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.

Comments

[Kerry Forrest]

I absolutely loved that movie when I saw it in theater. I left feeling confused, challenged and completely at a loss to what actually happened. Reading what you thought crystallized what I thought really happened. Give me a movie that challenges me, and I love it. Quite tired of slop that follows the expected path till the end.

[Tim]

I agree with your intuition that we are approaching a tipping point, when the leftist assumptions of the 1960's (conspiracy, out of control power, dark forces of reaction), start to be challenged, and then repudiated. It was clever of you to see the political implications of this movie, which I ignored. (But I plead the excuse that it was late at night and I came in at the middle).