What Superheroes Teach Us About Good and Evil

When little Braden Denton, just five years old, lost his battle with a brain tumor recently, his heartbreaking story and unconventional funeral – with pallbearers dressed as superheroes – stirred a bit of media and internet interest. It’s a terrible loss when a child full of life is taken so young, but perhaps there is an inspiring lesson to be gleaned from Braden’s story.

Like countless other kids, Braden idolized superheroes. “He was a huge Spiderman fan,” said his mother, but he eventually had to move on to other super idols as well “because he had all the [Spiderman] toys. So really, he liked every superhero.” They paid their respects at his funeral when the pallbearers came in full costume as Thor, Batman, the Hulk, Iron Man, Spiderman, and Superman – not exactly the usual decorum for such an occasion, but a fitting tribute to a boy whose joy and inspiration in his short time on earth came from his fascination with these fictional heroes.

Braden’s young uncle Corey – “Thor” for the funeral – said, “It was hard, but I did it for him. We went to the Superman movie and he was dressed up as Superman. I watched all the [Iron Man movies] with him.”

Children come into the world basically as little animals that need to be civilized. They have to be taught manners, given moral instruction, and presented with inspiring examples of virtuous behavior like courage and service to others. Unfortunately, our culture doesn’t have a lot to offer young people in terms of heroic paragons. We no longer share with our children the myths of ancient heroes. Our TV entertainment is littered with morally conflicted anti-heroes in fare that is too adult for kids anyway. The role models we celebrate now are pop culture figures such as professional athletes or American Idol winners rather than, say, soldiers or firefighters who literally put their lives on the line for others.

That leaves superheroes and their villains as the clearest, albeit fictional, exemplars of the eternal conflict between Good and Evil. Children (and not only boys anymore) find tales of superheroes compelling not merely because of the cool costumes or the awesome powers, but because, as this report states, “through [superhero] play they can feel brave, fearless, in control of their world, outside of ordinary, and just plain good.” Some are concerned that an obsession with superheroes may lead to actual violence down the line, but researchers have found the opposite to be true. It actually benefits children in many ways, including boosting their self-confidence. Jeff Greenberg, a social psychology professor at the University of Arizona, points out that “By identifying with the culture’s heroes and superheroes, children can begin to feel like they are aligning with what is good and can develop their own agency, power, and value in the world.”

A Florida woman named Cynthia Falardeau, for example, says of her son, “Sometimes Wyatt says that he gets bullied and superheroes give him the confidence to stand up, and tell the teacher.” Wyatt himself explains that superheroes “have super powers, strength, and they are brave. They always do the right things. They battle against evil. Superheroes give you strength!”

As children at play we were like Wyatt or Braden – lionhearted. But as we get older and life seems to become more morally tangled, we become jaded and the edge of our idealism and courage often grows dull.

Ms. Falardeau says of her son’s superhero fantasies, “I think he is learning that everyone is capable of being extraordinary.” I suspect Braden Denton, proud to dress up as Superman in the movie theater, learned the same thing. Perhaps his brief life can be a reminder to all of us to live as if we had never lost that childhood fearlessness, that moral clarity, and that sense of our own extraordinary power.

(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 6/7/14)

Is the Movie Western Dead?

Last weekend, multi-hyphenate Seth MacFarlane’s much-anticipated and heavily-promoted new comedy A Million Ways to Die in the West opened to an audience ghost town, earning only $17 million from over 3500 theaters (compare that to Maleficent’s $70 million). It aimed to be the new Blazing Saddles but now seems more like the new The Lone Ranger, another recent big-budget western that bit the dust hard. Has the sun finally set for good on the Hollywood western?

Westerns used to be a staple, perhaps the staple, of movie fare, as far back as the silent movie era. They largely fell off the map until 1939’s Stagecoach starring John Wayne, then took off again. Hollywood pumped out classic after classic like Shane, Rio Bravo, High Noon, The Magnificent Seven, The Wild Bunch, until the ‘70s ushered in a whole new breed of filmmaker. Clint Eastwood’s outstanding Unforgiven in 1992 sparked hope that the genre could be resurrected (tough guy Eastwood, of course, previously starred in many other gritty westerns like High Plains Drifter and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), but the western only sputtered to life occasionally after that. Kevin Costner’s Open Range in 2003 and the 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma with Russell Crowe come to mind as memorable but uneven examples. Neither was a big money-maker.

Hollywood now produces few westerns. Why? A major reason is that they don’t do well overseas where Hollywood now makes at least 65% of its revenue. Foreign audiences just don’t connect with our Wild West experience. It doesn’t help that, in a cinematic landscape dominated by CGI-bloated superhero films and fantasy epics, character-driven westerns don’t command much attention abroad or at home. Failed big-budget attempts to spice up the genre with a hybrid like Cowboys and Aliens or TV series adaptations like The Lone Ranger and Will Smith’s Wild Wild West haven’t turned the tide.

It has reached the point where filmmakers don’t want to be associated with the genre even if they have made a western. Actor-director Tommy Lee Jones, for example, debuted his new film The Homesman at the Cannes Film Festival recently and bristled at the suggestion that it is a western, even though it’s set during the mid-19th century American westward expansion and involves a tense confrontation with a threatening Pawnee raiding party. Perhaps Jones is afraid that having it lumped into the western genre is limiting or may even be the film’s kiss of death.

What is the principal reason for the disappearing western? At the risk of oversimplifying the history of a complex and influential genre, the classic western as a morality tale celebrating the rugged, independent, heroic, pioneer spirit, with white-hatted loners facing off against black-hatted gangs, is simply passé, and has been for decades.

Broadly speaking, Hollywood over that period of time moved away from straightforward good-versus-evil conflicts toward what they like to think is moral complexity (but is too often merely moral equivalence), with anti-hero protagonists. It has also embraced, if not actually driven, a politically correct reinterpretation of the history of the American West, to the point where, as in multiple Oscar winner Dances with Wolves, the Indians now wear the figurative white hats and cowboys the black hats, or at best gray. In last year’s flop The Lone Ranger, to name a more recent example, the Native Americans are depicted as wiser and more morally upright than the rapacious white man. They mock the buffoonish Lone Ranger, the movie’s ostensible hero.

In a press conference following The Homesman’s screening, Tommy Lee Jones seemed to be bucking that trend when he defended his movie against criticism that it presents Native Americans as the bad guys. He said, “I am not ashamed of the fact that they are considered by our characters to be potentially homicidal. We are not bending the truth at all or stereotyping anybody. That’s the last thing we wanted to do.” Good for him. It’s PC revisionism to pretend that 19^th century Native Americans were all noble, peaceful environmentalists or to romanticize their way of life as superior to the vastly advanced European settlers.

But then Jones declared that “I won't try to hide the fact that a consideration of American imperialism on the west side of the Mississippi river is the film’s underlying theme.” So much for bucking the trend.

Though hardly a traditional take on westerns, is MacFarlane’s bomb A Million Ways to Die in the West the genre’s last gasp? In the tragic film Lonely Are the Brave from 1962, Kirk Douglas plays a fiercely independent cowboy who loses a heroic battle against the inexorable advance of modernity. It would be a tragedy as well if the classic Hollywood western and its archetypal American hero met the same fate.

(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 6/4/14)

The Lunacy of Trigger Warnings

It’s official: we have raised at least one generation so privileged and self-centered that it makes demands on life instead of the other way around.

The New York Times reported recently on the rise of university student requests for “trigger warnings,” alerts from the professor that the syllabus material students may encounter in the course might deeply disturb them – re-traumatizing, for example, rape victims or war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

The student government at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) formally called for trigger warnings, and similar requests have been made at Oberlin College, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, and George Washington University, among others.

In a Rutgers newspaper editorial, for example, a student explained that trigger warnings are necessary for professors “to create a safe space for their students.” As examples, he cited Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which addresses suicide, and hyperbolically describes “scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence” in The Great Gatsby.

UCSB sophomore Bailey Loverin has a slightly more legitimate complaint. Loverin is one of the students who requested trigger warnings. A victim herself of sexual abuse, she approached a professor after he showed a film depicting rape, and suggested that he should warn students. I don’t know how graphic that film was, but I could concede that if professors are dealing in course material that really is graphic, then a general warning to that effect is appropriate.

For example, Lisa Hajjar, a UCSB sociology professor, uses graphic depictions of torture in her courses about war. I could accept the argument that students should know what they are in for if they take the class. But Hajjar complains that

Any kind of blanket trigger policy is inimical to academic freedom. Any student can request some sort of individual accommodation, but to say we need some kind of one-size-fits-all approach is totally wrong. The presumption there is that students should not be forced to deal with something that makes them uncomfortable is absurd or even dangerous.

Speaking of absurd, a draft guide for trigger warnings circulated at Oberlin College is laughable in the extent of its catalog of topics considered disturbing. It urged professors to “be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression.” I’m not sure there is any work of art that would make the cut in that list. “Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic,” the guide continues, “and that your students have lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand.” I think the writer of that guide should realize that it is condescending, and that students need to get over themselves and understand that the world, including a college classroom, doesn’t owe them any sensitivity to their personal circumstances, so they need to handle it or get help.

“Frankly,” says Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, “it seems this is sort of an inevitable movement toward people increasingly expecting physical comfort and intellectual comfort in their lives. It is only going to get harder to teach people that there is a real important and serious value to being offended. Part of that is talking about deadly serious and uncomfortable subjects.”

Rebecca Joines Shinsky at Book Riot takes a dim view of editorials (like mine) that complain about trigger warnings, which she favors because “people matter more” than books. She admits that “I’m not an educator, and I’m not here to make a declaration about how schools should address students’ concerns about triggering content,” but that “there is no scene in literature that is so important that reading it should supercede a reader’s psychological health.”

Jenny Jarvie at The New Republic disagrees:

Structuring public life around the most fragile personal sensitivities will only restrict all of our horizons. Engaging with ideas involves risk, and slapping warnings on them only undermines the principle of intellectual exploration. We cannot anticipate every potential trigger—the world, like the Internet, is too large and unwieldy. But even if we could, why would we want to? Bending the world to accommodate our personal frailties does not help us overcome them.

I couldn’t agree more with Ms. Jarvie. This is not to diminish anyone’s legitimate personal trauma, but if a college student is so sensitive that he or she is incapable of reading something as innocuous as The Great Gatsby or the anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice without suffering a psychological setback, then that student is in for a rude awakening about the real world. Institutions of higher learning exist, at least in theory, to open up students to the world, not to guarantee them safe passage through it.

(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 6/3/14)

‘For the Greater Good’: Life Lessons from The Americans

Eclipsed by all the attention rightfully given to the spectacular season finale of Mad Men, my favorite TV series The Americans just ended its latest season as well. One of the reasons I love this excellently crafted Cold War drama is that, in addition to its action and plot twists and well-drawn characters, it addresses broader themes than you would expect to find in a spy thriller. This second season-ending episode emphasized the conflicting ways in which the main characters seek to give their lives meaning and purpose.

I have written about the show previously for Acculturated (and elsewhere, for that matter). If you are sadly unfamiliar with it, The Americans centers on Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, two Soviet spies living undercover as a normal American couple in 1982 in Washington, D.C. While raising their two children (who are oblivious to their parents’ true identities), Philip and Elizabeth carry out subversive missions to advance the Communist cause.

Their teenage girl Paige, however, is growing up, trying to become more independent of her authoritarian parents, and looking for something fulfilling to give her a sense of her own identity and direction. She believes she has found it in a politically active, local church youth group, which seriously displeases her atheist parents. Believing that religion brainwashes impressionable youth with fairy tales (an ironic complaint coming from Communists), they try to discourage her from serious involvement. But Paige passionately asserts herself and explains that the church makes her feel that she is engaged in meaningful activity, that she can make a difference in the world. “Jesus was willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good – and that inspires me.”

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD

Meanwhile, the Jennings’ KGB handler informs them of a new program the Communists have initiated: a long-term plan to groom the innocent children of undercover couples like Philip and Elizabeth to become the next generation of spies – something the Jennings swore they would never permit for their kids despite their own total commitment to the cause. Their handler tries to sell them on the idea of bringing Paige into the espionage game: “It would give her life a purpose and meaning that she could never find in this country.” When the Jennings resist, she presses harder: “Paige is your daughter, but she’s not just yours. She belongs to the cause, and to the world – we all do. Have you forgotten that?”

Meanwhile, FBI agent Stan Beeman, their American counterpart, is wrestling with a soul-crushing choice between committing treason or allowing Nina, the beautiful Soviet double agent he has fallen in love with, to be repatriated back to Moscow to be tried for treason herself, which will surely end in her death – or perhaps worse, a life sentence in a gulag. To save her, Beeman is being blackmailed to give the Russians access to an American computer program that is critical to the future of the free world. In the end, even though his personal life has completely collapsed – his wife of 20 years has left him – he sacrifices love for love of country; he refuses to comply with the blackmail. Though it means abandoning Nina to her doom, Beeman ultimately chose something more important than his own selfish desires – patriotism – to give his life purpose.

“Life itself has no meaning,” the famed mythologist Joseph Campbell once said. “But you can give your life meaning.” We accomplish that by committing to something larger than ourselves: art, work, family, service to others – or in the case of the characters in The Americans – ideology, religion, love, patriotism. Whatever it may be, without that commitment, we risk wasting our lives in a gulag of our own making.

(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 6/2/14)

Mayor’s Advice on Bullying: ‘Grow a Pair’

Recently Mayor Cameron Hamilton of Porterville, California stirred a bit of controversy with his suggestion that people pushing anti-bullying measures need to “grow a pair,” and that victims of bullying should simply stand up for themselves or for those who can’t. Naturally, this incensed progressives in the media who believe government intervention is the answer.

His comment came during a City Council meeting earlier this month after Councilwoman Virginia Gurrola asked the Council to support a student-led anti-bullying program. The program would establish off-campus safe zones citywide for teens being bullied after school.

“I mean, I am against bullying,” an exasperated Hamilton said, “but I am getting damn tired of it being used as a mantra for everything that ills the world when all most people have to do is grow a pair and stick up for them damn selves.” Gurrola retorted, “It is hard to stand up and maybe grow a pair when you are maybe a 10-year-old little girl.”

Outrage quickly grew in the mainstream media, which gleefully jumped on Hamilton’s phrase as being sexist and inappropriate advice for children. He appeared on TV numerous times to clarify his remarks (meanwhile, no one in the media accused Gurrola of sexism for suggesting that girls can’t stand up for themselves).

Last week, for example, CNN invited Mayor Hamilton to discuss his comments on CNN Special Report, hosted by Don Lemon, with a panel featuring myself and legal analysts Mark O’Mara and Mel Robbins. I was invited to appear remotely from CNN’s Hollywood studio based on an article I wrote a few months ago entitled “We Are Raising a Generation of Wimps.” That article wasn’t specifically about bullying, but about our increasing zeal as a culture to create ultra-safe environments for our children, a paranoia which doesn’t serve them well as children or as the adults they will become.

Hamilton again tried to explain his position and was rudely dismissed by Robbins, who told him he needed to “grow a few brain cells” and realize that bullying must be solved by adults – specifically, educators rather than parents: “How are we gonna teach kids how to respond to bullying except to have communities inside of schools with a zero tolerance policy and that stick up for kids that are getting bullied?” O’Mara agreed with Robbins and derided Hamilton’s recommendation that kids physically defend themselves as “Neanderthal.”

The mayor noted that zero tolerance policies don’t teach kids to stand up against bullies: “They teach kids to stand down because they’re going to get in the same amount of trouble as the kid that’s causing the problem.”

“If they hit somebody, yes, they should get in trouble,” interrupted Robbins, “’cause that’s not how you deal with this situation. You may have dealt with things like that 20 years ago, but that’s not appropriate in 2014.”

“I think that’s very naïve,” the mayor correctly retorted. Bullies today are not kinder and gentler than those of 20 years ago. They are not more responsive to reason or dialogue or authority. They are the same as they have always been: cowards who respect only a dose of their own medicine. They target the weak and the fearful precisely because that is their predatory nature. Fight back and they disintegrate.

Even the CNN crew grasps this basic truism. After the commercial break, host Lemon noted that “everyone in the studio, about seven people, agreed that the best way to handle bullies was to fight back, to stick up for yourself.” (After the show I chatted with a female crewmember at the CNN Hollywood studio who also agreed.) He told of his own experience being bullied as a child, and said his father taught him to deal with it by commanding Lemon to fight back. That seemed to work for Lemon, as it does for pretty much everyone. Anyone – myself included – who has ever decided to physically stand up to bullies knows that that works and very little else does.

In my contribution to the discussion, I agreed with the mayor and asserted the necessity for kids to be emotionally, psychologically, and physically prepared by adults to deal with bullies themselves, and that preparation includes the use of defensive violence. But Mark O’Mara, like Robbins, rejected this notion. “There are more appropriate ways to handle violence.” Neither he nor Robbins mentioned what any of those appropriate solutions are. Robbins simply insisted, in her closing remarks, that educators must handle bullying, which she was quick to blame on parents: “Kids that bully are taught how to bully, typically at home,” she asserted. So her stance was that parents are part of the problem, therefore the schools must step in and protect our children for us (or is it from us?).

That is the solution of progressives (who have elevated political bullying to an art form): Let the state protect you. Don’t fight back, don’t defend yourself, because all violence is equally bad. Their refusal to acknowledge that self-defense is morally justifiable violence leads to such ludicrous zero tolerance extremes as suspending kids from school for pointing index fingers like gun barrels. The result is that American children are molded into risk-averse, helpless pacifists that, not coincidentally, can be easily controlled by the state. This will do nothing to stop bullying; it will actually exacerbate it.

Councilwoman Gurrola’s plan, for example, to establish off-campus “safe zones” for teens being bullied after school sends the message to bullies that they have won, that instead of the perpetrators being confronted and put in their place, their victims will simply retreat to a safe haven to huddle together in fear. It sends the message that the territory beyond those boundaries belongs to the bullies. It sends the message that we don’t have to grow up because the state is our protective father figure. If you want to see the real-world results of this kind of defeatist thinking, look to Europe, where Islamic bullies expand their sharia zones unchallenged by impotent authorities and largely unarmed citizens.

As the ancient Roman saying goes, if you want peace, prepare for war. If you don’t want the bullies –schoolyard punks, progressive radicals or government despots – to win, teach your children to fight back.

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 5/30/14)

Danish-Iranian Artist Shreds the Koran

Apparently Danish-Iranian artist Firoozeh Bazrafkan didn’t learn her lesson back in September when a Danish high court found her guilty of racism for making anti-Islam comments. Now she has put together a bold art gallery exhibition that is guaranteed to further offend the hair-trigger sensibilities of European Muslim fundamentalists and their multiculturalist abettors.

Unambiguously entitled “Blasphemy,” the exhibition in the small town of Skanderborg in central Denmark consists of the shredded remains of a Koran piled onto an Islamic prayer rug. “I want to continue to remind people that it’s okay to disagree,” says Bazrafkan, who is particularly critical of Iran’s Islamic regime as well as religion in general. “But it takes place under democratic rules” – an undeniably reasonable position, but she’s not up against reasonable forces.

Bazrafkan has a history of such provocative – sometimes sexually so – art installations and performance art pieces against either the Iranian regime or Islam. At an art installation called “Infidel” in 2007, she highlighted with a yellow marker the word “infidel” in a Koran every time it appeared (347 by her count). She also posted a video online of herself at the Arhus Museum on International Women’s Day in 2013, snipping and ripping her way out of a burqa and headscarf until she stands unencumbered in Western jeans and blouse, hair uncovered. In a new video performance, she strips naked and covers a Koran with her clothes, while another artist recites passages from it.

In 2010 she posted a video of herself in red heels and short skirt, lashing an open Koran a hundred times with a cat o’ nine tails in a protest against the Iranian regime’s flogging and stoning laws. In a video posted in early 2011, entitled “This is How I Celebrate the Iranian Islamic Revolution,” Bazrafkan jumps rope in high heels and halter top for a minute-and-a-half on a poster-sized photograph of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s glowering face.

In yet another video, she stands holding handwritten signs in English attacking the Iranian theocracy for silencing its critics with imprisonment, torture, and execution. “They commit murder in the name of God and hide the evidence,” one sign says. She urges her fellow citizens that “we must not deny ourselves to reach freedom and democracy,” “the right to live as a free human being.” In an art installation called “Allah O Akbar,” she presented the “decapitated head” of the former Iranian president, claiming “If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can kill people in God’s name so can I. I have beheaded him. The work symbolizes his death.”

“I do my best to get the point out in my artwork and installations because I want to criticize the Iranian regime my way,” she said in an interview with The Copenhagen Post. “If I want to be angry, I should have the right to be angry and call the Islamic regime anything I want. The state shouldn’t go in and take my rights.”

The Left’s Benghazi Comedy Show

Democrats “absolutely must boycott this absurd, insane, sickening, repulsive, shameful, and at the same time shame-less circus,” read an article at the Daily Beast last Wednesday. While you may be forgiven for assuming that the author was referring to the Obama administration, he actually was describing the upcoming hearings on the Benghazi investigation, which the article bluntly calls “bullsh*t.” That’s because progressives are rallying now in a desperate effort to dismiss Benghazi as a joke and the hearings themselves as a waste of time.

From the beginning, when four Americans including Ambassador Chris Stevens were killed in a terrorist assault in Libya in 2012, the administration did its level best to downplay the attack and divert responsibility for the murders to a scapegoated “Islamophobic” filmmaker and his hilariously inept, obscure YouTube video dramatizing the life of Islam’s prophet Muhammad.

But unlike the lapdog media, the right refused to accept the administration’s whitewashed narrative, so now that the left is feeling the heat from hearings to be chaired by bulldog South Carolina Republican Representative Trey Gowdy, they are naturally going on the offensive (when has the left ever gone on the defensive?). That means reaching for the most effective weapon in their arsenal: ridicule. Remember, this administration’s guru Saul Alinsky counseled that “ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” It is simultaneously a defensive and offensive strategy.

Political commentator and consultant Donna Brazile, for example, mocked on Twitter that “The Republicans are hyping the Benghazi hearings like they are about to launch a new TV series: what should we call this?” One Twitter respondent called her tweet “a horrifying display of arrogance and disrespect for the dead.” Another jabbed back that the show should be called “Truth and Consequences.”

Missouri Democrat Representative Stacey Newman got into the act, sending out the cutesy tweet that she was “thinking of saying ‘Benghazi’ while debating tomorrow on the House floor. Just to see what happens.” This is a woman who asserts in her Twitter bio that she is most “obsessive” about “saving lives due to gun violence” – unless they are American lives and Islamic guns, apparently. Then it’s just funny.

Mississippi Democrat congressional hopeful Trish Causey, another candidate in a crowded field for the title of Least Classy Comedienne, tweeted this hilarious nugget to her 1,325 social media followers: “As part of National Masturbation Month, Republicans like screaming the name of their fluffer, Ben Ghazi, when they orgasm.” It’s hard to imagine how anyone of any political persuasion could take a candidate seriously after such a disgusting, flippant public remark regarding American deaths, but then again, Causey admits on her website that she is “not a politician. I am an ActivistArtist [sic].”

CNN contributor, Daily Beast columnist, and now would-be standup comedienne Sally Kohn tweeted this smirky joke: “Little known fact: Monica Lewinsky is how Republicans pronounced Benghazi in the 90s.” She’s actually trying to claim that the unanswered massacre of Americans abroad, and the administration’s ensuing coverup is no more consequential than what the left considered Clinton’s harmless sexual indiscretion.

Here’s a little-known fact for you, Ms. Kohn: the Lewinsky affair rightfully ended in Clinton’s impeachment, and if the Benghazi hearings get to the truth, they could result in Obama’s. Kohn’s Twitter bio describes her as someone who “works for justice” – except justice for the Benghazi victims and their loved ones, because that might embarrass presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the woman who angrily shouted “What difference does it make?” when questioned about the attack. The woman who looked the victims’ family members in the eyes and promised them that a lone anti-Islam filmmaker would be brought to justice.

Why Today’s PC Police Would Ban ‘Blazing Saddles’

This year marks the release of the 40^th anniversary DVD of the classic comedy Blazing Saddles, directed by the incomparable Mel Brooks. If you were too young to have seen it in 1974, it is difficult to grasp just how outrageous and daring it was at that time; and if you were old enough to see it then, it is sobering to realize that Blazing Saddles couldn’t get made today.

Starring Cleavon Little, Gene Wilder, and Young Frankenstein’s Madeline Kahn, who actually earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for the film, Blazing Saddles is set in 1874 in the American West. A proposed railroad is coming through the little town of Rock Ridge, and  a conniving politician played by the hilarious Harvey Korman wants to drive out the citizens so he can buy up the land cheaply. As part of his plan, Korman sends them a new “sheriff,” black convict Bart (Cleavon Little), expecting the bigoted citizens to be so repulsed that they’ll move out or kill him – either way, Korman wins.

But Bart bonds with an alcoholic gunslinger, the Waco Kid (Wilder), and they win the hearts of the townspeople and turn the tables on Korman and his henchmen. Along the way, it is – as the late Roger Ebert praised it in his 4-star review – “a crazed grabbag of a movie that does everything to keep us laughing except hit us over the head with a rubber chicken.” In its pre-PC era, it was bursting at the seams with jokes about rape and flatulence, stereotypes of all races, and more N-words than one would ever hear onscreen today outside of a Tarantino film.

In a recent interview, Brooks said that he had given his writers (including comedy legend Richard Pryor) free rein:

I said to all the writers, “Look, fellas, don’t worry, this movie will never get released. Never. [Warner Bros.] will see it and they’ll say, ‘Let’s bury it.’ So let’s go nuts. Let’s write things that we never would dare write.” And we did.

Crudity is nothing new to today’s movie audiences (or TV viewers, for that matter), but in 1974 the film’s bold assault on racism stampeded past the limits of good taste on its way to box office success, and audiences everywhere loved it, surprising Brooks as much as anyone:

I envisioned a race riot. I thought everybody would come after me and kill me for what I said about the Chinese, and the blacks, and the Jews. I thought if this was shown in Waco, Texas, the whites would storm the screen and cut it to ribbons. Because we were kind of hoisting the black sheriff up on our shoulders and made him a hero. But Texas liked it as much as New York.

The American Film Institute liked it too, ranking it sixth among their 100 funniest American movies of all time (ahead of two other Brooks-directed comedies, The Producers and Young Frankenstein). Blazing Saddles accomplished a sort of deft balance of satirical social commentary and outrageous abandon, not unlike the creators of South Park today.

Flash forward 40 years. Instead of Blazing Saddles blazing a trail toward racial harmony, race relations in America are more problematic now than at any point since the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, and PC intolerance has such a stranglehold on the current Hollywood scene (as well as our culture at large), that it’s impossible to imagine Mel Brooks’ movie getting that green light today. “Isn’t it strange?” he asked his interviewer rhetorically,

It could hardly be made then. Certainly not 10 years before then. And now it’s suddenly, it’s 40 years later, it cannot be made today. That’s weird. The prejudices or whatever, the restrictions, should have thoroughly diluted by now, and here we are — it’s amazing. We’re playing it safe.

Comedy can break down barriers and unite people over sensitive issues that otherwise can’t be discussed comfortably or even rationally – all while seducing people to laugh at themselves and others. It is the enemy of political correctness, which is the humorless enforcement of speech codes to control the language and advance a political agenda.

Forty years ago, Blazing Saddles had audiences everywhere laughing at the N-Word, defusing its ugly power; today that word is cause for media lynchings. Our culture has succumbed to a PC intolerance that only divides, never heals or unites. Mel Brooks couldn’t get that movie made now, and that’s the tragedy of one of the funniest American movies of all time.

(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 5/22)

Angelina Jolie: Not Just Another Hashtag Activist

In the most tone-deaf example of what is sadly becoming more of a fad than actual activism, the social media campaign to raise awareness of the schoolgirl hostages of Nigeria’s terrorist group Boko Haram made its way to the red carpet last weekend at the Cannes Film Festival, where some of the cast of the upcoming action flick The Expendables 3 posed for photos with signs bearing the now-familiar plea, “Bring Back Our Girls.”

“Hashtag activists” Harrison Ford, Kelsey Grammar, Wesley Snipes, Sylvester Stallone, Ronda Rousey and Mel Gibson lined up and presented the signs (strangely minus the hashtag) to the masses of photographers that descend on the glittering French Riviera hot spot this time of year. In a separate incident, actress Salma Hayek brandished a similar sign on the Cannes red carpet.

(“Bring Back Our Girls” wasn’t the only such red carpet activism there. The cast of the Turkish film Winter's Sleep held up signs reading “#Soma,” referring to the Turkish city where over 300 people were killed in a ghastly coal mining accident a week ago.)

Apparently the Expendables actors didn’t confer beforehand about just what sort of facial expressions might be suitable for such a serious, weighty issue, because all were smiling to one degree or another. At least Ford looked a little sheepish and Grammar stiffly uncomfortable, as if they alone were aware of the vast disparity between their message and the glamorous setting. Perhaps Snipes was just happy to be out of prison after his tax evasion sentence, and maybe Gibson, looking like a tuxedoed Biblical prophet, was just happy to be in the spotlight for a reason other than personal meltdowns. Stallone and Rousey wore the most inappropriate grins imaginable, as if they were holding up signs with punchlines on them.

The efficacy of hashtag activism, discussed by Acculturated’s own Gracy Olmstead last week, is hotly debated. Some argue that it raises awareness and puts political pressure on the target, while others believe it accomplishes nothing except to make the sign-bearers feel momentarily good about themselves before returning to their sheltered lives. Indeed, the only impact it may have on the Boko Haram savages is to raise their profile and give them the notoriety they enjoy.

But whatever the answer, hashtag activism may have jumped the shark at Cannes. The reaction on Twitter to the Expendables photo was largely negative – and rightly so. “This is actually embarrassing at this point,” read one of the milder tweets. Two of the harsher ones were: “These girls deserve respect and help, not idiots holding cardboard. What an insult to them and us” and “F**k them. What are they doing about it while they're sipping champagne in viewing parties on French Riviera?”

In all fairness, the actors mean well, and it’s unclear whether it was even their idea or how much notice the actors had to prepare – perhaps a publicist thrust the signs into their hands just seconds before the pic was snapped, and awkwardness ensued. And what harm can it do, you may well ask? After all, who can raise awareness better than Hollywood celebrities?

The harm comes not from actors getting involved in the issues, but from ill-considered displays like the one involving the Expendables cast in Cannes, which may do more damage than good in the sense that they reek of “conspicuous compassion” and apparent insincerity, which just invite public contempt rather than inspire fans to take action.

By contrast, a serious celebrity activist like Angelina Jolie isn’t content to flash a hashtag from the red carpet or put in a brief appearance in a celeb-packed PSA. She does more than simply raise awareness. Check out the videos, for example, of United Nations ambassador Jolie visiting and talking with young Syrian refugees in Lebanon and in Turkey, as well as refugee children in Ecuador. There is no question of her active commitment.

Yes, she’s an extreme example, but the point is that her actions speak louder than any number of hashtagged phrases. If actors want to be taken seriously on a given political issue, they need to dispense with or avoid easy publicity stunts and, like Ms. Jolie, get out of their tuxedoes and luxurious comfort zone and do the legwork.

(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 5/21/14)

Camelot and the Miracle of Forgiveness

Last weekend I stumbled across a video circulating on the internet, of actor Jim Caviezel delivering an impassioned message to the members of a San Diego mega-church. Caviezel, a devout Catholic and the intense, handsome star of The Passion of the Christ and TV’s Person of Interest, assured the congregation that God’s grace and forgiveness are greater than their sins. “God forgives you,” he said, “and so now you need to begin again, to accept forgiveness.” As it happens, last weekend I also came upon a powerful, mythic example of that very lesson.

As part of the research for my book on chivalry, I was re-watching the 1967 musical Camelot, featuring Richard Harris as King Arthur, Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Guinevere, Franco Nero as the impossibly perfect Lancelot, and an incredible score by the songwriting team of Lerner and Loewe (the soundtrack from the original Broadway musical was America’s best-selling record for over a year). The movie spun out of the Broadway hit, which was based on T.H. White’s extraordinary 1939 novel The Once and Future King, itself based upon Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, the 15^th century compilation that is largely the basis for our familiarity with the Arthurian legends and with the tragic love triangle of the movie’s main characters.

Lancelot enters the story as the pinnacle of knighthood, a warrior of such unequalled valor and monastic virtue that he takes for granted his ability to surpass mere mortals. In fact, as White puts it, “he wanted, through his purity and excellence, to be able to perform some ordinary miracle – to heal a blind man or something like that, for instance.” As he proclaims in his signature song “C’est Moi” in Camelot,

And here I stand, as pure as a prayer,
Incredibly clean, with virtue to spare,
The godliest man I know!

But Lancelot soon discovers to his secret shame that, like all of us, he is far from perfect. Indeed, he betrays his friend and liege Arthur through his adultery with Guinevere, which leads to his slaying of a fellow knight in combat. Arthur, his Knights of the Round Table, and all his subjects believe him to be the purest knight on earth, but Lancelot lives with the knowledge of his terrible sins in his anguished heart.

Then one day Lancelot is called upon to do just that for which he had once arrogantly hoped –perform a miracle. In the novel (which differs somewhat from the play and movie versions), a knight cursed with wounds that will not heal comes to Arthur’s Round Table seeking the purest in heart to heal him, and everyone naturally looks to Lancelot. The author T.H. White asks the reader to imagine the terror that Lancelot now feels, knowing that his very public failure to perform the miracle will expose him as living a lie:

Miracles, which you wanted to do so long ago, can only be done by the pure in heart. The people outside are waiting for you to do this miracle because you have traded on their belief that your heart was pure – and now, with treachery and adultery and murder wringing the heart like a cloth, you are to go out into the sunlight for the test of honour.

His spirit broken by sin, and with all eyes upon him, Lancelot kneels beside the knight and prays from a place of deep humility for perhaps for the first time in his life, asking God to please save the knight not for his own glory, but for the knight’s sake. Magically, the knight’s wounds close, and the crowd exults in jubilation.

Forgotten amid the celebration is Lancelot himself, who remains kneeling and weeps like a child because he knew “a secret which was hidden from the others. The miracle was that he had been allowed to do a miracle.” The humbled Lancelot had been granted forgiveness and the grace to perform the impossible. His own healing process had begun.

This struck me as a beautiful example of Jim Caviezel’s point: no matter how undeserving we may believe we are, there is a power, whether divine or human, that is greater than our failures. Forgiveness itself is the miracle; we only need be willing to accept it and begin again.

(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 5/20/14)