Artemis Fowl (in the era of Censorship-via-Capitalism) · 5:36am Apr 27th, 2020
I just watched the Artemis Fowl trailer, excited that we'd finally see an adaptation of one of the best, most influential works of sci-fi literature, even knowing it'd probably be sub-par...
...I have never been so sickened and enraged by the idea of a movie in my entire life.
They took the character names and book title and wrote an entirely new movie devoid of all the dark questions that the original pondered, ESPECIALLY the central themes of whether it was reasonable for our society to give one person (young billionaire Artemis Fowl) the power and resources to mess with an entire country, and what sort of lengths a secretive authoritarian state might go to to stop people who know too much.
I guess they've realized they can't get subversive books banned, so now they just buy the IP and use it to make something completely different in an attempt to erase it from existence? Are future adaptations of works like 1984, The Fountainhead, Mana, or Walkaways, also going to devolve into nonsense while enforcing theme which literally glorify shadowy hyper-authoritarian governments and billionaires with unchecked power should be seen as heroic? How many steps away are we from seeing Anne Frank go on a whimsical adventure with fun-loving NAZIs who help her find the gas chamber?
This is a crime against Human Culture itself, spits in the face of every artist who ever lived, and actually frightens me for the future of America. I hope, for the sake of the very future of humanity, that it doesn't even break even, and that we get a government in place which has the basic decency to break up Disney for buying literally half of the movie industry and is now trying to whitewash our very culture.
I am also very sad that we will likely NEVER see an actual movie based off of Artemis Fowl, because it is a VERY good book...
Damn it all, now I can't stop thinking about how such a thing could be written out.
Perhaps as a Winnie the Pooh-inspired black comedy?
With that said, I'm sorry to hear that your favorite book will be raped to death in the film adaptation.
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Actually, I'm thinking of writing a short story that is basically that, literally Anne Frank and her Whimsical NAZI friends on their trip to the gas chamber.
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And so it came to pass that I am now writing a short story in which Anne Frank, a little girl made out of dough, is separated from her family while hiding in an attic during a game of hide-and-seek. She is accompanied buy a quirky NAZI, a neoliberal politician, and powerful billionaire Walt Disney himself, who accompany her on a magical journey through the whimsical world of World War II era Germany, learning that war is really a wonderful thing that the average person should never question, on her way to the Fun Camps, where she wants to join her family in the oven so she can get baked.
My plan is to publicly demand that Disney use this story for their official adaptation of the Diary of Anne Frank.
There's no sinister plot here.
Have you seen The Hunchback of Notre Dame?
Or The Fox and the Hound?
Or Frozen, which was inspired by The Snow Queen?
Or heck, almost all Disney movies inspired by other material?
Disney frequently removes objectionable material from stuff, or changes the plot considerably to try and better appeal to a younger target audience, or greatly lightens the material it was working with.
Frozen, for instance, was much closer to The Snow Queen in early development, but they changed it into a very different story, maintaining few elements from the original, including the complete removal of Christian elements from the narrative.
It wouldn't surprise me if they did more or less the same thing here - they licensed the property because it was hot, found Artemis Fowl to be too unsympathetic/morally ambiguous to their target audience, so they changed the story considerably. They probably maintained the name both for branding reasons as well as simply because the idea still drew a bunch of stuff from the books.
They may have also originally intended to go after YA audiences with this and then decided to change it into a children's movie because they felt they had enough YA targeted material.
Also, the plot summary of this movie sounds like it is some combination of the first two books, which might explain some of the weirdness; the bit where his dad tells Artemis that Artemis is all he has left would seem to suggest that his mother has been written out.
On the one hand, as a guy who read the Artemis Fowl books while growing up (and is also a dirty, HOI4-mod playing lefty Syndie), besides the sad fact the time to make an Artemis Fowl movie has long passed with the end of the Harry Potter-era of kids movies, I don't really think that the books themselves were really anti-capitalist, and were basically Harry Potter meets Goodfellas (mostly by playing on a PG-level of the "Damn, It Feels Good To Be A Gangster!" trope, with how Artemis Fowl's supervillain intellect combined with his lavish wealth allows him to bamboozle countless opponents with 4D chess). To be honest, it often felt like "good guy capitalist Artemis fights bad capitalist [insert current villain here]", as Fowl's villainy is a mixture of tongue-in-cheek and morally justified (either by saving his father from the first two books, or going after morally pitch-black antagonists in later ones), and while the books got into on-the-nose environmentalism, I don't think it made the 1-to-1 connection that capitalism is basically incompatible with environmentalism (again, "good guy capitalist" Artemis Fowl fighting "bad guy capitalists" who do anti-environmentalism).
Oh, and of course the LEP often being the good guys, when any ANTIFA supersoldier worth their milkshake knows that "All Cops Are Bad" (side-note - I say "Bad" instead of "B@$#&%s" not to self-censor, but to account for the so-called 'Good Cops' who aren't personally "B@$#&%s", but will ultimately act "Bad" in the line of work, if only to avoid properly taking the 'Bad Cops' to account for their abuses of power - ain't that right, Ice Cube?).
But on the subject of "Censorship Via Capitalism" (i.e. Manufacturing Consent), I don't think it'll be a case where totalitarian governments will be portrayed as the unironic good guys, but would be a mixture of conflating the authoritarianism with Stalinist-style communism (i.e. Commie-Nazis), and more framing of "good guy capitalists vs. bad guy capitalists" (i.e. "philanthropist" multi-millionaires/billionaires who want to help "change the world" vs. puppy-kicking PMCs who want to either get even richer even quicker, or want to "change the world", but in a totally different way from the good capitalists that makes them bad).
For evidence of capitalists not unironically celebrating authoritarianism, but lying and saying it (and other problems of capitalism) is all the fault of "Godd@#n C&$*-breath Commie Motherf@#$ers!", see this video from Renegade Cut:
And for evidence of capitalist media trying to cover its failings by casting narratives of "good guys capitalists vs. bad guy capitalists", i.e. "Liberals vs. Conservatives", see this video from Thought Slime:
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There is an anima where everyone on the Titanic was saved. So make the quirky nazi Twilight Sparkle and Equestria Naziland.
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Oh, Thought Slime! Great channel.
Not anarchist myself, but I really like the way he discusses things.
What 5251092 said. The mouse's thralls have started imagineering the 21st century. There's a series of articles on Tor.com, the Disney Read-Watch, that compares and contrasts source material and Disney movies to see just how drastically the latter warp the former.
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Admittedly I'm more of an "anarchist in spirit, Bernie Sanders-style Social Democrat in practice" type, if only submitting to a degree of Realpolitik in recognizing a fully anti-capitalist revolution in America won't likely be launched or succeed with the current state of things, so rather than take the accelerationist approach of "blow up the USA and hope what few card-carrying socialists there are will beat out the fascists in the ensuing apocalyptic civil war", I'm taking the harm-reductionist approach of counteracting the worst of the current system's effects (i.e. begrudgingly voting Joe Bidden when the actual election happens, but also voting down-ballot for the most progressive candidates possible to start swinging the Overton Window away from Clintonian Corporate Democrats, and especially the far-right faux populism of Trump, the Alt-Right, and to only a slightly lesser extent the rest of the current Republican Party).
Even assuming I'd get a "no-strings attached magic genie wish" to completely remake the government without a single shot fired, I'd side with Curio's personal take in that I wouldn't make the new America purely capital-A Anarchist, but to divide the administration so that the more urban cities would be managed under democratic socialism (i.e. a government to provide safety nets and efficient distribution of resources), while only the less densely populated regions undergo the full Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune treatment (if timestamp doesn't work, it's supposed to be at 24:38, where Curio admits it's disingenuous to pretend to be an "unbiased disembodied voice", and gives his personal opinion for how he'd prefer a post-capitalist/socialist society to be run):
Obviously you haven’t watched dracula 3000 I swear that’s the most racist, sexist, disappointment I’ve ever had the displeasure of seeing in my whole life. If you ever have to hate a movie hate the movie that make robots lame as fuck.
...No, I'm pretty sure that Disney is just historically bad at adaptions. And honestly I loved those books and as far as I remeber those themed you brought up were a side effects of how good everyone was at things and didn't get a lot if actual focus, especially compared to themes of "did you know pollution was bad" that I wouldn't have minded if they were more connected to the actual plot more often.
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SocDem myself.
I live in New Zealand, however, where being SocDem is easy because our "conservative" party is still left of centre and our current government is led by the SocDem party.
And we're also proof that socialist nations do not automatically create big governments...only about 10% of jobs are in the public sector - very similar to the US. To put it simply, NZ is probably the closest nation there is to a proper anarchist state. We still have a government, but by damn is it relatively small. And of course we're the least corrupt nation on the planet. It's ironic, really. I suppose there's a reason that governments throughout history have been putting down anarchists while saying anarchism isn't a threat.
Honesty wonder why you didn't name this blog post "Artemis Fowl (in the era of Censorship-via-Fascism)"; since because that is what you get when you combine capitalism and authoritarianism. Ignoring Walt Disney is like Hitler angle (because that another discussion in itself and the man is dead), my theory is that this company has built it's movie empire off the backs of other people's works. And made it so the rest of us can't use them.
They've gotten lazy and stagnant.
Last 20 years I can't name a original IP from them. Not saying they haven't been created or outside the scope of movies (Disney Cartoons on TV for example). Just saying for a couple a reasons they not doing well. Back in the day I would see and hear about the movie trailer now. It came out on YouTube in Mar 2, 2020 and we're getting into talking about at the tail end of April. When TV was king, we would have been talking about this last month. Though not on the internet because... the internet has killed the TV for now. Hell, my landlady who is 60 plus is on the internet more than TV.
As for the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex theory here where they bought up the IP to fuck it up to supprse it? That could be in part. I still think it's because the leadership at Disney corp has become to focus in chasing the dollar for their shareholders that they missed the point of art. Art, to me, is suppose to grow culture, inspire humanity and not make some fake number go up.
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Oh gott im himmel, that's quite awesome what you already have in mind!
Please share a linkie once you have it written--it feels like it's going to be a magical ride.
Right I never saw the original stuff in this, shame it seems given the praise given, but seeing this trailer, just made me shake my head, it was trying to hard to be something it couldn't be.