Juno’s heart of tin
I don’t go to the movies that often, but last night I went to see “Juno.”
It seemed a good bet. First of all, it’s a chick flick. And I’m a chick.
Secondly, all the reviews said the same things—funny, touching, smart, witty, sharp. It made many critics’ top ten lists for 2007. According to Rotten Tomatoes, it’s one of the brightest, funniest comedies of the year.
Can’t lose, right?
But within five minutes of the opening credits I suspected I was in deep trouble. Within a half hour I gave up as futile my hope that things might turn around, and that at least one or two of those adjectives listed above would come into play.
Maybe it’s just the final proof that I’ve officially become a hopeless old fart, but I did not laugh out loud even one time during the film. Once or twice I managed a wan smile, and that was pushing it. The picture featured a group of people so relentlessly ironic and sarcastic, so profoundly ill-at-ease with the display of anything resembling normal human emotions, and so continually (and, in most cases, needlessly) verbally aggressive (particularly the teenage Juno’s stepmom, who no doubt is meant to have a heart of gold), that it (and they) lost me at minute one and never gained me back.
This despite the fact that Ellen Page, the young and remarkably skinny actress who plays the heroine Juno, does as much as possible with the role. By the time the movie is over she convinces you that she does have some depth after all, as does another female character named Vanessa (I don’t want to give too much away, in case some of you want to see it after this glowing endorsement). But this does little to dispel the general feel the film gives, that of lost and directionless people muddling through lives devoid of the spark of whatever passes for poetry or humanity these days.
If the film is meant to be an ironic commentary on the emptiness and soullessness of our current culture, it fails miserably. It’s as empty and soulless as the culture it professes to criticize.
Read a plot summary on IMDB. I’m not sure it’s supposed to be an ironic commentery on the emptiness and soullessness of our current culture. I think it’s supposed to be, like, funny or something.
You are a hard woman. 🙂 I saw Juno a couple weeks ago, and on balance, liked it. Maybe because when I was sixteen (which was 35 years ago), I was sarcastic and cynical, as were probably 80% of my classmates. I think (some) sarcasm is a simple response to situations that are complex, that usually don’t deserve the sarcasm – appropriate for an adolescent, but hopefully something that teenagers grow out of when they find out, as Juno did, that things aren’t so simple after all.
Which leads me to wonder if part of the “emptiness and soulessness of our current culture”, at least as it is depicted on film, is not a reflection of those “artists” own inability to break out of adolescence.
But I digress. You didn’t laugh when the young man/ boyfired replied, after Juno comments how he doesn’t try to be cool, “Oh, I try really hard”? Everything about being a teenager, at least for me, was distilled in that phrase.
It was only a movie, but given the rest of the dreck in movie theatres…. At least there was some character development.
Were some or all of the actors in “Waitress” last summer?
Carol Ward: That was one of the moments when I smiled, wanly. The problem with that character was that he was really, really blank. I just didn’t buy the fact that Juno actually cared for him.
And although I was one of the more sarcastic 16-year-olds you’d ever find back in—well, never mind when it was—sarcasm and cynicism was a much softer thing back then. It didn’t go as deep. Just as I think I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, it left me, sarcasm and cynicism have moved into a whole new realm where I really don’t want to follow.
Your first mistake was believing critics. I find the customer reviews on Netflix are much harsher and more useful.
Try these for humor: Passport to Pimlico, The Rage in Lake Placid, Bread and Tulips; these for drama: The Fallen Idol, To Be and To Have, The Lives of Others. The Sorrow and the Pity is a lurid look into collaboration in France during WWII, which explained a lot and prompted a lot of though, much of which can be applied to the present.
Neo, ever since “American Beauty,” “Atlantic City,” and “Little Miss Sunshine,” I’ve been at a loss to see what critics find amusing and/or meaningful. Oh, and there’s always “Lost in Translation” and “Pulp Fiction” too.
Dreck, all of it.
stumbley: My favorite movie in recent years is “Groundhog Day.”
Hey, I liked it!
Agree about the kind of weird, over-the-top abuse dished out by the step-mom (which somehow reminded me of the weird, over-the-top abuse spewed by the Bush- or McCain-deranged), but the rest I thought was both fast and funny. Yes, it had a smart-ass, adolescent sort of tone, but in the best sort of way. I mean, adolescents are human too, right? Right?
My nephew and parents and I watched Groundhog Day on… Groundhog Day. Delightfully both funny and profound.
I have a post here about “Groundhog Day”, and its similarities to “Superman” and “The Wizard of Oz”.
Summary: they are all about the role of Men, with “Groundhog Day” being especially nasty.
Neo – if you haven’t seen it – watch The Dish – it’s a few years old as it was made in 2000. But it’s fun and funny and has some wonderful characters. Takes place in 1969 Australia and “The Dish” of the title is the one that brings us pictures of the first moon walk. (based on a true story) Maybe it will erase the bad taste from this movie. Whoever wrote it kept in mind that movies are supposed to be entertaining. Enjoy!
Drat – I forgot to add that I am not at all surprised by your review. That’s pretty much what I thought the movie might be like after watching the commercials. I also read the Rotten Tomatoes review and was skeptical.
Groundhog day is brilliant.
Will wait for the DVD on Juno — and maybe quite a bit after.
I also like most Meg Ryan Romantic Komedies (they spell it with a K in Slovakia), like Kate and Leopold (re-run recently, but I was busy).
True Lies had me gasping for breath after laughing at the machine gun rolling down the stairs and …
I think when the F* word becomes commonplace, the outlet for real anger/ frustration becomes worse.
IF you liked the movie Groundhog Day, it is loosely, very loosely based on a book called “Replay”, by Ken Grimwood, that I enjoyed immensely. In the book the main character keeps returning to 1963: “Jeff Winston, a failing 43-year-old radio journalist, dies and wakes up in his 18-year-old body in 1963 with his memories of the next 25 years intact.”
It’s about the choices he makes as he lives what some of us dream of: What if you could live your life over? (and over)
I liked the movie and laughed though out. But for such a visceral opinion such as yours I suspect there was personal angst in there some where. Still me liking the movie should not mean that everyone would like it but all my friends that saw it liked it as well and thought it was light hearted and deep enough to make a good movie.
Quite a few false notes were hit–Juno moves a bunch of furniture onto her ex’s lawn, exchanges some banter, and then tells him she’s preggers–but some of it was good, too. I liked Bleeker, who captures that adolescent awkwardness very well.
Paulie Bleeker: Like I’d marry you! You’d be the meanest wife ever, okay? And I know that you weren’t bored that day because there was a lot of stuff on TV, and then ‘The Blair Witch Project’ was coming on Starz and you were like ‘I haven’t seen this since it came out and if so we should watch it’ and ‘but oh, no, we should just make out instead la la la’
He carries this combination of shrewdness, tenderness, cluelessness, geekiness and awkwardness off perfectly.
Juno had too much 20-something writerly glibness to be a convincing character.
Recently saw “The Wedding Singer” for the first time. It was sweet and funny. “Groundhog Day,” “Caddyshack,” “Tommy Boy,” and the like are popular in our family; we loathed “Something About Mary,” “Knocked Up,” and similar tasteless dreck. Possibly my favorite comedies are “Hitch” and “Something’s Gotta Give.” The low-brow and affected seem to be taking over and it’s depressing. Discovering a quality comedic movie is like finding gold.
I have a little rant, with the caveat that I have not actually *seen* Juno:
I find it monumentally unfair that Juno (and its star, Ellen Page) have received rave reviews and accolades and award nominations for *portraying* a fictional young girl who gets pregnant (typical interview: “Ellen, you were so brave to take on this difficult role,” etc. etc.) while poor Jamie Lynn Spears, who is an actual girl who is actually pregnant with a real live baby (possibly from a Nickolodeon executive!) is getting ridiculed, lambasted, and mocked by the very same folks swooning over Juno and Ms. Page.
The hypocrisy is nauseating.
I agree with everything you say. Also, I felt that the dialog was constructed of all the things one wished to have said in a conversation, instead of the fumbled groping after meaning that actually occurs. I know it is art, but was just too perfect. Also, I wondered how people in other countries would view two sets of grandparents who seemed uninterested in the fate of a grandchild of theirs.
I think its getting the acclaim it does because it presents liberals with the pro-life argument in a way that speaks to them, and conservatives are so happy they are getting the message they are willing to overlook everything else.
Yeah, I hate to say it, but I think the “old fart” tag applies. So their sarcasm is stronger than yours, so what, yours was stronger than the generation before you! Juno has plenty of emotion in it, and it doesn’t look like you looked very hard to look at something new and different. Sadly, I know far, far too many people like Mark, just drifting through things, even when they’re successful. There’s nothing unusual about this character type in this movie.
I like Groundhog Day too, but like A Christmas Story, it’s been over-praised to the point of me not wanting to see it anymore.
Seafarious,
Could it be that Ms. Spears and her mom were trying to tout themselves as abstinence authorities, and then went got pregnant while Juno does not advertise it’s lead character in that way?
Ah, but this is the review I could have written based merely on the trailer and the identity of those praising it. I knew what it was as soon as I heard who liked it. Of all the usual left-leaning, collectivist suspects called it “warm” – they don’t know any better. For them, it a wistfully happy movie about the kinds of people and families and people they know. And that’s sad.
Part of this is because of what I think is the geo-cultural predestination of all the NYC-based critics:if you live in Manhattan, your default setting is irony and low-grade depression, with a side of sick-making self-absorption. The movie reviewers who think this is some kind of bullseye commentary on our failed culture, don’t understand it’s a commentary on culture…and guess what – it’s contained in a few square miles within a mere handful of America’s largest cities.
Regardless of what segment of society the makers of purport to reveal, it actually has very little relevance to the vast majority of America and Americans.
I saw it last night and enjoyed it. From my perspective, that of a 40-something old fartish male, it was well done. The characters are stumbling through life like most of us do, without a lot of poetry. The dialog is witty, though at times a little too polished for spontaneous conversation. Nonetheless, the plot and the characters are rather engaging. The characters were actually well developed. For example, Bleeker was just about tied down by the time he showed up for science lab having worked out the answers for his lab partners the night before. Add the fact that he was on the track team and his appearance and anyone could clue into him. The same with the almost forty and still wanting to be a rock star Jack.
It was actually to see something nice and somewhat life re-affirming (not just the choice to have the baby) for a change.
Anyway, that is my two cents.
Neo, a few pointers on movie selection, to be taken in the spirit in which they are given.
1) Avoid chick flicks generally, even if a chick. It’s not possible to add enough car chases, topless chicks, and/or fights to cheer up a chick flick. Once a movie is contaminated, it’s shot for good. In particular, avoid anything with “children” or such like in the title (e.g., “Who Will Love My Children?” RUN!!)
2) Avoid anything critics like. Critics make their living by extolling the virtues of crap that no one is his right mind would ever go see. It’s the way they gain cultural props, kind of like professing a hankering for haggis or menudo. No one actually likes it, but pretending to do so sets one apart from the crowd (kind of like watching the movie in the first place), which in their case is key to keeping their jobs.
No need to thank me now. I do this as a public service. /g
No matter how much you didn’t like Juno. It was a thousand times better than “There Will Be Blood”.
Chris, I’m worried about you, man.
I liked “Cloverfield”!
****DoD Property. Do not Duplicate. Last known recording of “Cloverfield” Incident****
A group of vapid, self absorbed 20-something New Yorkers at a stupid, vapid party are thrown into the street when buildings start collapsing only to see the head of the Statue of Libery roll past–thrown by “something alive”.
In the midst of swirling dust, papers and unseen horrors they find an inner resolve and determination to do the hard and right things.
Hud: “I heard the government created this thing and then it turned on them and killed us!”
#1 Guy: “What did you say!? What the f*&^ is wrong with you?!”
Hud: “I dunno, man–I’m just making up crap to keep myself sane!”
The military is uniformly courageous and helpful, but the living thing attacking New York spawns some kind of ‘parasites’ or ‘fellow travelers’–too small for the military to bomb or track–that have to be beaten and defeated by the people.
*wink* *wink* Get it? Good movie….
The Monster is The Monster. Not the Government. Not the Military. They are the good guys.
It was a breath of fresh air in a movie theater. I will get the DVD. I’ll bet it would be double creepy and realistic on the TV!
This reviewer liked it, but has some different takes than the usual critics. Perhaps it will be informative.
http://10-4goodbuddy.blogspot.com/2008/01/review-juno-2007.html
Chris: I thought “Juno” was an inferior version of “Knocked Up” in the “something-nice and-somewhat-life-affirming” category. At least the latter had some real laughs in it. And Jack the rockstar wannabe reminded me of Bruce Jenner (not that there’s anything wrong with that…sorta).
I find it monumentally unfair that Juno (and its star, Ellen Page) have received rave reviews and accolades and award nominations for *portraying* a fictional young girl who gets pregnant (typical interview: “Ellen, you were so brave to take on this difficult role,” etc. etc.) while poor Jamie Lynn Spears, who is an actual girl who is actually pregnant with a real live baby (possibly from a Nickolodeon executive!) is getting ridiculed, lambasted, and mocked by the very same folks swooning over Juno and Ms. Page.
Oooh… Be careful with that, Seafarious!
After 9 years of posting, I got banned permanently and irrevocably by Free Republic for expressing that very sentiment!
To pour salt, (or sal y limon) in it, the “Secure the Borders for American Culture!” crowd can’t be too squeamish about out of wedlock births if they want to win the demographic/culture war.
I assure you, Hispanics welcome every child in every circumstance; where rich gringos seem terrified having children in every circumstance!
Having created a culture where “The Children” has become a shibboleth to take away your freedoms and money, is there any wonder we are being ‘assimilated’ by a pro-child, pro-life alien culture?!
You made it about 4 minutes, 59 seconds longer than I did before I knew that I would hate this movie. How is that possible? The opening, oh so ironic shot told me exactly what I was in for. Ok, that would be impossible but the movie proceeded to be what I expected, too hip and ironic for me, honest to blog!
I think this will be one of those nominations that people will look back on in a year and wonder what the hell they were thinking.
Funny thing is that the radio ads are running nonstop in LA and the trite dialogue that passed for clever in the theater sounds, when heard on the radio, even more like bad sitcom lines.
Juno is crap. The basic trope is to have people say predictable but supposedly unexpected things in a dry, deadpan manner. You’re supposed to go “Haha! They said that like they really believe it! Aren’t these characters funny? Haha!”
Pffft.
I’ll second Teresa’s recommendation for Dish. It was great fun, and I’ve seen it recently in discount racks in Wal-Targ-Mart-Et or something.
I recently had an unaccustomed chance to meet and some Hollywood people and I was impressed with their creativity and (this surprised me) their work ethic. I have no idea what stars are like but the many names that scroll as we’re walking out of theaters work their bunions off.
My previous armchair image of them had been, as armchair images usually are, quite unfair.
Hmmm. Groundhog Day is my favorite movie of all time. I could watch it repeatedly still. I loved everything about it, so we agree there.
And yet I liked Juno – a lot. It’s no GhD, but then what is?
If anyone’s gotten to here without having the movie spoiled, you might want to stop.
Here’s what I liked. The boy was allowed to be decent, which is so rare these days. The cool dude rock guy was transformed before our very eyes into the wretch he deserved to be. The uptight Vanessa is shown to be in the throes of normal, human urges, and quite sweet. The parents are basically stable, even on their feet of clay. Especially the father is portrayed with all the failings of PC daddy-hatred, and shown to truly love enough to vastly outweigh the failings.
Everyone was served justly by the movie.
The message of the movie was that men and women still love, as men and women not androgony, even when they’re confused and ill-equipped for the trials of this century. I say in the 60’s we knew what we loved. By the 80’s we’d figured out what we hated. But in the ’00’s, we have no clue any more. We’re taught to cower in the middle, afraid to love or hate anything expect people who confidently love or hate. Juno, and everyone else, loved something or was exposed for failing to do so.
And it didn’t hurt that Juno sounded spot-on exactly like my 20-year old daughter.
Hey Neo, you should solicit reader’s suggestions for “little-known flicks that are worth the time to watch.” Mine would be “Two Mwn Went to War,” an English movie that is sweetly funny, based on the true story of two dentists who invaded France during WWII.
I found Juno deeply creepy and disturbing, for reasons that I explain here. Perhaps my reasons for finding the film so grimly unfunny will parallel yours…
I’m only commenting because I thought Juno was Fantastic. But I love those kind of weird movies like Napolian Dynamite and Being John Malkovich. I suppose they are not for everyone. I found Juno to be refreshingly smart and so much different from the bland writing that has been coming out of Hollywood for so long now.
neo,
I liked Knocked Up, though the drug references were a bit overwhelming. I get it. They like to smoke pot.
I see the differences between the two being mainly the result of the different stages of life the protagonists are in.
This was Knocked Up being played out in the John Hughes (age only) demographic.
There is, unfortunately, nothing to laugh at, about teenage pregnancy—wherein, let’s face it, very often the father isn’t some sweet, bashful, adolescent boy, but a guy in his 20’s, or 30’s, sometimes married, sometimes already having to support more than one kid he’s fathered on other women.
(Let’s also face it—-snarky, unpleasant, self-centered teenagers are boring, even though the media does think them the most wonderful human beings on the planet; and teenager-dom is one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated on American society.)
Dave, I liked “Napoleon Dynamite” too; but I really can’t compare it to yet another glorification of teenage, unmarried pregnancy, especially when what happens in “Juno” sounds so very unlike what happens with most unmarried, pregnant, underage girls these days.
Neo, I gave up on Hollywood after Starship Troopers. They need to fire the whole lot and start over from scratch.
As far as I’m concerned, the only problem with the continuing writer’s strike is the potential rise of realilty TV.
Also–
I admit to enjoying Groundhog Day immensely when it was released… but if you think that it is a movie of “recent years,” then you ARE an old fart. 😉
q2600, yeah, Hollywood is pretty hopeless. So is television. I suggest we all sit down and read a good book. Or find other, less preachy, politically correct forms of amusing ourselves (where we don’t have pretty, talking heads telling us what to think and feel, and how we should live our lives.)
(Agree with you about “Starship Troopers”, by the way—that was godawful, and nothing like the actual Heinlein book. Hollywood actually dislikes science fiction, and can only do it as, supposedly, stupid B movie stuff, or if there’s some cheesy, supposedly deep moral attached to it.)
I used to have a terrible time explaining the difference between the book and the movie to people. People would always ask, “Well, what’s the book about, then?”
It’s ABOUT a guy from Argentina who enlists in the military to fight arthropoidal extraterrestrials. The ABOUT isn’t important; that’s just how Hollywood excuses destroying the work itself as “artist license.” It’s the HOW that’s important.
Now, I use the illustration of Drill Instructor Staff Sergeant Zim, posed the question (I don’t have to book in front of me, so the wording may not be verbatim), “Why do we need to learn how to throw knives when we have atomic weapons?”
The movie’s answer: “Put your hand on that wall! (thunk) The enemy cannot push a button if you disable his hand! MEDIC!!”
As if that had anything to do with the enemy they were training to face.
The book’s answer: “If you do not understand the difference between a situation that requires a knife and a situation that requires a nuclear weapon, then you have no business being a soldier.”
‘Nuff said.
I disliked Juno so intensely that I actually walked out of the theater.
And this is from someone who liked Knocked Up so much I saw it twice.
Yes, q6200, there is so much in the book that never makes it into the movie—including the part where a good-goody student remarks that war has never solved anything (or something along those lines; I don’t have the book in front of me either), and the professor replies with a list of extinct civilizations, such as the Carthaginians, etc., for whom war, did, indeed, settle something—it defeated them, and empowered their opponents; a kind of tough, clear-headed point of view, that Hollywood, with its muddled sentiment and tendency to churn out stock figures: the good pacifist, the bad military man, etc., just can’t deal with.
They also left out much of the real nature of the bugs, (who are intelligent, formidable enemies, not just big, ugly slugs, as in the movie) the humans sometime enemies, eventual allies, “The Skinnies”, the eden-like world they’ve selected to evacuate the human race to, in case the worst comes to worst (anyone who knows its location is given hypnotic commands to kill themselves, if captured by the aliens), and the fact that all human, of all nations, are united—or should be—in this war. I found it quite laughable that “Rico” in the movie is played as this blonde stormtrooper type, when in the book, he’s a Filipino from Argentina, who speaks tagalog and admires Ramon Magsaysay.
As I said, Hollywood is usually terrible when it comes to Science Fiction, and just can’t deal with it, except as B-movie stuff, i.e., “Attack of the Sex-crazed Zombie Women”, or something with a horrible, progressive moral, i.e., “Ya see, the Emperor represents George Bush, and the evil galactic empire is Amerikkka, while the heroic freedom fighters are the Palestinians, and the evil space Gypsies are Israel. . . “
Yay! A movie thread by people I would actually like to hear opinions from! (My wife and I live outside the U.S. and don’t watch any TV..only movies…to explain our obsession.)
Recently saw “Knocked Up’ and “40 year Old Virgin”..some of the same actors…(the chunky curly red head guy is pretty funny) and heard these portrayed actually as a sign of a “conservative” values resurge in H-wood…because they somehow portray two values scourged mercilessly for decades inside the Left Coast bubbleworld – marriage-family and chastity. My thought was that both managed to mock and mangle both values while trying to praise them. Go figure. My conclusion was that hese writers are so disconnected from these values that even their attempts to renew them turn out insipid.
As for comedy, while I love “Groundhog Day,” “What About Bob?” (neo, gotta love that one) or “the Three Amigos,” all I need is to slip in “The Producers” (2005 musical version) in my DVD player to the musical tryouts part or the “Springtime for Hitler” part and will unfailing weep with howls.
P.S..wasn’t “Starship Troopers” satire or am I totally out of it? Speaking of SF…anybody like “Serenity”?
Speaking of recent films — Cloverfield was very good!
Serenity was great; Cloverfield was BRILLIANT (although headache-inducing). Starship Troopers was not satire, it was liberal spin-a-brilliant-novel-into-crap.
This is, without a doubt, one of the saddest comment threads I’ve ever read. What a sad, strange world (most of) you people live in. I do think, however, that this – more than anything ever before written by Neoneocon and her fans – very neatly illustrates everything that’s wrong with movement conservatism.
How so?
Why is this such a sad thread, “some guy”? Is it because a lot of us don’t like “Juno”? Or the movie “Starship Troopers?” Or that we do like Heinlein? Or science fiction? Life is full of sad things, to be sure (the way it treats science fiction, for instance, is enough to make sci-fi lovers sit down and sob, sometimes!)
Go read a nice Jane Austen novel; you’ll feel much better.
Schnargley, as q2 says, “Starship Troopers” was typical Hollywood spin-a-good-book-into-dreck stuff. It was, I think, a liberal director’s attempt to satirize what he believed was an evil, racist, warmongering book and make everybody hate it. Problem is, the book isn’t evil, isn’t racist, and shows war as hard, brutal, sometimes necessary, but distinctly unenjoyable.
In short, the stupid director was satirizing a book I strongly suspect he never bothered to read. The book itself is not satire. It’s actually a very compelling look at what humans would actually have to do, in order to fight off an alien invasion (as opposed to simply being conquered as in Wells’, “War of the Worlds.”)
q2600
As I said, I can’t tell if it’s Sci-Fi, Heinlein, or Hollwyood’s treatment of science fiction in general (a heartbreaking topic, to be sure) that’s making him sad.
As for “Juno”—I didn’t realize an unrealistic, rather silly, snarky teenage movie carried such moral, and ethical weight that disliking it would be cause for such grief! It’s only a movie! Read some Jane Austen, drink plenty of fluids—you’ll feel better in the morning.
(Haven’t seen “Cloverfield” or “Serenity” yet, but will seek them out, based on your recommendation.)
Serenity is better if you’ve seen the Firefly series (but it isn’t necessary). Take something for motion sickness before watching Cloverfield!
Oh dear, does Cloverfield have the same nausea-inducing-wobbly camera stuff Blair Witch Project had?
In fact, I will say this about Starship Troopers: I grew up a military-hating peacenik hippie (except for the drugs, which I suppose means I missed the whole point of being a hippie). I joined the U. S. Marine Corps originally as a “way out” of a bad situation at home (it is said that everyone in the Corps is running from something, or running to something. I do remember a lot of running!).
At any rate, by the time I had finished 13 weeks of Marine Recruit Training, 6 weeks of Marine Combat Training, 9 weeks of Military Police School, and been stationed on Okinawa for a month, I still wasn’t really sold on the military.
It was Starship Troopers that sold me. In it, I discovered the necessity and inherent nobility of the warrior class. I read it three times consecutively (it was on the Commandant’s reading list, after all!).
The movie of the same name was the closest I have ever come to walking out of a cinema while the movie was still playing.
The same, but worse (I think, I don’t really recall Blair Witch that clearly, I was bored to tears).
Here are some bits that just really leave me at a loss for words:
“Just as I think I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, it left me, sarcasm and cynicism have moved into a whole new realm where I really don’t want to follow.”
Is anything in life not a metaphor for politics and how bad the Democrats are?
“The Sorrow and the Pity is a lurid look into collaboration in France during WWII, which explained a lot and prompted a lot of though, much of which can be applied to the present.”
Because America is full of traitors!
“Of all the usual left-leaning, collectivist suspects called it “warm” – they don’t know any better. For them, it a wistfully happy movie about the kinds of people and families and people they know. And that’s sad.”
Do you know any real, actual liberals, or do you just make up cartoons to hate?
“No matter how much you didn’t like Juno. It was a thousand times better than “There Will Be Blood”.”
Now that’s just blasphemous, but not really central to my point.
“…the father is portrayed with all the failings of PC daddy-hatred…”
The dad was portrayed a stern-but-loving, take-no-bullshit awesome dad. Did we see the same movie?
‘something with a horrible, progressive moral, i.e., “Ya see, the Emperor represents George Bush, and the evil galactic empire is Amerikkka, while the heroic freedom fighters are the Palestinians, and the evil space Gypsies are Israel. . . “‘
If I recall correctly, a) Lucas started writing a few years before Bush was on the political scene, and b) it’s movement conservatives who can’t watch a movie qua movie, but only qua propaganda.
Meh. Heinlein was overrated, but not bad.
I would love to be able to put on a pair of crazy-glasses and see the world as you do, to know what it’s like to become enraged by everything! And they say liberals are angry all the time! It just must be so depressing not to be able to see a movie and enjoy it for things like plot, acting, etc, because you’re so caught up in the dogma of liberal Hollywood and blah blah blah.
[i]Is anything in life not a metaphor for politics and how bad the Democrats are?[/i]
That depends upon how open one is to metaphor.
[i]Because America is full of traitors![/i]
I’m really hoping a clarification will make that a less inflammatory statement…
“If I recall correctly…”
I don’t recall any Space Gypsies in Star Wars. I do believe TalkinKamel was making a generalization. And a valid one, at least since the mid-’80’s.
As for the rest–I believe that it is probably easier to ignore the propaganda quotient of a movie when you agree with it, than when it is demonizing you personally (doubly in my case, being not only not “right-wing,” but in the military).
Hmmm… Tags work differently here?
Correction to above: it should read “being not only “right-wing”, but in the military.
The second “not” was a typo. If you are wondering, I say “right-wing” rather than “conservative” because I am a neo-libertarian. I consider it to be a blending of the best of both neo-conservatism and libertarianism; Code Pink considers me the anti-Christ (or anti-Mao, which would be more palatable to both sides).
“Code Pink considers me the anti-Christ (or anti-Mao, which would be more palatable to both sides)”
This is what I’m getting at – this is either meant seriously, which indicates a really messed-up view of people who disagree with you politically, or its a really bad joke that…well, indicates a really messed-up view of people who disagree with you politically.
And aren’t liberals supposed to be the whiny cry-babies who can’t stand criticism? Come on! If you’re in the military, man up! You’re supposed to be made of tougher stuff than that. No? Who cares if Hollywood makes fun of you? (About which I’m a little incredulous, since I can’t really think of any movies I’ve seen that portray the military negatively.)
“I’m really hoping a clarification will make that a less inflammatory statement…”
Ok, here’s a clarification: maybe I was wrong, but I interpreted the above comment about collaboration as being a dig against liberals qua traitors. Considering that Mitt Romney, formerly-serious presidential contender and former governor of Massachusetts, called a vote for Clinton or Obama a vote for surrender to terrorists in his concession speech today, I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume (though perhaps I jumped the gun!) that the liberals-are-traitors meme was what commenter Matthew M was getting at above.
But, I digress from my original point was: try, try, try as hard as you can, readers of Neoneocon, to enjoy a movie as a movie, and not be ready at every moment (as some of you seem to be) to take umbrage with the slightest deviation from ideological purity.
(About which I’m a little incredulous, since I can’t really think of any movies I’ve seen that portray the military negatively.)
No, I imagine you can’t….
“But, I digress from my original point was: try, try, try as hard as you can, readers of Neoneocon, to enjoy a movie as a movie, and not be ready at every moment (as some of you seem to be) to take umbrage with the slightest deviation from ideological purity.”
O thank you, wise one. I will do my level best to follow your sage words of… sageness. I will fail, of course, because I am an inexorable moron, but I must thank you for gracing me with your enlightened and attractively mournful presence.
Would that I could live up to your standards! Think of the beautiful vistas that would appear before mine eyes, were I to jettison my perpetual umbrage and instead awaken, to embrace the gentleness and oracular profundity of thine words!
Alas, it will not be so. I try, try, try, yet I fail, fail, fail. Woe unto me, who roams the earth wailing, the ashes of neoconservativism despoiling mine mouth.
And I’m not interested in theatrical releases anymore. I watch tons of “Asia extreme” movies on DVD. Amazing art, some of it. That and “war porn” on YouTube and LiveLeak. When the helicopters come in and fire their high-expolosive cannon shells at the terrorists, and you see the vermin disappear as neatly as if a magician waved a magic wand, well, it just makes your heart sing, I tell ya.
I dunno, Some Guy; you certainly took umbrage at what you consider our excessive ideological conservative purity—then you take further umbrage when we don’t just fall into line and agree with your criticisms of certain movies.
(And as for the space gypsies, yes, I was making a generalization about science fiction movies—in fact, I was making a joke! And please don’t tell me there haven’t been way too many overly-ponderous, faux significant “Use the Force, Grasshopper!” science fiction movies, encouraged by George Lucas, but beginning with the tedious 2001!)
If you don’t want us to think of liberals as whiny crybabies, why not stop the whining and umbrage-taking?
“And please don’t tell me there haven’t been way too many overly-ponderous, faux significant “Use the Force, Grasshopper!” science fiction movies, encouraged by George Lucas, but beginning with the tedious 2001!”
ENCOURAGED BY GEORGE LUCAS??!?!?!? 200!?!?!??! Written by Arthur C. Clark and directed by the mad genius Stanley Kubrick???!?
Now I know I’m dealing with a bunch of rubes.
But, back to my original point: I feel bad for you folks! Though it’s likely distorted (though not as distorted as yours!), my image of you people involves you wandering all day, outraged by the shape of clouds and the chattering of squirrels who are insufficiently patriotic and pro-warrior culture/anti-liberal. It must be tiring, getting worked up so much.
try, try, try as hard as you can, readers of Neoneocon, to enjoy a movie as a movie, and not be ready at every moment (as some of you seem to be) to take umbrage with the slightest deviation from ideological purity.
Some guy:
I’ve hear that same complaint from a couple of my more dimwitted girlfriends after seeing a movie.
I heard that from one real dimwit of a girlfriend after seeing “The Handmaidens Tale” and remarking “Wow, they really crapped on the Christians in that one!”
I heard that same sentiment from another real “mensa-member” of a girlfriend after seeing “The Sum of all Fears” when I remarked “Nazis?! In the book, they were Arabs! Why can’t arabs be bad guys for a change?”
You’re not actaully one of my former stupid, but hot, girlfriends are you?
Now, I thought it was conservatives that had trouble with “seeing the nuance” and abstract thinking….
Written by Arthur C. Clark and directed by the mad genius Stanley Kubrick???!?
That’s actually a good point:
how come Hollywood made a couple of true-to-the-source movies of Sir Arthur Clark movies but had to camp up and crap on the book by Robert Heinlein?
Why should I go see a movie with George Clooney or Ben Affleck or any other Hollywood dicks who insult me and my beliefs? Why would I give them money?
my image of you people involves you wandering all day, outraged by the shape of clouds and the chattering of squirrels who are insufficiently patriotic and pro-warrior culture/anti-liberal. It must be tiring, getting worked up so much.
Personally, it’s rainbows and upside down triangles that set me off….
I see a big ol’ rainbow in the sky and I just know the rain is pushing the homosexual agenda!
‘I heard that same sentiment from another real “mensa-member” of a girlfriend after seeing “The Sum of all Fears” when I remarked “Nazis?! In the book, they were Arabs! Why can’t arabs be bad guys for a change?”’
In the same comment thread, we have one commenter expressing his entertainment over a scene in a movie (True Lies) in which Arabs, the villains, are hilariously gunned down by a dropped, spinning weapon. We also have another commenter bemoaning the fact that liberal Hollywood refuses to depict Arabs as villains.
I propose that there exists only one way of settling this: Thunderdome. Two men enter, Gray, yet only one man leaves.
“Why should I go see a movie with George Clooney or Ben Affleck or any other Hollywood dicks who insult me and my beliefs? Why would I give them money?”
Don’t! This has been another round of Simple Answers to Easy Questions.
“how come Hollywood made a couple of true-to-the-source movies of Sir Arthur Clark movies but had to camp up and crap on the book by Robert Heinlein?”
Part of the problem here is the assumption that “Hollywood” is a single, undifferentiated entity, rather than a huge array of writers, producers, directors, etc etc etc, ad infinitum, all working together and competing to get their projects made. Clark lucked out and got to work with Kubrick, et al. Heinlein was dead, and did not luck out. There was no conspiracy. OR WAS THERE?!?!11?
“I see a big ol’ rainbow in the sky and I just know the rain is pushing the homosexual agenda!”
You see this as an exaggeration, but what am I to make when reading a comment thread started by a blogger who can’t seem to stop herself from, in the same breath, comparing her growing disdain for movies to her disdain for Democrats? I feel sorry for people who seem to live in such a grey world that they can’t enjoy movies – movies! – anymore because their politics won’t allow them to. Liberals are frequently accused of having promoted the idea that everything – such as the personal – is now the political, yet it is conservatives I see insisting that art be processed not through the lens of art, but politics – and politics at its crassest, at the level of dull propaganda.
Some Guy
Heckety-whiz! Now all us rube types know we’re dealing with a snob! (Shuckins!)
Kubrick was okay, but let’s face it; 2001 was a big, ponderous bore. Clark was good, but he had his woo-woo new age tendencies, which, sadly, he gave in to, as he aged.
As for myself, I don’t spend my days wandering—I spend them flitting about through the air on my force-powered wonder-cycle, contemplating the whichness of what, outraged by the chattering of Smurfs (who have invaded my neighborhood on roller-skates) and those obnoxious aliens, who camp out in my back yard, and use the barbecue! I’m okay with clouds; I’m even okay with squirrels! I’m tired of the pigeons, though. They poop on everything
Now, now, Gray, don’t you know that actors such as Affleck and Clooney are superior to us mere mortals? Why, you must go watch them! Otherwise, you’d turn into a pro-military,liberal-hating rube, and you’d probably say mean things to squirrels, too! You’re obligated to watch their dumb movies, because it’s going to make you a better person! What’s more, if you don’t like their stuff, you’re going to make you-know-who unhappy! Suck it up, man, for the good of society! (And to make you-know-who smile!)
Seriously, I’m not sure why Heinlein has been treated the way he has, while other Sci-fi/fantasy writers, such as Robert Bloch, and Clark, have been treated relatively well. Bloch was lucky in that Hitchcock liked his work.
Heinlein had a rep for not liking liberals, and sometimes saying mean things about them (and maybe to squirrels and clouds and fluffy-bunnies, too!) so he was disliked by the Left. I suspect the director of Starship Troopers just had in in for him, and didn’t really give a damn about the book.
Clark, as I said, did have his new-agey woo-woo side, so they approved of him. Of course, other sci-fi writers have been treated badly too—among them Zenna (The People) Henderson and Andre (Beastmaster) Norton. And some, like James Schmitz, C.L. Moore or R.A. Lafferty, no one’s even tried adapting any of their stuff!
Yes, Handmaid’s Tale crapped all over Christians; what makes it worse is that Atwood blurted out in some interview that she’d been inspired to write it by Taliban’s oppression of women in Afghanistan. So, basically, her anti-Christian screed is actually about Islam—which she didn’t have the nerve to tackle. No wonder the book’s so skewed, and hard to believe (even as a fantasy.)
Of course, Christians don’t issue fatwas against writers they disapprove of, or order them killed. . .
“Yes, Handmaid’s Tale crapped all over Christians; what makes it worse is that Atwood blurted out in some interview that she’d been inspired to write it by Taliban’s oppression of women in Afghanistan. So, basically, her anti-Christian screed is actually about Islam–which she didn’t have the nerve to tackle. No wonder the book’s so skewed, and hard to believe (even as a fantasy.)”
Could it have been – and I don’t know for sure, because I don’t know Atwood’s motivation, so I’m just guessing – that Atwood was trying to take religious extremism in a foreign country (Islam, Afghanistan) and couch it in such a way that it would be familiar to a different audience (Christians, America)? That is, might the experience of living under religious tyranny strike a little closer to home, make a little more sense, etc etc etc, once familiar, unthreatening aspects of life here were recast in a different way?
Maybe she just wanted to write about the experience of religious extremism and living under tyranny, in a very general sense, non-specific to any time or place. But maybe she hates Jesus! I don’t know. Sometimes authors are tricky like that, using one thing to represent another without saying so in so many words.
“I suspect the director of Starship Troopers just had in in for him, and didn’t really give a damn about the book.”
It’s stuff like this that leaves me searching for words. Where do I start?
I mean…do you honestly imagine there exists such a (liberal) human being who thinks to himself “the best way to really take a crap on that jerk Heinlein, who expressed some conservative ideas, is to take a book – a book widely considered to be critical of fascism in a subversive, satirical manner – of his and spend months or years of my life immersed in the material, creating a film that’s a really dumb version of the book that’s sure to piss off legions of devoted, nerdly fans”?
Isn’t it possible that, in the long chain from book to script to proposal to filming to studio interference to post-production to release, someone made a bad film because they’re simply a bad writer or director, or if someone decided that Heinlein’s material was too heady to earn lots of money, and dumbed it down to widen its appeal?
Or maybe THE LEFT hates Jesus AND Heinlein. Let me consult my liberal handbook….
…oh, I see that you were right. Yes, we hate Jesus and Heinlein. That solves that one.
I’d like to know if Some Guy has seen any movies that profoundly challenged his leftist views in say, the past ten years. (Righty-challenging movie examples: Lions for Lambs. Redacted. Erin Brokavich. (sp))
Furthermore, Some Guy, I’m going to make an internet assumption based on your use of “rube” that you’re an urbanite living in a huge coastal hive-city. Here’s the assumed problem – you read local newspapers and websites that agree with you. You watch movies and TV shows that agree with you. And finally you associate with people who agree with you. Hence, you’re never exposed to opinions that differ from yours and have no idea what’s going on in the flyover states unless Jon Stewart makes a joke about it.
Your beliefs are never substantially challenged, so when a conflicting idea is presented to you it must instantly be EVIL or DUMB.
Whereas those of us in the sticks, unless we want to watch nothing but FOX News and listed to 1960’s country, are constantly exposed to conflicting viewpoints. I watch Keith Olberman and am told I’m stupid. I watch The Simpsons or Family Guy and am told I’m ignorant. I read a Reuters article and am told I’m evil. I visit a gaming website and see banner ads selling “Screw Bush” t-shirts. I read a gossip magazine and get told I should vote for Obama. However, I also read local news and associate with people who agree with me. Since I am exposed to both sides of the world, I have to constantly adjust and defend my views.
Those of us in the sticks are constantly presented with both sides of the Blue/Red conflict. You urbanites are exposed to blue, blue, blue all day long – and have no _interest_ in what we think – because once you leave city limits, there’s nothing but Jesus and NASCAR.
some guy – if you read Atwood’s many comments about the book over the years, she is quite clear that she considers Christian fundamentalism nearly as dangerous as Afghani Taliban rule, and her book was crafted to highlight that danger. She has been specific that she was not trying to awaken American audiences to the dangers of Islamism, but of Christianity. Sorry her actual quotes refute your theory.
You are rattling around with enormous collections of assumptions that would simply be tedious to take apart one-by-one. I recommend simple humility, and consider the possibility that what you believe about conservatives and what you think about your own crowd may not be accurate. Much of what you criticise as oversimplification and prejudice on our part is actually just shorthand for more rigorous discussions we have had long ago. It is not your fault that you were not present for those, and it is a bit unfair of us to use shortcuts so frequently, like a student not showing his work.
However, I feel little obligation to re-explain complicated discussions on every thread. If you stick with the ex-liberal blogosphere very long, you will encounter the reasoning behind the shorthand soon enough.
By the way, q2600—great story about how “Starship Troopers influenced you on the military.
Amazing, what a good book can do! (Somewhere in the afterlife, Heinlein is grinning.) Did you ever read “Citizen of the Galaxy?”
(I’m afraid I’ll have to pass on “Cloverfield”, at least until it comes out on DVD; I think I manage it small screen. For me, the scariest thing about Blair Witch Project was the fear that I would lose my lunch, right there in the theater! That swinging video-cam effect has a very bad effect on me. I will take a look at “Serenity.”)
Part of the problem here is the assumption that “Hollywood” is a single, undifferentiated entity, rather than a huge array of writers, producers, directors, etc etc etc, ad infinitum, all working together and competing to get their projects made.
Who all work in the same 4 blocks of New York or LA, read the same papers, go to the same schools, date the same people, watch the same shows, buy the same crap and vote for the same candidates.
Oh, if all of America’s movies came out of Salt Lake City you would claim a conspiracy you shallow-minded, surface-skimming numpty!
The soullessness of modern culture is a tragedy for adolescents, not a stuff for jokes. I have seen it in my five children, for almost 25 years now. They need, desperately need, some basic foundations of moral and spirituality. How they manage it? Paradoxically enough, in a traditional form of adolescent revolt. Some became fanatically religious, choosing the most extreme, exstatic kinds of orthodoxy, some choose more playing forms of the same, in imaginary realms of role playing games. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” is all-time favorite, the second choice being legends of Arthur cycle. They have their Camelot recreated, and every weekend I see dozens teenagers in medeival garments, with wooden swords and breast-plates, going to nearby park to play.
My apologies for the length of the post; I am combining several short replies to items that came in while I was away.
This is what I’m getting at – this is either meant seriously, which indicates a really messed-up view of people who disagree with you politically, or its a really bad joke that…well, indicates a really messed-up view of people who disagree with you politically.
Code Pink does not qualify as “anyone who disagrees with me politically.” Code Pink holds mockeries of military funerals–outside of Walter Reed Medical Center. Code Pink physically assaults people attempting to enter recruiting stations of their own free will. Code Pink compares President Bush to Hitler for his invasion of Iraq (historical inaccuracies aside, the irony of a group publicly identifying themselves as having a socialist agenda attempting demonize someone by comparing him to a former head of the German National Socialist (Workers?) Party is just outstanding).
And aren’t liberals supposed to be the whiny cry-babies who can’t stand criticism? Come on! If you’re in the military, man up! You’re supposed to be made of tougher stuff than that. No? Who cares if Hollywood makes fun of you? (About which I’m a little incredulous, since I can’t really think of any movies I’ve seen that portray the military negatively.)
I don’t recall whining; I’m quite proud to have people like Code Pink think of me as an enemy. If I am to be hated by someone, I’d much rather be hated by bullying postmodern socialist wackos than by people who actually go out to make the world a better place.
Ok, here’s a clarification: maybe I was wrong, but I interpreted the above comment about collaboration as being a dig against liberals qua traitors.
I saw a comment about a movie. Perhaps you could clarify how it ties into treason for those of who haven’t seen that particular movie?
It must be tiring, getting worked up so much.
I wouldn’t know. Why don’t you ask those people who are spending entire days assaulting people and disrupting local businesses near the USMC recruiting station in Berkeley?
In the same comment thread, we have one commenter expressing his entertainment over a scene in a movie (True Lies) in which Arabs, the villains, are hilariously gunned down by a dropped, spinning weapon. We also have another commenter bemoaning the fact that liberal Hollywood refuses to depict Arabs as villains.
“True Lies” came out in 1994. Try finding one post-9/11! Even “The Kingdom,” probably the best treatment I have seen of the subject by Hollywood, in the end turned into a moral-equivalence argument between mass-murdering terrorists and the FBI agents trying to stop them–which simply isn’t valid, no matter how emotionally involved agents might get in any particular case.
Part of the problem here is the assumption that “Hollywood” is a single, undifferentiated entity, rather than a huge array of writers, producers, directors, etc etc etc, ad infinitum, all working together and competing to get their projects made.
Two volcano movies in the same summer. Two mass-extinction by impact movies in the same summer (one by asteroid, the other by comet). Two alien invasion movies the same summer. 99% of vampire movies treat vampirism as a disease which renders its victims allergic to ultraviolet light, rather than the historical idea of demonically-possessed corpses who were less powerful in sunlight due to its symbolic connection to life. There hasn’t been a movie since “The Green Berets” in which the infantry wins by doing what the infantry does–closing with and destroying the enemy. In Hollywood, it’s always “hide and wait to be rescued by tanks or helicopters.” If any offensive action takes places, its usually immoral and lead by some schmuck who’d rather be smoking pot in his parent’s basement. Need I continue?
do you honestly imagine there exists such a (liberal) human being who thinks to himself “the best way to really take a crap on that jerk Heinlein, who expressed some conservative ideas, is to take a book – a book widely considered to be critical of fascism in a subversive, satirical manner – of his and spend months or years of my life immersed in the material, creating a film that’s a really dumb version of the book that’s sure to piss off legions of devoted, nerdly fans”?
No, I know that there was a working script by the Heinlein estate that was faithful to the original work, and Ver Hoeven refused to use it. His depiction of the military had to be fascist and incompetent–as a beginning of the changes he made. I doubt the feelings military personnel or fans of Heinlein actually entered his mind. I’m not familiar with “Starship Troopers” being regarded as either for or against fascism–and certainly not in a subversive manner, which would require that fascism actually be in force in the U. S.
I’m still trying to get italics to work. Some of the above post is from “some guy,” and some is my rebuttal to him. If it’s a terrible problem to pick out, I can re-post it with quotation marks… but I’d rather not use up Neo’s resources to make another huge post.
Oh, and for negative portrayals of the military in movies, here is a VERY short list:
1. Redacted
2. Platoon
3. Full Metal Jacket
4. Buffalo Soldiers
5. Apocalypse Now
6. Starship Troopers
7. In the Valley of Elah
8. Lions for Lambs
9. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
10. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
Ad nauseam.
Okay, I’ve re-posted my long reply above on my own blog, where I know how the daggoned italics work. Feel free to read it there, and comment on either site.
q2600 (Qatari? Are you from Qatar, or is that a play on Atari?),
You can italicize comments with the tags (just removes the spaces within brackets).
Anyway, I think it’s clear that you and I watch very different movies, even if they share the same titles. The versions of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket weren’t anti-military. Jacket was, as far as I could tell, about how awful war is. Can’t one say that war is not a pleasant thing, least of all for the soldiers who fight it, without being against the military?
And Apocalypse, drawing from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, is about the evil that lurks within everyone’s heart – the sinful nature of mankind, etc. A very Christian sentiment, no? Conrad’s novel was set in the Belgian Congo and had to do with ivory hunters, not soldiers. Coppola’s Apocalypse was – like Atwood’s recasting of an unfamiliar situation into familiar terms – a recasting of Conrad’s exploration of the sinfulness of man into familiar, modern terms – the Vietnam War, which likely resonated more with modern audiences than would have Leopold’s Congo.
But here’s part of the issue: I don’t go to see movies like Lions for Lambs because they look awful. I don’t want to see overtly political movies because I don’t want to see movies used for political purposes, ie, propaganda. But if you’re finding anti-military bias in movies like The Fantastic Four, then I have to assume both that you’re predetermined to find (or hypersensitive to) bias. And, you have awful taste in movies. Fantastic Four? No thanks.
“Two volcano movies in the same summer. Two mass-extinction by impact movies in the same summer (one by asteroid, the other by comet). Two alien invasion movies the same summer. 99% of vampire movies treat vampirism as a disease which renders its victims allergic to ultraviolet light, rather than the historical idea of demonically-possessed corpses who were less powerful in sunlight due to its symbolic connection to life.”
Two words: “cashing in.”
No, wait, more than two words: spend less time worrying about the technical details of vampire movies and spend more time enjoying movies. Seriously, “99% of vampire movies treat vampirism as a disease which renders its victims allergic to ultraviolet light, rather than the historical idea of demonically-possessed corpses who were less powerful in sunlight due to its symbolic connection to life.” You’re seriously upset by this? I feel like the chances of meaningful dialog are slim.
“I’m not familiar with “Starship Troopers” being regarded as either for or against fascism–and certainly not in a subversive manner, which would require that fascism actually be in force in the U. S.”
Actually, I used the term “satirical,” which is not the same thing as “subversive.” While satire can certainly be subversive (in either a political sense or an artistic sense, depending on context), it does not necessarily have to be. So, no, Heinlein’s work can be satirically or subversively anti-fascist without fascism actually prevailing in the US.
“His depiction of the military had to be fascist and incompetent–as a beginning of the changes he made.”
Here’s a thought – maybe he just didn’t get the point of the book. Heinlein’s book could have depicted a fascistic military as satire (even subversive satire!) and the director could have just been a bad director and translated it literally, losing the satire (and subversion!). It happens! All the time! Good source material is butchered by bad directors so often that, well, I find it difficult to read conspiracy into it. Bad directors, writers, actors, etc, certainly outnumber the good.
‘“The Kingdom,” probably the best treatment I have seen of the subject by Hollywood, in the end turned into a moral-equivalence argument between mass-murdering terrorists and the FBI agents trying to stop them…’
Are you sure we saw the same movie? I recall a movie in which heroic Americans (and it was quite a cheerleading film, though highly entertaining) and heroic anti-bad guy Arabs found faceless bad guy Arabs and won. The heroic anti-bad guy Arab even got to die heroically and tragically! It was feel-good, all around. For one, brief moment, the bad guys were given a face and a humanizing touch, just to remind audiences that the bad guys, too, were human, though still bad guys – and into that you read moral equivalence? I can only conclude that you have a hair-trigger sense for moral equivalence, likely searching for it (maybe without even meaning to?), leading to some false positives.
The movies I like to see are the ones that – like all really good literature – address the human condition, namely: death and the search for deathlessness (yes, a Tolkien reference!). I was dragged to see “A Prairie Home Companion,” not knowing what to expect, and was treated to a rather beautiful, whistful two-hour meditation on mortality. I saw “The Last King of Scotland” and, besides a gripping tale of Idi Amin and Ugandan history, an exploration of being-in-itself versus spectacle – as exemplified by Whitaker’s line to McAvoy’s character that his death would be the first real thing he ever experienced. I saw “The Assassination of Jesse James” and, besides a beautifully-filmed Western, an exploration of the existential crisis.
All wonderful films; I recommend you see them and let me know if you find bias in them. If so, well, please continue fuming about the technical details of vampire movies. If not, I have plenty more to recommend!
Cheers,
some guy
some guy;
My blog actually started as a mass e-mail to friends and family while I was doing contract work in Qatar. I wanted a clever name, so I made a pun on the old Atari 2600 I won from a box of Captain Crunch in elementary school. When blogs came into existence, I simply transferred medium and abbreviated the title.
I have nothing against the concept of an antiwar movie; war is bad, and should be a last resort. I would wish, however, that Hollywood would direct its antiwar propaganda towards the TERRORIST WHO ATTACKED US, rather than those of us devoted (upon our lives) to defending America and her people.
What I am rather discussing is a “negative portrayal of the military.” I can’t watch Hollywood military movies, because the characters are always craven, conniving, bloodthirsty, incompetent, drug-addled, etc. If I’ve been in the military for 12 years, in two different branches of service, and I can’t identify on any level with any of the characters in a movie about the military, doesn’t that say something?
I did not say that I was upset by Hollywood portrayal of vampires; I merely pointed out, in reference to your argument that Hollywood cannot be viewed as monolith, that… well, it is. There may be hundreds of writers working for dozens of companies, but they’re all using the same ideas. Not constantly reworking old material into; simply copying off each others’ notes.
If you will re-read your post, you DID use the word subversive regarding Starship Troopers.
Ver Hoeven never read the whole book Starship Troopers. And, he was handed a faithful script and threw it away. That’s not “butchering good source material,” it’s ignoring source material in favor of your own agenda.
The last 90 seconds or so of “The Kingdom” are flashes back-and-forth between two groups, at the end of which, the advocate of each group states verbatim the same motivation for their actions in the movie. How do you NOT read moral equivalence into that?
“How do you NOT read moral equivalence into that?”
Could the director and writer have been suggesting that, perhaps, the struggle against terrorism is far from over, regardless of a single victory?
I suppose both readings of the movie are perfectly legitimate – how deliciously postmodern of me! – but I guess I’m confused by a reading of moral equivalence in a movie in which one character – a heroic good guy – says to another that he wishes only to kill the villains and nothing else, and is met with approval from the other heroic good guy. This, it would seem, is a powerful case against moral equivalence, no? That the terrorists are so despicable that our heroic antagonists, with whom we are meant to identify, wish to annihilate them?
And, again, I guess I’m confused: if someone wanted to make anti-military propaganda, would the most effective way be the production of a terrible movie that no one takes seriously and bombs and the box office? Either he’s a bad director who made a bad adaptation, or he’s a bad propagandist who made bad propaganda. Which is worse? Does either matter?
And, again, I guess I’m confused: if someone wanted to make anti-military propaganda, would the most effective way be the production of a terrible movie that no one takes seriously and bombs and the box office?
No, you could do it like Spiderman where the Green Goblin bad guy is a corrupt defense contractor using military equipment.
In fact, ‘corrupt defense contractor’ has definitely become a Hollywood cliche….
Some guy, can you even name a pro-military or pro-defense movie made in the past, oh, 30 years?
“…I suppose both readings of the movie are perfectly legitimate – how deliciously postmodern of me! – but I guess I’m confused by a reading of moral equivalence in a movie in which one character – a heroic good guy – says to another that he wishes only to kill the villains and nothing else…”
You are correct; that is a very post-modern view. Here’s the clarification: the statement rendered is not, “We will stop those responsible for this.” The statement, given by both FBI special agent and terrorist mastermind, is “We’ll kill them all.”
Not only bad law enforcement policy, but no specification as to who “them all” is. Add in the constant switching between the views of both groups, leading the same statement of intent by each, and the meaning is really quite plain. I don’t even need to interpret it in the context of all the OTHER “we’re just as bad as they are” nonsense Hollywood produces.
The answer to the dilemma posed in your second paragraph is referenced in your first: Hollywood is post-modern. Post-modernism, being a rejection of the values of logic, liberty, and personal responsibility of the Enlightenment, does not care for profit. It only cares about THE AGENDA. Hollywood will continue to take losses to push THE AGENDA, and will never run out of items on THE AGENDA to push.
It only cares about THE AGENDA. Hollywood will continue to take losses to push THE AGENDA, and will never run out of items on THE AGENDA to push.
Can anyone think of a Hollywood movie in the past 30 years with a Christian character in it who acts in a kind, decent, admirable manner?
I can’t think of one off hand, but there’s gotta be one….
Well, that depends upon how strictly we define “Christianity.” I found a list of 27 here:
http://lookingcloser.wordpress.com/2008/01/16/name-20-recent-films-the-portray-christianity-in-a-positive-light/
But to be honest, I don’t recall any Christian references in most of them.
-“Serenity” has Shepherd Book, but he’s never actually identified as Christian, and “Shepherd” is not a Christian clerical appellation.
-“The Exorcism of Emily Rose” has a weak, sympathic Christian and a vindictive, unsympathetic Christian.
-“The Name of the Rose” (I don’t think it’s on that list) has a strong, capable monk… but he’s a heretic.
-I haven’t seen the “Left Behind” series, but I’m fairly certain that they portray Christianity in a positive light… Of course, Hollywood in general deplores them, and the Rapture is heresy, canonically speaking.
But to be honest, I don’t recall any Christian references in most of them.
Nah…. But they were scraping for anything ‘cuz people want to see a movie that doesn’t explicitly crap on them and their beliefs.
I did enjoy the Serenity series–it was kinda “Libertarians in Spaaaaaaace!” but it was good.
I just wanna be not crapped on, not lectured to and not propagandized by a movie.
Like the pro-euthanasia movie “Million-dollar baby”–I heard about it and said “What?! Women boxing?” That’s not right…. Heh.
But for a lefty like Some Guy, going to a movie is like a fish swimming in water–they don’t even know it’s wet!
Great Muppets reference–and very appropriate! And, having sat on that side of the fence for my first 25 years, I can certainly affirm the fish analogy.
Hey, how about “The Blues Brothers?”
“I have seen the Light!’ 🙂
Am I hogging the board?
I went back to look at the list again… “The Nativity” is on it. I suppose I’ll have to go see that movie, now; I want to see how they put a strong Christian character into a story set PRIOR to the birth of the Christ.
Paul Verhoeven on “Starship Troopers” (from the Paul Verhoeven Fanpage
(horrors!) http://www.ghosts.org/verhoeven/starshiptroopers.html)
“The movie is in fact stating that war makes fascists of us all.”
“It’s difficult perhaps to accept in a movie that the people that are your
bosses, that are your government, that are supposed to be taking care of you,
ultimately don’t take care of you and care only about a war that might not
have been necessary in the first place.”
“It’s certainly also talking about American politics now. And so it is really
saying as we have perceived in the past twenty, thirty years that there is a
tendency in American politics that if people disagree that we would use power
and violence. […] Power and violence is always used at a certain moment
when things take too much time to solve in a democratic way.”
“We tried to find [actors] that were resembling a proto-fascist ideal.”
From Starship Trooper Facts and Trivia (same page):
Paul never finished the novel of Starship Troopers. He thought it was too
philosophical and depressing.
Well. I certainly feel silly for suspecting that there might have been some BIAS involved.
“Post-modernism, being a rejection of the values of logic, liberty, and personal responsibility of the Enlightenment, does not care for profit. It only cares about THE AGENDA.”
See, I really wish I knew how, but I just don’t know how to continue a conversation like this.
Well, if you take exception to my comment, you might try researching the history of post-modernism a bit to refute me. It’s as easy as skimming an article at encyclopedia.com or (less reliably) wikipedia.com. Alternatively, I recommend the following book (which will, of course, support me):
http://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Postmodernism-Skepticism-Socialism-Rousseau/dp/1592476422/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1202508294&sr=1-1
Or perhaps you could explain this other post-modernism with which I am not familiar?
Sorry; encyclopedia.com above should be http://www.reference.com .
some guy:
I have a written a brief summary of my position on my blog. Hopefully it will be useful in clarifying our difference of opinion, and will certainly be faster than ordering a book from amazon.com.
Some Guy – who is getting a lot more attention than he deserves.
I sort of agree with you. I would love to just enjoy movies for what they are. Unfortunately, I am continually sidelined in that effort by critics that praise movies whose only virtue is in fact their casual trashing og things I care about. Exhibit A – “American Beauty”. How many awards did that piece of dreck get just because it made military people look like homophobic psychpaths? Exhibit B – it was OK, but because it had the cause du jour of the time, transvestites, it was talked up like a masterpiece. We conservatives could go on and on.
Fine – this doesn’t bother you. Then disagree and move on.
Sorry I meant to name the film “The Crying Game” as exhibit B.
Exhibit A – “American Beauty”. How many awards did that piece of dreck get just because it made military people look like homophobic psychpaths?
American Beauty did that pretty well, along with trashing America in general and stroking the Boomers ‘do your own thing’ mantra.
The Crying Game was actually pretty good–cept I’ve been to Juarez enough to say: “Hey, that’s a dude!” in the first few minutes….
Futhermore, have you ever noticed that formerly fat bastard Ebert loves any movie with even the smallest frisson of gender bending?!
Look at his reviews–no matter how lame the movie was, if there was some element of transvestism or transgender, he just raves about it.
I think he loves the gender-bending movies even more than the anti-american movies….
Again, I’m not sure how to continue this conversation.
To wit:
First, I still have trouble with your interpretation of The Kingdom. The filmmakers took great pains to humanize the al-Ghazi character; they showed him with his family, they showed the growing friendship with and respect from Foxx’s character, they showed him dying tragically and heroically, they showed Foxx’s character interacting with al-Ghazi’s son in a scene that mirrored an earlier scene with the son of another fallen comrade, and so forth. And you read the final scene as suggesting that the FBI agents intended to…kill all Arabs? Indiscriminately? Really? That’s really how you read that final scene?
Furthermore:
“American Beauty”. How many awards did that piece of dreck get just because it made military people look like homophobic psychpaths?
This would make more sense if the murderer in that movie weren’t a gay man. That movie, as overrated as it was, was about the prisons we build for ourselves. Every character had built a prison for him or herself without realizing it – Fitts was a homosexual who was so terrified of being himself that he had built an incredibly repressed prison for himself. Joining the Marines was, for Fitts, quite obviously an attempt to cultivate the strength needed to repress his own identity through the discipline of the Marines. It failed, with tragic results. Look at the characters who were happy in that movie – Jim and Jim, who lived openly as gays, not denying their identities; Ricky, who paid lip service to the rules of the society around him, recognizing them as arbitrary; and Lester, who after meeting Ricky also tries to find happiness through freedom.
The fact that the villain of the story, if there is one (beyond the limitations we place on ourselves without realizing it), belonged to the military was incidental to the story. If anything, Fitts represented a failure to live up to the ethos of the Marines – he had joined for the wrong reasons and failed even to achieve his own goal of crippling self-discipline. To read into this story a critique of the military as being psychopathically homophobic would require ignoring the huge fact that the character was gay. Following your logic (that the filmmakers wanted the audience to think that all military folks are homophobes), you’d have to conclude that the filmmakers wanted the audience to think that all military folks are gay. Does that make any sense?
I can only conclude that either you are incredibly inattentive while watching movies, or very forgetful about the movies you see, or are so incredibly eager to find bias against you in movies so you can continue to feel like a part of a repressed, discriminated against group at the mercy of the mighty, monolithic LEFT that runs HOLLYWOOD and are postmodernists dedicated to THE AGENDA (the idea that postmodernists could have an agenda – individually or collectively – is sort of at odds with postmodernism) that you twist art into propaganda. You have lost your ability to enjoy art AS art; you’re so ready to find bias and propaganda that you insist on finding it even when it’s not there.
And, I’ve tried to make a case, but when you’re willfully misreading a movie as straightforward as American Beauty, there’s no real point in continuing to talk.
Some guy –
thank you for taking the time to seriously answer my reply. I think you are a fairminded person, but just don’t “get” something that we conservatives experience frequently.
Let me give you some more examples:
The movie “Good Night and Good Morrow”. McCarthy is shown smearing as a communist a young dedicated idealist. Problem: he really was a communist.
Syriana – shows that CIA is the real evil. The terrorist guy is actually an alright dude.
Munich – Israelis cutting corners in a desperate effort to catch people who have murdered innocents, and prevent them from murdering more, are equated with those same terorist murderers.
JFK – instead of the real assassin, who was actually a communist, a conspiracy of military and anti-communist cubans did it.
Countless movies where the real enemy of course is not the obvious bad guy, but some businessman/general/or right wing politician.
Pretty much any movie that has a Christian, especially a Southern white male one, with a large exception for the “inexplicably” overlooked fine movie, The Apostle.
Please name me one movie where Hollywood has falsified historical fact to make a liberal figure into a villain. I and the people on this board can name possibly dozens. To return to the movie “American Beauty” – making the neighbor military was an intrinsic part of its attack on the American dream, not incidental. Its all part of the same tired “people against gays are really latent gays” trope that we’ve heard so long.
Just for the record, I think gays should be able to live openly and without fear, as should anyone, but I am tired of having the latest liberal cause relentlessly pushed on me.
From your previous responses, I think you are someone who just doesn’t care about themes of any type expressed in movies, and that is fine, but other people have a legitimate right to care about them, especially when they are always biased against their beliefs.
Again, I ask you to really think about this. No response necessary – please find one movie where Hollywood has falsified historical fact to make a person revered by liberals into a villain.
Anyway, thanks for the exchange. I hope you try to look for and recognize this pattern. Once you see it, its like Waldo, you can’t stop seeing it.
Sorry – meant to say “I and the people on this board can name possibly dozens where history has been bent to demean conservatives and their values”.
Also, in rereading your last response I see you do care about theme, as shown by your analysis of American Beauty, but I would submit to you that by your own analysis, the movie expresses the idea that self suppression is bad. To some extent I agree with you that this is the message of the movie. This also a deeply anti-conservative idea. No one can function as an adult, especially a parent, without self suppression. Does this make us “inauthentic”? Yes it does, but it’s the price we are willing to pay to have kids who we love.
Anyway – I would welcome a Hollywood where any ideas are expressed freely, and awards are given based on merit, and both liberal and conservative, and everything in between is expressed. But it is not to be.
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I’ll defer to Roy Edroso, who has written about this problem with far more insight and eloquence than I could:
“They have no idea what art is. The closest thing to it in their universe is propaganda, so they assume art is just a species of that. (Sometimes they’re accidentally right, of course, but having no aesthetics, they cannot make informed judgements.) Therefore any work of art that contains something they find viscerally objectionable — in Kurtz’ case, acts of love that do not involve one man, one woman, and (it would seem) one or fewer orgasms — is analyzed and denounced as if it were a piece of legislation or a policy paper.”
http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2005_12_25_archive.html#113570942715024088
“Bell seems to think that artists have a moral (and artistic!) duty to promote conservative talking points; if a director makes a film that “asks more questions than it provides answers,” he is a coward. This idea is more Soviet than American.”
http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_archive.html#113616832562338963
“If he has made a political work of art, the artist may think he wants a political result, but his observers know better. Do you really think Oliver Stone made JFK because he wanted the assassination files opened? No, obviously he made it because he felt a deep soul-ache that could only be healed by mass viewing rituals in cineplexes across America.
…To [David Frum] culture is not a spring that refreshes the spirit, but a storehouse of destructive power to be used against his enemies.”
http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2007_03_04_archive.html#8799765862059070677
“Doesn’t it seem as if Anderson could never even imagine a person making a work of art out of pure love of craft? When he looks at paintings, movies, novels, etc., a little meter in his head calibrates each cultural artifact’s relative usefulness in the Struggle.
Culture War, these days, apparently means war on culture.”
http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2005_10_30_archive.html#113094636006492462
Some guy –
Sorry for taking you seriously, but you still can’t explain how a movie like “Little Miss Sunshine” gets roundly praised. Or “My Beautiful Laundrette”. You only think art is free of politics when it agrees with your own point of view. I watch lots of movies, and I either like them or don’t like them based mostly on their own merits. But, that’s all beside the point. You’re not really interested in seeing someone else’s point of view here.
“Little Miss Sunshine” got roundly praised because it was a sweet, though heavy-handed, little movie. It was profoundly about family – note that in every shot of the family pushing the van, they were filmed from the side, individually and isolated from each other, until the last shot of them pushing the van, which was shot through the van’s windows, so that the family members were framed by the window, together, having symbolically been brought together through their shared catharsis.
What, exactly, was objectionable about this movie?
This is for q2600 and his comments about postmodernism, since I am unable to leave a comment on his blog:
Oy. This is wrong on so many levels that it’s hard to find a place to start.
Well, let’s work with your misunderstanding of the term “deconstruction.” Deconstruction is an act of textual criticism – hard to define, it most basically has to do with showing that no “text” (no creation of the human mind) has a single legitimate interpretation, that there are no privileged frames of reference.
I’ll refer you to Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy, probably the best single instance or example of deconstruction. Derrida focused on a single word used by Plato in his Phaedrus – pharmakon. In Greek, pharmakon can mean both “remedy” and “poison.” When translators present pharmakon as either “poison” or “remedy,” they are, in essence, writing a new text, as opposed to presenting Plato’s text. They decide “what in Plato remains undecidable,” interpreting something that can be “read” legitimately in any way.
Foucault followed with his exploration of the “archeology of knowledge.” In one of his works, he presented an ancient Chinese classification system for animals. Animals belonged to such categories as “those that belong to the Emperor,” “those that, seen from far away, appear to be very small,” “those that are numerous,” “those that are mythical,” and so forth. Foucault set out to show that this Chinese system – as strange, arbitrary, and useless as it might seem to us – was perfectly legitimate. Animals could, in fact, fit into all of these categories as well as they fit into our modern system of taxonomy. Our system, though it makes more sense to us, is in no way natural or self-evident – it’s the product of one cultural milieu and, perhaps most importantly, it’s useful to us in the here-and-now in a way that the Chinese system was at that time and place.
This is what I take away from postmodernism: that there is no privileged frame of reference, that nothing must be taken for granted, and that nothing should ever be considered self-evident.
It’s obviously a much bigger “thing” than just that, but it’s a pretty good way of summing up something you’ve obviously only experienced third- or fourth-hand via writers who have an agenda, to denigrate postmodernism.
Instead, I recommend you start with the postmodernists themselves: pick up some Derrida, pick up some Foucault, and read the originals – instead of books about how awful the postmodernists were/are.
Oh – and “deconstruction” does derive from the German Destruktion, but even in this sense has nothing to do with “destruction” in the sense of destroying ideas, etc. Heidegger was an ontologist – he studied existence, in the sense of questions like: what does it mean to exist? What does it mean to say that a thing “is”? Why is there something rather than nothing? Does nothing “exist”? He believed that the words we use to describe existence had, since their origins in the Greek, fallen into misuse. By Destruktion, he intended to burn off the chafe that had adhered to these words (“to be,” “being,” and so forth) and return them to their original, pure, ontological meanings. Heidegger, though not a postmodernist, was certainly influential on them. I recommend his Introduction to Metaphysics.
Again, I suspect that to you postmodernism is only something you have experienced through the writings of people who want to denigrate it because it threatens them politically, ideologically, culturally, etc. You hate it because you’ve been told to hate it. Give it a try! Foucault’s probably the easiest read; Derrida can be almost impossible, but it’s worth the effort.
PS – Postmodernism wasn’t a reaction to the Enlightenment. It was a reaction to…modernism!
PPS – Even if some practitioners of postmodernism poo-pooed the Enlightenment, a phenomenon that produced lots of great ideas but was not without its faults, this does not mean that postmodernism is an attack on the Enlightenment or its values. It’s like saying that the actions of one or ten or even a million Christians are representative of the actions and thoughts of all Christians. There is no postmodernist movement or agenda; if anything, postmodernism itself would tend to prevent such an action from occurring, as postmodernism teaches that there is no privileged frame of reference. You can’t have a unified ideology or agenda without some sort of privileged frame of reference.
“Some guy, can you even name a pro-military or pro-defense movie made in the past, oh, 30 years?”
I don’t know how you can wonder this when Steven Spielberg – as evil a Lefty as you can get – has directed or produced such paeans to the honor and sacrifice of the army as Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers. But, off the top of my head, I think: Glory, Gettysburg, Blackhawk Down, Letters from Iwo Jima. and – if you can call it a movie, rather than a series of special effects – Pearl Harbor. They’re all of varying quality, but they and so many more like them are either incredibly sympathetic to the military, if not blatantly, treacly fawning.
If anything, the soldier-as-hero is one of the most common themes in American culture, and probably rightly so. For a movie like Full Metal Jacket to portray war for what it is – an awful, terrible thing for the people who have to fight in and experience it – is not anti-military; to show a person or institution as having flaws is not to be against that person or thing, but to be willing to humanize it, to portray it fully. Was Im Westen Nichts Neues/All Quiet on the Western Front anti-military because it had the audacity to portray some soldiers as stupid or cowardly? If being “pro-military” in the arts requires artists to portray the military and its members as flawless, as inhuman angels incapable of doing wrong, is to do a disservice to both art – reduced solely to propaganda – and the military – infantalizing it, denying its members the strength to stand up to honest scrutiny.
Some guy – explain to me how all points of view are equally valid when someone is stepping on your toe?
“And you read the final scene as suggesting that the FBI agents intended to…kill all Arabs? Indiscriminately? Really? That’s really how you read that final scene?”
I don’t believe I used the words “all Arabs” anywhere in my analysis. The closing words of each side were “we will kill them all.” However each side defined “them all;” both were motivated by a desire to hunt down and destroy a faceless group of people who had offended them. Had moral equivalence not been intended, the FBI agents’ motivation would have been to “get justice,” or even to “STOP them all.”
I’m trying very hard to understand your perspective (despite claims to the contrary on this thread), as witnessed by the facts that I’m here, reading this page and trying to engage in a discussion.
But despite my efforts, I’m having trouble understanding how you come to this conclusion without having gone into the movie with the presumption of being propagandized to. After a lengthy movie in which the filmmakers went to great lengths to depict American forces and their Arab allies as heroes fighting the forces of evil, and the terrorists as the nearly-faceless murderers of children and would-be beheaders, to conclude based on a twenty or thirty second scene with a total of two shots that the filmmakers intended moral equivalence between the two sides just…boggles my mind. Does the rest of the movie not influence your understanding of that scene? Is not the scene part of a larger whole, in which moral equivalence was absolutely absent?
I went into that movie expecting popcorn entertainment with a “current events” flair, and that’s what I got. You went into a movie expecting propaganda, and that’s what you got. I can only imagine you sitting down in the theater, thinking to yourself “well, hopefully the liberal propaganda will be kept to a minimum, and then being pleasantly surprised – and maybe a little disappointed – when none materialized. Until that final scene! “Aha!” you must have thought. “I knew it would arrive eventually!” In a movie that’s 99% cheerleading for America and 1% potentially questionable in its interpretation, you have seized upon the one moment of ambiguity as proof of perfidy – and I can only conclude that you wanted to find perfidy.
the FBI agents’ motivation would have been to “get justice,” or even to “STOP them all.”
After reading this, I can only imagine that you’d do well at Pravda. What else does one call the dictating of lines in literature so as to abide by ideological strictures than Soviet?
“Well, let’s work with your misunderstanding of the term “deconstruction.” Deconstruction is an act of textual criticism – hard to define, it most basically has to do with showing that no “text” (no creation of the human mind) has a single legitimate interpretation, that there are no privileged frames of reference.”
Which is to state that no author–including the authors of “deconstructive” works–know what they are talking about. Otherwise, the author’s interpretation would be the only valid one.
—–
“In Greek, pharmakon can mean both ‘remedy’ and ‘poison.'”
Not by any usage with which I am familiar. Pharmakon is a remedy; dilitirion is a poison. My ancient Greek isn’t as good as my Latin, but I think I would have noticed if had I been reading about the civilization which gave birth to Western medicine and they couldn’t distinguish between curatives and toxins. I haven’t read “Phaedra,” but I really can’t imagine a use of ‘pharmakon’ which would could be translated as ‘poison’ without rendering, not a new text, but nonsense.
—–
“Foucault followed with his exploration of the ‘archeology of knowledge…'”
I have had many arguments with Skeptics (the “capital S” group) trying to explain that systems of thought other than could be valid. Aristotelian physics, for example, can predict pretty much any physical event that would happen outside of a laboratory.
But that does not mean that all systems of thought are EQUALLY valid. Aristotelian physics cannot explain why a crumpled piece of paper falls more quickly than an identical, but uncrumpled, piece. Did the entire list of “animals which belong to the (Chinese) emperor” disappear with the Communist takeover? I doubt it.
Despite the fact that history demonstrates that the scientific method will probably be replaced with a better system of understanding someday, its reliance on objective, reproducible results makes it the MOST valid method of interpreting data available.
—–
“This is what I take away from postmodernism: that there is no privileged frame of reference, that nothing must be taken for granted, and that nothing should ever be considered self-evident.”
Despite which, people who disagree with you on movie interpretation spend their days “outraged by the shape of clouds.” I see.
—–
““deconstruction” does derive from the German Destruktion, but even in this sense has nothing to do with “destruction” in the sense of destroying ideas…”
But both the German and English come from the Latin. “De” + “construction” = “destruction.”
—–
“Postmodernism wasn’t a reaction to the Enlightenment. It was a reaction to…modernism!”
I believe that if you read my essay again, the sentence before “Postmodernism was a reaction to this” (and the theme sentence of the first paragraph) WAS a reference to modernism.
Does the rest of the movie not influence your understanding of that scene? Is not the scene part of a larger whole, in which moral equivalence was absolutely absent?
You are, perhaps, unfamiliar with story-telling. You have it backwards–the intention of that scene, being the last thing audiences would see, is to influence one’s understanding of the rest of the movie (not vice-versa). The purpose of alternating between two perspectives which had seemed opposed throughout the work, speeding the rate of switching between them as scene goes on, and ending with identical statements of purpose, is to show a point of identification between the two. In this case, while we had just watched 90 brilliant minutes of selfless herois in the face of nameless villainy, we are transported back to the very beginning of the film and find that what we thought was heroism was really just a desire for bloody revenge, indistiguishable (as demonstrated by identical language and rapidly-alternating between the two) from the desire for bloody vengeance by the terrorists killing kafir in the Kingdom.
Further, although the bulk of the movie presented the villain as a faceless evil, at the end he is shown as a crippled and beloved grandfather of beautiful children who share their toys with Americans. He is not THOROUGHLY evil, you see; he has been offended and is killing “them all,” just like the American FBI agents.
“…Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers. But, off the top of my head, I think: Glory, Gettysburg, Blackhawk Down, Letters from Iwo Jima. and – if you can call it a movie, rather than a series of special effects – Pearl Harbor.”
Well, that’s just a whole list of movies I haven’t worked up an interest in seeing (much like “Titanic”. FYI, I wasn’t going to watch “The Kingdom”, until it was recommended to me by a friend).
I did try to get some information off of imdb.com; interestingly, I found that “Blackhawk Down” was heartily recommended as capturing “the true feel of war” by someone who thought that “Top Gun” was “too nationalistic” and that the protagonists in “Predator” were “marines” [sic].
“Which is to state that no author—including the authors of “deconstructive” works—know what they are talking about.”
Well, sort of – Derrida was famously reluctant to ever provide an actual definition of what “deconstruction” was, despite being its “father.”
“My ancient Greek isn’t as good as my Latin, but I think I would have noticed if had I been reading about the civilization which gave birth to Western medicine and they couldn’t distinguish between curatives and toxins.”
Again, I refer you to Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy. He explains it a lot better than I could.
“But that does not mean that all systems of thought are EQUALLY valid.”
Of course not, and I never suggested it did.
“Despite the fact that history demonstrates that the scientific method will probably be replaced with a better system of understanding someday, its reliance on objective, reproducible results makes it the MOST valid method of interpreting data available.”
No, it doesn’t. The scientific method is certainly the most valid within the context of modern civilization, and it certainly produces results, but results don’t confer “legitimacy.” Foucault’s point was: in the context of ancient Chinese society, their taxonomy of animals was as valid as our modern taxonomy is to ours. It was internally logical (all animals can be logically placed into those categories) and was useful in that context (it produced far more useful results to the ancient Chinese than could have our modern taxonomy based on genetic relationships and evolutionary descent). That is: you can’t decontextualize systems of knowledge.
Take, for example, the modern IQ test: a much cited criticism in recent years has been that modern IQ tests don’t test inherent intelligence, but rather familiarity with modernity. A !Kung living in the Kalahari, for example, might fail a question in which he is asked to place a knife next to the object it most clearly belongs with. He would, most likely, place the object with one of the options, a potato, because he would use the knife to cut the potato. The “correct” answer would be to place the knife with a spoon. The !Kung’s answer is perfectly legitimate – it is logical within the context of the !Kung’s lifestyle and environment, and it produces results. He would get the answer wrong, though, because the question priveleges modernity – a modern American would choose to place the knife with the spoon because we live in a society of different categories, categories that wouldn’t make much sense to a !Kung. Neither answer is “wrong” or “right,” and neither system of knowledge or classification is better or worse than the other. Again: you can’t decontextualize systems of knowledge.
“But both the German and English come from the Latin. “De” + “construction” = “destruction.””
Good for you! Except that Heidegger was explicit, as I said, that he was using the term Destruktion to refer only to ontological vocabulary. His frustration with the limitations of every-day terminology eventually led him to coin entirely new terms like Dasein and so forth. If he was destroying anything, it was the linguistic baggage he believed had accreted around such terms as “being.”
Derrida drew on this to develop his concept of deconstruction. Like Heidegger, he wanted to return to the source material and remove all that accreted baggage, but unlike Heidegger, his interest was in demonstrating the inherent ambiguity in any text and showing that no one single interpretation of that text – no one attempt to reduce that ambiguity – laid claim to “truth” any more than another.
Again, I suspect you’ve only ever read about postmodernism by people who don’t like it; I recommend you try reading the postmodernists themselves for a change (since you’ve obviously given this some thought and effort).
“Further, although the bulk of the movie presented the villain as a faceless evil, at the end he is shown as a crippled and beloved grandfather of beautiful children who share their toys with Americans. He is not THOROUGHLY evil, you see; he has been offended and is killing “them all,” just like the American FBI agents.”
Ambiguity! Double-Plus-Ungood! Alert the People’s Committee for Ideological Purity in Entertainment!
If your litmus test for
ideological purity in propagandapro-American sentiment in film is that villains are never, not even for a moment, depicted in any way that might show them as more than merely monsters and that might humanize them in any small way, then you really are demanding that art be reduced to propaganda. Onward with the Revolution, Comrade!I think the essential difference here is that Someguy does not believe that there are “privileged” points of view, while conservatives do. So, to a deconstructionist, anything that does privilege a point of view is propaganda. To a conservative, a work that purports the absense of any privileged point of view is basically nihilistic, and contains the self-contradiction that it does in fact privilege its own point of view as the only correct and valid one.
One of these is wrong.
PS – Like I said, those movies are of varying quality. Spielberg has done three very pro-military (though not necessarily pro-war) movies/series: Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, and Empire of the Sun (one of his first and, in my opinion, one of his best.
Then there’s Gibson’s We Were Soldiers.
Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot is both profoundly pro-military and profoundly anti-war (as is Full Metal Jacket – both movies do a service to soldiers by showing how shitty their jobs can be).
Though I haven’t seen it yet (an oversight on my part), I’ve heard good things about The Thin Red Line. Just added it to Netflix!
The Patriot, another Gibson film and a total stinker, is about as pro-American as you can get (the British only lacked baby-eating and swastikas to really round out their villainy).
Zulu and, to a lesser extent, Zulu Dawn are, in contrast, rather pro-British Empire.
The Hornblower series is a rather ripping tail of the Napoleonic Wars.
Gallipoli? Gibson loves playing soldier!
Red Dawn! Wolverines!
K-19: The Widowmaker was a dour little movie, but interesting.
Ridley Scott: you’ll probably hate these depictions of soldiers, as they’re depicted as real human beings replete with flaws, but if you’re looking for more than propaganda, then definitely see Blackhawk Down, Gladiator, and Kingdom of Heaven (his best).
Um…I’m sure there are more. Start with those.
“So, to a deconstructionist, anything that does privilege a point of view is propaganda.”
False!
To one who practices deconstruction, or at least believes that the practice has validity, then a work can only “privilege a point of view” if the reader/viewer privileges it. Derrida’s point was that a work is ambiguous – a film can “privilege a point of view” (it sort of has to or…where’s the film? the plot has to be about something) but cannot be “read” in only one way.
It’s sort of like Sartre’s claim that existence is a priori meaningless until we give it meaning ourselves. An author might intend a work to mean something, but that doesn’t mean that a work necessarily “has” that meaning, and only that meaning.
But, then again: the conversation about deconstruction is sort of tangential to the discussion about movies. My point is: artists make art because they’re artists; it’s sort of a reflex. To expect (or want) movies to have as their Raison d’etre the propagation of a certain idea, and to privilege the promotion of that idea over the art itself, is to expect (or want) propaganda.
But I think that is the essence of the difference here. Traditionalists do in fact believe that there is some transcendent reality that extends beyond the individual.
Movies do in fact present their own moral universe, some context within which choices are made. When the model presented seems that it would lead people to make wrong choices – when it calls what is bad good and what is good bad, then I think it is rightly criticized. Stories are how we understand ourselves and our lives.
This disagreement goes back farther than Plato, so I don’t think we will resolve it here.
“I’m trying very hard to understand your perspective (despite claims to the contrary on this thread), as witnessed by the facts that I’m here, reading this page and trying to engage in a discussion.”
Actually, you’re trying very hard to shoe-horn what I write into your own preconceived notions of what a conservative MUST believe–as demonstrated by the fact that my “all of them” became “all Arabs” (among other points) in your rebuttals.
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“Derrida was famously reluctant to ever provide an actual definition of what “deconstruction” was, despite being its “father.”
I would posit that it CANNOT be accurately defined, because it is a linguistically nonsensical word based in a non-philosophy. Just food for thought.
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“Again, I refer you to Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy. He explains it a lot better than I could.”
It really doesn’t require much explanation. Just point me to the Greek/English lexicon wherein “pharmakon” is defined as “poison.”
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“The scientific method is certainly the most valid within the context of modern civilization, and it certainly produces results, but results don’t confer “legitimacy.”
Again, you are putting words in my mouth; I never mentioned “legitimacy.” Seriously, this goes a lot smoother if you respond to what people say, rather than what you want them to have said.
I’m not going argue the merits of ancient Chinese animal-categorization versus biological taxonomy. It is only one example in the basic argument of valuation: Every system of thought prior to the scientific method began with a particular view of the universe, and then described how phenomena fit into that worldview (which is why Chinese classifications were acceptable to Chinese people). The scientific method, per se, does not offer a world-view; it attempts to falsify individual hypotheses and constructs models from the results.
The models thus obtained can be continually refined–or rejected–by future experimentation, thereby providing better and better predictive data. This may not lend “legitimacy,” but its VALIDITY is pretty much a tautology.
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“Good for you! Except that Heidegger was explicit, as I said, that he was using the term Destruktion to refer only to ontological vocabulary.”
With seven years of Latin, “easy for me” would be more appropriate. And Heidegger wrote in German; “Destruktion” in German becomes “destruction” in English. “Deconstruction” was the result of Derrida’s combination of mis-guided attempt to deal with philosophy free from “traditional ideas” (that is, intelligible language) and a rather tragic lack of understanding regarding the nature of Latin prefixes.
—–
“Ambiguity! Double-Plus-Ungood! Alert the People’s Committee for Ideological Purity in Entertainment!
If your litmus test for ideological purity in propaganda pro-American sentiment in film is that villains are never, not even for a moment, depicted in any way that might show them as more than merely monsters and that might humanize them in any small way, then you really are demanding that art be reduced to propaganda.”
Again, with the bias. I have been trying for a dozen posts to explain that “The Kingdom” ends with a position of of moral equivalence; now that you finally accept that it exists (sort of–you use “ambiguity”), you insist that I MUST BE searching for some sort of “ideological purity.”
Please argue with me, and not your own prejudices.
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“…as is Full Metal Jacket – both movies do a service to soldiers by showing how shitty their jobs can be…”
Before we get into whether “Full Metal Jacket” was a pro-military movie, perhaps you could point out the SOLDIERS in it? I don’t recall seeing any.
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“To expect (or want) movies to have as their Raison d’etre the propagation of a certain idea, and to privilege the promotion of that idea over the art itself, is to expect (or want) propaganda.”
Man, Leni Riefenstahl would’ve LOVED you!
“My point is: artists make art because they’re artists; it’s sort of a reflex. To expect (or want) movies to have as their Raison d’etre the propagation of a certain idea, and to privilege the promotion of that idea over the art itself, is to expect (or want) propaganda.”
A further analysis:
First, even if we for the sake of argument accept all films as art… an artist depicts what he perceives. Just as you are continually coloring my arguments with your ideas of what you think I must be trying to say, an artist’s work will be colored by his own view of the world. In the case of Hollywood, the overwhelming majority of liberalism among producers, directors, writers and actors in that community means that the liberal mind-set will color most of their products, even if unintentionally.
Second, your argument rests on the erroneous assumption that all filmmakers are “artists.” If you re-read the quotes I took from the Verhoeven fan site, you will find that he definitely made “Starship Troopers” as a STATEMENT, and not as ART. So, in addition to the more general “liberal tinting” of most Hollywood products, some products are quite blatant in their bias. Coming from the most powerful media empire on the planet, this constitutes a program of propaganda, even if it is unintentional.
Whether it is entirely unintentional is another argument.
TimC;
Excellent post!
Ridley Scott: you’ll probably hate these depictions of soldiers, as they’re depicted as real human beings replete with flaws,
‘Cuz being a cosseted little lefty, you know all about being a soldier….
“Art is a form of adult play. We are an playful species – this is one of our great strengths. To oppose playfulness in the arts is dangerous – both the Nazis and the Communists tried it and failed. I think the artist has a duty to offend the ‘working Joe’ as you call him. It is the duty of the artist to try out new things. Many of them will be ugly or just plain silly, but out of them one day springs something wonderful and beautiful. You never know where it going to come from and you have to avoid censorship at all costs. If you attack the wildest follies of the art world, you simply create a boringly conformist society.
Of course, some of the posturing of the art world today is foolish in the extreme, and I hate it as much as anyone else. I deplore the lack of craftsmanship, and the loss of reverence for the ‘art object,’ but I will always defend the young artist’s right make as big a mistake as he wants because, as with all innovation, you never know where the next great art form will emerge.”
– Desmond Morris
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