After reading this, Yglesias’s reviewlet of Funny People, as well as David Denby’s* recent rave, I wish that I could go see the film. Alas, I don’t go to the movies; I have kids. Anyway, it’s this line of Yglesias’s that caught my attention:
It also follows Knocked Up by offering a bracingly conservative vision of family life and obligation. It’s not a point of view I agree with, but it’s well articulated and done so in a way that’s divorced from the hypocrisy and petty moralizing of mainstream social conservatism.
What interests me here, beyond my own pathetic circumstances, is the question of how much more cultural traction conservatism would have if there were more legitimately talented conservative artists. I’m not saying there are none, mind you, but there really seem to be very few that can compete in an unfettered market of ideas, images, and songs with progressives/liberals/weirdos-like-Bjork.
But if there were, what would happen? Would the culture shift noticeably? I’m guessing it would. The easy test, perhaps, is to consider other nations where there are gifted conservative musicians, filmmakers, and authors, whose work captures the public’s fancy. Do such places exist?** And if so, what’s it like there?
* Who I still do not like. And whose opinions I still do not trust. And yet…
** Remember, I’m an Americanist. Which is to say, provincial. And poorly dressed.
79 comments
August 1, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Jason B.
Well, the conservatives do have Ted Nugent and Chuck Norris, two of our most respected . . .
I’m sorry, I can’t even complete that sentence as a joke.
August 1, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Seth
Another way of asking your question is would we have single payer health care by now if Clint Eastwood had never been born? I kinda doubt it.
August 1, 2009 at 3:51 pm
zunguzungu
Depends on what you mean by conservative, really. There’s a lot of play in that term, and while our pop culture is dominated by artists who are a certain kind of social progressive, there is also a tremendous strain of social conservative backlash to any kind of excessive progressivism. Don’t forget that America Hates Dirty Hippies, and Hollywood *especially* does.
Maybe it’s only because I’ve been reading Louis Hartz again, but I think he’s right that the United State’s cultural matrix defies the progressive conservative dichotomy patterned after the Frenmch revolution: in the United States, more often than not, liberalism has always been the entrenched status quo while conservatives are the revolutionaries.
August 1, 2009 at 4:01 pm
ari
Yeah, zz, I spent a few minutes trying to define terms — conservative, culture, Bjork — but then I gave up. Still, I think what I have in mind, and I’m not sure that it’s a valid question, is this: if we had conservative voices dominating our popular* culture, would that make a difference for our political culture?
Put another way, sure, the show runners** at the West Wing believed that Vinnick needed to win — before John Spencer died, anyway — in order to be fair and balanced. But we can nevertheless probably agree*** that popular culture in this country is produced, for the most part, by people who don’t self-identify as conservative. And that the art they produce does not express the values of a conservative culture. So, would it matter if the reverse were true?
* I’m really not comfortable with this nomenclature, but you made me do it, okay?
** Already a pretty conservative subset of popular culture, right? Network TV, in primetime no less, I mean.
*** Or not.
August 1, 2009 at 4:07 pm
stevenattewell
Curious, what’s the Denby beef?
And I always thought of the West Wing as somewhere between actual liberalism and Clintonist Third-Wayism.
August 1, 2009 at 4:24 pm
ari
Curious, what’s the Denby beef?
Boring, smug, self-satisfied, wrings the fun out of the movies.
And I always thought of the West Wing as somewhere between actual liberalism and Clintonist Third-Wayism.
I agree. My point was that if the West Wing show runners represent the right wing of American popular culture, that culture is probably not very conservative.
August 1, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Buster
What springs to my mind:
David Mamet–beyond the movies and plays, he’s moved into TV with The Unit.
The Donald Bellisario shows–from Magnum PI to NCIS.
The team behind 24–avowedly conservative and I think we can agree that the show captured the public’s fancy.
At least in the world of TV, I’ve never really bought this argument that the conservatives are pushed out.
Also, I had to wait to watch Fireproof as it was stuck in “very long wait” status on Netflix for two months. FWIW.
August 1, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Sybil Vane
I really do think mainstream TV – sitcoms and the 10pm dramas – are pretty conservative. Nuclear family centric, marginal characters who fulfill every stereotype about ethnic and sexuality-based identities, sanitized language and scare-tactics about crime and low-income neighborhoods. And while mainstreams films can be egregiously explicit w/r/t violence and sex (although much more rarely for the latter), they tend to fit pretty neatly within very traditional paradigms. Take Taken, for example, which I just suffered through and which is nothing if not a 2 hour romp through the myriad dangers of un-policed young female sexuality. Let your teenage daughter have a modicum of freedom and in a matter of minutes she is kidnapped by Ukrainian mobsters who, via their sex ring, sell her to some fat Arab on a yacht.
August 1, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Ahistoricality
Mike Judge’s work pushes a pretty traditionalist line, too, with a twinge of libertarian social ecumenicism (it’s not progressivism, so much as “leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone”-ism).
There have been shows with a more liberal bent, sure, but I can’t take the traditional “Hollywood=liberal” complaint any more seriously than I can the “ACLU=anti-Christian” complaint or the “Mainstream News Media=liberal” complaint: they’re tactical tropes which have succeeded in becoming conventional wisdom, but there’s no fundamental truth to them.
Mainstream cultural products are products and a certain amount of inventiveness is OK but views which go beyond a standard deviation from the national mean are going to cost viewers and advertisers and just aren’t going to get far.
August 1, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Martin
Not to take a premise too far or anything, but any comedy that doesn’t make its political bent a central focus is probably fairly conservative. So Apatow making a conservative-tending movie is just regular business as usual. I’m not objecting to anything or anybody by saying that, but a lot of humor operates by putting forward something “weird” that isn’t conforming to the norm and noting how it’s not resembling the norm. That’s how a lot of comedy works, it takes the normal for granted. Which is a bit conservative. At the same time, though, talented comedians are an imaginative bunch, and many of them might embrace liberal or “tolerant” politics — but the craft itself often tilts conservative.
August 1, 2009 at 7:39 pm
dana
Sybil beat me to it. I think we’d need a definition of what conservatives would need to have before we can tell what’s missing, and most mainstream entertainment comes from a very mainstream place. Parents are married (unless the show is about a divorce), dad works, there are two kids, good girls do X, bad girls do not-X, cops and soldiers are good guys, so is Jack Bauer, etc.
August 1, 2009 at 8:10 pm
ben
I’m sorry you had to sit through Taken, Sybil.
August 1, 2009 at 8:11 pm
jazzbumpa
Does art push culture, or does culture push art?
But we can nevertheless probably agree*** that popular culture in this country is produced, for the most part, by people who don’t self-identify as conservative.
***Or Not.
I’ll posit that avowed culture warriors (Bill-O, Rush, etc.) have some traction in influencing a mindset that gets reflected in pop culture. And, since there are great cultural divides in this country, that is a manifestation of their success.
Doesn’t art tend to be subversive of the status quo? Could it be that the relative lack of conservative art represents an artless conservative mindset?
Or am I all wet?
August 1, 2009 at 8:21 pm
ari
Sybil, dana, are you both saying that popular culture is conservative? Or that it’s being produced by conservatives? I mean, I’m ready to cede the point that the most middlebrow elements of popular culture — primetime television shows — are mainstream. But I’m not sure if you’re saying something more than that.
August 1, 2009 at 8:22 pm
ari
Oh, also Hollywood blockbusters. Those, too, are pretty mainstream.
August 1, 2009 at 8:22 pm
politicalfootball
It’s as if ari never heard of South Park conservatives.
August 1, 2009 at 8:34 pm
zunguzungu
I wonder if it’s worth getting theoretically slippery in talking about what we mean by “pop culture.” To wit: while it might be true that the creators of most pop culture products are not themselves self-identified conservatives, they write for an audience consisting of a great many conservatives, and since they take a lot of their cues on what is writable and what isn’t *from* that audience, you could make the argument that a great deal of our pop culture is written by conservatives.
Also, don’t worry about not seeing Funny People. I found it to be a draining experience, an incredibly long movie with an identity complex about what kind of narrative it wanted to be. And it never made up its mind, and wasn’t even that funny.
August 1, 2009 at 9:12 pm
ari
I found it to be a draining experience
I’m watching Rachel Getting Married right now, and it’s a multi-hour reminder that I can’t stand watching people embarrass themselves. I’ll happily trade you this draining experience for yours at Funny People.
August 1, 2009 at 9:18 pm
ari
Anyway, I’m willing to consider this post a failed thought experiment. When I come up with a working definition for all of the squidgy terms contained above, I’ll get back to you all. In the meantime, I need to finish writing this chapter. Again.
August 1, 2009 at 9:19 pm
Walt
Did you ever watch Happiness, ari?
August 1, 2009 at 9:24 pm
ari
It’s sitting right here, Walt. We just got back last week, and now I have to convince my wife to spend an evening with Todd Solondz.
August 1, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Matt
Lots of pop culture (and even some more high-brow type stuff) in Russia now is quite conservative in that it’s Pro-Putin, pro-authority, Pro-state and patriotism, etc. This is so in movies, popular music, TV, etc. Not everything, of course, but a lot of it, including big names with real talent, like Nikita Mikhalkov. (I kind of hate most of his movies, but he’s certainly a significant director with real talent.)
August 1, 2009 at 9:39 pm
Vance
I’m of the camp that thinks “poetry makes nothing happen”, and that politics in the normal sense is reflected in art (in the ways Sybil is talking about) rather than being driven by it.
Finding conservative artists isn’t hard — the trick is to find artists whose conservativism has mattered. Eastwood, for example, hasn’t done much, I think, to shape public opinion. The closest to a counterexample might be Dirty Harry (which, NB, he didn’t direct), a pretty potent bit of reactionary propaganda. Even there, though, I think it makes more sense to see it as a symptom and symbol rather than an agent of change.
To find a clear candidate, we might have to play (as it were) the Wagner card. There’s somebody who used the stature he had earned in the arts to change opinion — lending powerful prestige to a retrograde political current.
Doesn’t art tend to be subversive of the status quo?
No. The art that gets remembered may tend to be subversive of the artistic status quo, but average art doesn’t manage that, let alone subverting the political s.q.
August 1, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Ben Alpers
Vance beat me to Wagner, who I immediately thought of.
T. S. Eliot bears mentioning (though he never was pop culture exactly). But if we’re talking “talented conservative artists” he and Pound certainly belong.
Vance is also right about a lot of Hollywood conservatives whose politics didn’t much matter: Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper, for example. But I’d say that John Wayne’s and Frank Capra’s conservative politics did matter, though Capra’s populist-tinged conservatism was, for a time, misunderstood as a variety of New Deal liberalism (and some of the screenwriters with whom he worked were Popular Front left-liberals).
Certainly D.W. Griffith’s Southern conservative vision of the Civil War and Reconstruction mattered plenty.
Both the Western and the combat film, though not exclusively conservative genres, frequently represent conservative points of view.
The sense ari has that there isn’t any quality conservative art in America might have something to do with the vast quantity of conservative kitsch. Take the famous question of conservative rock songs. National Review Online did a justly belittled list of the Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs three years ago that was largely based on incredible conservative wishful thinking (the #1 song, for example, was “Won’t Get Fooled Again”). Christian rock, as far as I can tell, universally sucks. How many actually conservative rock songs are worth listening to as songs?
August 1, 2009 at 10:31 pm
Vance
Good examples, Ben. How could I forget Griffith!
Eliot influenced a conservative poetic fashion. There’s a book of lectures, “After Strange Gods”, that advocates e.g. “homogeneity” in society, but it’s hard to find. Under his editorship, Criterion printed some things pooh-poohing the stories of repression coming out of Germany in the ’30s; but there was rather a lot of that going around, I think.
Pound’s conservatism was too nutty to influence many. I read on Mark Scroggins’s blog about recent research on how his supporters after the war pushed his political writing to the margins — New Directions wouldn’t touch it, so he resorted to (yes) Regnery.
August 1, 2009 at 11:08 pm
teofilo
Not to take a premise too far or anything, but any comedy that doesn’t make its political bent a central focus is probably fairly conservative.
I’ve heard this before (though I forget where), and it makes sense. Goes back a long way, too. The attitude toward Athenian society expressed by Aristophanes is quite conservative.
Mike Judge’s work pushes a pretty traditionalist line, too, with a twinge of libertarian social ecumenicism (it’s not progressivism, so much as “leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone”-ism).
Judge is an interesting case. Many of his characters certainly have that worldview, but I’m not sure how much of it can be attributed to Judge himself. King of the Hill has always struck me as having a subtle but pervasive sense of moral and political ambiguity about it.
August 1, 2009 at 11:59 pm
ben
There are presumably artistic moods (relativized to certain media or artworlds) in which art, to be successful, has to gesture at undermining the political status quo, but precisely because of that mood, it’s unlikely actually to undermine much of anything.
Nevertheless, Vance’s camp, that poetry changes nothing, seems likely only to be accurate if it’s taken as a law rather than a true generalization; i.e., if a work’s changing something makes it not “poetry” (here, I take it, standing in for anything that merits the term “art” in its honorific sense).
August 2, 2009 at 12:53 am
David
If you look at classical comedies, from Greece to Shakespeare, you find a rather conservative framing of events – there’s invariably some mix-up, or mistake, or deviation from normality, that is at the conclusion of the show resolved, and the status quo is restored.
I think that pretty well fits “conservative”.
August 2, 2009 at 5:34 am
Jason B.
Even though he’s only influential to a certain subset of pop culture, you could probably fit Orson Scott Card in this category, too.
August 2, 2009 at 7:19 am
dana
Sybil, dana, are you both saying that popular culture is conservative?
Well, we still need a definition. I probably would have said “aimed at suburbia” instead of “conservative.” There’s a strange mix of fundamentally conservative values (pro-perceived-traditional-family, pro-traditional-gender-roles, pro-unreflective-patriotism) with nods to contemporary liberal sensibilities. E.g., the princess in Enchanted really is a Disney princess come to life complete with annoying forest animals, but… she picks up a sword to defend her beloved. But the other woman really wants nothing more than to be a princess.
August 2, 2009 at 7:31 am
Vance
ben, I think Auden, whose line I was
misremembering (“poetry makes nothing happen”) was indulging in hyperbole.August 2, 2009 at 7:31 am
kevin
Did you ever watch Happiness, ari?
Todd Solondz can die in a fire. I absolutely despised that movie.
If you value your marriage and your precious free time, Ari, you won’t subject yourselves to a viewing.
August 2, 2009 at 7:38 am
Vance
Huh, I quoted it right, but then butchered the quotation retroactively in memory. I blame Bay Alarm, one of whose current billboard slogans is “Making Nothing Happen Since 1946.”
August 2, 2009 at 7:57 am
kevin
How many actually conservative rock songs are worth listening to as songs?
Conservative rock is practically an oxymoron.
You have conservatives who write apolitical rock songs (unless I’m missing the subtext of “Cat Scratch Fever”). You have apolitical rock songs which are appropriated by conservatives (see every campaign song appropriated by Reagan-Bush ’84 except for Lee Greenwood’s). But you have very few explicitly conservative rock songs crafted, sung, and marketed by explicitly conservative rock stars.
But country, well, that’s another issue. Toby Keith singing “we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way” is just part of a long line of self-consciously conservative country tunes — no, hits — that stretches back through Charlie Daniels’ “In America” to Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” to Hank Williams Sr. “No, No, Joe” and on and on.
(Speaking of Haggard and Daniels, it’s always fascinated me the way they switched roles over the years. In the Nixon era, Haggard was the Silent Majority spokesman while CDB was mocking the same people in “Uneasy Rider;” in the Bush era, CDB was in a full-on Toby Keith mode while Haggard was denouncing the war and the media coverage of it.)
Anyway, it seems if we look at country, it’s liberals who have always been in the closet. There have been a few outspoken ones (Kris Kristofferson comes to mind, but he went Hollywood ages ago) but some key liberals have kept it quiet. Even Johnny Cash in his final years demurred questions about the war and Bush, when a close reading showed he didn’t care much for either.
So the question here is … which popular culture are we talking about?
August 2, 2009 at 7:58 am
kevin
Oh, Ari — we’re planning an intervention over your abuse of asterisks. You’ve been warned.
August 2, 2009 at 8:08 am
Ceri B.
I agree with Ben Alpers about conservative kitsch. I’m inclined to be looser in my standard for art mattering than Vance, in that I think that a work that focuses and articulates an idea that has been diffuse and loose matters too. Providing the symbols and examples by which people think matters. By that standard, First Blood and Red Dawn are hugely influential in American conservatism.
I’m thinking about whether I want to suggest that American conservatism is just plain more entertainment-driven than its liberal counterpart these days. I think I do, but while recovering from the Pacific Northwest heat wave I’m not in a position to make a very solid case for it.
August 2, 2009 at 8:19 am
eric
Top rated shows in the US always include sports broadcasts and professional wrestling, Law and Order franchises, CSI franchises, 24, American Idol, and Hannah Montana. All pretty conservative.
August 2, 2009 at 8:28 am
kevin
By that standard, First Blood and Red Dawn are hugely influential in American conservatism.
Red Dawn, sure. It’s practically a Reaganite wet dream.
But First Blood? John Rambo comes to that town to find his former military buddy but finds that he’s died of cancer caused by U.S. military use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. He’s picked up by the cops solely because he has long hair, and is then tortured and beaten by the more sadistic members. The National Guardsmen are shown to be idiots and incompetents.
Not exactly a conservative message there about the military or the police.
August 2, 2009 at 8:44 am
Ceri B.
Kevin: Nonetheless, Rambo became a widely talked-up figure in conservative media of the time, well before the sequel, an examplar of what happened to our brave Vietnam veterans when the cowardly liberal establishment scorned them until finally they had to rise up and fight for what should have been theirs all along. The actual movie is wildly unlike the talking points, you’re quite right.
August 2, 2009 at 8:46 am
Sybil Vane
Sybil, dana, are you both saying that popular culture is conservative?
Yea, I’m basically saying that. It’s not fringey-birther-antitax-abstinence-only conservative, but it’s aimed at reinforcing the (patriarchal, capitalist) status quo. I think the question of whether the sensibilities of the producers/creators of these texts are in line with that is beside the point. I never understand all the right wing wailing about the liberal Hollywood agenda when a)nothing that makes a lot of money is actually liberal and b)the former is the case because movie making, and tv making, are guided by market forces. If crazy liberal movies where women speak to each other and characters don’t inhabit racist stereotypes were huge money makers, then yea, that’s what Hollywood would make. Which would mean it was responding to sacred free market forces. But the regular tv-watching demographic, the ones that advertisers want most to target, is, as near as I can tell, pretty mainstream conservative and so the shows cater to that.
All the bitching about the moral decay of popular culture is so maddening to me. I have never seen a television program where my value system is represented. I seriously doubt conservatives can say the same thing.
August 2, 2009 at 9:01 am
James B.
Subtext of First Blood: ungrateful, lazy, soft (liberal?) Americans abandoned the Vietnam Vet. Message? – “Support the Troops!”
August 2, 2009 at 9:38 am
ari
All the bitching about the moral decay of popular culture is so maddening to me.
You don’t see me as part of this chorus of bitches, do you? I hope not.
I have never seen a television program where my value system is represented.
Me too. And thank goodness. The American people can’t handle the truth.
August 2, 2009 at 9:43 am
DaKooch
“how much more cultural traction conservatism would have if there were more legitimately talented conservative artists. I’m not saying there are none, mind you, but there really seem to be very few that can compete in an unfettered market of ideas”
Well, I suppose we can argue ad infinitum as to who determines what is “legitimate talent”, but I should think that by YOUR definition (and mine too probably) “conservative artist” is almost an oxymoron because that kind of artist gets subsumed into “popular” culture where it becomes difficult to separate the wheat from the kitsch.
. . . and I’m surprised none of you liberal elitists have taken up Kevin’s argument,
“Anyway, it seems if we look at country, it’s liberals who have always been in the closet. There have been a few outspoken ones (Kris Kristofferson comes to mind, but he went Hollywood ages ago) but some key liberals have kept it quiet. Even Johnny Cash in his final years demurred questions about the war and Bush, when a close reading showed he didn’t care much for either.
So the question here is … which popular culture are we talking about?”
Country has always been basically conservative, but more importantly has also had an ecumenical branch (look who Willie Nelson has played with and the popularity of the “Oh Brother Where Art Thou” soundtrack). Granted it does not take kindly to outspoken liberalism in critique of government policies (witness the Dixie Chicks), but I often find its inclusiveness (aside from the occasional patriotic rants) refreshing.
August 2, 2009 at 9:44 am
Ben Alpers
The sequence of vigilante films from the long 1970s (beginning perhaps with Billy Jack and lasting into the ’80s…certainly including First Blood) are a little hard to characterize politically. Taken collectively, they seem distinctly conservative–particularly, say, the Dirty Harry films and Bronson’s Death Wish films. But Billy Jack was a hippy-tinged youth-oriented film in which the title character employed violence to defend Native American rights.
What is the political valence of a plot in which a private citizen restores order through violence in the face of corrupt authority? Well it depends in large part on how that order and the forces threatening it are defined and how the authority is understood. If the authority is corrupt because it is liberal–which is the Dirty Harry understanding of the world–the politics are clearly conservative. And to a certain extent any restoration-of-order plot would tend to be conservative (see the discussion of comedy above). But, on the other hand, at least since the 1930s, the American left has often rhetorically demanded a restoration of this nation’s founding revolutionary principles (see, for example, Gore Vidal’s view of history, or the Port Huron Statement, or the rhetoric of the Popular Front). Thus order restoration–a return to or at least final realization of age-old American values–can be a liberal or even left theme in the U.S. context.
August 2, 2009 at 9:55 am
Tom
How about we ask the opposite question: can anyone think of genuinely liberal examples of popular culture? This, I think, is actually harder to answer.
I mean, maybe The Wire, but that show would hardly be considered “popular.”
August 2, 2009 at 10:01 am
joel hanes
Whatever sheen of artistic merit John Voight and PJ O’Rourke can lend to conservative ideas is more than offset by average-lowering pluggers such as Bruce Tinsley (Mallard Fillmore) and Dennis Miller.
August 2, 2009 at 10:09 am
Charlieford
So, on the liberal-conservative spectrum, where would we put “Battle Hymn of the Republic”? Is it liberal because it immanentizes God, seeing him incarnated in the Union Army? Or is it conservative because it immanentizes God, seeing him incarnated in the Union Army?
August 2, 2009 at 10:16 am
Daniel
Curious, what’s the Denby beef?
Not sure. I like Denby although he seems to go easier on movies than Anthony Lane.
August 2, 2009 at 10:21 am
kevin
How about we ask the opposite question: can anyone think of genuinely liberal examples of popular culture? This, I think, is actually harder to answer.
Two words: Norman Lear.
Whatever sheen of artistic merit John Voight and PJ O’Rourke can lend to conservative ideas is more than offset by average-lowering pluggers such as Bruce Tinsley (Mallard Fillmore) and Dennis Miller.
As far as actual popular culture goes, P.J. O’Rourke’s biggest contribution is co-writing the screenplay to Rodney Dangerfield’s godawful Easy Money.
August 2, 2009 at 10:22 am
CharleyCarp
Kevin @ 8:28 — IME, conservative viewers are no more interested in the facts of their entertainment than the facts of their world. Hence, the conservative hero of A Few Good Men is Nicholson (for giving liberals hell) not Cruise (for upholding the rule of law).
Conservatives either don’t get or don’t care that the climax of the big scene is ‘you’re under arrest, you son of a bitch’ not ‘you can’t handle the truth.’
I agree with those above who argue that pop culture largely mirrors conservative values. But modern conservatives (a great many of them anyway) don’t actually care about conservative values. They care about tribalism. And this is much less well represented in pop culture.
August 2, 2009 at 10:33 am
kevin
On First Blood, I certainly agree. The film didn’t have a conservative message, but it had one read into it.
August 2, 2009 at 10:47 am
Ben Alpers
The definition of “conservative” does make a difference…especially whether it encompasses capitalism itself. Capitalism tends to transform cultural values. But capitalism is also central to modern American conservatism. A lot of culture, especially pop culture, affirms capitalism (and occasionally the social and cultural transformations that it brings about). Is this conservative? Depends on what you mean by “conservative.”
August 2, 2009 at 11:38 am
TF Smith
I think we can agree that popular culture in this country is produced, for the most part, by people who self-identify as rich.
August 2, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Sir Gnome
“But modern conservatives (a great many of them anyway) don’t actually care about conservative values. They care about tribalism. And this is much less well represented in pop culture.”
And thus the emerging cottage industry of survivalist products and separatist literature—especially in the Northwest, and most pronounced in the broader Palouse region.
August 2, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Sybil Vane
ari, I only think of you as part of the chorus of all the good bitching. Never the maddening kind.
August 2, 2009 at 12:40 pm
RobinMarie
“Eastwood, for example, hasn’t done much” — I’m in no position to judge whether or not this is true, but while we are talking about conservative entertainment I’m surprised I haven’t heard more (in general not just here) about his new movie Gran Torino.
I haven’t seen it yet although my parents have been pestering me about it for weeks, but my impression is that it is sentimental about vigilantism and presents the politically incorrect (read racist) old white male as in fact the true hero of all who suffer from the lack of law and order in America. If anyone has seen it, is this right or did I misread the previews?
My parents, in any case, seem to think it has a “great message” which apparently has something to do with how people are “too sensitive” these days.
August 2, 2009 at 1:41 pm
DaKooch
“How about we ask the opposite question: can anyone think of genuinely liberal examples of popular culture? This, I think, is actually harder to answer.”
Bruce Springsteen
Willie Nelson
Neil Young (okay, he’s Canadian, but . . . )
John Irving
Larry McMurtry
Jon Stewart
A Prairie Home Companion/Garrison Keillor
John Grisham
Maya Lin
Muhammad Ali
August 2, 2009 at 1:46 pm
kevin
my impression is that it is sentimental about vigilantism and presents the politically incorrect (read racist) old white male as in fact the true hero of all who suffer from the lack of law and order in America. If anyone has seen it, is this right or did I misread the previews?
I think you misread it. (Spoilers follow.)
The “vigilantism” consists of two incidents of a once-isolated white neighbor coming to the defense of his Hmong neighbors and his ultimate triumph comes in a form of self-sacrifice that enables the law to work.
The interesting message of the film is that the very racist lead character is completely estranged from his own flesh and blood — two weak, soft sons, their harpy wives and the spoiled rotten grandkids — but comes to bond strongly with the Hmong neighbors who share his values and his worldview. The Gran Torino is his legacy, and he not so subtly passes it on to the neighbor kid, not the granddaughter.
August 2, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Sir Gnome
I’ll sit through anything, but Gran Torino was the first movie in a very long time that made me physically nauseous. I would suggest seeing it for the sake of unpacking it, but don’t forget the paper bag when the epithets begin to rhyme with such self-appreciation and regularity that you could ride a bicycle across them. Which once again returns to kitsch, as a plot framed in such a way as to allow a mainstream viewer’s indulgence in hidden (racial) impulses, sandwiched between a tragic narrative to justify those impulses as-such. But it’s definitely an instance of not-so-much-the-work-itself but rather the community of people for whom it was made (hungover suburbanites worshiping mythical fifties homogeneity? the entire theater that night? the hot rod aftermarket?).
Other thoughts?
August 2, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Hal
“Alas, I don’t go to the movies; I have kids.”
I’m somewhat surprised this hasn’t gotten a peep of comment.
Do the two statements necessarily follow? They may fit your own circumstances, but… {shrug}
It may just be I was well-behaved, but I remember seeing Airport in 1970 when I was 7. Early (as we must now say) Woody Allen movies as they came out. Fiddler on the Roof. I know my parents took me to theatre at about that age, too — Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.
I don’t even think this is a conservative/liberal, “what kids get away with today” thing. Some kids are well-behaved; some aren’t. Just like adults. Again, {shrug}.
August 2, 2009 at 3:49 pm
kevin
I would suggest seeing it for the sake of unpacking it, but don’t forget the paper bag when the epithets begin to rhyme with such self-appreciation and regularity that you could ride a bicycle across them.
You were really that shocked by the racial epithets in the film? Most of them were ancient slurs that were almost comical in how outdated they were. To my ears, they were about as shocking as hearing George Jefferson call his neighbor a honkey or a cracker.
And again, the slurs weren’t gratuitous; they served a purpose to the characterization and the plot. If he starts off as a PC character — and thus, a completely unbelievable octagenarian — he has no bridge to cross.
August 2, 2009 at 5:11 pm
RobinMarie
Thanks Kevin/Sir Gnome for the varying responses — maybe I’ll see what I think once I see it.
August 2, 2009 at 5:59 pm
SEK
Ari! How long have you been back? (Says SEK, looking around to see if anyone’s noticed he’s been gone.) I don’t have time to read through all the comments at the moment, but as regards the post, I’ve hosted a couple of lively conversations on this particular subject, and I’ll let them stand in for whatever I would have contributed to this conversation. (By which I mean, whatever you agree with over there, I fully endorse; and whatever you find odious, someone else said.)
August 2, 2009 at 6:14 pm
andrew
Bjork’s entertainment career took off only after the Senate rejected the supreme court nomination.
August 2, 2009 at 6:20 pm
ari
Hi, SEK! I’ve posted twice (maybe thrice?) in the past week. So I’m not quite back, but I’m edging in that direction. I hope to begin posting a bit more frequently, perhaps even regularly, over the next month or so. And thanks for the links.
August 2, 2009 at 7:25 pm
serofriend
Bjork’s weird? I like Bjork, although I don’t quite comprehend all of her stuff. I’m going to read both books before I comment, but this kind of seems like a “business” meets academy issue gone horribly wrong. Assumptions, misinterpretations, and pride.
August 2, 2009 at 8:44 pm
Hal
I’ve liked Bjork’s chutzpah ever since I saw a TV interview where she held up one of her personal notebooks and said, “I have a secret code called, ‘Icelandic,’ so you will never know what I’ve written here.”
August 2, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Anderson
I’m somewhat surprised this hasn’t gotten a peep of comment.
Yah, is babysitting a thing of the past?
August 2, 2009 at 10:08 pm
serofriend
Bjork On Hunter:
“I guess that song’s about when you have a lot of people that work for you and you sort-of have to write songs or people get unemployed, you know? In most cases, it’s inspiring but in that particular song I was pissed off with it. I was ready for a break but it didn’t seem fair on the people I worked with at the time.”
Check out English lyrics and explication on bjork.com.
August 3, 2009 at 5:22 am
kevin
Yah, is babysitting a thing of the past?
Oh, you people without young kids are just adorable!
Yes, babysitting still exists (and thanks for the Wiki link to that obscure term) but a good one costs about $15 an hour where I live. Doing the math, a six-hour evening out — dinner and a movie — will run you $90. Many in the NYC area expect to get dinner and cab fare out of it too, so throw another $40 on there. That’s $130 just to pay someone to sit on your couch.
The cost of your night out winds up costing about as much — a nice dinner for two is at least $100, likely more given the rarity with which we do that, and a movie’s $20 without snacks or drinks — so we’re talking about $250 or $300 in all.
That’s a lot of cash to blow for the pleasure of sitting in an uncomfortable seat and trying to listen to a film over the sound of the idiots behind me saying “Who’s that guy? What did he say when I said who’s that guy?”
Plasma screen TV. Netflix account. My couch. Priceless.
August 3, 2009 at 6:39 am
serial catowner
Well, I’m surprised nobody has mentioned Kelsey Grammer, who apparently is conservative, and has created in Frasier a socially conservative “liberal”, who totally roasts liberal goofiness repeatedly- in a show with an overall story line that is totally demotic.
It also seems possible that some of us just don’t realize when our values are being represented. I really didn’t like Married With Children at first, and probably not too many commenters here would be happy seeing themselves as Al Bundy or Peg. Well, live long and prosper, if you’ve never had that “working in the shoe store” feeling, or at least a heartfelt “there but for the grace of God go I” analogue.
And really, since about 1983, whenever characters have sex, the woman is on top. We won, declare victory and get out.
August 3, 2009 at 7:47 am
Vance
sc, I believe the point of putting the woman on top (now that we’re past the point that it’s “daring”) is to let the guys in the audience have a better look.
And about babysitting, it’s not just the cost: as kevin says, it can get high, but that’s just metonymy for the complexity and difficulty of “going out” for parents of a family. It focuses the mind, and changes priorities — and for many, movies turn out to be a lower priority than we thought.
August 3, 2009 at 9:42 am
Hal
Actually, Kevin, from your description it sounds more like the issue is living in the provincial Peoria-with-bagels that is New York.
$20 for the movie itself — check.
What makes a “nice dinner for two” is a chacun à son goût issue, but Quicken tells me we haven’t spent more than $63 for same in calendar 2009 – and #2 on the list was $50. That’s with about 40 datapoints. I may not be Eric Asimov, but I like to think I can spot a good place at a modest price.
Whether one needs a babysitter in the first place is entirely dependent on the kid. Which was my point in the first place.
So I’d be careful tossing around certain characterizations without an awareness of irony. Because embodying the stereotype of a drama queen determined to needlessly peg the kvetch-o-meter in the red zone is fairly adorable, too.
August 3, 2009 at 11:53 am
andrew
The Simpsons seem like a fairly liberal show. Some episodes more than others. Of course, they’re also a show with a family who goes to church regularly. And Flanders has apparently developed a bit of a conservative following.
August 3, 2009 at 2:32 pm
jvhillegas
Just a brief two-cents’ worth of thoughts on Eastwood’s _Gran Torino_: I saw the film and came away thinking that it was the perfect vehicle (no pun) to deliver a simple yet subtly subversive message to just the audience that needs to hear this message.
The narrative arc follows an old curmudgeon racist who changes his ways because he gets to know and understand the ethnic ‘others’ in his neighborhood. This protagonist, true to his character throughout (and, thereby, true to white male working class culture in general*), expresses these changes not through words but through actions.
Eastwood’s message, in my reading, is that the old (white male working class) politics of this country that may have ‘worked’ in some other galaxy a long time ago just don’t work any more, and the hero is the person who becomes self-reflective enough to make a positive change in any small way. In my experience, such incremental shifts are the source from which substantive change happens, even though these accumulations are so gradual as to be almost imperceptible at times. For this, I laud Eastwood’s work.
———-
* Of which I can speak with authority, being of this stock myself.
August 3, 2009 at 3:38 pm
kevin
Whether one needs a babysitter in the first place is entirely dependent on the kid.
She’s twenty months old, so I’m pretty sure (a) leaving her at home or (b) taking her to the 9pm show are both out.
August 3, 2009 at 3:39 pm
serial catowner
Not the first time for Eastwood. He did one in the 70s where he’s riding around with a monkey, reading books and magazines, trying to understand the new ‘liberated’ woman. A feeling not unfamiliar to many men of the time.
August 4, 2009 at 8:08 am
Anderson
One solution to the babysitting problem is to form a pact with a friendly parenting couple who would also like to get out to a movie now and then — you swap evenings.
August 4, 2009 at 8:40 am
serofriend
a pact with a friendly parenting couple
Make sure that all adherents of the babysitting covenant will be completely comfortable with it. I recall my mother agreeing to a babysitter for me and my sister, and then becoming upset halfway through my dad’s romantic dinner.