Pupienis Maximus’s comment at Sadly, No! regarding the contention that Brazil is a conservative movie spurred me to think about why it is that conservatives are so fucking obsessed with finding (and listing) art and entertainment that they believe express their values.
Those of us who do wingnut-watching for sport are aware that this is not anything new. The language in that Human Events email was directly lifted from the NRO’s conservative movies list. Obviously, John J. Miller has basically made a career out of it.
Most people tend to prefer entertainment that reflects their beliefs, but conservatives seem to be intent on twisting anything they enjoy into some sort of statement on conservative principles (or, at least, an anti-liberal statement).
Truthfully, conservatives don’t usually make good art. Anything that’s beautiful or revolutionary or groundbreaking (like Brazil) cannot be, by default, conservative. When you stand athwart history yelling “Stop!” you’re probably not going to be particularly original. Not only are you unwilling to allow progress, but you’re also prone to fetishizing the past to such a degree that you’re intimidated by new ideas in general, and new ideas that mock/give lie to old ideas in particular. It’s like comedy; comedy that sides with the bully, the powers that be, the status quo is usually terribly unfunny. You can’t make anything good if you’re propping up the values and institutions that make things, well, bad.
It also seems as if conservatives have a great deal of difficulty differentiating between things that are “bad” and things they just don’t like. Fascism is bad, so it must be liberal. Obama disagrees with me, so he is a Marxist. Green leafy vegetables pollute our bodily fluids etc etc etc etc etc…Similarly, they’re incapable of understanding nuance, so if they like something, it must be Good (conservative) because they are Good.
So, there are very few conservative forms of art, which means that conservatives who have interest in anything other than Veggie Tales and the Left Behind series must turn to art that is “liberal,” or, at least, “not conservative” (which, for most of them, means “liberal”). And since liberal is Bad, they have to figure out a way to fit what they like into their value systems. That’s how you get “Brazil is a vision of how the world would be if liberals took over” or “this song by a gay British vegan about infanticide is anti-abortion” or “’Rock the Casbah’ is conservative because it was controversial after September 11.”
Which, like, whatever. It’s their prerogative to like what they like for whatever weird reason they like it. And if those lists resulted in dipshits downloading Sex Pistols songs, then I can possibly get over how insulting it is to completely re-frame something as conservative when that wasn’t the creators’ intent. It’s just that it’s representative of the rigid values systems that a lot of conservatives have, and their uncanny ability to take things out of context and completely misinterpret what they mean. It’s juvenile, annoying, and, on a wider level, bad for political discourse.
Tags: conservatives, movies, music, politics
