Conservatives in Hollywood?

It was hard to parody Hollywood’s loony limousine liberalism this summer. “I’m coming out,” trumpeted actress Jane Fonda about her plans for an anti-Iraq-war bus tour (thankfully later canceled). “I have not taken a stand on any war since Vietnam”—if “stand” is the right word for her 1972 lovefest with the enemy. Paramount announced that conspiracy-minded director Oliver Stone, who described the 9/11 terrorists’ “revolt” as a legitimate “**** you, **** your order” to culture-controlling American movie corporations (of all things), will helm Tinseltown’s first large-scale drama about the attacks. David Koepp, co-writer of Steven Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds, likened the movie’s ravaging aliens to the U.S. military in Iraq. And on the Huffington Post website, such celebrity lefties as Rob Reiner and Laurie David huffed daily about President Bush’s outrages against civil liberties, Mother Earth, and all that’s proper.

But guess what: ever more Americans are shunning Hollywood’s wares—and disgust with Left Coast politics, both on and off screen, clearly plays a part. In a time of declining moviegoing, what gets people out to the theaters, it turns out, are conservative movies—conservative not so much politically but culturally and morally, focusing on the battle between good and evil, the worth of heroism and self- sacrifice, the indispensability of family values and martial honor, and the existence of Truth. Hollywood used to turn out a steady supply of such movies—watch just about any film from its Golden Age of the thirties and forties—and it still makes them once in a while (sometimes thanks to off-screen lefties like Steven Spielberg). We may soon see a lot more of them.

There’s no question Hollywood is reeling. Film attendance is down a wrenching 12 percent from last year, and a May USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll found that nearly half of American adults go to movies less often than they did in 2000. Some pundits have blamed the rising price of tickets, but in constant dollars a ticket costs less than it did 25 years ago. Others believe that it’s all those DVDs that people are buying—except that DVD sales are slumping, too. The most likely explanation is the left-wing politics. “You can date the recent box-office decline from the end of the summer last year, with the intensification of the presidential campaign,” notes conservative film critic and talk-radio host Michael Medved. “It wasn’t just Hollywood’s hostility toward President Bush; it was the naked, raw partisanship.”

If even one in ten Bush voters boycotted Hollywood after hearing the latest Tim Robbins anti-Bush diatribe or seeing yet another big-screen conservative villain (like the Dick Cheney look-alike who nearly destroyed the world in last year’s The Day After Tomorrow), it would add up to 6 million fewer viewers, Medved points out. “This is what many people in the movie industry don’t get: when you express hostility to conservatives, many Americans feel that you’re expressing hostility to them.”

Surveys support Medved’s theory. A Hollywood Reporter poll finds that nearly one in two Americans might shun a film starring an actor whose politics repulsed them. “The politics is definitely having an impact,” observes Govindini Murty, an actress and editor of Libertas, an influential conservative film blog. “Do car companies insult Republicans in their ads?”

When Hollywood does put its liberal worldview aside to make movies that embody traditional values, it often scores big with the public. Consider 2004’s Spider-Man 2, a sequel far better than the original. Directed by Sam Raimi, the movie is a visual wonder: the scenes of Spider-Man (played by soft-spoken Tobey Maguire) battling the tentacled benefactor-of-humanity-turned-terrorist Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina) high above New York—furious tangles of fists, mechanical arms, and shattered glass and stone—virtually explode off the screen. Spider-Man 2 is so eye-catching that you might miss the story’s old-fashioned moral truths.

The movie is a fable about duty and heroism. Young Peter Parker decides to hang up his Spider-Man costume, since his super-heroics—made possible by the bite of a genetically mutated spider—have kept him from chasing his dreams, which include, above all, winning Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). Parker takes this step after visiting an aging hippie doctor, Grateful Dead shirt under white scrubs, who advises, in vintage if-it-feels-good-do-it style: “You always have a choice.”

Yet as city crime skyrockets and the threat of Doc Ock grows, Parker’s conscience haunts him. In a crucial scene, his loving Aunt May (Rosemary Harris), the moral center of his life, sets him straight. “Everybody loves a hero,” she says. “People line up for them, cheer them, scream their names. And years later, they’ll tell how they stood in the rain for hours just to get a glimpse of the one who taught them how to hold on a second longer.” Her old voice grows somber. “I believe there’s a hero in all of us, that keeps us honest, gives us strength, makes us noble, and finally allows us to die with pride, even though sometimes we have to be steady, and give up the thing we want most. Even our dreams.”

Struck by her plain wisdom, Parker eventually does the right thing, not his own thing: Spider-Man returns and saves Gotham from Doc Ock. Not, though, before a band of straphangers risk their lives by stepping between the injured superhero and his terrifying enemy, proving that one doesn’t need superpowers to be valiant—a lesson that New Yorkers know well after September 11. The movie’s essential message is exactly contrary to the guilt-free “just do it” ethos of the sixties: sometimes the choice you have to make, to live a morally meaningful life, is to do your duty. The movie resonated powerfully with the public, grossing a whopping $374 million domestically, and it took in another $400 million or so overseas. Factor in DVD sales, and you’re getting close to a billion-dollar movie.

Pixar Studio’s dazzling animated superhero film The Incredibles (2004) is another box-office winner—domestic gross $261 million—with a surprisingly right-of-center worldview. Writer and director Brad Bird’s story, enjoyable for kids and their folks too, revolves around an appealing family of five, who just happen to be hiding the fact that they’re superhuman. Like others with enhanced abilities, parents Bob and Helen Parr (the former Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl) “retired” with the help of the federal government’s “superhero relocation program.” Tort-crazy lawyers, you see, had slapped the superheroes with so many spurious lawsuits on behalf of those they’d saved—“He didn’t ask to be saved, he didn’t want to be saved,” one lawyer histrionically complains—that it became impossible to use special abilities without incurring financial ruin. The Parrs now raise their kids in a typical American suburb, a seemingly typical family.

The defense of excellence—and frustration with the politically correct war against it—is a central theme of The Incredibles, as in a scene when Helen chides Bob for not attending their son Dash’s “graduation” from fourth grade. “It’s psychotic,” Bob thunders. “They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity, but if someone is genuinely exceptional. . . .” In another scene, Dash yearns to play school sports, but Helen says that his super-speed would make it unfair. “Dad always said our powers were nothing to be ashamed of—our powers made us special,” Dash complains. “Everyone’s special, Dash,” his mother tritely replies. “That’s just another way of saying no one is,” ripostes Dash, glumly.

The film’s science-wizard villain, Syndrome, seething at the superpowered (since he has no superpowers himself), has been killing off the heroes with his advanced technology, which he then will use to play champion. “Your oh-so-special powers,” he snarls at Bob. “I’ll give them heroics. I’ll give them the most spectacular heroics the world has ever seen! And when I’m old and I’ve had my fun, I’ll sell my inventions, so that everyone can have powers. Everyone can be Super! And when everyone’s Super . . . no one will be.”

The Incredibles affectionately embraces the bourgeois family, flaws and all. The Parrs have their difficulties: teenager Violet is sullen, the kids fight, Mom and Dad bicker, Bob hates his drab insurance job. But for the Parr kids, the family bond is all-important: a worried Violet, suspecting (wrongly) that their middle-aged father might be having an affair—Helen has rushed off to rescue him—tells Dash, “Mom and Dad’s lives could be in danger. Or worse—their marriage.” And the parents will risk anything to protect their children, as the film thrillingly demonstrates more than once. Like Pixar’s 2003 runaway winner Finding Nemo, the movie shows children “what adults are supposed to do,” writes author Frederica Mathewes-Green on National Review Online—“to be brave and self-sacrificing, to defend children even at risk to themselves, to give, even in the face of ingratitude.”

Nor are Spider-Man 2 and The Incredibles the only recent movies to bring conservative values to the big screen and win huge, enthusiastic audiences. Robert Zemeckis’s Cast Away (2000) is an updated Robinson Crusoe, starring Tom Hanks as Chuck Noland, a Federal Express troubleshooter marooned for years on a desert island. The movie makes us keenly aware of the benefits—the immense human achievement—of an advanced capitalist society. (Untypical for Hollywood, Cast Away depicts a big corporation as a caring and effective organization: when Noland returns after his rescue, FedEx takes him in like a long-lost family member.) For castaway Noland, a rotten tooth is a near-lethal problem, finding a little fresh water to drink a matter of existential urgency. “Zemeckis and [screenwriter William] Broyles file a brief in the case of Locke v. Rousseau, coming down squarely on the side of civilization,” writes critic Jonathan Last. “There is nothing either romantic, or even beautiful, about the island Noland is stranded on. It is a prison.” Noland’s survival depends on the washed-up detritus of civilization: FedEx packages from his crashed cargo plane and a door torn from a port-a-potty, which becomes a makeshift sail.

Cast Away quietly repudiates the sexual revolution, too. Reunited with his true love, Kelly, Noland discovers that she has married and is a mother. The meeting is overwhelming for both—it’s clear that Kelly still loves Noland, and his love for her, we know, has kept him going through his years of solitude. But Noland recognizes that his own happiness isn’t paramount. “You gotta go home now,” he says to Kelly, tearfully: there’s now a family involved, and the family is the basic institution of the civilized order he has rejoined.

Finally, as he later reflects, Noland realizes that survival on the island required more than rational efficiency, as important as that is; he also needed something like faith. After his rescue, he tells a group of friends about succumbing to despair as a castaway and trying—and failing—to commit suicide. “I had power over nothing,” he recalls. “And that’s when this feeling came over me like a warm blanket. I knew, somehow, that I had to stay alive. Somehow . . . even though there was no reason to hope. And all my logic said that I would never see this place again. . . . And one day my logic was proven all wrong, because the tide came in, and gave me a sail.” Perhaps we need more than reason alone to lift us above animal nature and become fully human, Cast Away implies. Though director Zemeckis on most accounts belongs to Hollywood’s liberal establishment, this is a profoundly conservative film, like his earlier blockbuster Forrest Gump, which conservatives applauded as a repudiation of the sixties.

Martial virtues, long jeered at by liberal Hollywood, have enjoyed a big-screen comeback over the last half-decade or so. Peter Jackson’s sweeping adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003) teaches us about the need for free men and women to stand up with military force to totalitarian evil—and about the potential of power to corrupt even the most decent from within. Many observers have likened Mordor’s destructive horror in the movies to the Islamofascism that now threatens the West, just as readers of Tolkien’s novels likened it to Nazism. The films have grossed over $1 billion domestically and twice that overseas. Spielberg’s 1998 World War II blockbuster, Saving Private Ryan, devastatingly realistic in capturing the horror of military combat, also extols martial virtues, in the heroism and honor of U.S. soldiers.

And all this is before coming to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, the 2004 movie that became a flashpoint in the nation’s culture wars. An emotionally gripping and devout retelling of Christ’s crucifixion in the dead languages of Aramaic and Latin, The Passion filled theaters worldwide with tradition-minded evangelicals and Catholics, many of whom rarely go to the movies. Despite fierce (and unjustified) criticism that the film was intolerant and anti-Semitic, The Passion, made for $30 million, grossed a staggering $370 million domestically and another $240 million overseas, making it one of the biggest movie sensations ever.

The size of the market for such conservative films first grew clear in the late sixties and seventies, when Hollywood nearly stopped making them. Swept up in the era’s revolutionary spirit, the industry junked its decades-old production code—which mandated respect for marriage, the military, and religion, and forbade cussin’ and nudity—and went in for movies geared to “a rebellious generation . . . challenging every cherished tenet of American society,” as leftist film scholars Seth Cagin and Philip Dray approvingly put it. Production-code-era Hollywood hadn’t ignored the darker side of human existence, but even its hardest-boiled noir films weren’t anything like this. The countercultural movies of “New Hollywood”—such as Arthur Penn’s violent, criminal-glorifying Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Robert Altman’s cynical antiwar comedy M.A.S.H. (1970), Hal Ashby’s sordid paean to the sexual revolution Shampoo (1975), and Martin Scorcese’s urban nightmare Taxi Driver (1976)—wowed critics, who shared their anti-establishment and anti-American attitudes.

But moviegoers turned up their noses. Weekly film attendance in 1967, the first year after Hollywood dumped the production code, plummeted to 17.8 million, from 38 million the year before (television had already eroded moviegoing from its late-1940s peak of 90 million a week). “In a single one-year period,” Medved notes, “more than half the movie audience disappeared—by far the largest one-year decline in the history of the motion picture business.” That audience then hovered around 20 million for the next three decades, despite a growing U.S. population.

There’s no mystery why so many stay home. Still dominated by countercultural types, Hollywood keeps churning out “edgy,” envelope-pushing movies—more than half of its films receive R ratings, for example—and Americans keep giving them thumbs-down, as the correlation of profit and ratings shows. Only five of the 50 top-grossing movies of all time have R ratings, and 13 of the top 100. A big 2005 Dove Foundation study examined the 3,000 most widely distributed Hollywood movies from 1989 through 2003 in each ratings category. It found PG- and PG-13-rated films between three and four times more profitable on average than R-rated ones—and G films, like this year’s hit nature documentary, March of the Penguins, more profitable still. The average R movie loses $6.9 million, the study showed; the average PG movie made nearly $30 million; the typical G movie made over $70 million. And a Christian Film and Television Commission study of the box-office receipts of the top 250 movies over the last three years found that films expres- sing a strong traditional moral message, whatever their ratings, earned four to seven times as much as movies pushing a left-wing cultural agenda.

Hollywood owes its best recent years—2002 and 2003, when it cracked the 30 million ticket mark again for the first time since 1966—largely to the massive box-office success of a handful of conservative, family-friendly movies, including the first two Lord of the Rings installments, Finding Nemo, and the low-budget smash My Big Fat Greek Wedding, virtually an ethnic Father Knows Best. The non-R movies draw more children to the theaters, as you’d expect, and more moviegoers 40 and up, too—their parents. “The largest consumer segment in America is mainstream families with traditional values,” emphasizes Dove chairman Dick Rolfe. National Association of Theater Owners head John Fithian concurs: “Family values sell tickets.”

There’s a simple explanation of why Tinseltown churns out so many commercial duds. Elite filmmakers want to make moola, of course—and they still do, lots of it, though not nearly as much as they could be making. But giving the public what it wants isn’t their prime motivation. More important is their wish for recognition as artists from peers, critics, and the liberal elites, says Emmy- and Oscar-nominated writer and director Lionel Chetwynd, one of Hollywood’s most vocal conservatives. “And it has been true from the late sixties on that if you wanted to be seen as an artist, you have to be a liberal—you have to rail against the government, be edgy,” he adds. Having the right artistic vision can mean other social advantages, too. “Making something commercially successful and appealing to a broad public, like The Incredibles, is less likely to get a Rebecca Romijn look-alike to sleep with you than making dark, hard-hitting, critically acclaimed material like Million Dollar Baby,” says longtime Hollywood watcher Medved.

Further reinforcing Hollywood’s leftish leanings are liberal interest groups that monitor script content for “offensive”—read: politically incorrect—content. This pressure can utterly transform a film project, as Tom Clancy will tell you. In his novel The Sum of All Fears, Muslim terrorists explode a nuke at the Super Bowl. When Clancy optioned the book and the film went into development, the Council on American Islamic Relations got to work. The 2002 film villains: white neo-Nazis, not Muslim fanatics. Some Hollywood production companies actually have outreach offices that contact advocacy groups ahead of production to vet potential film scripts. “Keep in mind [that] one of the reasons why the FBI or the government or business are the villains is because everyone else has a constituency,” former Motion Picture Association head Jack Valenti points out.

The PC concerns, internalized in scriptwriters’ heads even before any advocate complains, can produce bizarre incoherence. Novelist and screenwriter Andrew Klavan’s True Crime is about an innocent white man on death row, railroaded because officials needed to prove that the death penalty isn’t racially biased. “The only one who figures this out is this politically incorrect journalist who can see through the B.S.,” Klavan relates. The gripping 1999 movie version, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood as journalist Steve Everett, transforms the innocent death-row inmate into a black man (played by Isaiah Washington). The movie works, even if it takes the anti-PC edge off Klavan’s novel.

But the screenplay leaves in a sequence depicting a black woman confronting journalist Everett for caring only about injustices against whites and not blacks—even though the movie now revolves around the reporter’s relentless quest to exonerate a wrongly convicted African American. “That scene no longer makes any sense,” Klavan laughs. “The screenwriter apparently found the original politically inappropriate.”

Even so, jolted by The Passion’s huge success, Hollywood seems to be catching on that it is neglecting a large part of its potential audience. “When something does nearly $400 million in U.S. box office, and it isn’t in English—it makes an impression,” says former Universal Pictures boss Frank Price. The New York Times reported in July that studios have hired “newly minted experts in Christian marketing” to help sell movies with religious or family themes to red-state America. After cold-shouldering Gibson when he shopped around The Passion—he famously had to finance it himself—the studios lined up for the chance to distribute his next movie, the Mayan-language Apocalypto, with Disney landing the deal.

But a movie comes out of a worldview, and the Hollywood of Barbra Streisand, Rob Reiner, and Alec Baldwin may still not get it. Libertas’s Murty says that a publicist for Ridley Scott’s expensive 2004 flop about the Crusades, Kingdom of Heaven, asked her and her filmmaker husband, Jason Apuzzo, for advice on marketing the film to conservatives and Christians. Invited to a press screening along with representatives of various Christian groups, the two watched in disbelief as the movie opened with a Catholic priest beheading a woman and stealing her rosary—and went on in that vein, while also presenting the Muslims as noble and wise. “Every single person directly associated with the Church in the movie is a murderer or a liar. They really thought this would appeal to Christians,” Murty recounts. “Some of these people live in this completely sealed world in West Hollywood and didn’t register how offensive the movie would be.”

Nevertheless, several indicators suggest that the film industry’s cultural stance may be changing more dramatically than hiring some new marketers. For starters, Hollywood is home to a growing right- of-center presence, including hotshot young producers like Mike De Luca of DreamWorks and Gavin Pollone, and rising screenwriters like Craig Mazin, Cyrus Nowrasteh, and Klavan. What’s more, if reports are true, other young Hollywood types are on the Right, but keep their views quiet, for fear of career trouble in a still-liberal town. “It’s becoming increasingly clear that a significant majority of the young people coming into Hollywood are conservative,” opined Chetwynd this summer. Last fall, Details magazine’s exposé “Young and Republican in Hollywood” caused a stir by “outing” comedian Adam Sandler, actor Freddie Prinze Jr., and others as secret right-wingers. AMC’s 2004 documentary Rated R: Republicans in Hollywood, directed by former Democratic speechwriter Jesse Mosse, concludes that Hollywood will be shifting right as the under-40s become its new establishment. Already reinforcing David Horowitz’s long-established Wednesday Morning Club, which hosts conservative speakers for open-minded industry listeners, are such newly formed right-wing salons as the Hollywood Congress of Republicans and the discreet Sunday Evening Club, for still-closeted rightists.

When a trendsetter like Polone (subject of a glowing 2004 New York Times Magazine cover story) can observe that “we live in a much more conservative country than the entertainment industry had thought it was, and it would be much smarter for them to move in that direction,” it’s a pretty safe bet that the new Hollywood establishment will indeed be very different from the one that it soon will replace.

No one seems better positioned to move Hollywood right than billionaire Philip Anschutz, whose Anschutz Film Group oversees two studios: Walden Media and Bristol Bay Productions. Owner of everything from oil fields to railroads to newspapers, and a major contributor to conservative causes, Anschutz decided not long ago to begin a career as a twenty-first-century Louis B. Mayer. His agenda: producing humanistic, family-oriented films. “We expect them to be entertaining, but also to be life affirming and to carry a moral message,” he told a Hillsdale College audience last year. Anschutz sees a golden market opportunity in such movies. “Hollywood as an industry can at times be insular and doesn’t at times understand the market very well,” he explained. But he also “saw a chance with this move to attempt some small improvement in the culture.”

Like an old-time film mogul, Anschutz has nailed down the distribution side. His Regal Entertainment is the nation’s largest movie-theater chain, with about 18 percent of all U.S. indoor screens. He keeps a firm hand on the creative process. “Many things happen between the time you hatch an idea for a movie and the time that it gets to theaters—and most of them are bad,” he told his Hillsdale listeners. “So you need to control the type of writers you have, the type of directors you get, the type of actors you employ, and the type of editors that work on the final product.”

Anschutz demanded, for instance, that director Taylor Hackford revise the 2004 Ray Charles biopic, Ray, toning down the film’s focus on the performer’s drug problems and sexual exploits. After initially threatening to quit, Hackford came around to Anschutz’s more family-oriented vision. The resulting movie is an honest—there’s no effort to whitewash the drugs and womanizing—but ultimately inspiring narrative of Charles’s successful perseverance against the great odds of his own blindness and moral flaws and society’s racism. The movie—funded entirely by Anschutz, after every major studio had rejected it—garnered six Oscar nominations, winning two, including Best Actor for Jamie Foxx, riveting in the title role.

Anschutz is off to a gangbuster start, and not just because of Ray. This year’s bittersweet Because of Winn-Dixie, based on the children’s novel by Kate DiCamillo, tells the story of ten-year-old Opal (newcomer Annasophia Robb) and her preacher father (Jeff Daniels), who’ve just moved to a lower-middle-class Florida town as the movie opens. Opal’s mother, hating being a preacher’s wife, had abandoned the family several years earlier. The film unsentimentally captures the pain and loneliness that divorce causes children to feel. Portraying both small-town America and the Baptist faith with unpretentious sympathy, Winn-Dixie made back most of its modest $14 million production budget on its opening weekend and is currently one of the top-selling DVDs in the country.

Anschutz’s most ambitious effort yet is the forthcoming $150 million adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, a Walden Media–Disney co-production opening in December—the first in what Anschutz hopes is a long-running franchise. The Narnia books—an extended allegory of Christ’s resurrection—have sold 120 million copies worldwide, “more than either Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings,” Anschutz notes, suggesting the eye-popping box-office potential. Walden will work closely with Christian organizations to market the film.

A third signal that the film world is growing less culturally monolithic is the launch last year of two annual conservative film festivals: the American Film Renaissance Festival in Dallas (and soon to expand to other cities) and the Liberty Film Festival in Hollywood. Featuring conservative-themed movies, panel discussions, awards, and other events, both proved wildly popular and generated wide press coverage, including articles in Time and USA Today.

The festivals also generated golden networking opportunities. After a Michael Medved talk at AFR’s event, festival co-founder Jim Hubbard tells me, several aspiring filmmakers in the audience held up finished DVDs and complained that they couldn’t find distribution. “Here I am,” announced David Goodman, who had just started his own distribution company. He swiftly signed distribution deals for several films, among them Is It True What They Say About Ann?, an amusing documentary on liberal-baiting controversialist Ann Coulter (she signs one left-wing college student’s shirt: “Have fun in Guantánamo!”).

Feisty independent documentaries dominated both festivals; many, like Chetwynd’s Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain Begins to Die, were pointed rebuttals to Michael Moore’s mendacious oeuvre. Winning the Best Documentary award at the Liberty Film Festival was Stephen Bannon and Timothy Walkin’s In the Face of Evil, based on Peter Schweitzer’s bestseller Reagan’s War. The viewer comes away from the film’s canny account of Reagan’s anti-communist efforts, from his Hollywood days in the 1940s until the fall of the Berlin Wall, with a sense of the late president’s greatness—and of the decisive importance of political leadership. “As someone who had lived these times, I was very moved by the detail and emotion in which they were brought out on film,” pronounced former Polish president Lech Walesa.

If the festivals produced a potential star documentarian, it’s Evan Coyne Maloney, 33, an affable ex–software developer. His hilarious and disturbing 45-minute short, Brainwashing 101, exposes PC bullying at several universities. In one revealing sequence, pompous Bucknell economics prof Geoffrey Schneider gleefully acknowledges his desire to subvert the values that his students have learned from their parents. “Imagine your typical very wealthy Bucknell student taking a course which is a critique of capitalism and often saying things like: ‘Your parents are doing awful things around the globe, either indirectly or directly,’ ” Schneider crows. The “big danger” at Bucknell, in Schneider’s view? “Our trustees have made noises every now and then about interfering in the curricula and making sure that we have enough different perspectives.” Horrors!

These documentaries represent the Right’s first efforts to compete on a cinematic terrain long dominated by liberals. It’s a crucial development, says Lee Troxler, a former Reagan aide who wrote and helped produce Fahrenhype 9/11, a sober refutation of Moore’s monster-hit polemic Fahrenheit 9/11 that has shown on 500 campuses and sold a half-million DVDs. “Just as the pamphlet was the persuasive tool of choice during the American Revolution, the documentary has become a valuable tool in politics and culture today,” Troxler argues. “You can bring it out very quickly, without spending a lot of money—the technology makes it possible.” Reagan documentary co-director Bannon, a conservative Catholic, is equally revved up about the medium. “If the last election showed one thing, it’s that culture drives politics,” he told the New York Times in June. “I want to take the form that is now owned by the Left—the documentary—and use it to help drive an overall political agenda that supports the culture of life.”

After long using liberal Hollywood as a political punching bag, conservatives are moving to an if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them approach. If they can create a popular cinema that artistically reflects a right-of-center worldview—rather than crudely imposes it—it would be a huge advance for the Right in America’s ongoing cultural struggles. After all, it’s not just reason and analysis that will decide the outcome of those struggles. The imagination and the heart—the Dream Factory’s stock-in-trade—will play at least as large a part.

"I have not seen Million Dollar Baby. I will not see Million Dollar Baby. I will not subsidize Million Dollar Baby. I do not need moral guidance on "life issues" from Clint Eastwood, whatever his virtues as producer, director and actor."

Ok, this is what I don't understand, and someone can explain this to me. Why dooes anyone need moral guidance, period, from films or TV shows or books? Are you not already an ethical person? Do you not know right and wrong? Are we not adults? We are not monkeys, we can discern and use our God-given reason to separate fiction from non-fiction. We gain moral guidance from non-fiction, from our beliefs about how the world *is*. Fiction is about how the world *might* be, *could* be. So what, Clint Eastwood might be a wretched human being--why is anyone trying to learn morality from him? Why do people think that Million Dollar Baby is a treatise on ethics? It's a story about how a couple of people saw the world, and they had a flawed perception of it. Why do we need the movie to make the moral judgement for us? Should movies think for us, too? Eat for us, exercise for us, do our taxes?

"I am familiar with Kurosawa, Shakespeare (within limits) and Homer but I confess to having difficulty seeing the comparison."

Because all these directors, writers didn't deal with homily stories, at least w/ all their great works. They are not C.S. Lewis and JRR Tolkein. They did not provide "moral guidance". You are not going to know how to live from King Lear, or Romeo and Juliet, or the Iliad, or Kagemusha, or Anne Karenina, or Citizen Kane, or Frankenstein, or the Godfather. They did not have this checklist of guidelines they had to hit in their stories, so that the audience would know that heroes go to heaven and villains get punished.

I agree with you an things like Seabiscuit, as I noted in my earlier post, there are legitimate complaints about Hollywood being irresponsible around children and family oriented films. There is a difference, however, between films aimed at families and films aimed at adults, and I don't mean porn. I wouldn't recommend a 10 year old child read Agamemnon, Notes From the Underground, or the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldricht. However, that doesn't mean that said child should abstain from reading them when he's 17.

" Why frequent such bilge as Million Dollar Baby???? What unresolved moral conflicts? Suicide is wrong. Euthanasia is wrong."

Yes, they are wrong. Why does the film need to tell us that? Does Romeo and Juliet need an epilogue where one of the Capulets gives a soliliquy straight to the audience and preaches to them, "and don't you kill yourself or you might burn in hell like Romeo and Juliet are doing right now!" What I meant by unresolved moral conflicts is that--the answer isn't provided by the outcome of the story. The nonfiction--which is real--instead of fiction--which isn't real--must answer the questions. Fiction asks, nonfiction solves.

"Parables were a literary art form by which Jesus Christ instructed his listeners and readers as to how they ought to live. Parables are, well, stories. Do you think that J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were simply speculating, challenging, playing with the rules, and providing catharsis? I don't think so and neither did they, if you are familiar with their lives."

Since you are being snarky, I feel justified in responding in kind. No, parables *aren't* stories. Parables are *parables*. That is the category they are assigned to. They are no more a story than a poem or a song or a haiku or a painting or five seconds out of a two hour film. They have a *specific* point they are trying to convey to an audience. The argument made in the parable supercedes the form. Not every story is trying to convey a specific point to the audience. Some may, and it could be a good point, like Lord of the Rings or Spiderman 2. Fine, those are nice to have as well (I love Spidey 2, Batman Begins and the Incredibles). Some stories may have a message, and it could be a *bad* one, like Syriana or the Cider House Rules. Many however, if not most, *don't*. C.S. Lewis and JRR Tolkein are *not* the standard by which all fiction must align, any more than Homer or Shakespeare. It's a logical fallacy, a strawman to hold up the thin and limited form of the parable, and suggest that's the standard by which all stories are to fall in line.

I may be lenient and say every parable is a story, but the reverse is not true. A story is an artform that involves plotting, characterization, metaphor (maybe), pace, language, imagery. Message or *theme* is not a requirement. It may have one, but doesn't have to in order to be a story. You either appreciate the artform as is and what it can offer, or you don't.

Speculation drives most great fiction. When the writer sits at his desk, he speculates. A story--whether it has a good message, a bad message, or no message at all--is based on something that should not be. A contradiction, a conflict, a challenge, and the writer takes that gem of an idea and runs with it, sometimes not sure where it's going when he seizes it! I hit speculation hard, because I am mainly a science fiction geek first, and that's what so called "speculative fiction" does--it asks, "What if?" It's a joy, the imagination, and unfortunately I see too many people whom I agree with politically attack the freedom of the imagination, and thus alienate potential "converts" to our side.

Two books I recommend are "Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from it's Cultural Capativy" by Nancy Pearcy and "The Well Educated Mind" by Susan Bauer. They are conservative Christian authors (Bauer's a homeschooler and Pearcy praises Martin Olavsky), and they challenge and refute the "only good story is that one that teaches moral guidance" philosophy.

EXPLANATION:

Your distinction between fiction and non-fiction is wrong. Either can be used to convey moral and amoral or immoral messages.

Kurosawa's Seven Samurai is the obvious model for The Magnificent Seven. Fictional? Yes. Moral? Also, yes. You aren't really serious in suggesting that Shakespeare is not a purveyor of moral guidance in his dramas???? Do you really think Homer was not an author of moral guidance in The Iliad and the Odyssey???? The Godfather Trilogy, regardless of subthemes is a VERRRRRY moral tale and derives its fanatic audience from those of us who recognize that fact. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (check her biography, husband and friends) never planned to deliver a moral guidance but rather an antimoral one.

Enough of specific refutation of the authors you chose. Let us add a few others.

We agree on Seabiscuit. Good. Next is Cinderella Man, telling the very moral tale of James J. Braddock, Heavyweight Champion, played by the none too moral Russel Crowe, who is a truly professional actor nonetheless and brought to the screen a substantially forgotten morality tale of American sport. Unfortunately, we were required to witness and ponder the lowlife behavior of Max Baer lest the crassness quota remain unfilled. Barely, I would let my kids see this movie because the moral content would outweigh the unnecessary cold sores.

J.R.R. Tolkien was a committed Catholic and wrote a three volume allegory to lead his readers to the Truth. C. S. Lewis, though a close friend of Tolkien and of Charles Williams, was a committed Protestant and anti-Catholic but well worth reading for his moral guidance and his craft. They are two of the standards of fiction. Can anyone even name the author of Million Dollar Baby????? Will anyone be able to name that author five years from now???? No. And the obscurity will be no surprise. Euthanasia is one of our cultural antimoral fads. Five years from now it will be old hat. We may be pondering the WHAT IFs of sex with anti-war culturally diverse reptiles who operate abortion mills for anti-nuclear gay whales or some such abomination that may be capturing the interest of the bored culturati of that time and Hollywood will rush to the screen with cinematic portrayals of WHAT IF to make such things seem attractive to ever more jaded audiences. None dare call Hollywood related even accidentally to actual Western Civilization.

As to whether 17-year olds ought to spend their time wallowing in morally corrupt and corrupting literature, plays, movies, and other questionable works of "art", the short answer is no for seventeen-year olds and no for those younger and no for those older. You are free to frequent what we Catholics promise in the Sacrament of Penance to avoid---the near occasion of sin. You are also free to suffer the temporal and eternal consequences of doing so. A man who claims to be committed to avoid adultery is wise not to hang out at cathouses just to enjoy the humor and repartee available through the companionship of the ladies lest he find himself compelled to enjoy other aspects of their hospitality as well. If he falls, he can hardly blame the ladies when he ought not to have been in their company in the first place and could easily have avoided the temptation.

Suicide and euthanasia are wrong. WHY DOES A MOVIE NEED TO SUGGEST THAT THEY ARE RIGHT OR WISE OR PRAGMATIC OR OTHERWISE WORTH INDULGING??????

You don't think haiku or other forms of poetry carry moral guidance??????

I have spent the better part of my life acting in what was the conservative movement. It has boundaries. The idea of substituting a loyalty to "freedom of imagination" for the boundaries and principles of what was a great movement and will be a great movement again is not attractive.

To do so for the mere reason of not offending potential "converts" is positively craven. If you told me that you wanted to "convert" to Catholicism but could not believe that Jesus Christ was God, that you cold not believe that He is present Body and Blood in the Eucharist under the continued appearance of bread and wine, that you could not believe in the Resurrection, etc., I would not say welcome, convert. I would say: Get back to us when you have changed your mind on those things and any other doctrines you reject.

The conservative movement was and will be made up of, well, conservatives and not of "free thinkers." We may agree, from time to time with libertarians but it is merely coincidence. John Cornwell, who purports to write non-fiction, has delivered an antimoral message in his "Hitler's Pope" vilifying the memory of Pope Pius XII who saved more Jews than any other human being during the Holocaust and was publicly recognized for it by Golda Meir, the Israeli government, and more recently by Rabbi Dallin in Commentary, the Weekly Standard and several books on the subect. The Rabbi uses non-fiction as a moral message and moral guidance to correct the "non-fiction" lies and expressed evil of Cornwell.

Ayn Rand was no paragon of moral virtue. Hers was a life of militant atheism and serial adultery, complete with a phony "philosophy" concocted to justify both. Nonetheless, even Rand understood (The Romantic Manifesto) that it would not be a moral act to commission a great artist to paint a life-size portrait of a beautiful woman but to be sure to include a cold sore on her lip to reflect a temporary condition marring her beauty while she posed. Hollywood is in the moral cold sore business. It is not challenge. It is not speculation. It is antimoral cultural graffiti. Morality is well-settled. WHAT IF? is merely an invitation to the seduction of one's morality to place it in service to him who persuaded Eve. On matters such as euthanasia, abortion, homosexuality, there is and never will be any open questions. The questions are long-since resolved.

I know right from wrong. So do you and so does every other human courtesy of Adam and Eve saying yes to the forbidden fruit of the tree. I am an adult, whatever that has to do with frequenting the near occasion of intellectual sin. "Adult" themes in literature, photos and movies are often claimed to be those which maximize the portrayal of the maximum number of genital and eliminatory organs in various stages of mindless heat as graphically as the producer dares. As to whether "we" are adults, I cannot offer an opinion. I can only speak for myself. I am an adult and that description bears no resemblance to the warped view of adulthood expressed as various disordered forms of WHAT IF?

I am not a monkey. Darwin may well have been one. You can speak for yourself since we are not acquainted.

The question is not as to whether we "need moral guidance" from films or TV shows or books. It is whether we need antimoral conditioning conveyed through films, TV shows or books.

I am more ethical than I used to be and hope that I am less ethical than I intend to be.

The last two sentences of your second paragraph are obviously rhetorical, do not follow logically and need no answers.

"Your distinction between fiction and non-fiction is wrong. Either can be used to convey moral and amoral or immoral messages."

You didn't read what I wrote. Fiction is NOT non-Fiction. They are no more than same than a dream is reality or a word is an object. You are blurring lines, blurring concepts, and not *discerning*. Yes, fiction *can* offer a moral or immoral message (how many times do I need to type this?), but just because they can doesn't mean they *do*. This is a false choice you are offering--another logical fallacy. Just because a car *can* have a male or female driver, doesn't mean that every car has someone in the car at all times. 75% of cars are unoccupied, parked somewhere, likewise 75% of fiction can be a stimulus instead of a conclusion.

Fiction is basically a lie. It's about how things *aren't*. Fiction really isn't a lie, if you admit it's fiction and thus FREE from representing reality. It does make fiction a lie when you make the insistence you have made, that fiction = non-fiction. Morality is supposed to be true. If you suggest that morality should come from fiction, you are suggesting morality should come from a lie. Which is not only bad to base ethics on lying (ie the Plato, Hitler, Stalin worldview), but an argument in bad faith, as truth is generally considered a cornerstone of morality.

"Kurosawa's Seven Samurai is the obvious model for The Magnificent Seven. Fictional? Yes. Moral? Also, yes. You aren't really serious in suggesting that Shakespeare is not a purveyor of moral guidance in his dramas???? Do you really think Homer was not an author of moral guidance in The Iliad and the Odyssey????"

What about Rashomon? Or Kagemusha? Or Kurosawa's adaptation of King Lear, Ran? Iliad presented an ethical worldview, but hardly one's that's Catholic or Christian. If you agree with the ethics presented in the Iliad, you are a pagan. If you distance yourself from it, parcel it, discern and go "Woah woah woah, that's not what I mean, I mean I just like the cool violence you know people getting heads ripped open or the part about Achilles reclaiming his honor", well guess what, you're *discerning* and appreciating it for what it is! You're not condemning the entire work because it is either a.) written by and for pagans and presenting a pagan ethos or b.) exceedingly vulgar and x-rated (You *have* read the Iliad haven't you, and you know it has sex and dismemberment and child sacrifice in it?) You're thinking like *me*! You can't do that, I'm the Satanic enemy! It is not consistent to defend Kurosawa, the Godfather, and the Iliad, and then make the arguments you have made. These examples do *not* present the Catholic ethos you believe must be presented in every example of fiction, or haiku, or song, or poem, or whatever.

"As to whether 17-year olds ought to spend their time wallowing in morally corrupt and corrupting literature, plays, movies, and other questionable works of "art", the short answer is no for seventeen-year olds and no for those younger and no for those older...I would not say welcome, convert. I would say: Get back to us when you have changed your mind on those things and any other doctrines you reject."

Great, goodbye reading and thinking! Let's have a book burning while we're at it! Frankenstein, the works of Euripedes and Aeschylus, Tolstoy, all morally corrupting becuase they do not provide explicit moral guidance for the reader and/or they provide alternative worldviews to what we believe in real life. I think you should email every Conservative, and tell them that they shouldn't read Frankenstein, that their kids shouldn't read it, and that they aren't members in good standing of the conservative movement if they like it and appreciate it. See how large the conservative movement is then, with this notion that works of great literature or great music or mediocre literature or mediocre filmmaking shouldn't be read/viewed by anyone of any age. I doubt William F. Buckley, Francis Schaeffer and Condi Rice (Led Zeppelin fans), Rush Limbaugh (big Sopranos fan), G.W. Bush (big Austin Powers fan), agree with your definition of the Conservative movement and what traits are attractive or unattractive in it.

I guess those mentioned above would have to deconvert from the conservative movement, to accept your Catholicism analogy, because they willfully expose themselves to "intellectual sin", whether the nihilism of Led Zeppelin or the Sopranos or the sexual lewdness of Austin Powers. That must be the case, if people who like these things aren't members of your conservative movement. Wow.

You are confusing cause-effect, with stimulus-response. This is a problem in the conservative Christian movememtn. When you knock a water bottle on the floor, you cause the effect of water spilling on the floor. When someone whispers in your ear to kill your neighbor--and you do it--the neighbor has not caused you to kill your neighbor, he has provided a stimulus, and you have provided the response. You didn't have to kill your neighbor, no one forced you to like you forced the water to spill on the floor. You could have ignored the message of the whisper, you could have refuted the whisper, you could have punched the whisperer in the face. Stimulus-Response is NOT Cause-Effect. You have a will that decides what "corrupts" you.

You have a choice, when presented with a stimulus--agree to it, renounce it, or do nothing. When you watched the Godfather, the Godfather provided some bad "role models" for you. It gave you behavior choices--stimuli--and you had a varied amount of responses available to what was on screen. You could emulate it and join the mob, you could believe in the nihilistic worldviews of the characters, or you could do none of the above and just observe, and watch, and appreciate the creative arc of the fictional story as is. If the Godfather didn't cause you to join the mob, to kill and to steal, then Million Dollar Baby, Frankenstein, and Notes from the Underground don't cause these things either.

You can't have it both ways--that is, Story A (Rashomon, the Iliad, the Godfather) isn't morally corrupting even though it has murder, rape, sex, pagan worship, blasphemy, ect., but Story B (Frankenstein, Million Dollar Baby, ect) is morally corrupting because it has murder, rape, sex, pagan worship, ect. Just as fiction is not non-fiction, cause-effect is not stimulus-response. We are NOT monkeys, yet your arguments suggest that we must be programmed by our environment and by what we are exposed to. No such thing. We are autonomous individuals, able to wonder, discern, and use the tool of logic to separate fact from fiction, A from B, a good idea and from an ok idea, and ourselves from our media.

If someone watches Million Dollar Baby, uh oh they're going to be caused into believing in euthanasia! Uh oh, if someone watches the Godfather, he's going to cut off horses heads and shove them in beds! Uh oh, if someone reads Frankenstein, well Mary Shelley's two centuries old mindwaves will reprogram that poor soul's neurons and from the grave she has cloned herself into the mind of another, ready to spread sexual liberation through her new body. One is only morally corrupted by Frankenstein and the Godfather if he himself is *stupid*. And a stupid person has bigger problems than the movies he sees or the books he (tries to) read.

Right here, with your praise of the anti-Catholic Godfather and the Iliad, yet condemnation of Million Dollar Baby and Frankenstein, we have dismantled your view of fiction. Some films and books with bad behavior and dubious worldviews (keep in mind Coppola made the Godfather trilogy as an attack on the American Dream and the capitalistic system) are tolerable because *you* like them, others are not because you haven't seen them/read them thus don't like them. That's arbitrary.

" You don't think haiku or other forms of poetry carry moral guidance??????"

Do you know what a haiku is? Do you know the philosophy and worldview that led to the haiku? Hardly a philosophy one should expose himself to, as the haiku comes from the Japanese view of nature, that itself comes from Shintoism. And Shintoism has had some negative consequences just in the past 80 years.

"I am more ethical than I used to be and hope that I am less ethical than I intend to be."

You speak of Catholicism--I work for a Catholic services organization. I get my hands dirty to feed the poor and clothe the cold. My buddies who work with me love the Sopranos, and classic rock, and Celtic drinking songs (speaking of the temptation of "intellectual sin"), yet they do explicitly what Christ commanded us to do--feed the poor, help the needy, heal the sick (although the latter is a little hard for our organization to do). This is *non-fiction* morality. Actually DOING--not speaking, not whining, not typing--what's right.

I see this often in the Christian movement, of people who think that they have done a good deed if they complain about what someone else is doing, instead of doing the right thing that the other person isn't doing (not unlike people who claim to know the Bible, but don't know Hebrew or Greek). Again, back to the start--fiction and non-fiction is blurred. Complaining about what fictional characters are doing is somehow ethical?!? They're not real, they don't exist, no sin was actually done by Anne Karenina at the end of the novel, because she isn't real. If the sin didn't happen, than the righteous indignation over the fictional sin doesn't have any substance either. Meanwhile there are poor black kids who need tutors, homeless people with severe emotional problems who need friendship (and Christ), and atheists who need salvation, and *won't* get it from some stick-in-the-mud who whines about every little form of media that doesn't provide a perfect gameplan of morality and ethics for the reader/viewer.

"Total Truth" by Nancy Pearcey was written for you. I pray you read it, because it speaks directly to the current of anti-intellectualism and "cultural captivity" of the American Christian. Can't drink, can't dance, can't listen to secular music, can't watch R rated movies--how can one witness to the lost if you don't understand where that poor soul is coming from, what that person loves and fears and wonders about? How can that person trust you if you urinate on everything he or she likes (ie, the movies and the paintings and books he enjoys)? God made the imagination, he made the talents and skills within us all. We should appreciate them, while disagreeing with the message (again, many do not even have a message), as parts of God's GOOD, yes, GOOD creation. The imagination is what it is, speculation is what it is, "what if?" is what it is, and they aren't *sin*. They are wonderful parts of God's creation, and the most hated and misunderstood by God's servants on this earth.

I am directing this to you, my brother in Christ, not your friends you ping and probably misrepresent my post for--when we die and go to Heaven, Jesus isn't going to look at us and say "Gee, here's an addenum to your mansion because you didn't see Million Dollar Baby, what a good deed you did!", rather he will say "Here's where the extra floor of your house would have been if you had taken that atheist friend of yours to watch Million Dollar Baby, and used that shared non-sinful experience as a chance to get inside his inner world, understand it, then over a beer explain with clarity a better way."

In order to witness effectively, you have to understand, you have to relate. In order to relate, you have to expose yourself to the culture. And you might have some FUN in the process. It doesn't have to be MDB, it could be ancient greek "pagan" literature, or Japanese religion and art, or Led Zeppelin, all of which are apparently outlawed to the good conservative Christian, according to the tenets you have outlined in your post. You undermine your own strength, your own will, and thus the heart God has put in you, if you think that you will somehow be corrupted by a stimulus you have control over how to respond to. You do yourself a disservice by denying the power of discernment--that no one at any age can read something like Notes From the Underground--you lobotomize yourself, and worse ask others to do the same.

Another great gift given by God--logic. Distance. The ability to separate oneself from one's environment, from one's experience, from the film before your eyes and the "message" it may or may not propose. If you expose yourself to a pro-euthanasia "message" or "argument" (and MDB doesn't have one, but for the sake of argument) than you have bettered yourself, because you have challenged yourself and renewed and reinforced your understanding of your own arguments against euthanasia. You can better respond to what the pro-euthanasia crowd says, because you actually know what they're going to say. Cultural captivity, intentional intellectual weakness, is not ethical, but *un*ethical. It won't save souls. It won't make you better prepared for defending the faith. It's not rational. God don't make no junk, yet we have this undercurrent in Christianity that Logic and Fiction are junk, instead of using them as tools to witness, relate, understand, enjoy, and thus in the end, refute the wrong worldviews.

And I'm done, if you want the last word you can have it.

You certainly are done. You may praise logic or intellect but you do not evidence either.

I am a Roman Catholic. I am a conservative. I am not a social worker. I am a retired and recovering attorney who represented more than 1100 people who were arrested for sitting in in abortion mills, desterilizing the suction machines with raw eggs poured into their inner works to be a very efficient medium for growth of bacteria so that the machines had to be torn down by repair engineers putting the mills out of business for far more than the one day. About 30 of the 1100 were convicted (mostly of non-criminal infractions when they had been charged with felonies) which is more of a result of their militance than of their legal representation. Most of the 30 also refused to pay fines or sign probation papers.

I have posted that I can not very well speak for your experiences since we are not acquainted. You fail to return that modesty and, accordingly, assume much that is not so. Thus, more facts: I graduated a Jesuit prep school long enough ago that the Jebbies were still quite Catholic. The Iliad is not as high on my list of Classical literature as was the Aeneid. We translated the entire Aeneid (360 pages in the Oxford edition) and the capable Jebbies did challenge us as to the ideas and lifestyles of the Trojan pagans who founded Rome. They did not promote the idea that it would be really neat to engage in all of Aeneas's behavior even though he was to pagan Rome: Pius Aeneas. Therein lies the difference.

If you think that your false distinction between the uses of fiction and the uses of non-fiction is true, you are very wrong but you are welcome to advertise your wrongness wherever those who are right are free to demolish your errors lest they be believed by the impressionable. One cannot stand up in a theater and argue with the amorality/immorality of Clint Eastwoods decidedly anti-life propaganda and lifestyle. At least not with due regard to the rights of the ticket-buying public. The late John Cardinal O'Connor strongly advised Catholics NOT to protest Kazantzakis's despicable Last Temptation of Christ lest they inadvertently encourage others to see it. It crashed and burned at the box office which ought to be the fate of all such trash.

If these views mark me as anti-intellectual in some fashion, so be it and proud of it although wallowing in every speculation is no more intellectualism than working your way through Reno cathouses constitutes love. Whatever my intellect may be and, I assure you that it is in a very high sliver of the 99th percentile, it is high enough for me to recognize that, if I disagree with God, His is far and indefinably higher and deserves deference from the likes of me and from the likes of thee. On the other hand, if I agree with God and disagree with you, you are wrong with certainty because you disagree with God. My participation in that particular comparison is utterly irrelevant other than to stick to God's side of the argument.

I most certainly have read what you have written. I most certainly disagree with and reject most of it as I ought. Much is incomprehensible faux intellectual gibberish. Your friends and associates may be wowed by what passes for your arguments. I am not. Whether fiction is what things aren't or what things are, the complaint is that Million Dollar Baby is rank propaganda and anti-moral and anti-Judaeo-Christian propaganda at that. Those who develop a habit of submitting themselves to such trash as Million Dollar Baby and providing money to subsidize its production are gravely in error. Well, God gave free will to thee and to me. You are free to go to hell in a handbasket, if you choose. Working at some soup kitchen will not ameliorate unrepented sin.

Hippocrates was a Greek pagan and a father of medicine. He admonished doctors in the words of the oath they were to take to neither perform abortions nor to facilitate them. Pagan? Yes. Moral, also yes. We Catholics believe in Natural Law. So did Hippocrates whether he would have articulated it precisely that way or not. I agree with the pagan Hippocrates on Natural Law and the evil of abortion. If that makes me a pagan in your imagination, have a party. Your argument as to Plato, Hitler, Stalin is an example of incomprehensible gibberish. I would also note that I have read the Bible and it has sex (too many instances to cite) and dismemberment (ditto) and child sacrifice (Jeremiah, inter alia). Rumor has it that the book is Truth and is for moral guidance even so. It contains parables as well which are also for moral guidance. AND, if someone wrote a totally fictional account along the same lines (faithful to the principles) and avoided the propaganda for evil that marks much of Hollywood, that fictional account would also be for moral guidance whether you admit it or not.

You keep on having the same problem of thinking that I want you propagandized by fiction. I do not. I simply want me and mine not to be propagandized by the evil that emanates from so much of Hollywood and we accomplish our purpose by avoiding that which we find unacceptable lest we encourage or subsidize more of the same.

You give yourself far too much credit by referencing yourself even sarcastically as "the Satanic Enemy." Lucifer is far more capable than thee or even Million Dollar Baby.

Your choices of Euripedes, Aeschylus and Tolstoy do not bolster your argument. Perhaps you should use the fudge-packing lit of James Baldwin as an example of that to which we ought not to waste time paying any mind. Ohhhh soooooo sensitive, soooooo intellectual, soooooo morally "complicated", sooooooo pathetic! Baldwin who long ago assumed room temperature is sorry now!

I don't particularly care what you may regard as consistent or inconsistent. Who was it that observed that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds?

I must admit that I do like cool violence. The baptism scene in Godfather I is superb and likewise Michael Corleone's minions trying valiantly to rescue JP I.

On the other hand, half vast pop psychology enunciated as psychobabble is tedious and trite.

The 17-syllable Japanese poetry is a high art form and does carry moral messages. I do not have to be Shinto to think so any more than I have to be Shinto to admire the character, competence, brilliance and good fortune of the great Lord Toronaga in Clavell's Shogun and to revel in the postscript to that novel.

The Godfather is a saga of justice, and a better justice than that afforded by mere government.

I know Bill Buckley personally. I was a leader in Young Americans for Freedom on a state and regional level for some years. Bill invented YAF. I bet that you do not know Bill from what you write. He would not claim to be personally consistent with Catholicism in all of its beliefs. He is nonetheless a wonderful man who understands the actual conservative movement as you do not. He invented it which is a major advantage he enjoys over you. My wife worked for him for years. I could sic her on you on the matter of literary criticism but charity forbids. She studied under Cleanth Brooks. She says that you should, as a sci-fi fan re-read your Jerry Pornuelle (sp.?) to disabuse yourself of your curious notions as to the uses of fiction.

I could turn you over to the actual Catholic intellectuals here (some of whom have been pinged, but, again, charity suggests that I refrain.

The Rev. Mr. Francis Schaeffer was a remarkable man but decidedly NOT a fan of Catholicism. Nonetheless, like C. S. Lewis,he is well worth reading. Condoleeza Rice, Ph.D., was NOT in the conservative movement despite working at the Hoover Institute and other virtues. Rush Limbaugh, the closest thing to a movement nowadays, did not emerge in public until about nine years after the conservative movement died of euphoria over the election of Ronaldus Maximus and the simultaneous gutting of Jimmuh Peanut and the cream of the Senate Demonratic commie caucus on election night 1980. Dubya has his virtues but involvement in the conservative political movement is not one of them. He is just a good guy and good president.

AND, ummmm, please, the very idea of some misbegotten little twerp like Austin Powers having his name in the same sentence as the word "sex" is a bit much for the contemplation of anyone who is a fan of or participant in normal sex. I suppose you find Pee Wee Herman entertaining too, even when he is off duty and hanging out at porno theaters doing whatever that was that got him arrested.

In the eleventh to the last paragraph of your ramblings, you use the imperial we, which is never acceptable unless you happen to be, oh say, Queen Victoria: "We, Victoria in the fifty-sixth year of our reign....."

I am, BTW, a street-fighting Elk who patrols the periphery of Catholicism on FR and when I find someone making superficially persuasive arguments against the Faith which you do not, I can turn them over to those who care more for scholarly argument than do I. Of course, they have to have something to argue with. As I am pinging many, scholarly and otherwise, not all of them Catholic, it is not because you have earned refutation but for their entertainment.

If these authors you are promoting (the homeschooling moms who think that we should be wallowing in bad fiction/may God protect their own children) had any sense they would rethink their priorities. Save your prayers for worthwhile causes. I am well enough along in my journey that I need neither them nor you to tell me how to waste my time with the likes of Million Dollar Baby.

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