“Is this to be an empathy test?” – Blade Runner
An MS-13 sociopath that was incapable of understanding the feeling of others was diagnosed with empanada.
Empathy.
I first heard that word when I was five. I asked Grandma McWilder what empathy was, and was told that “Empathy is what bleeding heart GloboLeftist women do while their men do the dishes. Now get to work resizing that brass – this ammunition won’t reload itself.”
That’s supposed to be good, right? We’re supposed to feel good about ourselves when we care about others enough to mentally put ourselves in the position of another to share what they’re feeling.
Empathy really is part of what makes us human. Empathy allows us to model other humans and understand how they’re feeling. And, in some cases, anticipate how they’re going to feel. Like asleep. Or perspiring. Or sticky. You know, emotions.
Empathy is important.
If he sold weed from Ireland, would he be Ma’am O’gram?
But the problem starts to occur when empathy becomes our sole guide for how we conduct our world. One example are the transgender people. I still recall when the blonde gentleman with longish hair who was larping as a woman in a store back in 2019. He got famously irate because a flustered clerk couldn’t process that Macho Ma’am Trandy Savage was pretending to be a woman.
Because he was in this very weird place, his brain short circuited. He had been taught at a very young age that it was polite to call an older man sir. Confronted with the cognitive dissonance of what was obviously a man in makeup, his synapses fried by adrenaline, he did what he had learned as a babe. He called the dude, “sir.”
I doubt Trandy Savage would like this song.
While demanding empathy, the dude showed none himself. Empathy on the part of this brittle freakshow would have solved the situation, but the reason that it felt itself privileged enough with his lipstick and five o’clock shadow is because society has shown far too much empathy for people like him for far too long. Misplaced empathy has turned him into a sociopath.
You want to play pretend? Fine. Keep away from children, and don’t expect me to participate in the charade. And don’t yell at some minimum wage clerk who is really just trying to help.
We also show empathy for the wrong things. Who was the worst person in the movie Titanic?
You know, if you think the sinking of the Titanic was a tragedy, remember about the lobsters in the kitchen.
Rose. She was the villain. She’s married, but cheats on her fiancé with a random Chad urchin and then spends the next 84 years pining for Chad, all while being married to someone she didn’t love nearly as much and then drops a necklace worth (according to the Internets – it’s fictional) $3.5 million dollars into the ocean. This could have been a life-changing inheritance for her great-grandchildren. But no.
Everything is about her.
The audience is supposed to feel empathy for her? Hell, she could have jumped in and let Chad live, or died with him. No. She’s awful. But she’s not alone. Hollywood loves trying to make people feel empathy for the bad guy.
And don’t get me started on Dead Poets Society where the teacher played by Robin Williams (who is the walking, talking essence of the French Revolution) removes all the value systems from his students while giving them nothing to take their place.
The real bad guy in this movie is the teacher. But you’re supposed to feel bad for him because he got fired, but not bad because his removal of a belief systems without replacement caused a kid to commit suicide.
Because the teacher convinced the kid to throw everything away and become an actor.
Kirk couldn’t sing, though. He had trouble with trebles.
You don’t hate Hollywood enough, but let’s move to hospital beds.
And don’t get me started on the misplaced empathy in health care, where literal titanic efforts (no necklace) and tons of treasure go into the last, miserable year of the lives of most people.
We also have addled ourselves with empathy via the Internet.
There are those that share so much online, that I honestly believe that they cease to exist if they’re not posting. Who cares what other people think of your lunch? Who cares what other people that you’ve never met think about you?
As found.
This weird, parasitical empathy where people feel good about themselves only because others think well of them is the sympathy of a society where values and laws are being replaced by the feels. Look at the way the GloboLeft work to keep a criminal illegal in this country, and whine and cry to keep him from being returned to his own country.
It’s misplaced empathy.
This also has implications with race. People felt badly for black people, having empathy for discrimination. Now? Black entitlement is so strong that they feel that a killer is the actual victim, rather than the person he stabbed, and expect people to feel their pain.
This is at least in part because of the way misplaced empathy has let blacks act in violent fashion and subsidized their lifestyle through welfare. Misplaced empathy tells people they don’t have to conform to societal norms. The GloboLeft can’t wait to knit them sweaters and sacrifice their children to them.
Enough is enough. Empathy is not a blank check.
The good news is that people are finally waking up, and realizing that it is far past the time when we as a society need to end our misplaced empathy.
That’s good. After all, that ammunition won’t reload itself.
Elon was in the spotlight just a few weeks ago on just this topic…
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-interview-empathy-doge/index.html
Empathy has taken Western Civilization from this…
https://www.raymondibrahim.com/2018/07/18/islams-largest-army-came-siege-vienna-1683/
…to this…
https://www.thelocal.at/20250416/muslim-pupils-now-largest-group-in-vienna-schools-as-city-debates-civic-education
Since Fridays are movie discussion days around here, leading to a newfound deeper insight on Titanic and DPS, here’s a list of 100 movies to strengthen your kid’s sense of empathy…
https://micheleborba.com/building-moral-intelligence-and-character/100-movies-for-kids-5-to-17-that-teach-9-crucial-empathy-habits/
Enjoy them all with a good cigar!
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/jk-rowling-celebrates-with-a-cigar-after-uk-supreme-court-rules-trans-women-are-not-legally-women-101744898391917.html
Go JK! Now if she’ll move farther TradRight . . .
Don’t forget about the villain in Top Gun. That’d be Maverick.
Selfish
Not a team player
Gets his best friend killed (although Goose was telling him to get in there)
Almost gets the Iceman killed ‘cuz he’s just not feeling like a fight right now?
Villain.
Hmm, hadn’t considered that one. Top Gun attendees were supposed to take their learning back to the squadron, not wear it as an award. However, I’d imagine that the training was a bunch of high-T alphas . . . ?
The movie is a movie. Forget the Hollywood aspects of it. If you want to see it done even worse for TV, check out William Devane and Barry Bostwick (@$$hole!) in Red Flag: The Ultimate Game. Which certified TV schlock (look up Two-Handed Polish Heart Attack sometime), along with an LATimes Magazine story about the Top Gun program, was the combined genesis of the idea for Bruckheimer and Simpson making Top Gun.
It was also the best Navy recruitment pic that service had, for thirty years.
But to a man, naval aviators laughed about the plot.
There are no points, no trophy, no competition, unlike the fictionalized version.
The point of the program is to teach pilots to dogfight against 1 to many adversaries, to the limits of their aircraft’s envelope and their own abilities.
And take that info back to their squadrons and fellow pilots.
Period.
We won’t even touch upon the fact that Maverick would have been mandatorily retired after 30 years long before the sequel hit the theaters. Because then the movie that saved Hollywood would never have been made.
I enjoyed both, the second better than the first. They must be keeping Jennifer in Tupperware, because it doesn’t look like she’s aged.
For the record, a lack of empathy was on display at the recent FSU shooting…
https://x.com/Jniner69/status/1913014520915869863
Right???? I’m not going to note the obvious.
Misplaced empathy –> weaponized altruism
I suggest everyone watch HIGH NOON and SGT. YORK no globohomo antiheroes
High Noon is a cinematic classic, with two epic stars.
Its underlying message of a town full of cowardly westerners (as if!), however, was so cock-eyedly wrong and bassackwards even John Wayne hated it.
Yes.
Weaponized empathy was codified with 19A and won’t end – will only get worse – until 19A is repealed. We can have civilization OR suffrage. It’s a binary choice.
Tell me about it. Next time you gentlemen have the option don’t pull a Samson and give in, please.
I think you’re right.
Just like this week, when a murderer gets close to $1MM from Go Fund Me, then his mother leases a $900K house in a gated community and buys 3 cars. And we’re supposed to believe that the boy he killed was the problem.
And bail gets dropped from $1MM to $250K. Hung jury, anyone???
he’ll walk and get a book deal
When juries vote in accordance with their race, the jury system is dead.
Black juries have been doing that for decades, Hispanics to a lesser degree, Whites will try and hang an innocent White man to virtue signal.
JNorth
Yup. And that’s why the jury system is broken.
My boss man would say: “I can sure feel for you, but I just can’t reach you.”
Ha! Haven’t heard that one!
Sorry about this, but Point Of Order, Slick:
Rose was not married to anyone.
Engaged, yes. Decided she didn’t want to be the prize in the crackerjack box.
Which is what an engagement period is for.
And for which she was verbally, emotionally, and physically abused by her fiance. Seems like she made the right call there, but YMMV.
So all that Roseish analysis owes mainly to the first four letters of the word.
Sorry, but there it is.
Couldn’t have gotten it more wrong if it had been burped out by the coven on The Spew.
The villains in Titanic were
1) Bruce Ismay, pushing the captain to “go faster, set a record”.
2) Captain Brown, for doing just that.
3) Cal Hockley, for treating his fiancee like a trinket, to be bought and paid for.
4) Spicer Lovejoy, Hockley’s manservant/cronie, for trying to frame Jack Dawson and get him killled.
5) Ruth Dewitt Bukater, for whoring out her daughter, and judging Jack based on his income.
Rose was guilty only of wanting a free choice in whom she loved and married, rather than being whored out for a meal ticket. She learned she could have that freedom, but at the expense of her true love the night of her sinking. Disposing of her own property as she wished at the end of her life is exactly what we fought a revolution to protect. The selfish entitlement of her grandchildren had they known of that would have bought them the 6th place in the listing above.
The empathy in that movie should have been directed at Jack, and everyone else on that doomed voyage, who had no choices that would allow them to live, because stupid and selfish people didn’t think they mattered, in the long run. That it killed as many milliionaires as it did, along with the steerage class passengers hauled as cattle, was the only good thing about the entire incident.
You scored 0% in that outing.
This was not the example you wished it were.
Bummer.
And I’m giving you a pass on Dead Poets’ Society out of sheer pity.
No, really.
Go sit in the corner, and ponder the reality of an actor who, in real life, was nominated for an Oscar for this role, and later won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (back before it was a race-based award), whose actual father told him when he entered acting that he should pursue a back-up career, like welding.
I’m going to guess his performance was a wee bit informed by that sage advice, perspective, and life experience.
I don’t know what perspective you wrote this essay from, but my earnest advice is that you hike back through the brambles until you find the path again.
First time I saw RW was on “Fernwood 2Night”, where Martin Mull interviewed him as a gigolo. Same episode showed that polyester leisure suits caused cancer in mice, as I remember.
Robin William’s performances were mostly guided by his cocaine addiction as he used it to help “maintain focus”. It also sounds like Robin’s father gave him good advice. Only around 2% of actors earn enough to live on with most doing alternate work and/or waiting tables to pay the bills.
My parent’s gave me similar advice for which I am thankful because it allowed me to retire early. I had wanted to play college baseball but wasn’t good enough to really make a career of it (but it is hard to convince a teenager of that just as it is hard to convince a would-be actor that the odds are not in their favor). They were supportive of me playing but wanted to make sure I understood the risks and to have a backup plan. Based on their advice, I opted to focus on school, graduated early and started putting away savings in my early 20’s which allowed me to be financially secure very early in life.
J Bird
RW acknowledged his early-career addictions. The only performances so enhanced were while he was on TV as Mork. As he said himself, “I was on everything but skates.”
If you’re going to casually slander someone, you probably want to do your homework.
He was also a star stand-up comedian within a couple of years, headlining in a very short time, so his father’s advice was idiotically short-sighted and patently wrong, which is why Williams brought it up throughout his phenomenally successful entertainment career.
It shows his dad was too busy generalizing, and too little aware of how bright his son’s star was going to shine. If most actors had his talent, they wouldn’t be waiting tables and parking cars. The ones who are generally belong there. The ones who make a living is closer to 10%, btw, not 2%. But I only pissed away 20 years behind the cameras on sets in Hollywood, so what would I know about the industry?
Fortunately for the world, Williams completely ignored dear old dad’s stupid advice, went out into his chosen field of endeavor, and kicked its ass. His faults and foibles were tragic, but he ruled his mediums for 40 years, and the bigger tragedy would’ve been if he’d chosen welding steel for that time period, and only amusing his co-workers. Considering his absolute dominance of entertainment from his 20s into his 60s, he’s probably not a good example for anyone to use for sweeping generalizations, unless they were doing a “Say No To Drugs” PSA, which he probably would have appeared in for free.
“…behind the camera for 20 years…” as a medic? Or a technical advisor? And you are a trauma nurse physicians assistant and a USMC combat vet while being under 30 years of age? WOW!
@voortrekker10,
You writing a book?
Best wishes.
But don’t use false information just to be a jackass.
You just come off as petty.
I have cards from the union, the state, and the USMC to back up my C.V.
Even have the IMDb entry to back it up, if you knew my name.
Don’t be a hater just because someone else has done more things than you could have imagined.
That and $5 gets me coffee at Starbuck’s.
Anon-
A guy played JUCO BB one year, then was invited to try out at Mississippi State. Couldn’t hit a college curveball or slider, so the HC advised him just get his degree. So, he quit but got an accounting degree and went on to law school.
Name? John Grisham. He’s done OK.
The Bulldogs seem to have a knack for redirecting people’s careers. I also wanted to play at Mississippi State as they had such a great baseball program….and even visited the campus my senior year in HS. That was the “Thunder and Lightning” years when Rafael Palmeiro, Will Clark, Thigpen and Brantley were all on the same roster. No one knew at the time that those guys would all go on to be MLB superstars, and so I just assumed that level of talent was typical for all college players.
If I had opted to tour a different school with “average” college players, I might have mistakenly thought I still had a chance at a baseball career. But after seeing Jeff Brantley pitch, I knew deep down that baseball just wasn’t in the cards for me.
J-Bird
He’s right about Dead Poet’s Society, too.
Well-crafted, highly attractive poison is still poison.
Name the poison.
“You’re 17. Carpe diem.”?
If you consider that poison, your part was played by the pinch-fart headmaster who fired Williams’ character, and the father who drove his son to suicide.
Agree on all of your points.
Bear in Indy
who cares when were you right last?
“Disposing of her own property as she wished at the end of her life is exactly what we fought a revolution to protect”
The case for the first half is tired Hollywood tropes: manipulative dishonest justification for MeMeMe women. But given the forced premises, and cardboard characters, Rose was reasonable to prefer to take her chances as a poor (but honest) man’s donkey rather than an old man’s plaything.
Screwing him in an automobile. Not so much.
It’s understandable that Hollywood effectively sold Rose’s freedom to be selfish, self-absorbed, self-justifying narcissists. Pirates of the Caribbean did the same thing with pirates. Pirates are vile. Hang them all and let God sort it out. But yes, if you have monster undead ZOMBIE pirates the regular ones aren’t so bad.
Rose’s final choice was rubbish. Her betrayal of her husband and family was rubbish. Selfish, stupid, bint.
You can ladle all those epithets, but you can’t make any of them stick.
Starting with failure to comprehend that Rose wasn’t married to anyone.
When you miss that central tenet of reality in a fictional piece, you’re arguing against the voices in your head, not against actual facts.
#HowToTellMeYouNeverWatchedTheMovieWithoutTellingMeYouNeverWatchedTheMovie
So now, discuss the idea that women are chattel goods, and ought to behave as indentured servants.
Pick either side.
Then discuss Rose’s choices in the movie against that position.
Your ball, slick.
POTC took a beloved Disney ride, and added a ghost story component, which succeeded wildly beyond all expectations.
It’s no more an apology for real-world piracy than Apocalypse Now was advancing the argument that kids should be napalmed. You’re trying to equate houseflies with houses. The Fallacy referees assess you with a penalty of minus 25 yards, and loss of possession.
Next, you’ll try and tell us Dumbo was advancing the theory that elephants can fly.
If that’s the best you can do…
In order:
You missed: Rose parallels her position to that of a “slave” and Titanic as a slave ship.
Amazingly, she had legs. She could have walked away and not boarded the Titanic.
She got on board.
She had no obligation to get married to Cal, yet did for the money. She wasn’t whored out – she whored herself out for her lifestyle. Did her mother encourage her to marry an amazingly rich dude?
Of course.
An engagement is not a marriage, agreed. But it is a commitment of exclusivity. Rose was nude and hot and sweaty with Jack as soon as she could be. I know the screenplay isn’t canon, but it does indicate that Rose had been more than happy to bang Cal in the past, and more than happy to use his money to buy all the art she wanted. Any emotional abuse (I missed the physical bit when I hate-watched the film this weekend) occurred only after Rose started being inappropriate with Jack.
Despite that, Cal still wanted her back. Stupid? Sure. But he loved her. Was he a tool? Yes, to a woman who cheated on him. Criminal? Yes – framing Jack was criminal – it might have gone better for Jack if hadn’t been proven a thief by wearing a stolen coat when caught with the necklace.
And back to the necklace – certainly it was within her right to dispose of the necklace however she wanted. My argument wasn’t one of legality (never was, it’s legal to cheat, right?) it was one of morality. Her dropping a necklace worth hundreds of millions of dollars into the ocean is an act of pure narcissism. Narcissism is something we associate with . . . good guys or villains?
Villains. And if the narcissism wasn’t clear enough, who helicopters to a boat with 36 pieces of luggage?
A narcissist.
The Mrs. came up while I was hate-watching, and was there just in time to watch Rose die and have her fantasy of being on that slave ship again with Jack. A dude she spent 36 hours with. The Mrs. was incensed, “With that sort of loyalty to a man she had spent decades with, you can bet that she cheated on him, too, and probably none of her kids were related to her husband.”
Harsh, but cheaters gonna cheat.
Rose is awful, because the only thing that exists in her life is her.
And Rose was used to convince women that they can do absolutely anything if they’re temporarily unhaaaaaaaappy and face no consequences for their behavior.
Speaking of no consequences, I left it as a throwaway line, but John Keating did the most immoral thing possible: he removed the value system of the students, and didn’t replace it with anything. That leaves a blank slate, where everything is possible. And, remember, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” isn’t a line from the Bible. At least not the Christian one.
Robin Williams may have had luck becoming an actor, but that’s such a long shot that you constantly see even actors who had big roles and “successful” careers broke and destitute by the time they’re 35. It’s a brutal career, with a huge concentration factor. Williams was so magnetic it made sense for him, but most turn out to be realtors. Or managers of restaurants.
But no, Neil’s father wants him to become a welder. What, no? He wants him to go to Harvard Medical School and become a rich doctor?
The horror! And the weakness for not going Carpe Deim! and saving himself. He’s 17. He has a gun. He doesn’t have to use it if he has a belief system. He could go join the Army, or become a lumberjack in Maine.
No, Neil had the idea of duty ripped out, and, with no philosophical backstop, and decides to kill himself. The only reason John Keating is better than the French Revolution is that he didn’t invent the metric system and there was only one death.
Williams’ performance was very good, but when I left the movie theater after watching it, I knew something was rotten – it just took a while for me to figure it out.
John…I beg you…let this fact sink in:
Rose never married Cal. NEVER. Not for one second in her entire life. YOU COULD LOOK IT UP, FFS.
They were NEVER husband and wife.
All your subsequent errors afterwards proceed from that fundamental misimpression.
I repeat: go back to where you wandered off into the weeds with that completely false assumption, and take another whack at this once you find the path from which you have strayed.
The coat wasn’t stolen: the necklace was dropped into his pocket while he was wearing it by Cal’s manservant/toadie, specifically to make him appear like a thief.
(I have to ask at this point: Did you actually watch this movie, or just do the Spark Notes version?)
You’re opining on things about which you have obviously not been paying very much attention. That’s far beneath your usual standards, and you’re not covering yourself in glory by compounding your first misimpression by adding factual errors to it.
Robin Williams’ life and career underlines the point that no one, even his own dad, knew best for him. If you think he didn’t take that life lesson with him into the role of Mr. Keating, I have a bridge for sale, cheap.
Neil doesn’t want to be a doctor. (And speaking from firsthand experience, the last people you want in that field of endeavor are the ones who aren’t panting and frothing for it to the point of compulsion. There’s too much at stake every minute of every day to put people into that business who’re there under compulsion.)
But Neil’s father has left him no out, no other option. He couldn’t join the Army, nor become a lumberjack.
Daddy’s way, or the highway. No other choices left to him.
Neil has a belief system, and he also has incredible psychic pain due to his father’s inflexible demands, because he loves his father, and doesn’t want to hurt him, but the father withholds his approval for anything the father didn’t decree. Neil’s not mature enough to appraise the situation overall, and tell his father to go f**k himself, and that he’ll live his life however he pleases if his father’s too stupid to realize his dad-crown and say-so over his life disappears forever in a few short months. It’s a harsh lesson many parents never learn. BTDTGTTS. Everyone suffers for it, some more than others.
Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Neil’s not insane. He just wants the pain of that situation to stop. It’s like being a fox, gnawing it’s own leg off to get out of a trap. And at 17, too young to think long term, he grabs his father’s gun, and takes the only exit he can conceive of to make the pain stop. I only say this with a lifelong experience of dealing with people in physical and emotional pain.
I’ve lost track of how many of those exact cases have come across my radar first-hand IRL.
This is what can happen to a teenager when a tyrannical and obsessive parent tries to control their offspring’s life. The word for that is abuse, as well as slavery. It’s also a monumental parental failure to do the job.
The lesson there isn’t the perils of letting adolescent children decide their entire future, it’s the cardinal parental sin of never preparing your children to make their own choices by teaching them to think them through for themselves, starting with little things and gradually throughout their lifespan moving to the big decisions, because once they hit 18 years of age, anything Mommy or Daddy says is advice, not requirement.
Williams’ character in that entire movie was in loco parentis, exercised with extreme diligence, because he was teaching his pupils to learn to think for themselves, towards the inevitable day they had no other choice, 24/7/365.
Keating was the only one in that entire movie treating those adolescents as budding grown-ups, by letting them think on their own within a safe space, and giving them constructive feedback, rather than issuing draconian demands and kneejerk disapproval.
A kid acting in one play isn’t melting his brain or destroying his future. It’s showing him there’s a whole world of options out there (never mind the @$$hole father’s provincial pig-ignorance of sending his boy to a prep school where they teach and read Shakespearean plays, but forbidding him to participate in one such; that’s jackassically stupid and hypocritical in the extreme.) It also fails to appreciate that a well-rounded person makes a better doctor, by trying to understand and appreciate all the life experiences and situations Shakespeare covers eloquently, and which most 17-year-olds have only read about, if even that. So long before he ever played Red Forman, Dad’s a double dumbass.
Keating didn’t remove a sense of duty from any student. He didn’t tell them to strip naked, drop acid, and go to Berkeley. He just taught them to think for themselves, own their choices, and exercise their options within the limits of decorum. Starting by continuing to attend his – and everyone else’s – classes, wear their uniforms, and maintain good grades at a hardnosed stick-up-the-ass Eastern prep school. There’s no French Revolution going on anywhere in that movie. And when parental abject failure led to disaster because Mr. A$$hole doled out his parental approval conditionally rather than unconditionally, and because rather than praise his son’s multi-talented abilities, he instead brow-beat him, with tragedy resulting to his son, the family, and his fellow classmates. Keating became the fall guy for A$$hole Dad’s monumental failings as both parent and human being, and the school knew where their paychecks come from, so they boot him.
So that’s two movies you apparently didn’t watch too closely before taking them to task for things which aren’t there. I caught bits and pieces of Titanic for the first time in 20 years last month when it was on Miramax, and I haven’t seen any bit of Dead Poet’s Society in a decade or more, and I can pull this up from memory. Essay Rule One: Know your subject. Lord love a duck, man. Who are you, and what have you done with John? This is like the bad AI version of him. I’m truly sorry to have to even have to point it out.
1. Not married. Yes. So, instead of a moral felony it was a moral misdemeanor. Still immoral.
2. The coat jack was wearing was reported stolen. 1:45:55. You could have, you know, looked it up.
Keating and Williams.
1. Williams life. And therefore Williams killed himself. Oh, no he didn’t. I didn’t bring it up, since it’s non-canon and immaterial.
2. Neil can gut it out the three months until he reaches majority and go chase a career in waiting tables, er, acting.
3. YES! Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. The fact that Keating removed Neil’s belief system and left him bereft was the evil bit. Was dad an asshole? Yes, 100%. But just like you can’t force Rose to love, you can’t force dad to approve. He has the choice. He has free will. He is attempting to help his son in the only way that he knows how. Maybe Dad and Rose should have gotten together?
4. Also yes, his father should have prepared him to make decisions and to embrace life. When The Boy was 5 we worked hours to build his pinewood derby car. When he was 11, he took the kit and came back with a car. That’s the best. Would I have disapproved of him becoming an actor? Yes. Would I have been proud of him for taking the reigns of his own life? Also yes. Thankfully he can’t act.
5. Approval is conditional. If I had shown up wanting to marry a 40-year-old prostitute from TJ, I’m hoping Pa would have withheld approval.
We do disagree on this. But have you seen Rogue Heroes? If not, check it out.
1. More immoral than treating a person as a possession? Highly dubious. {cf. Slavery, 6000B.C.- present.}
2. The coat was reported stolen by the people who knew it had the diamond planted in it. That’s why they reported it as “stolen”. Poisoned fruit of a poisoned tree.
—–
1. Williams didn’t kill himself because he became an actor. And there was that wee 40 or so years of once-in-a-century talent, including an Academy Award squeezed in there too between adolescence and death, along with making a paltry few hundred million dollars or so, which kind of leaves welding a distant second, no?
2. That option was not given to Neil by Dear Old Daddy A$$hole. It existed in the realm of possibilities, but Daddy was more interested in breaking his son’s spirit and subjugating him than presenting him with reasonable life options. And it wouldn’t drive the plot, would it?
3. Keating removed no one’s belief system. He didn’t tell him to run away from home. He simply told the kid to give acting in a play one time a shot. That is not, in any sense, “the French Revolution”. (Unless it had been written by Nathan Lane.) Keating didn’t tell him to disown his father, put him on a circus train, and ship him to clown college. That’s why you overstep the reality of the account.
Dad’s job is to approve, barring felonious conduct or moral turpitude. Acting in one play is neither. And something at which his son clearly excelled, as everybody but Daddy A$$hole recognized. And to teach his son how to make mature choices. Not run his entire life for him. Everyone in the theater who saw the movie, and everyone else in the movie, got that. Except Daddy A$$hole. That’s what made him Daddy A$$hole. His blind pig-ignorance was his defining character trait.
He’s attempting to treat his son as an infant his entire life, because no one ever punched him in the nose and beat him within an inch of his life to encourage him to re-consider his actions. He’s a son-of-a-bitch bastard, and a ruthless bully, inhabiting someone who should actually want the best for his son, not want his son to be a robot, who drives his own son to suicide by his enormous flaws as a parent and as a human being. Freely. That’s what’s immoral.
The greater tragedy is that even his son’s suicide didn’t instill in him the realization that he should kill himself as penance, and instead his new focus to bully is Mr. Keating, a teacher who did all the things he should have done as a father. If Daddy and Rose had come across each other, she probably would have shot him herself.
4. Being unable to act is no bar to success in the profession. (I could give you a list.) And your actions as a father are the difference between you and Daddy A$$hole.
5. Approval is not conditional upon enervating unconditional acquiescence to the tyranny of the parent. It should be a large tent, not a plank over the side of a ship. Failure to understand that is what made Daddy A$$hole an @$$hole, and thorough-going bastard in need of a good cock-punching what a baseball bat, for an hour or two.
BTW, Rahab was a prostitute. Bethlehem was the Judean equivalent of TJ. She lies in the direct lineage of three kings, one of whom had a pretty successful multi-level marketing religion. Don’t base approval of things on petty appearances.
It’s a free universe. Hate and like the movies you wish, as I will. But for the ones you damn, base it on their realities, not specious or imaginary flaws. Hence my comment about Misplaced Antipathy.
DPS should have won Williams his first Oscar. (Against such thespian hacks as Morgan Freeman, Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branagh, and Daniel Day-Lewis.) If it were up to me, there’ would be a life-size bronze statue of a schoolboy standing on his desk in the graveyard opposite William’s grave, facing it, and the caption would be “O Captain! My Captain!” And if it ever lies within my power to make it so, I shall.
Titanic, OTOH, while a technical masterpiece, kludged up what could have been a great real-life story of actual persons, without the entire fictional and asinine Jack/Rose/Cal sub-plot, as though 2000 people getting turned into popsicles one April night wasn’t fetching enough of a story on its own without jackassical gunfights on the promenade deck as the ship sinks. I bet it took seven re-writes before Cameron changed it from a sword-fight in the dining room and across the quarterdeck.
Rose wasn’t the villain, she’s just a testimony to James Cameron’s inability to not step on his own dick by larding up a cracking good tale with moar cowbell. I’m surprised he didn’t make her the mother of Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the trifecta of stupid, and make Cal into Bush 41’s father. I’m pretty sure that’s the plot of Avatar IV or V, still in development.
Based on the clips I’ve seen, Rogue Heroes is a masterpiece. I can’t wait to binge-watch it on disc.
Titanic:
1. In some ways, women’s rights were absolutely inferior to the rights of a dude at that time and place. Rose still had legs and could have walked away at any time, but the consequences . . . YMMV.
2. “But I was going to give it back” is the key line. Jack “borrowed” the coat in order to get to Rose. The necklace was slipped into the pocket, but it was a stolen coat. Interesting fact, A.L. Ryerson, the owner, the name of an actual person who died on the Titanic. If only he had his coat, he might have made it.
Williams:
1. He was a much better actor than he ever would have been as a welder. I actually fumbled on the response – I was referring to Keating, and not Robin Williams. Words apparently mean things. Sigh.
2. This may be the primary difference in our dissections: Rose had free will. So did Neil. She could have run away. He could have run away. Perhaps my seeming callousness is that I’m not sure that any adult could have tamed my spirit at that age, so I’m viewing it through the lens of someone who always, always felt I had the choices in my life. But, Rose being a victim, and Neil being a victim were things that were there, as you say, to drive the plot.
3. The French Revolution as written by Nathan Lane. Okay, that’s funny. But Keating could have said, “Listen, skip the play, and you’re 18 in two weeks. There will be plenty of times to wait tables soon enough when you’re 18.” I will note that the movie erred: Neil lived and did become a doctor, working alongside that great diagnostician, Dr. Gregory House. Now, YMMV, but my job as a dad was never to offer carte blanche approval, rather, carte blanche love. With bonus points for when they told me to “sod off, old man, it’s my life.” Now, that, I did approve of. Again, though, we agree that the old man was a bastard.
4. We agree that talent is not a requirement. I have seen many Pauly Shore movies.
5. Bonus points for Rahab. I’m still gonna tell the kids to skip ‘em.
6. Misplaced Antipathy is a fair call. I blame my mother who convinced me to marry the daughter of a wealthy robber baron . . .
7. It is really an excellent performance. Garp is still my favorite because of the wide range it showed for the first time.
8. Titanic as a technical masterpiece? Certainly. What amuses me is that was just Cameron’s vehicle to get Cameron in a vehicle to dive the Titanic to do location shots. I’d love to see the straight-up story, including the crappy steel that made it all happen.
9. I really, really enjoyed Rogue Heroes. One more season, I think, and then it’ll be done.
https://gab.com/Zaklog/posts/114361384747620576
Hahahahaha!
Misplaced empathy is also behind the immigration crisis. But it is notable that the people who empathize with the invaders don’t care about their fellow Americans who are losing job opportunities or facing unaffordable housing as a result. I guess that is why their empathy is misplaced.
As for the Rose character, she reminds me of the line from “As Good As It Gets “ where the romance writer is asked “How do you write women so well” to which he responds, “I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability”.
Totally on point.
Bear in Indy
Kindly illustrate Rose’s lack of reason or accountability with examples.
Nicholson’s line is a great one, but you can’t slap it on her if you can’t back it up.
You also missed the irony that in As Good As It Gets, Nicholson’s character was the biggest woman in the film, who lacked “reason, and a sense of accountability” from start to finish.
Start with explaining whom Rose harmed by her choices, and which ones were unreasonable, and how she avoided any consequences for them.
I’ll just wait over here while you flail around trying to find any support for your position.
Cue the crickets chirping.
File this under Telling Me You Didn’t Watch The Movie Without Telling Me You Didn’t Watch The Movie.
If you want to tell me the whole thing was a stupid fictional subplot within a greater historical tragedy, go on ahead. That gets you nothing for nor against her character but the observation that she was totally fictional. But it’s internally consistent, and her character was anything but what’s been cobbled up hereabouts. She was definitely uppity and unconventional, but she was anything but unreasonable and unaccountable.
So when someone can’t land anything that sticks, probably best not to enter the ring in the first place.
it’s a movie bozo
Which helpfully negates any argument against it, including the OP, bozo.
Perhaps take a moment to put a tourniquet on the legs of your riposte, after helpfully sawing both of them off.
“So when someone can’t land anything that sticks, probably best not to enter the ring in the first place.”
So why do you keep posting comments???
In the vain hope that some of the bravely anonyomous commentariat will stand up, and let a clue smack them in the forehead.
Your bravely pseudonymous altruism toward the anonymous commentariat clearly puts you one up. I give you all due respect, and more.
Pseudonyms have a long and glorious history in the English language.
Mark Twain, Agatha Christie, and Silence Dogood all say “Hi.”
Anonymous doggerel, OTOH, is the hallmark of a lack of imagination, and amounts to nothing other than cowardice with a keyboard.
Own that broad yellow stripe up your back, and wear it as a badge of honor, or else sum up the wit to name yourself consistently without doxxing yourself for the whole internet.
Yes I’ve seen the movie. And for the example, as John noted, she threw away a fortune rather than help her family just because, and as her final act on earth. As for her having a right to do so, just because something is legal doesn’t make it moral.
Her family has no claim on her fortune, at any point before, during, or after her life, despite the earnest objections of the exact French Revolutionary shills in this very comment section who would pretend otherwise. It’s a convenient view of private property that would demand it from others on such a frivolous and specious basis.
Taken to its ultimate conclusion, your argument is the exact same one the Menendez brothers made, for shotgunning their parents to death: “We wanted our inheritance.”
“Liberty! Egality! Stupidity!“
She made a promise, then abandoned it because she was bored. She is a fornicator barely escaping adulteress. And, as already pointed out, as a pointless emotional gesture, she threw away a treasure which could have been a great financial boon to her family.
She is, in fact, a boomer.
“Bored”?
How about abused? Unloved? How about unwilling to throw her life away for a man who desired her (as chattel goods), but didn’t love her as a person for a moment? That’s grounds, then and now, for release from her promise, without recompense or penalty.
Fornicator?
Have a look at Matthew 5:27-28, followed by John 8:3-11, then get back to us.
Words mean things.
“Pointless emotional gesture”?
Like MREs, that’s three lies for the price of one.
It was shown in the movie to show it was very pointed, anything but emotional, and far more than a mere gesture. What it would or wouldn’t do for her family is a point so without merit for consideration than one should be ashamed to even bring it up. Srsly. When you’re arguing communism to prove a point, you should definitely rethink your principles, and the worth of the endeavor.
Abused? Unloved? Show your work . . .
So you missed this scene, did you? Pity.
Well, he did just find out that she’d boned someone else. Don’t condone it, but I understand it.
It is. “Feel sorry for a gang member because he knocked up a 2/10 that he used to beat.”
https://1drv.ms/v/c/0e4bab95e31b8178/EUnnsSJ25fZGtWgOfWRFWmoBeYNpH-aSD59JCsvSyy5AHQ?e=MYX5SJ
fatigue is saying it gently and it shouldn’t be
Link is broken . . .
Clearly, John, this essay should be re-written as Misplaced Antipathy.
You’ve hit the iceberg, and 8/9ths of it was just under the surface.
And most of your readership that can clear its throat is entirely unfamiliar with the basic facts of the case.
You more wrong you are, the more you keep posting.
Arguing with Aesop is like slamming your forehead into a brick wall. He’s never wrong and will bring out his Thesaurus and keep hitting you on the back of the head with it until you finally give up and Aesop can then say, “See, told you I was right!”
Or, you could argue facts, and take a shot.
It’s rarely attempted, but the shock of that approach used against me would probably stun me for several days.
What is the background story in the top picture?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12213399/Horrifying-moment-homeless-robber-drags-grandmother-granddaughter-home-France.html