I have ideas for an outline of movie plots, these are horror movies that draw attention to the politicization of fiction.
In the first the outlies are as follows:
Main character is a famous non-mainstream movie writer/director, he is celebrated for being "audacious" and "rebellious" and has a lot of awards, he's known for making "controversial" and "powerful" movies.
In reality, his works are all on commission from the government, agents come to him with a message or impression of a certain topic they want to embed into the minds of the people, and he makes film that specifically invoke that in the audiences. He is known by the secret name "the alchemist" for his ability to turn Iron (opinion) into Gold (fact).
He is visited one day by the agents who tell him that movies are no longer an effective medium, so they want him to be a writer-director for a video game instead, he tries to argue against the idea, but they sell him doing it by telling him that "he had already announced it" (they had already made the announcement on his behalf).
He agrees to do it on two conditions: he retains full control of the production, and once he's made it his career is over, forever. they accept his terms and tell him he will be staying with a tech billionaire who will teach him everything he knows about the medium.
He arrives at a thematically alien futuristic new home, where everything is fake, and is greeted by the guy who introduces himself like someone who wants to learn how to do propaganda from the director more than he wants to teach the director about making video games so he could help show how to successfully turn them into a propagandistic medium.
The director mentions amateur critics picking apart his films and all failing to see that they are clearly designed to manipulate how they think, and the game suit talks about internet critics who praise his games despite them not actually saying anything at all, and being more focused on action, but being pleasantly surprised that so much symbolism is being read into his basic plots, characters, and settings.
The true story comes out later, after a ton of weird shit happens, that the actual project is to use a mixture of technology and the occult to produce a reality that is dictated and maintained by the consensus of the people.
This works in two ways, the first in that the average of all beliefs are made fact, and the second in that the average of all opinions causes things to happen in ways that satisfy that opinion, such as causing the death of someone who is widely hated to the point where most people think he should die.
One thing that needs to happen is the targeting of "interference" from those who strongly and openly disagree, by removing them and their influence. this whole place is a contained field for testing out this technology, which is being tested to see how well it can kill off the kind of people that disrupt the plan.
A large part of the movie is explaining how fiction can be purposefully used to manipulate belief far better than other forms of propaganda, such as misinformation and half-truths, the most important ideas exposed is that feelings form the basis of most factual beliefs, the power of fiction is not to misinform the audience, but to manipulate their emotions, and the most important ones to work with are pride and shame, the other major idea is that no actual lessons can be drawn from fiction on any subject, these are less honest than thought experiments, because they are made to steer you towards a conclusion and not to an exploration leading to the truth, mostly by being closed off by nature
The last point is how this director best known for his horror films, and that horror was his favorite genre to work with, this is because of how most horror movies are those in which catharsis is achieved by punishing the people their prevailing society dislikes in all the horrible ways the people want to see them die.
There is, in fact, only one rule in horror: Do not do or say anything that will make anyone in the real world dislike you, or you will die horribly, the secret to having the best odds of surviving a work of horror is to be the kind of person everyone loves.
Then have the director reveal that in real life the people who are best at doing this was people with cluster B personality disorders, the kind that are experts at blending into the prevailing culture and manipulating people's perceptions of them by transforming themselves into what they think that the person they are manipulating likes the most, so the ideal final survivor is a sweet little girl with a cluster b personality disorder.
The second film is an episodic show that ties in to the first, there is a guy who is a horror movie asshole, in that he's a straight white male that is every kind of -ist, -phobe, and -ic, you can think of, a literal blonde-haired blue-eyed, nazi ubermenschen, tall and muscular, basically a /pol/ack.
He is transported to a world of horror movies, where slashers, monsters, and every kind of horror antagonist is sent after him and the rest of the cast.
Problem is, he keeps killing or otherwise utterly defeating the antagonists sent after him, while also saving the other stereotypical horror movie cast members (including the blacks and browns and jews and gays, but none of that makes them hate him any less, and none of it makes his ideology change one bit, he even points out how protecting their asses is completely in line with his beliefs, this is emphasized in the episodes where he fights against movie nazis and their monsters), he's also been every kind of badass before he was sent in, and he's also 4th-wall aware, which he realizes in the first episode from how different this world is from the real one, full of rational women and genius negroes. He's paranoid and can predict the threat from the foreshadowing he can see around him.
it's a dark comedy in that this guy is hilariously bigoted on every taboo subject, especially on demographics, so everyone is hoping he will die, and the universe is dong all it can to kill him, cabin-in-the-woods style, sending at him killers, monsters, curses, disasters, etc., and yet he gets to defeat the challenge like a boss, saving everyone else from it, only for the universe to reset itself with a new threat to go after him. in between these resets, he gets into arguments with "god", who wants him dead or to recant his beliefs (in which case he's told he would be sent back to reality), "god" keeps giving him a chance in order to satisfy his own ego, which is why he makes every challenge beatable, either by neutralizing the threat or by surviving it past a certain period of time.
Third idea is one where the world of fiction meets the world of reality, and the contrast is made clear by real world and fickworld interacting with one another, including where actors are confronted by the characters they play.
Basically "imaginationland" but treated with a lot more seriousness, and more like "the earth becomes a hub for countless fictional worlds".
Imagine fictional blacks or jews coming into conflict with their real world equivalents, fictional blacks and jews hating their real world variants, and vice-versa.
There could be other ideas, but the main point is to illustrate the issues with basing your real world positions on what you know to be fake events involving fake people in a fake world. Using fiction to declare war on fiction.
I have ideas for an outline of movie plots, these are horror movies that draw attention to the politicization of fiction.
In the first the outlies are as follows:
- Main character is a famous non-mainstream movie writer/director, he is celebrated for being "audacious" and "rebellious" and has a lot of awards, he's known for making "controversial" and "powerful" movies.
- In reality, his works are all on commission from the government, agents come to him with a message or impression of a certain topic they want to embed into the minds of the people, and he makes film that specifically invoke that in the audiences. He is known by the secret name "the alchemist" for his ability to turn Iron (opinion) into Gold (fact).
- He is visited one day by the agents who tell him that movies are no longer an effective medium, so they want him to be a writer-director for a video game instead, he tries to argue against the idea, but they sell him doing it by telling him that "he had already announced it" (they had already made the announcement on his behalf).
- He agrees to do it on two conditions: he retains full control of the production, and once he's made it his career is over, forever. they accept his terms and tell him he will be staying with a tech billionaire who will teach him everything he knows about the medium.
- He arrives at a thematically alien futuristic new home, where everything is fake, and is greeted by the guy who introduces himself like someone who wants to learn how to do propaganda from the director more than he wants to teach the director about making video games so he could help show how to successfully turn them into a propagandistic medium.
- The director mentions amateur critics picking apart his films and all failing to see that they are clearly designed to manipulate how they think, and the game suit talks about internet critics who praise his games despite them not actually saying anything at all, and being more focused on action, but being pleasantly surprised that so much symbolism is being read into his basic plots, characters, and settings.
- The true story comes out later, after a ton of weird shit happens, that the actual project is to use a mixture of technology and the occult to produce a reality that is dictated and maintained by the consensus of the people.
- This works in two ways, the first in that the average of all beliefs are made fact, and the second in that the average of all opinions causes things to happen in ways that satisfy that opinion, such as causing the death of someone who is widely hated to the point where most people think he should die.
- One thing that needs to happen is the targeting of "interference" from those who strongly and openly disagree, by removing them and their influence. this whole place is a contained field for testing out this technology, which is being tested to see how well it can kill off the kind of people that disrupt the plan.
- A large part of the movie is explaining how fiction can be purposefully used to manipulate belief far better than other forms of propaganda, such as misinformation and half-truths, the most important ideas exposed is that feelings form the basis of most factual beliefs, the power of fiction is not to misinform the audience, but to manipulate their emotions, and the most important ones to work with are pride and shame, the other major idea is that no actual lessons can be drawn from fiction on any subject, these are less honest than thought experiments, because they are made to steer you towards a conclusion and not to an exploration leading to the truth, mostly by being closed off by nature
- The last point is how this director best known for his horror films, and that horror was his favorite genre to work with, this is because of how most horror movies are those in which catharsis is achieved by punishing the people their prevailing society dislikes in all the horrible ways the people want to see them die.
There is, in fact, only one rule in horror: Do not do or say anything that will make anyone in the real world dislike you, or you will die horribly, the secret to having the best odds of surviving a work of horror is to be the kind of person everyone loves.
Then have the director reveal that in real life the people who are best at doing this was people with cluster B personality disorders, the kind that are experts at blending into the prevailing culture and manipulating people's perceptions of them by transforming themselves into what they think that the person they are manipulating likes the most, so the ideal final survivor is a sweet little girl with a cluster b personality disorder.
---
The second film is an episodic show that ties in to the first, there is a guy who is a horror movie asshole, in that he's a straight white male that is every kind of -ist, -phobe, and -ic, you can think of, a literal blonde-haired blue-eyed, nazi ubermenschen, tall and muscular, basically a /pol/ack.
- He is transported to a world of horror movies, where slashers, monsters, and every kind of horror antagonist is sent after him and the rest of the cast.
- Problem is, he keeps killing or otherwise utterly defeating the antagonists sent after him, while also saving the other stereotypical horror movie cast members (including the blacks and browns and jews and gays, but none of that makes them hate him any less, and none of it makes his ideology change one bit, he even points out how protecting their asses is completely in line with his beliefs, this is emphasized in the episodes where he fights against movie nazis and their monsters), he's also been every kind of badass before he was sent in, and he's also 4th-wall aware, which he realizes in the first episode from how different this world is from the real one, full of rational women and genius negroes. He's paranoid and can predict the threat from the foreshadowing he can see around him.
- it's a dark comedy in that this guy is hilariously bigoted on every taboo subject, especially on demographics, so everyone is hoping he will die, and the universe is dong all it can to kill him, cabin-in-the-woods style, sending at him killers, monsters, curses, disasters, etc., and yet he gets to defeat the challenge like a boss, saving everyone else from it, only for the universe to reset itself with a new threat to go after him. in between these resets, he gets into arguments with "god", who wants him dead or to recant his beliefs (in which case he's told he would be sent back to reality), "god" keeps giving him a chance in order to satisfy his own ego, which is why he makes every challenge beatable, either by neutralizing the threat or by surviving it past a certain period of time.
---
Third idea is one where the world of fiction meets the world of reality, and the contrast is made clear by real world and fickworld interacting with one another, including where actors are confronted by the characters they play.
- Basically "imaginationland" but treated with a lot more seriousness, and more like "the earth becomes a hub for countless fictional worlds".
- Imagine fictional blacks or jews coming into conflict with their real world equivalents, fictional blacks and jews hating their real world variants, and vice-versa.
---
There could be other ideas, but the main point is to illustrate the issues with basing your real world positions on what you know to be fake events involving fake people in a fake world. Using fiction to declare war on fiction.
(post is archived)