The most disturbing piece of dung I ever had the misfortune of seeing

I am entitled to not only have an opinion, but to voice it on a public forum. If you disagree with my title statement on this thread, please consider that I wont bother arguing any points you made but will rather simply place you on ignore. Sorry. I'm just really not interested in arguing over this film. I'm making a point here & nothing you might post could dissuade me from my position on this film. So why waste your time with me?

What is my point?

1. I don't like movies that make classical pianists the bad guy. Which are obviously ploys to gain affection from boomer Rock culture.

2. I don't like movies that make classical music something everyone is supposed to agree to hate. Or even a suggestion to that effect, such as in the film "Five Easy Pieces".

I would just leave well enough alone. Plenty of people disliked this film. But there is something particularly insidious about this one.

It was one thing when Nicholson as Robert Dupea gave us this utterly false impression of a disillusioned classical pianist by the character claiming that he "doesn't feel anything" after playing a Chopin prelude. But Brad Pitt's character here is thoroughly unrealistic considering how it could not be possible for such a person to exist. That is, it doesn't exist: someone who loves Bach so much that they become hateful toward their child.

On one hand, you might defend the Dupea character's line/scene by claiming he was only lying to piss off his snob artistic family. But not one statement to this effect has ever been said nor written in the almost half-century since the film was released.

Fact: No classical musicians are ever disillusioned with music. Classical musicians do, however become disillusioned with how so many people have difficulty respecting honest music; most people prefer to respect commercially promoted music--e.g. not honest music.

This is stated in view of how simple forms of music (folk, bluegrass etc) are considered to be honest music. Indeed, there would be no classical music without the composers of it first having great respect for simple forms such as Gypsy (Beethoven), American folk (Copland), gospel (Bach) etc.

So why does Dupea say what he does, suggesting he has lost interest?

Answer: Because the writers/director/producers are pandering to the Rock culture.

Same thing with Mr O'Brien (Pitt) character in TTOL. The director knows how to sell hate to the Rock culture. It's really just that simple (crass). I was waiting for the character of Mr O'Brien to show us some depth in his taste for music. Something, given the locale, which might bring together Texas folk music, for example, with the high-browed pianist's interests. But there was nothing there. It just sank into this mindless place where we're supposed to feel badly for Young Jack (Sean Penn's character as a child) without a thorough explanation for it. Obviously because the writer/director has no intention of explaining anything. All the better to arouse the old boomer Rock culture stigma of hating snob classical pianists.

Why does the Rock culture hate classical pianists?

Because during the time when Rock music was founded (1950s), its main contender in the music business was classical pianists. At that point, classical pianists had been for a century the most popular music & the most respected. So it makes sense that record companies and others in the rock music business would be at odds with those involved in selling classical music, particularly concert pianists. Since popular concert pianists represented their most formidable competition in the music industry.

Although this doesn't justify the viciousness with which American music businessmen & Hollywood depicted classical pianists beginning in the 1950s & especially during the 1960s-70s, tantamount to slander, espousing that all classical pianists are over-sexed narcissists, it certainly explains it. Especially considering how these very businessmen involved in the reputation slandering were themselves interested in rounding up large swaths of young female runaways (groupies) for sexual purposes at various rock concert and pop-festival venues. It's a typical political ploy: take one's own questionable behavior and put it on the competitor in the form of slanderous mudslinging.

Over the past half-century classical pianists have been marginalized & we must know that this is the result of rock music business forces (Rock culture) together with Hollywood selling other alternative styles of commercial music which appeared fresher and more stylish. You could ask anyone from the Jazz culture & they would complain about the same marginalization of what had just before been popular Jazz music reduced to the margin of popularity. But somehow classical pianists were easily made into the hated characters. Of course, we know now that the reason is how it's too easy to see classical musicians as snobs. Why?

Supposedly it's because classical music is too difficult for most people to appreciate. Therefore it seems as if this music is capable of appreciation only by educated intellectuals. Or worse, it's only for artistic snobs to appreciate. Even though we hear orchestral music almost every time we watch a Hollywood movie.

But there are people in the film industry who have recently been at work trying to change that, too. Fact is, there has been a war for attention & respect pitted between the Rock culture and the Classical music culture beginning with the advent of popular rock music in the 1950s and increasing over the decades in what can only be called vicious attitude. Many people in the Rock culture have shown outward displeasure with Classical music. Again, it's too easy to paint classical as music made by/for snobs. But is this really true about classical music?

Actually, if you want to find snobs around classical music, you wont have to look far. They can always be found in the audience & at the university. But the untold ironic truth of the matter is that the musicians themselves are almost always humble, modest people with very open minds and generous personalities.

Classical musicians, for example are the ones who teach private lessons as a tradition & there are always higher percentages of classical musicians teaching lessons than any other style of music. So classical musicians are often found in similar modest positions as grade school teachers, and usually even more independent than them, too (less hooked up & getting paid less benefits, no union etc). In short, classical musicians are by far the most modest of all the musical personalities. So why the snob reputation?

The culprits are the impresarios (promoters), who were/are the managers of classical music soloists (mostly concert pianists and virtuoso violinists). Along with the aforementioned snobs in the audience & universities. Those are the people responsible for initially ruining the reputation of classical pianists by painting the musicians as artiste snobs. Apparently it's a better sell. The Rock culture picks up on this & runs with it, also finding it a good sell (to hate classical music snobs) among their buying demographic audiences.

Finally, filmmakers cash in on the deal by creating movies with scripts that continue to belittle classical pianists according to this now well known stigma aimed at painting these musicians as stuck up snobs. Never mind that it's an unfair cliche & unrealistic. The stigma prevails. Meanwhile, nobody is more hated by heartland Americans than a stuck up snob. So it seems that Mr Malick realized this when creating his film.

Fact is, painting the protagonist's father as an angry Beethoven type is not only cliche, but obviously a cheap trick aimed to gain favor among so many boomers who had been inundated with this fashioned lie about angry snob classical pianists. The worst part of which is how real classical pianists & private music teachers suffer real reputation harm in American communities across the land.

In the end, it's just more low-brow mentality, the likes of Wayne's World, circulated around the USA. That such mindless viciousness has by now reached a state of tenure & respect in Hollywood should come as no surprise. Like the satire film "LA Story" starring Steve Martin, we are seeing the low-minded end of boomer Rock culture rising from its once youthfully rebellious state, where it was bad enough but still merely a laugh, to that of a respected elder family member whose film apparently everyone is supposed to regard as a serious statement. Satire becomes real life.

This picture, with the laughable surfer stoner character of Jeff Spicoli, played by Sean Penn in what is now considered an icon of the Rock culture and therefore an unshakable typecast, now playing the son of an angry & incommunicable lover of Bach piano music, a demeanor which has made him a lousy parent in a self-created dysfunctional family--vaguely explained here on IMDb as "a complicated relationship"--appears as a satire. As in, the kind of satire where the director/producers create a supposedly serious & ethereal film about spirituality, for consumption by boomers who are the butt of American society as a result of their massive reputation as former drug taking hippies, while laughing all the way to the bank over it.

There is nothing more like The Simpsons cartoon satire, than boomers taking themselves too seriously. That a director, in a vast & mindless tribute to boomers' take on spirituality, would throw in an "angry Beethoven" cliche as the main focus in his film epic, is so thoroughly full of it that it ceases to be even funny anymore. It becomes downright insulting to our intelligence. Should we expect this from the tenure of boomers' American cinema? Of course we should. Which is why this film is the single most disturbing piece of dung out there, in a world filled with disturbing boomer phenomena, such as NAMM, neo-conservatism, drones, chemical warfare, terrorists, black clothed border control police who separate children from their families & institutionalize them, the popularity of spy cameras, fashionable high tech home security systems, women teachers increasingly arrested for having sex with their male teen students, the popularity of alt-right-winged neo-nazi women, endless racially bigoted police brutality etc etc.

So the question remains: Will Americans ever be able to pull themselves out of the muck that its boomer pop-culture (idiocracy) has crassly instilled upon this potentially interesting population? The answer is: yes. When boomers are finally dead & gone, and America's survivors plod on, finally (hopefully) free of this Rock culture crap once & for all.

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"I don't know anything about music. In this business, you don't have to." --Elvis Presley