https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nhiMj0m747M
What’s going on there? Like what is happening with Sesame Street and the Muppet Show? Because a lot of it seems to be something like monsters, like especially in Sesame Street, all these kind of monstrous characters and the Cookie Monster and what is it, Count the Dracula character and all that. Right, right, right. But I don’t know if you’ve thought about Jim Henson’s, just Jim Henson’s takeover of that. There is one big element of all Muppet shows, even if it’s not under the name of Henson. I mean, I’ve been to churches where they do little Christian stories with little puppets that are essentially Muppets of a sort. Muppets are one of their main central features is your hand is inside the mouth making it move. But what’s going on up here is generally something plush and cute. Right, yeah. And the subject- Like a teddy bear, yeah, it’s like a teddy bear animated. Right, but the subject of cute is something I’ve really been thinking about for a long time. And I’m getting to the point where I did write about it. I had a, I have a essay site where I wrote and I wrote about it, but I’m getting ready to do a video on it. And there are things we just don’t think about. Fun is one of those things, and especially the teleological notion of fun. You know, that fun is a purpose for life. But cute is right up there. Cute is kind of baby-like. Yeah. It’s also been mingled with so many other things. And it’s a way of smuggling messages. Disney learned this probably earliest, that he could smuggle messages through the big-eyed Mickey. Mickey started off as a rat and ends up by the sorcerer’s apprentice having his big eyes and that’s the way he’s remained. And eventually the Japanese would pick up on this. They would pick up on what happened with Disney and then they would make all their anime figures. So many people use big-eyed anime or big-eyed cute creatures for their avatars online. Yeah, for sure. And what I’ve seen is it’s almost like, you know, you’ve thought about art, you’ve been to art school. And one of the things I’ve seen is, okay, so we went through all this stuff to get to, say, through the modern era. And then now the postmodern era is filled with ironies and eventually the message, you know, the woke message started to show up in it. But I’m thinking like, yeah, but postmodernism is like post-impressionism. It’s not the end of the line. It’s just a way station before we get to the next thing. And I started thinking to myself, I think this cute stuff is the next thing. That is, I think that our art has turned into, it’s, there’s something juvenile about it. Yeah. Well, what is the relationship of this kind of art to the geek? How can you take Leatherface from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie, which I actually love. I don’t like any of the remakes, but, and then make a bobblehead out of, that’s got big eyes, you see. There’s something that’s happened there so that everything can be condensed down to these big-eyed things. Yeah. Now I’m told that the Japanese didn’t see the big-eyed anime creatures as looking like foreigners, even though to us, it’s just like, well, they don’t look like you do, but they thought we look like themselves as a weird mirror of their inner essence. And one of the things the Japanese did was added sex and violence to them, to make cute things, you know, kawaii is the word they use, but it’s to make them sexual, sometimes pornographic, and to make them sometimes very violent. Now, interestingly enough, when they do the really macho ones, then they give them the more squinty eyes. Yeah. But I think this big-eyed thing, I did a- It definitely has to do with wonder. It definitely has to do with, let’s say, forcing or a technique for introducing something like childlike wonder, or bringing people back into a sense of childlike wonder, but then playing with that, twisting it, you know, you can see it in like the weird, because it’s not just the Japanese, like all the weird My Little Pony obsession that people had with the bronies, they recall, or whatever, called these 20-something year olds that became enamored with the My Little Pony. I think there’s a sense of, I think there’s a sense of disenchantment. People are disenchanted. They feel like the world is, and so they’re looking for a sense of connectedness, and instead of, and they’re looking to their own childhood, because maybe that’s the place where they remember, like watching Star Wars for the first time, or having some experience of wonder, and wanting to recapture that, instead of moving towards kind of deeper versions of enchantment, there’s an easy one. Like you said, there’s a cute, there’s a moment of like, you know, connecting to your teddy bear when you were four years old or whatever, and then you just perpetuate that forever in your life. Yeah, which I think it has everything to do with identity and the loss of it. You know, that is when people can know, you know, having lost their sense of being made in the image of God, they then construct an image of themselves, and if you can kind of get that cute smile out of the person looking at that image, going, aww, you know, if you get that, then it’s like unassailable, because it’s almost like you’re attacking children. I don’t know what kind of monster would do that. I’m that monster, evidently, but I think that… But you’re right, it has to do with identity, because the avatar is the ultimate example of that. Yeah, exactly. Like furry culture is the extreme version of that type of thing, like the cute animal that is then weirdly sexualized and weirdly, you know, it’s like a weird connection between this childlike wonder and a kind of twisted version of identity and sex and everything. No, definitely, I think you’ve got your own. I made a video called 21st Century Cargo Cults, and that’s where I really get into this stuff. But my thought is, you know, the cargo cult being the, if you build it, they will come, you know, and I go into this much more, but that’s the American version. So if we collect the Star Wars memorabilia, we will remain with the force being with us, you know? If we collect the MCU statues and comics, we will be aligned properly with the stars, which are evidently falling in on us as, you know, Galactus is about to arrive or something. Yeah, well, for sure, consuming has become… Because consuming is actually a way of participating. Now, again, here’s a way of participating, and so we’ve reduced participation to consuming, and it’s like a weaponized version of participation, where, you know, big companies make huge amounts of money because they know that buying something is a way of participating. It’s not the deepest way, but it is a way of participating in something. Well, these things have become religious, totally. Yeah, yeah. And they are symbols for what we hope we are, that is to say, the wide-eyed, childlike, you know? It’s a inverted, you know, becoming as children. That’s a great perception you’ve got there. Yeah, but the difference is that most of these people don’t understand the difference between being childlike and childish, you know? And I think one of the big moments where this culture starts is during the hippie revolution in San Francisco, because the whole point was to basically experience ecstasy, not the drug, but LSD, the drug, you know, acids, but getting stoned, getting high, whatever, and just acting like a child. And all the original San Francisco footage that we have, and I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area during that time, and I saw it. People essentially, you know, I had a friend who was telling me, before she became a Christian, she said, yeah, me and my friend Nancy used to sit in puddles on LSD, like puddles on the side of the road after a rain and just be like, oh, you know? But of course the problem was, if everyone’s a child, where are the adults? Yeah. Eventually the adults swooped in in the form of cults and, you know, all sorts of things to… Capture, yeah, to prey on attention, prey on that kind of sense of wonder, yeah. And that’s where we were moving. I mean, there’s a total connection here between the cute stuff, the geek culture that consumes it and has been spreading outside of its geek confines, and the identity politics. And it’s amazing how many of the people involved with identity politics, you know, that whole thing of, you’ve heard of like the person who’s the dragon kin or the deer kin, where they have these, it’s not only that they’re a different gender, but they’re a different species. Yeah. You know, so, but all these things, you look at it and it’s like when they pretend to be a cat or a dog, they’re doing it like they’re a little child. Yeah. They’re doing it like, this is cute. How can you criticize this?