Mike: what makes you say so?

Nic: stop lurking, get a goddamn account already.

NSA: I see you there.

Ooh la la.

Re, your first paragraph, and "laziest way."

Lemme ask you this. (I'm not disagreeing - I don't even know if I disagree right now - I just want to hear you work it out.) Imagine if the singular "they" in your paragraph - the "they" who write a piece espousing the apparent relationship between a given piece of media and the culture at the time - imagine that this "they" is not contemporary. Perhaps this "they" is a hundred years in our future.

Like, does what you're saying hold up, right now, if "they're" reviewing this brand-new book about a guy named Huckleberry Finn?

["Aw, fuck these critics with their 'personal worldview' shit." - someone in the 1880s]

Sure, you can control for the difference in society. "At the time, this was how it was, so adapt to that... Got it? K, now enjoy the story." But is it not worthwhile for a modern writer to kind of ignore the storytelling and use Huckleberry Finn as an entry-point to the culture of the time? ... If so, what exactly does [the year the writer wrote their review] matter, really? Why does it have to be a modern writer? Right now we'll all say there's some pretty outrageous inequalities inherent in the story itself. If someone had said that then, would their argument have been less meaningful?

At the risk of belaboring the point: if someone had written a piece going "well, you know, there's all sorts of subtle fucked-up going on in all of the relationships in this book" in 1884, the contemporary 1884 audience might have said "shut up with the social inferences already, jesus," ...but you or I - now - would go "yeah, that's pretty much the lasting thing I take away from this piece."

(Obvious differences to be drawn between Huck Finn and, well, anything. Focus on the distinction I'm making, not the example.)

Your value, and a lot of the value this podcast and the attending forum agree upon, is a set of rules by which a piece of media can be exciting and not-untrue-to-itself. But how is our "value set" any different from the "value set" in 1884, where someone could ("rightfully") say that, shit, this book is really obsessed with making out black people to look like human beings.

Hush your face. We're almost done with a song, once the song is done, song gets leaked. That's way faster than an album. 

How does The Thing fit into that?

I just love the fuck out of this forum.

Neither of them talked.

No, I think you're onto something.

Also, one screenwriter, one director.