RIP John Hughes ... Conservative? Politicizing Ferris Bueller
By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The Corner's Kathryn Jean Lopez reprints an email from a reader with excerpts from Ferris Bueller's Day Off including one where Ferris tweaks his uncle for being a Vietnam hypocrite, one in which the three main characters hint at being anti-abortion, and a third in which a Russian cab driver says America is better than the U.S.S.R. All of this is presented as evidence to suggest that the late, great director was a conservative. There are a couple of problems with this line of argument.
First, none of these scenes appear in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. According to something called the Internet Movie Script Database, all of the scenes are from the movie's shooting script, which was written by Hughes. But director Hughes apparently didn't see fit to leave them in the movie. Why were the lines in originally and why were they taken out? Who knows. (Former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein was cast in Bueller ... could that have been a secret shout-out to the great silent majority? It's ... the DaBueller Code.)
And more importantly--and here's the bigger problem with this line of argument--who cares? Hughes' films are for me, like many 30-somethings, cultural touchstones. Would I enjoy them more if I found out he was a raging liberal? Or would I banish them from memory if he was indeed a conservative? No. Sometimes a movie is just a movie, after all.
But as I've noted before, conservatives seem to have a special fixation with finding political messages and meaning in film, and not just the ones that are obviously political films. Hence the various lists of best conservative movies of all time. If you doubt me Google "best liberal movies" and you'll find the top result is a list of conservative movies. And most of the top search results are written by ... conservatives. ("Ten Liberal Movies So Lame They Make Even Democrats Want to Vote Republican") The progressive contribution to the search results comes from DailyKos, put together in response to an NRO list of best conservative movies.
The whole thing rather reminds me of the occasional Marxist nutters one would run across in college who would try to read patriarchal this or class-based that into everything.
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What does Miriam mean-bulk section whole foods?
Miriam forbids criticism of religion--oh dear, maybe God will go away unless everybody claps for him like Tinkerbell? She mentions a "void" that exists somewhere. Believers pay to take "courses" that tell them to "make Jesus a pal, a personal friend, someone who tosses you over a shoulder when you reach deep sand." Billions of dollars have been spent on religious greeting cards published by a company owned by a Far Right activist. Texts on abnormal psychology describe mental illness. They include hallucinations experienced after fasting or isolation. Holy books demand fasting, so their tithes payers will hallucinate, be convinced they really do "see and hear God," and never stop tithing. When people don't exert themselves to study science, they leave a void in their minds. It's easily filled with more fictional "Holy Writ." Look at any holy book. It's a batch of pages bound together and SOLD AS MERCHANDISE. its main message is "Pay the preacher." Darwin, by describing the process of evolution, was a threat to the tithe scam. That's why he's attacked by tithers who can't admit they will "never know for sure if there is a Heaven.'
"It's a Wonderful World" has angel, of course
To advance religion, "It's a Wonderful World" has a fatherly guardian angel in this not so subtly anti-abortion, anti- suicide movie. The Code of Canon Law bans abortion, suicide and attempted self-destruction. At the end, with an odd twist, the hero's pals "socialistically" make donations to bail him out. The Number One motive of the movie was to convince young viewers that "God exists and He does run the world and believers must vote the way their preachers tell them to vote." It took a long time, until l973, until Roe v Wade made the government stop enforcing church law banning abortion. All those years, Prolife lawmakers were responsible for crippling or killing millions of women who used illegal abortion. Who paid to make all those religious movies? Song of Bernadette, Going My Way, Boys Town (abandoned unaborted conceptions reared by celibate priests and nuns, all subsidized by religious tax deductions.) Those movies made paychecks for religious actors who tithed back some of it, whlle Blacklist victims suffered.
How many commentators read Marx, Lenin, Sinclair?
Comments, so very scared of "godless Marxism," make it seem their makers haven't read Marx, Lenin or Upton Sinclair on substitutes for profiteering "Godly" capitalism. (The buried talent was no good remember?) Social Security came from Sinclair's EPIC End Poverty in California. Every time I read Marx or Lenin I think "What wonderful prose--what excellent use of words." There's an Old World tale of caution about first appearances. Wolves lived near a woodcutter family. The trusted family dog was left to guard the baby in its cradle. The parents returned to find the baby and the dog bloody, but the baby was alive. They shot and killed the dog. Next day, they found a dead wolf. The dog had saved the baby and the parents mistakenly killed their faithful dog. Lesson: don't be scared by profiteering capitalists. Anti=Semites warn against Marx as a Jew, but his father had to convert to Christianity to get a job. There is so much controversy over ways to manage money. Surely, there must be PLANNED USE. That happens when people become well-socialized, without a favored upper class and submerged, cheated lower class. As I would not be a master, so I would not be a slave. That's the equality of classless socialism.
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