this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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This is winding me right up. You see people in movies and you think straight away - there is no way you would be able to afford this house/car.
The same goes with them living without any noticeable employment for months. Or having a job but spending their working hours doing something else.
Hollywood has done irreparable damage to society’s expectation of reality.
And it doesn't even stop at the financial stuff where someone has an incentive to screw with society's expectations. All kinds of other aspects like friendships, relationships, parenting,... are strange in movies too.
There's was a video essay on YouTube about there being less and less sex on TV and in movies and how bad that is. They argued that media should portray all aspects of life realistically; and if sex is left only to porn then it's going to give people a more and more skewed view with no counterbalance.
That is a good point but they should also just include more awkwardness and in general more of the effort required to keep relationships (of all kinds) working, even the successful ones. That whole "find your soulmate and then coast" nonsense has done a lot of damage to relationships to take just one example.
Agree completely. None of it is well portrayed and the movies that do it well are exceptions. Any movie in which I see a man and woman having alcohol, I know there's a sex scene coming up. Romance and sex are both so horrendously badly portrayed most of the time that I'm surprised more people don't complain.
James Bond - typically misogynistic and women are used as Bond pleases.
1st Iron Man movie - serious investigative reporter is reduced to a hot piece of ass for a one night stand as Tony Stark clearly just picks up and sleeps with whoever he wishes.
Star Trek Into Darkness - Kirk is so alpha that the easiest way to portray this is he is in bed with 2 alien women and doesn't even care as they beg him not to answer the phone and get back to action with them.
Honestly, I think it would already an improvement if the distinction was a bit clearer between wish fulfillment fantasy and supposedly realistic portrayal of relationships.
I don't mind so much if men and women want fiction with their respective wish fulfillment but don't pretend that it is realistic.
It's the system working exactly as designed. "you, too, could have all this if you only worked hard enough. Now that you've spent 2-3 hours of your weekend off at the movies, get back to work, slave"
Exactly, and everything is product placement. WTF would Ford want a beater from the 80s being the car in the film? They’ll lobby for the coolest, brandnewest model even when it doesn’t make sense. Or their product placement models will be every other car on the road. I see you Transformers.
To be fair, Transformers was always product placement. Not just "full of" it, but "entirely built of" it. They designed a line of toys first and made up a story to help sell them afterward.
The Iron Man movies were chronic for this, Audi really made them significantly worse.
The single worst example was I Robot.
Nah, it's nothing so subtly evil. People go to movies to get taken out of their day-to-day lives. No one wants to see the protagonists struggle with the same issues they struggle with. Struggle is fine, just don't want to see my struggle.
That may as well be the case as I found it mostly in US movies.
People in movies and tv rarely have messy houses, they’re always spotless, and everyone pops in on each other and everyone is at home wearing pants.
See: FRIENDS
Manifest was even worse. At least Friends was a sitcom, not serious and was mostly about their interactions.
Friends actually explains how Monica can afford her spectacular apartment, too. Her grandmother is the actual person on the lease and locked the rent in at $200 per month decades ago. Monica is illegally subletting the place and there's either an episode or an arc where one of them convinced the building manager to ignore it instead of reporting it to the owner.
Fair enough. Last time I watched Friends was a couple of decades ago.
They did this in The Rookie as well. Big LA house with views.
Explained it away as him taking care of the place for his wealthy friend.
Same in fiction about modern people. Used to always wonder, "How the fuck does this guy just not work while all this shit is going down?!" People flying all over the country, dropping out of work, paying anything that needs paid, all on a middle-class job.