[Culture Op-Ed] Has Hollywood Been Captured by the Left, Leaving No Room for Right-Wing Content?

It is a fairly old belief. In many cases, it is even treated that way outright in newspapers. What is interesting is that a considerable portion of Hollywood content that Korea’s right-wing media describe as “left-wing,” or dismiss as not even worth viewing ideologically, is in fact classified by the American media as right-wing content. In other words, Korea and the United States use different standards to divide the ideology of dramatic content such as films and television series.

So what exactly is so different? Let us begin by looking at the various positions that have appeared across the American media.

Christian films are fundamentally classified as right-wing films in the United States

First, in the United States, content dealing with Christianity, especially Protestant faith and piety, is generally regarded as right-wing content. This may sound somewhat strange in a country where 70 to 80 percent of the population is Christian, but there is a view that a large part of the lifestyles and ways of thinking that form the very foundation of American conservatism are derived from Christian faith and Christian modes of living. And in the United States, a great many explicitly religious films are produced, and they also enjoy strong commercial success. There are even “white community” Christian films and “black community” Christian films, produced separately by different studios, and branching off again from there. In that way, Christian audiences are gathered along distinct racial lines.

Among the studios producing “white community” Christian films, the representative example is Sherwood Pictures, founded by Alex Kendrick. Sherwood Pictures is the business branch of Sherwood Baptist Church in the state of Georgia. Kendrick, who serves as both company head and director, is an associate pastor in charge of media at Sherwood Baptist Church. He previously worked as a DJ at a Christian radio station, and films released by Sherwood Pictures—such as Fireproof, Courageous, War Room, and Overcomer—have all earned more than $30 million in the North American market, consistently turning profits in the “respectable hit” range.

Meanwhile, the films of Tyler Perry, who is counted as a leading producer, director, and screenwriter of “black community” Christian films, have earned even more at the box office. He releases nearly one new film every year, and his comedy films featuring an elderly black woman named Madea as the main character are especially popular. They bring in $40 million to $90 million in North America. Because they portray not only Christian faith but also black communities and the people within them, they are especially popular with black audiences.

Second, in the United States, various mystery and thriller content related to so-called “conspiracy theories” are also divided into right-wing and left-wing depending on their orientation. This is very different from the atmosphere in Korea’s right-wing political camp, where the term “conspiracy theory” immediately calls to mind false agitation by leftist forces. And the standard used to divide such content into “right-wing conspiracy theory” and “left-wing conspiracy theory” fundamentally stems from a libertarian perspective.

A representative example is The X-Files, the hugely successful drama series from Fox TV, which is known in the United States as a leading right-wing broadcaster. The X-Files is itself a bundle of every kind of conspiracy theory. It follows the adventures of two FBI investigators tracking supernatural phenomena or incidents that are hard to verify. But the focus here is always on the “public sphere.” The premise is that the government and various government agencies keep hiding things from American citizens and carry out various activities without their knowledge. Ultimately, it emphasizes vigilance toward public authority that conceals information citizens ought to know and conducts affairs in ways that suit its own interests.

By contrast, “left-wing conspiracy theory” content may look similar at first glance, but its target is the exact opposite. A considerable amount of conspiracy-related content coming from private broadcasters such as CBS and from the film industry is built around the idea that “big business” is plotting something for its own benefit. It then further divides the private sector itself into large corporations and small businesses. In the 2001 film Antitrust, for example, the head of a major IT corporation, vaguely reminiscent of Bill Gates, secretly steals information from programmers shut away in a warehouse developing a new program—or even has them assassinated.

In the end, the code is that “big business” must be guarded against, and here, by contrast, public institutions such as the FBI appear as righteous agents exposing the corruption of these subversive(?) corporations. This starkly opposite view of the public sphere is precisely how American right- and left-wing “conspiracy theory” content is distinguished.

The United States judges the ideology of popular culture content on the basis of libertarianism

A third example is “superhero” content, which has dominated not only the American but also the global film market over the past decade or so since the huge success of Iron Man in 2008. American media fundamentally take the position that superhero content—centered on films and now expanding into television dramas as well—is right-wing content. It may seem surprising, but it is true. The reason is simple: it does not take a negative view of “abilities superior to others” or of “great power.” This becomes easier to understand when compared with the difference in attitude toward “big business” in the conspiracy-theory content mentioned above.

In the overwhelming majority of superhero films, superheroes possessing power vastly greater than that of ordinary people ultimately bring prosperity to humanity as a whole in one way or another. There is absolutely no need to be wary of them; one simply needs to confirm their values. This is encapsulated in the line from Spider-Man (2002): “With great power comes great responsibility.”

In fact, this position became a major topic in American society when Pixar’s superhero animation The Incredibles appeared in 2004. The Incredibles dealt with a superhero family possessing great power. Yet ordinary citizens soon become wary of them for the very reason that they possess such extraordinary abilities, and insist that their role should be suppressed and reduced. They want to “tie them down” so they cannot do their work. The film ultimately ends with citizens coming to understand that “great power” also brings “great benefit,” and helping the Incredibles family do its work again.

As soon as the film appeared, media outlets around the world, including The Guardian, were stirred. Houston Press in particular ran a long critical article titled “Five Reasons The Incredibles Is Ayn Randian Propaganda.” The reason was that the film took exactly the same stance toward the “strong” as that seen in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. That is not wrong. It is all the more notable in that most superhero films take a similar position.

There is more to mention regarding superhero content. It concerns the “villains” that appear in various superhero films. Remarkably, the overwhelming majority are not simply selfish people with a criminal mindset. Rather, they are political, economic, social, or cultural idealists—social engineers who want to realize their ideals through powerful oppression and coercion. A representative example is Doctor Octopus, the villain in Spider-Man 2 (2004). He is a twisted idealist who threatens and pressures the world in the name of creating a world without disability.

Such settings are often found in other American animated works aimed at younger audiences as well. The 2014 animated film The Lego Movie is a good example. The film ultimately conveys the message that social engineering—which insists on thinking only within the prearranged Lego framework designed “from above” and imposes regulation on anything outside it—is bad, and that an open free society in which everyone can freely create new rules, that is, new Legos, as they please is ideal.

Why even ordinary stories of social success are viewed as right-wing content

Similar examples can also be seen in Hollywood urban action films. One case that often appears as the emblematic model when American media refer to a “right-wing film” is detective Harry Callahan, played by Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. This may be considered a fourth example.

The Dirty Harry series produced a total of five films. They were released, in order, in 1971, 1973, 1976, 1983, and finally concluded in 1988. It was an enormously popular character, and is also counted as one of Clint Eastwood’s signature roles as an actor. But Dirty Harry was distinctive from the very beginning. Watching an obvious serial killer receive protection under various notions of “criminals’ rights” and even be released back into society, Harry throws away his police badge and personally tracks him down and kills him.

Appearing in the early 1970s, during the era of New Left civil rights movements, as a kind of counterculture to that trend, it received an enormous response, and many urban action films afterward adopted a similar stance. A representative example is the 1974 film Death Wish, which dealt with vigilantism. It starred Charles Bronson. The film tells the story of an ordinary architect whose wife is killed by muggers and whose daughter is raped and committed to a psychiatric hospital; finding the police paralyzed by the framework of bureaucracy, he takes up a handgun himself and goes out to kill the muggers one by one.

These kinds of “vigilante” films are also classified in the United States as distinctly right-wing films. That is because they are directly tied to the heated political and social issue dividing the American left and right: gun ownership. Embedded in them is the idea that one should break away from the belief that public authority can solve and protect individuals from all kinds of problems, and instead recognize that individuals must exercise their own rights and secure their own safety and social justice.

Finally, films carrying the universal message that “even in difficult circumstances, if you pursue your dream and work hard, you can succeed” are also classified in the United States as right-wing films. This is because they affirm that, contrary to the class theory of socialism, capitalist society is in reality not one in which such rigid classes exist, and that it is an “open society” in which people can change their fate through their own efforts.

One example is The Pursuit of Happyness (2006). Set under the Reagan administration’s labor-flexibility policies in the early 1980s, it tells the story of a black door-to-door salesman with only a high school education who works as an unpaid intern to change his fate, ultimately becomes a successful stockbroker, and rises to become a millionaire. During his unpaid internship he suffers so badly from lack of money that he even sleeps in a subway restroom with his young son, but the film ends with the message that his efforts were not in vain.

The Blind Side (2009), which was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, is similar in that respect. It depicts the process by which a poor young black man becomes a football star with the support of a white middle-class family. The Blind Side was judged all the more right-wing because it portrayed a success story that crossed not only race but also economic class. This was especially so given that most “black films” up to that point had tended to deliver provocative messages about racial discrimination, including social upheaval.

The irony that the message is right-wing, yet the party supported is a left-wing party

The standards by which left-wing and right-wing ideology are divided in dramatic content such as films and television series in Korea are clearly not of this kind. Most people regard content as right-wing only if it contains an explicit “anti-communist” message, and especially only if it takes direct subjects such as the Korean War and clearly depicts North Korea as an “axis of evil.” There is more. If the filmmaker or writer has a history of joining a socialist-based party, or has held a post under a left-wing administration, then the film or television drama is classified as left-wing content without further consideration.

It is a rather strange distinction. For example, in the case of director Changdong Lee, who served as Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism under the Roh Moo-hyun administration, it is difficult to see his 2018 film Burning as conveying a left-wing message in any sense. It deals with economic class conflict as Parasite does, but Burning’s protagonist, out of a sense of victimhood and inferiority toward the so-called “haves,” comes to regard them as “evil” and seeks to harm them. In the end, because it takes an idealist position that all conflict lies “within the mind,” it stands in the exact opposite position from socialism, which is based on a materialist way of thinking that sees the environment as determining even one’s mindset.

On the other hand, if one regards only anti-communist films that simply fight communism as right-wing films, then such films virtually disappeared worldwide, including in Korea and the United States, after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Mid-1980s films such as Rambo may be seen as the last line of that trend. That is because they were no longer interesting as subject matter, and their commercial appeal was also declining accordingly. Rather than ideological war films beginning with the Korean War, it is now films set in the era of “clean wars,” namely World War I and World War II films, that have come to replace war-film content overall.

Of course, Korea’s situation is somewhat different because the Korean Peninsula remains divided between North and South. Even so, Korean War films that portray North Korea as a somewhat clear “axis of evil” have continued to appear in Korea from time to time even in the 2010s. Examples include 71: Into the Fire (2010) and Operation Chromite (2016). Both were well received by the public. Furthermore, films such as Ode to My Father, which view the development era itself positively, can also be classified as right-wing films. Ode to My Father drew over 10 million viewers. Seen from that angle, it is difficult to conclude that left-wing forces have “occupied” Korea’s film industry and popular culture scene.

Of course, whether in Hollywood, Chungmuro, or anywhere else, there is ample reason to see popular culture figures overall as having liberal tendencies. But if we retrace the situation by focusing on the “messages” of the content they handle, there are unexpectedly many reasons it is difficult to see things that way. This is all the more true if one broadens the perspective beyond simple anti-communism to a libertarian one. There is more content than one might think that seeks to focus on individual-centered thinking free from intervention and oppression by the public sphere.

Various causes are pointed to for this phenomenon. Most notably, many popular culture figures may in fact support a particular party or political force largely as a form of populist “fashion,” without possessing sufficient ideological knowledge. This tendency is especially strong in Korea, and there are also quite a few who mistakenly understand libertarian thinking as a left-wing or socialist stance.

On closer inspection, even the supposedly numerous Hollywood liberals are often that way because of the ethnic tendencies of the Jews and others who dominate Hollywood. What they convey through their content, however, is another matter. In any case, it is worth noting that the popular culture world is a “content” industry, and that the influence of popular culture figures derives precisely from that content.

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Original title: [문화칼럼] 할리우드는 좌익세력이 장악해 우익 콘텐츠는 설 곳이 없다?

Author: Mun-won Lee

Date: 2020-03-16

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=9&idx=22481