tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76890347324547355302024-03-05T09:30:01.263-08:00Screen to ScreedScreen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.comBlogger27125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-48260123579958041492020-06-19T16:14:00.001-07:002020-06-19T16:14:37.710-07:00Lights, Camera, Education: Blackboard Jungle (1955)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br /><br />The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Love Thy Neighborhood. This is one of the teacher movie asides that provide a companion commentary to each section of the book. Enjoy!<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />LIGHTS, CAMERA, EDUCATION: The Blackboard Jungle<br /><br /><br />The Nazis had been obliterated. So too the imperial Japanese. The Communists loomed, but Eisenhower had successfully downgraded the conflict from an escalating Korean War to a professionally managed, remote Cold War. The Americans of the 1950s were thus freed to turn their energies fully to the challenges and opportunities of the homefront. Postwar prosperity was in full bloom, record numbers of men were attending and graduating college (thanks in large part to the GI Bill) and a historic baby boom was underway. <br /><br />Not everything was coming up roses, however. Though the Great Depression was in the rear view mirror, poverty remained the grinding reality for a significant segment of America, as Michael Harrington would argue to momentous effect in 1962’s <i>The Other America</i>. There was also the alarming rise of juvenile delinquency, especially in urban areas, captured memorably in <i>West Side Story</i> (first introduced on Broadway in 1957 and adapted as a film in 1961). Coinciding with the in-migration of African Americans and Puerto Ricans to the big urban hubs, these trends sparked an intense public interest in solving social problems.<br /><br />The dominant spirit behind this new social focus was not the radical zeal of the revolutionary (that would come later) but the can-do spirit of American optimism. The same people that had survived or defeated the worst horrors of the 20th century and melded the descendants of the warring peoples of Europe into a unified nation could clear a few final hurdles. And the early thinking was that the usual All-American heroes would be the ones to do it. For instance, Disney’s first big step into contemporary social issues was to send Fess Parker, the star of their new smash hit Davy Crockett show (1954-1955) and a product of the GI Bill, on a goodwill tour of American cities. His focus was spreading his cornpone wisdom to the troubled youth of the day.<br /><br />The same spirit animated the film <i>Blackboard Jungle</i> (1955), but through a grittier lens more appropriate for the increasingly rough-and-tumble world of urban education. It provides a valuable snapshot of contemporary American attitudes to the emerging challenges of race relations, academic apathy and rebellion against moral and social authority in the urban public school systems. Its clunky but confident combination of social realism, sensationalism, idealism and unapologetic patriotism make it a sometimes preposterous, sometimes stirring tribute to 1950s America.<br /><br />Starring Glenn Ford, a Hollywood workhorse in the 1950s for his convincing portrayals of the fiercely determined, fundamentally decent American everyman, <i>Blackboard Jungle</i> follows the struggles of a first year teacher in an urban high school. Ford’s Richard Dadier is a soldier readjusting to home life and chooses teaching as a way to support his Baby Booming young family and make use of his new college degree. An idealist, he relishes the challenge and opportunity of teaching English in an inner-city school, initially dismissing the bitter cynicism of some of his more experienced colleagues.<br /><br />But the ice-cold slaps of (sensationalized) reality come in rapid succession, pushing his good-natured idealism to its breaking point. First he breaks up an attempted rape of a teacher and roughs up the teenage perpetrator. Instead of garnering him respect, that act wins him the loathing of the local teen gang. They ambush and beat him up, terrorize a similarly idealistic colleague out of the profession and begin a campaign of harassment that reaches his pregnant wife.<br /><br />All the while his classroom teeters on the edge of total chaos. Racial slurs fly between whites, blacks and Hispanics. On the rare occasions when students don’t make a mockery of his English lessons, language and cultural barriers do. The one sincerely smiling, attentive face in the crowd belongs to the kid with a “66 IQ.” Adding to Dadier’s growing frustration is what he suspects to be sabotage from Gregory, the intelligent, charismatic black student (played by Sidney Poitier) who seems to be behind the sullen rebellion. <br /><br />These overwhelming challenges threaten to break Dadier’s idealism, his self-confidence and even the domestic tranquility of his nuclear family. It’s not just the kids’ but his own Americanism that is at stake. In a low moment, he almost forsakes it all, barely restraining himself from tarring Gregory with one of the same racial epithets he had earlier denounced. But neither Dadier nor his optimism ever fully break. <br /><br />Slowly, painfully, he makes progress in earning the respect and loyalty of his students. His first step in the right direction comes when he volunteers to organize the Christmas program. This exposes him to Gregory’s sober and reverent leadership of a small caroling choir. This discovery of Christian unity forms a basis of trust that eventually leads to a pact between the two: Dadier won’t allow himself to be bullied into quitting if Gregory doesn’t quit on his education. In a revealing display of the ethic of the time, Dadier convinces Gregory not to allow racial prejudice to become an excuse for failing to reach his potential, instead pushing him to emulate those who had overcome. <br /><br />With Gregory’s charismatic support, Dadier’s conquest of the classroom is all but complete. But the most hardened delinquent element, led by the white thug Artie (played by Vic Morrow), won’t bend to order. In the climactic confrontation that closes the movie, Artie pulls a knife on the unarmed Dadier, trusting that the rest of the class won’t rat on him. Dadier is outnumbered and outmatched, but the intervention of his students saves the day. First Gregory subdues Artie’s evil accomplice. Then, in an act of charmingly clumsy symbolism, the 66 IQ smiler charges Artie and knocks him to the ground with the business end of the American flag pole.<br /><br /><i> Blackboard Jungle</i>’s sensationalist elements overstated the contemporary challenges of the urban public school even as its bright-eyed idealism undersold the obstacles to overcoming them. Still, it offered a prescient preview of the coming crisis in American education and society. Further, the remedies it proffered, namely the dogged persistence of flawed but fundamentally decent community servants deeply committed to American values, flowed from the very real strengths of 1950s America. <br /><br />Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-61948931282676963692019-11-17T06:01:00.002-08:002019-11-17T06:01:51.880-08:00Extreme Makeover: Lady and the Tramp EditionAs readers of <i><a href="https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B08144196C&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_6jv0DbEPEPJCW" target="_blank">The Trojan Mouse</a> </i>will know, modern Disney has taken on a woke new identity completely at odds with their roots. This makes for massive culture clash whenever new Disney meets its old self. The latest example of this clash is Disney's live action remake of <i>Lady and the Tramp, </i>just released on Disney+, the Mouse's new streaming platform.<br />
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Bringing this charming old relic in line with their dogmatic new belief system is no easy task. While the changes aren't quite as dramatic as those in the remakes of <i>Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty </i>(<i>Maleficent) </i>and <i>Jungle Book</i>, they are still glaring, and not for the better.<br />
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The original <i>Lady of the Tramp</i><i> </i>came out in 1955, in the midst of the Disney Golden Age. It is the final chapter of what I call Disney's domestic trilogy, following <i>Alice in Wonderland</i> and <i>Peter Pan. </i>Each of these movies works as a strong cautionary tale for young women tempted to venture outside the warm, protective confines of the so-called "cult of domesticity" that dominates our cultural memory of the 1950's especially.<br />
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The original <i>Lady </i>pits its sheltered, thoroughly domesticated Lady against the philandering devil-may-care Tramp in a contest of worldviews. Tramp tempts Lady into a bohemian life of adventure and thrills and Lady counters with a loyalist preference for her duties as the protector of her humans and their baby. As you would expect in a Golden Age product, Lady's values win the day and Tramp leaves his swinging bachelor lifestyle to join her, first risking his life to defend the human baby and then settling down to father children of his own.<br />
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The challenge for the modern, woke Disney brand is how to pay tribute to this cutesy old charmer while gutting it of its "problematic" elements. In more zealous hands, it might have been easier. They could have just made Tramp's bohemian outlook defeat Lady's conservatism and end the story with them both on the road in polyamorous bliss, leaving those oppressive humans and their "civilized" norms behind them. But corporate Disney isn't usually comfortable alienating markets as huge (and politically diverse) as pet owners.<br />
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Fortunately, the woke religion offers a lot of outs and Disney takes advantage of them all. The first is the diversity indulgence. Introducing diversity to a formerly white-dominated space gets a story all kinds of woke brownie (pardon the color-biased language) points. Eager for the credits, the new <i>Lady </i>moves the action to New Orleans to retain the period setting while providing a half-hearted rationale for the scrupulously diverse casting.<br />
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After checking off the boxes for minority representation (including tiny cameos for a Korean doctor and a Guatemalan waiter), <i>Lady </i>does its best to excise the political incorrect bits from the original. Gone are the Siamese cats and their song, replaced lamely by a half-baked and pointless (but inoffensive!) musical number. Also scrubbed are the Mexican chihuahua and the beaver with the speech impediment.<br />
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The gender stereotypes are tougher to get around, being so deeply ingrained in the original and the setting, but the writers at least give it a college try. Tramp doesn't rescue Lady with his fighting prowess this time (instead he gets her to pretend she has rabies). She also gets a chance to rescue him later. The new <i>Lady </i>is less successful pushing Darling, the woman of the house, out of the cult of domesticity, but it tries to make up for it at the end. Stepping out of her protective bubble, Darling hands the baby to Jim Dear and dresses down the villain as Jim Dear watches. It's a pointless scene that makes sense only as a limp apology to the feminists in the audience.<br />
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Bizarrely, given the reputation of modern progressives as the sexual liberators, the new <i>Lady </i>is actually far more reticent on sexual subtexts than the original. Tramp's promiscuity is gone as a plot point. Even the Lady/Tramp puppies from the original ending are gone, replaced by a pair of adopted puppies. The remaining romance is painfully dull and sterile, epitomized by the bizarre update on "He's a Tramp," which makes little sense with such a sparse romantic subtext (and looks supremely weird with live action dogs dancing around with CGI-doctored lip syncing).<br />
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After cutting out the political incorrectness and traditional romance of the original, the new <i>Lady </i>takes on its greatest challenge with the worldview contest at the heart of the story. Leaving Lady's motivations mostly intact (though they do shift her away from a strict devotion to the baby and towards a more general sense of family belonging), they do the heaviest lifting with the Tramp. The original Tramp is a wild bachelor in need of domesticating. The new Tramp is an embittered stray, whose independence is a transparent front for the wound he suffered when he was abandoned by his owners.<br />
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The moral of the story thus shifts from the triumph of domesticity to the defeat of the dog catcher and the adoption of the stray. It's hardly a Revolutionary twist, but at least it neuters the story's core Loyalist message.<br />
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The individual changes the new <i>Lady </i>makes are mostly cosmetic, little nips and tucks to make the story slightly more tolerable to Disney's woke gatekeepers while preserving its original appearance. But the collective effect of this modern facelift is to turn what was once a warm and charming story into something stiff and empty. Man's best friend becomes a soulless corporation's mindless automaton. <br />
<br />Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-30796428867830741782019-09-15T14:19:00.004-07:002020-08-09T07:04:10.428-07:00Memes over Memory: The Corn Pop SagaAs a Gen X/Y hybrid and non-combat veteran of the Meme Wars, I appreciate the maniacal tomfoolery of the internet age as much as anyone. But every once in a while, our trollish hooliganism crosses a line and puts something really valuable at stake. There are memes so dank and corrosive that they are eating through our cultural memory.<br />
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The case in point is the hullabaloo around Uncle Joe Biden's latest fish story. As Biden related it on the campaign trail, as a very young man he took a job as a lifeguard at a black community pool in order to get to know black people better. There he crossed paths with a gang calling themselves the Romans and their leader "Corn Pop." After kicking Corn Pop out for breaking the rules, Biden found Corn Pop waiting for him in the parking with a straight razor. Instead of fighting, however, they bonded, and Uncle Joe found himself officially initiated into the black community.<br />
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This is the face of most people born after 1980 when listening to this story:<br />
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Then, as we anticipate our favorite takedown artists on social media responding, we shift into the next gear, breaking out the popcorn for Corn Pop:<br />
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Sure enough, social media warriors were lining up to dunk on Biden for the story. A representative example is The Root's Michael Harriot, who offered up a wicked blow-by-blow <a href="https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/1172904996880441350" target="_blank">comic tweet thread</a>.<br />
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As Harriot writes, it sounds like "some white kid tried to make a gang fairy tale for a 6th grade play." For me, the story immediately triggered clips of Michael Scott (Steve Carell's character from The Office and one of the biggest meme stars on the interweb) trying to relate to his black coworkers. There's a running gag where his black coworkers make up stories about growing up in the ghetto to play to Michael's after-school special level of understanding of the black community (<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/DunderMifflin/comments/50rfco/in_the_gang_world_we_use_something_called_fluffy/" target="_blank">a refresher here</a>).<br />
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And so the first instinct after laughing in incredulity is to wind up for the dunk. I mean who doesn't love serving up Michael Scott/Joe Biden a plate of humiliation?<br />
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The only problem is that Joe Biden's fish story seems to be largely true (allowing for the usual big fish exaggerations). And it wasn't even a new story. He recounted it in his memoirs over a decade ago, and WaPo brought it up in <a href="https://beta.washingtonpost.com/politics/at-a-wilmington-pool-pranks-nicknames-and-the-racial-education-of-joe-biden/2019/07/12/29fcc8fc-a191-11e9-b732-41a79c2551bf_story.html" target="_blank">an article</a> in July. Multiple community members corroborate a bunch of the details, including the existence of Corn Pop.<br />
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Why should an apparently true story (again allowing for exaggeration) strike us as so ridiculous? Why do we so instinctively reach for the rotten tomatoes to fling? Biden's story could be an outlier, the exceptionally rare instance of a tall tale turning out to be true. But it strikes me as much, much more likely that is our reactions that are the problem here.<br />
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As soon as Biden opened his mouth and mentioned Corn Pop, the man disappeared and the meme took over. We stopped hearing a 76 year old recalling (and, yes, perhaps embellishing) his memories of a bygone era, and instead saw a familiar clown that we've been programmed to mock. And mock we did, regurgitating the appropriate memes and digs to generate the requisite sick burns.<br />
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As much as I love memes and the lèse-majesté they are capable of visiting on the powers that be, this is an example of some bad cultural programming. Trashing Biden for Corn Pop is false Wokeness, or a phony Red Pill, depending on which side of the culture war you're firing from. It's evidence of how the memers can be memed, losing all perspective in pursuit of the perfect put-down.<br />
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What perspective then can we gain if we set down the popcorn and pick up the Corn Pop? Maybe our elders, even Joe Biden, have some relevant, valuable memories. <br />
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Our gut reaction is to ridicule the idea that a cheesy white suburbanite could find some common ground with a corny urban black kid at a community swimming pool. After pondering it for a day, I'm more inclined to mourn that we consider that kind of encounter too ridiculous to be plausible.<br /><br />
To reference another cringy relic from an earlier age I'm reminded of West Side Story. The only time the (ballet dancing, Broadway singing) gang members get along is when they are ridiculing the grinning, Biden-like organizer of the neighborhood dance. Yes, we too can enjoy some temporary unity by ganging up to mock Biden. But are we really mocking the idea that we could ever really get along?<br />
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P.S. As an aside, I was thinking about the ridiculousness of the name Corn Pop. It's a tough name to square with contemporary image of the black gangsta. For me the first name that pops(!) into my head is NBA YoungBoy, a 19 year old rapper who has already done time for attempted murder. I have a very hard time imagining NBA YoungBoy calling himself Corn Pop and palling around with a cheeseball like Joe Biden.<br />
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But I'm also a big fan of old movies and the old NBA, so I have a few other cultural references to help me put Corn Pop in context. Back then, at least through these modern eyes, there wasn't such a huge corniness differential between prominent blacks and whites. Black celebrities had what we would consider "white" names. Their nicknames weren't quite distinctly "black" either. Contrast Kobe Bryant's self-bestowed "Black Mamba" with his dad's "Jellybean."Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-81698883266612366462019-06-06T15:10:00.000-07:002019-06-06T15:13:26.075-07:00The Knights Who Say OuiA few years ago, I dubbed the league of <a href="https://screentoscreed.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-knights-who-say-ni-left-as-big.html" target="_blank">woke multinational corporations</a> the "Knights Who Say Ni." In addition to being a reference to the nonsense-spouting tyrants from Monty Python, this name stands for their adoption of "Ni Marx, Ni Jesus" as their unspoken motto. Meaning "neither Marx, nor Jesus," this phrase (the title of a French book predicting a new kind of leftism) epitomizes the left's embrace of big business while retaining their hostility to Christianity and its morality. Today, the Knights Who Say Ni maintain their onslaught, their latest venture into the culture wars being the demonetization (the corporate version of demonization) of prominent conservative YouTuber Steven Crowder.<br />
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As the Knights Who Say Ni's demands are shifting from mere shrubberies to more substantial targets, they are practically begging for a challenge. In Monty Python, when the Knights escalate the heroes eventually tire of their demands and refuse them. Their modern equivalent have yet to hit such a barrier, however. No matter how shrill and unhinged the puppet-masters of the woke Big Business become, they find a contingent of conservatives willing to bend the knee on matter of principle. Thus the Knights Who Say Ni have come to enjoy the support of a nominally antagonistic order. We shall call them the Knights Who Say Oui.</div>
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Their figurehead is (the appropriately named) David French, a National Review writer who enjoyed a few days of notoriety as Bill Kristol's presidential nominee for the NeverTrump contingent of the conservative media. French is a Sir Robin like figure, his stature the product not so much of his own gallant efforts than the crows of his traveling minstrels, both pro and con. Kristol and his other friends in the neoconservative wing are all too happy to prop him up as a role model and then defend his honor when he is attacked on their behalf. From the other side, populist-leaning conservatives like to use French as a punching bag for wimpy conservatism. The most recent and explicit jab thus far came from Sohrab Ahmari with his <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/05/against-david-french-ism" target="_blank">"Against David French-ism,"</a> laying the blame for the litany of conservative culture war surrenders at the feet of his philosophy. </div>
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Though I'm sympathetic to the spirit of their argument, when Ahmari and the contingent he represents attack French for being too nice, I think they are misunderstanding the core creed of the Knights Who Say Oui. Nor do I take <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/david-french-response-sohrab-ahmari/" target="_blank">French's entertaining rebuttal</a> - highlights including a tortured <i>Game of Thrones </i>analogy and his boast that he "literally placed his body" in between Christian students and protesters - at face value.<br />
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Conservatives angered and frustrated by unchecked progressive cultural assaults tend to see naivete or weakness in French's failure-to-stands (French doesn't help when he crows about pro-life culture war victories that are directly downstream of Trump's election, which he vociferously fought against). They saw the same in the 2012 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney. They are just too darn nice to fight back! The constant tendency among friendly critics is to classify "French-ism" as a sort of unnecessary martyrdom. They see Neville Chamberlain - a man on the right side but using the wrong tactics for a threat as grave as Hitler.</div>
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Missing from this tragic picture, however, is any actual tragedy for the actors involved. To be sure, French, Romney and the NeverTrump host came out of 2016 with egg on their face, but what else? Romney actually increased his stature, waltzing into a shoo-in Senate seat in Utah. French's position in conservatism is unchanged. Though associated with surrender, these chivalrous knights haven't actually surrendered anything.</div>
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Consider French's dorkily expressed central point in his response to Ahmari: "the Valyrian steel that stops the cultural white walker is pluralism buttressed by classical liberalism, not Christian statism." In English, he's saying that upholding the political philosophies embodied in the Constitution is the only way to stop the left, not reverting to a medieval Crusader mentality of holy culture war. He would later <a href="https://twitter.com/DavidAFrench/status/1136286234358059009" target="_blank">summarize his position on Twitter</a>, his points being that politics is not war, that decency is not optional and that personal liberty doesn't get in the way of the "Highest Good."</div>
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None of these points match the situation on the ground of culture <i>war - </i>deplatforming, personal abuse and restrictions on speech are the battlefields du jour.<i> </i>So what is French actually getting at? He is nominally speaking aspirationally of the way things could or ought to be, but there is a real place that fits his description. It is the noble center of American politics and culture war.</div>
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In the noble center, where Ni and Oui coexist, outright war is forbidden (though greatly encouraged overseas). In the noble center, disagreements can occasionally get heated, but they rarely descend to outright indecency. Thus Romney, though savaged by the far left and then by the far right, can shrug his way right back into power. French, though loathed by the far left and disdained by the far right, retains his pulpit to preach at his fellow pundits - the intelligentry to coin another phrase. </div>
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Finally, they are able to preserve their sense of chivalry by continuing to fight for the Highest Good, which is ultimately defined as membership in the noble center. Jousting in formal tournaments where the rules are in place to prevent any accidental career fatalities provides chivalric thrills without requiring any actual dragon or ogre slaying. Leave the actual cultural sacrifices to the revolting peasants or bourgeois interlopers (along with the very occasional rogue knight) who don't understand or refuse to abide by the rules.</div>
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It is fitting that French should be fascinated by HBO's <i>Game of Thrones </i>(though hardly in keeping with French's stern reprimands of the President's supremely vulgar tastes)<i>. </i>It envisions a world where knightly pageantry has dissolved into constant barbaric war, with every shred of decency beaten out of even the noblest of knights, and the Higher Good entirely dependent on the whims of a carousel of tyrants. This is the ultimate risk-free escape for a Peer of the Intelligentry, where peaceful decency reigns and knight errantry is limited to shouts of "Ni! and "Oui!"</div>
Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-70805092602807457692019-05-28T18:26:00.000-07:002019-05-28T18:26:40.276-07:00Excerpt from The Trojan Mouse - Wreck-It Ralph and Disney's Great Awokening<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Having just wrapped up the first draft of my first book (The Trojan Mouse: How Disney Is Winning the Culture War, to be released this summer), I want to share an excerpt detailing one of the more interesting and blatant examples of progressive messaging in the latest crop of Disney movies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Below is my analysis of 2012's <i>Wreck-It Ralph</i> from the chapter on Disney's "Great Awokening" (a term I first encountered at Spotted Toad's blog):</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Though unheralded for much more than its charm and cleverness, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wreck-It Ralph</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> represents something much deeper and more significant in Disney’s ideological evolution. It also serves as a vivid illustration of burgeoning quasi-religious progressive movement that was breaking out in America’s cultural power centers, beginning in academia and percolating outward to Hollywood, New York and Silicon Valley. A number of conservative commentators have dubbed this ideological ferment the “Great Awokening.” </span></span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-d444b11c-7fff-d82e-4f18-f332c6c896b5" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Building on the established and widely shared loathing of racism, the Awokening gathered -isms and -phobias old and new into its widening funnel. The suck zone of this outrage tornado - a single circle of common ground encircled by the chaotic swirl of competing grievances - centered on straight white males. In this mythology, white men furnish the main supply of villains. As this mythology is post-spiritual and materialistic but intensely moralistic, whiteness, with its implicit power, becomes a synonym for vice*, and victim status for virtue. *The temptation of the reactionary of the present, just as it was for the colonizers of the past, is to make whiteness a synonym for virtue. To do so is to break as fully from Christian ideology as the Woke movement does today. For the moment, however, the anti-white ideologues enjoy the high ground, while the white supremacists enjoy nearly universal cultural condemnation. As such, the much greater ideological threat to present-day Christians and conservatives comes from the former</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This mythology had its early prophets in the Disney Renaissance. Villains like McLeach, Gaston, Ratcliffe, Frollo and Clayton embodied the stereotype of predatory exploiters and victimizers (of animals, native cultures, and women of color). But each of these had their virtuous white male antithesis - Cody, the Beast, John Smith, Phoebus and Tarzan. The Awokening’s evolutionary next step was to bring down even the benevolent patriarchs and institute a new victim-driven power structure. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It would fall to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wreck-It Ralph </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to bring the Awokening to Disney. It would not do so with ideological guns out and blazing, as the emerging class of internet-oriented “Social Justice Warriors” would do, but with humor, charm and a skillful knack for postmodern storytelling. Beneath the smiling, winking coating, however, lay a similarly revolutionary set of values and beliefs.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ralph</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">’s setting is straight out of Pixar’s postmodern kitchen - a world of sentient video game characters in an arcade, dependent on oblivious consumers for life and purpose. Under Pixar’s brain trust, it’s easy to imagine this project following the usual Pixar route of longing for a connection with the player and finding spiritual fulfillment in bringing joy to a child or a nostalgic adult gamer. At Disney, however, </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ralph</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s creative team of Moore, Johnston and Lee would show far more interest in the social power dynamics within the video game world, treating the setting as a fun staging ground for a culture war.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The story follows two characters with a case for overthrowing the existing power structure. The title character Ralph is an unwilling bad guy forced to live in a garbage pile when he wants to live in the penthouse with the “good” characters. With each game, the program celebrates the player’s win with the little character ritually tossing Ralph off the roof. In another game world, he meets a partner in grievance in princess race car driver Vanellope. Vanellope has been kept from pursuing her passion - racing - by King Candy because of a disability, a glitch in her programming. To make matters worse, the abled racers, a band of tweeny bopper popular girls, bully her cruelly.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Both seeking to right these social injustices, Ralph and Vanellope join forces. Ralph hopes to win a hero’s medal, shed his bad buy label and gain access to the penthouse, while Vanellope wants to force her way back onto the race stage. Disney’s newly awokened values begin to show in which of these grievances the story ultimately validates as legitimate and which it dismisses.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Ralph, a big, ill-mannered working-class schlub disdained by the penthouse residents, might have had better luck with an older, union-oriented progressivism. But in the new progressive mythos, no one is comfortable with a big powerful white guy taking charge. Indeed, the arcade characters’ foundational myth tells the story of Turbo, an old-school racer (an old white guy, naturally) who couldn’t handle losing power and popularity and began invading other character’s games and taking them over. “Going Turbo” was the ultimate social crime - refusing to accept one’s place in a new social hierarchy. Thus, when Ralph breaks out of his game and attempts to prove his heroism in another game, he is justly accused of going Turbo, and eventually all hell breaks loose as a result.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Condemnation of any attempt to overthrow a social hierarchy might seem to be a deeply conservative notion, but </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ralph </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is careful to flip that rule when the social dynamic in question is different. In Vanellope’s game, the ruler is an old white male, King Candy. As it turns out, he is the original Turbo in disguise, and he only gained his power by sabotaging Vanellope’s code and kicking her out of a game that was hers to begin with. Thus, fighting to overthrow Turbo’s patriarchal reign is not Ralph forgetting his rightful place but Vanellope regaining hers. Having embraced his lowly status as video game bad guy and destroyed Turbo to restore Vanellope to her kingdom (which she promptly declares a democracy and unilaterally declares herself president), Ralph returns to his duties as his game’s designated scapegoat. Grateful that he’s no longer trying to bust his way into the penthouse, the penthouse dwellers let him eat cake in the dump.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lest there be any mistaking these story choices, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ralph</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> reinforces them emphatically with its subplot. The hero to Ralph’s villain in the game world is Fix-It Felix, a pint-sized, high-voiced repairman who magically repairs Ralph’s societal damage. Bashful, apologetic, slightly effeminate and utterly non-threatening, Felix is the story’s preferred alternative to embarrassingly manly and dominant heroes of Disney’s past. As the Ralph/Vanellope relationship is strictly platonic, Felix does the romantic heavy-lifting. His romantic foil is a Sergeant Calhoun, a hard-bitten, gravel-voiced female platoon commander (voiced by 6’ lesbian comedienne Jane Lynch) hunting down the alien bugs Ralph accidentally lets loose.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Their relationship is a painfully illustrative of the alternative, woke social order. An effeminate, self-effacing man shyly courting a butch, militant woman represents a joyful overthrow of social norms and a pointed contrast to Ralph’s hard-learned lesson not to mess with a parallel norm that has him at the bottom. Though tempered with both silliness and sweetness, the Felix-Calhoun relationship is punctuated with a scene that gives literal form to the violent subversion the story preaches. The writers contrive a scene that requires Calhoun to slug a cheerful Felix in the face over and over again (each time he fixes his busted face with his magic hammer) to get them out of a jam. Played for laughs, it nevertheless illustrates how willing the new orthodoxy is to embrace even the cruelest excesses of the old it seeks to replace. That Felix is so happy to be abused in service of the woke social order (just as Ralph ultimately learns to accept his own villainous part) makes him the ideal white male.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wrapped in Pixar-style trappings, loaded with cleverness, fun and sweetness, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ralph</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s woke messaging goes down easy. Well-received by critics and the mainstream, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ralph</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s success was enough to entrench Lasseter’s new recruits at Disney and, with them, the woke ideology. Lasseter rewarded each of the leaders of the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ralph </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">with places high up in the Disney brain trust, where they would exert a powerful influence on the rest of Disney’s slate.</span></span></div>
Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-39206222112783143902018-03-23T17:08:00.002-07:002019-04-29T19:53:29.605-07:00Climbing the American Totem PoleThe old saying goes that politics is downstream from culture, but that begs the question: how do you get at the culture? That has certainly been the question of American Christians staring down the growth of disdain and hostility towards Christianity in American culture and the seemingly impossible task of reversing that trend through political means. The consensus answer of the past 20-odd years has been through "cultural engagement," a blanket term covering everything from witnessing to neighbors to appending hipster coffee shops to the church lobby to developing overtly evangelistic movies for broad distribution.<br />
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As Dean Abbott argues in a <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/theroadhome/2018/03/engaging-the-culture-doesnt-work-because-christian-beliefs-are-a-mark-of-low-status/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=FBCP-EVG&utm_content=theroadhome" target="_blank">new essay</a>, and I have touched on <a href="http://screentoscreed.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-enemy-isnt-us.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://screentoscreed.blogspot.com/2017/01/respect-and-respectability.html" target="_blank">here</a>, the returns on this charm offensive have been disappointing, even disastrous. Abbott breaks from the conventional wisdom that blames hypocrisy and political contamination of Christianity for its decline. It is not character deficiency but low social status that is handicapping Christian engagement efforts.<br />
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This observation rings true for me. I've long wondered why Christians are so willing to cede the moral and cultural high ground to their opponents. When you start to think of Christians as the low-status dorks of the American high school, that default position of surrender starts to make intuitive sense. When you're a teenager, no one needs to tell you that the hottie or the stud are on one tier, and that the metal-mouthed stickboy or pizza-faced shy girl are on another. You see it and sense it and adapt accordingly.<br />
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Humans are inherently hierarchical. We are constantly assessing our place in every social hierarchy. As a general rule, we even measure our happiness in terms of hierarchy. When you're working from the bottom of the sociocultural totem pole, then it doesn't matter how winsome is your messaging or how skinny is your pant leg - you are always going to be an interloper when you try to engage with anyone above you.<br />
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This concept isn't entirely new, but it has been deeply, perhaps willfully misunderstood by Christian self-critics. Russell Moore, for instance, talks a big game about embracing the low-status radical weirdness of the early church, but his bass-ackwards version of that principle is sucking up to high-status minority groups and media organs. (Meanwhile, the most effective modern Christian ministries are gathering recruits from people even lower on the totem pole, e.g. addicts in church-sponsored recovery groups)<br />
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Abbott rightly criticizes the attempt of churches to become hip, a tendency that goes far deeper than the clownish efforts of guys like Carl Lentz.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYONRAqsaKq1aLS_VgH0mjhZ4ZYU5p0KsqDl5N8lEEP8pGsncuPVNJ7EM1LiJlJuDHardS1kWi803tIdrzjETXc5EWPU5paQ8TbYyEyMj-FvirYco4opn4zuLE8w_nkKDg7X5s-MPD0-Y/s1600/Carl-Lentz-e1510029353609.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="530" data-original-width="999" height="169" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYONRAqsaKq1aLS_VgH0mjhZ4ZYU5p0KsqDl5N8lEEP8pGsncuPVNJ7EM1LiJlJuDHardS1kWi803tIdrzjETXc5EWPU5paQ8TbYyEyMj-FvirYco4opn4zuLE8w_nkKDg7X5s-MPD0-Y/s320/Carl-Lentz-e1510029353609.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nice glasses, Rev.</td></tr>
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The guys with Hebrew tattoo sleeves talking systematic theology over craft beer and cigars are often just as ridiculous to the outside world as the shofar-blowing Pentecostals.<br />
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Abbott stops short of specific solutions, cautiously tipping his hat towards Rod Dreher's "Benedict Option" and insisting on a realistic appraisal of our actual standing and the culture's actual problems before committing to an engagement. Having read the Benedict Option, I can offer a brief summary of Dreher's thesis: we've lost the culture war, so it's time to build a new culture by creating our own fortified institutions. Eventually the secular culture will fall to its own demons, and when chaos breaks out, the semi-monastic institutions we created will then be attractive.</div>
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That idea is particularly attractive to Rod Dreher because, like many bookish types, he has a strong aesthetic preference for medieval Christianity and an associated antipathy for all of modernity. Letting American culture collapse under its own decadence is thus an appealing strategic prospect - not only do we get to cease direct engagement with a bunch of people who hate us, but we now have civilization-saving justification for Renaissance Fair-style LARPing.</div>
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I suspect Abbott's refined aesthetic tastes - I've followed him long enough on Twitter to get deluged with Delius, Roger Scruton and the poetry I tried to leave behind in English lit class - make him more sympathetic to this approach than a pop culture hound like me. It also may have given him a blindspot in regards to the moral weight of low culture.</div>
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As High Plains Parson pointed out in <a href="https://highplainsparson.wordpress.com/2018/03/23/engaging-the-culture-a-response-to-dean-abbot/" target="_blank">his response to Abbott's essay</a>, the loss of elite culture isn't all that big a deal in America. As he says, "America’s cultural center is more Hollywood than Opera, more hamburgers and pizza than coq au vin." But contrary to the good Parson's optimistic spin on this truth, Christians have suffered their worst defeats in the pop cultural center, which is why Abbott's low-status diagnosis rings so true.</div>
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The elites have harbored growing disdain for sincere Christianity since the Enlightenment, but just 60 years ago, Christians completely dominated the middle-brow organs and institutions that in turn dominated American culture. Blockbuster movies, TV, popular music, radio shows, local schools, councils and country clubs - all were subject to Christian approval and catered to Christian standards. Now those organs and institutions are virtually immune to Christian disapproval and most seek subversion of Christian standards as a matter of course. Though they remain central demographically, Christians have been purged from America's cultural centers of gravity.</div>
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Dreher recognizes this, but in his distaste for modernity, he essentially gives up on pop culture and focuses on small-scale regional culture. He also seems loath to deal with existing institutions, preferring to build new schools and businesses.</div>
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I believe the best way forward does not involve surrendering the power of modern mass media or washing our hands of fully-converged institutions. Neither do I want a continuation of the smiley-faced groveling of the hipster wannabes or a return to the uphill charges of the Religious Right.</div>
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The best guide for our path back to cultural influence, though they might be unwilling sherpas, is the example of American Jews. When they arrived in America, they were assigned a place on the American totem pole approximate to Christians' position today. They were generally unwelcome in the highest-status positions of society. Though they did, as I believe Dreher references, establish many of their own institutions - primary schools, hospitals, charities - and patronized their own business, they refused strictly regional limits or a ghettoized subculture. Neither did they bunker down in monastic enterprises and wait for the collapse of WASP culture. Finally, they did not engage in frontal assaults on higher-status groups.</div>
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Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-27164193702597240892018-03-11T16:37:00.000-07:002019-04-29T19:55:25.240-07:00The Enemy Isn't Us, Part IIIn Part I of my response to Phil Cooke's summary of "The Way Back: How Christians Blew Our Credibility and How We Get It Back" on Dean Abbott's podcast, I argued that Cooke's prescription for Christian cultural woes was not effective primarily because his diagnosis (that we blew our credibility) was wrong.<br />
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To pin the marginalization of Christianity in American culture on the behavior of Christians is to make two assumptions: that Christians had earned their earlier credibility through good behavior (at least in relative terms) and that Christians then lost that credibility because of bad behavior. In Part I, I question the second assumption, but the first is just as suspect.</div>
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Did Christians owe their prior dominion over American culture to good behavior? It strikes me as highly unlikely. The most straightforward, self-evident reason Christians have enjoyed so much power in America until recently is that America was founded by devout Christians and their fellow travelers. As the natives were virtually annihilated by disease, war and displacement, our founders had an essentially blank slate on which to a heavily Christian and specifically Protestant culture. Christian legitimacy in the culture was initially maintained not by good behavior but by Christians refusing to cede control of their cultural institutions to the rivals that had driven them from the Old World.</div>
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Though battered by the later waves of European secularism, first from Voltaire and the Enlightenment secularists and then from Darwin and Marx and the materialists, Christians remained the governing force in American culture. The peak of America's power in the immediate post-war period of the 1940s and 1950s coincided with a muscular reaffirmation of our Christian identity. In God We Trust was enshrined as the national motto. "Under God" was affixed to the Pledge of Allegiance. The most lucrative intellectual property of that era was not the Marvel universe or Star Wars but the Bible and its literary spin-offs. Samson and Delilah, Quo Vadis, The Robe, The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur - these were the biggest box office smashes of the era.</div>
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The gap between Christian behavior then and now isn't even close to explaining the catastrophic loss of Christian stature in American culture. Christians could not blow so much credibility so quickly by their own hand. The culpable party was not huckster televangelists, but a third wave of European secularism that finally succeeded in taking from Christianity what it had refused to cede to Voltaire, Darwin and Marx: control of our cultural institutions. </div>
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This third wave is comprised of so many causes and -isms that it has eluded consistent labeling, but has been most accurately described as cultural Marxism. While it lacks a common manifesto with explicitly spelled-out doctrines, the last 50 years have shown it to be a real, cohesive and implacably hostile rival to Christianity.</div>
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It is not an anonymous, impersonal movement. It was spearheaded by an alliance of post-Christian American coastal elites and European, predominantly Jewish or atheist, intellectuals and artists. They enjoyed their most important cultural victories in academia and mass media. Their most consequential win was in Hollywood, where men like Otto Preminger and Billy Wilder used their stature as creative giants to drive the previously invincible Christian censors out of the industry in the space of ten years. This unleashed a tidal wave of overt media attacks on Christianity and associated social mores from men like Mike Nichols and Stanley Kubrick. This media revolution coincided with the Sexual Revolution breaking out on college campuses and urban environments ignited by academics like Alfred Kinsey and writers like Helen Gurley Brown.</div>
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This movement was not created in response to Christian hypocrisy or bad behavior. It predated the rise of televangelism and the Moral Majority and it remained after their collapse. It won't be deterred by better Christian witnesses, at least not at the atomized, random act of kindness level that Cooke seems to favor. Indeed, it benefits from (and generally encourages) any approach that cedes any Christian claim to cultural authority.</div>
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The Religious Right drew so much fire from the cultural Marxists not because of their hypocrisy, but because they were reasserting Christian cultural authority. Their efforts weren't helped by the humiliating examples of Bakker and Swaggart, but theirs was a failure of tactics, not ethics. A televangelist-led direct assault on the media-fortified high ground was doomed to failure - another Charge of the Light Brigade.</div>
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Though the tactics need to change if Christians are to increase their influence on the culture, the high ground should remain the same. The mistake Cooke and the self-critics make is to accept the moral high ground as the cultural high ground. A community of loving Christians shining out like a city on a hill is and always been the fundamental objective of the church, but temporal cultural influence was not just a fleeting obsession of the Religious Right. It is a precious inheritance of Western civilization in general and the separatist American colonists in particular. The American City Upon a Hill sought to be a light to the world and to safeguard the cultural mechanisms that had been used to stifle and extinguish it. </div>
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The American City Upon a Hill did not fall from grace, it was conquered by the same forces its founders sought to escape. Improving the percentages of church attendance, prayer, tithing and Bible reading are worthy efforts in and of themselves. If and when the culture war is lost for good, they may even be the only way forward. But if we are looking for a way back to a Christian culture, the road ahead of us is a long march back through the institutions that we lost. </div>
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Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-83257032377259548522018-03-09T17:09:00.001-08:002019-04-29T19:59:32.704-07:00The Enemy Isn't Us<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"We have met the enemy and he is us." This is one of those adages that is at least partially true in just about every scenario. And it gets bonus points for originating in my favorite comic strip.<br />
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But I'm starting to weary of it, at least in the culture war sphere. The latest Christian figurehead to employ it is Phil Cooke, a successful media producer and prolific cultural engagement writer who I encountered on Dean Abbott's podcast.<br />
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The context was his new book "The Way Back: How Christians Blew Our Credibility and How We Get It Back." As the title would suggest, and he made clear in the interview with Dean, he believes Christians weren't so much beaten in the culture war as they were disqualified by their own hypocrisy and false witness. Working from a basket of four metrics intended to measure Christian integrity - church attendance, prayer, Bible reading and tithing - he concludes that Christians aren't even coming close to practicing what they preach. The takeaway: how can we expect the secular world to listen to us when we aren't even listening to ourselves? He goes on to decry the politicization of Christianity and what he calls the anger-based approach typified by boycotts. He recommends a return to neighborly good deeds and cheerful Gospel-sharing.<br />
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This is a familiar refrain, echoing some of the arguments of Russell Moore and Rod Dreher. Each time I hear this line of reasoning, it's pitched as bold and fresh. Those pitching are always quick to define their winsome approach in contrast to the angry thundering of the Moral Majority and Religious Right, as if those philosophies of engagement are currently dominating American Christianity. They rarely seem to realize or acknowledge that the prominence of Falwell and Robertson and televangelist Right peaked 30 years ago and was basically kaput by the new millennium. For the last two decades, public leadership of American Christianity has been dominated by people who look, act and sound more like Mr. Rogers than Mr T.<br />
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Thus far the prescription hasn't worked. The retreat of the Bible-thumping televangelists from the main stage didn't put a stop to the string of culture war defeats. To the contrary, the cultural losses mounted, and eventually broke out into a political rout. In twenty years, the battleground shifted from a fight for control of the major cultural organs to a rearguard action for freedom from political persecution.<br />
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Cooke and his fellows could counter that the prescription hasn't yet been fully applied, that we're still suffering from the aftereffects of the previous regime. But no amount of time will make a prescription work if they are working from a faulty diagnosis. The prevailing assumption among self-deprecating Christians like Cooke is that the enemy is us. What if that's wrong?<br />
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What if it wasn't Christians that blew up their credibility? This is not to say that Christian error played no part in their many defeats, but that a strictly self-critical approach leaves a huge factor out of the equation. It's always a great goal to lose 10 lbs of fat through a vigorous nutrition and exercise regimen, but what's that gonna do about the malignant tumor that's taking over your body?<br />
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The enemy isn't always us. The defeats weren't purely self-inflicted. And, most relevant to Cooke's general argument, strengthening the local church isn't likely to get our credibility back if that's not how we lost it in the first place.<br />
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Who then is the enemy and what should we do about it? I'll tackle that next.Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-60351419692086569042018-01-22T11:08:00.000-08:002019-04-29T20:01:28.335-07:0012 Strong: Uncle Rico Goes to War<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The War in Afghanistan, aka Operation Enduring Freedom, turns 17 this year, making it old enough to see <i>12 Strong</i>, the new R-rated account of its first battle, without parental supervision. (And it's not the only Afghanistan movie this year - <i>Infinity War </i>comes out this May!).<br />
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Just because the actual war might be depressing and pointless doesn't mean the movies it inspires have to be. Our misadventures in Somalia produced maybe the best movie of the genre, <i>Black Hawk Down. </i>The doomed German attempt to assassinate Hitler created another gem in <i>Valkyrie</i>. Any war is going to generate examples of heroic self-sacrifice or, better yet, opportunities for slow-mo battle scenes with shrapnel flying in sync with mournful Gaelic wailing. I'm all about that strife.<br />
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Sadly, <i>12 Strong</i> is not. Despite the tragic source material and the epic demands of the genre, <i>12 Strong </i>has virtually no interest in the horror of war. I say that not in the preachy way - no one hates self-flagellating anti-war pics like <i>Platoon </i>more than me - but as a connoisseur of the cheap thrills and emotional manipulation of a good horror flick.<br />
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Bizarrely, <i>12 Strong </i>fancies itself as more of a victory lap. And in a war without much in the way of victories, it really has to stretch to keep it going for a whole movie. The exhausting lengths the writers go to make us this set of little mountain skirmishes feel like a huge deal are the closest it comes to epic.<br />
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See if you can spot the problems in the (true) story. Fresh off witnessing 9/11, a team of twelve special forces guys, led by Thor as Captain America, are chomping at the bit for justice and vengeance. So they leap at the chance to be embedded as air force spotters for a random Afghani warlord in his campaign to wrest control of an obscure mountain town from a another Afghani warlord. Thanks to a lot of precision bombing, atrocious Taliban aim, and Thor's Rambo on horseback skills, that campaign is wildly successful (and boringly so). That success leads to some hearty self-congratulatory back-patting... and another two decades of inconsequential mountain fighting.<br />
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Again, there's much to be said for looking for silver linings in wartorn hellscapes, but trying to pass off a few dull guerrilla exchanges in a barren wasteland as both a deeply meaningful and satisfying response to 9/11 and a sizzle reel of American military might is the dictionary definition of cringeworthy, right next to the picture of Uncle Rico.<br />
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For you uncultured brutes, Uncle Rico is the most pathetic and pitiable of all the small-town caricatures in <i>Napoleon Dynamite (</i>which, despite its title, is NOT also about an ill-fated land war in Asia). He's a middle-aged, steak-eating ex-jock who still dreams of a pro football career when he's not selling junk to stay-at-home moms or bullying his nerdy nephews.<br />
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Like Uncle Rico, <i>12 Strong </i>wants to go back to glory days that weren't all that glorious, and thanks to the magic of Hollywood, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIPke5cnpJA" target="_blank">the time crystals</a> actually work this time. The resulting vision of the good old days is hopelessly lost in delusions of grandeur. No matter the epic trappings, it plays a lot like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxN9Mw6iQUs" target="_blank">Uncle Rico's audition tape</a> - some rando in the middle of the nowhere, facing down imaginary competition, prancing, flexing and chucking like a fool.<br />
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In the words of Napoleon, this is pretty much the worst video ever made.<br />
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<br />Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-78721008128442804762017-07-27T23:26:00.000-07:002019-04-29T20:07:26.309-07:00Spam Takes Over The MenuAn army marches on its stomach. This adage holds the key to understanding how our present globalist masters succeeded where Hitler, Napoleon, Stalin and the other world-emperor hopefuls failed. Whereas Hitler and Napoleon starved their soldiers on exhausting treks into Russia and Stalin skimped on the pleasures of life (all purge, no binge), the corporate giants treat their regulars to an unending buffet of earthly delights.<br />
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I am reminded of a haunting scene from Hayao Miyazaki's <i><a href="https://www.tofugu.com/japan/spirited-away-food/" target="_blank">Spirited Away</a></i>. A family on vacation stumbles on an empty restaurant with heaping platters of steaming, delicious food. Ignoring their anorexic 10-year-old's hysterical warnings, the parents stuff their faces in an orgy of gluttony. Of course little Anna Rexia was right - they quickly transform into huge fat hogs to be herded into the pens of the master spirits that run the place.<br />
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"Wow, that's really disturbing, but a great modern parable for the dangers of consumer-powered globalism," I burbled as I chugged down a gallon-sized Disney jug of imported Miyazaki. The anti-globalist revolution should get underway any day now. In fact, we might even get some good ideas from next Sunday's <i>Game of Thrones</i>! In the words of a homegrown possum, we have met the enemy and he is us.<br />
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A dictatorship of the proletariat's stomach is upon us then, and our diet is trending towards complete garbage. Remember all those crazy urban legends about KFC about how they used the acronym because they couldn't call their vat-raised GMObominations chicken? Well that's what came to mind when I read today's <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/magazine/why-hollywood-is-trying-to-turn-everything-into-movies-even-mindless-games-like-fruit-ninja.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0" target="_blank">NY Times</a> piece on the modern movie business.<br />
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Reporter Alex French follows producer Tripp Vinson on his <a href="https://www.traileraddict.com/journey-2-mysterious-island/interview-tripp-vinson" target="_blank">Journey 2</a> the absolute rock bottom of Hollywood's brain-dead IP harvesting. (Note that it's referred to as IP, not intellectual property, presumably because the intellect is gone). Vinson is no stranger to the bottom of the barrel. French charitably describes him as a producer of popcorn flicks. More accurately, he delivers well-casted badly scripted stink bombs that happen to fill the right genre slots on the periphery of major studio slates.<br />
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As audiences have largely rejected lazy, soulless genre pieces, Vinson has joined his fellow producers in pivoting to lazy, soulless IP conversions. While the strip-mining rights to the really juicy IPs, like <a href="http://screentoscreed.blogspot.com/2014/08/nuggets-of-wisdom-from-george-lucas.html" target="_blank">George Lucas' severed brainchild</a>, are already long gone, there's always another layer to frack. Like board games, toys, bad TV shows and mobile games. Vinson struck pay dirt with the popular time-killing app Fruit Ninja, getting the rights and then setting a team BS artists to farting out an ad hoc narrative. Their winning take? Read it and weep:<br />
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Every couple of hundred years a comet flies by Earth, leaving in its wake a parasite that descends on a farm and infects the fruit. The infected fruit then search for a human host. The only thing keeping humanity from certain doom is a secret society of ninjas who kill the fruit and rescue the hosts by administering the "anti-fruit." The produce-slaying saviors are recruited from the population based on their skill with the Fruit Ninja game... The action starts after each of the story's heroes returns home after a horrible day and plays Fruit Ninja to relieve some stress... this aligns with the Fruit Ninja brand: "Anybody can play. Anybody can be a master."</blockquote>
That last bit sounds remarkably like the new Hollywood brand: "Any IP can be a movie. Any bot can be a screenwriter." I'm also reminded of the amazing kid's book pitch session from <i>Elf</i>. I'd love to see a tribe of asparagus children team up with these Fruit Ninjas and maybe end up less self-conscious about the way their pee smells.<br />
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In the somewhat recent past, we could rely on the English-speaking world having just enough taste to throw dreck like this right out of the theater and into the dustbin known as the HBO movie library. Sure there were embarrassing exceptions, like Adam Sandler's entire career, but for the most part, American audiences and the smaller Western markets on the periphery were pretty good about enforcing a quality standard.<br />
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But nowadays, unfettered access to global markets has essentially eliminated American audience's veto power over Hollywood. French references two doozies - <i>Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters</i> and <i>Battleship </i>- that were saved from domestic hostility by the intervention angel of consumers from abroad. Last year I was one of the few American masochists to brave the <i>Independence Day</i> sequel and <i>Warcraft</i>. They sucked but international audiences sent them to the moon. <i>Warcraft </i>made more in its opening weekend in China than it did in its entire domestic run in the states.<br />
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In the build-up to World War II, FDR answered allies call for help by calling on America to serve as a "great arsenal of democracy," devoting the bulk of American industrial might to the military needs of country in Europe and Asia. Today, Hollywood is converting our cultural might into a great arsenal of mediocrity to serve the least common denominator demands of the global market.<br />
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For the moment, America is less than enthused with the development but not yet in open revolt. We still go to see movies, but ticket sales have declined significantly since their peak in <a href="http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/?view2=domestic&view=releasedate&p=.htm" target="_blank">2002</a>. That decline has meant little to nothing to Hollywood however as international markets have<a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-mpaa-box-office-20170322-story.html" target="_blank"> more than doubled over the same time frame</a>.<br />
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Our situation is growing more and more like the cafe patrons from Monty Python's famous spam sketch. We are seeing our own cultural preferences sidelined to cater to foreigners' preferences for the worst stuff on the menu. Our favorite menu items are gradually being pushed to the periphery or omitted altogether, their places taken by endless reproductions of the same gelatinous mystery meat. And while our current choices may be Dunkirk, Atomic Blonde and <a href="https://www.vox.com/summer-movies/2017/7/27/16037862/emoji-movie-review-garbage-fire-poo-patrick-stewart" target="_blank">SPAM</a>, no amount of domestic protest can prevent the progression to SPAM, SPAM and more SPAM. Take it away, Viking chorus.<br />
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<br />Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-30462094895648683392017-03-09T14:24:00.000-08:002019-04-29T20:14:49.425-07:00Being John Mal... colm X: a Get Out ReviewIt used to be (and maybe still is) that you could drive critics wild by breaking the fourth wall, especially when lecturing, confronting or otherwise upsetting an audience of bourgeois white people. Hence the critical adulation heaped on Woody Allen and Spike Lee early in their careers: a Jew and a black man busting through stifling conventions and shaking up the white folk. I've never been that impressed - dropping the pretense of storytelling to lecture the audience always struck me as a self-indulgent temptation to resist, not a bold innovation to be emulated.<br />
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It is breaking the first wall, the one hiding the writer from the actors and the audience, that I've always found more challenging and more rewarding. Charlie Kaufman is the greatest practitioner of this art, rerouting the shallow and endlessly verbose asides of Woody Allen into outrageously deep and wildly unpredictable plunges into his own psyche. Kaufman's <i>Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind</i>, <i>Adaptation </i>and <i>Being John Malkovich </i>go boldly where no neurotic Jewish filmmaker had gone before.<br />
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For a few moments in his just-released <i>Get Out</i>, writer/director Jordan Peele approaches doing for Spike Lee what Kaufman did for Allen, exploring the wild twists and turns of his own grievances and paranoia instead of just rehearsing stale riffs on racial and social problems. Some of this seems to be conscious - while Peele attributes much of his inspiration to novelist Ira Levin (<i>Rosemary's Baby</i>, <i>The Stepford Wives</i>), his use of the head portal mechanic from <i>Being John Malkovich </i>and casting of <i>Malkovich </i>star Catherine Keener suggest a significant Kaufman influence.<br />
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Unfortunately Peele stops well short of Kaufman's extraordinary self-awareness, blinkering his self-reflexive journey to avoid any serious (or even satiric) self-analysis. The result is an initially tantalizing, unpredictable thrill ride that ultimately devolves into a more sophisticated version of <i>The Purge </i>series' unhinged <a href="http://screentoscreed.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-vast-white-wing-conspiracy-uncovered.html" target="_blank">anti-white propaganda</a> with a hefty dose of black chauvinism. While predictably raking in the raves and the bucks, it utterly fails to fulfill its considerable potential.<br />
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Before launching into the relevant elements of the movie, it's important to understand some key facts about Peele. While he rose to prominence as a capital B Black sketch comic, with viral hits from Barack Obama and MLK impersonations, his upbringing suggests an almost total assimilation into white liberal culture. His father was black but out of the picture from early on, so Peele was raised by his white mother in Manhattan, a few blocks from the SNL studio. Upon graduating high school he went to a fancy-schmancy white liberal haven, Sarah Lawrence College, where he studied puppetry (in addition to being the whitest profession imaginable, puppetry was also the trade of <i>Being John Malkovich</i>'s hero) and roomed with a white Jewish lesbian. He married a white woman, fellow NYC-based comic Chelsea Peretti (who actually beat Peele to the satiric punch on white liberal racism with her BlackPeopleLoveUs website in 2002).<br />
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A Kaufman-style deep dive into the actual Peele's search for a black or white identity would have been fascinating. <i>Get Out</i>'s premise flirts with delivering on that potential, setting up numerous parallels with Peele's own situation. Like Peele, <i>Get Out</i>'s protagonist, Chris, is a successful black artist in New York City, in a serious relationship with a white girl, Rose (who bears a very slight resemblance to Peele's wife). Like Peele, Chris' father was out of the picture early.<br />
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But the similarities stop abruptly thereafter as Peele builds a wall around Chris' black identity. In addition to casting the extremely dark-skinned 2nd generation Ugandan immigrant Daniel Kaluuya as Chris, Peele makes heavy use of best friend/comic relief Rod as an ever-present voice for urban black America, always ready and eager to reaffirm Chris' black cultural identity. Chris also seems terrified of white people, dragging his feet over meeting Rose's white family, and openly expressing his discomfort at being surrounded by white people. None of this rings true for Peele; to the contrary, one of Peele's funnier bits is playing off his racial anxiety over sounding too white.<br />
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Peele also hamstrings all ambassadors for the white cultural identity after a promising beginning. Rose initially serves as a rival to Rod, pulling Chris into white-world as Rod chirps in warning, Jiminy Cricket style. She pokes and prods at his insecurities, reframing his Rod-fueled paranoia as a silly streak of narcissism. This playful flitting between indulging paranoia and exposing narcissism is <i>Get Out </i>at its unpredictable best, but Peele is too eager to throw all of his weight behind the paranoia to force Chris deeper into his blackness.<br />
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Shirking ambiguity and exploration, Peele barrels into outright propaganda, gearing all the story mechanics to validate Rod's essentially anti-assimilation, anti-miscegenation views on race. Not only is Rose ultimately revealed as a malevolent honey trap, every white character in the story is in on the predatory scheme. When they speak of Chris joining the family, they are speaking only of his body. After Rose disarms his insecurities, her uber-ginger, UFC-obsessed brother will physically subdue him, after which her neurosurgeon dad will implant a white consciousness over the black consciousness suppressed by her hypnotist mom. When things get really hairy, Rose can call in her mind-controlled black servants - actually just hosts for the transplanted minds of her grandparents (you'd think the extended family would have included an Uncle Tom too, but no) - to help her out.<br />
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The inherent evil of the whites obviously nips any identity search for Chris in the bud. His new mission is to <i>Get Out </i>at any cost and liberate as many blacks from white culture as he can. The metaphors along the way are so cheerfully on-the-nose as to be parody. As <a href="http://takimag.com/article/get_out_get_your_money_back_steve_sailer/print#axzz4arxSHDQs" target="_blank">Steve Sailer points out</a>, the uber-ginger's unlikely weapon of choice is a lacrosse stick, a likely allusion to the Duke lacrosse hate crime hoax. His stalking and kidnapping of a young black guy lost in the suburbs is also a blatant shout-out to the Trayvon Martin killing.<br />
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Meanwhile, Chris' only means of waking up brainwashed blacks is getting them with the flash from his camera - how else is a filmmaker gonna wake up the people? He's able to escape imprisonment and prevent his own brainwashing by literally picking cotton to stuff in his ears. After impaling the great white hunter via deer antlers and killing the rest of the family, Chris even gets a chance to choke out Rose, Othello-Desdemona style.<br />
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This gleeful use of over-the-top symbolism, allusion and cliche while taking the easy way out of an existential crisis closely resembles Kaufman's self-parodying conclusion to <i>Adaptation</i>, when he gives up on his lofty ambitions for the story and lets his idiot twin finish off the script as an absurd thriller. But Peele's extensive public statements about the movie, unless he's playing extremely coy, show none of this self-awareness. As he related in <a href="http://screenrant.com/get-out-jordan-peele-ending-explained/" target="_blank">one interview</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Ultimately, the movie ends up talking about the exotification and the love of the black body and culture. It’s just as twisted a form of racism as the darker, more violent forms of racism. It’s all a piece of the same thing…It’s really meant to point out that any time we see color first or we categorize one another as a race, we’ve already lost an important part of what being human should be."</blockquote>
This is self-evident nonsense: the movie does no such thing. To the contrary, the ultimate danger to Chris is his de-exotification, where his distinctly black identity is swallowed up by ultra-bland whiteness. Throughout the movie the "important part of what being human should be" that has been lost is cultural distinctness. It is the utter lack of cultural blackness that Chris finds disturbing about the brainwashed black people. They talk and dress like old white people, they don't recognize his black solidarity cues and they are way too comfortable hanging out with a bunch of rich whites.<br />
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True, Peele takes every opportunity to lampoon white liberals for "exotifying" blacks, literally transforming the adoring pedestal into a platform for a slave auction, but little to none of that satiric bite remains for rampant self-exotification and racial categorization among blacks. Their paranoia is validated on every front as is their narcissism. Whites really are out to get them. They want them for their genetic make-up, their sexual performance, their muscles, their cultural cachet, even their eye for art. The conspiracy-theorizing, self-aggrandizing Rod often sets himself up as the butt of the joke, but ends up as the vindicated hero. Instead of the anti-exotification/categorization movie Peele claims he's made, we end up with a slick, witty repackaging of evil white-wing conspiracy plot of <i>The Purge </i>coupled with a light-hearted but still earnest pitch for the black nationalism touted by John Singleton in <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDhoKtjXEfA" target="_blank">Boyz n the Hood</a></i>.<br />
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From his own statement about what he thinks <i>Get Out </i>is saying and the ample parallels to his own life, it seems that Peele set out to fall on a double-edged satire, playing on the legitimate and illegitimate fears of a biracial man meeting the parents of his white girlfriend, and facing the prospect of total white assimilation. And yet he ended up with a bloody revenge fantasy, leaving this alternate universe covered in the blood of his own would-be white in-laws and girlfriend and walking into a big "I told you so" from his anti-miscegenation friend.<br />
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By Peele's own standards then, <i>Get Out</i>, for all its critical acclaim and box office success,<i> </i>is a catastrophic failure. Ostensibly digging into sensitive territory in hopes of finding a post-racial identity, Peele completely failed to penetrate even the flimsiest of racial barriers. And instead of owning and humanizing that failure, as Kaufman does so effectively in <i>Adaptation</i>, Peele surrenders to the most immature and irresponsible impulses triggered by the subject matter.<br />
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Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-46212764455863463962017-02-07T11:58:00.001-08:002019-04-29T20:23:04.903-07:00The Knights Who Say "Ni": The Left As Big Business<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This <a href="https://twitter.com/SenSchumer/status/828450516854247424" target="_blank">post-Super Bowl tweet</a> by Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called conservative Twitter's attention to a paradigm-shifting reality: once the loudest voice crying out against the depredations of Big Business, the Left now <i>is</i> Big Business. The Occupy Wall Street movement, framed as a protest against a cruel present, would have been more accurately rendered in the past tense. The massive American multinationals targeted for Leftist abuse, e.g. <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Seattle-WTO-protests-of-1999" target="_blank">the storefronts ransacked in the Battle for Seattle</a>, now almost uniformly push the Left's cultural platform.<br />
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This is not an entirely new or unexpected development. It was partially prophesied almost 50 years ago by French political scientist Jean-François Revel in his book <i>Ni Marx Ni Jesus</i> (directly translated as Neither Marx Nor Jesus). Written at the zenith of New Left agitation at the onset of the 1970s, Revel boldly broke with the fashionable designation of capitalist USA as a reactionary superpower, seeing instead its unmatched potential as an instrument of global revolution. Diverging from the old poor vs. rich dichotomy that animated most Leftist would-be revolutionaries, Revel describes a "centrifugal gyration" in America. Free speech, a free press and free enterprise create opportunities for a whole new revolutionary program that pulls the ideological struggle out of stale class-based antagonisms to create a unique new constellation of social alliances.<br />
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The leaders that emerge from Revel's revolutionary centrifuge are the Knights Who Say "Ni" to Marx and Jesus. They reject both the economic strictures of Marxist dogma, with its grim fixation on the working class overthrowing the landed class, and the moral injunctions of Christianity, especially its patriarchy, sexual mores and anti-materialist bent. They see commercialized technology not as corrupting but as the ultimate solution to the world's problems, particularly when divested from smelly, pollutant industry. Most importantly to Revel's thesis, they see revolution not as a demolition but a renovation. They've moved on from the political violence of their ideological predecessors, but not from their revolutionary aims. The societal institutions of yore are not to be destroyed, but absorbed and weaponized for culture war.<br />
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This revolutionary absorption is evident, indeed blatantly obvious, across the corporate landscape. Consider the huge northwestern multinationals targeted by the (recently resurgent) Black Bloc at the Battle for Seattle in 1999. Starbucks, already a <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/3046890/the-inside-story-of-starbuckss-race-together-campaign-no-foam" target="_blank">veteran</a> of Leftist causes, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/30/trump-travel-ban-starbucks-hire-10000-refugees" target="_blank">announced plans to hire 10,000 refugees</a> in a blatant stab at the Trump's refugee pause. Nike CEO Mark Parker <a href="http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2017/01/nike_condemns_trump_ban_on_ref.html" target="_blank">followed suit</a> with an unsolicited condemnation of Trump over the same issue. Nordstrom issued an internal memo panning Trump's policies, almost immediately followed up by <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/style/days-before-dropping-ivanka-trump-nordstrom-sent-a-memo-on-the-muslim-ban-164315381.html" target="_blank">dumping Ivanka Trump's fashion line</a>.<br />
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This is by no means restrained to the northwest. Silicon Valley and corporate Hollywood have been excelled by none in their zeal for Leftist social causes, with examples ranging from Google's annual outpouring of <a href="http://www.unz.com/isteve/hubris-and-nemesis-googles-triumph-of-the-sjw-will/" target="_blank">Lefty Riefenstahl propaganda</a> to the militant posturing of star actors and producers at Hollywood industry parties. This synergy is best exemplified by TJ Miller, the star of Hollywood's eponymous tribute to Silicon Valley, getting arrested for assaulting his <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-people-tjmiller-idUSKBN13Y2LE" target="_blank">Trump-supporting Uber driver</a> on his way between awards shows (he would host another awards show 2 days after his arrest). Completing the comedy of terrors, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick just bowed to Silicon Valley peer pressure and <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/02/technology/uber-travis-kalanick-trump-advisory-council/" target="_blank">stepped down</a> from Trump's business advisory council.<br />
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Not to be outshone, The Big Apple, the financial heart and media nervous system of Big Business, is just as open in its Leftism. Manhattan <a href="https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/numbers/clinton-trump-president-vice-president-every-neighborhood-map-election-results-voting-general-primary-nyc" target="_blank">voted almost 10-1 for Hillary</a> over native son Trump, with hedge fund managers in particular racking up<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/07/30/wall-street-for-hillary-clinton-has-48-5m-in-hedge-fund-backing-compared-to-trumps-19m.html" target="_blank"> a massive donation imbalance</a> in her favor. NYC-based sports behemoth the NBA has emerged as a leading enforcer of the Left's platform in red states, taking the pressure tactics <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/27/news/companies/businesses-fight-indiana-gay-discrimination/" target="_blank">Apple used</a> to great effect on Indiana after their Religious Freedom Restoration Act triggered LGBT fury and <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/nba-pulls-all-star-game-out-charlotte-over-hb2-n614466" target="_blank">applying them to North Carolina</a> for their transgender bathroom bill. The NYC-based NFL's <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/sports/2017/01/16/nfl-support-colin-kaepernick-tanked-2016-tv-ratings/" target="_blank">tacit endorsement</a> of Colin Kaepernick's Leftist agitation, even at significant cost in ratings, is yet another example. The leftward tack of red state dependent industries like sports is likely heavily influenced by the pressure of LA/NY media conglomerates, especially Disney/ABC.<br />
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In <i>Monty Python and the Holy Grail</i>, the Knights Who Say "Ni!" waylay travelers and assault them with sacred nonsense words until the travelers cower and give in to their absurd demands (sound familiar?). Eventually their victims turn around and use the same techniques on others even lower on the totem pole. And by the time the extorted goods are delivered, the Knights have moved on to new sacred nonsense with even more absurd demands - "you must cut down the mightiest tree in the forest... with a herring!"<br />
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The leaders of today's corporate multinationals have organized themselves into a fraternal organization worthy of Monty Python and their medieval inspiration, combining the high-pitched histrionics and escalating demands of the Knights Who Say "Ni!" with the global financial muscle and sacred commission of the Order of the Knights Templar, the West's <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=t8jQStJcVmAC&lpg=PA132&ots=CaJ-BZOKkV&dq=knights%20templar%20multinational&pg=PA132#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">first multinational corporation</a>. Fortunately, like their counterparts in Monty Python and the Templars, this new breed of Ni-sayers has only a tenuous grasp on soft power, bullying largely by the consent of the bullied. Monty Python's knights fell to pathetic cringing when their own tactics were applied against them. The Knights Templar were annihilated by their own <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_IV_of_France" target="_blank">vengeful client</a>. Such ignoble fates likely await the multinationals who continue to mistake their consumers for subjects.Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-64303947892545480602017-01-20T05:03:00.000-08:002019-04-29T20:22:51.223-07:00Respect and Respectability: Russell Moore vs. Mel Gibson<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Since the sexual revolution destroyed Christian hegemony over American culture, the deposed have been debating the appropriate manner of engaging a post-Christian culture. The initial televangelist-led counter-counterculture, epitomized by the late Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's CBN, favored straightforward, direct engagement. But a counter-culture headed by a federation of rotund cheeseball preachers and politicians proved to be no match for the Left's slick culture war machine. Though they would go on to notch further political victories, their ultimate cultural failure became evident when Bill Clinton's already strong approval ratings spiked as high as 68% after the Lewinsky imbroglio. As the culture war defeats have since accelerated in number and severity, two rival approaches to cultural engagement have emerged as candidates to lead the Christian counter-culture out of the wilderness. The clearest way to distinguish these approaches is through their differing goals: respect and respectability.<br />
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<b><u>Respectability</u></b><br />
The respectable side is best exemplified by Russell Moore, author of <i>Onward: Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel </i>and President of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). As a Southern Baptist preacher, Moore shares a church and a vocation with Falwell, Robertson and a host of other Religious Righters. Indeed, the ERLC is something of a remnant of the Religious Right organizations of yesteryear – it emerged out of conservative revolution in the SBC that defunded its left-leaning predecessor, the Baptist Joint Committee run by liberal minister James Dunn. In his manifesto <i>Onward</i>, Moore breaks from both traditions, at once scorning the erstwhile Religious Right for its worldliness and rejecting the nominally Christian Left's flight from fundamentalism.<br />
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This approach shares much in common with the Benedict Option touted by American Conservative editor Rod Dreher - both welcome (or at least embrace the silver lining of) defeat in the culture wars as a means of returning to the celebrated anti-materialist purity of the early church martyrs and the various silos of Christianity that held out against tremendous pressure from the secular West. Yet, as his title suggests, Moore doesn't share Dreher's inward-looking, anti-modern monasticism. To the contrary, he wholeheartedly embraces a global Church identity, one that eagerly piggybacks on secular global crusades for civil rights and immigration reform while intentionally remaining a "prophetic minority" in the domestic sphere.<br />
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Like many utopian visions, Moore's approach is riddled with magical thinking, oversights and inconsistencies. Moore either does not recognize or acknowledge that his secular globalist allies in the fight against the old standbys of racism and nativism view his positions on abortion and, especially, homosexuality as monstrous and repressive. Thus while he rails against the idea of a Moral Minority stretching for a Majority by including prosperity-preaching televangelists, fire-breathing Mormon talk show hosts (ironically, Moore found himself arm-in-arm with Glenn Beck as part of National Review's Against Trump coalition) and "serially-monogamous casino magnates", i.e. Trump, he has no problem reaching across the aisle in the other direction. Hence his courtship of Black Lives Matter, his advocacy for admitting Muslim refugees and his repeated affirmations of the Left's judgement of 1950's America as a morass of materialism, sexism, racism and bigotry.<br />
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Viewed as a whole, Moore's manifesto is as full of holes as the "Seamless Garment" pushed by left-leaning Catholics. The Seamless Garment aimed to tie abortion seamlessly into a holistic platform opposing all injustice. In effect the Seamless Garment was, as <a href="https://stream.org/seamless-garment-poison-pill-kill-off-pro-life/" target="_blank">John Zmirak argues</a>, an attempt at "saddling the pro-life movement with a deadly poison pill: Either embrace our outrageous, implausible, and likely suicidal utopianism, or let us go on murdering a million children per year." Thus the real utility of the Seamless Garment was not in advancing the actual causes it espoused, utopian or otherwise, but in providing cover from criticism from the left and right.<br />
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Viewed from this lens, Moore's argument can be reduced to a plea for respectability. Wielding his Christian fundamentalism within SBC circles, Moore can disarm challenges from the grassroots conservatives in ways that an outright liberal like James Dunn could not. When calls for his head came in the wake of Trump's victory, a host of conservatives rushed to his defense, including <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/why-russell-moore-matters/" target="_blank">Dreher</a>. He was only extrapolating from fundamental Christian principles you see. Then when engaging with the leftist establishment in DC and major media outlets like the Washington Post and the NY Times, Moore can present a huge swathe of his most left-friendly extrapolations. Their favorite Moore trick? Lecturing "<a href="http://www.bpnews.net/45498/conserving-gospel-top-priority-erlcs-moore-says" target="_blank">angry white men</a>" in the Bible Belt for being farther removed from "Middle Eastern illegal immigrant" Jesus than the third world refugees and immigrants they want to keep out of the country.<br />
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This approach has undoubtedly won Moore a kind of respectability. The establishment press, always leery of handing over the megaphone to fundamentalist Christians, proved extraordinarily open to his message. In the run-up to the election, he scored op-eds at the Post and Times along with a steady supply of attentive ears in interviews, culminating in an <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/the-new-evangelical-moral-minority" target="_blank">admiring, novella-size profile</a> in the New Yorker the day before the election. The triumphal title - "The New Evangelical Moral Minority" - was by no means one sided: the magazine of the liberal elite was joining hand in hand with Moore and a new wave of Evangelicals to celebrate the political marginalization of American Christianity.<br />
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As the sharks circling Moore's island fortress at the ERLC attest, there are many outraged by the ascendance of his respectability-driven model. But the return of a Moral Majority style offensive spearheaded by televangelists and megachurchers seems unlikely. While Moore's diagnosis of a collapsing Bible Belt is premature, and his prescription of an army of hip, tattooed young pastors passionate about prison reform is as ridiculous and painfully naive* as <a href="https://www.fastcocreate.com/3043852/this-is-what-happens-when-you-walk-into-starbucks-and-talk-to-the-barista-about-race" target="_blank">Howard Schultz's pie-eyed "Race Together" stunt</a>, it's hard to get excited about a return to Pat Robertson. To borrow from the infomercial, the televangelist's secular cousin, there must be a better way!<br />
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<b><u>Respect</u></b><br />
One might be tempted to see in Trump's victory a broader return of 80's-style ostentation complete with larger-than-life Evangelical leadership - call it <a href="http://religionandpolitics.org/2014/10/28/a-theme-park-a-scandal-and-the-faded-ruins-of-a-televangelism-empire/" target="_blank">Bakker to the Future</a>. But a notable subplot in the primary mania was the stubborn ceiling of support for Ted Cruz, an Elmer Gantry par excellence, even among Southern Evangelicals. Trump's primary victory was not because he was the Swaggart to Cruz' Falwell (Moore's analogy - his South-centric analysis extended to dub Rubio Billy Graham), but because he was the wildly irreverent Peter Venkman to a host of sanctimonious bureaucrats. Trump laid an independent if morally tainted claim to respect based solely on his own brand and body of work, blithely dismissing the self-appointed gatekeepers of respectability ennobled and emulated by Moore.<br />
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The Bible Belt was willing to look beyond its own waistline and recruit a geographic and cultural outsider to tackle its political agenda in Trump. There is now an appreciable hunger for a champion with a similarly independent claim to American respect to continue the counter-revolution throughout the rest of the culture. As the charisma of Southern Baptist preachers tends not to translate outside their own region, the goal is to recruit from within the decadent post-Christian culture, to intercept a talented enemy on his way to Damascus and win, or at least steer him to the cause. Such was the case with Trump - the once liberal and still decadent New Yorker - and is likely to be the case for his cultural counterpart(s).<br />
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Such a Christian counter-culture leader has already been active for most of the new millennium, albeit unwittingly and probably unwillingly. I speak of Mel Gibson. He'd hardly recognize himself as such. His public pronouncements range wildly between affirmations of ultraconservative Roman Catholicism to drunken profane rants to mumbled recitations of PC platitudes. His filmography is all over the place, ranging from hyper-violent nationalist epics to standard liberal Hollywood fare and everything in between.<br />
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Since establishing himself as creative force as director, producer and star of the Oscar-winning <i>Braveheart </i>in 1995, however, Gibson has been the single most powerful cultural ally of the Religious Right. Where the "God and country" salvos of the old Religious Right fell short, too heavily larded with country-western hokum, Gibson's electric <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIvRkjOd1f8" target="_blank">freedom speech </a>in <i>Braveheart </i>still rings out as a clarion call. The same God and country plus R-rated violence formula was at work in <i>The Patriot </i>and <i>We Were Soldiers. </i>He would also tackle faith more explicitly as the headliner to M. Night Shyamalan's last true hit, <i>Signs</i>. Each of these films foreshadowed Gibson's magnum opus, itself the single most impactful Christian contribution to culture in the 21st century: 2004's <i>The Passion of the Christ.</i><br />
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It's hard to overstate how unusual the success and mass market impact of <i>The Passion </i>was. Not just groundbreaking as a Christian film - it racked up 15x times more box office than the most successful Christian film of the modern age at that point (the Veggie Tales Jonah movie) - it was a harbinger of the vulnerability of the media elite that had scorned the project. A gifted filmmaker with enough financial wherewithal to self-fund and some marketing savvy in reserve could make whatever kind of movie he wanted and still deliver a Hollywood-grade four-quadrant blockbuster.<br />
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The flighty Gibson did little with the domestic momentum generated by <i>Passion</i>, routing his immediate currency into the exotic, pre-Christian <i>Apocalypto</i>.<i> </i>The cottage cheese industry that is the Christian movie business tried to ride its coattails with <i>The Nativity Story </i>and <i>Son of God</i> with little mainstream success. Hollywood too tried a post-Christian renaissance of the Biblical epic (Ridley Scott's <i>Exodus</i>, Darren Aronofsky's <i>Noah</i> and Timur Bekmambetov's B-movie treatment of <i>Ben-Hur</i>) with lukewarm results. Meanwhile, Gibson was busy self-destructing, starting with his infamous 2006 DUI and its accompanying "it's the Jews!" rant, continuing with a $400 million divorce and bottoming with a disastrous break-up with his new baby mama. It wasn't until 2010 that Gibson emerged from rehab to reappear at the fringes of the culture in a series of appropriately dark starring roles.<br />
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Adding to his renewed acting efforts, he has gathered the loyal circle of film-making talent nurtured during the making of <i>Passion </i>and <i>Apocalypto </i>and is now returning in earnest to the business of cultural engagement. While violence-drenched explorations of the revenge impulse and mental illness still feature prominently, his recent work is building a strong narrative of the redemption and restoration of the disgraced American patriarch, and with him, a Christian culture.<br />
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The first entry in the Gibson renaissance was revenge thriller <i>Edge of Darkness </i>, playing a nothing-to-lose father seeking justice for his murdered daughter. This was followed by his starring role in <i>The Beaver</i> as a terminally depressed husband and father revitalized by succumbing to his driven, super-competent id, taking the form of a hand-puppet beaver. His next vehicle, 2012's <i>Get the Gringo, </i>represented his first return to self-funded film-making, blending the border-fixation of his earlier creative works with a renewed emphasis on rehabilitating a loose cannon into a protective and loving family man. These trends culminated with two remarkable 2016 releases that could signify his return in force to the cultural scene: <i>Blood Father </i>and <i>Hacksaw Ridge</i>.<br />
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In <i>Blood Father</i>, Gibson plays John Link, a trailer trash version of himself. He's a violent felonious drunk in recovery, divorced, estranged from his missing daughter, and living in the trailer/tattoo parlor somewhere out in the wastelands of the California desert. His only remaining human connection is to the local trailer trash AA group and his hick philosopher sponsor (William H. Macy, looking suitably terrible). That AA group, his higher power and the faint hope that he might one day find his daughter are all that keeps him going.<br />
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But such rawboned tenacity has a power all its own; one that, when engaged, can accomplish much more than Moore's respectability-driven media campaigns. In <i>Blood Father</i>, Link's wealthy, respectable ex-wife offers everything to their daughter Lydia - all the material comforts plus a fancy education - but it doesn't stop her from running away with her bandito boyfriend. Nor does the ex-wife's six-figure award bounty fetch her back. When her self-destructive behavior earns a far more effective Mexican drug cartel bounty on her, only her roughneck dad can save her. As a man with nothing to lose but the most important person in his life, he fights with a savage determination that puts the fear of God into his enemies and inspires his daughter to beat her own demons.<br />
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The Gibson-directed <i>Hacksaw Ridge </i>carries the redemptive arc even further, with combat medic hero Doss already having overcome his violent nature and driven explicitly by his Christian faith to save his fellows without shedding blood. Of course there's still enough blood shed to get <i>Hacksaw Ridge </i>Gibson's typical R-rating, which continues to serve as a dividing line between him and the ghetto of Christian niche media.<br />
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This time last year, Tucker Carlson was penning a <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-is-shocking-vulgar-and-right-213572" target="_blank">far-sighted Trump piece</a> that would pave the way for his takeover of conservative media in the wake of Trump's victory. In it he excoriated the "conservative nonprofit establishment" for their complete failure to check their ideological opponents and to understand their conservative base. They craved the respectability to impress their ideological foes in DC and purchased it at the cost of detaching from their base. He concludes that Christians flocked to Trump over his purer conservative detractors because they wanted "a bodyguard, someone to shield them from mounting (and real) threats to their freedom of speech and worship. Trump fits that role nicely, better in fact than many church-going Republicans."<br />
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Moore believes such a role should be filled by younger, hipper versions of leaders in his mold, like the young pastors he's nurtured in seminary. Indeed, he is mortally opposed to the idea of an outsider applying for the job. In his <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/10/09/if-donald-trump-has-done-anything-he-has-snuffed-out-the-religious-right/?utm_term=.c60f02c530c3" target="_blank">WaPo denunciation</a> of Trump and the Religious Right, he summoned his ideal culture warrior: a "30-year-old evangelical pastor down the street from you" who would "would rather die than hand over his church directory to a politician or turn his church service into a political rally." This pastor must not "concede the public space, in our name, to heretics and hucksters and influence-peddlers."<br />
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In fact, these pastors and their predecessors have already conceded the public space and the popular culture. As Moore's example demonstrates, the only way they get access to it is by saying what their ideological foes at places like WaPo, the NY Times and the New Yorker want to hear. Without a bodyguard or a broad-shouldered fullback to punch a hole in the defensive line, there's no way to crash the party.<br />
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Moore's stated objective of confronting the culture with the strangeness of the Gospel runs directly counter to his efforts gain access to the culture by emphasizing the talking points in favor with respectable society. Jesus was a dark-skinned refugee! The illegal immigrant janitor is a future king of the universe! Donald Trump is a dirty, filthy sinner! This is not a strange and challenging Gospel but a familiar screeching refrain. It is preaching to the post-Christian choir.<br />
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Moore and culture-minded Christians would do well to compare the engagement modeled by his NY Times screed with Gibson's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a65DHhobPw0" target="_blank">recent appearance</a> on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert to promote his upcoming sequel to <i>Passion</i>. In stark contrast to Moore's clean-shaven Chamber of Commerce profile, Gibson shambled onto the stage looking every bit the half-crazed wildman, with soft eyes dancing manically behind a huge Old Testament beard. His personal baggage could not be more evident. He opened by bragging about a barfight with a rugby team that made him believable enough to get cast as a revenge-driven vigilante in <i>Mad Max.</i> Later a detour into spirituality had him seeing a devil and angel on Colbert's shoulders, with Gibson implicitly and pathetically pleading with the angel not to dig into his dirty laundry. As a public witness, to use Moore's term, Gibson is deeply compromised.<br />
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And yet there he was, in the bowels of secular pop culture, getting free media for a Christian movie centering on the boldest, strangest and most crucial tenet of the Gospel: the resurrection. This opportunity was not afforded by moral and political correctness nor abstinence from heresy, hucksterism and influence peddling. On the contrary, Gibson wallowed in the muck and mire of the worst of Hollywood and human nature, only momentarily emerging from it, like King Kong or the Creature of the Black Lagoon, to grab a hold of something pure, beautiful and redemptive<i>. </i>However earnestly a moral minority seeks respectability, it cannot command respect without a champion from within the immoral majority. Sometimes it takes a swamp creature to drain the swamp.<br />
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*Another example of Moore's painful naivete from <i>Onward</i>: fantasizing about how amazing a public witness it would be for a church to have a worship leader with Down syndrome and a scripture reader with dementia. How about an emotional equivalent of a 14-year old as president of the ERLC?<br />
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<br />Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-52382248004533976012015-12-10T12:33:00.002-08:002020-09-05T15:45:52.534-07:00The Samson Option: The Biblical Case for Donald Trump<div style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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American clergy and Christian conservative pundits have conditioned the Religious Right to hold those aspiring to national leadership to the standard of Christ. Absolute moral clarity, humility unto (political) death, compassion for enemies and strangers - these have been the virtues serious-minded believing voters have searched for in candidates. Hence the enormous early appeal of the humble, soft-spoken, gentle Ben Carson. Many others are flocking to the principled but opportunistic Ted Cruz, who adopts the cheesy Sunday morning drawl of a Southern Baptist preacher whenever he faces the camera, or to Marco Rubio, who commands goosebumps to rise with every impassioned salvo against Planned Parenthood and the moral bankruptcy of the Democrats.<br />
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The conditioning that draws us to these candidates also inflames every fiber of our political being to cry out against Donald Trump. He boasts incessantly. He casually drops profanity and below-the-belt insults. He never repents. He doesn’t forgive or ask for forgiveness. He doesn’t turn the cheek. He equivocates on the crucible issues of abortion and gay marriage. He loudly and proudly prioritizes the material over the spiritual. For Christians trained to run candidates through the eye of the needle, the Camel-sized Trump is <i>prima facie</i> no-go. Through a Christian lens, he is the world and the flesh, and all we need is a little bit of the left’s politically correct reflex to tack on the devil. Hence the widespread and emphatic renunciation of Trump by Christian conservative leaders like Russell Moore and Rod Dreher.<br />
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Christians like me who find themselves rooting on Trump in flagrant contradiction to all of our training and conditioning can’t help but feel unfaithful, drawn by some base depravity to worship at the feet of this Golden Calf that just sprang out of the fire. Could it be that we are stopping our ears to the still small voice and instead hearkening to a heartbeat quickened by the satanic appeal of our pagan, barbarian ancestry? Is Trump Conan, luring us back to the old creed of crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of the women?<br />
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To these nagging questions and those who raise them, I pose a strong biblical counter-example. He was the ultimate man’s man and an archetype of Christ, celebrated by the author of Hebrews in the ranks of the faithful leaders of Israel along with Gideon, David and Samuel. I’m talking about Samson.</div>
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The parallels between Trump and Samson are extraordinarily close and abundant and I am far from the first to notice them - Pat Buchanan referred to Trump’s Samson Option in early August and blogger/satirist David Burge, responding to the Trump favorite Bible verse controversy, dubbed him the “jawbone of an ass.” But to my knowledge, no Christian conservative commentator has considered the depth of the comparison or its implications.<br />
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Samson arose during a time of bondage. On the eve of his birth, the Lord had delivered the Israelites into the hands of the Philistines. America today suffers under cultural bondage that is rapidly transforming the political and demographic landscape of the country. The modern connotation of Philistines is “people who are hostile or indifferent to culture” and you couldn’t ask for a better description of the political and social elites in this country. There is no greater existential threat to American culture than mass immigration, yet that is the only issue on which the establishments of both parties can agree. A similarly unified front on the doctrine of political correctness polices all dissent on this issue while gradually decoupling modern America from its heritage by the escalating demonization of white privilege, patriarchy and Christian values. Both situations cry out for nationalist heroes to break the yoke.<br />
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Like Trump, Samson was anything but a pure Messianic figure (other than the hair). Neither did he fit the Robin Hood/Batman “heroes that Gotham/Nottingham deserved” vigilante archetype. Rather he was the villain that the Philistines deserved. Like Trump, Samson was a sworn foe of the Philistines on the political/national level, while being almost indistinguishable from them on a personal level. For most intents and purposes, he was one of them. He scorned his own people to sleep with Philistine women and spent most of his time in Philistine territory where he could give his many vices free rein. And God wasn’t even mad - he wanted Samson in there getting dirty with the unholy so he’d be able to do more damage (Judges 14:4). Sort of a continuation of His rationale for Jesus intermingling with the hookers and vice merchants: you send the physician to the sick and you send the wrecking ball to the crumbling tenement. <br />
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It’s because Trump has slummed (or slum-lorded) with the Philistines that he’s such a potent force within their midst. The Apprentice, a million Hollywood cameos, golf dates with every conceivable celebrity, media mogul and power broker, donations to every establishment candidate - he started this war from the middle of their wheelhouse. Again and again he strolls into their centers of power, runs headlong into their traps, and walks off with the city gates on his shoulders.<br />
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As many have declared of Trump, Samson was almost completely non-ideological. His acts were motivated by hunger, self-preservation, greed, lust, hatred and vengeance, and yet they always resulted in gain for his people. He obviously had a knack for brute-force destruction, but he was also resourceful and cunning. His firebrands-to-foxtails strategy mirrors Trump’s mastery of social media, and he showed a similar inclination to troll those plotting against him with conniving riddles and baiting proclamations to expose their hidden agendas for the world to see. The parallels are also striking to Christ’s use of disciples to multiply his impact and clever parables to confound the Pharisee media. <br />
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Samson always pushed the envelope further than any of his people would or could. So much so that his own people delivered him into the Philistines’ hands just as the Lord had delivered them. Even his lovers had no qualms about turning him over. We’ve seen this over and over with Trump, as his GOP fellow travelers compete for the chance to trip him up and turn him over to the other side to demonstrate that they had nothing to do with his hell-raising. No one ever exposed the duplicity and cravenness of frenemies better than Samson or Trump.<br />
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Samson’s fighting style was crude, often unfair, and barbaric, but it was brutally effective, not only in defeating the enemies that had overwhelmed his people, but in exposing their own barbarity. When he struck down 1,000 Philistines with the jawbone of an ass/donkey (about as pregnant a double metaphor as you can get with Trump), he declared in characteristically bombastic fashion, “with a donkey’s jawbone, I have made donkeys of them.” (Sly as always, Samson was punning - the Hebrew word for donkeys is apparently a homonym for piles or heaps). So has Donald’s unbridled jaw laid waste to surprised opponents who had come to expect gentle, heavily-qualified rhetoric from GOP frontrunners. It has also provoked a torrent of crude ass-braying from prominent liberals and the media, unmasking the visceral hatred lurking behind tolerant facades.<br />
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The Samson comparison has a tragic dimension that might not bode well for Trump the man. Their shared predilection for cannonballing into enemy honey traps ultimately produced Samson’s downfall, ending with him as a blinded carnie freak show trotted out for a sadistic Philistine mob. Even so, by bringing down the evil Philistine establishment with him in a final act of vengeance, he ended up doing even more damage to Israel’s enemy than when he lived.<br />
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Meanwhile, as much as the biblical headlines focus on these sensational scraps with the Philistines, none of these unserious hijinks or dangerous flirtations disqualified him for the serious job of judging the Israelites during a volatile time. Judges 14:20 tells us that Samson led, i.e. judged, the Israelites for twenty years. While he was unquestionably an agent of chaos for the Philistines, the Bible gives us no indication that he was a bad executive for the Israelites. Indeed, the author of Hebrews puts him on a veritable Rushmore of faithful Hebrew leaders, with the group being recognized for having “through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight.” Trump would put it more succinctly: they made Israel great again.<br />
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There is ample reason to believe that Trump could provide a steady hand at the wheel, even as the other wields the jawbone against his enemies. His business record, while not as spectacular as his boasts, suggests a competent administrator, evaluator and entrepreneur, however unorthodox and flamboyant his public persona. His ability to delegate has been on excellent display during the campaign: he couldn’t have picked better ghost writers for his policy papers on immigration, tax policy and gun control. His dominance of the media has demonstrated again and again his ability to set the terms of debate and advance his message in even the most hostile environments. This undercurrent of competence has consistently been discounted by conservative commentators, even those who admire his work against the establishment. They see the destroyer and not the judge.<br />
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The biblical precedent then for a leader like Trump is concrete. If these are Samsonian times and America is truly in the hands of modern-day Philistines, as I believe most Christians would agree, the worries about Trump’s motivations, principles, character and demeanor are largely irrelevant. The matter of greatest consequence is whether he or any of the other candidates are strong enough to bring down the Philistine establishment and return the country to its people.</div>
Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-22893262627861294592015-09-23T16:32:00.000-07:002019-04-29T20:22:50.983-07:00The Alien's Guide to Xenophobia<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNLH1oepQyvfyljCLlGcxxM3jLqZ8uVm3jLXnxV8-oKwTmL5PPi97zLL4-A9Oazk0Quqwp_nGwIkGKI73YBhtquL_lcr5n8hfRxxZoMISYIMzYLgEDhdZr9y3wEpyQpK2nlNOEdEkZfM0/s1600/alien_poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNLH1oepQyvfyljCLlGcxxM3jLqZ8uVm3jLXnxV8-oKwTmL5PPi97zLL4-A9Oazk0Quqwp_nGwIkGKI73YBhtquL_lcr5n8hfRxxZoMISYIMzYLgEDhdZr9y3wEpyQpK2nlNOEdEkZfM0/s320/alien_poster.jpg" width="246" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Are you looking for a trusty handbook to steer you through the thorny ethical and political dilemmas raised by the immigration crises raging across the Western world? Look no further. The appropriately titled 1979 sci-fi/horror classic </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alien</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> tells you everything you need to know.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The demographics and attitudes of the ill-fated </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nostromo</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> crew are not unlike the West prior to the immigration explosion of the post-boomer era: a pair of working-class guys, one white and one black, in the engine room, a middle class of WASPy American officers and a snobby semi-aristocratic Brit on the periphery. Though they share a camaraderie born of long isolation in each other’s company, this sense of kinship does not extend beyond their own hull and certainly not to newcomer Ash, the cold, aloof Science Officer. When the ship’s computer interrupts their blissful hypersleep with a command to respond to an alien distress signal, they grumble and whine at the imposition. Only a begrudging respect for company policy and the threat of withheld money forestalls a mutiny. While this curmudgeonly behavior might strike some as selfish and unenlightened, the events that follow vindicate it as common sense.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Unfortunately such stubborn independence and self-interested caution is in short supply when the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nostromo </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">advance team embarks for a derelict alien vessel. Dismissing the sensible fears of navigator Lambert as she pleads with them to cut the mission short, cowboy Captain Dallas and his adventure-hungry officer Kane plunge ever deeper into the ship’s heart of darkness, mirroring the eagerness of the West’s neoconservative lobby to extend a Middle Eastern anti-terrorism mission into an exercise in kingmaking and nation building. (Ironically, Kane’s recklessness brings him face-to-face-hugger with just the type of WMD stockpile that we went into Iraq to find). </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The results of these misadventures are horrifying. The domino-style toppling of stable, if evil, dictatorships in Iraq, Libya and most of Syria have unleashed the denizens of hell on the region. Demonic ISIS and their fellow jihadists now cover the face of the Levant like the creature face-hugging the terminally curious officer Kane. Meanwhile in Mexico, where many blame the drug wars on the US outsourcing of its narcotics industry, drug cartels pioneer gruesome tactics for future use by ISIS. Still, to quote the ultimate hero-coward Don Knotts, while the horribleness and the awfulness of it will never actually be forgotten, the hellish contagion is mercifully remote. At the onset of the crisis, the stateside Westerners and the more cautious </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nostromo </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">crew enjoy a healthy distance from the alien menace, and, in the latter case, a secure border monitored by a careful watchman.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This brings us to the thorniest moral quandary posed by the crisis. While the outbreak of horror is initially remote, it doesn’t take long for its victims (and its perpetrators) to close the gap. The sympathy and empathy that rise so naturally in response to the news of distant tragedy lose much of their potency when the fallout suddenly arrives on our doorstep, angrily clamouring to be allowed inside. Instincts for self-preservation and skepticism battle with humanitarian impulses, as the West and the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nostromo</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> crew grapple over the agonizing question: let them in and risk the sacred home turf or leave them weeping and gnashing their teeth in the outer darkness? </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The responses of the members of the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nostromo </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">crew to this quandary, and the motives and philosophies behind those responses, provide the greatest of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alien</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s insights on the immigration debate. The crewmembers’ responses divide them into three basic categories (with one intriguing spin-off) which I consider to neatly match the various camps staking out positions on the present immigration and refugee questions.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first of these groups is the Hardliners, derided as selfish and heartless by their detractors, their positions closely parallel the strict immigration restrictionists like Trump in the US and Viktor Orban in the EU. On the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nostromo</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, the grimly practical Ripley is the standard-bearer for this position, with sympathizers in Brett and Parker from the engine room. Ripley adheres firmly to the rule of law and her conviction that letting them in would endanger the rest of the ship. So resolute is she that she denies even the demands of her commanding officer to open the hatch and let them in. It is a tough stance to take - a potential death sentence for three shipmates, even though two aren’t even infected - but it is firmly rooted in the conservative notion that the safety of the crew already on the ship takes precedence over the demands of any outsiders.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The second group are the Bleeding Hearts. Their stance is less ideological than moral and emotional. Commander Dallas and Lambert embody this perspective. Though Dallas is normally a respecter of laws and protocols, and Lambert a cautious and sensible person in other contexts, they are so moved by the horror that has befallen Kane that they are willing to dismiss any theoretical risk to get him the immediate help he so clearly needs. In the context of the current debate, these are the sincere humanitarians who fear that a strictly conservative response to human suffering will cost us our humanity, even if it shields us from risk.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The third and final group would claim membership with the bleeding hearts, but their chest-beating appeals to emotion ring strangely hollow. These are the Company Men. They cloak their company-uber-alles agenda under a veil of arch morality. The </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nostromo</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">science officer Ash is the ultimate company man. It is he who makes the fateful decision to circumvent Ripley and let the Alien onboard. He claims to have acted on compassion, even allowing a charge of recklessness, but the cold rationality of his personality, the evenness of his demeanor, and the intensity of his interest in the Alien suggest entirely different motives. As it turns out, he is quite literally a company man, an android engineered to do the company’s bidding whatever the human cost. In this case, the company views the Alien as an asset and the crew as expendable.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Such synthetic bleeding hearts abound in positions of power across the Western landscape. Facing a demographic winter that could simultaneously put substantial upward pressure on future wages and reduce consumption, as well as an ornery middle class seeking more political power, the chamber of commerce class and the political class it bankrolls views mass immigration as an unmitigated good. If a few hundred suburbs have to be transformed into third world hellholes, to borrow Ann Coulter’s phrase, that’s just the cost of doing global business. Thus, bright-eyed automatons like Angela Merkel and Barack Obama crank up the wattage on their humanitarian rhetoric as they cheerfully implant Alien embryos into the heartlands of their paralyzed constituencies. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A final variation on the Company Man type is found in increasing numbers in the West and hinted at in the character of Ash. Cognizant of his synthetic form, Ash has none of his shipmates’ instincts for self-preservation. From this standpoint he can logically view their xenophobia as close-minded and irrational, even as the Alien rips them into pieces. The real-life equivalent to this extreme detachment is seen in the example of several prominent Christian leaders, including Pope Francis and Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore. These men are not only enthusiastically pro-immigration, they seem incapable of entertaining or comprehending the fears of their followers. No amount of material or cultural devastation can sway them. From reading Russell Moore in particular, you almost get the sense that he views the potential for negative temporal consequences as a spiritual perk... A means of mortifying the flesh (at least the flesh of the unenlightened). Such men make useful allies of Company Men.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And there you have it: the complete Alien’s Guide to Xenophobia, pieced together from the scattered entrails (including a few literal bleeding hearts) of the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nostromo </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">crew. </span></div>
Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-86993479139599782922014-12-01T13:17:00.000-08:002014-12-01T13:17:37.637-08:00Artificial Gravitas<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
Born and
raised a Bible-believing Christian, the only post-earth scenario I've ever
seriously entertained involves a new heaven and earth of God's creation. I
wouldn't say exactly that I'm comfortable with this scenario, as anything
earth-shattering is inherently discomfiting, but it sure beats the secular
alternative I encountered in places like my astronomy textbook. I
remember the author droning on with scholarly detachment about the inevitable
burnout of the sun and the ensuing end of all life – the nihilist eschaton. I
imagine the normal secular response to such a depressing future to be something akin to John Maynard
Keynes' famous shrug: "in the long run, we're all dead." But the more
optimistic of the secularists turn to science fiction, projecting their trust
in the power of the human mind, whether manifested in technology or evolved intelligence,
to furnish a new heaven and earth.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
The Nolan brothers (the brains behind <i>Memento, Inception,</i> <i>The
Prestige </i>and <i>The Dark Knight </i>trilogy)
with<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Interstellar</i> have
provided the latest secularist entry into the optimist's column. Sure the
world's ending - an infectious blight wiping out our crops and turning the
earth into a vast dust bowl - but there's a way out. Some mysterious
force, alien perhaps, has opened a wormhole in Saturn's backyard, offering a
shortcut to a host of new habitable planets. With new friends like these,
who needs an old-fashioned deity like the Lord of Heaven and Earth? To
answer heaven's new call, a heroic band of scientists and astronauts take up
the mantle of Moses and set out in search of a new promised land. Of course to
perform the miraculous feat of launching earth's remaining millions into space,
our heroes need some additional guidance from their mysterious friends.
This help can only be found in a close encounter with a black hole, which
serves as a sort of inverted burning bush. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
The many parallels to Exodus are not coincidental.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Interstellar<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>is a powerful new voice in a
familiar chorus of secular prophets calling the West out of the bondage of
Christian ideology. Not that<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Interstellar<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>directly attacks any Christian
doctrine - the plagues have already been meted out on Christian hegemony by
earlier generations of culture warriors. All that remains is to offer the
people a new faith to comfort them. Thus,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Interstellar<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>looks forward, articulating a 3rd
stage replacement theology, with the species taking the place of the Christian
church and super-evolved transdimensional beings filling God's shoes.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
In taking
such a positive, constructive role, <i>Interstellar
</i>wisely avoids a direct confrontation with Christianity, a conflict that mired
its ideological relative <i>Contact </i>(incidentally
starring a younger Matthew McConaughey as the smarmy liberal peacemaker between
faith and science) in Baby Boomer preachiness.
The Nolan brothers also sidestep the alienating art house vibe of <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i> by grounding the
cosmic stakes in a heartwarming father-daughter relationship that literally
transcends space and time.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
Forcing a
feel-good narrative into the core of a black hole greatly diminishes the
awesome and terrifying grandeur of outer space, much like the Cuarons largely
neutered space with the imposition of a stock Sandra Bullock character arc on <i>Gravity</i>. Or, on the extreme end of the
Hollywood spectrum, how Michael Bay and his collaborators turned <i>Armageddon </i>into a work of high camp. Still,
the Nolans are defter screenwriters than the Cuarons and Christopher Nolan is
infinitely more serious a craftsman than Bay, so much of the violence to logic
and ideological coherence has been better disguised. It’s artificial gravitas – not quite as
powerful as the real article, but not as lightweight as the hackery that is so
dominant in modern Hollywood. More importantly, it palliates the optimistic longings
of the human heart while suspending the thoroughly justified disbelief of the
human mind.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
At heart,
the Nolans are meticulous, highly skilled entertainers and careless ideologues –
ideas are to them as magic to a magician.
Whereas Kubrick and Clarke used space as a grand canvas on which to
paint their atheistic vision of life, the universe and everything, the Nolans pull
rabbits out of wormholes. Yet the bent of the artist matters less than the
content of his work, and <i>Interstellar</i>,
for all its sacrifices to sentimentality and artifice, ultimately worships at
the same bogus altar of human technology and evolution. Indeed, by pandering
skillfully to the tastes of the common man, <i>Interstellar</i>
outdoes its predecessors as an apostle, reaching into the heartland passed over
by the elitist <i>2001 </i>and maligned by
the belligerent <i>Contact</i>. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<i>Interstellar </i>offers a
more entertaining and hopeful endgame for humanity than my old astronomy
textbook, but the entertainment is fleeting and the hope is false. A sober examination of infinite space will
yield one of two images, both of them terrible to behold: the face of almighty
God or an abyss of nothingness. The
secular <i>Interstellar</i>, unwilling to acknowledge
the face of God yet shirking the nihilism of the black hole, settles for smoke
and mirrors.</div>
Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-76945008548369374022014-08-13T15:13:00.000-07:002014-08-13T15:13:09.346-07:00Nuggets of Wisdom from George Lucas' Severed Head<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3Ca9aDNZ8bc24Rk0AHD46T0-0ODDUtAc4lKQrgQF4fscxyj3HzfERSKYDWOkKl8vgPW9o6FGBb70QcpIcb-KlI5aaFl0YCQwkXxSbbCzgTfrpX1cg0Mqwqn-dfdcHgmjtE_5pl7VsadE/s1600/GOG_Head.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3Ca9aDNZ8bc24Rk0AHD46T0-0ODDUtAc4lKQrgQF4fscxyj3HzfERSKYDWOkKl8vgPW9o6FGBb70QcpIcb-KlI5aaFl0YCQwkXxSbbCzgTfrpX1cg0Mqwqn-dfdcHgmjtE_5pl7VsadE/s1600/GOG_Head.jpg" height="201" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Eureka!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-e79efd37-d165-74dc-603e-bd3314f028e0"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Safely ensconced in a simpler age, Hitchcock observed that drama was “life with the dull bits cut out.” Clearly that is no longer the case. In this postmodern age, our lives are wrapped in so many layers of entertainment that what Hitchcock would have recognized as “life” is increasingly irrelevant as a primary source. Now more than ever, popular entertainment is our foundation, and we construct our dramas by excavating previous generation’s favorites, hammering away the duller bits to hone in on whatever was awesome about the originals. A case in point is the defining hit movie of the year thus far, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Guardians of the Galaxy</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the most intriguing, and illuminating, bit of </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Guardians</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, our ensemble of strangely familiar heroes stumbles upon the giant severed head of an ancient celestial super-being. Inside, a guy named the Collector has set up a pirate mining operation, drilling into the decaying nervous tissue, presumably to discover the wondrous secrets stored in the great old brain. The movie plays coy until the very end as to the identity of the decapitated being, when the surprise </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Howard the Duck</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> cameo makes it clear (as the ever-keen Steve Sailer <a href="http://www.unz.com/isteve/guardians-of-the-galaxy/">points out</a>): the ancient celestial super-being is none other than George Lucas.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Collector then is the Disney-Marvel entertainment-industrial complex, in this case represented by writer-director-foreman James Gunn, and this film is the first nugget of the box office gold that was </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Star Wars</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to be successfully refined into something shiny enough for this postmodern age. And shiny it is, gleaming like a newly-forged golden calf. Gunn has developed into a capable refiner: having earned his stripes as screenwriter on a pair of successful reboots of Boomer-era hits </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Scooby Doo </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dawn of the Dead</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, he exhibits a near perfect accord with the zeitgeist in </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Guardians</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Along with co-writer Nicole Perlman and the creators of the original comic (which in turn, I understand, is derivative of a Marvel universe too vast for me to comprehend), Gunn strip-mines the </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Star Wars </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">universe for elements most readily recognized as “awesome,” leaving behind the less compelling bits.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Guardians</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> happily</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">scratches the painfully earnest Luke and preachy old Obi-Wan to showcase Peter Quill, a beefed up, geeked up version of everyone’s favorite scoundrel Han Solo. Also reforged in new forms are Leia as a kung-fu fighting Green Goddess, Chewbacca as a Space Ent, R2D2 as a pissed-off tech-savvy raccoon, C3PO as a socially-awkward bodybuilder, and the Death Star as the </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dark Aster</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The dated </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Star Wars</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> trappings have also been scrapped like so many yards of shag carpet (ironically to make way for judiciously applied retro stylings). For instance, instead of the bombastic classical scores that Star Wars made synonymous with the blockbuster epic, we get an “awesome mix” of catchy 70’s pop hits. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The resulting film is simultaneously impressive and pointless. It’s a pastiche imitating a portrait - like a Lego version of a Rockwell painting - a characteristic that is at once central to its charm and damning of its overall value. It has an unapologetic self-awareness of its derivative nature that frees it from the silly pretensions of so many other comic book adaptations. Where a movie like </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Watchmen </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">trudged grimly onward, grunting under its own importance, the lightweight </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Guardians</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> lassos pop hooks with one-liners and leaps nimbly from spectacle to spectacle. All this, however, begs the question: what does it matter how skillfully the Guardians fly circles around lamer fantasy heroes? They are all still stuck orbiting the same lifeless objects, whether it be Lucas’ head or Stan Lee’s or any other misplaced centers of “expanded universes.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s not that </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Guardians </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">or its lesser comic book inspired brethren are merely derivative, but that they are derivative of a derivative that renders them of so little cultural worth. Their growing popularity and sophistication is symptomatic of the broader cultural phenomenon described by the postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard and condemned by the Second Commandment. Baudrillard pointed to the “precession of the simulacra,” when the real is </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">preceded</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (essentially replaced) by its imitation in the culture. God forbade the Jews to create graven images lest they worship them in place of him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the past, boondoggles like </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Guardians </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">tended to be amateur projects, usually the work of adolescents and/or antisocial single guys who would expend their creative and productive energies in exploring and expanding fantasy worlds of others’ creation. Today, they attract the attention of some of our best craftsmen, the bulk of the funding of our major studios, and the brand loyalty of the broadest segment of the market. As a recovering nerd who suffers the occasional lapse, a part of me wants to embrace the success of </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Guardians </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">as mainstream validation of a misspent youth. As a new father, however, I worry about the stability of a crumbling cultural foundation reinforced with Legos.</span></div>
</span>Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-29786748601973893962014-07-24T17:24:00.001-07:002019-04-29T20:22:51.091-07:00The Vast White-Wing Conspiracy Uncovered<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.1500000000000001; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 5pt; margin-right: 27pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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" 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" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Not the only guy in whiteface</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As awful an ideology as nihilism is, it can make for riveting entertainment in capable hands. Consider the tremendous success of <i>Game of Thrones</i> and <i>The Walking Dead</i>. The creators of these shows appear to have learned from Macbeth’s authoritative summation of nihilist story-telling: tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. By replacing the idiots with skilled narrative craftsmen and cranking the volume on the sound and fury, they can sustain the audience’s rapt attention until the inevitable soul-crushing conclusion. Exciting means justify bitter ends.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />Perhaps those of us worried about the conquest of pop culture by so dark a worldview should be encouraged when an intriguing anarcho-nihilist premise like that of <i>The Purge: Anarchy </i>(and its 2013 predecessor, <i>The Purge</i>) is bungled so spectacularly. Instead of pushing the mainstream another inch closer to <i>A Clockwork Orange</i>, writer-director James DeMonaco stumbles backward into a more benign era of ham-handed B-movie liberalism. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Purge’s conceit is as follows: sometime in the near future, the American government reorganizes under a shadowy oligarchy called the “New Founding Fathers” and institutes the Purge, an annual holiday in which all crimes (even murder, the Big Brother announcement makes sure to specify) are legal. Each Purge day, those Americans willing to risk death to indulge their long-repressed rape and murder fantasies roam the streets, while the sensible sorts who don’t want to get hurt lock themselves in their homes with barricades readied for the occasion. Of course, there’s always some trick to force a few conscientious objectors out of their hiding places and into an all-or-nothing fight for survival.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It would seem to be a set-up for a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Lord of the Flies</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-style descent into savagery and horror, a narrative which has lately harbored a powerful, if grotesque, appeal to American movie-goers. Indeed, this is the exact idea that the clever marketing team at Universal conveyed in the unsettling trailers. A yuppie couple hurrying to some suburban refuge when their car breaks down in the ghetto as machete-toting hoodlums in demonic masks circle. Presumably, a harrowing tale of survival and sadism ensues. Surprisingly, DeMonaco takes a much different path. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In a jarring subversion of expectations, DeMonaco blends the intimate, visceral style of recent horror efforts like </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>The Crazies</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>The Strangers</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, with bizarrely misplaced schlock and sophomoric political satire lifted whole cloth from Gen X sci-fi efforts like </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>RoboCop</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>The People Under the Stairs</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>They Live</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The scary masked anarchists from the trailers turn out to be mere bit players, ceding the central villainous role to… WASPs? Yes, DeMonaco populates his apocalyptic war zone with prayerful, flag-waving white folks (NRA members, no doubt) hell-bent on machine gunning as many poor minorities and homeless people as they can find. One particularly absurd sequence has a party of country clubbers donning pheasant (or is it peasant?) hunting garb to hunt our hapless heroes.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s a disastrous creative decision, obliterating the nightmarish quasi-realism that furnishes so much of the thrills for the sub-genre. The heavy-handed, amateurish quality of the political commentary bleeds into every element of the film. The plot, characters and dialogue have the careless, throwaway quality you’d expect from a grad student rushing to meet a deadline. The movie manages to make enough sense to avert a complete collapse, but only because the abundant filler is so familiar and unambitious. Such a raw product would be understandable if this were a first-time filmmaker, but DeMonaco is a veteran screenwriter, with some respectable credits to his name. The crime drama </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Negotiator </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(co-written with Kevin Fox), in particular, exhibited a high degree of craftsmanship that is entirely absent from </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anarchy</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What could cause an experienced and talented filmmaker to suffer such a precipitous decline in professionalism? An excessive nostalgic affection for 80’s B-movies certainly plays a role, but the most apparent causal factor is DeMonaco’s slavish, drooling adherence to the dogma of progressive political correctness. Not that overt ideology necessarily makes for bad movies: James Cameron’s mega-hits reek of liberal ideology, but that doesn't make them any less exhilarating. In this case, however, DeMonaco has preemptively sabotaged his own concept, blowing enormous holes into his material to lay down a track to convey an acceptable message.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Somehow, the conceit of a middle-class white couple getting stuck in the inner-city on the eve of bloody riot simultaneously tickled DeMonaco’s creative fancy and triggered his white guilt. Clearly, the latter won out to the former’s detriment. Again and again he makes violent intercessions in his plot to ensure that no matter how much the carnage may appear like the Rodney King riots on steroids, the most savage criminals, and the only legitimate objects of fear, are actually rich white people. If that sounds like a white guy’s hasty paraphrase of Huey P. Newton, it’s because it is. DeMonaco’s stand-in for Newton is Carmelo Jones (narrowly beaten out by LeBron Johnson and Shaquille Davis for the laziest possible character name for a black guy), played in a blush-worthy performance by <a href="http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_tv/2008/01/barack-obama-on.html">Barack Obama’s favorite screen gangsta</a> Michael K. Williams. Carmelo’s role is to wear green paramilitary garb, swear and shout the message of the movie repeatedly: the Purge is just an excuse for rich people to slaughter poor people and reduce the surplus population. Later, he leads an army of black panther types on a revenge purge of those evil WASPs, to the presumable cheers of the audience (isolated clapping in my sparsely populated theater).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As a WASP myself (though I’m still working towards that elusive country club membership), I could be offended by this absurd slander, but I choose to be heartened instead. For as much as </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anarchy</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> appears to be a racial-political hit-piece (and it is to some degree), DeMonaco’s inadvertent disarming of his concept may have done some good. In the long run, blatant but incompetent propaganda poses far less of a threat to civilization than the seductive madness of skillfully rendered nihilism. </span></div>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-e2d8ab4b-6ab6-1b83-97fb-095006e1b00e"><br /></span>Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-2310457000523407832014-05-28T18:14:00.001-07:002023-09-15T06:43:35.212-07:00Mr. Sith Goes to Washington<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXvM-OCSc0jH8COsDhphPddXdyDHdaxAEeltkYPTGrZqolPfhw7Sw1xEgywgMfg0J15zhxnN9du5Z32jjtQ2FnynHFuXl5GP3v18VnPe_n5BlPtiAeurZI2O18VEALCb5NzOKWl9SJkOw/s1600/mrsmith.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXvM-OCSc0jH8COsDhphPddXdyDHdaxAEeltkYPTGrZqolPfhw7Sw1xEgywgMfg0J15zhxnN9du5Z32jjtQ2FnynHFuXl5GP3v18VnPe_n5BlPtiAeurZI2O18VEALCb5NzOKWl9SJkOw/s1600/mrsmith.jpg" width="232" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’d say Netflix’s </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">House of Cards</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> was a guilty pleasure (not that Hollywood produces guiltless pleasures anymore), but that would be underselling how deeply disturbing its success has been. On the surface, its appeal is readily understood: its sleazy shock factor conducts an electric new energy and lurid vibrancy to a tired old narrative. It’s Shakespearean tragedy fully modernized with graphic sex, violence and profanity: Iago Unchained. The result is intoxicating, addictive – I plowed through the first two seasons in the space of a few weeks – but with the hangover comes a chilling realization. This story is not set in some Machiavellian medieval state where murder and coups d’état were routine, but in America, land of the free and home of the brave. Nor does Frank Underwood fit into the tragic anti-hero archetype: this is Palpatine, not Vader. Here he comes, the Evil Emperor, marching through our most revered and cherished political institutions, corrupting and subverting all he touches, trampling all who resist, and at times I catch myself rooting for him!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let’s assume that I’m not a lonely deviant and other viewers feel similarly. How were we so easily seduced to forsake the red, white and blue for the dark side? It was only a few generations ago that Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart made us believe that one good man could foil a corrupt D.C. establishment in </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mr. Smith Goes to Washington</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. So how did we go from Mr. Smith to Mr. Sith? Thankfully, a greater mind than mine has already tackled these questions in exhaustive or at least exhausting fashion. In case my excessive </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Star Wars </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">references hadn't already tipped you off, I am speaking of George Lucas and his prequel trilogy.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Moving away from the elegant moral simplicity of his original trilogy, Lucas set out to answer a pair of dilemmas with obvious parallels to my own: how could a peaceful republic give rise to an evil empire and how could a righteous defender of said republic transform into a minion of its destroyer? Like Queen Amidala in the third film, the resulting movies are stiff, overwrought (if occasionally pretty) and mostly incomprehensible, but pregnant with valuable insights that can be rescued from their moribund host.</span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-9e3e0f06-4586-bafc-d538-41c6cc11791c" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our first clue comes from the glaring absence of a crucial element of the original trilogy: likable good guys. The qualities that made Luke, Leia and Han likable are the same that made them successful in defeating the Empire: infectious enthusiasm for their cause and a powerful combination of moral clarity and courage. These were the same type of qualities that made Jimmy Stewart so powerful a figurehead for American optimism in </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mr. Smith </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and similar roles in </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s a Wonderful Life</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (heck, we can even throw in </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fievel Goes West</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">). They were also the qualities that got Ronald Reagan elected – it’s no coincidence that Reagan felt so comfortable co-opting </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Star Wars </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">terminology for his policies. And it is the utter lack of these qualities that doom the prequels’ Anakin, Amidala and their Jedi friends to failure.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The prequel heroes are so fundamentally dislikable that I’ve almost convinced myself that it was intentional – that this was Lucas’ version of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Idiocracy </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(no one hates on Mike Judge for populating his worlds with irritating morons). Amidala is one of the most flagrant examples. Lucas has surgically removed any organs producing charm, character or feeling. Under the pretext of shielding her from assassination, he has surrounded her with look-alikes and rendered her indistinguishable from them under metric tons of make-up and fabric. The same pretext prompts her to affect a mind-numbing monotone when pleading to the Senate for justice; imagine Ben Stein as Mr. Smith in the famous filibuster scene and you’ll get the idea. Or just watch C-SPAN. Of course Amidala isn’t the only offender. Anakin’s a pouty psychopath with all the charisma and sex appeal of Elliot Rodger. Obi-Wan and his Jedi confreres squint and squirm their way through moral dilemmas in a constant state of mystic constipation.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Perhaps the best case for the prequels as Lucas’ </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Idiocracy </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is Jar Jar Binks, the alien rube who gets set-up in the exact same role as Mr. Smith – as a patsy Senator for a nefarious conspiracy. If it were Mike Judge instead of George Lucas, Jar Jar would win the Chancellorship and run the galaxy into the ground a la President Hector Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. But Lucas, uninhibited by the comedian’s tendency to prophesy the most ridiculous outcome, offers a soberer outcome: Jar Jar makes the decisive motion to confer dictatorial powers to the evil Palpatine.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Can it be a coincidence that it is the failure of Jar Jar – the most blatantly idiotic and universally reviled character in the prequels – to live up to the example of Mr. Smith that paves the way for the rise of the Sith Lord? Or that Ian McDiarmid’s Palpatine is the only character with anything approaching gravitas in the entire trilogy? Whether coincidentally or intentionally made, the argument is the same: that a dearth of likable heroes leads to increasing appeal for even the most despicable tyrants. Given the choice of benign mediocrity and malignant excellence, the majority will choose the latter.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The absence of a credible champion like Mr. Smith or Luke Skywalker to validate our belief in the Republic is felt as keenly across the culture as it is in the </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Star Wars</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> microcosm. In the years since the close of the first trilogy and the end of Reagan’s presidency, our on- and off-screen political heroes have fallen precipitously in the public graces, drifting into irrelevance or stumbling into ridicule. Harrison Ford was the heir apparent – part John Wayne, part Jimmy Stewart, all American – but his various American heroes were always too busy saving their own families to serve any public interests. Kevin Costner had the earnest idealism and the common man bona fides but deep-sixed his career on post-apocalyptic bombs. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Independence Day</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">idea of a neo-Stewart to restore a fallen America was the guy from </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Spaceballs</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Dennis Haysbert and Morgan Freeman both got turns as soothingly deep voiced statesmen, but their generic appeals to the American people are now almost indistinguishable from their ubiquitous commercials. Aaron Sorkin made perhaps the most serious effort, attempting to recreate the Kennedy urbane crusader persona in </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">American President</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">West Wing</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> as an alternative to the Stewart archetype. It failed to catch on, overwhelmed by the torrent of anti-Presidential snark unleashed by 16 consecutive years of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, interspersed with Bob Dole’s Viagra ads.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With such competitors for public affection, it’s no wonder that Frank Underwood’s bloody march to the highest office in our Republic should elicit more cheers than tears (or even fears, to keep the poetry flowing). Our pride in our political institutions has eroded under a succession of buffoons and mediocrities to the point that we can’t help but celebrate strength and competence in whatever form it arrives. When we've run out of real American heroes, we run into real American villains.</span></div>
<br />Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-34513491433034341562014-05-03T16:37:00.002-07:002014-05-03T16:42:01.264-07:00Burn Book Burning: Mean Girls, Donald Sterling and the Culture of Hysteria<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.0909090909090908; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Raise your hand if you've been personally victimized by Regina George." </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ten years ago this weekend, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mean Girls</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> hit theaters. At the time it seemed little more than a sleek Millennial turn on the pop anthropology studies of high school that have been a Hollywood staple since Andy Hardy. Sure it was chock-full of insights into the pettiness of teenage girls, but you don’t have to dig very deep to get to the bottom of the shallowest age of human development. As far as I was concerned it was Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul interlaced with a few undissolved cubes of salty comedic bouillon. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What a difference ten years can make. When I watched it again this week, my once cavernous yawn became the slack-jawed gape of wonder. This was no mere teen comedy, but a prophetic vision of the future of American society startling in its clarity!</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mean Girls </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">has gotten any better with time; it’s still as shallow and superficial as ever. Rather, society has sunk so low that the leaders of culture and industry are now seeing eye-to-eye with teenage brats. Indeed, we may already be looking up to the Plastics (the movie’s nickname for the elite faction of mean girls) as artifacts of a more civilized age. Forget the serious business of civilization that occupied previous generations of adults: this society is consumed with assessing popularity, finding an advantageous place in the byzantine hierarchy of demographic cliques, eagerly trafficking in illicit gossip and shrieking hysterically over any perceived slight. Case in point: the hubbub surrounding Clippers owner Donald Sterling.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.0909090909090908; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The scandal might as well have been ripped from the scented pages of the Plastics’ “burn book” – a giant pink bible of scathing “burns” heaped on the other girls in school. In a private phone conversation with his mistress V. Stiviano – secretly taped in a manner strikingly similar to the sneaky 3-way calls the Plastics use to entrap each other – Donald Sterling hisses his disapproval of her public associations with star black athletes. Whether his distaste for these black men is driven by envy or prejudice isn’t quite clear from the tapes; perhaps it’s the same blend of both that drives the Plastics’ queen bee Regina to ravage the girls around her.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.0909090909090908; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While Sterling and Regina are seemingly secure in their wealth and status, they still keep their most anti-social inclinations private. In public, they make nice: Sterling with his ostentatious displays of charity and eager accumulation of humanitarian awards; Regina with her phony compliments and thirst for prom queen affirmation. Though their peers privately revile them – Sterling’s cocktail of sleaze, greed and racism has been an open secret for years – they reciprocate niceties in public. Only when a rogue Plastic takes disruptive action do the underhanded hostilities break into open conflict.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Enter Sterling’s mistress V. Stiviano, the incarnation of everything Plastic - still fighting the good high school fight at age 38. Apparently firing back at Sterling over a lawsuit (his wife trying to recover all the luxury items Sterling bought for her), Stiviano betrayed her sugar daddy and leaked their taped conversation to TMZ. It’s not quite as neat as Regina posting the pages of the burn book in the halls, but the reaction has been the same: mass hysteria. In both cases, the uproar springs not from material damage but from hurt feelings. Apparently the realization that someone really loathes someone else is far too much to take sitting down.</span></div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/WPYqRaOm1ak?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.0909090909090908; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Unfortunately, in the real world Tim Meadows isn’t around to bring the sprinklers down on the rage parade. Instead we have NBA commissioner Adam Silver joining the fray with a lifetime ban for Sterling, a $2.5 million fine and a push to force him to sell his team. Meanwhile, the pitchfork media clamors for anyone with any past connection with him to publicly denounce him, reverse Manchurian style: “Donald Sterling is the meanest, coldest, most despicable human being I have ever known in my life” (though with Sterling’s rap sheet, you wouldn’t think they’d need the brainwashing). A bunch of LA nonprofits are even sending his donations back - UCLA cancelled his $3 million pledge for kidney research.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.0909090909090908; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nor does the real world seem to believe in the healing power of inclusiveness, preferring inquisition to acquisition. Whereas the Plastics were ultimately broken in by the compassionate authority figures and reacclimated to a nicer (albeit utopian) world, there are no such better angels of our nature to be found on the modern scene. Whereas </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mean Girls</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> preached a message of overcoming evil with good, envy with empathy and arrogance with humility, in the real world we've reverted to an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and 2,000 minutes of public hate for 2 minutes of the private variety. There is no longer any humanization of the offender, no self-analysis. Before removing the speck from our neighbor’s eye, we take the plank from our own and beat him to death with it.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cady, the heroine of </span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Mean Girls</i></span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, becomes obsessed with Regina in much the same way that we have been consumed with Donald Sterling for the past week. She hates and envies her just as we hate (for his racism) and envy (for his money) Sterling. By the end of </span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Mean Girls</i></span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, Cady had come to an important realization: “Calling somebody else fat won't make you any skinnier. Calling someone stupid doesn't make you any smarter. And ruining Regina George's life definitely didn't make me any happier. All you can do in life is try to solve the problem in front of you.” It’s a lesson the leaders of the Sterling witch hunt would do well to learn.</span>Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-12212387875179233352013-09-16T21:00:00.000-07:002013-09-16T21:04:12.779-07:00The Post-Man Always Rings Twice<div style="background-color: white;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-style: italic;"><span class="text Gen-19-4" id="en-NIV-462">'All the men from every part of the city of Sodom<span class="crossreference" style="font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top;" value="(<a href="#cen-NIV-462L" title="See cross-reference L">L</a>)"></span>—both young and old—surrounded the house.</span> <span class="text Gen-19-5" id="en-NIV-463"><span class="versenum" style="font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top;"> </span>They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.”<b> </b></span></span><span class="text Gen-19-6" id="en-NIV-464" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-style: italic;">Lot went outside to meet them<span class="crossreference" style="font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top;" value="(<a href="#cen-NIV-464N" title="See cross-reference N">N</a>)"></span> and shut the door behind him</span><span class="text Gen-19-7" id="en-NIV-465" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-style: italic;"><span class="versenum" style="font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top;"> </span>and said, “No, my friends. Don’t do this wicked thing.</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-style: italic;"> </span><span class="text Gen-19-8" id="en-NIV-466" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them."' - </i>Genesis 19:4-8</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+19&version=NIV">Here</a>'s the rest of the passage to show you how it turned out, but the Tl;dr version is below.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Suffice to say, the next time eHarmony offers you a choice between extraterrestrial visitors (however angelic their looks) and a pair of teenage virgins, take the virgins and don't look back. Hellfire and Brimstone might be breathtaking to look at, but they are lousy for intimacy. What's that? The Bible not your thing? Then take it from the Greeks - nothing good ever came from submitting to Zeus' animal charisma. Semele got incinerated by his divine form, Io got turned into a cow and poor Ganymede ended up spending eternity as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canteen_Boy">Canteen Boy</a> to Zeus' <a href="http://images.hollywood.com/cms/300x375/5248918.jpg">Alec Baldwin</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It appears, however, that my generation (Gen Y, though as a 1985 baby, I can claim both X and Y, just like my sex chromosomes) has dismissed the conclusions of the existing literature on extra-human relationships. The anti-miscegenation laws that once governed our mythology are falling to a new breed of progressives. One by one, disenfranchised classes of Gods & Monsters are gaining unfettered access to the relationship classifieds: vampires & werewolves (<i>Twilight</i>), aliens (<i>Avatar</i>), demons (<i>Hellboy</i>, the revised <i>Beowulf</i>), pagan gods (<i>Thor</i>), mutants (the various <i>X-Men</i>), zombies (<i>Warm Bodies</i>), robots (<i>Terminator Salvation</i>, the <i>Battlestar Galactica </i>reboot), hamsters (check the latest Kia commercials),<i> </i>even cartoons (<i>Enchanted</i>). In some cases, real humans are dropping out of the picture entirely, making way for a new set of post-human couples. Slum with a bunch of muggles and <a href="http://screentoscreed.blogspot.com/2011/08/apes-of-wrath.html">bald simians</a> and they're likely to pee in your sparkling new gene pool.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Why should my generation be so eager to cuckold good old homo sapiens? Previous generations have flirted - Spielberg's fetish for the inhuman has spanned generations (<i>Close Encounters of the Third Kind</i>, <i>E.T.</i>, <i>A.I.</i>) - but this widespread, blatant cheating is unprecedented. I can see three possible reasons for this infatuation:</span></div>
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<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Peak entertainment - with so much entertainment at our fingertips and so much time devoted to its consumption, we've reached (to paraphrase Wikipedia's peak oil definition) "the point in time when maximum satisfaction extraction from existing entertainment forms has been reached." Boredom encroaches, prompting the urge to subvert even the most fundamental norms to create new combinations and new experiences. When you've messed around with the full spectrum of humanity, the eyes start to wander.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Inhuman rights - with the Boomers having planted their flag on all the real world social issues, the pioneering crusader impulse has to have an outlet somewhere. Getting out in front of a future alien encounter with a solidly progressive take on the issue merits a hearty clap on one's own back.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Self-esteempunk - with technology charting an exponential course to sci-fi utopia (and special effects that can bridge the gap) and a culture that seeks to overwhelm any self-doubt with waves of positive reinforcements, it's a lot easier for this generation to believe in its own superhumanity. Having gracefully bounded a mile in <i>Avatar</i>'s alien moccasins, we are not only more likely to be sympathetic to inhuman rights, but we have an inflated opinion of our ability to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbNlMtqrYS0">walk 500 more</a>.</span></li>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">We can see evidence of each of these generational attributes on display in one of the first post-humanist romances and the quintessential Gen Y movie: <i>Shrek</i> (released in 2001 - the coming of age year for the first crop of millenials). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Bored to exhaustion with the dominant Western fairy tale formula, <i>Shrek </i>sets about subversion from the opening frames (Shrek using a storybook ending as toilet paper). Cherished humanist icons including Pinocchio (he wants to be a real boy!) and Robin Hood (the original venture philanthropist) are recast as punchlines and villains. The only fully human character among the leads is the villain Farquaad (voiced by John Lithgow, building up quite the CV of post-humanist roles), whose defining characteristics (other than his name) are his puny stature, impotence and unattractiveness. The role of hero falls to the ogre (after he demolishes an assortment of nondescript human knights in try-outs).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The subversion stops abruptly after the embrace of post-humanism. The cheeky snark crosses paths with Shrek's character arc and flees headlong into maudlinism. Deep down, Shrek just wants to be loved, and his misanthropy stems from man's incessant meanness towards him. The sticks, stones and burning torches of the bigoted humans can't break his bones, but words hurt him every time. By taking poor, ugly Shrek's side, we show our evolved sensibilities - that Gen Y mutation that allows us to see that beauty is exclusively on the inside. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We millenials have also evolved a helpful cognitive dissonance that allows us to claim victimhood and supremacy simultaneously. Shrek is a case in point: while he mopes about ugly discrimination, he suffers no equal on the field of combat. The closest he comes to a worthy opponent is a huge dragon. Not that Shrek need worry about a hard fight - the dragon joins his side for the 3rd act, rendering all attempts at human resistance even more futile than they had been for the rest of the movie. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Shrek</i>'s fairy tale ending prophecies a blissful post-human marriage and a happily ever after-party, but I remain unconvinced that this generational romance with the alien and the unclean is a progressive (in the original sense of the word) development. A movement driven by boredom, misplaced pity and delusional self-image can hardly be constructive and will almost certainly become destructive, if it hasn't already. This is not a marriage but an affair with a mysterious stranger. If the warnings of the Bible aren't enough for you, check out the endings of some noir films from the 40's - <i>Double Indemnity</i> and <i>The Postman Always Rings Twice</i> for starters - to see how those types of decisions pan out.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Mankind might be too old and tired and genetically inferior to keep up with our postmodern imaginations, but the only sensible means of addressing the gap is to slow the latter down. Whenever we experience the urge to leave our own kind in the dust to pursue some beautiful chimera we should weigh the costs. How foolish would we be to discard so rich a heritage and find nothing? How much worse still to seek the chimera alone and find him.</span></div>
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Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-24356013281173250222013-08-29T17:59:00.000-07:002013-09-25T21:33:09.894-07:00Fairy Sue<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>"Gee, golly, gosh,
gloriosky," thought Mary Sue as she stepped on the bridge of the
Enterprise. "Here I am, the youngest lieutenant in the fleet - only
fifteen and a half years old." - </i><a href="http://stexpanded.wikia.com/wiki/A_Trekkie's_Tale">"A Trekkie's Tale"</a></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">There wouldn’t be much need for
hyper-vigilant critics (or hyper-critical vigilantes) like me if <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue">Mary Sues</a> were always so obvious. Unfortunately,
Mary Sue technology has advanced significantly since the early appearance of
the clunky wish-fulfillment bots in the ghettos of 1970s Star Trek fan fiction.
Nowadays, they've become so sophisticated that they walk among us,
undetected, infiltrating our favorite stories - books, movies, TV shows, you
name it. Your favorite movie could be harboring one right now.
Tragically, that’s the case for<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The
Brothers Bloom</i>, one of my new twitter follower Mae Batista’s faves. Fortunately, I’m Sam “Reese” Lively, Sergeant Tech-Com, DN38416, sent
back in time (2009 in this case) and assigned to protect you from faulty
entertainment choices. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Or, if Reese is too intense, think of me as one of those Terminator-sniffing dogs, poking my big
wet nose where it isn't welcome. </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Speaking of dogs, in the time-honored
tradition begun in last week’s </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Usual
Suspects</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><a href="http://screentoscreed.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-details-in-devil.html" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">review</a><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, let’s introduce the companion dog to </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Bloom’s</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> cheetah: Terry Gilliam’s </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. Both released in 2009, both
highly stylized, and both fairy tales centering on con men. </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Parnassus</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> is also a dog of a film, so
there’s that.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The con man/fairy tale dichotomy is
the heart of both narratives. In<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Bloom</i>,
Adrien Brody is the reluctant con man who wants to believe in the fairy tale
webs his brother Mark Ruffalo weaves for their marks. In<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Parnassus</i>, con man Heath Ledger
is the carnival barker for Christopher Plummer's traveling <a href="http://www.springhole.net/writing_roleplaying_randomators/fairytaleplot.htm">fairy tale generator</a>. Each film eagerly casts asides at the thematic parallels
to their own craft: are they telling stories to deceive and profit or to teach
and edify? Is it about the money or the magic? Or, better yet, is
it some deliciously bittersweet combination of both – a juicy mouthful of the
pluot that is human nature? These are the immediate questions that leap
from the material and they were tantalizing enough to capture Gilliam's and <i>Bloom</i> writer-director Rian Johnson's
full attention. In their eagerness, however, both artists left another,
more fundamental question that they left unconsidered: when a storyteller tells
a story about a storyteller, is he really exploring human nature or is he just
writing fan fiction about himself?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The answer to
the last question lies in the ability of the teller to find some objectivity.
It can be done. The pioneers of the reflexive fantasy genre –
Charlie Kaufman and Wes Anderson – have provided us with successful examples:
Kaufman’s<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Adaptation<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>and Anderson’s<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Life Aquatic.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>Their combination of exhaustive
attention to (and disciplined application of) detail and a firmly established
perspective keep the risky process of critical self-portraiture from
degenerating into a montage of preening, posing and flexing in front of the
mirror. To the degree that they deviate from these object lessons, <i>Bloom</i> and <i>Parnassus</i> drift away from the canvas and towards the mirror.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In matters of detail, Johnson wields
his brush with the panache of an accomplished BS artist, with one hand calling
your attention to a nice bit of detail work here (e.g. Rachel Weisz' allergy to
the alloy in hypodermic needles was a clever little touch), some high culture
name-dropping (Herman Melville, Russian novelists) over there. Meanwhile,
he's using his free hand to fill in the blank expanses with broad strokes of
arbitrary color (e.g. the ridiculous - and feebly animated - juggling of
chainsaws and camel-chugging of whiskey flasks) and hide unfinished or
ill-conceived details under blobs of quirkiness (give your hazy outline of
a villain a silly name and costume and you're all set!). I’ll give
Johnson credit for trying; in <i>Parnassus</i>,
Gilliam forsakes all pretense of discipline, eats all his crayons and proceeds
to barf color all over himself for 123 horrible minutes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">But all that is just confetti for the
parade. The narrative is where the Mary Sues
rear their implausibly beautiful heads. Don’t let the Brothers in <i>Brothers Bloom</i> fool you – they are both
Rian Johnson, even more so than Charlie Kaufman and his made-up twin in <i>Adaptation</i> are Charlie Kaufman. They both display the tell-tale signs of a
Mary Sue: they are fantastically gifted from a young age; women everywhere throw
themselves at Brody, while Ruffalo has his own pet Asian chick; they are witty,
hipster-stylish and they literally have cards up their sleeves. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Their problems? Poor Brody feels
guilty about all the illicit booty (I’m just too tragically attractive!) and
Ruffalo’s con writing, though impressive, isn’t quite convincing enough to
assuage the guilt. Enter Weisz – an
adorkable heiress who can give Brody the loving & lifestyle he needs, some
additional quirky-cred and, by virtue of her magical virginity (on loan, along
with epilepsy, from Natalie Portman’s character in <i>Garden State</i>), return his own lost innocence. Meanwhile, Ruffalo manages to die the cleverly
heroic death he always dreamed of (with sense of humor and style intact), and
his passage is mourned with much sobbing.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">See if you can spot Gilliam’s Mary Sue:
Dr. Parnassus is an aging British entertainer, unappreciated and underfunded by
the masses. Little do they know that he’s actually an immortal sorcerer, waging
a battle with the devil for their souls. Gilliam could tell you who he’s really
talking about, but modesty prohibits. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Lest my haughty tone deceive you, I am
not unsympathetic to the filmmakers’ plight (just condescending). As an avid
amateur navel-gazer, I know well how easily a well-intentioned introspection
can succumb to the mighty undercurrents of vanity and be swept off into
indulgent daydreaming. How much more
difficult, then, to stay afloat when your mode of introspection is a fairy
tale, a format built around wish-fulfillment? The overwhelming temptation for
Johnson and Gilliam and any other artist entering their own incipient fairy
tale universe is to start granting all of their own wishes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><u1:p></u1:p>
<u1:p></u1:p>
<u1:p></u1:p>
<u1:p></u1:p>
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It seems an innocent enough mistake to
indulge that temptation, but doing so undercuts the premise of both films, as
well as a central tenet of the creed that motivates artists to spend so much
time, money and psychological energy in telling stories. The sacred, philanthropic power that <i>Bloom</i> and <i>Parnassus</i> ascribe to the storyteller is wasted on self-delusion. The fairy godmothers, having taken all the
seats in the pumpkin carriage for themselves, leave Cinderella in the dust.</span><span style="font-family: Times, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Screen to Screedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750572661987237037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-59594189403034996722013-08-20T18:03:00.000-07:002013-08-20T18:04:42.259-07:00The Details in the Devil<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">“Who's Keyser Söze!?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> “What’s in the box!?” <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">You can stop screaming, mid-90’s detectives. I've got your answer right here (in the form
of an extremely belated double movie review).
I’d say spoiler alert, but as
both movies in question are now legally of age – 18 this year! - I figure I can spoil with impunity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Why dig into a pair of cold cases like this, you ask? Easy: I’m desperate for attention and I’ll
review the favorite movie (<i>The Usual</i> <i>Suspects</i>) of anyone (<a href="https://twitter.com/kirbysoze3">Rob Kirby</a>) who follows
me on Twitter. Also, I have a weakness
for analyzing 90’s movies (among other cultural artifacts) – a dusty VHS cover
is my idea of nose candy. And there are
important lessons to be learned, gosh pound it!
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I’d review <i>Suspects</i> on its own,
but I find that a movie is easier to break down with a companion, kind of like
those <a href="http://taildom.com/blog/videos/kasi-mtani-cheetah-dog-best-friends-forever/">cheetahs at the zoo</a> that have dog friends to keep them in line. <i>Se7en</i>
is a natural fit for this role: both movies released in 1995, both featuring
Kevin Spacey as the villain, both crime thrillers, both famous (and much
imitated) for twist endings, both playing fast and loose with genre
expectations and religious themes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">1995 was a watershed year for movies.
As much as movies like <i>Jaws</i>
and <i>Star Wars</i> get credit for changing
the Hollywood landscape back in the late 70s, it wasn’t until the mid-90s that
the changing of the guard was complete. In
the 80’s it was <a href="http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=1981">still possible</a> for a Lifetime movie like <i>On Golden Pond</i> to rule the box office. By the early 90’s, special effects
extravaganzas like <i>Jurassic Park</i> and <i>Terminator 2</i> were starting to flex their
muscle and crowd out the lower-concept hits of yesteryear. Then in 1994 came the swan song: <i>Forrest Gump</i>, a sentimental non-action
dramedy, somehow took <a href="http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=1994">the box office crown</a>.
But come 1995, <i>Toy Story</i> took
pole position, and the big budget action epics haven’t looked back since. All that to say that by the mid-90’s, if you
wanted to make a splash you had to have some kind of visceral wow factor.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Suspects</span></i><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> and <i>Se7en</i> both embraced the wow or bust
philosophy with near unprecedented gusto (<i>Silence
of the Lambs</i> had beaten them to the punch-up of the crime genre, but the
body was still fresh). While Pixar was
breaking the technology barrier to put out the first fully CGI movie, the
writers of <i>Suspects</i> and <i>Se7en</i> were in the story structure
workshop trying to build a better jack-in-the-box thriller, fine-tuning every
cog and gear in the script to goose the impact of the inevitable reveal. They were undeniably successful in their
goals: <i>Suspects</i> won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and <i>Se7en</i> made it into the box office top 10.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">All that success did not come without some collateral damage. Selling out for the twist ending in these
cases meant selling many of the other story elements short. Consider one of the golden oldies of the crime
thriller genre: <i>The Maltese Falcon</i>. More than 70 years after the fiction, the
shocking reveals in the third act pack all the punch of a geriatric baby, but the
delicious moral ambiguities of the story and the rich characters are still
intoxicating. In contrast, <i>Suspects</i> and, to a lesser extent, <i>Se7en</i> deploy their characters more like
one of the automatons in Geppetto’s workshop, following predetermined,
diligently synchronized paths. Moral
ambiguities are present, but only as decorative detail carved on the surface.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The various Spaceys are examples of delicately crafted but thoroughly
artificial characters. Even their names
are conspicuously made-up: Verbal Kint, Keyser Söze, John Doe. Keyser
Söze in particular reminds me of the Rollo Tomasi moniker Guy Pearce made up to
give a name to his father’s nameless killer in <i>LA Confidential</i> (another Spacey movie). The artificiality goes well
beyond their names. They lack consciences
or vulnerabilities– all that would just gum up the works of their convoluted
and impossibly cunning plans. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Söze suffers no ethical qualms and meets no real challenge in conducting
his crime and murder spree. Other than the
challenge to his ego (the detective declares that he’s smarter) that apparently
motivates him to lead the detective (and the audience) on the thrilling goose
chase, Söze does his screenwriter master’s bidding with all the soulless efficiency
of a T-1000, or, given the amount of plot twisting required, a non-alcoholic
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bender_(Futurama)">bending unit</a>. John Doe is another robot,
matter-of-factly sacrificing his life to produce a thrilling conclusion and
keep the plot’s gears grinding towards perfect synchronicity with the seven
cardinal sins. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The rest of the cast (with exceptions in the case of <i>Se7en</i>) are kept to fixed paths.
Pitt of course is a vessel of Wrath.
Baldwin the Younger and co. never tread far outside stereotype – the insignificant
exception being Benicio del Toro, who was allowed to riff freely on the basis
that his character’s only function was to die.
Even Gabriel Byrne, the putative conscience of the story, appears to be
nothing more than a common crook once everything is revealed. The desire to go straight, the love angle
with the criminal attorney, the hesitance to kill, the friendship with Kint – all
of it was just a red cape (or herring) Söze was waving to incite the bullish
detective to waste all his energy “proving” that Byrne (his longtime nemesis)
was a bad guy (which the screenwriter doesn’t seem to care about answering one
way or the other. He’s wholly concerned
with establishing Söze as the baddest guy).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">While the characters dutifully adhere to their routes, the abundant
moral and religious themes get plastered onto the walls of the jack-in-the box
as decoration. <i>Suspects</i>’ Charles Baudelaire
quote “the greatest trick the Devil pulled was convincing the world that he
didn’t exist” is pregnant with religious and philosophical implications – it’s
a quote from a 19<sup>th</sup> century French poet about the Devil for crying
out loud! None of those implications are
explored in <i>Suspects</i> – it’s there
because it sounds slick (just like the title, lifted from Casablanca) and because
it fits the big twist so well. Kint’s line “I believe in God, but I’m afraid of
Keyser Söze” neatly sums up this topsy-turvy world where God takes a backseat
to the sleek super-villain with the cooler-than-real name. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<i><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Se7en</span></i><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> takes its metaphysical
content more seriously, but I’d argue that’s more the stylistic effect of a
much darker tone than proof of more philosophical rigor. As evidence, I present John Doe’s thoroughly
unconvincing confession of Envy in the finale.
Chopping off a pretty lady’s head to inspire Wrath is not indicative of
envy, nor are any of John Doe’s other crimes.
His conduct is characterized by a dearth of emotion and an absolute dedication
to completing his riddle. The clumsy
handling of Envy reveals the conceit: the cardinal sins have been chopped up
and sanded down into a set of serious-colored, neatly interlocking plot devices. Their ultimate importance is how much force
and flair they contribute to the final spring.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Returning now to the questions raised so vociferously by the detectives. Who is Keyser Söze and what is in the
box? Technically speaking, the answer is
Jack – a disembodied head, covered with all sorts of charmingly gruesome
details, made up to look like a devil, and shot out at the audience to elicit
the greatest reaction. When the shock
wears off, however, ankle-biting critics like me are left to pick up the detectives’
line of questioning, though no one is left on screen to answer. Who do you mean by Keyser Söze? What was in
the box, really? What does it
signify? To which the body of work might
as well reply, in the manner of a mother shushing her overeager child on
Christmas Eve, “It’s a surprise.” Nothing
more, nothing less. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Sam Livelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11553880780722833945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-42203506379415164262013-08-06T21:06:00.000-07:002019-04-29T20:22:51.156-07:00Old Turks & Young Jerks<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Squeezed in between the sweaty folds of the terminally obese </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ottoman Empire, the Young Turks - a cadre of secular, progressive younglings in the imperial administration - set about the work of reform from within. They were a last-ditch stem cell injection for the “sick old man of Europe.” To these jaundiced, Wikipedia-informed eyes, their notoriety is undeserved – the sick old man died and Turkey has yet to re-attain even the nadir of its former imperial glory. Yet the term survived, resurfacing periodically as a label for any group of plucky upstarts trying to take on the establishment. </span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Working from the definitive characteristics “young,” “secular” and “progressive,” it would appear that the Baby Boomers are America's Young Turks. Unfortunately, the target for their destructive reform was nothing resembling a sick old man but rather the world’s reigning superpower as it approached the height of its material wealth and global influence. Regardless, their success in effecting (or at least cheerleading) change – the sexual revolution, the Vietnam war protests, women’s lib, the civil rights drama, etc. – puts the original Young Turks to shame. But being a successful revolutionary (i.e., not a martyr) comes with a price: after 50 years of social dominance, the American Young Turks have become Old Turks, in full control of their own version of the “establishment.” </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Unique in so many ways, the Boomers have deviated from the familiar narrative of young revolutionaries settling into paternal conservatism after raising families and/or ascending into power. After weathering a mild conservative counter-revolution, the Old Turks have pressed their progressive agenda into the new millennium with renewed enthusiasm. Never having relinquished the revolutionary high ground, the Boomers have thus ceded no political or cultural territory to a younger class of revolutionaries. Indeed, by constantly re-animating the ghosts of the past establishment through their mouthpieces in academia and the media, they have largely co-opted a gullible and feeble-minded generation of younger crusaders and directed them onto quixotic quests to eradicate liberal Boomer bogey-men (racists, polluters, sexists, Christian bigots, etc.). </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That’s not to say that the Boomers have completely outmaneuvered the inevitable uprising of youthful rebellion. A new wave of anti-establishment feeling is bubbling to the surface across the pop culture landscape. The tenor of this rebellious movement is distinct from the self-righteous brashness of the Boomers in the 60’s – it reverberates in the impudent sneer of the stand-up comic, the unabashed cruelty of anonymous internet commenters, the snort of the heckler drowning out the shrill soprano of a Boomer castrati shrieking about white privilege. It’s becoming clear that the counter-revolution to the Old Turks is comprised not from younger versions of themselves, but from a newer upstart breed of Young Jerks. I count amongst their core Adam Carolla, Mike Judge and Daniel Tosh, with something akin to fellow travelers in Louis CK, Bill Simmons, Joel McHale, Matt Stone, Trey Parker and the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jackass</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> diaspora (the Jackasspora?), among other lesser known entertainers. </span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The battle lines of this counter-revolution are still hazy – the most prominent Young Jerks are nominally aligned with the most cherished progressive ethics (some Young Jerk offshoots like Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino ground their Gen X rudeness in Boomer doctrine). Nor is the movement cohesive or self-aware enough to fire anything that would be recognizable as a shot across the bow. Nevertheless, their assorted pot-shots constitute a barrage of sorts against the Old Turks’ edifice of political correctness. Hard-edged racial jokes at the expense of minorities, cheerful misogyny, the vulgarization of free love and drug use (as opposed to self-serious, romanticized hippie antics), the trivialization of violence and rape, proud indulgence in crass commercialism, defiant political apathy and anti-intellectualism – these regressive characteristics stand out in stark opposition to progressive orthodoxy. Though it’s impossible to discern a clear shout of “The Emperor has no clothes!” from the rabble rabble of the Young Jerks, you can at least make out a few jokes about the size of his penis.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Many Boomers of the progressive establishment are generally tolerant or at least unaware of this understated rebellion. After all, vulgarity is part and parcel of the progressive package and a valuable weapon in the fight against lingering Judeo-Christian dominionism. So long as the Young Jerks are not collaborators in the vast right-wing conspiracy, their improprieties can be chalked up to immaturity. If they ever get really out of line, a la old fogey Don Imus, there are ample Inquisitors on hand to put them to the question. Better yet, if they are pliant enough to apply their coarse means to progressive ends, the establishment will fete them – witness the accolades heaped on Quentin Tarantino for packaging his nihilistic orgies of excess with minority revenge fantasy narratives in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Inglourious Basterds </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Django Unchained</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Still, some of the more zealous Old Turks are seeing the profane writing on the wall and taking a harder line with the Young Jerks. Prominent among these is neo-Boomer Aaron “Ignatius” Sorkin, self-appointed Defender of the Progressive Faith, who has responded to the staggered barrage of the Young Jerks with a series of thunderous broadsides. In the pilot episode of HBO’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Newsroom, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sorkin’s crusty sock-puppet Will McAvoy (played by Jeff Daniels) lets loose on the underachieving younger generation – “the worst generation ever” – for slouching so apathetically into decadence. Having declared war via proxy, Sorkin used his 2012 commencement address at Syracuse to rally the gullible young to his banner, preaching: "Don't ever forget that you're a citizen of this world, and there are things you can do to lift the human spirit, things that are easy, things that are free, things that you can do every day. Civility, respect, kindness, character. You're too good for schadenfreude, you're too good for gossip and snark, you're too good for intolerance."</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXMYqHiNoaoQPzoVQb6orKgKJNrfLgvwhaDvEFpEMNhaDkou5FDTSMaTo-qJF1FNjssXaY1Kh24Kt_k3-uKAKpL9HJEq5SNzsu-zoVxFys72G28IxY16RXgncveR5xGZWrj9iyIyRebO4/s1600/wut.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXMYqHiNoaoQPzoVQb6orKgKJNrfLgvwhaDvEFpEMNhaDkou5FDTSMaTo-qJF1FNjssXaY1Kh24Kt_k3-uKAKpL9HJEq5SNzsu-zoVxFys72G28IxY16RXgncveR5xGZWrj9iyIyRebO4/s320/wut.jpg" width="227" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sorkin’s optimism aside, if schadenfreude and snark are the battle lines in the pop culture cold war, then the Young Jerks have already seized the high ground. To be sure, Sorkin’s brand of earnest liberal idealism still has a firm foothold in the marketplace – the didactic 90’s tradition of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Philadelphia</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dances with Wolves </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Field of Dreams</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> lives on with the likes of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Brokeback Mountain, Avatar</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Life of Pi</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. But the undercurrents of schadenfreude and snark that surfaced in the marketplace with </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Beavis and Butthead</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Simpsons</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> have swelled, with unsightly whiteheads like </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Man Show</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tosh.0 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">South Park</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> giving a new, visceral meaning to pop culture. These are not so easily dismissed as low-brow groundling fodder in the vein of Saturday morning cartoons, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Three Stooges</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">America’s Funniest Home Videos</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Beneath the immature vulgarity is a hard-edged adult cynicism and, in some cases, nihilism that strikes at the core of Boomer utopianism. And their influence extends far beyond the mainstream outlets: their jeers echo in millions of Youtube videos, blogs and hit-and-run internet comments.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Scarce few of the Young Jerks have met Sorkin on the field of explicit ideological warfare, and even their guerrilla combat is more catch-and-release than take-no-prisoners. Parker and Stone – gleeful sacred cow-punchers – noticeably reserve their most straightforward attacks for distant (Islam) or marginal foes (Mormons), engaging in evasive maneuvers whenever they take on higher-profile targets. The acrobatic displays of submission put on by </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">South Park</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and Louis CK to justify their frequent use of “fag” are illustrative examples of most Young Jerks’ cautious but still subversive approach to engagement with the more powerful aspects of the establishment. Even the most daring and shameless of the high-profile Young Jerks, Daniel Tosh, takes cover behind an omnipresent cherubic smile. </span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yet as much as the Young Jerks avoid direct confrontation, their passive-aggression is a form of attack, and one that is setting the stage for a bloodier conflict in the future. The Young Jerks have stoked a market with a growing demand for schadenfreude and a short supply of politically acceptable victims (there are only so many ways to skewer a redneck). Further, they have implanted a younger caste of intellectuals with a foundation of reasonable apathy and an appetite for destruction. Consider the explosive implications of a growing class of hungry, amoral cultural predators descending on the Boomers’ asylum for militant victims (or, alternately, a hungry coalition of militant victims descending on a group of apathetic underachievers with no interest in propping up the redistribution system). Given the Boomers’ record of inverting historical antecedents – revolutionizing an ascending society into decline, getting more progressive with age – we can anticipate that the nature of their eventual downfall will also turn the established wisdom on its head. To reconfigure T.S. Eliot, this is how their world will end, not with a whimper, but a bang.</span></div>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-76c95c3a-56cb-4c02-574f-90454ae8947f"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span>Sam Livelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11553880780722833945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7689034732454735530.post-17140281724796541622012-05-17T10:39:00.000-07:002019-04-29T20:22:50.917-07:00No Country for Old White Men<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>When
the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, the people die. That
is the progression.</i></div>
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– Patrick J. Buchanan, <i>Suicide of a Superpower<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i>But
I think once you quit hearing "sir" and "ma'am," the rest
is soon to foller.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
–
Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, <i>No Country for Old
Men<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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The archetype of the ornery old
man bemoaning the follies of a new age is stitched into the tapestry of
American mythology. An old man has
merely to utter a variant of “back in my day” and his audience will smile,
picturing him wagging a gnarled old finger at youthful passersby from his
porch-bound rocking chair. Two old men I
have recently encountered might have prompted similar condescension (a sort of
reverse-paternalism) if not for the disturbing resonance of melancholy in their
otherwise familiar “old manologues.” Such
affecting angst moved this relatively youthful passerby to stop for a moment, turn down Pandora and stifle a yawn long enough to figure out what they were saying. In case you hadn’t guessed from the
introductory quotes, these two men are Patrick J. Buchanan, as encountered in his
2011 polemic <i>Suicide of a Superpower</i>,
and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, the fictional protagonist of the Coen brothers’
Oscar-winning crime drama <i>No Country for
Old Men.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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In <i>Suicide</i>, Buchanan addresses modern America like an Old Testament
prophet urging the Jews to return to the God of their fathers. He points to the decline of Catholicism and
fundamentalist Christianity – in terms of influence, moral standards and
pervasiveness – along with immigration from Third World countries and the
demographic decline of white Americans as the primary catalysts of a
decomposing social order and the coming collapse of the country. Such
ideas are hardly new, having been bandied about for decades in the political
arena (though rarely have they been articulated so clearly)<i>,</i> but the depth of feeling Buchanan has for the “country he grew up in” lends an emotional gravitas often missing from political polemics. In some sections, he delivers his money points with such feeling as to rival the impact of a roundhouse kick to the face from Old Glory herself. </div>
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I found the closing section of
his preface, when he shifts abruptly from coolly recounting statistics and historical
anecdotes to invoke a Biblical parable, particularly moving: “We [Americans] are
the Prodigal Sons who squandered their inheritance; but, unlike the Prodigal
Son, we can’t go home again.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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It is in such soul-aching eulogies for his country that Buchanan most resembles the fictional
Bell. In a long monologue that
accompanies contemplative shots of the uninhabited Texas countryside, Bell
recalls the “old time sheriffs” fondly, including his own father, noting that
many didn’t even have to carry guns. He
contrasts this with the modern era, now so dark as to be incomprehensible to
the old timers. The world has changed so
much for the sheriff that he’s almost scared to venture away from his nostalgic
musings, saying, “I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet
something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd
have to say, ‘O.K., I'll be part of this world.’"<o:p></o:p></div>
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Though Bell never spells out the
existential threats to his America as clearly as Buchanan, the film harbors
many parallels to Buchanan’s view of a broken and disordered society. Buchanan’s diagnosis of a dying faith is a
represented in Bell himself. As
suggested in his “soul at hazard” comment, Bell has little surety in his
faith. His shaken faith is almost
paralytic in his effects; it is only instinctive stoicism that pushes him on
when he lacks the courage of his convictions. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The dwindling power of Christian
beliefs and ethics is even more pronounced in the next generation, as
represented by the character of Llewellyn, a pessimistic interpretation of the Great
White Hunter. From the onset, Llewellyn
is easily led astray from the righteous path, first stealing a satchel of
Mexican drug money, then jeopardizing his wife’s safety in a display of
machismo and finally giving up on redemption and even survival for a fatal
night of alcohol and adultery.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The most explicit parallel to
Buchanan in <i>No Country</i> is in its
depiction of immigration and destructive culture clashes. Bell’s peaceful Texas countryside is the
subject of repeated violent invasions.
Mexican dope-runners spill over the border to spill blood and leave
behind illicit loot on the virgin soil.
They hound the aforementioned Great White Hunter before finding and
murdering him. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The character that best
epitomizes the perceived existential threat of Third World emigration is the
villain Anton Chigurh, played by Spanish actor Javier Bardem. He is evil, of course: a serial murder with
no regard for human life. Yet it is his
incomprehensibility that makes him the most dangerous to Bell’s community (and,
by extension, Buchanan’s America). His
motivations, his methods, his mindset are unknown: as such, the host culture as
no way to contain him or ensure the protection of its citizens. He blazes through the American West
decimating the unsuspecting citizenry like an Old World disease through
indigenous populations (it is telling that the only suitable reference an
American in the film can apply to Chigurh is the bubonic plague).<o:p></o:p></div>
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Beyond tone and message, there
are a number of similarities between the two that merit mention. Both Buchanan and Bell are white. Both are old: Buchanan turns 74 this year,
while Bell is portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones, whose popular role in the <i>Men in Black</i> series has made his craggy
face almost synonymous with old age in pop culture. Both hearken from what many would consider
the “South”: Bell from Texas and Buchanan from D.C. Both have strong ties to an older order:
Buchanan having earned his stripes as a young staffer to the Nixon, Ford and
Reagan administrations and Bell a third-generation lawman. <o:p></o:p></div>
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From such familiar starting
points, the narrative line to their ultimate lamentations practically draws
itself, especially to those who have been schooled in the orthodox cultural
history of America from the 1950’s to today.
Here is a pair of good old boys from the South stewing over the loss of
illicit privilege with the overthrow of the white-supremacist, patriarchal,
fundamentalist old order. When they
mourn the “loss of America,” they are actually mourning the loss of what legal
scholar Kenneth Karst termed “an all-white preserve,” a notion at odds with the
true American values of tolerance and equal citizenship.</div>
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This is certainly the reading
that MSNBC gave to Buchanan’s book, erasing him from their line-up of political
commentators shortly after the release of the book. (Obviously, as an Oscar-winner, <i>No Country </i>was spared the righteous
indignation – Bell’s paralyzing crisis of faith prevents him from making any
moral judgments as offensive as Buchanan’s.)
In doing so, however, MSNBC echoes the court historians of the
conquistadors, who, as modern history professors dutifully point out, may have
exaggerated the atrocities of the indigenous peoples to discourage sympathy for
their plight as captives.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I would advocate a far more
sympathetic reading. For whatever the
faults of the earlier American society eulogized by Buchanan, and in many ways
echoed by Bell, his sadness at its passing is sincere and worthy of
consideration. It is a sadness that is
similar in tenor, if not context, to the cries raised by oppressed minorities
in works such as Mine Okubo’s <i>Citizen
13660</i> or the pleas for sovereignty from American Indian tribes in court
cases such as <i>Cherokee Nation v. Georgia</i>. If you have a moment, I’d ask you to stop with me for a moment, and
lend an ear to the old man on his porch, mourning the loss of his country. <o:p></o:p></div>Sam Livelyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11553880780722833945noreply@blogger.com0