Every day some Millennial who can recite at will the litany of why all the Boomers who lived this life helped destroy the world with car culture and climate change and sucked the life out of American cities and turned into a smug stupid piece of shit Lies awake and wonders
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Even when she's chilling in the Avengers compound whiling away the hours watching TV by herself she's switched to watching Malcolm in the Middle, which is much more subversive and less embarrassing than being a fan of Dick van Dyke It's something she's in denial about
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I mean, isn't everyone? The 1950s American Dream is the most worn-out dunk target in, like, all of pop culture and academia It's cringe af to say you actually want that shit "I can't move to the suburbs, my soul would wither and die there", etc
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She doesn't admit it until she's completely broken down, eroded all the way to her exposed core, till she's lost absolutely everything real in her life and has nothing at all remaining but her dreams, her oldest dream, her last dream
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The last thing that changes in that scene is *herself*, after everything around her changes This defiant 21st-century badass rebel lady finally stepping into the empty hole in the picture and assuming the role of a Laura Petrie housewife
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And I really do think the subtext is there, especially with the jokes in the commercials about rubbing in the over-the-top sexism of the era "Yes, I know it's problematic Yes, I know it's demeaning Yes, I know I'm throwing other women under the bus LET ME FUCKING HAVE THIS"
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Wanda blasting Monica out of her fantasy world is like if the "Shh, let people enjoy things comic" came back armed with a shotgun and filled with intense feral rage
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Now that I think about it I dunno if this meta angle could possibly be intentional but it's definitely there This is absolutely a meta show about Enjoying Problematic Media About the sheer intensity of the emotion behind people who get ultra-fucking-defensive about their faves
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Like, that's my response to
@nberlat's thing about the moral links being muddled -- how almost no one who has a Problematic Life in the Suburbs is problematic in a way that you can point to them and say "These are the specific people you horribly victimized"Show this thread -
A lot of people's moral critiques *are* very hard to make literal and concrete, especially about "messages" and "attitudes" and "media" "This music is sending harmful messages about women, it's part of a larger social problem, and by playing it you're contributing to harm"
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And the obvious response is "Who the fuck am I specifically harming I'm not fucking 'brainwashing' anybody into thinking anything by listening to this music *myself* If I'm the one being brainwashed, I have the right to do that And I like it"
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And like They're right But their critics are also right If media never had any impact on anything then the world wouldn't be the way it is, and yet it's asking a whole fucking lot sometimes to ask people to give up something that gives them joy over seemingly abstract concerns
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I dunno, I think that as shallow as the writing may have been forced to be by being an MCU product there's absolutely something potent that resonated with a lot of people here Dreams don't die easy We don't *change* from our childhood selves so much as just add layers on top
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I dunno if this is intentional on the WandaVision writers' part I *do* know the FaWS writers were thinking about this stuff, hence the one Flag-Smasher who sheepishly admits he was a fan of Captain America as a kid (setting him up for his ironic fate)
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But like that one shot from the WandaVision penultimate episode (the true finest hour of the show) will stick with me a long, long time More than the "Love persevering" line That shot of the unexploded Stark Industries shell in the rubble, right next to the still-playing TV
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The blinking red light telling Wanda and Pietro they're going to die at any moment, while the Dick van Dyke show still merrily plays Wanda's favorite episode -- the one where Dick has a silly nightmare of his world falling apart but he wakes up and everything's fine
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The American Dream and the American Reality, side-by-side America's broken promise, in one shot
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These are the two things America gave the world They literally give you *both of them* at the same time, served on the same tray And you wonder why people's attitudes about this country are so fucked up? You wonder why people have no chill?
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I don't fully stand by everything I said when I wrote this years ago But I will stand by the hot take that I don't think "native-born" Americans will ever understand the "American Dream" the way many immigrants do Some things are only defined in negative space
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The American Dream is everything the American Reality isn't, after all By definition It's what Martin Luther King called an "uncashed check", the accounting discrepancy between what is owed and what has been paid, accruing interest through the generations
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And goddamn is that one hell of a yawning gap Maybe some of you are so used to hearing it as background noise it doesn't register anymore But those are some wild fucking promises to make people if you never intend to keep them There's consequences for doing that
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From the high-minded abstractions -- freedom, dignity, equality, opportunity -- to those saturated colorful images of the concrete life they're supposed to represent beamed onto everyone's TVs Those beautiful homes, those clean, safe streets
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A decent job with a fair wage for an honest day's work A new land and a fresh start where anyone can decide who they want to be and make themselves into it Forty acres and a goddamn mule A fucking chicken in every fucking pot
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And the conservative politicians look at our changing world full of resentment and conflict and anger and think that means "the American Dream is dead"? All that negativity is because the Dream *didn't die*
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That crimson rage is the Dream still pulsing hard beneath the skin of every radicalized "anti-American" It's having a vision of how life could be -- of how you were *promised* life *would* be if you put in your hours and took your lumps -- that *didn't* die
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No matter how many bland, polite men in business suits looked at you from across your desk and told you it was never yours to begin with Something they tried to bury but *would not die*
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That play about the desperate, possibly doomed struggle for a working-class Black family to get the damn house in the suburbs, A Raisin in the Sun, is named for a line from Langston Hughes' poem "Harlem", whose first line is "What happens to a dream deferred?"
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It's that whole galaxy-brain thing Foucauldian thing about how every seemingly subversive text has a reading where it upholds the status quo and yet also every conservative text invites a subversive reading
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