Canadian Cincinnatus

Have you seen the latest Mad Max film?

The reason I ask is that while it has the critics raving, when they actually read their description, or when I watch the trailer, it sounds and looks awful.

I will tell you where I am coming from. As a teenager, I saw the original Mad Max in the theaters and the experience was riveting. I’d seen nothing like this before. All the familiar tropes weren’t there, and a lot of things I’d never seen before were. The effect was both disturbing and electric. I eagerly awaited the sequel. When the Road Warrior came out, I was not disappointed. It was even better.

Looking back at it years later, both films still stand up, though the original Mad Max was an uneven mix of bold originality and the banal. The homoerotic villains, the Aussie accents, the nihilistic post-apocalyptic environment, and the cruel, cynical dialogue were brilliant and original. In contrast, the loving home scenes with Max’s wife and young son were pure filler. It is as if the filmmakers didn’t quite have the confidence to pull it off completely: whenever they did something creative and bold and original, they felt they had gone overboard and had to reign themselves in. The result was uneven, but brilliant in many places. In the Road Warrior, their confidence had arrived, and it was justified.

(The less said about the third film, Thunderdome, the better. It was a bloated monstrosity that had the form of the first two without any of the substance. Too much money, too many hit songs and too many pop-culture divas.)

The issue is not CGI vs. actual stunts. CGI is fine, if used properly. What separates the first two Mad Max’s from a typical action flicks is that you actually care about the characters. When Max takes revenge on the Toecutter’s gang, you cheer him on because you were shown how utterly evil they are (they ran down his three year old son with motorcycles). In the Road Warrior, it is civilization vs. the barbarians. Take the scene where Humungous (“the warrior of the wastelands, the ayatollah of rock and rollah”) and his gang menacingly park their souped-up rigs outside the compound gates to deliver their ultimatum to the townspeople. Is there a more vivid scene in the entire history of cinema that visualizes the idea of Barbarians At The Gates better?

You cared because the filmmakers sweated all the little (and cheap) details – in the stunts, the cars, the set, and the dialogue. All reinforce The Story.

Take the first meeting between Max and the Gyro Captain. This scene’s charm emanates from the cautious and cynical way they maneuver around one another. Their world is nasty, brutish and short, and they act accordingly. They don’t take foolish chances. The dialogue perfectly captures their tactical wariness. The Australian accents didn’t hurt.

When Papagallo tells everybody to get ready to evacuate the compound, what follows are a series of rapid-fire scenes showing rushed preparation. Among them are a couple of quick scenes where chickens and pigs are being corralled. It lasts mere seconds but it reinforces the story: the people in the compound are makers; those outside are takers. Again Civilization vs. Barbarians. Road Warrior contains a thousand details like this.

Another critical factor is that both films are deeply embedded within the hot rod culture. Road Warrior featured a bevy of customized cars and trucks, but every modification made automotive sense. They weren’t designed by an art director, they were made by somebody who read Hot Rod magazine. (OK, you can’t switch off a roots-type blower, but other than that…) A Mad Max knock-off I saw a few years later featured Volkswagen Beetles covered with paper mache. None of the accoutrements served any purpose but I suppose the art director loved it. That flick disappeared without a trace.

The trailer to the new Road Warrior film features a huge VW Beetle-thingie on steroids with giant, monster-truck wheels. OK, but to what practical end (other than to look cool in front of the camera)? The originals stood out because every cool car detail served a practical purpose to the characters; they were also things that people living at that time could conceivable make. (Proof of the latter is that hard-core Mad Max enthusiasts have built some of these vehicles for themselves.)

Then I saw this piece by Andrew Klavan in PJMedia, entitled, ‘Mad Max’ – the Critics are Lying for Political Reasons, which confirmed my worst suspicions.

Which is all too bad. A friend of mine had a great idea for the third Mad Max film (again, forgetting Thunderdome ever existed): a remake of Steve McQueen’s second last film, Tom Horn, where he plays an aging but legendary lawman who has lived long enough to become an anachronism. If memory serves me correctly, it took place in the 1890’s where Tom Horn’s old gunslinger ways are increasingly out of step with a West being tamed. In my friend’s Mad Max finale, Max is an aging road warrior at a time when the post-apocalyptic world is recovering. Road warriors are no longer wanted as peace and order is coming back. McQueen was 50 when he made Tom Horn. Mel Gibson is 59 – the high side of the perfect age.

Perhaps the problem with Mad Max is that the first two films were made by the duo of George Miller and Byron Kennedy, and Kennedy died in a helicopter crash in 1983 – two years after Road Warrior. The awfulness of the third Mad Max film, and the weakness of George Miller’s subsequent career, suggests that Kennedy was the more talented half of the partnership. Was Kennedy Paul Simon to Miller’s Art Garfunkle?

So, unless I hear otherwise, this Mad Max fanatic is going to stay away from the theaters. I might not even rent Mad Max: Bigger, Louder and Dumber.

 

 

Fifty Shades of Grey and feminism’s contradictions

The current box office champ is Fifty Shades of Grey, produced, directed, and written by women, and based on a bestselling book written by a woman. The topic: a submissive woman falls in love with and loses her virginity to a powerful man who insists on ‘dominance and submission’ role-playing, and with a taste for rough sex. (If this took place in Canada, he’d have his own show on a government-funded radio network, but I digress.)  By all accounts, the overwhelming majority of the fans who made the book and movie so popular are women.

By feminist theory, this does not compute. According to the Gospel According to Germaine Greer, the film should have instead been popular with heterosexual men, as the film affirms the Patriarchy (as feminists imagine it to be in their nightmares). Rather, the husbands and boyfriends try to ditch their wives and girlfriends at the Cineplex to see American Sniper instead. What is happening here is the type of cultural event I look forward to, and that I savour like a fine wine when it happens: a contradiction in left-wing ideology played out in the media.

The contradiction in question is the fact that a woman is programmed by nature to be attracted to a powerful, successful, dominant man, much the same way that a man’s mind has been hard-wired to find young, fertile, and healthy young women to be the epitome of sexiness. This fact directly contradicts a basic tenet of Feminism, namely the equality of the sexes, which many of the movie’s fans would no doubt agree with, if you were to survey them. This is the contradiction.

This is also the reason why I believe so many feminists are miserable. Their core beliefs directly contradict their inner desires. The root cause is that the feminists have gone too far in trying to regulate society. A lot of the sensible things that Feminism championed – the vote for women, political equality, equality in the workplace – have been enacted, enough so that there are few legitimate jobs left for feminists to do, aside from mopping up operations here and there. But, feminists don’t want to lose their jobs, so they champion crusades that take Feminism too far.

In taking the nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate, they thought they could remold humanity through legislative fiat, Political Correctness, and tendentious Hollywood movies-of-the-week. Men and women could be made – through force of will - to have the same personality type – not dominant, nor submissive, but neutral and reasonable. It was at this point where Feminism became a force of oppression. One popular way we deal with repression when it contradicts our desires is to mouth the Political Correct platitudes when required while living out our true nature while nobody is looking.

Except that every now and then a cultural event comes along to expose the hypocrisy.

Cultural conservatives are mostly clued out about this sort of thing, except that the institutions we champion (e.g. traditional marriage) have real knowledge about human nature baked into the cake, thanks to millennia of trial and error. A typical off-the-mark take on the Fifty Shades phenomenon is provided by Rich Lowry, who titled his article, “Creep Meets Girl, Fifty Shades of Grey: The proper response to Christian’s obsession would be a good kick in the groin.” The operative word here is ‘proper’. The improper – but instinctive – response of a woman facing a dominant alpha male is to fall in love with him and try to have his child. Much as a man’s improper response to a floozy with a set of implants and blonde dye-job is to have quick sex with her.

OK, I hear all my conservative female readers out there screaming, what do you know? I am a woman, and I don’t want to have anything to do with this BDSM garbage.

I hear you, and for what it’s worth, I have no use for it either. But here’s the thing: BDSM is a caricature of male-female relations, and that is the reason it is popular in certain quarters. Dominant-submissive role-playing is a normal man-woman relationship taken to an extreme. In other words, it is a reaction to the joyless, sexless Swedish ideal of equality where the man does macramé and the woman pumps iron. And like any reaction, it goes too far. (Go see the great Norwegian comedy series Lilyhammer on Netflix for a hilarious send-up of Nordic culture.)

What traditional morality does is to employ the woman’s natural abhorrence of female promiscuity to channel her sexuality towards a father-knows-best, pillar-of-the-community type of respectable alpha male. A woman who falls for the Christian Grey-type is shamed. Therefore, women end up shunning him (even if they secretly love him). Instead of being a winner, Christian Grey is turned into a sexual loser, and therefore becomes the butt of other men’s jokes, instead of an object for their admiration. At that point, the women no longer secretly love him. This is the way sexual regulation used to work.

More than anything else, traditional marriage is a compromise between the interests of men and women. As a result, nobody gets everything he or she wants but everybody gets something. And most importantly, everybody gets someone. The latter is the real reason for the prohibition on polygamy and extramarital sex. The only winners with those pursuits are alpha males and (to a lesser extent) alpha females. The rest end up as sexless chumps, which is what you see on the college campus today. The beta-males (aka the nerds) are ignored, while the alpha males (the jocks and players) live like Hugh Heffner. Unfortunately, it is the beta-male provider types who form the backbone of modern society.

The thing about compromises, even good compromises like traditional marriage, is that they often don’t look that great at first glance. All the customs and traditions making up the institution of marriage look like a patchwork of contradictions and antiquated habits. The hard-won empirical knowledge behind the rituals only becomes obvious after they are removed.

Many of our sexual customs were overthrown in the sixties. The reason for their existence is only becoming apparent now.

Is Interstellar the most anti-global warming film ever made?

According to Wikipedia, part of the plot of Christopher Nolan’s lattest blockbuster, Interstellar, goes as follows (emphasis added):

“Low on fuel, Endurance can only visit one more planet before returning to Earth. Amelia believes Edmunds' planet has the more promising data, but Cooper and Romilly favor Mann's planet, as Mann (Matt Damon) is still transmitting. … The team votes for Mann's planet, but they find it to be icy and inhospitable. Mann reveals that he knew Plan B was the mission's goal all along, and faked data about his planet's viability.”

Apparently, Steve Sailer has alerted Mark Steyn to the fact that a character in Nolan’s latest flick is named Dr. Mann. Mark saw the film. Here is an excerpt from his subsequent film review:

“The movie ‘Mann’ is one of several astronauts out there in search of new worlds. The other guys are just referred to by one-word surnames, but ‘Dr Mann’ is never referred to as anything but ‘Dr Mann’. In other words, the Nolan brothers appear to have consciously chosen to give their villain the character of a ‘climate scientist’. … Given the film's themes, it's difficult to believe the Nolans' choice of name for their bad guy is pure coincidence.

Once he's on his new world, he sends back data telling NASA what a perfect climate it is. When Coop & Co get there, they discover it's an ice planet - a vast frozen wasteland in which even the clouds ice up. Consigning the man who eliminated the Medieval Warm Period to a giant planetary icebox again seems too good a jest to be coincidental.”

Film-maker Christopher Nolan has developed a reputation for being one of Hollywood’s secret crypto-conservatives, especially after the last film in his Batman trilogy, 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, debuted, where the villains are more or less explicitly modeled after Occupy Wall Street. Given examples like this, I think it is incumbent on conservatives to refrain from dismissing all pop culture as trash, and to make an effort to differentiate between films that makes our points and stuff made by the enemy.

Good conservatives should be seeking out fellow conservatives like Nolan and give them sustenance and support. Go rent Nolan’s older films, go see his current movie, and keep an eye out for what he does next. If you don’t, you won’t have anybody to blame but yourself if everything out ends up really being trash.

The Arroyo: an out-of-the-closet conservative film by an out-of-the-closet conservative

Conservatives love to complain about the pop culture, how it demonizes conservatives and propagates a subversive left-wing agenda. But film-maker Jeremy Boreing decided to do more than just whine. He decided to take matters into his own hands by making a conservative film, The Arroyo, which is just being released. 

Here is Andrew Klavan’s (who is a conservative screenwriter himself, penning one of Clint Eastwood’s flicks) take on the backstory:

“For those conservatives with artistic talent and ambition, this is a spectacular moment to take to the barricades. Big Media is tottering under the assault of new technologies. With electronic publishing and social media, books can be self-published and self-promoted. With the new video cameras, professional-looking films can be produced on the cheap and distributed online. YouTube, iTunes, smart phones, tablets, blogs — all provide opportunities for new kinds of work and new ways for that work to be dispensed. 

But to take advantage of this moment, conservatives have to come to grips with a situation that they naturally find uncomfortable: to wit, we are now the counter-culture.  When it comes to the arts, Radical Leftists are The Man. We need to act like the rebels we now are and stop trying to win the favor of the big studios and publishers and mainstream reviewers. We need to make stuff. Good stuff. And get it out to the audience any way we can.” 

“This is easier said than done, but one genuinely inspiring example has been set by my friend Jeremy Boreing. Jeremy’s movie The Arroyo has had theatrical showings in Los Angeles and Texas and is now available on DVD. The good people at Newsmax will help with distribution and the film is scheduled for release on iTunes as well.”

About the film itself, Klavan has this to say:

“The Arroyo is really an amazing accomplishment. Brought into being on a micro budget, it’s a feature quality film. And to label it conservative would be limiting and unfair. It’s only conservative in the sense that it doesn’t lie about its subject. It tells the story of a rancher on the border who gets fed up with the heartless Mexican cartels using illegals to smuggle drugs across his land. Ignored by local law enforcement and deserted by our corrupt and hapless federal government, the hero takes a stand alone — and finds himself in a world of trouble.”

“The leftist Machete had no trouble corralling a top-flight cast and getting a wide release, complete with upcoming sequel. Jeremy, on the other hand, basically had to pull The Arroyo out of the ground by main strength. And he did, delivering steady writing, good direction and strong performances from an unknown cast (which, by the way, is extremely difficult to do). There’s also a top-notch score by John Campbell and some great songs. It also inspired this beautiful piece by Texas songwriter Cary C. Banks.”

I haven’t seen the film yet myself, but the trailer looks very enticing.

Boreing’s partner in art is Bill Whittle, famous to many for his Afterburner videos. While he only edited The Arroyo, he is developing film projects of his own: The Common Sense Resistance, Big Bat Problems and Aurora.

To those of us who like to complain about Hollywood, I say we have a duty to support filmmakers like Bill and Jeremy, as well as their products. So spread the good word about The Arroyo; get yourself a DVD copy; and support Bill Whittle’s upcoming projects by becoming a paid-up member of BillWhittle.com.

Apocalypse Now: Col. Kurtz has died

Col. Robert Rheault died on Oct 16 at the age of 87. His relationship to the fictional Col. Kurtz in the film Apocalypse Now is explained in this New York Times obituary:

‘John Milius, who wrote the screenplay for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War film, “Apocalypse Now,” told The Times in 1977 that he had based the Marlon Brando character of Walter Kurtz, the mysterious Green Beret colonel who conducts an unauthorized secret war in Cambodia, on both the fictional Kurtz of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and the real-life Colonel Rheault.

Colonel Rheault was “a great man,” Mr. Milius said, adding, “Men like Rheault could’ve helped us win the war.”'

Col. Rheault was a fascinating man because of the moral conundrum he created with his straightforward, unhypocritical approach to the Vietnam War.

‘When the Army charged the Green Beret commander, Col. Robert Rheault, and six of his officers with murder and conspiracy on July 21, 1969, in the secret execution of a Vietnamese spy suspect, it caused consternation on both sides of the growing American divide over the war in Vietnam.

Hawks condemned the charges for what they saw as a Catch-22 military absurdity: the prosecution of front-line troops for killing the enemy.

Opponents of the war portrayed it as proof of American involvement in a secret campaign of terror and assassination, paralleling the combat seen nightly on television.’

Was Rheault some kind of a Lt. Calley-style loser?

‘Colonel Rheault, the son of a prominent Boston banking family, was a rising star in the Berets. Widely thought to be on the cusp of promotion to general at the time of his arrest, he had entered West Point after graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy, received a Bronze Star in Korea, earned advanced degrees in international relations and worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon before serving his first tour of duty in Vietnam as a Green Beret officer.’

Rheault didn’t behave impulsively or in the heat of the moment. The assassination was the result of an informed, rational decision designed to help the war effort and bring about victory. If you have read anything at all about the history of SOG in Cambodia you know that the locals who the Special Forces worked with included many double agents.

Where are my sympathies, with the war realists, or the war moralists? Honestly, I can’t decide. I can see both sides of the moral question he raised. On the one hand, I naturally sympathise with those who aren’t deluded by pretty lies and choose to operate in the real world with their eyes wide open. On the other, there have to be legal standards or your military will degenerate into a gang of cut-throats. Which is what makes Col. Rheault a fascinating character.

As I have said before, biographical films should be made about some of the characters in Apocalypse Now who are based on real people, such as Kurtz, the Harlequin and Col. KiIlgore. These people are too interesting to be remembered by their caricature.

So how conservative is Hollywood anyway?

No that isn’t a typo, I meant to say ‘conservative’ rather than ‘liberal’. The reason I ask such a counterintuitive question is that I have long suspected that there are far more conservatives in Hollywood than meet the eye, choosing to go stealth to avoid the fate of out-in-the-open conservatives John Milius and Mel Gibson.

Milius is the talented but underutilized scriptwriter of Apocalypse Now and Dirty Harry. As Steve Sailer pointed out:

"When I was in college, Apocalypse Now was being sold as the ultimate antiwar film. Yet it was actually beloved by the jocks and ROTC cadets in my dorm, who came back from it humming Wagner and shouting, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!” Meanwhile, my more cultured friends seemed perturbed by it.

When I finally saw Apocalypse Now, I realized why: It was a based on a far-right script by Milius (who went on to direct Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn) about how the US could have won in Vietnam if we only had the guts to unleash Kurtz. (Apocalypse Now was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who won his first Oscar for writing Patton.)"

Other that being the creator of the excellent Rome miniseries in 2005 (one of the best shows to ever appear on TV, at least in my opinion), his work schedule has been pretty light. A writer and director as talented as him should have had three times the output.

When it comes to Mel Gibson, in spite of the fact that has a track record of producing blockbusters as well as one inarguably brilliant film (The Passion of Christ), his latest film Get the Gringo (which was good enough to get an 80% approval rating by critics on Rotten Tomatoes), never got wide theatrical release in the US. You ever heard of it before now?

Rather, conservatives who are more adept at office politics covertly insert conservative themes into their work, thereby avoiding the liberal blacklist.

For instance, Soprano’s creator, David Chase said of himself, “I am very, very, very traditional.” Hmm. I wonder what he meant by that? (This quote used to be found in the Wikipedia page for The Sopranos but has since been removed.) 

Or take Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, who described his philosophy of life thus: 

"If religion is a reaction of man, and nothing more, it seems to me that it represents a human desire for wrongdoers to be punished. I hate the idea of Idi Amin living in Saudi Arabia for the last 25 years of his life. That galls me to no end. I feel some sort of need for Biblical atonement, or justice, or something. I like to believe there is some comeuppance, that karma kicks in at some point, even if it takes years or decades to happen. My girlfriend says this great thing that’s become my philosophy as well. 'I want to believe there's a heaven. But I can't not believe there's a hell.'"

Yup. Sounds like a conservative to me.

An example of an almost-out-in-the-open crypto-conservative, who practically spells out his themes in countless interviews, is Neill Blomkamp. He nevertheless still manages to deceive critics of his true intentions. The left-wing critics hear what they want to hear, and his right-wing critics, who never bother to read the interviews, can’t see past the liberal smokescreen in his films. For instance, conservatives widely denounced his latest film, Elysium, for being ‘left-wing’, even though it was a critique of America’s open border policy with Mexico, as he eludes here:

"And then the third thing is painting this realistic image of a future Earth that is my realistic version of a future Earth, which meant the borders being erased entirely and having this fluid population group that basically moves from Chile all the way up to Canada. … I just wanted that to feel real, like, as real as possible, and the numbers of people that are Latin are going to overwhelm the numbers of people that aren’t. And if you, again, hold true to the metaphor, the wealth would have gone to the station."

And here (where he describes his first experience in Mexico):

“We were walking through these totally impoverished, insane areas with feral dogs and crying babies and people making fires, and on the horizon I could see the floodlights from the U.S. shining into Mexico, and there were multiple Black Hawks flying the perimeter, and it was like science fiction on Earth,” he says. “Nothing has changed, but now you’re on the other side of the border.” His goal with Elysium, he says, was to put all of us there."

About his career prospects he says:

"The next film I want to make is far lower budget than this and is f**king mental. And the next film after that, I think it may end my career. It’s like a, it’s a comedy that may — I don’t even know what will happen. And I like that I don’t know what will happen, you know? If it’s like too volatile, and people just hate it, and I get booted out of Hollywood."

Notice how he uses 60’s language to cloak conservative intentions.

Christopher Nolan, the director of the spectacularly successful Batman movies is another almost-out-of-the-conservative closet, especially with his last of his trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, which an explicit attack on Occupy Wall Street. But I guess his conservative themed films make too much money for Hollywood to blacklist him…for now.

But perhaps I am being too optimistic here. Could it be that many of the filmmakers I supect as being conservative are really not so much deliberate crypto-cons but rather unreflective liberals harbouring an inner conservative id? This ideological schizophrenia may simply be a product of a conditioned reflex response. If one has to hold liberal politics in order to get by at work, but if, at the same time, your marketplace rewards work that is at least nominally conservative, then an unexamined duality is perhaps the path of least psychological resistance.

I had always suspected that Martin Scorsese was a closet conservative, as most of his films depict humanity as Hobbesian savages, where life is ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Not too many of his movies show people to be the Rousseauian noble savages (“man is born free but everywhere he is in chains”) that utopian socialists think we must be. But perhaps Scorsese just hasn’t examined the contradiction within himself, enjoying enough worldly success and acclaim that he doesn’t feel the need for much introspection.

The Lost Worlds of Apocalypse Now

I have always been a big fan of the film Apocalypse Now, so I was pleasantly surprised when I came across an off-hand remark about the adventures of Col. John Stockman in Col. Hal Moore’s book, We Were Soldier’s Once...And Young. Hal Moore was a battalion commander in one of the original helicopter-borne units in Vietnam, the First Cavalry Division. The First Cavalry pioneered airmobile tactics and Moore’s book was adapted into a very good war movie starring Mel Gibson in 2002. 

Col. John Stockman commanded another battalion in the First Cavalry, the First Battalion, 9^th Cavalry, otherwise known as the first of the ninth. Stockman was known as an unconventional loose cannon by the brass, but who was loved by ‘his boys’ for dramatic gestures such as introducing Civil War era paraphernalia into his unit, like trumpets and Union cavalry hats. Sounds familiar? It should, if you have seen Apocalypse Now. 

So, I thought: are there any other characters in the movie based on real-life interesting people? It turns out there are.

Take Col Walter E. Kurtz, played by Marlin Brando. He was obviously based on the literary character Kurtz, from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. But it turns out he was also based on an historical character as well: Tony Poe. Tony Poe was a Marine veteran of Iwo Jima. After the war, he joined the CIA and organized Korean refugees for sabotage work behind enemy lines in the Korean War. From there, he did similar, behind-the-front-lines work in Burma, Indonesia, and Laos, where, according to Wikipedia:

“He paid Hmong fighters to bring him the ears of dead enemy soldiers... He dropped severed heads onto enemy locations twice in a grisly form of psy-ops. Although his orders were only to train forces, he also went into battle with them and was wounded several times by shrapnel.”

After Vietnam, he went native, as the British used to say, and married a Hmong woman with whom he lived in Thailand until 1990. When he moved back to the States he helped Hmong war veterans settle in the US. What an interesting guy!

The trouble is, as I read further, both Poe and Coppola denied that he was the basis of Kurtz, despite the obvious similarities. Coppola claimed Kurtz was inspired by Special Forces Col. Robert Rheault, who was considered a brilliant officer by everybody who knew him and whose predicted rise to the top ranks of the Pentagon was halted when he was charged with murdering a South Vietnamese double agent while a green beret in Nam. More similarities and another interesting character.

And the interesting real-life characters don’t stop there. Take the photojournalist portrayed by Dennis Hopper. Again, he is obviously based on another literary character from Heart of Darkness, this time the Harlequin. But again, he was also based on an historical character: Sean Flynn, actor Errol Flynn’s son! In addition to being the son of a famous Hollywood actor and starring in a movie at age 15, he was a maniac, freelance photojournalist who went to Vietnam on his own initiative and spent a lot of time on the front lines (and behind it), travelling with the 101^st Airborne Division and the Special Forces. He went missing while travelling by motorcycle in Cambodia in 1970. He was never heard from again and his remains have never been found. 

After reading all this, it occurred to me that Stockman, Poe, Rheault and Flynn were interesting men in their own right who deserved far more than to be remembered by history as movie caricatures (though Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper did superb jobs caricaturing them). All of them inspire films of their own that could be marketed as quasi-spin-offs of Apocalypse Now.

Great idea or what!

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.