Junto Boys

PROBLEM WITH THE MOVIES

When movies began to shift to the left it wouldn’t necessarily bother you to see a businessman or corporation as a villain. It was still a fresh idea. Fred MacMurray played a great cad in THE APARTMENT. Steve McQueen managed to be the hero and the villain in the THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR.

The Military Industrial Complex was also ripe for satire and villainy. After so many heroic World War II film, DR. STRANGELOVE was a nice dose of balance.

And who didn’t like to see Sidney Poitier give it to the man in IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT after so many blacks in film history were subservient to whitey?

Wasn’t it fun to watch Katharine Hepburn outsmart and out-lawyer Spencer Tracy in ADAM’S RIB?

Wasn’t it interesting to see Al Pacino play a non stereotypical homosexual in a mainstream movie like DOG DAY AFTERNOON?

None of the above movies were offensive and they were all believable and progressive at the same time. The intention may or may not have been to push the political dialogue to the left, but they didn’t hit you over the head with social policy, they just showed you characters behaving rationally in the context of good storytelling.

From what I’ve read, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN could fit into the same tradition of the aforementioned films. The problem is that BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN was stale before it was even made. Although it’s in some ways very original, it’s not surprising. We already know that society is the villain in this one without reading any further than the premise.

Remember when Jonathan Demme stuck to the novel of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and let his psycho be a homosexual? He was so in danger of losing his liberal card that he was made to atone by making PHILADELPHIA. And his movies have been right on the PC plantation ever since.

PASSION OF THE CHRIST was ignored by the Academy and called anti-Semitic on the basis of a line or two while others simple dismissed it as too violent. But suicide bomber movies like PARADISE NOW are nominated in all their glory.

The problem with movies isn’t that they’re liberal, but that they’re so reliably liberal that they have nothing original left to say. Given a list of characters and their situations and you can almost write the movie yourself.

A few months ago we were playing poker and I was in the minority defending the war in Iraq. The same guys that talk in the familiar center-left talking points concerning that issue have been relentless in their lampooning of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. There was debate as to whether KK, JJ or KJ should be referred to as a Brokeback Mountain hand. Lately in another game I’ve been playing in, a player has been quoting “I don’t know how to quit you” when he’s on a draw and faces a tough bet. He’ll use the accent and he always gets a big laugh. It’s not insignificant that when I first knew him in the late 1990s he invited us all to his birthday party at a pizza joint that he was also using as a charity event for Aids. And the same guy has two gay brothers for crying out loud.

When Ang Lee accused the Christian Right of calculated silence on his movie, he was simply too self-involved to realize that the people offended by movies like his are the least likely to watch movies anyway. The average parent is probably more offended by the kids cussing in BAD NEWS BEARS.

The reason so many people are teasing BROKEBACK is that we’ve been given such a steady diet of the same PC tribulations that they cease to be tribulations anymore. Issue movies are no longer stories with complex heroes and villains, but too often the same black and white good guys and bad guys that the Left has always ridiculed in the old rightwing movies.

The result for people like me who like movies is that I wind up seeing them on DVD or HBO if at all. It’s not a boycott, but casual indifference.

Some people in Hollywood understand this enough that they make more even-handed movies. For as much as a Bolshevik as Tim Robbins is personally, he does a good job of making his rightwing characters real people. Bob Roberts was a much more appealing character than we could have expected even if he was the bad guy. I thought DEAD MAN WALKING was so even-handed that I was surprised to find that the intent was for me to feel sorry for Sean Penn. Even CRADLE WILL ROCK makes Bill Murray’s anti-communist character more human and sympathetic than any others I could name.

Now maybe Robbins is so secure in his beliefs that he doesn’t think he needs to create cartoon villains or obvious heroes to make his points. That so many others do so is maybe a sign of insecurity in those beliefs. One of the Greeks maybe Aristotle said that all ideas should be freely expressed among the educated even those ideas that seem obviously wrong because experience shows that so many seemingly wrong ideas turned out to be right and without discussing bad ideas it’s hard to remember the merits of the good ideas in the first place. In other words, the biggest champion of the truth is an open dialogue.

I don’t mind political movies, even ones I disagree with. I admire someone like Clooney for tackling political subjects although I think his postulating that this act is noble, dangerous, and somehow career threatening is overstated to the point of comedy. What the movies lack is an open-dialogue that doesn’t even need to seek the truth, but it just needs to provide some variety.