Is Hollywood’s Bias Conservative?
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.
Isquith concludes with the politically controversial Batman finale The Dark Knight Rises as Hollywood “at its most ideological . . . [It] is one thing above all else: radically, thoughtlessly individualist.” He claims that this film and the others he addresses exemplify and glorify “Hollywood’s—and indeed, much of entertainment’s—enduring, conservative belief” that it is “individuals, and individuals alone, who matter”:
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 sixteenth 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.
Mark Tapson, a Hollywood-based writer and screenwriter, is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He focuses on the politics of popular culture.
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I agree that the subtext of many popular films is deeply conservative. After all, you need a rupture in the moral order to propel a narrative, and that requires a moral order at all and judging something as “wrong,” which is a conservative position. The big question is whether subtext influences people. Critical theorists seems to think so and have enforced PC standards to stop its supposed negative effects.
BTW Southland also is “conservative” IMO.The cops see their job in large part as coaching the people of South L.A. to take back control of their own neighborhoods. Great show! It starts again in February.
http://www.libertasfilmmagazine.com/tnts-southland-in-praise-of-the-civic-virtues/
This explains all the tendentious, stupidly, vapid, antiwar films that were made during the Bush term; because conservative Hollywood types get a kick out of caricaturing our armed forces as cruel, jingoist, and clueless.
Hollywood is conservative and the war with Eurasia is going super well too.
Body of Lies isn’t quite as anti-war as you believe. It is more to show the bureaucratic ineptitude of Washington leads to failure. Throughout the film it demonstrates how someone who has “gone native” understands Arab culture and is therefore able to effectively fight terrorism. Whereas Washington bureaucrats continue to fail. Its meant to show that we as Americans have yet to understand the Arab culture and until we do, we will be a step behind winning the war.
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“In Lincoln, it’s only through the singular grace, wisdom, and humanity of the sixteenth president that the greatest evil in American history, an evil few but he sees with true clarity, is finally put to rest.” Anyone who believes this tripe is willfully ignorant. The “grace, wisdom and humanity” of a man who suspended habeas corpus and civil law, who arrested and imprisoned 13,000 people (including reporters) without charge or trial, who ignored orders from the Supreme Court twice to bring these prisoners to hearing, who believed in white superiority (read the transcript of the first debate with Douglas), who was ambivalent to slavery so long as the south paid their tariffs, who with the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in areas the North did not control and only as a military tactic? Whoever came up with this insipid quote had too much indoctrination at the government-monopoly schools.
Tell the truth: Hollywood is infested with cowardly, unthinking, self-absorbed, supercilious juveniles.
James, I haven’t seen the Lincoln movie yet. But I have read a whole lot about Lincoln. You were correct about many of your points about Lincoln during the Civil War. But he did hate the institution of slavery. He would have tolerated it where it existed, had the southern slave states not seceded and formed the CSA before he was even inaugurated. He was a man who grew during his time in the presidency. Although he thought black and white races could not live together and supported ‘Back To Africa’ voluntary repatriation efforts…he became much less racist in his thinking as he transitioned from his first elected term into his second. His writings and speeches supporting racial equality and equal rights in all areas of civic life were the ‘final straw’ for the famous actor, southern sympathizer…and Lincoln’s assassin…John Wilkes Booth. The Thirteenth Amendment legally freeing ALL the slaves everywhere was what Lincoln wanted and pushed personally as part of the Republican platform prior to the election of 1864, when he was easily re-elected.
To that list of failed “message” films, you could add “Promised Land”, which looks unlikely to recoup its $15 million cost. Still, as a way to propagandize the masses, I’m not sure that all of these movies would be considered failures by their makers. If your goal is to spread some political message, what’s a $5 million or so loss? Lots of political ad campaigns cost more than that.
Speaking of superhero movies, I think “The Dark Knight Rises” was more conservative than Isquith suggests. Yes, Bane’s army were all hired guns rather than ideologues, but they seemed to take a good deal of enjoyment out of putting on show trials for the ultra-rich and powerful.
I agree that “The Dark Knight Rises” is an inherently conservative movie, as was “The Dark Knight” before it. Nolan was pretty open about being inspired by “A Tale of Two Cities” in writing “Rises,” and the “eat the rich” parallels to the French Revolution are fairly evident. Within the context of the film, those who proclaim to be taking care of the people and overthrowing the tyranny of the rich are, in fact, only interested in destruction (that seems like a pretty decent summary of the conservative’s view of modern liberalism). Meanwhile, and rather shockingly by modern Hollywood standards, most of the business executives at Wayne Enterprises are portrayed as virtuous or at least as less evil than Bane and crew. When’s the last time you saw a Hollywood movie depict rich businessmen as NOT evil?
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