My commentary on the 'conservatives"finally discovering what The Boys is actually about:

My commentary on the 'conservatives"

finally discovering what The Boys is actually about:

My favorite movie when I was young was Fight Club.  

Tyler Durden was my guy. Brad Pitt made that character seem like the coolest white dude on earth. I watched that movie so much I probably could have recited most of it.

Moving through the world with nothing but your brain, your words, and your hands, and you can get a couple hundred thousand people to follow you to the end of the world? Whatever the black version of that was, I want to be it because that was some dope shit. 

I have to say that it's a lot easier building a cult following with the internet.

Plus, the movie made fun of a lot of things. It made poked fun at mindless consumerism(the IKEA lifestyle), the corporatization of everything(little did they know back in 1999), climbing the corporate latter to nowhere, the unending male obsession with women, the ever decreasing outlets for masculinity, the search for meaning in life, culture, counter culture, everything. An endless list of the unintentional consequences of modern society were derided in this movie. Despite the shallow title, it was an exceptionally deep, thoughtful, and inspiring movie in a lot of ways.

It was about unplugging from the matrix more than even The Matrix.

And in 2000, for a teenageer(I'm old, I get it), even though there were hints all throughout the movie, when you finally get to the scene where EVERYTHING flips and you discover who the actual protagonist and antagonist are, there's nothing more mind blowing. 

You don't know what to believe. You don't know who to root for. And you probably subconsciously started aligning to an idealogy that seemed so freeing... and then you realize it was a foundation built on a sand dune.

Fast forward: I'm in mid 20s, haven't seen it a while, and with a fresh eye and more life experience, I happen to sit down and watch it. 

Shocking experience, let me tell you. Just like the first time watching that scene that flipped the meaning of the movie, just having lived some life after watching it had flipped the entire theme and meaning of the movie yet again.

While it still poked fun at the things it previously did, the solutions it had offered that I once idolized? It was poking fun at those too.

The fighting, the super cool friend who does all the wild shit and gets the girl, the hyper(now toxic) masculinity, the way the characters experience women in the movie (hint, it's pretty gay and I don't mean that as a slight in any way), the search for meaning in life for the protagonist, discovering zen, friendship and comradery, acting on your intentions, discovering purpose, how the masses who unplugged from the matrix just plugged into another matrix, and on and on and on. 

In every single way that I had once idealized the "cool" shit in that movie, I realized the director, David Fincher, was POKING FUN AT THAT TOO.

If anything, the one takeaway from the movie is that Fincher doesn't like any of those characters, isn't rooting for them in any way, doesn't want them to be idealized in any fashion at all, and you probably shouldn't infer any deeper meaning other than a general warning not to date or even follow insane people.

Do you know what building up this movie in my mind and attaching a piece of my identity to it only to have it collapse and be totally destroyed and did?

It made it an even greater movie.

As unsubtle a movie as it was in some ways, it was a movie for smart guys who weren't THAT smart. Otherwise you'd get it on the first watch and never watch it again. Or maybe you weren't smart enough to ever get it and you want to be Tyler Durden.

The Boys is kind of like that, but so over the top that even the dumbest guy alive shouldn't need 4 seasons to figure it out. 

If you're that dumb guy, it was ALWAYS making fun of you. You just never grew any intellectual or emotional intelligence and the director finally dumbed it down even further.