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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 1505413" data-attributes="member: 2067">This is pretty much the cusp of the issue, and I disagree. The movie contains variation, but it is, in it's basic form, the same story. It's still "about something."It tells me something *very* meaningful about the nature of storytelling and humanity. Everything is viewed in the methods of a "plot." That's hardly insignificant. It's a universality in a presumed random assortment of atoms.It's like saying that "everything is made of atoms is so broad and vague as to be meaningless." It's obviously not. And like with creativity, the true variation is in the details.Nothing is innovative. That's okay. It's not a bad thing, it's just a real thing.Sad to say, political satire, powerful empires that can destroy each other, and slapstick comedy have been in existence since civilization.There's more to Strangelove than just that, but that's it's major dimension. Everything else, all of it, the bomb, the cowboy hat, the bodily fluids, is all just cultural variation on the same themes that have been around since before history. You're looking at it far too closely. You're looking at the details. No one is disuputing that Loki doesn't ride a bomb in Ragnarok. What we are saying is that the basic story has been done. The satire, the warning of destruction, the commentary comedy, this isn't anything new. And the fact that these kids of stories exist throughout human existence is valuable, because it displays a unique variation on human beings in all of creation. I don't, offhand, know of any chimpanzee tales of the end of the world involving political comentary. It's part of what makes mankind different.But to presume that Strangelove was something "new" is a bit ethnocentric, a bit too closely examining it, and a bit too desperate for innovation. It's different. But that doesn't make it new. And it doesn't make it better. It's just a cultural variation on the same thing that's been going on as far back as we can remember. It's powerful, this stuff, but it's nothing we haven't seen before.</blockquote>

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