Ross Douthat on my "Hollywood's Skin Deep Leftism" essay

Ross Douthat on my "Hollywood's Skin Deep Leftism" essay: On his American Scene blog, Ross responds:

Hollywood has two tracks: their big-money movies, which are calculated to be as politically inoffensive as possible, and their Oscar-bait movies, which are pitched to a narrower, more elite and more liberal audience, and thus are free to express the values of the community that produces them.

Consider the last year's slate of movies. On the first track, you have the high-grossing crowd pleasers, which are largely apolitical. Some slant right (The Incredibles, for instance, with its pro-family, pro-competition message) and some left (Shrek 2, with its snide and occasionally lewd deconstruction of fairy tales), but never in particularly polarizing ways. Sure, sometimes blockbusters come swaddled in liberal pieties - i.e., the soft-headed environmentalism of The Day After Tomorrow. But for the most part, the bigger movies are determinedly centrist, balancing Red and Blue sensibilities and rarely lapsing into preachiness, or politics of any kind. (The Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin are perfect examples of this difference-splitting, swaddling Austenesque marriage plots in wacky sexual permissiveness - a combination that corresponds pretty well to the mainstream American attitude toward sex and romance.)

But then there are the prestige movies - with their low budgets, artful cinematography, art-house runs and dreams of Oscar glory. It's this Hollywood track - movies for "our kind of people," they might say if they were being honest about it - that produces films like last year's Kinsey and Million Dollar Baby, and that gave us American Beauty and The Cider House Rules, Chocolat and The People vs. Larry Flynt, Quills and The Crying Game, Traffic and The Quiet American and . . . well, you get the idea. Not all of these are bad movies by any stretch, but they all reflect, and promote, the particular kind of liberalism shared by most Hollywood actors, writers, producers, and movie moguls. And they have no conservative counterparts.

Right. The fact that "Chocolat" (which was the Weinstein Brothers' very long condemnation of the Catholic Church for encouraging the faithful to give up chocolate for Lent, I kid you not) got a Best Picture nomination while "The Passion of the Christ," which Quentin Tarantino said was as impressive a piece of visual storytelling as anything since the talkies came in, well, that pretty much proves Ross's point.

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