This has been a big week for conservatives weighing in on le cinema, what with, for one thing, National Review’s Top 25 Conservative Movies of the past who the hell knows years. I haven’t weighed in on the, um, material contained therein, ’cause it’s not really my department and all (UPDATE: see here for a far more expert assessment), but rest assured that I was exceptionally tickled by such gems as Kathryn Jean Lopez’s I‑actually-don’t-like-it-at-all-but-it’s-still-a-classic-cause-the-chick-in-it-doesn’t-get-an-abortion assessment of Juno, and Michael Long’s not-naming-names-because-there-actually-aren’t-any observation apropos The Edge, “[s]ome have interpreted the film as a Cold War allegory because it features a menacing bear.” Hilarious, and believe me, there’s more, including an elsewhere noted write-up of Master and Commander that’s all, “see, even a liberal like A.O. Scott can recognize this movie’s conservatism!” And indeed he can. I should note the list actually highlights far more good movies than bad, which is nice.
But, more to the point, the week also brought “A Report to the Industry” by culture warriors Ted Baehr and Tom Snyder (not the dead one), and it is from their February 12 Wall Street Journal piece, “A Hollywood Stimulus Plan: Make More Uplifting Movies,” that I extract the nugget of perplexity which inspires this post’s hed:
What’s especially amusing is that “An American Carol” only made about 7 million. But when your data set includes Indiana Jones 4, which made over 700 million…
Ah, statistics.
Oops, Indy 4 only made 317 million domestically, and I see they’re using domestic numbers. Mea culpa.
Well, considering the grosses of “Moon,” and particularly “Ember,” they really needed “Indy” to get that particular average up…
That first article should have been titled “Grasping at Straws”. My personal favorite was their inclusion of “Brazil”, which includes this hilarious observation:
“Terrorist bombings, national-security scares, universal police surveillance, bureaucratic arrogance, a callous élite, perversion of science, and government use of torture evoke the worst aspects of the modern megastate.”
So, basically, “Brazil” represents an exaggeration of how it was to live under the Bush administration. That said, most of the movies are good, but to classify most of them as conservative is quite a stretch. “300” is the best fit for the list, but the movie is garbage.
That quote from the Wall Street Journal is cheating the grosses. If you take “Indiana Jones” out of the anticommunist group, the average drops significantly as all the other movies were major flops. The supposedly pro-communist movies were all independent films, which, of course, are going to average lower than the movies from the first group as they weren’t released in many theaters and are going to appeal to smaller audiences because they’re not meant to be mainstream Hollywood product like “Indiana Jones” or “City of Ember”, not because of their thinly-veiled Stalinesque leanings.
And, Glenn, Woody Allen has been sneaking pro-communist messages into his films since “Bananas”. Didn’t you know that?
Tom beat me to it, but let me second his “bullshit” on the average of An Americal Carol’s costs with Indiana Jones’. I think it’s safe to say that only one of those films relied overwhelmingly/exclusively on its political conservatism to attract audiences, and it ain’t the one that cleared $100 million…or $10 million for that matter.
I really have to check out those two links. I share some of the conservatives’ distaste for contemporary cinema, but then they have to go spoil everything with their poor taste. Why not take refuge in a Buckleyesque Western-Civ-fetishizing cultural elitism, rather than this market-knows-best dumbed-down-blockbuster-but-with-a-right-wing-bent kick? At least then they’d have an aesthetic leg to stand on.
How about factoring “Iron Man” in as implicitly pro-communist? After all, Tony Stark starts off as a weapons manufacturer and turns against the military industrial complex.
This would help even out the numbers somewhat.
@ MovieMan: there are one or two such Western-CIv boosting titles on the list, but National Review has wandered so far from the Buckley roots that nobody participating seems to have noticed the most recent film adaptation of WFB fave “Brideshead Revisited.” For what it’s worth, here’s how I break down the films on the NR list:
Masterpieces:
“Metropolitan”
“Brazil”
“The Incredibles”
“Gran Torino”
Creditable to Excellent:
“Master and Commander”
The “Rings” Trilogy
“Simple Plan”
“Dark Knight”
“Groundhog Day”
“The Lives of Others”
“Team America: World Police”
Not-My-Cup-Of-Tea to Meh:
“Narnia”
“The Edge”
“Juno”
“Gattaca”
“Heartbreak Ridge”
“United 93”
“Pursuit of Happyness”
“Braveheart”
Unmitigated Crap:
“We Were Soldiers”
“Ghostbusters”
“Blast From The Past”
“300”
“Forrest Gump”
Red Dawn:
“Red Dawn”
As for the apparent Commie leanings of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” – I guess threesomes have always been socialist, right? From each according to his ability …
These people are morons.
A second comment was accidentally deleted before posting, but I was going to say I actually thought the NR list was MORE Buckleyesque than I expected (which isn’t saying much, but still.)
I like Gump, and think it’s more ambivalent about the 60s than its boosters (and perhaps even the film itself) realize, but if I thought it was as draconian about the era – not to mention its sexually abused heroine, whose fate Charlotte Hayes sneeringly implies is deserved – I’d probably consider it “unmitigated crap” too. Surprised to see Ghosbusters on your shit list though – care to elaborate?
What really fascinates me about the NR list, and by extension the increasingly contentious conservative movement as a whole, is its contradictions. One moment we’re praising hard-work-gets-you-ahead in The Pursuit of Happyness, the next exalting the hierarchical everyone-in-his-proper place elitism of Master & Commander. Big Brother is good for Batman (and Bush), but bad (and liberal) when it comes to Brazil. And then there’s The Incredibles which pits two visions of conservatism – elitist and entrepeneurial – against each other, and gives the former the upper hand. One could even say that the film ISN’T conservative, at least in the modern sense, that the superheroic family is Kennedyesque and patrician in its noblesse oblige while it’s the villain who represents Reaganesque values.
In short, conservatives seem torn between two postures: the We’re Misunderstood, It’s All About Liberty and Individuality school on the one hand and the Yup, We’re Reactionary and Elitist and Traditionalist and Proud Of It on the other. Occasionally, these strands can complement or at least not contradict one another, but quite often, as demonstrated above, they lead to a kind of cognitive dissonance – hence the need for various external boogeyman to distract and lend coherence to the variously authoritarian and liberterian forefathers of the right wing (this is another reason why conservatism’s had so much trouble since the fall of Communism).
Also, I see your second post has a religious bent. It’s been said before, so I’ll tread lightly on the whole “Jesus hated the profit motive, hung out with the poor and dispossessed, defended the sexually illicit, preached a social gospel, etc.” mantra. But can I also point out that Jesus was anti-family? Not only did he avoid marriage and child-rearing himself, but he actively encouraged his disciples to abandon their familial responsibilities and showed scorn for the man who puts family before God.
It’s been said that were Jesus to arrive in the present day, his present-day “followers” would condemn him as a communist. But that paints him as too meek. I prefer to think he’d drive THEM from the temple, whip in hand.
I’m now tempted to finally see “Red Dawn” since Glen has put it in a category by itself.
Milius has always been to me a strange attraction, a freak of sorts, given his place among the young lions of the early ’70’s. (Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas, etal.)
He comes across as a sage in Steve Erickson’s “Zeroville”, a fiction I won’t begin to describe since I’m into my fourth beer. (Any one read “Boy Wonder” by James Robert Baker?)
Sorry to wander – burp! – off the path but…
While there are works in any any of the arts that are first and foremost political and which identify themselves with a certain movement or party, it’s immature to ascribe to the majority any particular agenda.
@MovieMan: I guess I’m too hard on “Ghostbusters.” It’s just that the damn thing has never once made me laugh. Even the best Murray stuff. Strange. (And the idea that it’s a conservative film by dint of the fact that it makes a couple of academia jokes, and its bad guy is an EPA dude—what a thin peg to hang that conclusion on…)
Your analysis is trenchant, and it points up the varied fallacies one will fall into whenever one tries to pigeonhole a lot of good art into a single embracing ideological construct. Your “Dark Knight” versus “Brazil” comparison hits the nail on the head. By the same token, one would be almost equally off-base to try and claim “Brazil” as a “great liberal film” or some such. It’s an anti-totalitarian satire, but not a prescriptive one.
Oh, and of course “opposing Nazi tyranny” and “resistance fighters uniting to save lives in World War II” are strictly conservative content (um, who did those “conservative” resistance fighters team up with in real life again?).
I really must stop here, but your second link is about as Buckleyesque as Sean Hannity on a crack binge and it’s driving me up the wall.
I noticed that NR admires “Braveheart” because it shows that freedom is not only worth dying for, but worth killing for. Which suggests that the problem with Gandhi, both the movie and the individual, was that he didn’t kill enough Englishmen.
MovieMan, you hit precisely the part of the WSJ opinion piece that had me chucking my copy across the room. Hello, anti-Nazi partisans = it’s a conservative movie? Absolutely fucking offensive.
To be honest, I can actually see a conservative interpretation of some of these movies, but much of it seems rather thin. I think there’s only so far you can push a political angle on any movie, and that’s as far as the filmmaker has considered that angle. So, something like Milius’ “The Wind and the Lion” you can take pretty far. “The Incredibles”? Not so much.
@partisan
No, they think it inspired legions of America’s youth to join the Army after 9/11, and that’s why all the libruls hate that poor Mel Gibson.
Campaspe, the most ironic part, which I perhaps too vaguely alluded to in my comment, is that apparently the partisans whom the film Defiance depicts were allied with the Soviets – and some may even have participated in a massacre of Poles during the war. But they’re fighting fascists, and as Jonah Goldberg has informed us fascists are liberals, so ipso facto… (Goldberg, to be fair, actually had some of the better blurbs in that NR piece.)
Movieman, every now and again over the years I would meet the occasional barroom gasbag speechifying about how the key word in the Nazi party name was not “National” but “Socialist” and now whaddya know, somebody wrote a book, and apparently we are all doomed to hear an even larger number of people quoting it like it’s “The Great Terror.”
I do agree with Glenn that Metropolitan is a masterpiece, and definitely a conservative movie. The NR paragraph on it wasn’t bad. Many liberals love Metropolitan too, though, because it speaks to concerns that often cross party lines, like the coarsening of American culture, the desire for more grace and refinement, to live a life full of good books and fine art and shut out the noise of the worst aspects of modernity. Hell, it spoke to me, although I am definitely not Upper Haute Bourgeoisie, more like pure horse thief, way back. Anyway it’s a type of conservatism that is far more appealing than–well, a lot of other stuff on NRO.
I wonder how Whit Stillman feels about the Irrational Review co-opting his films as paragons of neo-con virtue. They don’t seem to be able to understand the difference between a film about upper-class solipsism and a film promoting upper-class solipsism.
What? The NR not having a nuanced understanding of something? Impossible!
I agree with Glenn’s classification of “Red Dawn” as “Red Dawn”. It’s such a strange movie that begins with an absolutely ridiculous premise and then follows it through with absolute conviction and excellent extrapolation. That is, it asks the time-honoured question behind the best speculative fiction, “If ‘x’ happened, what would it be like?”, and they answer that question to my satisfaction. At the same time, “U.S.S.R. invading and occupying part of America” is a pretty damn perposterous “x” to begin with. I can’t say if it’s a bad movie or a good one, and so I’ll be sure to parrot Glenn’s classification when asked about it in the future. 🙂
‘Among the films with more conservative content were “Valkyrie” (with its theme of opposing Nazi tyranny), “Defiance” (resistance fighters unite to save lives in World War II), “Bolt” (which promotes such moral values as loyalty, sacrifice and doing the right thing), “Rambo,” “Prince Caspian” and “Gran Torino.” They and others in their category averaged nearly $70 million more per movie at the domestic box office than more liberal movies. That group’s films range from those with very strong libertine content (such as “Mamma Mia!”) or licentious content (“Milk” and “Brideshead Revisited”) to those with politically correct content, such as “Sex and the City” and “Under the Same Moon.” Also in the category are movies with anti-American content, such as “Stop-Loss” and “The Visitor, and with very strong atheist or nihilistic content, such as “Religulous” and “Wanted.“ ‘
I just think this paragraph bears repeating, that’s all.
These guys took some horse-strength crazy pills before writing this one.
About Braveheart, and not only dying but killing for liberty: well we can all agree we have to do that to stop Hitler. But I would think “Come and See” would be a better choice. Or “The Battle of Algiers.” If you wanted to name a great movie of the past 25 years with clearly conservative values, I would choose “Russian Ark.” I also noted that all of the movies have secular subjects. I don’t know how conservative these movies are, (not very actually), but apparently they’ve never seen “L’Argent,” “Nostalghia” or “The Sacrifice.”
How odd for Buckley to think “The Lives of Others” maybe the best movie he ever saw. Leaving aside several hundred movies that are better than that which admittedly have nothing to do with communism, I would think that “The Confession” was a much better movie, and more to the point about communism’s evils. (A powerful man wants to abuse his power by discrediting someone and getting his girlfriend. He hires an investigator acting in good faith to do the dirty work. Although East Germany is a good place for this to be, given the constant surveillance, this could take place in all kinds of societies. South Korea under the Park régime had similar levels of surveillance.) That reminds me that last year Andrei Wadja made a film about the Katyn massacres (called, reasonably enough, “Katyn”) where as it happens his father was murdered. Although it was nominated for best foreign film and Anne Applebaum wrote an article for the New York Review of Books about it, I haven’t heard of it since. You might think Big Hollywood might do something useful and get this released.
As a conservative myself, I’ll admit that some of these choice really don’t work. Like, say, “Brazil”, a film I love, but which I would not label right-leaning. If taken too far into a the-way-we-live-now interpretation, it functions more as a paranoid liberal fantasy (which, given Gilliam’s politics, it sort of is). But I don’t choose to look at it that way, so I’m not bothered by that.
But all of this pointing and laughing at NR for this list seems a bit…let’s go with “silly”. How many of you dig into basically non-political films that you like and are somehow able to find elements that confirm your own political biases? I think everybody does this to a degree. And better to have to dig for such things, if that’s what you want to do, than to have to sit through “The Contender” again.
Zxcvb, I don’t find Metropolitan neo-con at all; I think it’s conservative in the purest sense of the term, as support for tradition and the things of value from the past. And I do think Stillman likes and respects his characters; they are introspective, not solipsistic.
Bill, Brazil was a particularly egregious misreading, although not quite as bad as a guy some years back who put The Bicycle Thief on a list of the Best 100 Conservative Movies because it showed the relationship of personal property to a man’s soul.
Wait, I just looked up the story and it’s online, if you can get past the hideous formatting. And whaddya know, it was the National Review again. These guys don’t give up.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_n20_v46/ai_15905983/pg_2?tag=content;col1
Anyway, the problem with both articles isn’t finding political themes in nonpolitical movies. Movies may be about a great deal more than even the filmmakers realize. The problem is the reverse-engineering involved here: I like this movie, therefore it is conservative. Look at the prior 100 list, which opens with an assertion that Star Wars was a harbinger of the Reagan Revolution because it was about good vs evil.
I would agree with you, however, that approaching a film that way is equally obnoxious when done by a liberal. I love Ninotchka, but that doesn’t mean it’s really a harbinger of 60s liberalism because people fall in love, pursue hedonism and use mind-altering substances (champagne).
That reading of “The Bicycle Thief” is SORT OF accurate, if you allow that the bicycle AS A PIECE OF PROPERTY is kind of irrelevant. But anyway.
Look, I understand the impulse that NR is acting on here. In the last fifty years, give or take, we conservatives haven’t really had a film – or not many, anyway – that championed our philosophy, while you guys on the other side of the aisle have them coming out of your ears (good ones and bad ones). It’s frustrating. It’s ultimately also not really that big of a deal, but it IS frustrating.
But that doesn’t mean we have to go around misinterpreting other movies, and trying to cram square blocks into round holes, or in some cases, square blocks into a whole different kind of toy. That, like, doesn’t even HAVE holes or anything. If you see what I mean. Worse for me, however, is the politicization of goddamn EVERYTHING on the planet, which every political stripe is guilty of. That’s what bothers me most of all.
Bill, excellent, well-taken points all, with a couple of exceptions. There have been a number of movies with conservative–as distinct from overtly right-wing–themes in the past 25 years. NRO even names several of them, although Brazil is a head-scratcher. I would argue that the action genre as it’s evolved over the past couple of decades is fundamentally quite conservative–wonder why they left off Die Hard? (The old swashbuckler genre, on the other hand, from which at least the first couple of Star Wars movies descend, skews much more leftward. Which may be a small part of why I prefer those old swashbucklers.)
Admittedly, however, the number of movies made since the 60s that a Republican can take to heart on political grounds is not large. There is a profound distrust of cultural matters that keeps many deep-dye conservatives away from the arts professions. And then there is the idea, frequently endorsed in Big Hollywood’s comments and by certain posters there (although not Nolte), that art is and should be didactic, which tends to make bad movies no matter which side of the aisle that you are on.
As for The Bicycle Thief, come on … it’s about the plight of the underclass, not some Randian elevation of property rights as the highest form of human rights.
@bill
As a raging liberal, I’m in full agreement. I’d like to see an intelligently done movie advocating a conservative philosophy; if the guy tells a good story, I’d probably even like the movie. I don’t even think it would be terribly tricky; Hollywood used to make them at a fairly good clip and they had a fairly decent hit-to-miss ratio (I’m thinking especially of the noirs about Commie-chasing).
I feel bad for you guys, because you get stuck with articles like the NR’s and movies like “An American Carol” as “explicit” conservatism. But at least you still have Clint.
@Campaspe – Good point about action films, and I don’t know why neither I nor NR thought of them (outside of “Red Dawn”, anyway, about which all I can say is that I loved Glenn’s classification of it). My only problem with that genre is that I think most of the ones that could be regarding as conservative aren’t all that great. Except I did truly love “Rambo”…
“There is a profound distrust of cultural matters that keeps many deep-dye conservatives away from the arts professions.”
I wonder if that’s the reason. I admit that I don’t have another explanation for why there seem to be so few conservatives in the arts (at least nowadays, but it wasn’t always like that). I could offer up some theories regarding why there aren’t more conservative directors in Hollywood, but then you would rightly ask “Well, what about in the more do-it-yourself arts?”, so I won’t bother.
And I’m not saying that I buy that guy’s reading of “The Bicycle Thief”. It frankly doesn’t make any sense to me. My point was simply that the bike as, specifically a BIKE was important to the film, not its existence as a piece of property.
@Dan
Thank you for your sympathetic ear, but, you know – and this has very little to do with what you said, but you reminded me of a point I wanted to make – I have to say that when the rare conservative film comes along that doesn’t wear its philosophy on its sleave, and is embraced by a the larger film and critical community, anyone who claims that the film contains that element tends to get shouted down. Not to open too big a can of worms, but see “The Dark Knight”, or more importantly and more to my point, “No Country for Old Men”. Maybe I’m getting McCarthy’s book too mixed up with the Coens’ film, but it’s there. It’s absolutely there in the book, and I think it bleeds into the film as well, whether the Coens lean that direction, politically, or not. The point being that it feels like any time a film is touted as conservative, the opinion is treated as absurd.
As to what you actually DID say, Dan: yes, we still have Clint, God bless ‘im. And the noirs you refer to obviously came from a time when Hollywood was more conservative as a whole. Not exclusively, of course, but far more so than now. You had great artists whose politics tilted every which way working in Hollywood back then. Why that’s no longer the case is a larger, different argument, but it sure would be nice to get back to that point, wouldn’t it?
A person may have certain values, moral or otherwise, that a certain film validates (say, “No Country for Old Men”), and that person may also adhere to a political philosophy in part because of these values. However, the values themselves are not the same thing as the political philosophy. This is just my confusing way of saying that I vote for the Democrats, generally consider myself politically liberal, but also value hard work, honor, individual liberty, personal property, family, the American Dream, and kicking Nazi ass. From shared values, I derive a different philosophy than NR does. Why must “the Left” always be the extreme Marxist left to these clowns? When it comes to cultural matters, NR spends too much time fighting straw men. And, for people who mock Hollywood as “out of touch” they waste an awful lot of energy writing about pop cultural and sucking up to any semi-famous person who identifies as conservative.
Ted Baehr is an astonishing fellow. Years ago I heard an interview in which he discussed a film that, according to him, wouldn’t have succeeded if it hadn’t been for the intervention of “The Church.” Its parent company would have let it die on the vine, but it became a cause for good Christians everywhere and thus “the little movie that could.”
The little movie? “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.”
Astonishing.
“Why must “the Left” always be the extreme Marxist left to these clowns?”
The same reason that conservative are so often viewed as heartless, bigoted fascists by those (some) on the Left: because looking at the worst extreme of something you disagree with makes it that much easier to set up an us vs. them mentality, which allows the person with that mentality to think less and feel self-righteous at the same time.
I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying one side is more likely to do this than the other (or, for that matter, that you do it). Every time I think one political persuasion is winning that particular race, the other suddenly takes the lead.
Oh, and a PS to Joel: kicking Nazi ass is an excellent pastime. I hope you and I can both find much to love in “Inglourious Basterds”.
Agreed with everything you said, Bill. This past election, as with the past eight years, have given me a window into some of the knottier realms of political psychology, which so often seems like a more benign form of paranoid delusion–i.e. “if someone’s against me on one thing, he’s against me on everything.” Why do people have to mark everything with their political ideology? As I said above, what we appreciate in politics and what we appreciate in art often stem from the same values, but it doesn’t mean that those values belong to any particular party. To claim that things like “family,” “God,” and “Democracy” belong to conservatives is laughable at best, and insulting at worst. In fact, to claim that “conservatism” itself belongs to the Republicans is ridiculous. No ideology is that all-encompassing.
Yes, well, and “caring for others” isn’t exclusively liberal ideal. I’ve heard that one, you know.
But anyway, on to other points: your point regarding our taste in art stemming from out personal values is one I agree with, although since we do all share broadly similar values you might think it would be easier to not politicize every frickin’ movie that comes along.
Oh, my mind is going all over the place now. I have some things I wanted to say (I was going to bring up “The Devil’s Rejects”!), but I fear that would be so out of the blue as to come off as non-sequitors, so maybe I’ll just bag it for now.
Well, the NR didn’t set out its definitions, which is going to muddle the whole concept by, er, definition. So we have socially conservative with “Forest Gump” (absolutely true, and utterly offensive for that, and did someone say Charlotte Hayes? Just me? OK), but no “The Ice Storm”; military/historically conservative (or rather right-wing) with one work of friend Gibson (“Braveheart”) but not another (“The Patriot”) and revisionist conservative with “Blast From the Past” (true, but suck movie) and no “Back to the Future,” a cri de couer in defense of amassing shiny stuff and things at the expense of all else; libertarian-which-isn’t-quite-the-same-thing (“Team America: World Police”); Christian conservative (“The Chronicles of Narnia,” because it’s couched in fantasy yo, but no overtly Christian movies, because they’re niche); morally conservative (“A Simple Plan”) but no acknowledgment that noir film in many of its incarnations is about a decent man doing one wrong, greedy thing, and what did Fred MacMurray live and die for, anyway?
And then, of course, there is “Red Dawn.” To quote Tommy Lee Jones in “The Fugutivie” (which – hey!): What. A. Mess.
Waitaminute, “Sex in the City” was politically correct?
Demimonde, great comment. The thing about noir is that it also frequently shows a decent person caught in the wheels of a pitiless society. By order of the Production Code the law could not be flouted but it sure could seem rigid and uncaring.
A Simple Plan is definitely a noir throwback, and it fits into what Joel says also. I was pleasantly unaware that strictures against greed and theft automatically made an audience sit up and say, “By George, a conservative theme!” (Another aspect of noir that you won’t see much discussed on Big Hollywood or NRO: the recurring character of the war veteran unable to shake the violence he learned at the front–because of course negative veteran images in American art began precisely five minutes after the last helicopter left the embassy.)
Your Christian-movie point is interesting, too, because one of the most intensely Christian mainstream movies of recent years, one that goes into the very heart of the religion’s teachings, would never, could never make a list like this: Dead Man Walking. (John Nolte, let it be said, has praised the movie.) I realize that Tim Robbins is probably an apostate at the very minimum, but the movie is based on Helen Prejean’s book and the entire film is about the notion of divine mercy and redemption.
that’s the Saigon embassy, of course.
@bill
I think part of the problem is most people these days define “conservative” as “neo-conservative”, and there’s a vast gap between the two. I, for one, have no trouble with the idea of “No Country” as a conservative film; hell, it’s practically Old Testament in some respects. Plus I am not overly attached to Cormac McCarthy. In fact, if the NRO would adopt him so I never have to hear about how brilliant his “muscular” prose is again, I would be indescribably happy.
“The Dark Knight” I happen to think is a little more complicated, because it’s not really a film with a political angle, so there’s only so far you can push that perspective without getting into the realm of the personal and/or silly. You walk up to anybody of any political persuasion in America and say “I think mindless violence is bad”, they’re probably going to agree with you. In other words, I can see what conservatives get out of it, but I don’t happen to agree that’s the intent of the film.
As for more political opinions in Hollywood: we’ll probably get our wish, as the technology gets cheaper and video becomes more and more ubiquitous as a communication medium (yay, my grad degree isn’t useless!) I think it’s more likely, though, that we’ll see films of a more conservative perspective from different countries. I think American conservative film is doomed to more “American Carols” and “Is It True What They Say About Anne?”-type “documentaries” until conservative thought worthy of the name makes a comeback.
I expect this, alas, to take a while. I really do like my politics best when two strong, well-considering ideologies are duelling. Progress is slow, but it’s usually of a high quality.
Bill
If “The Dark Knight” was a conservative film, it wouldn’t have Lucius Fox, Morgan Freeman, voice of morality and reason, suggesting that tapping people without warrants is a rather unethical thing to do, even if your target is the Joker, who is referred to as a terrorist by Alfred in the picture. Also, Batman’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” do abasolutely nothing. Like John Doe in “Seven”, the Joker volunteers information because he chooses to do so. And Batman does his own fighting, and never because of wishful exagerations of data. Also, Clint may self-identify as right-wing, but “Flags of Our Fathers”, with its scathing deconstruction of heroic mythmaking and its disillusionment with the way war effects the men who wage it, suggests an entirely different reading.
Dan -
The “mindless violence is bad” aspect of “The Dark Knight” isn’t what makes it a conservative film. It’s the idea that Batman has to make the difficult choices for the greater good, which will nevertheless make people hate him that does it.
But yes, it’s more complicated than that, in that it allows other takes on the argument, and it’s quite possible that this isn’t the “intent” of the movie, but it’s still there.
Mike -
So “The Dark Knight” can’t be conservative because it includes a character who you say is reasonable and moral? I love the way you construct your argument. It should probably be pointed out, though, that Fox goes ahead with the surveillance plan anyway.
And Batman does his own fighting? So FDR should have been on the battlefield, too? But that can’t be what you’re saying, of course, so forget I said anything.
As for “Flags of Our Fathers”, a movie that I think is Eastwood’s best outside of “Unforgiven”…I’m sorry, but if you choose to believe that conservatives don’t believe that war is hell for those who fight it, then I don’t know what to say to you. It sounds to me like you choose to believe conservatives don’t believe that so that you can dislike them more, and if one makes a film that deals with the issue, well hell, maybe he’s not a conservative! I mean, Eastwood supported McCain, for God’s sake. It’s been said elsewhere on this thread, by liberal commenters, that conservatives and liberals often share similar values but construct different philosophies based on that. This is absolutely true, so the next time you find yourself agreeing with a conservative value, try not to panic.
The film tells the truth about Iwo Jima, and the raising of the flag, and it may destory certain myths, but it does not in any way deconstruct the idea that any of those men were heroes.
I used “choose” and “believe” far too often in my last comment. I just want everyone to know I’m aware of that.
@Bill: No sweat, sir. As you’re no doubt aware, I sometimes use “putative” the way William S. Burroughs used to use heroin.
Yeah, but at least “putative” is an impressive word.
At least the National Review analysis is instructive. I didn’t know that only liberals are narcissists and that only conservatives accept responsibility for their actions. Have these people never heard of Watergate?
@ bill
“It’s the idea that Batman has to make the difficult choices for the greater good, which will nevertheless make people hate him that does it.”
You see, I don’t view that as political, either. Noble, certainly, but self-sacrifice isn’t really political. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective.
“This film gives us a portrait of the hero as a man reviled. In his fight against the terrorist Joker, Batman has to devise new means of surveillance, push the limits of the law, and accept the hatred of the press and public. If that sounds reminiscent of a certain former president — whose stubborn integrity kept the nation safe and turned the tide of war — don’t mention it to the mainstream media. Our journalists know that good men are often despised by the mob; it just never seems to occur to them that they might be the mob themselves.” Batman, Bill, never sent thousands of other people to their deaths based on wishful thinking. That is why Batman is a hero, and W. is a lame duck. And if “The Dark Knight” was in touch with the conservative ethos, it would not have the character of Lucius Fox espousing doubts about illegal wiretapping at all. The film would have endorsed such activity with no doubts as to whether such technology should be used “for the better good”. And the situation presented in the film is clearly the fictional “ticking time bomb” scenario, as opposed to something occurring in reality. And, even in the Rachel Dawes/Harvey Dent time bomb scenario, torturing the Joker does not work. So, in the eyes of the film, tapping people’s phones is morally questionable, and torture does not work, hence the film flies directly in the moral bankrupcy that had characterized the Bush Administration. If anything, the movie is of an ambiguous nature that one would expect to confound any writer of the National Review.
Baehr is the crackpot who condemned GODZILLA 2000 as “blasphemous” because it involved an alien spacecraft having lain at the bottom of the ocean for 60,000,000 years, when everyone knows God only created the Earth 6,000 years ago.
And no, he wasn’t joking.
I hear bill on the non sequiturs – this is such a stimulating conversation that a whole line of comments has occurred to me. So before I finish the thread let me butt in on a few points:
1. I actually do think Brazil is kind of conservative, at least in the libertarian sense. It did occur to me while watching that it made free enterprise seem rebellious and cool while big government = massive, ineffective bureaucracy.
2. Great point, Joel, on the “values”. I’m not especially thirsting for more (or any) Republican-party-line/self-consciously neoconservative films but I’d LOVE to see more films with conservative values, which I too share in many ways, though i voted for Obama (whose success, by the way, related to his ability to sidestep not just racial stereotypes but political ones; he didn’t give off the “liberal cultural warrior” vibe which the GOP tried to peg him with, and which even more moderate politicians like the Clintons DID give off, at least until Hillary reinvented herself as the beer-swilling compatriot of working-class Pennsylvanians…). Maybe some of the slackening of Hollywood filmmaking in the present day is due in part to the ideological homogeny out there (though there are a considerable amount of other factors to consider as well).
3. Yes, The Bicycle Thief is about a man’s relationship to his personal property. But it condemns his this forced dependence, which makes sense as Zavattini was a Marxist (did NR take that into account?). The point is that the hero needs property, and the money to buy and sustain property, in order to make money in the first place, which he needs to care for his family, and that the whole situation breeds unhappiness. Not exactly The Pursuit of Happyness we’re dealing with here…
4. I should have said it before, but yes, Glenn’s classification of Red Dawn is brilliant and quite apropos.
I wish I could remember all the other threads I wanted to comment on here, but there were too many…I’ve forgotten them now.
Many of my favorite movies tend to mix together values and/or aesthetics in unusual ways, creating an interesting tension which transcends the usual political cliches. For example, an avant-garde style with conservative content or a classical style with a subversive message, etc. I’ve heard David Lynch is a Reagan conservative, and I hope it’s true.