Hollywood's Right Wing agenda

On the run today so I'm going to violate the magician's rule and write today's post in bits and pieces right before your very eyes, thereby giving away all my tricks.

Nancy Nall saw Million Dollar Baby for the first time over the weekend and has posted some of her thoughts, one of which is that the movie in no way does what Right Wing critics insisted it did, including advocating a "culture of death."

Which, because I was thinking along these lines after yesterday's post, has me wanting to make the case that over the last 25 years or more Hollywood has not been pushing its Liberal agenda nearly as much and as hard and profitably as it has been pushing a Republican and even a Right Wing one.

First, let's look at the way that Hollywood pushes a plain old Republican agenda.

Forget North Country.  Almost all its movies are concerned with the doings of upper middle class white people whose lifestyles and life choices it almost invariably celebrates.  Most movies show that happiness is well-accessorized with consumer goods and luxury items, that the good life is to be bought with gobs of money earned by working at a great, self-aggrandizing career.

Second, forget Brokeback Mountain and look at how Hollywood movies treat love in general---as the be-all and end-all of male-female relations.

Love is the Answer, always, and love is permanent, monogomous, and leads almost always to a wedding, children---so far Democrats can be on board with this too---and an expensive life in a big house in the suburbs.

In Hollywood love stories, love means settling down.

By way of an aside here:  Forget Hollywood's supposed Feminism.  The Feminism that movies and TV shows preach is the most superficial and Republican kind---their feminism is a matter of giving beautiful and talented and already privileged upper middle class white women anything their hearts desire, including a glamorous, self-aggrandizing career that makes them oodles of money that they use to buy themselves expensive shoes and gorgeous apartments; but when the time comes these women will find the right guy, marry, settle down, and raise the kids.  Finally, the point of feminism in the movies is a big house in the suburbs.  The only way this isn't a Republican paradise is that movie wives actually give up their careers and raise the kids without hiring nannies that they pay substandard wages. 

Third, in the generation since the original Star Wars, Hollywood's bread and butter hasn't been blockbusters, but blockbuster action-adventure movies.  And forget Munich, in almost all action-adventure movies---definitely in most of the most successful---there is a sharp divide between Good and Evil, and Good is us and Evil is Them, and it's Good's job---our job---to stamp out Evil.

Now here's where Hollywood veers sharply to the Right.

Star Wars is almost unique among the blockbuster action-adventure movies of the last generation in insisting that there is a code that the Good Guys have to follow and they can't break that code without becoming villains themselves.

This is explicitly the theme of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, but Lucas began to introduce it right from the first with the news that at one time Darth Vader was a good guy and then he made it flat out his main point in Return of the Jedi when Luke refuses to kill Vader and lets the Emperor try to kill him rather than call on the power of the Dark Side to save himself and the Rebel fleet.

Luke isn't committing suicide here.  He trusts that by keeping to the code he will accomplish what he needs to accomplish, bring Anakin back from the Dark Side, and defeat Emperor Palpatine.

Lo and behold!

But although Star Wars begat countless action-adventure movies, it begat no more Lukes.

Instead for the next twenty years we had Rambo, the Terminator, Steven Seagal, the Die Hard movies, and Indiana Jones.

In all these incarnations, the hero isn't bound by any code.  He isn't even defined by his virtues.  He is good because he is the hero and the bad guys want him dead.  (Yes, I remember that in the first Terminator movie, the Terminator was a bad guy.  I'm really talking about Schwartzegger in most of his movies, of course.)  Evil is very clearly defined as the work of monsters, but Good is defined only by its hatred of Evil and the violence it uses to stomp it out.

The stomping part is the important part.

And whatever he needs to do to stomp it out is fine.

For a generation Hollywood has been selling us the idea that Heroes are angry, brutal, violent, and Right.  Good is what they say and what they do.  This is an extremely Right Wing notion, that law and order are what the authoritarian strong man says they are and that not only are we to accept this, we are to applaud it and fall in line to cheer the strong man on.

It's heartening that since Schwartzenegger's, Stallone's, and Harrison Ford's knees gave out on them, Hollywood hasn't been able to find any reliable successors, but they haven't stopped looking.

Hello, Matt Damon.  Hello, the Rock.

This is all a bunch of gross generalizations that I need to tie together.  Like I said, I'm on the run, so I'll have to leave it here.

Look up some FSBO Hollywood homes if you decide to move there.

Comments

[Linkmeister]

TV, generally. Jack Bauer, specifically.

[sfmike]

Good generalizations. For reasons of cultural immunization, I'm watching DVDs of Season Two of "24," the post-9/11 season with a nuclear bomb going off near Los Angeles to terrorize the plebes. Filled with scene after scene of "terrorists" being tortured to save innocent American citizens, I haven't seen such transparent propaganda since Leni Riefenstahl was making "Triumph of the Will." It was softening up everybody for what was to come in the New World Order. Plus, it's ridiculous enough in a throw-in-the-kitchen-sink kind of way that it becomes a new genre, Terrorist Camp.

Linkmeister is right. From "Cold Case" to "CSI" to whatever other piece of crap Mr. Bruckheimer and friends are using to terrify the general populace, TV in general and Jack Bauer in particular really are creepy and frightening.

As for the pushing of Total Consumer Values as the way to goodness and happiness over the last couple of decades, Hollywood moviemaking really does have a lot to answer for. The effect has been pernicious on the entire world.

[Shakespeare's Sister]

Spot on, Mannion.

One of the notable exceptions to this, which you've mentioned (and I've written about, too) are the recent reimaginings of comic heroes, most notably Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man ("With great power comes great responsibility") and Christian Bale's Batman ("It's not who I am underneath, but what I do, that defines me"), both of whom wrestled with their identities specifically within respective code of ethics modeled for them by men they felt the need to live up to. They each face an option between virtue and apathy - which is, in some way, even more interesting (in its realism) than good vs. evil.

A similar example is the world of the X-Men, which is also not a straight good vs. evil (or an us vs. them) scenario. It could easily have been mutants pitted against non-mutants, but instead, it's mutants (aligned in some cases with sympathetic non-mutants) against other mutants - and each has a clearly defined agenda. And, yet, on some occasions, the opposing mutant groups (X's and Magneto's) have allied themselves together to work against a non-mutant threat to all mutants. It's a complicated and interesting world that relies on ethics and politics - and, as an aside, happens to be one of the rare examples of a network of characters that also features mulitple good and bad female characters.

[The Heretik]

Jack Bauer violates the Fourth Amendment before the first spoonful of Cheerios every morning. We eat this breakfast of champions McKrap TM every day as part of a "normal" American diet.

[burritoboy]

What's interesting is that while our modern drek-meister movie directors insist on pretending they are great scholars of film history, the modern action-adventure movie is actually the moral reverse of action-oriented movies of classic Hollywood (since there were technically no purely action movies within classic Hollywood, the actual genres were Westerns, mysteries, gangster/crime, etc.)

Even in the most brutal movies of classic Hollywood - Westerns that involved the hero fighting against Indians - there were never any heroes near as abysmal as the ones regularly featured in modern action movies. The old Western heroes might have been Indian-killers, but they were rarely sadistically brutal, violent for the sake of violence, or as ludicrously anti-social and psychotic as most modern action heroes.

The modern action hero is a highly disturbing construct - the character conception is that his might (whether in Dirty Harry's large pistols or Schwarzenegger or Stallone's bulging biceps) makes right. Dirty Harry, really the first harbinger of the modern action genre, was an intentional antithesis of classical Hollywood's police officer. Classical Hollywood's archetypal police officer hero is actually a true conservative: kind and polite to non-criminals (and great pains were taken to show that he respected all economic classes of people, something egregiously violated today), a close follower of laws and rules, a man with an ordered existance of office, duty, family and religion, well-dressed and well-mannered, a citizen within an ordered and right community. Right was made right by the law and the rightness of the American regime standing behind those laws. The classic cop hero might use violence when forced to, but his existance is defined by the same modes and orders as any other citizen.

Our modern cop hero is a "nothing man", one without community, family, religion, propriety or even laws. He only comes into being with violence. It's notable that many modern cop heroes are actually unable to talk except within violent settings. We're not talking about laconic (which is in some sense a heightening of communication), we're talking about "heroes" essentially unable to communicate anything. They deal with fellow humans only in the frame of violence. The modern cop movie will depict an environment of no community, randomized individuals who come together as a group only to cheer the "hero" after he has emerged from murdering his opponents - i.e. the rabble cheering the concept of "might makes right" and their bloody-handed natural leaders, great blond beasts, taking command over them.

[catherine]

Good comments, SFMike, but I see that your examples are comic book heroes. They're not real men. Is there some message there? Are the creators of superheroes (of the graphic variety) a different breed of writer?

And, does it frighten anyone else that 24 is as popular as it is? And have you noticed that what started out as a fun kind of comic book show (Alias) has turned into a bunch of thugs who kill anyone in sight. (Yes, I know, the premise of Alias was that Sydney left the bad spies and went to the CIA - the good spies - but I accepted that as a way into an enjoyable, friend-oriented send-up of spy shows in general.) But, alas, no longer.

[Rana]

Lance, I'm really liking this series of posts. Lots to think about here.