Hollywood's Liberal Agenda

Continuing from yesterday.  More bits and pieces.

Despite the way movies sell us a Republican Suburban Idyll as the land where dreams come true and happiness is ever-aftering, it's a socially liberal form of Republicanism and the paradise portrayed is not inhospitable to Democrats and Liberals.  In fact, in real life, a great many Democrats and Liberals live there quite contentedly, cheefully, and even eagerly.

And while the parade of brutal, amoral, authoritarian strong men marching through the movies is attractive to certain Right Wingers who long for a man on a horse to come in and save them from the 21st Century, they are also very appealing to the adolescent boys and adolescently-minded young men who happen to be the prime target audience Hollywood aims at because they have disposable cash they don't mind wasting on giant-sized bins of popcorn and barrels of soda pop that they consume while watching the same action-adventure for the sixth and seventh time.

What's being pushed isn't so much an authoritarian politics as a fantasy of adult male potency...and another trip to the snack bar.

That the ranks of Right Wing public intellectual types and the speechwriting staffs of a lot of Republican politicians are filled with paunchy, pasty, jowly Gen X-ers who like to talk as if they are flat-bellied, rock-jawed, two-fisted bully boys with great shooting-eyes and no fear may be due to too many Rambo movies.  But it may also be that these guys' seminal movie-going experience was Footloose and their bloody-minded politics is all their own.

Movies are a combination of popular entertainment and advertising and both pursuits succeed through flattering their audiences' vanities.  So it may be that movies have become more materialistic and hyper-masculine because America has.

But even though these two forms of "Conservative" idealism are relentlessly repeated in movie after movie, TV show after TV show, I think on the whole movies and TV shows contain far more Liberal tropes than either Republican or Right Wing ones.

For the most part, even in movies featuring Right Wing strong men or Idyllic McMansion-filled suburbs, corporate business types are invariably bad guys, spotted owls and snail darters should always be saved even if it means not building the shopping mall, and Republican politicians and conservative religious types---ministers and believers---are hypocrites, bullies, ignornant rubes, or misguided and closeted Liberals who are just looking to let go and join the fun if only some smart, idealistic young people come along to show them how---the exception being Catholic priests and nuns.

There are no such things in Hollywood as conservative rabbis.

There are plenty of liberal ministers, however, and I might actually watch The Book of Daniel.  The Jesus as an apparently blissed-out surfer dude joke is drawing me in.

That Jesus is played by the actor who played Jack McCall on Deadwood is an added attractive weirdness.

There will never be a big-budget Hollywood movie that presents sympathetically the other side of Erin Brokovich or A Civil Action.

There are corrupt Union officials in the movies, but one of the ways they are corrupt is by being on the side of the bosses and their comeuppance isn't the busting of the Union but losing control of it to honest working men and women who will then stand up to the bosses.  There will never be a conservative Matewan or a movie in which firing Norma Ray and having that pushy New York Jew Union rabble rouser beaten to a bloody pulp and run out of town saves the day.

There will never be a big-budget Hollywood movie that presents as a good thing a gay character being "cured" of his or her homosexuality through faith.  There have been movies and TV shows in which "gay" characters are turned straight by orgasms brought about by wild sex with the "right" partner of the opposite sex, but that brings us to another liberal trope.

Sex is almost always a good thing, beautiful, redemptive, as good for you as it was for me, and totally without consequences except for increasing the love between the two partners---unless it's the case that the hero or heroine made the mistake of going to bed with a psycho-killer.  In romantic movies, sex is bad, at first, because the hero or heroine got involved with the wrong person and just needs to find the right free spirit to sleep with, then sex will be beautiful, redemptive, and better for her than it was for him, although it was great for him too, it's just that real guys are always in control and make women bounce off the ceiling or melt into puddles of joyously weeping goo.

There will never be a movie that tells the "true" story of the Nixon presidency, and George W. Bush better pray to God that Hollywood never gets around to making his life story.

Wait.  I forgot.  It already has.

Comments

[Gotham Image]

Thanks for the link, just noticed - When I get around to having links, I'll have to reciprocate. A movie about the real Bush Presidency cannot be made. It's too unbelievable to work as a script. So, in the meantime, the scripts I'm posting, about people in the Dubyaverse, will have to do.

Nixon is still a great source for ideas - Read the Haldeman diaries when you get a chance. The Nixon tapes are also like a window into a part of our national subconscious. Fascinating.

[The Viscount]

What started out as a comment to this post evolved into Republicanism 101 over at my place. Your blog is a consistent source of inspiration.

[Jennifer]

Ah-hah! That's why the laid-back Jesus was giving me the creeps. I knew he was in something else, but couldn't think of it.

[C.J.Colucci]

Hollywood will eventually make whatever enough people want to watch. I agree that you'll probably never see the anti-liberal-trope movies you described made, but it may be that they just don't write -- or sell. It may be possible to make a good, entertaining movie about a diligent, ethical, hard-working constructive businessman, and I'd like to see one, but I can't imagine how it would write. The other movies would be just too damn dull.

[Rana]

Oh, god, that movie is _hilarious_. Thanks for the link!

[burritoboy]

"For the most part, even in movies featuring Right Wing strong men or Idyllic McMansion-filled suburbs, corporate business types are invariably bad guys, spotted owls and snail darters should always be saved even if it means not building the shopping mall"

That's not really a correct intrepretation. Yes, INDIVIDUAL businessmen are depicted as bad guys. Those individual businessmen are evil for their own perverse individual reasons, but not capitalism or corporations as a system. The thinking is intentionally non-systematic and anecdotal, and the implied solution is equally ludicrous: the hero kills/arrests the evil businessmen, and the remaining good businessmen take over the corporation and make it good. There is no criticism of capitalism as a whole here.

Equally there is no systematic way to oppose the bad businessmen within the world of the modern action movie. There are literally no suggestions that other economic systems could even potentially exist, or that workers or citizens have ever had any collective or democratic way of fighting "evil" businessmen.

[burritoboy]

"There are corrupt Union officials in the movies, but one of the ways they are corrupt is by being on the side of the bosses and their comeuppance isn't the busting of the Union but losing control of it to honest working men and women who will then stand up to the bosses."

First, it's extremely wrong to associate action movies after the Lucasberger revolution with movies either within classical Hollywood or the cinema of liberal America (1943-1972 or so) or independent cinema. We mainly see unions primarily within movies made by outsider directors closely associated with the Left such as Kazan, Dassin and so forth, primarily in a short period in the late 40s and early 50s.

Outside of very particular historic moments and individual productions, workers as a class don't exist. Focusing on the Lucasberger era, it's even worse - nobody below very upper middle class exists. Modern movies depict "middle middle class" as a partner in a major law firm or a successful architect with his own firm or doctor with a thriving suburban practice - in reality, most of these would be firmly in the very wealthiest sections of society. There's no depiction of unions because there is no realistic depiction of ANY workplace (which makes sense since the core audience of modern action movies is boys aged 12-24, who have no substantive experience in the workplace).

Thom Anderson, in his masterpiece movie "Los Angeles Plays Itself" notes that the depiction of economic realities within modern action movies is quite literally insane. Unemployed writers rent large Malibu beach-front houses. A book store clerk lives in a house in the Los Angeles hills with a 180-degree view. Cops live in ultra-modern spacious condos with beach views.

Conversely, the urban poor live in the movies in an environment that resembles a bombed-out Berlin in May 1945. No attempt is made to show that many sections of South Central Los Angeles and East Los Angeles, though poor (and there are very wide variations within those two vast areas), have vibrant commercial districts, arts institutions and public buildings.