Not That's There Anything Wrong With That

Professor Vic writes, rather humorously I might add,

"As for the Golden Globes, I'm not really sure what the obvious message is other than that several good movies this year dealt with the topic of homosexuality and gender identity. I'm not sure you would say Hollywood has a "pro-Hobbit" bias just because Lord of the Rings won in 2004, or a "pro-Game Theory" bias because A Beautiful Mind won in 2002, or a "pro-large scale disasters and sappy love stories" bias because Titanic won in 1998. (Ok, that last bias is probably true.)"

Interestingly enough, A Beautiful Mind skipped over dealing with portions of the book that had Nash getting anonymous homosexual sex in park bathrooms, and being arrested for it. I am no psychiatrist (really, I'm not), but perhaps conflicted feelings about his own sexuality contributed to his psychological problems, so they may have been very relevant to the story. But that imagery - anonymous sex in a park bathroom - does not fit the romantic picture that I think Hollywood would like in general to convey with respect to male homosexual behavior in particular; yet I would argue it is far more prevelant than committed monogomous relationships among male homosexuals. Nevertheless, those making a movie have no responsibility to portray the statistically more likely behavior, especially when you can't build much of a story around the more typical behavior - so I don't fault the movie for that.

Now, Hatch is right that Brokeback Mountain wouldn't even have been nominated had it featured a heterosexual relationship. Of course, that is because the taboo nature of the realtionship sets up the dramatic tension of the entire movie. Romeo and Juliet would have been lost to the ages if Juliet had only been a Capulet instead of a Montague. West Side Story would never have swept the Oscars if Maria's brother had only been a Shark instead of a Jet. Cabin Boy would never have become such a classic if... wait, sorry, got carried away there.

Referencing Cabin Boy is never an indication of getting carried away ... if you hadn't abandoned that path, you were more than likely to make a point that would leave your comments unanswerable. Agreed - dramatic tension is required. The assumption of a vast left-wing conspiracy in Hollywood and other portions of the media sets up the dramatic tension for this entire blog, but hopefully the entertainment value of this blog is independent from buying into that assumption. I think the exact manner in which the relationship was taboo in this case is likely to contribute vastly to its critical success and acclaim.

You don't really know what the fued between the Capulets and the Montagues stems from, and it doesn't really matter to the sympathies you feel for the characters. In this case, I think it is likely to make all the difference in the world to those who think it's a great movie: They are not likely to reliably distinguish the strength of the movie from their own great sympathy with the unfairness of the source of dramatic tension. Compare it to Nabokov's Lolita, considered by some a true love story, which also involves a taboo relationship - no one comes away from that book thinking its damned unfair that a fifty year old guy can't be sleeping with a 14 year old girl without taking all kinds of flak over it, nor is it Nabokov's intention that they do so. In this case, my guess is that that exact message - how unfair society was (is?) to gay cowboys in the 1950s - is more important to both those who made the movie and those who critically acclaimed it than the story itself. Of course I haven't seen the movie, because when I want to see a movie I usually just pop Cabin Boy back into the DVD.

So Hollywood is open-minded enough to tell interesting tales about people who happen to be gay and is willing to release films exploring homosexual love stories. Good for them.

A story is a story, and it should be judged on its merits independent of whether or not you agree with the underlying message. But telling any story does not require open-mindedness - I could write a story about two gay cowboys, and my mind is a closed book. Whenever a liberal refers to an "open mind," it is usually applied to someone who agrees with them, and often it can be said that such an open-minded person is not very tolerant of those who disagree with their open-minded view. The zeitgeist today is certainly swinging in favor of the sexual libertarian view that as long as two adults are consenting, eveything's fine. It is possible to hold the opposite view without doing so constituting a hatred of homosexuals, and indeed I think this is true for many. It may be a mistaken view, but it is not by definition one that can only stem from animus. It is no more indicative of a closed mind than adherence to the opposite libertarian view, and to suggest otherwise is itself close minded.

And before you say that Hollywood would never expose the warts of socialist regimes or of Democratic presidents, try watching Oscar nominated films such as Hotel Rwanda, Farewell My Concubine, or The Killing Fields.

Fair point.

Finally, I might add that over the past ten years "pro-gay" Hollywood has nominated more pictures for the Best Picture Oscar that have featured a pig or a ghost as the main character than a homosexual.

If I recall, most of these ghosts and pigs were Commies!