Is modern television and advertising patronising and overtly negative in respect to the successful mindset?

I had to Google search “successful mindset” just in case this wasn’t a title for some new kind of cynicism that started on the internet recently and that I wasn’t aware of or has a different context attached to it like conspiracy theory or any other kind of hallucinogen... This, being an example for my answer here in that I will say both yes and no. But, I’m going to mostly say yes if I had to pick one since the quote-on-quote ‘successful mindset’ as it pertains to the American dream was largely predominant in entertainment around in the 90s and some of the 2000s when Televison absolutely boomed and prior to the dominance of the internet with platforms like YouTube and Facebook taking hold. Back then, we had stuff like MTV and others really providing these outlets for ‘celebrity’ to be successful to mass culture. There was less significance on identity politics. Now, culture has a ton of opinions by different people all over the world, both higher and lower. Television back in the 90s, was also much for accepting if you were politically wrong, and no one was going to really object on a scale like they do now with a regressive left being more concerned with identity politics and social behaviors tied to everything. Television programs, if anything, are going to explore the chaos of the mind, to try as much as they can to postmodernize and fragment material to the viewership to reflect what the computer is doing to the mindset or perhaps cause for a sort of ‘interaction’ with the characters similar to a phone app so that the content can be recycled as memes or short gags in the form of images on laptops

A pretty good example of this was the popular show Rick and Morty where the creator of the show Dan Harmon felt like one day restructuring Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero’ Model in how both main protagonists venture into one world and come back to the real one as different characters. This was an unusual feature for an animated sitcom since following the ‘irony’ days of a show like Family Guy. The culture now gets something a tad more intellectual that fans least expected. With a growing rationalist community in the US, fans could discuss, laugh, and argue online with perhaps the more irrational users (creationists, fantasists, etc.)

Another good example is the TV series Black Mirror which won an Emmy for it’s unusual and twisted writing in creating narrative loops. “Bandersnatch” was the name for an interactive film about the creation of a video game that you can watch on Netflix. Again, not a lot of emphasis on targeting a particular class. The emphasis is to outsmart it's audiences as audiences become more and more hungry for new information.

In a nutshell, it seems that television and movie writers are really obsessed with a sort of reconstructionism involving the user experience with the technology nowadays for that matter.

This primarily not just being the case because programs can’t really come up with anything else that’s new, but there is still very little for science to reveal in the subject of the mind involving consciousness, so the arts has seen this as an opportunity to use psychogeographic ideas or integrate them somehow if it involves metaphors or symbolism in the writing. There is a lot of content out there now that loopholes in a way for the viewers to relate in terms of the experience with modern technology. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter has just recently received the most dings in their reputations, so we are most likely seeing a shift in the culture in that it is in this reflective stage of questioning a lot of ideas online/TV with perhaps a tad more empathy of other people’s differences than before.

Read my full answer on Quora:

https://www.quora.com/Is-modern-television-and-advertising-patronising-and-overtly-negative-in-respect-to-the-successful-mindset

Twitter:

@LightsCamTalk

Wong Kar-wai - Godard

Wong Kar-Wai's work is a dark, sparkling diamond in the rough of Hong Kong cinema. Poetic albeit obscure, Kar-wai offers a refreshing, distinctive vision in an underground scene that has grown weary of the cliched wuxia flick. Unlike his contemporaries, Kar-wai breaks the mold by drawing inspiration from the French New Wave, in particular, the vibrant complimentary backdrops found in Godard's technicolor feats like 'Pierrot' and 'Contempt', or Demy's melodramatic love letters in the 'Umbrellas of Cherbourg' and the 'Sisters of Rochefort'. These films that may contain a senstivity to light and color from the cinematography department, are largely in contrast with Kar-Wai's choice of multi-layered narrative loops. Kar-Wai's work as a whole truly examines the possibility of what the New Wave would be if the style is resurrected in the present day with modern camera work that offers more sophisticated shot angles, slo-motion tracking, greater color scales, and bold visceral filters. 

Kar-Wai is the movement's ideal successor in adding to it's broad lexicon devices of dreams and memories to stream parallel with a subject's action making for a composited abstract poem. If Godard is the Picasso then Kar-Wai is like the extension of this with hints of arthouse flair. Contrasting from the New Wave's scatter mindedness, Kar-wai demonstrates sensitivity and growth  to this abstraction. Within a romance genre that has lacked a sophistication in it's execution, the enigma that Kar-Wai has presented to us and wants his audiences to solve while on a ride that consists of twists and turns, is a point of observance that the viewer must draw from introspection. Understanding is sometimes the farthest point from empathy here. What remains stagnant and cohesive is the feeling of attachment and attraction between each character interaction. Similar to the ambiguity in a Godard narrative, Kar-Wai adds emotion to his characters so that the viewer can leave questioning the story while marveling at a romantic bond that is conflicted by a forgetfulness of dreams and memories. This bond can only be entirely solved on a personal level just as any moment of isolation would inhibit the thoughts of a poet's voice in a dark apartment space like in '2046'. The events that occur before and after may be subliminal to the emotion experienced in between action.  What happens in the past, present and future is integral and doesn't necessarily apply here in a Kar-Wai film. Once we realize that occurence is rather blended with the hue of Kar-Wai's amtospheric backgrounds, the emotions expressed is the missing key to this chaotic metropolitan setting; words become more palatable through poetic verses than the third-person.

With the exception of Yimou, Kar-Wai may be the most prominent filmmaker to arise from Hong Kong's scene in the 90's. His work should be recognized as the very hallmark to cinema in China.