Mark Granza
@markgranza • 11,101 subscribers
Writer, Editor | Founded @im_1776 | Christian Futurist
Shorts
Videos
I love this old interview with Monica Bellucci because it perfectly illustrates why we can never have another Monica Bellucci. It's not because of her beauty. It's because no celebrity knows how to be authentic anymore. Notice how she answers that being Monica Bellucci is basically about not having a strong ego, then immediately proves it by being annoyed that she has to talk about herself. "In this industry you always have to say I, I, I..." Or how she clearly never filmed herself talking to "her followers", since her instinct is to describe being "normal", i.e., authentic, as separate from when cameras are rolling. "I live a normal life, and every now and then, there's a camera." Then, when asked what the French people think of her, instead of going on a rant praising how "awesome" they are, she just goes, "yeah, I think they like me a bit." Everything about her is literally the opposite of an influencer.
Mark Granza2,785,396 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
Everything Thomas Shelby does is an attempt to fix himself because he's broken. He finds peace in his relationship with Grace ("I don't hear the shovels against the wall") and, ultimately, meaning in marriage. He's not the ubermensch; he's the ultimate romantic. This is why the show goes completely off the rails towards the end, when the wokies clearly took over some of the writing. They hated what Tommy and Grace represented, i.e., meaning emerging from genuine romance between a masculine man and a feminine woman, so they had him fight Nazis instead.
Mark Granza1,109,632 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten
I just watched the Netflix manosphere doc. If you focus only on its themes and subjects, it's pretty boring overall, but if you look at its format, it becomes quite interesting. It might be the most unintentional work of art ever made (and I don't mean it as a compliment toward the producers). This scene alone is one of the most surreal I've ever seen (so much to unpack that it would take me years). For context: the scene takes place towards the end, when the host returns to Marbella for one last follow-up interview with one of the influencers. At this point, the influencer has received plenty of negative feedback from his own followers about the host, having live-streamed the making of the doc several times, so he's well-aware of his and his producers' intentions (i.e., to essentially do a hit piece), so he tries to set them up by asking his own "cameraman" to live-stream the whole encounter. This time, however, not just for the sake of live-streaming, but to expose them as biased, corrupt, etc. IOW, to engineer a "hit piece" on them (whether his attempt backfires is irrelevant). On top of that, by the time the encounter takes place, the host has been live-streamed multiple times by almost all the subjects he had been profiling (over the course of weeks or months, not sure), which in turn has generated not only lots of discussion on socials (I've never heard of any of the influencers before this so I missed it), but also news articles about the making of the doc, the subjects profiled, the host, their views, and so forth, not to mention content about the news articles and the streams by other influencers... *before the doc has even wrapped up filming*. So it's already kind of unique. Now, though, that the documentary has come out, here are some Qs: Who's producing it? The host or the influencers? Their followers? The media? The other influencers? A combination of all of these? Who is the subject? Is the host making a documentary about himself by making a documentary about the influencers, or one about the influencers by making one about himself? Both? The whole thing is like a production within a series of streams within multiple reality shows within news stories within a debate within multiple platforms within (more layers I'm probably not even thinking of), which can also work in reverse, depending on how you look at it and/or how you've come across it. It's an unintentional work of art insofar as it perfectly captures the absurdity of today's "cultural" production—the way we consume it, contribute to it, engineer it, let it affect us (or the other way around). It also reveals in part why many of us online are prone to describe culture as "stuck". I think the reason we can't seem to ever get to the bottom of why is that we are not really describing "culture" when we say that. We are describing ourselves. Those comments that appear in the chat within the stream within the documentary? That's "us".
Mark Granza95,294 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
This is the most crucial scene of the trilogy. Most people think Bruce's choice to become a vigilante is due to his loss of faith in the system after his parents' killer is granted parole, but it's actually shame over realizing he's weak and just as evil. He realizes that the only way to defeat crime is to find the criminal within him, so he ventures for seven years into the underworld until he's forced to become one. When he comes back, he works WITH law enforcement, so he's not really a vigilante because he's not technically taking matter into his own hands. Rather, he has become the ultimate individual, working with the collective WITHOUT seeking its approval (i.e. becoming a politician or pundit.)
Mark Granza118,451 Aufrufe • vor 9 Monaten
Keine weiteren Inhalte verfügbar