Are audiences so sensitive and offended by movie content now

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Oh okay. Why is it that when a lot of people talk about movies that they refer to the past as a more innocent time in movies, but at the same time, movies from the past are more controversial to be people nowadays, if they were supposedly more innocent?

Because it is a myth that people all want to believe that the past was more innocent. You have elements of nostalgia where people mistake how they were sheltered as a child as evidence that things just used to be more simple and innocent, which they are just looking through the past with rose tinted glasses. Or you have cinema that would like to put up an illusion of innocence while they would rather just pretend issues did not exist.

An old western would have Cowboys and Indians, where they could pretend that the native American characters were just savages that could make things hard for the masculine cowboy, ignoring all of the historical issues that the story would gloss over. It was also even easier to often guess who villains were, especially in cases where they could just make them something like queer coded, and usually a simple or innocent style of masculinity was all a hero needed, easy but not often very complex.

Well one thing I've noticed that has come up quite abit is that a lot of people seem to be offended by the movie Tropic Thunder because Robert Downey Jr. plays a character who wears an African skin looking disguise, and pretends to be black.

But is that really offensive though? I mean I'm white for example, and in the movie White Chicks, two black cops, dress up as white women while going undercover. But I thought it was funny, and wasn't offended. Does that make me insensitive?

The whole deal with black face is not just something like a person pretending to be another race, it is specifically about the history of black face. It was where for a good amount of history black actors would not even be hired for black roles, followed by elements of mocking caricatures of black people as a minority group, a low blow of punching down with quite the history.

I personally care less about Robert Downy Jr's portrayal in Tropic Thunder, since a good deal of his character is mocking the type of actor that would the ridiculous thing he is for a role. It is ridiculous in the universe of that movie that someone picked him for the role over a black person. But I can't tell someone else, especially if they are black, whether they should feel offended by it themselves, it is not my place as also a white person.

As a non-binary person, I probably could speak out against Benedict Cumberbatch's character in Zoolander 2 though.

Oh okay. Well Robert Downey Jr. said in an interview that everyone who is offended by it seems to be white, and all the black people are defending him on it and don't seem to be. So so far, it's the white people who are offended by it, or at least according to him.

Critics are also, to some degree, responsible for destroying the credibility of what is going on in movies or about actors. Social media is possibly an even bigger problem, when it comes having people overreacting and guiding others toward… receiving attention for the wrong reasons. Criticizing a piece of art. Anyway, I think you just gotta look at the artwork and a trailer and make your pick.

No movie has ever offended me. I'm not the type that gets offended by media content.

Well I recently saw You Don't With the Zohan, and I laughed hysterically at and found it to be very funny, but also wonder, should people be offended by this, if it makes fun of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Or maybe that conflict could use a little self mockery, and people in that conflict might find the movie funny too?

I guess that's an example, of where I didn't know if I should be offended or not.

I do not know if more people are offended or that the offended have a voice on social media that people in legacy media and companies listen to. 40 years ago a person offended by a movie would be more likely to say “The plot was stupid”, not “it’s offensive, ban the movie”.

Very little gets literally canceled by complainers, it is the influential people that listen to them that do that.