Deleted Scenes 11.05.09: Political Content in Your Entertainment Content
Posted by Robert Sullivan on 11.05.2009
Your intrepid columnist has noted a recent increase of this, and would like to share his feelings. Come on in.
Hey, everybody. I'm Rob, this is Deleted Scenes, welcome yourselves on back for another edition thereof. A lot of this column is aimed at analyzing films and TV shows for their narrative themes, content, all sorts of deep things like that. This week is no different. But before we can get to that, first...
And after you read all that content, go ahead and make 411Mania YOUR official homepage. You're good people, I know you will.
The Column
Art is impacted by the outside events surrounding the time of its creation. Pretty basic, right? Well, I don't know about you fine readers, but as above stated, I seem to have detected a bit of a growth period for such activities. I don't mind this, of course...by all means, a movie with ideas - even bad ideas - is preferable to a movie that is brainless and has nothing going on below the surface. While it's interesting that there's a spike, it's even more interesting that said spike has happened in genres rather attuned to such content - specifically, science fiction and horror. This, happily, is a long standing tradition in television, arguably started by my main man -
Now, if you'll remember, my favorite TV show is a little item called "The Twilight Zone" and this man was responsible for it. In fact, the entire reason behind the creation of the series was due to Serling's wants to express political ideas in his art form. He was previously unable to do so because of existing censors at a program called "Playhouse 90." Typical to the era, anything that pissed off the censors couldn't possibly be shown on TV, and especially nothing that accurately portrayed the times as something less wholesome than "Father Knows Best." Concerning a screenplay he had written called "A Town Has Turned to Dust," about the horrible death of Emmett Till, Serling said the following -
"Emmett Till became 'a romantic Mexican, who loved the sheriff's wife, but only with his eyes,' the location went to the Southwest, and it got so far removed from reality it became soup."
So came his stroke of genius - nobody respected science fiction at the time, and if he "had a robot talking politics, nobody would care." And so no one did, at least at the beginning, as famously Mike Wallace asked Rod Serling if "he had given up writing anything important for television" prior to the pilot's airing. "The Twilight Zone" was greenlit for production and became the classic that it did, inspiring legions of followers and imitators that noticed that not much really had changed. If you put messages into far out scenarios, people will still largely miss them...or worse, misunderstand them.
This brings us to today's topic - the two most recent examples of this phenomenon. One in a remake, the other in a sequel, both very interesting in their own right. One allegedly biased to the left, one allegedly biased to the right. Have you guessed which examples I'm discussing? Have you really? Well, here's a hint about the sequel -
Jigsaw proves he's a liberal! This is good stuff, at least to me. I have to think that only the success of Paranormal Activity deprived us from the sight of Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and the rest of the circus berating the major theatrical release of a movie portraying the torture and murders of predatory bank lenders and HMO employees.
Just think of it.
"Un-American! Sick torture porn perversion Saw VI shows itself to just be yet another attempt by liberal Hollywood to indoctrinate our youth and corrupt their morals to the point where it would be normal and sympathetic to kill poor employees of health insurance companies!"
It would've been beautiful, really.
Alas, we had to have a huge phenomenon fueled by massive hype and Katie's big ass tittays to ruin everything. At least they were nice.
In the end, John Kramer coming out in favor of universal health care and against denying medical coverage to sick people? This is a good thing. In the very least, it led to the best Saw sequel since Saw III. Saw IV and Saw V can eat the dust of Saw VI: Jigsaw Would've Voted for Obama. It gave, no pun intended, fresh blood to the franchise and further filled in the backstory of the best horror villain in a generation.
It also gave up to we Dr. Gordon wishers. I'll say no more.
In this case, I have to say the Slate article and the surrounding hubbub around it is all wrong. "V," a good pilot with great future potential, is not an anti-Obama allegory. For one thing, the big cheese in charge of "V" is from Canada. For another thing, just because the Visitors come to Earth promising "hope" and "change" and "universal healthcare" doesn't mean Obama's under attack.
How can I be sure?
Yeah. We're tying all this together.
One of the most beloved episodes of "The Twilight Zone" is "To Serve Man," a story about a bunch of visiting aliens who came to Earth promising to help us. They erected invisible forcefields to make war obsolete. They solved world hunger. They cured our diseases. And in the end, it was a cookbook and they wanted to eat us all. "Seemingly benevolent aliens come to Earth secretly plotting to kill us" is not a post-Obama phenomenon.
Wait.
"To Serve Man" was produced in 1962, though...one year after Obama's birth...
Coincidence - OR PROPHECY?
I report. You decide.
Seriously, "V" isn't doing anything that hasn't been done previously. "To Serve Man" was originally written in 1950, for example, but that didn't fit the above joke. It's not sympathetic to Teabaggers or Birthers at all. Hell, if it's sympathetic to anyone's viewpoint, it's his -
