This is winding me right up. You see people in movies and you think straight away - there is no way you would be able to afford this house/car.
The same goes with them living without any noticeable employment for months. Or having a job but spending their working hours doing something else.
Hollywood has done irreparable damage to society’s expectation of reality.
And it doesn’t even stop at the financial stuff where someone has an incentive to screw with society’s expectations. All kinds of other aspects like friendships, relationships, parenting,… are strange in movies too.
There’s was a video essay on YouTube about there being less and less sex on TV and in movies and how bad that is. They argued that media should portray all aspects of life realistically; and if sex is left only to porn then it’s going to give people a more and more skewed view with no counterbalance.
That is a good point but they should also just include more awkwardness and in general more of the effort required to keep relationships (of all kinds) working, even the successful ones. That whole “find your soulmate and then coast” nonsense has done a lot of damage to relationships to take just one example.
Agree completely. None of it is well portrayed and the movies that do it well are exceptions. Any movie in which I see a man and woman having alcohol, I know there’s a sex scene coming up. Romance and sex are both so horrendously badly portrayed most of the time that I’m surprised more people don’t complain.
James Bond - typically misogynistic and women are used as Bond pleases.
1st Iron Man movie - serious investigative reporter is reduced to a hot piece of ass for a one night stand as Tony Stark clearly just picks up and sleeps with whoever he wishes.
Star Trek Into Darkness - Kirk is so alpha that the easiest way to portray this is he is in bed with 2 alien women and doesn’t even care as they beg him not to answer the phone and get back to action with them.
Honestly, I think it would already an improvement if the distinction was a bit clearer between wish fulfillment fantasy and supposedly realistic portrayal of relationships.
I don’t mind so much if men and women want fiction with their respective wish fulfillment but don’t pretend that it is realistic.
See: FRIENDS
Manifest was even worse. At least Friends was a sitcom, not serious and was mostly about their interactions.
Friends actually explains how Monica can afford her spectacular apartment, too. Her grandmother is the actual person on the lease and locked the rent in at $200 per month decades ago. Monica is illegally subletting the place and there’s either an episode or an arc where one of them convinced the building manager to ignore it instead of reporting it to the owner.
Fair enough. Last time I watched Friends was a couple of decades ago.
They did this in The Rookie as well. Big LA house with views.
Explained it away as him taking care of the place for his wealthy friend.
Is that a Frank Lloyd Wright?
Yup, thats Fallingwater in Pennsylvania. Its a museum now and you can take tours of it
Despite subsequent repairs to the parapet, the cracks there periodically reappeared. Fallingwater’s problems were so numerous that Edgar Sr. referred to it as “Rising Mildew”.
This part never fails to amuse me.
lmao yeah thats great. Cantilever structures are interesting to look at, but boy would I not want to be in charge of maintenance on that
Rising Mildew
This was my first thought upon processing wtf was happening in the pic. I mean, sure, that’s neat. But also a nightmare.
I think his general style was really good, how his buildings could look futuristic and naturalistic at the same time, but FLW kinda didn’t give a shit about structural integrity or insulation.
Kentuck Knob is nearby, which is another FLW house you can get a tour of. Less busy, very pretty, and the owners have an obsession with cast-iron French public urinals. I’d recommend checking it out too if you are in the area.
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Yup, I believe it’s Fallingwater
This is one of the reasons I hate and ignore all advertising. Commercials have NO IDEA who they are marketing to anymore. All I can think about when any commercial or advert plays is how fucking out of touch the company is to be showing the product getting used in a 26000 sq foot house EVERY TIME. I don’t have a garage, I don’t have a lawn, I don’t have a basement, I dont have a house, I don’t have a dog, I don’t have kids because none of this shit is sustainable or affordable. What world are you marketing to you board rooms upon board rooms of assholes?
If a vacuum cleaner company wants to correctly advertise a vacuum to the masses, they would now have to have the commercial show a lonely man getting off of the night shift of his 3rd job, taking a bus back to his squalor closet of an apartment, and then passing out gazing at the vacuum which has been sitting unused in the corner of the bedroom for 8 months, because the only world where he has the time and energy to use it is in his fucking dreams.
I don’t think Hollywood and advertising are out of touch, they know what they’re doing. They’re not just selling products, they’re selling an ideal. It’s about shaping how people see the world. For working-class viewers, it feels fake because it’s their reality being distorted. But for middle and upper-class audiences, it subtly shifts their perception, makes working-class life look manageable, maybe even confortable. They know it’s not 100% accurate, but they don’t realize how far off it is. That’s the real effect: it makes things look better than they are, and pushes people further out of touch without them realizing it.
How many Mercedes and Audis are actually sold vs the ridiculous amount of commercials they run? It really feels like people in this country are living in two different realities
They’re not for people looking to bought a car but for people that already bought one. To reinforce that they took the correct decision and that the next one they bought should be another of the same brand
To be fair, the important part about buying a Mercedes isn’t that you know what a Mercedes is, it’s that others know what a Mercedes is before you drive past them.
You’re talking about them right now
And funnily enough ads are way way more targeted now than any other time in history.
Apart from the obvious privacy concerns i actually prefer non targeted ads, because they are less effective.
But of course, you’re auto-opted into personalized ads and the majority of users couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to opt out
And then he starts masturbating…
This is one of the reasons nobody likes movies anymore. Hollywood is so disconnected from the struggle of the working class it’s just sad. The Oscar’s have become a joke
When I was a kid growing up in the Middle East in the 80s and 90s I idolized the hollywood/US TV western lifestyle. They all seemed so effortlessly lavish and nice. All sitcom/domcom families had large homes and all the kids had their own rooms and those kids didn’t need an allowance. They could get jobs like waitresses or paperboys that earned a half decent pay that allowed them to afford whatever the hell they wanted. I lived in Dubai they forbade all child labor. Even if those laws were ignored in some circumstances, they were generally quite strictly enforced. So unless you were a debt-slave camel jockey kid, you were not going to work at any job.
I legit thought that that was the reality of many people. Even young adult slackers with chronic unemployment issues still somehow had small houses bigger than any apartment I knew. Of course this was myth, and ever since the 2000s rolled along with nearly 40+ years of stagnant wages AND rising costs of everything else meant that that idea is dead.
Grew up in the ghetto of the US.
Would watch Fresh Prince and Family Matters and like “WOW look at that. Their house is so pristine. Everything looks new. Everyone has their own room. People sit at a dining table.”
My house was dark, smelled funny, full of random junk and we’d have mattresses on the floor to fit a large family.
All my hood friends had the same experience. I had friends whose bedroom also their living rooms.
Now I have friends who have a lot of money. 6 figure incomes and everything. Their house is slightly better looking, but that’s about it. Still full of stuff. Messy if you surprise them on a off day.
Average American is no longer the standard for quality living.
Yeah. Movies and TV really painted a highly unrealistic view of American life. Also Hollywood positively sucks at depicting poverty accurately. The home you lived in is something even many poor people in the middle east don’t live in.
I’m always sort of happy when I see realistic apartment situations. Like how Ruby Sunday on Dr. Who lives with her foster family as an adult.
I’m not even sure who can afford just the Lego Set of Fallingwater.
What about the Atom Brick set? (3/4-Lego-scale bricks).
seriously. or they’ll have some 25yo running the CIA or something.
Malcom in the middle had a realistic home.
Having a home in general isn’t exactly realistic anymore
Things really have changed.
Rosanne was about a poor, blue-collar family struggling to get by that had a house with a detached garage and 4 bedrooms.
I find most video games and other media far more unrealistic in that nobody ever needs to go to the bathroom.
Sounds like you don’t play Ark: Survival Evolved.
Imagine my surprise when I didn’t know stimberries did that too. So much!!
LPT from a local: Skip this tourist trap and just go to Ohiopyle down the road for natural rock slides. It is, perhaps, my favourite park.
I don’t mind unrealistic housing as long as it’s not directly referenced. Nothing worse than a character inviting someone into their home saying something like “sorry it’s so cramped” and then the shot reveals a living room large enough to fit my entire apartment.
It’s all that tip money.
80s had a different definition of being a part time mum to 20 kids
The trope continues though.
Pretty wild that this house was built in the 1930’s.
