ABOUT THE WEEK BEFORE LAST I confessed that I love to do research, to go looking for answers to questions, to fact check ideas I've been told or taught about history, biography, etc. Writing blogs over the past fifteen years, almost and before that getting into blog brawls has been a chance to indulge myself. I really went into the wrong line of work, I'd have loved to be a research librarian. For one thing, especially in the age of card files and the necessity of looking at books you'd walk and climb through a large library to find, I'd have probably been in better shape. Sitting on a piano bench the hours it takes to play one isn't exactly a serious cardio workout.
Not that I don't like the new technology, when it works. Machine search, word and phrase search capabilities are a lot more efficient at locating the parts of books or documents that will provide you with answers, those things you half remember from reading something decades ago but which would take forever to find. Especially those things you read at the university library fifty miles away but, now, available to you from Archive.org or Project Gutenberg along with lots and lots of public domain and pirated books and documents that may not have been held by the university library in an ink on paper copy. I have repeatedly warned people that now that those capabilities have become available that a lot of the former ideological mythology of, for example, the old and then the "new left" was doomed to discovery.
I have warned Darwinist ideologues and those who bought into the post-WWII constructed myth of the eugenics-free, innocent Darwin that that myth is doomed because all you have to do to have that lie shattered is to read his words, read the ideas by the likes of Galton and Haeckel and Greg he endorsed and supported as science, read the understanding of Darwinism by the next generation such as Karl Pearson and the German scientists he cited and collaborated with on "racial science" and his own children, especially Leonard Darwin and you have the direct link from Darwin sitting in his home in Britain and the Nazi's Final Solution, argued out, even at the infamous Wannsee Conference in explicitly Darwinist claims of natural selection. The necessity of the creation of a similar false front for the rightly infamous Ernst Haeckel, a proto-Nazi, as has flowed out of a certain University of Chicago scribbler and alleged scholar, so as to prop up the post-WWII plaster saint Darwin, ignoring or lying about Haeckel's writing that Darwin endorsed as science is either a death knell for the post-war myth or for the last shred of intellectual integrity in the same period.
And what I said about that could certainly be said about a large number of other things, much of the lefty mythology which we grew up with, many of its heroes, the oligarchy - corporate media created and promoted myths of the cult of the "Founders" "the Constitution" the "First (or Second, depending on which side of the lies you want to argue) Amendments" the smash-hit Broadway lies of Hamilton being a part of that, all of those are either seriously damaged or totally obliterated by reading the original sources and admitting what they mean. Either those myths go or you give up any pretense of morality and integrity in the scholarly or, uh, "artistic" endeavors that have wrought or promoted those lies.
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In the days before I finally got shut of TV, one of the shows I used to watch was Sneak Previews, the one where Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert reviewed movies. I don't know why I watched it, I'd pretty much given up going to the movies about the start of that show. I still liked some, a few of the few adult level movies being made in the 60s and 70s, I guess, generally not the block busters. As I recall I generally agreed more with Siskel than Ebert, I think I'd have liked him better as Ebert seemed kind of prickly. Though I think you'd probably end up being more the listener than the talker with either one. Which is good too. It might come as a surprise but I'm considered a bit taciturn in real life, it's when I feel like I have to say something that people think I'm a mean little bastard.
When I was having the brawl here, and elsewhere over the movie Birth of a Nation, unambiguously a movie that incited violence and got people killed as it was the stated inspiration for the early revival of the most infamous of American terrorist groups, the Klu Klux Klan - people didn't want Hollywood getting the credit for doing that and doing it knowingly. But that's the history.
In preparing my arguments I went to the website that has a number if not all of Roger Ebert's movie reviews and I found the one that he did on Birth of a Nation and found that he indulged in one of the most dishonest of all dodges in those in the scribbling profession, as he was, in the journalistic racket that he worked in, denying any moral responsibility for the foremost force in doing evil, predictably, knowingly, obviously on purpose. He claimed that the movies, far from having a role in promoting such evils as it inspires merely reflects those evil tendencies that are already there in society. He said:
Griffith and "The Birth of a Nation" were no more enlightened than the America which produced them. The film represents how racist a white American could be in 1915 without realizing he was racist at all. That is worth knowing. Blacks already knew that, had known it for a long time, witnessed it painfully again every day, but "The Birth of a Nation" demonstrated it in clear view, and the importance of the film includes the clarity of its demonstration. That it is a mirror of its time is, sadly, one of its values.
To understand "The Birth of a Nation" we must first understand the difference between what we bring to the film, and what the film brings to us. All serious moviegoers must sooner or later arrive at a point where they see a film for what it is, and not simply for what they feel about it. "The Birth of a Nation" is not a bad film because it argues for evil. Like Riefenstahl’s “The Triumph of the Will,” it is a great film that argues for evil. To understand how it does so is to learn a great deal about film, and even something about evil.
But it is possible to separate the content from the craft? Garry Wills observes that Griffith's film "raises the same questions that Leni Riefenstahl's films do, or Ezra Pound's poems. If art should serve beauty and truth, how can great art be in the thrall of hateful ideologies?"
The idea that art or, as I'd put it when it comes to movies "art", can, on the basis of "art" be divorced from the real life consequences that come from it is the same kind of intellectual dishonesty that was practiced by the cult of the Founders which gained its greatest traction as the white segregationists resisted the small gains made against American apartheid, the de facto continuation of the slave power in the same decades that that movie was being used as a recruiting tool for the KKK, there were reports of it being used that way well into the present, I wouldn't be surprised if it still is used for that as I'm sure Trimph des Willens is used to cement neo-Nazism into some semblance of cohesion and provide encouragement which was the purpose of making the movie, it wasn't any friggin' technical exercise, and, as I'm sure, a lot of our killer cops love to watch Dirty Harry movies - just as I have every conviction that a lot of serial killers probably watch movies and TV shows that they find encouragement and, perhaps, instruction from.
Ebert did, in fact, exonerate Clint Eastwood in similar terms that he granted absolution to D. W. Griffeth, absolving him from the most regressive of Republican-fascist politics, the racist content of his movies, as if those can be divorced from his Republican-fascist act of reducing the first Black President to a mute chair so the old asshole could ridicule and yell at him without risking being answered to the delight of the party of the Dixiecrats and neo-fascists.
I think films are more often a mirror of society than an agent of change, and that when we blame the movies for the evils around us we are getting things backward. "Dirty Harry" is very effective at the level of a thriller. At another level, it uses the most potent star presence in American movies -- Clint Eastwood -- to lay things on the line. If there aren't mentalities like Dirty Harry's at loose in the land, then the movie is irrelevant. If there are, we should not blame the bearer of the bad news.
Ebert, typical of the professionally interested journalist, doesn't, of course, come to the logical conclusion that watching Dirty Harry presented as a hero (the self-conscious intention of Eastwood and his director and the writer (hilariously considered a "liberal") could inspire a killer cop to become one, carrying out what Harry clearly wanted to do. That the movie had an effect on those who saw it, which is certainly something that the people who make movies knows they do. I would bet that Ebert would not hesitate to claim that movies had a beneficial effect on society when their messaging promotes, for example, racial equality. Such people clearly want to have it both ways.
In exonerating the fascism of Clint Eastwood's movies, Ebert relied heavily on pretending that the things that that most controlled of all, um, "art forms" in which every single second, every shot, every line, every recorded second, every product placement, etc. is done to achieve an effect on the audience, using the basest aspects of their assumed characters, appealing to that no less than a tobacco company or beer or vodka company does the same in their creative branches that produce advertising WITH THE INTENT OF HAVING AN EFFECT ON THE BEHAVIOR OF THOSE WHO SEE AND HEAR THEM.
One of the things I've learned in writing this and my previous blogs and working for another blogger is that a lot of the distinctions we have become accustomed to making are artificial. The one between journalism and show biz is one the breaching of which was noticed by Karl Krauss as far back as the decade when Birth of a Nation was produced. In the period of TV and, especially cabloid and online "news" that distinction has disappeared in everything but the admission of it. I don't think it was ever anything like a bright line separating them. The pretense that there was one is exactly that, a pretense. It's one of many pretenses that becomes dangerous with the advance of technology, which, with the ability of computerized information tracking and word search and classification technology allows a level of audience manipulation that the old time ad men could only dream of. One of the earliest to understand the political uses of that was the Republican-fascist direct-mail guy, Richard Viguerie (I learn from the internet this morning, in hilarious coincidence, his middle name is "Art") and his methods have gone way, way past where he took them, way past where they merely harvested the insanity that was already there into today world where lies can be fed through suggested links to those identified by algorithm as being fertile ground for the poisonous fungi that racists, fascists, corporate manipulators, white supremacists, misogynists, etc. want to plant there. Doing what Griffiths certainly did in planting the seeds of the KKK well past where it had gone before it had the help of the movies and the idiotic belief that what the movies say is true or, even stupider, innocent of its effects.
The First Amendment is no help in fighting this, it is too inspecific in that it enables lies and hate speech, racism (I'd guess that if they could do that intentionally the slave holding majority of the "Founders" would have retained that "right") it privileges them by not specifying that what people have a right to say and publish is the truth, the common good, equality. Fiction and falsehood should not be put on the same level with them as our Constitution so recklessly does and which today's civil liberties industry has made even more dangerously ubiquitous, the journalistic and other scribbling and media professions as guilty as hell in that, too.
What they might have assumed could be done in that area safely or manageably in the ink on paper age has certainly gone the way of silent films, it was, in fact, an outmoded assumption long before that.
Update: I should have noted that Ebert, as a journalist of the type he was, a movie reviewer, certainly had no right to pretend that the media has no power to change peoples behavior. His entire career was to encourage people to pay money to go see movies or to discourage them from paying money to go see movies. Otherwise there is no reason for anyone to read his reviews or the newspapers to publish them or the movie theaters and studios to pay money to put advertisements for the movies on the same pages with his review. I might have liked Roger Ebert and agreed with him, especially in many of his positive reviews, but when he exonerated the movies in the typical post-WWII civil libertarian way, he was a complete hypocrite.
Good god, you're an asshole who knows nothing about movies, pop culture, or any of the non-religious stuff you gas on about at tedious length here. And I won't even get into the fact that the Klan revival of the 20s had zero, zilch, nada to do with BIRTH OF A NATION (it was the product of a PR firm in the 20s that saw it as a way to merchandise white hoods).
ReplyDeleteBut here's the bottom line, you ignorant schmuck: what you're arguing is that if a ten year old ties a towel around his neck and then jumps the roof of his house in an attempt to fly, it's the fault of the SUPERMAN tv show.