Flicks For The Far Right

American Film Renaissance asks "Where are the films for normal people?"

I know you intended to go, and maybe just forgot, but Salon.com has provided a fine run-down of America's first Neocon film festival which ended Sept. 12. And you better believe, morality was in the house. Speaking at the American Film Renaissance's small opening-night reception at the Dallas Intercontinental last Friday, the right-wing film critic Michael Medved praised the Christian message of The Passion of the Christ and then called for the inclusion of more demeaning portrayals of gay people in the mass media:

"Every single image of homosexuality you see on TV is positive. It's not only positive, it's glowing. It's saintly. When was the last time you saw a nasty gay character? A degraded gay character?"

The right has gone wild at the success of recent political documentaries, especially Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11:

According to the story that festival founder Jim Hubbard, 35, told repeatedly to journalists and attendees, he was inspired to create the American Film Renaissance after he and his wife, a pretty, bouffant blonde named Ellen, went to an art house theater one night and were distressed to find that their only choices were Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and the Frida Kahlo biopic Frida, about "a communist artist."
"Where are the films for normal people?" he asked.

The line-up included The Siege of Western Civilization, the 45-minute fledgling effort by Herb Meyer, DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, about Bush's masterful handling of 9/11, Operation Eagle Strike, made by Protest Warriors Kfir Alfia and Alan Davidson, Innocents Betrayed, which attributes most of the ills of the 20th century to gun-control, and a 45-minute documentary about double standards and PC excesses on college campuses, Brainwashing 101.

One of the more amusingly bad selections was Jack Cashill's Mega Fix, in which Cashill, a thin, craggy man with a reassuringly amiable voice, delivers a lunatic monologue about Bill Clinton and terrorism. According to Cashill, a columnist for WorldNet Daily, Islamic terrorists, some with ties to Iraq, were behind the Oklahoma City bombing, the downing of Flight 800 and the bombing at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Clinton, corrupt and pusillanimous, covered all this up because he didn't want to go to war. His Justice Department preferred to pin the blame for Oklahoma City on "these two perfect specimens of right-wing American manhood" because it would help them discredit Newt Gingrich and the Republican revolutionists of 1994.

Of course, Michael Moore was a main target, with two anti-Moore films on the bill: Michael and Me, an anti-gun-control work by talk-show host Larry Elder, and the ambitious Michael Moore Hates America by Michael Wilson.

Wilson seems to pride himself on his open mind, but he often seems either naive or willfully blind. That's true in person, as well. Over drinks at the Intercontinental on Saturday night, I suggest to Wilson that, although Moore might have erred in using an unsuspecting and unwilling amputee to illustrate his point, things in Iraq are indeed awful, and many soldiers feel marooned and furious. A voluble chain-smoker with platinum streaks in his hair, Wilson replies, "I've talked to tons of soldiers who say it's like a Fourth of July parade every time they roll into town." Perhaps because of all the explosions.
Most irritating of all is Wilson's titular accusation. Part of the political fallout from 9/11 has been the emergence of cultural vigilantes who've taken it upon themselves to defame the insufficiently jingoistic. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1962 book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote of American intellectuals' historic ambivalence toward their country and of "the tension between protest and affirmation that had been most often associated with great achievement." In trying to root out the element of protest in national thought -- all while paying insincere lip service to their respect for dissent -- people like Wilson make themselves the enemies of intellect. They become the enforcers and purveyors of the most squalid philistinism.

Well, there's always next year...

Salon.com has Michelle Goldberg's full story at Flicks for the far right (If you are not a Salon subscriber you can watch a short "commercial" to get a "day pass" for the site)