The discussion was inspired by this column of Erik Kain, based on a painting depicting Obama enslaving the American people:
For some reason, conservative attempts at pop culture simply don't pan out for the most part. So we get complaints about liberal media or liberal Hollywood or whatever. But it's not liberal Hollywood's fault that conservatives can't do art. (Nor is it entirely obvious that Hollywood is liberal, but that's another story for another time.)
And it's not as though no good conservative art or literature has ever been produced. It's just that today's conservatives have lost any sense of proportion or subtext. Everything is so overt and over-stated. I think that The Lord of the Rings is a basically conservative text. It's just not explicitly conservative and doesn't say anything nasty about Obama.
Today's conservative pop culture is reactionary, which is fitting I suppose. There was a mockumentary conservatives made a couple years ago that attempted to not very cleverly spoof Michael Moore. But an attempt to beat Moore at his own game is probably going to fail, if only because it's little more than preaching to the choir (and this isn't even to say that Moore isn't deserving of his own criticism -- the left is actually very good at leveling its own critique at Moore.) It's the same in politics: conservatives aren't so much interested with their own ideas about governance as they are about responding to and obstructing the ideas of their opponents.
And perhaps that's the crux of the issue. Conservative art mimics conservative politics rather than the other way around. And so it can never really be art.
An observation: If you pick a crappiest selection of "conservative pop culture" as your representative example, then yes, your argument of "conservatives can't do pop culture" appears stronger.
Ed Driscoll argues that a big portion of the problem begins when creators put their political views ahead of their dramatic instincts:
Today, both sides in the culture war have forgotten those lessons. The anti-Iraq War movies of the late Bush era were notorious bombs at the box office. Why? Their creators were more interested in agitprop than entertainment. And on the other side of the aisle, when David Zucker directed and cowrote An American Carol in 2008, the laugh-a-minute humor that dominated his earlier films such as Airplane and The Naked Gun took second place to overt jingoism.
There were powerful themes that drove the American films of Hollywood's golden era, whether it was one man fighting against the odds to save his homestead in the American westerns, or the dissipated men and women of the film noir era, fallen because they've abandoned God and morality. But these messages were subordinated to hard-hitting action and intense drama.
The best television still seems to understand this concept, whether it's the pro-War on Terror themes of NCIS, or even the fart jokes that keep the audience laughing on South Park, while its writers sneak in libertarian themes on a regular basis. If conservative film and TV makers want to make headway recapturing the ground that, as Andrew Breitbart told Peter Robinson, their predecessors abandoned without much of a fight in the late '60s and early 1970s (or steal a little of Hollywood's lunch via YouTube, Roku, and other alternative means of distribution), they'll have to put entertaining ahead of teaching. But the result will be a win-win for their audiences, their careers, and eventually, maybe even the country.
Keep in mind, the Hollywood structure gives our friends on the left an enormous advantage in making their art look better, regardless of whether it really is better. I remember a screenwriter friend of mine pointing out once, "Almost anything looks magical when you're at the movies; you're sitting in a dark room, everyone around you is silent, and you're staring at a moving image on a 40-foot-tall screen." (This was in contrast to television, where the viewer always has the option of clicking the channel or turning off whatever he sees.)
There are certain actors who walk into any role with enormous reservoirs of audience goodwill, and we'll be inclined to like whoever they play (or respond appropriately to whatever role we associate them with). Robert Downey Jr. will be fast-talking, smart, wise-cracking, and have a heart of gold. Reese Witherspoon will be perky and cute and cheery and indomitable. Samuel L. Jackson will get angry, swear like a banshee, and want these flippin'-flappin' snakes off this flippin'-flappin' plane. If Ray Wise is in the movie, he committed the murder. So any Hollywood production with big stars that avoids horrific miscasting is halfway there to being an effective messenger for whatever message the screenwriter and director wants to convey.
Also, I think we're likely to run into trouble when we try to define what messages are conservative. My distinguished colleague Kathryn Lopez really liked the 2004 Adam Sandler comedy-drama Spanglish. (Spoilers ahead, but . . . the movie came out eight years ago, so I think I've given you enough time to catch it.) In it, Adam Sandler is a well-meaning, successful chef, married to perhaps the most horrific, abusive shrew of a wife in cinematic history played by Tea Leoni. Paz Vega, playing the beautiful immigrant housekeeper with limited English, feels pangs of attraction with Sandler's character . . . their connection builds, the extraordinary problems in Sandler's character's marriage become clear . . .
. . . and the pair back away from a potential affair, knowing that the end of the marriage would be bad for the children of both characters. Roll credits.
Allegedly this is a pro-marriage movie, but I'm not so sure I'd give the movie's message the thumbs-up. Leoni's character is so relentlessly abusive to everyone around her that she's even cruel to her children, and the audience is expected to laugh or applaud when the mother of Leoni's character tells her, "Lately, your low self-esteem is just good common sense."Some came away from Spanglish with the message, "marriage is worth it, even when it's hard." I think it's just as easy to come away with, "no matter how horrific your spouse is to you and your children, it's best to stay together for the sake of the kids," which makes marriage and parenthood resemble an insanely risky gamble that could doom you to misery forever. Your mileage may vary.
If we're looking for a movie that says, "marriage is worth it, even when it's hard," you know what film did a pretty good job of conveying that message? Mr. and Mrs. Smith. (I can hear it now: "Jim, you had to pick the movie that ended the Pitt-Aniston marriage?")
The eponymous characters are in a stale marriage after five or six years until each discovers that the other is secretly a spy (for differing agencies). They're each assigned to eliminate the other, attempt to do so, find that they can't . . . and both end up hunted by their employers. (Of course, this a Hollywood movie, where secret government agencies' first response to a personnel issue with their top assassin is to attempt to kill the person who they've spent millions of dollars training in evasion, combat, etc. See the Jason Bourne movies.) The moment of truth for the pair is when they're told that if they separate, they have a much better chance of evading their captors; staying together means they'll probably be hunted down . . . and they choose to go on the run together. In the end, it's them against the world, and they find that together, they can face down anything. (Metaphor alert! Metaphor alert!)
Now, is Mr. and Mrs. Smith a conservative movie? I'd bet a lot of conservatives would object that' it's not, from the numerous shootouts to Angelina Jolie going undercover as a dominatrix in an early scene. But . . . what makes a conservative movie? The choices in depicting sex and violence? The theme or message? Or is it simply the thoughts and reactions it inspires in viewers?
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