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Misery Perfectly Explains Modern Fandom

"Toxic fandom" is a term that barely seemed to exist until a few years ago, but now we accept that making a Star Wars movie means you get death threats. It's easy to assume this is a product of the social media era and our contemporary inability to keep any damned thing in perspective. But the 1990 movie Misery (based on a Stephen King novel from 1987) detailed the pathology of entitled fandom back when the internet was the domain of a few dedicated super nerds.

Misery tells the story of Paul (James Caan), a prolific author of romance novels about a character named Misery. He gets into a bad car accident and is nursed back to health by the reclusive Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), who claims to be his "biggest fan." But when she discovers that Paul plans to kill off Misery so he can move on to more serious fiction, she doesn't take it well at all. She forces Paul to write a new Misery novel, later taking a sledgehammer to his legs to make sure he can't escape. It's paramount that he "give Misery back to the world."

That's how too many fans frame their worldview, claiming to be dedicated to the work when in reality they're just obsessively demanding that their own preferences be catered to. If that means relentlessly harassing creators, well, that's simply how much they care, right?

Copyright/Credit/Source: Columbia Pictures"YOU made me do it."

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Demolition Man Portrays A Society Of Polarized Social Bubbles

On the surface, Demolition Man seems like the kind of convoluted setup designed only as an excuse to get Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes to punch each other across vaguely futuristic sets. The social satire felt ridiculous in 1993, but maybe that's because it came too early.

Sylvester Stallone plays a one-man war machine / cop who gets framed for killing civilians by the criminally insane Wesley Snipes (who may or may not be playing a character). They are both cryogenically frozen and eventually wake up in the year 2032, which by now has eliminated nearly all crime and become something of a utopia. At least on the surface ...

And I mean that literally, because there's an entire underground culture that rebels against the surface world and its strict, suffocating rules. These are the forces of conservatism (the uppers) and liberalism (the downers).

Copyright/Credit/Source: Warner Bros.This is the future that liberals want.

2

Coneheads Is A Takedown Of ICE And A Broken Immigration Policy

Here's a scenario for you: A pair of immigrants slip past the U.S. armed forces to get into the country, where they eventually settle down, work their asses off, have a family, and become fully American. But immigration enforcement officials, using underhanded tactics, track them down to deport them back to their home, which really isn't home anymore. They've assimilated and have a child born in the U.S., so they don't want to go back to a place where they wouldn't even be welcomed. Also their heads look like butt plugs and they eat toilet paper, but that's not part of the metaphor, as far as I know.

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Planet Of The Apes (1968) Is About How Fake News Can Reshape Society

Today, nearly everyone agrees that fake news exists, and that it is bad. They just disagree over which side is actually using it, and therefore which side should go fuck themselves. Historians will probably spend a lot of time studying the way the factions in 2020 America didn't disagree on opinion, but on the nature of reality itself. They may want to start by watching Planet Of The Apes.

The villain is an orangutan named Dr. Zaius, who holds an impressive triple-title: member of the Ape National Assembly, Minister of Science, and Chief Defender of the Faith. He's therefore a politician, a scientist, and something of a pope. Zaius thus controls the flow of information on the ape planet, keeping stuff from the general population which he deems to be "dangerous" according to their Articles of Faith or Sacred Scrolls.

This includes scientific facts, like how flying machines are impossible. The chimps Zira and Cornelius are scientists, yet they don't question this propaganda until Heston shows them a paper airplane. They could have deduced the facts based on observable reality, but apes, like humans, don't work that way. They had been presented a worldview, and once it was accepted, facts were filtered according to whether or not they fit it. If your reply is, "That's right, the other side DOES do that! They're basically a cult," well, that's part of it. You spend all of your time dismissing other people's sacred truths, so you never scrutinize your own.