The Death of Film

 

Picasso once said of art that “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”

 

How sad it is then that the film industry in the US is adamantly doing precisely the opposite – by trying to cram in as much intersectional, nonsensical, absurdly philistine and outrightly disgusting politics into an unwilling public as possible.

 

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have recently decreed that for a future film to be eligible for the Best Picture Oscar, it will have to submit to sexual and racial quotas in four categories – on screen; in the crew; at the studio; and in training and advancement in other areas related to the film.

 

The on screen representation onus include: having at least one lead character or a significant supporting character being a sexual or ethnic minority, having at least 30 percent of the supporting roles be from two underrepresented groups, or having the main storyline, theme or narrative to be focused on an underrepresented group.

 

Underrepresented groups, according to the Academy, include women, people of colour, people who identify as LGBTQ and people with disabilities.

 

Putting aside the inconvenient fact that females are the majority in the US, the requirements of the Academy can be simply summed up as: fewer straight white men.

 

Adhering to their own rules, the Academy would have had to reject these past winners over the last ten years alone: The Shape of Water, Spotlight, Birdman, The Artist and The King’s Speech. This is not to mention all-time great films like Schindler’s List, Chariots of Fire, The Godfather I & II, The Sound of Music and Casablanca, which all would be ineligible.

 

Not an ethnic minority, LGTBQ, or disabled person in sight.

And what about the recent winner, Parasite? While the Korean movie is acted and staffed almost exclusively of Koreans, Koreans in Korea are not a minority. Would it then not be logically consistent that the Academy penalize the movie for not being diverse?

 

This kowtowing at the Alter of the Woke and complete divorce from the sentiments of the majority is perhaps not surprising. The always prescient Orwell wrote: “The movies are probably a very unsafe guide to popular taste, because the film industry is virtually a monopoly, which means that it is not obliged to study its public at all closely.”

 

The disdain of those in the very progressive film and media industry bubble for the public has become ever more apparent. Rotten Tomatoes, the film/television score aggregation website, has two measures, one by professional critics and another by the general audience. Some of the discrepant ratings are telling.

 

Rambo: Last Blood had 82% approval from the audience but only 26% from the critics. Rambo, though geriatric, did what he always did, in this case, rescuing a beautiful girl from a Mexican cartel and slaughtering through a lot of extras and stuntmen along the way. This time, however, he is accused by critics of racism and anti-globalism.

 

The documentary Knock Down the House, about the rise of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortesz, has a 99% critic score but only 19% from the audience. The low audience score possibly because most people recognize AOC and her cohort’s utterly unrealistic proposals and hypocritical behavior. This realization seems to have escaped the critics, who only care that she is expounding positions they like, extreme and farcical though these positions are. As an aside, for a proper diagnosis of the climate issue, serious and deep thinkers like Bjorn Lomborg should be listened to. 

 

Another documentary, Uncle Tom, written by the black conservative Larry Elder, that questions the relationship between black voters and the Democratic Party in the US, and gives a platform to a lot of often elided black conservatives, has received so little press that there is no critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. However, it holds a 97% audience score. Despite the media ghosting, it had a bigger opening weekend than other fan-fared documentaries like Bowling for Columbine and was in fact the number one grossing documentary when it was released.

 

The same trend is seen in comedy. Dave Chappelle’s Sticks and Stones, in which he went after the self-righteous and humourless woke crowd, including Jussie Smollett, got a 99% approval rating from over 40,000 audience members, but only a 35% from 17 professional critics, who claimed it to be inflammatory.

 

Compare this with Australian comic Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, which garnered a stellar 100% rating from 48 critics but only 25% from the audience. One audience wrote succinctly of the show, suffused with unqualified fourth wave feminism: “It was a miserable preachy sermon based on victimhood that was labeled a comedy special”.

 

The sharpest of all reliefs comes from the recent French film Cuties, a film that, putting it mildly, puts prepubescent young girls in sexualized settings. It is not surprising therefore that the film received only 15% approval from over two thousand audience members.

 

The defense of the documentary by critics who point out that it is critical of the sexualizing of children does not change the fact that it depicted very young girls, before the age of consent, in highly sexualized and provocative ways, before the world.

 

This self-evident moral failure has led to multiple petitions, some of them reaching hundreds of thousands of signatories, demanding Netflix remove the film. And it has succeeded in bridging the chasm between the Democrats and the Republicans, with prominent politicians across both aisles coming together to condemn the film. Netflix shares fell by 3.9% the day after the film was released. In contrast to wider society that has expressed such a unified moral attitude, the professional critics on Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a stellar 85% approval.

 

This is not surprising if one remembers that within the extreme left, there is a movement to normalize pedophilia. This strange movement has its roots in the French Left of the 1968 generation, with many luminaries such as Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvior, the ex-French Health Minister Bernard Kouchner and the ex-French Education Minister Jack Lang signatories on a petition in 1970 arguing for the decriminalisation of paedophilia. Further proof if more is needed that the industry is mired in the most extreme version of a political religion.

 

What is clear is that while for the most part, people are going to television and films for entertainment and escapism, those making them have begun to see their role as being the moral compass of society. They have turned the moving pictures ever more into a medium where only propaganda, and only propaganda in one political direction, will be allowed.

 

And these priests that will preach from the podiums are from an industry that has indulged Roman Polanski, Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey for decades, and where the ‘casting couch’ is an open secret. 

Hollywood regulars accused of sexual harassment

 

Orwell famously wrote, in reference to Dickens, that “All art is propaganda.” By this he meant that all art has a message, a point of view, a statement that is conceptualized by a unique mind and propagated through the artist’s medium.

 

However, he also wrote that “On the other hand, not all propaganda is art.” It is regrettable that the moving pictures industry of the US is so determined to become propagandists instead of artists, for whom ars gratia artis was the motto.