What Liberal Hollywood? posts

First, Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday is right: movies matter, and we are influenced by them in incalculable ways, and the violence and sexism that is threaded throughout Hollywood history can’t be doing us much good.

At the same time, laying the crimes of Elliot Rodger at poor Judd Apatow’s feet is itself a kind of crime.

Second, Ann Hornaday is still right: the movie industry is sexist, in that it’s dominated by men who are interested in greenlighting stories about men, which leaves 50% of the population leading only 15% of our stories. That creates imbalance. That’s creates marginalization. That creates a sense of privilege.

At the same time, even if half the execs in Hollywood were women, greenlighting stories starring women, these stories would most likely be wish-fulfillment fantasy. Maybe less violent but still wish-fulfillment fantasy: a spirited woman, say, choosing between two handsome men against a backdrop of historic tragedy. With bows and arrows. Or witchcraft. Or cooking. Or … 

Because what’s missing in Hornaday’s column about the movie culture Hollywood creates is the true culprit, the man behind the curtain: us, the moviegoers.

Hollywood is a business, a very risk-averse business, and it spends most of its time trying to create what they think we will like. And they do this by looking at what we’ve liked in the recent past. Then they re-do that. Hey, here it is again. This thing you liked. Happy happy. 

Which is why we get this story again: a lone man using violence to achieve justice. And why we get this story again: I love you and you love me … but not for 70 minutes yet. And this story: a spirited woman (or girl) choosing between two men (or a vampire and werewolf) against a backdrop of historic tragedy (or high school on the Olympic peninsula).

That’s worth mentioning. The fault lies less with our stars than in ourselves.

New Yorker staff writer John Cassidy is right, too: Blame the gun laws for all the people who died because of Elliot Rodger's crime.

You could actually combine Cassidy’s and Hornaday’s columns and get something worth positing as a question: to what extent can we blame our gun laws on Hollywood’s 100-year glorification of the gun?

A discussion like that might even make my day.

Go ahead ...

This is a continuation of a recent post, “Ward Bond: Oaf, Loadmouth, Anti-Semite,” which focuses on Bond's role as self-proclaimed judge, jury and executioner for the Motion Picture Alliance, the right-wing, Hollywood organization working hand-in-hand with the FBI and HUAC to create the blacklist of the late 1940s and early 1950s. 

Turns out Bond was also a friend of Joe McCarthy:

When John Ford was making The Long Gray Line in West Point, Ward Bond would head over to a bar across the street from the location and watch the Army-McCarthy hearings. Bond knew McCarthy, and, according to Mahin, Wayne had Bond pass a message from him to the senator: “You’re going to have to name names because you’re just throwing out accusations and innuendo and not producing any facts, and you’re making everybody look bad.”

Plus he screwed over Orson Welles ... not to mention John Ford:

[John]Ford had made a tentative deal with Orson Welles to play the part of Frank Skeffington in The Last Hurrah, and as soon as the trade papers announced it, Harry Cohn at Columbia received a packet supposedly documenting Welles’s “communistic or subversive activities (alleged). . . . These were sent by an actor who had said all over town that he was to play the part—a Ward Bond. . . .“

Welles wound up not getting the part. Neither did Ward Bond. It went to Spencer Tracy. 

All of this is from Scott Eyman's ”John Wayne: The Life and Legend.“ 

The year ”The Last Hurrah" was filmed, by the way, was 1957: three years after the supposed demise of McCarthyism.

More, I'm sure, later. 

Ward Bond: self-appointed cop for the far right in Hollywood. 

Every other post on Breitbart’s “Big Hollywood” site is based upon the following assumptions:

• Hollywood is full of liberals.
• They try to inject their liberal ideals into movies.
• These movies fail at the box office, because ...
• ... you and I don’t like that shit.

Let’s look at these one by one.

• Hollywood is full of liberals.

Sure, why not. Most cities are of the left, most artists are of the left, and Hollywood is a city full of artists. Plus businessmen. But we’ll let that go for now. Onward and downward.

• They try to inject their liberal ideals into movies.

Sure, why not. Every once in a while anyway. I think of the framed portrait of Ronald Reagan that showed up whenever we dropped a defcon in 1983’s “War Games.”

But Breitbart’s second assumption comes dangerously close to the whole McCarthyite, HUAC-led and FBI-supported blacklist of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Back then, right-wing reactionaries searched for anything that might indicate leftist, un-American politics, and, in its fever dream, wound up condemning “The Best Years of Our Lives,” “Gentleman’s Agreement” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Among others.

This second assumption also ignores how conservative most Hollywood movies truly are. They are wish-fulfillment fantasies about men with guns who blow away objectively evil bad guys and save the day. They’re blueprints for any speech at any GOP or NRA convention.

We’ll take the last two assumptions together:

• These movies fail at the box office, because ...
• ... you and I don’t like that shit.

This is where Breitbart really performs a faceplant. I don’t even need a sentence to refute these two assumptions. I just need one word:

AVATAR

In the 21st century, there’s been no movie, particularly a big-budget movie, that contained more squishy leftist ideals (trees, etc.), and a greater attack on the right (war, etc.), than “Avatar.” It’s basically an attack on Bush, Cheney, the Iraq War, and the military industrial complex. As I stated in my review back in 2009:

Hell, it’s not even subversive. It states its apostasy out loud. “We will show the sky people they cannot take whatever they want!” Jake, the avatar, shouts before the final battle. “This is our land!”

Psst: We’re the sky people.

James Cameron’s “Avatar” is the classic Breitbart culprit: a Hollywood movie that sneaks its liberal, leftist agenda into a mainstream movie to poison us all.

And how did it do at the box office? You might have heard a little something-something about it. I think the first something was 2.7 and the second was billion. That’s what it grossed worldwide: $2.7 billion. No. 2 all-time also belongs to Cameron: “Titanic” at $2.1 billion. Third is “Marvel’s The Avengers” at $1.5 billion. Fourth, the last “Harry Potter,” is at $1.3 billion.

In other words, only two other movies are within half of what “Avatar,” with its awful, anti-GOP message, grossed.

I’m not saying “Avatar” did this well because it liked trees and disliked war, or because its heroic native peoples attacked a military-corporate complex hell-bent on exploiting natural resources for its own financial gain. I’m saying that whenever Breitbart’s Big Hollywood makes its four big assumptions at the top of this post, they need to solve a problem like “Avatar.” Or at least address it. And they never do. 

Sooner or later, you always have to wake up.

Breitbart headline: FRED THOMPSON: CONSERVATIVE FILMS NOT MADE BECAUSE OF HOLLYWOOD 'COCKTAIL CURRENCY'

Repsonse: Right. If only Hollywood made movies starring good guys who use guns to save the world from usually nonwhite bad guys. But that'll never happen.

On second thought: That's not nearly the dumbest thing said at CPAC. Dinesh D'Souza spoke, after all.

Maybe someday we'll be able to see scenes like this on our movie screens. But liberal Hollywood keeps getting in the way.

Big Hollywood attributes the Oscar ratings boost to the lack of politics at the event during the Obama years. (Above: First Lady Michelle Obama announces the best picture winner, for “Argo,” in 2013.)

How bad is Breitbart's Big Hollywood site? It makes Fox News look fair and balanced in comparison.

Big Hollywood recently posted an article on the bounce-back ratings for the Academy Awards Sunday night (43 million vs. 32 million in 2008) and attributes it solely to the lack of “boorish, smug, divisive political behavior” from the Hollywood elites during the Obama years. No Michael Moore speeches, no anti-Iraq war speeches, etc. So viewers are tuning in again. “Who would have ever guessed?” John Nolte asks smugly, if not to say divisively, at the end.

The problem? 2008 was also the last year there were five best picture nominees—nominees, by the way, that had long stopped being among the top box-office hits of the year. (See this chart.) That was the whole point of expanding the nominee pool: to get bigger box-office hits among the mix, and thus, hopefully, goose the TV ratings. Do politics, or apolitics, have something to do with the recent ratings boost? Who knows? But for Nolte not to mention the expansion of best picture nominees verges on duplicitous.

The Fox News site, on the other hand, while it gives us a boorish, divisive headline about another Oscar matter (“Academy, Hollywood's failure to recognize 'Lone Survivor' a travesty”), attempts some fair and balanced reporting from James Jay Carafano.

His piece is about how “Lone Survivor,” the Mark Wahlberg/Afghanistan/anti-My Lai picture, garnered no nominations despite some critical and box-office acclaim. Certain right-wing pundits (Sean Hannity) have used this as an example, according to Carafano, of “how liberal Hollywood really hates the military.” Carafano isn't convinced. He brings up “Saving Private Ryan” and “The Hurt Locker,” and echoes the shrug of The National Review's Jonah Goldberg over the controversy.

True, Carafano writes, in over-the-top fashion:

In the annals of American war films, the technical accuracy and realism of this film is unprecedented. In this regard, it is truly a historic cinematic achievement. For Hollywood, not to salute that is a travesty.

But he adds:

That said, it’s simply unfair to label Tinsel Town as a bunch of pathetic pacifists.

(Of course, that's almost like push-journalisim, isn't it? The way that push-polling is about disseminating false facts rather than extracting true information, this could be the same from the journalism side: pretending to be vaguely objective while pushing propaganda points.)

Carafano also gets his numbers wrong.

In the first graf, he compares “Survivor” to “Waterworld,” the 1995 Kevin Costner flick that actually garnered an Oscar nomination (sound editing) even though “Lone Survivor” has none, and even though the Wahlberg flick “also crushed it in ticket sales.”

First, you can create the world's greatest film festival from the movies that never received an Oscar nomination—from 1957 alone: “A Face in the Crowd,” “Paths of Glory” and “Sweet Smell of Success”—so I'd leave that one alone. Second, the numbers are fudged. Yes, “Survivor”'s domestic box office is bigger than “Waterworld” ($123.5 million to $88 million), but when you adjust for inflation “Survivor” is the same while “Waterworld” is on top with $169 million. And that doesn't even take into account international box office, where “Waterworld” grossed $175 million in 1995 (unadjusted) and “Survivor” grossed exactly zero dollars this past year, because it hasn't been released overseas. Will it ever? Who knows? Maybe Universal feels it won't play in Europe. Or Asia. Or anywhere but here. There's a story there.

In the end, the handwringing over “Lone Survivor”'s zero noms is overdone. It's an OK movie but hardly great. For all of these reasons.

“Wait, we didn't make as much as 'Waterworld'?”

“Wait, I thought FOX Business condemned us as anti-capitalist. So why doesn't the Breitbart site mention us in their anti-liberal rant?”
“Because we've already grossed $200 million. And because I'm Batman.”

How awful it must be to see the world this way. To strain the vastness of existence through the puniness of your political ideology.

In case you don’t know—and most don’t and don’t care and I don’t blame them—“Big Hollywood” is a conservative website that assures its few readers they’re right and liberal Hollywood is wrong. And that liberal Hollywood is liberal. And not popular. Totally.

Do the Breitbart writers know what they write is bullshit? They must. I don’t think you can cherrypick your facts in this manner without realizing what you’re doing.

Their latest piece is below. The annotations in bold are mine.

**

Liberal Hollywood Movies Drag Down 2014's Box Office Receipts

It's no secret that liberal Hollywood producers are under extra scrutiny these days. It’s a secret to me. Who’s scrutinizing them? Besides you sad folks.

Last year saw huge box office disappointments in the form of White House Down, After Earth, The Fifth Estate and Elysium. There were bigger box-office disappointments last year: “The Lone Ranger,” “Oblivion,” “Free Bird,” “A Good Day to Die Hard.” Why focus on “White House Down,” et al.? Because they’re “liberal”? In that three-quarters of them are about men with guns?

It got so bad in 2013 that a virtual shouting match ensued between actor George Clooney and hedge fund kingpin Daniel Loeb. Basically, what it boils down to, is Hollywood elites enjoy making liberal message films that cater to their every desire—however—those who fund the films are tired of losing money. It’s hard to parse the bullshit out of this last sentence. The conflict is generally between the artist, who wants to create the new and the relevant, and the businessman, who wants to recreate the successful. The businessman usually wins. Which is why we live in a sequel society.

So far, 2014 isn't helping the progressive cause's wallet, either. Films like Lone Survivor (pro-military) are powering huge box office profits. “Lone Survivor,” with which I had issues more related to storytelling than politics, has done well at the box office: $122 million, 25th-best for 2013. But the most successful film of 2013 was “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” at $423 million domestic and $863 worldwide. Question: Are there liberal values in “The Hunger Games”? It’s got a strong female lead and condemns economic inequality. You could argue it’s a movie for the 99%. If, that is, you want to be as reductive as the Breitbart site. 

Overseas, The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug and Frozen are on the verge of grossing $900 to one billion dollars respectively. Both are driven heavily by conservative and traditional narratives. Um... This is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever read.

This isn't new. I wrote on how this was occurring in last year's holiday/winter frame as well. These successes are in direct contrast to recent notable box office misfires, which go as follows:

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

It's no secret that many in Hollywood want to make Christians the next “go to” bad guy in films. The filmmakers thought they had a winner in using this, while also rebooting a previously successful franchise. Instead, they quickly disappointed with a terrible January opening. In the post-mortem, it turns out younger audiences had tuned out the film with only older audiences even bothering to show up. This is especially sad when you consider the Tom Clancy brand is huge in video game arenas (an area where sales are dominated heavily by the younger market) but they won't show up when you offer them a lame religious villain meant to destroy geo-politics. Yawn. The hell? I saw this movie last week. Who’s the Christian villain you’re talking about? Kenneth Branagh? He’s Russian. Is he Christian? And even if he is, how does that relate to the film’s box office success or failure? What are you basing any of this on?

The Monuments Men

In truth, this film was doomed the moment Lone Survivor became a breakout hit. Long paraded with the likes of Green Zone, Lions For Lambs, Brothers, and such, Survivor liberated audiences from these typical “anti-war” narratives where military soldiers were often the villains. You can be pro-military and anti-war. You can also be pro-war and anti-military—just look at Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Plus the hero of “Green Zone” was a soldier. I could go on, but the main lesson, an old one, is that most moviegoers want escapism from their movies, and “Green Zone” and “Lions For Lambs” didn’t deliver escapism. They also weren’t very good movies.

All of these films resulted in box office disasters. Instead, Survivor showed soldiers performing heroically under duty, and audiences couldn't get enough. This meant going to the theater to high profile progressives like George Clooney/Matt Damon in their version of a “war movie” just wasn't interesting anymore. Despite the high profile cast (which is debatable), the film struggled to make a high opening and was crushed by The Lego Movie of all things. Where to start with this last bit? How about “The Lego Movie”? I believe some FOX News analysts see it s another liberal anti-business message out of Hollywood. I believe they’ve said that. It’s also the early hit of the year: $200 million and counting. So why doesn’t Breitbart mention that? Because it doesn’t fit into its formula that liberal Hollywood movies kill box office.  But it is true that “Monuments Men” hasn’t done well at the box office. It’s a serious film, about art, and getting Americans to see a serious film about art is tougher than getting them away from the television set on Super Bowl Sunday. It's also not very good. Sadly.

Film will be lucky to even make “half” of Lone Survivor's final box office tally, a film that did so without the high profile cast. Mark Wahlberg isn’t high-profile? Tell him that.

RoboCop

Liberal film critics have been trying for years to label the first RoboCop (which I love) as some giant “anti-Reagan” opus complete with anti-capitalistic themes. This is laughable when you see the film. Even director Paul Verhoeven has said the main lead is more a “Christ-like figure” who's resurrected to save a failing city and hold firm to his own humanity (despite being turned into a powerful machine).Well have no fear liberal entities, you got to remake RoboCop this year and pack it with your liberal talking points. The result was a box office opening that made even sci-fi bomb John Carter chuckle. Taking aim at the likes of Fox News and such, audiences were left wanting to watch the original RoboCop quickly, if only just to get the bad taste out of their mouths. The original “Robocop,” with its corporate villains partnering with drug dealers, wasn’t liberal, but the new one is? *Sigh*

Look at the three movies the Breitbart site condemns as liberal. What do they have in common? They're about men with guns: one’s a cop, one’s CIA, the others are WWII-era soldiers. “Monuments Men” honors our WWII veterans. If you insist on calling that liberal, fine, but please remember that and refrain from mentioning any of it at the next GOP convention.

RELATED POSTS:

• What Liberal Hollywood?
• How Movie Stars on the Left are Punished; How Movie Stars on the Right Punish Us
• Early GOP Brass

Good new, liberals. We get WWII vets now.

Here's Fox Business' main talking point:

Charles Payne: Is Hollywood pushing its anti-business message to our kids? First it was “The Muppet Movie”—remember they used an oil baron as the enemy—and a year later it was “The Lorax” ...  Well, now it's “The Lego Movie” with a villain named President Business. Take a listen to him.

CLIP: President Business: Would you cancel my 2 o'clock? This meeting could run a little bit ... deadly.

Payne: Looks a bit like Mitt Romney.

Payne goes on:

Why is the head of a corporation, where they hire people—and people go to work, they pay the rent and mortage, they put their kids through college, they feed their families, they give to charities, they give to churches—why would the CEO be an easy target?

Monica Crowley piles on:

Hollywood has long been dominated by the far left, which is very anti-capitalist.

Rebuttals after the video.

1. The “Really? Hollywood is anti-capitalist?” response: Hollywood brings in $10 billion a year, domestic. It brings in even more from abroad. Its product is one of the better, more globally recognized products that U.S. companies export. The American auto industry wishes it could dominate the field the way Hollywood dominates movies globally. So why is Fox Business getting all up in Hollywood's business?
2. The “No, Hollywood is pro-NRA” response: When a movie shows a corrupt politician, which they do all the time, is Hollywood being anti-government? When it shows a sleazy journalist, which they do all the time, is Hollywood being anti-mainstream media? Hey, how about this: Does almost every action movie ever made make Hollywood pro-gun? If I follow Fox's line of reasoning, that's the message I'd get from Hollywood. Those damn Hollywood people. They just love, love, love their guns. Let's face it: Guns in movies, being shot by heroes, are way more prevalent than villainous CEOs. So does that make Hollywood pro-gun? Pro-NRA? If not, why not?
3. The “Sorry, but CEOs make good villains” response: Generally, you need a villain in a movie, and CEOs make good villains. Why? BecauseAmerican CEOs make 273 times what the average American worker makes. Fox Business is aware of this, right? They should be. They should be aware that the nature of the corporation is to put profits before people, which includes laying off longtime workers and hiring cheaper workers elsewhere, and that means many Americans, particularly those who have been laid off, don't have particularly positive views of corporations and their CEOs. Fox News, and Fox Business, should be aware of this. It's part of the sad fabric of life at the moment.
4. The “Did anyone there actually see 'The Lego Movie'?” response: Payne's discussion is even more absurd for anyone who's seen “The Lego Movie.” Because—and please accept the usual SPOILER ALERTS—anyone who's seen the movie knows that Pres. Business isn't like Mitt Romney. He's like ... Dad. He is Dad. The adventures we see for most of the movie are in the mind of a young boy, Finn, whose father, one imagines, goes to work at a business the boy doesn't quite understand. Then he comes home and gets mad at his son for playing with the Legos; for messing up the carefully created dioramas they've made. So not Mitt Romney. Dad. Who, in the end, realizes the error of his ways; who, in the end, is loved.
5. The “You missed the forest for the trees” response: There's actually a message in “The Lego Movie” more dangerous to Fox News than the one they're complaining about, and, again, please accept this SPOILER ALERT. It's a message about change, and its inevitability, and how it's preferable to stasis. It's a movie that celebrates the relativism of the building blocks of our society, the constant change, the infinite possibilities. Pres. Business, in contrast, wants everything the same. He's cranky this way. He likes things as they were. Which makes him sound like almost every cranky talking head and host on this network.

I hate doing this kind of thing. I really do. I hate being in a position to defend Hollywood. So much of what Hollywood produces is just crap. But it's not leftist crap. If anything, it's conservative crap. But mostly it's just crap.

By the way, Fox Business: Next time, try to come up with some examples less far afield than “It's a Wonderful Life” and “The Hudsucker Proxy.” And Ms. Crowley? Next time, try to sound a little less HUAC-y. That's creepy.

“But the fact is that these dam [sic] Jews are a dirty, filthy lot. Their only standard is the standard of the box-office. To attempt to talk ethical values to them is time worse than wasted.”

-- Joseph Breen, film censor, and head of the Production Code Administration (PCA) from the 1930s to the 1950s, in a letter to Martin Quigley, publisher of the Motion Picture Herald, as reported in John Sbardellati's “J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood's Cold War.” At the same time Breen was complaining about the unquenchable capitalism of the Jews, he also worked to ban “communist propaganda” (generally any left-wing sentiment) from the movie screen. Not sure if he realized the irony.

“After the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Mr. LaPierre declared that 'the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,' as pure a distillation of traditional Hollywood morality as you could want. ...

”When mass killings happen in the real world, the mark of the killer’s pathology is often described as an inability to distinguish fantasy from reality. But that is not a syndrome that afflicts only individuals. We gravitate, collectively, toward a simplified world where might makes right and good guys and bad guys are easy to tell apart.“

--A.O. Scott, from his article, ”Finding Comfort in Easy Distinctions,“ which is part of a section on movies and violence in today's New York Times.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, former governor of California, in ”The Last Stand" (2013).

Maybe Mitt was right about the dangers of PBS programming after all. From Steven J. Ross' “Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics,” pg. 378:

Schwarzenegger may have kept his personal politics quiet during his rise to stardom, but that did not mean he lacked a well-conceived ideology. Schooled in free market thought during his youth, his economic philosophy crystalized in January 1980 after watching Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman's Free to Choose television series on PBS. “It expressed, validated and explained everything I ever thought or observed about the way the economy works,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

On the other hand, maybe Mitt's beef ultimately has less to do with Big Bird than Big Arnold (from pg. 387):

Party loyalists were less than thrilled  when [Schwarzenegger] bypassed Mitt Romney to support Ted Kennedy's reelection bid in 1994 in Massachusetts.

Arnold, learning.

“[George] Murphy and [Ronald] Reagan's electoral success was directly tied to Southern California's emergence as the center of a plethora of socially and religiously conservative groups that preached, as one historian notes, an ideology of 'staunch individualism, Protestant piety, and resentment against Washington ”collectivists'.' Ironically, this hotbed of antifederal activism owed much of its wealth and growth to Washington's largesse. In 1957, defense-related jobs accounted for 70 percent and 59 percent, respectively, of all employment in San Diego and Los Angeles counties. By the early 1960s, defense was the nation's largest business, accounting for 62 percent of the federal budget, and Southern California received the majority of those funds.“

--Steven J. Ross in ”Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics," pg. 164. In Clintonian terms, it takes some brass to come to power by attacking what has created and nurtured you.

“Making a film attacking Hitler [‘The Great Dictator’] proved far more controversial than Chaplin anticipated.

”Producers who wished to turn out starkly anti-Nazi movies—such as Walter Wanger, and Harry and Jack Warner—were repeatedly constrained by Hollywood's self-censorship board, the Production Code Administration (PCA), and its anti-semitic head, Joseph Breen. Created in 1934 to forestall federal censorship of motion pictures, PCA rules prohibited filmmakers from attacking or mocking foreign governments and their leaders. When Hitler and Mussolini promised to ban the films of any studio that offended them, and all Hollywood films if necessary, Breen stepped up his efforts to stop producers from endangering the industry's highly profitable foreign revenues.

“Indeed, not everyone thought Hitler was so evil. As late as January 1939, PCA censors attempted to halt production of Warner Bros.' Confessions of a Nazi Spy, the nation's first explicitly anti-Nazi film, explaining that to ‘reperesent Hitler only as a screaming madman and a bloodthirsty persecutor, and nothing else, is manifestly unfair, considering his phenomenal public career, his unchallenged political and social achievements, and his position as head of the most important continental European power.’”

—from “Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics,” by Steven J. Ross

According to the Production Code Administration, Hitler had “unchallenged political and social achievements.” Why pick on him? According to HUAC 10 years later, the star of the movie was a red, too.

Jonathan Chait’s New York magazine piece, “The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy is on Your Screen,” props up the very tired, and very dangerous, notion that the product of Hollywood is liberal. Here’s how you refute it:

Think of almost every movie you’ve ever seen.

Seriously. Once you do that, the product of Hollywood, i.e., the movies, is revealed to be as white as the Republican party, as violent as a neocon’s wet dream, and as monogamous as no one’s wet dream.

The GOP propagates an absolutist vision of good vs. evil? Hey, so do the movies! The GOP is dominated by white men? Most movies star white men! With guns! And when bad guys gather, there’s one thing Hollywood and the GOP agree on: Keep the diplomats out because they’ll just screw things up with their words. Stupid words. Who needs words when you can kick some ass!

Forest, trees
Chait’s thesis is a textbook example of not being able to see the forest for the trees. Here are some of his trees:

• “Margin Call,” which blames the global financial meltdown on Wall Street shenanigans.
• “Ice Age 2: The Meltdown,” which warns of global warming.
• “Avatar,” which is full of “tree-hugging mysticism.”
• “Veep” and “The Muppets” and “The Campaign,” whose villains are rich oilmen.
• “The Dark Knight Rises,” which, he writes, “submits the rather modest premise that, irritating though the rich may be, actually killing them and taking all their stuff might be excessive.”

I’ll give him rich villains. Most movies are about underdogs, which the rich are not, except in the fevered imaginations of FOX-News. Even Hollywood hasn’t gone far enough to make them heroes. Except, of course, when their names are Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark.

I’ll give him “Avatar” ... except not on his grounds. Tree-hugging mysticism? How about a not-so-subtle attack on the military-industrial complex? How about a greater critique of the Iraq War (“shock and awe”) than its main opponent for best picture that year, “The Hurt Locker,” which was actually set in Baghdad in 2004?

But I won’t give him “Margin Call.” It was barely seen. Its widest release was a mere 199 theaters (1/20 of a summer blockbuster), it grossed $5 million (1/40 or 1/60 of a summer blockbuster), and it was hardly the blanket condemnation of Wall Street Chait makes it out to be. It was a complex, ambiguous movie. One of the nastier execs, who turns out to be more loyal than we suspect, makes this speech as he’s driving back from Brooklyn in his convertible:

The only reason that [most people] get to continue living like kings is cause we got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off and then the whole world gets really fuckin’ fair really fuckin’ quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don’t. They want what we have to give them but they also want to, you know, play innocent and pretend they have know idea where it came from. Well, that’s more hypocrisy than I'm willing to swallow. So fuck ’em. Fuck normal people.

Meanwhile, “Veep” skewers everyone, and the Democratic incumbent in “The Campaign,” played by Will Ferrell, is a sleazy John Edwards type who screws any woman. Sometimes he does it in his campaign commercials. Chait’s readings of Hollywood movies turns out to be more reductive than the reductive movies he’s supposedly watching.

He thinks “Dirty Harry” is an anomaly and “Rambo” is forgotten. They’re not. They’ve been replaced by “300,” and “Taken,” and “G.I. Joe,” and the “Transformers” trilogy. He thinks “Syriana” shows us the dangers of our misbegotten wars. Maybe. But it, too, was complex, murky, and barely seen. Its widest release was 1,775 theaters, which was the 117th widest-release of 2005, and it grossed $50 million domestic, making it the 56th most popular movie that year. No. 2? “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” I believe there’s a Christ analogy in there. No. 4? “War of the Worlds.” Beware of foreign invasions. No. 8? “Batman Begins.” Because when street violence happens, it’s best to take the law into your own hands. Because you are pure and the system is not.

That’s liberal?

Chait keeps doing this. He keeps bringing up the barely-seen to prove his point while ignoring movies that are disseminated everywhere. It’s as if, to prove that liberals dominate the airwaves, he talks up “Fresh Air” but ignores Rush Limbaugh. His is a cloistered viewpoint in which HBO’s “Girls” matters. Yet, for most of the country, “Girls” doesn’t even exist. As in most Hollywood movies, girls don’t exist.

Who are the heroes of most movies? Superheroes and soldiers, cops and cowboys. The movies haven’t progressed past the mind of an 8 year-old boy. Neither has the Republican party.

In the documentary “Rated R: Republicans in Hollywood,” Ben Stein, actor, conservative and Hawley-Smoot Tariff Bill advocate, actually crows about this:

In recent years, the obsession that young viewers have with the action movie has helped the political conservatives. Because it’s basically saying all you braino, pointy-headed intellectuals, you’re all wimps and losers. It’s the action guy, the military guy, the police guy—he’s the real hero of society, the real man, and he’s the kind of guy you should be like.

That’s the forest that Chait, obsessed with the trees, or with twigs he’s found on the ground, misses.

John Wayne, George W. Bush
Chait makes one good point. It’s about a twig he found on his short walk through the Hollywood trees:

When Joe Biden endorsed gay marriage in May, he cited Will & Grace as the single-most important driving force in transforming public opinion on the subject. In so doing he actually confirmed the long-standing fear of conservatives—that a coterie of Hollywood elites had undertaken an invidious and utterly successfully propaganda campaign, and had transmuted the cultural majority into a minority. Set aside the substance of the matter and consider the process of it—that is, think of it from the conservative point of view, if you don’t happen to be one. Imagine that large chunks of your entertainment mocked your values and even transformed once-uncontroversial beliefs of yours into a kind of bigotry that might be greeted with revulsion.

You’d probably be angry, too.

I am angry, but for the opposite reason. Yes, the movies influence us. Yes, TV influences us. In my mind, everything affects everything, and if you’re seen on 4,000 screens or in millions of households you’re affecting things that much more.

So “Will and Grace” made us more tolerant of homosexuals? Good. I wonder if it makes up for the decades of sissies and perverts and suicidal sad sacks that were detailed in “The Celluloid Closet,” a documentary on Hollywood’s sad history with homosexual characters. Chait suggests that the portrayal of black presidents in movies like “Deep Impact” paved the way for Barack Obama? Good. I wonder if it makes up for decades of Stepin Fetchit roles, the lazy and the fearful and the laughable, which were the only black faces seen on movie screens for years.

More to the point: If “Will and Grace,” a singular phenomenon, is so influential, what about the aforementioned westerns and cop shows, war movies and superhero epics? What influence do they have on us?

Could Ronald Reagan have been elected president without John Wayne on the movie screen? Could George W. Bush? Both played up the cowboy angle. Both kept using the lines of Hollywood to further their political goals. “Go ahead, make my day,” Reagan said. “Wanted dead or alive,” Bush said of Osama bin Laden. “Bring it on,” Bush said to the Iraqi insurgents. One imagines that he saw himself as an action hero in an action movie. Most of America did, too. It went, “Fuck yeah!” Except the Iraq War didn’t end the way movies are supposed to end. It just kept going. It got messier and bloodier and more difficult to sort the good guys from the bad guys. The audience got restless. It thought it was watching something by John Ford or Clint Eastwood and it turned into “The Battle of Algiers.” It turned French on us. Fuck that. We walked out. We wanted a happy ending. Lesson unlearned.

And that’s my point: Not only is the product of Hollywood not liberal, but its playbook, its archetypes and storylines, have been stolen by the GOP to get their candidates elected.

What liberal Hollywood?
Chait begins with the culture wars of the early 1990s (“Murphy Brown,” “Cape Fear”) and wonders where they went. He argues that conservatives have given up. They haven’t. They bitched about “Million Dollar Baby” and its right-to-die ending. They bitched about “Avatar” and its trees. They bitched about “The Blind Side” and a photo of George W. Bush on the wall. They keep on bitching. Chait argues that liberals won the early’90s culture wars because these days homosexuals are sometimes depicted as human beings rather than demented perverts. I say conservatives won that war because they branded the product of Hollywood as liberal and the label stuck.

But it’s a false brand. Seriously. Just think of almost every movie you’ve ever seen.

I was writing a review of “Margin Call” the other day, a good film with a great cast, and considered for a moment Paul Bettany's name in the cast list. IMDb.com informs us that he's best known for “A Beautiful Mind,” “Master and Commander,” and “The Da Vinci Code.” I loved him in each of these and expected big things from him. But “A Beautiful Mind” was 10 years ago, “Da Vinci” five, and he kept appearing in movies I had no interest in seeing (“Priest,” “Legion,” “Inkheart”). Then IMDb reminded me he had recently played Charles Darwin in “Creation.” “Was this the one that was never distributed in the U.S.?” I wondered. “The one Christian fundamentalists had a problem with?”

So I clicked on the character link.

While the answer to my initial question was yes, probably, I soon forgot all about it when I realized the following:

Charles Darwin wasn't portrayed on film until 1972.

Immediately, the usual “What Liberal Hollywood?” hackles were raised in me. The man who changed our 20th and 21st century worldview was ignored for the first eight decades of film? Not even a walk-on in someone else's story? Not even a “Bewitched” episode? And he's only been portrayed a total of 21 times? And this from an industry that's condemned daily as “liberal”?

That rant led to this thought:OK, how many times has Jesus Christ been portrayed on film?

Answer? 350 times, starting in 1897 with “The Horwitz Passion Play,” which starred Jordan Willochko as the Son of God. But that answer immediately led to this question:

Hey, is Jesus the most portrayed character in movie history?

I tried to think of who might have been portrayed more often. Robin Hood? 122 times. Hamlet? 198. Abraham Lincoln? 263. Sherlock Holmes? 246. Dracula? 274. God? 340. Close.

Eventually I asked Patricia for her thoughts. In five seconds, she gave me this, but in the negative: “I don't think it's Santa Claus...” she began.

No, it is Santa Claus. 814 times.

Wouldn't it be nice, though, if IMDb had a sort function beyond what it currently offers—particularly if one could further sort by “movies,” “TV,” “Made-for-TV movies”? Instead, the site gives us user-created lists. We may never find out who the most filmed character in movie history is, but we do get to read blahXblahXblah's list of the 204 “Hottest Actresses”!

What do you think? Are Santa and Jesus it? Or has another character been portrayed more often?

Robin Hood is a piker compared to Jesus Christ and Santa Claus.

ADDENDUM: After all that, it turns out there is another....

Jeff Wells talks up the latest poster for “The Iron Lady,” Meryl Streep's biopic of Margaret Thatcher, and its tagline, “Never compromise,” and riffs on all the anti-Obamaites in Congress who would agree with that slogan, who would rather “pull down the temple than be responsible legislators,” and concludes, even as he admits he's going to like the hell out of Streep, “no heart-swelling emotional currents for Meryl's Maggie Thatcher...not from this corner, at least.”

What all of that reminds me of, again—again, again, again—is how the right-wing in this country borrows the tropes of Hollywood heroes (“never compromise”) even as it disparages Hollywood.

Sure, this time it's slightly different, since the uncompromising hero, or heroine, is in fact a politician, and a right-wing politician, rather than John Wayne, or Bruce Willis, or Arnold. But she's still being viewed through that Hollywood and PR prism. And it raises the question:

Why does the tagline, “Never compromise,” appeal to us?

Immediate answer: Because most of us, poor wretches in the audience or in the voting booth, compromise all the time. We spend our lives compromising: with parents, with partners, with bosses; with expectations, with kids, with corporations; with life. Life for us is one compromise after another. Only life doesn't compromise back. (And Death is even worse.) We feel like we're the saps in all this. 

That's why we go to the movies in the first place: to see that uncompromising hero or heroine. It's a wish-fulfillment fantasy, as surely as watching a man fly is a wish-fulfillment fantasy, and that's fine as long as we don't take the fantasy with us as we leave the theater.

But more and more of us are doing just that. We're taking that fantasy, now generated by the GOP—the less entertaining, right-wing version of Hollywood—into the voting booth and voting for the man who claims he never compromises. Which is as silly as going into the voting booth and voting for the candidate who claims he can fly.