PHILLIP ADAMS
How can Americans love The Simpsons yet vote for Bush? That's not merely paradoxical; it's paranormal. In the recent presidential elections, Hollywood came out for Kerry. The biggest names in cinema and in television were united in their detestation of Bush. In LA, only Arnold Schwarzenegger stood out. But his brand of Republicanism seemed light years from Dubya's — as demonstrated by his gubernatorial endorsement of stem cell research. Despite the help of everyone from Spielberg to Streisand, from Springsteen to Gary Trudeau, the luminaries who sing the songs, make the movies and draw the cartoons were crushed beneath the wheels of the Bush/Rove juggernaut.
| Gee. Golly. Gosh. Lemme think real hard here... Oh. I have it. Speilberg's political opinions are unconnected with what he does for a living, as are those of the rest of them to greater or lesser degrees. Streisand is a black belt dipwad. Trudeau has become tiresome and predictable. And Springsteen is in the same category as Spielberg, prompting calls to "Shut Up and Sing." Basically, what it tells us is that they're not as important as they think they are. |
Fundamentalist Christians see Los Angeles as both Sodom and Gomorrah, cities of Jews and liberals, whose salacious offerings are destroying the nation's moral fibre.
| Oooh. Look at the cliches! I can't speak for fundamentalist Christians, being a fundamentalist agnostic, but I don't think anybody sees Los Angeles as Sodom and Gomorrah except for when some actor or actress turns to a pillar of salt. I do like the way Phil off-handedly implies that them there fundamentalists are anti-Semitic, concetrating as they are on the Jew content of Los Angeles. I can honestly say I've never heard anybody bring that up in conversation, though there have been occasions where people have remarked on the number of Mexicans who live there. On the other hand, when it comes to anti-Semitism, liberals like Phil seem to have a pretty good handle on feeling the plight of the poor Paleostinians and sniffing at the brutal Jews of the Zionist Entity™, though as we all know, they're not anti-Semitic, they're anti-Zionist. |
This is despite the fact that films in The Terminator genre are decidedly Nietzschean, more than a little fascist in their peddling of superman individualism and ultra-violent.
| "More than a little fascist in their peddling of superhuman individualism"? Phil, fascism doesn't glorify the superhuman individual. Fascism glorifies the fasces, the slender reeds, weak in themselves, bound together by the ties of state power, which produce a bundled unity of strength. Roving gangs of fascisti beat people up and destroy the property of Üntermenschen, and, yes, they do it with ultra-violence. Fascism isn't the individual, it's the group. The individual lacks the ability to terrorize the Üntermenschen. |
Combined, in Hollywood's case, with turbo-charged patriotism.
| Scratch the Stars and Stripes Forever. We wouldn't want to believe in our country, would we? Drop the Washington Post March, but do turn that into an entire sentence. |
But conservatives are on firmer ground when they instance the scurrilous and exuberant subversion of, yes, The Simpsons.
| Is there meaning to that sentence? Film at 11... |
Seinfeld may seem utterly apolitical. Certainly its lead characters never mention politics or express an opinion that could be identified with Republican or Democrat. Yet they had baby boomer written all over them and, of course, engaged in or (in the cases of George and Kramer) dreamt about promiscuities. Not the sort of values that should appeal to the Bible belt. Yet those decadent New Yorkers rated enormously everywhere in the US.
| I believe people living in more civilized areas watched the series in the breathless anticipation that something would eventually happen, explaining it all. It never did, but they kept coming back expecting that it would — kind of like people used to watch Twin Peaks in the expectation there was some sort of sense behind it that would eventually be revealed. |
But The Simpsons provides the clearest of cases — with its own axis of evil dominated by a Phil Ruddock lookalike who, consumed with greed, owns his own malfunctioning nuclear power station. Among the most frequent targets of lethal satire are The Simpsons' next-door-neighbours, archetypal Christian conservatives whose religiosity our hero, Homer, constantly derides. Indeed, pretty much all the baddies in a Mike Moore movie can be seen in The Simpsons which, at its heart, is a never-ending version of Fahrenheit 9/11.Yes, it can be laughed off as a cartoon — but it's a cartoon closely related to the cartooning of Gary Trudeau in Doonesbury.
| Ummm... I beg to differ. Unlike Doonsebury, the Simpsons are usually funny. Nor is the Simpsons tiresomely political like Doonesbury. Homer works in a nuclear power plant because the idea of a nuclear power plant hiring a dullard like Homer is laughable on its face. The Simpsons isn't "a never-ending version of Fahrenheit 9/11." It's a good laugh because it lampoons the pompous and the pretentious like... ummm... Phil, among others. |
Most of the major drama series are essentially liberal in their themes and attitudes. ER, for example, is full of hints and clues and assumptions that are not merely liberal but often left-wing. And that's been true of every hospital program — from Mash to Chicago Hope.
| We've noticed that. We've commented on it... |
The only significant TV series in which the lead characters would be pro-Bush is - The Sopranos.
| The gangsters on HBO? They wouldn't be pro-Bush. They'd be lined up with the Teamsters, buying local Democratic politicians. |
Their line on Muslims, the war in Iraq, let alone their ongoing prejudices against African/Americans, would put them firmly in the category of chest-thumping, white alpha males.
| There's another base assumption of the intolerant and cliche-ridden left: if it's Republican, it's obviously against African-slash-Americans, because... ummm... What about Bull Connor and those dawgs and firehoses and such? Oh. Wait. He was a Democrat. But you know what he means... |
Of course, at some levels, David Chase's fascinating portrait of New Jersey criminality is a social satire. At others, it takes over where Coppola's The Godfather left off - as a piece of symbolism of US capitalism.
| Is that what it is? I thought the Godfather was a modern morality tale, in which young men, both the young Vito and the young Michael, are caught up in a system they didn't make, reacting to the conditions around them, and are eventually changed to the point where they become a part of the system and men they never wanted to be. I thought it was a ripping good novel, with characters who were familiar without being cliches — people you knew when you were young, or you knew guys who knew them — set against a backdrop of the postwar world. If you'll notice, throughout the novel, the only real reference to politix comes with reference to buying politicians; Don Vito and Michael weren't Democrat or Republican. I haven't watched The Sopranos, but I gather from things I've read that there's a certain amount of the same approach in the writing, which is probably why it's so popular. |
Even when the entertainment industry produces an overtly political series — The West Wing — the result is bizarre.
It turns contemporary political issues on their head by having them played out in a fictional Democrat administration — where Sheen fills the same role as Dubya but, of course, plays things very differently. Any parallels with current events are more than offset by the contradictions — so that we finish up with a program that's half doco-drama and half fairy story.
| Phil is probably still sitting at his computer trying to compose a closing paragraph to bring all this hodge-podge together. Either that, or he didn't have anything to say in the first place, but he vented and his editor didn't read all the way through this load of cliches to discover there's no substance to it. |
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