Anti-American Oscars
by Spencer Warren
Issue 102 - February 27, 2008
 Oscar time in a presidential election year offers a litmus test of the attitudes of liberals like the two Democratic contestants, their spouses and many other liberals and radical leftists, who received their education from renowned left-wing movies. From their release in the late sixties-early seventies Clinton generation, many liberals became radicalized and the Democratic Party, led by George McGovern, turned leftist and anti-American. These “Oscar” films of the left often reflect the profound alienation and even hostility toward our country’s history that Michelle Obama just gave voice to, when she said the other day: “. . . for the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country.”
Here are our nominees:
1. The Graduate (1967)
This watershed film embodies the youth revolt that erupted at Berkeley a few years earlier. The Greatest Generation is presented as callow materialists whose only aim in life is lounging around their swimming pools and making money in “plastics.” The new college graduate Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) knows better. Initially seduced (metaphorically and literally) by the bored, cynical Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), the mother of the girl, Elaine, he loves (Katharine Ross), Benjamin storms into Elaine’s arranged wedding and runs off with her, imprisoning the contemptible Greatest Generation in the church by jamming a crucifix into the door handles of the sanctuary (as the young audiences cheered). Such blasphemy was verboten under the Hollywood Production Code (written by a Jesuit, Father Daniel Lord), which governed Hollywood films from 1934 until its replacement by the ratings system in 1966, with disastrous consequences for American culture and morality. Ironically, the immoral Mrs. Robinson (immortalized in the Simon and Garfunkle song), prefigures what some in Benjamin’s generation and their children have turned into, conscience-less hedonists unmoored from transcendent morality.
2. Easy Rider (1969)
ow the Vietnam War radicalized the Clinton generation can be understood in this film, perhaps the definitive totem of the “Sixties Generation.” A motorcycle odyssey across “Amerika” by two drugged out hippies (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) who pick up along the way an “awakening” middle class dropout (Jack Nicholson, in the film that helped make his long career). At the end, having spent part of the film doped up on cocaine and LSD, and much of the rest of the film on marijuana, to the accompaniment of hard rock, they are wantonly gunned down by evil Americans represented by two men driving a pick-up truck. The film was co-written by Hopper and Fonda and directed by Hopper, who today – sweet irony – is making a living as the face of Ameriprise Financial in the company’s TV commercials. Along with Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) – see below – Easy Rider is perhaps one of the two most viciously anti-U.S. movies ever made.
3. MASH (1970)
Robert Altman is the most hateful anti-American director along with Stone. He made the famous crack after 9/11 that he was disgusted by the sight of the Stars and Stripes. This gross comedy of a medical unit of wise-guys who employ black humor to keep their “sanity” against the madness of war in the Korean conflict was Altman’s first big hit and hugely popular during the Vietnam War era on college campuses (as were the first two films listed here). The film mocks religion and patriotism. Interestingly, this attack on America’s noble stand against communist aggression near the outset of the Cold War was written (adapted from the novel by Richard Hooker) by the unrepentant Communist and former party member Ring Lardner, Jr., who had been blacklisted (perhaps with good reason, in retrospect) in the late 1940’s. Lardner was one of the original Hollywood Ten, most of whom were Stalinists. (See my essay on this subject at http://acuf.org/issues/issue94/071022med.asp .) It bears repeating: this much loved film of the Sixties Generation was written by a Communist.
4. Little Big Man (1971)
This burlesque of that most vulnerable of American myths, Custer’s Last Stand, becomes an assault on the American experience. The story is told in flashback by one Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman, who would never have been a movie star before the 1960s), now aged 120, who witnessed the events. Custer -- who, let us remember, was a courageous cavalry officer whose boldness was instrumental in cutting off Lee’s retreat at the end of the war, leading to his surrender at Appomattox -- is portrayed as something of a dunce. Just about every other white person in the film is venal or worse, and the film implicitly attacks our settlement of this continent. Further, this supposed de-mythologizing film furthers a myth beloved of the left, the alleged massacre by Custer’s Seventh Cavalry of a peaceful Indian encampment along the Washita River in the Oklahoma Territory in 1868. In fact, braves from this encampment had been attacking and killing settlers and Custer’s men were defending them. The picture was directed by Arthur Penn, who had directed the watershed counter-culture Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, ushering in the explicit buckets of blood exploitation of violence which has ruined movies and afflicted our culture and society ever since. Penn’s nihilism didn’t take him far and by the end of the seventies his career was dead. The screenplay was written by Calder Willingham, who also did the adaptation of The Graduate.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)
Having disposed of the Korean War, Robert Altman then turned his attention to deconstructing that most American and heroic of genres, the Western. The noble knight on horseback protecting the new oasis of civilization in the wilderness is replaced by Warren Beatty’s bordello owner, whom Altman also depicts as a stand-in for American entrepreneurship. At the “climax” which provided the moral catharsis of the classic Western, he is shot to death, helpless, stumbling in a blizzard. Altman’s deliberately formless, even nondescript, direction, is a conscious revolt against the beautiful, noble classicism of the traditional Hollywood greats like John Ford and other paragons of the Western, such as Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher and Delmer Daves. By comparison with their rich legacy, Altman left a desert of mediocrity
6) Heaven’s Gate (1980)
One of Hollywood’s legendary mega-million box office disasters, this monstrosity was the culmination of the trend of anti-Westerns that had begun in the late 1960’s as part of the counter-culture revolt. (See my essay, Rediscovering the Classic Western, which also traces the decline of this genre down, yes, to Clint Eastwood.) It virtually killed off the movie Western, which before, into the early sixties, had been the most popular movie genre (and on television as well). Written and directed by Michael Cimino, whose once promising career (see his 1978 The Deer Hunter) was virtually killed off as a result, this would-be epic film turns the real-life Johnson County War between settlers and ranchers in 1890’s Wyoming into a neo-Marxist assault on the entire American Western experience. Its original 219 minute running time quickly was cut by more than one hour, but nothing could save this fiasco. The film also wrecked United Artists.
7. Dances With Wolves (1990)
Westerns experienced a brief revival following the success of this Kevin Costner film, which became the first Western to win the Academy Award as best picture since Cimarron in 1931. Costner plays a Union officer who finds no meaning in fighting the Civil War, so he takes a post out West in Indian country, where he goes native and finds Indian “civilization” much superior to America’s. Costner also directed this overbaked, self-regarding travesty in which, again, whites are portrayed with a clichéd hostility that is as obvious as the treatment of cardboard villains in juvenile movie serials of the 1930’s.
8) JFK (1991)
Oliver Stone served in the Vietnam War, winning a Bronze Star and the Purple Heart, and he has been taking it out on the USA ever since. His Vietnam War movie Platoon (1986) won the Academy Award as best picture and he won as best director. This film could be substituted for JFK: it centers on the killing of civilian villagers by U.S. troops, an atrocity which was the exception to the rule, while ignoring the widespread, systematic killing of tens of thousands of civilians by the communists (e.g. the Hue Massacre during the 1968 Tet offensive, which, unlike the isolated U.S. My Lai Massacre, is not widely known because, like all communist atrocities, our brilliant television reporters were not present to film it). Further, and typical of the immature left (see MASH above), the film focuses on the subjective, personal experiences of Stone’s U.S. soldiers (not to be minimized) while ignoring the broad political and moral context. By this approach, service in the Civil War or World War II also could be portrayed as a waste.
In any event, JFK has done far more damage than Platoon because it is most responsible for reviving and perpetuating the unproven claim – now a myth – that the CIA and other Cold War warriors at the highest reaches of the U.S. government participated in a conspiracy to murder John F. Kennedy. In Stone’s fevered brain, he and his fellow soldiers in Vietnam would have been spared their hell because had he lived, President Kennedy would have averted direct U.S. military involvement. This is unproveable and open to much doubt, inasmuch as Kennedy sharply escalated indirect U.S. involvement by sending thousands of advisors and acquiescing in the overthrow of Vietnamese President Diem. But Stone long ago abandoned any rational approach to the subject.
JFK is one of the most dishonest films ever made. It is pure propaganda. Stone interweaves factual material, such as the famous home movie of the assassination by a bystander, Abraham Zapruder, with his fictional film, and he falsifies many important details to back up his conspiracy claim that Lee Harvey Oswald was not acting alone. Stone denies his falsifications, and justifies the film in any event on the ground of dramatic license. But his use of factual material (some of which only a well-informed student of the subject would recognize) goes way over the line of dramatic license. Joseph Goebbels would be proud of Stone’s work on this outrage.
Following is a list of some of the film’s falsehoods, presented through the person of Kevin Costner, trashing his country this time by playing New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison, who in 1967 brought the only prosecution in connection with the assassination, of local businessman Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones):
a. Oswald was not a good enough shot to get off the third, fatal, shot in the time available before the presidential limousine would have driven below an overpass, which would mean the fatal shot was fired by a second gunman, from the side at the Grassy Knoll, according to Stone and other conspiracy theorists. But the fact is that Oswald’s record as a rifleman in the Marines was excellent. An 89-year-old medical doctor, using the same type of rifle as Oswald and sitting at the Texas School Book Depository window from where Oswald fired, demonstrated how he could easily do what he did, in an ABC documentary shown several years ago (shown since on the History Channel). FBI demonstrations further confirm this.
b. The second bullet, which according to the Warren Commission passed through Kennedy’s back and then Governor John Connally’s chest, could not have done so because Connally was not seated directly in front of the president; he was at the wrong angle. The bullet would have had to zig zag, according to Costner/Garrison’s argument at the trial. Unfortunately, the film’s model used in the trial shows Connally in a false position; in truth, he was perfectly seated in front of and below Kennedy for the bullet’s trajectory to hit both men as it did. (If this second bullet did not hit both men, it would have meant four bullets were fired, hence two shooters and a conspiracy.)
c. Kennedy’s head is seen in the gruesome Zapruder film thrusting backward as the fatal bullet strikes. Stone presents as fact that this means the bullet was fired from the front or side. But a victim’s head can react this way when struck by a bullet from behind, according to medical and ballistics experts. Further, the autopsy showed the fatal bullet entered from the back of the president’s skull, and that all the bullets fired came from Oswald’s rifle.
There are other examples of Stone’s falsification of the record. Also noteworthy: the key prosecution witness, Perry Russo, had failed a police lie detector test, yet Garrison went ahead with the trial and put him on the witness stand. Shaw was acquitted in less than one hour. Of further interest, Stone’s hero, Garrison, had been found by an Army doctor to be rather unbalanced mentally and unfit for duty when he was serving in the National Guard in the early 1950’s. And Stone gives Costner/Garrison a speech of his own radical views at the end of the trial, concerning the nature of our government, which was never given.
This tissue of falsehoods has been found to be responsible for the large number of Americans who believe Stone’s thesis, for which no credible evidence whatsoever has ever been produced. Nor has any credible evidence ever been produced that anyone other than Oswald killed President Kennedy.
9) Gangs of New York(2002)
It is 1863. Our country is fighting for its survival in a terrible civil war. Americans of all walks of life, including many new immigrants, are dying in record numbers and suffering unimaginably to save the one democracy in the world, the hope of the human race. So when he turns to this period, what does the renowned Martin Scorsese make of it? He films a perverse buckets of blood story about primitive ruffians slaughtering one another over some turf in a Manhattan lower class district. And he includes a shot of newly arrived immigrants serving only as cannon fodder for the – presumably – pointless war. Another descent into the nihilist world of Scorsese, who appears to have some serious mental hang-ups. (See my essay on Scorsese’s career at http://acuf.org/issues/issue83/070504med.asp .)
10) Letters from Iwo Jima(2006)
As I wrote in detail last year (http://acuf.org/issues/issue78/070216med.asp), this Clint Eastwood film represents the nadir of moral equivalence. It places the U.S. and Imperial Japanese on the same level, when in fact the latter was in the same league as the Nazis in the millions of innocents its army killed and tortured. Not to mention Japan’s treachery at Pearl Harbor. Like some of the war films above, it substitutes the subjective and personal for the objective historical situation. And it is based on profound, if not willful, ignorance of historical fact. It is made to fit the left’s radical egalitarian dogma that there is no objective moral truth, that no country or civilization is better than any other, because that would make one superior and thus violate the one true precept: total equality of all peoples and cultures, everywhere, and its derivative, absolute “tolerance.” The film is joined in this perversity by Eastwood’s companion film, Flags of Our Fathers (2006). (See my review essay at http://acuf.org/issues/issue73/061211med.asp.)
Undoubtedly readers will have other nominees for this list of lamentable movies, which provides incontrovertible evidence of the Culture War now dividing America and threatening our future. And it all grew out of the Sixties counterculture, which in many quarters today is the dominant culture.
Spencer Warren is www.ConservativeBattleline.com‘s movie critic.
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