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The Culture Project

The American Culture News - Analysis - Criticism

[O]ver the last decade, Hollywood has unleashed a stream of high-profile films directly or indirectly about the war in Iraq. Nearly all of the polemical anti-war films bombed. Robert Redford & Co. were desperate to remake Coming Home and other anti-war films, but Americans weren’t interested. The few war movies that did well pretty much avoided the sort of preachy jeremiads you’d expect to hear at Susan Sarandon’s book club. For instance, The Hurt Locker — nominated for Best Picture — largely ignores the debate over the war and instead tells a gripping story about our troops’ heroism. The Kingdom, another War on Terror movie, was a hit despite the best intentions of director Peter Berg, who wanted it to be a parable about the cycle of violence. It succeeded because it was a good action movie that depicted Americans as heroes.

It’s a bit funny, then, to hear some people claim that Avatar, with its cartoonish environmentalism and hackneyed attacks on the military and those evil corporations, is proof that Americans love serious left-wing preaching with their popcorn. “For years,” writes Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times, “pundits and bloggers on the right have ceaselessly attacked liberal Hollywood for being out of touch with rank and file moviegoers, complaining that executives and filmmakers continue to make films that have precious little resonance with Middle America.” The last laugh is on them, cackles Goldstein, because Avatar “totally turns this theory on its head.”

I’m sure Goldstein’s right. No doubt James Cameron could have made Avatar for $300 million less and still made a fortune. After all, audiences didn’t need the 3-D digital magic, explosions, giant aliens, or spectacular backdrops. All they wanted was an extended lecture about the evils of corporate America and the cruelty of the military, and some gassy pantheistic blather about the need to get back to nature. Why, Cameron could have simply recorded a poetry jam at Barbra Streisand’s house and still put out the highest-grossing film ever.

-- Jonah Goldberg, "Hollywood Has Seen the Enemy"

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The Glen Online

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Welcome to the Glen Online!

One of Image’s central missions is to emphasize the importance of craft, both as an end in itself and as a spiritual discipline—concerns that lie at the heart of our Glen Workshop program in Santa Fe. Every year nearly 200 people gather at the Glen to work with some of the world’s finest writers and artists to hone both craft and vision.

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