The Triumph of Derrièrism

Last year I identified an important new school of film criticism, which I called “derrièrism,” since all schools of film criticism are supposed to have French names. Derrièrists are inspired by Jack Warner (though some say it was Harry Cohn), who once said that he judged movies by whether his ass shifted in the seat while he was watching them. Like Warner (or Cohn), a derrièrist film critic judges movies by his ass. As I wrote last year: "Derrièrists are tired of liberal elites telling us what is good for us. They are tired of movies that are depressing and pretentious and difficult." At the time Variety magazine hailed derrièrism as “provocative” theory and said my piece “represents to some degree the thinking of the younger male online film community that recently voted for their Top 100 films,” whose virtues I extolled in my piece. While derrièrism was once an esoteric school of film criticism championed by a few forward-thinking critics, this year it has triumphed. Not only has Andrew Breitbart, the conservative Hollywood critic behind Breitbart.com, announced that he will start a new website, Big Hollywood, which promises to be a hotbed of derrièrist film criticism, such respected film critics as Roger Ebert and the critics at Cahiers du Cinema have jumped on the derrièrist bandwagon.

Breitbart’s site will feature film reviews and criticism from some of this country’s leading derrièrist film critics, people like House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner, Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor, Reps. Thaddeus McCotter, Mary Bono Mack and Connie Mack, former presidential candidate Fred Thompson, MSNBC correspondent Tucker Carlson and conservative commentators Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and others. According to The Hill, “If Boehner, for instance, sees a movie, ‘I’d like for him … to do a movie review,’ Breitbart says. ‘Not everything is going to be a political dissertation,’ he says. In that vein, Cantor spokesman Rob Collins says he could see his boss writing a post on the television shows his three teenage children watch and how those programs affect them.” Breitbart wants to bring back the kind of crowd-pleasing movies Hollywood used to make, which encouraged people to pay their credit card bills on time. “The movies used to reinforce good behavior — that you should pay back your loans,” he says, apparently thinking of such films as The Grapes of Wrath, It's a Wonderful Life and Salt of the Earth. Because Breitbart's site will not pay its writers that should encourage good behavior like thrift.

Breitbart also wants Big Hollywood to change the image of conservatives in Hollywood, where they are cruelly oppressed. “We’re not bigoted, homophobic, racist, sexist monsters,” says the new blog’s editor-in-chief, John Nolte, the proprietor of Dirty Harry's Place. Nolte, who says that gay marriage “has nothing to with ‘rights’ and everything to do with hate, the tearing down of tradition, and seeking yet another excuse to attack conservatives and religion,” and who wrote after J.K. Rowling outted Dumbledore, “English and Gay is like Japan and China: you can’t really tell the difference,” is known for his trenchant film criticism. Although he has never seen such minor, really old movies as City Lights and The Passion of Joan of Arc, that hasn’t stopped him from weighing in on such important questions of film scholarship as whether Deuce Bigelow or The Searchers is the best film ever made.

While Big Hollywood should be a welcome relief from critics who think they know a lot about movies just because they have seen a lot of them, even some of the most respected film critics in the world have succumbed to derrièrism and are pulling film criticism out of their asses. Roger Ebert has seen his influence wane since he left At the Movies and was replaced by hipper, younger derrièrist critic Ben Lyons, who called I Am Legend “one of the greatest movies ever made” and named Superbad, which he just happened to have an acting role in, one of the ten best movies of last year. Then in October of this year Ebert joined the ranks of derrièrist critics with a big splash. He wrote a savage one-star review of the gay film Tru Loved after sitting through only eight minutes of it. It was only at the end of the review that he revealed he hadn’t watched the whole thing or even very much of it, so if readers got bored and decided they didn’t want to sit through Ebert’s entire review, they wouldn’t know how much of the movie he hadn't seen. Although Ebert’s editor wanted him to disclose this fact at the beginning of the review, Ebert argued that it would ruin his carefully constructed artistic prose if he did that. “I thought that would have made the review anticlimactic,” he said.

Ebert was slammed by some critics such as Margaret Nowak, who gave a derrièrist critique of Ebert’s derrièrist review: “After learning that Roger Ebert defends writing a full-column review based on an 8-minute scrap of film, I don't feel so bad about not reading movie reviews. I give a cursory glance to the score rating the movie received, and move on.” Ebert, however, was not amused: “I find it charming that Margaret Nowak was able to arrive at her scorched-earth opinion of me without reading either the review in question OR my linked blog entry that was posted simultaneously with the review on the same page.” He called her review of his review a “cheap shot.” If Nowak had just spent eight minutes reading the beginning of Ebert's review, she might have seen the error of her ways.

Unfortunately, under pressure from anti-derrièrists, Ebert eventually apologized for the review, watched the movie and wrote a new review. Derrièrist Ann Althouse was disappointed by Ebert’s capitulation to the anti-derrièrist mob, writing, “Walking out is an important form of judgment.” Althouse is one of the leading proponents of the idea that you don’t have to see or read something or really know much about it at all to criticize it, which has given hope to other aspiring critics who, like her, have the attention span of a two-year-old.

Unlike Ebert, Cahiers du Cinema had the courage of its convictions and defended its list of the 100 greatest movies of all time. Abandoning its support of the tired old theory of auteurism, the critics at Cahiers put together a list steeped in derrièrism, which included not a single boring Tarkovsky film or any British movies at all, relegating such tedious efforts as Brief Encounter, Lawrence of Arabia, The Third Man, and The Red Shoes to Le ashbin de l'histoire.

But it wasn’t just snooty French critics who embraced derrièrism. Entertainment Weekly published a list of 100 “classics” of the last 25 years that included only six excrutiatingly dull foreign movies. By redefining the word classic, EW was telling us that we don’t have to bother watching dreary old movies when we can watch such new and improved “classics” as The Breakfast Club, Naked Gun, The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Ghostbusters instead. Meanwhile, Premiere.com, which started out as the website for a print magazine whose articles no one ever finished, this year introduced a new and improved template for film reviews made up of what bitter former Premiere writer Glenn Kenny calls “thematic modules.” But even Kenny could not resist the derrièrist onslaught and gave this ground-breaking approach to reviewing a shot, applying it to one of the most boring films ever made, Au Hasard Balthazar:

"The Pitch: A donkey in provincial France gets passed from owner to owner until it, like, dies.
What It Really Is: Apparently, a "meditation" on life, suffering, and grace, and that kind of stuff….
Can We Be Serious For A Moment?: Seriously? What this movie really needed was for Andy Samberg as Mark Wahlberg to show up and have a nice little chat with Balthazar."

Kenny has a long way to go before he reaches the scholarly heights of one of the deans of derrièrist film critics, John Podhoretz. Podhoretz didn’t bother to see Stop-Loss, yet another anti-war-in-Iraq movie, before he reviewed it because what would be the point? “It is high time to cease the armchair analysis of those who refuse to attend war-in-Iraq movies and ask them directly to explain their behavior,” writes Podhoretz, who then moves from the armchair to the divan to begin his analysis by interviewing himself. “I'm about to turn 47. I have seen thousands of movies in my time. Life is too short to spend even two hours in a theater watching Stop-Loss. Its virtues are, I expect, that it is very well made, with vivid scenes of terrifying battles in the streets of Karbala or Falluja--and touching moments of reconciliation. There's probably a well-done scene in or just outside a Wal-Mart. Its failings are that it tells a schematic story that stacks the deck.” Podhoretz was able to figure all this out from “three trailers and a few minutes watching Showbiz Tonight.” Podhoretz also wrote an entire column extolling the virtues of watching movies on an iPod: “Say you're watching a bad or boring movie on a subway train, a movie you nonetheless want to get to the end of. A distraction or two is not a bad thing; the movie turns into a radio show for a moment as you survey the other passengers. And if a homeless guy comes through asking you to help him in the name of Jesus, you can turn right back to the iPod, confident he will pass you by.” Isn’t that what movies are for anyway, to distract you from homeless people?

Sadly, one of the great proponents of derrièrism, Libertas, went defunct this year, but not before its founder Jason Apuzzo denounced the film WALL-E, which attacked everything derrièrism stands for. “Conservatives are understandably up in arms about what is apparently depicted in this film,” wrote Apuzzo before he had actually seen it. In the film humanity is depicted as a bunch of dim-witted, materialistic couch potatoes, which derrièrist film critics saw as a personal attack on their lifestyles.

Patrick Goldstein said the film slandered “the American way of life.” “If Michael Moore, or Oliver Stone, or, God forbid, some effete French director, had crafted a feature film that was a thinly disguised political broadside portraying Americans as recumbent tubbos who moved around on sliding barcaloungers with built-in video screens and soft drinks always at the ready, don’t you think there’d be some sort of notice taken?” wrote Bill Wyman, who is no film theorist. “I’m no film theorist, but I think what director Andrew Stanton is trying to tell us is that we humans eat so much and limit our movements to such a degree that we will soon become immobile whales unable to focus past the video screens permanently affixed in front of our field of vision.” Shannen Coffin lamented, “From the first moment of the film, my kids were bombarded with leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind.” And a reader of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism blog helpfully pointed out the film’s fascistic elements, such as the use of the color red, which was one of the colors on the Nazi flag and should never be used in a film unless accompanied by the colors white and blue.

Next year promises to be even better for derrièrism as many critics realize, like John Miller, that you don’t actually have to sit through all four hours of Ché to attack it. And who really wants to see crazy left-wing actor Sean Penn kiss a guy in Milk no matter how good his performance is supposed to be? I’m sure most critics would rather watch over and over again the oiled-up, musclebound actors of 2006's 300, a “classic” that brought back the “lost art of cinematic masculinity,” according to John Nolte, and wasn’t the least bit homoerotic no matter what left-wingers say. Why doesn’t Hollywood make classic movies like 300 anymore?

Crossposted at Newcritics

Update: The left-wing New York Times weighs in. And Roger Ebert replies: "The acid test of the ancient distributor's definition of a great picture--'a tukkus on every seat.'" Meanwhile, Josh Taylor writes "Note To Awards Givers: Ignore The Dark Knight At Your Own Peril," which may come to be known as one of the great manifestos of derrièrism: "Film critics can no longer afford to champion pet films which no one has ever seen, at the expense of what even they have to know is probably the better film. Here’s why: They’re all about to be out of a job....For print critics, a vote against The Dark Knight is a vote for your own irrelevancy. It’s a vote for the unemployment line."

Carnivals: Movie Monday Carnival, Pajama Party Flick Picks

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Conservatives Need a Bailout

The Big Three automakers are in Washington this week, hats in hand, looking for a handout. Washington has already bailed out some of our largest banks. But they are not the only ones suffering in this economy, which was ruined by the Democrat Congress and regulations that were implemented by the Clinton Administration that set the meltdown in motion. No one has been hit harder by this financial turmoil than conservatives. Although conservatives generally support self-reliance when it comes to others, the situation is so dire that the only thing that will save our conservative institutions at this point is a quick infusion of government aid.

In the 2008 election a number of conservatives with families to feed who thought their jobs would be safe for years to come got laid off by callous voters. And on January 20, more hard-working conservatives will find themselves on the unemployment line. Barack “Scrooge” Obama has already signaled that he will be pink slipping a huge number of government workers when he takes office, which will flood the economy with unemployed job seekers. Although Presidents have traditionally allowed ambassadors to stay on during transitions from one administration to another, for example, Obama has ruined Christmas for all of our currently serving ambassadors by informing them that they must vacate their offices as soon as he is sworn in. President Bush has made some effort to save people’s jobs by making it impossible for Obama to fire some political appointees through "burrowing," that is, changing their jobs into civil service jobs. But he may not be able to save everyone’s job. Only Robert Gates seems to be absolutely safe from the carnage.

But it is not only government workers who find themselves in economic dire straits. Conservatives throughout the country are losing their jobs as conservative institutions try to save themselves through belt-tightening. The staff of The National Review returned from its luxury cruise in the Caribbean to discover that it is surprisingly not actually making a profit and is now on its knees pleading for money, unfortunately, without much success. “It takes a lot of bucks to run NRO. Of course, each and every dollar we have is stretched to the max — we don’t have the luxury of, well, having luxuries. Cabs? Ha! Subway fare? Think again! How do I get to the press conference then? By foot! That’s how we operate. Calluses, fallen arches, and vibrant conservatism are the consequences” writes Jack Fowler, before losing what’s left of his dignity and concluding, “Come on, I’m begging.”

Recent cost-cutting initiatives to purge conservatives from the masthead of The National Review who failed to toe the editorial line, such as David Frum, Kathleen Parker and the son of the magazine’s founder, Christopher Buckley, have apparently not been enough to stave off financial disaster. To stay alive, The National Review may have to narrow its definition of acceptable conservative thought even further and encourage more of its writers to quit. If readers do not pony up soon, John Derbyshire could be the next apostate to get the boot. Mr. Derbyshire has apparently read the writing on the wall and has started a blog for “secular conservatives” (which is an oxymoron if I ever heard one), though I’m afraid I must disabuse him of the notion, which he probably heard from a mischievous liberal, that blogs are a great way to make money. Mr. Derbyshire is already struggling to pay his health insurance premiums, so losing his job at The National Review would be especially devastating for the man who is, let’s face it, not getting any younger and hasn’t looked well lately.

But even if The National Review makes its political philosophy indistinguishable from James Dobson’s, that may not be enough to save it. Dobson’s Focus on the Family has also fallen on economic hard times. Because group spent $539,000 passing Proposition 8, which ended gay marriage in California, it doesn’t have enough money left over to pay its employees’ salaries so it has been forced to lay off 20% of its staff, which is just the latest in a series of layoffs. I’m sure that the workers being laid off are grateful that their families have been saved from the scourge of gay marriage, which should provide some solace when they lose their homes or their children have to skip a few meals. And economic calamity should make their families even closer and stronger, helping them to fend off future threats from homosexuals. Meanwhile, a leaner more focused Focus on the Family will concentrate its efforts on fighting other dangerous enemies of America, such as ex-National Review writer Kathleen Parker, and retailers who don't say "Merry Christmas."

This economic downturn is especially hard on conservatives because many of them have never held real jobs. Forcing them to develop skills other than deploring the liberal media and warning how gay marriage and Islam will destroy our country from cushy perches at conservative think tanks may be asking too much. There are only so many positions for out-of-work neocons at conservative think tanks and their funds are drying up. Conservative authors are discovering that they may actually have to sell their books as fewer of them will be bought up by their own publishers, like Regnery. Some conservative institutions may even have to resort to outsourcing jobs overseas, to places like India where conservative pundits are cheaper. It’s one thing to send all of our manufacturing, call center and newspaper editorial jobs to India, but conservative punditry is a skill whose nuances would be lost if it were outsourced. Imagine what it will do to our political discourse if every pundit on Fox News and every token conservative on MSNBC sounded like Dinesh D’Souza and Ramesh Ponnuru. It’s too horrible to think about.

And if you think things are bad for conservative pundits, conservative bloggers are hurting worst of all. Kim du Toit, whose essay “The Pussification the Western Male” may be the greatest piece of writing the blogosphere has ever produced, was forced to stop blogging after his stingy, freeloading readers were unable to come up with enough money to pay for his shooting range memberships and food and drink for his family’s European vacation. What a sad commentary it is that after all he has done for his readers these many years, they could not come up with enough cash to keep him living in the style to which he has become accustomed. Unfortunately, Mr. du Toit is unable to work because years of lobster dinners have given him a severe case of gout, though at least he’s not a pussy like black people who just “want to be looked after when they’re sick, for free.”

Mr. du Toit may be the first of many conservatives who get “fed up with supporting the unproductive” and decide to “go John Galt,” denying us their wisdom and expertise to punish us for not appreciating them enough. If Confederate Yankee does not get enough donations to purchase new guns, which are going to be necessary when Obama takes office, he may be next. Luckily, this modest blogger makes enough to survive – barely – with the income I get from Google ads and Mrs. Swift’s three jobs, but, of course, any bit helps if you have a little to spare this Christmas season (see the Paypal button above). Unfortunately, my son Spiro and my daughter Schlafly may have to forgo college and join the military anyway, which would be a terrible waste of their skills, though if it comes to that, we’ll probably put the cat to sleep first.

I know there are probably some uncompassionate and vengeful liberals who would prefer to see conservatives left to the vagaries of the free market, and even some conservatives who are too proud to accept government charity and would prefer to stick to their principles. But as President Bush showed us, in a crisis you are sometimes forced to abandon your principles temporarily to survive. Being a conservative, like the Constitution, is not a suicide pact. To fight the terrorists President Bush was forced to bring back the era of big government, on a temporary basis, just as President Reagan was forced to spend profligately to end the Cold War. Conservatives must face reality the way Bush and Reagan did and realize that the only way to preserve our ideals may be to sacrifice them for a time and reluctantly accept government checks. Once we have gotten back on our feet again, then we can go back to doing what we do best: condemning lazy welfare queens and berating the poor for not raising themselves by their own bootstraps.

Update: Ramesh Ponnuru links to the crossposting of this post at Shakesville and calls it an example of "feminist racism," leading to a long battle in the comment thread between Corner readers and Shakerites. Thers comments on the reaction. I am appalled that Mr. Ponnuru would insult me by calling me a feminist and demand an apology.

Carnivals: Bobo Carnival of Politics

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In Defense of Angry Mobs

This week pundits were all in a tizzy about the angry mobs showing up at John McCain and Sarah Palin rallies. “Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November,” fretted former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum. “Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for a man who may well be the next president of the United States, incidentally the first African-American president?” David Gergen warned, “There is this free floating sort of whipping around anger that could really lead to some violence.” Andrew Sullivan intoned ominously, “This is a moment of maximal physical danger for the young Democratic nominee. And McCain is playing with fire.” And there are signs that John McCain is now looking on the passion he has stirred up the way Frankenstein looked on his monster. But I’d like to know, What’s so bad about angry mobs? After all, angry mobs made our country -- and the Republican Party -- what it is today.

This country wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for an angry mob that decided it wanted a tax cut and threw English tea into Boston Harbor. Angry mobs once enforced local justice without interference from the meddlesome federal government in the Old West and in the south after Reconstruction, just as our Founding Fathers had envisioned in The Federalist Papers. And we would probably all be Muslims now if an angry mob hadn’t chosen Barabbas over Jesus 2,000 years ago.

The Republican Party certainly owes a lot to angry mobs. Angry mobs in Little Rock and Selma deeply concerned about the issue of state’s rights, angry mobs of parents in Boston who didn’t want their kids bussed across town and angry mobs of Chicago homeowners who didn’t want their property values to go down all helped give birth to the modern conservative movement. The Democrats had angry mobs of their own rioting in the cities and burning flags at antiwar protests and conservatives realized that the only way we would win is if we had better, angrier mobs. What was Nixon’s Silent Majority but a very quiet, very angry mob?

But some conservative “intellectuals” like David Brooks subscribe to the canard that the conservative movement was defined by pointy-headed eastern elites like William Buckley, whose “entire life,” Brooks recently wrote, “was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect. Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines, they disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.” Now Brooks laments, “What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole.” Brooks even goes so far as to claim that conservatives once valued “constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking.” We did? Since when? Does he honestly believe that the conservative movement was based on people who read books? Reagan wasn’t elected by the Harvard faculty. It was an angry mob tired of welfare queens and pinko fellow travelers selling us out to the Soviet Union that put him in office. And when Al Gore tried to steal the election in Florida in 2000 it took an angry mob of bussed in Young Republicans to remind Americans that you don’t get to be President just because you have the most votes. That’s not how democracies work.

So when people like David Brooks and David Gergen act like scared little rabbits over a good old American red-blooded angry mob, I wonder, where have you been all these years? How do you think Nixon, Reagan and Bush got elected?

Some conservative “thinkers” now act shocked when angry conservative mobs don’t bow down to their precious ivory tower thoughts. When Kathleen Parker treasonously wrote that Sarah Palin should quit the ticket, they responded with justifiable outrage, sending her 12,000 emails calling her a traitor and an idiot and saying she should have been aborted. But suddenly Parker no longer wants to have a frank dialogue with her readers. “When we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one's own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk,” she writes self-righteously, acting as if the scales just fell from her eyes. Is this the same Kathleen Parker who excoriated Scott McLellan for being disloyal to President Bush just to sell his book? Is this the same Kathleen Parker who defended a man who pointed out that Barack Obama is not a “full-blooded American” by saying, “Some Americans do feel antipathy toward ‘people who aren't like them,’ but that antipathy isn't about racial or ethnic differences. It is not necessary to repair antipathy appropriately directed toward people who disregard the laws of the land and who dismiss the struggles that resulted in their creation. Full-blooded Americans get this.” I’m sorry, Kathleen Parker, but you are just not like us.

And whether Ms. Parker likes it or not, how else to characterize the endorsement of Barack Obama by William Buckley’s son Christopher Buckley as anything but a betrayal? Buckley was too much of a coward to make his endorsement in his father’s magazine. He made it on The Daily Beast because he said he didn’t want to receive “foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails” from National Review readers. Why is Buckley turning his back on those who have kept the magazine in business all these years? If National Review cut all of its foaming-at-the-mouth readers from its subscriber rolls who would be left to read the magazine? Now, suddenly, Buckley thinks foaming at the mouth is a bad thing?

Sure, angry mobs can get a little rambunctious and overenthusiastic at times. Some members of the angry mobs that have been attending McCain/Palin rallies (otherwise known as “the Republican base”) got a tad carried away when they reacted to hearing Obama’s name by screaming “Kill him” and “Off with his head.” But it’s easy to go overboard in the heat of the moment. Who wouldn’t be furious at the prospect of a terrorist who went to Pakistan on an Indonesian passport, where he probably had secret meetings with Osama Bin Laden, the Weather Underground and the Illuminati, getting elected President? Can you blame them?

At first it looked like John McCain and Sarah Palin were not only prepared to ride this angry mob to victory but were even willing to egg them on a little. But yesterday it seemed McCain suddenly got cold feet. On Friday he rebuffed a woman at one of his rallies who said that Obama was an “Arab,” telling her, “No, ma'am. He's a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign's all about. He's not [an Arab].” He told another man that he didn’t have to be “scared” if Obama is elected President. Now you tell us. Don’t you want to win this election?

I don’t know why McCain now seems to be turning his back on his base, which never trusted him anyway. Maybe it was the memory of the angry Vietnamese mob that pulled McCain out of his plane when it went down in Hanoi and nearly beat him to death that gave him second thoughts. But now is not the time for McCain to suddenly find his moral scruples. Pandering to the eastern elites won’t get McCain elected. If McCain wants to win, he’s going to have to put aside whatever principles he is still clinging to and embrace the angry mob the way Ronald Reagan and George Bush did before him. Because if he loses there is no telling what this angry mob will do next. There could be rioting in the streets or worse. So let’s hope for all of our sakes that McCain has the stomach to win this election.

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