Sunday, October 19, 2008
Reaction to W (the movie)
I saw the Movie "W" last night at the Princeton Garden theatre.
The movie itself is deeply personal and Freudian. W is portrayed as a partying idiot (with traces of social savant) who is motivated entirely by his inferiority complex vis-a-vis his brother and father. For the most part, the movie asserts things we cannot know and conflates many anecdotes and bushisms accrued over years into single incidents.
Colin Powell is lionized, although he comes across as weak within the cabinet. Condi is portrayed as an empty sycophant. Cheney is scheming to control the world's oil reserves. Rumsfeld is a gunslinger. But oddly enough, the movie only really impugns Cheney's motivation. Everybody else is just stupid. So it is more sympathetic than you might have expected.
But it is a very condescending picture. One thing rings clear as a bell, which is Stone's contempt for Texans, people who like football, and people who relish the combat of politics.
Worse, of course, was attending with the Princeton audience. Someone behind me felt it necessary to loudly proclaim that "nobody in *this* theatre voted for him". Many in the audience treated it as somehow a fact-based criticism, which it manifestly is not.
As many have observed, while there are many policy reasons to be critical of Republicans and this administration, the Oliver Stone-style bien pensant coastal liberals often start with aesthetic and/or cultural revulsion and don't get much further. As my wife said, "Bush's swagger just makes my skin crawl". This type of reaction is just reinforced by cocooning social dynamics of a town like ours. One wishes one could hold it up to a mirror with the players changed and see how people felt about themselves.
11 Comments:
By 
Steve M. Galbraith, at
Sun Oct 19, 04:02:00 PM:
One wishes one could hold it up to a mirror with the players changed and see how people felt about themselves.
Yeah, Obama has a sort of "cocky" walk or swagger that makes me roll my eyes when I see it.
I guess in a couple of years, I'll be throwing things at the TV when I see it.
And believe me, I'm the last person on the political right that has any animosity against Obama as a person. Zero. None.
By 
, at
Sun Oct 19, 04:08:00 PM:
This is so sad. I have had many people use Michael Moore's films to prop up their insane ideas about how Republicans think and and what we believe. What you won't see in film is honest police officers, honorable soldiers, intelligent Republicans or Ted Kennedy after Chappaquiddick.
Hollywood has never produced a film that showed the brutality of Joseph Stalin, and they like it that way. Just a few weeks ago an online critic posted an essay about Red Dawn that recast the American freedom fighters as the bad guys in the film.
So what happens when just staying home from the theater doesn't stop the propaganda?
By , at
Sun Oct 19, 07:14:00 PM:
About Bush's "swagger", I remember laughing when he referred to it at the 2004 Repub. Convention: "In Texas, we call it walking."
I'm from Texas, and I can verify it's true, though I hadn't realized how much it bothered some people.
By , at
Sun Oct 19, 07:23:00 PM:
As my wife said, "Bush's swagger just makes my skin crawl".
I think that I should like to see that thing be pressed. If you would, ask Mrs. Tigerhawk why Bush's swagger sets her teeth on edge, and this* sort of swagger does not.
*hyperlink comes from the first page of Googling "Obama Messiah."
By , at
Sun Oct 19, 07:29:00 PM:
That would be "Mrs. Mindles H. Dreck", not Mrs. TH. Check out the byline on this post.
There is a profound clue in all this that links the attitudes in the theater with some of the media reaction to "Joe the Plumber".
I think when we can solve this riddle to our own personal satisfaction, perhaps a notion of how to lead a national government will arise out it. Until then, we are hostages to the media punditocracy and the people that they approve of.
-David
By Assistant Village Idiot, at
Sun Oct 19, 08:35:00 PM:
David, maybe it's a profound clue, but I've been repeating it for years, and I went to W&M, not Princeton. That person shouting out in the theater - think birds chirping to signal their presence; think hives of bees or warrens of rabbits testing by smell whether everyone around is a friend (with the implied threat that the others will be dealt with). Progressivism - not the same thing as being a Democrat voter - is primarily social, not intellectual. It is tribal, clannish, primitive. Liberalism cannot exist in isolation - it evaporates without social reinforcement/control. That is why so much of their political discourse is mockery and condescension.
By Georg Felis, at
Sun Oct 19, 08:38:00 PM:
"So it is more ---pathetic than you might have expected."
Fixed it for ya!
Blogger does not appear to like the Del, Strikethru, or Small tags, so I had to use --- for sym :(
By , at
Sun Oct 19, 09:31:00 PM:
Well, yes, AVI, that is a point well taken.
I started to write a very long response to this post early today, then deleted it, as this is not my blog, I just come here to read and make comments.
But there is a clue with regards to people's IQ, and the perception of their own intelligence, based on where they live and who they "rub shoulders with", whether it be at Princeton, William and Mary, Harvard, MIT, et al.
Most people aren't "that smart". Their intelligence isn't that markedly higher than others. The chatter that you comment on is indeed a social, not an intellectual marker.
My point it that group think and social programming (and conformance) are vitally linked to the notion of social approval (as communicated through the media). Until we escape this problem (how?), we are trapped by what the media will define as the norm. It would have been unthinkable to make a movie like "W" five years ago, but not now.
Thus we are stuck in an endless cycle of Clintons, Bushes, Kerry, Gore, etc., because it is hard for someone different to break through the signal to noise level, especially at the local level. Regresssion to the mean, or something like that. There the media can be casually brutal in ways the national media can't (except for MSNBC, these days).
David
By , at
Mon Oct 20, 01:26:00 AM:
People very seldom see the challenge of their time. World War II is a classic example of people rising to face the threat of their lives when only a few years before there was none.
There has been no threat lately. People are so comfortable that the idea of liberalism is easy to slip into. It is exactly that sort of easy political comfort that makes people believe that there is no threat.
The hardest part of history is to see it before it hits the books. George Bush saw a threat, but it was not what the vast majority of Americans perceived as a threat. Those people saw what Bush did as a reach into Imperialism. George Bush went with his bet, and America did not follow. It was his gamble. Not many Americans will follow the progress of his bet to any kind of conclusion.
Twenty five years from now his gamble might be seen in a different light. Certainly if we had a free press now it might even be perceived as a path to that way now. But we have neither a free press in this country nor do we have an American people who have a clue about world affairs. That might be because the press has been bought and paid for by its own perfidy.
Best I can do right now is re-label the press as the Lazy People's Press. Because only about one in 30, maybe 50 really read and research the news past what they read in a paper or see on the nightly news. The rest just read it or see it. They don't believe it, but they act like they do. Sort of like a kid who doesn't buy his mother's excuses about not picking him up at school so he has to bum a ride or walk home. And he forgets about it because to think about it makes his head hurt. But that is what news is supposed to do. It is supposed to be a remarkable image of the real world. But that makes your head hurt. And people don't like that
And then one day the main stream news became the truth because it supposedly made the world not hurt anymore. And this is what we got from all that. We got news that neither hurts nor informs nor tells the truth. Soylent Green in the early stages.
If you think it sucks now, you have things to learn in the next few months.
By , at
Mon Oct 20, 11:56:00 AM:
I wouldnt wate my time or money on any of OLIVER STONES purtid movies their a waste of food movie film and this stone jerk is a castro bootlicker we should just boycott his crappy movies
By , at
Mon Oct 20, 12:28:00 PM:
Why squander your earnings on an Oliver Stone film? What has he done of value since "The Joy Luck Club?"
