User:Mdiamante/Unedited writings

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It's in the Subtext: Multiplex Politics

By Matthew Diamante

This is the Internet's only complete copy of Multiplex Politics, an essay published in the Tufts Observer on September 29, 2006. The piece as printed can be found here; however, that edited version omitted two paragraphs and added a completely alien conclusion. Here is the essay as the author intended it to be read.

Ah, summer blockbuster films. For some, it's a time to experience glorious other worlds; to glimpse strange realities in a manner similar to that of Plato's cavemen. For others, summer flicks are a time to bond with the celebrities they sort of think of as friends, and still others go merely to escape Tatooine-like outdoor temperatures. But when I head to my favorite multiplex each June, July and August, I'm often looking for something else: namely, just what sort of political statements are being transmitted to the American masses?

Don't laugh. As even amateur cinema historians know, the moving picture has long been known to have significant effects on the national psyche. D.W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation had the monstrous yet significant effect of reviving the Ku Klux Klan. Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK prompted Congress to release previously classified documents pertaining to the Kennedy assassination. And the 1996 live-action version of 101 Dalmatians prompted a temporary surge in dalmatian adoptions. Granted, that last film may not have had political implications, per se, though I'm sure that PETA was pleased with the anti-fur-clothing theme.

So when the lights dim and the twelfth preview mercifully ends, I don't merely anticipate an exciting screening of Terminator 4: The Reign of Steve Jobs or Indiana Jones and the Wheelchair of Destiny. I look forward to grabbing the skin, exposing the vein and measuring the throbbing pulse of the American mind.

First up on this summer's slate of potential paradigm shifters was X-Men: The Last Stand. Apart from taking a bold stance against numbers by refusing to follow up 2003's X2 with the title X3, The Last Stand's plot involved a “cure” for mutant-ness (which in X2 's most memorable scene was treated as an allegory for homosexuality). Wolverine, the franchise's most prominent character and primary voice of conscience, gives the treatment an implicit endorsement by urging a fellow mutant not to feel pressured into taking it by others. If we do take the mutant condition as a straightforward metaphor for homosexuality, the film would thus seem to suggest that taking some sort of heterosexuality serum would be acceptable if one truly wanted to, which seems a reasonable conclusion most Americans would be willing to accept.

The Last Stand, however, also presents a trickier and less-examined question: in what circumstances, if any, could this mutant “cure” be justifiably applied against the subject's will? Both the US President (who is, unhappily, a different character than the one we met at the end of X2) and his newly appointed Cabinet-level Secretary of Mutant Affairs take for granted the notion that a large-scale and indiscriminate treatment would be reprehensible. (Seemingly forgotten is the incident of the previous film in which the nefarious Magneto nearly succeeds in killing every non-mutant on the planet. In today's post-9/11 world, such an attack would surely prevent such a course of action from being so easily dismissed.) But after Magneto breaks several dangerous mutants from a police convoy, a police officer fires a "cure"-tipped dart at a fugitive, rendering her normal (or at least as normal as someone resembling Rebecca Romijn can ever be). The outraged secretary resigns and rejoins his X-Men comrades, where he is rewarded with the usual pomp and glory enjoyed by good guys in such entertainment. While we see that the use of the dart gun was not one of self-defense, it seems reasonable under the circumstances that authorities transporting mutant felons should enjoy such protective armament. I for one am inclined to agree with the film's president, who berates the Secretary's resignation as a petty and unproductive move.

Next came the J.J. Abrams-helmed Tom Cruise-fest Mission: Impossible III, also known by its aesthetically problematic abbreviation M:i-III. In IMF agent Ethan Hunt's latest cinematic outing, our hero is compelled to steal an object known only as “The Rabbit's Foot" for a mysterious black-market arms dealer, or his wife gets it. Oddly enough, Hunt seems to play his part fairly, and actually delivers the MacGuffin with no apparent double-crosses planned. We assume that once he recovers his wife, he'll go after both the arms dealer and his ill-gotten bounty, but his actions nevertheless appear to be a clear case of appeasing a terrorist for personal gain (and at the possible expense of countless others). For his conduct, we learn that the president has a high-level position in mind for him. Worrisome— was this Paul Wolfowitz's idea? If nothing else, however, M:i-III confirms our society's willingness to poke fun at organized religion: in one scene, Anthony Lane writes in The New Yorker, "an explosive [is] disguised as a crucifix. I can think of other faiths whose followers would riot for less." [1]

In true Gilbertian fashion, however, this summer paired the irresponsible authorities of M:i-III with noble outlaws in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. When 2003's inaugural PotC film, The Curse of the Black Pearl, was released, I complained to anyone who would listen that in addition to being a limp and unexciting affair, the film actually glorified piracy while portraying the British Empire as an entity that was square at best and sinister at worst. To those who would counter that the film's admiration of the bandits was simple good fun, I could only reply that Disney would hardly have the same sense of humor in dealing with those caught pirating the flick to their own financial gain.

Happily, no such faults are found in Dead Man's Chest. As Annalee Newitz pointed out in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the "supreme enemies" this time around are the British East India Company and a ship full of cursed seamen who eventually merge with the ghostly hull, their very bodies appropriated by welathier forces. Both villains, Newitz writes, are "ruthless corporate enterprises whose owners mow down human life in search of bigger profits. It's only in an overt fantasy like Pirates," she concludes, "that we get a story capable of capturing the full horror of uncontrolled corporate greed." [2] Captain Jack Sparrow's merry crew of relatively harmless pranksters, on the other hand, resembles nothing so much as a relatively enlightened worker's co-operative. (After all, we learned in this first film that their piratical booty was to be distributed evenly — as close to an endorsement of communism that mainstream entertainment has offered up in some time.) It is interesting to note that despite their law and order-flouting careers, many actual pirate crews were the most egalitarian societies of their times: in the late seventeenth century, for instance, one of the safest and freest careers an African or dark-skinned islander could enjoy outside of their home lands was that of a gentleman (or even gentlewoman) of fortune. Under such circumstances, who wouldn't root for the noble sailors of the Black Pearl?

The Man of Steel couldn't out-earn Johnny Depp's man of mascara, but what Bryan Singer's Superman Returns lacked in box-office receipts, it bravely strove to make up for with one of the most trenchant indictments of real estate-dealing megalomaniacs ever put on a hard drive. In this sequel to Superman I and II, we are reminded by Marlon Brando's Jor-El that Clark Kent, née Kal-El, has been sent to Earth to be a "light" that will show us humans how to be a great people. But instead of discussing his political beliefs with Larry King or brokering peace in the Middle East, everyone's favorite solar-powered immigrant contents himself with wowing curiously mute spectators and foiling bank robberies.

"Every day I hear people crying out for [a savior]", Superman says at one point, but as writer/director Singer told beliefnet.com, "I certainly didn't want him going across the globe solving terrorist problems [...] Because he leads by example. He helps you solve your problems by just being supportive, helping every once in awhile." [3] Okay, but would it transgress his sense of honor to make a public plea or two for world peace or some other worthy cause? Whenever Superman speaks to the media in Returns he's either talking about himself or recycling a smart-aleck remark about airplane travel.

The most interesting statement Singer's film makes is that Superman is no longer merely an American icon; rather, he is a global do-gooder who defuses crises around the world. "Does he still stand for Truth, Justice... all that stuff?" the Daily Planet's news editor asks. For at least that moment, Returns acknowledges that the nation has matured since Superman first appeared in 1938, and that Truth and Justice are no longer synonymous with, nor are they exclusive to, the American Way.

So there you have it, the mass-market socio-political statements event movies made in the summer of '06. I'd intended to discuss the implied messages of other films, including Miami Vice and the crossword-puzzle documentary Wordplay, but I've run out of space. Worst of all, however, I have not yet seen, and can therefore not comment on, the intriguing subtexts of Snakes on a Plane.

Politics by Other Means

This essay appeared in the March 2007 inaugural issue of The Forum, the Tufts Democrats magazine. Available online here (.pdf, page 16), the full text, with typographical corrections, appears below.

We are, or so the saying goes, what we eat. But are we also what we watch? There are grounds to believe so: we've seen the polls showing regular viewers of the Fox “Noise” Channel are less well-informed than those who don't follow news at all and heard the worried speculation that violence in popular media is desensitizing an entire generation of citizens to the suffering of others. It is said that politics is war by other means; as a corollary, then, media is surely politics by other means.

And those from the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party know that in terms of mass media, the American Left is at a sizable disadvantage. The Right is served not only by (nearly all) talk radio, Fox "Noise" and such nakedly propagandistic rags as the New York Post and the Washington Times but also by the shoddy, profit-driven fluff that dominates contemporary mainstream journalism. “Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” quoth Colbert; ergo, the further news outlets stray from their task of reporting reality and sniff up the posteriors of such non-events as “runaway brides” or court struggles over deceased tabloid fixations, the further they stray from promoting liberalism nationwide. (As the coverage of the lead-up to the Iraq War amply demonstrated, not even allegedly liberal outlets such as the Times can be fully trusted.)

Telecommunications deregulation and internal politics within mass media conglomerates exacerbate the inherent difficulties in speaking Truth to Power, and the result is inflated high support for right-wingers (see: the measured and substantial disparity in positive/negative media coverage of Gore and Bush seven years ago). Fortunately, liberals enjoy natural dominance over one media domain more regressive and reactionary types have an instinctual aversion to: the arts of Entertainment.

Granted, aggressive promotion of contemporary liberalism in mainstream culture is probably not as important as some other vital components of a progressive and forward-thinking society. (Voting rights come to mind— and confounding as it is, the last two presidential elections have shown that we still have much work to do on this matter.) Still, the engaging of the public via entertainment must not be overlooked. A first-rate primer on the left-versus-right struggles of the collective unconscious was featured in the January 2005 Esquire, in which one Tom Junod demonstrated that popular culture “doesn't represent liberals any more than it represents conservatives. "The culture,” he maintained, “is merely identified with liberals,” and argued that right-wingers score political points with swayable voters by associating the mass media's “omnivorous pornographication” of human life (a holistic brand of smut in which sexual objectification is but one part of an unresting march to the lowest common denominator) with liberalism in much the same manner that right-wing pundits make news outfits walk on eggshells by accusing them of left-wing bias. Throw in a sneered “Hollywood” or two, and even the Rupert Murdoch-funded right-wing fantasia 24's graphic violence becomes another rock in Republicans' catapults.

The main obstacle to a thriving mainstream progressive culture, Junod noted, is that liberals' metric for preference in entertainment is not based on message but quality. To left-wingers, he wrote, “if the TV show/CD/movie is good, then it's moral. If it's bad— cheesy, corny, clunky, or sentimental— then it doesn't matter what values it attempts to transmit.” Liberals ignore graphic violence in movies such as The Matrix or The Bourne Identity because they're good films, but fwoosh, there go the votes of Soccer Moms.

Yet gloomy scenarios such as these presuppose a false choice between artistic quality and liberal values. At their best, left-wing entertainments such as Dr. Strangelove, The West Wing and An Inconvenient Truth rise to critical and iconic heights far above those in reach of the right-wing counterparts. Example: the inaugural Chronicles of Narnia film (in which a quartet of simple but good-hearted children tell stronger, more experienced adults how to fight a war) was one of the most neocon-friendly media in recent memory, and even managed to out-earn Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire within the States, but unlike all three subtler and more humane Lord of the Rings films, neither it nor its sequels will be so much as nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.

Junod again: liberals stand to gain much more from mass entertainment than right-wingers because “liberals understand the culture” better. Culture is, after all, a product of reality, which brings us back to Colbert's principle of reality's liberal bias. Best yet, good left-wing entertainment is often cost-effective: large-scale visibility for films such as Good Night, and Good Luck. (budgeted at a mere $7 million) is freely provided by the entertainment divisions of corporate mass media in the form of critical buzz and historical analysis. Since marketing a film can now be as costly as making it, this free media can invaluable for cerebrally-inclined projects.

So without compromising our insistence on quality artwork, powerful, intelligent and dedicated liberals such as ourselves should not only embrace but support mass entertainment that promotes our politics and values. With the power of the purse being put to progressive and crowd-pleasing use, we'll win the culture war yet.

The valuable lessons of Golden Compass

This letter to the San Francisco Chronicle was printed in edited form on December 28, 2007. The excised bits appear below, highlighted red.

When the Christ-on-steroids lion Aslan brings a troubled child back to the company of his siblings in the 2005 film "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", he orders the youngsters not to discuss their difficulties, thereby advocating the repression of unpleasant thoughts. There are no such demeaning lessons, however, to be found in the recent "The Golden Compass" film or the books that inspired it; instead, author Philip Pullman's works challenge youth to question authority, rebel against tyranny and serve humankind. These are Christian values, but since Pullman and his protagonists reject the fallacy (recently regurgitated by Mitt Romney) that liberty and virtue are impossible without religion, it is drearily unsurprising that some Christians of a right-wing persuasion attack Pullman's series.

In a December 21 letter to Datebook, Al Smith repeats this attack, and accuses the film of an "absence of joy". (The Vatican newspaper l'Osservatore Romano has similarly groused that "in Pullman’s world, hope simply does not exist.") In a story of friendship strong enough to inspire its protagonist to risk her life for that of a companion, such a charge is transparently dishonest. Pullman's tale is indeed an attack on a fantastical vision of Biblically-inspired authoritarianism, but when such detractors as Mr. Smith and the Vatican accuse it of nihilism, it is not difficult to detect a note of desperation in their plaints.

A September '08 letter to the Tufts Daily

This letter to the Daily was slightly modified in its 9.15.08 published version. The full text follows, with modified and excised bits highlighted red.

Editor – I thank Matthew Ladner for his September 8 Op-Ed “The Democrats' Palin Problem”. It was respectful – except when he abbreviated Obama's position to “Sen.” but spelled out Palin's “Governor” five times. It was hard-hitting – except in his failure to directly attribute a single criticism of the GOP's ticket. And it offered powerful arguments for why Ms. Palin will, come January 21, be suited to assume the presidency if needed: she led a “successful campaign against corruption” (though Mr. Ladner offers no source for this statement), she has a “warm”, “refreshing” personality and she demonstrated “leadership” during her RNC speech (presumably by guiding the adoring audience in applause). Palin hasn't served on the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, as Obama does, nor does she have any notable foreign policy experience, but she does bear an “indifference to intense scrutiny”, which, as President Bush has shown, inevitably leads to excellence in public service. Well, Mr. Ladner certainly has me convinced!

As Stephanie Brown correctly noted in her Op-Ed from the same day, political debate at Tufts (viz., Mr. Ladner's piece) often over-focuses on “superficial” issues. That quote, incidentally, was buried in a piece calling certain posters “Soviet”-like, caricaturing Obama as a “messianic” figure and insisting that the word “change” is overused. She also deplored “hypocrisy” and incivility in political discussion, yet signed off with two incredibly patronizing sentences – but I digress.

Here are some non-superficial issues no amount of right-wing howling can conceal: the McCain-Palin ticket represents a sure continuation of the Bush Administration's dangerous command of our armed forces, pathetically regressive taxation, gleeful explosion of the national debt, illegal torture and politicization of the federal government, abuse of power, unconstitutional shirking of congressional oversight, ghastly selection of federal and Supreme Court justices and too many other disgraces to name here. Small wonder, then, that Mr. Ladner and Ms. Brown fall over themselves to vilify Democrats and the better choice their Obama-Biden ticket offers.