A Brief History of Off-Broadcast Poverty
Remember when the rich cried too? It seems unbelievable, but there was a century when the default television fiction was considered to be soap operas starring the upper classes. American titles like Falcon Crest , Dynasty , and The Colbys were black-label series , manna from the gods in times when, if you turned your back on prime time, you weren't part of society. At the end of the 1980s, Venezuelan soap operas arrived, which, like the mansions of the nouveau riche, were a happily shabby adaptation of those glories, but equally successful.
Now that the value of seeing ourselves represented in the fictions that consume our free time is so widely debated, we might ask ourselves why we became addicted to stories about rich people , where there was no room for the rest of us. And if we did appear, it was in the form of a fairy tale archetype: a person from the middle class or lower could be a humble servant, a shadowy monster, a mysterious orphan, a magical vagabond, or an assassin in the service of another king.
Succession has been celebrated ad nauseam as the perfect update of Shakespearean fiction. I'm surprised that the direct legacy of shows like Dallas , also built around an inhuman patriarch with an invincible aura, isn't cited as much. Jesse Armstrong seems very aware of the shortcomings of the television series that preceded his own and may have taken them as a starting point. From the first episode, it was clear that Succession wasn't going to be shy about depicting the sociopathic relationship the corporate aristocracy has with us, the normies , a group mocked and scorned, relegated to the background but now visible . In fact, some normies rise to character status and survive more than one scene. Those who provide drugs and sex, that is.
In the recently released Mountainhead, we normies disappear completely. Jesse Armstrong knows that for the brand-new economic elites, we don't even have material representation; we're tokens whose suffering and even extinction can be gamified . The film depicts how accelerationist rhetoric and posthuman fetishism are a disguise for the selfishness and cruelty of old , but with a capacity for destruction on a science-fiction scale. Jesse Armstrong has been accused of having been carried away by the satirical tone here, of having made a piece that's hardly credible. As if we normies , in Elon Musk's Post-Bruise Era , had the slightest idea of what goes on in the chalets where we're no longer even called in to sweep.
elmundo
