Fail: National Review's list of the 25 Best Conservative Movies

[samedietc]

FAIL? I think this list of the 25 Best Conservative Movies might even achieve EPIC FAIL levels. If you can't bear to click on the link, here's a quick rundown of what 25 people think the top 25 conservative movies are (in my rundown, I don't bother to mark the names of most of these ersatz critics, thinking it charitable to let them distance

Comments

[samedietc]

I don't know, sister, I feel like arguments could be made to cast both films in light of liberal traditions--as long as you focus on only one aspect of a film and attach that aspect unequivocally to one or another wing. E.g., the Incredibles is really about community and team-work, which runs counter to the conservative American tradition of the rugged individual: sure, the speedster can beat people at being fast, but he needs the invisible girl's forcefields, etc.

That's part of my (assumed) argument here, that narratives tend to (accidentally) include their obverses, inverses, reverses. Take Red Dawn, an unapologetically anti-Russian, anti-Communist film--which includes a sub-plot about an honorable Soviet soldier who only wants to go home to his family. (Note: his desire to return to his family matches perfectly what the critic in this article said of the American soldiers in We Were Soldiers--but at no time does this soldier ever abandon or challenge Communism itself. So there's a clear divorce here between being a good person and being an American--they're not synonyms, even though the film would seem to want that on the surface.)

(Addendum: Case study 1: I can see some part of the Randian argument about Incredibles, and the film certainly does play with that idea, but the fact that that line about everybody being equal when special gets said by Bob, Dash, and then Syndrome would seem to mark it as an immature or wrong idea. For one thing, as I hinted at above, everybody being special doesn't mean everybody being equal, since their "specialness" is so different.

(Case study 2: Gattaca certainly seems to be a conservative sentimental story, where "heart" beats out over external circumstances and limitations, but the transparent fantasy of the matter undermines that message for me--maybe it's just me, but I always imagine a coda where Ethan Hawke has a heart attack in space, and so can't reach a critical button, and so a space station explodes. Actually, the scene where the brothers swim is so Oedipally-fraught, with the return to the womb-ocean (and so dream-like: how did they get to the water? iirc, it's a really sudden transition) that, again, it's hard to take entirely seriously as a defense of a real-world politics. So, it may be conservative, but to me it points out the difficulties that conservatism faces applying its principles to the real-world.)