If the only tool in your political arsenal is shame, don’t be surprised what happens when you meet a shameless man.
Enter Wonder Woman in 2017 AD.
There’d been about fifteen years of films about superheroes, which were intellectual properties about supranatural beings like Celia.
These films were all the same: a supranatural being reenacted American foreign policy by responding to an existential threat through exaggerated violence, generally after another supranatural being reenacted 9/11, which was when some Muslims blew up two ugly buildings in New York and facefucked reality into a cartoon.
What differentiated Wonder Woman from the rest of the super-hero films was that its lead character was female.
Because the country was run by a monster created by liberals in the Celebrity branch of American governance, and because liberals were totally disconnected from the political structure of their country, and because the film mapped to easy marketing demographics, Wonder Woman was freighted with a swollen ideology.
It arrived as a place where the unexamined ideologies of American life could belong to women as easily as men.
If you think this is an exaggeration, please read the following quotes from “Want to Take Political Action This Weekend? Go to the Movies”, an article written by Melissa Goodman for the website of the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union:
Political action doesn’t always have to take the form of marching, holding a house party or calling your local representative. You can make a bold and necessary political statement just by buying a movie ticket.
Go see Wonder Woman…{https://www.aclusocal.org/en/news/want-take-political-action-weekend-go-movies}
That was politics at the mid-point of 2017 AD.
It arrived in an article on the website of an organization dedicated to civil liberties which suggested that an alternative to applied Leftist action was to patronize media produced by a massive multinational corporation owned by the same old shits who’d been ruining the world for centuries.
This was the madness of the moment.
People had lost the ability to tell the difference between the Celebrity and the other three branches of American governance.
Because the world has gone stupid and elected a rogue member of the Celebrity branch of American governance into the Executive, allow me to point out the difference: representation in the traditional three branches of government really does matter, because the people who end up in the government are the people who make policy and laws.
In other words, these are the people who determine whether or not you will be able to make a living wage.
These are the people who shape your lives.
People who end up in the Celebrity branch of American governance are the people who make movies and television and huge profits for the same old shits who rule the world.
In other words, these are the people who are taking your money.
I know of what I speak.
I’m one of them.
I’ve duped you into buying my turgid work.
Unless you’ve pirated this book.
If you have, then good for you!
Do me a favor. Steal The Future Won’t Be Long!
And, yes, reader, I know the arguments about why it’s important to see diverse faces in television and in films.
And, yes, I realize that no one agrees with me on this topic.
But I’m sorry, arguing about the shadow theater of the entertainment industry is not politics.
What did everyone at the Vista Theater see when they made a bold political statement by giving money to the people who’d ruined the world?
Wonder Woman was a film made by people baptized in the primordial ooze of unconscious American life.
The attendees saw a story about the unexamined glory of American foreign policy, of the meaningfulness of war and violence, and a story about how a woman could be like a man in her ability to simulate genocide.
A woman named Diana lives on an island full of lesbians. Her mother is the Queen of the island. Everyone lives in paradise, doing what everyone who’s ever met a lesbian knows that all the world’s lesbians do, which is train for perpetual war. This goes on for millennia until one day an American in an airplane crashes on the island. Diana rescues the American, only to find that the reason he crashed is because a bunch of Germans were firing materiel at the plane. The Germans invade the lesbian paradise. The lesbians murder all the Germans. The Germans murder some of the lesbians. The American gets naked and feels insecure about the size of his penis on an island full of lesbians and then confesses that he’s working as a spy against the Germans, who have developed biological weaponry. Some nonsense happens where Diana gets convinced that Ares, the Greek god of war, is responsible for the chaos. Diana and the American go out into the world with the intention of murdering a bunch of Germans and stopping Ares from developing biological weapons. Then Diana goes to London where, as Celia once discovered, English shit is widely acknowledged as Europe’s most toxic. Then she goes to France with a motley crew of drunkards, and for some reason only the dark-skinned drunkards are capable of belief in the supra-natural. Then Diana kicks the shit out of some Germans for about forty minutes, performing ritualistic genocide that saves the fictional world while adhering to an unspoken embrace of American foreign policy. Somewhere in here, weirder members of the audience cheer and cry because they’ve imbibed enough primordial ooze that they believe the appropriate solution to the horror of men is to adopt the tactics of men. In other words, the committing of genocide has become so ingrained and unexamined in the American psyche that there is no longer any purpose in questioning whether or not one should commit genocide. The real question is who gets to kill. And for some reason it’s important that women have opportunities to butcher their fellow living beings. Just ask the ACLU. Then Diana kills Ares, who turns out to be an Englishman in a bowler hat, which is probably the only realistic thing in the entire film, and then the war ends and everyone is happy because Diana has committed genocide against the right people at the right time and there’s no way that the roman numeral at the end of World War One could possibly predicate a sequel.
At least the genocide simulator of Wonder Woman gave some people at the Vista an opportunity to dress in goofy costumes.
And it was those costumes that brought Celia and Rose Byrne to the premiere.
The magic bullshit window had chosen well.
Celia and Rose Byrne were clothed in Fairy Land’s haute couture, which over the last season had moved into animal pelts.
Had they arrived anywhere else in Los Angeles, their outfits would have drawn a lot of attention.
At Wonder Woman, they were just making a political statement.
They arrived through the magic bullshit faery window, popping dead center into the lobby of the Vista, right in front of the concessions counter.
They saw a lot of people going into the twin double doors of the theater.
They both remembered Tom a Lincoln at Gray’s Inn.
They knew what it looked like when people went to a show.