Elias Isquith in The Atlantic no doubt raised a few
eyebrows with his recent article with the counterintuitive title, “Hollywood's
Real Bias Is Conservative (but Not in the Way Liberals Often Say).” He
looked at the impressive slate of political (and in some cases, highly
politicized) films from 2012 including The Dark Knight Rises, Les Miserables,
Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln, Django Unchained, and Argo, and uncovered
an often overlooked conservatism there – but an economic one, not an
ideological one.
Isquith argues that Hollywood’s
business model, rather than its politics, determines what risks it is willing
to take and what cultural assumptions it is willing to question. For example, he
points to the hunt-for-bin-Laden movie Zero Dark Thirty as an example of
how, contrary to its left-leaning reputation, “Hollywood falls in line when the
nation is awash in patriotic fervor and the fear of an existential threat.”
Not always. Sure, World War II-era
films tended to be unabashedly patriotic, but as far back as the Cold War era
Hollywood often took a subversive tack, as with the political satire Dr.
Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. In our
contemporary conflict with Islamic fundamentalists, Hollywood presents a
morally relativistic stance. The filmmakers of 2oo2’s The Sum of All Fears, for example, famously swapped out the novel’s
original Muslim terrorists for the politically safer, Hollywood go-to bad guys,
neo-Nazis – and that was in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when patriotic fervor
was at its highest. Even today, ten years later, the filmmakers and stars of award-winning
Showtime terrorism drama Homeland are
proud of its
moral equivalence.
In Zero Dark
Thirty, an isolated, single-minded CIA agent—a loner that no one believes
in—is the chief reason the butcher of 9/11 is lost to time at the bottom of the
sea. In Lincoln, it's only through the singular grace, wisdom, and humanity
of the 16th president that the greatest evil in American history, an evil few
but he sees with true clarity, is finally put to rest. And in The Dark
Knight Rises, Gotham is saved by the orphan Bruce Wayne as the pariah
Batman. These people do great things. And they do them alone.
His point is overstated, but Isquith
is correct that each of those films focuses on a single hero or heroine. In his
final paragraph he notes, though, that this choice is “less ideology than
business imperative.” That’s because, not only in Hollywood but in storytelling
generally, the narrative journey of a single protagonist quite simply is the
most compelling and satisfying. Even a well-done heroic epic with an ensemble
cast like The Avengers doesn’t resonate
emotionally with the audience like a Braveheart
or a Gladiator, to name two personal favorites. It is a storytelling
imperative that stretches all the way from Aristotle’s Poetics to Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, and
Hollywood screenwriters are well-versed in that formula.
So does progressive ideology take
a backseat to conservative business sense in Hollywood, as Isquith says? It’s a
common assumption that Hollywood is all about money, and certainly success is
the bottom line. But Hollywood has also shown a headstrong determination to
take a bath on occasion to prove its activist bona fides with political “message” projects such as anti-war flops
Rendition, Redacted, Body of Lies, Matt
Damon’s Green Zone, and Sean Penn’s Fair
Game. It’s still a political town, but audiences prefer to be moved and
inspired rather than lectured. That’s a message filmmakers should take to heart
if they want their bottom line to increase.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 1/22/13)
