The post-lockdown disorientation in the arts

Snow White was caught in the breach between two periods of madness, revolution and counterrevolution, and ended up as the target of anger from both sides. But it is hardly the only piece of cultural presentation to elicit such fury.

It's the same with many movies and most legacy media too. The lockdowns provoked mass disorientation, but the post-lockdown period has kicked off a fiery passion to repair whatever it was that caused such outrages as two successive cancellations of Easter and Christmas.

The last of the Covid era's craziest art, music, film, and literature is being released into a world that is positively fed up with being hectored, manipulated, browbeat, and lied to with unrelenting political bromides that demand totalitarian acquiescence to a value system utterly alien to anything our ancestors knew or believed.

This is why we are witnessing the advance of a type of neo-traditionalism in the face of revolutionary hype that suddenly seems more ridiculous than radical.

We really must have sympathy for the locally owned theaters, struggling for revenue in the post-lockdown period and competing so directly with home streaming services. They imagined that a Disney classic could bring families back to the movies, and purchased the rights to days of showings scheduled on the hour, only to fire up projection screens in empty theaters. It was a bad decision, one that will not likely be made again.

If only one theater had decided instead to show the 1937 version of Snow White, it likely would have sold every seat in the house. That's where we are and where we are likely to stay for the duration, in a long period of nostalgia for what was and a hunt for what went wrong to the point that somehow we threw it all away for no good reason.

For many of us today, the only question is how far we must go back in history to find clarity over many matters concerning practically everything from art to science to health. Is it the 1980s or perhaps the 1880s? Whatever the stopping point, we are looking for a better way than the one dreamed up for us by the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates, and the new and not improved Disney Corp.