A show about fake ultrarich people played by less rich people watched by poor people. A show that has pretensions about flagellating the rich while still somehow revelling in their debauchery and parasitism, a sort of recursive self-awareness that is supposed to somehow absolve the characters (and the irl rich?). Somehow it is both the sale of anti capitalism back to the anti capitalists whilst also scratching a Keeping Up With the Kardashians itch for watching the inter-familial spats of our feudal overlords.
A contemporary Game of Thrones where everyone is bad and there is no good and it’s just a TV show so it doesn’t matter, which handily conceals the fact that our everyday reality is literally this show, and that the stakes in real life are actually weighty and have moral and material value and can easily be viewed as right and wrong.
Along with a healthy dose of “their daddy was mean to them so it’s not their fault they’re all disgusting bourgeois pigs”.
What the fuck. We desperately need prolekult. I’m so sick of this two faced culture that sells our own hatred back to us and pokes the reward centres in our brain - “hey you just watched a pithy comment that could KIND SORTA be construed as anti capitalist on a million dollar show on a billion dollar network, you’ve done your leftism for the day!”
What stage of capitalism is it when everyone is so widely aware capitalism sucks that the most successful business model is pretending you agree that capitalism sucks?
AAAAAA
I don’t think art is really praxis at all. Hot take maybe.
The impulse to categorize all art into “good and leftist” and “bad and capitalist” and applying some type of moral value to consumption of one or the other is a form of moralism. Neither are good or bad to consume, you are just consuming entertainment either way and it doesn’t matter
I think some of it is leftover Christian puritan brainworms. It’s a personal “sin” to consume certain art, and a personal “penance” to consume other art. Personal art consumption is not praxis, and policing the consumption of others is extra silly.
Watch the art, or don’t. Have your takes and interpretations, discuss it. I don’t buy that it’s some sort of anti-praxis if you watch a “bad” show.
