Why Hollywood Sucks

 by Phillip Ellis Jackson  

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Americans like to kill people for no reason — now that’s entertainment!

The writer’s strike is entering its third month, and instead of lamenting the loss of new primetime TV shows, I’m hoping it will last until 2097.

It’s not that I don’t think the writers have a point.  They deserve to be paid for their product whether it’s broadcast on TV or the Internet.  Rather, like most Americans who are voting with their feet, I could care less if the strike ends tomorrow or not because I’m tired of watching all the crap that supposedly passes for entertainment.

No, this isn’t a comment on the depravity that is Hollywood at its core.  A little depravity now or then suits me fine, such as the excessive violence in a Die Hard movie, or the knee-capping of some terrorist in an episode of 24, or even a smattering of scantily-clad women here and there (as long as my wife and daughter aren’t watching the program with me).  Okay, so I’m typical American male and occasional hypocrite.  So sue me.

But this isn’t why Hollywood sucks.  I had an epiphany about the issue after watching a marathon of recent movies over the holidays, when all the things I knew were wrong with Hollywood came to the front of my mind during Rush Hour 3.

Let’s start with the basics.  A good movie/TV show does two things well.  It entertains, and it educates.  However, both of these ingredients are weighted differently.  Entertainment should be 99% of the content, and the remaining 1% education should come through in context instead of with the blunt force of a swinging baseball bat.  This is why good dialogue reveals character instead of creating character.  A hero who says “tell my daughter I love her” as he’s about to detonate a nuclear bomb that will both kill him and save planet Earth from the approaching meteor reveals character.  A character who says “I’m going to blow myself up now to save the world, so please erect a statue of me in Central Park” kills the buzz.

Somewhere in the last seven years Hollywood forgot how to make entertaining movies.  Like the vast right-wing conspiracy they think exists but doesn’t (it’s called exercising individual political common sense and opposing liberal philosophies), Hollywood has entered into a little conspiracy of its own.  Not every TV show or movie is an active co-conspirator along the lines of NBC’s Green Week, when to save energy and showcase their concern for the environment they turned off the lights in the TV studio while expending enormous amounts of energy broadcasting a football game; sent reporters to the four corners of the earth to freeze while reporting on global warming; and inserted little enviro-messages into each TV script (“let’s walk the 5 miles today Jim instead of taking the car so we don’t destroy the environment.”).  Rather, this left-wing conspiracy is a mindset that permeates Hollywood brought to crazed levels by the election of 2000, and now requires a heavy-handed political component to every program they create. 

Consider Rush Hour 3.  Good guys chase bad guys.  They hail a taxi in France.  Comedic moment approaches.  The French driver doesn’t like Americans for: insert reason here.  And what exactly was that reason?  We eat processed cheese?  We think old men look good wearing shorts with black socks and wingtip shoes?  We don’t appreciate the artistic genius of Jerry Lewis?

No.  It was because “Americans like to kill people for no reason.”  This observation was made right after announcing that we “lost” the war in Iraq.

Now, my first piece of unsolicited advice for Hollywood is, if you are going to comment on current events, remember that the great line you wrote in 2005 won’t appear in the theaters until 2007 at the earliest.  When dealing with the initial stages of a military conflict, it’s better to hedge one’s bets a tad than emphatically declare that war over and lost.  There are a few thousand, post-surge, dead foreign fighters in Iraq who, though sympathetic to the sentiment, might not share the same strategic vision despite their wish reality was otherwise.

Second, when you announce that Americans like to kill people for “no reason” in a comedy, it doesn’t come off as particularly funny to a lot of people who paid their $8.75 at the theater or $15.95 for the DVD expecting to laugh.  This tends to dampen interest in the next movie in that series that will one day come along.  If I want bad political commentary disguised as humor, I’ll rent the latest Michael Moore movie.  Otherwise, keep your political opinions to yourself, and let me enjoy the movie I paid to see.

There is nothing wrong with inserting some meaning into a movie, even a comedy.  Harry Potter fights evil while entertaining us with dragons and magic.  One of its main characters is even gay, we now find out.  How?  Through Dumbledore groping Harry in either the book or movie?  No.  J.K. Rowling just said he was one day in response to a question she was asked.  Those who want to assign great meaning to this fact can now re-read or re-watch the movies to see the behavior of a gay wizard in the context of living his life.  Those who could care less who Dumbledore lusts after in the privacy of his own thoughts remain unaffected.

This is why J.K. is a billionaire and all her books and movies are huge successes.  And it’s why what looked like a similarly well crafted movie, The Golden Compass, has failed miserably.  Even if the idea of “killing God” was toned down in the first of 3 expected movies, it was still there in full detail in the books themselves.  For this reason The Golden Compass has bombed (at least in the US where we care about these kinds of things), just as Harry Potter would have bombed if J.K. decided to make Dumbledore “God” instead of gay.  That little detail would change the entire meaning of the book/movie.

And this is the point I’m making.  Hollywood, in its current anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-American crazed state, has confused “meaning” with “message.”  Message movies — even comedies — can be great.  It’s a Wonderful Life is the quintessential example of this.  But like all great message movies, the message is in its overall meaning.  Today, Hollywood wants to shortcut the process by heavy-handedly delivering the “message,” which it instantly equates with meaning.  Why spend 30 minutes revealing something through dialogue or character when you can just toss in a throw-away line that Bush sucks, the war is illegal, or Americans like to kill people for no reason, etc?

And so we get a spate of anti-war propaganda films that failed miserably at the box office, from which Hollywood learns that the American public is “tired of the war.”  No.  I’d love to see a kick-ass movie about the war in Iraq or Afghanistan.  The Kingdom looked like a great movie that I was ready to see, until I learned from reviews that it had a morally-equivalent ending.  So, I went to see the third Die Hard movie instead, because I was pretty sure Bruce Willis wouldn’t be condemning Bush while he was killing the bad guys.  And while the US government was certain to be seen as bloated and corrupt as it must be in every Hollywood film (otherwise there is no plot), I knew that the corruption and incompetence would be due to an individual's ineptitude rather than the Bush-supported CIA wanting to spy on and/or imprison every American.

All of which returns me to the writer’s strike.  As much as I’d like to see the next season of 24, or a few more episodes of Chuck, I’m quite happy to see that strike continue.  I don’t need to know that Hollywood thinks the Patriot Act is Bush’s way to keep all opposition to his evil war silent.  I don’t need to be reminded by a detective in pursuit of a mugger that man-made global warming is real.  I don’t need to see an American flag pin on the lapel of every corporate criminal.  And so on, and so on.

And, particularly in 2008, I don’t need to be reminded that voting against a woman or black for president is an inherently racist act, regardless of what the woman or black wants to do once in office.

What I’d like to see is a funny comedy, or a dramatic drama, without all the unnecessary political baggage Hollywood wants to force-feed me.  Fortunately, between Blockbuster and Netflix, there are enough older shows to rent to get me through the upcoming election season. 

And when all else fails, I can turn off TV and read a book.

Culture: Hollywood, Entertainment

Read more articles by Phillip Ellis Jackson