“Come on, Mick, it’s network propaganda. We wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t helped us.” – The Running Man
Come to mention it, I ordered a book called “How to Scam People Online” a month ago and it still hasn’t shown up.
The monthly movie retrospective that I do the last week of the month has been a fairly popular part of the blog and has really given me some time to think about the content of the movies that we’ve seen in the past, and what it really means.
Before the 1970s, sequels weren’t the norm. Gradually sequels became popular. A large part of that is failure – the sequels usually made money, though in almost every case less money than the original. But they would make money, even if they were crappy.
Making sequels lowered the perceived risk a studio was taking.
The other factor in play is that the revenue streams changed. How many Chinese people in Mao’s China lined up to see Jaws? None. Zero. I’d imagine the same was true of Star Wars. Revenues from China in the 1970s. From what mud hut theater? Paid in what? Chickens?
Now, the goal is to create a product for the world stage. and to go through the Marvel Cinematic Universe™ you could spend sixty or more hours on the thirty-five MCU® movies alone, even skipping their television spinoffs. But the audience was different. Avengers: Infinity Wars made $680 million in the United States and the 51st state, Canada, but made nearly $1.4 billion overseas. Contrast that with Star Wars, where about 70% of the revenue came from the 51 United States.
I guess that was a wookie mistake.
Some movies are utter failures in the United States but achieve profitability only when international revenues are included. The very odd Matt Damon movie The Great Wall (2017) made only $45 million of its $289 million total in the United States, but made $171 million in China, who now had movie theaters and no longer paid in chickens.
Movies have changed, dramatically, because they’re no longer made just for American audiences. Sequels help here, because they allow foreign people to see the same characters again and again. So, movies have changed because the audience has changed. And, if you’ll note, the international audience is almost always much more leftist (though not necessarily GloboLeft) than Americans.
Making movies for foreign audiences automatically moves them into a more socialist frame since foreigners are more socialist.
The one time they selected me for jury duty they gave us snacks. Trial mix.
But subversion in the American cinema goes way back, because the GloboLeftElite have had their fingers in propaganda forever. One example is 1957’s 12 Angry Men, starring GloboLeftist subversive Henry Fonda.
I had never seen 12 Angry Men, so when it showed up on my “Up Next For You” list on the television while writing. By the time I was done, I was amazingly angry. 12 Angry Men was subversive, highlighting how awful Americans were casting us as stereotypes filled with bias, prejudice, or disinterest. Keep in mind this was made at the time that McCarthy (who was right, by the way) was being lampooned for being biased and prejudiced against communists. The disinterested were an indictment of capitalism.
This was a movie where the circumstances were so contrived in order to play on emotion, not facts. How bad is this movie? During the movie, Henry Fonda’s character absolutely breaks the law by introducing new evidence into the jury room. This is illegal, precisely because it now takes the process of introducing evidence into open court for all to see and puts it behind closed doors. Sounds like everything that GloboLeftElites love.
When I watched it, I got pretty angry, and wanted to see if anyone else had the same reaction. Here’s Proper Horrorshow with a discussion about just what I saw:
To be clear, if I watched 12 Angry Men 20 years ago, I probably would have missed the anti-Americanism that the movie is drenched in. But after years of having woke slammed into my face? My antenna were up, and I couldn’t have missed it.
The bad part of German navigation systems is that whenever you want to go to France, you have to go through Belgium.
Blazing Saddles was similarly subversive. Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was a hoot the half-dozen times I’ve watched it, but it is at its core a GloboLeftist exercise. One of my friends recently said, “They couldn’t make this movie today.”
My response was rather pointed, “Why not? Exactly what part of the movie would reflect a value that the people who run Hollywood wouldn’t love? Is it the normalization of gays? Is it the race-swapping of the sheriff? Is it the interracial romance? Is it the “make fun of white guys as much as you want, but don’t mock a single minority”? Was it shooting a hole in a Bible? ”
No. It’s racial slurs. But those racial slurs were used to make . . . a white guy look racist, so even those might make the cut.
Please, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have such a stick up my backside as to be unable to laugh at jokes aimed at me, especially funny jokes. But I recognize it. Turn the sheriff white and everyone else be black. Would the jokes about all the black townsfolk being stupid still be funny?
Now that is a movie one couldn’t make today.
What font is on Wyatt Earp’s tombstone? Sans Sheriff.
The last one I’ll bring up for now is Pleasantville. This 1998 movie set the stage for the Woke revolution and is a ideal bookend to the vile 12 Angry Men.
I really hate this movie. It is the worst sort of subversion. The plot is that 1990s kids (Brother and Sister) get sucked into a Leave it to Beaver-type television show set in the 1950s. Their lives are in black and white. Literally. That’s not the only thing that gets sucked, since after Sister has sex with a guy, instead of being in black and white, he goes into color. When Sister tells a high school girl how to pleasure herself, she goes into color. A malt shop owner paints a nude on the window of his malt shop.
The result?
Color.
The message is clear. Living in a society like the 1950s where people practiced restraint is so boring. Live your life. Remember, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” is from Aleister Crowley’s, not the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.
The Mrs. asked me if she had any bad habits, but then had the nerve to get offended by the PowerPoint® presentation.
Pleasantville is anything but. Obviously, critics loved it. Thankfully, audiences hated it, turning Pleasantville into a big failure.
Pleasantville failed because it was too big of an ask to audiences in 1998. It asked them to fully give in to whatever deviant thought they had in the moment and, in fact, to embrace that deviance. Be proud of that deviance.
Hmm. Proud. Pride month. Got it.
In 2025? It’s not a challenge at all to find subversion in almost any movie. The rot has come more to the top, and it has killed the industry, since no one wants the crap anymore and people are done with watching the 37th Marvel™ Cinematic Universe© movie.
Some might say that entertainment is downstream from culture, but how much, really, of our culture is driven by propaganda as entertainment?
A current version of 12 Angry Men that came and went from the theatres with little fanfare is Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2. The “little fanfare” part is significant. Warner Brothers put zero effort into publicizing or marketing this film and didn’t even do a wide release on it. I had to pay $5 or so to watch it via streaming TV and thought it was pretty good. Why was I unable to see it in my local theatre? Maybe the headline of a review I just now saw on line explains it: “Juror #2: A Right-Leaning Conservative Message in a Plain, Stark Narrative”. The “right leaning conservative message” of the movie is basically the importance of personal integrity and responsibility – pretty much the basic theme of every single movie involving Clint Eastwood as an actor or director. And not the theme of pretty much every left-wing movie ever released. I would post a link to this review, but it is not very insightful and pretty much spoils the suspense of the movie in the first couple of sentences. Probably deliberately.
So yeah, movies are propaganda and the ones that are not pushed are as significant as the ones that are.
Of course, for a film like Juror #2 to make money, there’s gotta be enough (right-wing) ticket payers out there to cough up the film’s $32 million cost in exchange for seeing a straightforward adult morality play. Apparently there’s not. The film was released in only 32 theatres nationwide and pulled after 2 weeks. So it’s a chicken-and-egg kind of dynamic at play, too.
Anyway, I recommend Juror #2. I would post the Youtube copy of its preview, but after viewing it I think it spoils the suspense of the movie, too. If you watch it, go in with as little prior input as you can.
I’m glad to see someone else taking swings at Blazing Saddles. I’ve grown really tired of hearing people on the right talk about how great it is and based. A brilliant black guy and a courageous Jew selflessly save a town of stupid bigoted white people who hate for no reason. Yes, so based.
Now, I agree it couldn’t be made today because at the time, they still had a little more art and subtlety. But not because the message is no longer acceptable.
Silence of the Lambs? That couldn’t be made today. A tranny is a dangerous lunatic. Way too close to reality.
Yeah, I never could finish Blazing Saddles as it just wasn’t that funny. Mel Brooks was a one trick pony in that his humor was entirely based on racial stereotypes. Take that away and he was just that annoying uncle that no one wanted to sit next to at Thanksgiving.
Sadly, that style of humor became the norm starting in the 90’s as we got inundated with talentless hacks like Amy Schumer and Chelsea Handler who only knew extreme/perverse sexual humor, or others like Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah who can only get laughs by telling extremely cringeworthy and biased political jokes. Sadly these people would never go away, as even if their show was cancelled, they’d get a new one a year later (just shows how bad the nepotism issue had gotten).
Amy Schumer even got a short lived cooking show with her new husband because everyone wants to see a disgusting sexual pervert show us how to cook a pot roast.
The Mrs and I cut the cable about time ICarly started manifesting increased poor behavior in our two youngest daughters. Not completely, but we skinned it way, way back.
Come forward a few years and we go all reminiscent and start to watch some shows we enjoyed as kids in the 70s and 80s, and we couldn’t do it. Your comment about having the antenna up is definitely true, but I found I was getting irritated at the laugh tracks. It was like someone constantly nudging me. There were laugh tracks in shows that I didn’t even remember having them, too.
Rambling path to conclusion: they’ve been leading us by the nose for decades. Break free my friends.
LFM-
Agreed on TV, really, from 1970 onward. As Pat Buttram (Mr Haney) noted, “In 1970(71?) CBS cancelled every show with a tree in it.” Even James West, the #3 Nielsen at that time. What’d we get?
Archie Bunker, George Jefferson, et al. Whitey dumb racist, Blackie smart urbanite. That homely, lower middle class chick raising her daughters in Indy with sage advice from an 80 IQ janitor. Rinse & repeat, ad nauseum.
Jim Rockford, the Duke Boys & Frank Cannon (and Bob Newhart) were the only saving graces from the 70s. And let’s not get started on mandatory “Dallas” viewing parties (ex-wife’s insistence) back then.
Cut the cable years ago as well. I find that most of the old shows we watched and couldn’t wait to see way back when are completely intolerable now. Can’t make it past the first few minutes and I have to shut it down. Laugh tracks just pile on to the ignorance of these shows, drives me completely insane now to hear it when back in the day it was barely noticed. It is nothing more than dumbing down the masses. I refuse to take part in it anymore…
Don’t forget that Pleasantville ends with the wife of the main character in the show (a thoroughly pleasant man, loving father, and doting husband) leaving him and their children because she’s bored. And they portray that as the only sensible thing for her to do.
You can’t hate that movie enough. Although, you could use it as a documentary of the evils of the boomer generation – take something wonderful and ruin it for everyone, while loudly proclaiming moral superiority.
To be fair to the boomers, they weren’t the ones on the (anti-American, anti-Constitution) Warren Court, or the Congress that voted for the (un)civil (anti)rights act or the (mass 3rd world) immigration act.
Once you become an adult, all Mel Brooks films become unfunny. And it isn’t just because of the wokery, but that the humor is junior high school level humor.
Pleasantville. Written and directed by Gary Ross (who also worked for the Ted Kennedy, Dukakis and Clinton (penis Clinton that is) campaigns. Good to see that a Scotsman can make it in Hollywood. 😍
That is one of the most startling things once you wake up, you look back and start to see how far back the rot began. Sure it was more subtle back then but that made it even more dangerous and set the subliminal messaging that White men who didn’t have sex with other men were bad.
Exactly. Then realize that it’s not just entertainment/pop culture. They’ve done (and are doing) the same thing in academics. For just one example, Franz Boas and Anthropology. Why would any Folk allow their history to be kept and taught by people who purely hate them?
I had to present a race relations class one time when I was in the Army. I started it by showing part of Blazing Saddles, then saying that if there is anybody that we haven’t insulted yet, see me after class and I’ll insult you personally.
“After all, he wasn’t even armed.” So a one-armed bandit, or a seven-armed octopus – those would be OK?
I’ve been watching Gunsmoke reruns. The old episodes were full of sound, insightful plots. The later years are filled with the efforts to promote the narrative created at the end of the Vietnam war. Whether that was the reason the show was cancelled in unclear, but sure keeps me turning the channels when the newer episodes are on.
John, I cannot remember the last television series I watched at all having cut the cord years ago. Honestly, some of the Disney items my kids watched still entertain me in a way that modern shows do not (circa 2008-2012 or so, before they became unwatchable).
Modern movies? I watch a handful at best. Looking at the selection during flights (I have had a few recently) is 90% a reflection of “The Unwatchable”. I go out of my way now to look for foreign films or older movies.