Conservative Tastes: Trash Triumphant

...We all become a bit like the window decorator at Olsson’s for whom the concept of moral degeneracy exists only as a joke at the expense of uptight conservatives...

...conseRvaTIve TasTes Trash Triumphant by James Bowman W W alking past my neighborhood bookstore the other day, I noticed a display of books in the window under the following notice: “Olsson’s Recommended Reads for Moral Degenerates...

...The post-revolutionary romance was represented by Woody Allen’s Annie Hall of 1977 and Rob Reiner Old-fashioned ideas of romance and romantic comedy, which had been built upon the centrality and the exclusivity of marriage, gave way to a hybrid of buddy picture and sex farce as the assumption of a once-and-for-all marriage was replaced by that of serial “relationships...

...I mentioned in the last installment of Conservative Tastes (see “In Defense of Snobbery,” TAS, July/August 2008) David Hajdu’s Ten-Cent Plague, which celebrated the triumph of the comic book and its ethos over their many detractors in the 1950s—and, by extension, over traditional moviemaking in the Hollywood of the 1970s...

...Doubtless the display, like the books themselves, was intended as a joke by people who find the idea of moral degeneracy attached to anything sexual comically outdated—people who don’t really believe that there is any such thing...

...He is the author of Honor: A History and the new book Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books...

...Out there, of course, means in the dating scene, displayed like a piece of meat on a butcher’s hook, or a small animal in a shelter hoping to look cuddly enough that someone will want to take her home...

...That’s why, in the summer of 2007, as I wrote in these pages at the time (see “The Hero Vanishes,” TAS, September 2007), I presented a film series on The American Movie Hero at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., to explain and illustrate my view that the 1960s, in so many ways a watershed in American cultural history, was in none of those ways more of a watershed than when it came to America’s understanding of heroes and heroism...

...Of course, it’s no news that there are lots of such people around...

...Traditional, well-written movies without violence or special effects were pushed to the margins...

...When real heroes were superseded by cartoon and superheroes, we began to forget what real heroes looked like...

...It was only in the late stages of her New Yorker career (from which she retired in 1991) that some of her admirers began saying she had sold her point of view too effectively...

...Writing in the National Post of Canada this summer, Robert Fulford suggested that, latterly, some of the makers of the revolution, including even Ms...

...Doubtless Nora Ephron intended such crassness as a joke at the expense of these children of the 1970s, but now we have come to the point where even people who ought to know better can hardly understand love and romance except in grossly physical terms...

...Many of my fellow critics appear long since to have forgotten the difference between serious movies and cartoonish superhero fare like The Dark Knight, which was greeted on its opening this summer with the sort of rapturous reviews that would once have been reserved for only the finest The worst thing about the triumph of trash culture is that people start to forget that it is trash...

...But those standards were swiftly eroding...

...Underneath were such titles as Mary Roach’s Bonk, Peter Sagal’s Book of Vice, something called The Deviant’s Pocket Guide, and several others of a similar tendency...

...What was interesting to me about this celebration of moral degeneracy was the assumption of those who put it together that anyone likely to come into the shop would be in on the joke...

...Seamus Hasson “The Myth: Is there Religious Liberty in America...

...The unspoken part of that proposition, which seems to be borne out by the ending, is that men and women cannot be friends in a social environment that consists of a sexual marketplace like that of 1980s New York...

...The Future of Individual Liberty – Elevating the Human Condition and Overcoming the Challenges to Free Societies The American Spectator is publishing a series of articles on the components of individual liberty, how freedom evolved in the West, and the future of individual liberty not only in Western society but in the rest of the world...

...In both these movies the dramatic conflict, such as it was, had to do with finding some middle way between love and friendship...

...A year after her death (in 2001) one formerly enthusiastic reader, Paul Schrader, a screenwriter of films such as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, wrote: “Cultural history has not been kind to Pauline...

...Old-fashioned ideas of romance and romantic comedy, which had been built upon the centrality and the exclusivity of marriage, gave way to what amounted to a hybrid of buddy picture and sex farce as the assumption of a once-and-for-all marriage was replaced by that of serial “relationships...

...As with the new heroism, the new romance is ultimately a political statement—a statement about why we no longer want either the old kind of heroism or the old kind or romance...

...Ingrid Bergman’s going off with Paul Henreid at the end couldn’t have been her own choice, says Billy Crystal’s Harry, who asks Meg Ryan’s Sally if she “would rather be in a passionless marriage…” “And be First Lady of Czechoslovakia,” interjects Sally...

...They were, after all, built into the culture...

...Schrader argued that she and JaMes bowMan her admirers won the battle but lost the war...

...It was fun watching the applecart being upset,” Schrader said, “but now where do we go for apples...

...In the same vein is Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (Penguin, 490 pages, $27.95...

...Acceptable taste became mass-audience taste, box-office receipts the ultimate measure of a film’s worth, sometimes the only measure...

...He concludes by noting that “not long before she died, Pauline Kael remarked to a friend, ‘When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture.’ Who did...

...It’s simply a matter of being “practical...

...Harry concludes that Sally’s understanding of the movie is owing to the fact that she has not known “great sex,” which also leads back to the central thesis of the film: men and women cannot be friends...

...The newest and hippest of these five movies was of course Bonnie and Clyde, which was a revolt not only against a style of filmmaking but against the values and assumptions of the middle-class audience that the movies had always sought to cater to in the past...

...Kael assumed she was safe to defend the choices of mass audiences because the old standards of taste would always be there...

...The worst thing about the triumph of trash culture is that people start to forget that it is trash...

...There is something deeply shaming about this, particularly for women, but they are paralyzed and helpless participants in the sexual economy because the alternative of chastity or continence would be a massive setback for feminist and progressive ideas...

...James bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center...

...and Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally of 1989...

...Conservative books are increasingly relegated to the right-wing intellectual ghetto of publications like this one, which are the only places where they are likely to be reviewed...

...That was what recommended the movie to Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, whose review of the movie did so much to bring about the revolution...

...64 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR sePTeMbeR 2008...

...What came after that revolution, though it bore some superficial similarities to the old Hollywood romance, was as different from it as the post-’60s hero was from his predecessor...

...That, I suppose, is some small reason to hope...

...Paul Johnson “Freedom and Property” Anne Applebaum “The Fate of Individual Liberty in Post-Communist Europe” Rémi Brague “Liberty, Secular Government and the Western Inheritance” Robert Bork “Individual Liberty as the Constitution Understands It” Robert P. George “Academic Freedom and What it Means Today” Christina Hoff Sommers “The Emancipation of Women: True and False Perspectives” Pierre Manent “Liberal Democracy and the Nation State” Brian Anderson “Freedom and the City” Roger Scruton “The Limits of Liberty” The American Spectator’s 2008 Catalyst Essay Series: n the summer of 2008, my EPPC film series was an attempt to find a similar pattern in Hollywood’s treatment of romance...

...Mainstream books as well as mainstream booksellers can now take for granted the progressive “narrative” arising out of the 1960s...

...She says that she would, and so would any woman in her right mind...

...And, just as real heroes became unrecognizable, so did real romance...

...than live with a man that you have had the best sex of your life with just because he owns a bar and that’s all he does...

...This is what Carrie Fisher’s Marie is referring to when she says to her husband: “Tell me I’ll never have to be out there again...

...Kael herself toward the end of her life, were beginning to have second thoughts about what they had wrought...

...examples of the moviemaker’s craft—which, unfortunately, is what that movie has become for our time...

...There’s a moment near the beginning of When Harry Met Sally when the title characters are arguing about the meaning of Casablanca in a way that suggests neither has the faintest idea of what the movie would have meant to its original audience...

...It’s not the only indication that the world of books and ideas is becoming as much the exclusive preserve of our “progressive” heirs of the 1960s counterculture as the movie business already is...

...Starting with Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night of 1934 sePTeMbeR 2008 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR 63 conseRvaTIve TasTes and continuing through Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940), George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story (also 1940), David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), and Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember (1957) to Billy Wilder’s The Apartment of 1960, I showed what I considered to be a representative sampling of Hollywood romances as they existed before the sexual revolution of the 1960s...

...And yet we don’t quite want to let go of them either, or else we wouldn’t be trying to reinvent them...

...Harris 62 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR sePTeMbeR 2008 takes the five nominees for Best Picture at the Academy Awards for 1967—Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Doolittle, The Graduate, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night—as the foundation on which to build a similarly triumphalist account of the coming of “a new world of American movies” destined to sweep aside the fusty old habits of moviemaking formed during the 1940s and 1950s...