Canadian Cincinnatus

The wonderful Don Cheadle film, The Guard

Over the weekend I had a chance to watch the Irish movie, The Guard, starring American actor Don Cheadle. Structurally, it is a standard cop buddy film, the kind where two completely dissimilar police officers are paired up together to solve a crime, like the great Nick Nolte/Eddie Murphy film 48 Hours. Don Cheadle plays a straight-laced FBI agent sent to Ireland to intercept a large drug shipment from shipboard smugglers, and Irish actor Brendan Gleason plays an aging Gardia (Gardia is the Irish police, and hence the title is an Anglicization of that name) sergeant who is serving his pensionable time in a remote Irish village where most people still speak Gaelic, and who is far enough along in his career that he doesn’t give a damn what people think of him, or how offended they may be over his political incorrect observations.

For one example of the banter between them, during a PowerPoint briefing to the Garda, Cheadle’s character shows mug shots of the suspected drug dealers to his colleagues. They are white and Irish. Gleason’s character comments out loud that he thought all drug dealers were “black... or Mexican.” Cheadle responds, “That’s racist!” Gleason retorts, “Sir, I’m Irish. Racism is part of my heritage.”

To prove that Cheadle is not being subject to extra treatment simply because he is black, every group of people not from the small town where the events take place is subject to insult and mockery of some sort. For instance, every form of vice and folly is ascribed to Dubliners by the non-Dublin Irish. Another example is the widow of the sergeant’s partner: a Croatian babe who only married the officer to get an Irish visa. Throughout the movie she is referred to as ‘a Romanian’, even after she patiently explains that she is Croatian. But to the Irish, any dodgy Eastern European chick is a Romanian. Of course, it goes without saying that Protestants, the English and Americans are subject to similar verbal abuse.

In other words, this is just the way they carry on. They don’t hate blacks like Don Cheadle any more than they hate Dubliners (though they do hate Protestants and the English). This depiction of ‘casual racism’ strikes me as realistic. As a summer student at an Ontario Hydro power plant, I worked predominately with English, Scottish and Irish fitters and welders. They were always trading insults like this to one another - while hanging out together in the lunch room. It seems they had a derogatory name or rhyme or story about every little village in the British Isles. For instance, I learned from them that people from Hartlepool are called monkey hangers.

However, over and above the realism, this movie demonstrates that the Politically Correct lie - that any non-PC comment is the moral equivalent of racial terrorism - is hooey.

To take an example from the world of politics, consider President Harry Truman. He integrated the US Armed Forces and championed civil rights for blacks so passionately that the Dixicrats split off from the Democrat Party in 1948 and ran Strom Thurmond against him, splitting the Democrat vote. But in private, Truman used the n-word and enjoyed black jokes. Is civil rights champion Harry Truman a racist? Today’s PC zealots would say yes. Whoever wrote the screenplay for The Guard (as well as common sense) would say no.

Conservatives are fond of complaining about how the film industry produces nothing but crap. However, if you look carefully, there are quite a few gems out there with a positive message. I think it is incumbent on us to patronize these films to encourage more of the same. For this reason, I will continue to periodically highlight such movies and (increasingly) TV shows.

 

 

I had long suspected that Hollywood director Martin Scorsese was a closet conservative, now I am sure

Have you seen Scorsese’s last film, Shutter Island?

Very interesting movie.

The film is about a US Federal Marshall played by Leonardo DiCaprio who investigates the disappearance of an inmate on a maximum-security mental hospital for the criminally insane, located on an inaccessible island off the coast of Massachusetts. About three quarters of the way though it, DiCaprio’s character comes to believe that he has uncovered a plot by the CIA to conduct medical experiments, they learned about from the Nazi’s after World War II, to produce zombies “who are capable of anything” to be used for fighting the Cold War. DiCaprio believes that the omnipresent conspiracy in charge of this farfetched scheme basically controls the entire US government and is presumably backed by the military-industrial complex. At this point I rolled my eyes. I was a hair’s breadth away of turning the DVD player off but for some reason I didn’t. I was glad I didn’t because by the time the film ended, the whole story had been inverted in such a way that DiCaprio’s beliefs were shown to be dilusional and irrational.

I had always felt that one of the best ways to make a conservative film is to seemingly employ the left-wing tropes and plot twists standard in Hollywood films, making the audience think they know what is going to happen next. After you have sucked them in, you invert the plot against the left-wing themes. By inverting the plot, you subvert the usual Message.

This is exactly what Scorsese did.

And in doing so, he made the film a treatise on madness and a study on the insanity of conspiracy theories – in particular, a study of the insanity of left-wing conspiracy theories.

Conservative media gadfly Andrew Breitbart remarked that a few years ago that when he researched the left-wing bias in Hollywood he was surprised by how many closet conservatives he found there – people who think like you or me but are afraid to say so because of the negative impact this might have on their careers. He claimed that some fairly well known names are actually conservative.

Evidence like this convinces me more and more that mainstream US culture is on the verge of a tipping point, where the “counter-culture” and the mainstream culture trade places – kind of like a mirror image of what happened in the sixties. And judging by the hysterical way the left reacts to, well, pretty much everything, they believe this as well, at least at some level.

What I liked and didn’t like about The Hurt Locker

For starters, I liked that a fairly straightforward war movie about Iraq beat out the peacenik Avatar, with its anti-technology undertones and romantic notions about noble savages.

I also appreciated The Hurt Locker’s (mostly) apolitical nature. Though it wasn’t anti-Iraq war, it wasn’t pro-war either. It simply told a good story about one aspect of war, the life of bomb disposal techs. War is a topic so rich in interesting themes, why does Hollywood so often restrict itself to one narrow aspect – the morality of war?

But the thing I enjoyed most about it was the very thing that many actual Iraq veterans hated - particularly if they were bomb disposal techs: the lead character, the reckless Sgt. Bill James. I liked his character because he is the archetypal warrior who loves to fight. Normally if Hollywood portrays a war hero, he is the civilized, reluctant warrior, like Tom Hank’s character, Capt. John Miller, in Saving Private Ryan, who dreamed of getting back to his hammock where he can quietly read Emerson. While there have been plenty of effective gentleman-warriors in the past, such as Robert E. Lee and George Washington, the type of combatant that I personally find most interesting is the ugly warrior, the man who lives for war and is bored by peace. These men go to war because they like to fight. At the end of The Hurt Locker, Sgt. Bill James is shown back in civilian life with his family, looking out of place and wishing he were back in Iraq. In peace, we civilians find this sort of man uncouth, uncivilized and more than a little frightening, but when faced with a crisis we also find him indispensable. In history, he is Ariel Sharon, George Patton, Pappy Boyington, Bomber Harris, Curtis LeMay, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Horatio Nelson, Robert Clive, Oliver Cromwell and the Black Prince. In film history, he is Gen. Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove, the title role in Patton and Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now – all memorable movie characters because they mirror our romantic warrior ideal.

Getting back to The Hurt Locker, Iraq veterans did not like Sgt. Bill James because he does not act like a modern soldier. In modern war, a reliable team player is more valued than a risk-taking individualist; accomplishing the mission while getting the team back safely is more important to defense departments than fulfilling romantic dreams. In The Hurt Locker, James’ recklessness puts his team in unnecessary danger several times, but it is all worth it for James because he revels in the action.

In the book, Carnage and Culture, classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson draws a distinction that I was unaware of prior to reading it - the distinction between a soldier and a warrior. Hanson contends that what differentiates modern western warfare is that it is fought by soldiers whose defining virtues are team spirit, discipline, duty, reliability and calmness. In contrast, warrior virtues are individualism, righteous anger, risk taking, élan and the lust for glory. Warriors belong in personal combat, like the kind practiced by medieval knights. They do not belong on today’s battlefield where contests are decided by teams not individuals.  

But if a war film can inspire this sort of discussion about the nature of warfare, then I think it is a good sign that it has something interesting to say about the topic.

Unfortunately there was one troubling scene, one that didn’t really fit into the movie as a whole. It was the one where James’ bomb disposal team comes across a stranded group of British ‘contractors’. The ‘contractors’ had just captured a couple of Saddam’s henchmen important enough to be featured on that famous deck of cards. While James’ team is helping them fix their Toyota SUV, they come under insurgent attack. At this point, the contractors freeze in panic and require James (a former Ranger) and his two men (regular GI’s) to get them out of trouble. This is absurd. The only people private security firms hire are ex-special forces or former members of other elite units. If they were Brits, that means they are either SAS or Royal Marines, probably SAS. The SAS are the best commandos in the world. To employ a hockey analogy, this would be like pitting a couple of house league players led by a former Toronto Marlie against a bunch of NHL stars and expecting the stars to lose. The only reason for this scene was to vent Hollywood’s hatred of contracting firms such as Blackwater. 

But other than that annoying detail, it was an eminently watchable war film, not as good as Blackhawk Down, Rules of Engagement or the Band of Brothers series, but still quite good. 

The secret cabal of Hollywood conservatives

This article was prompted by an Andrew Briebart article in the Washington Times, “Mr. Spielberg, tear down this wall,” where he discusses politics in Hollywood. While the pervasive socialist bias of Hollywood should not be news to any reader of this blog, what I found interesting was to what extent an undercurrent of closet conservatives exists there.

We have all heard of the prominent big name conservatives – Clint Eastwood, Charlton Heston, Arnold, Joel Surnow (creator of the TV show “24”) and “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker (who are both card carrying libertarians, who regularly bash liberal pieties on “South Park” and who made the pro-war-on-terror film “Team America”). These are people who have become too big in show business to be squashed. As a result they are free to publicize with their politically incorrect leanings. However there are other conservatives who are not so fortunate and who are forced to live out their political lives in the shadows. And there are more of them than we think. This gibes with a personal observation I have made, which is that many times, recent Hollywood films contain subtle right-wing messages.

For instance, take the recent Will Smith film, “I Am Legend”. This is a remake of the Charlton Heston film, “Omega Man”, which itself was a remake of “The Last Man on Earth” with Vincent Price, and based on the book “I Am Legend.” While I have not seen the Vincent Price version or read the book, a comparison between the Charlton Heston and the Will Smith versions is instructive. For those who have not seen the Will Smith film, I don’t want to spoil the movie because many of the right-wing themes only come to the fore near the end. In both films, Charlton Heston and Will Smith think they are alone in the world. In “Omega Man,” mankind has been killed off by biological weapons that had killed everybody off except for a few people who are left in a vampirish state. Charlton Heston, a scientist researching a cure, is the only uninfected person left alive. In “I am Legend,” the weaponized virus has been replaced by a runaway cancer cure. In both films, the protagonist unexpectedly runs into other immune people. The difference is that, in “Omega Man” (made in 1971), the other immune people belong to a hippie commune and spew out standard counterculture clichés of the era. In “I Am Legend”, Will Smith runs into people with a decidedly different attitude. As a result, “Omega Man” presents an overt counterculture message presented. In “I Am Legend”, it is a covert conservative message.

An example of a Hollywood crypto-conservative is the “Sopranos” creator, David Chase. According to the James Bowman’s book, “Honor”, Chase says, “I am nostalgic by nature.” Nostalgic by nature – what could that mean? Could it be that he is signaling that he is a conservative, but in such a way that it wouldn’t be flagged by the Hollywood gatekeepers? The show offers many clues to suggest that the answer to this question is yes. For instance, as James Bowman observes, the “Sopranos” deals primarily with the intersection of the honour culture (as represented by the mafia) and the therapy culture (as represented by Dr. Melfi). While this, in and of itself, does not make Chase a conservative; consider how Dr. Melfi and other white liberals are portrayed in the show. Dr. Melfi is repeatedly shown to be self-indulgent, weak and morally relativistic. For example, she has a drinking problem at one point; her motivation for treating Tony is at least partially sexual; she herself sees a shrink (who is a pretentious intellectual stuffed shirt); she constantly emphasizes that therapy is a ‘morally neutral’ and ‘non-judgmental’ activity; her ex-husband is a PC prig; and Tony often gets the better of her in their sessions because he sees things more clearly.

The most politically revealing scene occurs in the episode, “Second Opinion,” where Carmella seeks a second opinion after seeing Dr. Melfi herself. It turns out that Dr. Krakower is the anti-Melfi. While Dr. Melfi makes great pains to embrace moral relativism in the show (“The purpose of therapy is to help you, not to judge you”), and was always looking out for root causes of Tony’s behaviour in his childhood, Dr. Krackower tells Carmella that she must leave Tony immediately because he is evil; she should refuse to accept any money in the divorce settlement because it is ‘blood money,’ and refuses to accept any payment from Carmella for the same reason. He also believes that therapy without morality is a sham and that it is often used by people to find excuses for their anti-social behaviour. Compared to the morally confused Dr. Melfi, Krakower has clear values and lives by them. There are many other examples in the series where the stereotypical liberal elite comes off poorly, but the contrast between Dr’s Melfi and Krackower is, I believe, the best indication of where Chases’ heart lies.

Another crypto-conservative, I suspect, is director Martin Scorsese. Enough of his movies have deep, conservative themes running though them – albeit surrounded by liberal camouflage – that I can’t help but think that this is not by accident. For instance take the movie “Casino” – a straightforward, non-political crime caper. Except that it is based fairly tightly on actual events. There is one character in it, a ‘state senator’, who is played by Dick Smothers. He is a freebie-grubbing, prostitute using, pill popping, influence peddler who only falls out with the mob because Robert DeNiro’s character fires a politically connected incompetent from his casino. Given that most of the characters correspond to real life people, who is the Dick Smother’s character in real life? It turns out that he is none other than current Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid - a Democrat. Hmmm.

Another conservative Scorsese moment occurs in the film, “The Aviator”, where Howard Hughes (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) meets Katherine Hepburn’s family. They are portrayed as eccentric, free-spirited intellectuals – just the kind of people who are usually given a sympathetic portrayal in Hollywood. At dinner, Katherine Hepburn’s mother announces, “We are all socialists here.” Howard Hughes responds, “That’s because you have money. You can afford to be socialists,” and then leaves the dinner party.

To me, the Scorsese film that seemed to me to have the clearest conservative themes running though it is 1991’s “Cape Fear”. In it, a modern family (father: Nick Nolte, mother: Jessica Lange, daughter: Juliette Lewis) is stalked by an ex-con (Robert DeNiro). Nick Nolte was his defense lawyer before he got sent away for 14 years. Why is DeNiro angry? Because Nolte had covered up a report stating that the girl he had brutally raped was promiscuous. In other words, Nolte’s humanity led him to sabotage DeNiro’s defense. This sets up two liberal pet causes – criminal rights and feminism – against each other. And why is DeNiro able to prey so effectively on Nick Nolte’s family? Because the members of his family are in conflict with each other because they are all self-centered narcissists – conflicts that DeNiro exploits. For instance, Nolte’s womanizing has estranged him from his wife. In order to beat DeNiro, the family has to pull together by putting family values ahead of their own selfish interests. Their distracted hedonism is repeatedly contrasted negatively with DeNiro’s single-minded dedication to his goal of vengeance.

And don’t let the fact that DeNiro is portrayed as a Pentecostal cracker fool you. This is just camouflage. It is the same strategy used by atheists in the middle ages who wanted to get their message out without suffering from the Inquisition. What they did was to put the real message into the mouth of their ‘villain’ and the received wisdom into the mouth of the ‘protagonist’, making it clear to those who ‘got it’ that the villain and protagonist’s roles were actually reverse. Take the case of the sixteenth century monk Tommaso Campanella. Though a Dominican monk, he was also an Epicurean philosopher who thought miracles, heaven and hell were myths used by the Vatican to control the masses. In the middle of the Counter-Reformation he actually said that publicly! Needless to say he ran afoul of the Inquisition, who tossed him into jail. As part of a deal to get out, he wrote “Atheism Conquered,” a dialogue between the protagonist - a Catholic, and an atheist, where the Catholic wins. This was written ostensibly to make amends for his previous heresy. While it did that, he wrote it such a way that the atheist presented fresh, new, exciting arguments and the Believer’s arguments were tired and hidebound. Anybody who had atheistic tendencies could read between the lines to see what Campanella was really saying. The best part was that the Church couldn’t complain - after all the ostensible protagonist wins by presenting the Church’s standard arguments. To criticize it would be to criticize themselves. One should keep this story in back of your mind when watching a recent film.

Scorsese used this tactic a second time in his film, “The Gangs of New York”. While this movie was not one of his best, it did have one of the most memorable movie villains of all time – Bill the Butcher, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. While everybody else in the film is forgettable, the film shines every time Daniel Day-Lewis appears on screen. Bill the Butcher is a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant leader of the Nativist anti-immigrant gang, as well as a Republican. About as much of a villain for the Hollywood left as it is possible to make somebody. Since, the film takes place in New York City during the Civil War, I was interested to see how he would portray the anti-draft riots. I.e. would Scorsese whitewash the fact that the riots were perpetrated primarily by a Democratic mob who prominently targetted blacks for lynchings. The protagonist, Leonardo DiCaprio, was affiliated with that prominent Democratic institution, Tammany Hall. I was pleased to see that Scorsese didn’t flinch at all about presenting the true character of the riots. Nor the corrupt character of the Tammany Hall political machine either.

Another conservative, this time not so much in Hollywood, and not so much in the closet, is Frank Miller, the creator of the films “Sin City” and “300”. "300” in particular has been criticized by the left as being a piece of pro-Iraq-war jingoistic propaganda. Lets see what Frank Miller himself thinks: on an NPR radio interview he states his views on the War on Terror: "Mostly I hear people say, 'Why did we attack Iraq?' for instance. Well, we're taking on an idea. Nobody questions why after Pearl Harbor we attacked Nazi Germany. It was because we were taking on a form of global fascism, we're doing the same thing now….It seems to me quite obvious that our country and the entire Western World is up against an existential foe that knows exactly what it wants... and we're behaving like a collapsing empire. Mighty cultures are almost never conquered, they crumble from within. And frankly, I think that a lot of Americans are acting like spoiled brats. … For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built.”

According to wikipedia, “In 2006, Miller announced that his next Batman book would be called “Holy Terror, Batman!”. In it, Batman defends Gotham City against attacks by real-life terrorist group Al-Qaeda. Miller proudly announced the title of his next Batman book, which he will write, draw and ink; Holy Terror, Batman! is no joke. And Miller doesn't hold back on the true purpose of the book, calling it ‘a piece of propaganda,’ where ‘Batman kicks Al Qaeda's ass.’” Interestingly enough, just after I downloaded this quote, the following piece appeared in the Wall Street Journal, comparing George W Bush in his fight against islamofascists to Batman of the Dark Knight series. Frank Miller originally authored the Dark Knight comic book.

I had planned on posting this essay last week, but every time I came close to doing so, I came across yet another article about secret conservatives in Hollywood that needed to be incorporated into the article. For instance, The Washington Times ran an article about a loose-knit group of Hollywood conservatives called “Friends of Abe” that is organized by actor Gary Sinese. The National Review Online ran a very informative article on Hollywood conservatives. Among other things, writer Mark Hemmingway states that while there are more conservatives in Hollywood than you think (for instance, actor Robert Downey Jr. apparently became a conservative thanks to his experiences with drugs and a federal penitentiary), the resistance to conservatives in Hollywood is ferocious. I also found out that apparently Kevin Costner (of all people – “Dances With the Wolves”!) is a crypto-conservative as well. His new film “Swing Vote” is not the typical election season fare in that it is not thinly disguised propaganda for whoever the Democrat candidate is. One of the themes in it is that people have to assume responsibility for their own lives and shouldn’t rely on politicians to fix their problems for them.

The Weekly Standard ran an article on the upcoming film by David Zucker film “An American Carol”. Loosly based on the Charles Dickens classic, the holiday in question is not Christmas by the Fourth of July. Ebeneezer Scrooge is a Michael Moore parody, Michael Malone, and the three ghosts who visit him are George Washington, Gen. George Patton and JFK. Interstingly enough, David Zucker did not start out as a conservative. He used to be a standard run-of-the-mill Hollywood Liberal but 9/11 (or more precisely Hollywood’s anti-American reaction to 9/11) converted him to conservatism.

Another article by Andrew Briebart states that actor Jon Voight is now on the Hollywood blacklist thanks an op-ed piece he penned for the conservative Washington Times where he stated that he thought he had been misled by Marxists when he was an anti-Vietnam war activist. He said: “I was caught up in the hysteria during the Vietnam era, which was brought about through Marxist propaganda underlying the so-called peace movement. The radicals of that era were successful in giving the communists power to bring forth the killing fields and slaughter 2.5 million people in Cambodia and South Vietnam. Did they stop the war, or did they bring the war to those innocent people? In the end, they turned their backs on all the horror and suffering they helped create and walked away.
Those same leaders who were in the streets in the '60s are very powerful today in their work to bring down the Iraq war and to attack our president, and they have found their way into our schools.”

As a result of this avalanche of stories, I finished writing this article with a great deal more hope than I had when I began it two weeks ago. Perhaps something ice is beginning to shift in Hollywood right now. Who knows, maybe Hollywood is on the cusp of a conservative revolt. In the meantime I can’t wait to see “An American Carol”.

What went right with Generation Kill?

HBO's new series, Generation Kill, has an identity crisis.  It wants to be the usual Hollywood anti-Iraq morality play, yet the undertones are distinctly masculine.

I'm willing to bet it was sold to the studio as an anti-Iraq war piece.  It has a predictable comment about WMDs.  It has a bad officer who guns down an unarmed man and another who hoards night vision gear.  It has a dead Iraqi girl on the side of the road.  It has a marine who just wants to kill someone.

Yet somewhere along the way to production, other themes crept in that don't fit the stereotype of an anti-war movie.  There's a journalist riding in the humvee who barely utters a word through the whole episode.  When they take heavy fire while driving through a town he actually participates in the operation, passing ammo to one soldier and helping to pull down the top man when he gets caught in some wires.

Where are the sanctimonious speeches that Alan Alda would have given had he played the journalist?  Instead, when he photographs the corpse of the Iraqi girl, a marine shouts, "Hey, going for a little exploitation?  Who's the blood-thirsty one now?  The fucking jarheads or the liberal media?"

The marine's point is well taken.

As for the bad officer theme?  Well, the bad officer's superior is a class act, aptly referred to as Godfather because of his husky voice.  He compliments good work and is a solid commander.  His last order during the episode characterizes the duality of this show.  He orders his troops to drive through a town that they know is hot, even though his juniors have figured out a way around the town.  This is a typical Hollywood theme right out of MASH--an officer needlessly risking his men's lives.

Yet, we see it from Godfather's perspective as he makes his decision.  They have no recon of the town.  The enemy is controlling where the marines go and are picking the battlefields.  Godfather makes what is suddenly portrayed as a wise and bold decision to break this pattern by going through the town.

The marines support him and love him.  That's just not Hollywood.  It makes you want to join the marines.

Will it get worse of better?  I can't say, but they've got me hooked.  I'll watched the next episode for sure.  If it were all just anti-war that wouldn't be the case.  Perhaps Hollywood has gotten tired of making money losing anti-war films.  Maybe someone (the writer? the director?) is a closet Republican.

The times are changing.

Mike Downtown