I’ve been writing for years about the steep decline of cinema — in fact all art and media — this century. My very first article for this fine publication (fortunately for my integrity, a true statement rather than a transparent bid for a raise) a shocking six years ago explored how even a moderately good action picture like 2008’s Taken was beyond the capability or intent of 2018 Hollywood. Because the idea of a loving tough-guy dad rescuing his helpless teen daughter with manly “certain skills” while his gorgeous ex-wife frets realistically became anathema soon afterward. Hollywood had not yet fully mutated into Hollywoke, but it devolved fast.
I’ll be watching the TCM premiere of The Godfather, commercial-free and uncensored. And I’ll confidently say, “They can’t make ‘em like that any more.”
Today, most people recognize the film industry as the creative wasteland it has become. A brand new Rasmussen poll shows Americans by a two-to-one margin think movies have gotten worse in the 21st Century. The poll found 54 percent believe motion picture quality has deteriorated in the last 20 years. Only the usual 27 percent of unshakable zombies assume the opposite. What happened to the screen trade during this time period is a tale perhaps not worthy of Edward Gibbon (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) but a lot more justified. (READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: England Reconstructs Camelot)
Most of the great auteurs and producers either retired or expired, and the studio system they enriched became a vacuous shell. Academia-spawned progressives took over, minus the talent to extend, duplicate, or simply maintain their marvelous inheritance. All they knew how to do was implode artistic truth with leftwing fantasy, reducing a once beloved industry into a pedestrian liberal message factory.
“If you want to send a message, try Western Union,” Frank Capra once said about blatant preachiness on film. Yet Capra was a master at instilling moralistic philosophy into his pictures, except he did it with heartwarming stories about virtuous people in some of the greatest films of all time. Modern filmmakers both dismiss that aspect of the craft and lack the skill to create anything close to It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, and It’s a Wonderful Life.
But in 2001, they found a loftier goal than the genius director who immortalized the year, Stanley Kubrick with 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was attacking the War on Terror and the American men fighting it. They made an unprecedented number of antiwar pictures slamming those heroes as ignorant pawns or psychopaths — American Soldiers, Redacted (about the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers), Stop-Loss, The Mark of Cain, Home of the Brave, Green Zone, In the Valley of Elah (a peacenik bridge too far for director Robert Redford) — while our guys were in harm’s way.
Every one of these films lost money, yet they kept coming throughout the whole decade, forming the first deliberate gap between Hollywood and the unwanted “deplorable” audience. It took two uncancellable superstars to make a pro-soldier film that each earned a fortune — Mark Wahlberg with Lone Survivor and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper. But the Hollywood die — or DEI — was cast, and exploded in the 2010s.
As happened all over the country, only to a ridiculous extreme in far-left Tinseltown, identity politics began superseding production ability. Diversity quotas replaced filmmaking merit. And it got much worse much faster. You couldn’t just be a black, female, or gay writer-director-producer, you had to be anti-white or anti-male or anti-heteronormative.
Marvelous franchises built with affection and artistry by straight white men — Walt Disney, Stan Lee, Gene Rodenberry, George Lucas — for all races and both sexes became cinematic graveyards haunted by impossibly macho women and improbably forced minorities. Because their inheritors couldn’t create their own fantastic worlds. They could only destroy those built by their predecessors — Disney fairy tales, Marvel Comics, Star Trek, Star Wars — by making them repellant even to their former fans.
They couldn’t even maintain popular film genres— the white action hero movie (like Taken), the feminine princess fairy tale, the romantic comedy, the sex comedy, plain old normal comedy. A large number of men and women would still want to see such fare, but Hollywoke people cannot oblige them, for it goes against their idiotic principles. That, and they couldn’t make good enough pictures to satisfy the undesirable crowd.
Now they’re devouring each other as the wokeness gets more ridiculous and repulsive. Disney’s Bob Iger just fended off a hostile takeover of the company for having subjected it to a slew of woke bombs and making it a laughingstock over the forthcoming Snow White live-action remake with a dispensable Prince Charming and diverse non-dwarf “magical beings.” (READ MORE: Midway in the Culture War)
Ironically, and amusingly, most of my former movie industry pals are in a bad way. They unfriended me when I came out for Trump in 2016, while embracing DEI, feminism, and conservative hatred. But they forgot one thing. They’re white and male. And now they’re out of work. I don’t know how many of them, if any, have developed the new sensation that they may be a woman. Only that a decade ago, they would have shuddered at the thought. It depends how much they need the job.
As for me, I’m going over the publisher’s excellent edit of my new political-thriller detective novel, The Apocalypse Mask, ahead of its fall publication. And relishing the 30th Anniversary of Turner Classic Movies (TCM). There, I can enjoy the ultimate expression of the cinematic art, unencumbered by liberal wailing and gnashing of teeth. This Wednesday, I’ll be watching the TCM premiere of The Godfather, commercial-free and uncensored. And I’ll confidently say, “They can’t make ‘em like that any more.”
