America This Is Your Brain On Hollywood

Films and hotels have many aspects that are the same. For example, there is always a big vision, an idea.
Francis Ford Coppola

Back at the height of my reading of the lefty magazines, a period which began to ebb in the 1990s and still hasn't ended, entirely, I'd have told anyone who predicted that twenty years later I'd be depending on Esquire more than The Nation for important news that they were insane.  Shows how reliable the prediction business that seems to obsess the news media in the United States probably is.

I know the estimable Charles Pierce gets more repetition but I've come to really value Jack Holmes as someone who often gets it just about perfect.  One of his recent pieces about Donald Trump's mind and its formation in TV and the movies  tells us a lot of why we are in such danger from Trump.

After recounting the horrific story of how Trump, responded to veterans plea that there be more support given to service members damaged by the United States spraying Agent Orange on Vietnam out of his mis-remembered viewing of the movie Apocalypse Now.   Even Robert Duval's famous line, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" didn't register with the grad of one of the Ivys as he repeatedly told some of the audience, some of the Vietnam veterans some of them must have been wrong that they weren't spraying Agent Orange in the movie. because of what he remembered from watching it.   Holmes goes into some detail about the consequences of having the reality TV star as president in horrifying specificity:

It's always comforting to remember the world's most powerful man is swimming in a mental sea of informational flotsam, his synapses firing erratically as he latches onto the profoundly limited number of things he thinks he knows, most of which are fragments of reality he internalized around 1982. This is how you get the moronic, bordering-on-incomprehensible advice for dealing with wildfires he spooned out of his brain onto The Tweet Machine last week. It's something that he heard once, maybe, filtered through the kaleidoscope of his reasoning faculties, which he then presents as God's Own Truth. Of course it is—he's the one saying it.

Obviously, this has some negative consequences for, say, veterans. The Vietnam vet groups in the Apocalypse Now fiasco meeting were trying to improve treatment for vets exposed to Agent Orange. It does not appear they made progress, and Weidman says they now struggle to get the president's ear at all. One upside of the meeting, however, was it was the last time veterans' groups had to deal with Omarosa, whom Trump tapped to run point on vets issues when he first entered office. Now a mortal enemy Trump wants to see "arrested," the former Apprentice was then saying nice things about the president, so he doled out out crucial responsibilities to her for which she was completely unqualified. Apparently, shortly after the Apocalypse meeting, Omarosa simply got bored of her vets assignment and other aides took it over.

It's bad.  Really bad.  And I don't mean the Omarosa angle, I'd certainly trust her more than the three businessmen thugs Trump lets run the VA.  Well, "trust" isn't the right word, though "more" is.

But what's worse is a country which has an effective electoral margin (along with the putrid, anti-democratic Electoral College) handed the country to the biggest liar and phony in our history on the power of his TV presence, his fascist Boss-man "Apprentice" character along with the long running subplot of the media in which Hillary Clinton was not one of the most dedicated public servants to ever get the nomination of a major party, but that she was written a role something like what I'm told was Omarosa's stock character of evil black woman villain. 

Our system, and by that I don't mean only the putrid, corrupt vote-suppressing state states and the Electoral College (now subject to Supreme Court rigging, as well) but also the media, from highest to lowest (and, it seems most influential) has produced Donald Trump through media saturation of the collective American mind.

Donald Trump is able to do what he is doing BECAUSE of the "free-press" which now, thanks to the innovative language and creation of neologisms of the "free-speech-free-press" industry means the media, including FOX and Sinclair, Breitbart, etc.  They installed him, they sustain him and the people who put him there, billionaires domestic as well as foreign, used the media they control, taking the corrupt elections system into account to do it.

I don't know what Francis Ford Coppola intended in making Apocalypse Now but I doubt he intended it to inform the ignorant and pathological criminal depravity of the Trump regime, though obviously it does that.   I don't generally go looking for quotes that I never read to illustrate a point but here's one from James Gray

 'Apocalypse Now' poses questions without any attempt to provide definitive answers, and the film's profound ambiguities are integral to its enduring magic.

How anyone could maintain a view permitting ambiguity about the moral depravity of the characters in that movie or have the intention of leaving the audience with an ambiguous view of what they presented is disturbing. 

I think it's related to that thing that Terry Eagleton talked about, the pose of suspended judgement and decision that is such a big part of the folly of modernism and the demands of the materialist-scientistic view of life.  The claim that unless  something has the status of proof required by nothing but pure mathematics, we are not to assert the truth of something.  If that was what Coppola got out of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it leaves me to wonder if the fault was his or Conrad's.  Which is one of the reasons I've come to wonder about the efficacy of using fiction to make points about such serious life or death truths and about the entire project of modernism, as can be read in the quote by Jack Levine right under the blog header above.

I would like to hear Coppola on this, on how dangerous such stylish ambiguities are when a reality-TV president misremembers the directorial the auteurial intent in the movie. 

Making a movie to make a point is about the most lavishly, expensively inefficient and incredibly stupid ways to make a point that have ever been dreamed up.  Writing an opera to do that is probably less of a waste of resources, effort and time.  Making a TV drama series must be at least as bad, especially if it goes into more than a couple of seasons.  Though presenting Trump as a fascist boss-man seems to have gotten across with a dangerous number of people.  If the point was about the depth of evil of the charters in Apocalypse Now, built off of the presentation of evil in Heart of Darkness,  I doubt that more than a minority of the audience gets the point.   That is even more true when it is a high-budget extravaganza with audacious and memorable effects of the kind that will be adjudged to make it a great movie.  The part those play in the ambiguous take away from the famous "Ride of the Valkeries" scene of the movie is probably one of the main contributions to Trump's use of it in his gawdy, vulgar mental furniture and, as a result of people buying his TV persona, in his use of it in governing us, including the veterans Jack Holmes wrote about.

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Is the left any better?  I'd have thought so back when I subscribed to four lefty mags, before I went online.  I don't think so now that I've read a lot of the lefty thinking, only instead of producing electoral victory and powerful presidencies, the left produces electoral impotence and (perhaps as a result) impotent presidencies such as those of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

The Trump regime is just the most recent and extreme in a series of disastrous presidencies since the high point of American liberalism, the Johnson administration got suckered by the Harvard boys and some Generals into sinking it in the mire of the Vietnam war.   One of the strongest tools they used to talk Johnson into increasing the American presence there was his fear of the media calling him weak, saying he "lost Vietnam" and empowering the Republicans who were not yet overtly fascist.  The American media was wildly supportive of the Vietnam war in the early 1960s and, I would say, well into the Nixon administration, that is after they helped use opposition to the war to end Johnson's plans to run in 1968 and then to defeat Hubert Humphrey when he got the nomination in his stead. 

The part that the "new left" played in that self-defeating idiocy was no where near as important as the role that the media played in it, and I would include Hollywood which has never been remotely liberal in general and when it has been it's generally been pretty stupid about it.  I mean, Susan Sarandon is hardly the only one,  Aaron Sorkin is as big a tool in his own way.  Never, ever trust a Hollywood liberal, especially one who wants to prop up an updated version of JFK's Camelot, which was a lot of hooey even before his assassination.  In his own way, I think Obama or at least many of his supporters thought it was going to be President Bartlett and CJ and Leo and Toby and the team as they elected Jimmy Smits who won narrowly over the noble Republican  (it was that big a pile of bullshit) Alan Alda who would be offered a job and CJ got to be chief of staff.  Well, in the real life that such TV produced, we got Trump.  Shows you how realistic that show was.

The left are as big a bunch of suckers for show biz as the right, it's just they like different shows.  Even some of the best of them, such as the crew at Majority Report show signs of it.  The lower quality rungs of the left are as wallowing in show biz as the right.  I doubt there are many of them serious enough to miss or give up their shows to save egalitarian democracy.   I used to think it was all that pot we smoked, now I think it's all the TV and movies that sank the left, and the lefty magazines that were running their own old movies of lefty classics on a loop through their heads.  Look at the movies the Hollywood lefties were making, look at the hagiographic junk produced about losers like Emma Goldman and the Hollywood lefties.  John Reed, for Pete'sake, that total and complete asshole douche-bag John Reed!