This Month in Media Illiteracy
Starship Troopers, X-Men, Social Grifters, and Deceptive AI Bros
Afternoon, y’all. Heck of a week over here. Hope you’re well. If this newsletter resonates, feel free to share with a friend or enemy.
The question I’ve been pondering a bit since last week’s newsletter: where do we draw the line between the death of the author and oh no the audience is an idiot? When every work of fiction in a pluralistic society is open to the interpretation of the reader/viewer, who’s to say someone’s interpretation is objectively wrong?
Twitter, obviously!
Media Literacy is a term that gets tossed around on social media whenever someone really doesn’t get “the point” of a piece of media, and their bad take goes viral. Wikipedia calls media literacy “an expanded conceptualization of literacy that includes the ability to access and analyze media messages.” Applying critical thinking to the media landscape seems like a necessary skill in this digital age, when the web isn’t a reliable narrator, much less a source of truth anymore (if it ever was).
Last week a thread about Starship Troopers went viral. The original poster (OP) claimed the 1997 Paul Verhoeven-directed sci-fi film “failed as a parody” because the characters are “naturally handsome, fit, and well-groomed” and their home cities have “clean, beautiful streets” instead of being “crime ridden and drug addicted…ghettos.”
Admittedly I thought it was a comedy bit at first. A clever poster satirizing the satire. Because how could anyone miss that the humans in the movie are the bad guys when Neil Patrick Harris shows up in a Nazi SS uniform and by the end of the war they’re conscripting literal child soldiers?
Apparently easily — the OP thinks the movie isn’t successfully parodying fascism because they simply can’t see the fascism. The dunks kept rolling all week, mostly in satire form as well: “Starship Troopers fails as a parody because I personally identify with the thoughts and actions of all the characters the movie seems to be satirizing, and that can’t be right.” “If verhoeven wanted starship troopers to work as a satire of fascism he should not have cast such perfect specimens of the Master Race.” Maybe it was too subtle that “all the main characters are white people from Argentina (descendants of nazis?)”
FWIW, death of the author aside, here’s a two-minute interview with Starship Troopers screenwriter Edward Neumeier about Verhoeven’s intentions with the film — a desire to tell a story about young people joining the Nazi party in 1935 “before they know they’re bad.” The satire in Starship Troopers was not designed to be subtle.
OK, so maybe satire is just hard for some folks?
The same week a now-deleted tweet of a self-proclaimed X-Men fan claimed “The X-Men fight giant robots & aliens. Not ‘mUh bIgOtRy.’ It’s a shame they’ve been adopted by idiot leftists…” They promptly received a flurry of responses that in the X-Men comic books, animated shows, and movies, the robots in question are specifically designed to track down and eradicate all mutants, regardless of their threat level.
You know, literal giant bigot bots.
How is it possible to read a single X-Men comic and not see the mutant cause as a civil rights metaphor in the Marvel Comics universe? It’s not a liberal media agenda to see the X-Men through the lens of bigotry — it’s a core plot point. This isn’t a case of someone missing satire; this is someone who doesn’t understand the story.
If you can’t find the patsy in the room, you’re the patsy.
Maybe I’m entirely too online, but I’m not convinced either of those original posters are media illiterate. I don’t think they don’t get it. They likely understand the media landscape better than most.
An increasing amount of online content is specifically-designed to bait commentary. And commentary is currency on social media. The new media literacy isn’t just about analyzing the media itself, but also analyzing the context the media exists in.
When posts are designed to leverage social media’s outrage-driven algorithmic curation, intentionally bad takes fail upward thanks to an angry mob of commenters carrying them into our feeds. As the inventor of wiki software said, “the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”
The new technology wrinkle is the way websites and social media have become inundated with AI-generated artwork, writing, and deep fake videos. There’s a recent type of post where modern AI artwork is shared with fake captions like the artist was an obscure oil painting artist from the 1800’s. As my friend Elizabeth asked, “Why are AI artists obsessed with intentional misinformation?” Maybe it’s more social grifting, maybe it’s a desire to prove they’re legitimate artist because they fooled you. Either way, the discernment required for the average online person to find truth is staggeringly high.
Culture complexity doesn’t scale linearly
To be media literate in 2024 means having your bullshit radar on full alert at all times — is this poster baiting me, or lying, or grifting? Or are they just stupid and they have the same microphone everyone else does?
Is the image I’m looking at conceivably real? What’s real? (Will we even be able to tell in a few months?) How many fingers does a hand really have? What’s art? Who can say? And does it really matter to the Facebook Boomers blissfully favoriting AI images of cute puppies and impossible architecture in magical locales?
The author is dead. The author is a grifter. The author is an AI. Keep your head up.
Great thoughts on an ageless issue, but with so much new complexity now with social media and AI. Teaching high school, media literacy is a major goal of my classes. And I’m bringing back a film criticism elective next year after it being cancelled for a few years (apparently it wasn’t rigorous enough at other schools), so I’m eager to do more with that.
I think when I was a sophomore in high school, watching Starship Troopers with the boys was just pure fun. It was over the top and different from anything we’d seen. The satire was lost on us. I just finished a big satire unit with Animal Farm and most of my seniors that aren’t honors are equally incompetent and inexperienced with it. Hopefully I helped a few of them level up.
I’ve spoken with a few of my more advanced students about Hunger Games and Fight Club having the same issue leveled at Starship. Does the critique of violence get lost in the spectacle of violence in the Hunger Games books? Does the critique of toxic masculinity in Fight Club get lost by casting someone as charismatic and beautiful as Brad Pitt?
I think the medium is crucial. In a movie, the attractiveness and spectacle does distract. In a book or comic, the deeper message is more easily accessed. I think very early on reading X-Men I just assumed it was about anti-semitism because of the creators; later, in high school maybe, I figured it could be about homophobia. The allegory was impossible to miss.