OK, so I've just finished all six seasons back to back. What's the lesson?
I suspect this will not be a popular opinion, but the lessons I take are that
It think it tells you everything you need to know about Hollywood's America that a show that is so self-aware, and that makes a big deal of the issue of normalization, is so blind to the water in which it lives that the show could resolve the way it does, with the ultimate litany of issues condemned vs not condemned over the show.
So I don't know. At the end, I think I'm more pessimistic for America. Life is hard, yes, people are terrible to each other yes. But we solve that by facing honestly and head-on what the causes are. And what I see in popular American culture is a massive unwillingness to face one particular big cause. Oh sure, scream and rant about slavery as an issue from 150 years ago. Blame everything on (a particular theory of) what the US was like 50 years ago. Bring in your parents. But god forbid we ever say one bad word about the elephant in the room...
So will America end its days living on soma? Yeah, I think so, I really think so.
I suspect this will not be a popular opinion, but the lessons I take are that
- substances are vastly more destructive in America than guns
- and Hollywood is ground zero for normalizing every aspect of their destructiveness.
It think it tells you everything you need to know about Hollywood's America that a show that is so self-aware, and that makes a big deal of the issue of normalization, is so blind to the water in which it lives that the show could resolve the way it does, with the ultimate litany of issues condemned vs not condemned over the show.
So I don't know. At the end, I think I'm more pessimistic for America. Life is hard, yes, people are terrible to each other yes. But we solve that by facing honestly and head-on what the causes are. And what I see in popular American culture is a massive unwillingness to face one particular big cause. Oh sure, scream and rant about slavery as an issue from 150 years ago. Blame everything on (a particular theory of) what the US was like 50 years ago. Bring in your parents. But god forbid we ever say one bad word about the elephant in the room...
So will America end its days living on soma? Yeah, I think so, I really think so.