If you open up any streaming platform these days, you won’t believe it, but I swear to you that until recently, all culture commentators wanted to be screenwriters. For a trivial reason: you earn better. Someone succeeded, and never came back (again for that reason of telegraphic transfers). Others didn’t, because being a screenwriter was a task to get to that required you to know how to build a story.

Then I don’t know what happened, but the end of 2021 has arrived, the one in which the best storytellers clearly decided, yeah, well, let’s put the plot, the characters, everything you want; But, first of all, it has to be there in my movie or in my series Ethics for the zeitgeist, the cultural commentary on who we are and what we want, the powerful metaphor of our limits as a society.

It’s on Sky and Now santa company, One of those simple things (is it still called animation or is it decided that a more complex term is needed?) where Santa Claus has to choose a successor (after the chosen one has gone to work for Jeff Bezos) and an elf she wants to be her, but in short a female, And with her obsession with sustainability and health insurance, she probably isn’t a fit.

We—the audience—must think it’s appropriate, and that it’s only discriminated against because it’s female (the series’ creator Seth Rogen said the bombers come from white supremacists who don’t tolerate Christmas run by a Jewish woman: the voice of dwarf Sarah Silverman). However, when the imp says there are no gift bags at the end of the board because it would be a consumer and a polluter to give us useless things, one cannot help but sympathize with the (perhaps a white supremacist) board member who utters: What do you think? Could it be Christmas?

Not that other platforms are less brimming with goodwill. In Prime there’s Aaron Sorkin who, with the pretense of telling Lucille Ball (a sort of Raffaella Carrà of America) and Love Lucy (a kind of 1950s Casa Vianello), tells the story of McCarthyism and how hard it is. Be the smartest of the bunch when you’re a woman In addition to solving business problems, you must also do it secretly so that the men of the group do not feel deprived of power.

Being Ricardos (Ricardo was the nickname for the couple who, in I Love Lucy, played Lucille Ball and her husband Desi Arnaz) is the most feminist product I’ve seen this year, but the Pavlovian anti-Yorkine curve determined that he’s a male chauvinist writer, and there’s not enough evidence to temper his spontaneous reversal. The reason must be that feminism is now a male pastime, and if you are a male, it is unpleasant to be forced to believe that what Lucille Ball and a few others had in the 1950s is now the main problem of successful women: if you earn more of it , your husband is not attracted to him anymore (not with you at least).

On Netflix, the metaphor is carried away by Adam McKay, who tells in Don’t Look for an Avoidable Apocalypse but unfortunately we’re boring, unfortunately we’re greedy, and unfortunately we have the wrong priorities. Those who want the metaphor repeated in every scene, want to be told two hundred twenty times in two hours and twenty times “Look, this is going to end with vaccines,” and even before the movie ends they want to show it on social media to say it’s going to end like this, Adam McKay is George Orwell this century can afford. It’s not clear to me how vaccinating or not vaccinating could cause a planet to explode when collided with a comet, but it must be because I did poorly in school in metaphors.

There’s also the vengeful man for female success: When Jennifer Lawrence discovers a comet that will destroy the planet, her boyfriend—a columnist with television ambitions who takes it upon himself to do serious journalism and not just scrap for double the flicks—writes a radical piece called “The Chick Who Says We’re All Going to Die?” I fucked her.” He must be the worst of the bad guys – he’s the only reasonable character. He and the general bring water from the White House canteen to the scientists, and charge for it because he took it from the machines.

The paradoxical effect is that all of these products are made to make us a thoughtful middle class — or, if we really are, to make us mirror ourselves in characters who, looking at them, remind us, Hey, we’re the good, we’re well, we don’t inherit the Earth, that’s just because we don’t There is merit – all these products instead make us want to stop recycling, not pay taxes, Go and review the caliphate Where at least they are all mean assholes and no regional professor tries to save the world no well-meaning elf wants a sustainable birthday and no successful woman struggles to please her husband by producers.

Speaking of which: My favorite Santa Inc character. She is a pimp apprentice who, if you look at him not dubbed, has the voice actor playing Cousin Greg in Succession, the Giandon who didn’t grow up among the rich but now that he’s found himself a little bit in the middle he doesn’t want to give up. While Santa Claus repeats that he chose his first black successor, perhaps now he can even choose a woman, in short, who is more progressive, enlightened, and cross-eyed than him?

But the details that reveal, once again, are the wives. When Santa’s wife told the Elf she really enjoyed her board speech, she realized we had a problem. When he told her that his predecessor’s speeches always sounded like a visit to a circus, and her speeches sounded like a Holocaust documentary, he said it was a compliment. You are bored and depressed: you can see that you are a serious person and that if we were a proper society, you would be our first choice to rule the world. Who knows why, Achilles Okito’s maroon jacket was remembered in the televised confrontation with Berlusconi.