House of Eratosthenes

About six months ago I took out a subscription to TOTALFARK, the premium service provided by the Fark.com website. FARK is so awesome, because it has a format that encourages participation from its users, and this has caused it to explode as a presence on the innernets over the last few years or so. Articles are linked from FARK — and web servers collapse. FARK has become an eight hundred pound gorilla.

The other cool thing about FARK is that it is flooded with liberals. Snotty, self-righteous liberals who think they’ve become political geniuses because they watch The Daily Show. Liberals who don’t know or care about the difference between a fact and an opinion. Liberals who patrol the innernets as self-appointed Thought Cops, looking for evidence of opinions different from their own, be they legitimate opinions or not, so they can “correct” those “wrong” ideas and make sure the “right” ideas always have The Last Word.

So as a paid subscriber, how in the world could I resist linking The Political Teen’s list of the 100 most liberal movies of all time. Political Teen compiled the list by tabulating the amounts of money contributed to liberal causes by each well-known actor in recent times, and then compiling a database of who appeared in what film. From this, a point system was devised where each liberal movie was assigned a negative number, and then the list was simply sorted — with “American President” on top.

The consensus came back rapidly: The list is stupid. The content was stupid, and the concept was stupid. One guy offered a comment, with which I had to agree, suggesting “what about judging the movie based on content, rather than the polictical affiliation of the actors or directors invovled? …me thinks someone has a small penis.”

I don’t know about the penis thing. Mine is anything but small, of course, but more to the point, I have to take similar issue with Political Teen’s list. If the object of the exercise is to keep money out of the pockets of Hollywood liberals, then by all means, the criteria is correct. But let’s be realistic. Robert Redford is not going to the poorhouse anytime soon…and if he ever does, I can guarantee nobody close to him is going to say “you’d be rolling in it if you were a Republican, Bob.” No, Hollywood stars go supernova when the plastic surgery stops working. When they make the wrong enemies. Besides, not that I know any movie stars personally, but I get the impression they’re not known for blaming themselves when things turn sour.

But if the goal is to protest Hollywood’s service as a satellite office of Liberal America, and its investiture as a self-annointed High Priesthood of Truth, presuming to tell the rest of us what opinions we’re supposed to have, a simple change to the criteria can help achieve this. And the FARK person quoted above is right on the money. Content is important. Much more difficult to monitor across thousands of movies, but still important.

Therefore, I offer, just as a rough draft, my own list of “liberal” movies. But just ten, instead of 100.

1. The Contender, which appears nowhere on Political Teen’s top 100.
2. Fahrenheit 9/11
3. American Beauty
4. Philadelphia
5. Fried Green Tomatoes
6. A Few Good Men
7. Dogma
8. The Rainmaker
9. The Pelican Brief
10. Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones

I don’t claim this to be scientific by any means, but it is based on some kind of a “point” system, processed by the computer that is my gut. I might easily have missed…several hundred.

Historical References: Subtle references to real-life history in American politics. For example, there is a line in the Star Wars movies likening one of the lead characters to President Clinton, and the desire by some for Clinton to be allowed to run for a third term.

Down with Mayberry: This is a truly brain-damaged practice in which the story pretends to be promoting something, when it’s really declaring war on something. For example, although American Beauty pretends to be complicated, it’s really not much more than an attack on what some would call “family values.” There really wasn’t too much point to Dogma other than an exercise in annoying Christians. A Few Good Men could easily have come in as an hour’s worth of solid movie story, if the hatred for the military were to be stripped out of it.

Horse Blinders: Movies dealing with entire political offices and the people who occupy them, like The Contender, have shown a strong tendency to present a single political issue as the entirety of what’s at stake if person A gets into that office as opposed to person B. In real life, of course, most high-profile political offices that have a bearing on one issue, have a bearing on many other important issues as well. The Vice President of the United States has to make decisions about other things besides abortion rights — assuming the VP has much of anything to do with abortion. And you wouldn’t know it from watching The Pelican Brief, but a Supreme Court justice decides on a lot of other issues besides environmental protection.

Left-Wing Whining: This is where the movie’s story depends mostly, or completely, on the dictum that conservative politicians or powerful corporate conglomerates are out to screw the little guy. My habit of avoiding these movies doesn’t have quite as much to do with conservative activism, as judicious spending of my entertainment dollars. I’ve found once a movie has pushed a story involving hearty, threadbare and ethical people being pushed around by greedy, profiteering white males, such movies don’t appear to be pressured to do too much else. By itself, that’s not the way I want to spend three hours and nine dollars.

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The Most Liberal MoviesSaturday, January 28th, 2006

The Most Liberal Movies
Saturday, January 28th, 2006