“Hollywood vs. America” - the dystopia created by US film-makers

Film critic Michael Medved’s Hollywood vs. America made a huge impression on me when it was published in 1992. Until I read it, I hadn’t been able to figure out why so many US films and TV dramas were so depressingly anti-American. Given that Americans had voted for Republican presidents for the previous twelve years, why were they so addicted to negative portrayals of their own country?

Let’s face it, if you despised traditional American values, you didn’t vote for Ronald Reagan – so why would you lap up dramas which basically told you that America was A Bad Thing and that everything you believed in was a delusion?

Medved’s answer was straightforward (here’s a speech he made at the time) – if American films were more patriotic and celebratory, they’d attract larger audiences. American film and TV directors’ failure to mirror the traditional values of the majority of their audience was based partly on their desire to enjoy the approval of their overwhelmingly left-wing peers, and partly on their deeply held political conviction that only a tiny minority of right-wing fanatics could possibly believe in all that Mom, God and Apple Pie crap.

My own experience of Americans had led me to believe that most of them were conservative, religious, and deeply proud of America’s history and traditions. Yet so relentlessly negative was the self-loathing, anti-American propaganda peddled by Hollywood that even I had begun to question whether my own feeling for America hadn’t blinded me to the truth. But then two visits in 1992 and early 1993 convinced me I hadn’t been mistaken. The vast majority of Americans believed that the USA was a decent, honourable country which acted as a beacon of freedom to the world  (not an unreasonable belief, given that it had just destroyed Soviet Communism). 

As for the depiction of a sick society on the verge of collapse, well, certainly, any city controlled by Democrats was likely to be a violent hell-hole overrun by criminal vermin and full of welfare junkies - Washington, New York, San Francisco and New Orleans, for starters -  but everywhere in between seemed packed with tolerant, charming, friendly people leading decent, happy, hard-working lives. 

This, of course, was the exact opposite of what liberal movie-makers were telling me back then. According to them, all US businessmen and all corporations were evil and manipulative. All seemingly respectable, middle class homes were in reality dysfunctional hotbeds of racism, child abuse, sexual infidelity, hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness, religious mania, tyrannised by selfish, weak, cowardly, violent, right-wing male fanatics. 

All social workers were self-sacrificing saints. All drug addicts, prostitutes, alcoholics and petty criminals were the victims of a grossly unjust society, and if only we’d all be more generous and more compassionate towards them, they’d be automatically “cured” of all their vicious habits - which weren’t that vision in any case. 

All FBI and CIA agents and military officers were lawless, racist, fascist warmongers. America was not a true democracy, and its economic success was entirely based on exploiting the weak. All Native Americans were – and always had been - peace-loving, spiritually advanced eco-warriors. Everyone sent to fight for their country returned emotionally crippled. All cops were either mavericks operating outside the law, or corrupt Nazis. All Christians were mad. All farmers were decent and pure and good. The US government was engaged in a war on poor people and minority groups in their own country and abroad, and if only they’d stop wasting money on weapons and spend it on left-wing social programmes and public sector workers, America would be great once again – just as it had been during those few, brief, glorious years when God sent us His son, John F. Kennedy, to reveal unto us the Holy Left-Hand Path to Equality and Justice. 

Network, Reds, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Lenny, Chinatown, Mash, The China Syndrome, Save the Tiger, Lenny, Blazing Saddles, Coming Home, Mississippi Burning, Wall Street, Missing, Under Fire, Salvador, The Front, The Big Chill, Dances with Wolves, Revolution, Born on the Fourth of July, Dead Poets’ Society, Field of Dreams… the list is endless. 

Many of these Oscar-nominated films were terrific entertainments, but the political payload they carried was often malign and downright dishonest: boil them down and you got one powerful, over-riding message – one way or another, America sucks.

Then there’s the implicit approval of behaviour that’s stupid, self-destructive, offensive or irresponsible – or a mixture of all the above. Sexual promiscuity is fun and only religious nuts disapprove. Gay sexual promiscuity is even more fun – and if you get AIDS, it’s somehow the government’s fault. Violence is the answer to many problems, especially political repression - unless it’s employed by the state to protect its citizens or its allies, when it’s always unjustifiable. 

Sometimes, drug and alcohol addiction are a sane person’s only way of coping with life in America, and, in the case of the former, it’s often the fault of the authorities (although I’m never quite sure why). Besides, every respectable middle class person is popping pills every chance they get –what’s the difference? Petty crime isn’t a big deal – and is often justifiable, especially when  directed against anal, “respectable” types, and practically a moral duty if the victim is a corporation, which no doubt grew rich off the backs of poor people in the first place. Society leaves prostitutes no choice but to sell their bodies (and, of course, it’s all the fault of men – shagging anything that moves is admirable, and indicative of a free spirit,but not if you pay for it). 

The only truly interesting characters are outsiders – the weird, the perverted, the extreme: why bother making movies about honourable realtors or just lawyers or decent priests or honest politicians or trustworthy businessmen when you can bring us life-affirming transvestites and transsexuals and S&M enthusiasts? 

Everyone fucking swears all the fucking time, except for uptight religious maniacs (all child rapists anyway) so why fucking well not have all your characters say fuck every thirty seconds and it’s even fucking funnier if it’s a fucking kid cos, like, that’s so fucking cool and it’ll like, y’know, really fucking piss off all those fucking uptight middle class fuckers in the audience, right? Fuckin’ A! And making references to “pussy” is just the most hilariously cool thing you can do – I mean, how cutting-edge and out-there and relaxed and liberal can you get? Offended? Well, good! Asshole!

A few caveats:

I have no objection to films criticising aspects of the country where they’re made. But when the basic assumption is that the country is irredeemably rotten,  that’s tedious and silly (Avatar is a classic example). Loving one’s country (countries, in my case) is a natural human emotion: maybe Oliver Stone should think about that next time he feels an urge to defecate on the Stars and Stripes.

I have no objection to the occasional swear-word (for instance, the “f” word was brilliantly used in The King’s Speech, and it would be odd if Tony Soprano didn’t utter the occasional profanity), but using them constantly in contexts where they’re just not funny or serve a dramatic function and where their sole purpose seems to be to signal how fabulously liberated the film-maker is - well, that’s just lazy and boring.

Some drug addicts and prostitutes and petty criminals may very well have been the victims of exploitation or dreadful luck or a terrible upbringing – but to take a non-judgmental approach to these activities on that basis is morally insane. Taking drugs is wrong. Prostitution isn’t a fun lifestyle choice. Any filmmaker implicitly or explicitly condoning or glamourising these activities is doing something deeply wicked – our kids watch your films, you stupid,  irresponsible bastard! Shame on you! 

When  it comes to screen sex, as pornography is now widely available on the internet, I don’t really see the point of asking actors to simulate sex acts: it may get all you film-makers squirming in your seats, but it just annoys and embarrasses the rest of us. Next time you feel the urge, grab a laptop and some Kleenex and go somewhere private.

Now, I could probably have figured out most of this for myself, but Michael Medved – former Democrat, religious Jew, author of The Golden Turkey Awards and now the host of one of American’s most popular radio talk shows – certainly helped me understand that the near-universal left-wingery of Hollywood was to blame for the hysterical anti-Americanism of so many of its products.

In the nineteen years since Medved brought us Hollywood vs. America, things have got much, much worse. Now that the Hollywood mainstream seems to consist entirely of frat boy gross-out “comedies” and CGI-dominated Science Fiction silliness, the lack of dramas featuring ordinary, decent, God-fearing patriotic American adults who aren’t busy molesting their children or embezzling their employers or exploiting the poor or leading appallingly empty, meaningless lives based on a false American Dream is beginning to look decidedly perverse. Do these Hollywood types ever meet anyone (apart from hookers, drug-dealers, waiters and gardeners) who doesn’t live in New York of LA and doesn’t inhabit the strange, warped world of the entertainment industry?

I urge them all to put down the coke spoon for an hour or so, search their hearts and ask themselves whether they can’t find anything at all to admire about their country’s people, history, traditions or political institutions - and if they do manage to find something positive, please try and get it up there on the screen next time they make a film.