I’ve been collecting some of the astonishingly bad opinions I’ve encountered recently, rhetorical thrusts and parries on the frontiers of the culture wars. I’d intended to write a thoughtful, nuanced post about them but then realised that (a) it was probably beyond me, and (b) the culture wars don’t do nuance.

In any event, I had a poor sleep last night and have had a low-grade headache all day; no doubt the two are linked. Even had I wished to wade into a skirmish, my brain hurts. Instead, I was seduced again by the lure of Netflix and a film called The Old Guard.

The Old Guard features Charlize Theron as a badass 6000-year-old immortal warrior. We can distinguish her from Highlander because she has an axe rather than a sword. A bad-pharma guy attempts to steal the secret of the immortality of her and her team of ace immortal warriors; violent shenanigans ensue.

This, like The Warrior Nun, is classic Netflix material: a string of cliches strung together by reasonable production values and a good cast. One might cavil at the narrative framing and fetishisation of the military; one might point again to the reliance on the stages of the monomyth, but what’s the point? Charlize Theron, who has a production credit, is a talented actor and an engaging lead. The two hours passed without at any point requiring me to think, and, therefore, without aggravating my headache.

Some time ago, discussing a show I have since given up on (It May Seem Hokey, But…), I wrote that:

The tenor of my criticisms of a lot of this stuff is that, in a golden age of television, including genre television, too many shows aren’t rising to the challenge and being all they could be. I would expect writers, producers and directors with ambition and talent to look at how genre TV has developed since Babylon 5, through Buffy, and The Wire, and in more recent times through Twin Peaks, Game of Thrones, Jessica Jones, The Deuce and Sense8, and raise their game accordingly (and I note in passing J Michael Straczynski and David Simon were each responsible for two of those). No doubt there are budget issues, and studio expectations, and Supergirl is pitched at a different audience to those I cite, but that doesn’t negate my expectations as a viewer. And it’s not just writers et al: my expectations run to choice of lenses and camera angles, lighting, and sound design.

My thoughts on these Netflix shows are still essentially the same. In conversation online with friends yesterday, though, I realised that this is not a function of bad writing per se. It is to do with a kind of expected, professionalised writing, in which manipulation of familiar tropes brings a reward. It isn’t what you might call an artistic reward, but art is for elites and old people (that is, over the age of 30). Which brings me back to the culture wars, babies.

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Music. Someone online earlier commented that Suzanne Vega was his favourite songwriter, bar none. I have to say I’m not overly familiar with her work, though I do have at least two of her albums. And I like this song: