On a recent Quackcast episode here on the duck, Ozoneocean made an interesting point about some older raunchy comedies.
The point was that in some of these movies, the female characters were presented a certain way, maybe not as three-dimensional as the male characters, or maybe came across more sexual than most people usually are, but that this actually made sense, because the story was being told from the teenaged male point of view. That's how these hormone-addled teen boys were seeing the world in the context of that story.
It reminded me of a pet theory of mine that the Deadpool movies, which I really enjoyed (fingers crossed on the third one rounding out the trilogy well!), were kind of a subjective reality as well. It's not spelled out that way in the movies - but it was one way I was able to justify certain things about the movie.
Of course, I'm not talking about an actual ‘dream sequence’ or ‘imagination sequence, or an ’unreliable narrator' situation, where the subjective take is obvious.
For example, the character ‘Colossus’ (the big metal guy) was an important character in the X-Men comics for many years. He'd been seen in the X-Men movies too, but more of a background/supporting character. Actually, the actor from the X-Men films was offered the chance to voice the character in Deadpool (his voice would be mixed in with other voices). The actor turned it down, apparently because he didn't agree with the changing of the Colossus character, who is completely different in the Deadpool movies.
For me, because of the nature of Deadpool, the change in character worked for me without feeling inconsistent, because I took the crazy vibe of Deadpool to be the result of a subjective reality. At least partly subjective.
So, the Colossus we see in Deadpool is a big, goofy dude because Deadpool sees him that way.
Granted, superhero movies since then have gone all in on the multiple realities thing so it matters even less than it did then (and I didn't see anyone other than me online even thinking about this at the time, so maybe it didn't matter then either).
But the fact remains that a movie, or a show, or comic, just like prose, can be a subjective reality. I think it's less obvious in the film medium, and easier to imagine a book or story as being subjective. But many movies and shows can be appreciated as the point of view of the main character, and not an objective reality.
There's a school of thought that our real lives are the same - that the way we see life will be the way life is. So if we think the world is against us and we always lose, that will be our reality. And that we can change that by changing our mindset. I've seen some signs in my own life that this might be true.
From a Certain Point of View.
Have a good one!
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Subtly Subjective
Banes at 12:00AM, Sept. 14, 2023
3 likes!
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bravo1102 at 6:48AM, Sept. 15, 2023
Fiction is highly subjective. It's all from someone's point of view, whether it's a character or the actual creator themselves. Raunchy comedies are from the POV of their intended audience, teenage boys to adults. My wife loved "Bridesmaids" I've had too many raunchy adventures to really like those movies but "Bridesmaids " was good being from the other side that you just don't see as much.
davidxolukoga at 9:50PM, Sept. 14, 2023
From now on this is my new reality: I’m a billionaire with my own secret spaceship. Screw You Musk
MOrgan at 11:29AM, Sept. 14, 2023
I just assumed Colossus was the way he was in the movie because the creators didn't have the right to use Captain America, so they just grafted on Cap's persona onto whichever X-Men character they were allowed to use.
J_Scarbrough at 7:24AM, Sept. 14, 2023
BRIDESMAIDS was apparently the antidote to that perspective, in that even though it too was a raunchy comedy, it was written more from a woman's perspective, and the characters were praised by female audiences for being more relatable and believable than women have often been portrayed in such movies. But even so, if you're going to use raunchy comedies as an example, then of course that's what you're going to get, because that's exactly how they're written, they're meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and the humor is meant to be as cheap and grotesque as possible to get the quickest and easiest laughs. Having said that, there's a number of reasons why I detest such raunchy comedies, and those are only among a few of my personal grievances with such.
PaulEberhardt at 5:33AM, Sept. 14, 2023
A pet theory of mine in literature is that many of the accusations Piers Anthony has faced, like misogynism, being way too fond of minors etc., largely stem from people misreading the way he subtly shifts the p.o.v. of every Xanth novel to match that of the main protagonist. Nasty remarks about girls and women crop up in those books whose protagonist is a boy, and to me they do sound a lot like the typical trash talk of teenage boys heard on schoolyards around the world (when they think girls and grown-ups are out of earshot), the kind that mustn't be taken too seriously as it's part of their trying to make sense the newly discovered opposite sex and more of a guilty pleasure, really. In those books centred on one of the girls, the male cast indeed gets some retaliation, and the "adult conspiration" is most scorned when the focus is on children. To me it's a clear example of why you should never confuse the narrator with the author, not even one who is a self-confessed dirty old man.😉
PaulEberhardt at 4:43AM, Sept. 14, 2023
Most of my literature lecturers maintained that there is no such thing as objective reality. I don't really agree with that notion, at least I wouldn't take it at face value, but what they really meant was that all narrators are to some degree unreliable and that whenever you create anything you'll have to allow for the fact that no two readers will read it the same way. And these two things are certainly true. Even LOTR could be read as a work of pro-Elven propaganda if you really wanted to and put in enough effort to find "proof". In line with your pet theory, Banes, I'd say that literally every movie has a subjective element in it. I think you can tell the skill of a director by how well he or she is able to toy with this.
marcorossi at 3:49AM, Sept. 14, 2023
In some sense, the most extreme charachters in a story can be seen as a projection of subjective emotions. For example, often there are stories where there is the "stupidly bad" enemy, someone who seems inclined to do evil for no particular reason. I believe that we instinctively class people between "friends" and "enemies", and that the concepts of "good" and "bad" are an abstraction from the subjective friends and enemy. If I write a story, and I see a character as the "enemy", I will abscribe to him/her all "evil" traits even if this makes no sense. In some sense, those fantasy worlds like LOTR where there is an "objective" evil are like this kind of projection, applied to the whole world.