A guide to the right-wing Grifterverse.
For many viewers, reviews are a guide not just to whether to watch certain films or series, but to how to interpret them. Certain “reviews”, however, barely engage with the text, and instead use them as battlegrounds in a culture war. The problem is that some of the more popular reactionary voices are also less televisually literate, more intellectually dishonest, and primarily politically motivated – and the less informed the viewer is, the more susceptible they are to the grift.
First, if you haven’t already, check out our look at how media literacy is demoted by certain popular YouTube channels – and the dire implications this has for the intellectual as well as the emotional intelligence of audiences:
José could be describing any critic of “strong female characters” as someone who “has uncritically accepted the movies and TV shows of his youth as ‘normal’ and internalised their often conservative messaging (at least by today’s standards). He sees deviations not as reflections of changing tastes and times, but some kind of top-down imposition, as some kind of abnormal intrusion” (which often means conveniently ignoring how neither this, nor their thoughts on it, are anything new). José details how a certain category of commentator “views media through a very specific lens – one that assumes [media production and industry] insider knowledge he doesn’t have (or at least he doesn’t evidence), an affinity towards conservative political messages, and a tendency toward superficial readings to reinforce a general anger toward specific companies and certain types of politics”:
(Sidenote: in the video above, José almost makes, but doesn’t fully make, the point that such commentators measure the limitations of “strong female characters” as purely physical, without considering any placed upon them by society, because such commentators agree with those social limitations, and therefore don’t see them, much less as anything to be challenged or commented on).
But why does this matter? Well, entertainment media, and specifically commentary of it, can act as a gateway to broader cultural movements. The implications of this deliberate misrepresentation of entertainment media reach beyond literacy, and into politics – specifically, recruitment. In this second part of this three-part series, Pillar of Garbage traces the financial connections which reveal how far right conservatism is funnelled from high-level political figures, all the way down to movie and video game commentators:
In his series Exposing the Grift, Th3Birdman demonstrates that, despite grifter claims that their complaints are about “writing” or “tokenism” in modern media, racism in sci-fi-fantasy fandom is older than the internet. The first episode includes Billy Dee Williams recalling the backlash he received in 1980 after playing Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back (1980):
Further Viewing
Glass Onion (2022) was the object of a whole bunch of bile from online conservative commentators. Pillar of Garbage’s responses to a couple of particularly vocal individuals made their way into our entry about the film: