We’ve gone from Dirty Harry to Jason Bourne (or whatever his name ended up being; the camera was too shaky for me to ever tell what was going on). We’ve gone from Humphrey Bogart to George Clooney.  We’ve gone from John Wayne fighting Indians to Na’vi fighting Americans.

But, don’t fret. For there is an answer to our problems, fellow film buffs. I know you’re six feet from that ledge, but let me give you hope…they are called books. They are these contraptions with bindings and pages with words on the inside. Together this all creates a story one hundred times more fulfilling than today’s dim-witted liberal flavor-of-the-month films.

Hollywood has always been a liberal town. They give us anti-Iraq war movie after anti-Iraq war movie despite the fact that they all flop at the box office. But what of the literary world?  They must surely share Hollywood’s contempt for conservatives and enriching stories, right? Wrong. The publishing world seems to get it, for the most part. They like to publish what sells and what seems to sell today are right-leaning stories.

Stephen Hunter, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, Tom Clancy, Frank Miller, James Ellroy, and Andrew Klavan. These are just a handful of names of today’s top fiction writers. All of them have something in common: they have, admittedly, right leaning politics and philosophies. This does not mean that their books are some kind of weird right-wing propaganda. What it means is that their stories usually make the bad guys who the bad guys really are and their heroes don’t shy away from masculinity or righteous indignation. These writers also have something else in common: they are all New York Times bestselling authors. Try out Stephen Hunter’s new novel Soft Target. It’s a hundred times better and more visually striking than any new action film to hit theaters in the last year. Or try Andrew Klavan’s last adult thriller, The Identity Man. It’s more thought-provoking and more well thought out than any half-baked political thriller cooked up by George Clooney. These writers lead the fiction front in literature today. They put out bestsellers that frequently win acclaim from critics.

As for non fiction…now we are really getting to the heart of the beast. Look at the New York Times bestseller list for non-fiction and you are bound to see a plethora of conservative thought. While Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham are regularly blasted in the mainstream media, they regularly put out bestsellers. Others do too. In fact, most non-fiction political books that hit shelves are written by conservatives. Why this phenomenon and why now? Is it that conservatives have been turned away by Hollywood so they have retreated to the inner workings of books? Or is it because right-leaning artists and right-leaning thinkers need more than a 90-minute film to bring across a message and/or story?

Perhaps films are more representative of a liberal approach to storytelling, while writing is a more conservative approach. Films are a collected effort. They takes hundreds, if not, thousands of people to create, and usually have a vision that is compromised by too many cooks in the kitchen. Books, on the other hand, are a celebration of individualism. It takes one person to sit and put his vision down. Maybe this is the explanation, but maybe not.

But whatever it may be, this much is true: if you hit up your local bookstore or head over to Amazon, you’ll find a world of old school storytelling and right-leaning stories. John Wayne and his films ain’t dead, they just grew up. They exist in an entirely new world: the world of books.

Check out footage from the latest Tea Party rally and you’ll see people holding signs referencing classics like 1984 by George Orwell and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Check out footage of the latest Occupy Wall Street rally and you’ll see people wearing “V for Vendetta” masks. That says it all.

-President Obama appears at the 1:50 mark-

Occasionally, however, there arises a radical who is all these different things rolled into one: a progressive with a persona that enables him to influence adults and hold sway over the minds of children. A good example of this type of leftist is President Obama, who not only convinced a majority of adults to vote for him over Senator John McCain in 2008, but also used that same campaign season to appeal to children and younger voters by having his name advertised in video games. Since then, he has crafted presidential speeches aimed at America’s youngest generations (as when he gave a special speech to elementary school students which was broadcast throughout the public school system in the fall of 2009), and will be appearing in the soon-to-be-released Madden NFL 11.

That’s right: Obama’s image will be tucked into the scenes of one of the most popular video games available.

These attempts to make Obama’s face and message ubiquitous perfectly exemplify what the left always denies: that they are willing to use education and entertainment mediums to indoctrinate instead of educate. And as with all the other things Obama does, he is not placing his image everywhere by accident. Rather, he is doing so in order to saturate the minds of young Americans with a Hollywood-crafted caricature of “the messiah” who promises hope and change (but mainly change).

I believe Obama and his surrogates know that the generation that grows up under constant exposure to his image will more readily accept the kinds of policies Obama promotes. And while this is really just a new dance to the same old song, it fits perfectly into the schema that the left has been constructing for decades.

Just as the generation that came of age during the 1980s did so under the tutelage of MTV, and the generation of the 1990s under that of late night television’s presentation of Bill Clinton as a hip saxophone player, so too the generation coming of age in the early 21st century does so with the constant presence of Obama. If they go to school, he is there in a speech. If they watch television, he is there striking an austere pose. And if they play a video game, his brand awaits them, and his face is there too (minus the cigarettes of course).

George Orwell couldn’t have planned it better.

During the same period, various Leftist writers began penning spy stories of their own in reaction to Fleming’s potent brew of unapologetic clubhouse masculinity (smoking, drinking, gambling, golfing, seducing) and unqualified patriotism, favoring a more, shall we say, morally nuanced look at the Cold War. Author John “The United States of America has gone mad” le Carré, then finding fame with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963 — good guys die, bad guys win, yay!), considered Fleming’s books “cultural pornography,” and mused that in the real world Bond’s “misty, patriotic ideas” would hardly prevent him from betraying his country at the first opportunity. “Because if the money was better,” le Carré snickered with certainty, “the booze freer, and women easier in Moscow, he’d be off like a shot.”

Into this maelstrom of anti-Fleming derision came a little volume called The James Bond Dossier (1965), penned by a more notorious member of the English literati, academic-cum-novelist Kingsley Amis. A savagely witty writer, a world-class drunkard, and a conflicted serial adulterer (all qualities shared, you may recall from our previous installment, with Bond’s creator), the overarching critical statement of his book was simple enough: “Inside that conservative dark-blue worsted suit and under the same skin as a bearer of the hard-earned double-o prefix there lurks an intruder from another age,” a “Byronic hero,” who “is lonely, melancholy, of fine natural physique, which has become in some way ravaged, of similarly fine but ravaged countenance, dark and brooding in expression, of a cold or cynical veneer, above all enigmatic, in possession of a sinister secret.”

James Bond “enigmatic”?  Mrs. Fleming and her writer pals, secure in their superiority over Fleming’s simplistic nonsense, found that laughable. To them Bond was predictable and formulaic, about as enigmatic as the flashing neon sign outside of a gambling den or whorehouse. Yet against these prevailing critical winds Amis used The James Bond Dossier to build a countervailing case, one that posits that 007’s adventures “were more than simple cloak-and-dagger stories with a bit of fashionable affluence and sex thrown in.”

Guided by a close reading of the novels, Amis notes a number of startling truths about the character. Contrary to so many other fictional detectives, Bond “has no perceptible interest in the arts. . . his library is small. . . his mind is a completely utilitarian organ.” He argues convincingly that “this is an enormous refreshment after the dozens of adventure and thriller (and straight) heroes whom their authors load with learning or arty accomplishment as a reassurance, I suppose, to the more obdurately highbrow reader that he needn’t be ashamed of enjoying the stuff.”

Amis also revels in the way Bond “unreflectingly enjoys what we can no longer feel quite comfortable about” — drinking, smoking, womanizing, driving fast — but then astutely mentions the scene in Thunderball where Bond’s doctor reports the damage hard living is doing to his body and psyche. Fleming here hints at the ultimate, off-page end for his hero — a dark fate forged not by prepubescent wish-fulfillment, but by the same sense of dissolution and melancholy that haunted the author’s own final years. Such details, each deftly highlighted by Amis, give James Bond true depth.

In answer to feminazi critics decrying the (in one female reviewer’s words) “adolescent inferiority feelings compensated for” by Bond’s caveman misogyny, Amis corrects the record with aplomb. A thorough study of Bond’s varied dalliances leads to the inescapable conclusion that “However much amateur lip-curling toward women in general Bond may go in for, he never uses an individual woman unkindly, never hits one, seldom so much as raises his voice. (Rosa Klebb and Irma Blunt are admissible exceptions). . . Bond’s habitual attitude to a girl is protective, not dominant or combative. . . Women take to him because he likes them and knows how to be kind to them.” And then, Amis’ wickedly sly coup de grace: “Critical horror at Bond’s sexual victories, I feel, can have its own element of ‘compensation’.”

I’ve always found Judi Dench’s weirdly passive-aggressive, ball-busting, feminist-fantasy M of the recent Pierce Brosnan/Daniel Craig movies a nauseating false-note of a character (and one echoed by Joan Allen’s equally implausible attempt at grizzled gravitas in the Bourne films). But it wasn’t until reading Amis’ forty-five year old book that I figured out why. He points out that the M of the books is an old-school, world-weary, bridgeclub-and-cigar father-figure, one who engenders, in Fleming’s words, “a great deal of [Bond's] affection and all of his loyalty and obedience,” and is happily “loved and obeyed” by our hero throughout the series.

M’s masculinity, you see, is a crucial element to the series: a valuable link between the cold and cynical modern world and the old, towering, Kipling-esque England of war and empire, a place of great civilizational confidence. “What (if anything) holds [Bond’s] elementary moral system together,” writes Amis, “is belief in England, or at any rate a series of ideas about her.” It’s remarkable to see a writer who built his name on withering sarcasm praise Bond’s bedrock patriotism as “more sympathetic than the anguished cynicism and the torpid cynicism respectively of Messrs le Carré and [Len] Deighton.”

Amis realized early on that “Politically, Bond’s England is substantially right of center,” a world (Amis takes the quote from Dr. No) “of tennis courts and lily ponds and kings and queens. . . .”:

The England for which Bond is prepared to die, like the reasons why he’s prepared to die for it, is largely taken for granted. This differentiates it, to its advantage, from the England of most Englishman of Bond’s age group. Negative virtues are even more important in escapist than in enlightening literature, and not the least of the blessings enjoyed by Mr. Fleming’s reader is his absolute confidence that whatever any given new Bond may contain, it will not contain bitter protests or biting satire or even witty commentary about the state of the nation. We can get all that at home.

All of this met with the approval of our literary tour-guide — after an early flirtation with Communism, Amis had grown ever more disenchanted with the Left. He began to hate the overweening stupidity of the “permanent revolution,” cloaked as it was in faux intellectualism by zealots “who think student freedom is impaired when a college applies its statutes; who buy unexamined the abortion-divorce-homosexuality-censorship-racialism-marijuana package.” Or to put it another way: it was one thing for conservative women to occasionally frustrate the lecherous Amis by politely rejecting his advances, and quite another for an entire phalanx of glowering feminists to shriek “All sex is rape!” while spouting pithy inanities about fish and bicycles. By 1967, he was disgusted enough to publicly state “I think a half an hour with a convinced lefty is enough to make even the most progressive person wonder a bit whether Conservatism might not have a little more to offer.”

Shocked at his apostasy, the Left condemned much of Amis’ later work as misogynistic, racist, imperialist, homophobic — all their usual show-trial charges. Amis remained unbowed, supporting Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s while continuing to detest the loony fellow traveling of many of his friends. I particularly like how he challenged his late-in-life pal Christopher Hitchens on the younger writer’s asinine idolization of Lenin (a toxic infatuation which continues to this very day — the next time Hitchens grandstands about arresting the Pope and putting him on trial, everyone should keep in mind exactly whose century-old tactics the writer is emulating).

Amis died in 1995, his end hastened by a lifetime of prodigious drinking. Between benders he had managed to write three well-regarded, affectionate books on boozing, even as alcoholism slowly killed him. Oh well — some people overeat and keel over from heart attacks, others choose hooch. There’s worse ways to live and worse ways to die, as both Fleming and Bond well knew.

During one high point of The James Bond Dossier, the agnostic Amis laments the number of critics, both liberal and conservative, who accuse the Bond books of a “total lack of any ethical frame of reference,” and who see the character and his exploits as “both anti-human and anti-Christian.” To the contrary, he retorts:

I should have thought that a fairly orthodox moral system, vague perhaps but none the less recognizable through accumulation, pervades all Bond’s adventures. Some things are regarded as good: loyalty, fortitude, a sense of responsibility, a readiness to regard one’s safety, even one’s life, as less important than the major interests of one’s organization and one’s country. Other things are regarded as bad: tyranny, readiness to inflict pain on the weak or helpless, the unscrupulous pursuit of money and power. These distinctions aren’t excitingly novel, but they are important, and as humanist/Christian as the average reader would want.

Amen. This goes for the films, Goldfinger chief among them, as well as for the novels. Perhaps Fleming’s imaginary, pulp-fiction England — colorfully decorated as it is with outrageous villains, enormous breasts, bracing drinks, good smokes, and all the rest of it — isn’t quite the elegant “precious stone set in the silver sea” of Shakespeare’s fancy. But in a fallen, “progressive” world veering ever closer to the stuff of Orwell, we’ll take it.

James Bond — that magnificent battler of Communism and preserver of the old order — remains a blessed salve to conservatives, an antidote to the anti-Western fulminations of so many lauded writers of the modern era. Amis ends his wonderful book on an unembarrassed, heartfelt note, the sneering Malcolm Muggeridges of the world be damned:

Most of the above had already been written when Ian Fleming died. I hope I’ve sufficiently conveyed my admiration for what I think he did best. When a few Easters have gone by without a new Bond adventure, regret at the passing of his creator may well help to bring about an assessment of his proper place in literature. This, as I see it, is with those demi-giants of an earlier day: Jules Verne, Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle. Ian Fleming has set his stamp on the story of action and intrigue, bringing to it a sense of our time, a power and a flair that will win him readers when all the protests about his supposed deficiencies have been forgotten. He leaves no heirs.

Ian Fleming’s spy fiction was pulp. Bond is pulp. And yet I agree with Amis: beneath all of the “Sex, Snobbery and Sadism” of a book (or a movie) like Goldfinger lies more honest humanity, morality, and existential truth than has been mustered up by most of the “nuanced” and “complex” novelists of our time over their entire award-winningly wretched careers.

This concludes our look at Ian Fleming’s rousing James Bond adventure Goldfinger starring Sean Connery. Come back next week for the beginning of an all-new For Conservative Movie Lovers series, only at Big Hollywood.

Previous posts in the series “Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and Goldfinger”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Goldfinger is available in a special edition chock-full of extras both on Blu-ray and on regular DVD. You can also rent the flick from Netflix, of course. If you’ve seen it before, revisit the film armed with everything you’ve learned in this series. If you were deprived as a child and this is your first time seeing it, you’re in for a real treat. From the moment Connery sends his Miami hotel masseuse on her way with a stereophonic smack on the behind, you’ll know this isn’t the Bond pre-approved by the gelded metrosexuals who run modern-day Hollywood.

In an interview long after Goldfinger’s release, the actress Honor Blackman (Pussy Galore) fondly remembered that, “[producer Harry Saltzman] used to say that women came out of a Bond film dreaming of Bond, and men came out walking tall.” Check out this forty-five-year-old film, with its hero trapped in the amber of the culture of your parents and grandparents, and see if it still possesses the power to inspire those feelings in modern viewers.

The James Bond Dossier by Kingsley Amis. Amis wrote another Bond overview called The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007 (1965) along with the first Bond pastiche, Colonel Sun (1967). But it is his first foray into the field that remains closest to my own heart. The various ways he skewers the tired, politically correct arguments of the “better Red than dead” critics of the Bond series are priceless.

Ultimately, the book does for Fleming’s hero much of what the great bookman Vincent Starrett’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1933) once did for that classic detective — it makes him deeper, more complex, more real, and thus more satisfying a fictional creation. Great fun all around, and most enlightening.

And for those who missed it, check out an old article from Big Hollywood’s Russ Dvonch, wherein he dissects the script of Goldfinger and used it to demonstrate how to structure and write a good movie screenplay. Interesting stuff.

But there’s another revolution underway in America today, and you sure as hell won’t see it televised or reported on by our new fourth branch of government. It’s not in their interest to do so. Nothing new there. For a long time now, political corruption has been rampant in the Leftist ‘mainstream’ media. In 1998, Matt Drudge made his big mark breaking the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which Newsweek had buried to protect President Clinton. Think Obama’s Tiger Beat would have done that for Bush?

It has only gone way downhill since into Soviet-era Pravda territory. The MSM’s modus operandi today is identical, and I don’t say that lightly. But having listened to Radio Moscow broadcasts on ham radio for years during the Cold War era, combined with some Naval Intelligence training and research into the subject, I deconstructed the Soviets’ propaganda MO down to five simple canons. All five are in direct violation of every principle of objective and unbiased journalism there is:

1. Always make the State and its political leadership appear infallible.

2. Promote the State’s ideology and official policies wherever possible.

2. Demonize political adversaries and dissidents as enemies of the State.

4. Suppress news that reflects poorly on the State or its leadership.

5. If bad news cannot be suppressed, attack and discredit the source.

Those canons apply to any totalitarian dictatorship’s propaganda machinery, really. Just ask the Green protesters in Iran. I referenced the Soviet-era Pravda because I know it all too well. Example. All five canons were applied in the days following the KAL 007 shootdown by Russian fighter jets on September 1, 1983. There was nothing from Radio Moscow for days, then a terse statement of how Russian fighters encountered KAL 007 before it “continued on to the Sea of Japan.” That’s verbatim.

Finally, when the big news and damning facts could no longer be suppressed, Radio Moscow went on an all-out offensive, blaming the Americans for their own rash action in shooting down a commercial airliner and killing all 269 passengers and crew. They even insinuated that the flight number, 007, proved that it was on a spy mission. Don’t expect reason or sanity from propagandists.

Now, take a look at those five canons again and compare the MSM’s response to the Van Jones, Yosi Sergant/NEA and ACORN video sting scandals, all stop-the-presses headline stories. Van Jones, a presidential ‘czar’ whom we discover is a radical racist, self-avowed Communist and 9/11 Truther. Yosi Sergant, communications director at the NEA, an independent federal agency, politicizing NEA by coordinating with the White House and artists nationwide to create art promoting Obama’s political agenda, a direct violation of NEA’s charter. And all with our taxpayer dollars.

Last but not least, six ACORN workers in three different field offices, all most willing to perpetrate housing and tax fraud to facilitate the establishment of brothels with illegal alien child sex rings, and all on our dime. Makes you wonder who they’ve placed already. I can just picture Pinchy doing a Dr. Evil-like “Ssssh!” on that last musing at a Times editorial board meeting. Given the Paper of Broken Records’ non-coverage of Van Jones and Yosi Sergant, I’d say Pinchy has a whole bag of “Ssssh!”

The Pulitzer Committee should add a new award category for Best Non-Coverage of a Major News Story. It would be an Oscar-like Battle for the Gold the first year out. It’s tragic to bear witness to, having been weaned on great American investigative journalism that seems almost nonexistent in the MSM these days. Very sad state of affairs, but We The People need to know who and what we’re dealing with here. This now-endemic political corruption in the MSM goes way beyond just reporting or not reporting the news. It violates the sacred public trust We The People have put in our media watchdogs to investigate and report the truth on our behalf so we can make informed decisions.

That political corruption also introduces severe conflicts of interest when ideology trumps major front page news stories, which has happened far too often lately. Our government should be fearful of a free press, not worshiped by it. That’s more apropos for North Korea, not America. A truly free press is supposed to keep public officials honest and on their best behavior, regardless of party affiliation. Unfortunately today, in Animal Farm-like fashion, our MSM pigs and government farmers are all gorging themselves at the same table and berating all the other farm animals who don’t fall in line.

In closing, I’d like to leave you with some schocka headlines from today’s wild British tabloid-like Pravda that you will never see in our ‘mainstream’ press in this Golden Age of the ObamaMessiah:

Obama Embodies Grand Failure of Great Hopes

Barack Obama and the Banality of Evil

Obama is Just a Slave

By stark contrast, our own MSM has reversed roles with Pravda in through-the-glass-darkly fashion and morphed into the Dear Leader Soviet-era version. All major MSM outlets suppressed the Jones story until it was no longer feasible, then attacked and discredited those who would dare expose a self-avowed Communist presidential appointee, all the while omitting key elements of the story and praising Jones despite it all in order to make Jones look good and his political opponents nefarious. That’s all five old-school Pravda canons rolled into one story, and that’s just Van Jones. As an American citizen, how much does that suck? Orwell had days like this. Da Svidaniya, Comrades!

“Wax on, wax off.” “He slimed me.” “Fortune and Glory, kid.” “I’ll be back.” “Don’t get him wet. Keep him out of bright light. And never feed him after midnight.”

It’s hard to believe that a quarter century has passed since that magical movie summer of 1984. The calender year of George Orwell’s dire dystopian nightmares had arrived, but instead of a nation writhing in servitude to Big Brother, America was delighting in the prosperity engineered by Big Gipper. Throughout the summer of ‘84, the greatest president of the twentieth century was cruising to the single largest electoral total ever amassed by a presidential candidate in our history, and “It’s Morning Again in America” commercials were playing on TV’s across the land to widespread approval.

In California, a cute little R2-D2 of a machine called the Apple Macintosh had been introduced, heralding the beginnings of a technological tsunami that has yet to abate. Meanwhile, across the world, the latest in the Soviet Union’s grotesque chorus line of cadaverous leaders had croaked, presaging the collapse of the whole miserable works in just a few short years. There was still a world-full of the usual problems, failures, and challenges, yes. But for those of us who spent that summer in gloriously air-conditioned, velvet-dark theaters — and sometimes, when we were lucky, in massive outdoor parking lots flanked by titanic movie screens glowing mystically in the dying light of the setting sun — times were good in America.

There’s much to say about that year from a film perspective, and in the coming months I’m sure those of us at Big Hollywood who had our minds permanently warped by ectoplasmic entities, unstoppable crane kicks, phased-plasma rifles in the forty-watt range, and the dreaded Black Sleep of Kali Ma will be saying it. I’d like to kick things off, however, with a short shout-out to a picture that didn’t rake in blockbuster profits, or fuel a billion-dollar toy industry, or get its characters immortalized on collectible Burger King cups, or spawn an assembly line of sequels and prequels. No, this film penetrated the cultural zeitgeist through an unassuming former editor of National Lampoon, directing his first movie on a shoestring budget, from a script filled with deathless lines like:

“Whatsa happenin’, hot stuff?”

“By night’s end, I predict: me and her will interface.”

“Chronologically, you’re sixteen today. Physically? You’re still fifteen.”

“What the hell are you bitchin’ about? I’ve gotta sleep underneath some Chinaman named after a duck’s dork.”

“I can’t believe my grandmother actually felt me up!”

“I can’t believe I gave my panties to a geek.”

“Sophomore, dude, sophomore! Fully aged sophomore meat.”

“Relax, would you? We have seventy dollars and a pair of girls’ underpants. We’re safe as kittens.”

“No more yankie my wankie! The Donger need food.”

“This information cannot leave this room — it would devastate my reputation as a dude.”

“C’mon, I don’t want to see it!”

“Fresh breath is the priority of my life.”

“I’m kinda like the leader, you know? Kinda like the King of the Dipshits.”

If you got through that list without some serious laughing accompanied by a tinge of bittersweet nostalgia, then in all likelihood you were a criminally sheltered child who was locked in a closet somewhere the day a small movie called Sixteen Candles (1984) debuted in theaters twenty-five years ago. The man who etched “They f***ing forgot my birthday!” into the permanent memory banks of a whole generation of teens was John Hughes, who had cut his comedy teeth writing thousands of jokes on spec, sending them to comedy club veterans like Rodney Dangerfield and Joan Rivers and getting the princely sum of $7 whenever they condescended to buy one. He later weaseled his way onto the staff of Harvard’s National Lampoon, which left him well positioned when Hollywood eventually began looting that talent pool. His scripts for two successful pictures, National Lampoon’s Vacation and Mr. Mom (both 1983) netted him his first chance to direct.

Using a motley assortment of green unknowns, Hughes proceeded to invent an attractive new subgenre, the “teen comedy-drama,” defined by its clever whipsaws between silliness and seriousness until the audience is hard-pressed to decide whether they are supposed to be laughing or crying. And if that sounds like the perfect description of a typical teenager’s emotions, then you’re getting close to figuring out what made Hughes’ films so successful. “I’m not interested in psychotics,” he once said in a New York Times interview, “I’m interested in the person you don’t expect to have a story. I like Mr. Everyman.” In Sixteen Candles, we get not only an Everyman in the form of The Geek (Anthony Michael Hall, who out-auditioned a young Jim Carrey to land the role), but also an Everywoman in Sam, played by Molly Ringwald with the sort of effortless, winning, subdued charisma that would soon become a Hughes trademark. The kids in his films just plain acted better than the ones in other pictures, and it’s hard not to chalk that up to the instincts and human insight of Hughes, a guy who avoided the pitfalls of the Hollyweird lifestyle and stays safely secluded in the Midwest with his wife and kids, living a comparatively normal life.

The film is in many ways the closest thing that my generation has to an American Graffiti (1973). Spandau Ballet’s “True,” playing at the school dance in Candles, has since become a perennial staple on wedding and prom playlists. Little details like the Heather Thomas bikini poster seen briefly on a bedroom door will bring back memories for any man of a certain age. And like Graffiti, Sixteen Candles jump-started the careers of a number of young actors, among the most prominent the brother-sister tandem of John and Joan Cusack. It was hardly a big hit (it ended up only the 44th top-grossing film of 1984), but the budget had been small, and its relative profitability allowed Hughes to continue directing. The films that followed, and that with Sixteen Candles constitute Hughes’ entire output as a director, were The Breakfast Club (1985), Weird Science (1985), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987), She’s Having a Baby (1988), Uncle Buck (1989), and Curly Sue (1991). That last stumbled at the box office in a way that none of the previous ones ever did, after which Hughes abandoned directing and stuck to producing and writing. His notable producing successes include Pretty in Pink (1986) and Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), and by far the most profitable movie of his career in any capacity was the enormously popular Home Alone (1990). By all accounts that film and its sequels left Hughes the Writer and Producer at the very peak of his fame, power, and influence.

And then, without explanation, John Hughes retreated into an inexplicable, baffling virtual retirement, where he remains to this day. No one knows exactly what sent him into seclusion. Perhaps, like so many artists, he had burned himself out with his decade of non-stop production (over twenty scripts flowed from his imagination during those years, not counting all of the directing and producing he was doing). Maybe the death of his close friend John Candy in 1994 sent him into an emotional/artistic tailspin from which he never truly recovered. Maybe age robbed him of the connection he used to feel to teens and their particular fears, hopes, and dreams. Or maybe he sensed that the world had changed, and that films like Sixteen Candles (which was PG, with the barest smattering of obligatory nudity and swearing) were becoming relics in the face of far seamier fare like the American Pie series (1999-present) and non-stop raunch-fests like Superbad (2007).

That last film is as good a benchmark as any to use. Its producer, Judd Apatow, is widely seen in Hollywood circles as the heir to the John Hughes teen mantle. It would be more accurate to say that a movie like Superbad is to Hughes what a wannabe snuff-film like Hostel (2005) is to classic, elegant horror like The Exorcist (1973) or The Shining (1980). Hughes could certainly be fantastically juvenile when looking for that all-important next laugh (Sixteen Candles, in its blasé treatment of Asians and the disabled, is in many ways a time capsule of political incorrectness), but nothing he ever foisted on audiences comes close to the wall-to-wall, one-note crassness and vulgarity of a film like Superbad. The problem with taking the lazy way out — using mere shock value to elicit Pavlovian, knee-jerk laughter — is that next time you always need something just a little more outrageous or cruel or perverse or shocking, until eventually you’ve hit bottom with nowhere else to go. To the hardcore, open-minded filmgoer, the affront isn’t so much moral as artistic — it’s bad storytelling, bad comedy, bad filmmaking. Super-bad, you might say. And the few times that Superbad tries to be clever (see the incongruous jokes the otherwise brain-dead youngsters are able to make about such non-teenybopper cultural touchstones as Orson Welles and Waylon Jennings) it only succeeds in sounding spectacularly phony, just a Hollywood comedy writer’s uninformed view of how teens talk and how much pop culture history they would reasonably know.

I get the feeling that when John Hughes wrote his movies, he had in mind the truth that all teen films eventually become cobwebbed and dated relics of a bygone age. The cool becomes cheese and the style old-fashioned. In the real world, both the stars and the target audience get old and balding and baggy-eyed and wrinkled and gray. When that happens, all that’s left of an old movie is what is universal and timeless. The question becomes: did it truly hit the zeitgeist of a generation, or did it just fake it?

By that criterion, I’m guessing that the Apatow and American Pie films are destined to someday be filed on a dusty back shelf along with mostly forgotten movies like The Last American Virgin (1982) and Private School (1983). Along with the cream of Hughes’ output, the modern teen comedies that I think have the best chance of surviving include House Party (1990), Swingers (1996) and Napoleon Dynamite (2004), all films that earn their laughs with far more than scatology and Tourette syndrome. In any case, no matter how it all shakes out, Sixteen Candles has assured itself a place at the head of the class, by blazing the way toward a more meaningful style of teen comedy that takes the emotions of kids seriously even in those spots when it doesn’t take itself seriously at all.

“I can’t believe this — they f***ing forgot my birthday!”

Well, we here at Big Hollywood didn’t. Happy Birthday, hot stuff. Chronologically you’re twenty-five now, but at the sunswept drive-ins of our imagination you’ll always be sweet sixteen.

The unveiling of OCO capped-off a terror euphemism trifecta for the administration.  Previously, the Justice Department scrapped the ghastly “enemy combatant” to describe war prisoners in favor of the much more uplifting, “detainee.”  Additionally, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano─who may be the only member of the administration more intellectually troubled than Tim Geitner─rebranded terrorism as “man-caused disaster.” (To review:  mail carrier; police officer; business person; but man-caused disaster… maybe the errant sexism has something to do with Ms. Napolitano’s romantic leanings.)  

Ever sensitive to the plight of our illegally invading friends from the south, Ms. Napolitano also refuses to use the term “illegal immigrant.” In an administration where the Secretary of Treasury is a tax cheat, it’s only fitting that the Security of Homeland Security does not wish to tarnish the image of people who illegally raid our country and pillage our resources.

Words are very important to B. Hussein Obama─they don’t describe the narrative, they structure it.  In college, he transformed himself from Barry—a hackneyed disgrace of a name befitting lounge singers and kid actors—to Barack, instantly making him exotic and interesting (a Barry snorting coke is a hapless junkie, but a Barack snorting coke is a conflicted soul seeking to open his mind, especially if he’s wearing a kente kufi hat while snorting).  During the campaign, two little, but very important, bumper-sticker and t-shirt friendly words helped solidify his candidacy.  Thanks to Hope and Change, Barry didn’t have to leak anyone’s kinky, sealed divorce papers to the media to get elected this time.

When more than one word has to be produced, Barry defers to his teleprompter to ensure rigid semantic integrity and to minimize his brain’s default proclivity of generating “uhhhhhs” and “ummmms.” In a recent speech before a requisitely awed group of business leaders, the teleprompter displayed the following gem, which The Father of the $1.2 trillion stimulus package voiced with contemplative gravitas:  “I don’t like the idea of spending more government money, nor am I interested in expanding government’s role.” The statement wasn’t followed by a “NOT!” or a “PSYCH!” or even a “FACE!” Just more contemplative gravitas.

In Barry’s bizzaro world, reality in and of itself doesn’t matter.  Words make the reality. Words matter. Teleprompters matter.  The biggest spending bill in American history never happened if Barry calls it a “stimulus.” But if it did happen, Barry never agreed to the bonuses.  But if he did agree to the bonuses, he did so unknowingly.

In the first half of the 20th century, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf cobbled together a theory of linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity which would eventually become the unwitting foundation of the PC movement.  In a nutshell, Sapir-Whorf believed that language determines thought, not vice versa.  So call a prison a “correctional facility,” and the inmates should be so overcome by the warm fuzzies that they wouldn’t rape each other as much as when they thought they were stuck in a mere “prison.” Likewise, call welfare expansion a “tax cut” and more people will vote for you.  I doubt Barry read much Sapir/Whorf, but many of the same ideas are discussed in different terms by his favorite community organizer, Saul Alinsky, and his favorite unicorn wrangler, Karl Marx.

Marx believed words may be used to confuse and control the dolts, rubes and twits who constitute the governed.  An effective leader could introduce new words─or alternative definitions and combinations of old words─into the lexicon, and thereby induce the unlearning of old belief systems and the learning of new ones. Change the culture through words─one of the planks of the Cultural Marxist platform.  As Fred Barnes points out, BHO has already redefined “fleeting”: the quarter century of unprecedented economic growth which began in the first term of the Reagan presidency was “fleeting prosperity” according to our noble leader. “The Reagan Recovery is urban legend, my children, now don your purple Nikes and listen unto me…”

Moreover, the War on Terror was that dummy Bush.  General Secretary of the Central Committee President Obama doesn’t deal with wars or terror, he deals with contingencies and operations.  You say, “potato,” I say, “potato.” You say, “that sleeveless dress really shows off Michelle’s toned arms,” I say, “pre-menopausal hot flash relief.” You say, “sensitive language soothes the people,” I say, “social engineering through verbal eugenics.”

To distance the current administration from the words of the former administration is predictable, to do so from the words of the Founding Fathers is creepy.  Whether conscious or not, the end game of the current administration is to redefine the US Constitution in its own socialist, state-must-save-the-proles image. Now hopechange means abhorrent stimulus and bailout packages.  Soon it may mean government-run health care or restrictions on how much gas and electricity citizens can use.  The more Barry’s Obonics seep out of the teleprompter and into pop culture, the easier the administration’s task to remake America becomes.

Maybe Barry was stoned the day the English teacher pointed out that George Orwell was a warning, not a blueprint.