In movies back in the day, the “bad guys” always lost. Today that’s not always the case, if the “bad guy” has to survive at least to the sequel, or is a woman whose character is “revised” to “justify” her badness to make her not really bad—like Disney did with the Maleficent and Cruella characters. It is interesting to note that Hollywood seems to have a “transactional” idea of what “bad” is now. The actresses who agreed to play those characters (such as the narcissistic Angelina Jolie) would not do so unless those characters were only “bad” in the sense that their “revenge” for the “wrongs” supposedly done to them (and not part of their “nature”) was “bad.”
Thus in the “real world” there is a different notion of what “bad” is, although for men it is the other way around. Movies are not real life, and we have to deal with the reality of the new world order; the sexual antics you saw in teen comedies of the 70s and 80s could get you arrested today. Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby have learned that they are not protected from actions that they once thought was just another “perk” of fame. If people didn’t think that their behavior in the past was bad (and that could be from both sides), well they know now.
Weinstein probably did believe that many of the accusers nobody ever heard of turned “transactional” encounters in which they expected more than what they received (i.e. “fame” and success in the film industry) into crimes, which is how the MeToo movement became an instrument of revenge against powerful men like Weinstein, who are now held to account for what are now seen as crimes. The old Hollywood system died off long ago, where it was “expected” that budding “starlets” would sleep around to get ahead (Joan Crawford was “famous” for that—with both men and women).
But that world doesn’t exist anymore, and women are supposed to able to get ahead on their own merits and not expect to get a powerful film producer’s attention by sleeping with him, or feel coerced into doing so. I suspect that Weinstein still doesn’t understand what he did “wrong.”
Meanwhile, we really do want to cheer for legitimate “good guys” like TIME “person of the year” Volodymyr Zelensky, and boo really bad people, like Andrew Clyde, Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz, the latter seen here smirking like the juvenile punk he is as Zelensky left the chamber after his speech before Congress yesterday:
Why did they
even bother to show-up anyways? Well, obviously because they thought it would
be a “good look” for them to actually be seen acting like the cowardly a-holes
they are, and not an embarrassment for their constituents. I guess that is all
the “punishment” we can expect for their badness. By the way, their claimed reasoning against aid for Ukraine is rather similar to that of members of Europe's far-left, like Ireland's EU MP Clare Daly, which I discussed in my December 8 post.
Of course Zelensky was here because of a really bad man that most of us wish something bad would happen to, Vladimir Putin. It is the misfortune of the world that Putin is the worst kind of bad, like Hitler who in his refusal to accept defeat decided to take Germany with him into national suicide. In Putin's movie script, the Ukrainians are the only ones who were supposed to be victims of his badness. But now it is literally a matter of his own life as the West keeps messing up the lines. Anything short of “victory” means prison, exile—or death at an earlier time than he wishes.
Like Hitler,
Putin will kill as many of his own people as necessary to achieve his ultimate aim of
absorbing all of Ukraine; failing in spite of all the men (and possibly
women, as at least one Russian uber-nationalist is calling for Russian women in
prison to be “recruited” for military service) he sends into slaughter would mean that the preservation of his own life is his principle motivation. That's what happens when badness transmutes into madness, although it is question of whether in today's world it is "morally" acceptable to stop a bad man now or wait until he becomes a "madman."
Apparently Putin for now is just a "bad man" who feels "justified" in killing every Ukrainian opposing him, and there are plenty of Russians in his inner circle and in the media who also know their “reputations” are in a kill-or-be-killed situation. There is no reasoning yet with people who spent the budget on a "script" that looked good on paper but is playing out terribly in the rushes because the acting is mostly by amateur players reading bad lines. For Putin, the budget is running out before the movie can be finished, and he can only hope he can end it with a CGI-generated super-action scene, probably with those "hypersonic" missiles.
And then we have Donald Trump, the anti-hero “star” of his own unreality show. Maybe he isn’t leaving a trail of corpses behind him like other crime bosses (unless they are the innocent Central Americans refused asylum killed by the U.S.-bred gangsters “deported” into their neighborhoods), but he has survived mostly unscathed up to this point because he has been able to write his own script, with those who displease him written out.
There are those who are doing “rewrites” of the script, but whether he is written out himself ultimately depends more on what the “audience” wants, and how many will buy the tickets to see the “sequel.” The worst punishment that can befall a “bad guy” like Trump who is unlikely to see prison time for his crimes in today’s politically hyperventilating world is "irrelevance."
Of course not all “bad guys” are “guys,” which we learned in the Depp-Heard saga; not surprisingly competing “experts” have differing opinions on the “settlement,” with The International News finding under a rock an “expert” who clearly paid no attention to the trial, who claims that Amber Heard “settling” a case that she knew she wasn’t going to win set a “bad example” for other “survivors” of her alleged DV. Yeah, I know, that Heard Instagram statement where she never once admitted any wrong in her relationship with Johnny Depp is probably all the “facts” in the case that some people know, or want to.
Meanwhile
Colonel Kurtz here
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAxriNBFZQPTsj9vBOSnhkA
has been on the Marilyn Manson case, where Manson is suing former domestic partner Evan Rachel Wood and Ilma Gore for defamation. The latest information is that Wood is trying to have removed the highly damaging evidence that she fabricated an FBI letter that she not only used to convince other former Manson relationships to make false or exaggerated claims of abuse, but to prevent another man who is her ex-husband from seeing their child. There obviously was a “plan” there.
Also not helpful to Wood’s claims of abuse which she made in a documentary is that two former Manson partners, Rose McGowan and Dita Von Teese, not only denied that Manson had ever abused them, but had been pressured by Wood supporters to make false claims against him; this of course begs the question of just how reliable is the testimony of those who did succumb to that pressure. What seems to be happening here is that Wood and Gore—knowing that Manson is a friend of Johnny Depp—thought they could show their own “power” to destroy a life just as Heard tried to do.
Unfortunately we live in a world where “bad guys” don’t always lose as they deserve to—and those who do lose is usually to a higher “power” that has its own “bad guys” who are just better at being “bad”—or better at forcing their “script” into the movie.
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