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I recently made a blog about "Media Litmus Tests" (found here) and my personal picks for apt tests, but I'm gonna do a rapid-fire extras round!
Interview With The Vampire (2022): I think this acts as a good litmus test just because of how subtle IwtV is with its themes. IwtV is all about our tendency to create false narratives, which is an excellent way to see how easily someone picks up on or falls right into the narrative devices someone creates.
And the aforementioned subtly of this, particularly up until and even during the finale, makes even more likely that someone not picking up on those themes already might miss it all entirely.
Dungeon Meshi: I was and have been, frankly, quite surprised by the thematic depths that this otherwise very silly manga/anime presents. Yes, it is a comedy series about some idiot adventurers eating monsters. However, it's also a story about soo much more than that. Each character is almost seemingly jam-packed with their own individual themes and narrative purposes.
And what otherwise might be missed as merely "cool fantasy worldbuilding" actually contains a deeper message about ecology and community. A message about living in the world sustainably and being in-tune with that world whilst it lives.
I think the latter doesn't get talked about nearly enough. Though, for what it's worth, maybe it will be a bit more once the anime catches up with the manga.
Serial Experiments Lain: This one is cheating. Lain isn't exactly subtle with it's themes per se, but the fact that it transmits those themes in such an otherwise elaborate and dissociative format means you have to really be paying attention to pick up on Lain's secrets!
Disco Elysium: This game is so overtly communist in its message, themes, aesthetic... everything. But somehow there are people who miss this? Usually they can tell that the game is "critical of both sides", but this makes it unclear for them... I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if something is that critical of both fascists and leftists, it's probably leftist. 😔
Honestly, for me, this isn't a general "Media Litmus Test" so much as it's a "Liberal Politics Media Litmus Tests".
1984: I think 1984 is overrated..... My thoughts on it have fluctuated a bit, especially recently, but I still think it's overrated if you actually read through it. A lot of it is Orwell's personal gripes with the Soviet Union ventilated through the medium of the narrative.
Even if you think the Stalinist Era USSR was an ultimately bad thing, Orwell seems to suggest or imply that it was actually worse than Nazi Germany. Which, to be clear, is not something anyone with any genuine historical background would ever think.
For context, Orwell was just mad about the way the Spanish Civil War turned out and the socialist infighting that took place therein. A lot of that really perverts the text.
There are also just simply better Dystopian novels... I might make a full dissection blog of 1984 at some point.
Shin Godzilla: Whilst it holds cult-classic status amongst some, Shin Godzilla still has pretty poor reviews for what I think is a pretty damn good cinematic critique of the inefficiencies of bureaucracy.
I think people want it to be more—fast-paced cinema with non-stop badass explosions? Instead, Shin Godzilla is a pretty slow movie that only focuses on the monster half the time. And even when it does focus on Godzilla, they aren't really this cool massive lizard fucking shit up, so much as they're a sad suffering creature wrecking emotional and material damage on everyone it comes in contact with.
So many reviews talk about how slow this movie is, and its so goddamn undeserved. It's slow, but that's in proportion to the slowness of the bureaucracy that it critiques! And I don't mean to use the old "The movie isn't bad, it's trying to be bad" argument, but people just don't give enough thought to what its doing with that slowness.
(Plus, people call almost all movies "too slow" these days. You guys need to get off TikTok. And this is coming from someone with diagnostic ADHD.)
Gachiakuta: (I've only seen what's currently out of the anime thus far) This is an up and coming shonen hit, however, I think Gachiakuta has a little bit more depth than some of its other shonen brothers, whilst still not being as overtly "edgy" as its anti-shonen cousins like Attack on Titan or Chainsaw Man.
To me, it seems pretty clear that Gachiakuta has a theme (among many) about sentimentaility, especially towards the objects around us. What we consider to be "trash". Which, can I just say, is a pretty novel and interesting theme?
Nonetheless, I figure this might go kinda overlooked for some people who are just there for the awesome-as-fuck magic system, or the badass fight scenes, or the manic pixie dream girl (Riyo) people really seem to adore.
This one is admittedly a bit speculative. Still, with the trend other media has these days, I'm worried...
Bugonia: Saved this one for last since it's probably the one people are least likely to be familiar with. For clarity, Bugonia is a Yorgos Lanthimos movie that released less than a couple months ago. It's an absurdist black "comedy" (comedy may be doing some work).
I liked Bugonia in some ways, but I also think the movie's ultimate message, if it really has one at all, isn't particularly interesting (though the method it uses to get there kinda is).
It's message (spoilers???) as far as I can gather is basically "for as bad as the institutions around us are, it is humanity who created them and which is the true progenitor of evil!"
This is so.... lukewarm? A friend of mine described it as a "millennial liberal kind of take" which is pretty much how I feel too. Not nearly as deep or profound as one would be lead to believe...
Once again, I'd love to hear more personal media litmus tests from you guys!
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Explorer of Wonder
Herrementary, how you react to that movie says a lot.
aprrr
Might be a bit basic but Breaking Bad is my main litmus test; so many people have seen it, and so many people get it wrong. Most of it boils down to a "main character = good" perspective that too many people seem to have (and misogyny). While you are supposed to empathize with Walter---a struggling working-class man with a "mundane" life feels the need to turn to crime to pay for his healthcare after his cancer diagnosis---his ego gets in the way of nearly everything he does. Need I remind anyone that his former colleagues offered to pay for his treatment, yet he refused because of his pride and ego, as well as not being over having previously dating Gretchen. Yet for many, the villain in the show is Skylar? Walter can distribute drugs that are ruining people's lives, kill over a dozen people, and even sexually assault his own wife, but Skylar is the one who is demonized? Her only truly questionable and bad action was smoking while pregnant. Everything else is something you can entirely expect from an average stay at home wife in 2008 (and can you blame her for how much she smoked and drank by the end of the show? She was miserable.). Her "cheating" was after she had served Walter with divorce papers. Or they mention the "happy birthday scene" as if a somewhat cringey scene is worse than the aforementioned drugs, killing, and sexual assault.
Vince Gilligan, the creator, even stated that after a certain point, he wanted to make Walter as evil as possible, yet even he was surprised by how many people stuck by his side. I think most characters in BrBa are morally grey in some way, shape, or form, but Skylar was one of the only voices of reason in the show, and yet she was demonized for being a woman who was "in the way" of the cooler main character.
I could go on for much longer, but at that point that'd be it's own post
I agree, I also think all the characters are purposefully quite morally grey. Or quite morally wretched, paired with having sympathetic circumstances for how they got there.
I've often said that the reason all of this happens + why Walter White is so dangerous is because he is a sick combination of both genuinely intelligent and also erratic as fuck. I actually think that's actually how and why he manages to kill Gus, and ultimately also gets himself killed—his erraticism. Gus is by all means the scarier man, the more dangerous man, even "The Man" as Mike says, but Gus is also a more cautious and planned man, which makes him susceptible to Walt's erratic behavior. I find it funny so many online guys love Walt and see Gus as the terrible villain, because Gus *is* the guy they want to imagine Walter White is. Of course, in either case, they're actually terrible people. (I'm gonna be making a blog eventually that discusses this fact in context to some other stuff)
I find it so interesting how easily these guys are convinced by the facade that Walter White (and characters like him in other media) put on. Like, Walter White constantly tries to position Skylar as "a b*tch", which he succeeds in doing to his son and others variously. But we SEE him do this, we see him go out of his way to put her in the position of "the b*tch", so how the fuck does it work on these guys? I say this rhetorically, and I'll be talking about it in aforementioned future blog, but yeah.
I find it interesting how even people who dislike Walter will sometimes still walk away with a "Hank was actually the good guy" mentality, whenever, whilst Hank is still much better than Walter in a long shot... he is a misogynistic, racist, pig of a cop. The show is just so focused on the evils of Walt that his own greyness looks white (pun not intended).
by LuciLucilia; ; Report
I think, again, it boils down to the whole main character thing; you see Walter's schemes and plans unravel, or be revealed that he was behind something, and instead of evaluating them from a moral / ethical framework, they see how cool and smart he is, despite how sporadic and reckless (and reprehensible) he is.
The funny thing about the Gus Fring thing is that Walter also thinks he's who Gus is. That type of watcher falls for the same trap that Walter does, which is why it's such an important litmus test for me, because it often reflects how they actually will act on / think about things.
Also on the "Skylar's a b*tch because Walter makes her out to be," I see a similar sentiment with certain Better Call Saul watchers, which is almost weirder (albeit a bit less common). Kim Wexler is often hailed as one of the best-written woman characters in television (and they'd be right, in my opinion) by the Skylar hate crowd, but then they turn around and make comments that follow a certain line like "I'll find the love of my life until she dumps me like Kim dumped Jimmy," again missing the point. Kim is just as complex a character as many others in the series, and possesses that same moral greyness as others in the show; yes, she participated in the schemes and ruined Howard's life with Jimmy, but her realizing that she was falling down a worse and worse path makes her a b*tch to these viewers because she didn't continue to have "fun" with Jimmy. So again, the one who goes down a worse and worse path goes down as the hero, and the one who acts as a moral compass, a villain. So they fall for the same trap as they did in Breaking Bad, because the show is focused on Jimmy, and Kim "gets in the way" of their love by leaving, Jimmy (by that point almost fully leaned in to the Saul persona) is vindicated while Kim is made out to be irrational.
But I entirely agree on the "b*tch wife" point, those scenes frustrated me so bad.
And on that last point, I think it's the other wing of the same bird as the main character phenomenon; trying to fit a complex story into a simple, elementary formula. Not every story has a good guy and a bad guy per se, and I think that's a definite creative choice with Breaking Bad that the creators made, yet the watchers flatten the greyness of all the characters in the show into a binary black and white---meaning every evil must be matched with an opposite good, and so on and so forth (on top of Walter's reprehensible-ness flattening Hank's grey-ness).
by aprrr; ; Report
The part about Walt thinking he's that guy is exactly what I was getting at. He presents himself like he is The Man, but Gus can immediately tell he isn't. I really think the scene where Gus calls Walt out on this is one of my favorites, just because it should suggest to a literate watcher that Walter isn't The Man, if you couldn't have already figured that out... Unfortunately, many viewers nonetheless get swept up in Walt's cognitive dissonance, precisely because they are wrapped up in their own.
by LuciLucilia; ; Report