How TikTok Reduces Irish Life to a Cliché

Against the G-Splitters

Photo by Tavis Beck on Unsplash

Anthony Lane, the film critic for the New Yorker, once noted in a review of Mission: Impossible 2 that the more global a film’s ambitions, the more it tends to reduce any individual country to a narrow set of stereotypes (he was critiquing a scene in the movie that tells us we’re in Spain with a close-up of a flamenco dancer’s clacking castanets). We might worry that movies are becoming a less vital artistic force in recent decades but a quick glance at social media shows you that new media is experiencing the same problems as the old, in an even more concentrated and obnoxious form.