Movies, Moral Clarity, and the Reproduction of Culture

"Not everything has to be a judgment through the prism of 'moral equivalence'."

That's Wordsmith, at my post yesterday, differing with my take on Clint Eastwood's "Letters From Iwo Jima."

Actually, he's right: We don't have to look at everything through a lense of morality, but since the media, Hollywood, and the global film industry will do it for us anyway, it pays to be on guard against the pernicious influence of mass media relativism - doubly so considering the powerful impact movies have on the popular imagination of our younger generations.

With that, I think folks need to read Bill Whittle's essay on Hollywood's reproduction of political culture, "The Workshops of Identity." It's a lengthy piece, but brilliantly explosive in its blatant and triumphant exaltation of American cultural and material power, and of our (providential) exceptionalism. It's also a reminder of our responsibility as a nation not to discard that inheritance:

There was a time when America broadcast its virtues to the world. Films like It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, even Star Wars and Spider-man, were films about common, decent people – Americans, obviously, for we all know that even Luke Skywalker was an Iowa farm boy – who find themselves in dangerous and evil places and whose fundamental decency corrected this wrong in the world and restored a sense of hope and optimism, a sense that we are masters of our own destiny. It is an idea so powerful that even French intellectuals, who seemed then and seem today to be incapable of a single positive or upbeat thought, could watch in wonder and contempt as legions of their countrymen flocked to see them.

Those days have gone. No longer does Hollywood broadcast America’s mythic virtues to the world. No, the flow is reversed now. Now the great creative driving force of Hollywood is to present to America the anti-American hatred of the intellectuals watching in impotent fury out in the rest of the world,

Of the six or seven war movies made during the last few years, all – save one – were spectacular failures. Many were the reasons given for this, but perhaps, someday, while sitting in a hammock in the Cayman Islands, even a studio executive might be just intellectually aware enough to catch a flash of what is obvious to a pharmacist in Des Moines: that maybe, just perhaps, these films failed not because of war weariness or denial or rank stupidity on the part of the American people, but rather – are you sitting down? – that most of the country, unlike Hollywood, has sons and daughters and fathers and brothers in the military and know for first-hand fact that they are not rapists or murderers, hicks, dullards, losers, or broken and victimized children but rather the bravest, the most capable, the most decent and honorable and just plain competent people we have.

And perhaps, just perhaps, it might enter that navel-gazing, self-centered, dim little brain to reflect that the one war movie that did out-of-the-park business was the one that showed the Marines as the good guys, winning on the battlefield, defending their people and their culture against long odds and full of the heroism and sacrifice that used to be so commonplace in this city… even if the Marines in question wore loincloths and funny helmets and advanced with spears and round shields.

If America simply led the world military to the degree that it does today, well, that would simply be historical. That it should have both economic and military might, and use them so much more often for good than for ill, would unique and awe-inspiring. That it could couple military and economic strength with such leadership in science and medicine is simply unheard of in the annals of history, and for it to be the military, economic, scientific and cultural beacon that is is not only unheard of, it simply almost defies imagining – would, in fact, defy imagining to anyone who had not grown up in it, as we have, and seen it with their own eyes.

I have said all of that simply to say this: I know my people and I study our history. The single thing that makes America so exceptional is the belief of its people in American exceptionalism. It is a simple cause and effect relationship, easy to understand from using your own common sense and the examples in your own life. The confident and the bold do bold and confident things. The shameful and self-loathing? Not so much. And Hollywood as it exists today is using all of its vast talent to turn us from the former into the latter.

America is not just a cauldron, but a reactor. From all over the earth, men and women have risked their lives to immerse themselves in this great experiment in freedom and individuality, and the results, by any measure, have produced more goodness, more security, more prosperity and more raw happiness than society or combination of societies in history.

Stars, like our sun, are reactors too: the tremendous, monumental energies and pressures they generate would blow them to pieces in a millisecond, but for one thing… the immense gravity that holds these fiery atoms together and strikes the balance of force and pressure that creates all the light and life in the universe.

The American reactor of individuality and freedom of expression would also fly apart too, but for one thing: the deep love of country that has bound it together and liberated the best of the human spirit. Destroy that love of country and the idea of America – for that is what she is, in the end… simply an idea of freedom and the pursuit of happiness – eliminate that binding love and the reactor will explode. And when it does, there will be no more light – no more medicine, no more art and poetry, no more iPhones and MRI scanners and jet travel, no more Fifth and First Amendment rights, no more security and peace… in fact, no more hot running water.

Readers should absorb the whole thing, here.

This is probably the best essay I've read on American exceptionalism and the primacy of morality in culture. And in reading this, readers can see why I take issue with Tim, my commenter at the post, who says:

Donald: I believe, truly, that there is room for war films that are both triumphant and morally ambiguous. You're sounding a bit grandpa-ish here. By the way, what's wrong with showing something from another perspective? Isn't that one of the goals of art?

Bill Whittle's essay above provides the answers for Tim that in my sense shouldn't be so elusive.