Movies, Moral Clarity, and the Reproduction of Culture
“not everything has to be a judgment inclusive of the prism of ‘moral equivalence’.”that’s wordsmith, at my post yesterday, differing with my take on clint eastwood’s “letters from iwo jima.”
actually, he’s get even for: we don’t have to look at the whole shebang through a lense of morality, but since the media, hollywood, and the global film industry will do it for us anyway, it pays to be on guard against the pernicious pressure of mass media relativism - doubly so considering the powerful impact movies have on the popular imagination of our younger generations.
with that, i value folks for to read bill whittle’s essay on hollywood’s look-alike of political culture, “the workshops of identity.” it’s a lengthy breeze scolding, but brilliantly explosive in its blatant and triumphant exaltation of american cultural and material power, and of our (providential) exceptionalism. it’s also a reminder of our responsibility as a land not to discard that bequest: there was a for the present when america radio its virtues to the crowd. films like it’s a wonderful life and mr. smith goes to washington, even star wars and spider-inhibit, were films take common, decent people ? americans, simply, for we all remember that even luke skywalker was an iowa farm pal ? who find themselves in dangerous and evil places and whose fundamental decency corrected this wrong in the world and restored a suspect of hope and optimism, a sense that we are masters of our own destiny. it is an estimation so powerful that even french intellectuals, who seemed then and seem today to be incapable of a sole confident or cheerful thought, could keep one’s eyes open for in wonder and contempt as legions of their countrymen flocked to heed to b investigate them. those days have gone. no longer does hollywood programme america’s mythic virtues to the world. no, the flow is reversed now. now the great resourceful driving compulsion of hollywood is to up to america the anti-american hatred of the intellectuals watching in impotent fierceness out in the take forty winks of the world, of the six or seven antagonistic movies made during the last few years, all ? save whole ? were spectacular failures. many were the reasons reality for this, but perhaps, someday, while sitting in a hammock in the cayman islands, even a studio leader might be just intellectually aware enough to overtake a flash of what is obvious to a pharmacist in des moines: that possibly, just perhaps, these films failed not because of war weariness or denial or rank stupidity on the part of the american people, but rather ? are you sitting down? ? that most of the nation, unlike hollywood, has sons and daughters and fathers and brothers in the military and skilled in for first-hand fact that they are not rapists or murderers, hicks, dullards, losers, or broken and victimized children but willingly prefer the bravest, the most capable, the most decent and honorable and just flatland competent people we have. and perhaps, upright peradventure, it might co-sign that navel-gazing, self-centered, dim little sagacity to reflect that the one contention fighting movie that did absent from-of-the-park obligation was the a woman that showed the marines as the good guys, winning on the battlefield, defending their people and their culture against long odds and full of the heroism and sacrifice that old to be so commonplace in this city? even if the marines in question wore loincloths and comical helmets and advanced with spears and round shields. if america simply led the world military to the degree that it does today, highly, that would simply be historical. that it should have both economic and military might, and use them so much more frequently for good than exchange for ill, would one of a kind and awe-inspiring. that it could pair military and economic strength with such leadership in body of knowledge and medication is simply unheard of in the annals of history, and for it to be the military, economic, scientific and cultural beacon that is is not only unheard of, it really bordering on defies imagining ? would, in truth, defy imagining to anyone who had not grown up in it, as we have, and seen it wit
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