Friday, December 24, 2021

"Christmas" Lights or "Holiday" Lights? Vocabulary is a Weapon in the Woke Culture War



 "Christmas" Lights or "Holiday" Lights?
The Woke's Vocabulary is a Weapon in Their Culture War

 

I never had kids and when I look at Facebook friends' photos of their own I realize that that's probably a good thing. I am a graduate of the school of hard knocks. I know how tough life can be. Children's dewy, defenseless skin, their huge eyes, the easy pleasure they take in puppies, dandelions, and bubbles, break my heart. As a parent, I'd be wracked by anxiety.

 

The other day, a grandchild photo, rather than making my palms sweat, brought forth from me a rare and hopeful smile. The towheaded toddler's cherubic face, unblemished by time or woe, was illuminated by a white glow. He was holding in his two hands something he'd likely never encountered so closely before: a string of Christmas tree lights. The anxiety I usually feel when exposed to photos of children was replaced by the promise of joy and hope voiced in Luke's Gospel. "And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them … 'Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.'"

 

Yes, the boy in the Facebook photo, like all children, armed only with limited intelligence and resilience, will naively march into a world boobytrapped with threats and disappointments. Yes, he will be rejected in love, fail tests, not be picked for the team or the school play or the plum job. He will, one day, thanks to a speeding car or meteor, a tired heart or some as yet unimagined pathogen, die.

 

Many belief systems insist that we humans resign ourselves: death is the end of the story. What was the point of it all? Life's only point is the pleasure you managed to enjoy, however briefly. For Christians, suffering is never permanent, death is not the end, and mere pleasure is not life's telos or its meaning. Those Christmas tree lights, shining in the darkness of night, are a material symbol of that light that transforms human lives.

 

I know that most people are not Christians, and I know that others draw forth hope and strength from a variety of wells, from work to family, from friends to art. I respect those paths. I offer this meditation on Christmas lights because we are in the midst of a culture war. Our Woke overlords would like to denigrate and then erase Western Civilization and replace it with a Woke Utopia. Before we surrender Western Civilization, it is important to understand it, and one of its three foundations. Whether we are atheists or believers, we arm ourselves in the Culture War if we educate ourselves about the Ancient Greeks, the Enlightenment, and the Judeo-Christian tradition, even in so small a manifestation as Christmas tree lights.

 

Light is a symbol for God found throughout the Old and New Testaments. "The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined," writes Isaiah. In Genesis, God creates light before he creates the sun. Light as a concept, not just the sun as a source of light, is privileged in Genesis.

 

The most eloquent equation of God with light appears in the first chapter of the Gospel of John. Here God is "light." God is also "the Word." In the Greek original, John uses the term "logos" for "Word." We encounter "logos" in "biology," the study of life, and "cosmology," the study of the cosmos. The PBS series "Faith and Reason" defined logos as "A principle originating in classical Greek thought which refers to a universal divine reason, immanent in nature, yet transcending all oppositions and imperfections in the cosmos and humanity. An eternal and unchanging truth present from the time of creation, available to every individual who seeks it. A unifying and liberating revelatory force which reconciles the human with the divine; manifested in the world as an act of God's love in the form of the Christ."

 

John writes of God as logos and as light. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

 

And that, in short, is why Christians make use of light at Christmas. Light symbolizes God's incarnation on earth as a human; light come to mankind.

 

I smiled at the toddler holding his first string of Christmas tree lights because, rather than feeling my usual anxiety, I felt confident for him. I believe that faith strengthens believers, as described in one of Paul's letters. "Put on the full armor of God," Paul writes. Clearly, he is speaking metaphorically. At this time, Christians were persecuted unto death; Paul was not encouraging his readers physically to fight the Roman Empire. "Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but … against the spiritual forces of evil … when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground … with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace."

 

When I gazed at that barefoot toddler in his adorable little-boy pajama set, holding Christmas tree lights in his hand, I did not see a defenseless creature at the threshold of this vale of tears. I saw a human being armed with light in darkness and logos in an irrational world. I saw a boy gripping a material symbol for "the full armor of God."

 

Christians believe that our lives manifest logos – meaning – and are illuminated by light in darkness. This conviction affects us. Churchgoing Catholics like myself have significantly lower suicide rates than the general population. Citing a JAMA Psychiatry study, the L. A. Times wrote in 2016, "Against a grim backdrop of rising suicide rates among American women, new research has revealed a blinding shaft of light: One group of women – practicing Catholics – appears to have bucked the national trend toward despair and self-harm … Among especially devout Catholic women – those in the pews more than once a week – suicides were a vanishing phenomenon." 

 

Not all religious beliefs or practices generate the same statistics. "Muslim adults in the U.S. were twice as likely to report a history of suicide attempt compared with individuals from other faith traditions, according to results of a survey … published in JAMA Psychiatry." The study's author was herself a Muslim, Rania Awaad, MD, director of the Stanford Muslim Mental Health & Islamic Psychology Lab at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

 

Those without faith appear to have higher suicide rates. According to The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, "Concerning suicide rates, religious nations fare better than secular nations … of the top ten nations with the highest male suicide rates, all but one are strongly irreligious nations with high levels of atheism. Of the top remaining nine nations leading the world in male suicide rates, all are former Soviet/Communist nations … Of the bottom ten nations with the lowest male suicide rates, all are highly religious nations with statistically insignificant levels of organic atheism."

 

America has been experiencing a demography-skewing epidemic of "Deaths of Despair," that is deaths by drug and alcohol addiction and suicide. Some observers relate this epidemic to America's retreat from religion. "There's a spiritual void in America, a loss of meaning," opines a New York Times op-ed writer. "Secularization is killing middle America," pronounces author Tim Carney. "The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University has assembled a body of evidence that suggests that about 40 percent of the increase in suicides from 1996 to 2010 was attributable to declining religious participation," reports Brendan W. Case. Princeton scholars Anne Case and Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton, whose work brings attention to deaths of despair, write, "We believe that much more important for despair is the decline of family, community, and religion."

 

When I look at innocent, defenseless babies, with all of life's pains before them, I tremble. When I see a towheaded toddler holding, as if they were a jump rope, a string of Christmas lights, when I see his face lit up like a candle, I think, hey, he's in good hands.

 

I read the caption of the photo. My Facebook friend identified the lights the toddler was holding as "holiday" lights. My heart sank a little. My Facebook friend, if she posts about Christianity at all, posts to alert her readers to some Christian somewhere who did a bad thing. A pastor preached an obnoxious sermon; a reality show Christian was arrested on morals charges. This toddler, I fear, will be raised on a bigoted distortion of Christianity.  

 

After I saw the caption that identified Christmas lights as "holiday" lights, I posted on Facebook that I believe in Christ and Christmas.

 

My friend replied. She said that Christmas lights are not Christmas lights at all. Rather, she said, "these *are* holiday lights." The asterisk before and after the word "are" adds emphasis. My friend informed me that people from many religions have holidays. Use of the word "Christmas" indicates a lack of "kindness and respect." To use the word "holiday" lights "is inclusive, not exclusive."

 

I've celebrated Diwali, Shiva Ratri, Holi, Buddha's birthday, Eid, Passover, the anniversary of the liberation by the Red Army, Burns Night, and various Wiccan solstices with Hindus, Muslims, Jews and others, in the US, Europe, Africa, and Asia. I live in a city where the Muslim call to prayer is announced over loudspeakers, and where there were several historic synagogues, and Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Hindu houses of worship. My friend has lived her life in an area with virtually no Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, or Jews, and with a one percent African American population. And yet it is my friend who must lecture me on diversity. So often Woke's lectures don't follow any real-world logic, but, rather, counter-factual Woke dogma.

 

My friend argued that it is "exclusive" not "inclusive" to speak the words "Christmas lights," because, after all, lights on a string decorating a tree is a custom belonging to many traditions. Was her statement based on facts – and was it really "inclusive" – or was it representative of a Woke attempt to erase one chapter in the history of Western Civilization, by being as "exclusive," and as divorced from real history, as possible?

 

The Library of Congress reports, "Before electric Christmas lights, families used candles to light their Christmas trees. This practice was dangerous, and led to many home fires. In 1882, Edward H. Johnson, Thomas Edison's friend and partner, put together the very first string of electric lights meant for a Christmas tree. He hand-wired 80 red, white and blue light bulbs." Smithsonian magazine quotes a witness of these first Christmas tree lights. "At the rear of the beautiful parlors was a large Christmas tree presenting a most picturesque and uncanny aspect. It was brilliantly lighted with ... eighty lights in all encased in these dainty glass eggs, and about equally divided between white, red and blue … One can hardly imagine anything prettier."

 

Smithsonian continues. "Johnson's lights were indeed ahead of their time – electricity was not yet routinely available – and they weren't cheap. A string of 16 vaguely flame-shaped bulbs sitting in brass sockets the size of shot glasses sold for a pricey $12 (about $350 in today's money) in 1900. But in 1894 President Cleveland put electric lights on the White House tree, and by 1914, a 16-foot string cost just $1.75. By the 1930s, colored bulbs and cones were everywhere … it all started with Johnson's miracle on 36th Street."

 

Light is a symbol for God in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Lights on a string, used in December to illuminate evergreen trees, were not invented, as my friend wrote, as "holiday lights" belonging to "a multitude of religions and spiritual practices, including, but not limited to, Christianity." Rather, they were invented quite specifically as "Christmas lights."

 

When interacting with our friends on the left, it's impossible not to collide with selective outrage. The left tells us that Christmas lights are "holiday" lights, but the left also tells us that it's a very bad thing to "appropriate" someone else's "culture."

 

On April 22, 2018, Utah high school student Keziah Daum posted photos of her prom on Twitter. She wore a cheongsam, that is, a Chinese-style dress. Keziah, pretty, young, and fit, is drop-dead gorgeous in the form-fitting red dress with the thigh-high slit. Tens of thousands of outraged tweets followed. "My culture is not your goddamn prom dress," read one. Keziah was a white thief, guilty of "cultural theft" from "BIPOC."

 

In 2017, a Portland burrito shop was forced to close, and proprietors Kali Wilgus and Liz Connelly received death threats, because they are not Mexican. "These appropriating businesses are erasing and exploiting already marginalized identities for profit and praise," The Portland Mercury said. "Because of Portland's underlying racism, the people who rightly own these traditions and cultures are already treated poorly."

 

Wikipedia defines "cultural appropriation" as "adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity. This can be controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from minority cultures."

 

The very definition of cultural appropriation relies on selective outrage and morality-by-identity. One must condemn "dominant culture" members who make use of cultural products associated with "minority cultures." No one condemns a black professor for teaching Shakespeare or calculus. Similarly, whites associated with the left are much less likely to be accused of cultural appropriation. The Beatles famously cribbed from African American artists. An online petition demanding that the Beatles pay Black Lives Matter ten million dollars in reparations for this cultural appropriation garnered only twenty-six signatures.

 

Keziah Daum, Kali Wilgus and Liz Connelly never claimed Chinese garb or Mexican cuisine as their own. Daum did not lecture Chinese people, "It is unkind to refer to the cheongsam as Chinese. Please be inclusive. The cheongsam is an American garment." Wilgus did not tell Mexicans that they were being "unkind" and "exclusive" by claiming burritos. Woke appropriators of Christmas do insist that Christmas is not Christmas, but, rather, a deracinated, relativized "holiday."

 

Cultural appropriation is related to another Woke concept, land acknowledgement. The Microsoft 2021 Ignite event began with a so-called "land acknowledgment." "First, we want to acknowledge that the land where the Microsoft campus is situated was traditionally occupied by the Sammamish, the Duwamish, the Snoqualmie, the Suquamish, the Muckleshoot, the Snohomish, the Tulalip, and other coast Salish people since time immemorial – a people who are still continuing to honor and bring to light their ancient heritage."

 

Land acknowledgement, like cultural appropriation, is a concept whose ethics apply only to certain ethnicities. No one expects contemporary Comanche to acknowledge the Apache whom they displaced. A nameless people once lived in northern North America from Russia in the east to Greenland in the west. This people disappeared as Inuit, a.k.a. Eskimo, moved into their territory. No one expects contemporary Inuit or other northern tribes to perform a "land acknowledgement" for the nameless people they replaced. No one would dare demand a "land acknowledgment" from Muslims occupying what had been Christian North Africa, the Christian Middle East, Zoroastrian Persia, or Buddhist and Hindu Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India.

 

Woke demands that white women who sell burritos in Portland be threatened with death for doing so. For whites to make burritos is "cultural appropriation." Woke demands that Microsoft acknowledge that the land its campus occupies was once home to Salish Indians. At the same time, Woke insists that "Christmas lights" be dubbed "holiday lights," belonging equally to "diverse spiritual traditions." Woke exercises this selective outrage because Woke conflates Christianity with the West, and the West is bad, and the West must be erased in a cleansing cultural genocide. BIPOC are good. In Microsoft's words, we must "honor and bring to light the ancient heritage" of the Muckleshoot, proprietors of "The Northwest's Biggest and Best Casino." Simultaneously, one must trash Christians. The Woke's march to triumph tramples over the appropriated cultural products of the West.

 

But, you may be thinking. Christmas lights aren't really Christmas lights because Christianity stole, or appropriated, Christmas from Pagans. If you think that, propagandists have successfully brainwashed you.

 

Early Protestant Reformers sought to discredit Catholicism. Some disseminated stories insisting that Catholicism was all just revamped Paganism. Though many Protestants came to embrace Christmas, celebrating Christmas was actually against the law in seventeenth-century New England. To Puritans, Christmas was "Papist idolatry," that is, Catholic Paganism.  

 

Hostility to Christmas among Christians did not die out when the very last Puritan, wearing a tall, black hat and a long woolen cloak, disappeared into the mists of history. Many fundamentalist, "sola-scriptura" – "Bible only" – Christians today are adamant that no Christian should celebrate this Pagan day. These Christians disseminate the same anti-Christmas myths that have been circulating for centuries. See, for example, here, here, and here. 

 

What "facts" do Atheists, Christophobes, Jehovah's Witnesses, Pagans, and fundamentalist sola-scriptura Christians cite to prove that Christmas is a Pagan festival, "stolen" by Christians from Pagans? The following:

 

* December 25th was chosen as the date of Jesus' birth because it was once the date of the birth of a Pagan deity, Mithra;

 

* Ancient Germanic Pagans brought evergreen trees into their homes and decorated them with baubles and candles;

 

* Santa Claus is based on a Pagan deity;

 

* Yule logs are a Pagan custom.

 

As is so often the case with "everybody knows" facts, none of these facts check out. That Jesus is Mithra, for example, is roundly rejected and even mocked by serious myth scholars. You can read more here, here, here, here, or watch this short video here.

 

Michael Jones is a prolific YouTube Christian apologist and University of Arizona grad student in philosophy. He has investigated the claims that Christmas trees, Yule logs, and Santa Claus were originally Pagan festival items. Citing ancient sources and modern scholarship, Jones argues that every one of these "everybody knows" claims lacks support. Christmas trees, Yule logs, and Santa Claus, whatever you think of any of them, were, Jones argues, first recorded as customs associated with Christians celebrating Christmas. Jones is interviewed here.

 

"Everybody knows" that early Christians selected December 25th to celebrate the birth of Christ because that date was a Roman holiday. Have a look at one listing of holidays in Ancient Rome. Of course, not only Roman Pagans celebrated holidays in Ancient Rome. Various imperial populations, Persians, Egyptians, Jews, etc, celebrated their own holidays as well. No matter what date early Christians selected, that date would inevitably fall near or on some Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Persian, or local holiday. That December 25th falls near some Roman holidays proves nothing.

 

The Bible does not report the date of Jesus' birth, and the few things we know about that event provide no definitive clue. Shepherds were watching over their flocks by night, Luke reports. Readers ask when that activity likely occurred. Henry Baker Tristram was one of those Victorian polymaths – he was a clergyman, a Bible scholar, an ornithologist, and an early supporter of Darwin's theory of evolution. During his travels in Israel, he noted that what little rain that does fall in arid Bethlehem falls in winter. This rain brings forth growth; growth that the surrounding hills cannot support during the dry summers. Only, he wrote, "during the winter and spring months … is pasturage is to be found on these bleak uplands." Thus, he argues, it is quite possible that Jesus was born in winter.

 

Luke 1:5 mentions Jewish priestly divisions. These divisions entailed fixed terms of service. These terms may provide a clue as to dating. Dr. Alfred Edersheim, a Jewish convert to Christianity, used the information in Luke 1:5 in his calculations. He decided that the December date is acceptable.

 

Andrew McGowan is Dean and President of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and McFaddin Professor of Anglican Studies at Yale Divinity School. His scholarship has focused on early Christian thought and history. In the December, 2002, edition of Bible Review, McGowan introduces readers to the scholarship of Louis Duchesne and Thomas J. Talley. Their scholarship showed that early Christians came to believe that Jesus was conceived on the very same date as the date of his death.

 

Jesus' death date was relatively easy to calculate, or at least estimate, given the Gospel accounts of the Passion. Jesus died, they calculated, on the 14th of Nisan, or March 25th. Thus, Jesus was born nine months after that date, on December 25th. The idea that Jesus was conceived and died on the same date is not Biblical, and it is utterly foreign to modern Christians. But it did take hold among early Christians, as written records from that period attest.

 

This concept was popular among Eastern Christians as well. They, though, held to a different calendar than those in the West. Their dates were April 6th for Jesus' conception and death, and January 6th for his birth. These different dates were informed by the same idea: that Jesus was conceived and died on the same date.

 

McGowan writes, "Connecting Jesus' conception and death in this way will certainly seem odd to modern readers, but it reflects ancient and medieval understandings of the whole of salvation being bound up together. One of the most poignant expressions of this belief is found in Christian art. In numerous paintings of the angel's Annunciation to Mary – the moment of Jesus' conception – the baby Jesus is shown gliding down from heaven on or with a small cross (see Master Bertram's Annunciation scene); a visual reminder that the conception brings the promise of salvation through Jesus' death … The notion that creation and redemption should occur at the same time of year is also reflected in ancient Jewish tradition, recorded in the Talmud … 'In the months of Nisan the world was created; in Nisan the Patriarchs were born; on Passover Isaac was born … and in Nisan they will be redeemed in time to come.'"

 

Yes. Christmas lights, history shows, are indeed Christmas lights, not generic "holiday lights." Yes, Christmas is a Christian holiday; it was not "stolen" from Pagans. Yes, some Woke today would like to culturally appropriate Christmas as a relativized, deracinated "holiday," and erase the true meaning of the day. And that's not all. Our Woke overlords desire to appropriate more than strings of lights to claim as their own. They want the Biblical deity. They want to relativize the God revealed in the Bible into a generic deity, as Christmas is relativized into a generic holiday. Solstice is the new Christmas; sunlight itself is no longer a symbol of God, but the new god.

 

On December 21st, 2013, the winter solstice, I posted the following on my Facebook page:

 

"Light doesn't care about you, my Pagan friends. It is inanimate. It is not sacred. It is insensate. It is impersonal … Seeking consciousness in light is really no more deep or romantic than seeking consciousness in consumer items. It's a spiritual dead end.  Humans are hungry. Light is not that for which we hunger. Light is only a metonym, a figure of speech, for that for which we crave that we associate with light.  Our souls cannot find rest until they rest in that for which we truly hunger. We hunger for a consciousness that loves us. That consciousness is not light. It is something we associate with light. It is God."

 

I was immediately denounced as a "judgmental douchebag" and an "intolerant inquisitor." Stating that the solstice sun does not care about humans hit a bit too close to home.

 

Those who appropriate Christmas very badly crave the Biblical God. And so they re-invent him, in everything from the solstice sun to the TV show "The Good Place" to the phrase "The Universe," as in "The Universe wants me to take the job in Buffalo." "The Universe Has Your Back" promises the title of a 2016 bestseller by Gabrielle Bernstein, a scantily clad millionaire blonde. The Universe sent us here, Bernstein promises, "to be love and spread love." In fact the Universe is an extremely cold, silent, and empty place. It has no consciousness with which to evaluate whether or not the job in Buffalo is a good idea, and no heart with which to care about you or your job. The Universe has no arms to support your back. The God who is love is unique, and he is found in Biblical verses, like 1 John 4:16.

 

Read Barbara C. Sproul's Primal Myths: Creation Myths Around the World. You will meet the Zoroastrian Ahriman, who gives birth to demons by sodomizing himself. You will meet Egyptian Khepera, who masturbates, swallows his sperm, and spits out his children. You will meet Hindu Parusha, whose sacrifice establishes the caste system, and all its evils. In what is now California, the Old Woman of the Sea and the Eagle fought to the death; the Eagle's victory over the Old Woman resulted in the world. In Australia, the Djanggawul, a brother with a giant penis and his sisters with clitorises like snakes, have sex, wander around, and drop children. Dogon high priest Ogotemmeli recounts the creation story that sacralizes female genital mutilation. Ogotemmeli's country, Mali in Africa, has an over 90% FGM rate.

 

In no other creation myth from no other culture will you read of one, transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient, loving God, who creates all of creation in one act of love, and pronounces it good, a God who knows each one of his creations intimately, "in whom we live and move and have our being." It is that God who is most often culturally appropriated.

 

The Christmas tree lights the toddler was holding cannot be understood through my friend's relativism, her insistence that those lights represent "a multitude of religions and spiritual practices, including, but not limited to, Christianity." Those lights do not represent Ahriman's auto-sodomization. They do not represent Eagle killing off Old Woman. They do not represent ancient justifications for the caste system or FGM. They represent the light that shines in the darkness, a light the darkness will never overcome. Please, I beg of you, take this God if you want him – believe me, he wants you even more. But do not take him in an act of cultural appropriation that disguises the truth through cultural relativistic mumbo jumbo. Take all of this God. No matter how hard you try to hide it, your heart's yearning for him is revealed by the tracks of your own search.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery

 

 

Friday, December 17, 2021

The Power of Art v The Power of the Dog: The Impact of Woke on Movies

 

The Power of Art v "The Power of the Dog"

Eight people, three dogs, multiple cats and reptiles, in a tiny house with one bathroom. The TV was black-and-white, with a screen not much bigger than many laptops. The image often began to slide upward – "Adjust the vertical hold!" degenerated into static, or blinked off into a test pattern. The voice of God would announce, "We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by." Someone was always walking between you and the screen, on their way to the bathroom or the kitchen or the front door. "Turn it up!" "Turn it down!" "Turn it off!" "Everyone wants to watch football!"

 

Somehow that tiny portal salved pain, erased loneliness, inoculated me with the gumption to surmount future challenges, and, like the church, made me realize that what I could see of reality was limited; it splayed out before me a menu of infinite possibilities. I traveled on the magic carpet of Golden Age Hollywood movies seen on a small, black-and-white TV.

 

2021 America is in the midst of a cultural revolution, and our Woke overlords insist that America before this very moment in time has always been a structurally racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic, etc-phobic wasteland. We must trash the past and embrace the brave, new world our Woke overlords have prepared for us. Thomas Jefferson's statue must be removed; allegedly "racist" illustrations on butter, rice, syrup, and pancakes must be scrubbed; the Constitution must be rewritten. This cultural cleansing includes Hollywood, which has always been racist and a tool of the evil oppressor. We need new movies, movies informed by Woke.

 

When I now watch those classic films without which my life would be incomplete, powerhouses like "Gone with the Wind," "Psycho," and "Lawrence of Arabia," or even merely twenty-year-old episodes of "The Sopranos," I mourn. "You couldn't shoot that scene today … you couldn't hire that actor today … you couldn't speak that line of dialogue today." That art is now castrated is not a minor hiccup. It is a cultural catastrophe, every bit as menacing as Woke's incursion into math, science, and engineering.

 

The Woke indictment of Golden Age Hollywood as a bastion of intransigent racists is not accurate.-No, Golden Age Hollywood was not perfect. I'm a Baby Boomer, and Hollywood's Golden Age ended around the time I was born, but my parents grew up watching classic films, and they educated me. My mother would stand behind me, ironing, on her day off from cleaning other women's homes, working in factories, or both. As we watched a film together, my mother would pass on the lore she'd gleaned from her era's gossip magazines.

 

Judy Garland, innocent and dewy, was in fact addicted to drugs, drugs fed to her by powerful producer Louis B. Mayer. Judy's husband, Vincent Minelli, "liked boys." The daughter of glamorous sex symbol Lana Turner stabbed to death Lana's Mafia lover, Johnny Stompanato. Gary Cooper, the strong and silent, virginal hero, my mother remarked, had an affair with Patricia Neal while he was married to Rocky Cooper. Before that, All-American Coop was with Mexican Spitfire Lupe Velez. And you know Pearl Bailey married a white man, back in 1952. Oh, and Danny Kaye? Real name Kaminsky. Of course they made him change it, and dye his hair blonde. To hide his Jewishness. John Garfield died from stress during the Red Scare. Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff spit his lines and Merle Oberon as Kathy had bad breath in "Wuthering Heights." Charming, fatherly Bing Crosby abused his kids; his wife, Dixie, was an alcoholic.

 

They knew, I knew, everyone knew, that Hollywood was corrupt and heartbreaking. And nothing my parents taught me disenchanted the magic. Judy Garland singing "Over the Rainbow" still evokes in me the wide open wonder of childhood. Cathy and Heathcliff on the moors are icons of star-crossed lovers; Gary Cooper is a patron saint of integrity.

 

Our Woke overlords get Golden Age Hollywood wrong. They present it as a white supremacist monolith of WASP masters dictating films that would brainwash youngsters into hating Indians and loving some imaginary heteronormative master race. A Wokester with an ax to grind can certainly cherry-pick Hollywood products that are thoroughly racist. That cherry-picking creates a distorted history. "The Birth of a Nation," from 1915, is indeed evil, Confederate propaganda. But in spite of its huge box office, the film was condemned by prominent black and white Americans, including Jane Addams and Rabbi Stephen Wise. It sparked riots, and filmmaker D. W. Griffith was tarred as a racist. He made subsequent films, "Intolerance" and "Broken Blossoms" in an attempt to refurbish his image. Hollywood profited from, but also paid a price for its forays into blatant propaganda, and Hollywood changed its product, even its profitable product, in response to righteous condemnation.

 

D. W. Griffith was probably the only successful filmmaker who was the son of a Confederate army colonel. Golden Age Hollywood was largely created by immigrant Polish Jews, Irish, Germans, Italians, American societal outcasts, gay men and lesbians. The Jews who invented Hollywood – in the phrase of historian Neal Gabler – wanted very badly to reach, and to be loved by, the masses in America and around the world. "If you want to send a message, call Western Union," Warsaw-born producer Samuel Goldwyn is supposed to have said. Goldwyn, so much an immigrant that he was famous for butchering the English language, wanted to make movies that served any American Joe or Josephine. Movies should not send ideological messages. Movies should move; move in the sense of action, and move in the sense of moving the human heart to tears, joy, laughter. That human heart was understood to be universal. Yes, Goldwyn was a Jew from Warsaw who spoke fractured English. Yes, he was making movies for Christians named Smith and Jones living in Iowa. You didn't have to make a movie featuring recent immigrants or retail store clerks or French Canadians to move those specific demographics. Rather, you had to aim for the humanity common to them all. Hollywood films perfected a cinematic language that transcended barriers between people and created a community, united by their response to flickering images that didn't specifically reflect any of their lives, but that somehow touched all of their dreams.

 

Those moving images, contrary to Woke preachment, were, more often than not, not "white supremacist." Busby Berkeley, the son of an actress, created kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria that reflected nothing in the real world, except for the desire to use human imagination to escape the Depression. Jean Arthur, who was probably a lesbian, wore buckskins, wielded a whip, and drove mules. Hollywood pushed for acceptance for minorities like blacks, immigrants, and Jews, pulled back in response to pressure from racists, and then pushed forward again, always trying new ways to hit art's target, the human heart. As early as 1935, the legendary Bill Robinson, a black man, danced onscreen with superstar Shirley Temple. Paul Robeson's father was born a slave. Robeson himself was a Rutgers valedictorian and football star. With a magnificent athlete's build and a stirring bass baritone voice, Robeson starred in "Show Boat" in 1936. His rendition of "Ol' Man River" is a lengthy musical number, featuring many black male singers, depicting the suffering of blacks under slavery and Jim Crow. "The land ain't free," Robeson sings. As he is shown carrying large bales of cotton, he sings of "bodies all aching and wracked with pain … darkies all work while the white folks play … let me go away from the white man boss." In 1939, David O. Selznick worked hard to present a positive image of African Americans in "Gone with the Wind," changing some of the more egregious aspects of the book. "In our picture I think we have to be awfully careful that the Negroes come out decidedly on the right side of the ledger." Black actor Lennie Bluett tells how Clark Gable, the film's biggest star, cooperated with him, a mere extra, to desegregate on-set toilet facilities.

 

The point is not that Golden Age Hollywood was a monastery of virtuous monks. "Hollywood Babylon" is a better sobriquet for all the adulterers, drug addicts, moral cowards, and outcasts of the day. Even Hollywood's Jewish moguls notoriously dropped the ball during Nazism's rise; see this review of "Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust." The point, rather, is that the Woke characterization of Hollywood as steering the wheel of racism and chauvinism is a distortion.

 

There's a more important point here, though. It's not so much about the progressivism of Hollywood bigwigs, as about how Golden Age films were constructed and received. Again, the filmmakers were themselves largely outsiders, trying to get in. The crowbars they used to jimmy open the lock of American homes and consciousness were their mastery of a storytelling technique that vanquished differences between filmmakers and their audience, and between audience members, and also the filmmakers' hard-won, virtuosic command of mere flickering lights on a screen.

 

That a fat, abused, dyslexic, first-generation kid like me could watch a film like 1935's "Top Hat" and identify with Ginger Rogers, in a dress made of feathers, dancing with Fred Astaire in a gazebo poised over an indoor canal, has nothing to do with the aesthetically useless Woke concept of "representation." According to this concept, you can't get anything from art that doesn't include someone like you. If you are a fat dyslexic girl, no movies that don't include a fat dyslexic girl can move you. Our Woke overlords would be driven to apoplexy by my appreciative reception of the feather-dress dance scene from "Top Hat." I can just imagine what a Wokester would say. "Both characters are white. Both characters are cis-gendered. Both characters are able-bodied. Where are the fat dyslexics in this scene?"

 

Here's the answer. There aren't any. There are also no white people in this scene. Is any Woke overlord so stupid that she thinks that white Americans in 1935 were wearing dresses made of feathers and shining, flawless hairdos constructed of spun sugar? Many white American women in 1935 looked like Dorothea Lange's "Woman of the High Plains," that is a gaunt, exhausted field worker wearing a burlap dress made from a feed bag and an expression of infinite despair. Even that High Plains woman, wrestling with the Dust Bowl and hunger, could afford a movie ticket in 1935. My immigrant mother first tasted peanut butter during a Depression-era excursion to forage for food in a garbage dump. Someone wealthier than she had left some peanut butter in the bottom of the jar. My father was a child "hobo" "riding the rails" seeking work. But my hungry and homeless parents did spend some of their pennies on movies. Because art is necessary. Because movies fed their souls. Because for the length of "Top Hat," they didn't see "someone who looks like me." They saw someone who looked like they looked in their dreams.

 

Hollywood did try to make a movie about someone "who looks like me," a movie of "representationality" for poor, Eastern European immigrants. There was, in fact, deadly prejudice against immigrants like my parents one hundred years ago. One of my family members was murdered in an anti-immigrant assault. Hollywood attempted to address this prejudice in the 1937 Humphrey Bogart film "Black Legion." In the film, an American nativist turns to violence after a Polish immigrant gets a job that he, the nativist, feels should have gone to him.

 

I find "Black Legion" unwatchable. It's heavy-handed, preachy, and stiff. I'd much rather watch "The Awful Truth," a 1937 screwball comedy directed by Leo McCarey and starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. McCarey, Grant, and Dunne are at the top of their game in this frivolous merengue. I'd rather watch a well-made film that "does not represent me" than an aesthetic botch that tries to and fails. "The Awful Truth," as totally divorced from my own real life as it is, offers me something I need as badly as I need hard-hitting history. It offers me escape. It offers me entertainment.

 

Golden Age Hollywood films were made by outsiders trying to get inside, and their tool was a storytelling style that lent itself to universal human concerns. Audiences managed to read their own stories into what they were seeing, and the films were designed to be read that way. My mother didn't like "Black Legion" any more than I did. My mother loved John Wayne and she rooted for the Indians in every Western. "They are like us, Slovaks," she would inform me, intimately. "We, too, have been driven off of our lands. We, too, had to fight, with just sticks and stones, against powerful invaders." She interpreted movies that featured Indians as celebrating Indians, and, by proxy, Slovaks. She saw the Westerns she wanted to see. My mother loved Paul Robeson. When she heard him sing "Ol' Man River," she thought of her own life, her people's lives, of endless, thankless, hard work. These aesthetic experiences encouraged my mother's feeling of unity with Indians and African Americans.

 

In the 1995 documentary, "The Celluloid Closet," gay audience members recount how they saw themselves in Hollywood films about straight people. Susie Bright, a lesbian, invented her own alternate scenario to "Morocco," a movie featuring a love affair between sex gods Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper. To young Susie, the real story revolved around Dietrich and a female extra in the cast.

 

There are even African American women who can appreciate the best of what "Gone with the Wind" has to offer. One black woman, Cheryl Teeg, wrote that the history of slavery is not the point of GWTW; rather it's about how two very different women, hard Scarlett and soft Melanie, handle catastrophe. "I love it, and it is one of my favorite movies of all time. My grandmother loved the book/ movie too … The point is the collapse of a proud and almost naive society of upper class people, the stark realization that they made a grave miscalculation, their struggle for survival, and their attempt to carve a new place in a world that works opposite to what they had always known. It's about the strength and perseverance of Scarlett, how she goes from a delicate socialite to a hardened survivor, while remaining fascinatingly selfish, and unintentionally hilarious."

 

Asked what book "made you what you are today," Ayaan Hirsi Ali responded that she couldn't name one, but several. "When I was 9 or 10, in Kenya, the Nancy Drew books showed me a type of empowered girl that I was not used to at all … When I was older, Charles Dickens inspired my sense of justice and fairness. George Orwell criticized liberals for apologizing for Communism; he continues to inspire me to persist in my position that Islam unreformed, when put into practice, leads to a dystopia."

 

Our Woke overlords classify Ayaan Hirsi Ali as black; she must only appreciate black authors. Our Woke overlords' classification system is worthless. Blackness is not Hirsi Ali's most important feature. Her most important feature is her fearlessness and her insistence on taking action to do right. She is in the same class as Nancy Drew, as Dickens, as Orwell. Skin color doesn't matter in the authentic classification system, any more than it mattered to my mother, when she saw her story onscreen, in cinematic depictions of Native Americans, and in Paul Robeson's singing.

 

Samuel Goldwyn was told that he couldn't produce a film version of a book he was interested in, because it was about lesbians. "That's all right; we'll make them Hungarians," he replied. There's a kernel of truth in Goldwyn's malapropism. That gay people, Slovak immigrants, and black women could and did see their stories in Golden Age Hollywood movies makes sense, given two aesthetic restrictions filmmakers in the Golden Age worked under. The first was the Motion Picture Production Code. This code was heavily influenced by activist Catholics who wanted to limit graphic depictions of sex and violence onscreen. The other feature affecting filmmakers was the communal nature of viewing. It was nearly impossible to watch a movie alone. Entire families would go to the movies together. Ivy Leaguers and the illiterate, immigrants and the native born, all sat in the same theater. Violent films about criminals had to be careful of grandmothers in the audience; romantic films had to factor in any little kids. Given these features, allusion and suggestion were built-in to films. In place of graphic sex scenes, the filmmaker would show ocean waves crashing onto a shore. In place of sadistic violence, a villain would arch an eyebrow, laugh maniacally, and the scene would cut to black. Without nudity or gore, sheer artistry produced amazingly erotic scenes, like this one with Greta Garbo, and disturbing violent scenes, like this one with Jimmy Cagney. Suggestion in movies trained audiences in participating in filmmaking, in creating in their own minds what could not be depicted onscreen. I realized how thoroughly I had learned to "fill in" what was not shown after a revival house viewing of 1933's "The Bitter Tea of General Yen." I was describing to friends how much I loved the movie, and I mentioned an alluring red dress worn by Barbara Stanwyck. Only hours later did I catch myself – I had been watching a black-and-white movie. I had added the red myself. Just so, minority group members could add their own story to films about movie stars more perfect and remote than any human being who ever lived.

 

Film fans kept nagging me to watch the 1956 film "The Searchers." "It's a classic. You have to see it." I didn't want to see it because, unlike my mother, I don't like Westerns and I don't like John Wayne. I finally went to a library that had a copy and sat down at the library's VCR. I felt like I was doing homework. Immediately, with the opening scene, director John Ford had me wrapped around his finger. I still dislike Westerns and John Wayne, but "The Searchers" is one of the best movies I've ever seen. Ford's use of light, space, character, comic relief, allusion, features that are independent of the Western genre, captivate me. Ford pooh-poohed talk of his own artistry, as in this interview, but he was brilliant. The film's opening scene has been written about a great deal. One article dubs it "100 Seconds of Greatness."

 

"The Searchers" does not represent me. To say that its main characters and I are "white" is childishly meaningless. I have nothing in common with Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) a Civil War veteran and Wild West desperado. I shared "The Searchers" with a Muslim friend from Syria. From the first scene, she, like me, was utterly sucked in by the film's artistry. At first, as the film drew to a close, she was silent. Then she burst into chatter, and then tears. In every scene, Ford aims for, and hits, universal humanity.

 

There's a famous, and highly disturbing, scene in "The Searchers." Ethan Edwards happens upon white captives who have been living with Comanches. The white women are clearly insane. Their rescuers, US Cavalry, attempt to pacify them by handing them toys. Ethan stares at these women. Many filmgoers interpret Ethan's facial expression as demonstrating his "white racism" against Indians. The poor women are insane, one blogger argues, because "they likely bore witness to a cavalry massacre." White men doing white man things drove these poor women over the edge. White racist Ethan Edwards' face shows hatred for these captives because they have "gone native" and are more Indian than white.

 

I have read accounts of Comanche ritual torture. Diabolical acts, including being forced to watch their infants being tortured to death, did drive some women captives insane. I don't see "white racism" on Ethan's face when he looks at the captives. Rather, I see Ethan's confrontation with what author Joseph Conrad dubbed "the horror, the horror." Ethan has seen the bodies of several people he loved desecrated in ways too obscene for him to describe to anyone. "Don't ever ask me!" he shouts when asked to describe one atrocity. "As long as you live, don't ever ask me more." In any case, that the very same scene can reasonably be read in multiple ways is testimony to the artistry of "The Searchers."

 

A blogger wonders who the leading lady of "The Searchers" is, and decides, correctly, that the leading lady is Martha Edwards (Dorothy Jordan), Ethan's sister-in-law. This is remarkable, because Martha is onscreen for mere minutes, disappearing forever after the movie's opening scenes, and she speaks no weighty dialogue. Martha smooths Ethan's coat with her hand. Her tiny, mundane gesture – smoothing a coat – has prompted pages of analysis. One critic remarks that many of those commenting on Martha's tender handling of Ethan's coat think that they are the only viewer who saw it happen. Ford so thoroughly draws his viewer in that she thinks that she is sharing an intimate moment with a film character. It is through details like the coat-smoothing that Ford renders Martha a larger-than-life force in the film. At a key moment, Ethan is about to murder Martha's daughter, Debbie. At that moment, Martha's Theme plays on the soundtrack. Ethan does not kill the girl; we know it is Martha's influence that stayed his hand. Martha has been out of the film since the first brief opening moments, but she lives in Ethan's heart, and she is still affecting key plot points. In the original script, Ethan says, when he changes his mind about murdering Debbie, "You sure favor your mother." That statement made it more obvious that Martha's influence on Ethan prevented him from murdering Debbie. Ford deleted the line from the script, relying on the more subtle clue of the song to reach his viewers' hearts.

 

To add another layer, and there are always more layers with "The Searchers," though it is never mentioned in the film, Martha's Theme is in fact, "Lorena," a lachrymose ballad of star-crossed love and irretrievable loss that had been a favorite of Civil War soldiers like Ethan.

 

"The Black Legion" didn't fail for me as a film because it had a message, that is, a message against nativism and in favor of acceptance of Polish immigrants like my parents. It failed for me as a film because it lacks artistry. It is heavy-handed and preachy. Film critic Molly Haskell is quoted saying, of "The Searchers," that it depicts how "Love dissolves hatred, mercy dissolves authoritarianism, maternal and paternal instincts unite in a single, all-encompassing figure." That's a preachy message. Ford did not send that message lecture-style. He sent it through artistry, through the mere wisps of a song on the soundtrack, a song that the viewer perhaps only registered subconsciously. Hollywood had been developing this artistry for decades, the ability to use flickering images on a screen to bypass human diversity, that is, to maneuver past this or that skin color or income, politics or orientation, and to reach the universal in human hearts.

 

Golden Age Hollywood was not a monopoly of white supremacist WASPs hard-selling white, male heroism to brainwash simpletons. Golden Age Hollywood was a Babylon of buccaneers and outcasts spinning tales with the desperate, intoxicated, power-mad fervor of Scheherazade, dancing as fast as they could to keep one step ahead, not of a Sultan who would behead them in the morning, but of anti-Semites and morals policemen, blackmailers and gossip columnists breathing down their necks, ready to expose their scandals to public outrage and boycotts. It was their very desperation, that free-market generated tension between what they wanted to do and what they could do, that created a perfect storm that made Golden Age Hollywood one of the most powerful aesthetic forces in history.

 

Recognizing how powerful films are, our Woke overlords now demand to vivisect them. There are new diversity and inclusion standards for Academy Award contenders. While it starred white men, the New York Times reassures its readers, the film "The Irishman" had a woman casting director and a Mexican cinematographer.

 

Diversity hiring is a risky business, as recent articles about Vice President Kamala Harris demonstrate. Some have ventured that the fatal shooting on the set of "Rust" may have been a "diversity hire gone wrong." Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the film's armorer, was 24 years old and had received negative feedback on her previous assignment. But she was a woman and "Latinx," and her presence ticked off items on the required diversity list.

 

In addition to diverse behind-the-scenes teams, movies must now tell more stories about black heroes. NPR critic Eric Deggans made this very demand of superstar Tom Hanks in 2021. In fact, Hanks had already made "News of the World," a 2020 film that depicts white men as pretty damn awful – racist, violent, genocidal, power-mad, and generally unpleasant. 

 

The opening scene of the strongly hyped 2021 production of "Scenes from a Marriage" includes Oscar Isaac, an Hispanic, Jessica Chastain, white, and Sunita Mani, South Asian. Then a black actress appears. In a series that focuses almost exclusively on two married people, the creators managed, immediately, to check off all the ethnic boxes. Mani asks Isaac and Chastain their preferred pronouns. She wants to be called "she." He wants to be called "he." "Scenes from a Marriage" is poke-in-the-eye obvious in its adherence to Woke dictates; this shattered my willing suspension of disbelief.

 

I tried watching something more lighthearted, "A Castle for Christmas," a silly but endearing romance. Brooke Shields plays a divorced American woman who travels to a remote Scottish village and becomes best friends with Andi Osho, who is Nigerian. And looks Nigerian. And has a Scottish accent, and lives in a remote Scottish village. I guess the day will come when we are all so used to diversity casting that the presence of a Nigerian wearing plaid and speaking with a Scottish burr in a remote Scottish village will not interrupt the willing suspension of disbelief we need even for silly romance movies, but I'm not there yet.

 

Early reviews of "The Power of the Dog" intrigued me. Jane Campion directed, wrote, and co-produced. Her 1993 film, "The Piano," is one of the best films I've ever seen. I went to Wikipedia and read the plot of "The Power of the Dog." Here is that plot, including the ending. George (Jesse Plemons), a rancher in 1925 Montana, marries the widow Rose (Kirsten Dunst), who has an effeminate son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). George's brother, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), his fellow cowboy, is cruel to Rose and Peter. Rose becomes an alcoholic. To save his mother, Peter tricks Phil, the cruel cowboy, into handling the hide of a cow that died of anthrax. Phil dies. The End.

 

This plot astounded me. It sounded so simplistic, even juvenile. Like the plot of a throw-away episode of a thirty-minute television anthology series. I revere "The Piano," and I was sure there had to be more to it.

 

I coerced a friend into watching the film with me. (Friend – I apologize.) "The Power of the Dog" is a beautiful film. Ari Wegner's cinematography is so rich you feel you could dip a spoon into the screen and withdraw light liquid as honey. Scenes are so beautiful they could be images you'd frame and hang on the wall. Campion shot the film in New Zealand, not Montana, and, as anyone who has seen the Ring movies can attest, New Zealand boasts sensuously rolling hills and vast crystalline skies. Wegner and Campion freely allude to "The Searchers," specifically its opening and closing scenes contrasting brightly lit landscapes with dark, domestic interiors (see here).

 

Kodi Smit-McPhee's face and body are tremendous assets to his performance. He is tall and as thin as a runway model. He has large eyes and lush lips. He looks excruciatingly vulnerable, the inevitable recipient of bully blows in high school. But he has the intelligence and talent to convey that there is more here than meets the eye, and when this nice young man commits the film's climactic murder, you are not surprised. In this he reminds the viewer of Anthony Perkins in "Psycho." Both are androgenous, homicidal mama's boys.

 

Other than Smit-McPhee's performance and the film's visual beauty, though, "The Power of the Dog" is a failure. Its fulcrum is domestic psychological abuse. Phil Burbank, as written, and Benedict Cumberbatch's performance as Phil lack verisimilitude. Cumberbatch scowls and knits his brow in virtually every scene. This is not frightening. Domestic abusers are terrifying to the degree that they are shape-shifters. The parent who beat you and threatened to kill you on Monday might approach you with your favorite sweets on Tuesday, and be a completely calm and charming person when interacting with other, powerful adults. Phil shows no such manipulation, and no such instability of personality. He is, thus, much less scary and much less accurate a portrait. A victim knows how to approach a man who is perpetually scowling. How to approach someone who loves you one day and comes close to killing you the next? Abuser instability presents a maze to the abused, a maze that is often impossible to navigate successfully.

 

Victims of domestic sadists are rarely the flaccid doormats that Rose and George are. More than one reviewer has commented that Jesse Plemons' performance as George is so catatonic he could have been replaced with a mannequin with no loss of realism. Victims struggle against abuse, trying timeworn strategies like bargaining, flattery, confrontation, avoidance. Phil is mean to Rose once and she immediately collapses into incoherent and publicly humiliating alcoholism. The viewer sees little reason to champion Rose, a character who makes no effort to rescue herself.

 

In fact the film could be read as a brief in favor of domestic sadists. Phil, the villain, is the only competent rancher. He is the one who is shown, graphically, castrating bulls, herding cattle, ordering rough cowboys to work, to eat, and to recreate with prostitutes, and the cowboys obey him in all of these assignments. The same cowboys ignore George. The movie never asks, but the viewer must: what happens to the ranch once Peter murders Phil? It falls to catatonic George and drunken Rose. It, in short, falls apart, and everyone descends into poverty. Bad guys are the only competent guys is this film's confused message.

 

Montana cowboy Phil is also Phi Beta Kapa in Classics from Yale. This gratuitous detail just made Phil more unbelievable to this viewer.

 

For long stretches, nothing happens onscreen, except a visual display of New Zealand's ample wonders. By "nothing" I do not mean that action consists of significant glances or quiet but pregnant dialogue. I love such films and such subtlety. I mean nothing happens. At all.

 

Weirdest of all, Phil is cruel because Phil is gay. He is shown fondling and masturbating with a bandana that belonged to the long dead Bronco Henry. He has a secret cache of gay porn. When he hears George and Rose having sex, he fondles a leather saddle that had belonged to Bronco Henry. Effeminate Peter murders gay Phil to protect drunken mommy Rose.

 

Published reviewers heap praise on "The Power of the Dog." Amateur moviegoers are not so kind. Rotten Tomatoes' professional reviewers award TPOTD a 96% rating. The amateur rating, on the other hand, has steadily gone down. It now stands at 64%, and it will descend as more people see the film. The rating has also gone down at the International Movie Database. Many "prolific reviewers," at IMDB, that is film fans dedicated enough to have contributed more than 300 reviews, dismiss TPOTD as "beautifully photographed but boring. Yes, simply boring." "ABSOLUTELY nothing happened;" "atmospheric nothingness;" "arty twaddle;" "very beautiful but I was detached, unmoved, unimpressed, goes nowhere … moves at the speed of molasses in January … I felt no tension whatsoever .. Endless moments are presented as significant because they move slowly and there is next to total silence. I just didn't care;" "I had a difficult time remaining awake;" these quotes reflect a trend of prolific reviewers assessing TPOTD as a boring film. Reviews judged "most helpful" by others reveal a similar theme: "The power of falling asleep ... a bunch of nothingness;" "Slow, ponderous, and ultimately unsatisfactory;" "Very beautiful and very boring;" "In dire need of a script;" "Nothing happens;" "Pretentious, indulgent, unskilled, boring … what a waste of money;" "nothing to see here" are typical comments from "most helpful" reviews.

 

We've been here before. Professional reviewers praise a film excessively, and hardcore film fans reject that same film. What's going on? Possibly what's going on is Woke.

 

Praise for "The Power of the Dog" is accompanied by assertions that the film destroys the cowboy, that quintessential symbol of white, American masculinity. In fact if you search the term "toxic masculinity" and "The Power of the Dog" you find pages of essays. As no less an authority than the New York Times put it. "The Power of the Dog" is "a dazzling evisceration of one of the country’s foundational myths," that is cowboy Phil, "a swaggering man's man." It's possible that those adoring 'The Power of the Dog" don't boost it so emphatically because it offers them a valuable aesthetic experience. Rather, they cherish the film because it bashes the cowboy and heterosexuality. Their championing of this film smacks of spite, given that, in "eviscerating" the "swaggering man's man," it depicts one gay man as a sadist, and another gay man as a killer.

 

When arguing a point, I like to rely on objective facts. It is a fact that there is a disconnect between how audiences respond to TPOTD, and how professional reviewers respond to it. But here's the fact I wish I could harvest. I wish we could somehow measure the aesthetic pleasure movie fans get from a well-made film, yes, a film like "The Searchers." And I wish there were a way to measure when a viewer is feeling rewarded by a film because that film punishes someone the viewer hates. TPOTD, as pages of essays on the web assert, punishes "toxic masculinity." Did the viewers who value "The Power of the Dog" really enjoy it? Or were they just marinating in spite? I don't have the answer to that, but one thing I do know is that a healthy society requires art created through the rough and tumble feedback loop of the free market. Art honed to meet ideological needs is no less toxic to society than mathematics, engineering, or science crafted to meet ideological needs.

 

We must throw out the past: Jefferson statues, pancake mixes, Golden Age Hollywood. I want films that include persons and themes that could not be depicted before. I'd pay money to see a movie about a fat dyslexic girl. But I demand that that movie is well-made. I don't want to be preached to; I don't want to support a film made only to "eviscerate" the hated white male hero. I wish we could combine the virtuosity of the old masters, the Leo McCareys, the John Fords, with modern inclusion. I hope that day comes.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery