I want to talk about popular media/because I don’t like much/any of it. I’ve learned to keep my opinions to myself because lots of people do not appreciate hearing that someone doesn’t like their favorite book/movie/TV show/anything else.
When I used to use Facebook, I would post my opinions on my wall. Because it’s my wall! If there’s one place I should be able to be honst about my opinions, it’s on my own wall. Even then, I shied away from pop culture for the most part, but would comment gleefully about snow (which I love). Every winter, I would get one or two comments saying I would not like it so much if I had to shovel it and/or that I should not show so much happiness at something like that.
The first response annoyed me because if you wanted to qualify like that, then I could start pushing back on other people’s joy. The person who liked to make that snide comment traveled fairly often. They never qualified it by saying something like, “I realize it’s a privilege to be able to travel around the world. Not everyone can.”
In addition, i’ts my fucking wall. I’m allowed to be joyful about whatever I wanted. In addition, I rarely showed unbridled joy at anything, so why shit all over it? If you don’t like the fact that I love snow, fucking block me during the winter! Unfollow me! Make your feed more pleasant for you.
The same thing happened in reverse when I was in my Christmas-hating phase. I would post about how much I hated Christmas because, again, it was my wall. I was allowed to post whatever the fuck I wanted. I had a friend at the time who loved Christmas. She would call me on my cell just so she could sing Christmas songs in my VM. Which, I will say, I did not appreciate.
She posted on her own wall how she wished people wouldn’t harsh her mellow about it. Again, FUCKING BLOCK ME. It’s my fucking wall, which means I get to post whatever the fuck I wanted.
This drives me nuts about, well, everything. We tend to notice the outlier to our own opinions and inflate how prevalent they are.
When I used to be on Twitter–by the way, I am not on social media any longer. I do have a Blue Sky (I think that’s what it’s called?), but I don’t use it. I just do not want to build up my network again, plus, I don’t want to bleat? I do’nt know what it’s called, but whatever. I’m calling it bleat.
I fell off Twitter even before it became utter shit in the hands of the musketeer. I trace it back to me coming out of the hospital. I did tweet a bit about my situation, but not much. I was more focused on my recovery.
I used to tweet my unpopular opinions on everything ranging from The Big Lebowski (hated it) to The Beatles (can take or leave them) to Game of Thrones (hated the one episode I saw). My god, did peolpe not like that, but I didn’t care. I was never rude about it. I didn’t say they were shit. i just stated why I didn’t like them and left it at that.
I got people telling me that my taste sucked. How could anyone not like ______?!? I would cheerfully agree that my taste did, indeed, suck, which inevitably took the wend out of the people’s sails. I discovered that on accident, but it’s been absolute gold. Don’t give them anything to push back against, and then whistle merrily as you walk away.
I don’t have guilty pleasures–just pleasures. I don’t feel guilty about anything I like–except bac kthen What Makes You Beautiful by One Direction. Until I got a bunch of people saying they loved the song, too, unironically. Plus, Harry Styles’ reimaging of it is fantastic (I have included one version with this post).
In general, though. I don’t care if people think I have bad taste. I like what I like and that’s pretty much that. More to the point, I do’nt like what I don’t like, and that is that as well.
However. There are a few things i really wanted to like, but just didn’t. I’m going to list them now just beacuse.
1. Brokeback Mountain. I think the biggest issue was the hype that surrounded it when it came out. People were raving about how groundbreaking it was and how it was so daring. By the time I went to see it with K, I was expecting a once-in-a-lifetime movie.
Instead, what I got was a good movie, but one with a lot of issues. First, let me say that I am not a gay man. That’s pretty obvious. So I can’t say what impact that had on gay men. Seeing a story about them, I mean. But I will say that I had been out to myself as queer for at least a decade by that point. I had consumed much queer media. So the movie felt…stale? Tame? First-gen immigrant? Something like that.
What do I mean? I mean that when I first started reading stories about and by Asian women in the beginning of the aughts, they were all about how downtrodden Asian were and so terribly abused by all the Asian men around them.
I remmeber standing in Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco at the turn of the millennium, leafing through the new books by Asian women. I said in a very loud and disgusted voice, “If I never read another book about three generations of abused immigrant Asian women, it will still be too soon!” The firiend I was with quickly shushed me, but I meant what I said.
Look. There is pain in being an immigrant (or a second-generation American like me). I’m not trying to deny that, but that’s not all there is, and the stories did not reflect me at all. It’s the same with Brokeback Mountain. There is a lot of pain with being closeted and loving someone you can’t have. But the movie just didn’t resonate with me. It felt clunky and–
Look .I ‘m just going to say it. I think Ang Lee handled the romantic/sex part of it really badly. There was way too much boobs in a gay movie and the fact that the het sex scenes seemed ten times as long as the one male-on-male, ah, implication of sex scene really did not sit well with me.
I felt that the gay part of the movie got really watered down whereas the het scenes were totally overplayed. I felt that the movie was made for straight people and played into all the stereotypes of gay men. I know it was set a long time ago. I don’t remember how long ago. I googled. It was set in 1963, which I guess can explain all the sureeptitiousness, but not the het gaze.
I was left unmoved by the movie. I would have a hard time telling you what it was about except that there was an illicit gay attraction at the heart of it. I think one of the characters died? Not sure. It did not stick with me in any way.
I have been told that I’m too hard on the movie. I probably am. But I would have given it a 7 out of 10. Maybe a 7.5. The acting by the four main characters was incredible, but the movie itself fell way flat for me.
I’m running long. I have more to say about a certain author–actually, two, but I’ll wait until tomorrow.