Lights, Camera, Education: Blackboard Jungle (1955)

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!




LIGHTS, CAMERA, EDUCATION: The Blackboard Jungle


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.

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 The Other America. There was also the alarming rise of juvenile delinquency, especially in urban areas, captured memorably in West Side Story (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.

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.

The same spirit animated the film Blackboard Jungle (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.

Starring Glenn Ford, a Hollywood workhorse in the 1950s for his convincing portrayals of the fiercely determined, fundamentally decent American everyman, Blackboard Jungle 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Blackboard Jungle’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.

Extreme Makeover: Lady and the Tramp Edition

As readers of The Trojan Mouse 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 Lady and the Tramp, just released on Disney+, the Mouse's new streaming platform.

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 Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty (Maleficent) and Jungle Book, they are still glaring, and not for the better.

The original Lady of the Tramp 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 Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. 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.

The original Lady 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.

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.

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 Lady moves the action to New Orleans to retain the period setting while providing a half-hearted rationale for the scrupulously diverse casting.

After checking off the boxes for minority representation (including tiny cameos for a Korean doctor and a Guatemalan waiter), Lady 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.

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 Lady 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.

Bizarrely, given the reputation of modern progressives as the sexual liberators, the new Lady 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).
 
After cutting out the political incorrectness and traditional romance of the original, the new Lady 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.

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.

The individual changes the new Lady 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. 

Memes over Memory: The Corn Pop Saga

As 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.

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.

This is the face of most people born after 1980 when listening to this story:

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:

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 comic tweet thread.

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 refresher here).

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?

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 an article in July.  Multiple community members corroborate a bunch of the details, including the existence of Corn Pop.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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?


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.

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."

The Knights Who Say Oui

A few years ago, I dubbed the league of woke multinational corporations 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.

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.

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 "Against David French-ism," laying the blame for the litany of conservative culture war surrenders at the feet of his philosophy. 

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 French's entertaining rebuttal - highlights including a tortured Game of Thrones analogy and his boast that he "literally placed his body" in between Christian students and protesters - at face value.

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.

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.

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 summarize his position on Twitter, 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."

None of these points match the situation on the ground of culture war - deplatforming, personal abuse and restrictions on speech are the battlefields du jour.  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.

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. 

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.

It is fitting that French should be fascinated by HBO's Game of Thrones (though hardly in keeping with French's stern reprimands of the President's supremely vulgar tastes). 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!"

Excerpt from The Trojan Mouse - Wreck-It Ralph and Disney's Great Awokening

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.

Below is my analysis of 2012's Wreck-It Ralph from the chapter on Disney's "Great Awokening" (a term I first encountered at Spotted Toad's blog):

Though unheralded for much more than its charm and cleverness, Wreck-It Ralph 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.”

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

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.

It would fall to Wreck-It Ralph 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.

Ralph’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, Ralph’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.

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.

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.

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.

Condemnation of any attempt to overthrow a social hierarchy might seem to be a deeply conservative notion, but Ralph 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.

Lest there be any mistaking these story choices, Ralph 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.

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.

Wrapped in Pixar-style trappings, loaded with cleverness, fun and sweetness, Ralph’s woke messaging goes down easy. Well-received by critics and the mainstream, Ralph’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 Ralph with places high up in the Disney brain trust, where they would exert a powerful influence on the rest of Disney’s slate.

Climbing the American Totem Pole

The 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.

As Dean Abbott argues in a new essay, and I have touched on here and here, 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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

Nice glasses, Rev.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As High Plains Parson pointed out in his response to Abbott's essay, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Enemy Isn't Us, Part II

In 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.  

The Enemy Isn't Us

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

Who then is the enemy and what should we do about it? I'll tackle that next.

12 Strong: Uncle Rico Goes to War

The War in Afghanistan, aka Operation Enduring Freedom, turns 17 this year, making it old enough to see 12 Strong, the new R-rated account of its first battle, without parental supervision. (And it's not the only Afghanistan movie this year - Infinity War comes out this May!).

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, Black Hawk Down. The doomed German attempt to assassinate Hitler created another gem in Valkyrie. 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.

Sadly, 12 Strong is not. Despite the tragic source material and the epic demands of the genre, 12 Strong 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 Platoon more than me - but as a connoisseur of the cheap thrills and emotional manipulation of a good horror flick.

Bizarrely, 12 Strong 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.

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.

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.

For you uncultured brutes, Uncle Rico is the most pathetic and pitiable of all the small-town caricatures in Napoleon Dynamite (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.

Like Uncle Rico, 12 Strong wants to go back to glory days that weren't all that glorious, and thanks to the magic of Hollywood, the time crystals 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 Uncle Rico's audition tape - some rando in the middle of the nowhere, facing down imaginary competition, prancing, flexing and chucking like a fool.

In the words of Napoleon, this is pretty much the worst video ever made.

Spam Takes Over The Menu

An 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.

I am reminded of a haunting scene from Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away. 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.

"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 Game of Thrones! In the words of a homegrown possum, we have met the enemy and he is us.

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 NY Times piece on the modern movie business.

Reporter Alex French follows producer Tripp Vinson on his Journey 2 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.

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 George Lucas' severed brainchild, 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:

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."

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 Elf. 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.

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.

But nowadays, unfettered access to global markets has essentially eliminated American audience's veto power over Hollywood. French references two doozies -  Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters and Battleship - 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 Independence Day sequel and Warcraft. They sucked but international audiences sent them to the moon. Warcraft made more in its opening weekend in China than it did in its entire domestic run in the states.

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.

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 2002. That decline has meant little to nothing to Hollywood however as international markets have more than doubled over the same time frame.

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 SPAM, no amount of domestic protest can prevent the progression to SPAM, SPAM and more SPAM. Take it away, Viking chorus.

Being John Mal... colm X: a Get Out Review

It 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.

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 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation and Being John Malkovich go boldly where no neurotic Jewish filmmaker had gone before.

For a few moments in his just-released Get Out, 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 (Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives), his use of the head portal mechanic from Being John Malkovich and casting of Malkovich star Catherine Keener suggest a significant Kaufman influence.

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 The Purge series' unhinged anti-white propaganda with a hefty dose of black chauvinism. While predictably raking in the raves and the bucks, it utterly fails to fulfill its considerable potential.

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 Being John Malkovich'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).

A Kaufman-style deep dive into the actual Peele's search for a black or white identity would have been fascinating. Get Out's premise flirts with delivering on that potential, setting up numerous parallels with Peele's own situation. Like Peele, Get Out'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.

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.

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 Get Out 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.

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.

The inherent evil of the whites obviously nips any identity search for Chris in the bud. His new mission is to Get Out 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 Steve Sailer points out, 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.

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.

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 Adaptation, 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 one interview:

"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."

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.

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 The Purge coupled with a light-hearted but still earnest pitch for the black nationalism touted by John Singleton in Boyz n the Hood.

From his own statement about what he thinks Get Out 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.

By Peele's own standards then, Get Out, for all its critical acclaim and box office success, 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 Adaptation, Peele surrenders to the most immature and irresponsible impulses triggered by the subject matter.

The Knights Who Say "Ni": The Left As Big Business

This post-Super Bowl tweet 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 is 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. the storefronts ransacked in the Battle for Seattle, now almost uniformly push the Left's cultural platform.

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 Ni Marx Ni Jesus (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.

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.

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 veteran of Leftist causes, announced plans to hire 10,000 refugees in a blatant stab at the Trump's refugee pause. Nike CEO Mark Parker followed suit with an unsolicited condemnation of Trump over the same issue. Nordstrom issued an internal memo panning Trump's policies, almost immediately followed up by dumping Ivanka Trump's fashion line.

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 Lefty Riefenstahl propaganda 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 Trump-supporting Uber driver 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 stepped down from Trump's business advisory council.

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 voted almost 10-1 for Hillary over native son Trump, with hedge fund managers in particular racking up a massive donation imbalance 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 Apple used to great effect on Indiana after their Religious Freedom Restoration Act triggered LGBT fury and applying them to North Carolina for their transgender bathroom bill. The NYC-based NFL's tacit endorsement 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.

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 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!"

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 first multinational corporation.  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 vengeful client. Such ignoble fates likely await the multinationals who continue to mistake their consumers for subjects.

Respect and Respectability: Russell Moore vs. Mel Gibson

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.

Respectability
The respectable side is best exemplified by Russell Moore, author of Onward: Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel 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 Onward, 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.

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.

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.

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 John Zmirak argues, 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.

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 Dreher. 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 "angry white men" 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.

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 admiring, novella-size profile 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.

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 Howard Schultz's pie-eyed "Race Together" stunt, 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!

Respect
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 Bakker to the Future. 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.

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).

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.

Since establishing himself as creative force as director, producer and star of the Oscar-winning Braveheart 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 freedom speech in Braveheart still rings out as a clarion call. The same God and country plus R-rated violence formula was at work in The Patriot and We Were Soldiers. He would also tackle faith more explicitly as the headliner to M. Night Shyamalan's last true hit, Signs. Each of these films foreshadowed Gibson's magnum opus, itself the single most impactful Christian contribution to culture in the 21st century: 2004's The Passion of  the Christ.

It's hard to overstate how unusual the success and mass market impact of The Passion 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.

The flighty Gibson did little with the domestic momentum generated by Passion, routing his immediate currency into the exotic, pre-Christian Apocalypto. The cottage cheese industry that is the Christian movie business tried to ride its coattails with The Nativity Story and Son of God with little mainstream success. Hollywood too tried a post-Christian renaissance of the Biblical epic (Ridley Scott's Exodus, Darren Aronofsky's Noah and Timur Bekmambetov's B-movie treatment of Ben-Hur) 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.

Adding to his renewed acting efforts, he has gathered the loyal circle of film-making talent nurtured during the making of Passion and Apocalypto 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.

The first entry in the Gibson renaissance was revenge thriller Edge of Darkness , playing a nothing-to-lose father seeking justice for his murdered daughter. This was followed by his starring role in The Beaver 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 Get the Gringo, 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: Blood Father and Hacksaw Ridge.

In Blood Father, 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.

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 Blood Father, 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.

The Gibson-directed Hacksaw Ridge 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 Hacksaw Ridge Gibson's typical R-rating, which continues to serve as a dividing line between him and the ghetto of Christian niche media.

***

This time last year, Tucker Carlson was penning a far-sighted Trump piece 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."

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 WaPo denunciation 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."

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.

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.

Moore and culture-minded Christians would do well to compare the engagement modeled by his NY Times screed with Gibson's recent appearance on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert to promote his upcoming sequel to Passion. 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 Mad Max. 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.

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. 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.



*Another example of Moore's painful naivete from Onward: 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?