The Myth of a Liberal Hollywood 12/12/2018
Hollywood sells bourgeois ideology and markets capitalist hegemony. This notion of a liberal Hollywood is a myth created by conservative reactionaries in order to make them seem the victim of what they imagine as a vast “Radical Left” conspiracy to undermine their dearly held reactionary and philistine believes. They’re angry over what they perceive as liberal control of Hollywood, of academia, of the media, of the “deep state”. They’re angry because they have lost the culture wars and all they have to show for it are such cultural luminaries as Kid Rock and Scott “Chachi” Baio, oh ya, and The Piano Guys.
All art is political, whether overt or not, knowingly or unknowingly. What one chooses to “express” and how one chooses to “express” it is an expression of one’s worldview, one’s ideology. Robert Zemeckis’, the most insidiously reactionary director in Hollywood, Forrest Gump is a morality play about ’50s American ‘values’, when America was great, Forrest versus the ’60s Hippie Jenny who, even though she eventually sees the error of her ways and repents, she ultimately pays the price of her unwholesome un-American lifestyle. And then there’s Back to the Future, back to 1950s America yet again, where at the end an ’80s suburban White boy bestows upon Chuck Berry a “new sound”, albeit a somewhat sanitized Black R&B guitar riff.