In June 2020, I wrote a blog post about intertextuality, one of my favorite things in literature. Yesterday evening Susie and I went to the movie shown here at Carolina Meadows (free, with complementary popcorn) and saw the new Downton Abbey movie. There is a lovely and extended homage to the great old Gene Kelly Debbie Reynolds movie, Singin’ in the Rain. If you have not seen the Downton Abbey movie yet, I strongly recommended. It is great fun in these difficult times.
On a totally different matter, I learned to walk 87 or 88
years ago – I do not actually remember precisely when – and since then like all
other human beings I have been walking around without any difficulty. As a boy,
I was a pretty good dancer, and I could even press up into a handstand and walk
around on my hands – no problem. Now, because of my Parkinson’s, walking and
even standing steadily upright have become problematic, and for the first time
I am compelled to realize how extraordinary it is that we humans walk about on
our hind feet without dragging our knuckles on the ground to steady us. It
really is, when you think about it, an extraordinary feat of balance.
60 comments:
I was never a good dancer nor could I walk on my hands, but at age 76 I am very conscious that walking on the unevenly paved sidewalks and streets of Santiago (how aware one becomes of badly paved sidewalks and streets as one gets old) is "an extraordinary feat of balance".
I keep up my daily walks, but taking a bad fall scares me. It's no longer any fun.
Off topic, but for those interested in an account of the maneuverings w/in the Republican far right in the House of Rep.:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/07/jim-jordan-mark-meadows-mccarthy-speaker/
History repeating itself as farce. Headline from the New York Times:
“Facing various investigations from his time in office, Jair Bolsonaro is believed to be holed up in Florida.”
"And to ensure that holdouts would not abuse it, moderates threatened their own motion — they could band with Democrats on bipartisan legislation to “discharge” any legislation stuck in committees to bring and pass bills on the floor."
This could get interesting tomorrow.
I don't watch very many movies. I think I can count on two hands the movies I saw last year.
I know leftists are supposed to be really good at media critique. I'm not though, so I find when I watch a lot of movies, I try really hard to analyze the themes in them, and I feel like I get the wrong answer every time. It gives me a weird sort of anxiety, like I'm going to feel stupid after watching a movie.
Anyway, I went to find the blog post from 2020 and I knew instantly where it was going, because yesterday, I decided to watch a movie. Whiplash. I hated it. Here's the post. https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2020/06/?m=0
I just felt like I didn't understand the point of the movie again. The instructor drives his student to almost kill himself. He doesn't feel sorry at all. He says, "Nothing has been more harmful to the world than the words 'Good Job.'" Then the movie ends with the student playing a masterpiece, him nodding "good job," and it was all worth it in the end - the torture and abuse.
But leftists have to critically engage with media, so I guess I'll keep trying.
Sonic,
I think you are being rather hard on yourself. People, regardless their political and ideological orientation, whether, as you put it, “leftist,” or conservative, interpret works of art (used broadly to include cinema) differently, and there is no one way to interpret any work of art. With regard to “Whiplash,” I believe your interpretation is spot on. There was, from my perspective, no deep message about correct or incorrect educational methodologies. The band instructor was a sadistic perfectionist. For him, telling students “good job,” regardless the quality of their work product, yields mediocrity, and mediocrity does not deserve to be praised. But there are other reasons for giving students psychological encouragement, which he was unable to appreciate. His abusive treatment of his students caused a former student to commit suicide, and he is held legally accountable, with the help of the drumming student. The drumming student is also a perfectionist, and determined to show the instructor that he, the instructor, underestimated his ability, and upstages him while performing “Caravan.” The movie was, essentially, a character study of people whom most of us have also encountered in our lives. Character study movies have merit in allowing us to observe actors re-create the behavior of fictional characters who may resemble people in our own lives. It is a form of entertainment, and need not have a meaning which will change our lives.
If you are looking for a “message” movie, I would suggest “Nine Days,” a movie I have recommended on this blog in prior threads. It is a fantasy, but has one of the most creative, inspiring plot-lines I have seen in a long time.
Post-script
Cinema trivia: J. K. Simmons, the actor who portrayed the sadistic band instructor in “Whiplash” (and the spokesperson for Farmers Insurance) grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a wealthy suburb of Detroit where many of the auto executives live. His father was a music teacher at Parcells Middle School, a selective school for gifted students. An interesting question would be whether his portrayal of the band instructor incorporated aspects of his own father.
Marc,
There is a leftist critique of mass media such as is found in Adorno's and Horkheimer's study on the culture industry which mainly critiques Hollywood movies from the 1940's. These studies expose the ideological bias and messages behind the apparently innocent and apolitical plots of such movies.
I'm sure that people do the same kind of studies today, but I see so few movies (the last one I saw was Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, which I liked) that I don't pay any attention to them
In my experience people who fill their spare time with lots of movies and television tend to be more conventional than those who fill their spare time with, say, poetry and classical music and/or jazz, but I'm not sure whether otherwise conventional people seek out conventional media sources or whether it's the media sources which form conventional people.
s.w.
I have a comment on the last paragraph of your comment. I'll preface it by saying that I watch little TV, not having a working TV or a Netflix etc. subscription, and I go to movies these days only rarely. (I have been watching on my computer a PBS Masterpiece Theater series that I didn't see when it first aired -- the re-make of Poldark, which is basically a historical soap opera, set in late 18th c. and early 19th cent. Cornwall and London, but well-acted and entertaining. [Based on a series of novels.])
That said, movies do not have to be a "conventional" source, i.e., a purveyor of "conventional" messages, though a good many of them are. It depends what sorts of movies one is talking about, made by whom, etc. The Hollywood of the 1940s, dominated by a few major studios with stables of actors under long-term (typically) contracts, is quite different from today's movie industry -- at least as it appears to an admittedly complete outsider w/ no inside knowledge. There are still big studios churning out action blockbusters to make lots of money, but there are also smaller studios and production companies making movies that are not intended to turn huge profits but may rather be intended to win awards, which burnish a studio's reputation and image and thus redound to its benefit. (Some of them also have to make money, otherwise the studio, if it's a small one, may eventually go under, but that's not the sole consideration, or at least doesn't appear to be.) In this context somewhat unconventional directors may have a chance to make movies that, while often intended to be entertaining in some sense, are also not "conventional."
Also, U.S. audiences, at least if they live in big cities on the coasts (and maybe elsewhere), are sometimes able to see non-Hollywood movies made in Europe and Asia and Africa if they want to. I live a shortish distance from the American Film Institute theater (formerly located in Wash. D.C., now in Md.) that has annual festivals of films from the EU and Africa. (Not that I often take advantage of my proximity to the AFI, but I could if I wanted to.)
Thanks Marc,
I take suggestions from this blog seriously, so I'll be sure to check out Nine Days. I guess I didn't know about character studies. I suppose it makes sense. I think I once read that all stories have three elements, the plot, the setting, and the characters, and that usually stories try to focus on just one. I saw Avatar, and that was an example of a movie with a cliche plot and boring character roles that we're used to, but the setting was strange and new. The setting is the focus. It makes sense that there would be stories that similarly focus on interesting character types and disregard plot and setting.
At least that makes sense to me right now.
It does seem like right wingers are frequently poor media consumers by contrast. Famously, Tim Pool tried to argue that Squid Game was about communism. It seems like Rage Against The Machine gets canceled every month for "going woke." I've even heard people argue that Yellowstone, the darling TV show for everyone who dreams of being an ultra rich capitalist tough guy rancher, is secretly leftist propaganda about abortion access and land back. Not sure I buy that one though.
P.s. and Latin America, I should have added.
LFC,
If you enjoy unconventional Latin American movies, try one from Chilean film director and personal friend Cristian Sanchez if you get the chance. He even has a Wikipedia page in English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristi%C3%A1n_S%C3%A1nchez_(director)
s.w.
Thanks, I'll follow the link.
LFC: if you get far enough along in Poldark (and I have to say I preferred the first version and can never undrstand why the bbc chooses remakes instead of showing the earlier versions) you'll encounter Colonel Despard and his terrible fate, which is also discussed in EPThompson's "Making of the English working class." Enjoy.
anon.
Interesting.
Two things:
1) Wikipedia tells me the original series was shown to American audiences in 1977-78. I remember seeing at least some of it, which is why I sought out the re-make. (I was a student in college at the time.)
2) I'm in the last season now, so I have encountered Col. Despard, who has been arrested for high treason (but I haven't come to his "fate" quite yet). I read a smallish amount of The Making of the English Working Class as an undergraduate -- at this remove, I don't know why I didn't read more of it, except perhaps that its subject was not particularly central to my studies (such as they were - cough). Nor do I know exactly what happened to the paperback copy I used to have many years ago.
(A close friend of mine in college, who became a professional [i.e., academic] historian, remarked to me, perhaps somewhat pretentiously -- odd what one remembers! -- that reading Making of the English Working Class was "a great historical experience." But apparently it was not a sufficiently great experience to persuade him to become a labor historian or historian of the working class/lower classes, because he didn't choose that as his specialty.)
sonic & S. wallerstein,
Check out the documentary Theaters of War by Roger Stahl, who is a professor of communications studies. He shows how the Pentagon and CIA are, and long have been, intimately involved in the bankrolling and writing of countless Hollywood productions. To the point that films won't even be considered by major studios if the studios worry that the US military might have objections about their content, because those studios & producers don't want to jeopardize other projects that they need military cooperation on.
ROGER STAHL: Another main job of the Office is to sell regular Americans on pouring vast resources into these institutions. All those weapons can get expensive....
MATTHEW ALFORD: And this means that they're able to show off how sexy, and how wonderful, and how useful, and how targeted their new products are, which means that the public is going to be less liable to criticize the arms industry as something that is messy, unpleasant, dark, cruel.
ROGER STAHL: Of course, Hollywood has played a lead role in selling weapons, too. They rewrote the Hulk so he climbed on an F-22 and rode it into the sky. They got the F-35 to fly alongside Superman. And got Ludacris to show off the new Ripsaw vehicle.
...
ROGER STAHL: The Iron Man franchise was an outright celebration of the arms industry. It started out as the exact opposite. The original script for the first movie was all about Tony Stark going to battle against the arms manufacturers.... By the time the film went into production with the DOD, however, the whole thing was gone. Co-star Jeff Bridges told the press they didn't have a script and were getting regular notes from what he called the suits at Marvel, who were, of course, getting notes from the brass at the Pentagon....
When it was all said and done, Stark had happily ... become an emissary of the military industrial complex himself. Flipping the storyline cleared the runway for all of this.
(contd)
And it's not just Hollywood films that are affected.
The biggest surprise was just how much stuff—how many different kinds of media that they’re working with. To call it the military-Hollywood complex now is really a misnomer because you’re dealing with almost every kind of media activity—sporting events and parades, in fact, anything that shows up on TV, video games, social media, you name it. The military are involved in things that you would not recognize as military productions. They do an astonishing number of cooking and cake shows, for example.
All this signaled a shift away from the war film to working within a story-telling realm that is designed to do something else. This is not only to justify military policy but to pull emotional strings and get people acclimated to the presence of military personnel, military bases, military operations, and weapons. They’re injecting this stuff into all the crevices of everyday life, normalizing the omnipresence of the military. That’s the basic strategy. It’s geared around massaging the political attitudes of the American body politic so that the military funding keeps flowing.
One of the most alarming things in the documentary is that it exposes how an extremely influential media scholar, Lawrence Suid, author of what has been called the definitive work on Hollywood and the military (a '90s book called "Guts and Glory"), was secretly working directly with the military. In public Suid always took the position that the military's role was limited to making films more "accurate," and he always rejected suggestions that there were more nefarious propagandistic motives. In actuality, the military's involvement is much greater than that. They rewrite scenes, sometimes whole scripts, to ensure the military is portrayed positively. And Suid was taking notes from the military's main office overseeing Hollywood propaganda.
Here is Roger Stahl discussing the film in a recent interview:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/01/02/ureo-j02.html
If you don't have time to watch the whole film, there's a transcript of it somewhere online.
Eric
Not to dispute that the Pentagon does some of this, but how does Stahl explain a movie like Stop-Loss (2008, distributed by Paramount)? I happened to see it in a theater when it was released. I wouldn't describe it as a pro-military movie (though I don't remember it all that well).
p.s. I'm deliberately not going back to the Vietnam and post-Vietnam movies, bc that was a different time, probably before the Pentagon became so interested in this.
s. wallerstein and LFC,
There are many superb movies made during the 1930’s and 1940’, both dramas and comedies, that you are overlooking. To name a few: The Oxbow Incident, starring Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews and Anthony Quinn; Citizen Kane; Captains Courageous, staring Spencer Tracy; The Awful Truth, starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne; Arsenic and Old Lace, starring Cary Grant; The Maltese Falcon, starring Bogart, Peter Lorre, and Sidney Greenstreet; Casablanca, of course, the greatest love story on film; The Grapes of Wrath, starring Henry Fonda; It Happened One Night, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert; The Best Years Of Our Lives, starring Fredric March and Myrna Loy. The list goes on and on.
Marc,
Although my knowledge of the history of movies is not as comprehensive as yours, if you look closely at my comment in question you'll see that I mentioned only the 1940s. That was deliberate, since my impression -- which might be wrong, I suppose -- is that Hollywood made fewer good movies in the 1940s than in the 1930s. (N.b. That's not to say there were no good movies during the 1940s.)
LFC,
I think the Pentagon was always interested.
It's just gotten even more involved as time has gone by.
ROGER STAHL: To see how all this works, just look at how the Entertainment Office has used the biggest weapon in its arsenal, rejection. It can put a production at a distinct disadvantage. Say you want to make a film based on the Kennedy White House tapes about how military leaders almost got us into a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. That'll earn you a solid one. You'll have to go to the Philippines for old planes to repaint and military bases. You'll have to construct U2 sequences from scratch and beg a museum for a destroyer. [The reference here is to "Thirteen Days," starring Kevin Costner.] Rejections like this have become more common over the years. On the heels of World War II, the Pentagon assisted a long list of films. But it rarely flat out denied filmmakers.
As Americans began to deal with a more controversial history of military intervention, though, the rejections started to come, first with films that failed to celebrate US military action in Vietnam and continuing with the Cold War, Gulf Wars, and issues way beyond war films. But these were only the rejections that were lucky enough to still be made. Many more weren't. That is no military assistance often means no show.
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer said that without military help, he couldn't have made Pearl Harbor.... There wouldn't have been a Top Gun without support either, he said.
Most of the time, it comes down to the studio's need to keep costs low. Take The Hunt for Red October, producer Mace Neufeld said Paramount straight up told him if you don't get cooperation, we won't make the movie. And they put it in the contract. It was a good thing for Neufeld that the script was an easy sell. It set him up for the long Jack Ryan franchise.
In contrast, consider another '90s film, Countermeasures. If it doesn't ring a bell, it's probably because it was never made. Sigourney Weaver had signed on to play the lead role. But that didn't matter as much as what the Entertainment Office thought. They didn't want a story about weapons smuggling on an aircraft carrier.
p.s. Casablanca is a very good movie and it's also a high-class contribution to Hollywood's propaganda effort on behalf of the Allied cause, in the non-pejorative sense of the word "propaganda" (there is such a sense; look it up if you don't believe me).
Above comment @6:45 directed to Marc.
Casablanca is excellent war propaganda, without a doubt.
Is it a good movie?
I don't know. Would I recommend it as a good movie to someone who is totally uninvolved in all the symbolism of World War 2?
No.
On the other hand, I might well recommend Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (the movie version as well as the play) to someone who has zero interest in the end of the Roman Republic.
s. wallerstein @11:58AM,
This is a fantastic lecture by Michael Parenti, discussing how entertainment media, like popular films, serve to reinforce existing social norms. He talks about how movies like Rambo are made over and over and widely distributed while films like Burn! (1969), Matewan, Reds, and 1900 (1976) are few and far-between and poorly distributed when they do get made.
Rambo and the Swarthy Hordes
(Btw, the ironic thing about Adorno and Horkheimer making those points is that, as Gabriel Rockhill argues, they themselves were serving a similar role in their analyses that ultimately concluded there was no alternative to capitalism.)
Eric,
There's a difference between two guys, Adorno and Horkheimer, who after having analyzed how brainwashed people are, concluded that there is no way to undo the brainwashing on a mass scale and those people who actually and deliberately carried out the brainwashing.
“Adorno and Horkheimer claim that Hollywood in that period basically serves to inculcate the values of the system, of the established order of things and I think that is true.”
What left-wing, utter socialist nonsense. And, s. wallerstein, how could you vouch for the validity of this statement since from your own admission you do not particularly like movies, and have not seen many of the movies from the 1930s-1940s.
How do the following movies from the 1930s “inculcate the values of the [capitalist] system”:
1. The Wizard of Oz, a fantasy about good and evil and the value of family life.
2. Duck Soup, a satire about the absurdity of war.
3. M, a story of a social outcast.
4. It Happened One Night, a romantic comedy about a plain-spoken journalist who puts a spoiled rich girl in her place.
5. Modern Times, a satire about the evils of technology and factory work.
6. Bringing Up Baby, a romantic comedy between a pedantic paleontologist and a free-spirited young woman.
7. The Adventures of Robin Hood, a movie about an English folktale and rebellion against greedy nobility (“You speak treason!” “Yes, I speak it fluently.”)
8. Wutheriing Heights, a love story of star-crossed lovers.
9. Frankenstein, a science-fiction movie about the hubris of science.
10. King Kong, a fantasy about human greed.
11. I Was A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, a condemnation of the American penal system.
12. All Quiet On The Western Front, a condemnation of war.
13. Jezebel, about a selfish Southern belle.
14. Mutiny On The Bounty, a movie about tyranny at sea.
15. The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, social commentary on rejection of the disfigured and disabled, and the capacity of love.
16. Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, a movie about standing up against political corruption in Washington.
17. Camille, a beautiful woman dying of consumption.
18. The several Astaire and Rogers dance musicals, pure entertainment.
And on and on.
Is entertainment for entertainment’s sake social ill?
And what about these movies from the 1940s:
1. The Maltese Falcon, a detective mystery about “what dreams are made of.”
2. The Man Who Came To Dinner, a satire about a self-centered academic.
3. The Pride of The Yankees, a tribute to a great baseball player.
4. Arsenic And Old Lace, a zany comedy about two sisters who poison lonely, elderly guests to put them out of their misery.
5. Rope, a suspense about the effort to commit the perfect murder.
6. Casablanca, yes, anti-Nazi propaganda about two lovers caught up in the throes of war, who put their love aside to do the right thing. What’s wrong with that?
7. Here Comes Mr. Jordan, a fantasy about a man who comes back to life reincarnated as someone else.
8. The Best Years Of Our Lives, social commentary on the sacrifices made by WWII veterans and how the country they served fails to appreciate their sacrifice.
9. The Big Sleep, a convoluted murder mystery, which even its author, Raymond Chandler, admitted had some loose ends he could not figure out.
10. Mildred Pierce, a story about a woman who sacrifices everything for her unappreciative daughter.
11. Key Largo, a confrontation between a war hero and a ruthless mobster, during a hurricane in Key West.
12. The Grapes of Wrath, a condemnation of capitalism and the depression it caused.
13. Laura, a murder mystery with a twist.
14. The Sea Wolf, another movie about tyranny at sea, and defiance of it.
15. Lifeboat, a movie about survival and selfishness.
16. Meet John Doe, a commentary on the abuse of capitalist power.
17. It’s A Wonderful Life, a sentimental movie, loved by millions, about the value of friendship and dedication to family and basic human values.
18. Now Voyager, a movie about a spinster who falls in love with a married man.
19. The several Abbott and Costello movies, for pure fun.
And on and on.
Where, pray tell, is the social indoctrination in these movies? Is it a social sin to be entertained., a sign of moral decay?
Astaire and Hayworth inculcating the values of the system in their unsuspecting movie audience:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUhhKELUxB0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-ds05t_ljM
More cinema trivia:
Rita Hayworth, a sex icon of the 1940s and pin-up girl of servicemen during WWII, and in The Shawshank Redemption, had a tragically sad life. Her father was a dance instructor of Roman ancestry, who taught her dancing lessons starting at the age of 3. He moved the family to Hollywood, with aspirations of making his daughter a movie star. It was rumored that he had sexually abused her as a teenager. She was married five times, most famously to Orson Welles and Prince Aly Khan. She had to spend most of her wealth in a custody battle with Aly Khan over their daughter, a custody battle she ultimately won, which left her broke. She once said that men went to bed with her thinking she was Gilda (famous for her semi-strip tease to the song “Put The Blame On Mame, Boys”), and were disappointed in the morning when they woke up with Rita Hayworth. Charlton Heston reported that he and his wife once went to dinner with Hayworth and her last husband, film producer James Hill, and her co-star Rex Harrison. Hill proceeded to heap verbal abuse on Hayworth, reducing her to tears. Heston resisted slugging Hill, and instead left the dinner with his wife. Hayworth became an alcoholic and sadly deteriorated into dementia in her sixties. She was arrested for shop-lifting, and in her declining years was cared for by her daughter. Princess Yasmine Aga Khan. She died in 1987 (the same year Fred Astaire passed away), at the age of 68.
Correction:
Rita Hayworth's father was of Roma, not Roman, descent.
Justice Sotomayor reports that she was “shell-shocked” after the Dobbs decision.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/sotomayor-felt-shell-shocked-after-us-supreme-courts-abortion-decision-2023-01-04/
I'm not familiar w every single one of the movies Marc listed, but of those listed the strongest case for a movie critical of capitalism (apart from The Grapes of Wrath) is probably Chaplin's Modern Times.
Sartre and de Beauvoir named their periodical/journal Les Temps Modernes after that movie.
Marc (@12:15 am)
If you have a critique of the view of Horkheimer and Adorno held regarding the role of mass media in late capitalist society then please enlighten us. Lacking same, your opinion on the matter is utterly conformist ideological nonsense. Remarkably similar, come to think of it to your take on Marcuse.
LFC,
Whether Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s “basically serves to inculcate the values of the system” is not determined by counting how many Hollywood movies of that era criticize the contemporary value system, as The Grapes Of Wrath and Modern Times did, but determining how many movies actually actively inculcated the values of the system. None of the movies I have cited above engaged in such ideological inculcation. So the thesis is lacking in empirical evidence to support it.
Christopher Mulvaney, Ph.D. (Mustn’t forget the cachet which the doctoral degree confers on the author),
Can you name any movies from the 1930’s or the 1940’s which actually actively “basically serve[] to inculcate the values of the system.” In the absence of such empirical evidence, the generalization by Adorno and Horkheimer is so much socialist hooey. And I do not have to read their works to figure that out. Cultural critiques by the socialist left – the opiate of the elite intelligentsia.
Marc Susselman, J.D., M.P.H.
Works of art -- movies, paintings, novels, whatever -- can contain all sorts of messages and points that are not totally explicit and shouted from the rooftops, so to speak, but that exist below their surfaces and are nonetheless communicated. Presumably that's what Adorno and Horkheimer were concerned with.
For example, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (which I have a rough idea of though I'm not sure I've ever seen it) could be taken to communicate the message that a single courageous honest politician can triumph over corruption, thereby reassuring its audience that the sources of corruption are bad individuals rather than the system itself. (I'm not positive that works in that case, but it's the example of the sort of analysis one could do.)
Typo: an example
A comment I made earlier this morning does not appear here, but I imagine that all the regular readers got it in an email.
Marc, for someone who reminds us daily of your status as an attorney and with details of the many important cases you've participated in, it's seems weird that you'd bitch about the fact that Mr. Mulvaney comments noting his academic achievements.
Not all of us opt for the email feed. At least, I don't.
s. wallerstein,
How does the email notification system work? Do you get notifications for all comments posted to threads you are subscribed to, including from anonymous posters?
I've try to repost it.
Yes, you receive all the comments.
s. wallerstein,
I rarely add my degree abbreviations to my name when posting on this blog. I did it in my last comment to make a point. Whatever degrees I have, I have never claimed that my degrees ipso facto validate my opinions. Why does Christopher Mulvaney insist on reminding us that he has a Ph.D. every time he comments. He is not the only individual who comments on this blog who has a Ph.D. David Zimmerman has a PH.D., but he does not include his degree after his name when he comments. So does John Rapko, but he does not highlight his degree. The only person who does this is Christopher Mulvaney, the message being that we should defer to his opinion because he has a doctorate.
LFC,
Whether Mr. Smith Goes To Washington has the subliminal message you ascribe to it, is debatable. Regarding its overt message, other politicians have found it to be inspirational. It was Senator McCain's favorite movies, and he prided himself on being a rebel, as demonstrated by his thumbs-down vote on the Republican effort to repeal the ACA. Moreover, what do you claim is the subliminal message of Key Largo; or Citizen Kane; or The Oxbow Incident; or The Maltese Falcon; or any of the Astaire/Rogers musicals; or .... ?
I've always thought that my having a PhD was mildly shameful, a sign of a lamentable conformism and lack of intellectual and cultural ambition. On the other hand, for the 12 years I taught at a community college, they paid me an extra thousand bucks per class because I had a PhD, although I'm not aware that it made me any better a teacher.--My father-in-law's favorite wisecrack when he saw someone doing something especially stupid was 'Nice work, doctor!'--I withhold comment on the attacks on Adorno, other than to recall his saying that 'the splinter in one's eye is the best magnifying glass'. I recall a class on modern art when I showed Dziga Vertov's The Man with the Movie Camera. One adult student became quite upset, because, she said, the film gave a false, propagandistic, and so outright evil portrayal of the Soviet Union in the late 1920s as some sort of workers' paradise. (She was from a Hungarian family who had fled Hungary in 1956 and had all their property confiscated by the state. Her family moved to Argentina, from which she fled during the Dirty War; she realized she was being followed on the way to class, so instead of going to the university she went straight to the airport. She was no naif.) Instead of directly responding, I showed the lindy hoppers' scene from Hellzapoppin, and asked: "Is this similarly false and propagandistic because it doesn't depict the contemporaneous socio-economic conditions of African Americans?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahoJReiCaPk&ab_channel=docludi2
To John Rapko:
"I've always thought that my having a PhD was mildly shameful, a sign of a lamentable conformism and lack of intellectual and cultural ambition."
This blog is probably not the best place to say such a thing.
I'll point out that the typical 19th century period pieces generally glossed over Native American genocide, glorified Manifest Destiny, and propagandized Lost Cause ideology. Then there were those 1930s biopics that glorified Gilded age crooks, grifters, and thugs like Drew and Fisk. Of course the studio heads were generally politically conservative and some were monsters (e.g. Mayer) and thugs (e.g. Cohn). Folks like John Wayne were true believers.
Very bad people can make very good films built around very bad ideas. What bugs me are things like films set in the late 1860s/early 1870s with folks using SSAs and '94 Winchesters.
Other factors like the Legion of Decency, Hays, Breen, and the Production Code should be considered, not to mention the antisemitic heckling from the likes of the Silver Shirts and Fr. Coughlin when evaluating film content. There was only so much you could get away with back then.
David Zimmerman,
I have noticed that not just this blog, but the internet generally, is not a great place for complex ironies, self-deprecating humor, or indeed any sort of remark that pokes fun at contemporary pieties. Once on Facebook I was pretending to give voice to the anti-French sentiments of American yahoos, and declared that French fries were not even food, because if you took off the peel and threw away the bone there was nothing left to eat. I was immediately castigated for my ignorance of not just not knowing how to eat French fries, but not even knowing that they're not French but rather Belgian.
aalll,
“I'll point out that the typical 19th century period pieces generally glossed over Native American genocide, glorified Manifest Destiny, and propagandized Lost Cause ideology. Then there were those 1930s biopics that glorified Gilded age crooks, grifters, and thugs like Drew and Fisk.”
Can you be more specific? Here is a list of some bio-pic movies which Hollywood made in the 1930’s: Alexander Hamilton; Annie Oakley; Augustus the Strong; Cleopatra; Clive of India; Giuseppe Verdi; The Great Waltz’ Jesse James; Lincoln in the White House; The Mighty Barnum; Parnell; The Private Life of Louis XiV; Rembrandt;; Stanley and Livingstone; The Story of Louis Pasteru; The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle; Viva Villa; The Waltz King.
Biopics made during the 1940s: The Adventures of Mark Twain; The Babe Ruth Story; Belle Starr; Bismarck; Brigham Young; Edison, The Man; The Fabulous Doreys; God Is My Co-Pilot; Jolson Sings Again; The Jolson Story; Kit Carson; My Gal Sal; My Wild Irish Rose; Rossini; Scott of the Antarctic; Sergeant York; The Story of GI Joe; They Died With Their Boots On; Till The Clouds Roll By.
I know of no movie made in the 1930’s or 1940’s which “glorified Gilded age crooks, grifters, and thugs like Drew and Fisk” or which endorsed Manifest Destiny. Where do you get your information from?
John Rapko:
You give yourself too much rhetorical credit: there is no complex irony or any sign of self-deprecating humour in your remark about getting a PhD.... just a bit of verbal self-loathing.
Marc, "The Toast of New York." Edison was sort of a jerk and Kit Carson killed himself a lot of Indians and was instrumental in stealing California from Mexico. Going through all the films that treated dead and displaced Indians as a good thing or at best regrettable but unavoidable and displaced Confederates as honorable, noble, etc. would be a book. Haven't seen the Brigham Young pic - did it deal with the Mountain Meadow incident? A lot of this is subtext. The problem we have is that while we could watch the films on your list one by one and I could make my points, we are unlikely to live long enough to go that route. If you have a favorite Western or so let me know.
Edison: My great-uncle Julian started working at age 12 or 13 in Edison's factory in West Orange, New Jersey, near where I grew up. It was so cold in the factory that Julian never took off his overcoat and his gloves all winter while working.
Probably no worse than other factory owners, but hardly a great human being.
s.w., he also pushed DC over AC and liked to electrocute elephants. Lousy human being.
Birds of a feather:
https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p267401coll32/id/10406
A tween working in a factory/lab with all sorts of things that could kill you. What could go wrong?
Marc,
So you don't need to know what you are talking about to have an opinion to offer? It's an oddly Trumpian approach. It's "hooey" because its "socialist." Brilliant. Lastly, that the three letters and two periods which follow my name offend you is a reflection on you.
Christopher Mulvaney, PH.D., PH.D., PH.D.,…
No its" hooey" because here is absolutely no evidence to support its ideological thesis that movies made in Hollywood during the 1930s-1940s were made in order to inculcate in the viewing audience “the values of the system, of the established order of things,” and neither you, nor aalll, nor s. wallersteing have offered any movie titles which support that preposterous thesis. As foy your need to keep mentioning that you have a doctorate, it is a pretentious demonstration of your own intellectual insecurity.
aalll and s. wallerstin,
Of the 39 movies I listed above, you focus on to biopics, on Kti Carson and Thomas Edison, as evidence for the thesis that movies made during that era “basically serve[d] to inculcate the values of the system, of the established order of things.” How can two movies out of 39 prove any pattern, even assuming the outlandish things you claim of those two movies, neither of which either of you have ever seen? So Edison kept his lab too cold demonstrates that he was “hardly a great human being,” despite the fact that the Wizard of Menlo Park was responsible for revolutionizing the world’s technology. The fact that you could make such an absurd and preposterous remark demonstrates your inability to make any reasoned assessment that movies of the 1930s and 1940s were intended to “inculcate the values of the system, of the established order of things.”
AS far as Westerns that deserve honorable mention, there’s Shane; The Searchers; 3:10 to Yuma; High Noon; The Wild Bunch; The Unforgiven; Hostiles;
Well, now I've got 'verbal self-loathing' to go into my commentariat bag of insults, along with 'desperate', 'sophist', and probably some others.--Best wishes to Robert Paul Wolff, and that's it for me!
John Rapko,
I just saw your above comment. If your reference to someone calling you “desperate” refers to my comment to you regarding your extreme efforts to marry one of the Nooran sisters, my comment was a tongue-in-cheek response to your tongue-in-cheek description of your efforts to propose to the Nooran sisters. It was not intended as an insult.
Christopher J. Mulvaney is one of the few people here whose formal education uniquely qualifies him to weigh in on many of these matters.
I'd frankly like to hear a lot more from people like him and Jerry Fresia, and less from certain others.
Just to say that how Christopher Mulvaney signs his name on the blog does not bother me at all. (I don't choose to put various letters and periods after "LFC," but I would not criticize someone else's different choice. Complaining about this seems to me to be petty.)
LFC.
Ouch.
And your are certainly above being petty.
Marc's list could be added to, seemingly indefinitely.
Hitchcock's movies of the 40s didn't serve to inculcate the values of the system. Just the opposite. Some them – e.g., Rope and Shadow of a Doubt – served to underscore the menace and evil in the system.
Likewise for virtually all of 1940s Hollywood film noir – they're a *critique* of the values of the system. Such becomes obvious after spending some time with them.
To Marc's list of pure entertainment, I would add Laurel and Hardy, whose comedy is genuinely timeless. They were geniuses, and words can’t adequately convey how much pleasure I've derived from watching them over the years.
I would also add Lubitsch. His movies didn't serve to inculcate anything. They took place in their own universe.
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