Hollywood & Politics: Ann Coulter on Why America Hates Hollywood (Opinion)
Americans love movies and would like to love Hollywood, but I suspect they are getting a little sick of Hollywood hating them.
By "them," I mean:
► Southerners (as portrayed in A Time to Kill, Deliverance, Easy Rider, Talladega Nights, Pulp Fiction, Raising Arizona and Law & Order)
► Residents of small towns, except the Hamptons and Malibu (Footloose, The Last Seduction, Pleasantville and Law & Order)
► Christians (The Virgin Suicides, Easy A, Seven, Straw Dogs, Carrie and Law & Order)
► Connecticut WASPs or their equivalent (Ordinary People, Far From Heaven, Caddyshack, Trading Places, The Ice Storm, every single movie on "Lifetime: TV for Women" and Law & Order)
► Priests (Primal Fear, Stigmata, Priest, Godfather III and Law & Order)
► Conservative politicians (The Contender, Good Night, and Good Luck, The West Wing, any movie by Oliver Stone and Law & Order)
► The rich -- but never rich trial lawyers, rich environmentalists, rich educators or rich-off-the-taxpayer politicians (Titanic, Sleeping With the Enemy, Wall Street and Law & Order)
► Businessmen (Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, The Insider, Silkwood, Michael Clayton, every John Grisham adaptation, even The Muppets, where they reunite to save their old theater from a greedy oil tycoon! And Law & Order).
Southerners are dumb hicks, presumptively Klanners. Residents of small towns are narrow-minded xenophobes, presumptively Klanners. Christians are hypocrites and anti-everything (even dancing!), presumptively Klanners. Businessmen are cheating, soulless vermin, presumptively Klanners (unless they are in a Hollywood-approved business like making solar panels). And Connecticut WASPs are dull, sexually neurotic snobs who beat their wives and molest their daughters. Presumptively Klanners.
Hollywood's heroes are just as odd. Moviegoers flocked to a film about a prostitute who was not only gorgeous and charming but disease-free because they wanted to see a Cinderella story. We know Pretty Woman's winsome streetwalker was as plausible as a talking bear, except we've always wanted to see a talking bear.
It was the same with The Da Vinci Code. That movie mocks the most sacred belief held by a majority of Americans -- the divinity of Christ -- but we ignored that because we just wanted to see an exciting Hollywood thriller.
Out in America, the country is fairly bristling with crosses and American flags, but in the Hollywood oeuvre, those symbols appear rarely, and when they do, they generally show up as signifiers of White Supremacists or child-molesting Connecticut WASPs. In real life, there are a lot more girls wearing cross necklaces than teenagers with Che Guevara posters in their rooms, a peculiar staple of Hollywood movies.
In the remake of Cape Fear, the psychotic killer, Max Cady, was recast as a Christian fundamentalist, sporting biblical tattoos and constantly reeling off scriptural verses. Other than the raping and murdering part, the person in real life he most resembles is Tim Tebow.
Is that what Hollywood thinks of Tebow? And why is there never a character like Tebow in any movie or TV show? Never, ever, ever.
...Whenever a priest walks onto the screen these days, you can be pretty sure he's a Nazi or a pedophile. Most people's actual experience with clergymen is closer to Montgomery Clift's portrayal in Hitchcock's 1953 thriller I Confess. That movie probably was the last time Hollywood showed a priest as a true man of God.
Even after the priest-pedophilia scandal, priests still haven't molested as many children as teachers have. Now, guess what profession is more revered than even prostitution in Hollywood movies? That's right: public-school teachers!
To piggy back on that. Since Tom Bosley on The Father Dowling Mysteries every priest in TV and movies has at least been accused of being a pedophile. It's so bad you would swear the priesthood was filled with Duke lacrosse players.
They are closely followed by trial lawyers, who would never, ever be anything like John Edwards; environmentalists, who would never be anything like Solyndra executives; Democratic politicians, who would never be anything like Bill Clinton or the tax cheats in the Obama administration. But Tebow is Max Cady, murdering psychopath.
I remember just after George HW Bush was President the movie Clear and Present Danger came out. In it President Bennett (never out and said it but it was implied he was a Republican) instigated an illegal war in South America to interfere with Columbian drug trade. And he just happens to have a jar of jelly beans on his desk. But later on in the Clinton years we have a president who is moral and firm (Michael Douglas in The American President), a real leader (Harrison Ford in Air Force One) or all of the above (Martin Sheen in The West Wing). All liberal Democrats for some reason. Is there a pattern here?
Let me give you the plots of two true crime episodes I recently watched, back-to-back, on ID TV. The show was titled Unusual Suspects -- "unusual" only if it were a Hollywood production. In the first, a woman was raped at home, stabbed through the heart and her house set on fire. The police looked at suspicious white guys in her life. Then, in the last five minutes of the show, DNA proved that her rapist/murderer was a Hispanic who wanted to have sex with a virgin. In the second, a married couple and their son were stabbed to death in their sleep. Various white guys were arrested, but all were let go when their DNA didn't match or they had airtight alibis. Then it turned out to be a random Hispanic kid who committed the murders as a gang initiation.
In other words, the exact opposite of a Law & Order plot. I like watching beautiful rich people with fabulous Manhattan apartments killing one another as much as anyone. Maybe more. But why do ALL the wealthy white people, Christians, Southerners or WASPS in these scripts have to be racist, misogynist snobs? Whatever happened to diversity? Hollywood learned to stop stereotyping black characters. Can't it learn to stop stereotyping the rest of America?
Not to brag, but I've been to America. The natives do not need coaching in tolerance, certainly not from beautiful airheads who are paid like Enron executives to lecture us -- the child-molesting, greedy racists -- about learning to be decent human beings.
Ann I think you got a point here. We need multicultural specialists in Hollywood. They need to let producers, writers, actors etc know what America is really like.
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