The Battle Continues Over "Childish Things"

Dannyalcatraz said:

Cerberus was full of social commentary (and base humor).

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About half the time Dave Simm is my hero, he comes up with very insightful stuff, the other half on the other hand.... [shiver].

Haffrung said:

I'll play devil's advocate here.

Big picture, it's worth considering is there's something unhealthy in a society where people's outlooks, preferences, and pass-times don't change between adolescence and mature adulthood. When adults are regarded as teenagers with more money in their pockets. When it's pretty much impossible for a movie to be a big hit unless it appeals to adolescents.

Look at the top box office movies over the decades and consider what they say about society.

https://www.filmsite.org/boxoffice2.html

What did it say about the 1960s that movies like Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, Midnight Cowboy, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf - movies that few 12 year olds would understand, let alone enjoy - were box office hits?

What does it say about the 2010s that virtually all of the biggest earners are fantasies aimed at 12 year olds? What does it say about the changes in tastes that an unapologetically adult movie like Doctor Zhivago would be considered a fringe art-house film if it were released today, instead of enormously popular entertainment? Or that Kramer vs Kramer wouldn't even get wide distribution today, let alone be the #1 top-grossing movie of the year?

What does it say about a society when its 45 year olds want to consume the same art and culture that they consumed as 15 year olds?

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My father kinda counts as a boomer (I guess, he was born in the late fifties), he is big into action and science fiction, even some older superhero stuff -like the Green Hornet or Adam Wests Batman-. Seriously, he is a big Star Trek fan. I've never seen him interested into artsy films, yet he is about the most mature and responsible adult I know. Yet, I've met people who are a bit too much into high-brow entertainment whose life is a complete mess and that can hardly take care of themselves, and I mean basic stuff like doing your own laundry, picking after yourself, or cooking. And that is, because these two things are completely unrelated to each other, your ability to be an adult is not determined by your taste in entertainment.

MoonSong said:

And that is, because these two things are completely unrelated to each other, your ability to be an adult is not determined by your taste in entertainment.

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That about sums it up, right there. Well said.

Haffrung said:

I'll play devil's advocate here.

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I love a good healthy argument.

Big picture, it's worth considering is there's something unhealthy in a society where people's outlooks, preferences, and pass-times don't change between adolescence and mature adulthood. When adults are regarded as teenagers with more money in their pockets. When it's pretty much impossible for a movie to be a big hit unless it appeals to adolescents.

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Actually, agreed. The arrested development in society and the failure to accept adult responsibility has been a very large topic of conversation, not just by Bill Maher, but by many of the communities - conservatives, the religious, etc. - that Bill Maher is noted for being highly critical of. And it shows up in a lot of aspects of society, which I won't get into because, well, it will get political. But suffice to say, Bill Maher isn't making a particularly novel observation and that it an observation which you'd normally expect from a conservative that thinks society is going all to heck in various ways.

What did it say about the 1960s that movies like Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, Midnight Cowboy, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf - movies that few 12 year olds would understand, let alone enjoy - were box office hits?

What does it say about the 2010s that virtually all of the biggest earners are fantasies aimed at 12 year olds?

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What it chiefly says to me is that a parent in the 1960's could generally take his kids to see a movie aimed at an adult audience without fear that it would be inappropriate viewing for them. They might not catch all the nuance, but there is hardly anything in the 'top films of the 1960's' that I wouldn't have let me kids watch if they wanted to. Indeed, 'Lawrence of Arabia' contains so very serious subject matter - rape, sodomy, torture, murder, suicide, etc. - but it's handled generally tastefully and without gratuitous obsessing over the matter, so that I do remember watching (and enjoying) 'Lawrence' when I was like 9 or 10 even when I might not have gotten exactly what was going on in every scene. By contrast, it's a rare films these days that is aimed at an adult audience that doesn't show a juvenile obsession with depicting sexual acts and graphic violence.

What does it say about the changes in tastes that an unapologetically adult movie like Doctor Zhivago would be considered a fringe art-house film if it were released today, instead of enormously popular entertainment?

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I think there are still plenty of dramatic epics in the mode of Doctor Zhivago that are not considered fringe art house films. Speilberg's 'Lincoln', for example, is I think a very serious adult film and it grossed like $275 million domestically. Many other examples could probably be cited, and its worth noting that 'Zhivago' in edition to being a film for an adult audience was in its day a grand 'effects' film designed to be visually stunning. Some notice needs to be made of the advances in technology that have allowed more and more spectacular effects films to be made - for example, as badly made as it actually was and as low brow as he directed it, Peter Jackson's 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy of films could very much be considered a spiritual successor to the old box office epics with casts of thousands.

What does it say about a society when its 45 year olds want to consume the same art and culture that they consumed as 15 year olds?

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I think it says that we've gotten much more sophisticated in terms of the media that we target to 15 year olds. One positive thing that I see in the current culture is that while we may be dumbing down what media we feed to adults, we've gotten much more respectful of the intellectual abilities of children and young adults. If you look back at what was available in children's literature 30 or 60 years ago, the pickings were pretty thin. Today, not only is that a huge market, but books like 'Harry Potter' have provided to children long sustained story telling with complex themes and a rich vocabulary. (Seriously, I occasionally have to look up words in 'Harry Potter' - for example, 'serried' comes to mind.)

But, while we may agree generally that there is something wrong with the maturity of society, I don't at all agree it has to do with things like reading comic books or watching comic book movies. I won't attempt to diagnosis it here, but what I will do is ask whether - if this is a serious problem - someone like Bill Maher in any way acts as if this is a serious problem. Is Bill Maher a serious thinker and a serious and astute critic of society's immaturity?

Well, this is a 62 year old man who appears to be emotionally arrested in young adolescence. He pursues women nearly half his age. He's never been married. Heck, he's never had a long term relationship of any sort - his dating usually lasts less than two years. He's raising no children. He's never been to a PTA meeting. He's never served in the military. He has virtually no business experience. He has no religion, no externally reviewable morals to live up to. Even the few standards he claims to have, such as being a member of PETA, he freely confesses he violates when he feels like it. He has no scientific or intellectual credibility on really anything. He never has to present a rigorous or defensible opinion. He can always say, "Hey, I'm just an entertainer." or "I'm a comedian." or "Why so serious?" He doesn't have to discipline himself in anything, because he doesn't have anything that he feels he ought to do that isn't what he Bill Maher prefers to do. He's thus never had any real adult responsibility and he's made his money essentially as a professional troll whose gimmick is to gather an audience of people who largely hate the same things he does and then validate the audience by vulgarly mocking the things that they approve of, thereby getting them to feel smart. The emotional maturity of his jokes are essentially that of a kid on the playground accusing another kid of being a bedwetter, and his audience is essentially those kids at the playground who upon viewing a popular kid say something like that would laugh along with him. This is a guy that never has really even had to worry about being called out as doing something offensive or losing his career because he does one absolutely stupid and objectionable thing, because what else would you expect from him? Pick which one you consider the worst?

This is not someone whom I feel has the stature to critique my maturity, or really that of anyone else.

Celebrim said:

Well, this is a 62 year old man who appears to be emotionally arrested in young adolescence. He pursues women nearly half his age. He's never been married. Heck, he's never had a long term relationship of any sort - his dating usually lasts less than two years. He's raising no children. He's never been to a PTA meeting. He's never served in the military. He has virtually no business experience. He has no religion, no externally reviewable morals to live up to. Even the few standards he claims to have, such as being a member of PETA, he freely confesses he violates when he feels like it. He has no scientific or intellectual credibility on really anything. He never has to present a rigorous or defensible opinion. He can always say, "Hey, I'm just an entertainer." or "I'm a comedian." or "Why so serious?" He doesn't have to discipline himself in anything, because he doesn't have anything that he feels he ought to do that isn't what he Bill Maher prefers to do. He's thus never had any real adult responsibility and he's made his money essentially as a professional troll whose gimmick is to gather an audience of people who largely hate the same things he does and then validate the audience by vulgarly mocking the things that they approve of, thereby getting them to feel smart. The emotional maturity of his jokes are essentially that of a kid on the playground accusing another kid of being a bedwetter, and his audience is essentially those kids at the playground who upon viewing a popular kid say something like that would laugh along with him. This is a guy that never has really even had to worry about being called out as doing something offensive or losing his career because he does one absolutely stupid and objectionable thing, because what else would you expect from him? Pick which one you consider the worst?

This is not someone whom I feel has the stature to critique my maturity, or really that of anyone else.

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I just want to add that, as someone who generally dislikes Maher, he wasn't this bad about a decade ago. Yes he was still a pompous, self-entitled jerk but there was at least some effort to have discussion on his show. There was at least some attempt at real humor. I even attended a couple of them back in 2006.

But this is hardly limited to Maher, without naming names or getting too political, the overall face of media has changed in the last 20 or 30 years from social commentary (fair, but honest) to critical commentary (honest, but brutal) to essentially trolling (brutal and dishonest). Noone ever really minded when someone made harsh but honest critique of others, it's a hard pill to swallow and sure some people can't swallow it but generally speaking most people understood that sometimes you have to hear the hard truths and you can't dance around that.

But at some point consumers generally found themselves more interested in the shocking, the scathing and the cruel rather than the fair or the honest or the accurate and that's pretty much the definition of trolling: cruelty for the purpose of shocking and hurting others in order to get attention.

The Greater Internet *badword* Theory has expanded to much of modern media.

Celebrim said:

"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." - C.S. Lewis

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I came to this thread to post this exact quote.

Lord Mhoram said:

I came to this thread to post this exact quote.

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I think I beat several people to the punch.

I think a lot of people in this thread have completely missed the point. It is never about how many people like comics or not or what kind of movies people watched. It really is if you are Adult enough to take a joke at your own expense without having to make personal attacks about who is dating who or who looks like an eggplant whatever that is supposed to mean.

Gawd if you can’t take these jokes then you would have died thirty years ago. Sad.

Shasarak said:

I think a lot of people in this thread have completely missed the point. It is never about how many people like comics or not or what kind of movies people watched. It really is if you are Adult enough to take a joke at your own expense without having to make personal attacks about who is dating who or who looks like an eggplant whatever that is supposed to mean.

Gawd if you can’t take these jokes then you would have died thirty years ago. Sad.

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There is a difference between good natured joking and ribbing and the kind of spiteful, smug crap that Maher spits out on a weekly basis. I guess many don't give him the benefit of the doubt.

Shasarak said:

I think a lot of people in this thread have completely missed the point.

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On the contrary, I'm more than willing - if it is necessary - to look at what Maher actually said. If you can quote Maher in a way that makes it look like I have indeed missed his point, then by all means do so. But my distinct impression is that you have a desire to defend Maher's "point" with no reference to what he actually said, but rather by making up what you might have wished he said. You might have wished he was telling a joke, but the evidence of his actual words suggests he wasn't. You might have wished he was making a point about people being too thin skinned, but there is no evidence of that in the text. You might have wished that he was not equating admiration for Stan Lee with immaturity, but what you wish he had said has nothing to do with what he actually said.

If you really think Maher's words are being treated unfairly or taken out of context, by all means demonstrate that.

It really is if you are Adult enough to take a joke at your own expense without having to make personal attacks about who is dating who or who looks like an eggplant whatever that is supposed to mean.

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Again, I see no sign that he was joking about anything. And, for that matter, if we was simply providing some corrective but sharp criticism aimed comic book nerds, I would I think be man enough to take it, even if it was completely lacking in good humor or even good intentions. The problem though is that not only is he speaking without good humor, or good will, or any sort of charity, he's just simply wrong.

Gawd if you can’t take these jokes then you would have died thirty years ago. Sad.

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I have endured far more insulting descriptions than this, especially 30 years ago. But I do not call such gibes 'jokes'.

Celebrim said:

Actually, agreed. The arrested development in society and the failure to accept adult responsibility has been a very large topic of conversation, not just by Bill Maher, but by many of the communities - conservatives, the religious, etc. - that Bill Maher is noted for being highly critical of. And it shows up in a lot of aspects of society, which I won't get into because, well, it will get political. But suffice to say, Bill Maher isn't making a particularly novel observation and that it an observation which you'd normally expect from a conservative that thinks society is going all to heck in various ways.

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That may be but I don't really think D&D is unique in this regard compared to, say, people who are into gambling, sports fandom, or a lot of other things.

What it chiefly says to me is that a parent in the 1960's could generally take his kids to see a movie aimed at an adult audience without fear that it would be inappropriate viewing for them.

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I also think that what's happened now is that parents back in those days mostly didn't take their kids to more adult movies. There have been a lot of changes in parenting over time, but one was a much clearer separation between "adult world" and "kid world" in a lot of ways. Getting babysitters was a lot easier back in the '60s, just as an example, and expectations were quite a bit different.