Suffering through the top story in the arts section of yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, I thought of Andrew Breitbart, whom I knew a bit—enough to have had several conversations about how insidiously destructive the mainstream media are to American ideals.
Breitbart’s passion and mission in life were to counter that influence. So I’m certain he would have read Films That Last—“Many are timely upon release, but what makes a few timeless? It’s in how they address their times” in our hometown newspaper with the same head shaking that I did.
In fact, it was as a sort of homage to Breitbart that, at my own website, I made fun of Reed Johnson, the article’s author. Andrew would have agreed that viciously ridiculing the man’s laughable writing is a potent weapon against his lame thinking, given that Johnson himself will never be persuaded that his ideas are anything less than received wisdom.
But here at Legal Insurrection, let’s focus on Johnson’s opinions that are stated as self-evident truths, because they serve as a particularly useful exemplar of Breitbart’s contention that the oikophobes have hijacked our culture. The man who wrote the following selected inanities is an at-large culture reporter whose worldview informs everything he writes about dance, architecture, opera, movies, etc.
But will a film like Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty,” about a specific, recent event — the killing of Osama bin Laden — resonate in the same way that her previous, fictional movie about the Iraq war, “The Hurt Locker,” did with its fearless main character channeling our deepest fears about the price of that misbegotten war?
Oddly, my deepest fears about the war were that (a) the rules of engagement prevented victory, and (b) any gains made would be lost to politics. Both of those fears have been realized.
Two of the great films about the Vietnam War, “Apocalypse Now” (1979) and “The Deer Hunter” (1978), provided devastating commentaries about American involvement there without ever directly confronting the morality of the war itself.
Didn’t directly confront the war’s morality? Both movies were built around metaphors (the trip upriver to find Kurtz in Apocalypse Now and Russian Roulette in The Deer Hunter) intended to symbolize exactly that.
Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” (1960) became a curtain-raiser on ’60s youth rebellion several years before anyone heard of Beatlemania.
Uh, Reed, ever heard of Elvis, James Dean, The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause…all of which predated Breathless?
George C. Scott’s Oscar-winning performance in “Patton” (1970) was so perfectly balanced that conservatives (including Richard Nixon) saluted the biopic as a patriotic homage to the blood-and-guts World War II general, while liberals saw it as a brilliant satire of a warmongering lunatic.
A “warmongering lunatic”? Why, for wanting to actually, you know, get to Berlin and kill Hitler as quickly as possible?
I was a sentient semi-adult in 1970, when Patton was released, and though I attended a university where it was always hip to deride war mongers, I don’t recall anyone considering the movie a satire. (Also, Nixon a conservative?)
Then there are those films with no clear topical intentions that somehow take on serendipitous significance through a combination of great storytelling and shrewd marketing. Ads for “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” which opened the year after the twin towers fell in Lower Manhattan, used phrases and imagery (“All will be lost unless all unite against evil”) that reminded moviegoers of the real drama unfolding outside the cineplex.
Reed Johnson has already called George Patton a war monger and the Iraq War “misbegotten.” Now he says that the “real drama” was against evil terrorists who…shouldn’t be fought?
Of the current batch of films, “Argo,” about a largely forgotten episode of the 1979 U.S. hostage crisis in Iran, may be the most au courant in that it depicts a political facedown between a Western superpower and a defiant Islamic theocracy that continues today.
No, it wasn’t “largely forgotten.” It was largely unknown until a few years ago.
What [Argo] surprisingly fails to do is humanize the Iranians, who are almost uniformly presented as howling fanatics — the same stereotype that has prevailed in U.S. pop culture for the last three decades.
Yes, let’s humanize the “good Nazis” who kidnapped and held for 444 days 52 Americans in the name of Islam; who to this day refer to the U.S. as the Great Satan and vow to wipe Israel off the map. Maybe they should humanize themselves.
“Lincoln” speaks more clearly to our own time, although it’s set in the uncertain winter of 1865, as America’s 16th president labors to bring the Civil War to a close and muster congressional support to pass the 13th Amendment. The story of the Rail Splitter’s heroic leadership in breaking the ferocious partisan gridlock surrounding slavery should make Spielberg’s movie relevant as long as there are obstructionists and knaves in Congress.
So Patton is a war monger but Lincoln isn’t. Fine. But would anyone be surprised if Reed Johnson believes Lincoln is the only Republican president whose agenda shouldn’t be obstructed by Democrats in Congress?
Another likely awards contender, “Les Miserables” is an example of a film based on older material — the novel by Victor Hugo that became the megasuccessful stage musical — that can be linked to current issues in our own time. The brave souls manning the Paris barricades during the 19th century uprisings could be seen as stand-ins for the Occupy movement of 2011 in American cities, and their song, “Do You Hear the People Sing,” could be the anthem of the 99%-ers battling Wall Street and social inequality.
When you’ve jumped the shark as many times as Johnson has in this piece, all that’s left is to compare the young idealists getting slaughtered in the streets of Paris with all those iPhone-toting campers sleeping in corporate-sponsored tents in government-permitted encampments in the police-protected parks of America. Given that the “brave souls manning the Paris barricades” were fighting government tyranny, wouldn’t Tea Party demonstrators have been a more apt comparison?
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Comments
My review:
Finest words ever to line a bird cage with! Or to help a puppy in training. Or to be shredded as packing material. Reed Johnson has his pen on the pulse of what the needs of animals and those fleeing the burdensome regulations of California want most in a movie review.
Critic-of-the-moment Reed Johnson’s article is smog-wash and it makes me want to stick my head out the window and yell ”I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore.”
Funny, but from within my “bubble” I could write BETTER crap than Johnson, using the same Collectivist formulaic clap-trap.
It is all too predictable, trite, and mindless.
I understand why no one readsthe newspapers anymore.
Excellent critique. I’m sure it was difficult to be susinct with all the material.
Dear Joel,
Extra points for the use of the Hunter S. Thompson phrase “fear and loathing.”
I read lots of his claptrap. He was assigned in college journalism classes. He shot himself.
What sewage we are served by our Progressive betters.
We’re currently writing the textbook on how to self destruct as a nation.
The first step was the importing of all those Socialist DP University instructors who found themselves wandering stateless around Europe after the end of WWII which inevitably resulted in turning our universities into Marxist training grounds that endlessly produced graduates who never found a movement to overturn and destroy the United States they didn’t like.
I’m no Reed Johnson, so forgive me if the following is unreadable, but the pop-cultural oikophobe commenters and critics do have a traceable lineage.
You won’t find it through ancestry.com, but the great Michael Barone has their birth pegged:
Remarking on Adlai Stevenson’s revealing quip to a supporter who’d told him that all “thinking people” supported him—“Yes, but I need to win a majority”—Barone laments,
“Stevenson was the first leading Democrat politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture—the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting.”
As Barone says, FDR would never have thought, let alone said, such a thing.
Not if you were a servant of the court, hoping to find and receive favor from the sovereign.
Well, that’s odd. There is no mention of Kosovo, which was practically a war to cover for the atrocities committed by the Muslims, including murder, rape, and human organ sales. It was also a long awaited victory — an anniversary remembering old glories — over the Slavic people. A population periodically subject to enslavement and exploitation by imperial (i.e. left-wing) interests, especially Islam, and now with the aid of the “enlightened” West.
There is also no mention of regime change, wresting control from national Muslims to empower imperial Muslims, in Egypt, Libya, and Syria.
The Iraq war was inevitable because Bush Sr. left the process incomplete, and Clinton was too distracted to finish the job.
The wars to aid a free people to escape communist bondage were morally justified. Neither redistributive change nor retributive change, neither denigration of individual dignity nor devaluation of human life, are morally justified.
As for the Iranians, end the occupation of Persia. What is the statute of limitations describing a proper and moral transfer of property?
Recalling a selective history undermines Johnson’s credibility. A selective indignation is unbecoming a self-described “progressive” individual.
Oh, one more thing. The French revolution — an exceedingly violent correction — was necessitated because the regime maintained a monopoly of authority and supported monopolistic practices, which caused the marginalization and evisceration of competing interests. The people had no peaceful alternative to hold the regime accountable. Incidentally, the methods and practices embraced that regime are founded in left-wing philosophy. The same which forms the foundation of communism, socialism, fascism, imperialism, and similar totalitarian regimes.
The Occupy movement may be well-intentioned, but their focus betrays their true convictions.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
(I hope my comment accurately reflects the degree of respect I hold for Mr. Reed Johnson’s cultural musings. Thanks for giving me the first good laugh I’ve had all day.)
[…] (b) any gains made would be lost to politics. Both of those fears have been realized. –”Yet more fear and loathing of American culture (and history) at the LA Times“,by Joel Engel (giving a “reason you suck speech” to the LAT’s Reed […]