They say art holds a mirror up to society, which means something becomes art when it reveals the nature of society or just nature itself. The classical nude statues are art, rather than pornography, because they are idealized representations created to celebrate the human form. Literature becomes art when it portrays society in such a way that it reveals certain truths about the age. For example, The Great Gatsby is art, because it captures the age and the reality of materialism.
Whether or not movies can rise to the level of art is debatable, as the medium is superficial by design. Another aspect of art is it tempts the person experiencing it to think about things they may not be naturally inclined to consider. Motion pictures are a passive medium, encouraging the viewer to relax and let the images flashing past him do all the heavy lifting. Citizen Kane is considered the best film ever made, but it does not rival literature in terms of artistic impact.
That said, maybe movies should be judged on a narrower artistic standard, in that maybe the best they can do is reflect attitudes of the age. The science fiction shows on the later-50’s and early-60’s, for example, reveal the optimism of the age with regards to scientific progress. Fast forward a generation and science fiction films reveal the fear and disappointment in science. Today, science fiction is mostly multicultural personal drama in space, revealing the feminization of our age.
In other words, like pop music, a movie can be considered art if it comes to symbolize the times in which it was made. The 1970’s movie Saturday Night Fever can be called art, because it reflects the vulgarity of the time. The movie Terminator is a reflection of the anxiety over the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. These movies are not art because they achieve some high technical standard, but simply because they were popular, touching some nerve with the public at the time.
It is a low standard, for sure, but popular culture is a low-brow product made for profit, not artistic achievement. The performers and characters in the business of producing this content can call themselves artists, but in reality, they are just the modern version of carny-folk, tolerated by society for entertainment purposes. The elevation of the profane in the modern age, is itself a statement about the age and the people, who have taken over control of the culture. Our is the age of vulgarians.
Putting that aside, by this standard, Quentin Tarantino is probably one of the great artists of the modern age. His movies tend to reflect some aspect of the times, in an exaggerated and juvenile manner. He makes movies that his ten-year-old self wanted to see, so they tend to lack anything resembling complexity and instead feature exaggerated characters that even a child can grasp. They are morality tales for stupid people, who are not all that interested in lectures about morality.
His latest film, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, is a long boring buddy story about a fading television actor. It is set in late-1960’s Los Angeles and references every popular news event of the period. The point of the film is to tell the people, who came of age in that time, especially those who grew up in Los Angeles, that it was a great time to be a young American. It was also a great time to be famous, as you got to party and bang starlets, even if you were a minor television star.
Tarantino, of course, is a meta-movie maker. He tends to make movies about movies and the world around movies. All of his shows are celebratory versions of the B-movies he watched growing up as a kid. In some respects, he is the Gen-X movie maker, in that his stories never end well, but the bad endings don’t offer a larger critique of the times or offer a lesson about the characters. In other ways, they lampoon the long shadow of the Baby Boom culture the 60’s and 70’s.
You see that in his latest film. The people are living in an idyllic time, where they can have great lives with little actual work. That time in California was probably the best time and place to live in post-war America. Yet, the degeneracy of the people and the pointlessness of their existence eventually destroyed that society. Modern Los Angeles is homeless camps and third world peasants. A white person growing up in that squalor will come to hate their ancestors for having created it.
That’s the funny thing with Tarantino. He grew up watching cheesy B-movies and re-runs of 1960’s television shows. Much of that content was science fiction. Yet, he has yet to make a movie about the future or even a B-movie version of it. The space movies of his youth would make good fodder for his brand of film, but instead all of his stuff is set in the past. From an artistic perspective, he is a man backing through life, watching was passes into the fading mists of his age.
Again, whether movies can be considered art is debatable. Art should be lasting and movies just don’t hold up over time. Still, by a lower standard, one that simply relies on cultural relevance, Tarantino would be counted as an artist. His movies speak to a people living in steep cultural and demographic decline. His latest celebrates the memories of a generation who will literally be gone in a generation. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is an epitaph for a generation and a nation.
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Perhaps at one time, long ago art and the movies could be a reflection of society.
Not anymore.
Art today – all it’s forms – reflects the views and attitudes of the elitist, very wealthy ruling elites. Of course, this includes Hollywood.
This is why you see “art,” for which the wealthy will pay tens of thousands of dollars, that could have been created by a three year old with a brush and a can of paint and a canvas.
Or worse, “created” by an elephant or a chimpanzee, provided with paint, brush and canvas.
Today’s “artists” realize that to gain wealth and fame they must ingratiate themselves into the world of the Manhattan and LA upper class elites. And these elites, to distinguish themselves from their fellow elites, and thus appear one step “above” their fellow elites, will drop 50 grand to buy a work of “art” that any child or chimp could have created.
Of course, the worlds greatest “artist” and suck-up-artist to the elites was Andy Warhol. Honestly, any first rate college art major could have created everything that Warhol produced.
And look at the “art” of the paint-splatterer Jackson Pollack. All it took was one influential art “critic” to praise his “art,” or one wealthy , influential Manhattanite to buy one of his ‘art” works.
Oh yea, Pollack produced much of his “art” while living in NYC. I realize that most of you will be shocked learn of this.
Sure.
He knew which folks he needed to have buy his “paintings” and which self absorbed, , stuck up art critics (and where they were located ) he needed to praise his work.
Recall that the Brooklyn Museum of Art at one of their exhibits, showed a cross of Jesus placed upside down in a pile of horse shit.
This today is called art.
What was the thinking process utilized by the folks that run that museum, that told them, “yea, this piece of art, is art and it should be exhibited.”
Well, to the elites of the NYC art world, that IS art and their concept of art is a reflection of their own , self absorbed, provincial, arrogant elitist views.
Movies today – and perhaps even since about 1930 or so – oft times have socio-political messages – that reflect the political ideology of the leftist Hollywood millionaire elites more than they reflect the culture and values of society at large.
These movies are really an effort to influence and change society to conform to the Hollywood (ie., leftist, Bernie Sanders ) worldview.
It is no coincidence that the CPUSA, under the directions of their great leader, “Uncle” Joe Stalin, made concerted and successful efforts to finance films promoting the socialist agenda.
Movies and art in general, long ago ceased to be reflections of society; they reflect the political and social ideology of a very small group (relatively speaking) of left wing , self-anointed ‘intellectuals,” and the wealthy elites (mostly all whom reside in NYC and LA) who wish to seen as something more than millionaire fat-cats and who wish to be seen as members of the “intellectual” class.
I don’t watch TV or go to the movies. I gave up on both about 20 years ago.
But I do think a movie could be art. The original, voice over, version of Blade Runner seems to be art to me. It was far, far better than the short story. The movie caused me to seriously think about AI long before it became a thing.
Citizen Cane on the other hand was tedious and boring. That movie is not even in the top 100. (other than on lists made up by ¨intellectuals¨).
The Blade Runner was great art, one of the immortals. You’ll find it’s the music that makes the movie.
Vangelis in BR, or say, J. Williams’s Star Wars.
Sorry to go off-topic but I just saw a couple online ads that got the old blood boiling. The first is that there’s a slew of Census ads now bombarding us. And they all feature non-white, artsy-fartsy types, with the tag line that participating in the census will help shape your future. Even the government makes no bones about its plans for replacement.
The second one was for entrepreneurs on Amazon and the subsites they can create and control. Naturally this ad featured a deeply black woman, the head of one of those simply dreamy upper middle class colored families. She sells some sort of bric-a-brac on Amazon and she hopes, in her words, to “empower my kids and others that look like them.” Others that “look like them”? I thought that was an interesting way to phrase it. She didn’t take the usual tack of saying “other black kids”, which would give her cover based on some gauzy “reparations” angle. No, she flat out said that it only mattered that they look like her people. Woe betide the Caucasian who said anything remotely similar.
Anyway, I know we all have countless examples of this in our daily lives. Just wanted to vent a bit.
Woke: “empower my kids and others that look like them”
Nazi: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
Basically the same sentiments, right?
Yes, and both are perfectly natural and healthy sentiments. Problem is, only the former are protecting the interests of their future children.
One of the first books i read was “Call of the Wild”. The movie with Clark Gable was okay, but doesn’t compare with the classic book. I won’t be seeing the new remake with Harrison Ford, probably has Buck as gay, the way things are going.
The ZMan wrote “popular culture is a low-brow product made for profit, not artistic achievement”
Remember, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt and those other guys were no more “artists” than today’s performers. They were just guys busting their humps to make a living. They were the pop culture stars of their day; no more no less. Hell, Liszt had unusually large hands so he wrote music pretty much nobody else play so people would pay to see/hear him do his thing. It’s only later generations that considered them great artists. Mozart’s dad used him as a source of income because he was such a prodigy.
Today’s performers are just putting on airs calling themselves “artists”. And the phrase “rap artist” to me is seriously oxymoronic. I have said FOR DECADES that rap was just so much “otic excrement” – Ohrscheiße – i.e. shit for the ears. They can style themselves “artists” till hell freezes over but it don’t make it so.
Mozart was the first great child prodigy, but he was not a rock star. The first rock star was Pagannini, but he was also immensely talented and several levels above any composer-perfomance artist ever to live to that point. Musical artist of that day, like both those men, indeed loved money and loved to spend it as well, but the alternative to having money in that time was grim. The level of genius in the musical arts has been dropping, ironically, in proportion to the great incease of the numbers of people in the world and along with it those attempting to become artist.
Tarantino has made some fine movies but we need to use what means we can to get the #MeToo mob turned in his direction.
Call him “Weinstein-Adjacent” and meme that notion throughout the left’s restless camps. There’s an education angle here, too: none of these zoomer pink guards have ever heard of Dead Nigger Storage.
If TRS can’t bring itself to enter the political arena because reasons, maybe they can rouse the shitlords to cause chaos for the J-left. Have some fun again.
https://youtu.be/knAqM2Gsfi4
Ouch!
I definitely like ‘One Upon A Time … In Hollywood’ better than the Zman. Rather than thrilling the audience (at least until the end), Tarantino seemed to be going for seduction (with a bit of creepy and, then, finally, ultraviolence).
Interesting takes Z. Film has literally become an anxiety producing media form of filth and horror. The films that come closest to art (Darren Arenovsky’s or Lars Von Trier’s work) are grotesque mockeries of humanity or just pressure cookers that stew the viewer in madness. TV and film are now nothing more than syringes to inject a corporate branding message, or reinforce themes of mental, spiritual and cultural subversion. They are all but unwatchable.
So that means that film and television are out of bounds for discussion, except to mock the medium or deconstruct the AntiWhite narrative. Music is vulgar, and disgusting. Art is subjective. So that leaves sports ball as the only topic you can safely discuss and not get into a fist fight over. Sportsball which is increasingly becoming pozzed and political.
It’s really hard for me to talk politics these days with any of my normie conservative friends. I instantly offend them and it usually devolves into them supporting DR3, sodomy or some Proud Boys/Crowder talking points. Now I just jump straight to the point and wreck the conversation with scorched Earth and let it lie there.
My Boomer relatives are the worst, they literally believe what MSDNC tells them. I point out that this channel is literally a lobbying group on behalf of Comcast that owns the DNC and that Rachel Maddow, Chuck Todd and friends are lobbyists not journalists. Regardless they still go to trough and ingest this poison swill which has become the central core of their ideology. They have this pathetic nostalgia for a time which never really existed for them in movies, tv and music especially music, which brings me to the end of this rant :p
Because Boomers do have this fondness for the music they grew up with, I have developed a fondness for severely Blackpilling them about it. If you aren’t familiar with the work of the late, great journalist Dave McGowan, then this stuff will blow your mind. It’s the most blackpilling shit for Boomers to have to confront the fact that their cherished Hippy Cultural Icons were nothing more than intelligence assets and creations directing the culture toward degeneracy and materialism. The story of the music culture that rose up in the late 1960’s Laurel Canyon is a mindfuck. Here’s the story. Drop it on your parents and see the carnage ensue.
https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/laurelcanyon/
Art should be lasting and movies just don’t hold up over time.
Neither do most novels.
Artforms need time to mature, and the novel has only really come of age in the last 100 years. It’s a matter of developing techniques and tradecraft. In a hundred years, maybe film will have matured too.
(And it should be noted that back when the novel was conceived, it was considered base and frivolous entertainment poisoning young, impressionable minds who should be reading their catechism instead.)
Actually, bearing false witness was the problem, lying is immoral, fiction is lies.
Pop culture’s corrosive influence on the youth has been an issue since Antiquity, so it’s not just about the Church. Musical inventions have almost invariably been met with the same attitude.
The classical nude statues are art, rather than pornography, because they are idealized representations created to celebrate the human form.
I suspect a lot of it was porn or at least softcore, and I am positive that is the case with Renaissance art. (And to nobody’s surprise, a lot of the artists were gay.)
And to think, those neolithic Venuses may have been the porn of their time as well.
All the men in the cave paintings are sporting monstrous boners, so it’s not like they were being subtle about it.
So fat acceptance is the mark of barbarism. Thanks feminists!
Bring back bone-in-the-nose!
Tradition matters!
FYI, here’s “Yggdrasil’s Movie List”. The original web site, with reviews, appears to be down. This link is from a web search.
https://the-eye-opener.blogspot.com/2007/02/yggdrasils-movie-list.html
>Motion pictures are a passive medium, encouraging the viewer to relax and let the images flashing past him do all the heavy lifting. Citizen Kane is considered the best film ever made, but it does not rival literature in terms of artistic impact.
hmmm but many ,movies are based off books and that screenplays and literature share similarities
edit: obv. example: Shakespeare
Tarantino did a good job reconstructing what the Valley would have looked like at the time. But at the end, yes, I walked out of that movie saying “this is a sad, creepy, wax museum of our culture.” Compare that to its namesake, Once Upon a Time in the West. That spaghetti western is pure art, right down to the soundtrack. Only an Italian director could have made that. It’s not even comparable to the shitty, overrated John Wayne movies from that time. American culture is about materialism, but with cheapness and utilitarianism. It’s the big roomy house, clad in vinyl siding, stuffed full of cheaply manufactured items and electronics with cords hanging everywhere. A friend from Europe told me it comes from a culture of getting too much too soon. I think that makes sense. Abundance without class. You see that with most of our movies. A visual buffet where we stuff our faces, but the meal is mediocre and soon forgotten.
Yes, a white person growing up in that squalor will come to hate their ancestors for having created it. And yes, it was all thrown away, and not just the Boomers but the generation before that. They worked in concert to throw it all away. Our culture is now a wax museum of itself, but its a museum honoring cheap decadence and self destruction.
It is very hard to make a retrospective and get it right. The morals and attitudes of the later moment always invade the narrative. I try to take my cultural cues from movies that are made concurrently to the moment being portrayed.
Z – The thing I got from Once Upon A Time in Hollywood was that there was still a kind of optimism in LA back then. Compare that to “The Nice Guys” or “Boogie Nights” which are both set in LA, but in 1977. It’s like the optimism of the 60s was long gone.
I look forward to your “Are Video Games Art?” column 😉
one of the best youtube channels for film is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwFshwxECq0&t=7s it is called blackpilled .
I saw ford vs Ferrari and I thought it was a great rendition of the masculine ethos of the 60’s. I have foggy memories of some of the events. but at it’s heart it was both a buddy movie , and a great love story . I loved both . the story of the ken miles and his wife , and the way she supported and loved him through the ups and downs of life. also how he overcame his weaknesses and ego to do what was needed in the end to secure her and his sons future by doing what the ford guys wanted at the cost of his own personal glory.
I also agree with Derb that Saturday night fever was a great movie , it was an excellent treatment of masculinity in the era of societal decay.
I find pulp fiction and American beauty unforgivable crimes against humanity for the way they demonize the pale males and their culture. after watching that I am not surprised to find out kevin spacey is ped .
one of the best youtube channels for film is called blackpilled .
Seconded. His take on Stepford Wives is devastating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng9YjgN19to
Try the Blackpilled take on “The Man Who Saved Europe” — a 1934 hagiography about the Rothchilds.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/VjPC-tnw7Ik/
Shockingly, this was NOT made to be anti-Jewish but rather the opposite.
Yes, but that’s a rather obscure movie. The Stepford Wives is mainstream.
Maybe it should be less obscure then. And I got the title wrong. Sorry. The MOVIE is called The House of Rothschild, the video is called TMWSE.
The level of ethnocentric arrogance, self-pitying victimhood, self-puffery, and obliviousness displayed in THoR [1] is rarely so nakedly on display in movies and television these days. You have to go to places like Forward to see that sort of cluelessness in the present.
[1] Wellington tells Nathan Mayer Rothschild that NR is the real hero who defeated Napoleon.
Just because it’s obligatory in this sort of discussion. Sturgeon’s law:
“Ninety percent of everything is crap.”
One of the most popular TV shows of our time is Game of Thrones. I watched the first 4 or 5 seasons and started out enjoying it. Eventually the nihilism wore me down and I didn’t see any point to continuing it. Maybe I missed out and it turned out to be worthwhile, but I doubt it and I don’t care.
They are all just soap operas with elaborate set designs and costumes. British accents for extra effect. LOTR, GoT, everything on Netflix etc.
it was just a chance to put T &A on the screen , with a little hinted at kinky stuff. along with gory violence. the hipsters lived for that crap. I didn’t watch much of it .look at this . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Qsndv9DTSk
Good column, thank you for it. And for the explanation of why I can’t stand modern sci-fi. My young relatives recommended the Expanse. I was disgusted and bored by it.
Ok, here’s some boomer sci-fi poasting. The stuff I read as a kid in the fifties could be dismissed, and was, as pulp space opera. But, guess what? At its heart it was masculine and moral. Take the stories written by Andre Norton (actually a pen name for a lady), such as the Lucky Starr series. These you could dig up and give to your kids, and be happy about it. Her short juvenile novel, Star Mans Son, I read six times as a kid if I read it once. If you have a young son, you should dig it up.
Boomer poasting over. TimNY
Thank u for saying EXPANSE is bad. Can’t agree more.
Read the Legionnaire series. Basically Star Wars written from the perspective of the stormtroopers if they were competent instead of cannon fodder.
The Expanse had all the tough wimmen tropes and so on. What makes me giggle is that, as far as I can tell (I don’t dive deep into it), fantasy and sci-fi, which lefties simply crave, is all about clans and tribes and battles. All the human nature stuff that lefties try to ignore or do away with (at least on the white male side) in the real world.
At least they had the sense to make the female warrior a giant mutant. Seeing a pixie beat up grown men with karate chops is the dumbest of TV tropes.
The amusing thing about The Expanse is the world is regularly screwed up by the multicultural rulers of the future, only to be saved by the one white guy that seems to give a damn. The survival of humanity literally depends on James Holden imposing the white man’s morality on everyone.
I agree, once I started noticing leftist propaganda sneaking into modern films, that killed a lot of the joy for me.
Holden is a sort of an accidental hero, even to himself. He just keeps trying to do the right thing, and it turns out to be heroic. But the UN Sec Gen Indian woman sending him out “because you are the only one that I can trust to do it” was an unintentionally hilarious moment.
‘The survival of humanity literally depends on James Holden imposing the white man’s morality on everyone.’ Well, with a little indispensable help from the mulatta genius love interest. James Holden can be tolerated (though not exactly forgiven) for being a white hero because he took a page from Ted Danson’s book. And, he is the ONLY white hero, save the lady lesbian Reverend-Jesus gay married to black lesbian saint-wife. Which kinda makes my point. So in the end Holden’s children will look like all of the other heroes. And so will everyone else in ‘The Expanse’ universe. And that’s a happy ending in Pozzywood!
Haha! Saving the Solar System from racism!
After all, those Nazis are why we can’t go to space
Haven’t bothered to watch the Expanse, I like hard SF but two minutes of the writing made me go ugh. Any plot with overcrowding and/or a functional UN needs to be sh**canned for something else and planetary colonies are not much less realistic for mankind than midichorians
As for ballerina fu- my pet peeve is River Tam from Firefly ugh,. Now when Summer Glau was on Terminator Sarah Conner Chronicles this was fine. She was after all an advanced nuclear power combat cyborg made of coltan alloy .
That’s true regarding River Tam, but damn, the physical grace of that actress in the bar fight scene in Serenity — long, uninterrupted, choreographed takes, not chopped into incomprehensibility by a hundred fast cuts and weird camera angles … I couldn’t bring myself to hate that.
Summer Glau was a ballerina before she was an actress. She was sidelined to acting by an injury.
Now and than though they let her dance and it is lovely.
Liker most ballerinas she is a skinny as a stick though. I watched a few minutes of a Lifetime movie with her in it strictly for the bikini shot. Girl needs a few more meals and well the acting wasn’t good either but given she did well in Firefly and TSC, that’s more casting/writing I think
Your statement about ours being “The Age of Vulgarians” would make a great book title.
I speed-read it as ‘Age of Vulgarius’ and heard a song in my head…
Singing it now, dagnab you! 😉
“Art should be hammer, not a mirror”. I forget now which old leftie revolutionary came up with that one but it worked and we are still living with it and dealing with it.
The idea was to use art not to reflect the age or the values of any given society but to use it to demoralise and neutralise the “bourgeois values” that, according to hair-on-fire lefties, were preventing the general acceptance and spread of their revolutionary ideas.
Subsequent generations of artists (including this generation) regard it as their job not to create great, uplifting art but to tear down and smash the values of their societies; to hold them up to ridicule and derision. This is why we get things like “piss Christ”. It’s not just an accident. It’s deliberate.
The only difference is that “bourgeois” is now commonly referred to as “whiteness” and, in their minds, it amounts to the same thing. So it’s “whiteness” that needs to be ridiculed, demoralised and otherwise trashed. “A generation of vulgarians”? Yes, by design.
King Tut, can we have NOTHING?!
Alzaebo, I don’t think so. “Woe unto the vanquished” as the saying goes.
Yes, indeed. Art became a hammer 100 years ago; it has been anti-art except for what is in the museums and as practiced by a small number of artists. The destruction of beauty was the goal and it was achieved.
If Kubrick made this movie, it would have been about Polanski making dark deal with higher ups for success, witch covens sending Manson to kill Shannon Tate, Woodstock as a giant ritual for the coming NWO.
That’s da difference between Quentin & Kubrick.
Z-Man is right about Tarantino, he is juvenile. People will remember this movie for Bruce Lee scene.
My favorite mid-century so-called “art” was the old comedy TV shows. Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Hogan’s Heroes. They played in endless rerun loops in the late ‘60s, in the afternoons and early evenings, and on weekends.
They portrayed a certain elan in their productions, idealizing upper middle class life and hot blonde MILFy wives (probably where my thing for tall blondes came from). Hell, Hogan idealized POW camp living in a way that would make Bernie Sanders envious. Yeah, you could see the beginnings of the stupid husband and boss thing starting up, but still…for an eight or ten year old boy, watching Samantha or Jeannie every night on TV was pretty cool. Back in the day, I would have eagerly forsworn exposure to arty-art-art any day for another go-round with my TV shows. I guess I am a dirt person, through and through…
Gilligan’s Island! Addams Family!
The Munsters! Batman! Green Hornet!
Dark Shadows! Looney Tunes!
Star Trek!! Beverly Hillbillies!
And, after school, The Flintstones!
Art is art – the quality varies. Tarentino’s entitled to claim the label but we can qualify or detail it (e.g. “degenerate,” “anti-” etc….). His art serves the same function as high art but resonates with a lower brow and isn’t necessary done with the kind of technical mastery more discriminating tastes would demand.
There’s always room for another nihilist. Snark, irony and black pills are net-positive for Big Nanny – the dissatisfaction and critique they spread is more than made up for by the apathy and ennui that spread with dread-memes.
The kind of “critique” offered by guys like Tarentino is a honey pot perfect for trapping dissenters in a lotus-like circle of black-pill eaters.
I disagree about the tastes of the brows. It’s not the people of the gutter enjoying “abstract” and “modern” “art” It seems to me that the less sophisticated put more value on technique and technical mastery than the sophisticated appreciator of what passes for art these days.
Tarentino’s not abstract or modern – it’s lowbrow. Pulp Fiction mania was the 1990’s definition of mid-wittery.
Cinematography and CGI-splodeys aren’t the same thing. Grugs aren’t concerned with the brush-strokes and color selection, they just want gore & bobs.
You have no grasp of the vast gulf between Tarantino’s middle-brow (at times) pieces, and the quotidian knuckle-gragging dire crap that’s the usual movie fare,
Great column!
I don’t know if it’s “art,” but The Far Side cartoon now officially is online. Once the most popular cartoon, it ended in 1995 and is a weird excursion into an America that no longer exists:
https://www.thefarside.com/
Jeff MacNelly’s political cartoons were some of the finest of the 20th century. The dude was a great illustrator. Here’s just one example…
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/55/0c/7f/550c7ff39837a9774c961461a6806940.jpg
The sort of movies that are popular tangentially touches on something I discussed the other day, w European dissidents. We were discussing why Enoch Powell, the British politician who made the ‘rivers of blood’ speech against immigration to Britain in the late 1960s, was railroaded politically after that.
I suggested Powell was like Churchill but less fortunate. Others felt he was at fault himself for not rising up so he could have averted Britain’s disastrous course on immigration, and possibly inspired other countries in Europe and North America to rethink multiculturalism.
The central contention is if leaders rise to change society or the ‘mood’ (place in civilizational cycle, testosterone levels etc) of society gives traction to a particular type of leaders. While there is an element of both, I am convinced the latter dominates the former. In good times, when all bellies are full and most have a comfortable place to live and such, and perhaps most importantly, when few middle class people know real violence and fear, society not only goes soft but picks leaders who are soft. It is high noon for grifters b/c the soft life does not educate people to separate grit from bullsh*t. And, to take Powell as an example, the qualities that could have made him ‘Churchill to demographic replacement as Churchill was to nazism’, that he didn’t mince his words, that he held his line in face of outraged, hysteric opposition, that he trusted his own combination of intellect and instincts over the angry majority of his peers, were exactly the impediment to his rising to power in the conservative party and then the country.
In other words, as with films, the leaders who rise are the ones who represent the times more than they create the times. And that is why an unserious, fluffy, feel-good, ‘let’s take a post Cold War holiday from history’ America elected someone who represents all of that perfectly, Bill Clinton. And a nervous, shaken (by 9/11, growing leftist nagging over race, 2008 meltdown) basically supplicated all of this BS nagging by electing their ‘dream president’, Obama, and got exactly what beta men get every day for supplicating to feminine nagging.
The masculine thing, I submit instead, is to forge a strong character (becoming outstanding in something useful is probably a great way to help that, more than ‘personality courses’ and other artificial ways), stick to your guns in opinions and other matters. And then wait for your time. Which, for most, may never arrive in their lifetime. Which is why it takes a sort of existential courage to be a real man.
“The masculine thing, …(is to) stick to your guns in opinions and other matters. And then wait for your time. Which, for most, may never arrive in their lifetime. Which is why it takes a sort of existential courage to be a real man.”
Simba, the immortal gods themselves salute you for that.
Haha thanks buddy 🙂
If art says something about society, what it seems to be saying about us is that we do not care about effort, skill or technique. It is an absolute condemnation of our society that janitors will sometimes mistake “art” with trash and throw it away and so-called all white art can sell for 15 million dollars.
Tars, two sites where you can fall through the rabbit hole and enjoy art as you and I believe it to be.
http://www.artcontrarian.blogspot.com
http://www.illustrationart.blogspot.com
The second one suffers from TDS, but when he sticks to the task at hand, which is most of the time, it is very good.
Thanks for the links, Dutch.
I’ll check em out.
Tom Wolfe The Painted Word
“Don’t let the Mexicans see you cry”
Classic line from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
1969 was probably peak America
Now it’s the multi cultural Star Wars brigade and females with the upper body strength of Mike Tyson, only nicer looking and no facial tatoos.
No wonder we look back. It was a better time.
And if this coronavirus is really not just a exaggerated news story to damage Trumps re-election chances or the latest hair on fire chance to get news ratings like Hurricanes and Tornado coverage.
If this virus really is that dangerous?
President Roosevelt’s Japanese internment camps won’t look so bad.
The past will make a lot more sense to all of us but the looneys ruling us.
COVID-19 is not that dangerous, but will cull the old and sick as do all these pandemics. That is Nature. 20% or so if you are over 60 (Chinese stats). That has me somewhat nervous, but that is not a knock-out blow for civilization as we have limited value at this point in life.
Folks point back to the “great influenza”. Note that took out the susceptible (culled the herd) and never came back. So it may be with this latest version of SARS.
I agree but after watching the bafoons last night I will be waiting for the billionaire idiot Tom Steyer breathlessly tell us the Russians are behind the Coronavirus.
Or the 4 ft Oligarch Bloomberg tell us that he bought the solution to the problem like he told us last night that he bought Congress.
If the virus is more dangerous than the regular flu bug it’s gonna be fun watching the business school elites “ just in time” production systems collapse because “ just in time” means a fed ex shipment from communist China.
Some interesting scenarios brewing today.
Just in time shipping and China connection is really the icing on the cake and the good news—iff the lesson is learned, and perhaps only will be learned if reinforced with several thousand avoidable deaths.
Ah, good. You grow your own food, carry water in buckets, and regularly overhaul your Model T’s engine with hand tools, then.
Local rail branches deliver farm goods.
Failure cascades.
May this Angel pass over us.
Though I agree, not a knockout blow.
We weren’t waiting for the Bomb- we all knew that Nature’s Cull would come to the interconnected world.
Will it be a proof of separation or of redundancy?
Our masters must’ve forgotten the Black Plague, but we Europeans remember it, and we keep our history. And our art:
Ring around the rosey
Pockets full of posies
Ashes, ashes
We all fall… down!
And what about the point that someone on UNZ is making that there has yet to be even one death of a non- east asian? Maybe us gringos can just skip this panic, keep our powder dry for the next ‘heterosexual aids global warming is racist pandemic’ threat to human survival?
Yeah I am not really sure on that score – seems like the story is being told along the ‘Florida man’ line of agitprop. I want to know if there are any non Asians that died. What percentage of non Asians, compared to those affected – and comparable statistics for Asians in terms of communicability and mortality.
But all I see is that The Bachelor should not sex up all the wimmins, aka “news” in the MSM.
I understand the blogger here, as a younger man, finds his focus on pop/junk material from the likes of a Tarantino. However, to me one of the earliest, post World War II pieces of sociological “art” – mirroring life – to come out of Hollywood… in an era when high profile closeted homosexuals were still being put forth as icons of manhood in films is: “Attack!”, the movie made from the screenplay “Fragile Fox.”
This story is a stand in for ALL that is, and was government, military and corporate bureaucracy and corruption. Cowardice is the main theme, as is stupidity. And there is a complimentary portrayal of a country boy, a crack shot that takes down a sniper from a steeple.
You can search the rest of the plot yourself – and are invited to do so. Long before Rambo (2) was “coming back”, the character played by Jack Palence threatened to, and ended up fragging his CO.
IIRC it is Lee Marvin’s first movie role. The DOD didn’t like it. The movie chains didn’t like it. As a kid, it was my earliest ‘red pill’.
Kind of like The Cross of Iron then. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074695/
Yeah, and that among my favorite Peckinpah movies. Before the genre all went to team wuss, team woman.
California Dreamin’ has turned into a nightmare. It is interesting to speculate on the psychological trauma this will induce in millions of young people yearning for that life-altering experience in the Golden State, particularly the Hollywood version. It will still alter lives, but not in the “consciousness-raising” manner they are expecting. Soon, there will be nowhere for white America to run to. Utopia is gone.
For those of you who enjoy classic Hollywood films, many are definitely worth watching, especially John Ford westerns and Hitchcock thrillers. And there are others. Don’t buy them new if you are a collector. Buy used DVDs. I have hundreds and never paid a dime of it to Hollywood.
I would rather go fishing or to the rifle and pistol range than contribute one penny to those in the movie business. I like CM Russell paintings and older Broadway musicals, Handel’s Messiah, classical country music, Sinatra, Cole, Monro. My life ambition is to hijack the sound system at at the next national feminist convention and play Jack Jones singing Wives and Lovers.
“ Hey, little girl
Comb your hair, fix your make-up
Soon he will open the door
Don’t think because
There’s a ring on your finger
You needn’t try any more
For wives should always be lovers, too
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you
I’m warning you
Day after day
There are girls at the office
And men will always be men
Don’t send him off
With your hair still in curlers
You may not see him again
For wives should always be lovers, too
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you
He’s almost here
Hey, little girl
Better wear something pretty
Something you’d wear to go to the city
And dim all the lights
Pour the wine, start the music
Time to get ready for love
Oh, time to get ready,
Time to get ready
Time to get ready
For love.”
I should post this on Huffington.
One of the things I find the most disturbing is the total dumbing down of popular music. Remember, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holliday, etc were the ‘pop music’ of their day. Compare that to pop music today…
A great thing about movies and music (and art) of the past is that a lot of it is still out there to discover and visit. One finds that some of it was dreck, but some of it was very nice to watch or listen to. Digging beyond the icons yields up all sorts of enjoyable nuggets. Some of the iconic stuff that has been passed down and is now cliche can be bypassed for the less lasting material. Find what was the most popular in the day, but is unknown now, and one discovers that part of it is drivel and part of it is good stuff.
Elvis, as much as my Dad loved him and got me to appreciate him, killed all that pop music.
Everything that Elvis’s critics said about the effects his acceptance would have came true. Who do you blame for a shameless slut like Miley Cyrus being a pop star? Elvis and the system that promoted him.
Helen Forrest or Martha Tilton will get you fixed right up.
Kevin Smith said that people hundreds of years from now will look for inspiration from Captain America lifting Mjolnir in The Avengers.
Truly art for the ages.
LOL!
I preferred Nolan’s Batman trilogy myself. His version of Bruce gets his ass kicked, continuously trains himself, changes his tactics, and comes back better and stronger. That is a lesson my sons will be raised on.
In the Nolan Batman trilogy, Batman/Bruce Wayne is the bad guy pushing globohomo. He protects a Gotham whose oozing putrescence had covered all that was decent with social pus that then hardened into a shell. That decent under-structure was then dissolved such that what remained was a brittle, degenerate, and disgusting shell, a diseased echo of what had once been. All it would take to bring it down was a sharp blow. And then decent folk could rebuild.
.
Batman/BW sought to keep animate the rotten corpse and prevent its resurrection. Batman was the bad guy.
Oh fuck that Roo—ster. In the first one he’s trying to save the righteous from being immolated along with the unjust by foreign terrorists, in the second he’s fighting the personification of chaos and madness, and in the third he’s practically the Scarlet Pimpernel, Bane et al are overtly referencing the French Revolution, many shots were lifted from classical paintings portraying the French Revolution. Clear left wing mobbery, the third one is about as leftist as Red Dawn.
On top of all that he’s an hereditary aristocrat trying to preserve his patrimony, that’s not just traditionalist it’s downright anti modernist and live a life of noblesse oblige. If you watch the movies you don’t see a single homosexual that I recall, and he’s trying to get Wayne Enterprises to benefit Gotham, not “the world”. He’s a Chestertonian small p patriot of Gotham City. I know I’m the transient normie on this site but if you see leftie messages in Nolan’s trilogy you’re just wrong so far as I can tell.
The Batman character was always a bit of a nutjob to me (the “no guns” thing) but it’s hard to see the Nolan trilogy pushing globohomo. The “ballroom conversation” might be interpreted as leftist:
Selina Kyle [into Wayne’s ear]: There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.
But I interpreted that as anti-oligarch and therefore anti-globohomo.
I have a theory why we are seeing this crap—box office mega hit movies featuring comic book characters ad nausea. No supporting evidence, just the bad boy in me thinking. It’s that we now have a different audience at prime movie watching age with a different level of intellectual/cognitive ability.
I, like most others here (yes, I’m being presumptive), watched my fill of Saturday morning cartoons while in grade school and bought lots of comic books as well. But as I matured and began to achieve a certain level of intellect/maturity, fell away from such childish entertainment and indeed, the genre in the theaters available to me reflected that. I continued to see plenty of movies in the theater and on TV, but they were not the amazing cartoonish, comic book stories of my youth.
Today, what if the primary audience is largely composed of our new ethnic replacements? Those with room temperature IQ’s and emotion proclivities of 12 year olds? Would not the movies offered reflect that?
And they do. 🙁
Bingo.
The 30s and under in America are 60% or less white. It ain’t your grandpa’s American no more, son.
My father and other older relatives have trouble grasping the same ideas in Canada. They can’t fathom that the core of the country, people in their 20s, are actually alien mud hut people. I see it because I’m with the 3rd worlders. every day. and it’s awful.
The only “benefit” to 3rd worlders is that p*ssy is easy to get particularly from Asian (East and South) women. But really that’s no benefit at all and we’re just as screwed, but with more weird HAPAs now in the mix.
*snigger*
Save him, Heimdall!
Once upon a time, people had to struggle in order to stay alive by finding food and avoiding been eaten. This was anything but boring, and we are descended from the survivors of than gauntlet. Nowadays, virtually no struggle at all is required in order to subsist in our modern society, because government will provide food, housing, medical care, etc. etc. etc. And so boredom is the new existential affliction of our age. Movies and rap music mollify this boredom. It’s the real version of soma.
Art reflects the collective soul, and ours is in transition. Let us examine how we got here:
In the beginning there was God’s will. His was a universe of an endless morality play, and His will governed everything we did. Lose a war or battle? God’s will. Pestilence and plague? God’s will. Famine? God is angry with you!
That eventually ran us afoul of guys like Capernicus and Galileo and they ushered in The Age Of Reason. That in turn sparked the renaissance and art and science took off at a rate that our wisdom could not keep up with. Morals and ethics were created by God, but reason and rationality were created by Man. Our sense of reason began to fail or fall short of the issues that faced us.
In the 60’s, faced with that conflict, the idea of a relative truth was made popular by some (((contemptible modern liberals))) and it caught on. According to them, I can have my truth, my morals, my ethics, Z could have his, and you can have yours… and they would all be valid.
It was utter rot, of course; truth is not relative, nor are morals and ethics. Truth is true up here in Canada, same as it is in the USA or in Africa. The idea that we can define our own truths as we see fit not only offended our Maker… it unleashed all kinds of demons to plague us. If you don’t believe me… look at the people of The Hive. How many are happy? Most of them are retched, angry and miserable despite living in times better than any other in the history of man.
They’ve lost their way, they’ve lost their souls, and it shows in their “art”. Hollywood now is just one big Piss Christ art exhibit… and that’s it. This perhaps will be one of the greatest challenges for the dissidents going forward: sure, you are well on your way with your ideology… but you might want to have a care for your spirituality as well.
The medium is naturally limiting by length and dialog. In the book to movie genre, the most successful are ones that manage to capture the “feel”. “The Right Stuff”, “Last of the Mohicans” and “Lawrence of Arabia” fit that mold. Wolfe’s writing was pointillist, which made his books almost impossible to translate to the screen. Fenimore Cooper wrote in vernacular, which is impenetrable if not acquainted with it and TE Lawrence covered more nuanced ground in “Seven Pillars”. But each movie, despite liberties with storyline (extensive in Cooper/Manns case, put in you in the moment and feel of the time. Most of the crap that comes out of Hollywood today is simply mindless. Tarantino has had a much better run than his peers simply due to an extraordinary ear for dialog (the visuals of the violence aside) Simply reading one of his scripts is entertaining by itself.
Novels tend not to make good movies. There’s too much ground covered in a novel. The exceptions are those that have simple story lines, like the Great Gatsby. In terms of literature, it just barely clears the hurdle to be counted as literature, so it can be dumbed down for a movie without losing too much of the novel.
You raise an interesting topic though. In the “golden age” of cinema, movies based on literature were common. Today, it never happens, unless it is a reboot of an old movie.
the mention o last of the mohicians reminds me how great that movie was. It my ancestors were there at that time fighting those wars. sure they Pozed it up with some girl power, but the overall story was very good. I got the DVD, but the editors cut diminishes the story. the lighting and sound on the dvd are awful , but it sill still worth doing if you can find it.
5x grandfather was at Ft. Edward, after marching almost 4 straight days with his militia company only to find Genl Webb refusing to allow them to move north to relieve William Henry. They finally arrived only to find the results of the massacre. Read “Relief is Greatly Wanted”—one of the best histories of the siege. Twenty years later he served under John McCrea (whose sister, murdered by a Wyandot Huron, was the inspiration for Cora) at Saratoga. One reason they were able to so effectively harass and whittle Burgoyne’s strength on the trip south is many of them fought on the same ground in 57-58. They knew it, Burgoyne did not.
The movie was good, but I grew up watching The Last of the Mohicans on Masterpiece Theatre with Alastair Cooke. Read the original book many years later; dealt with the dialect fairly well but the action didn’t come out as well, at lest in my opinion.
Someone said somewhere that great novels seldom make great movies, but mediocre or bad novels can make great movies. Lots of great movies are based on forgettable pulp material which the director pillages for ideas, plots, etc. Badge of Evil, I’m told, is mediocre but Touch of Evil is genius. Most of those “prestige” movies are the ones most unwatchable — great movies are based on midcult material like Gone with the Wind. Exception: I read The Magnificent Ambersons and damned if Welles didn’t manage to cram just about every scene, dialog and even narration into the film, even the studio cut version.
I would add Blade Runner / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep to that category. Brilliantly captured the dystopian future of the novel, imho.
Novels are always better than the film adaptation. Novels are read and then “pictured” in the mind. So if you read about a hero, say a man of great strength, integrity, and endurance, you build a “perfect” picture of him in you mind. A movie however, might cast Brad Pitt. When you see the movie, especially after reading the novel, you are naturally disappointed—unless you are a die hard Pitt fan. 😉
I always thought the odd thing with To Kill a Mockingbird was that it lost nothing from book to screen (which speaks to the weakness of the book and the comparative strength of the movie).
As a non-reader of Harry Potter books I wished the movies, at least the ones that I could make myself sit through, were a little more divorced from their source material.
‘Novels are read and then “pictured” in the mind.’
Exactly. A good friend says, “I will never watch the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies. I don’t care if they are good or bad, because I already *know* what Strider looks like.” This is the one who also said “I am not Hispanic, or Latina. I am Spanish, which means White European. I am NOT one of those people.”
Line that will live forever, “Do you see a sign on my house that says ‘dead …… storage?'” I was agape with tears in my eyes laughing the first time I saw that movie. The Christopher Walken vignette regarding the watch was just so off the wall bizarre too!
“Nah, I’m pretty fucking far from “ok””
Something that I noticed when I first got Netflix was the overwhelming number of historically-based shows. At first, I just figured that it was a way for the producers to have all (or mostly) white actors/characters because while whites may claim to love diversity in theory, they avoid it like the plague in real life, including in their day-to-day viewing habits.
But then it dawned on me that another reason might be simply that a show set today or God forbid in the future is just depressing. Outside of the usual accusations of racism or sexism, a show set today would either have to lie about how great multi-everything is (which would doom the show’s ratings due to being laughably untrue) or admit that whites made a huge mistake.
As best as I can tell (and my TV viewing has fallen off a cliff), a good chunk of shows set in our current times are Nice White Lady shows, which are hilariously stupid and even they keep the multi-everything down to a minimum because NWLs don’t really like multi-everything, or shows set in rural areas so they can be fairly white and thus don’t have to get into multi-everything.
Via revealed preference, whites are showing that they preferred their past to their present and they are more than a tad nervous about their future.
Netflix was so notorious for adding diversity to times and places that had absolutely none, it became an internet meme.
Netflix doesn’t actually create very much on its own. The vast majority of its “Netflix Productions” are existing properties it bought or optioned, so the multi-culturalism reflects what people in the film industry think, but Netflix certainly seems to sift for the very most vibrant.
Lately, there’s been a huge dump of Central and Latin American series and film, and those hold no interest for me, because I find a lot of their cultural assumptions either alien or repellent.
Also a ton of Korean stuff, which I find painfully amateurish and juvenile, from the few things I’ve sampled. Also not my culture.
I love foreign film. True science fiction in action.
Some foreign film I like. I’ve enjoyed some French, Dutch and Swedish stuff very much.
I suspect other than really bored people or activists no one White, Hispanic or anything else watches that stuff. Much of it is whiny activist stuff and/or woke trash which basically nobody likes other than woke folk.
There is a strong Latino film/TV culture but its mostly crazy dumb comedy like the late Sabado Gigante (56 seasons!) and Telenovelas along with lots of dumb action films that all kind of guys of all races watch.
The fusion of the cultures Anglo and Hispanic is basically El Rey TV which can be pretty good at times. Its all English speaking though and I suspect its audience is petty pallid even if “Latino”
Korean horror and crime drama are interesting though, horror movies are comprehensible if “not my people” and the crime drams I’ve watched kind of remind me of American ones. I found them less weird than Danish or sometimes UK shows !
Most of the offerings on Netflix streaming fall into standard product categories. They even advertise them that way — each has a terse description (“Heartfelt dot intimate dot emotional”; “Slow burn dot forceful dot gritty”) to connect with the target audience. And as we all know the great majority are multi-culti globohomo.
I check the lineup regularly but mostly am disappointed or repelled.
Yet, occasional Netflix original movies and series are as good as anything being made today or in the past. Examples: if you like intelligent action films, Bodyguard is a model of its genre, a rare thriller that actually thrills. Ricky Gervais’s new show, After Life, is abrasive and crude, but with more than a few flashes of wit, and at times movingly sentimental.
Yes, I hate supporting Netflix in light of its anti-white products, but without it I’d never see a movie, including Netflix’s best. I don’t go to movie theaters.
Yeah, I noticed a fair amount of silliness. But you can almost see the producers walking that fine line between avoiding the SJW crowd while keeping their white audience. Whites might show up once in a while for a movie with a black lead actor or a heavily multi-everything cast (mostly to make themselves feel better about themselves) but they won’t do it day in and day out, which is what a series needs.
Whites don’t like diversity. Simple as that.
“Whites don’t like diversity. Simple as that.” I wonder why that would be. Are whites just prejudiced and insular?
Nobody really likes actual diversity. As has become plain, diversity doesn’t mean diversity, it means “no Whites.” But so what if we are prejudiced and insular? It’s our country. Go somewhere else full of wonderful brown people.
For same reason everyone hates diversity: You have to be around people and cultures that are different and foreign. Sure, blacks love white stuff, but most don’t actually like living around whites.
And, yeah, whites are prejudiced and insular, just like everyone else, only we’re too fuc$ing pussy to admit it.
No human being other than a few Leftists actually likes diversity, Duck.
Its human, all of human nature and pushing it is as cruel to non Whites as it is to Whites.
Everybody wants to live among their own people to their own customs in peace and prosperity and even well meaning attempts to encourage diversity end up hurting everyone.
” Are whites just prejudiced and insular?”
No no. That would be Chinese and Special People.
Among others….
“Are whites just prejudiced and insular?” Whoops. Blowback! It was metaphorical. The correct answer to the question is, “No, but they do tend to notice things.”
And women warriors who could slash their way through a room of muscle-bound Vikings. Yeah. That works.
After several seasons of suffering Lagertha slay Viking warriors I finally busted through peak ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ and crashed into ‘can no longer tolerate juvenile Grrrrrrl Power agitprop’, and quit watching “Vikings”. I, like many here no doubt, prefer period pieces because they tend to be less pozzed. More and more of the period pieces are caving to anti-white norms and casting minorities in the roles of europeans, or highlighting homosexual characters, or Jewish themes. Its almost as if the creative people who run these shows spend considerable efforts in finding ways to deligitimize whitey’s history. Recently, in the UK there was some drama regarding the racist practice of casting whites to portray their ancestors in period pieces, with a famous lady director publicly and loudly swearing off the practice. I got into the 1st episode of a new period drama starring a heavyweight lead. I got as far as a few scenes in when we were introduced to the Dauphin of France, whom we all now know was a sub-saharan african. In a generation we here will all be shocked and outraged that nearly half of all white school children believe that black africans were actually just as prominent and common in medieval europe as in contemporary europe. It may be that free expression and freedom of speech are really just means, not ends.
When I mentioned to one of my kids that I didn’t like non-whites showing up in medieval Europe shows, she said that she didn’t see why it was a big deal.
I asked her how she’d feel if the actress for her life story was a fat, very dark-skinned Mexican who was portrayed as a lesbian. She just shook her head in agreement.
Its not easy to explain how you can defeat a people by re-writing their history for them. Just to say that is liable to provoke eyerolls from the kids. For girls making it personal, as you did, may be a good tactic.
That was exactly what I was trying to do: Make it personal. And it’s not just girls that this works on, it’s everybody, though, admittedly, it works best on girls.
Like if someone brings up immigration, I say, “History isn’t kind to minorities and that’s what your kids are going to be. Mass immigration didn’t do the Indians much good, I doubt we’re going to get treated much better.”
Speaking of deliberately offensive casting, here is Varg Vikernes giving his opinion of the movie “Lords of Chaos”, this section in particular is about the casting, including which actor was selected to play him.
https://youtu.be/O2d5jWg9b1w?t=162
Michaeloh, indeed. That’s what I hate about all novels/movies that are claimed to be fiction based on fact or a historical based narrative. Folks see these and assume they are relatively accurate and that unfortunately is their sole instruction in the history of the events portrayed.
Vikings was a good example. If you know a bit about the Vikings and their initial surge into European history, you are amazed at how the writers got the history wrong. They basically used names, events, and scenes dozens of years out of order and made the rest up, and then layered it over with behavior more indicative of moderns than ancients. Sigh.
Compsci, good points. What’s really interesting to me is that most people who have seen “Schindler’s List” are unaware that it’s based on a NOVEL, not a nonfiction historical work.
Now there are collections of Black historical imposters, just as collections of media blue-stars and black-top couples.
Regarding Lagertha, nonwhite girls, most emphatically blacks, will go all banshee– but only on other females.
White women? They’ll shoot a man-threat with the same cold dispassion as white males. I resent the propaganda showing our women as quivering wimps.
We have Queens and WACs in our history.
Our women are badasses, and hold the same lethal efficiency as our men.
As VDHanson says, we are clean killers, without the messy cruelty of the nons.
“Netflix was so notorious for adding diversity”
The BBC is a close second. At least. Compare this excellent version of Henry V (The Hollow Crown, TV series):
https://youtu.be/oz_IBbvcRao?t=16
to this racist monochrome version of Henry V:
https://youtu.be/y1BhnepZnoo?t=36
In the good and historically accurate version, the black gentleman next to Hiddleston is the Duke of York (portrayed by Paterson Joseph). In the hateful and racist version the entire cast has been whitewashed. Shockingly, Branagh would have you believe that there were no Afro-Britons among the great nobles of England circa 1415.
The BBC hits another one out of the park with “Troy: Fall of a City” where we finally see the truth. Zeus is portrayed in his actual form by the great Nigerian-British actor Hakeen Kae-Kazim, and Shamilla Miller is the very ideal of the “Grey-eyed Victory bearer” (Glaukopis! Nikephore!) Athena.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/2fy62q7thWzjM5DYzTnsr7N/the-gods
The Beeb is more progressive than the Marvel Cinematic Universe which only had Idris Elba as Heimdallr (“the whitest of the Gods”). While it’s true that in the MCU “Valkyrie” became a mystery-meat lesbian, but that was only a minor character. Shame on the MCU. But they are catching up to the BBC in their “Phase 4”.
Remember. If it ain’t woke it’s racist, misogynist, intolerant trash.
Well said!
Citizen – at risk of coming off as brown nosing – I would like to say thank you for your posts, which almost always bring new insights. When I see “citizen” I know to read the comment closely.
You actually get it, and understand what we need to do. I wonder if Z could come up with some kind of pamphlets or materials outlining our strategies in clear ways, with contributions from you and others here.
Best of luck living in the DC swamp. I hope that we can all spread yours, and other great ideas coming from this blog, across the nation to all whites. We ALL hate diversity, but over 95% of us can’t admit it. Let’s slowly roll this back by changing whites minds and attitudes.
I get nostalgic for the 70’s and 80’s because people still had fun – which I think is why Tarantino looks backwards. A while ago my son and I were watching some music concerts from the 80’s – and even a teenager could see the joy people had making and listening to the music and recognize that it’s gone now. He wished he was around then to have that kind of fun.
That’s a very sage inference. I often look at old films from the 30-40’s as well as silent films. There is something to be gleaned of the culture and people of the time. Yes, even though films are fantasy to a great extent, there has to be some reality surrounding it wrt how people behave and interact and live or the audience of the time would not accept it.
So as Z-man can see hope for technology in early films as to later, I too see standards of behavior and aspirations that I regret no longer exist in our current society.
Noir movies of the ‘40s are awesome. The cultural details, the rather staged but feisty human relationships, and the constant shadowy foreboding. We thought the dread signified life under the atom bomb, but perhaps what we actually feared back then was our own sad future, now partly realized. The curve of culture going from aspiration to disgust and surrender. Noir is the interaction of human decisions and Fate. We are seeing the results of such an interaction now, in the light of many bad human decisions.
Ol’ Remus’ sentiment is that great art captures a time and a place.
*********
Update: just read Dutch’s comment.
Wow. Even then they suspected the wrong side had won.
The movie “Gaslight”, from whence comes the term, was certainly a secret revolt, and a warning.
I don’t know if I agree that film is not art, but on the other hand, I don’t really care that much. What people judge to be art in their own lifetimes doesn’t mean a lot. Motion picture film is one of the newest media, and one which can’t be directly analogized to previous media the way still photography is analogous to painting.
If someone 300 years from now is watching a film play in the Louvre of Mohammed, in the shadow of the Grand Parisian Mosque, then calling it art, or not, will be meaningful.
“…in the shadow of the Grand Parisian Mosque,” erected on the footprint of Notre Dame….FIFY
Notre what?
Wasn’t art in times past tied to the divine? We have fallen a long way since the beginning of the 20th century. I mentioned Cary Grant to my twenty something niece and she had no idea who he was. Yeah, movie’s impact lasts a generation or so until the next set.
I saw this quote from Craig Ferguson the other day:actors are just carnies with better teeth. Seems about right.
I was doing a private Q&A with the AIM supporters and one of them asked me a question about movies. I mentioned the movie Pale Rider, the old Clinton Eastwood movie. The person had never heard of it, even though they new Eastwood. They knew him as the curmudgeonly old guy in movies like Grand Torino.
Movie actors think that, unlike theater actors, they’ll be remembered forever because their faces are imprinted on film. Turns out that it does give them a bit more time in people’s minds but not much. Like the rest of us, they are forgotten in a generation or two.
How many 20-year-olds know who Steve McQueen is.
20 something here. I know the name, not the face or filmography.
TB…..check out Bullitt. Filmed in 1968 with a guy Steve McQueen that sets me to drooling. (Especially the chess scene in The Thomas Crown Affair.) And San Francisco before it was covered with crap, homeless and illegals. The hippies were in full swing. Nice to see the old buildings of SF. In ’65, my mother would let me take a bus with a girlfriend to SF to spend my saved allowance. The Howard Street bus station had 3-4 old drunks slumped marosely against the wall who were not threatening nor angry, just miserable. We’d walk through the business district through North Beach explore Fisherman’s Wharf then back through Chinatown. And nothing untoward ever happened. Am Never returning to that s***hole again.
To me, Bullitt is most memorable for having cast Jaqueline Bissette in an early role: Young and achingly beautiful.
“I am woman, hear me roar!”….had not set in yet, besides symmetrically lovely she wasn’t angry.
They tend to be dated too. From the hairstyles to the cars to the furniture, it is often easy to identify when a film was made. Because it is so difficult to hide, they lose their timelessness and interest wanes. Very few movies have intergenerational interest.
The Lakota Sioux painted their shields with significant events in their life.
After his death, a brave’s shield was hung in the lodge. When no one could remember whose story it was, it was taken down and honorably burned.
I’m well over that (Gen X) and no one in my generation or younger cares about him if we know who he was, Bullit is well before many Gen X’rs birth and to us its a forgettable action film none of us have seem.
With the cultural and ethnic changes , the cultural memory is further fragmented . Old White Boomer movies mostly mean jack for non Whites and later White movies as vs international movies (like say Fast and Furious) the same.
Not good for the continuity of culture if you ask me but only actual Conservatives, the rump of the Republican party actually cared about that.
I’m an Xer as well. That was my point. I remember watching a few McQueen movies with my dad. Actors might get a few kids of the people in their age group who remember them, but it doesn’t last.
But you bring up a good point. Why should non-whites care about long-gone white actors? That also goes for long-gone white writers and politicians. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, South Asians, etc., don’t care about Washington or Jefferson because they aren’t their people. Stupid CivNats never understand this.
I’m White decently educated , SAR stock (have Founding Father ancestors) and care increasingly little about Washington and Jefferson
I can’t imagine immigrants not from the Anglosphere or maybe Germany and France would care at all.
Its pretty clear the nation they built was built of false premises on a foundation of sand and we need something new.
The key I think is letting go to make something new.
And to my critics do remember that the US was originally a UK enclave for the most part, Anlgo Saxon Protestants and had the FF been hung we’d have stayed that way and for the most part all the mischief we suffer from would not have happened. We’d be 1970’s Canada 2.0
Caveat philosemitism blame that on Cromwell
The Founding Fathers were open borders, free trade types though they were assuming German immigration
And if you doubt me, from the Deceleration of Independence among the complaints
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
Grifters who wanted faster growth than a homogeneous population would have allowed for and when they became disobedient, they whined about being brought to heel
I respect my ancestors sacrifice but the Founding Fathers weren’t in the right and our current mess is a natural outcome of those choices
Boy, you speak for a lot of people. Do you have permission?
Hit a nerve did I ? In any case I think its common knowledge there are assimilated Americans who care about the Founding myths and no assimilated ones who do not or who might give lip service.
A great many people’s immigrant story starts when Grandpa So and So was at Ellis Island and goes from there, They might like our values or not but they aren’t of them.
This is why WASPS who were “here in Colonial times”or whatever have always set themselves aside a bit from the hoi polloi often the detriment of the US as a whole.
Broadly IMO anyway few Blacks (13%) Latinos (15%) Asians (6% or so) and more than a few Whites don’t give a fig about this stuff (call it 21% )
This means broadly speaking 55% of the US population doesn’t give a fig about Washington or any of that stuff or at least care only a very little.
This is a slight majority BTW so yeah those who do care for Founding myths, stories and history are a minority. This is a logical outcome of immigration especially the last 50 million immigrants from 1965 onward.
If you want to change that, mass repatriation and rigid control of the education system will be required.
This probably won’t help with Blacks many of whom have a far less pleasant history behind them and no good reason to be part of the Honkey Sphere
There are of course exceptions. If you have power, its up to you to sort them out.
The Outlaw Josey Wales could’ve been his best, and has some fantastic quotes.
“Shall we bury them.” “To hell with them. Buzzards gotta eat, same as worms.”
The name dropping and reference points in today’s column and in the comments are telling. No one mentioned John Wayne.
He died when I was 19. As a boy whenever he had a new movie come out all of the grandfathers in the neighborhood would take their grandsons to see it. It was one of the ways they passed on the sensibility of their era. His movies were communal events. Every Saturday morning the local movie house held a kid’s .25¢ matinee. A ’30s -’50s Western paired with the latest SciFi B-movie (lots of Italian ones – perfect for a boy approaching puberty). At least half of the dramas on TV were Westerns or Farm dramas.
Wayne was the biggest star in the world and by far the biggest movie star in the North America. John Ford (the director) was the biggest influence upon all directors on both sides of the Atlantic.
If you told me in 1980 that my children (born in the ’90s) would never watch a John Wayne movie and that the Western genera would dry up…it would have been like telling me grocery stores and automobiles would disappear.
Period dramas in Europe, Samurai dramas in Japan and Warring Period dramas in China are as popular as ever. The dearth of the Western is the diversity tax in action.
If you’ve never seen a Wayne movie I’d recommend Red River and The Searchers.
Worse than not watching/forgetting John Wayne is what replaced him—the antihero. All/most of our hero’s today are confused and basically as bad as they are good. Right moral conduct is hopelessly confused with bad moral conduct. The viewer is left to take his choice. And of course, that leads to….
In Eastern Europe, they hold Medieval parades like we do Civil War reconstructions.
An American lady sitting at an outdoor cafe in Bulgaria, watching the parade, saw some 200 men marching barefoot with spears, wearing nought but wolfskins, with the wolf’s head on top.
The table next to her said “Hey, American!
We still remember before the Romans!”
Yves….Just viewed The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance again. What Lefty doesn’t get about human nature! Should be mandatory film art in school. Having Commie folks I missed John Wayne growing up. Basic Husband introduced me to Westerns and John Wayne. Gals….don’t miss young Tom Selleck westerns with Sam Elliot. Was watching 1996 Riders of the Purple Sage with Ed Harris the other night when Basic Husband and I exclaimed that’s filmed in our world! That’s Wingate sandstone on top of the Chinle formation….that’s us!
Also don’t miss Ride the High Country more on human nature movie by Sam Peckinpah staring aging Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea. Fabulous visual as filmed in my old hometown Mammoth Lakes and the Alabama Hills, recognized the weathered granites.
I kind of like Thunderbolt & Lightfoot which was a mid 70s movie with Jeff Bridges and Clint Eastwood. It’s a western but it has a countercultural vibe to it that I like. Bridges was in another movie around that same time called Rancho Deluxe, which I’ve seen parts of, that is similar.
I have to force myself to watch a movie. When there is a news item on the net I much prefer a text synopsis rather than video description (the exception is actual footage of some dramatic event.) Taking in basic verbal information via video just takes up too much mental bandwidth and I’ll often skip over news blurbs that are video only. I think it has something to do with the nature of the media. Like the above commenter, my 17 year old daughter probably knows very few 20th century actors, but she knows A LOT of 20th century musicians. She was listening to some tune the other day and I asked her if she knew who the singer was. She replied correctly, Dean Martin.
Re: ” movies just don’t hold up over time” .
Time also makes movies unviewable by succeeding generations. Unlike paintings, sculpture, great buildings….. movies require infrastructure for people to even view. Who has an 8mm projector any more? Anybody who bought a movie on 8mm would have had to either buy it again on a Laserdisc or VHS tape years later to keep viewing the movie – if their projector broke. Who has a Laserdisc or VHS player any more? If you bought either – you would have had to buy the movie again on DVD years later after your player broke. You can of course convert your VHS tapes over to DVD, but the picture quality is going to be so lousy on any modern TV that it gets close to unwatchable.
You can go to the movie theatre – but that again – is infrastructure.
DVDs and BluRays now can be viewed with players on your TV – or on your computer. What happens when the power goes out? They’re unplayable.
What happens 50 years down the road – when the entire thing has moved to streaming and all the DVD and BluRay players are broken and in the landfill? All those personal collections of movies are now unplayable.
What happens when modern civilization devolves so much that ALL of those infrastructures needed to view a movie – simply don’t exist any more?
That 500 year old painting can still be hanging in the corner of my grass hut – and the 1000 year old sculpture can be sitting outside my deerhide door.
I can still “use and admire” those traditional forms of art. On the larger historical timeframe – movies are just a flash in the pan and entirely tied to modern day technological infrastructure to even be viewable. Take that away – and movies instantly go away as well.
The fact that a technological advance may render previous technology unuseable is one reason why I prefer books to kindle. The one exception is a little book that I will only read once. If it’s a book that I want to keep to refer back to, I want a traditional book. Plus, I just like books.
With some exceptions, all media “goes away”. Not to be pedantic, but artwork is a good example. Even relatively modern stuff, less than 100 years old, is being restored everyday. Perhaps statuary has an indefinite lifespan if protected from the elements, but I can’t think of much else.
Makes me wish I had the patience to chisel and polish marble. Remarkable what those guys were able to produce.
Perhaps here is a hobby you can afford and master—wood turning. Check out the YouTube videos and such. I find it fascinating.
If I had another chance, I’d be a classical sculptor, working in marble, obsessed and autistic as all get-out.
Technology doesn’t necessarily work like that. Companies hungry for product when the new tech is just getting started will raid their libraries (figuratively) to put out new tech products and get people to convert. Someone in 1956 had NO access to old, forgotten 78s, then along came Harry Smith, put a bunch out on LPS and boom, the folk revival. In turn, more LPs are available now Same with kindles or other ebooks or even pdf files. I’m sure a considerable part of the spread of Rightist ideas is all the old, obscure stuff They wanted you to forget about now being available on the net and downloadable. You technophobes think everyone is a millionaire with a huge, ancestral library.
An interesting side note in a similar vane is TV robbing radio series. In the early 50’s there was a rush to get TV content as the medium exploded. So old radio series were converted into TV series. One radio series, “The Lone Ranger” comes to mind.
If one watches the very first Lone Ranger TV programs, you’ll notice something odd—most of the program can be divided into two parts/types: The Lone Ranger and the antagonist in a room talking to/fighting each other, and The Lone Ranger riding his horse Silver in lengthy treks back and forth. In short, you’d see about the same thing if you were a radio “audience” in the studio viewing the voice actors reading the script—except for the horse scenes, where you’d see the sound effects man with two coconuts.
Took a season or so before they discovered how to use the new medium, probably by hiring movie directors.
Well, “Okay Boomer….” But wait…I AM one! Arrrgghh!
If we’re going to be in grass huts, I think we’ll have lost the capacity to appreciate a Rembrandt or Michaelangelo anyway.
In general, I’ve seen vastly increased accessibility of obscure film. Used to be a big Kate Bush fan back in the ’90s. She was a notoriously reclusive artist, so the videos of her short, early, active performing career were highly sought after. They were handed around person-to-person on grainy recopied VHS tapes.
Now I can get virtually every one of them including many I never saw in an instant on YouTube. Video formats now are pretty much endlessly convertible and interchangeable, and there are many venues — when YouTube memory holes something, it pops right up on BitChute or some other video site, or if nothing else BitTorrent.
I doubt civilization will fall so far that we will lose world-wide video service. And, as I started out, if we do, we’ve got bigger problems.
Kate Bush makes me swoon. Such creativity and femininity. She’s a bit shrill at times, but my Lord…
Just viewed The Man I Love. No wonder she is swoonable. Sultry come hither without blue hair, facial fishing tackle, not petulant nor growling to bite your arm off. Enjoy her while you can before the cultural gaff hook comes out.
I saw her first appearance on American television on SNL, back in ’78 when I was just under 15 years old. My teenage boy mind was blown.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x25r049
One of the best things about YouTube and its ilk is that they have made a lot of formerly obscure videos far more accessible to more people.
On the flip side, as someone who was into quite a few obscure bands, the music streaming services like Spotify, Pandora, and Amazon have acted to filter out lesser known artists. I know this because I have a few dozen CDs and singles that simply aren’t available on any of the music streaming services.
If they’re on Spotify, Pandora or Amazon you know they’ve sold out, anyway. So why would you want to listen to them? 😉
I have watched like one movie in the last 18 or so years (The Road). I haven’t been in a movie theater since like 2001 or 2002. I cut my cord shortly after that.
I suggest everyone in dissident politics do the same. These people hate you and you shouldn’t be financing them or allowing their propaganda into your head. The funny thing is, is that once you are away from this stuff for a couple of years, it becomes unwatchable. I absolutely cannot watch network TV. It literally gives me a headache.
Agreed. The last movie I saw in a theater was “Titanic” in 1998. The leftist attitudes in movies, TV, media has literally driven me away. I refuse to be talked down to by people who have the wealth of kings and the morals of alley cats.
Tars – spot on.
Good point. Long ago I used an hypothetical scenario with my son when he was younger. In those days, Jack Nicholson had made a killing in the original Batman movie. Something like $50M+. Was on all the media touting his salary and cut of the profits, audience increase, ticket sales, etc.
I started with a hypothetical crazy guy in the street asking him (son) for a dollar so he could buy drugs. Of course, the answer was no. Then we computed how much of the estimated ticket sales went into Nicholson’s pocket—easily more than the dollar being asked for by the homeless druggie. Point being, if you wouldn’t waste a dollar on a beggar, why give even more to a movie star who holds values antithetical to your own?
And besides, it was a wonderful exercise in basic match and critical thinking.
I have seen two movies at the theater in the last year, more than the previous ten. Went and viewed 1917, not bad at all. If there was political message in it, I missed it. Just a very good story about a mission in a god awful war. Valor, horror and sorrow but done very well from my standpoint.
I liked 1917. Pretty well balanced except they had to make the Germans merciless and the German pilot stabbing the young British soldier.
Could have happened, yes, but more than likely the German pilot would have been grateful they saved his life from burning to death.
Had to bring in a Indian too but was not totally out of line.
Good movie though.
World War 1 was the beginning of this current madness that we are in.
And a time period we should read and study more about.
if the movie is any good it jut keeps getting converted to whatever the latest format is.
“Of all the arts, the cinema is the most important.” – V.I. Lenin
It has been a huge and multi-generational setback to our side that we have no creators in this genre.
There are exceptions. “Forest Gump“ was one. I remember the howls of the Leftist critics wrt to the main character—a retarded Boomer. The objection was that the main character Forest—too dumb to be cleaver and “with it”—did what the society of the time expected of a young man, even with his mental impairment (or worse because of it), and became an outstanding success in life, while the ones that went against the culture of the time (counter-culture folk) did poorly. I’m sure the writers and director considered this a cleaver spoof, but not so sure the audience took it that way.
True, but it says something that the exceptions come along about once a decade. Blade Runner 2049 would probably be the most recent, 300 was in 2007 and the aforementioned Gump in 1996.
BTW, the book of Forrest Gump is arguably better and completely insane – he and a monkey go to outer space and when the simian returns it can talk!
I liked Gran Torino until I realized the car was America and the old white guy with the shitty white family was giving it to the immigrant. Insidious.
A good one is Watchmen. The villain is a utpoian and the hero is a brutal conspiracy theorist.
Off the top of my head, here are a few of my favorite movies dealing with right-wing themes.
1. Demolition Man
2. Straw Dogs
3. Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy
4. Black Hawk Down
5. End of Watch
this is a great takedown of forest Grump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpVIVRIjRfE
yep. I saw the movie again recently and I totally forgot how much of a bitch Jenny was
Forrest Gump author Winston Groom has written mostly nonfiction history books. He was royally screwed by Hollywood when he sold the movie rights to the book. He took $350,000 and 3% of the ACCOUNTING profits. Guess what? Despite it being one of the highest grossing movies of all time, it somehow never made a profit (Hollywood accounting). Groom sued and lost. “Sorry buddy, I know we made a billion dollars off of your creation but a contract is a contract”. I read a story about this where they said that insiders like Spielberg take a percentage of movie ticket sales.
This past year has been filled to the brim with (intentional or not) rightist film and TV – from Alita to Joker to Richard Jewell to 1917 to the final season of Game of Thrones, which may have been the most anti-leftist thing that’s been on TV since Fulton Sheen retired (why do you think all the usual suspects howled about how much they hated it?).
Most of the entertainment media I consume is anime, which has (mostly) yet to be POZed.
I’ll be sure to check “Alita” out.
Hunger Games too. Perfect analogue to Washington, DC versus Flyover Country.
Clint Eastwood. There are others. A few. Don’t forget John Milius and Red Dawn.
The Last Temptation of Christ did pretty well though on the whole imaginative fare is not culturally Conservative. Our guys don’t have as many stories to tell. A Conservative life is one with little drama and there are only so many war stories and bible stories to go around.
Still the other side often operated like a cartel and put a lot of effort into suppressing our side. The Right’s obsession with money and general Liberalism made a legislative response impossible.
Frankly the Left is correct in saying free speech for the other side is poison which is why we had things like community standards obscenity laws and the comics code.
However the money junkies are correct in one way too it does correct. The only Hollywood movies making money these days are brainless international fare like Sonic the Hedgehog.
‘Frankly the Left is correct in saying free speech for the other side is poison which is why we had things like community standards obscenity laws and the comics code.’ I am coming around to the idea that free speech and freedom of expression are ideas that we bought into hook, line and sinker just like earlier commandments received from The Clouds, such as the divine right of kings which asserted the moral authority of the elites to own everything and rule everyone. Our ancestors thought that authority was handed down by God and it served as the instrument of their subservience. We think of freedom of speech and expression as human rights, the religion of current year, and it has been turned into the instrument of our subservience.
apocalypto wad excellent too.
“The Last Temptation of Christ did pretty well though on the whole imaginative fare is not culturally Conservative. Our guys don’t have as many stories to tell. A Conservative life is one with little drama and there are only so many war stories and bible stories to go around.”
Good points. Arts and creativity in general don’t really mix with conservatism. One needs an open-mindedness and willingness to buck tradition in order to inspire others with art.
Conservatives are probably better at defending the arts, oddly enough.
Golconde.
https://www.menil.org/collection/objects/4901-golconda-golconde
Z Man, glad you pointed out how light and superficial cinema is compared to real art. I’ve been making this point for years and heavily criticized when I do. (People have their favorite films they believe are sublime, profound, and life changing. They are to some extent, but as you said, Citizen Kane isn’t anywhere near the equal of War and Peace or Anna Karenina.) The Hayes Code made this distinction long ago in noting the tremendous propaganda power in film because it didn’t engage the viewer intellectually but emotionally. The Code pointed out the difference between the demands a stage play puts on the auditor and what a movie does.
Also great art, like stage plays, don’t generally appeal to the masses in the same way. Most people haven’t the patience to sit through a good play, even a light comedy that is fast and witty.
Art engages and demands. Pop art (culture) immerses, washes over, manipulates, and conditions the viewer/listener.