Story and the Power of Conservative Themes in Film

by John T. Simpson

Boy, did I ever kick a hornet’s nest with my tongue-in-cheek Archie Bunker-on-steroids BH post, “My Secret Life as a Conservative Republican.” Lefties called it Reaffirmation With Senator Smalley, which I expected. But Righties nearly wet their pants in fear, which I did not expect in the least. Where’s the pioneering spirit, self-confidence and gutter-level humor that founded this country?

People, this is OUR Fortress Hollywood! This is OUR sanctuary! Since when the hell do we care about what demagogues like Keith Olbermann think or say? Or any other mental tinfoil hat Lefties like Garofalo for that matter? It’s like Churchill worrying about Hitler calling him a fat cigar-chomping drunk! Who won that fight, and why? And who was in the right, despite all the insipid name-calling?

Time to grow a pair, people. It’s also time to raise the stakes. Now, I’ve heard from some contributors here at BH that it is really bad in Hollywood in places. That people might even lose their jobs if they spoke up like I do here. If true, that’s McCarthyism at its worst. Fortunately, that’s not my experience. I still have great relationships with people in the biz who could care less about politics. All they care about is finding great scripts or literary works to adapt, and telling great stories on film.

And that is where the battle really needs to be fought: on their playing ground. An insurgency of ideas, if you will. Example. Just under the Big Hollywood sign today, I saw the banner “TNT’s ‘The Closer’ Thrives on Strong Moral Foundation.” That PJM-linked article describes how The Closer, a show that portrays the border, the illegals situation, and even the cops themselves in very gritty and realistic fashion, is the top-rated scripted show on ad-supported cable since its inception.

The Pajamas Media reviewer, Jim Kearney, finished off his glowing review with this statement:

Perhaps if we spent more time following positive stories about law enforcement professionals, it would elevate consciousness and support for crime fighters in our culture.

Bingo! Give that man a Kewpie doll! Because he just threw down the same gauntlet I’m about to throw down to all of you conservative creative types, and it extends far beyond just cop stories. Screw what Lefties think! No changing minds there. But we conservatives believe what we believe for good reasons. In fact, only 21% of Americans identify themselves as liberal, the majority conservative. That’s a lot of box office just waiting to be tapped.

We conservatives need to address our talents not only to making better films than Hollywood Lefties do, but better films than anyone. The foundations are already there. How we can succeed in Hollywood, and reel ‘em in at the box office, is by telling great compelling stories with universal themes that in and of themselves advance our values systems, like the aformentioned The Closer. In the end, Hollywood is a business. If You Write It, They Will Come. Box office talks and BS walks.

The story should always come first. It is great compelling stories that should drive a film’s politics, not the other way around. That is the big mistake Hollywood Lefties make, and why they bomb so badly with politically-motivated films. The best way we can succeed is with desperately compelling stories that demand to be told. Success is the best revenge. And with the best stories, the morality and politics are already embedded. Just like Geraldo Rivera in Iraq, remember?

Examples. Even today Ben Hur, which still ranks #13 all-time in adjusted dollars, retains wide and astonishing popularity fifty years on. The other Biblical Charlton Heston classic, the Demille-directed Ten Commandments, is holding steady at #5 all-time adjusted. It also remains a very popular film. The over-the-top success of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, a film project every major studio in Hollywood turned its collective noses up at, is confirmation that there is still a huge religious market just waiting to spend their money on great moral Biblically-themed films.

If they’re done right. They must first and foremost be great compelling stories with universal themes.

The irony here is, I am not a religious person. But my Dad was a Baptist deacon, and I know vast swaths of the Bible inside out. And I LOVE Ben Hur! Who doesn’t? From purely business and film perspectives, I see great stories there just waiting to be told. But they have to be told in the right way. Ben Hur, despite its Biblical underpinnings, is perhaps the greatest epic revenge tale of all time. Who didn’t pump their fists when Massalah fell under his chariot and got trampled underfoot?

Ultimately, films should reveal their morality without being preachy. Ben Hur does not advocate conversion to Christianity. Nor does Passion of the Christ. But what both of those extraordinarily successful films share is great storytelling in a moral Biblical context. Story is all. In the framework of great marketable stories, we can advance our ideals of, say, true lifelong romance as opposed to freestyle sex. Huge market. Harlequin didn’t become the mega-empire it is today by promoting the zipless fuck. They did it by tapping into every woman’s deep inner yearning for True Romance.

In short, the best films don’t preach. They don’t even tell. They throw moral monkey wrenches at us during moments of extreme conflict. They make we, the audience, judge and jury. To me, the best dramatic films are morally ambiguous in the extreme. A Clockwork Orange, for example. Kubrick just threw it all in our faces and left us to ponder all the dark moral conundrums. The moral dividing line in film, as I see it, isn’t right and left. It’s right and wrong. Even between very wrong and evilly wrong.

Examples. What would you do differently as Denzel Washington’s John Creasey character in Man On Fire? Or Dirty Harry? Or Liam Neeson in Taken? Or Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle character in The French Connection, with New York about to be flooded with potentially fatal high-grade heroin? Would you push the envelope of the law as Popeye did? Perhaps most relevant to today, and which fellow BH contributor Matt Patterson so eloquently examined in his post The Dark Knight: Year One, what would you NOT do to stop Heath Ledger’s Satanic megalomaniac Joker?

Isn’t even American Gangster an epic American tale of good and evil? Super Cop vs. Superfly? Even Pulp Fiction, as decadent as all the characters in that brilliant film are, contains a gritty street morality we can all understand, as does The Shield. And what gritty gin-soaked smoke-clouded morality could possibly be higher than that of Casablanca? Yet I also believe that most of those films, not by design but by default, actually advocate the conservative position of imperfect people making tough, often distasteful decisions, and taking violent action with resolute determination when necessary.

All of those films and TV shows I’ve listed are populated with dark, troubled anti-heroes who make very unsavory choices, and aren’t necessarily people we’d want marrying our daughters. Yet in each case, varying degrees of evil are put side by side, and we are left to decide which is the lesser. If you are repulsed by, but deep-down agree with, the brutal actions of such outside-the-law characters as Vic Mackey, Dirty Harry and John Creasey, and what they do to enact vengeance and street justice on the slimiest of perps to either save or avenge their victims, you just might be a conservative.

By contrast, do you really think many Lefties, especially the ACLU, would have given Bruce Wayne the same slack on omniscient cellphone monitoring, no matter what the threat, as Lucius Fox gave Batman to take down the Joker, however personally unpleasant that choice was to Mr. Fox? Or given The Shield’s Vic Mackey the green light to pummel a sick child molester to find out where Dr. Perv had a young girl locked away and possibly dying?

Or given Man On Fire’s John Creasey carte blanche to jam a C-4 Easter egg up a corrupt Mexican cop’s ass in order to extract information on the kidnapping and presumed murder of Dakota Fanning’s Pita Ramos? Ya, as if! Yet in all those cases, those characters get right in our faces and demand of us, “what would YOU do in this situation?”

Sometimes the questions themselves are way more important than any answers. In fact, sometimes the questions ARE the point. The greatest, most compelling stories have moralities and politics all their own and tell us what they are, not by preaching or shoving the answers in our faces, but by raising troubling questions that force us to ask, “what would we do?”

Even in comedy, there is a deep morality in Leslie Nielsen’s Frank Drebin pounding the crap out of the Ayatollah Khomeini and wiping the birthmark off Gorbachev’s forehead in Naked Gun, or Stewie giving Osama bin Laden a Naked Gun-like beatdown in Family Guy. But that morality is just a side benefit of writing great comedy that everybody gets deep-down, like Team America: World Police. It’s the ultimate in vicarious fun. What Americans, besides Lefties, wouldn’t want to do all that?

The larger point here being, we should always strive to make the best movies and documentaries possible that expound on and examine closely our ideas and values as conservative Americans, without actually expounding on or examining them. Just present the story, the facts and the evidence, and all else follows. It’s the Art of Fighting Without Fighting, as Bruce Lee so eloquently put it.

A lot of great compelling stories for documentaries, too. The Iraqi national soccer team, once tortured, now heroes. Played their first home game in Iraq last week since the Saddam era. Was a smash hit. A great human interest story, with political overtones that go way beyond soccer. If they lose now, they’re still heroes. As opposed to Uday Hussein making them kick concrete soccer balls.

For much darker subjects, there is the ethnic cleansing of black Americans from LA neighborhoods by illegal racist Mexican gangs. Of how Los Zetas and the drug cartels now control and use our southern border like the Taliban and Al Qaeda use Pakistan’s. Or how Phoenix is now the second-ranking kidnapping capitol of the world, behind only Mexico City. Again, all you have to do is present the ugly stories on the ground and let the viewers decide. The human stories drive the politics, see?

Another great doc subject would be Iran’s Green Revolution and the regime’s iron-fisted response. I would include in such a documentary the fate of the dead and imprisoned protesters, the role of modern technology in fostering a democratic uprising in a fascist state, and how it all symbolizes the eternal struggle between those who seek freedom, and those who seek to crush it to remain in power. But it is the personal accounts and tragedies that should reveal its morality, not a narrator.

As to purely feature films, I am very much looking forward to the upcoming Lone Survivor hitting theaters. Peter Berg, who is slated to direct the project for Universal, seems a most capable director, and the producers can’t fail if they stick to what made Lone Survivor a huge bestseller. In other words, if they just tell the story and leave politics out of it. That said, I sure would have liked to have seen what Spielberg and Michael Bay could have done with that story on film.

Inglourious Basterds is also high on my must-see list this summer. Makes a nice bloody contrast to all that liberal Lefty nailbiting about CIA hit teams lately. What’s the big problem there, anyway? I LOVED the Dirty Dozen! Looked like a plan. Why shouldn’t we unleash all our condemned Maggotts on Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders in exchange for a shot at freedom? Liberals are such pussies!

Lastly, being conservative doesn’t mean being a stuffed-shirt Polly Prim. I’m as rude and raunchy a bastard as they come, just like Mozart. Six years Navy, okay? My writing reflects that. For those of you out in BigHollywoodLand who took such offense at my taking the name of the Lord in vain, you’re in the wrong place. Now, I don’t curse just to offend. But like my idol Gen. George S. Patton Jr., when I want it to stick, I give it to ‘em loud and dirty. Just like my Baptist deacon Dad did behind the wheel.

But just as you can tell a very high moral tale by creating a landscape of pure evil and forcing characters to make desperate and irrevocable choices, you can also tell a story with a romantic or moral heart with the crudest humor and language imaginable. Wedding Crashers, anyone? By the way, Rotten Tomatoes favorably reviews Wedding Crashers as “both raunchy and sweet.”

I rest my case.

I am fully on the same page with one scribe who said, “I write extreme right-wing material with extremely raunchy language.” I could have been looking in a mirror when I read that. But in the end, it’s all about great films and great stories. Yet all the greats have contained within them important moral and political themes and parables, be it A Bugs’s Life or Taken.

By writing or adapting great stories that contain within them the core values we as conservatives believe, as do most Americans, we can take control of the fight. If we’re lucky, control of the box office, too. Far more Americans consider themselves conservative than liberal. We have a distinct advantage. We can wage our insurgency of ideas within the system. And we can do it with great stories in so subtle a way even Hollywood Lefties wouldn’t know they’re making a conservative-themed film. Best of all, they won’t even care if the story’s a total can’t-miss winner.

A lot of it starts with conservative writers like me, or like-minded producers and other Hollywood professionals choosing great stories to adapt from existing literary works or screenplays, and pushing hard until they’re made. The Stoning of Soraya M. is one good example. The Passion of the Christ is perhaps the gold standard. No major studio in Hollywood would touch it, but who was right? The studios or Mel Gibson? Whose minds were closed there?

Most important, who laughed all the way to the bank? Box office talks and BS walks, and I believe there is a ton of box office yet to be reaped from some great stories that are just dying to be made. So if I don’t show up here at Big Hollywood for awhile, y’all know what I’m doin’. Break a leg, All!

P.S. As an entertaining aside I’ve just discovered, it seems the founder of Air America is on the same page as Rush Limbaugh when it comes to the Orwellian Fairness Doctrine.

Hope Springs Eternal :)


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Posted Jul 21st 2009 at 10:22 am in Classic Hollywood, Film, Politics, Religion | 104 Comments