Hollywood is, as everyone knows, the ultimate bastion of leftism, and a skilled purveyor of the many defining myths of the liberal ethos. Many films could be cited to prove this point, but perhaps the easiest example is James Cameron's Avatar (which can serve as a proxy for many different movies, since it stole so freely from hundreds of liberal cinematic homilies that came before it). Avatar is a kind of cinematic Mass for the 21st Century Secular Liberal soul, dramatizing with cutting edge 3D and Special Effects liberals' most cherished paradigms (since corporations are horrible, and the military satanic, combining them creates the ultimate evil); deeply felt prejudices (my own closest neighbors and family relations are hopelessly xenophobic, so I will prove my sanctimonious superiority by embracing, nay becoming, the more enlightened others my lesser co-citizens currently fear); and vaguely articulated but sacredly viewed beliefs (worship nature, not God; on some planet, somewhere, surely nature will actually respond back in kind, proving that the indigenous pagans were right all along).
But, once in a while, through some quirk of physics or something, a movie with a conservative message somehow gets made. Here are 11 such films:
The Dark Knight Rises This final film in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy is basically another cinematic cover of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. That means we get lots of imagery about the dangers of revolutionary movements, which subvert the civil order of the boring old conservative status quo, like the Scarecrow presiding over a Kangaroo court handing out arbitrary and capricious death sentences to anyone who engages in counterrevolutionary activities. Also, Occupy Wall Street-type protesters are shown to be the dupes of an evil power-hungry tyrant (Bane = George Soros). And the police are celebrated as overcoming the protesters and restoring law and order to the streets, rather than vilified as the evil henchman of a Black Lives Matter morality tale. But the single most important conservative moment in the film comes in a scene where Catwoman is spending time with the revolutionary revelers in a home they've stolen from some hapless middle class family, whose photo, in a destroyed frame, she finds laying amongst their belongings:
"Catwoman (viewing the photo and looking horrified): This was someone's home.
Catwoman's ditzy stoned friend (ignoring the troubling question of what happened to the family who once lived here): Now it's everyone's home."
All this anti-collectivist scene needed was the obvious next line, "Which means it's nobody's home" and it could have been written by William Buckley or Ronald Reagan.
The Way Back This 2010 film about a group of refugees fleeing a Soviet Gulag earns its conservative stripes at the moment when the main characters are about to leave the borders of the Soviet Union, only to be greeted by images of Stalin at the border of the country (Mongolia perhaps? I can't remember) they are fleeing into. They are crushed, and one of them mumbles something about "it" (the evil of Stalinism) having spread to other lands.
Ghostbusters A group of academics lose their public grants and have to start a small business in the private sector, where, one of them notes, "they expect results." Their successful efforts at providing a needed service are then thwarted, and the city of New York threatened with annihilation, because of an overzealous and power-hungry federal bureaucrat from the EPA releasing toxic ghost matter into the city rather than allowing the small business owners to store it without a license. In the end, the evil federal bureaucrat gets what's coming to him.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Frodo keeps trying to give the ring to all the most pure and noble souls in Middle Earth: Gandalf, Galadriel, Aragorn. They each demonstrate that they are truly pure and noble, by refusing the offer, knowing, as Gandalf says, that, though they would use this ring out of a desire to do good, through them it would work only great evil. Such is the nature of concentrated power. Clearly, none of these Tolkien characters would have had much good to say about U.S. Supreme Court Justices who abuse their concentrated power by legislating from the bench, or about Fidel Castro, but they all would have cheered on George Washington when he gave up his commission at the end of the Revolutionary War. (And clearly, Canada's Castro-loving Prime Minister Bieber Trudeau has never read the Lord of the Rings. Or if he did, failed to understand it.)
Gattaca A refutation of the modern liberal paradigm of a purely materialistic and mechanistic universe, in which there is no such thing as human agency, such that none of us may be held accountable for the outcomes of our pre-programmed decisions (see, for example, Sam Harris's book, Free Will, which denies that there is such a thing, or Barack Obama's "You Didn't Build That" speech). This film, by contrast, argues there is no gene for the metaphysical human spirit.
Amazing Grace William Wilberforce is arguably one of the most important men in history. This story of his successful, and Christian-motivated, crusade to end the slave trade, is a helpful rebuttal to modern liberal sneers at the evils of Christianity.
A Man for All Seasons One of the reasons I know I'm a conservative is because of my cranky annoyance at the belief that we can legislate away or reeducate away hard and objective scientific truths about human biology, sexes, chromosomes, and non-asexual reproduction. Nothing better encapsulates this conservative worldview, than the following defense of objective truth, uttered by Sir Thomas Moore, in this film about the famous Catholic martyr's contest of wills with Henry VIII over the definition of marriage: "Some men think the earth is round; others think it flat; it is a matter capable of question. But if it is flat the King's command will not make it round, and if it is round, the King's command will not flatten it." [The movie version of this line is stronger than in the original play, where it is phrased as a question.] Lincoln, our first and still greatest Republican President, made a similar argument about the stubborn implications of objective truth, when he contended that if you call a dog's tail a leg, the dog still has only four legs, because calling something a leg doesn't make it so. The same goes for humans, who remain human, even if you call them property, or fetuses.
Groundhog Day It is possible to misread the message of this movie and see it as just another liberal celebration of the sexual revolution: the purpose of life is to get the girl into your bed. But, despite that terrible ending, that's not really the point. This is a movie about a lost soul's realization that life's purpose is to be found in personal growth, accompanied by joining, and serving, a community. Charles Murray has argued that the film is a good substitute for reading Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. I don't know if that's true, but it's certainly a lot more fun.
Blast from the Past The polar opposite of left-wing screed, Pleasantville this film instead provides a gentle defense of the lost values of pre-1967 America, as embodied by a young man who spent his life being raised by his 1950s-era parents in a bomb shelter and was thus never slowly brought to a boil, like the hapless frog of the oft-repeated conservative analogy for America's slow embrace of modern immorality.
http://www.hatrack.com/cgi-bin/print_friendly.cgi?page=/osc/reviews/reviews98/movies_worst.shtml)
The Island An explication of why we don't create or tamper with the sanctity of human life merely for scientific research.
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. For obvious reasons, any film based on the life or writings of C.S. Lewis (who spent his youth in socialist folly before converting to Christianity) will resonate with conservatives. I could list movies and books all day which, in my humble opinion, end with a symbolic retelling of Christ's atoning sacrifice, at least as I choose to apply and as I choose to understand the plot of those stories. There's less viewer's choice here, as the story deliberately sets up an analogy and an allegory for each element of the central doctrines of Christianity: the existence of an objective moral law, temptation, sin, betrayal, atoning sacrifice, redemption, death, resurrection, and the battle against evil. Normally, as Tolkien believed, such forced allegory, as opposed to chosen applicability, is a bad thing. But because Lewis understands the theological points which he is making so well, the story works, not only as a good children's story, but as a helpful source of theological clarity. The movie is, in my opinion, much more powerful than the book (especially if the sequel is watched shortly thereafter), and transcends its juvenile literature source material, primarily because the actor who plays young Edmund does such an amazing job of portraying the differences in his character's character, before versus after his countenance has been changed by his recognition of what someone else did for his redemption.
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