Iām going to share with you guys a revelation Iāve had about why politics in fiction is so unbearable now, and Iāll probably go on a while, so Iāll just tl;dr right now.
Up until recently,Ā āpolitical messagesā in fiction were meant to give you a new perspective on real world issues. Now, political messages use real world issues as shorthand for the message theyāre already delivering.
Iām going to give you about the most obvious example I can think of for the former.
Let That Be Your Last Battlefield is hardly Star Trekās most subtle hour, but itās still a thought experiment. Youāre invited to take the position of a third party and observe black-white race relations through the perspective of an alien being. And in a world of Gorn lizard people and energy beings and that one talking baby, itās ridiculous that two people who are nearly identical canāt get along because of (ba dum tssh) the color of their skin.Ā
Youāre not meant to look at these Star Trek characters and goĀ āoh, this is like black people and white peopleāāyouāre meant to look at black people and white people and goĀ āoh, this is like the characters who had a race war over petty differences on Star Trek. Howād that work out for them?ā
In contrast, letās look at the more recent The Falcon And The Winter Soldier.
The villain and the general plot are meant as a metaphor for the refugee crisis, but itās really poorly established and constructed and executed, in just about every way. You basically have to have a working knowledge of the refugee crisis to even understand what theyāre getting at. But the idea is⦠and I donāt think they spelled this out until episode four or so, well into the plot, so you just could not understand the fundamentals of the conflict or what anyoneās motivations were and anythingā¦Ā
but anyway, the idea was that after the Thanos Snap, half the population of Earth disappeared, so the developed world welcomed immigrants from the third world to help rebuild society in the wake of all that. But, five years later, when the Snap was undone, everyone came back, so they just kicked out all the immigrants and I guess gave all their property and land and money over to the people whoād come back to life while putting the immigrants in camps. And the bad guy decided to fix that by blowing people up.
Now, I think that couldāve worked as a metaphor, but they didnāt put any effort into it beyondĀ āget it, these people are like refugeesā. It didnāt work as an analogy, it didnāt work as a thought experiment, it didnāt work as a parallel.Ā
And they couldāve used the situation to make you identify with the Flag Smashers, to put you in their shoes and ask you to emphasize with themābut they never did. We never saw what theyād been through, what was motivating them, what they were hoping to accomplish.Ā
They just had Sam Wilson deliver a cringe-as-hell speech about how the people weād seen being terrorists for six hours shouldnāt be called terrorists and the best way to prevent them from being terrorists was to give into all their demands.
The writers went at the story from the position that their audience already agreed with them (or, worse, that their audience was dumb and just needed a strong talking-to to get them to agree) and so they would just present the political message of their story and get happy nods. No effort to educate, no effort to inform, no effort to convince. The whole thing is more of an exploitation movie centered around the refugee crisis than an attempt to address it through fiction.
And thatās the problem with a lot of writing these days. Instead of using a fictional character to explain why something Donald Trump does is bad, they invent a fictional character, sayĀ ālook, itās Trump!ā, thus heās bad and they fight him. And it used to be they would have main charactersānoble, heroic, sympathetic charactersārepresenting the political positions that they were criticizing!
If Star Trek: Discovery had a good-natured character who was making a good-faith argument about why immigration should be restricted, and other characters opposed him, I donāt think anyone would mind. But they donāt do that. They take a character, heās Space Hitler, heās a straw-man for all the politics that the writers donāt like, and they blow him up. Oh, and heās a straight white man, natch.