Ontological Distinctions in the world of Substandard Entertainment

I'm a big critic of what I call Manichean entertainment for children - basically a dualistic backdrop to so many advernture stories, where there's an endless battle between good and evil forces, where both sides actually look pretty evil to the uninitiated, and the diabolical hideousness of "the bad guys" tends to dominate the bulk of the story, with a tiny bit of heroic victory and pseudo-moralism at the very end to justify the vast display of fierceness and malice leading up to that point. There's no better example of this trend, I think, than the Transformers; theoretically, they're sliced up into camps of "good guys" and "bad guys" (they literally invoke those categories), reminiscent of High Neocon Theater in the golden era of Rumsfeld and Cheney, but all the Transformers look vaguely demonic, no matter which side they claim to be representing.

Needless to say, the boys love the Transformers.

I have similar objects to G-Force, the latest Disney movie (I think) about guinea pigs. I really wanted to see it, because we love guinea pigs, but when we rented it in a hotel, the last time we were on a mini-vacation, Amy and I were horrified to discover that it's basically Die Hard for preschoolers, with furry but largely unloveable creatures standing in for Bruce Willis.

This morning, I bit the bullet and read the boys (and Madeleine...) a Transformers book that Daniel (of course) had selected from the town library. [Amy was horrified that she couldn't get them interested in any books at the library - they only wanted DVD's - but at the last minute, the apparently culturally tuned-in librarian asked them if they wanted to borrow a book about Transformers, and naturally they snapped it up.]

So anyway, I read them the story, but at the end, I mentioned that the Transformers aren't my bag. Ian wanted to know why, so I basically said, "Well, I like my people to be people and my machines to be machines. I don't like machines that try so hard to look like people." [I didn't want to tell him I don't like them because they're demonic...]

At that point, Ian asked a very logical follow-up question:

"You like your guinea pigs to be guinea pigs, don't you?"

(January 23, 2010)