Culture War: Atlas Drugged!

At first glance, 'Fight Club' is not an obviously conservative movie. After all, isn't the source novel the type of thing Sir Elton would read, if only it wasn't just too camp? And isn't there an underlying nihilism to the whole thing?

Well, yes and no: yes the original novel is kind of gay, but no, for once Hollywood can truthfully claim to be describing a lifestyle not advocating it. The characters in 'Fight Club' are disengaged from life, but the movie sees this as a bug not a feature, the natural outgrowth of a society that's lost its soul.

That's where the movie is genuinely bold. It's prepared to say that something has gone very wrong with modern society. So much of Hollywood's output - so much of liberalism - accepts that social progress is always forward, with the Fifties as the Worst Decade Evah!, the Seventies as better, but still awful, and right now as the peak of societal evolution - and anyone who objects clearly wants to lynch women, put blacks in the closet and chain gays to the kitchen sink.

Sure, 'Fight Club' takes shots at consumerism, big business and the like - not stuff conservatives ever go all misty-eyed about anyway - but it's a lot deeper than that. Consider Ed Norton's nameless protagonist. Here's a guy employed as a technical expert for a big car company. Fifty years ago he'd be a success, now he's a loser. Hence the attraction of Brad Pitt's Tyler Durdan, a John Galt figure who encourages Norton's salaryman to shake off the demands of a society that despises him.

Of course, it's all played for laughs, but at least it's asking the big questions: what loyalty does the beta male owe to a society that hates him? What does it mean to be a success today? How can traditional morality survive when the social contract has broken down? If nothing else, the film deserves credit for pointing out just how warped modern life is.

Culture War: Cruelty To Dictators Edition

Two things were inevitable following Stallone's successful resurrection of the 'Rocky' franchise. One was that we'd be seeing a new 'Rambo' movie, and the second was that liberals would denounce it as the Worst Film Evah!

After all, liberals have successfully cast the first three movies as the epitome of Reagan-era excess, despite a first film that's a perfect slice of Carter-era angst, and even the supposedly jingoistic second and third movies both being predicated on the idea that the troops can't trust Uncle Sam.

Liberals opened their campaign by claiming that the movie unfairly demonised the Burmese government right up until... well, you know.

Fortunately, liberals are unhindered by a sense of embarrassment so they were quickly able to 'draw a line under' that episode and move onto their next talking point: the movie was just too violent.

True, Spielberg was hailed as a genius for featuring graphic violence in 'Saving Private Ryan', but that was then and this was now.

Actually, the humbug runs deeper. Unlike Spielberg, the violence has an actual point. In a world where seemingly everything is a human right, the violence in 'Rambo' serves to remind us that there are parts of the world where 'oppression' doesn't mean 'not getting a government grant to make sculptures out of horse manure' and the battle for freedom involves more than street theatre.

Or, to put it another way, there's this exchange between Rambo and a representative of a humanitarian group near the beginning of the film:

Burnett: Let me explain our situation - our church is part of a Pan-Asian ministry, located in Colorado. We are all volunteers, who around this time of year bring in medical supplies, medical attention, prayer books, and support to the Karen tribes people. People say you know the river better than anyone.

Rambo: They ain't lying.

Burnett: So what I'm asking is that we compensate you for a few hours of your time that will help change people's lives.

Rambo: Are you bringing any weapons?

Burnett: Of course not.

Rambo: You're not changing anything.

Of course, it would be tempting to dismiss all this as more Hollyweird Christian bashing, but two things soon become obvious: these are the type of Christians who don't actually do any of that religion stuff, and their smug, ostentatious moral preeening that makes them sound like nothing so much as....Hollyweird liberals.

Needless to say, it all goes horribly wrong, and so we meet that most libertarian of libertarian archetypes: the mercenary. A team of them are sent up river led by Lewis, a guy described as 'old school SAS' - and you can tell he's a genuine libertarian 'cause every ***** second ****** word is a ******* obscenity.

They quickly deduce that the loonies have been captured and the area is thick with Burmese troops, and so it's time to go home and count their money, until Rambo comes up with the movie's other key line:

There isn't one of us that doesn't want to be someplace else. But this is what we do, who we are. Live for nothing, or die for something. Your call.

Exactly. Be as libertarian as you want, but you're still going to die. The only question is whether you're going to risk being a sucker, a dupe or a pawn, and do something with your life, or waste it away on sneery, eye-rolling, congratulating yourself on how superior you are to all those 'sheeple' (who actually make stuff happen).

Actually, the movie goes further, drawing parallels between liberalism and libertarianism, for example flagging up the narcissism that underlies both ideologies. But here's the thing: this is not some conservative version of 'American Beauty'. There are no caricatures here. Burnett is a genuinely skilled and compassionate doctor, Lewis is ferociously brave. Stallone isn't saying that these people are necessarily evil, he's saying that their extremism is the problem - they have a role to play, but it needs to be balanced by other people doing their bit. Think Gary's speech at the end of Team America.

To the point: 'Rambo' nails what's wrong with both liberalism and libertarianism - they demand all manner of ends while pronouncing any practical means of achieving them to be evil and/or stupid. All this and lots of guns too!

Culture War: Charlton!

The Omega Man opens with Charlton Heston - see, it sounds great already - driving his convertible through the streets, clad in a safari suit and with tunes playing on his 8-track - the epitome of 70s cool. It's takes a few seconds to realise that the streets are kind of trashy, even for LA, then a few seconds more to realise that they're also kind of empty... Say, you don't think a Sino-Russian border conflict has spiralled into global biological warfare, resulting in the extermination of humanity, do you?

Funnily enough: yes.

Yep, Charlton Heston is the last man on Earth, and the bad news is he's not alone. A weirdo clan of deranged, albino plague victims emerge at night and lay siege to Charlton's pad, while he hunts them down by day, in a movie so conservative, mere contact with the DVD causes liberals to spontaneously combust.

Take Heston's character: he's Colonel Robert Neville, an unapologetic military man who always dresses for dinner on a Sunday. Meanwhile, the deranged plague victims, known as 'The Family', are led by a former MSM news anchor who preaches the dangers of technology and condemns Neville as the 'last of the scientist, bankers, businessmen and users of the wheel' - so apart from the hideous appearance he's just your typical Lib Dem.... wait, that's exactly like your typical Lib Dem.

Of course, in so far as these freaks reject technology, they're kind of at a disadvantage when dealing with a user of the trigger like Neville. Contenting themselves with bombarding his apartment building with giant catapults and attacking him with axes, petrol bombs and even bare hands, making up for what they lack in weapons with numbers and homicidal insanity (geeks: think the castle cultists in Resident Evil 4). Meanwhile, Neville fights back with courage, cunning and lots of guns.

The first act is brilliant, but if the story starts to drift afterwards, the conservatism cranks up a notch when Neville falls in with a group of fellow humans, all slowly succumbing to the virus. What to do? Well, as it happens, Neville has been vaccinated against the virus and his blood could yet save them. So not only are firearms useful when repelling liberals but science can yet save the day. At which point you're wondering if the script writers were competing to see who could annoy the left the most.

Fortunately, as Neville is also a top scientist, he manages to purify enough blood to save a young black kid from the brink of joining the plague-infested weirdoes. At which point Junior decides to sneak off to The Family's lair - in a court house -and pass on the good news: he's been saved, and so they can they be. Oops - as our MSM guy explains from the judges' bench, they're not victims, they're quite happy being liberals mutant weirdoes, and furthermore as a non-freak, he deserves to die - and so another black kid is sacrificed to goofy liberal values.

Anything else? Well, how about Charlton Heston - the guy Michael Moore got a Oscar for smearing as a racist - taking part in the silver screen's first mainstream inter-racial sex scene? Or The Family's even more bonkers Number 2 being an ex-black power dude? Or that the longer the film goes on, the more explicit the Christian overtones? Or the fact that - in a break from Hollywood tradition - the film is based on Richard Matheson's filthy, sleazy, disgusting, nihilistic book 'I Am Legend', yet inverts the meaning 180? Or just the plain respect for the utility of violence and the refusal to enter into slippery '28 Days Later' moral equivalence imbecility?