Will Hollywood change the political overtones of its creative products, in response to the 2010 Midterm Election results? Another very interesting and relevant Poliwood conversation with Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd on PJTV (9 min. video):
My prediction: Not a chance; the bulk of Hollywood’s creative and producer class seems too deeply entrenched and calcified to temper its sneering condescension toward Middle America (a.k.a. “Flyover Country”). Which should make the future very interesting, as alternative production companies like Declaration Entertainment potentially seize the opportunity to serve pent-up popular demand for America-positive content that formerly mainstream Hollywood seems content to leave unrequited.
Then again… Every time I feel I’m about to completely give up on Hollywood’s relationship with America, I seem to be greeted with one last glimmer of hope. Re-watching the spectacularly well done Iron Man followed by Iron Man 2 recently, I was delighted all over again by Robert Downey Jr.’s pitch-perfect portrayal of an unapologetic American inventor-entrepreneur-capitalist-hero-patriot. You see something beautiful, inspiring, and celebratory like that and can’t help but wonder, “Why not more like this?” But there it is nonetheless, even if it stands comparatively alone among recent movies, reminding us that there are still at least a few people in Hollywood who really get it about who we are and why many of us are so rightly proud of it.
Perhaps, as Simon and Chetwynd seem to conclude, the book isn’t closed on Hollywood just yet. It will be interesting indeed to see what comes out of Hollywood over the next few years, as ideas entering the production pipeline now start to reach audiences.
To Be Continued … ?
UPDATE 2010-11-25 (Happy Thanksgiving!): An interesting related article on the Washington Times website: “Hollywood Ending not in script for ‘Elites’”
In September 2001, I was living in Upstate New York (meaning, as the obligatory joke roughly goes, somewhere north of 186th Street). A little over a year earlier, I had heeded the call of wanderlust and left my rewarding but insufficiently purposeful and fulfilling videogame programming job in San Francisco to pursue my own entrepreneurial endeavor — the realization of ideas that had been gnawing at my restless mind for some time. The largely solitary research I then pursued being eminently portable, I was in the perfect position to relocate when my then-girlfriend, now wife decided to return to school for a graduate degree. New York state turned out to be the place, and the dramatically lower cost of living in the small town by the Hudson that we were headed for suited my purposes just fine. Lower expenses vs. living in Bay Area California meant a slower burn rate for the hard-earned, socked-away cash and investments I would be using to self-finance my project, and that was a very good thing — for what I needed most was time to think. We sold our furniture and non-essentials, and hit the road East for a new adventure. That was the summer of 2000.
Our first year of adapting to this transition went well, considering what a change it was transplanting ourselves to a quiet small town and the even smaller, more isolated community of the graduate art program. We had rented the upstairs of an old but satisfactory white clapboard house, for a price that would be unheard of back in California. We learned about heating oil and boilers and changing tires for the winter. We crossed a bridge over the magnificent Hudson River to do our weekly shopping. We visited historic sites that had been beyond the easy reach of our mostly car-less Connecticut college experience. We sledded.
I pursued my research, at the college’s libraries or at home, and strove daily to keep focus in my imperfect and occasionally uncertain, wandering mind. I had been on my own like this before (I will likely write about that at another time), knew that it would take all the self-discipline I could muster, knew also that if I didn’t persevere and give it my best shot I’d be driven mad by the road not taken, by ideas that would not leave me alone.
That year was also an eye-opening continuation of my first encounters with the Contemporary (as distinct from Modern) art world and the cultural attitudes and ideologies that have tended to dominate it, and a foreshadowing of many such encounters that would continue to this day (another subject I hope to write about at greater length another time). I had then only the first and faintest inkling of the bleak perspectives and frequent obsession with cynical cultural criticism that I would often encounter in the work of contemporary artists.
As summer 2001 rolled around, it became clear that our remaining assets weren’t going to last us comfortably another year at our current rate. Our investments weren’t doing as well, and I had underestimated some of our expenditures. I did some job-hunting, seeking to put my software engineering skills to use to generate some income for us. The suitable opportunities in that part of the country were few, and the prospects I did find would have required me to move on my own to Boston or Albany or New York City — incurring among other more practical inconveniences an emotional cost of separation that we did not want to bear.
In anticipation of my need to depart, my girlfriend had made arrangements to share an apartment with two of her female classmates who we had begun to get to know during the program’s first year. When August arrived and it became clear that I would not settle my job hunt before the time came to move, I was graciously invited to be a fourth roommate on a temporary basis. It seemed like a good arrangement, and it was at the time. None of us could have forseen the world-upending historic event that silently approached, or what it would mean for us.
On the morning of September 11th, my girlfriend and I were awakened from an otherwise ordinary night’s sleep by the alarmed shouts of one of our roommates outside our door. My girlfriend’s parents had called from their home in Europe, and our roommate had answered the phone and was relaying the news to us as she received it herself. I don’t know whether she was repeating exactly what was said to her, but I will never forget the sound of her increasingly alarmed words as she exclaimed through the door, phone in hand: “There are bombs all over New York!”
After hearing something so unthinkable we got up with a sudden start of course, and, like so many others that morning, headed to the TV with a great sense of urgency to find out what was happening. As the picture tube warmed up, in faded the scroll-by newsbytes, the solemn news anchor (I don’t remember which), and the terrible, haunting image of the North Tower of the World Trade Center bleeding a long, slowly rising plume of dark smoke. Reports were that a plane had hit the tower. Nobody knew why. Could it have been a terrible, terrible accident? How could such a thing have possibly happened?
We sat stunned and spellbound, anxiously awaiting each fragment of new information — even just new speculation — as the news coverage repeated and ad libbed in that early time before anyone had the remotest idea what had just happened, much less grasped its immense historic significance — that this was the sudden and irrevocable end of one era and the beginning of another. Hauntingly, the then-unexplained southward turn of American Airlines Flight 11, which was soon identified as the plane that had hit the WTC, had brought its flight path through skies fairly close to where we lived. I got a terrible chill thinking of its passengers’ last minutes alive, soaring past us down along the Hudson on that perfectly beautiful, crisp, clear day — surely, I supposed, not knowing the terrible end that awaited them in Lower Manhattan.
Then something still more unthinkable happened that, impossibly enough, shocked us out of the shock we were already in, and into a daze of complete disbelief and confusion — killing instantly any hope that this had been some awful accident. Before our very eyes, United Airlines Flight 175 flew into the South Tower.
As the impossible reality of the day’s events sank in, it gradually became clear to me: Our country and its people had been attacked. And in the slow dawning of that terrible realization through the coming hours — hours that brought with them the crashing of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 and its heroic passengers in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and complete uncertainty about what else might still be in store — both a terrible fury and a somber determination welled up in me. Things were going to be different now. They had to be. I was sure that we would snap out of our useless, toxic gloom of cultural self-doubt, drop our idle infighting over comparatively trivial disagreements, identify those who sought to cause us all such terrible harm, and go after them with swift and united resolve — unequivocally removing their capacity to mount further attacks, and never again allowing such a thing to happen.
The terrible events of September 11th changed me, and seemed to mark what I was sure would be a watershed, a tectonic shift for our entire country, and for the world. I assumed 9/11 had had a similar effect on everyone I knew. I was soon to find out just how mistaken I was in that assumption.
It wasn’t long before the self-recrimination began to flow from those around me, first in a trickle, then more and more freely as the days went by. Didn’t you know, we had it coming? Probably deserved it, even. Of course, we’re going to jump the gun and blame The Arabs, while those responsible were probably homegrown fanatics of our own making. (Oklahoma City was still fairly fresh in everyone’s mind then.) People who looked Middle-Eastern were of course going to be targets of random mob violence on a massive scale, and/or rounded up and put in internment camps, because — don’t you know? — that’s just the kind of unsophisticated, “jingoistic”, racist simpleton bumpkins we Americans are.
“I can’t believe what I am hearing in this house,” I finally declared after perhaps two or three days of this. How could anyone begin to rationalize and justify such malicious horror — the deliberate, premeditated flying of aircraft full of people into buildings full of people — the vicious mass murder of so many?
At this, our roommate who had answered the phone on the morning of 9/11 shot back unhesitatingly in a dead-serious fury: “America mass-murders every day!”
I’m quite certain that my jaw dropped in dumbfounded astonishment. I was stunned — flummoxed beyond any ability to comprehend and respond to the concentrated vitriol that had just reached my ears, particularly in light of all that had just happened. The cognitive dissonance left me frozen in my tracks, speechless. I held no pretension that our nation’s history was flawless and unmarred, but surely this degree of venomous contempt was not deserved. (During my visit for the program’s graduation the following Spring, the same roommate quite casually announced — in much the same way that one might express delight in the discovery of a new favorite ice cream flavor — “I think I’m a Marxist.” Well, there you go. At least she’s not affiliating herself with mass murderers.)
I might have been able to dismiss such occurrences had they remained confined to our household. I soon learned, however, that the decay afflicting our culture’s self-image was (and still is) much more extensive and persistent than I had realized. All around me in this academic setting, the primary concern seemed to be not how we were going to win this one or what despicable monsters the attackers were, but what unjustifiably terrible things the United States was now likely to do. Mass e-mails expressing American resolve to stand up and fight back, of the kind that commonly circulated back then, were derided. The then-ubiquitous U.S. flags that flew from car antennas and windows were greeted with a disapproving roll of the eyes. The increasing prevalence of the same flags on commercial products was derided too, consistent with a worldview that holds commerce to be something outside of us that manipulates us, rather than an expression of and by us, an integral and vital part of our own culture that was simply reflecting the defiant, heartfelt pride and determination to go on that many authentically felt. In response to my despairing expression of incomprehension at such horrific and vicious attacks, another of my girlfriend’s classmates referred me to a website that he gently assured me explained it all. And that it did — through the grim and twisted lens of Chomsky-ite faith in America the Ugly and Brutal, and her innumerable (or perhaps enumerable) sins that made us deserving of the world’s contempt and such a hateful, murderous surprise attack.
This kind of thing continued in various other forms, until I gradually got the message that I was very, very alone in my thoughts and views. Even my girlfriend didn’t know what to make of my behavior, and was disturbed by my words and my anger, and the uncomfortable living situation they created for us. As the gloom of that realization and of that climate of cultural self-recrimination encircled me, I withdrew, holed up, and learned to keep my thoughts largely to myself. I had not at that point gotten wind of the budding “blogosphere”, much less managed to find solace in writers who felt as I did. I felt utterly and completely alone. I had to save myself, I concluded — to get out of an environment where I felt trapped and poisoned — but my remaining resources were by then very limited, and I had made the mistake of letting myself become financially dependent on what had become a very deeply psychologically bad situation for me. Gathering my last reserves of embattled optimism, I redoubled my job-hunting efforts. An attractive offer came in from my previous employer in February. I came very close to taking it, but my own need for self-rescue was not the only factor in play. My girlfriend was paddling hard against the proverbial current to finish her graduate degree, and needed me there for moral support. I stayed a while longer, keeping my feelers out for other, possibly more local job opportunities. Eventually another offer came from California, and with our savings dwindling and only a little over a month now left to go in the graduate program, I took it.
The fresh start did me good — being wanted, needed enough to be moved across the country by my new employer certainly helped to pick up my spirits. But I was still under the weight of a terrible gloom, still reeling from what I had been through and could not stop thinking about. I have an indelible image in my mind of sitting outside at lunch, looking up at a company building against a clear blue California sky — feeling simultaneously grateful to have a handle on my life and surroundings again, and somber with the weight of memories and thoughts I couldn’t shake.
At the program’s graduation ceremony in May of 2002, which I returned to attend, the college’s president followed his expression of sympathy for the 9/11 victims and their families with an expression of his profound shame at being an American in these times — for which, to my astonishment and disgust, he was roundly applauded and cheered. It took all my self control and decorum not to hiss and boo at this display of insular, ungrateful, self-righteous pontification.
Those who’ve kept track of the post-9/11 timeline will recall: Our nation’s response was still confined to the war in Afghanistan, back then.
I held my tongue. This day belonged to the hard-fought achievements of those who were being awarded their degrees, my girlfriend among them, and I did not want my own self-indulgence to detract from that. If only the college president had felt the same. Apparently, either no one objected, or they were just as silent about it as I was.
Prior to the events of September 11th, 2001, I had developed an awareness of our gloomy climate of cultural self-doubt, idle self-recrimination, and intellectually fashionable college campus radicalism — first with startled dismay, then with grim resignation — and naïvely supposed that the appearance of some new, bona fide external threat would eventually wake us out of our idle funk. In hindsight, I could not have been more mistaken. The roots of our cultural self-distrust run far, far deeper than I had ever dared suppose, casting our future as a country, culture, and civilization into serious doubt. To this day, I find myself deeply troubled by the question of what, if anything, we can do to recover from the sad state we seem to be stuck in, and for all my usual optimism I find it hard to imagine a day when I won’t have cause for such worry.
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I have a bad habit of responding to e-mails that I should probably just let slide, as I did again yesterday when this YouTube video was enthusiastically recommended by a relative as “brilliant”. Below is my [diplomatic but fairly direct] reply. Is it just me, or does the tone of this thing bother anyone else?
Thought-provoking video!
I like the clever trick of reversing the words, but it’s hard for me to know what to make of the content, since it seems deeply cynical about the way things are now, and the priorities it appears to disparage are in many ways my own. Both work, as a means of achieving and striving to advance one’s art, and family life are important to me, in balance. Do I have to choose only one? (Interesting that the narrator’s voice sounds female; I wonder, would some object to the seeming implication that she should choose family life over work as the approved-of right thing?) Further, does choosing to focus my considerable efforts on my own life’s aspirations and my family’s well-being and happiness, instead of in some public sector endeavor (is that the implication of “changing the world”?), really make me “apathetic” and “lethargic”? I do not feel “lost” at all, but very much in my element doing exactly what I want and need to be doing, and what is also most likely to contribute something useful to the world.
Money isn’t the most important thing, but it’s a useful means of exchange, and a seemingly indispensible means to an end of achieving the life one wants. Maybe put differently, it certainly isn’t the most important thing … until one doesn’t have enough of it — then it can of course become painfully important. Family comes before money for money’s sake, to be sure, but it would hard to raise a family and realize one’s hopes for them without some measure of it.
I also think we can become better caretakers of the planet without having to beat ourselves up excessively over the things we do and the resources we use to do them. (Seems almost like the ideas of original sin, guilt, and the need to atone for our perceived offenses are deeply embedded in the human mind, even when not expressed in a religious context?) I like the aspiration to do things better and more wisely and efficiently, but that kind of gloomy approach always bothers me.
I do generally agree, and have said so before myself, that many of the essential ingredients of true happiness come from within. Maybe that is the key take-home point that I’m missing in getting hung up on all the rest leading up to it? If nothing else, hearing another’s perspective articulated can help to clarify things one takes for granted about one’s own. Thanks for the interesting video!
I think there’s more troublesome stuff in this that I missed commenting on too. The implication of “work”, for example, seems to be of something that takes unreasonably from one without giving back, rather than being an opportunity to pursue genuinely worthwhile goals and ambitions that produce reward (monetary, spiritual, and in my field technological) for yourself and others.
Guess I’m just glad I’m nowhere near that cynical?
Update: I just noticed that the creator of this clip is apparently still in college, so presumably hasn’t experienced having a career of any kind yet, let alone a fulfilling one. Maybe that explains the focus on money issues instead of achievement and fulfillment?
I have more writing in mind that I hope to get to, including posting some brief post-election thoughts that I’ve been mulling over. Meanwhile, I’ve been occupied by the flood of particularly worthy and interesting writing by others that the election seems to have prompted. Following are some highlights that I’ve bookmarked with the intention of pointing them out, including some sober and probably sorely needed self-assessment from libertarian/conservative thinkers:
WSJ: Same Old Berlin Wall
One benefit of a Democratic Presidency is that it will expose the myth that U.S. disagreements with our nations are all the fault of the Bush Administration. Take the failure of NATO, and especially Germany, to supply more troops for the war in Afghanistan.
…
The Continent’s free-riding on U.S. security while criticizing the way that security is provided predates the Bush Administration and will outlive it. President Bush has mainly provided Europeans with an excuse for refusing the kind of cooperation they’d rather not provide anyway. Mr. Obama has promised a multilateral surge of troops into the Afghanistan-Pakistan front. He may find, like Mr. Bush, that most of those troops will have to be American.
James Lileks reminisces in “SuddenlyEnlightenedLand”:
Hey, remember after 2004, when the interior of the country was viewed with deep suspicion for its insufficient interest in a John Kerry presidency? Crude maps called it JESUSLAND, a place opposed to liberty and education. Well, shuck my corn and call me Orville: the red part of the country has been reduced to something that looks like a mild case of contact dermatitis.
The solid block of flyover Christiansts who spend every Sunday hopping up and down so they can get a head start on the Rapture appears to have turned into enlightened change-agent lightwalkers, and in a mere four years. Or, the people in the middle of the country weren’t all weirdoes who still harbored a grudge against the Renaissance, and viewed the coasts as they were greedy remoras fastened on the Real America. In any case, no one will make mocking maps of them now.
I remember well the mocking of “Jesusland” that immediately followed the 2004 election, from the supposed standard-bearers of “tolerance” and “diversity”. It was one of the experiences that helped clarify for me that only certain kinds of diversity are to be embraced and celebrated in the contemporary multicultural order, and that certain utterances get an exception from the usual concerns about “hate speech”. I felt deeply ashamed of fellow Californians who I saw engaging in this disparagement of their countrymen, this tarring with a broad brush of stereotypes that would surely be condemned if applied to any other culture or group of people. The sight of a “Can we secede yet?” sign enthusiastically brandished at a San Francisco protest that broke out after the election filled me with gloom and despair. I heard people on the left threaten both before and after the election that they would leave the United States — move to Canada, Europe, or some other such haven of decency — if Bush were to win (or “steal”?) a second term. I heard the same threat repeated again before this year’s election, both from celebrities such as Susan Sarandon and from others around me. Katie Granju had a good response to that kind of talk, I think:
[I]f your civic investment in American democracy is so weak that it hinges on one single candidate or issue or election, then you probably would be happier elsewhere anyway…
As for the outcome of those threats/promises back in 2004, I feel entitled to complain that of all those who vehemently insisted that they were leaving the country, not one of them has sent me a postcard. Because they’re all still here!
Lileks continues:
The lesson, as always, is that things change. Things will change again. And I expect that the GOP leadership will conclude that since things do change, they can sit back and wait for it to happen again. Which is a recipe for ensuring that the next such map has a thin red line like the one you used to use to open a Band-Aid.
There does seem to be a risk of taking political pendulum swings for granted. Pendulums can get stuck, you know.
More from Lileks in “Monday delights” (see the original post for the accompanying graphic):
Conservatives cannot help but be saddened and left out – the only possible event that could lift their spirits right now would be a headline that said REAGAN, BACK FROM THE DEAD, EATS BIN LADEN AND CRAPS TAX CUT, but pictures like this reminds the right that no one was ever this happy about Bush, even when the love was at its zenith. No one put him with George, Abe and Frank before he took office. Really, he was just The Next Guy, a caretaker in a post-history world. People forget how much “compassionate conservativism” stuck in the craw back then; the party’s own standard-bearer modified the terms in a way that managed to insult, mischaracterize, apologize, and reshape the debate all at once. It would be like a Democrat running on a program of “Logical Liberalism,” and not knowing why his own followers found the catch-phrase unhelpful.
Anyway. There are rumors of new Executive Decrees, which include magic Federal dollars for stem-cell research that uses human embryos – if you have any objections, you hate science – and a ban on domestic drilling and nat-gas exploration in public lands in Utah. (If you have any objections, you hate the environment.) The two form a nice mirror image: the former was a ban put in place to preserve a particular definition of human life; the latter is a ban lifted to preserve the environment. Again, it’s understandable: we only have one Utah, but we can always make more people. As long as they don’t live in Utah.
Will executive unilateralism remain a bad thing, a threat to our rights, or suddenly gain favor with old critics? Hmmmm. Cue the Jeopardy! theme. That’s a stumper
Mark Steyn: The Death of the American Idea?
While few electorates consciously choose to leap left, a couple more steps every election and eventually societies reach a tipping point. In much of the west, it’s government health care. It changes the relationship between state and citizen into something closer to pusher and junkie. Henceforth, elections are fought over which party is proposing the shiniest government bauble: If you think President-elect Obama’s promise of federally subsidized day care was a relatively peripheral part of his platform, in Canada in the election before last it was the dominant issue. Yet America may be approaching its tipping point even more directly. In political terms, the message of the gazillion-dollar bipartisan bailout was a simple one: “Individual responsibility” and “self-reliance” are for chumps. If Goldman Sachs and AIG and Bear Stearns are getting government checks to “stay in their homes” (and boardrooms, and luxury corporate retreats), why shouldn’t Peggy Joseph?
He’s got a point.
Along that line, a particularly sobering assessment from the inimitable P.J. O’Rourke: “We Blew It”. As I’ve said before, I generally part company with O’Rourke on issues of war (roughly speaking, he’s more of a “Big ‘L’ Libertarian”) but he does make good points on a number of other topics.
Tim Ferguson:
[M]aybe this is again the early 1930s, ushering in 20, 30, 40 years of soft socialism and cynicism about markets, a bent for the bosom of the organized state over the seemingly fractious pursuits of individuals. It did happen before in America. If hard times instead freeze opinions in place, then we may be looking to a long haul.
Short term or long term, what is to be done by those still enamored of an America “conceived in liberty”?
(Hat tip: Instapundit)
On a related note, Fred Smith wrote before the election, on Oct. 15th:
A world where economic interests are disenfranchised – indeed, even de-legitimized – is a world that will have little regard for economic – and, thus, indivdiual – liberty.
Accompanying all of this, fresh threats from a seemingly forgotten enemy: Via ABC News: Osama Bin Laden promising an attack that “Will ‘outdo by far’ the attacks of September 11” and will “change the face of world politics and economics”.
A promise that al Qaeda, in its present state, is capable of carrying out? — or just bluster? Let’s hope we won’t have to find the hard way.
