Posted on 06/03/2015 11:05:42 AM PDT by Sean_Anthony
Reality TV is now dictating to the masses what is 'normal' and making millions of dollars at it in the process
There’s always a Paul Harvey-type “the rest of the story” for everything.
According to Greek mythology, a young Narcissus fell in love with his own image reflected in a pool of water, the pool of life.
Hurtling forward to centuries later, along comes a preening, latter-day Narcissus, Barry Soetoro, posing in full presidential gear as Barack Obama, who when he peered into the pool of life, saw not just himself reflected there but millions of people just like him standing behind him.
American culture corrupted Europe? That’s a laugh.
As I recall that “strangers have sex in a box” reality show was created in Britain before infesting us here.
American Liberal Culture is pushed globally through TV and Movies.
Before motion pictures, Actors performed on stages in front of live audiences. They could only entertain a few thousand, and even the best of them could only make so much money. Actors were generally regarded at that time as people of low character, fit only to consort with Gamblers, Whores and Bums.
The Thomas Edison invented motion pictures, and Actors suddenly found their audiences in the millions. Not only did this give them more money, but it empowered them politically as well. Suddenly they could strengthen opinions they held by influencing the general public with a heart tugging movie.
The same tactic had been working well with literature, and using the medium of movies to influence the public should also work.
Thus did low life scum find themselves in positions of influence within our society, and able to use the tools of their trade to further degrade that society.
Yes, the Entertainment industry is pushing the country ever leftward. They couldn't do it so much back when they had minders, but now there is no control on them at all. In fact, there is a homosexual veto board that has to approve scripts before movies or tv shows are allowed to be made.
We now have a system in which leftism is deliberately baked into the cake.
Libs used to decry America’s “cultural imperialism” on the rest of the world, when we were exporting positive ideas like democracy and capitalism. No complaints from them now, as America’s primary cultural exports have shifted to homosex and moral deviancy.
Hollywood has an effect on culture but Europe theater has had a terrible effect on American theater and their socialistic corrupt ways have influenced us through the American left.
It’s shocking to compare the offal that passes for entertainment today with many of the old films and TV shows before culture rot took hold in force. It’s hard to believe that were PSAs urging families to pray together and to attend their church or synagogue for worship.
I just read her explanation and I liked yours better. I am suspicious of that Gallup poll that shows America shifting to the left. The Bruce Jenner travesty, hysteria, is not bubbling up from the bottom (the culture) but is being forced on us from the top - the mass media in all its forms. That picture we can’t get away from is gut shuddering repulsive. As for reality shows, young people don’t watch TV.
I think most such movies and PSAs were made back when Hollywood had government appointed monitoring boards. Since the 1920s, it has been recognized that the people who work in this industry cannot be trusted to maintain decency or propriety in their products or even their daily lives.
There must be something about playing "make believe" for a living that tends to bring out the worst in people. Of course, liars are the best pretenders, so perhaps you have to have a bit of rot in your soul to pursue such a career in the first place.
I think it is no coincidence that some or our cities that have the most contact with foreign influence are some of the most socialist and most liberal. (Boston, New York, Los Angeles and San Fransisco come to mind. )
Shows like "Glee" and "Modern Family" deliberately paint an inaccurate, non-objectionable picture of "gay" characters. That it is completely unrealistic does not change the fact that it influences people. These and other shows deliberately misinform the public as to the true behavior of the majority of "gay" people.
They do not show the diseases, the suicides, the astonishing number and frequency of sodomy partners, and various bizarre and disgusting practices like fisting and felching.
There is a reason they don't show the reality of "gay" life. If they did so, people would rightly recoil from it, and they would get no political traction for the normalization of their perversions.
Hollywood has become a weapon to be used against us. We need to take it apart and sterilize the pieces. The first step ought to be repealing the Hollywood tax cuts, as Glenn Reynolds of "Instapundit" is so fond of saying.
We need to cut their financial throats in any way of which we can conceive.
One thing I’d gathered from speaking to a good number of people who worked in the film industry from the 1920s to the 1950s, and even including many of their ordinary generational peers, is that they had a genuine fear and aversion to the prospect of film being used for the purposes of “messaging” or propaganda. They’d seen what the Soviets and the Nazis did with film in the 1920s and 1930s, and were viscerally revolted by it. The studio bosses kept sharp eyes on some of the lefty screenwriters that had swept in from NY/Broadway, following the transition to talkies in the late-20s/early-30s, and stomped on anything that had the whiff of a soapbox. There was a generic disgust throughout the industry towards anyone trying to utilize the medium for blatant ideological propagandizing.
But the post-WW2 crowd was of an increasingly different mindset, starting with the Dore Schary types, who fully embraced (in their minds) “educating the masses” with message-oriented narratives and subtexts.
Similar also to the way you started seeing the postwar trend towards “psychological westerns.” Villainy had to suddenly be explained by poor environments, poor familial situations, and various accompanying psychological demons. All to deflect the concept of individual responsibility. Pre-WW2, a villain was just a villain because he was a greedy blackguard who broke any and all societal rules to get his way. Ultimately, this has struck me as more reflective of reality than all the operatic, emotive naval-gazing that followed. Indeed, also perhaps a point in which the culture first really started going off-the-rails, into the mass-insanity and self-absorbtion of today.
People took immorality and attempts at propaganda far more seriously in those days. Oh sure, there was plenty of immorality in Hollywood, but they made every effort to keep it quiet and on the "down low" rather than blatantly shoving it in everyone's faces as they do now.
That industry needs some serious decimation to steer it back on course.
One other minor little thing I might like to add is that in the “notorious” pre-code era of early talkies (before the Hays Code went into effect in 1934), I’ve often gotten the impression that it wasn’t so much that the filmmakers were deliberately “pushing the envelope” for blatantly provocative reasons (indeed each state’s censor boards would snip out things, making their efforts moot), like was done in the post-war years of film and tv. Rather, it seems to me that the more risque material (in both comedies and dramas) was just more reflective of the looser standards from the New York stage crowd, swarms of which had been hired and/or enticed to go to Hollywood with the “talkie” craze. A lot of this resulting product was naturally found offensive out in most of mid-america. And the industry itself wanted the uniformity of the Hays code restrictions, rather than the crazy-quilt nature of 50 state censor boards chopping up varied pieces of their film releases.
I am glad you provided this information. Yes, that sounds exactly right. Of course actors would come from previous acting venues, and of course they would carry with them the risque morality of their previous social group.
Working out the cause and effects of history can be very interesting sometimes. A lot of the behavior we saw in that industry is easier to understand since you've filled in some of these details. Again, thanks for that.
You’re talking about WW2 items. And indeed, the American stuff even there is SO timid, compared to what the Soviets and the Nazis did. I’m referring to the majority of the product from the 1920s to the 1950s. Unless you’re casting a huge net (like a lot of liberals are actually prone to do, in regarding the perimeters of propaganda), in which anything and everything like even a generic “crime does not pay” subtext automatically constitutes propaganda, or that somehow depicting a Nazi in a negative light is of similar ideological contrivance.
I LOATHE messaging and manipulation in films, and I can cite any number of examples, from the heavy-handed preachiness of Lillian Helman’s “These Three” (1936), to John Howard Lawson’s blatantly anti-capitalist script for “Success at any Price” (1934). I never even liked “The Ox-Bow Incident” (1943) with its tiresomely self-conscious anti-vigilante message, even if some consider it a classic.
Pre-WW2, there’s very little of that, percentage-wise.
Noting that two of the “message” movies you list are from the 1930s, I still stand by my refutation of the idea that Hollywood during the pre-war era didn’t go in for propaganda (in dealing with either politics or culture/morality). Notwithstanding the quote falsely attributed to Samuel Goldwyn—”Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union”—movies like All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Reefer Madness (1936), and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) were all made (at least in part) to send messages to the movie-going audience.
I guess where I’m differing is in how we define things. It can be said that EVERY film is a message. There’s a truth to that, of course. When I’m referring to propaganda, though, I’m referring to examples in which the MESSAGE is primary to the actual story, and the writer is using it as a soapbox, hiding ‘behind’ the story to do so. That’s what gets under my skin, and always has. I know a lot of liberals have had a tendency to go with the “all films are propaganda” route, because it tends to cloud the egregious examples, which virtually all have blatant left-wing undercurrents.
But there were nearly 500 films made each year back then. MGM, Paramount, Fox, United Artists, RKO, Columbia, Republic, Monogram, PRC, Grand National. And how many of them really were consciously and deliberately pushing an ideological message? Hardly any of them. I’ve been a film buff for forty years. I’ve kept a list of all the films I’ve watched since 1979. Right now, I’m up to 4,561 films that I’ve viewed. The vast majority from the so-called “golden age.” And yes, I can cite a good number of films that seemed to really push a message. Even a little RKO b-film like “Sorority House” (1939), which was about sorority snobbery. It seemed to exist solely to push a message about this. And the screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, as I recall. Which figured. It seems the nature of lefties to USE film this way, similar to the way lefties all gravitate to teaching professions, propagating their beliefs to the masses.
And by the way, I don’t know why “Reefer Madness” gets cited so much. It was a bottom-of-the-barrell roadshow attraction. Not made by any of the named studios, and wasn’t even considered worthy of being screened in ‘legitimate’ movie theaters when it was made. Except maybe some urban fleapits. Grubby exploitation fare, which tried to sell itself as ‘educational’ material to clueless civics groups, but more often screened in tents of passing carnivals for a fee of two-bits. Considered junk then, on the same level as some ultra-low Robert J. Horner b-western (or later on, like “Plan 9 from Outer Space.”). Nonetheless, I’m still fond of hubby-and-wife Dave O’Brien and Dorothy Short, who appeared in it, while struggling to find Depression-era gigs.
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