Another Reboot
11th January 2022
ZMan is delightfully dyspeptic today.
Hollywood figured out a long time ago that they could make a lot of money on a sequel to a popular movie. They could count on attracting most of the original audience without having to think too hard or spend a lot of money. If the sequel was just the original with a couple new twists, then it was easy money. The reboot is a similar concept, except it relies on nostalgia to sell the concept. Fans of the original Star Wars movies could take their kids to the reboot of the franchise.
The general consensus is that the reboot and remake are a sign that Hollywood has run out of creative writers. The wrinkly brains are now in the technical end, making cool graphics and special effects. The writers arrive in a short bus. This cultural dead end where they just keep rebooting prior ideas has reached a point where they are rebooting reboots of reboots now. The only novelty is they are stripping away anything of interest and replacing it with ideology.
Leni Riefenstahl is smiling in her grave.
The same process has been happening with politics. The first little hint of it happened with Bill Clinton who was sold as his generation’s JFK. This played on Baby Boomer nostalgia, which has been powerful juju since the 1980’s. The first genuine political reboot was Obama. He was pitched as the black JFK, which was a foreshadowing of what has been happening in popular culture. Just as the role of JFK was being played by a black guy, everything on TV is now played by nonwhites.
The thing that was interesting about Obama was that despite all the talk about the future, they were obsessed with the past. His signature program, health care, was a re-do of the failed health care fight in the 1990’s. His Russian reset was a rebuke of Reagan’s tough approach to the Soviets. His Iran policy was a re-do of what happened in the late 1970’s under Carter. The Obama years were a series of remakes of old defeats by the Left, but this time they were the winners.
Just as the copy is never as good as the original, Joe Biden’s AlGore is a cheap plastic imitation.