Posted on 05/24/2007 5:36:14 PM PDT by wagglebee
On May 12 FSM Contributing Editor Don Feder gave the following speech at the World Congress of Families in Warsaw, Poland. Mr. Feder points out that increasing pollution and coarsening of our culture are assaulting our traditional American family values. Can this be reversed?
How many of you live outside the United States? As an American, I want to apologize to you.
Every day, an American industry drops metric tons of toxic waste in your countries and your homes. I refer to Hollywood, whose primary products are sex, violence, perversion, nihilism, attacks on religion and a thoroughgoing anti-family ethic. These are products produced both for domestic consumption and export.
That wasn’t always the case. As fans of old movies can attest, in the 1930s and ‘40s, Hollywood was unabashedly pro-family. It treated parents with respect, took sex seriously and portrayed it discreetly, affirmed faith, and generally promoted those values that foster social cohesion.
Fathers were wise and benevolent. Mothers were loving and nurturing. Children were generally respectful. In movies like “Since You Went Away, “The Best Years of Our Lives,” “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn,” the “Andy Hardy” series and “I Remember Mama” – family life was celebrated.
This ethos was charmingly encapsulated at the end of `1939’s “The Wizard of Oz,” with Dorothy’s heartfelt declaration, “There really is no place like home.”
Movies of that era called us back home. Today, Hollywood tells us that, at best, families are irrelevant, and, at worst, stifling, suffocating and an obstacle to self-actualization and happiness.
Occasionally, the entertainment industry gets it right -- makes a movie that puts families in a positive light. In this regard, two of the best were “Blast From The Past” (1999) and “The Family Man” (2000).
In the latter, a successful venture capitalist – rich, powerful, single and self-centered – falls into an alternate reality and gets to experience what his life would have been like if he’d married his college sweetheart and had children. By the end of the movie, the hero discovers that he’s missed everything that really matters in life.
But pro-family films like the foregoing are very much the exception. They could almost be regarded as throwbacks to a bygone era.
Today, the typical movie family is comically or tragically dysfunctional. To one degree or another – children are rebellious, if not self-destructive. Parents are portrayed as well-meaning fools or monsters. We’ve gone from “Father Knows Best” to Father’s a beast, or an idiot or a raving lunatic.
Typical of this assault on normalcy was a 2006 comedy – nominated for an Academy Award – called “Little Miss Sunshine.” The movie revolves around the road trip of a family that includes: a father who’s a failed motivational trainer, a mother who’s a chain-smoking neurotic, an uncle who’s a suicidal homosexual, a brother who worships Nietzsche and a grandfather who’s a drug addict. This is Hollywood’s idea of family life in the 21st century.
There are family values and there are Hollywood values.
Family values include fidelity, respect, love, sexual restraint, nurturing and mutual support.
Hollywood values are the exact opposite. The worldview which shapes today’s movies includes:
• Sexual liberation – the glorification of pre-marital sex (including adolescent experimentation), adultery, promiscuity, homosexuality and the sexualization of children. In other words, actors and actresses, writers, directors and producers want us all to live the way they do. In movies, casual liaisons usually end well. Forget about marriage; characters don’t even have to fall in love before they fall in bed. The 2005 film “The 40 Year Old Virgin,” was based on the premise that an unmarried 40-year-old man who was sexually inexperienced was a freak of nature. The next time you go to a romantic comedy, take a stop watch with you and time how long it takes for the couple to have intimate relations. You’ll only need the second hand.
• Live-for-the-moment – The family ethic is based on restraint, self-sacrifice and sublimating our own short-term happiness to the greater good – which, of course, makes long-term happiness possible. The Hollywood ethic is based on the immediate gratification of whims. It tells us that not to express our feelings – and act on them uncritically – is unhealthy, neurotic and soul-annihilating.
• The cult of the imperial self – or, in the words of the pop song, I-gotta-be-me. Hollywood regularly tells us that putting anything ahead of our own happiness – including family obligations -- is stupid, if not psychotic.
• Militant feminism – the bizarre and amply refuted notion that men and women are psychologically identical, that so-called gender-roles are socially imposed and that to believe otherwise is “sexist.” Think of all the films where 110-pound women, who look like anorexic fashion models, beat up 190-pound men, who look like football players. Hollywood actually believes that 1997’s “GI Jane” was a reflection of reality. That was the movie where Demi Moore (who previously starred in “Striptease”) became a Navy SEAL. But the family is based on gender roles. “Mr. Mom” notwithstanding, a man can’t nurture a 2-year-old as well as a woman. Men and women were endowed with physical and psychological attributes which compliment each other – the more we try to obliterate those differences, the harder family life becomes.
• Radical secularism – the belief that religious expression is dangerous and a hindrance to happiness and self-fulfillment. In film after film – including “Kingdom of Heaven,” “King Arthur” and “V for Vendetta” -- Christians are portrayed sadistic, hypocritical or repressive. But it’s faith that validates the natural family. The Bible is a veritable handbook of family values. Undermine traditional religion and you will inevitably undermine the family.
• The normalization of homosexuality – the dogma that people are born homosexual or heterosexual and are unable to change, that all voluntary sexual activity is equally good and that homosexual liaisons must be afforded the same recognition and respect as heterosexual marriage. Note all of the movies where homosexual characters are happy, helpful, well-adjusted and generally appealing – so unlike members of the typical Hollywood family. Like promiscuity, pre-marital sex and adultery, homosexuality undermines the family. The natural family will not thrive when competing models are validated.
The family ethic rejects each and every one of these nitwit notions. It posits moral absolutes and demands sexuality sublimated by monogamous marriage, marital fidelity, putting others before self, gender differentiation and the Biblical perspective on sexual relations.
These worldviews are diametrically opposed.
If you’d like to know how well Hollywood values work, compare the divorce rates of Beverly Hills and Biloxi, Mississippi – or the number of Manhattanites in therapy versus the number of residents of Rapid City, South Dakota who are going through a mid-life crisis.
Hollywood’s arsenal includes seductive images splashed across the screen, stories that stack the deck in favor of its agenda and beautiful faces selling its social poison. All we have is truth.
Of all the challenges to the natural family – bureaucracies, courts, academia, feminism, homosexual activism and the sexual revolution – this is the most potent. It invades every aspect of our lives, attacks our values and inculcates its attitudes ceaselessly.
We must find new ways to expose and counter this foe. Otherwise the real-life family of the future will look like the Hollywood family of today.
This is true and our future depends on stopping it.
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I loved The Family Man enough to buy it. It is a great Christmas movie and always brings goosebumps and tears. Successfully portraying what’s important in life is a lost art when it comes to Hollywood movies.
They produce only what we demand and buy.
Hollywood’s degradation is nothing new. “Family values” did not become the norm in Hollywood until after the Hayes Code was passed in 1934, largely due to the efforts of the Catholic Church and the women of the Legion of Decency. Take a look at movies from the 1920’s, nudity is common, lesbianism, homosexuality, divorce, etc. Plenty of “the World, the Flesh and the Devil,” as one Greta Garbo flick was entitled. Granted it was not as visually graphic as today as that was not socially acceptable, but the themes were all there. Only when what was essentially censorship was imposed on Hollywood did the sexual content of movies become less obvious, more hidden in innuendo. I agree Hollywood is basically a bunch of sickos, but they are reflecting society to a large extent, not creating it.
I agree. In the early movies,Douglas Fairbanks played a private eye called “Coke Ennyday’.....And they weren’t talking about coca cola....
I disagree. The most profitable movies are those that are “family friendly”, yet the Tarantinos of the world insist on making violent, anti-family movies.
No, the driving “value” of Hollywood is to promote the leftist agenda of destroying our society so that it can be remade in the leftists’ image.
Which came first.....the chicken or the egg?
It is true, Medved has suggested that many times, but he is wrong. Given that truly "family-friendly" movies are made infrequently, people gobble them up and create good profit. But if you made twice more of such movies, the novelty effect would not be there, and you would not get twice more profit. If people know they can wait for a month and see another family-friendly movie, they will.
But if you create twice as many "scary" movies, you will sell all of them. That is why you see so many.
Medved's and yours mistake is in extrapolation from a few movies to many. As a category, "action" movies with blood and sex are much, much more profitable than the CATEGORY of family-friendly movies. That reflects the culture. When WE wanted to see patriotic movies and heroes that concurred the west, we got those movies in abundance. We no longer want them and prefer value-free sex and violence.
Hollywood is in no way different than IBM or Procter & Gamble; they only sell what we demand and willing to pay for.
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