All businesses, even in show biz, have no choice but to respond to their environment or perish (if they can’t get a bailout, that is). Compared to, say, the steel industry or the auto industry, nudging the entertainment industry culture into better alignment with the broader culture (and reality) is not so tough. When you are in the popularity business, you care about what other people think; when you must catch trends, the readiness to change must be comparatively high.

Fortunately, a lot of thinking has been done over the last several decades on the subject of influencing organizational cultures. Businesses realize that unless their organizational culture is consistent with their strategic objectives, they are likely to fail in getting people to change the way they work when circumstances demand new behavior. But increased emphasis on such matters as quality, cost, innovation, and the other sorts of objectives that managers must move their employees to achieve, cannot simply be imposed by fiat. Employees have to own the new behavior (as the parlance has it), and getting them to do so requires forcing the group culture to change.

Unfortunately, the most prominent example of engineering corporate and industry cultures has been the attempt to impose various diversity mandates. For all the unpopularity of sensitivity training and other methods of indoctrination, and despite inevitable backlash and resistance, industry cultures have changed dramatically when it comes to accepting the full participation of various groups over the least few decades.

Conservatives inherently disfavor many of the approaches employed by the diversity mongers, but there are still lessons to be learned and ammunition available, thanks to these efforts. Like Aikido adepts, conservatives will have to use the opposition’s momentum against it, channeling it in our favor. Now that “diversity” has been enshrined as a sacred proposition, political diversity is a hard value to disparage publicly  (though it has been and will continue to be done.)

If we want to topple the cultural hegemony of the left in Hollywood, we will have to focus our efforts, and think strategically.

Norms

The central goal of any cultural change effort is to establish new norms of behavior.  A norm is a specific type of sentiment: one that contains an expectation of how people ought to behave in a given circumstance. Modifying old norms and establishing new ones means changing people’s internal beliefs, a formidable task.

But no man is an island. In figuring out how to behave, people pay attention to others’ actions, noting what works and what doesn’t – what gets rewarded and what gets penalized. In small groups, they see it first hand. In larger groups, like companies and industries, they rely on formal communications channels (including media), events, and feedback from outsiders to learn stories defining what behavior works and is acceptable.

In fact, this is how all cultures work, national, corporate, and local. Stories that illustrate important lessons become legendary, remembered and shared within the group as part of its distinctive folklore. When people join a company or industry, part of the process of becoming accepted as an insider and a professional involves learning this sort of folklore. Vivid tales of monumental screw-ups receive the most repetition.

The Fear Factor

Self-preservation is the primary imperative for any group. When group members observe behaviors which seem likely to impair the survivability of their group or themselves, they tend to sanction that behavior – punishing it publicly, by word or deed or both. If enough people visibly sanction a certain type of behavior over time, most others draw the appropriate conclusion and start to believe that they should avoid a similar fate.

Considering the troubled environment facing the entertainment industry, the instinct for self-preservation can be tapped to empower an unfreezing of the beliefs currently enforcing leftist cultural hegemony in Hollywood.

The film and music industries face tough times, and can less readily afford a cavalier attitude toward segments of their potential marketplace whose values conflict with Hollywood’s own. Internet-based distribution systems are a challenge to existing industry mainstays, and are promoting market segmentation. The barriers to entry for new competition are falling, as video and sound reproduction technologies become cheaper, and distribution via broadband internet increasingly fragments the total entertainment market.

The traditional insecurity about careers that is a Hollywood staple faces increased pressure, in other words. Deep down, Hollywood’s noisiest enforcers of left hegemony know they are vulnerable to the changing marketplace. And the inherent value the entertainment industry must put on trends argues that after a period of leftist dominance, the next new thing will be something different. Fashion always changes, and Hollywood leftism is nothing more than a fashion that began with the reaction to the 1950s blacklist and HUAC, and has now largely run its course. Because it is so boring by now, all it needs is a little help and knee jerk leftism becomes a laughingstock.

Storytelling

Big Hollywood has the opportunity to present the world with tales from Hollywood, in which leftist Hollywood’s excesses can be made common knowledge within the industry itself, and among its audience as well. The fact that there are so many Hollywood conservatives who have to remain private about their beliefs creates a ripe environment for spreading tales of outrageous hypocrisy, nasty behavior, and other real events that can finally reach a public hungry enough for gossip about celebrities that they keep platoons of media professionals employed feeding them. Until now, the foibles of the left have been largely ignored in the mainstream celebrity gossip outlets. But the internet and Big Hollywood are about to change the landscape.

The hypocrisy of the Hollywood left is a rich vein to mine. In the current era, hypocrisy is the deadliest sin of all when it comes to public ridicule. Having a platform to expose the internal contradictions (use those Marxist clichés, comrades!) of the lefties makes all the difference. Thanks to the vast popular appeal of gossip about Hollywood, stories which begin in Big Hollywood will travel far and wide. When substantial numbers of people are laughing at leftist hypocrisy, leftists will become more circumspect, and may even begin to notice that it pays to be more tolerant of conservatives, or even back, participate in, or appreciate the commercial potential of products with conservative values.

The commercial failure of much of the most left-propagandistic Hollywood product on the Iraq War is another rich vein. Investors and corporations have lost big bucks backing the political fantasies of the left. The more details Big Hollywood can publicize about the actual business cost of leftist excesses, the better.

Feedback Loops

Even though Hollywood depends on the general public, it pays more attention to what other members of the industry say and think. So it is important that Hollywood lefties know that their unacceptable behavior is affecting their standing within the show biz community itself.

If Big Hollywood develops the theme that a lot of tickets aren’t being sold because a big segment of the public is alienated by the monochrome character of Hollywood’s political scene, that would help make the connection between personal and corporate economic survival and a change in political tone.

It also means that in their personal conduct, Big Hollywood members and sympathizers can multiply the effect, by telling others stories they read about here, and otherwise spreading the perspective that a little change would be good for everyone. When people inside a community hear others voicing sentiments, it opens minds to the possibility that times are a changing, and that it’s a good thing.

Cover and Overt Conservatives

In the long run, we hope that no one will have to remain a closeted conservative in Hollywood. But in the short run, there are certain advantages that accrue to having support that is not personally identifiable as committed to a point of view. As Hollywood adjusts to the reality that leftist excesses will be publicly chronicled and that intolerance will be exposed, there will be a lot of informal conversations making sense of it. Positive support from covert conservatives can influence the tone of these conversations, opening minds, presenting facts and analyses, and doing so from a sympathetic, not adversarial posture.

The Hollywood pendulum is about to swing in a new direction. The transformation from patriotic embrace of America and its traditional values to today’s reality took years of concerted effort by the left to achieve. There were overt and covert aspects to that transformation, too, a subject for Big Hollywood to cover, no doubt.

In the last few decades, most of the major institutions of mass culture in the United States were taken over by left. A generally leftist mindset rules in education, movies, television, and theatre. As a result, the last generation and a half has grown up in world where the baseline assumptions they absorb from schools and media are hostile to conservatives and many of their principles.

Correcting that situation is the larger purpose of Big Hollywood, and it is a noble one. Success will not be immediate, nor will it occur without incident. But we are both blessed and cursed to live in interesting times, and might as well make the best of it.

But for a French film director today to address the fear of the rise of Muslim violence, it would be necessary to operate at a purely metaphorical level, staying away from anything which might suggest a connection to politically incorrect hate-mongering against Muslims or Islam. After all, France locks up people for what it regards as inciting hatred. Keep the subject matter overtly unrelated, but throw in some telling symbolic details allowing viewers to realize what the game is.

Surprisingly, a French director has slyly made just such a thriller, a skillful one at that, superficially unrelated to the threat of violent Muslims, but obviously speaking symbolically to it. The film, Feux Rouges, or Red Lights, came out in 2004, to largely positive reviews internationally. In the United States, it even won the Independent Spirit Award (considered the Oscars of indies) for best foreign film.

Done in the style of Hitchcock and/or Chabrol, it is a tale of a French man standing up to a violent escaped con, one who doesn’t obey the same law as the rest of us, as the film observes. The movie scrupulously avoids any overt suggestion that the escaped convict is ethnically other than French. But by not giving him a name and having him wear a beard, it does not close that door either.

On the surface the French man, an alcoholic in the shadow of his more successful wife, kills a man who attacked and raped her after they separate while on a journey to pick up their kids from summer camp. Accompanied by the dreamy orchestral lushness of Debussy’s Nuages (listen), a nightmare unfolds, but one with an ironic happy ending.

The setting chosen by director and screenplay co-author Cédric Kahn makes the metaphor inescapable. The attack and subsequent murder of the rapist unfolds between the cities of Tours and Poitiers, southwest of Paris, as the couple journeys to Bordeaux. Those names might ring a faint bell for those who have studied the highlights of European history. In France, I have to assume everyone knows their significance.

In 732 AD, Christianity stood its ground against Islam, which had been fighting northward from Moorish Spain, in this very locale. The Battle of Tours is also called the Battle of Poitiers because the battle was fought on ground in between the two cities. Charles Martel led Burgundian and Frankish forces against the army of the Umayyad Caliphate led by ‘Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi, Governor-general of al-Andalu, which had advanced northward from Bordeaux before being stopped.

Generations of historians saw this battle was the turning point when Christendom finally halted the advance of Islam, ultimately pushing  it back out of Europe, preserving Western culture. Muslims call this “the tragedy of al-Andaluz,” and vow to bring Spain (and presumably southwestern France) back into the dar al-Islam. Of course the latest generation of leftist historians does not see the battle quite so heroically, but nobody disputes that a major historic event related to stopping Muslim aggression took place exactly where the film is set.*

Red Lights is based on a 1953 novel by the giant of French language pulp fiction George Simenon, creator of the Inspector Maigret series. Simenon’s novel is actually set in the United States, but the film’s director Kahn re-set the movie in France, arguably to make it appeal more to a Francophone audience, but in my view his choice of exact location is conclusive as to his metaphorical intent. But he will admit no such thing. He is in fact on the record denying any significance at all for the setting:

“The set is a road, the country is of no importance. I just wanted to re transcribe my strong fist impression.”

The gentleman doth protest too much.

The movie is an excellent example of the thriller genre, and can be enjoyed without all the symbolic analysis. But when an American viewer factors in the metaphorical baggage, it becomes a classic of the politically correct era in which we live, an artifact of the unspoken terror, the specter which haunts not just France but all of Europe. After the killing is accomplished and understood by husband and wife in the movie, we see the beginning of a new harmony between them, just as France might reconcile its culture of glossy sophistication with its neglected rougher masculine side, the willingness to kill people and break things in the defense of what belongs to it. The suggestion is clearly that France needs to embrace both halves of its national character.

Fortunately, you can see Red Lights on (of all places) the normally leftist Sundance Channel, twice on January 8th (Thursday) and again on the 14th and 21st of January. See the broadcast schedule here.