NOT EVERYTHING WAS ALWAYS POLITICS, DAMMIT, AND ONE OR TWO PITHY POP CULTURE REFERENCES WILL PROVE IT.
In the summer of 1984 one of the finest motion pictures of all time swept across the nation, and indeed the world, changing everyone it touched for the better and for all time.
Of course that motion picture was Ghostbusters. In the film, you’ll recall, the eponymous Ghostbusters (the good guys) did battle with spirits from beyond the grave, a demon from another dimension, and a representative of the Environmental Protection Agency (collectively the bad guys). See where I’m headed already? Course you do. How could you not? Today, everything is politics.
William Atherton brilliantly portrayed EPA inspector Walter Peck with all the arrogance and patronization that lies at the heart of smalltime, petty bureaucrats everywhere. With his hooded reptilian eyes and sardonic smile, Peck’s function in the film is to bring all the resources of an overly endowed government agency to bear on making life miserable for a group of four hardworking small business owners. And more than the busting of any ghost, more even than the climactic banishment of Gozer in the form of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, the most delicious comeuppance in the film, and the scene that got the loudest cheers from audiences all twenty-seven times I saw it, is the moment when the Mayor takes sides with the Ghostbusters, points a finger at Peck and says: “Get him out of here” (or maybe it was the moment just before that when Peter Venkmann (Bill Murray) calmly asserts that indeed Walter Peck “has no dick,” I’m not sure). At any rate, the point remains that the most hateful villain in the film is not a beasty from the underworld but a jackass from the government.
This was not divisive in 1984. My friends and I were all democrats back then (at least we thought we were – our parents were hippies after all); our parents were democrats, our teachers were liberals, everyone I knew was a lefty of some stripe. Yet we all took it for granted that government interference in our lives was a net negative. Democrats were making films about government bureaucracies run amok, like 1984 and, most notably, Brazil. More to the point, it never occurred to anyone to bother parsing the politics of a movie like Ghostbusters.
Okay, cue the caveats: yes, there was the hue and cry of the politically aggrieved against Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom that same year. But that was emotional handwringing over alleged racism (always an attractive dunghill for cranks to climb up and pontificate from), not the relative dangers of overregulation. And yes, Hollywood’s class of humorless political scolds was swelling well before that summer. But to see the difference between then and now, imagine a major summer “tent pole” movie today in which the most unpleasant character traits are reserved for, and the most biting comebacks delivered to, a villain from the Environmental Protection Agency, for God’s sake. IRS? Sure. EPA? Doesn’t seem likely.
Why not? It’s not simply because Hollywood’s appetite for feel-good causes like “The Environment” has grown since then (it’s exploded, but it was big then too), or that there was less bias in the 1980s in favor of large government agencies than there is today. It’s that today, unlike then, every facet of American life has been so politicized that it is well nigh impossible to imagine a wide-release summer movie so casually and so mercilessly bashing a political darling of the left like the EPA without drawing to itself all the wrong kinds of attention for doing so (yes, yes, Nixon started the EPA. And does he ever get any thanks for it from angry hippies?) More to the point, it seems unlikely it would even occur to a filmmaker to do so today unless he was grandstanding (or at least posturing). It’s as if somewhere along the way filmmakers en masse decided that Michael Palin’s Constitutional Peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail actually raised some pretty good points. “Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I’m being repressed!” stopped being funny and became very, very serious.
“But hey,” you may be asking, “weren’t there good political movies back then, too?” Yes, there were. And the key word is “good.” For example, recast Jack Nicholson’s sardonic gumshoe in Chinatown as an earnest Water and Power bureaucrat who dedicates himself to ensuring the farmers of Owens Valley own their own means of irrigation, and you have the version starring Matt Damon and directed by Steven Soderbergh. You also have the version nobody gives a damn about.
“But I liked that Erin Brockavich movie,” you say? No you didn’t. You’re wrong. It was junk. And besides, there weren’t any interdimensional demons in that. Now sit down.
No one outside the humorless halls of campus socialists cared one way or the other about the politics of Aliens in 1986, but twenty-four years later the politics of Avatar are inescapable. Of course that’s exactly what James Cameron intended; his critics aren’t wrong about the latter movie’s content. Nobody is “backward masking” Avatar to find signs of Gaea worship. No, Avatar is overtly political in a way Aliens was not; you’d have to be dense not to see it. If Aliens had wallowed in half the pompous didacticism of Avatar, it would have been as boring and insufferable as, well, Avatar, and would have likely died at the box office. The fact that Avatar did not die but has thrived beyond all reckoning says its not just Cameron’s fault – it’s ours too. And while it seems plain that Avatar’s spectacle is the dominant reason for its unqualified success, we also seem much more willing today to blur the lines between politics and entertainment, and neither is the better for it. Both are worse (ahem...I'm looking at you, Green Zone. And Redacted. And Rendition. And Stop Loss. And Lions for La-- oh, forget it). I blame Michael Moore.
Okay, it’s not all his fault. But politics is never improved by the imperatives of entertainment. There may or may not be any third acts in politics, but there always are in movies, whether the truth warrants one or not. Good politics requires sobriety, nuance, and a willingness to be endlessly boring. Entertainment, somewhat less so. And the more political our entertainment gets, the more like cheap propaganda it becomes. It’s like the old Reese’s Peanut Butter cup ad: “hey, you got politics in my entertainment … you got entertainment in my politics … mmm, delicious!” Except it’s not delicious. It’s hideous crap, and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong.
Not to keep harping on Avatar, but…ah, to hell with it. Perusing Barnes and Noble the other day I chanced upon a stack of Avatar tie-ins and collectibles; the kind of stuff that would have been blue catnip to me when I was a teenager saving up to buy all the Aliens crap I could get my hands on. One book, aimed at the youngsters, caught my eye: Avatar: An Activist Survival Guide. And I thought: this is what we’ve come to? A kid can’t even buy a cheap, disposable, faux “collector’s item,” the kind destined to be sitting in a landfill by the palette-load within a year, without being inducted as an activist? Holy Reforestation Subsidies, Batman!
Seriously, WTF?? This is for 8 year olds. What's next, Mr. Greenpeace-Jeans and Captain Kagaroos-Are-Endangered-So-Get-Away-From-That-Kanagroo-Asshole!?
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s a good version of Ghostbusters in which Walter Peck forces the team to comply with regulations stating that the containment of focused, non-terminal repeating phantasms simply isn’t worth the potentially negative environmental impact it poses; one in which the chorus of the title song goes: “I ain’t afraid of no noxious, possibly hazardous waste chemicals!”; one in which Walter Peck is the good guy. Maybe we’re all much more “enlightened” now that we’re being “turned on” as we “tune in.”
But these days all I want to do is “drop out.”
Wait, wasn't Erin Brockovich nominated for best picture? I must be wrong. I take it all back.
