For a while, I've noticed this weird thing where people try to use films and TV shows to make an analogy to real world issues. But they SUCK at it. The oldest instnace of which I know was an old TV show about aliens infiltrating humanity, which was supposed to be an analogy for McCarthyism. I never saw the show, but I read a novelization about it. The only McCarthyism I can find would seem to be saying the McCarthy was right. In this story, the supposed lunatic whom no one in power, no respectable opinion, believes is actually telling the truth about infiltrators throughout society (I mean, McCarthy was right, too, but I don't think that's where the show was going - ironically, that's one position you canNOT take and remain employed in Hollywood).

There was "Fern Gully," a cartoon when I was a kid all about protecting the rainforest, because there were fairies living in it and, well, Avatar. Basically Avatar. Without humans becoming unhealthily assimilated into non human culture. I think. I didn't watch the end of it. But what I don't get (in Narnia or Middle Earth, either, for that matter) is why that should matter to people in the real world concerning environmental issues. Yeah, deforestation is bad when there are magic pseudo-people living in the trees. But there are no fairies or nymphs or dryads or Ents in the real world. So deforestation is okay, right?

Or there was the last Indiana Jones movie, where Indy is scoffing at anti-Communist paranoia - AFTER he has been kidnapped by Soviet infiltrators, who penetrated a highly classified military base, near a nuclear testing facility. That's not paranoia!

And don't even get me started on the X-men. Just don't.

Back on the second season of "Boardwalk Empire," the Klu Klux Klan showed up. In New Jersey. As it has been known to. The Klan were antagonists to the main characters and it is plain from how they were written that the showrunners didn't want the audience to think well of them...except they wrote them as the heroes. It's like on "Game of Thrones" where they have everyone talking about how despicable Cersei is, except they forget to show anything bad she has done in between ordering a wolf killed and blowing up a church which was expecting her to show to be tortured or killed. On "Boardwalk Empire" the Klan supposedly gains traction in AC out of resentment towards the black working class community in the city, where they occupy a lot of service positions, as you'd expect in a resort town in the 1920s. But they don't bother to show any real bigotry. The black community is introduced as the constituency and foot soldiers of a black crime boss who is an ally of the town's political boss, Nucky Thompson. Nucky is utterly corrupt. He's a county official who almost never sets foot in his office, has officials & local businesses paying him kickbacks and protection, his brother is the police chief and his muscle, to the extent of performing executions for him, and the black crime boss is in business with him, and turns out the black community to vote in Nucky's favor, which in turn, strengthens his hold on the political scene, as the politicians have to court his favor. And he's getting involved in the now-illegal booze trade and hobnobbing with Arnold Rothstein, and the founders of Murder Inc and the Five Families, as the early seasons of the show detail Thompson's transition from a corrupt politician to a full-blown gangster. And he's a Republican. No doubt, Hollywood was unable to resist leaving the GOP as the dominant party they were at the time, so they can wallow in their portrayal of corrupt Republicans (in the same way conservative audiences take the schadenfreude up to 11 watching the Democrats on "The Wire" flail around in their self-created messes), but they are seemingly unwittingly unpacking a whole lot of historical truths that are unfamiliar to the modern audience.

I mean, when you are fed up with corrupt Republican dominance, whom do you call? Why, the Democrats! And for the majority of its history, the Klan was the militant arm of the Democratic party. So, yeah. It's completely realistic that they'd show up in such a time and place. So when the aforementioned black crime boss has a bootlegging operation that gets hit, he immediately suspects the Klan and threatens Thompson with trouble if something isn't done post-haste. So the police "arrest" the head of the Klan in a public meeting, drag him off to a private residence, where the black boss tortures the audience with a typical HBO monologue, in which a character relates an anecdote about his family past that is so perfectly illustrative of the themes of the episode and the scene, and tortures the Klansman with actual knives. He comes out of the interrogation with the news that the Klansman doesn't know anything, and the amusing little note that he realized this halfway through, and just kept torturing him for fun. Remember, at this point, the Klan in AC has not done anything illegal. All they have done is pass out fliers and hold meetings. It turns out the culprits of the hit were rival gangsters, and their trademark warning was misread as racist tagging. Later on in the show, the Klan finally gets around to doing something awful, aside from bearing the name of a group that will be unfashionable in the period in which their TV show is produced. In retaliation for the unwarranted kidnapping, torture and mutilation of their leader, they shoot up an isolated hideaway where several black people are at work...diluting alcohol with formaldehyde! The show portrays this as a hate crime, and Thompson is at fault for not moving swiftly to address this grievance of his crime boss ally. Take away the name of the Klan, and make everyone involved white and the story, based purely on the actions and established character of the people in it, is one of heroic resistance. A political group that gathers openly and ostensibly under the protection of the Constitution to effect a change in a corrupt political regime has its leader kidnapped, tortured and maimed by the lawful authorities with no due process, at the behest of an mafia boss who helps rig elections. All legal avenues for justice or redress of their grievance exhausted, they obtain weapons, and in an isolated location, free of the danger of collateral damage, attack a criminal operation, engaged in actively malicious activity, namely poisoning their supply of illegal intoxicants to increase their profits. It's not even like this attack is pointless - the "victims" are all engaged in harmful and illegal activity, and they know it. There are no innocents to be harmed and if they can hurt the crime boss enough, the corrupt regime will lose his critical support. If you have no legal recourse, it's not a bad way to go. But screenwriters think all you have to do is indicate the teams, and people will root for the correct one, while suspending all critical thinking.

There has also been a lot of stuff with Mexicans and immigration. For example, the current TV series, "Mayans MC" or "Sicario" movie franchise. In way too many of these shows, they are attempting to say something about the plight of these poor Mexicans, except they almost universally portray a population whose transnational status and fluid residence gives them advantages in dealing with American natives, and who hold a superior loyalty to their birth culture, above that of the country they allegedly wish to join, or the standards of decent people to not affiliate with criminals and terrorists. America is a mean horrible place for condemning Mexicans to live in the country they messed up, where the problems are other Mexicans, but at the same time, every entertainment advocating for the cause of Mexicans portrays Mexicans as being Mexican first, law abiding citizens or Americans well behind that.

I'm not saying "make TV shows and movies that show my issues" or "don't propadandize in TV shows or movies", I just want them to actually tell the message they WANT, instead of demonstrating a case where their issue is irrelevant or providing hypotheticals that contradict their position.