"Hollywood's Skin Deep Leftism"

"Hollywood's Skin Deep Leftism" -- My cover story from the June 11th American Conservative (subscribe here) is finally online. An excerpt:

The Federal Election Commission's online database of political donors amusingly confirms that the movie industry is as one-sidedly Democratic as the stereotypes claim.

Oscar-winning actors and directors give about 40 times as much to Democrats as Republicans. Hollywood's Republican donors turn out to be mostly aged actors to whom the threat "You'll never work in this town again" long ago lost its terror. Over the last decade, stalwart Republican campaign contributors have included Jane Russell, who starred in Howard Hughes' 1943 Western "The Outlaw;" Yvette Mimieux, who played Weena the Eloi in the 1960 "Time Machine;" and sword-and-sandal star Victor Mature, who got so mature he's now dead.

(Yet, almost all elected actors, such as Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, have been in the GOP, which suggests voters appreciate that just being a Republican in Hollywood demonstrates strength of character.)

The right wing of the chorus of the perpetually indignant have repeatedly gone on the warpath against Hollywood for political crimes real and imagined, excoriating actress Maggie Gyllenhaal ("Secretary") for her brief criticism of American foreign policy, and denouncing George Lucas for perhaps alluding unadmiringly to George W. Bush in "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith." (I'd go over this crushingly boring brouhaha with you, but I'm all Sithed-out.)

Yet, the actual relationship between Hollywood and politics turns out to be convoluted and often surprising. Hollywood wasn't always so ideologically homogenous. Consider one of the best films of the industry's best year, 1939: "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." Its leading man Jimmy Stewart, director Frank Capra, and studio head Harry Cohn were all Republicans, while its screenwriter Sidney Buchman was a card-carrying Stalinist. Today, though, acceptable views run the gamut all the way from Eleanor Roosevelt Democrats like Barbra Streisand on the left to Harry Truman Democrats like Tom Hanks (who named a son "Truman") on the right...

In the wake of Mel Gibson's vast profits from "The Passion of the Christ," the movie industry finally senses that it's out of touch with much of its potential audience. Yet, it can hardly be relied upon to figure out what it is doing wrong. If conservative want to watch conservative movies, we'll have to make them ourselves.

Yet, too much of what passes for "conservatism" during the Bush era is stridently prosaic, dogmatic, and anti-artistic. The "primarily political people" (as culture blogger Michael Blowhard calls them) who now dominate the public voice of the Right deplore the imagination and empathy required to make good films.

Indeed, the movies are far less obsessed with politics than the rightwing media is, in part due to the years it takes modern free agent Hollywood to put deals together. If Hanks would suggest to Steven Spielberg, who has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democrats, that they undermine the Republican campaign against the filibuster by remaking "Mr. Smith," which famously climaxes with the haggard Jefferson Smith trying to keep speaking against a corrupt bill, by the time they got their movie finished, the Democrats might have regained control of the Senate and be busy quashing Republican filibusters.

To those of us who care about more than partisan politics, however, the Hollywood of 2005 in some ways confirms historian Robert Conquest's First Law: "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best." The mainstream audience restrains Hollywood's leftist affectations, and the vicissitudes of making movies teach filmmakers hard-headed lessons in how the world actually works, making the actual politics in the movies closer to Tom Hanks's than Michael Moore's.

Contemporary Hollywood movies approve of manly men and womanly women, guns, violence in self-defense, anti-drug laws, true love, marriage, big weddings, big houses, and moms and dads spending time with their kids. The worst sin is parental adultery, because Hollywood's target audience of teens dreads anything that could break up their homes. And no film's heroine ever has an abortion.

Many of the rightwing attacks on Hollywood stem from it not toeing the pseudo-conservative line of worshipping some of the less conservative forces in history, such as war, laissez-faire, and George W. Bush.

Movies such as Oliver Stone's "Platoon," Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan," and Mel Gibson's "We Were Soldiers" have done America a service by taking war films to a new level of bloody realism. While neoconservative jingoes have worried that revealing the effects of combat too honestly will induce second thoughts about World War IV, veterans have typically been pleased that moviegoers can now get a better sense of the sacrifices they made in the service of their country. Nor is it Hollywood's fault that the Bush Administration didn't learn anything about the dangers of occupying a Muslim country from "Black Hawk Down," the minutely detailed 2001 depiction of our Special Forces' desperate battle in Somalia.

As lavishly paid members of the private sector, filmmakers admire public sector workers, such as soldiers, cops, and firemen, who risk their lives for the kind of annual pay that a Beverly Hills matron might spend on feng shui consultations. For example, Hanks passed up tens of millions in movie salaries to produce patriotic miniseries about the G.I.'s of WWII and the astronauts and engineers of the Space Race.

There are few conservatives in Hollywood, but at least there aren't many neoconservatives either. When the GOP wanted to feature a movie star at the 2004 convention in New York, the best they could come up with was Ron Silver, who once played, uh … c'mon, Google … Alan Dershowitz in "Reversal of Fortune."

And if movies tend to be skeptical that unbridled capitalism automatically produces the utopia foreseen by U. of Chicago economists, well, filmmakers have all had some first-hand experience with just how far human beings will go to get rich. In Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," George Bailey rages at the subterfuges of the banker, Mr. Potter, not because Capra was a pinko, but because the director had similarly raged at his own boss Harry Cohn's nefariousness.

Cinema, a medium of the visible, is innately ill-suited for explaining the wonders of the invisible hand. But the movie's basic message about business -- that the magic of the market is no substitute for individuals making moral choices -- isn't necessarily anti-conservative. Capitalism is a terrific system, but it doesn't absolve capitalists from the need for ethics.

Nor is it anti-conservative for film people to believe that they should occasionally make a quality film that might not be as profitable as most of the drek they churn out. If the market was the measure of all things, three studios wouldn't have gotten together and invested close to $200 million in "Master and Commander," 2003's splendid, but not terribly lucrative, realization of Patrick O'Brian's superb (and deeply conservative) seafaring novels.

As the deplorable quality of 2005 releases underscores, this resistance to pure profit-maximizing behavior is disappearing in Hollywood, but if conservatism means more than just the worship of the free market, that's not a good thing. [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer