Hollywood's Left Wing Agenda...

If the title of this post isn't enough to make you spew beer (or your latte) all over your keyboard in wonder-struck hilarity, maybe you should head over to Big Hollywood for some real guffaws.

See, for example, The Top 5 Conservative Characters on "Lost", and wonder to yourself, is this a joke? There are people out there who give a shit about how characters in a fucking TV show might vote? Really? Sadly, yes.

There's much more, of course, but I won't bore you with the sorry details. You can check it out for yourself and come to to your own conclusions. You should probably also check out this post at Kung Fu Monkey [Note: Link fixed 1/22] if you want to get some sense of how things really work in Hollywood.

I'm going to go off on a tangent for a moment or two. Clearly these conservative idiots have no understanding of what constitutes "drama." Don't get me wrong. It's not necessary to have read Aristotle's Poetics to have an intuitive idea of dramatic concepts like "recognition" and "reversal" (for example). In fact, just reading the terms is probably enough to evoke a pretty good theory of what they mean from anybody who's actually watched any sort of dramatic presentation. It gets a bit thornier with concepts like "plot" and "character," and this is where these conservative "critics" show themselves for the un-cultured assholes that they really are.

(Aristotle, by the way, laid out the template for pretty much everything we recognize as "drama" even today. However he, wrongly I think, assigned more importance to "plot" than to "character". A great strength of "Lost," for example, is its meticulous attention to both. I would also include the newer version of "Battlestar Galactica" in any list of good TV shows. I remember very clearly watching the movie Reservoir Dogs at around the same time I was studying Greek drama and the Poetics. I was completely fucking floored. It's one of my favorite movies of all-time. It's a bloody Greek tragedy!)

I remember a few years ago somebody tried to do a hack job on The English Patient by comparing it with Casablanca, the basic beef being that the main character in the more recent movie tells the Nazis what they want to know in a desperate attempt to save his lover, whereas Bogie sacrifices his personal interest in order to fight the Nazis (well, something like that--I'm working from memory). I think both movies are great, and I think both movies are "true" (in an artistic sense--they both speak to some human truth). I think a typical TV-watching, movie-going person has absolutely no fucking problem whatsoever with the moral and ethical dilemmas posed in a good dramatic presentation. Only a fucking retard would walk out of The English Patient thinking to himself, "What a fucking sissy commie wimp, talking to the Nazis for a piece of tail." Nor would anyone leave Casablanca thinking "Man, that Rick is a fucking loser, I would have so nailed her ass."

Now that I'm going, I'm reminded also of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil's Aneid. And really, this brings us directly to what the Big Hollywood site would like to see: propaganda. They would like to see productions that glorify their view of the world, their achievements (whatever conservatism's achievements might possibly be...), their worldview. But wait...

Homer and Virgil? What the fuck am I talking about? I'll tell you what the fuck I'm talking about, and I'll tell you because I've had the benefit of a liberal arts education and because I've read this stuff and it's secondary literature, and because I'm not just making funny noises out of my asshole.

Homer (it's very questionable whether "Homer" was a single individual, but that's irrelevant for the purpose at hand) told stories. He told stories that he'd had passed down to him, and he likely embellished those stories with things he thought might be interesting to those listening. Homer is especially famous for telling the story of The Trojan War and the story of Odysseus and his voyage home after the war. You know that (I hope). Homer told (well, actually, he sang) his stories in bars and pubs and such for food and drink. Homer was an artist.

Virgil was an artist, too. (I don't want to diminish the importance and sheer skill of Virgil in the following. He had a tough boss, though.) Virgil had the (arguably) good fortune to be in the employ of Augustus Caesar. Virgil was basically instructed to write a poem glorifying (and justifying) the origins of the Roman Empire. He did a damned good job (although he plagiarized Homer almost unforgivably). Such a good job that, a couple of thousand years later, most people don't recognize it as an early piece of propaganda. (Let the evil comments begin!) Apocryphally (i.e. I read it somewhere, but I'm getting too drunk to verify it), Virgil, on his deathbed, instructed that the Aneid be destroyed.

As I think I've suggested above, most people can distinguish between "art" (something that, somehow, imparts some human truth) and propaganda (something that attempts to tell you the "correct" way to do or think about something.). The mere idea that somebody, somewhere, thinks I should be watching this or that material is, in and of itself, extremely offensive.

"Lost" is not a "conservative" show, you incompetent fucking idiot.

[UPDATE: See also alicublog and Sadly, No!.]