Qualities Of Better Film #21 of 31: SUBVERSIVE TO THE STATUS QUO

SUBVERSIVE TO THE STATUS QUO:
It is too easy to just give the audience more of what they got last year. Who has the courage to lead us to somewhere new? How little does that actually happen and why is that? We see the world through a fixed paradigm and only the visionary can show us a true alternative. Quite often, a filmmaker will be diminishing their financial prospects, or at least the quick and easy route to them, if they don’t simply serve up more of yesterday’s dessert. It not only takes courage and ambition to subvert the status quo, but it requires real artistry in order to work with current audiences: you just don’t have to do it well, you have to do it so well that people both take notice and can engage in a new language. Frankly, I imagine that a lot of the best work that is done in this area goes unnoticed for some time because both critics, curators, and audiences are trained to see anything but today’s filter. In America, we have a particularly hard time at looking openly at anything that doesn’t reinforce today’s political paradigm other than perhaps when it is delivered by the frequently conservative viewpoint reinforcer of the dystopian post-apocolyptic aesthetic. Even still, it’s easier for American audiences to accept explosive content than it is to even consider radical form. We are spoon fed linear narratives with dominant protagonists one after the other. When will we be set free?

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