Dying Tired Old People Media

[Ichor_Juice]

This fucking thing.



I have heard people sing the praises of this movie due to its supposedly counter-cultural elements, at least in the sense that it vanguards the spirit of double ought America in terms of subject matter. It doesn't quite reach the spirit of the 80s, and it most certainly cannot be said that it carries any of the genuine vital spirit from the movie of which it is imitating. Note that I say imitating. I can hardly describe this as a sequel. It is a hodge podge of recursive elements attempting to convey the theme of "passing on a (very dead) tradition to your juniors" in a most defeated modern American fashion. After all, this time around Tom Cruise is being henpecked by a faggoty Navy, regardless of his status as a war hero, and one of the pilots in the new Top Gun class is some uppity boss girl bitch. The modern military training nightmare continues up until the climax of the movie, which is the only time there is an attempt to deviate from its supposed 'predecessor', albeit done farcically (Plane Jockey Tom Cruise hijacking a landed jet in an Iranian military base like Master Chief).

They use the Kenny Loggins opening again. They also do a lot of things again.






[...Rooster playing the same song from his dad. Remember that one?]






[The dementia might have set in already, but can you remember this song my fellow nursing home patient?]






[The Volleyball Scene.]


Hey, remember this you wrinkly old retard? Remember when you were young, during a period where you weren't a failure passing on failed ideas to the children you passively but wholeheartedly are pushing to fail as well? Ain't that nice? What I'm trying to get to here is that this isn't a movie for everyone to see. If you really wanted something like that, you would have watched the first Top Gun, where Tom Cruise is young and cool and dangerous and fucking a hot blonde DOD consultant with dark eyebrows. In this one he is the dad who stepped up, having a childish and sexless 'tryst' (can I even call it that? Tom is playing house with this woman like a twelve year old) with some old whore and her dumb bitch daughter. The fact that I now personally know people in the military who have fallen for this woman trap makes it all the more despicable. The ultimate goal for being a masterful war fighter, a fierce deity beyond good and evil, is receiving a hotdog hallway who couldn't keep her first sugar daddy around as a 'reward'. I don't think this movie has pushed anyone into the recruiting station as much as I imagine the old one would have, besides the fact that it is a movie for 60 year olds and not recruiting-aged men. She even has the gay dream bar targeted for fellow old people and veterans that every retiree dreams of running. This woman is the archetypal dream of every 50-something divorcee, not me or anyone else who would be willing to kill sandcoons and niggers for the United States should The Red Prince Trump give a mere wave of the hand.




[The makeup can't fool anyone. Still or in motion, you can tell she is old. Also apparently Jewish based off the Wikipedia article that I glanced at to yoink a properly unflattering photo.]


The geriatric nature of the movie doesn't stop at the constant reminiscence or even at the sex. It is reflected everywhere. Even the 'tragic death' that affects Cruise's character spiritually is imitated, except this time its Iceman dying from throat cancer in the most old person fashion possible. Its crazy to see Val Kilmer doing his best FDR/ effete rich North Eastern American impression in total juxtaposition to Iceman's character in the first movie. It is pathetic to see the hot shot, competitive, but level-headed rival reduced to being some New England dweeb. If that character had aged, he would have behaved like Trump or McMahon, not my brother's father-in-law. It is disgraceful that this is being used in place of Goose's death in the first movie. Tom Cruise losing his RIO in a Jet accident where he breaks his neck on the canopy due to an ejection failure, leaving Goose's wife a widow and his son fatherless. A training accident that leaves Cruise truly shaken, Goose being both his Icarus and his Enkidu/Jonathan/Patroclus. There is weight to the tragedy and significance. In the new movie, the death is merely a reflection of the tired and defeated spirit of many modern Americans, who desperately seek to pass on the torch to a new generation in some 'noble' fashion like Kilmer's character. Except in real life there is no new generation to pass anything on to in the traditional sense. The country is moving in a spiraling downward motion. There is no forward movement or genealogy. Forward movement wouldn't have let some annoying shrill voiced 5 foot 4 inched woman, played by a spic-ess with the last name 'Barbaro', be a jet pilot, and as a jet pilot, a soldier, and as a soldier, a causer of violence, a killer. Forward movement would see her south of the border, getting diced up by some mongoloid indio, who would then proceed to be strafed upon by actual white attack-jet pilots.




[Look upon the spic-ette.]


Asides from amateurish editing, such as the use of awkward flashbacks to call back to events from the previous movie as if the audience were watching some kind of sitcom and not a theatrical work, I have little else to say about this doppelganger work.

I just want to provide a prompt for others to add upon. Go whip out comments and reviews about trends and media, especially recent stuff and ESPECIALLY sequels and MOST ESPECIALLY sequels that were made decades after the fact, that you notice specifically catering to older demographics. Think about the people directing and producing the movies and the reason they target older people. If such movies are sequels, think about the cultural significance of their predecessors and how the sequel attempts to imitate. Above all else, I want you to think about the appeal of such media to the American Right Wing counter-culture. I don't mean X guys (people who post on the Elon Musk website named after porn not gen Xers those are fair game) or Amarnites or Submarnites or Italian Americans or BAPians or Solbrahians or fucking whoever. 





I mean outside of our strange but influential Right Wing circle. Since all of American Right Wing is basically a counter culture in the modern day, I want you to specifically and single-mindedly focus on the older guys. Your Dads and Uncles and maybe even older brothers. Think on the large section that is most notably old evangelical dispensationalist types, even if they are nominally Catholic [an American Catholic IE. the Catholic Zionist, just like my Dad who I love but can't help to pick on over this]. Think on the guys who are right leaning but not necessarily in-the-in. Think on both low-class and      middle-class types. Think on Northern and Southern US cultures, even if the locality doesn't really apply anymore (where I live in the North East is loaded to the brim with rednecks repping the Dixie Flag, and Florida is loaded with New York retirees). Think about which demographics fought in GWOT or 'Nam or at the Gulf. Maybe bring some focus on divorced types as well? I want to place the magnifying glass on these guys because I suspect what we what we will see in Dying Tired Old People media (acronym DTOP) is a lot of stuff that at least appeal to older right wing types. Obviously there is going to be a lot of action movies, war movies, and perhaps romance movies focusing specifically on values that our elders are more concerned about (my ma and pa watch a boatload of Hallmark direct-to-TV movies). There will be material which recalls a period that they have passed by, or perhaps a cultural elements which have passed them by instead. The original Top Gun is a timeless piece after all, much like all good art, and regardless of the temporal context of the 80s the masculine spirit which is carried within the film transcends time in a way that its sequel, and most mortal men, specifically cannot. For most of them DTOP media recalls a less politically tense past [for their myopic memory; any of us can say with confidence that Gay Nigger Communism was zombying along way before even our parents were born]. Perhaps the media provides an escape from rapidly oncoming death coinciding a long fulfilled internal spiritual death. I would also like to focus on fantasies captured in DTOP media that are only appealing to a specific subset of old Americans. Think stuff such as rekindling an old romance after a rough divorce or separation, or perhaps an older protagonist teaching younger punks a lesson or two. Those kinds of fantasies that are both impotent and short-sighted (in the sense that the only thing to look forward to is a not-too-violent death) and only capable of being spawned from a mind with not too much left to live for. Compare this to your fantasies, both conscious and unconscious. I had dreams about raping women and them falling in love with me afterwards, or jumping into the howling black depths of danger without certainty of victory or death. Regardless, I'd like to hear more from all of you.

[anthony]

These are kind of like Warehousecore for old people, who due to better times mostly didn't have to work in warehouses.

Here's an example and commentary for you (very good commentary).

https://twitter.com/DrMcbeardface/status...9174370403

Original tweet for you. This account seems too boring to be banned any time soon. Look at this garbage.



And the part that's of interest to us. Violent Virgin's commentary.



The areas of overlap between DTOPcore and Warehousebrown core might be the subject of a future post by me in this thread. But for now I'll leave it here.

Here's the clip being shared in the original tweet, if it goes down.

[Unformed Golem]

Nursinghomecore isn't going to go away, the demography is already locked in.  I don't think it's something to get too angry about except insofar as it's used to legitimize the diversion of resources to the old and useless.  It's easy to tune out; if you're younger it's not really in your face the way fat bitch or negrolatry psyops are.  The basic boomermoral of Top Gun Maverick is that the kids [Diversity Edition] might not quite Got It the way We Did but they'll still be all right.  The subliminal boomermoral is that you, the dying old kulak, are still an active and respected member of society and not a helpless pogrom target/loot drop with some obsolete social and economic skills.

[thankyoucomeagain]

I feel Cobra Kai belongs here, though it will take more time than I have at the moment to parse through the show with specifics. It has a lot of the tropes you have noticed, but I find it interesting because instead of how Maverick is written just as a call back to the glory days of the old people watching the show, Cobra Kai is written for two audiences, and lectures both simultaneously. For the old men, it criticizes them for either having wasted away in hedonistic pleasure and abandoned their family, or having a family and become too weak and submissive, in both cases ensuring that their children, who should have adopted their interests and/or talents, now have been turned into the stereotypical modern zoomer.

For the modern (multiracial) zoomer audience, it serves as propaganda, pushing the tropes you see in 80s movies for teenagers onto teenagers today. Drive-in theatres, large house/beach parties with heavy drinking, driving choppers around with your girlfriend behind you, etc. It encourages the younger audience to essentially LARP as 80s kids today, and in the show, Karate and 80s music is treated as some sort of initiation rite where they transcend from the archetypical smartphone obsessed zoomer to an 80s Cool Kid or 80s Badass Bully who has big muscles and gets all the chicks. There's even a part where a character is paralyzed from the waist down, and is cured by listening to Dee Snyder sing "I Wanna Rock" at a rock concert.

Ultimately it's a powerful piece of Boomercore, a message to the old men to stop being pathetic and go back to the old selves, and a message to the Youth to stop being modern and woke and be cool like their elders used to be in the movies.

[Edge]

I feel Cobra Kai belongs here, though it will take more time than I have at the moment to parse through the show with specifics. It has a lot of the tropes you have noticed, but I find it interesting because instead of how Maverick is written just as a call back to the glory days of the old people watching the show, Cobra Kai is written for two audiences, and lectures both simultaneously. For the old men, it criticizes them for either having wasted away in hedonistic pleasure and abandoned their family, or having a family and become too weak and submissive, in both cases ensuring that their children, who should have adopted their interests and/or talents, now have been turned into the stereotypical modern zoomer.

For the modern (multiracial) zoomer audience, it serves as propaganda, pushing the tropes you see in 80s movies for teenagers onto teenagers today. Drive-in theatres, large house/beach parties with heavy drinking, driving choppers around with your girlfriend behind you, etc. It encourages the younger audience to essentially LARP as 80s kids today, and in the show, Karate and 80s music is treated as some sort of initiation rite where they transcend from the archetypical smartphone obsessed zoomer to an 80s Cool Kid or 80s Badass Bully who has big muscles and gets all the chicks. There's even a part where a character is paralyzed from the waist down, and is cured by listening to Dee Snyder sing "I Wanna Rock" at a rock concert.

Ultimately it's a powerful piece of Boomercore, a message to the old men to stop being pathetic and go back to the old selves, and a message to the Youth to stop being modern and woke and be cool like their elders used to be in the movies.

It does belong here, but it's not Boomercore, this is GenXcore. This has various implications. The "old men" this is partially made for aren't really "old" in the sense of the word that really means something. They're more like late middle age. They're just old enough to pass on the torch in some ways but not entirely. From what I've seen of this it feels more like trying to live vicariously through the brown youth. The show is basically about them getting some teenagers to settle their old grudges. As GenXcore becomes more prominent I expect to see more similar stories rather than sailing off into the sunset after one last hard knocks lesson for the kids (who will never ever surpass you, don't worry) that you see in boomercore.
An interesting element here though is that unlike 60s culture, 80s culture actually garners some interest from younger generations. However, even irl I've noticed that most Gen X don't really "get" what they like from this era or why they like it. They remember the 80s for the goofy comedy movies and old Nintendo games ("Before they sold out and became anime!!1!"), not synth pop and neon. I Wanna Rock is not showing up in 80s Aesthetic Youtube playlists, let's put it that way.
If the trend survives long enough, and it doesn't look like Hollywood has enough young talent or the audience to reverse it any time soon, I'd be interested to see how this intersects with the Y2K and 90s Japanese pop culture nostalgia of younger demographics and the ""authentic"" grunge era people who were young adults then seem to remember as the 90s (disclaimer: personal observations of this demo).
Of course, trying to make a modern teenager into an 80s movie character is unintentionally cruel in a way that Boomercore's overt dismissal towards young people couldn't achieve. It's sending them off to a world that no longer exists. Even if they could find such venues it would be a LARP, and they'd know it was a LARP too. This gets at something that I consider to be a true generational divide that I somehow never see anyone else even approach: anyone who went through adolescence and young adulthood prior to smartphones and social media taking off simply doesn't get how life is now.
As I alluded to above, I think there's a high risk that we'll be locked into a trend of media demanding young people put down their phones and go outside (which hasn't existed since 2013 at the latest) for quite a while.

[anthony]

This was always coming in one form or another.

[FrenziedFish]

Interesting thread, I wouldn't say actors adapting to growing old is a bad thing (not that any of you are implying so) just that it is so when they do it via these self aware generational films that attempt to control or demean the cultural expression of the perceived youth.

One film that could fit into this Dying Tired Old People Media genre is Harry Brown, a film I was meaning to write a bit about on here before getting temporarily filtered by the forum.

Harry Brown however transcends this genre via it's stark and unapologetic (if understandably quite non-racial) portrayal of a late 2000s London housing estate. Michael Caine channels his previous performances, primarily as soldier (in actions) and spy (in fatalism) to avenge a murdered friend. The murderous youth he battles with are portrayed as animals empowered by a weak and naïve state, a state arguably helped into existence through various counter-cultural productions Caine himself was involved in. The film through it's runtime and final showdown, where the estate erupts into anarchy from the mismanaged police reaction to Brown's vigilantism, takes on a purgative quality then cap ended by the final shot with Brown able to take a now clear underpass whose blockage by the now vanquished youths took his last visit to his wife from (who is shown in a rather dour representation of the NHS).

[thankyoucomeagain]

It does belong here, but it's not Boomercore, this is GenXcore. This has various implications. The "old men" this is partially made for aren't really "old" in the sense of the word that really means something. They're more like late middle age. They're just old enough to pass on the torch in some ways but not entirely. From what I've seen of this it feels more like trying to live vicariously through the brown youth. The show is basically about them getting some teenagers to settle their old grudges. As GenXcore becomes more prominent I expect to see more similar stories rather than sailing off into the sunset after one last hard knocks lesson for the kids (who will never ever surpass you, don't worry) that you see in boomercore.
An interesting element here though is that unlike 60s culture, 80s culture actually garners some interest from younger generations. However, even irl I've noticed that most Gen X don't really "get" what they like from this era or why they like it. They remember the 80s for the goofy comedy movies and old Nintendo games ("Before they sold out and became anime!!1!"), not synth pop and neon. I Wanna Rock is not showing up in 80s Aesthetic Youtube playlists, let's put it that way.
If the trend survives long enough, and it doesn't look like Hollywood has enough young talent or the audience to reverse it any time soon, I'd be interested to see how this intersects with the Y2K and 90s Japanese pop culture nostalgia of younger demographics and the ""authentic"" grunge era people who were young adults then seem to remember as the 90s (disclaimer: personal observations of this demo).
Of course, trying to make a modern teenager into an 80s movie character is unintentionally cruel in a way that Boomercore's overt dismissal towards young people couldn't achieve. It's sending them off to a world that no longer exists. Even if they could find such venues it would be a LARP, and they'd know it was a LARP too. This gets at something that I consider to be a true generational divide that I somehow never see anyone else even approach: anyone who went through adolescence and young adulthood prior to smartphones and social media taking off simply doesn't get how life is now.
As I alluded to above, I think there's a high risk that we'll be locked into a trend of media demanding young people put down their phones and go outside (which hasn't existed since 2013 at the latest) for quite a while.

I have reviewed the show, and I think your analysis is not only correct, but that Cobra-Kai has another interesting aspect, it shows the Gen-X reaction to Boomercore. The child characters on the "good" side each season never become stereotypes, they just become superior normies, while it's only the children on the "bad" side who become 80s stereotypes. Gen-x people view Boomers and Boomercore as some kind of ultra-eugenic culture, where every adult wants all children to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and those who fail or are deficient should be pushed and punished harder. Every American Boomercore character in the show, Kreese, Terry Silver, and Johnny's father, is an evil schemer, and they become more of an evil schemer the more they return to what they used to be when young. They all want to beat, bully, and manipulate anyone younger until they become like them as well. They are tired old people, but they are only tired as long as they are removed who are impressionable enough to re-make into their perfect vision. And from how Kreese's backstory was depicted, they believe every earlier American generation was like this too.

The Gen-X, here it's Daniel and Johnny, consider themselves some sort of synthesis between the brutal, spartan boomer and the cringe, effeminate millennial. The ultimate theme of Cobra-Kai is impressing this on the audience, that Gen-X are the perfect organism, they are just as tough and capable as Boomers were, but they're also cool and liberal, open to new things, sympathetic to children due to their brutal parents. I think you can see this theme a lot of media now, but most obviously in sequels to 80s-90s media made recently. The Star Wars sequel trilogy was attempting this too. I'd argue you can see this even in some Japanese media, Apollo Justice and Ace Attorney Investigations for example push this theme.

[Geisteshahnreischaft]

regardless of his status as a war hero, and one of the pilots in the new Top Gun class is some uppity boss girl bitch.

Wasn't that the same case in the 1986 version? The female protagonist was an "astrophysicist", civilian, but at the same time, a Top Gun instructor (?) -- which never happens in real life. 

Her initial obnoxy was no less intense, if you compare it to the so called "boss girl bitch" zeitgeist.



But yea I can't agree more with your other observations, the new Top Gun movie is a geriatric phantasm. Just like most other movies that have been spawning out from the abyss of Neo-Hollywood since the last decade, in order to revive the appeal from their pre-sequels, although never seem to achieve the goal in any stretch. (Almost?) every single one of them is a complete failure. 

The most grisly example would be this one particular neoteric ensemble:

[Guest]

Does this belong here?

The Bikeriders

As a zoomer, it's impossible for me to see this as 'cool'. It looks like a movie for boomers to reminisce about the days when they used to be tough. The one nice thing I'll say is that there's shockingly few niggers in it.

[capgras]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Devils

[Unformed Golem]

regardless of his status as a war hero, and one of the pilots in the new Top Gun class is some uppity boss girl bitch.

Wasn't that the same case in the 1986 version? The female protagonist was an "astrophysicist", civilian, but at the same time, a Top Gun instructor (?) -- which never happens in real life. 

Her initial obnoxy was no less intense, if you compare it to the so called "boss girl bitch" zeitgeist.



But yea I can't agree more with your other observations, the new Top Gun movie is a geriatric phantasm. Just like most other movies that have been spawning out from the abyss of Neo-Hollywood since the last decade, in order to revive the appeal from their pre-sequels, although never seem to achieve the goal in any stretch. (Almost?) every single one of them is a complete failure. 

Not quite -- Kelly McGillis (whose life was completely ruined by being nigger-raped btw) was a sex object in the original Top Gun.  While Girlboss Gomez was not.  The original Top Gun had a problem with verisimilitude: being a naval aviator means flying a jet (all dudes) on a boat (all dudes).  The Top Gun school itself is in the middle of desert.  Women weren't even allowed to fly tailhook strike planes in the US Navy until 1993 [after an engineered virtue-hysteria scandal, this is a topic for another time].  So some dumb excuse had to be made to get a Romantic Interest into this place.  You'll notice that the pilots pretty openly roll their eyes at the idea that she is an actual expert rather than just eye candy, and this is borne out by the narrative -- she doesn't actually know anything about planes and air combat compared to Maverick or, presumably, any of the other actual pilots.  Both the audience and the male characters are in on why she's there.  Her credentials are an excuse to get her in the presence of these men.  The part where the rot was already showing, in 1986, is that this girlboss facade was built at all instead of just making her a secretary -- even if the bayonets hadn't yet been fixed on forcing everyone to pretend they were serious (and note McGillis herself doesn't seem to be in on the joke).

In the sequel, the bunned-up femme-latinx is Just As Good As Any Man and is actually the natural leader and has to be taken 100% seriously and isn't an object of sexual desire at all except insofar as all of those things I just listed give neutered audience members permission to imagine themselves as her slacker bf.

Does this belong here?

The Bikeriders

As a zoomer, it's impossible for me to see this as 'cool'. It looks like a movie for boomers to reminisce about the days when they used to be tough. The one nice thing I'll say is that there's shockingly few niggers in it.

I'm not sure it does belong -- I couldn't bring myself to sit through all two minutes of that but from clicking around I didn't see any geezer self-inserts.  It seemed more like it was encouraging late millennials to imagine themselves LARPing as storybook Boomers.  We already know what an authentic boomer motorcycle movie looks like -- Easy Rider.  The "bike club" in that trailer looks like a distinctly Millennial vision, with a clearly defined bureaucratic hierarchy full of "codes" and "rules" and constant anxiety over the approval of clucking women (when the protagonists of Easy Rider want some "female approval" they purchase it from a brothel).  Compare the wandering Zen monk Jedi of the 1977 Star Wars vs the Jedi Board of Directors in a plush D.C. headquarters building in the prequels.

[Frank]

The end credits of Top Gun: Maverick (2022) include a dedication to [Top Gun director Tony] Scott... He had been working on the film before his death [by suicide].

Coincidence? I think not.

He had been fighting cancer in secret for a long time so he was likely terminal by this point and making an exit on his own accord, but it fits the thread theme regardless. Speaking of Tony Scott, go watch The Fan (1996) if you haven't already.