No West Right Wing -

No West Right Wing - An interesting clip, via Andrew Sullivan, from Howard Kurtz' "Reliable Sources". The topic was "Politics in Hollywood". Kurtz spoke with Lawrence O'Donnell, writer of "Mr. Stirling":

KURTZ: One thing these programs have in common, conservatives are practically invisible. President Bartlett is a Democrat. Martin Sheen, in fact, made anti-war ads before the invasion of Iraq. "Mr. Sterling" is a California liberal based loosely on Jerry Brown. Why aren't there any Republicans?

O'DONNELL: You will never get that TV show. You'll never, ever get the Republican TV show. the Writers Guild of America, my union, is at a minimum, 99 percent leftist liberal and, like me, socialist. And we don't know how to write it. We don't.

While that's no doubt true, that lets Hollywood off too easily.

Being unable to write from a conservative perspective - and especially to write anything that treats conservatism fairly - is a sin of omission; I could likewise probably not write anything about, say, feminism, that a feminist would consider fair or balanced or even particularly well-informed.

And yet the entertainment industry has turned out a few things that at the very least treat the conservative perspective fairly. The liberal media's behavior was, shall we say, less than stellar, when this happened. Two jump immediately to mind:

In 1987, Lionel Chetwynd's excellent Hanoi Hilton received widely-mixed reviews (many of them politically-motivated). Worse, its distributor essentially sat on the movie, under pressure from Hollywood leftists, for its treatment of Jane Fonda. The movie depicted life at North Vietnam's Hoa Lo prison accurately - but it changed the last names of the prisoners, and of their visitors, including Jane Fonda. An actress who represents Fonda ("Paula") does everything Fonda is said to have done while in the Hilton. That was one of several stories that Hollywood didn't want told (that and, of course, the moral of the story; the men survived because of their military training and warrior ethic). "Hanoi Hilton" was buried, received a tiny theatrical release, and is hard to find on video today. (Do it if you can - it's an excellent movie).

Another more recent example: A Walk To Remember was a deeply flawed but generally good movie, marred more by an unavoidable, bathetic plot turn in Nick Sparks' original book than by anything else; I remember my daughter dragging me in to see it, and thinking "what a very good movie this turned out to be" up until about 3/4 of the way through, when the story decided to kill off the protagonist (very well-played by otherwise-irritating teenypopper Mandy Moore, who apparently got all the acting talent that Britney Spears missed) in an unneeded tearjerker plot chicane.

But the movie had one deep, dark secret: the protagonist character was a committed fundamentalist Christian; furthermore, she and her father, a fundy Baptist minister (a dignified performance by Peter Coyote) were not depicted as fundamentalists almost invariably are in Hollywood, as ignorant simpletons, repressed rubes, authoritarian Falwellish cartoons, dangrous loose cannon, hypocrites (think about the evangelizing, hypocritical security guard in The Good Girl, played by the movie's writer, Mike White) or all of the above. They were depicted as real people whose faith was a vital part of their lives, a part that didn't preclude life's struggles (Coyote was a single dad, a widower grappling with raising a teenage girl; Moore's character wrestles with sexuality like any real teenager does) informed how they dealt with them nonetheless.

Furthermore, the path to the movie's solution didn't require that the protagonists compromise their beliefs. I remember walking out of the theatre amazed that the movie didn't involve the real truth appearing after the teenage couple shared a Hollywood-stylized boink, or with Coyote being exposed as a child-molesting hypocrite at the end.

And that was too much for many reviewers; while the plot's unneeded last-minute swerve into Love Story-like bathos drew some justifiable brickbats, many reviewers seemed almost offended by the notion of a fundamentalist family being shown as sympathetic, human, and still principled; like that notion violated some double-dog-secret Hollywood code.

So it's not just that someone in Hollywood couldn't produce a story that portrayed conservatives as humans; it's just that doing so would ensure they never got a table at Elaine's again.

The answer? I don't know that we need an answer. Conservatism functions just fine without acclaim in the popular entertainment media. Yet I wonder, sometimes - couldn't some conservative entrepreneur do for movies what others did for talk radio and the Fox News network? It'd seem to be a ripe market.

Posted by Mitch at May 28, 2003 07:14 AM