Conservative Cinematic Crankiness
In their never-ending, misinformed and outright false (but unfortunately successful) attempts at continuously portraying the media as too liberal, every now and then you’ll hear conservative whining about major Hollywood films, most recently such as Cameron’s Avatar being anti-capitalist and too pro-environment. A few years ago, some Republicans were criticizing Clint Eastwood (one of the few tolerable Republicans out there) for his Oscar-winner Million Dollar Baby as “pro-euthanasia”, as Eastwood’s character helps Hillary Swank’s paralyzed character kill herself. Now, putting aside the fact that that wasn’t Eastwood’s intent of the film – so fucking what if it was? Is there some bullshit conservative cinematic code artists are obliged to conform to if they want their films released in Alabama or Texas or something? It’s like these paragons of “freedom” are also the cinematic thought police. It think it also has something to do with jealousy, as overtly conservative films tend to bomb at the box office (see Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” or that stupid comedy skewering liberal celebrities that came out last year that no one can even remember). Conservative attempts at humor are usually pathetic, as well. It’s just hard to be funny when your guiding philosophy is akin to walking around with a 10-foot pole in your rectum all the time.
One of the more vile youngsters out there (as in detached-from-reality-whiny-typical-conservative) is the NYT’s Ross Douthat, whose columns are as torturous to read as waterboarding. In his latest whinefest, he bitches about Matt Damon’s new Iraq movie, The Green Zone, for all the usual, obvious reasons:
In “Green Zone,” everything is much simpler. “We” were lied to. “They” did the lying. The “we” is the audience, Matt Damon’s stoic soldier and the perpetually innocent American public. The “they” is the neoconservatives, embodied by a weaselly Greg Kinnear (playing some combination of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer and Douglas Feith) and capable of any enormity in the pursuit of their objectives.
Such glib scapegoating looks particularly lame in the wake of last week’s Oscar triumph for “The Hurt Locker,” the first major movie to paint the Iraq War in shades of gray. But “The Hurt Locker,” of course, was largely apolitical. Throw politics into the mix, and there seems to be no escaping the clichés and simplifications that mar Greengrass’s movie — and Robert Redford’s “Lions for Lambs,” Oliver Stone’s “W.” and all the other attempts to bring the Bush era to cinematic life.
Boo-frickin’ hoo. See the problem with Asshat (and similar critics) is no matter how it goes, one cannot polish the turd of the Reign of Bush. You have good people of both nations dying in Iraq because some neo-con pricks wanted to have some fun, and lied through the teeth to have it.
Interestingly enough, with the exception of anything written by Pat Buchanan, what little intellectual content left in the conservative movement can often be found at the American Conservative magazine. And Daniel Larison isn’t buying Asshat’s b.s.:
Yes, the problem might be that we do not have artists capable of rendering contemporary architects of a war of aggression that was based on shoddy intelligence, ideological fervor and deceit in a sufficiently subtle, even-handed manner. If only Hollywood were better at portraying the depth and complexity of people who unleashed hell on a nation of 24 million people out of an absurd fear of a non-existent threat! Life is so unfair to warmongers, is it not? Then again, the reason our debates are so poisonous and our nation so divided might have something to do with the existence of utterly unaccountable members of the political class that can launch such a war, suffer no real consequences, and then reliably expect to be defended as “decent” and “well-intentioned” people who made understandable mistakes. The unfortunate truth of our existence is that villains do not have to come out of central casting for comic book movies. They are ordinary, “decent” people who commit grave errors and terrible crimes for any number of reasons. Many great evils have found their origins in a group’s belief that they were doing the right thing and were therefore entitled and permitted to use extraordinary means.
Well put. The whole modern conservative movement seems, with few exceptions, hell-bent on bending reality to conform to its perceptions of worldview. Considering how far removed most of that reality is (with a few exceptions in certain parts of the country), they’re never gonna win that one.
