The Broken Back of Counterfeit Liberalism

[IndianaGreen]

The Broken Back of Counterfeit Liberalism

By Karin S. Coddon

Months after the event, an event that I concede is the quintessence of triviality, I am still pissed. I’m pissed that the Academy Awards snubbed Brokeback Mountain in favor of the “surprise” choice of Crash, a film described by Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan as a “feel-good movie about racism.”

It’s not that I am a rabid cinephile or that Brokeback, which I truly loved, was the best or boldest film I’ve ever seen. Nor is it simply that the Brokeback slight was clearly fueled by a combination of homophobia and cowardice. But several friends and I remained angry for the next couple of days after the Oscars. My sister and I remained angry for a good two weeks. Here it is months later, and I’m still fuming. My spleen was jump-started by my coming across an old issue of Entertainment Weekly in which one of my literary heroes, Stephen King, also takes the Academy to task over bypassing Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture. One of King’s comments particularly struck me, gesturing as it did toward the true basis for my umbrage in excess if not of the facts, then of the context. The Academy, observes King, is at heart “as conservative as the current U.S. House of Representatives” (EW 858, Mar 17, 06, 126).

Exactly – yet mainstream political culture continues to label Hollywood “liberal” and thus out of sync with the values of the heartland, just as the right-wing punditocracy assails “tenured radicals” whose rarefied and indecipherable post-fill-in-the-blankism is cited as proof of a concerted leftist indoctrination project. Both targeted and demonized by the right-wing side of the “culture wars,” Hollywood and academia alike proudly wear the banner of contestation while remaining in essence as reactionary in membership and institutional practices as their adversaries on the right. The banner of contestation is in reality the emperor’s new clothes. These liberal bogeymen play the valuable role of lightning rod against which the right wing can rally the troops even while knowing that these threats are as counterfeit as the Red-under-every-bed of the 1950’s.

Thus for me the Brokeback Mountain incident embodies – and lays bare – the vacuity at the core of much of what passes as culturally subversive in this, the Bush era: the self-deceived complicity of those demonized as much as the facile demonization. I am left to ponder two questions. First, what are the available modes of leftist contestation if popular and academic culture offer only safe, sham versions? And second, with the rare acts of honest liberal/leftism – Fahrenheit 9/11, gay marriage legislation, even Randi Rhodes’s passionate anti-Bushism on Air America Radio – appropriated as mobilizing tools by the right no less effectively than the faux liberalism of Hollywood and the university, is a refusal to engage at all the only remaining option? Is it better to say nothing than to risk feeding the reactionary beast?

http://politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/3700/1/195/

[Mythsaje]

1. The ONLY option, as far as I'm concerned,

is to look them straight in the eye and tell them... "You're full of shit. Pardon my freedom."

[Redstone]

2. You're beating a dead horse,

with a broken stick.

Redstone

[MrPrax]

3. Oh man...

Boy Marxist scholars have certainly fallen on hard times.

Why exactly would someone claiming to be from the 'hard left' view Brokeback Mountain as 'bold' and then see significance in it NOT being voted 'Best Picture' by an elitist body of corporate employees?

1) Brokeback Mountain wasn't a very good movie
2) Crash won largely for the fact it was made in LA and it had a large cast of actors so a lot of people made a few bucks
3) Hollywood or more correctly media corporations are 'liberal' because they like the 'unfettered' access to both an audience and subject matter -- conservative moral agendas tend to limit what can and can't be produced.

My feeling about Brokeback Mountain was the same as I had about Million Dollar Baby -- both are genre movies (westerns/boxing) and these types of genres don't do very good box office. To add to the box office appeal, these genre films were fused with 'controversy' (explicit gay sex/euthanasia) in order to wring a dollar out of well-worn genres prone to cliche. The structure of BBM was the same as Neil Simon's play 'Same Time, Next Year' or another variation of that theme, a much better film, Remains of the Day.

This Marxist should really go back and read his Adorno, Walter or even Lukas and then he won't be so disappointed by the fact the revolution is noting going to come from either liberals, 'artists' or their corporate entities...in fact left to their own devices, liberals will always line up with the Right in a crisis.

A much better movie he should have watched which incidentally did win Best Foreign Picture was Istav Szabo's Mephisto starring Klaus Maria Brandeur. That movie pretty well nails the fallacy of the so-called liberalism in the Arts...

[cprise]

4. Why

...does this 'Marxist' worship the pricey, for-profit media circus? Reading the article, I got the impression there was little room in his head for anything else.