subject. The point is that there were more going on in these simple old movies than you think.

Even Chuck Norris movies, the nexus of lazy punchlines for years, all have moral cores. Yes, even the Cannon ones. Missing in Action is about a man who will do anything to undo a near-fatal mistake and put things right again. Invasion USA is about how even in the face of tremendous odds, good remains stronger and will still prevail against encroaching evil. Even The Hitman is about how good repaid with evil eventually leads to self-destruction, ending with good standing on top again. There is nothing empty about any of that because it's all based on truth.

The best example is probably Sidekicks, not made by Cannon. Sidekicks is the story of a physically sick kid who uses his dreams and fantasies and his hopes to improve his life condition to become a stronger human being. Despite being a silly movie meant for younger audiences, there is a very good moral core at the center of it all. Our hero's plight cements both imagination and effort as two of the most important aspects of personal growth.

There is nothing negative about any of this. In fact, this is all healthy messaging. But it was twisted by those in charge into being considered "wrong" and backwards from reality. This is why they were turned into punchlines by those in charge. The last thing they want you to imagine is any greater purpose to anything in life. Just consume, give them your paycheck, and keep your head down. There is nothing else to life.

Reddit Carnage, therefore, is the opposite of what wonder stories are intended to be. It has no relation to how action stories are meant to be.

Find Combat Frame XSeed Here!

So what is a good example of something on the opposite end of the spectrum from Reddit Carnage? What is the sort of story where large ideas and concepts are portrayed as such, where looking up is considered important, and the good is always shown as just that?

The above image should give you a clue. I am talking about Giant Robots. There is a good reason for that--it is action storytelling meant to make you consider Big things through portraying Big things in clear visual language. It is the exact mirror of Reddit Carnage, to the point that the two have never met in the same project. I am not convinced they ever properly can without turning said resulting idea into a mess.

But I digress.

Now, were I to bring up something like Giant Robots in casual conversation, I am liable to get one of two general reactions. The first is of excitement and child-like joy at the very idea of large objects engaged in epic actions, and the other are eyerolls from mature adults who prefer to spend their time golfing on the weekend away from such juvenile things. In other words, your appreciation for the idea of Giant Robots probably aligns with how much you appreciate wonder and the potential for life itself. It's a litmus test: much like how much your appreciation for space opera goes beyond multi-billion dollar brands shows how much you appreciate the general idea of the genre in the first place, or just how much other people are talking about it.

But even in the giant robot space (if one can call it so) there is a bit of misunderstanding as to what they are, what their intent is, or even what makes it a "real" robot story.

The above video highlighted at the very top of this long post delves into the history of the giant robot genre through where it really flourished--Japan. the history goes back far. Particularly important is how it was an invention of post-WWII Japan for a country that wanted to dream big (and did) while finding their footing in a world unlike anything they knew before. In the process they stumbled into something that morphed into a worldwide phenomenon for those lovers of the overblown and the epic. Because it is an idea anyone can understand.

Of course I'm not going to say Japan created them all on their own or are the sole creators of the style, but they ultimately put their own stamp on the idea, just as they did with superheroes with their own tokusatsu. Therefore what influenced them became reflected back out into the world and influenced everyone else. This key aspect of communication and back and forth is what makes art and entertainment so very interesting.

The most fascinating part of the whole thing is that they can't really be subverted. Don't get me wrong--you can try. You can try to inject modern values into the genre, you can try to make the good guys lose, and you can even make it so there are no good guys at all--but it never seems to matter. What remains at the end of it is still the idea of Big, or scale, or romance beyond the mundane. It can never quite be gutted out because by default that is what is.

The Big is embedded in the genre.

And perhaps all of this is why, despite the crumbling of mainstream culture in the West, there still remains plenty of joy and life in those who create and those who want to enjoy the creations of others. Those who still appreciate the Big, the truly weird, and the epic, refuse to be shaken off by the dead trends of those who are supposed to be in charge of them.

You've certainly noticed it yourself, the tide changing. The air is no longer quite what it used to be even a few years ago. We're in the mid-2020s now, and the decade is finally taking shape into what it is meant to be. The shackles of Cultural Ground Zero are breaking apart. As long as we stay the course we can finally break the downwards spiral and aim up once again. All we have to do is keep thinking Big.

There isn't anymore room for Reddit Carnage and its empty promises. It is time for better ways: ways that we are finally rediscovering for ourselves.

Let us keep going back at it and we can then look back on the '20s as the decade where everything finally changed for the better.

Just remember to never stop looking up. There is always something bigger than you can imagine, just waiting to be discovered.

I have my own Giant Robot story in Two Adventures Across Eternity!