Thus exclaimed English academic Hugo Dyson as his friend J.R.R. Tolkien prepared to read aloud the latest chapter in his then-unpublished “heroic romance” to a small audience of intimates in the pleasantly smoke-filled, gin-scented rooms of C. S. Lewis. Years earlier, during a fateful night of impassioned debate, it was Dyson and Tolkien who together convinced Lewis to forsake unbelief and embrace Christianity, doing such a good job of it that the future author of The Chronicles of Narnia would become the most influential Christian vindicator (I despise the word apologist) of the twentieth century.

Now Dyson was mocking the work of the man who would become the most influential purveyor of Christianized fiction of that same century, and many of Tolkien’s fellow Inklings were of the same mind. It was thus left to Lewis to spur the author of The Hobbit on to greater heights of imagination. “If they won’t write the kind of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves,” he once told Tolkien, and that’s just what they did. Each used the medium known (fondly to some, pejoratively to most) as “fairy stories” to achieve the tang and ring and chime — and through them the thoughts and feelings and beliefs — that they were seeking in literature.

In between his increasingly unpopular Inkling readings, Tolkien wrote during snatches of time carved out of days filled with exhausting academic duties, and frequently only after penning worried, often melancholy letters to his sons off to war. “I sometimes feel appalled,” he admitted in one 1944 missive, “at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment. . . If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour, shrouded from the amazed visions of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil….” In another he lamented that, “A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity: old, old, dreary, endless repetitive unchanging incurable wickedness. All towns, all villages, all habitations of men — sinks! . . . We do so little that is positive good, even if we negatively avoid what is actively evil. It must be terrible to be a priest!”

And yet, he also possessed shadowed hope: “At the same time one knows that there is always good: much more hidden, much less clearly discerned, seldom breaking out into recognizable, visible beauties of word or deed or face — not even when in fact sanctity, far greater than the visible advertised wickedness, is really there.”

Finding that quiet sanctity amidst clangorous wickedness and despair would become the defining characteristic of The Lord of the Rings.

To his youngest boy, Christopher (b. 1924, and then stationed in South Africa with the Royal Air Force), he regularly sent new chapters of his burgeoning magnum opus, along with news that, when he read each aloud to C. S. Lewis, the author of Mere Christianity and so many other kindly, bracing works would sometimes be moved to tears. “[Lewis] was for long my only audience,” Tolkien wrote later with deep appreciation. “Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.”

**********

All about the hills the hosts of Mordor raged. The Captains of the West were foundering in a gathering sea. The sun gleamed red, and under the wings of the Nazgûl the shadows of death fell dark upon the earth. Aragorn stood beneath his banner, silent and stern, as one lost in thought of things long past or far away; but his eyes gleamed like stars that shine the brighter as the night deepens. Upon the hill-top stood Gandalf, and he was white and cold and no shadow fell on him. The onslaught of Mordor broke like a wave on the beleaguered hills, voices roaring like a tide amid the wreck and crash of arms.

**********

“I have not been nourished by English Literature,” Tolkien once wrote, “. . . for the simple reason that I have never found much there in which to rest my heart (or heart and head together). I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer.”

While browsing through a dusty old college library as a teen, young “Ronald” Tolkien discovered a veritable Ring of Power in the form of a book on Finnish grammar. Learning that language, he would later marvel, was “like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before.” Soon his study of other languages gave him a “sensibility to linguistic pattern which affects me emotionally like colour or music,” and he began penning stories and poems in a genuine, rigorously applied archaic mode, deeming our more garish modern idiom as possessing “an insincerity of thought, a disunion of word and meaning” whenever it was applied to tales of high romance. In Tolkien’s view, you couldn’t drink vintage spirits out of a soda pop can without it fatally marring the taste and experience.

At the same time, many old myths were missing something important. “I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages Irish and Welsh),” he once explained by way of example, “and feel for them a certain distaste: largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright colour, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact ‘mad’. . . but I don’t believe I am.”

He thus “set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own.”

By the time the 1930s gave way to the 40s and then the 50s, Tolkien began to quietly despair at ever accomplishing his quest. “I have produced a monster,” he wrote to one correspondent, “an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody).” In 1953, while checking galley-proofs, he admitted that it “seems, I must confess, in print very long-winded in parts.” Over fifteen years after beginning his “arrogant” task, he was left to grimly muse that:

Hardly a word in its 600,000 or more has been unconsidered. And the placing, size, style, and contribution to the whole of all its features, incidents, and chapters has been laboriously pondered. I do not say this in recommendation. It is, I feel, only too likely that I am deluded, lost in a web of vain imaginings of not much value to others — in spite of the fact that a few readers have found it good, on the whole.

The first print run of The Fellowship of the Ring was limited to 4,500 copies. “I am dreading the publication,” he wrote, “for it will be impossible not to mind what is said. I have exposed my heart to be shot at.” Many in the entrenched Ivory Towers of academia and literary criticism did just that, offering up scathing critiques that — all too typical of such people — frequently got whole portions of the book (characters, events, dialogue) embarrassingly wrong. In response Tolkien could only sigh, having told his publisher, “It is written in my life-blood, such as that is, thick or thin; and I can no other.”

But one man above all others was determined to (I use a phrase coined by Robert E. Howard) “not be backward when the spears are splintering.” C. S. Lewis took up his pen like a Crusader and, in a review titled “The Gods Return to Earth,” shouted out to the world a written manifestation of the same tears he had shed while first hearing the story read in manuscript:

[The Fellowship of the Ring] is like lightning from a clear sky. . . To say that in it heroic romance, gorgeous, eloquent, and unashamed, has suddenly returned at a period almost pathological in its anti-romanticism, is inadequate. . . Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron; here is a book that will break your heart. . . .

It is sane and vigilant invention, revealing at point after point the integration of the author’s mind. . . Anguish is, for me, almost the prevailing note. But not, as in the literature most typical of our age, the anguish of abnormal or contorted souls; rather that anguish of those who were happy before a certain darkness came up and will be happy if they live to see it gone. . . . But with the anguish comes also a strange exaltation. . . when we have finished, we return to our own life not relaxed but fortified….

Even now I have left out almost everything — the silvan leafiness, the passions, the high virtues, the remote horizons. Even if I had space I could hardly convey them. And after all the most obvious appeal of the book is perhaps also its deepest: “there was sorrow then too, and gathering dark, but great valour, and great deeds that were not wholly vain.” Not wholly vain — it is the cool middle point between illusion and disillusionment.

Over the ensuing decades Tolkien’s “long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance” sold millions of copies, and immeasurably enriched the lives of millions of souls, many of whom felt lost and alone in a mad world seemingly bereft of the sanity and the sanctity that his tale embodied. By the time the indispensable scholar and philologist Tom Shippey published his book J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2001, with a title meant to be taken as a comment on Tolkien’s thematic essence as much as his popularity) his remaining detractors resembled nothing so much as the routed forces of Mordor, running “hither and thither mindless. . . wailing back to hide in holes and dark lightless places far from hope.”

And from the cimmerian gloom of those dark, lightless places, oh how they snarl! “The Lord of the Rings is racist,” wrote John Yatt in the Guardian in 2002:

It is soaked in the logic that race determines behaviour. . . the races that Tolkien has put on the side of evil are then given a rag-bag of non-white characteristics that could have been copied straight from a BNP [British National Party] leaflet. Dark, slant-eyed, swarthy, broad-faced — it’s amazing he doesn’t go the whole hog and give them a natural sense of rhythm. . . .

[LG -- actually, it was the 1980 Bakshi cartoon that did that: "Where there's a whip!" (ssss...crack!) "There's a way!"]

Begun in the 1930s, published in the 1950s, it’s shot through with the preoccupations and prejudices of its time. This is no clash of noble adversaries like the Iliad, no story of our common humanity like the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s a fake, a forgery, a dodgy copy. Strip away the archaic turns of phrase and you find a set of basic assumptions that are frankly unacceptable in 21st-century Britain.

What gall. The Guardian is a paper, after all, that later praised fantasy author George RR Martin for his unflinchingly graphic portrayal of a world in which “the old are tortured and humiliated, women are raped, suffering is everywhere,” for his “unsettling passages of bracingly weird sex” and for his myriad scenes of “inventively unpleasant killing.” It’s a paper that later recommended Joe Abercrombie’s first book for its “delightfully twisted and evil” torturer “who can shorten a man’s arm from fingers to elbow in neat little slices,” and for its young hero possessing “no redeeming qualities whatsoever.” Hey, if that’s all to your taste, fair enough.

But does anyone really expect the rest of us to take that same paper seriously when it draws a courageous line in the sand against a mild-mannered Christian professor and his exquisitely rendered masterpiece? To meekly agree that Tolkien sitting on the shelf next to the books of Mssrs. Martin and Abercrombie is “frankly unacceptable” in this evolved new century of tolerance and diversity, lest we be branded racists and throwbacks ourselves? Or to renounce The Lord of the Rings in favor of books overflowing like a backed-up commode with torture-porn, sadism, and nihilism? (Apparently so: the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia has a meaty entry dedicated to RACISM, CHARGES OF.)

After a lecture, Shippey (whose wonderful Author of the Century book was itself trashed in the Guardian as “a belligerently argued piece of fan-magazine polemic”) was once asked what motivated people to spit such abject nonsense onto Tolkien’s self-professed “life-blood.” A man of eloquence and erudition, he responded with exactly the tone, and at exactly the length, that such diatribes deserve.

“They’re bastards!” he said cheerfully.

Or perhaps we should translate that into words Tolkien would have ruefully recognized, and that adequately express what people with intellectual standards think whenever they open a typical newspaper these days:

“Oh f***, not another liberal critic!”

To be continued. . . .

It also brings to mind an excellent documentary I saw a few years back called Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (2008 — the asterisk leads to a footnote: “*The Side Effects of Being American”). You can check out the spectacularly funny, rousing, and nostalgic first ten minutes (and then the whole movie, if so inclined) at YouTube:

Stallone, Schwarzenegger, the Hulkster — all are members of a category of celebrity I described in a previous BH article as “silly video-game tough guys.” The walls of countless Reagan-era boys, myself among them, were papered over with posters and photos of these oversized he-men. Throughout our teen years we read their exercise books and magazine interviews, followed their advice, and strove to live up to their examples.

Examples that, as it turned out, were far too good to be true.

The director/narrator of Bigger, Stronger, Faster*, Chris Bell, kindly but thoroughly strips his beloved childhood icons of their mythic qualities, reducing them to a series of ordinary men who used tricks, illusion, and lots and lots of steroids to become larger than life to millions of youngsters. “It is kind of sad in a way,” Bell said in a Sundance interview at the time his movie was released, “how all of our heroes in America are now falling.”

Add to that his documentary’s many vignettes of confused, aging fans still following their muscle-bound pied pipers after so long. Their stories are heartbreaking, because many of us harbored similar fantasies of stardom and badassery once upon a time, and on some deep level there remains a whole lot of our own hopes and dreams wrapped up in those forlorn guys still waiting for their pro wrestling or action star trains to roll in. It’s a chilling realization that prompts me to mutter, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

Largely left out of the analysis, though, is the more sensible side of the coin. The vast majority of boys who marinated themselves in the action films of the 1980s dreamed of being mighty and indomitable like Sly and Arnold, yes, but unlike the outliers of Bigger, Stronger, Faster*, they left those fantasies behind as they grew older and mortality set in. Nevertheless — and this is the important part — they retain to this day some healthy inner fire of masculinity from those pictures that’s served them well in their adult lives.

How many men serving with distinction and bravery in our armed forces can trace the genesis of their decision to enlist to Rambo or Commando? How many fathers who’ve fought off intruders in their homes can credit their successful defense of their families to martial arts and weapons training undertaken when they were teens in thrall to “silly” cinematic heroes? How many guys who’ve rescued people trapped in floods or fires or raging rivers did so by calling on notions of courage hammered into their heads over two decades ago, and using muscles once built by youthful sessions of pumping iron in rooms decorated by large posters featuring stern action heroes gazing down on their efforts like dark demi-gods?

Yes, movies like The Expendables can be silly. But then, on that narrow basis of criticism, so are classic action extravaganzas like The Iliad, rife as they are with ultra-bloody scenes featuring warriors cutting down ten or twenty enemies at a clip. So are Westerns with their ritualized duels and codes of honor and amazing pistoleering, all of it at odds with much of real history. Whenever you veer too far towards the realm of the impossible, it’s going to strike many as silly.

But it’s thoughtless misandry to dismiss these myths as unimportant or, even worse, as a form of violent pornography that young boys need protection from. The inherently brutal nature of males isn’t a design flaw but a feature, and cultures need fierce heroes to guide boys toward ideals of masculine and martial perfection. Wiser minds adhere to the dictum expressed so memorably in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” We mere mortals emulate these legends imperfectly, but our country and families are the better for our having tucked away some of those savage lessons to be called upon when needed.

The Expendables, like the 1980s action movies that came before it, looks set to once again “print the legend” in all of its wild implausibility and silly, bloodthirsty grandeur. I’m old enough now to know it’s a legend, but I’ll be eager to see the movie anyway, as ready as always to engage in that age-old ritual of using the fantasy world of the impossible to fortify and strengthen and reassure the real world of the possible.

And if you think that’s crazy talk, or reading way too much into a blissfully mindless popcorn movie, then I feel sorry for you, I really do. How pathetic to see otherwise decent and intelligent people lost in a candy-colored fantasy world more ridiculous than the most preposterous action film, too unreflective to realize that their smug stance of non-violence is a luxury made possible only by the sacrifices of strong men of heroic spirit who stand ready to do life’s bloody work for them.

David Bordwell, writing in Planet Hong Kong, describes how

Many of Woo’s visual tics, like freeze-frames and slow-motion walks and glances, were already passé in the West, but the “heroes” cycle allowed him to integrate them with MTV dissolving musical segues, an endlessly arcing camera, wistful silhouettes against saturated landscapes, and glamorous, anguished players. The result was a glossy synthesis of Italian Westerns, swordplay, film noir, and romantic melodrama new to both Hong Kong and the West.

“We are all learning from and imitating each other,” is Woo’s own way of explaining it. “Hong Kong in the old days got a lot of influence from American movies, especially technique. We got a lot of inspiration from the West. We used Western techniques to tell a Chinese story. We just combined elements to create a new cinematic language. Now it’s the West that is borrowing back. It comes full circle. We are all in the same film family. It is a good thing, I think.”

Yet making a movie like Hard Boiled takes more than coming up with new ways to shoot a gun or blow up a building — it’s an intricate fusion of style, technique, and emotion, all geared towards expressing a thematic worldview. “Woo does not protract his films’ shootouts for fun,” says Michael Bliss in his book about Woo’s spiritualism, Between the Bullets. “The excess in such scenes represents the director’s attempt to bring the action up to a level of intensity that would suggest cataclysm on a grand, operatic scale. These cataclysms are also meant to represent a concretization of the powerful forces in the characters that are unleashed by betrayal, frustration, anger, and guilt. Woo’s violent scenes are his way of graphically depicting the perennial clash between good and evil, a conflict that must always strike sparks.”

When struggling to find words to describe the kind of movie Hard Boiled is, I’m tempted to borrow Simone Weil’s famous description of The Iliad: “The Poem of Force.” Like that ever-famous “conflict that must always strike sparks,” Woo’s characters engage in outsized heroics reminiscent of an Argive champion plunging into battle like (in the words of the late, great Iliad translator Robert Fagles) “a lion leaping into the fold. . . piling corpse on corpse. . . cutting the legs from under squads of good brave men.” When we see Chow Yun-fat tearing through legions of gangsters in Hard Boiled, nary a scratch on him as he slices through their ranks like a hot knife through butter, is it any less fantastic than Diomedes or Achilles doing the same thing in a three-thousand-year-old tale? Woo is using cinema not just to entertain or thrill, but to mythologize.

Other critics have noticed this in Woo’s work, as when Kenneth Hall describes Hard Boiled’s memorable one-eyed villain Mad Dog as “rather like Cerberus in Hades” as he haunts the bowels of the hospital that features so prominently at the end of the film. Woo puts the virtues and vices espoused by the ancients — their rages, underworlds, betrayals, and triumphs  – in modern guises. I see little essential difference between the two, and those people who feel Woo’s hyper-violence and enormous body counts are far too over-the-top have perhaps forgotten who we really are under the sheen of modern civilization. What looks impossible in reality is all-too-realistic in spirit, and the impossible can stimulate and inspire the world of the real, as the Greeks well knew.

Woo is actually given more credit for this in the East than in America, much as we like him on this side of the pond. By Hong Kong standards Woo’s action (if not his violence) isn’t very outrageous — instead, he is seen as an expert at using action to emphasize emotion. “For Woo,” writes Michael Bliss, “external action is almost always interior action, in the sense that it expresses states of mind and emotion.” Unlike so many action films, where the various set-pieces all bleed and blend together into one long mash-up of noise and thunder, Woo’s cataclysms are striking in their individuality, with each leading up to a profound emotional climax that drives the story. When you think Hard Boiled, you think Teahouse. Warehouse. Hospital. Each dazzlingly complex set-piece is brought to life, and then to destruction, with the precision of a watchmaker, and with crescendos of feeling that mimic the powers of a Stokowski or an Ormandy.

The great shots of Hard Boiled rival the best of any action movie ever made: Tequila’s face, covered in flower, blasted red as he shoots his enemy in a rage; his balletic entry into the warehouse, swinging from a wire with gun blazing; his double-gun standoff with Tony the undercover cop, each man one false move away from death; Tequila preparing to hit a bullet with a bullet to escape the basement of a hospital as filled with exotic villainy as any Bond villain’s sanctum; Tequila evading a veritable symphony of explosions as he saves a lone baby from the hospital. Great, great stuff, and all crammed into a single relentlessly entertaining movie.

“Action is the major part of a Hong Kong film,” Woo says. “The production spends more time and money on that than anything, so we could shoot or re-shoot or get more money and time to make the action right. In America, there’s never enough time to do a perfect action scene.” Giving Chow Yun-fat’s character so much to do and making him look so good doing it is a big reason why, when the British film magazine Empire commissioned a poll to determine “The 100 Greatest Movie Characters” of all time, Chow’s portrayal of Tequila in Hard Boiled came in at a respectable #33.

The famous climactic hospital scene from Hard Boiled, which lasts a full forty-five minutes, took over a month to shoot all by itself. It contains the movie’s single most famous shot, of a kind only achieved a handful of times of celluloid before by directors with names like Welles and Scorsese. It’s an expertly choreographed, nearly three-minute long handheld journey through the hospital, following Tequila and Tony as they maneuver through the maze-like hallways, clearing them of gangsters with workmanlike action-movie determination, and every bullet and explosion and action beat executed by the dozens of participants without any cutting away to different angles.

“For that shot,” Woo says, “we took two days to build the set, and then we rehearsed several hundred times. Then we took two more days to try and shoot the shot. But always we failed. The timing is wrong, or the special effect doesn’t go that well. I almost give up, but the crew and the stunt group and the actor, they all want to try it again. At last we got it done.” Well, almost done — in the end, Woo had to link two disparate takes together with a quick, almost imperceptible dissolve. But it remains one of the all-time great long takes in cinema history, and twenty years later it still leaves directors mumbling, “How did he do that?”

Of course, with Woo planning to make the jump to America, that reaction was exactly what he wanted to hear from Hollywood. He knew that Hard Boiled was the coda to his Hong Kong career, so he crafted it into a calling card that he could take to California. Perhaps that’s why he gave the story a happy ending of a sort. As he tells the story:

In my version of Hard Boiled, Tony Leung [who played the undercover cop] was dead. He sacrificed himself. It was a dark message and he was a dark character. But after I shot the ending, the crew and the actors were not happy. They were insisting that I keep him alive. Some of my assistants even cried. I could understand why. All that had happened in Beijing [during the Tienanmen Square protests] gave the people in Hong Kong a lot of sadness. It made them feel like the good person should stay alive. So we added another ending.

In this newly conceived finish, the shot of Tony lying on the pavement, seemingly mortally wounded, gives way to an image of him sailing his boat, living the dream he had earlier stated to Tequila. Some have claimed that this is merely Tony in heaven, but the bandage on his head seals the deal. “Tony lives,” Woo says, “and it gives people hope. Also, it was good for Chow Yun-fat’s character, it was a great metaphor that he never lost his friend. It really touched my heart that people felt so strongly about this Tony’s character.”

When Tony’s ghostly image sails away at the end of Hard Boiled, he may as well be John Woo sailing away from Hong Kong, that exciting city filled with the “perennial conflict” of light and darkness, his sails tacked straight for Hollywood. It’s sad that the Hong Kong industry crested and then largely withered after the 1997 takeover of the city by the mainland Communists. It’s always bittersweet to see a Golden Age end. But for the Hong Kong career of John Woo, Hard Boiled was one hell of a swan song. “Strong visuals, original action, sympathetic heroes and villains, and a story which forces these elements to the hilt combine to create emotionally powerful situations. This is what I look for and create. A film should bring out your emotions, whether it’s happiness or pain. I hope my movies will fill people’s lives and, through their expanded feelings, teach them love and honor.”

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our look at Hard Boiled by meditating on John Woo’s Christianized notions of heroism, villainy, and moral codes in a war-torn, blood-soaked world.

Previous posts in the series “John Woo, Chow Yun-fat, and Hard Boiled”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

“The New Cult Canon: Hard Boiled” by Scott Tobias. A nice look back at the film and how it holds up in the face of today’s CGI onslaught.

“A Sequel to John Woo’s Hard Boiled is in Development” by Peter Sciretta. This little item, published in March 2009, discusses the self-explanatory news given in the article’s title. And check out this follow-up with more information.

“The Films of John Woo and the Art of Heroic Bloodshed” by Anthony Leong. A long web article covering all of Woo’s major films through Face/Off. Lots of interesting ideas and thoughts on each movie.

“Hard Boiled Memories: Visiting the set of a John Woo classic” by Bey Logan. The author describes his visit to the set of Hard Boiled in 1992 and his conversations with the film’s director and stars.

In our last installment, we read one critic from the 1920s refer to silent films as the “uncertain art of the unspoken drama.” What made it so uncertain was its newness. People then had no way of knowing how the technology was going to play out. Were “flickers” a fad, or something more? Would they be superseded by some newer, better, impossible-to-predict technology, making them as irrelevant as the horse and buggy had become by 1919? Or was this “uncertain art of the unspoken drama” fated to last for centuries, with names like Griffith and Gish remembered and admired in the year 3919 the same way ancient names like Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides still carried weight in 1919?

As it happened, silent films vanished in the face of synchronous sound only a decade after Broken Blossoms appeared. Black-and-white photography lasted a few more decades, but that, too, eventually gave way to color. The art of film continued, but the art of silent film was dead and largely forgotten.

And yet here we are, ninety years later, using this newest of game-changing technologies — the Internet — to spend over a month talking about one of these old movies. If you’ve followed along, you’ve learned much about the people that made it, the thoughts that fueled their artistic decisions, the innovative techniques that brought it to life on screen, and the rapturous reaction of American audiences everywhere to its fell beauty, bewitching exoticism, and achingly tragic love story.

Real art endures.

Consider, then, the following analysis, pulled from one of the thousands of books of modern academic criticism published at our universities each year (for the morbidly curious, this one is titled Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction, and was written by Gina Marchetti, a professor specializing in Asian cinema). Broken Blossoms, this scholarly tome informs us, is “a tale of sexual perversity” delineating not D. W. Griffith’s poetic soul but his “own well-documented penchant for young girls as objects of erotic desire.” The movie is not — as contemporary audiences once judged it — a tender, heartbreaking story of innocent love in a brutal world, but one of “rape, incest, sadism, masochism, pedophilia, necrophilia, fetishism, voyeurism, and prostitution as well as miscegenation.”

In short, this aged little film (one that had audiences openly weeping in their seats, and critics rhapsodizing about “Such art, so real one can think only of the classics, and of the masterly paintings remembered through the ages; so exquisite, so fragile, so beautifully and fragrantly poetic. . .”) is judged to be pornography. “Bible-Belt pornography,” to be exact:

Given the very thinly disguised sexual deviations depicted in the film, approaching Broken Blossoms as a pornographic text seems appropriate. Like pornography, Broken Blossoms uses spectacle to arouse the sexual interest of the spectator, while narrative structure permits, controls, and legitimizes this arousal by symbolically punishing the principals (and through them the viewer who identifies with them) for their erotic excesses. However, spectacle wins out, and the evocation of an atmosphere, an image, a feeling that stimulates the erotic involvement of the male viewer takes precedence over the moral imperatives of the plot.

Stimulates the erotic involvement of the male viewer? Actually, the truth is the exact opposite: Broken Blossoms was what we call in modern parlance a “chick flick.” It was mothers and wives and daughters who stood in line to see it again and again, driving its box office grosses into the stratosphere. Editor Robert Parrish, the same man who helped John Ford edit The Battle of Midway during World War II, remembers being dragged to Broken Blossoms by his mother as a child. As he tells it in his memoir Growing Up In Hollywood:

As we crossed Broad Street and turned into Talbotton Road, I could see the lights flashing BROKEN B OSSOMS on the Royal. The L was not functioning, and for the first five years after that I thought we had seen Broken Bossoms that afternoon. . . .

We took our seats, and as the lights went down, a man and a pipe organ came up out of the floor in front of the screen. He was banging away at the keys and kicking his feet and I thought his name was Wurlitzer because that’s what it said on the organ. . . .

Mr. Wurlitzer’s music rose to a crescendo as the coming attractions ended and Broken Blossoms started. My mother’s eyes began to fill as soon as Lillian Gish’s name appeared. . . her watery eyes were glued to the screen. Nothing sad had happened yet, but she knew what was coming up and she wasn’t going to be caught unprepared. . . .

By now, the famous emotional scene in the closet was on and my mother was really enjoying herself. The tears were flowing freely. . . I looked around. Most of the other people were women. They were all crying.

Over-educated and hyper-politicized academics the world over would have us believe that the reactions of these long dead women were the result of cultural brainwashing, accomplished through relentless oppression levied via racism, sexism, and any other -ism, -phobia, or -philia that can be dreamt up. Thousands of nigh-unreadable books make such arguments every year. The pages are formatted into near gibberish according to the dictates of the pompous, pretentious, and monolithically leftist Modern Language Association. The contents are absurdly footnoted against myriad other academic treatises in an endless, incestuous merry-go-round. And the whole works is funded by heaping piles of your tax dollars, funneled like mobster-loot into the lavish coffers of once-great universities. Students pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of being assigned such books, and they are relentlessly pressured into accepting their batty premises.

Thus it happens that, when presented with two people on a movie screen expressing honest love, our children are soberly informed that it is really (to pull again from the above-mentioned volume) “implicit sexual abuse,” a “rape fantasy,” and an expression of “white, patriarchal power.” Note the rhetorical sleights of hand. The critic can’t reasonably damn Broken Blossoms for bonafide sexual abuse, because none exists in the film — so she falls back on implicit. The critic can’t cry rape, because no rape occurs anywhere in the film — so she tries to claim that somewhere in the story lurks a rape fantasy. And, of course, what book of modern academic criticism would be complete without suggesting that Battling Burrows, the villain of the film, isn’t just an abusive ogre who happens to be both white and a father, he’s abusive because he’s both white and a father.

Putting ivory-tower ravings aside for the moment, let us ask the $64,000 question: what message did D. W. Griffith intend for his film, if any? I looked long and hard for a clue to this riddle, and finally found the answer in an old 1919 file clipping from a long-forgotten magazine interview. Which magazine, alas, remains a mystery, but the article’s title is “Just Marionettes,” and the byline credits one Louise Williams, who describes attending the New York premiere of the film. “Incense floated out from the stage,” she writes, “while the notes of a balalaika orchestra threaded a plaintive melody back and forth through the fabric that was being woven in the mind of the audience. Far back in a corner of one of the upper boxes sat D. W. Griffith, hat drawn down over his eyes, chin sunk deep in his overcoat collar, watching unobtrusively to see how New York would take Broken Blossoms, the result of his latest straying from the beaten paths of picture making, and the first picture of his repertoire series.”

Afterwards she cornered Griffith, and goes on to relate the following:

“We didn’t have any idea that this picture would take hold in the way it has,” Griffith remarked with the most unassuming frankness as we stood, discussing the picture after the showing was over. “It was originally intended to be just a regular picture, so far as presentation was concerned. But something impelled me — the story, in the first place. I believed in it. Personally, I think that Thomas Burke is about the only writer doing anything original nowadays, and his “Chink and the Child,” from which we made the picture, has a big message, which ought to do much toward internationalizing human sympathy. Of course, we broke all the rules when we did this story: it has a yellow man for a hero, instead of a white one; it’s a tragedy throughout; there are no quick, snappy bits; the story moves very slowly. But I believe that it shows convincingly that we’re wrong when we labor under the delusion that Americans are superior to those they call “foreigners.” No nation can do that — just as no nation can afford to think that it represents all the beauty and heroism and ideals in the world.”

OK, let’s recap:

Filmmakers and viewers of 1919: human sympathy, tragedy, anti-prejudice, beauty, poetry, heroism, ideals.

Modern critics and academics: rape, incest, sadism, masochism, pedophilia, necrophilia, fetishism, voyeurism, prostitution, miscegenation, and “white, patriarchal power.”

The next time you hear someone write with a straight face that, say, the horsewhip wielded so horrifically by Battling Burrows in Broken Blossoms is a phallic symbol just because actor Donald Crisp holds it “at penis height,” or that when his abused daughter drops to the floor and desperately wipes the dust off his shoes it represents not abject fear but fellatio, keep in mind that these theories say far more about the critic than the work being criticized. If you’ve read enough in the field, you don’t have to be any kind of prude to conclude that academia is home to some real sick puppies. There’s nothing too crazy for them to say, nothing too perverted (not just in a sexual sense, but also in a logical, rational one) to slather on any beloved book, film, song, painting or poem you care to name. These people are nothing less than cultural terrorists who will happily blow your entire culture sky-high just to watch it burn if you let them.

Good criticism is earthy, carrying with it the grit of the soil of a culture, and thus the tang of truth. It doesn’t rely on jargon, it doesn’t try to achieve a sheen of authenticity with footnotes and MLA format, and it is easily understandable by anyone with a passing interest in the subject at hand. You know you’ve encountered good criticism when it leaves you feeling expanded and healthy, afire both with a respect for art and with a pride for your culture. Worthwhile essays deepen and broaden their subjects in one’s mind — in a very real sense, they make the original work better. Forever after, the thoughts of the essayist will be there in your head, reminding you of how that particular work of art succeeded in putting you in touch with some untrammeled height of emotion or depth of virtue.

In the original theater program for Broken Blossoms there is a quote from Confucius, one that hints that D. W. Griffith understood all this as well as anybody: “I care little who makes a nation’s laws if I have the making of its ballads.” Conservatives would be wise to heed those ancient words of wisdom. Culture matters, and if we let the other side pervert and mock the great art of the past with impunity, then we’re not worth a damn, and we’ll all get the debased, degraded culture we deserve. The tears wept by our great-grandmothers during this silent ballad still echo down to us, if we care to listen, with a music powerful enough to drown out the deranged howling of all the cultural terrorists combined.

This concludes our look at D. W. Griffith’s sumptuous, “unspoken” love story, Broken Blossoms. Come back next week for an all-new film from an all-new year, only at Big Hollywood.

Previous posts in the series “D. W. Griffith, Lillian Gish, and Broken Blossoms”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

There are plenty of ways to view Broken Blossoms — free on YouTube, streamed via Netflix’s on-demand service, or even projected on-screen during the occasional museum or revival-house retrospective. If it’s a DVD you want, visit the Silent Era website and read their detailed analysis of all the various versions floating around out there. They recommend the edition released by Kino International (a company that advertises itself as providing “The Best in World Cinema”).

Whenever you watch a silent movie, you’ll want to worry about two items: the music and the film speed. My opinion is that, for modern viewers, these films go down a lot better when played absolutely silent, with the accompanying music track muted. Almost all of the music on silent movie DVDs is of the crappy keyboard variety, with repetitive themes that fail to live up to the often splendorous visuals. When watched in silence, the long-buried original pace of the film becomes discernible. Before you know it, shot-lengths that used to feel strange and edits that used to feel jarring begin to flow and make sense.

As for speed, our modern eyes can forgive things moving in slow-motion far easier than when they are sped-up in Benny Hill fashion. I therefore recommend that you adjust the speed setting on your DVD player so that the film plays just a bit slower than normal. That will give all movements a far more realistic edge, and I think you’ll find that the images become much more dramatic as a result.

Broken Blossoms is only around ninety minutes long, so I do hope you give it a whirl. There are many joys to be had in silent film, and culturally literate conservatives need to familiarize themselves with the best of them.

In Jerry Maguire, the key conflict was Jerry’s realization that he was putting a pretty facade on the moral deterioration within his profession, and was in fact complicit in it. It took an injured hockey player’s young son telling him to fuck off and a bad dream for Maguire to realize the true ugliness of who and what he had become, especially when measured against the high standards of his idol and mentor, agent Dicky Fox. Those troubling events created in Maguire a perfect storm of revulsion, introspection and a commitment to reaffirm the basic principles of his profession, which he laid out in his memo “The Things We Think and Do Not Say.” In truth, he had me at hello. Tom’s a hottie!

Like Jerry Maguire, I too started out in my chosen profession with the highest of ideals, which were sparked by a boundless love of the great stories, writers and filmmakers that inspired me. Like the best of them, I am totally dedicated to the pure craft of storytelling in film. It is all about The Story, which is bigger than all of us. That treasured craft has been handed down to us throughout human history, from Homer to Shakespeare to General Lew Wallace, Jules Verne and L. Frank Baum.

It is no surprise that epic stories like Wallace’s Ben Hur and Baum’s Wizard of Oz were made into films, or that so many of us treasure those movies like they were our own. Over time the greatest film stories become a part of us, interwoven into the very fabric of our culture and society, even our very personalities. Today in Hollywood that pure craft, though thriving on many fronts, is in deep trouble on many others. Like Jerry Maguire, I am witnessing the progressive corruption of the highest ideal of what my profession should be all about: the pure craft of storytelling in commercial film and TV.

More and more that pure craft is being poisoned by ideology, propaganda and malicious intent to insult or denigrate audience members whom certain creative film artists vehemently dislike. Tells, ideological plot points that are dead giveaways as to exactly where the story is going, ruin the viewing experience by instantly killing all tension and suspension of disbelief. How about taking viewers and audiences where they’ve never been before? It’s called high concept. Look into it.

Be it left or right, politics is artistic and box office poison. The low ratings and receipts bear me out. Bathrooms and kitchens are separate for a reason. It’s not very smart to shit where you eat. In the long and glorious history of storytelling on film in Hollywood, these developments are both modern anomalies and creative pestilences which offend me to my very core as a pure apolitical storyteller dedicated heart and soul to my craft. Who would dare tell Picasso he has to put Green in Guernica?

And the only health care I want to see pushed on film is Nurse Ratched, Dr. Giggles and Batman giving Dr. Crane a dose of his own medicine! Writers are artists, too. So, as a screenwriter, I’ve drafted my own memo. I may not always succeed, but I will do my damndest to uphold the oaths I now put forward to the American people, my fellow creative film artists, and to film fanatics everywhere on 3 Rock. Consider this my Jerry Maguire Mission Statement for Hollywood:

1. I promise to adhere to the finest principles of pure storytelling which have riveted men, women and children around campfires since the dawn of time. Those principles have endured across the years, decades, centuries and millennia for very good reasons. They will endure long after we and Hollywood as we know it are gone. That is our great responsibility to our past, present and future.

2. I promise to proffer the greatest respect to my audiences and fellow film artists regardless of ethnicity, religion, creed, gender, sexuality or belief system. We all want the same thing: great film.

3. I promise to respect the intelligence, dignity and sensibilities of my audiences and fellow creative film artists in my work, regardless of how stupid, misguided or insensitive they may be in real life.

4. I promise to bring the best of my talents and abilities to bear in telling the greatest and most compelling four-quadrant stories with the widest possible appeal for all. Box office tells the tale.

5. I promise I will not write any script or work on any project with the intent to advance any race, creed, religion, ethnicity, belief system or non-violent ideology over any others. Basic moral themes and conflicts are universal. We are all ultimately human on the most basic and visceral of levels.

6. I promise I will not allow my personal ideological or political beliefs to infect my work. The story is bigger than I am. Where the story leads I must follow, irrespective of all other personal political or ideological considerations. It should always be about telling the best possible stories on film.

7. I will not allow others to infect my work or corrupt my pure storytelling with politics, ideology or propaganda, or to maliciously target for insult or denigration certain segments of my audiences.

8. I promise that I will do my utmost to work in harmony with those creative film artists who may not share my most righteous and ultimately correct core personal, political or ideological beliefs, but share in the dream of creating great stories for the screen. The story is bigger than all of us.

9. I will never blackball, or attempt to have blackballed, a fellow creative film artist based on his or her own personal beliefs. Film artists’ creative talents and merits, not their belief systems, should determine their place in film and TV. This is America. Besides, didn’t we go through all this already?

10. I promise I will never blame any audiences if a story I write is produced and bombs at the box office. We creative film artists alone are responsible for our celluloid failures. I will take full personal responsibility and blame only the writers, actors, directors, producers or studios that screwed it up.

These guidelines are not the be-all end-all, but I do believe they are a good start. There are, of course, notable exceptions to some of these rules in the arena of  satirical and political comedy, nonfiction and documentaries. I’m talking straight-up creative TV and feature film production here.

To be clear, I am not trying to impose restrictions here. Just the opposite. I am trying to unbridle creativity to whole new levels. Ideology is a straitjacket which suffocates artistic creativity. It’s killing the craft of storytelling and turning off a whole lot of audiences needlessly. Worst of all, it’s costing millions of viewers and truckloads of money. How self-destructive can you be?

Whether this mission statement is taken to heart in Tinseltown in the spirit in which I have presented it is not up to me. I can only take the Hollywood horses to water. I can’t make ‘em drink it. But sometimes you just gotta hang your balls out there, because doing nothing is not an option. Just as it wasn’t for Jerry Maguire. Many thanks to Cameron, Tom, Renee and Cuba for showing the way. Hell of a story, Jerry Maguire. Made a ton of dough too! And no politics. Get the Big Picture now?

And who knows? If studios and creative film artists remove politics from the celluloid equation, renew emphasis on the pure craft of compelling human storytelling, and open the doors to all with the brains and talent to be there, it may just spur a new Golden Age of Hollywood. Can’t be bad. Hope Springs Eternal on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. I love Hollywood! Show me the money! End memo. Oh, and please don’t politicize SpongeBob and ruin it for me. I’d have to shoot you.

Homer wrote his two great works, The Iliad and The Odyssey, in dactylic hexameter.  Not for arbitrary reasons was it so organized – in pre-literate Greek society, epic poetry was sung, and the fixed metrical structure allowed for ease of memorization for the poet while simultaneously lending a pleasing musicality for the listener.  This relationship between music and words, a relationship both practical and aesthetic, continued to be enshrined in poetic structural forms for millennia.

Until Whitman.

That beautiful, bearded, destructive bastard knocked poetic form hard to the ground with his free, expansive, structureless verse.  The fact that it was also thrilling and brilliant and original had the unfortunate effect of encouraging lesser poets to write in a likewise fashion, and what Whitman had floored in the 19th century was thoroughly killed in the 20th.  Music and verse became decoupled; form and structure became increasingly ridiculed as backwards, stifling, archaic, not unlike bourgeoisie society itself.

Until…

In the 1980’s, a push-back began.  Poets began to re-examine the worth of the old structures; some began to come to their defense.  Some brave versifiers even began to revive them.  In 1987, a poet named Dana Gioia sounded the battle cry in Notes on the New Formalism;

…the real issues presented by American poetry in the Eighties will become clearer: the debasement of poetic language; the prolixity of the lyric; the bankruptcy of the confessional mode; the inability to establish a meaningful aesthetic for new poetic narrative and the denial of a musical texture in the contemporary poem. The revival of traditional forms will be seen then as only one response to this troubling situation.

The debate had begun, and was thenceforth waged in creative writing departments and in the pages of literary journals across North America.  In 1990 William Baer started The Formalist, a journal whose prime business was “keeping [poetic] tradition alive” (April Linder, 2000).  In 1995 Dana Gioia and Michael Piech founded an annual conference for writers and enthusiasts of formal poetry at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.  In 1996 the summa of formal poetry anthologies, Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, appeared.  In 2002 Dana Gioia was nominated by President Bush to assume the chairmanship of the National Endowment of the Arts, from which post he has vigorously promoted formal verse and its past and present practitioners.

(Gioia, one of the most active and high profile NEA chiefs in history, was nominated for a second four year term in 2006 – sadly, he stepped down in January 2009.)

So, what to make of this strange movement?  Is it a mere coincidence that its first stirrings occurred in the midst of Reagan’s Great Conservative Awakening?  Of course, literary conservatism does not in itself suggest political conservatism.  Or does it?

Some critics of New Formalism (or Neo-Formalism) see the movement not merely as a revival of harmless, if archaic, artistic structures.  These critics see a dark sociopolitical plot in the musings of the formal poets.  It is especially the claim of some Neo-Formalists that structured verse is more popular with the general reading public that arouses the ire of these (mostly academic) critics.  Ira Sadoff, for example, in an article titled “Neo-Formalism: A Dangerous Nostalgia,” writes of this menacing aesthetic:

….neo-formalists have a social as well as a linguistic agenda.  When they link pseudo-populism (the “general reader”) to regular meter, they disguise their nostalgia for moral and linguistic certainty, for a universal….and univocal way of conserving culture.

Sadoff acknowledges, correctly, I think, that the enemies of Neo-Formalism are “democratic relativism and subjectivity.”  In identifying formal poetry with objective reality, Sadoff finds in the practitioners of formal verse a deep philosophic conservatism of an Aristotelian bent.  “Reality exists, and I shall sing of it!” proclaims the formal poet.

From this philosophical follows a sociopolitical conservatism; a rejection of “democratic relativism” otherwise known as multiculturalism.  The Neo-Formalists therefore commit the thought crime of celebrating Western Civilization (as have I just now, by capitalizing ‘Western Civilization’).  According to Sadoff, “The Neo-formalists’ perhaps unconscious exaltation of the iamb veils their attempt to privilege prevailing white Anglo-Saxon rhythms and culture.”

But Sadoff is not just finding hints of sociopolitical conservatism in between the iambs of Neo-Formalist poetry; Sadoff gleefully points out that Robert Richman, the editor of the Neo-Formalist anthology The Direction of Poetry, “…writes for the politically and socially conservative New Criterion.” From this and other pieces of damning evidence, Sadoff proceeds to chastise Richman and the Neo-Formalists;

Although it may cause discomfort to neo-conservatives, we live in a world of many cultures, many voices; our poetries are enriched by otherness…

Thus, in one fell swoop, Sadoff equates Richman and Gioia with Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol.

Whatever the fairness or lack thereof of Sadoff’s critique of Neo-Formalism, I think it is fair to say that the New Formalism is a conservative movement artistically, with some practitioners being more or less conservative politically.

(These terms are, of course, highly elastic over time.  As Paul Cantor, Professor of English at University of Virginia and pop culture guru, explained to me, conservative authors today want to “conserve” what has come in the past, but this in itself is actually quite a radical notion in today’s literary climate.  The example of Walt Whitman serves to illustrate how elastic these terms can be – Whitman was a pro-war, and, as Cantor reminded me, pro free-market.  Today, this would make him conservative, but in his day, it must be pointed out, and in fact my friend Martin did point out, those were fairly radical positions.  Indeed, the Republican Party itself, which Whitman supported, was the “radical” party in that it sought to overthrow the old “conservative” slave-holding society.)

Sadly for Sadoff, the New Formalists have been successful in exactly the manner in which he most feared – they enjoy a wide popular audience.  As Dana Gioia writes in “The Poet in an Age of Prose,” anthologized in After New Formalism:  Poets On Form, Narrative, and Tradition; “…New Formalist poetry and criticism have democratized literary discourse.  The poetry is accessible to nonspecialist readers.” For Sadoff and every academic who imagines themselves to be the keeper of the poetic gates, it is truly a revolting development to think that there may be non MFA students reading and, God forbid, enjoying poetry.

[Ed. note: You can read a new chapter of this eight-part series every Saturday and Sunday morning. Previous chapters --Part one, two, and three.]

Matt Patterson is a columnist and commentator whose work has appeared in The Washington Examiner, The Baltimore Sun, and Pajamas Media.  He is the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story.”  His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.

Every once in awhile an action film comes along that revives. That proves that — no matter how strong the political correctness of an age, no matter how pale and pathetic its notions of masculinity, no matter how much Ritalin is force-fed to little boys, no matter how many toy guns, xylophone mallets, and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots get banned from stores and playgrounds — there are certain aspects of the male soul that are inviolate, and certain primal yearnings that are evergreen. Taken (2008) is one of those films, and its release last week on DVD and Blu-ray should be heralded by lovers of all things red-blooded, hairy-chested, and morally sound.

When this movie appeared in the doldrums of Hollywood’s off-season, it was expected to die a quick death in a marketplace filled with audiences either too sophisticated or too sophomoric to respond. Modern theatergoers, the theory goes, increasingly want their “heroes” to be either brooding Abercrombie & Fitch nymphets like Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, feckless stumblebums like Ben Stiller and Paul Blart: Mall Cop’s Kevin James, quirky class cut-ups like Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp, or silly video-game tough guys like Jason Statham, Vin Diesel, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. When an actor does put some honest testosterone in his performance — Daniel Craig in Munich (2005), Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino (2008) — it’s inevitably to make a much larger point about violence breeding only more violence, all of it equally reprehensible, a product of way too many pesky males wreaking havoc in primitive bursts of knuckle-dragging temper.

 We are led to believe that if only The View and Oprah could become required therapy for guys, if only there were enough copies of How to Take the Grrrr Out of Anger to go around, if only enough Neanderthals were herded into sensitivity/diversity/anger management/sexual harassment/conflict resolution training, then gee, what a wonderful world it would be. In recent years, only Sly Stallone’s lumbering but effective Rambo (2008) (tagline: “Heroes never die. . .they just reload”) has dared to flip a fully unapologetic middle finger at Hollywood’s human potential movement, offering up a wholesome, rejuvenating hero of implacable moral certitude bathed in the blood of his hated enemies.

Director Pierre Morel and writer/producer Luc Besson’s Taken follows in that film’s laudable footsteps, but significantly ups the ante by adding intelligent layers of real-world characterization to its steel-tipped judgments. The overarching villain in Taken is not a cat-stroking, monocled megalomaniac, nor a motley army of interchangeable third-world guerrillas, but an attitude. A NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) policy practiced by an entire assembly-line of well-imagined kidnappers, pimps, concierges, businessmen, cops, and Sydney Greenstreet sheiks — American, French, Albanian, Arab — all of whom are perfectly content to participate in and profit from the great evil of sex slavery as long as it’s not their daughters being fed into the meat grinder.

Social conservatives have long highlighted the very real plight of women and children across the globe being forced into prostitution (see Donna Hughes, Claudia Barlow and Big Hollywood’s Kathryn Lopez, all at National Review Online). But it’s the rare Hollywood action film that eschews absurdly convoluted plots of world domination or mass destruction in favor of a setup utterly chilling in its innate on-the-ground plausibility. In this age of Natalee Holloway-style sensationalism, what parents haven’t worried about their daughter heading off on a trip? Using this potent, universal fear as a linchpin with which to hold together the stunts, fights, and pandemonium was a stroke of genius, and elevates the audience’s emotional investment far above that of any other action film in recent memory.

As the film’s star, Liam Neeson, stalks through Taken’s miserable underworld of murderous degenerates and silky-smooth predator elites, he is continually faced with the gangland version of the same bureaucratic nightmares that so often terrorize our real workaday lives. “I sit behind a desk now,” a French policeman “friend” tells him by way of rejecting his pleas for help, “I take my orders from someone who sits behind a bigger desk. . . .my salary is X, my expenses are Y. As long as my family is provided for, I do not care where the difference comes from.” When at long last Neeson’s Bryan Mills, captured and defenseless, confronts the man capable of freeing his daughter with a nod of his immaculately coiffed head, the exchange is one that, but for the life-and-death stakes, could have occurred at any DMV or post office:

ST-CLAIR: “Do you mind telling me what you’re doing here?”

MILLS: “The last girl — I’m her father.”

ST-CLAIR: “Oh my. . . .”

MILLS: “Give her to me.”

ST-CLAIR: “I wish I could — honestly. See, I’m a father myself. I have two sons, and a daughter. But let me tell you something, Mr. whoever-you-are. This is a business. This is a very unique business with a very unique clientele.”

MILLS: “I’ll pay!”

ST-CLAIR: “This business you have no refunds, no returns, no discounts, no buybacks. All sales are final. Besides, discretion is about the only rule we have.” [turning to his henchmen] “Kill him. Quietly — I have guests.”

Translation: you didn’t fill out the right form/pay the proper postage/return the item by the deadline, so your daughter is going to spend the rest of her life as a burqa-wearing blow-up doll. I’m oh-so-sorry — next customer, please. . . .

Set against these smiling, Armani-clad, ever-so-reasonable slave traders is a man with “a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you,” a man of such singular purpose and moral clarity that we believe him when he promises to “tear down the Eiffel Tower if I have to” to find his daughter. A lifetime of living far from the sterilized bubble-universes of political correctness and cradle-to-grave pampering has taught him that there is no negotiating with such scum, no possible penance or rehabilitation, no shrugging at or sympathizing with the worldview they represent. They are the enemy, the nemesis of everything he holds dear as a Judeo-Christian, as an American, and as a father. Against that evil, blood is the only disinfectant.

One of the chief joys of the picture is watching how each defeated villain squeals like a stuck pig and falls over himself to appeal to the hero’s mercy — the very sense of decency they never displayed while engaged in their own unfettered cruelties. “We can resolve this,” one pleads, as if trying to calm down an irate customer returning a defective blender. “I know how you feel. We should talk. We could work this out.” Each time, our hero sees these empty entreaties for what they are: the soulless cries of scorpions unexpectedly denied the use of their sting.

The frontier justice meted out is swift, brutal, and thoroughly satisfying — which means, of course, that the resulting carnage was decried by horrified movie critics as “lowest-common-denominator trash,” a “risible male-re-empowerment fantasy,” an “unsavory mix of sentimentality and high-octane seediness,” and a “post-Sept. 11 throwback to the most primitive movie melodramas.” My, my — how nice to see liberals bitching about a film getting an inappropriate PG-13 rating for a change! Meanwhile, those males around the country who remain proudly unreconstructed — and also, based on the audience I saw the film with, the women who love them — cheered as each doom-laden verdict was rendered:

“I believe you — but it won’t save you.” FFFFZZZZZZZZZ.

“You could have made this much less painful if you had been more concerned about my daughter and less concerned with your goddamned desk.” WHAM!

“It wasn’t personal!” “It was all personal to me.” BLAM!BLAM!BLAM!BLAM!

By the end, the hero’s determination reaches such a fever pitch that he doesn’t even spare a moment for the usual Hollywood banter with the arch-villain cowering behind his terrified human shield: “We can nego–” BLAM! A thunderous exclamation applied with diamond-sharp moral certainty, without a single iota of doubt or remorse. As it should be.

(from left: Jon Gries, Leland Orser, and David Warshofsky)

If there ends up being a sequel to this film, I hope they do it right. Leave behind the kidnapping meme and take on another of the many moral outrages to be found in the progressive multikulti worldview. Bring back Neeson’s three CIA buddies — portrayed by character actors Leland Orser (the real-life husband of Jeanne Tripplehorn, the lucky dog), Jon Gries, and David Warshofsky — and this time give them some real things to do and good lines to say. And for Pete’s sake, don’t have them betray each other, and don’t kill them off for cheap thrills — let them be heroes. Above all, keep the emotional core of the film real and honest, and do your best to drive the heterophobes and misandrists nuts.

Every action movie is filled with its share of stupid implausibilities, but there is nothing stupid about a father’s love for his daughter, and nothing implausible about the sex-trafficking nightmare portrayed in Taken. The legalize-prostitution crowd has gotten a lot of mileage out of putting a reasonable, libertarian face on the whole sordid business, reminding us that, after all, it’s “the world’s oldest profession.” Taken answers back with a growl: “No — the world’s oldest profession is father.” And fathers, for those who need reminding, are men. Males. X-Y.

At the end of the day, when all of the sensitivity/diversity/anger management/sexual harassment/conflict resolution training falls away, the male of the species is a killer, the keeper of a bloody heroic ideal that winds through our history and through our myths, back through Snorri Sturluson and Luo Guanzhong, Shakespeare and Malory, Virgil and Homer, and ultimately the Old Testament and beyond. Countless women and children owe their lives and happiness to the men who tread grim paths of death in their defense. Just as many owe their misery to the failure of some men to honor that age-old crimson burden.

The self-loathing ninnies in Hollywood can spend millions of dollars to make Greedo shoot first, or to airbrush shotguns out of scenes. But such pale attempts at enforcing nanny-state ethics amount to little more than spitting into a merciless wind, the harbinger of a hard, isolate, stoic truth that has never yet melted.

(with Apologies to Homer)

Book the First: A question for the Muse

Speak to me, O Muse, of this resourceful man
who strides so boldly upon the golden shrine of Potomac,
Between Ionic plywood columns, to the kleig light altar.
Fair Obamacles, favored of the gods, ascends to Olympus
Amidst lusty tributes and the strumming lyres of Media;
Their mounted skyboxes echo with the singing of his name
While Olbermos and Mattheus in their greasy togas wrassle
For first honor of basking in their hero’s reflected glory.
Who is this man, so bronzed in countenance,
So skilled of TelePrompter, clean and articulate
whose ears like a stately urn’s protrude?
So now, daughter of Zeus, tell us his story.
And just the Cliff Notes if you don’t mind,
We don’t have all day.

Said the Muse:

I will tell the story of Obamacles through my scribe Iowahawk.
But this poem is copyrighted, so reproduce at your peril.

Book the Second: Obamacles Meets the Oracle of Doritos

From the land of Kenya beyond Nile, came Obamacles the Elder
To the grad school at Oahu, where Ann of Kansas bore him a son.
It would prove to be a hassle, thus he left his baby’s mama,
who then won favor with Soertoro, who brought them to his far-off island nest.
Young Obamacles was growing, and they shipped him back to Gramma,
And the prep school on Oahu. There he trained and studied boldly,
Drinking beer and smoking weed: Maui Wowie, paca lolo, sensimilla,
blunts and chiva, Thai and chronic, just enough to hone his mellow,
in the back of Kyle’s TransAm, a line or two of coke on weekends.

In his mellow young Obamacles beheld a vision in the salty snacks at Safeway;
There the Oracle of Doritos bade him:

“Travel the seas to the East, fair Obamacles, for this is where your fortune lies.
But beware, that way bodes peril if thou are not pure of image and smooth of delivery.
Seek first the masters of Occidental College, who will train you in the philosophers of Po-Mo.”

Replied young Obamacles,

“Accidental college heh heh heh heh Accidental moxidental taxidental heh heh,”

And Kyle is like,

“Dude you’re totally talking to the Doritos. That is totally bonus.”

Book the Third: Obamacles dazzles the masters at the Agora

After Obamacles had completed the perilous sea voyage to LAX and retrieved his bag from the carousel,
He entered the agora of Occidental, where wily Obamacles dazzled the masters with recitations:
Fanon, Menchu, Zinn and Chomsky, Saul Alinsky, Eldridge Cleaver, Kurtis Blow.
After two years his masters said,

“fair Obamacles, we can teach you no more, for your bullshit has surpassed even ours.
Hie thee now to the Isle of Manhattus, where in the agora at Columbius
you may study a bullshit so deep and complex and angry it is beyond our philosophies.”

Yet bold Obamacles was equal to the challenge. “Give us your thesis,” said the masters at Columbius,
and Obamacles conjured a mighty paper on Soviet disarmament, double-spaced and expertly margined.
Its beauty was such that the masters wept, and laid a baccalaureate wreath upon him;
But the masters ordered the beautiful thesis destroyed that so no mortal would again read it.

Then one day at the Duane Reade on West 123rd, the Oracle of Doritos appeared to him again:

“You have passed your first test, brave Obamacles, but the peril is yet beginning.
For now you must travel west to Chicago, the dreaded Isle of Monsters;
And become yourself a community organizer.”

To which Obamacles replied, “I really should cut down on the ganja.”

Book the Fourth: Obamacles meets the Jeremiad of Chicago

When Obamacles reached the shores of Chicago, he saw no monsters;
Yet its bone-strewn sands announced a land of many unseen dangers.
And though he be clever, Obamacles did not understand his task,
set before him by the Oracle; perhaps it was a riddle?
“Community organizer?” he wondered, “What the fuck is that?”
And yet he pushed from house to house, offering to organize the people,
But lo, the Southside people shunned him, slamming doors and mocking sad Obamacles.

“O people of Chicago, why do you shun me so?” he lamented.
“I have a bachelor’s degree and I am here to organize you.”
And then Obamacles heard from behind a voice of such fury and anger
that he was frozen in fear for the very first time.
It was the Jeremiad, the fire-breathing Monster of the Pulpit, who roared:

“You stupid ass foo, it because you white!”

Now, it was known to Obamacles that the Jeremiad had forbade white men from the Southside.
What Obamacles did not know is that the Jeremiad also decided who was a white man.
Although his own hue was darker still than the Jeremiad, he was too clever to argue with the Monster;
Instead he said:

“You are right, fearsome Jeremiad; I am sadly white. And only your magic, my lord,
can relieve me of my accursed paleness. Cure me, that I may join with the sun people.”

The Jeremiad was astonished by the boldness of Obamacles and his clever flattery. He said:

“You have much bravery for a white man, Obamacles. But to become an authentic brother,
you must prove your worthiness in the torments of the pews.”

Hour after hour, Sunday after Sunday, year after year, Obamacles stood before Jeremiad
And the other monsters of the pulpit, Phlegeron and Mekus, withstanding their bellows of fire,
Never blinking or flinching, and seldom falling asleep.
the Jeremiad was pleased and and absolved Obamacles of his whiteness,
and allowing him to finally organize the community.
Which turned out to be a system for getting money for the Jeremiad.

One day at the Co-op in Hyde Park the Oracle appeared again to Obamacles from an end-aisle display:

“You have done well, young wayfarer, but further torments lurk in thy destiny.
Prepare at Kaplan for thy LSATs, for the abyss of uselessness at Harvard Law awaits.
And then must you return to Chicago to conquer the legion of monsters.”

Book the Fifth: Obamacles and Victimia

Having withstood the scorching blasts of the monster Jeremiad at Chicago,
Harvard Law proved no challenge for our hero; he was named beloved of the faculty,
For at the Isle of Harvard they eat that “community organizer” shit right up.
He returned to the Isle of Chicago with his magic Harvard talisman,
Small of heft but able to open any door.

Here he met Victimia, a long and lanky beauty, whose siren songs of woe bewitched;
They were wed in the screaming gardens of Jeremiad.
“O Victimia,” he sang, “if I could but bottle thy sob stories, the world would be ours.”
“Yes, Obamacles beloved,” replied she, “but first let me help you conquer Chicago.”

The monsters of Chicago were helpless against the duet’s laments and dirges;
Like a moth to a flame they proved irresistible, and the strange mutant beasts
of this Isle of the Damned soon were transfixed by their enchantments:

Ayres, the decrepit conjurer of fireballs;
his wife Doron, worshipper of murderers;
Rezko, Philistine Lord of the Pits of Slumos;
Giannoulis, Bagman of the Mafios;
Blago, Governor of the Underworld of Illinus,
And all of the monsters of the Pulpit from Jeremiad to Pherekon.

Obamacles had conquered all of the Chicagomon, even Daleos the little retard king,
Without once unsheathing his sword; such was his charm.
The monsters realized Obamacles was the perfect front man for federal funding scams,
And thus showered our hero with tributes and contributions,
Elevating him to Vicelord of the Chicagomon.

Thus exalted did Obamacles train his gaze on the mounts of Tribune and Suntimus,
and WGN and WLS and NBC 5, whose anchors splooged in simultaneous ecstasy
At his gleaming incisors and crossover appeal. Together they swore
their undying liege and to crush all obstacles in his path.
By acclamation he was sent as Chicago’s emissary to Senatus.

Book the Sixth: The Rage of Hildusa

In Senatus, Obamacles laid beside the reflecting pool while a coterie of Media fed him grapes.
Again the Oracle appeared to him, this time in the form of a bowl of arugula; it said,

“You have done well, hale Obamacles, but your torments are not yet complete.
The toughest test of all awaits, and may the gods have mercy on your soul.”

“Do your worst, arugula,” he laughed, “for I am Obamacles,
Lord of Illinus, who single handedly conquered the LSATs
and disarmed the Chicagomon. What task would you possibly fear me with?”

“You are to led the Demos back to the White Temple, by vanquishing Hildusa.”

At the sound of Hildusa’s name even brave Obamacles was driven to wet his toga,
For Hildusa, cuckolder of Bubba, was the mightiest of all the gorgons.
From her head grew a writhing nest of asps, and the mere sight of her cankles
Would turn a man to stone. Some said she came from Lesbos
But others said her only pleasure was torment and sucking the marrow from her victim’s bones.
Around her at all times was a phalanx guard of mincing eunuchs,
led by Ickis, Wolfsonis, Blumenthalis and Pennis. At her side, an angry force
of menopausal PUMAs ready to strike on her command — for the children.

But Obamacles was only momentarily dissuaded from his task,
for he knew the people of Demos longed to return to the White Temple,
where they had been banished by the idiot emperor Chimpos II.
Although the Demos knew that Chimpos was the stupidest person in the world,
and they were the smartest, they had somehow been unable to defeat him.
Obamacles seized his opportunity. On the Isle of Demos, and said:

“Citizens of Demos, I am Obamacles of Illinus. I will lead you
from the wilderness back to the White Temple.”

Dispite his gleaming smile the agora laughed at the stranger’s folly.
“Fool, our leader is Hildusa,” they mocked. “What chance stands a handsome
newcomer like you against the mightiest of the gorgons?”

“For one, I will conjure our Spartans back from Babylonia,” said Obamacles.
“Hilldusa voted with Chimpos. I say it is time to begin the war to end this war.”

The words of Obamacles created a murmur in the agora, for on Demos the people
wished the Spartans home from war, to face trial for war crimes or be caged as madmen
Like in the many tragedies at the Demos Odeon Octoplex.

“We are with you, Obamacles,” came the shout of a man, who was turned to marble
and struck by lightning before his words could be completed. Obamacles had stoked
the terrible rath of the gorgon Hildusa, and the battle was joined.

Book the Seventh: The Battle for Demos

All the torments suffered by Obamacles had steeled him for this epic test.
The cliffs of Demos resounded with the approaching screeches of Hildusa
And her army of soul-eating Morpheons, spinning and faxing and conjuring position papers.
But Obamacles was unmoved, and with his right hand summoned
the Subterranean Creepos of the Nutroots to do his bidding,
Kos and Ariana and Demos Underground.
Hildusa was enraged for she thought them allies, and shot them the stink-eye.
“Destroy Obamacles!” she bellowed at her Eunuchs,
But they were retards and got busted for DUI on the chariot ride over.
Then Obamacles shot the arrow of Iowa across abyss of Dukakis,
striking Hildusa true in her cankles, no more to freeze men to stone,
And all of Demos roared approval.

“Citizens of Demos,” screamed the hobbled gorgon, “fair Obamacles is not what he appears!
Look, behind him! A phalanx of Chicagomon, the demons from the pits of Illinus!”

When the Demos people saw the Chicagomon they shrugged,
but Obamacles was taking no chances for the general battle;
He had no more further use for the Chicagomon and thus he summoned
Underbus, the destroyer of memes. One by one he disposed them,
The Jeremiad and Phlegeron and Ayres, all sacrificed to Underbus.
When Hildusa saw this her eyes boiled with rage,
and she summoned her Amazon Pumas
But they were too fat and old and employed
to battle the snarky college assholes in official Obamacles tunics.

At last Hildusa summoned Bubba, who in principle was her husband.
Though the mightiest god of Demos, he trembled before her gaze;
For once she saved his sacred bacon, but yet had him castrated and banished.
“Destroy! Destroy! Destoy!” she bellowed, handing Bubba sharpened talking points,
But Obamacles would not yield, and from beneath his tunic
withdrew his razor-sharpened race card, filleting Bubba into tiny pieces.

The crowd at Demos was breathless, hardly believing their eyes.
And then winged Media lifted Obamacles across the abyss to where Hildusa
lay supine and helpless, and, grabbing her by the asps,
took one more mighty swing with his race card,
and held her severed head before the cheering crowd.

All of Demos sang in praise, even the severed head of Hildusa
as he paraded it around the stage at Invescos
and banked it off the glass for three points.
But yet, as he exited the stage amid the cries of the rapture,
The Doritos called once more from the Table of Catering:

“Beware, fair Hero, for one last task awaits thee.”

Book the Eighth: The Contest of November

“Who dares challenge me now?” asked Obamacles. “For I am Obacles,
vanquisher of Hildusa, of whom all of Demos sing;
Make him the mightiest, so that I might find him worthy.”

“Your foe will be the grizzled warrior Crustius,” said the Doritos,
As Obamacles laughed in disbelief; for though brave Crustius
had once proved great valor in the tragic war of Namos,
He had grown old and addled sailing the Sea of Maverikus.
In years a full score he sailed, seeking the fabled Microphone of Media,
Only to crash on its shoals, lured to doom by the flattery of the Sirens.

“Be not hasty in thy hubris, Obamacles,” warned the Doritos.
“Although he is old and stranded and beset by mutineers,
grizzled Crustius is far craftier than in your imaginings.”

True to the prophesy of the Doritos, wily Crustius had a secret trick up his toga.
From his rock-strewn shipwreck he summoned Palina, huntress of Wasilla,
Whose fertile loins had many odd-named children bore,
Bristol and Trig, Dakota and Algebra, Calculus and Physed,
And yet she retained the visage and figure of a goddess.

Palina emerged from the sea, springing fully formed from a clamshell,
Brandishing the spear that had slain a thousand antlered beasts.
Once mutinous, the Crustonauts were instantly heartened,
For now they and sensed a chance at victory.

Although his pollsters warned of danger, Obamacles was stalwart
For he knew just how he got here. “Attack,” he beckoned very calmly,
And from across the land of Soros, a thousand score of demons answered;
HuffPo nutjobs, New York Kronos, the shrieking hags of talk TV,
Couric, Fey, Oprah, Behar, the hermaphrodites of NBC.

Palina was undaunted by the minions and thus she battled gamely on.
But at last she was attacked by Crustius himself;
For so addled and contrary was the wizened sailor
That he had forgotten which side he was on.
Vanquished Palina returned to Wasilla to fight another day,
While Crustius sails again, forever seeking the elusive Sirens of Media.

Book the Ninth: Obamacles Ascends to Olympus

Now behold him, brave Obamacles,
Who strides triumphant down Pennsylvania Avenue,
With Victimia at his side in a gown of golden brocade,
Hewn from the finest hotel draperies.
Behold his ascent to the marble dais to swear his oath,
Which Justice Roberts flubs; so dazzled is he
by our hero’s pure magnificence.

And behold the crowd whose number has grown to a million,
Mocking limping Chimpos as he flees to Brazos exile,
Tossing their sandals at his edifice, only to stop to hail the conquering hero.

“All hail Obamacles!” they cry, “Master of Bullshit,
Vicelord of the Chicagomon, Slayer of Hildusa,
Vanquisher of Palina. You are our new and shiny hope,
a true god amongst mortals.”

And yet once more the Oracle appears to Obamacles,
At the Inauguration Bacchanal, brought to you by Doritos.

“What now?” said Obamacles, irked at Oracle’s salty impertinence
and the interruption of his famous pop ‘n’ lock. “For I have conquered
all, and there is no challenger left in all the Beltway.”

The Oracle spoke out from the depths of the guacamole:

“I bid thee welcome to the White House
where your true test now begins:

Markets deaf to happy buzzwords
Blind to Shepard Fairey’s art,
Heeding laws of economics,
Not the wishful laws of man;

A world of of evil filled with monsters,
who are unmoved by flowery talk,
Invulnerable to race cards
or leftwing blogger insults,
Who Hope for Change in megatons.

Do not despair! For look before you,
The noble army who brought you here:
Thespians and hiphop moguls,
Graphic artists, hipster twats,
The academic scribes of Athens,
basic cable sycophants.

These are the arrows in your quiver,
for the coming epic tests;
Use them well, but first remember:
They’re waiting on those magic tricks.

Good luck with that, well-spoken hero,
I think I’ll grab a snack and watch.”

Obamacles look out onto his drooling throngs, and wept;
for then he realized then may be things even gods can’t do.

Is this man hewn from Olympus,
Sent by Zeus to save our souls?
Or a plastic dashboard Jesus
In a car he can’t control?

Will this Adonis save the planet?
Or is he fleecing golden sheep?
Ask another Muse tomorrow,
Hell if I know, it’s all Greek to me.

Burma Shave