Examine This Specimen

When somebody like Oliver Stone decides to make a movie draped in the “remember our heroes” iconography of 9/11 rather than one about the victimization of Muslims in America, it is not too hard to figure out the mood of Hollywood. Like the Democratic Party it orients to, it has lacked the guts to take the system on full throttle. Instead it prefers to bankroll movies that dance around the edges like “Babel” or “V for Vendetta”. --Louis Proyect

Louis Proyect isn't the world's last living Bolshevik, but he's close. His activism, insofar as it manifests itself on his blog, consists mainly in going to see movies, especially movies from places we don't usually import them from, like Senegal and Turkey.

While righties such as I complain that Hollywood films tend to be oikophobic and gratuitously vulgar, the likes of Proyect expect them to "take the system on full throttle," and make films about "the victimization of Muslims in America." Any dime-store Marxist, of course, would tell us, as Proyect does elsewhere in his post, that movies are expensive, producers have to make money, and "the system" (doesn't he mean the bourgeoisie, the capitalists?) isn't run by revolutionaries, anyhow. As a friend of mine once said, "There's no use fretting about the fact that a rattlesnake is venomous. It's a rattlesnake."

Although La Streisand lives, the Hollywood Ten types are gone, and the last time I checked there wasn't a big market for flicks about the victimized American Muslims. The surprising thing, in fact, is how little Muslims are victimized in this country, and how much effort goes into making nice to them. Some on the left, of course, may see Muslims as a potential recruiting ground and potential allies. Although someone might pitch a remake of Bad Day at Black Rock, set in Dearborn, with Arabs instead of Japanese as victims, I doubt a writer could live on the options.

In my youth, I remember the followers of Daniel DeLeon, the Socialist Labor Party I think it was, who always managed to get on the ballot, and were obviously senescent fossils of what once might have been a political movement. As clever as Mr. Proyect can be, I get the same impression from remarks like the one I quote.

Wotthehell. Let's go to the movies.