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Baby's first Netflix movie 😍 (discuss.online)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/microblogmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 39 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (8 children)

For the slightest bit of defence: it makes sense. "Nepo baby" generally refers to some kid who doesn't have the qualifications for their role but got it through their parents giving them an unfair chance.

But it makes perfect sense that if you grow up in a house with actors and writers for parents they can both teach you about the business, they'll be happy to pay for that kind of education, and they'll be super encouraging because unlike most families, to them becoming an actor or director is a perfectly reasonable goal.

It's like a child of doctors growing up to become a doctor. On one hand their parents could have just pulled some strings, on the other hand, having parents excited to teach you organic chemistry and advanced math in middle school probably helps you a lot when it comes to qualifying for med school.

I don't think all Hollywood nepo babies are like this. I'm just saying you would expect to see children of great actors become actors themselves.

Edit: so some of these responses confuse me. I say in the first paragraph that "nepo baby" generally refers to a subset of children who take on their parents job who are given unfair opportunities despite not being the most qualified for it. It might not be the strict definition but it's my modern understanding of it and it's the thing that people are actually angry about, including me. Acknowledging this at the top is meant to caveat what I'm saying for the rest of the post that I'm not talking about those people.

I agree that in a perfect world all people should get as much access as possible to any education and opportunities they want and I hope we get that.

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  • [–] 14 points 10 months ago

    But all of that training and extra support is exactly what that term is referring to. They wouldn't have gotten that support unless they were born into it. The people aren't as giving with their time to just any kid who wants to study their craft. Maybe some do. We need more of that.

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  • [–] 11 points 10 months ago* (2 children)

    It's like a child of doctors growing up to become a doctor.

    Except these aren't remotely the same scenarios, because it simply doesn't happen as often in any other industry. If anything, the 9/10 number is LOW for entertainment.

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  • [–] 15 points 10 months ago

    It's a terrible comparison.

    Nobody's going to give the child of a talented surgeon the chance to do surgery on themselves.

    But they might give the child of a talented actor a role in a film, this is a situation of connections not nurture.

    Example: After Earth (2013)

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago*

    My point with that comparison is precisely that. That child of doctors is a result of a type of nepotism and they are much more likely to make it in the medical field than a child who may be intrinsically smarter than them but did not have the advantage of having parents who instilled that passion to become a doctor and educated them for the profession at an early age.

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    While what you say is true to a degree the part you’re leaving out is that the kids who don’t have actor/musician/doctor/etc parents are still perfectly capable of learning these things.

    They’re arguably better to bring into the various fields to challenge entrenched perspectives that get perpetuated by systems of momentum that you describe. In acting it’s what creates what led to metoo, in medicine it’s what creates wildly unfair work expectations and elitism, mainly because the old guard did it that way, and if you question the entrenched power “it’s because that’s the way we do things”. New blood is arguably more likely to push back against this because they aren’t as conditioned to play into the system from birth.

    The other part that you leave out, as a result, is that these nepo kids then get an unfair advantage. Take kid A - a nepobaby like Kate winslets son, and kid B, just some kid who was obsessed with acting and writing. Let’s say your perspective is true and the nepobaby kid is obsessed with acting and writing in a wild environment of access to intense creative minds. But kid b is no slouch either, living and breathing acting and writing, constantly accessing whatever mentors they can, watching content online giving advice on process, and most importantly just constantly writing (or playing, acting, whatever) for years and years and years.

    They’re both immensely talented individuals at this point. But what’s the difference? Kid A has connections capital to make films and eventually to production deals if they are any good. Kid B, at best, can scrape together a few grand to make a student film because they’re not affluent and their circle of peers is also broke. Even if they scrape together something noteworthy they have no connections whatsoever to industry.

    In more extreme examples it’s a mediocre singer getting connected to hitmaker producers and media promotion while there are 10,000 excellent artists on Spotify with under 1,000 streams because they don’t have the capital to professionally record and promote their shit

    Etc

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago*

    I edited the post to further acknowledge that I'm not talking about the advantage of parents being connected in the industry. Which I mention in the first paragraph of my post. It's a larger problem in the entertainment industry than most because that industry is so cut-throat and competitive and frankly because more than most industries mediocre talent can be mitigated by the dozens of other people working with them to make the product, not to mention the ability of marketing to exalt people who might not deserve it. Rereading your post it seems you were responding exclusively to that which I thought was pretty clearly not the subject of my post.

    I was simply acknowledging the fact that things like passion, obsession, and talent are all things that are heavily influenced by parents. Kid A could be intrinsically worse at music than Kid B (for as much as we know about nature vs nurture) but if Kid A has musician parents who encourage lessons, or even teach the kid themselves from a very young age and Kid B only discovers their passion on their own in high school or later. Kid A will probably always be a better musician due to a form of nepotism.

    While I agree that that's existentially unfair, and maybe we can create a world where all children are given identical education so that we only get the best of the best in every field, I think it's a bit wack to say Kid A doesn't deserve to express their art or even outshine Kid B because they tragically grew up in a music-obsessed family.

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