House of Eratosthenes

Two weeks ago, as a countermeasure to Hollywood finally slipping off its rocker for good and going wombat-rabies-bollywonkers crazy, I looked to The Simpsons character Jasper Beardsly, the old man obsessed with dishing out “paddlin’s,” as perhaps our savior. There is something about the Hollywood culture, and it’s not hard to see what it is, that encourages shock value. Well, shock value is a dynamic thing, not a static one. It’s like a shark; it moves, or it’s dead. So each shocking thing that comes along, has to be much more shocking than the shocking thing that came before, or else there’s no use even trying.

That’s a problem when Hollywood starts telling us what political opinions we’re supposed to have. The nature of a reasonable opinion, one that is formed through a rational process involving sound logic used to derive credible inferences from established and empirical facts, is that such opinions are a little dull. They don’t have a lot of snap. Or zest. Or pep, or sizzle. No, you have to add that if you want it…and typically, the only way to add in snap, zest, pep and sizzle, is to mutate the reasonable opinion into something unreasonable.

So the opinions put out by the Hollywood crowd, have to get more and more zesty and zippy — unreasonable — as time goes along, in order to get the attention they crave. And, we have no Jasper Beardsly. Nobody’s getting a “paddlin’.” Everything is acceptable. That’s what we need to stop. Save us, Jasper!

Exhibit D is as follows (Exhibits A, B and C were listed in my post of April 10). Last weekend, Eli Roth, director of “Hostel,” said that we have a lot more horror movies than usual lately because the Bush administration makes people want to scream, and a horror movie gives them an excuse, in a dark theater, to do that screaming.

Roth claimed that people wanted to scream because of the “things going on in the world” and the government�s failure to help after Hurricane Katrina. He explained that horror movies offered a safe environment which allowed people to scream. Roth went on to say the seemingly “never ending war”, fighting people that do not care about our money, our “disorganized army” with “scared kids” for soldiers and the generals calling for Rumsfeld�s resignation were specific reasons for the need of an emotional release offered by horror movies.

Newsbusters, my source for this latest parade of Hollywood nuttiness, goes on to editorialize that “It is ridiculous to attempt to tie President Clinton with the horror movies released during his 8 years in office. It is just as ridiculous to blame the Bush Administration for an increase in the popularity of horror movies.”

Sorry, I can’t quite sign up to that last one. Seems I’m being asked to categorically reject the notion that a pronounced trend of successful movies within a confined period of time, fitting into a specific genre, says nothing about changes in people’s priorities and concerns.

Hope I’m not putting words into someone’s mouth there, but that’s how I’m interepreting “it’s ridiculous.” Ridiculous?

We had lots of cowboy movies in the 1950’s and early 1960’s; during the 1970’s and 1980’s, we didn’t. You wouldn’t call it “ridiculous” to assert that this change said something about what people were, or were not, ready to watch during those times. We had a lot of movies taking place in outer space during the 1980’s. We had a lot of movies made for women during the early 1990’s.

I’ll tell you why I’m going down this bunny trail. It’s long been a favorite pet theory of mine, that during the late 1960’s people lost faith in government for three reasons: 1) Vietnam; 2) Watergate, and 3) this does not get very much mention at all, but — the criminal incarceration system becoming useless.

Permit me just this much scope creep. Soon after we had an Earl Warren Supreme Court, it was established that in order to enforce the rules of constitutionality about gathering evidence, it was okay — in fact, compulsory — to magically transform guilty people into innocent people. The law, it was thought, was duty-bound to pretend incriminating evidence simply did not exist. Rapists, thugs, murderers, perverts, psychos, and creeps were turned out of the prisons in droves. Suddenly, children had no reason to believe they wouldn’t be abducted, and women had no reason to believe they’d remain unmolested.

People got pretty tired of this by 1969. For three dozen years previous, Eisenhower notwithstanding, no Republican had been elected President. Now, the great liberal “let’s give the bad guy one more chance to be good” train came off the tracks forever. Chief Justice Warren, by then plagued by health problems, retired just months after the new Republican President Nixon was sworn in. The Burger Court did very little to reverse the damage Warren did, but as far as making more damage, the party was pretty much over. And as far as the electorate was concerned, they were fed up.

Now look at what we had going on in movie-land. I say “I’ve got a movie you have to see, it’s about a man who’s family is brutalized and/or murdered and so he takes the law into his own hands” and what movie am I talking about? More to the point, when was it made? I give you this description of my movie — just what’s written above, not a single word more, and you know, to the level of certainty you can bet quite a bit of money — it was made between 1971 and 1977. During which, you know what? We didn’t have a lot of movies about crooked presidential administrations micro-managing wars and getting thousands and thousands of good young men maimed & killed. Just a few movies. Not a lot. Although, that had been happening, and people were supposed to be concerned about it.

How about a cop who is constantly yelled at by his Lieutenant because he throws the book away and takes justice into his own hands? Movies like that were made during the same era. Not a lot of movies about Watergate. Although, Watergate did happen, and a lot of people were supposed to be concerned about that, too.

No, during the seventies, movies about “Cause For Distrust In Government #3” did more than spike — they went through the friggin’ roof. This was a huge problem. The elites chose not to say a whole lot about it back then, and they choose to say even less about it now. But the contract between the government, and the governed, had been torn asunder. It was a huge glaring problem, and we can only avoid repeating it by making sure the infraction is never committed again. By making sure that creeps get smoked. Given a toe tag, and tossed in a body bag. By our government. Because that is one of the jobs government is supposed to have. Protect the innocent, from those who refuse to abide by any social contract whatsoever, those whose gears are so stripped that their continuing survival is mutually exclusive from any acceptable margin of public safety.

But I digress.

My point is, some of the logic Roth is using is sound, and not without precedent. There’s a reason why we had lots of vigilante movies in the seventies. People were fed up with the law screwing around and playing pretend with vicious, liquor-store-clerk-shooting, woman-raping, child-chopping-up perverts and creeps.

So with that precedent, I agree with Eli. People can get tired of things, and people can start to want to scream, and because of that they may have a demand for a certain genre. In my opinion, it has happened before.

But I agree with Newsbusters about something, too: The facts do not support Roth’s theory, not substantially anyway. He’s talking out of his ass, just to get some shock-value talking-points out there, and get attention for himself. Newsbusters says “Roth�s explanation had nothing to do with facts. It was simply another overt attempt by a Hollywood liberal to beat up on the President and his administration.”

Hollywood has become a fairly vicious, snarling parody of itself. Week after week, month after month, we are told we should blame the Bush administration for…just name it. The summers are too hot. The winters are too cold. My gas is too expensive. My ass itches. There aren’t enough sexy movies, there are too many scary movies. I stubbed my toe.

At a certain point, you have to say, you know what Hollywood? You’re the boy who cried wolf. I mean, way back when Julia Roberts was personally funding a “recount” down in Florida and your glittering elite upper-crusts wanted to blame Bush for everything from global warming, to mythical stories about vicious snarling attack dogs intimidating black Florida residents from voting for Gore — way back then, you were the boy who cried wolf.

You had crossed that line in December of 2000.

And after that, Hollywood liberal upper-crusters, you did it fifty bazillion more times!

It’s no longer funny to watch. It’s gotten tedious and tiring, and then painful and embarrassing…and then with a little more repetition, it’s gotten tedious and tiring again.

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Horror MoviesSunday, April 23rd, 2006

Horror Movies
Sunday, April 23rd, 2006