#propaganda can be technically excellent even though it's ideologically vile

[electricpentacle]

My mother used to teach a film studies course at her university. Quite a lot of the movies she taught were established classics (Citizen Kane, Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon etc), others were just in there because she liked them (Star Wars, Blade Runner, Alien). But there were two movies she absolutely hated but taught anyway: Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will. Because she felt it was really, really important to do a lecture on movies as propaganda, and those two are excellent examples of cinematic technique used to launder and glamorise a truly vile and noxious ideology.

So yeah. Even the nastiest propaganda movies imaginable were still useful to an academic teaching a class of young people how to recognise and resist the techniques of propaganda.

(I got the propaganda lecture too, as a Young Person who needed warning about such things. And it stuck, to the point where quite a lot of modern MCU makes me wince.)

Ok so...I've been thinking: is it true that there's an actual irredimable media?

IMO media is only truly bad when its specifically intended to cause harm or is just a blatant act of bigotry. Media is media. Media is supposed to tell a story, invoke thought, express things. Such things don't need redemption.

I mean I'll be blatantly honest and say after watching A Serbian Film I just... Didn't get it. If there was a message within it beyond the corrupt and horrific world of extreme pornography then it was lost on me. But assuming that was the message, the film did its job well. It told a story. The things shown in the film are the story. Contrary to my view, most people think its a horrific and damning piece of media that needs to be outlawed and everyone involved shot on sight.

Unless a piece of media was just a flagrant display of bigotry or something truly intended to be blatantly offensive with no ulterior goal, thinking of media as something that needs to be redeemed is just... Pointless, honestly.

JoJo Rabbit, for example. Many people were outraged that such a terrible era was turned into a slashy comedy, but those people also missed the very important messages conveyed in the movie. Does the film owe them redemption, or do they owe the film self-reflection?