* Whites like Del Toro sit as a thin film at the top of Mexican society, much as Jews do in the US. In both cases, the .7-1.0 SD difference in IQ at the group level leads to several orders of magnitude of outsized influence.
It’s La Griffe’s smart-fraction theory through the lens of ethnic networking.
Del Toro the individual, who would be a despised conquistador in Chiapas, is a typical Hollywood/Manhattan courtier peddling crap that he knows will receive support and acclaim from the Ministry of Information.
* Bottom line, ‘the fringes’ are really the centers of power. They are the ones who cannot be criticized in any way, are the defacto Aristocracy, and do most of the censoring and controlling of society’s boundaries.
* Del Toro is one of those people, like James Whale, Tim Burton and David Cronenberg, who have a gift for design, but aren’t terribly good at storytelling.
* I think you hit Del Toro’s weakness on the nose – he’s spending hundreds of millions of dollars setting moods with visual design but without stories to match. The visual style can fool you into thinking there’s going to be a good film but it just doesn’t work out that way.
He also seems to have a fetish for inserting his own Manichean politics into his projects. Of course both Pan’s Labyrinth and Devil’s Backbone featured Francoists as the baddies. The Strain couldn’t resist making both the original Vampire a fan of the NAZIs and his adjutant an actual NAZI, and hitting you over the head with NAZI parallels to the vampires.
* Remember Mohamed Noor, the Minneapolis policeman who for unknown reasons shot and killed a nice Australian tourist when she tried to say something to his partner? Turns out he was hired after the city drastically lowered their standards for psychological screening in the name of diversity. Welp, turns out that those lowered standards are still keeping out too many vibrant applicants, so they are being lowered even further.
