Some random thoughts about the divergence in Western and Chinese entertainment media

For a long time i've been getting more and more disinterested and disappointed with the state of the Western film industry. There's just barely anything there anymore that appeals to me. So i've been watching more Chinese movies and TV series over the past year and i've noticed something. Looking past the differences in style or technical aspects where they may lag behind, there's just something about the way that they are written and acted that is just so refreshing to me. I see people often call it cheesy but what it actually is is a real optimism and genuineness about them. A sort of emotional earnestness that they are not ashamed of. They are not cynical and irony poisoned and pessimistic in the way that so much content coming out of the Western entertainment industry is nowadays. When you first start getting into it it feels really alien. It doesn't translate well to where the Western cultural Zeitgeist is currently at, which is a very dark place to be honest. But the more i see the more i appreciate it.

And it really shows the difference between the mood in their society where, despite difficulties, things keep improving all the time, and our own societies where clearly things are getting worse and worse every year. So our media of course also reflects that with darker themes, pessimistic about human nature, full of violent treacherous sociopaths and ubermenschen, post-apocalyptic scenarios with no vision of how a better society could look but instead more of the same broken, dysfunctional, egotistical, inhumane system that we have now, consumerist distraction, and empty social critique that describes but never actually offers any solution, because we have internalized that "there is no alternative". The only "solutions" offered are individualistic and idealistic, of the singular powerful savior or the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" type, or of the "all we need are the right words to say that will convince people to stop being bad".

Anyway, these were just some thoughts that were going through my head last evening as i was watching some stuff. This isn't a rigorous analysis, i don't have a comparative case study to present and i'm not a film critic, it's just how i feel.