A tell-tale sign of a decadent society where people are depressed and unfulfilled, more interested in escape from life than engagement with life because everything they might live for is compromised in the name of profit at the expense of everything else.
I don't know what point you think you're making, but it's not helpful and there is nothing about this that anybody should be proud of.
He doesn't seem to be implying that this is new. Rather, that this is something that happens to any decadent society society where people are depressed and unfulfilled.
Which I find ridiculous to be honest, every generation laments the downfall of society, it's nothing new at all.
Distribution groups like A24 are still carrying the torch, but the mass consolidation of Hollywood really seems to have greatly diminished the variety of bread and circuses available.
Not really, where exactly am I going to get dragons in real life?
For some reason dubious psychologists had a thing for King Arthur stuff for quite a while and I'm not really sure there's any dragons in there, there's weird fisher kings and stuff. I think someone is rich enough and has enough free time (probably over a billion now, but similar people existed in the past in lower numbers), they would find some weird thing to work on or think about.
I've been reading some of his books recently and enjoy them, he's a legend for a reason. But once you get accustomed to the style and archaic words, you start to realize the stories and characters are pretty basic. Where he really shines are the creative premises.
Science fiction is historically not escapist at all, but that has somewhat changed.
These days we have adults everywhere who will openly exclaim their plain adoration of dragons and robots and hobbits devoid of any particular meaning or social value. They just merely love dragons and robots and hobbits. This is escapism and it's historically unprecedented.
That is not something American cinema ever done tho.
humans have been obsessed with fantasy for centuries and even more.
We live in a time when adults everywhere will openly exclaim their adoration for fantastical nonsense. They will unabashedly assure you that they simply adore dragons and robots and hobbits, devoid of any purposeful meaning or relation to the world we live in. Almost nobody who loves zombie films, for example, has the first clue what zombies meant when first devised.
They are literally the same. Fantasy is just modern mythology and most fantasy is rooted in ancient historical tales or historical events. The Kree-Skrull war for example was based on WWII USA vs Japan.
Old mythological stories and religions are based on historical events and switched to entertain. It's almost a certainty that Ramanaya never happened but Indian invasions of Sri Lanaka did happen etc.
> Almost nobody who loves zombie films, for example, has the first clue what zombies meant when first devised.
Ok and who cares? People don't speak ancient Sanskrit or old English either. Are you going to be complaining people who love English don't have the first clue what English looked like when it was invented.
Ever heard of Odyssey and Homer? That is adults being fascinated by escapist features long long time ago. We have records of adults entertainment and adults being fascinated by entertainment from pretty much any historical periods we have records from.
Literally the oldest surviving epic is Gilgamesh, which features Tiamat, the mother of dragons.