Last night my husband and I watched the movie Code 8 on Netflix. It had a good storyline, great X-Men-esk concepts about oppressing those with special powers, the gritty true-to-life struggle of someone who has no options because of that oppression, and how far he will go to find options.
On the surface, this looks like an amazing movie, so why did I just like it? Knowing who I am, my love of super powers, and realism in the superhero genre, I should have loved this movie.
I thought about this last night and this morning, and came to a conclusion that is probably not going to be very popular. The movie itself seemed to have an overbearing air of depression and self-loathing. I believe that this comes from the creative industry being passed into the hands of the millennial generation.
The majority of millennials are prone to depression because reality hit them far harder than it needed to. Many of these children come from homes where they were told from birth that they were special and better than everyone else. Preschools and elementary schools reinforced those concepts by rewarding everyone, regardless of performance. High school is where reality started to sink in a little bit, when they were actually graded on performance. Of course many kids still had hovering parents to ensure that they made it through. In college, professors cannot be intimidated by an irate parent, so these kids were thrown to the wolves. All at once their worldview was completely shattered, which led to confusion, self-doubt, depression, and self-loathing.
Most artists work through their deepest and darkest feelings through their art. If we have an entire generation of people who are in such a dark, depressed place, does that mean that our art will reflect that? Are we entering a “Dark Age” of art?
Now that the kids are all grown up, is there anything we can do to help them? Granted, it is harder to reverse the effects of childhood programming than it is to instill them, but the best thing to do is remind your friends that you care. Keep telling all of your friends that we are all human, we all have flaws, and we love and care for each other sometimes because of those flaws.
Perhaps there is nothing I can do to increase how much I like Code 8, but I hope that if everybody works together to remind each other how much love is in the world, maybe we can stop depression from permeating all of our artistic outlets.
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