livelymyrtle - Tumblr blog

[livelymyrtle]

Titanic is a good movie and I don’t care what you have to say about it. I could delve into how popular things, especially unabashedly feminine popular things, get shat on for no artist reason but because of misogyny and peoples need to prove themselves as being intellectual and worthy by putting down femininity due to its association with being inferior but that’s a really big box to unpack and I don’t know if y’all are ready for it.

[livelymyrtle]

Honestly atp I don’t know how to feel about Lin Manuel Miranda. I don’t want to be in that crowd of the “Hamilton and everything else he does sucks and it’s all awful” because it’s not really true… Hamilton was very good (mostly brought down from excellence by the second act), and I actually quite liked Encanto (aside from the fact that Abuela gets pretty much excused at the end + Disney forced him to do stuff like writing in Isabela). In The Heights I haven’t paid much attention to, but what I saw I remember being good, and I know he has plenty of other gems…

so why is it that I, like so many people, am just not feeling it? Netizens have recently been feeling more meh on him or even begun to hate him. So why this shift in perspective?

I think the sudden scrutiny against LMM has two main components:

1) Overexposure

After Disney has been putting him in everything, which was already after everyone was saturated with Hamilton and ITH stuff, I think people are just getting a bit sick of the man. It’s especially damning for Lin that he tends to make every main character himself, and that he has such a distinctive lyrical style(or rather, he is unwilling to diverge from that style - he wrote How Far I’ll Go for Moana and that was more off par for him). As a result, it just feels like you are watching the same thing over and over and over again with him - and at this point it’s just getting kind of exhausting to see him all the time doing what feels like the exact same thing.

It also probably doesn’t help that he has become associated with Disney just as Disney has begun losing popular favor. Nowadays, they mostly are doing mediocre movies with the exact same plot, characters, art style, aesthetic, and message(basically trying to be Studio Ghibli in plot except that they don’t have the slow pensiveness, nor the understanding of what consumers actually want, nor the desire to create art for art’s sake), and extremely awful live action remakes that literally nobody likes, so Disney’s new stuff has been bleeding popularity like a bullet wound. Now, people think of Lin in the same vein that think of their disappointment with Disney, which is probably not making him look better. I’ve even seen people blame Disney’s negative shift on him, which isn’t really fair, but… I can see why someone would draw that conclusion, you know?

2) More importantly, cultural shift in attitudes.

Post COVID and what I like to call the Reality Exodus, everyone went on their phones, got really depressed and pessimistic, and got really online. I think that this has directly lead to why people are no longer ok with some aspects of LMMs stuff. In 2015-16, we all loved Hamilton: it was an inclusive and fresh new take on US history, something that we were pretty starved of pride in. With the election of Trump, things seemed bleak: but people remained hopeful still that there could be pride in this country. The concept of Miranda only hiring actors of color was also just the right amount of groundbreaking but not too shocking for the culture - we were committed to diversity, but not so much to the point where we wanted truly diverse stories to be told, so the all-POC cast in a very white story was a good way to knock on the glass ceiling without breaking it. The added message of “we are all a part of America” was fitting for the widespread “we don’t see color, everyone is welcome, hakuna matata” brand of anti-racism that was the most widely accepted narrative at the time.

But as we got into COVID, we see In the Heights released. And all of a sudden, the Twitter mob has come out against LMM for… colorism in his casting, of all things??? Casting that was very diverse?? And that he wasn’t even in charge of anyway???

In hindsight the whole Twitter cancellation thing seems ridiculous, but I do think it’s an important example of how much more aware and critical we had gotten as a culture. And I think our new perspectives shifted our views on some of his earlier work, too: namely, Hamilton.

After COVID, a play written by a nonblack man about rapping slave masters (but they are all played by POC) didn’t really seem all that revolutionarily anti-racist. We as a culture had developed our understanding of racial theory to a different, more radical narrative: we should start uplifting the stories of real POC and make actual changes. All of a sudden, LMM’s rooting for diversity just didn’t seem genuine anymore the the culture at large. I think that has played one of the biggest parts in his loss of popular favor.

And that’s where we get to now: I just don’t know what to think. I mean, on the one hand, of course Lin Manuel Miranda does some great stuff artistically. But his art, his messaging, his image in general has become associated with an era of lenient attempts at equality that I just don’t really support. And no, before you think it, this isn’t going to devolve into the regular separation of art and artist stuff. But it is a question of separation: Can we separate the goodness of an art piece from its intent? Can we judge art or media as being good objectively? And how important of a part does messaging play in what makes something “good”?

My answer? I don’t know. I need a cup of tea and a nap. Peace.

[livelymyrtle]

How did The Weeknd get away with literally writing himself into his own personal porno and pretending it was a tv show. Like damn even Quentin Tarantino envies you