Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Conservative Hollywood

Over the years I've developed a deep dislike (to put it mildly) at many things Hollywood spews out. But it was only recently that I realized part of the reason is that most Hollywood movies work on the same black-and-white assumption that characterizes a significant part of the conservative discourse. Perhaps this is why conservative policies are so unrealistic: they operate on a Hollywood-infused mentality, where, a) it's easy to know who's the good and who's the bad guy; and b) the good must always win in the end. Conservative politicians then simply want to bring about the world they see (out of the corner of their eyes) in the movies they spend so much time badmouthing. Badmouthing them for the wrong reasons, too, both from my point of view and from theirs. To me, the right point of view would be to badmouth them for their risible aesthetic derived from a reductive moral world view derived from a lazy and self-assured epistemology (if that's not too pretentious a word, and it almost certainly is, for a discourse whose supreme articulation is "We will find them and we will smoke them out!") From their point of view too, it ought to be wrong to badmouth for sex and violence the movies Hollywood produces, for without representations of sex how would we know who the bad guys are, and without violence, how would the world be saved from them? We all know that if there is anything worse than a world with bad guys, is one without them, both for your standard Hollywood flick and for your standard conservative discourse. In such a world one might need to think about alternative ways evil can come about, like out of people's ignorance or people's understandable to a point, self-interest, or people's good intentions pitted against well, let's just call it bad luck or bad karma or what have you... Or any number of other such theories. Why not just blame it on the devil, and wing it that way?

No comments: