SJW Grooming by Netflix

Although I have developed an aversion for trying to find something worth watching, my wife and I often watch a movie beginning around dinnertime. Browsing movies on streaming platforms is sufficiently unpleasant that we usually disagree as to which of us has to control the remote. Example: to browse the offerings of the premium channels (HBO, Cinemax, Starz, etc), one must choose A - Z (alphabetical order, beginning with the many movies with numbers in the title). Even if you limit it to a single genre (drama, sci-fi, etc), you must still scroll through screens of 5 movies or so per line of thumbnails ad infinitum. One of them used to allow the reverse, Z - A, but I think that’s gone now. In any case, by the time I get to E or F, my viewing desire has become a bit flaccid. You get the picture.

Yesterday, in our usual desperation, we landed on Enola Holmes, produced by Netflix Originals. It began comfortably enough, as we learn of Sherlock Holmes’ younger sister, Enola. That, of course, is associated with the first atomic bomb, which impression - that of a bomb - only grew as the film progressed. Early on, I predicted to my wife the message is going to be ‘social justice warfare’.

How right I was. As the story opens, we are instructed how Enola’s relationship with her mother was wonderful, that her mother and she were inseparable and her mother saw to her complete education; right up until her mother disappears without warning. To spare both writer and reader unnecessary suffering at this juncture, it behooves us to cut to the chase.

It was the time of agitation in England for women’s suffrage. At the (merciful) conclusion, the mother explains that she had to abandon her teenage daughter to fight for women’s right to vote, because she could not bear to leave her daughter the world as it was. One need not be clever to infer that the generalizable narrative is that parental responsibilities are in second place compared to Social Justice Warfare - and we learn, mid-film from observing a large cache of weapons and explosives - that the term ‘warfare’ is not an exaggeration. Oh, I almost forgot to mention, in the 2020 production, Netflix manages to work in (too) many episodes of cross dressing and androgyny. I think there is presently a quota, a minimum number of such scenes, is now de rigueur.

Although I don’t encourage you, gentle reader, to suffer this ‘entertainment’, I suggest that, if you do, keep a basin handy - as this flic is a surefire Emesis Award© winner.

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Not even an original idea: Dickens lampooned this kinda woman very well in the character Mrs. Jellyby, full of tender concern for foreign nationals while her own children were starved for attention, languishing of neglect. So evil.

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Yes, indeed you are right! The fact that it didn’t enter my mind (despite the fact that Bleak House is one of my ATFaves), I attribute to a loss of thought plasticity associated my “seasoned citizen” (HT Rush Limbaugh) status. Attempts to accurately measure this phenomenon have failed. There is, however an axiomatic approximation reminiscent of Newton’s Third Law: “the brain hardens even as the member softens”.

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