Bookending the horrificly badly played but popular "Don't Look Up" with "Orange is the New Black", wondering how much of our education and views are shaped by the new streaming culture. This is not the 60's version of "that show/music is going to warp your mind" - at least the content like Ozark or Breaking Bad is a full-on onslaught of a Max Headroom virtual reality. A full-on mindfuck dystopian show like Mr. Robot can cause some cognitive dissonance/disorientation when you leave the screen. But OITNB is also a heavily cleaned up and twisted view of female prison life, with 7 seasons of soft porn lesbian action and victim/revenge porn as a glue justifying bad ridiculous behavior perhaps being enough to get a minor in Sociology instead? And how true to life is that education?

https://www.salon.com/2015/07/11/dont_believe_the_orange_is_the_new_blac...

To be fair, Don't Look Up is just 2 1/2 overlong hours of junk memes crammed into unbelievable but once A-List Actors, loosely presented as "humor". (Perhaps the only decent character is the Tim Cook/Marshall Applewhite-like persona, still more caricature than divine acting.

Still, the point being a huge amount of indoctrination under the guise of "entertainment". How many from the Jan6 protesters had too much time on their hands and we're influenced by social media, Fox News *and* stream binging? I'll confess to only watching a few minutes of OITNB and the "humorous" seething violence of the Sopranos, but what part of American reality do they form? And the huge load of viciously presented Mexican drug lords in Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Ozark, and I presume others prolly does little to soothe the opioid-laden crackers contemplating their fate with no obvious government support to their rescue? How much does the screen affect our socio-political reality? "Don't Look Up" is a huge piece of obvious left-wing agitprop lifting obvious liberal takes (parodies of right-wing behavior and non-news Fox Newsish talk shows) that it's basically an Oprah nodding-yiur-headathon experience for the like-minded woke - 2 1/2 hours of confirmation bias, presuming the audience has trouble distinguishing a TV fantasy from reality, which judging from IMDB reviews they do. Ironically, NASA launched the $10 billion Webb telescope the day after DLB premiered - a badly needed upgrade/version 2.0 to the hampered Hubble telescope (a lot of flaws discovered with first launch that fortunately got fixed to some marginal extent). But where is the public interest in science or justice when our TV versions substitute such saccharine over-processed alternatives? Much as I admire a number of Musk's achievements,i suspect his union with Grimes and blowing a spleef one time live on radio make for half his fame and attraction. "Engineering" for a vast majority is just someone clacking a keyboard and having hacking-like effects come out the other end. The few affected by construction, material science, by electric grids, et al are tiny compared to those left out of technology. But similar to the social media hangers-on with not a lot more than Arianna Grande to pin them to the modern tribe. Seems a lot of looking without actually seeing anything. How to fix that snow blindness?

ETA - seems some film critics can see how bad it is, but 130k votes gave it a 7.3 - and indeed if this kind of awkward proselytizing/riffing is seen as good "art" it just may indicate a societal problem in processing relevant material.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/dec/27/look-away-why-star-studded-...