Hollywood/In a Word, Communistic

...Socialism...

...there are rather few films about families...

...Naturally, about the only anti-Communist movies of recent years have been Red Dawn and Eastwood's Firefox...

...Liberalism appears only as a hypocritical encumbrance to the hero on whom liberal society, without gratitude, depends...

...Listen, if you can bear to, to the emanations of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has plenty of views on war and poverty but none, apparently, on pornography...

...The films themselves, if exported to the Soviet Union, would have only to be pruned of a few sex scenes offensive to traditional Russian morality...

...We have to rely on post cards...

...It has room for Communism socialism, and liberalism, but it imposes its sanctions against nonconformists (fundamentalists, for instance...

...He represents another era, when the film industry was with (if not quite of) Middle America...

...The rating system, of course, has made a joke of the idea that the film industry will regulate itself...

...It is part of a larger community, the community of progressive "public opinion," whose nerve and power centers are in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles...

...All in the name of "honesty," of course: Though "honesty" doesn't require that normal life be depicted, or that middle-aged married couples be shown naked, or that people pay a price in pregnancy, disease, or even heartache for their swinging behavior...

...Criticism was supposed to take up the moral role former--ly left to the censors...

...The Killing Fields, a current film about a refugee from Cambodia, never identifies the Khmer Rouge as Communists...

...It exerts peer pressures that forbid the making of overtly conservative movies...

...Worst of all, the mainstream churches have been cowed and even converted by the left...

...but organizing resistance is another matter...

...Liberals pretend that the structure of values they promote is a casual, haphazard thing, and that they aren't exerting pressures for conformity with their views even as they talk of freedom of expression...

...Pretty clearly there exists in Hollywood a functional equivalent of blacklisting and censorship by the left...

...At any rate, big stars don't have to peel before the cameras, and most of them don't...

...nudity and even simulated intercourse are standard features of today's films...

...You might think a movie industry as profit-hungry as Hollywood's would take the hint: There is a huge market out there for right-wing movies...

...the real regulation is done by the left...

...Movie stars in those days smiled, in publicity stills, for the public...

...Secular humanism...

...The word is unfortunately associated nowadays with the John Birch Society, but its first use in English occurs in the authorized translation (supervised by Friedrich Engels himself) of The Communist Manifesto...

...And even if the bishops were to express themselves on porn, it is doubtful that their message would be carried by the self-regulating media...

...It seeks not to please the public as a whole, but to engage the public it wants, even, in good supply-side fashion, to produce the public it wants...

...It is a useful, even indispensable word for forces naturally allied with Communism but not formally attached to the Party, though Communists themselves now prefer to speak of "progressive forces" and the like...

...There had been non-liberal movies before-John Wayne's, of course-but they acted as if liberalism didn't exist...

...None of the three sequels has been nearly as good as the original Dirty Harry, but all four movies have been big hits...

...The movies mentioned (and others I haven't mentioned) avoid overt ideologizing, but they are intended as consciousness-raisers to usher the giddy multitude to Political Awareness...

...Communism, of course, isn't mass-market stuff in America, so "liberals" are forever edging toward it (and attacking those who resist leftward movement) without admitting that this is what they are doing...

...It says a lot that Lear can get away with this act-just as it says a lot that the "McCarthy" era is named for a man who, at worst, slandered dozens rather than for a man who killed and enslaved millions...

...When he was giving the Khmer Rouge the benefit of doubt in a 1975 column on the forced march of three million people out of Phnom Penh, he didn't call them "Communists" either...

...If they do, they are usually butts of ridicule...

...Still, very few films have defied the Hollywood orthodoxy...

...As if you didn't know: Clint Eastwood plays Harry Callahan, a tough San Francisco cop who always gets his man, even if it means bringing him back in several pieces...

...Harry kills all the holdup men but one, who grabs a waitress and threatens to kill her unless Harry drops the Smith & Wesson aimed at the punk's face...

...After all, no society that means to survive can countenance such profligacy...

...Well, you can't be arrested for impersonating a mainstream...

...None is quite right...

...Eastwood is nearly as much a lone wolf in the film industry as Harry Callahan is in his movies, and most of the people who count there are the sort of folk Harry has to work around to catch evildoers...

...See Victor Navasky's Naming Names, soon, for all I know, to be a major motion picture...

...The President is a vehicle, not a simple cause, of something deeper...

...The judiciary can be relied on to see things the ACLU's way...

...The Catholic Church offers none of the serious resistance to moral decay it mounted in the days of the Legion of Decency-a private, voluntary organization that liberalism equates with state censorship and repression...

...The critics share the ideology of the film industry, and they generally criticize it from shared values, rather than from the perspective of Middle America...

...Harry cares nothing for Supreme Court guidelines on the proper care and feeding of suspects...

...The market limits but doesn't dictate what may be produced...

...The ideological consensus of the moviemaking community is far more stubborn than is generally realized...

...As James Hitchcock observes, secular humanism is unusual in being a phenomenon whose existence is denied by the very people who personify it...

...You can always turn off your set or stay away from a movie...

...Imagine a society divided into two classes of people, one of which had telephones while the other didn't...

...Evil can't be eliminated...

...Hoilywood is, in a word, communistic...

...Forbidden to pursue him, Harry does so on his own and kills him with contemptuous fury...

...the informal taboos of the Hollywood community itself have quietly replaced them...

...Most people who are uneasy about nudity on the screen are resigned to putting up with a minute or two of it as the price of seeing a movie at all...

...All the President's Men, one of the few movies ever to put me to sleep, works on the premise that Watergate was an epitome of evil, though the nature of the evil is never defined...

...Jamie Lee Curtis says she was only able to graduate from horror flicks to mainstream movies by consenting to do nude scenes, though it makes her sick to do them...

...It doesn't answer to liberal conceptions of man as rational creature, subject of rights, or victim of socioeconomic circumstance...

...The United States is deeply divided culturally, but at the moment the left holds all the trumps...

...People who stay away from movies altogether cease to influence them at all...

...Jack Kroll of Newsweek gave his hard-breathing approval to the rape scene in Hitchcock's Frenzy...

...The left controls the media, the judiciary, the universities that count...

...At the time it seemed daring, and it probably was...

...It isn't easy to give this deliberately vague orthodoxy a name that sticks, though in essence it is a very definite thing...

...Some films with conservative themes even have been big hits, apart from the Eastwood genre...

...Conservatism in the film industry exists, but it has to be furtive...

...Naturally, he kills again...

...It was inevitable that there should be a reaction in the form of, say, Moral Majority, but that reaction has a hard time catching hold of the phantom ideology whose works are everywhere...

...But the broken taboos are those of traditional, Christian America, whose legal power over movies has been broken...

...This has been proved again and again by blockbuster vigilante hits like Walking Tall, Death Wish, and Red Dawn, all of which succeeded without the usual apparatus of heavy promotion and distribution, to say nothing of the critical scorn they received...

...The free market exerts only a residual influence, rewarding a certain amount of obscenity but not tolerating too much...

...A clumsy name, although it was coined by avowed secular humanists themselves and it fits lots of people who mock it as a redneck expression...

...The New York critics, who deserve to be considered part of the peripatetic Hollywood community (which is no longer confined to studios and back lots), haven't seen fit to criticize the fast-sex culture: an interesting fact, since the liberal argument for the lifting of censorship was not that there should be no restraints, but that they should be private...

...Or has it...

...They constitute loyalty oaths to liberalism by the filmmakers...

...Many of the left-wing movies, like Daniel, have been predictable flops, but this hasn't caused many ideological conversions in Hollywood...

...Rocky and The Deer Hunter are among the few that actually celebrate marriage...

...Dirty Harry not only acknowledged liberalism's, presence but spat on it...

...The casual sex scenes are of more than commercial significance...

...The decorum of the progressive forces dictates affairs that can hardly be called love affairs...

...it can magnify its own signals and muffle the right's...

...Communism...

...There is one source of evil in the modern world that Hollywood carefully avoids showing in a bad light: the Soviet Union...

...Even to take note of the consistent patterns of their behavior is to incur the inevitable charge of "McCarthyism," a word that used to purport to refer to naming non-Communists as Communists but now means naming Communists themselves as Communists...

...Will all this change during the Reagan era...

...The Hollywood Ten are now Hollywood culture heroes, honored by people who wish they had the courage to take such risks for convictions most of them share but don't dare put up front...

...But most of them have been low-budget sleepers like Rocky, Breaking Away, and American Graffiti...

...It crawls with night monsters...

...Its lines of communication are in disrepair, under constant threat of sabotage...

...It encounters frustrations, as all of us do in our pursuits, but it is a community with a will of its own that seeks more than just to entertain and to be rewarded for doing so...

...Pauline Kael likes feminist movies...

...but the director, William Friedkin, will do anything for shock effect, including a sordid depiction of homosexual life (in Cruising...

...The Invisible Hand thus sets limiting conditions...

...But the ideology permits and even encourages these assaults on traditional morals...

...If has even succeeded in making its own vocabulary the rhetoric of public discourse (what Richard Weaver called a culture's "uncontested terms...

...These responses may not sit well together, but they both belong to the gentlemen's agreement by which the liberal critics department pretends that Hollywood is not encouraging a moral revolution against the moral understandings of Western civilization...

...Liberalism...

...In the left-liberal ideology these are not all evil but all somehow connected...

...Conspiracies by aging Nazis are the looming menaces in Marathon Man and The Boys from Brazil...

...it isn't eligible for Utopian planning...

...Harry has what Edward Banfield would call limited time horizons: the future beyond the present nightmare is unforeseeable...

...It is not some left-wing cabal that Norman Lear represents, but the American way itself...

...Reagan's election and re-election are expressions of popular sentiment, which John Lukacs urges us to distinguish from "public opinion'1-the more Utopian stuff that issues from the media...

...But they-the great mass of patriotic Americans-have little institutional leverage against the great organs of public opinion...

...The villains have been Nixon, Nazis, the CIA, South Africa, oil companies, nuclear power, the government of Chile, the House Un-American Activities Committee...

...Harry's San Francisco is a locale of seedy, phantasmagoric evil that makes Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles seem like Our Town...

...But something important is going on, even if its promoters aren't candid about it...

...and what is even more important, it has discredited alternative rhetorics...

...If any of them are talented, ideology is exacting tributes from art, though in a way that is impossible to measure...

...They are all "fascist," even if the word isn't used...

...Not, of course, the false "American Way" of Archie Bunker, Joe McCarthy, and Ronald Reagan, but the true American way of the Meathead and the Hollywood Ten...

...She turns out to be dead, and Harry's modus operandi means the killer has to be released...

...The great exception, of course, is The Exorcist, where Christ is pitted against the devil...

...Ask yourself which class would rule...

...Americans, like Harry Callahan himself, are learning to talk back to liberalism, uncowed by charges of fascism, racism, and sexism...

...it in no way guarantees that people will get what they would really prefer, let alone what they need...

...Hollywood may be driven largely by the profit-motive, but it is also animated-or at least inhibited-by ideology...

...What is produced itself shapes the market to a great extent...

...an Eastwood or a John Milius (Red Dawn) may be independent enough to make them, but if so he is definitely striking out on his own...

...They are not imitations of life, but models proffered for it...

...Anthony Lewis, who seldom writes about movies, devoted a column to the film without using the word "Communist...

...and a foreign film like Chariots of Fire can get away with a lot (even religiosity) that would be taboo in Hollywood...

...The point is that these aren't major media...

...Hollywood hates America, as liberalism hates America...

...How is the right, as a system of communication, supposed to coalesce...

...It was the first movie that talked back to liberalism...

...In- the realm of public opinion (in Lukacs's sense), Moral Majority has a bad name...

...Eastwood's films have elicited only one fervent word from the critics: "fascist...

...Some things never change...

...It is outrageously funny, a trademark moment for Eastwood...

...it can only be staved off for the moment with a will and cunning equal to its own...

...one wonders how many young women are deterred from acting because they prefer not to double as strippers...

...This is hard for most people to understand, since movies always seem to be breaking taboos...

...when the movies celebrated patriotism, expunged subversives, and made epics on Biblical subjects, including Christ and Our Lady of Fatima...

...In any war it is essential to establish your lines of communication and to cut the enemy's...

...Even Charles Bronson starred in a detente flick, Telefon, in which he cooperated with the Soviets to frustrate a plot to start a war between the two superpowers...

...An almost daring exception occurs at the end of Places in the Heart, though that film pays its respects to the Hollywood orthodoxy by including a banker and some Klansmen as villains...

...the liberals inhabit city hall, they are cowards, and they are indifferent to the victims of the evil they abet...

...Instead, Harry snarls quietly: "Go ahead-make my day...

...If there is anything corrupt and hypocritical about the liberal culturati whose main point of contact with Middle America is the film business, it is their constant pretense that nothing important is going on when mass entertainment subverts traditional morality...

...Dirty Harry appeared during Nixon's first term, and it spoke powerfully to the Silent Majority that usually expresses itself only at four-year intervals...

...If a handful of German octogenarians hiding out in South American bungalows could take over the world on short notice, maybe they really are the Master Race...

...If Eastwood belongs to the Silent Majority, many of Hollywood's big names belong to the left: Jane Fonda, Shirley 'MacLaine, Warren Beatty, Ed Asner, Norman Lear, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Robert Altman, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Woody Allen, Jeff Bridges, Jill Clayburgh, Dustin Hoffman, Marlon Brando, Arthur Penn, Donald Sutherland, Burt Lancaster, Michael Douglas, even Mary Tyler Moore...

...Actually, the adherents of this ideology have found a name for themselves: People for the American Way...

...Harry's style reaches its apotheosis in the fourth movie of the series, Sudden Impact, in a Shootout in a cheap diner...

...We have to rely on post cards.day's culture...

...And of course the American Civil Liberties Union-a mainstay of the "American Way"- stands vigilant to prevent communities from defending their ways of life, insisting that the neighborhood effects of art don't matter...

...True, there are the New Right, Moral Majority, and other groups that have outflanked the major media...

...Almost nobody prays in today's films...

...The list of villains in liberal films could double, come to think of it, as villains in the Soviet film industry...

...They vary in how far they are willing to go, but they are all headed in the same direction...

...Not that the movie industry doesn't do plenty of pimping...

...There is almost no such thing as a family film any more...

...While Eastwood and Charles Bronson have had the Silent Majority almost all to themselves, Hollywood has doggedly produced films with liberal themes: All the President's Men, Marathon Man, Three Days of the Condor, Executive Action, The Front, Julia, The Wilby Conspiracy, The China Syndrome, Reds, Ragtime, Missing, An Unmarried Woman, Daniel, Silkwood, Gandhi...

...Ronald Reagan himself is held in contempt in Hollywood...

...Consider words like "communistic," "secular humanism," and "godless"- words of perfectly rational meaning and useful reference that have been ridiculed to death...

...Hollywood goes to fantastic lengths to sustain the bogey of fascism as the generic villain...

...Now that Ronald Reagan has definitively proved that audience is there to stay, you would expect the crass producers to cash in on it...

...A good liberal, of course, would yield...

...He shoots a kidnapper in the leg and stands on the maimed limb to make the writhing evildoer (who screams about his right to a lawyer) disclose the whereabouts of his victim...

...It hasn't done so...

...Then you will begin to get the picture: Conservatives lack telephones in today's culture...

...Don't hold your breath...