The profound correlation between ideological uniformity and aesthetic degradation

Precisely at the moment when Disney ends up under fire even from “friendly fire” - that is, it is attacked by mainstream publications such as Wired and Huffington Post - I would like to make a clarification with respect to what I wrote two days ago.

I believe that the subjugation of cultural production to ideological propaganda is the cause - the prime mover - of the long sequence of flops that, in the last two years, has hit the genre of cinecomics.

This does not mean, however, that audience disaffection is directly linked to a rejection of the woke ideology professed by the studios.

Instead, and to a very large extent, said disaffection stems from being confronted with productions with an increasingly ragged script, less and less engaging characters, as well as TV series that tell in ten hours a short-lived plot that could easily have been structured in an hour and a half.

This fact, however, begs the following question: to what extent is ideological standardization the cause of the lowering of quality at the aesthetic-formal level?

Well, I believe that the answer to this question indicates a strong causal link between the two aspects.

Without needing to lavish now on an encyclopedic list of examples, even at the level of common sense it should be evident that propaganda--of whatever type and color--imposes on the arts a principle of instrumentality, simplification and standardization. That is, with the subjection of artistic language to propaganda, styles disappear, poetics disappear, and, in short, anything that can be qualified as “originality” disappears. With the subjugation to propaganda, in short, we have the netflixization of cultural production: that is, the latter becomes a mono-colored and mono-tasteful whole dominated by a kind of all-pervasive “aurea mediocritas” zeroing in on every stylistic and authorial trait.

In this sense, we can thus enunciate the thesis that audiences have become disaffected with cinecomics because of the aesthetic consequences of their subjugation to an ideology, not because of a reaction of rejection toward that specific ideology.

A certain ideological rejection, on the other hand, we can say that it broods under the surface, but it manifests itself-as in the case of the failure, among the public, of NATO propaganda on the Russian-Ukrainian war-more as passive disinterest than as active and conscious opposition.

To prove my point, perhaps it would be good to recall the blockbuster film of 2023, namely Barbie.

I don't think anyone can dispute that that was a film under the banner of the most unbridled woke extremism, but, nonetheless, Barbie was a film that - unlike the latest Marvel and DC cinecomics - was able to deploy elements of stylistic-aesthetic innovation. Thanks to such elements, a woke propaganda film found mass acceptance beyond expectation.

Thus, on both the political and cultural levels, it is good to tread lightly with the assertion that a collapse of the dominant ideology is imminent: the latter works on the long run and, from that point of view, its promoters are driven by the fanatical conviction that, in the end - barring any setbacks - all of humanity will eventually conform to the transngenderist dictates and environs.

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Translation by Costantino Ceoldo