Movies

The Culture War

Mark Noonan20 Comments

Apparently in the new Odyssey movie, Odysseus suffers from a form of PTSD over his participation in the sack of Troy. Thus one of the problems of crafting a historical epic – complete misunderstanding of how the people at the time viewed the matter.

They did have rules of war! Don’t think for a moment that they didn’t. And those persons and powers who egregiously violated those rules would be hated, perhaps even fought to destruction because of it. There was even a rule about sacking cities – in that if a city surrendered on terms then the conquering power had to live up to them…the terms usually being that the people are spared death or slavery and rather than looting, the wealth of the city is carefully tallied up and transferred to the conqueror, leaving enough for the conquered city to survive (it would, after all, now become part of the conqueror’s realm). But a city taken by assault? Different story: the defender’s lives are forfeit and they’re fortunate to merely be reduced to slavery. Bottom line, Odysseus would not have felt bad about sacking Troy; in the moral code he lived in, there was no problem with what the Greeks did. But if we translated him to 1570 to observe the Siege of Famagusta he would have been outraged that Mustafa Pasha, after accepting the surrender on terms, then went on to murder the defeated Venetian commander, Marco Antonio Bragadin as well as every other Christian he could lay his hands on. This was a rather stupid move by Mustafa as it fired up the Venetians (as well as the overall Christian West) so that a little more than a year later, at Lepanto, the Christians were…well…not very nice to the defeated Muslims. So, rules. Just not our rules. More importantly, just not our rather silly rules.

I’ve talked about this before and in war, very bad things happen. Decent people try to limit the bad as much as possible – and bring any war to as rapid a conclusion as possible – but, mainly: bad. You are, after all, trying to kill people in order to compel them to obey your orders. This is not a nice thing to do and it can’t be done except by being, to some degree, rather nasty. But in the modern West, we’re supposed to believe there’s a method of warfare where everything is done nicely. Can’t happen. As Jackie Fisher put it, attempts to humanize war are akin to humanizing hell. But because we’ve been sold this concept, we can’t imagine an Odysseus not feeling guilty about the sack of Troy…which, to be sure, would entail lots of murder, rape and looting…with the survivors sold off as slaves. But that was the code they all lived by – and the Trojans could have accepted surrender terms. They felt they didn’t have to. Bet wrong!

And that gets me to this: this new movie, like all of popular culture, is an attempt to propagandize us into a certain mode of thinking. Like all those Cold War movies which cast the United States as the bad guys…the unreasonable partners in the global dance. Which cast patriotic Americans as idiots who simply didn’t understand things. On and on like that – it didn’t take with all of us, but it did take with enough…so now we’ve got American citizens calling essentially for the abolition of our Constitution and the rejection of our Declaration of Independence. That is, wishing to replace America with something quite different…something they view as other than the inherent evil which is the United States of America.

None of this is done with a sledge hammer, nor is it done overnight. It is a slow, steady drip, drip, drip of propaganda until the ground is ready for the seed of treason. We’re being told – mostly by allegedly Right voices – that we should ignore the DEI casting decisions in The Odyssey. They are all small roles. Only on screen for a few minutes. Ignore that! Look at the beautiful film! This is why we were losing for so long. We kept just gliding over the subversive aspects…after all, they didn’t work on us! Or, at least, not as much as they worked on others. But by making things like The Manchurian Candidate and Cool Hand Luke part of our shared culture, we were simply internalizing enemy propaganda. In The Manchurian Candidate, the true enemy is anti-Communism. Don’t fight the Communists! Fight the Americans who want to fight Communism – the True Irredeemable Bad Guys are displayed with a pathetic caricature of Joe McCarthy…name never mentioned but everyone knew and he’s just this drunken idiot puppet of malign forces. In Cool Hand Luke the true enemy isn’t a shiftless vandal, but prison guards trying to keep good order among a prison population made of of men with a proven disregard for truth and the property of others. We’re supposed to feel sympathy for Luke – he didn’t really do anything that bad, right? Just a little bit of vandalism. Let him go! I submit Detroit as the result of that attitude turned into policy.

In The Odyssey, the drip, drip, drip is mostly that West doesn’t matter – never did anything. As I’ve said before, it doesn’t really matter what the skin color of the actors are – but it must be placed in a proper context. You can have an all-black Odyssey…but you’d have to set it in Bronze Age Africa. To just slip a black lady into the role of Helen of Troy is to insult the work and those who love it. It isn’t a matter of disliking black, it is a matter of loving the integrity of the story. And, of course, it never goes the other way. If a person in a story is female, black, Asian, gay, Muslim or what have you then the actor portraying that character better match up. We are told we must honor the wonderful achievements of everyone except for the white or the male or the Christian. One thing that did make me laugh was in the reboot of the Star Trek movies starting in 2009, the character of Mr Sulu is gay. He wasn’t in the original series, nor in the first batch of movies. Why is he gay now? Because the actor who played him in the original series is gay. That this didn’t come out until years after the first series went off the air is irrelevant. That there are scenes in the original series indicating Mr Sulu is heterosexual also doesn’t matter. The actor is gay, so Mr Sulu is now gay for all time to come. Just try to make him straight in some later movie or TV show and you’ll get howls of anger. We get erased, they get strictly honored in all things…and get to take over our roles at will…we’re not even supposed to laugh when they cast a black woman as Richard III.

The main take away here is to not give them an inch, because we know they’re going for the mile. Don’t participate in their absurdity. In this, it can be just waiting until The Odyssey shows up on streaming. Personally, I won’t watch it at all – the source used for the movie is a feminist re-write of the original, the DEI casting decisions are absurd and the scenes I’ve seen from it don’t impress me at all. Nolan is a pretty good movie maker but I think he got way off course on this one. Don’t concede the point. Don’t be like, “well, I didn’t mind the casting”. Mind it. Say it. Call it the idiotic twaddle that it is, even if you otherwise like the film. Point and laugh at it – don’t get yourself invested in it. That is, don’t feel like your intellect requires you to say you like something you don’t. Don’t be one of those people who simply want to sit at the cool kid’s table and so will say something nice about nonsense.

And, of course (and once again) we on the right simply must start building a replacement entertainment industry…one that will subvert the Left rather than the Right. We do have talent! We just don’t have institutions willing to pass us bundles of cash for garbage, like the Left does.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan60 Comments

I’m getting some feedback on “Mirrors” and I have to say I’m pleased – people are liking it. Wish it would sell more, of course! But, the main thing is that I’ve written a story that people like. And I’m very grateful for that.

So, the Ukraine thing – looks more and more like it is another self-own by the Democrats: it is the Bidens who might be in jeopardy, not Trump. My view: in any controversy regarding Trump, always work on the assumption that he’s the guy who didn’t break the law. We’ve long heard about Biden’s son getting sweet heart deals in Ukraine…and my bet is that this NSA “whistleblower” was a desperate rear-guard to try and keep it from coming out. RSM has thoughts.

Patriots ditch Antonio Brown after a mere 11 days with rising allegations of bad behavior. I don’t know what is true in this – it’ll come out over time, I’m sure.

We’re close to flipping the 9th Circuit – this is why we elected Trump and why we have to re-elect him. Once the Courts are firmly in the hands of judges who will enforce the law not only will the left no longer be able to impose their policies via judicial fiat, but we’ll be able to start rolling back the previous, unconstitutional rulings liberal judges made. All those years the Tru-Cons told us they’d do this…and they never, ever did: Trump has nearly done it in three years. All that was lacking was the will.

“Ad Astra” has a good review. I might have to go see it – and as the Progs are simply hating Sallone’s latest “First Blood” installment, I’ll probably have to check it out, too.

Trump’s approval rating is better than Obama’s at this point in his term. And this with, I’m very certain, polls cooked to make Trump look worse than he is.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan33 Comments

America: love it or leave it. That is all Trump’s tweets really amounted to. He didn’t mention race: all he said was, “if you really hate it here that much, leave”. And that is the truth of the matter.

You can’t fix what you don’t love – you must love something before it is lovable. People like Omar and AOC clearly do not love this country. Not the country founded in 1776. To them, that country is racist, slave-owning, genocidal, sexist, homophobic, rapacious, war criminal. They hate it and want it gone, to be replaced by an America they will love…a country which has torn down the Washington Monument and will consider its founding moment to be MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech (not that they believe a word of what King said that day). They want an America which despises the Pilgrims; the Founders, the Westward Expansion. That rejects the Constitution and the idea that the individual matters. It is not an America I will ever be part of – first off, because they’ll jail or kill me, and those like me; but mostly because I’ll die fighting such a thing.

Democrat says that skin color is the only thing which matters. This is racist.

They’ve decided to kill the James Bond franchise by making the next 007 a woman. This is just stupid. Bond is a male fantasy: we kill the bad guys while dressed well and looking sharp and get all the hot women. No man will want to go see Super Chick do that…nor will women, I suspect.

Don’t know why any parents let their kids have their own internet accounts: 17 year old girl murdered by loser she met on line.

The Ninth Circuit gave a win to pro-lifers. Yes, that Ninth Circuit. Trump is remaking the Courts. That, alone, is enough to re-elect him next year.

I’ve stared the sequel to Mirrors, to be called Secrets. Don’t want you guys to have to binge-read, so you’d better pick up a copy of Mirrors, today!

Open Thread

Mark Noonan13 Comments

The 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, is an excellent film. It is, of course, almost complete nonsense as far as depicting what Bonnie and Clyde were like; the film treats them as cool, misguided kids in love and trying to have fun. They actually were, of course, psychotic killers who murdered people for no reason whatsoever. Now, to be sure, Clyde had his issues – he appears to have been horribly brutalized as a youth in prison. On the other hand, he landed in prison as a youth because he decided to become a crook at a young age. There’s no real explanation for why Bonnie decided to become a killer, other than general insanity. Netflix has a new production called The Highwaymen covering the pair from the other side: how law enforcement dealt with two people who killed in cold blood nine police officers. There has been controversy about it I never understood: some people taking issue with the likely chance that the cops, in the end, just ambushed the pair and blew them to heck and gone without a warning. My view: when you’re dealing with psychotic killers who have already demonstrated they’ll even kill cops without blinking, you don’t give them a chance to return fire.

New York is now going to tax the street if you go for a drive. Wasn’t there once a song about this?

The concept of time is now racist.

Multiculturalism is good, as long as it isn’t an American culture. Some are trying to change that.

Related: moves to ban Thomas Jefferson. One of the defining marks of the left is hatred – most especially hatred of Western Civilization in general and the United States in particular.

Democrats want to interrogate Fox News over their programming decisions. The Democrats are fascists at heart.

Joe Biden says he’ll keep his hands to himself from now on. If the Democrats wanted him to be their nominee, he’d be allowed to get out of this jam just as the Virginia Democrats were allowed to skate…but if the Democrats want Joe gone, this won’t do a darn thing to save him.

Thinking About Art

Mark Noonan30 Comments

So, I’m still writing the novel. Just past 57,000 words, now. I figure I’ve got about 20-25,000 left to go. Very importantly, I figured out how it ends. Meaning, I knew in general how it ended all along, but now I know how to get there. I’ve re-read what I’ve written from time to time…make a few changes here and there, but the main thing is the story is compelling. At least, to me it is. I do hope other people like it. To me, it’s a real page-turner…and I already know what’s on the next page, being the author of it, and all. There will be a lot to do in the re-write after the first draft is done…increasing the descriptions, diving a bit more deeply into character development, making the overall Narrative flow better. I’m having a lot of fun writing it. Though it will take longer than I first thought – originally hoped to have it out in May, but now that will slip by several months. Partly because I got dragooned into working on another project which will absorb some writing time over the next month or so.

The other day the news did what Chesterton pointed out is the primary purpose of the news: telling people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive that Lord Jones is dead. In this case, Lord Jones was Ursula Le Guin. I had never heard of her until I found out she was dead. In case your ignorance matches mine regarding this lady, she was a famed sci-fi/fantasy author…writing lots of books and winning all manner of awards. Someone quoted a passage from one of her books and said this was the most beautiful opening paragraph he had ever read:

Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of the ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moon-driven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.

If you like that, then I’m afraid my novel is going to be a terrible disappointment to you. It is just a bunch of words strung together, in my view. I initially thought the guy who posted that on Twitter was joking – and maybe he was (it is hard to tell), but the comments from people about it indicates that some people actually think this is meaningful stuff. Deep. Thoughtful.

Its about a freaking jellyfish drifting with the tide! Its drivel!

It got me thinking about the whole concept of creative arts – and thinking that it is in a very bad way. Ms. Le Guin wrote that on purpose and people read it and gave it awards. I am flabbergasted. I’d be embarrassed if I wrote anything like that. I’m hoping that she wrote it as a joke – that the rest of her writing was better and that she merely put that out once securely rich and famous as part of an “I wonder if they’ll really just buy anything I write?” experiment.

Then I read a bit from Andrew Klavan about how he was viewing the upcoming Oscar awards:

The Oscars as a glamorous, televised, fun event are a relic of the days when film was the central American art form, the way America told stories to itself. When an art form is at its peak — which usually comes pretty early in its life cycle — the greatest works and the most popular works are usually one and the same. The movies, for instance, peaked around 1939 when the nominees included Gone With The Wind, Dark Victory, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Stagecoach, Wuthering Heights, and The Wizard of Oz. All are still rightly considered classics and all were in the top ten at the box office.

I’ll have to agree with that. My Mrs gently chides me for my preference for old movies, but I really find most modern movies unwatchable. There have been a few recent offerings I liked. In sci-fi, for instance, I liked Interstellar. It got panned, but I thought it the most interesting sci-fi movie since, say, Planet of the Apes in 1968. But, mostly I just keep watching old movies. They are just better, in my view. For instance, for most of my life I had ignored Citizen Kane: mostly because I figure a movie that praised couldn’t be as good as people were saying. Then I watched it all the way through. And then watched it again. It is the best movie ever made in my view. I’ve watched Lord only knows how many movies, but I’ve never seen anything as interesting as that – something so crisply done, such great dialogue, such phenomenal acting and cinematography. Klaven has hit upon something – the movies are worn out. So is fiction writing. So, too, is writing in general (Matt and I were most pleased with those who opined Worst was well-written; we really appreciated that…but, I can’t argue against the people saying it…most books written these days are simply badly written…I mean, just terrible, and they are written by people who supposedly went to school and learned how to write. I just started writing in 2003 and slowly got better at it).

It occurred to me that part of the reason I’m writing my novel is the same reason that C S Lewis wrote the Narnia series: he took one look at what people were reading, was appalled and set about trying to write something worth reading. So am I. I don’t know if anyone will read it; I hope they do. But my purpose is clear: to write a story which will be interesting and fun to read.

And I think that is where the modern arts have gone wrong: they aren’t trying for interesting and fun. They are trying for something else…a message, or a moral, or simply to be as weird as they can, because that is where the awards and book contracts are. I’m writing a fairy tale – and that means I’ve taken some average folks and put them in strange, dangerous situations where they can only rely on their courage and each other to triumph over evil. You know – it is a story which you can imagine yourself landing in, and then imagine how you might react. There is no sex in my book; though there is love. There is violence, but not gross violence. No one is depressed. They are, at turns, afraid and unsure…but they aren’t wallowing in self-pity and trying to get to some cosmic truth because they have it hard. Having it hard is just part of life, and you take it with as much grit and good humor as you can.

We need to recapture the sense of wonder and hope which art is supposed to provide us. We’ve had quite enough of weirdos and psychopaths. Maybe my book flops. Doesn’t matter. I’m writing it because it is fun to write…and I’m going to keep on writing it. I just hope that other people will join in – we’ve learned that our experts in most areas are rather dumb. The experts in the arts are no less so. If you’ve got a song in your heart, a story in your mind, a painting that is waiting to be done…do it. After all, the really great art wells up from the people…and perhaps it is time for we, the people, to take back the arts, too.