Hollywood: Time to Use Your Superpower for Good Again
Photo by Michael E. Arth, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Hollywood has a superpower. They’ve used it before to help address social problems. This superpower is in-your-face without being in your face. That’s why it is so super. What is it? Well, it’s right in front of your nose. Hollywood sets the tone for what is “normal” in American culture. It’s time they used it to address the separate but related issues of gun violence and police brutality.
Origin Story
Since the beginning of the glitz of Hollywood, everyone knew they were trendsetters. People wanted to be like the stars, wear the same clothes, live the same lives. That much was obvious. What wasn’t obvious was the subtle influence Hollywood had to push society as a whole into behaving and believing things about itself. Ever see a chalk outline of a body in a television show or a movie? Well, for a long time thanks to movies and television shows, people thought that police would always draw a chalk or tape outline around a dead body at a crime scene before it was moved. And while the chalk/tape outline was used sometimes by real police, it was mainly done for journalists who wanted pictures of the crime scene but could not publish pictures of a dead body. Outlines were not drawn for investigative purposes.
But then movies and (especially) television picked up on it and made it common because, like journalists, it allowed them to show a crime scene without a gory dead body. People everywhere started seeing this on their televisions on a regular basis. It became “common knowledge” that these outlines were used in homicide investigations. Heck, even some police departments started doing it because they thought that was what they were supposed to do. All because of television. Hollywood took something uncommon with a specific purpose, and made America believe it was widely common for a completely different purpose. This shows how powerful imagery from Hollywood can be.
“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain“
The above quote is from the Batman movie The Dark Knight, and is said by the character of Harvey Dent a.k.a. Two Face. For those not familiar, he’s a District Attorney who becomes a schizophrenic villain after being horribly disfigured by the movie’s other villain, The Joker. He makes a good analogy for today’s Hollywood in our society. How so, you ask? Well, since nearly the beginning but definitely ramped up consistently since the 1960s, Hollywood has used two tropes to ramp up the action and suspense in movies: gun violence and the “lone wolf” law enforcement officials who take justice into their own hands when the legal system isn’t working fast enough for them.
Now, let me take a step back and make something clear: I am not one who takes the leap of blaming the media and Hollywood for gun violence because they show a lot of gun violence. If seeing gun violence alone made people want to go out and shoot people, everyone you know would be shooting people. Kids have been exposed to it for long enough to know that just isn’t the case. However, as shown above, depicting gun violence does normalize it as a part of our society. Even when it is shown as a “good guy” response to the villains, it still normalizes it. Especially when it is not a law enforcement officer using the guns. The more Hollywood shows guns used in normal society, the more normal it will feel as society to have guns around all the time.
Similarly, a lot of movies and television shows use the trope of a good guy law enforcement officer “bending” the rules to catch an obviously guilty party when they are kept from bringing the bad guys to justice. One of my favorite TV shows of the past decade was The Mentalist. It featured a former “psychic” who used his abilities to observe and manipulate human behavior to help catch bad guys. Fun, entertaining stuff. He worked with a law enforcement unit depicted as pretty straight-arrow types who (at least at first) were frustrated by some of his shenanigans. OK so far. But in later seasons these same law enforcement officers who were 100% absolutely depicted as the good guys also engaged in some very extra-legal activities to catch bad guys. Again, it was always shown that the bad guys in fact were guilty before these acts were committed. But the honest truth is that what was depicted as the good guy winning was actually police brutality. This normalizes police brutality.
Good Triumphs Over Evil
So, what can Hollywood do? Well, the easy answer is “stop.” Find ways to show that law enforcement does not always have to use a gun to stop a bad guy. It’s not necessary. Just ask tough guy Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman. He’s been a reality TV star for his ability to track down fugitives. And in his entire career doing so, he has used non-lethal methods because he was actually barred from owning guns for a felony he committed 45 years ago. In the linked interview he makes great points about how unnecessary it is to use guns to capture these people who are obviously actively trying to avoid capture. He also makes great points about minimal police training and how that leads to police brutality. Go read the interview. This is coming from someone who “100% backs the blue.”
So why can’t Hollywood follow the same example? Show strong action heroes that don’t need to use a gun and kill people to stop the bad guys. Batman doesn’t use guns and people love him. Stop having non-law enforcement protagonists using guns and lethal force. Show law enforcement using guns and lethal force less. I acknowledge it is not realistic to show a police unit that doesn’t have guns in America. But you can show them partnering with well-funded mental health and social worker units to resolve problems. The drama can still be there.
At the end of the day, if we can make what people see on TV less violent with police who use better tactics, have better training, and have far less lethal outcomes then at some point the rest of society will start asking “why aren’t real cops like this” when they see reports of gun violence and police brutality. Hollywood needs to model the ideal. Have movies and TV shows depict society how we want it to be. Give people good examples to follow. We’ve shown we will follow.
And hire more Native Americans!
Part of the problem is the whole thing where you have two movies with two sets of similar problems:
1) The first movie has people defeat the problems with being smart, being somewhat pacifist, and making friends
2) The second movie has people defeat the problems by PUNCHING THE GUY IN THE FACE, oooh! And he shoots this other guy! And throws this other guy out the window! And then says something like “There’s no such thing as gravity, the earth just sucks!”
Which one of these strikes you as more likely to turn a profit?
Make 10 of them. Which pile of 10 strikes you as more likely to turn a bigger profit?Report
Not to mention which one translates better to foreign audiences with little care for or point of reference to our cultural and political obsessions.Report
Oh, yeah. The whole “Chinese Market” thing. I wasn’t even thinking about that when I wrote my first comment.
Remember the Warcraft movie? It came and went in the states so quickly I spent a few months thinking that it just hadn’t come out yet.
It beat out Prince of Persia for highest-grossing video game adaptation. It made a buck and a half in the states. It made all of its money in Asia.
They’re making a sequel.
You think they’re going to spend 15 seconds taking American tastes into consideration when making the film?Report
My wife was just asking me this morning who is actually going to the theater to see the Fast and the Furious 9. The answer is people all over the world.Report
Back when I flew to Qatar regularly, I had the opportunity to enjoy movies that never made it to my radar here in the states.
Have you ever heard of “Kung Fu Yoga”?
It’s a Jackie Chan movie set, primarily, in China and India (with some scenes shot in the Middle East).
Gorgeous sets, gorgeous outfits, the barest of midriffs, and mayhem, mayhem, mayhem.
It made a mint in China, flopped in India, and they didn’t even bother trying to make a dime in the US.
Watching it on the plane, I thought that (other than the CGI animals), it could have been made in the 80’s.Report
That looks like it was way better than any in flight movie I’ve ever experienced.Report
It was kinda campy.
Otherwise a lot of fun.Report
Yeah, basically this. Smart witty dialogue is hard to translate, and often has certain…philosophical conflicts with what the government considers responsible behavior, like when you suggest that maybe religious minorities should be allowed to have their own weird beliefs instead of being Brought Forward To The Twenty-First Century Like The Rest Of The Planet.
But punching in the face and zapping with lasers? Everybody understands those words, and you can always dub in some filler about “the government has authorized this deployment”.Report
Remember MacGyver? The old one, with Richard Dean Anderson that ran for 7 seasons (6 full, one half, and 2 made for TV movies). Nary a gun in sight, and Mac hated them.
New MacGyver, with a lot more guns in use, and Mac was OK with them – ran for 5 seasons (3 full, 2 half).
Obviously there’s a lot more than just gun use involved in whether or not or not a movie or show can do well, but it’s not a make or break thing. You can do amazing action movies without a lot of gun play. Most of your martial arts movies do this. Hell, the bulk of the Fast & Furious franchise is super hero action movies with cars. Sure, there are guns, but you could remove a lot of the gun fire from personal arms from the movies and they’d all play just fine.Report
Also, as a shooter, I would be quite happy to see more realistic gun handling in movies because A) There would be less of it, and B) People would stop having stupid ideas about how guns work.
This is not to say we can’t have John Wick movies, but John Wick is awesome not because he uses a gun.Report
Bruce Willis’s Death Wish movie had some minor realism.
Like, he was shooting a Glock and I remember thinking “if he was doing that IRL, the slide would bite the meaty part between his thumb and forefinger”.
And then the slide bit him!Report
Arnold’s weapons handling in the Terminator is a thing of beauty to behold. Apparently he spent hours upon hours at the range with instructors to make it look both mechanical and perfect.Report
I give props to Keanu, you can find YouTube videos of him training to get the gun handling somewhat right. You can also find videos of people explaining what he does right and wrong as well.Report
I’ve seen those before as well. Nevertheless there’s just something so profoundly unsexy about a good Weaver stance.Report
Totally off topic, but can we get coffee cups held by actors to not be totally obviously empty? Sheesh, put some water in them.Report
There’s been plenty of discussion here about how superhero stories are intrinsically authoritarian- where the Strong Man On Horseback rides in to save the day while everyone else just stands around in stupefied wonder.
As opposed to the small-d democratic story where the group gathers together and fights the villain as a group which just doesn’t have the emotional punch.
It would be pretty to think that Hollywood leads our culture, but its not quite that simple. It seems more of a Darwinian feedback loop where a story is presented, then depending on how the public receives it, is either replicated or ignored.
The recent show Mare Of Easttown had all the complexity an nuance one could ask for, but won’t do a billion dollars in worldwide gross.Report
It could have the emotional punch, but it’s more challenging to do it well. The lone wolf is easier to do because it involves less characters to manage in the 90 minute format, and more actors means less budget for the special effects and explody stuff.
As for stuff like Mare of Easttown, is that a fault of the public, or the media marketing machine that assumes the viewing public are idiots?
PS, stories of the public coming together do happen.Report
Culture is a two way street. Each of us influences it, and it influences each of us. Those among us who work in entertainment have a lot more reach.
I wouldn’t say that superhero stories are necessarily authoritarian. Maybe just elitist or oligarchic. Although less with a group like the Guardians of the Galaxy, and by the time you get half the members of SAG fighting Thanos, the message is practically democratic.
I think movies are following video games, in terms of violence among other ways. Retrieve the tesseract to find the Death Star to get the weapon that will shoot down 10,000 invading faceless bad guys. It’s been a while since I watched crime dramas on TV, but they had a formula that goes against this article. The team has replaced the solo detective or the private eye, and the labs and lawyers get as much air time as the people with the guns.Report
“As opposed to the small-d democratic story where the group gathers together and fights the villain as a group…”
that’s literally what happens in The Avengers
and Avengers 2
and Avengers Infinity War
and Avengers EndgameReport
I think people here aren’t quite grasping the criticism of superhero stuff, mostly because it wasn’t really explained. It isn’t anything to do with the number of people involved. So, here we go, and this is kinda convoluted:
Superheros live in a universe where there are extremely dangerous threats that require powerful people going outside the law and stopping them. (The numbers of people don’t matter.)
But we don’t live in a universe with superheroes.
And seeing the threats presented, and being told ‘This cannot be solved except going outside the law’, and _not_ having superheroes, this all really only provides one logical solution: A much stronger police state.
Now, this might seem a bit silly. We know a fictional Thanos doesn’t actually require more policing.
The problem this all gets tied up in metaphors, metaphors we can dismiss. Superpowers aren’t really relevant here in our minds. It’s a fight, between two (or more) people, outside the law, and it is VERY IMPORTANT that this fight happen and the right person win and stop the wrong person. The science fiction or fantasy trappings are just that, trappings.
So, if we believe a) there are fights that cannot be done within the law, within the system that exists, and b) no vigilantes are going to show up save the day, then the problem is that the laws and system need to be expanded.
Now, all this sorta depends on how much you think culture influences us. And it’s easy to dismiss this. Except…we admit other things have messages, we admit Star Wars, despite being totally fictional, presents a message of rebellion against fascism.
The reason we can’t really see it in superhero stuff is that it’s an inbuilt premise of the genre. A world out of control with evil forces the authorities cannot deal with is basically the _requirement_ for a superhero universe.
But, minus the superheroes, ‘A world out of control with evil forces the authorities cannot deal with’ (So replace the authorities with us, and we’ll crack down on the evil) is, straight up, how fascism shows up.
It’s easier to see in things like ‘Death Wish’ which is a vigilante story, but minus any superhero framing, and is almost overtly fascist.
…and, before you argue with this, be aware that I am merely presenting this theory about how _some_ superhero stuff _can_ influence people. I think it’s entirely possible to have superhero stories in opposition to this theme (In fact, superhero stories often do that, and _started out_ that way.), but it does require _being aware_ of it to start with and actively trying to counteract it.Report
I think you’ve identified the source of my unease with the genre.
To put it another way, compare superhero movies to the rash of monster movies during the 50’s.
In most of these movies, a mutant giant ant/ spider/ preying mantis/ whatever was menacing civilization.
And in these movies, it was the authorities, the system that mobilized and defended civilization and ultimately The System prevailed, demonstrating that it worked and could be trusted.
I think of this with regard to my observation in the Boy Scouts thread, that we are seeing the collapse of faith in institutions. Government, churches, academia, civic groups; Law enforcement, legislature, the business world- It appears to me that we, the citizens, are increasingly gripped with the sense that we are detached and impotent, alone and adrift without any power sources that we can rely upon.Report
Of course, those self same institutions are the ones telling the public to trust them to handle things and that they are the only ones trained or equipped to handle X*. And then those institutions fail at handling things and leave people holding the bag.
*Whenever there’s a flood in the SE and the Bayou Navy springs up to rescue people, it’s the authorities telling people to stop that.Report
I wrote this a million years ago.
The problem, of course, is that superheroes live in a universe where being able to punch someone really hard will help.
Back when the Evergreen got stuck, there was this really funny tweet that went around that said “The Evergreen blocking the canal provides us with that rarest of things: An international crisis that could be solved by Superman.”Report
Well, there’s always this quote, a quote I’ve always loved, but has its own problems: “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”. ― G.K. Chesterton.
And that’s true, and honestly a great defense of speculative fiction in general, but at some point we have to ask whether or not _killing_, or even violence _at all_, is the correct solution to problem, because in the real world, it almost never is. The dragons being metaphorical in that quote are _people_.
I’m now thinking back to the first Superman comics, where an entirely plausible plot was Superman using his superhearing to overheard a bad landlord trying to illegally evict tenants, and he goes to reveal that as Clark Kent, and the only real fight was when he got accosted by the landlord’s goons _as_ Clark and had to pretend to be a human in a human-level flight, and the narration was likely to talk about how he was being careful not to hurt them.
I.e., violence wasn’t the solution to the problem, even if it was involved. In fact, violence was the solution that _bad_ people chose! There was, as Chip said, an assumption that merely discovering and reporting the problem to the proper authorities would solve things, and comics were premised off that, and if there was any violence that the _hero_ needed to step forward and do, it was solely because of some emergency that the authorities could not react fast enough to.
Now, of course, superheroes comics still claim to assert that violence isn’t the solution except as the last resort…it’s just they’ve evolved to where the situation is _always_ at that point! At least the popular heroes, and the popular movies.
But there’s an interesting point: Current comics are right, in a way, that reporting things to the authorities often _doesn’t_ do anything. If the newspaper reported a landlord trying to do something illegal (Pretending that such reporting was even a thing that still happened!), probably nothing would happen…or, hell, the newspaper would be owned by a friend of theirs and it wouldn’t even get printed. At best, six years laters the courts maybe issue a small fine.
But the question is: Are comics supposed to be descriptive or prescritive, and at what point is this a feedback loop, where fictional stories’ constant portrayals of a government that does not solve problems in any way helps _cause_ the low expectations that keep us from getting outraged when they do not solve problems?Report
I’ve played the “Entertainment Should Be Glorifying To The Lord” game before and it doesn’t work as well as you’d think.
When it comes to entertainments that show the government that solves problems, the first shows that come to mind are shows like The West Wing and Law & Order.
Now we could have a real argument over whether or not there are some people who “just need killing” (or “just need locking up”) and society, as a whole, would benefit from this having been done and, if there aren’t people like that, then we should stop having entertainments that glorify such solutions… I mean, maybe we can’t have Actively Good entertainments but we can have something like a Hays Code forbidding Actively Evil ones… but I’m not sure that the proverbial dogs will eat the proverbial dog food.
And that’s without getting into whether The West Wing created more pathologies than it solved.Report
There’s a rather large gap between trying to argue that everything must be morally uplifting, and pointing out that superheroes in comics used to, and in fact, still do, often solve problems in non-violent ways, or ways that involve the authorities (Adam West Batman talked to the police all the time, he had a fricking phone direct to them!), but the movies and other pop culture representations of them often now fail at carrying this over.
Snyder’s Superman, in fact, was first criticized for not really helping people at after that first oil platform thing, and then, later, he sort helped people in a very strange stoic manner while they treated him as the messiah and attempted to lay hands on him as he hovered above them. (Which, I guess, did address the concerns, only to raise new and even stranger concerns!) Superman should, uh, probably be friendly?
OTOH, there’s a way to take that too far: The Flash recently got criticised for, oddly, having several episodes in a row where a good scolding and ‘please stop it’ from the Flash resulted in the villain giving up.
Here’s the thing: Fiction has metaphors and symbolism and it’s easy to have meaning aren’t fully noticed or processed. Like a slightly fascist slant in the premise of superheroes. Things can creep in without anyone meaning them too.
Just because a type of work is criticized for some accidental stuff doesn’t mean it’s Bad(TM). It just means that people who make that sort of thing should probably be aware of it, in the same way that people who write Lovecraftian horror should probably be aware of how _very quickly_ that can end up accidentally racist if they aren’t careful.
And once that’s noticed, and pointed out, people writing those stories can actively work against it. In fact, they _are_, the writers of comics put a good deal more nuance into them and usually are very actively antifascist.
It’s the _derivative works_ that seem to have problems, skimming right past the serious questions the comics ask all the time into ‘smashy smashy punch punch’.Report
Well, we’re currently in a place where mangas are outselling American comic books.
Personally, I see this as a criticism of American comic books.
There are a lot more ways to be morally uplifting in the current year than merely resorting to non-violence.Report
Well put and well reasoned.
On some side notes;
Just like Dr. Manhattan, the Flash can turn people into red mist. If you’re having that kind of conversation with him then “stopping” is a fine option.
I liked the issues Snyder’s Superman was running into, yes, he’s worshiped. I also liked how the gov wasn’t aggressively stupid (without Lex’s help). If they know Lois is the girlfriend then they must also know Clark is Superman.
And what do you do with that? Probably nothing. You can’t arrest him. Not only can you probably not kill him but you also probably shouldn’t.Report
Technically speaking, I don’t think the Arrowverse Flash could do that, thanks to the Speed Force sorta protecting him and things he runs into. He could, however, put his hand into people’s chests and stop their hearts, so the point still stands.
But, he wasn’t threatening them to get them to back down. They were pretty powerful, more powerful than he was, and he’d been fighting them, and he pointed out the entire thing was completely stupid. The entire back half of the current season has been superpowered entities (Avatars of fundamental forces) fighting each other pointlessly. And Flash had to keep talking them down, and it was just this giant mess of ‘Literally no one here needs to be enemies, please stop trying to kill each other, you are causing massive collateral damage.’.
Flash has always favored non-violence, and is notable for talking his enemies down, it’s just he did it like in four sequential episodes recently and people were like ‘Hmmm.’.
You know how _not_ to be worshipped? Stop posing as a hovering deity in the sky watching over the masses with a serious expression.
Start walking around, talking to people, posing for pictures with kids. Helping people change a flat tire. Make dad jokes. Show up at charity events. You know, the stuff Superman does in literally every other medium.
I think this site has, a few times, talked about whether ‘someone you could have a beer with’ is a valuable asset in a president. (Spoiler: It is not.) But Superman _must_ be someone you could have a beer with, if only because if he’s _not_, he’s an inscrutable deity that you should be afraid of…and I mean ‘afraid of’ in the sense of ‘godfearing’.
I haven’t actually seen The Boys and their ‘somewhat-sociopathic-that-the-government-covers-up’ Superman, but I did see the Tick and _their_ Superman-pastiche who put on a veneer of friendliness but, underneath, while actually a good person, was cared about popularity to a huge extent, to the point when the population turned on him, he got somewhat unstable, to the point of kidnapping people who were rude to him and carving his likeness into a mountain. You never got the sense of any real _malice_, and he did seem to have a strong moral compass about hurting ‘civilians’, but just the idea of someone like that being unstable was very scary. (And notable, he actually does get arrested at the end for a few of his stunts, and goes willingly.)
There’s a reason all Superman-pastiches have to either be, or pretend to be, friendly outgoing people, because if you remove that, you don’t get someone that even _looks_ like Superman.
Like Synder’s. So yes, Synder is correct that people would indeed react to the Superman he gave them in the way he had them react, but that is an idiotic Superman to start with.Report
RE: Flash
He could take a brick, run with it, and then let go. He’s prevented by a lack of willingness for the show to show blood.
Yes and no.
Given that this is a movie, we could put Superman in very limited social situations and make him more “have a beer with” friendly. However as Superman gets closer to RL, he really shouldn’t do that (with non-Supers), that’s why Clark Kent exists.
We tend to think “God made flesh” would be a good thing on the Earth, but that’s because we picture him with our ethics and on our side of all of the societal divides. A Superman who is not above the fray can get rid of Nuclear Weapons (because all right-thinking people oppose nuclear weapons), but that wasn’t a good movie.
A Superman who isn’t above the fray should have views on gay/trans-rights, Israel, gun-control, abortion, climate change, terrorism, and so on. It doesn’t really matter what those views are.
If we’re going with an above-the-fray Superman whose personal life is hidden and private, then Synder’s vision largely works. The gov more or less knows. The ideal would be him working for the Army but that was refused. Having him living with (married to?) an American Reporter and pretending to be a normal American is better than the alternatives. The least scary alternative would be him seeking political asylum from Iran or Russia. Over throwing the US gov would be worse, going full Zod would be much worse.
Superman is a loose cannon. The Suicide Squad is a gov run group.Report
The Arrowverse doesn’t shy away from showing blood. That’s a strange idea. We had the horrific fricking weirdness of Bloodwork last season on the Flash.
And he’s prevented from killing someone that way by not being that sort of person. That’s not within his characterization.
I think, technically, the Flash might be the only hero who’s been around for a while who hasn’t outright tried to kill someone. Yes, even Supergirl has, although it was via ‘deliberately not stopping Lex from falling to his death’.
I am baffled by your idea that friendly and political are the same thing.
Superman in the comics, and even in the animated stuff and Arrowverse, very explicitly refrains from taking political positions as Superman. Clark Kent gets political, Superman doesn’t, at least not in anything more than an extremely bland sense of ‘let’s build a youth center’ and ‘stop being openly racist to that person’.
This does not stop him from being friendly. Like I said, talking to people like he’s a person. Waving at people. Appearing to, in any manner, enjoy their company. Unlike the one n the DCEU, who does not appear to know how to smile.
We don’t have to _imagine_ this or try to figure it out, it’s literally the definitive Superman from the comics…and, hell, the 80s movies.
Even the ‘take all nuclear weapons into space’ was _presented_ as a politically neutral thing everyone agree to, even if that is a completely ludicrous idea. That’s not Superman being ‘political’, it’s the writers of that movie not understanding such a thing _was_ political because they were dumb.Report
Agreed.
OK, fair point.
That being a “non-political” idea hasn’t aged well and speaks towards where their heads were at.
IMHO society is filled with these sorts of ideas when we look at history which implies some things we do now will be thought of poorly by future generations.Report
It is very hard to see the law handling super heroes well and very easy to picture them being handled poorly. Local politicians don’t want super battles in their area so they outlaw them.
The law&gov have limits, political promises do not. So we have politicians trying to stop school shootings by outlawing bayonet fixtures. The war on drugs hasn’t worked out well. BLM has showcased the gov isn’t exactly a force for good and competence.
The idea that the law&system is part of the problem and the problems could simply solved resonates.Report
After Guns we could do Sex.Report
Well, that was forward of you.Report
Well, if it worked in my 20s… wait, it never worked in my 20s.Report
I see there’s a controversy in Hollywood over Pixar’s latest movie not making their two boy leads explicitly gay.Report
Controversy?
https://www.out.com/film/2021/6/22/luca-director-says-film-about-pre-romance-time-boys-livesReport
A childrens’ movie failing to meet adult expectations they never knew they had until they saw it? The scandal….Report
Sometimes the curtains are blue because the author likes the color blue and there is no deeper meaning.Report
https://www.theonering.net/torwp/2020/10/06/108573-sex-sensibility-amazons-nude-take-on-tolkien/Report
Inevitable. Proves the profound lack of confidence that studios have in their ability to create content; Decadence in Douthatian terms.Report
Lack of confidence? Or capitalism turning all art into a property, ripe for ruination by the highest bidder?Report
Both… if you’re spending that much money on the thing… you sure as hell aren’t going to risk it on writers understanding how Tolkien’s world works and delivering on that.Report
Toxic Tolkien fans (incels?) demonstrate that they are afraid of a woman’s breasts.Report
While never expressed by Tolkien himself it’s obvious from the text that Numenorean culture was
pansexual to the core.Report
Numenor just before they sail West?
That’s pretty much a tale of decadence.Report
“We have decided to add a part where the Orcs scuttle the Elven boats right before they sail West and force them to fix the mess they made of Middle Earth.”Report
It’s pretty clear what the orcs did to Elrond’s wife that made her abandone Middle-Earth.Report
Man… every single story is a love story.
Heck, Elwe and Melian licherally gazed into one anothers eyes for a few centuries. Maybe it’s a better story if every other decade he cops a quick feel?Report
“How Orcish Polyamory helped drag Middle Earth out of stagnant agrarianism and bring everyone to a more productive industrial society.”Report
I heard the Russian version includes that part.Report
Heh… 100% sure we’re going to see an Orc rehabilitation arc.
Which would be an interesting theological question depending on settling the ‘Orc’ question that Tolkien himself never settled… which is, we’re not really sure if Orcs are more like the original Dwarfs or corrupted elves (or something else).
But I go back to my original point that I don’t think a stable of Hollywood writers could work that out… so we’ll just get an oppression parable that attempts to map on to present day politics.
It won’t be *real* CRT, but…Report
Always Evil means “Always Evil” (excluding PCs).
Usually Evil means “Usually but not always Evil”.
Orcs can be fun, they can be PCs, they can even be the protagonists (see: Villain Protagonist) but the problem isn’t a lack of understanding.Report
I assume you are referring to rule-sets like ICE or D&D or WoW? Sure, those are downstream derivatives from Tolkien’s work.
But in terms of the “Fall of the Orcs” and in what theological way does their fall inform what we mean by evil? Then, those (fun) derivatives aren’t in the same world. Whether that’s a lack of understanding or indifference to Tolkien’s project doesn’t matter for what they are doing… but they aren’t doing Tolkien.
Heck, WoW’s Orcs have the Green Jesus meme… which is fine for WoW; but those Orcs aren’t Tolkien Orcs.Report
Can orcs be redeemed?
Not if they’re purely evil creations of Morgoth, but Morgoth lacks to power to create; all he can do is corrupt existing creatures. (Though Aule the Smith created the dwarves, and he’s less powerful than Morgoth, so …)
Anyway, if Orcs weren’t originally evil, you’d think one could be redeemed. Though I can’t think of a single character in LOTR who was pro-Sauron but got better.Report
Exactly… fascinating stuff to noodle through. Tolkien seemed to be leaning towards corruption, but the way he puts it is that he ‘thinks’ that’s how it must have been… but until he writes and rewrites it to see what emerges he’s not entirely sure.
Sub-Creation in the books, plus how he himself viewed his work as Sub-Creation is probably the stuff of which dissertations are made.Report
I think the closest we ever came to seeing an evil (much less Evil) character redeemed was Gollum (and ultimately he failed).
Apart from that we had a handful of good(ish) characters trying to avoid becoming evil. Sam, Frodo and Bilbo most obviously, the fallen member of the Fellowship who died fighting the Orcs less obviously.
As a description “Always Evil” is hellishly true to the source. We never saw any Orc even question evil much less try to be good.
In LOTR it’s easy to become evil, hard to stay good, and impossible to become good after becoming evil.Report
“and impossible to become good after becoming evil”
Not flat-out evil, but Theoden had a redemption arc. and was probably too tainted to survive. Boromir was corrupted for a little bit, and even Bilbo had his moments. I don’t remember The Hobbit well enough, but I think the leaders got caught up in passion and nearly went to war?Report
The humans and the dwarves were on the verge of war over the Lonely Mountain and the elves were going to throw in too though Tolkien threw in a line in the novel to make sure it was clear how unhappy and reluctant the Elf King was about doing it.
Canonically the original orcs were twisted creations made from distorting elves and trolls were creations made from twisting ents (Melkor could not create, only change). Whether the original or successor orcs/trolls could have be redeemed/emancipated is an interesting question and one I understand Tolkien struggled with. It’s been a while since I read much on the subject but my recollection is that the general vibe was that the original orc models could, possibly, have been redeemed had they survived long enough to have the opportunity but their descendant progeny were by and large not capable of such thinking or moral considerations.Report
Hmm…
Token’s Mordor Orcs speak “The Black Speech” (constructed language created for them by Sauron) which is expressly Evil (capital E). The one ring’s runes are Black Speech.
Token’s choosing of the word “Orc” is descriptive because it’s based on “Orcneas” (from Beowulf) and is normally translated as an “evil spirit”, it’s a tribe condemned by God. And/or the Latin world “Orcus” (“Goblin, spectre, or hell-devil”).
As counter as it is to modern sensibilities, it really looks like they’re supposed to be a race of irredeemably evil creatures.Report
Theoden and Boromir died well and were arguably “redeemed” via their sacrifice… but “too evil to stay alive” means true redemption isn’t possible past a certain point.
If they had lived they would have still be corrupt, and still struggling against their inner evil, and presumably fallen to it. That’s why they had to die.
The Hobbit came before the whole epic good epic evil thing so the One Ring was presumably asleep. Bilbo’s moment was when he came close to refusing to give up the ring & had to be pushed by Gandalf.
Frodo would have eventually fallen to the Ring. At the end he decided to not destroy it right before Gollum took it back.
I don’t want to hold him up as the one character who actually turned away from evil because it’s not clear if he was evil. He might have been just insufficiently good.Report
I don’t mean Theoden was too evil to stay alive. I’m thinking more from a narrative perspective. But he was probably too wrecked as a person to function any more as a leader.Report
Theoden is less clear a case than say Thorin Oakenshield.
But imho Token had this thing where rising above evil/corruption wasn’t the same as eliminating it. Stare into the abyss and it stares back and all that.Report
Elwe finally met a girl he liked. He was tired of the Thingol life.Report
Hot Maia Summer.Report
Naked ents! Just some strategically place leaves.Report
After World War II, Hollywood released a slew of movies whose job was to get people ready for civil rights. Movies that attempted to show White Protestant America that African-Americans, Jews, and other minorities were just normal folks to. Think of the Sydney Portier line of movies. As recent history demonstrates, the results of these movies were mixed at best. These movies probably did do a lot of prep work in getting White America as ready as possible for the Civil Rights Movement but there was still massive resistance to it and we know that there is still a lot of racism in the United States.
So it is really unclear whether Hollywood movies showing cops or cop adjacent figures solving crime without guns or violence is going to change the social scene. It might do some work on the margin but there will still be plenty of people who believe in the cowboy cop with guns akimbo blazing.Report
Communism too? I remember being told that the movie industry was just telling stories, not pushing an agenda. If you don’t like it, don’t watch it. I was told that sitcoms like Friends weren’t pushing a gay agenda, they just happened to have Newt’s daughter presiding over a gay wedding. All those anti-American movies during the Iraq War that kept bombing but Hollywood kept making, that wasn’t anything partisan. I was assured on that point.Report
Also, there are no (positive) conservative values.
There are only liberal values and universal values.Report
I remember an old guy in a movie who ran a corporation and was too busy stealing from the poor to specifically target the minority poor, that was a virtue, wasn’t it?Report
Let’s do the time warp!
This is… 1991?
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The DeVito speech is one of the great reveals in movie history.
Interestingly, the Peck speech sounds like Trump.Report
My theory is that there are two dynamics.
1) There are no “Conservative Values”, there are only Liberal/Progressive Values and Universal Values
2) In a movie where the Protagonist has Universal Values, you can tell whether it’s a Liberal or Conservative movie by who the Enemy or Foil happens to be
So Kevin Bacon’s Footloose was… Tah-dah! A liberal movie! Not because dancing is liberal. Dancing is universal. But dancing when a preacher doesn’t want you to dance? TAKE THAT, BILLY GRAHAM!
Now imagine Footloose 2: Footlooser.
An Imam in Iraq has decreed a fatwa against dancing.
The sons and daughters in the town team up with the heathens and shout “Down with the Fatwa! Up with Dancing!”
There is a scene where the Imam gets pushed into a pool and everyone laughs at him.
Is this movie Liberal, Universal, or is it just racist enough to be Conservative?Report
My theory is that subtle, humble people can appreciate different viewpoints but Hollywood lacks those. (Oops, I meant Hollywood lacks subtle, humble people, but I guess it lacks different viewpoints too.)Report
This is why Hollywood loves zombies and aliens.Report
Hollywood used to love Nazis as bad guys too. Would Raiders of the Lost Ark be too insensitive to “Teutonic-Americans” and “Dedicated Conservatives” today?Report
Nazis are more uniform than Zombies, much less aliens.
Zombies/Aliens can “reasonably” show up in the modern world, Nazis need time travel or hidden bases or something.Report
Or the inability of conservatives to state C values without trying to own universal values. And as a side dish that Americans are far more together on values then culture war dupes would have you believe.Report
Seems weird that this would hinge on the rhetoric of conservatives and whether or not they’d be able to say something coherent.
That’s a criticism of conservatives.
Anyway, if you want to see us argue this a couple of years ago, you can do so here.Report
Well I do remember you and Kristin on the twitters claiming family as a con value which those darn libs were trying to horn in on.
But I’ve seen similar kinda of threads here.
Again, not a hot take, Americans are far more united on values then people see. Part of the issue is that values, great though they are, are quite separate from actual policies. They are great for self righteous chest beating and ginning up anger.Report
Yeah, I originally thought that I should ask for 3 (non-negative!) conservative values that were not obviously universal but I didn’t think that it would be fruitful.
Anyway, I think that you can make a conservative movie by having the foil be someone stereotypically liberal and you can make a liberal movie by having the foil say grace before dinner.
Easy peasy.Report
Urm liberals find people who say grace to be evil?! Yeah…. Sure… Right.
People with different labels can hold many or all of the same values.Report
He’s literally just screwing with you now.Report
Urm liberals find people who say grace to be evil?! Yeah…. Sure… Right.
No, Greg.
I said “the foil”.
Not “the bad guy”.
People with different labels can hold many or all of the same values.
Sure, they can.
But I still think that you can make a conservative movie by having the foil be someone stereotypically liberal and you can make a liberal movie by having the foil say grace before dinner.Report
And then there’s Ricky Bobby’s Baby Jesus grace.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiWydDyMIEReport
Ricky Bobby was the hero; the foil was a guy who was married to a man.
So, the judges award this one to conservatives.Report
“Ricky Bobby was the hero”
Is he? Serious question… I’ve seen the movie, but I’m definitely *not* in the demographic for whom Ricky Bobby would be a hero. I’m honestly on the fence whether he’s Satire (done with love) or Sarcasm (done with contempt).
I could see it either way.Report
The serious answer is that Ricky Bobby, like most movies, has complex and nuanced political messaging.
As played by the Will Farrell, Ricky is both an absurd buffoon, but also lovable with a dignity and pathos that makes us root for him.
His religiosity is a caricature, but we can also see that he actually is a decent person motivated by a naïve childlike innocence about the world.
I would expand this to say that the majority of movies made extoll values that are universal like the importance of family relationships, the pain caused by betrayal, or the wonder an joy that comes with opening oneself up to others.Report
Good point; nothing quite says nuance like ‘Talladega Nights’… it’s not exactly ‘Step Brothers’ when it comes to Family Studies analysis. But then, it’s hard to capture lightning in a bottle twice.
If I pull back on the snark a tiny bit… I guess that’s my point: Step Brothers is Hollywood making fun of itself.. they are the DINKs with 40-yo failures-to-launch who’s denouement *would* be at the Catalina Wine Mixer… we are they and we love them.
Ricky Bobby? Still not sure.Report
I always remember this tweet (and the discussion it kicked off) fondly:
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Well, if my team can pray to His Sacred Heart… hard to see how baby Jesus isn’t a legitimate intercessor.
Selling a spot for PowerAid in each grace might push some boundaries, though… but probably accrues to personal sin rather than actual heresy.
But I may be biased since ‘Cuddly and Omnipotent’ was my high school band name.Report
How about everything Stephen King has written? Extra points for the corrupt preacher.Report
Many “universal” values aren’t really universal. Freedom of religion is in theory universal but Team Blue pitched it over wedding cakes and adopting children.
It’s easy to be “for” rights “A” and “B”, but when you need to pick between them we see what you really value.
Freedom of religion.
Freedom of choice on whether to be armed.
Stronger desire to let people spend their own money.
Now we really should put negative rights in there. Freedom of speech is really the freedom to not have the gov shut down speech.
Big picture the Left really likes collectivist rights. That’s where we get “equality” issues including CRT. The Right is more into individual rights, thus their opposite stands on affirmative action.
Note also Team Blue and Team Red are large coalitions. So someone who is on Team Red because of abortion may be for gun control.Report
Yup. Conservatives don’t want thematically conservative fiction…or, they do, but it already exists! To quote myself from that discussion you linked to:
Seriously, I literally don’t know how to make it more conservative _thematically_ based on what conservatives tell me they want in a conservative story. But almost no conservative who complains about how fiction is ‘too liberal’ would count that episode as conservative, because I put in one very significant lie: Lance is actually Sara Lance, a bisexual woman (Who is otherwise as described.), and this is a queer couple.
Conservatives want _representation_, not themes. (The themes are already there!) They want someone who sounds like them…and isn’t mocked for that. Isn’t, as you say, the foil. In fact, it would be cool if _they_ were the protag and had a liberal foil.
And, annoyingly, because conservatives are so dismissive over liberal concerns about the media, a lot conservatives can’t even _articulate_ this problem, which there already is a term for: Lack of representation. Or ‘diversity’.
But some do. In fact, they call out the left for being hypothetical there. So why hasn’t it been addressed?
Well…conservatives are pretty bad at creating shorthand clues to their identity that isn’t weirdly bigoted. When those more subtle clues are used, the people criticizing ‘the liberal media’ tend to just completely ignore them!
Like, is Sarah Connor a conservative? I mean, pretty much any contextual clue you can come up with says she is. (Even the fact she’s a LA college student/waitress when we meet her…that’s in _1984_, mid-Reagan. It’s entirely plausible for her to be conservative.) Does she ever get cited as a conservative character? Not…really. Is it because the clues aren’t strong enough? Is it because she’s a woman and that overrides things? I have no idea.Report
I believe that the argument would be that Sarah Connor is Universal.Report
“conservatives are pretty bad at creating shorthand clues to their identity that isn’t weirdly bigoted”
That is such a bizarre argument. I mean, you’ve got to see how bound up it is in your own perceptions, right? You’re saying that…oh, I just want to read the statement back to you. IT’s like Lionel Hutz hearing the bourbon talk to him. I don’t know. I’m at a loss.Report
Oooh! I found the thread!
Here’s where it starts:
And here is our (as in: Yours and Mine) interaction:
Check out the thread yourself.
I think that describing it as “you and Kristin on the twitters claiming family as a con value which those darn libs were trying to horn in on” is a misrepresentation of the interaction.
Like, to the point where I’m almost sure that you’d agree that it is.Report
jaybird, that was last year, surely you can’t expect him to remember that far backReport
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You know, in that entire thread he never once answers his own question. It’s nothing but a jeremiad of how “woke” people look down on conservatives and their “culture”.Report
He talks about what it does more than he talks about what it is.
But it’s easy to defend defining a thing by what it does pragmatically, even if what it is happens to be less than aesthetically pleasing (and not fashionable at all).Report
Doesn’t this align with Greg’s point above, though? Everything the tweeter cites are values supported by almost everyone. Just not in the way he likes.
I think if you’re going to headline an essay with a question, you damn well be ready to answer it.Report
The problem is that If the error bars for “what is Liberal” covers pretty much everything, then pretty much nothing is conservative.
There’s only Universal (which covers pretty much everything) and Liberal (which covers the stuff that the conservatives don’t claim).
Which is a hell of a trick.
It, effectively, leaves us with saying that there are no (positive) conservative values.
There are only liberal values and universal values.Report
Which brings us back to his failure to answer his own question.Report
Are discussing his question or are we discussing him personally?
I am willing to say that he sucks. Without having met him or read anything more from him than, what? A dozen tweets?
Yep.Report
His question. Like you, I don’t know him. He might be a great guy, but as a spokesman for conservative culture, if such a thing exists, he’s terrible.Report
If you can’t judge a philosophy by a particularly loud adherent, what can you judge it on? What could possibly remain?Report
I will give him credit, at least he pretends there is a question. Most commenters from the right make their case as though it’s holy writ.Report
I think that wrestling with his question is more interesting than pointing out that we don’t have to… because he didn’t do a good job of answering it.Report
“Conservative” is a large coalition. Christian Fundamentalists are a faction. It is true that not every anti-communist/socialist is a Christian Fundamentalist but it is a misuse of language to claim they’re not a conservative.
Mammals are a large group. Most have fur, some do not, that doesn’t change that “mammals” is fairly descriptive.
If we play that game with Team Blue we find that not all of them are in favor of getting rid of the cops nor are all of them gay.Report
I just noticed how slippery greginak’s original tweet was. The modern liberal supports liberty, personal responsibility, and family, but only if they themselves define those words. The way they define them conflicts with the definitions used through most of the Anglosphere’s history. Conservatism supports those three concepts in a way that wouldn’t make a 1921 listener’s head spin. Maybe this was covered in earlier exchanges, but it finally jumped out at me now.Report
There’s fiscal responsibility while a Democrat is president.Report
Most real actual Communists would see Hollywood movies as inherently anti-Communist because they celebrate materialistic consumer capitalism and routinely had the Soviets, other Communists, and radicals as subversive villains. Only since American conservatism has declared that anything but pure free market capitalism is communism does Hollywood movies count as Communist.Report
I was thinking about the actual, admitted members of the Communist Party who somehow didn’t influence the movies they themselves wrote.Report
Name the names, name the movies, show the message.
Or, as the Hollywood joke goes, there was a young, ambitious starlet so dumb she f****d the writer.Report
Obviously, Trumbo is an example. Pacifist through the Third Reich years until they turned on Stalin. Unrepentant. But I can’t tell which game we’re supposed to be playing now. I thought this thread we were admitting that Hollywood influences the culture.Report
So that’s a name. Now name a movie. And show the Commie message. Spartacus?Report
Remember at the end, when all the slaves collectively decided to be crucified? 😉Report
I always thought that “Johnny Got His Gun” was an amazing piece of anti-war literature to come out when the Molotov Ribbentrop pact was going on.
Hell, it remains a brilliant piece of anti-war literature.
It’s a book, though.
It didn’t get made into a movie until Vietnam.Report
So did the Commies make it a movie? And is there anything wrong, in a free society, with writing and publishing anti-war literature when, in hindsight and in contrast to popular opinion at the time, war might have been a good idea?Report
It’s always fun to wax philosophical over whether what “wrong” would consist of when one has a big enough picture.
The earth is billions of years old. Will humans be anything but a blip? Maybe we could leave our mark if we nuked each other but I don’t recommend that.
In any case, the whole “anti-war when Hitler was buds with Stalin” pivoting to “I’M A YANKEE DOODLE DANDY!” after Operation Barbarossa is one of the criticisms of the so-called “communists”.
Oh, so are you saying we shouldn’t have entered the war? Are you some kind of anti-semite?!?!?!?
No. I’m saying that the commies were saying that until Operation Barbarossa.Report
Indeed. But back to the movies written by Commies…..Report
Eh, “what about this explicitly pro-Union movie from 1954 that gets called Communist propaganda even in the current year?”
“What? Are you saying that *UNIONS* are *BAD*?”
sighReport
Name the names. Name the movies. Show the message. Is that hard to understand? Who actually ran the studios and made the decisions? The arch-capitalists who, well, ran the studios, or the hired help? Did any significant number of propaganda pieces, other than government-approved propaganda, sneak by the bosses?Report
Here you go. Salt of the Earth.
Part of the problem is that any given message is not necessarily *BAD*. And calling it “Communist” should not be seen as calling it “Bad”.
But, like, heavy anti-war messaging during Molotov Ribbentrop was a Communist message.
And asking me whether I think being hesitant about going to war is *BAD* or whether it should have been illegal like Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. did when he threw Schenck into *PRISON* for writing a *PAMPHLET*… Surely you’re not agreeing with the Supreme Court, are you?
You want examples, there you go.
“But those examples weren’t bad.”
“It is the current year.”Report
I haven’t seen Dalton Trumbo’s Tender Comrade, but apparently HUAC weren’t fans. The director, fellow Communist Party member Edward Dmytryk, went on to create The Caine Mutiny, a fairly anti-US military movie for the 1950’s. The three movies that HUAC seems to have concentrated on were Mission to Moscow, The North Star, and Song of Russia.
Jaybird mentions “Johnny Got His Gun”. That was an anti-war book by Trumbo that came out when the USSR was in league with Hitler. He had the book pulled when Hitler attacked the USSR, because war was ok when the US was on the side of the Soviets. When the US was at war with the communists in SE Asia, he had the book made into a movie.
But again, just as your mantra is (unironically) “name the names”, movies, and messages, mine is why are we pretending that movies don’t affect culture?Report
I agree with you that movies have an impact on culture.
But the examples you list, demonstrate the silliness of “political” movies.
Being anti-war is Good in 1929, referencing WWI;
However, it becomes Bad around 1939 when we are menaced by the Axis powers;
However, being Communist is Good when they are our allies against the Axis powers; But then it becomes Bad when the Reichstag falls;
This shifting winds of good and bad are the sort of things we mock the Communists for, when they expel someone for being “prematurely anti-fascist”.
I’m not saying these shifts are bad per se; I fully support the strategic necessity of partnering with the Soviets to defeat the Nazis.
But it seems ridiculous to have the US government approve of a movie like Mission To Moscow, then later use that as a weapon against the makers of that movie.Report
I’m not saying that movies, in general, don’t influence culture. Though I suspect that the culture influences the movies more. What I’m saying there aren’t many Commie movies that actually had any such influence. You haven’t seen Tender Comrade. Neither has anybody else. The Caine Mutiny? Seriously? And the three movies HUAC disliked were in the “our gallant Soviet ally” mode, which was our official line at the time. Johnny Got His Gun? It was anti-war and Trumbo was a Communist. But what’s the Commie message? Lots of non-Communist folks were against the war.Report
The Caine Mutiny, anti-US military? Do you mean the film that was made with the full cooperation of the Navy after they approved the script? You know, the one that ends with a speech about how while the jerk who masterminded the mutiny was going to his fancy college, the military was doing the dirty job of protecting the country?Report
There’s a running gag in How I Met Your Mother that Barney always confused the villain and the hero in any given movie.
It’s not exactly something the writers invented out of whole cloth to lampoon the character, however.
You’d be surprised at how many people miss the bluntest of messages — people who saw Wall Street and thought Gekko was the hero. Or who watched Starship Troopers mock fascism in a fairly unsubtle fashion and didn’t notice.
I think even kid’s PSA’s are too complex for some people, so it doesn’t surprise me to see — for instance — someone complaining a movie was “anti-military” even if the military was 100% on board with it.Report
Or that Ricky Bobby was being celebrated instead of mocked!Report
There is even a TVtrope over this, misaimed fandom. The problem basically goes back to Truffaut’s theory on why doing an anti-war movie is so difficult. Film is such an intensely visualized medium that you usually end up glamorizing whatever you are trying to preach against.
This effects both righties and lefties. Anti-hedonistic films that try to show the depravity of sex, drugs, and rock n’roll end up making the entire depravity look really good and fun even as our protagonists are vomiting in a hospital bathroom. Lefties try their best to show high financiers as despicable but the high financiers always come across as powerful and living very well. Like the Soviet Union aired Good Times to show the poverty of African-Americans but a lot of ordinary Soviet citizens realized that really poor Americans still had better apartments than they did and could afford cars while they could not.Report
There’s also the fact that some actors turn in stellar performances as villains.
I mean comping across as powerful, charismatic, appealing — and that muddles the messages. (Which is true to life — powerful and charismatic people HAVE made some truly awful things seem good at the time).
Alan Rickman did this with Snape, for instance. Michael Douglas as Gekko.
Heck, I’m pretty sure there’s a scene in one of the X-men movies shoehorned in as a kick-the-dog moment for Magneto because Ian McKellan was selling it so well they wanted everyone to be certain he was a Bad Guy. (The whole “Oops, bye Mystique let’s be real clear that if you don’t have an X-gene you’re not even really a person” moment)
of course there’s the flip side — the actor that played Joffrey was so good at being a villain that, bluntly, he was run out of acting by moron fans who couldn’t separate the repellant character from the actor.Report
This speech, by the way, being given to a Jewish character by a Jewish author during the war against Hitler. It wasn’t meant to be questioned.Report
In fact, most of the movies made in the postwar period have a rather unromantic view of the military, which isn’t surprising since the audience were almost all people who had direct personal experience with it.
They certainly didn’t see soldiers as “Warrior Heroes” or any of that crap we see today. Sgt. Bilko, Operation Petticoat, The Best Years Of Our Lives…these movies viewed soldiers as just regular guys who did their job, and had a very complex view of the military establishment that was just any other bureaucracy.Report
This is the difference between a conscript army where you have a lot of people who would rather not be there serving and an all volunteer army like we currently have.
It’s a lot easy to glamorize the military as being filled with super sexy bad ass soldiers who are also great in bed when they at least theoretically all want to be there because they volunteered. When a big part of the military is drafted than you get more comedic fodder even during something like World War II. You don’t have anything like Private SNAFU for any conflict post-Vietnam. No dopey regular guy and gal just over their head.Report
Says the guy who was never in the military. The stories I can tell of the dopey guy or gal…Report
I’m taking about how the media shows the military. Yes, I realize the real military is very different and people join for many different reasons. I remember from my high school years that the army and navy advertise themselves as big tech schools while the Marines emphasize being a bad ass in their ads. However, when you had a draft army than you got a lot more army comedies than you do now.Report
That’s less about the draft and more because the Pentagon has been taking a much more active role in influencing how the military is portrayed in media.Report
You’ve got the plot wrong. Johnny Got His Gun was written in 1938. CPUSA was strongly anti-Nazi until the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact in 1939, and then became anti-Nazi again after the invasion of the SU in 1941. It’s that turning on a dime, twice, that proved CPUSA was nothing but an arm of the Soviet Union. A pacifist novel published in 1938 (during the Spanish Civil War) was nothing like the Party line.Report
Part of the difficulty in assigning a political label to “Hollywood” is that there are a lot of facets of Hollywood, which skew in all sots of different directions.
Additionally, there is a gap between professed values and lived values.
So like a producer may be LGBTQ friendly, but still champion free market ideas.
At least until he decides he needs a subsidy to film in a certain locale.
Or a socially conservative actor may end up in a messy divorce amid charges of infidelity.
As the saying goes, in Hollywood once you strip away all the fake tinsel, you can see the real tinsel underneath.Report
Hollywood’s influence per movie has gone down as the number of movies has exploded.
In the old days, “make a movie” was a big deal because every movie was watched by enough people to matter. Or maybe we just don’t remember the unsuccessful movies to the point where they don’t exist.
In either case, now days it’d have to be “make a successful movie”. Or more likely, make a series of successful movies showing that gun violence is unpopular.
And as a species we’re hardwired to pay attention to people killing other people.Report
In discussing what might be a “conservative” movie, what occurs to me is how much of what is called “conservative values” tend to be prohibition.
For example, the movie Knocked Up, where Katherine Heigle has an unplanned pregnancy, and the characters bring up the subject of abortion, but she rejects that and decides to keep the baby.
So this is a conservative movie, reflecting a world conservatives would like to see?
Well, not really. Because the world conservatives are pushing for is one where the mere possibility of abortion doesn’t exist. The existence of it as a choice is what they object to.
The father, Seth Rogan, gradually grows out of his hedonistic man-child life an becomes a sober responsible parent with a steady job.
So a conservative movie, right?
Wrong, because again, he does this by choice. His own parent and family embrace him uncritically, and there is no stigma attached to a “bastard” child, no punishment for his hedonism.
What stands out for me regarding the American cultural conservatives is how they can’t seem to take yes for an answer.
The outcome of the Sexual Revolution was that some of the old taboos like premarital sex and homosexuality were discarded, but most of the underlying premises were actually ratified and re-affirmed.
Everyone today embraces the ideal of committed monogamous marriages and family formation. But instead of celebrating, the conservatives focus on who they want to exclude from the circle, to the point of absurdity like where they prefer a child remain an orphan that be raised by a gay couple.
In this light, a “conservative” movie is almost an impossibility since it would necessarily focus on punishment and exclusion. A couple can’t just choose to bear a child and grow into maturity, there would need to be some sort of punishment which forces them to do it.Report
While Evangelicals will agree that only Evangelicalism counts as Conservative, I’m not sure that they’re right.
You bring up Judd Apatow movies and I want to say that they’re fairly conservative not because of the whole “Is being a 40 Year Old Virgin conservative?” issue but because of the whole issue of what words you put into the mouths of the foils.
Steve Carrell was the least screwed up guy at the poker table.
In Knocked Up, abortion was portrayed as an option that Heigl’s friend portrayed monstrously. (“Now she has a *REAL* baby.”)
Never saw Trainwreck but if it follows the patterns of the other two movies, you’ve got some pathologically miserable people milling about with some people who are closer to health and merely unhappy and the pathologically miserable person gets put in a position where they have to change their life by making a choice to stop being pathologically miserable and move toward being healthy. And then they make that choice.
Subversive as hell, even if they do have people having unsexy sex, getting drunk and acting like drunken fools, and being alienated from the people in their lives that ought to be helping them be less unhappy.
The “culturally liberal” people were miserable. And the people who were really square were merely unhappy.
Is that “conservative”?
If you measure “liberal” vs. “conservative” by the yardstick of “who is wearing the flashing I’M WRONG ball cap?”, it pretty much is.
Ah, but we say, one of the main characters said a word that wouldn’t have been allowed on Veggietales.
(Maybe we can make “The 40 Year-Old Virgin” conservative now that “you know how I know you’re gay?” is a homophobic scene that everyone involved should be embarrassed by.)Report
“While Evangelicals will agree that only Evangelicalism counts as Conservative…”
If the last 5 years have shown us anything, it’s that evangelicals would never accept a non-evangelical politician.Report
This goes back to the same criticisms as the shows.
How can you tell whether a politician is Liberal or Conservative when he advocates for the same goddamn policies as everybody in Washington advocates for?
Who does he blame?
Trump blamed The Liberals.
Therefore: He Was Conservative.
It doesn’t matter what his policies were.
It doesn’t matter what his history was.
It doesn’t matter what he even did.
It just mattered who he said the foil was.Report
A “conservative” movie would be everyone choosing to follow conservative values. Keeping the baby qualifies.
The last movie where a woman had an abortion was… Fast Times In Ridgemont High? 40 years ago? Am I missing any?
Amusement. Dragon slayers need dragons. If none exist by the old standards, then the goal posts will be moved to create them.
By old standards we have no poor. The number of people who starved last year, during a massive economic disruption created by a plague, was zero. Most (all?) of the poor have access to all of humanity’s knowledge via smart phones, the internet, and wiki. The level of discrimination against minorities is low enough that we need to invent microaggressions (sources differ on whether they exist in RL) and cherry pick police shootings.
We should be celebrating these things. Instead we have the occasional riot.Report