Give us that Old Time Hollywood Religion

Neal Gabler argues that the movie magic is gone in the LA Times, and takes the time to do a thorough post-mortem. At what cultural pathologies does Gabler point the finger for the demise of Hollywood's centrality to the national zeitgeist? Why, its the rise of conservatism, naturally:

But in the two years since, another phenomenon has battered the motion picture industry, attacking one of the very fundamentals of moviegoing: the movies' communal appeal. Before demographics became the marketing mantra, the movies were the art of the middle. They provided a common experience and language — a sense of unity. In the dark we were one.

Now, however, when people prefer to identify themselves as members of ever-smaller cohorts — ethnic, political, demographic, regional, religious — the movies can no longer be the art of the middle. The industry itself has been contributing to this process for years by targeting its films more narrowly, especially to younger viewers. In effect, the conservative impulse of our politics that has promoted the individual rather than the community has helped undermine movies' communitarian appeal.

All of this has been hastened by the fact that there is now an instrument to take advantage of the social stratifications. To the extent that the Internet is a niche machine, dividing its users into tiny, self-defined categories, it is providing a challenge to the movies that not even television did, because the Internet addresses a change in consciousness while television simply addressed a change in delivery of content. Television never questioned the very nature of conventional entertainment. The Internet, on the other hand, not only creates niche communities — of young people, beer aficionados, news junkies, Britney Spears fanatics — that seem to obviate the need for the larger community, it plays to another powerful force in modern America and one that also undermines the movies: narcissism.

I can understand how you can arrive at this startling conclusion if you reduce political philosophy to the most simplistic of value equations: liberal = communal, conservative = individual. But we all know that political philosophy can't be reduced so simply, and that sniffing out political motives in social trends by using such a simplified ideology detector will result in such appalingly absurd diagnoses as Gabler's. Let's examine why it is so absurd.

For one thing, individuality with respect to political ideology has to be understood in context to the realm of socio-economic life that it references. Conservative, or classical liberal ideology, stresses the individual with regard to property ownership, economic activity, political affiliation and to a greater or lesser extent conscience, or religious affiliation. Yet conservatives realize that without a strong set of shared social traditions and values individuality will lead to the kind of social atomization that Gabler points to. There is a conservative temperament that goes along with conservative ideology, and that temperemant stresses personal morality, the importance of mediating cultural institutions and associations, most importantly the family, and also values a certain degree of self-control and civic mindedness in the expression of personal, individual desires and passions.

It was this traditionally conservative communal cohesiveness that was reflected in the universal appeal of the Hollywood films of yesteryear that Gabler describes. And the Hollywood studio heads and directors respected that communal identity. They didn't try to "push the envelope". The communal experience ended not because conservatives walked away from it, but because Hollywood directors walked away from them. Does Gabler think that Quentin Tarantino was honoring the communal American spirit with his movies "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs"? These two movies catapulted Tarantino to "A" list status in Hollywood and are admired for their cinematic brilliance, but their ubiquitous obscenity and graphic gratuitous violence so alienated those of a traditional conservative temperament that only a clueless person would imagine for a moment that they would provide a sense that "in the dark, we're one", to quote Gabler.

No, the stratification in society had already begun, and Hollywood, as Gabler pointed out, tailored its fare to take advantage of the new social realities, though it often ignored it's more traditional customers, to its own financial detriment. But conservatives did not cause this division or even encourage it. They tried to stop it. So get a clue, Neal Gabler!