Hollywood values



Apple roared into the TV game with 'The Morning Show' — a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing… made by a company that runs sweatshops in China. So, well, you say you're woke, but the companies you work for, unbelievable — Apple, Amazon, Disney — if ISIS started a streaming service, you’d call your agent, wouldn't you? So if you do win an award tonight, don't use it as a platform to make a political speech. You're in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. So if you win, right, come up and accept your little award, thank your agent and your god, and piss off. It's already three hours long. In this age of terror and soaring budget deficits, when our President has proposed cuts in veterans' benefits and funds for children, I got a tax cut of over $100,000! Support the Hollywood elite. Please re-elect W|George Bush. Value is at least as much an economic as a cultural concept. So any proper definition of Hollywood values ought to begin with the astonishing costs of producing major films and the "blink to make sure it's real" real-estate market. The production "values" of movies made in Hollywood, California, run easily to eight or even nine figures (in USD), and the value of real estate in Hollywood shocks the little people who can only imagine having the income to buy a little wedge of it.

Using the alternate definition of the word, as in "family values", "Hollywood values" are &mdash; wait &mdash; does Hollywood even have a uniform belief-system? Even metaphorical wars need real enemies, or at least imagined enemies with empirical referents, and the culture war needs enemies, so who better than those objects of envy in Tinseltown?

Film
Hollywood, by its very nature, attracted a certain class of people. Much of the American film industry was established by first- and second-generation Jewish, Eastern European, Irish, and Canadian Americans who found themselves locked out of much of the WASP-dominated social and cultural life of the early 20th century. Film, as well as similar industries like vaudeville and musical theater (which both had a substantial influence on the early "talkies" of the 1930s), was considered to be "vulgar" entertainment suited only for the lowest common denominator, and thus, was scorned by the era's cultural elites, who instead had a fondness for literature and more "respectable" forms of theater. Yet there was a demand for such entertainment, and since nature abhors a vacuum, the evil immigrants rushed in to take the jobs that the Real Americans™ turned their noses up at because it was beneath them.



So now you've got a new and rapidly growing (in both wealth and cultural power) field of entertainment that was established by, and is thoroughly dominated by, immigrants, a good number of whom are Jewish, and most of whom don't fit in the culture of early 20th century America. In addition, a large number of WASPs who also find themselves alienated from "traditional" cultural life, including some who may have a few (*ahem*) skeletons in the closet, are themselves migrating to Hollywood because it's the only table in the cafeteria where outcasts like them are welcome. Jews, immigrants, homosexuals, money, and new media, all in one place... you can see where this is going.

It wasn't even a decade after the first Hollywood studios had established themselves when the first great moral panic arose from Real America™ regarding the "immorality" of Hollywood. The scandal in 1921-22 and other incidents like it led to calls for government censorship of film, which didn't happen only because Hollywood, seeing what it was facing, pre-empted such efforts with censorship of their own. The (also known as the Hays Code) was written up in 1930 and put into force in 1934, binding Hollywood's films to a strict set of guidelines for decency and morality until the mid '60s.

While this placated America's self-appointed moral guardians for a time, after World War II it would prove to be insufficient, as there was now a new threat to America's bodily fluids: Communism! As it did in many industries across America during the Great Depression, communism attracted a lot of sympathy from the rank-and-file in Hollywood during the film industry's unionization battles of the '30s, and with the Soviet Union as a nominal American ally during World War II, Hollywood's government-commissioned propaganda films took a neutral-to-positive view of the communists as friends in the global struggle against fascist tyranny. But even before the mushroom clouds had dissipated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the second Red Scare had begun to heat up once it became clear that the wartime alliance was over, with Americans concerned that all those Eastern Europeans in Hollywood were a fifth column that would turn American media into a "Red propaganda machine." Hundreds of writers, actors, and directors lost their careers in the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s, as anti-communist studio heads like Walt Disney, Jack L. Warner, and Howard Hughes, egged on by the press and HUAC, sought to purge the industry of political radicals both real and perceived. Simultaneously, the notorious tabloid Confidential combined the sleaze of the News of the World with the reactionary politics of Fox News, going into overdrive reporting on all the misdoings of Hollywood's stars — which, at the time, included such things as homosexuality and even blacks dating whites — and delivering an irreparable blow to the idea that the Hays Code had cleaned up Hollywood in any meaningful way. This being the age of Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best, the usual suspects reacted like they usually did.

But then something different happened. The Supreme Court had ruled in 1952, in  (also known as the "Miracle Decision" after the film involved), that the film was protected speech under the First Amendment, and with the '60s rolling in, nobody cared about indecency any more. Besides, Hollywood in the '60s had much bigger problems than its public image — namely, competition from television and foreign (especially British) cinema, the latter of which was not bound by the Hays Code and which, thanks to the Miracle Decision, could not be legally censored. Films like the sultry, action-packed James Bond series of spy thrillers, Hammer's blood-soaked, sexualized remakes of classic horror films, and the Italian film industry's violent, morally gray take on the Western genre drew in hordes of viewers sick of Hollywood formula, and the Hays Code meant that they never had to worry about American competition. Under increasing pressure from British and other European film studios and looking for an angle from which to compete with television, Hollywood, having loosened the Hays Code in 1956 and relaxed its enforcement in the ensuing years, abandoned it altogether in 1968 and replaced it with the MPAA's (still in use) film rating system, allowing for far greater leeway in content.

The result? Ask any film student or critic what the greatest decade for American cinema was. The answer you will get is probably the 1970s, the decade after the Hays Code was buried. Filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet, William Friedkin, Francis Ford Coppola, and others broke down the barriers of "old Hollywood" and brought about a revolution in American cinema that helped to turn back the tide of irrelevance. Despite notorious missteps like One From the Heart and Heaven's Gate that forced the studios to rein in filmmakers' creative freedom, by the '80s Hollywood was back on the path to financial sustainability thanks to the likes of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg applying the "New Hollywood" style to bigger, family-oriented blockbusters.

Television
Meanwhile, a similar revolution was going on in film's rival, television. Despite a few minor blows like the quiz show scandals and FCC chairman Newton Minow's "vast wasteland" speech, it was never anywhere close to the precarious position that the film industry was in. In fact, its success was responsible in a big way for Hollywood's decline in profitability and cultural influence during the 1950s and '60s.

However, by the late '60s the "Big Three" American television networks (CBS, NBC, and ABC) had discovered, through the study of demographics, that a lot of what they thought were their most highly-rated hits were, in fact, doing poorly among the viewers that the marketers who paid their bills craved — namely, young and middle-aged people in the cities and suburbs with plenty of disposable income who were still figuring out what brands to trust. This was most pronounced at CBS, which had the highest ratings but the worst demographics as its viewership skewed overwhelmingly towards older viewers and people in rural areas, demographics that advertisers didn't care for due to both their comparative lack of purchasing power and decades of ingrained brand loyalty making it hard to change their consumer habits. In the '60s, they were nicknamed the "Country Broadcasting System" due to the stereotype of their viewership being composed of farm boys and retirees, quickly canceling any show that attracted the slightest whiff of controversy. NBC also discovered just too late that Star Trek, a seemingly low-rated show that they had just canceled, would've actually been measured as one of their biggest hits had they applied the use of demographics just a few years earlier. Still the network didn't bring the show back, notwithstanding there being plenty of fan outcry to do so.

The result of this embrace of demographics was the in the early '70s, when CBS canned long-running, rural-themed shows like Lassie, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres in favor of programs like All In the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*S*H, and others aimed at a more urban — and urbane — viewership base. Green Acres star Pat Buttram cynically remarked that CBS was "cancel[ing] everything with a tree," but the rural purge worked, as CBS's image turned around overnight and its new shows became some of the most talked-about hits on television. The other two networks (most notably ABC, which had always been more youth-oriented), noticing CBS's recent success, followed its lead, and just a few years into the '70s most of the older-skewing hits of the '60s were canceled.

To sum up...
In other words, Hollywood didn't suddenly become "immoral" because the liberals running the show wanted to foist decadent values onto American society, they became "immoral" because it was the only way that they could hope to stay in business against foreign competitors. For the television industry, meanwhile, becoming "immoral" afforded them exponentially more advertiser revenue and profit than they had been earning by focusing on Middle American audiences. In other words, it was pure capitalism. And don't conservatives always tell us to "Buy American" and not support those evil foreigners, and that capitalism is the greatest economic system the world has ever seen?

Today
The perception that Hollywood is a subversive force in American culture, spreading liberalism and secularism and undermining Real American Values,™ is still widespread within a certain section of the populace. Michael Medved and the late Andrew Breitbart, for example, built cottage industries promoting the idea that conservative actors and filmmakers are actively persecuted by Hollywood's "liberal elite" and prevented from getting work in the film industry.

Let us ignore the fact that the "liberal" Hollywood machine cranked out three gung-ho Transformers movies that got progressively more militaristic (and awful) as the franchise went on, as well as the two-hour Marine recruitment ad known as Battle: Los Angeles, supporting autogynephilic conсept and gatekeeping for transgender people movie The Silence of the Lambs and the pro-PATRIOT Act, pro-War on Terror blockbuster The Dark Knight. The show "24" has many pro torture narratives and had writers that supported George W Bush and admired Ronald Reagan. The show was also infamous in its depiction of Muslim terrorist, including a Middle Eastern family in Season 4. The show itself was popular with conservatives and was often promoted by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Interestingly enough, this is the same show that featured a black president and a Middle Eastern woman (who was later racially profiled) as the head of a CTU divison. Or the fact that they have shown themselves, over and over again, to be decades behind the times when it comes to what's acceptable regarding race, gender, and indeed just about any cultural issue. It took until 1967 for a Hollywood studio to make a movie about an interracial couple that didn't demonize the idea, by which time most of America outside the South was fine with it, and when the AIDS epidemic broke out in the '80s, the industry's response was as shamefully homophobic as anyone's at the time, despite the fact that, as Elizabeth Taylor (whose response wasn't shameful ) pointed out, Hollywood wouldn't exist without gay people. Or the fact that Adam Sandler, a registered Republican who, in 2007, made a hit comedy built almost entirely around a homophobic premise, is still one of the biggest comedic stars in Hollywood despite the fact that everyone many people feel that he stopped being funny years ago. Or that it's nearly impossible for a mainstream Hollywood movie to portray an atheist character who isn't a jerk, doesn't have loose morals, didn't get dealt a bad hand by life (thus explaining why they don't believe in God), and/or doesn't convert to Christianity by the end of the movie. Or that Hollywood's attitude towards gun violence and vigilantism seems to be that it's totally awesome.

So yes. Hollywood is clearly a very liberal place. Just keep saying it.

A reality check
The bottom line is that Hollywood is run by major corporations. Whatever the personal convictions of individual movie stars may be, the real movers and shakers in Hollywood are the CEOs, chairpersons, and executives of the studios. They make movies with liberal messages because they will make money in the blue states, just as they make movies with conservative messages (such as the aforementioned Transformers movies, American Sniper, Red Dawn, etc.) because those will make money in the red states. If Hollywood is liberal, then it is classically liberal, its chief ideology being rooted in profit and keeping the censors off their backs. Since, for nearly a century, it has been culturally conservative Christian activists who have led the calls for censorship, Hollywood has long had practical, bread-and-butter reasons to distrust right-wing politics, and so its culture, if not among the studio heads then certainly among the filmmakers and actors, has gravitated to left-leaning liberalism almost by default. That being said, they are a privately-owned-and-run industry, and they're no fans of socialism; during the '80s, they adored Ronald Reagan (a former Hollywood actor) and embraced his nostalgic, free-wheeling, flag-waving, pro-capitalist brand of conservatism.

Ultimately, Hollywood is a vast, nebulous industry, so it cannot be conclusively said that it is dominated by any one political ideology. Ideals from across the political spectrum are on display in one form or another, and most others in Hollywood are deliberately apolitical and solely interested in creating entertainment for its own sake.

Left-wing criticism of Hollywood
They fix the need, develop the taste / Buy their products or get laid to waste / Coca-Cola is back in the veins of Saigon / And Rambo too, he got a dope pair of Nikes on / And Godzilla, pure motherfucking filler / To keep your eyes off the real killer / Cinema, simulated life, ill drama / Fourth Reich culture, Americana / Chained to the dream they got you searchin' for / The thin line between entertainment and war If one is looking for real-deal, left-wing politics in the American film industry, then the place to look is in the indie/arthouse/film festival scene (Tribeca, Sundance, and so on). It has long had an uneasy relationship with the mainstream Hollywood system; while it employs Hollywood talent on numerous occasions and often relies on the major studios (all of whom have their own "indie" arms) for distribution and promotion, it is also a popular destination for left-wing actors and filmmakers who think Hollywood is too stifling. This is far from unique to the film industry. The modern indie scene is deeply embedded within the urban artist (or, more pejoratively, "hipster") culture, and its politics can be far more easily traced to that scene's countercultural beliefs than to anything in Hollywood.

Furthermore, many leftists would likely give you an earful if you ever told them that Hollywood was a subversive, radical force. The claim of "Hollywood values" has a mirror counterpart among both leftists and non-American (especially non-Western) nationalists. To them, Hollywood's commanding position in the global pop culture is seen as a tool of American "cultural imperialism," pushing American consumerist values and a whitewashed image of the nation's social life and military. Consequently, for many countries that seek to protect and promote a certain vision of their own culture (for better or worse), the first step in doing so is censoring Hollywood movies and other American cultural products. China is arguably the most famous example of this today.

Feminist and anti-racist activists have also long criticized Hollywood for the preponderance of white men claiming leading roles at the expense of female and non-white actors, even in stories where white men logically wouldn't play a major role. Hollywood has a long history of casting lily-white actors as swarthy Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern, or Native American figures who, historically, would've had trouble passing the brown paper bag test, using "tanning" makeup, stereotypical clothing, and fake beards to get them to look non-white. They still do this today with films such as Exodus: Gods and Kings and Gods of Egypt, the only difference being that now they get criticized for it. Films and TV shows with mostly black casts, meanwhile, have long existed in a (pardon the pun) ghetto of sorts, marketed almost exclusively to black audiences and usually existing in low-budget genres like crime or comedy. 2016 saw "#OscarsSoWhite" become a popular hashtag, criticizing the fact that all twenty of the Academy Award nominations for acting went to white actors for the second year in a row, despite a number of acclaimed performances by non-white actors. Some have seen this not as a sign of bias on the part on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but rather, as a symptom of a bigger problem of white actors being favored for roles, especially for "prestige" roles.

The same goes for female-oriented films. The "chick flick" stereotype of cheap romantic comedies aimed at women (often while perpetuating negative stereotypes of them) is well-known to the point of parody even among the most manly of men, while in bigger blockbusters, women often serve little role beyond shallow eye candy and love interests that exist for the male protagonists' fulfillment and the male audiences' wish fulfillment. Even as early as the '80s, complaints over the lack of female representation in Hollywood films had produced the Bechdel test as a satirical method of demonstrating how hard it is to find movies with women as the lead characters. It's worth noting here that Anita Sarkeesian, before she became the bogey(wo)man of reactionary male gamers, got her start critiquing the portrayal of women in Hollywood movies.

Again, just like in the '50s and '60s, television is a place where Hollywood routinely finds its ass kicked. On TV, producers like Shonda Rhimes, Lee Daniels, and Kenya Barris have had great success running popular, acclaimed, dramatic series and sitcoms led by women and/or people of color, and even when it comes to shows created by white men, you get a mix of popular programs like The Wire, Modern Family, and Orange is the New Black that are rooted in racial and sexual diversity. Networks like The CW, MTV, and Freeform have enjoyed great success appealing to young women with their scripted programming. Money talks, and when women and non-whites suddenly had enough money for advertisers and businesses to view them as a potential major market, the advertiser-driven television industry started listening. As such, many critics of Hollywood whitewashing have pointed to modern television as a model for how things can get better.

In short, if Breitbart, et al. really wanted to look for lefties within the film industry, they should've started in Silver Lake, Echo Park, and Tumblr rather than Hollywood and Burbank.

Superheroes
Let us also take a look at one of Hollywood's biggest cash cows in the 21st century, the superhero movie. It can (and has ) been argued that the entire concept of the "traditional" superhero, à la Batman or Superman, is fundamentally conservative.

Of course, this is a widely disputed point, as for every argument that superhero fiction is inherently conservative, there's a counterargument against it. The hero is often a man, despite the long-known existence of female superheroes like Wonder Woman, Catwoman and Elektra... many of whom, until very recently, have utterly bombed in the transition to the screen. While superhero comics are fairly diverse, superhero movies have been, with the exception of ensemble pieces like the X-Men movies, Fantastic Four and The Avengers, a sausage-fest. That said, recent female-led outings such as Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, and Birds of Prey have been massively successful with critics, audiences, or both. On one hand, the character possesses some form of moral, physical and/or biological superiority over the rest of his fellow men -- therefore supposedly disproving the equality of all men; on the other hand, a decent majority of heroes start out as relatable everymen and outcasts who work their way up to becoming the heroes seen on the screen. The hero has often been "chosen" by God a higher force, or is just filthy rich and highly dedicated, which some see as an attempt to claim that the 1% does care about us! In reality, benevolent billionaires in superhero stories are actually in the vast minority, and most rich people in such stories are evil and corrupt; in either case, the fact that the person is chosen by God or happens to be a billionaire is not typically meant as a value judgment, but rather an explanation of how they got their powers in a plausible manner.

Heroes are typically depicted as acting outside legal channels to protect them -- which, as some point out, is just like what the CIA and NSA are doing. Of course, those same heroes more often than not work alongside military and law enforcement officers, and only work outside the system because of systemic corruption within those systems (not to mention that demanding unyielding loyalty to government institutions would not be very liberal either.) Detractors characterize heroes as acting outside the law because it is right and proper and in line with "truth, justice and the American Way," often to a total lack of appreciation by those who they're trying to protect (just like those ACLU radicals who should just shut up about what the CIA and NSA are doing). The difference, of course, is that unlike the CIA and NSA, superheroes do not engage in torture, do not kill entire civilian populations just to take out a single target, do not engage in mass surveillance (The Dark Knight being the one exception, and even then it was all but explicitly said that wiretapping was not the right course of action to take), and overall do not force their will onto the masses. Critics of superhero films like to claim that morality in such stories is a matter of black and white, but this is not even remotely true. The heroes in such stories have flaws, make mistakes, and are otherwise far from paragons of virtue or perfection; villains, on the other hand, are often given tragic backstories, understandable motives, entertaining personalities, and occasional moments of empathy and compassion that humanize them.

Many argue that superhero fiction has long been a favorite go-to of anti-establishment types who wish to challenge systems they see as corrupt or unjust. Matt Frati of The Medium brings up some interesting particulars:

Noted leftist and film critic Mark Hughes has also offered cogent arguments for superhero movies' tendency to align with the left-wing on a number of issues.

The international box office
Furthermore, in the last decade the American market has ceased to be the be-all, end-all decider of success or failure for Hollywood. As the rest of the world (particularly the developing world) has grown in economic stature, Hollywood has become increasingly dependent on international box office in order to sustain its ever-expanding budgets — and foreign films are entering the US market, once seen as a 100% buy domestic affair (barring the brief interlude of the '60s), in growing number.

A perfect example would be 2011's The Adventures of Tintin, a $135 million budgeted CG-animated epic by Steven Spielberg based on the Belgian comic Tintin, which has no mass appeal in the US but is on a par with The Simpsons or Marvel Comics in much of Europe. Its US release was an afterthought, making only about $77 million, but overseas it made nearly $300 million, a certified blockbuster. Likewise, the $180 million adaptation of The Golden Compass, the first book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, made over $300 million overseas and just $70 million in the US; it would've made a great year for its production company, New Line Cinema, had they not foolishly sold off the international distribution rights to other companies.

In this environment, especially coinciding with a time when the US's international reputation has taken a nosedive, Hollywood has to be very careful with its appeals to patriotism — whatever American viewers it might gain would be more than balanced out by disgusted European, Asian, and Latin American viewers deciding to stay home. And now you know why the live-action G.I. Joe movie turned the all-American Joes into an international team, and why the Red Dawn remake retooled the villains from the Chinese to the North Koreans at the last minute.

Sexual abuse
The one moment that conservatives might seem to have a leg to stand on in terms of attacking is the recent explosion of Hollywood power players (X-Men director Bryan Singer, boy band impresario Lou Pearlman, Universal Studios attraction developer Gary Goddard, the 2017 revelations concerning Harvey Weinstein, the reopening/reminding of the cases of Roman Polanski, and so on) who have been accused of child sexual abuse or rape by various individuals, whose accounts seem to corroborate each other, in civil suits. The Weinstein allegations led to many major Hollywood players (Rose McGowan, Alyssa Milano, Asia Argento, Ashley Judd, Gwyneth Paltrow and Patricia Arquette, among many others) coming out about their experiences. Back in 2014, Michelle Malkin, of all people, wrote a lengthy article talking about how there appears to be a world of child grooming, pedophilia and flaunting the rules, hidden in plain sight, and that people should combat it. Of course, she goes off the rails in blaming this as a liberal problem, saying things to the effect of (and bear in mind this is a paraphrase), "the sanctimonious Obama-loving, SJW crowd who manufactured the War on Women are protecting their own and turning Hollywood into a cesspool of sick perversion. What can you expect from Democrats?" And since Weinstein's exposure, conservatives have used it a handy shibboleth to wave away criticism of Donald Trump. Of course, child sexual abuse and rape is a problem that has no political boundaries whatsoever. And besides, the fact that several of the individuals Malkin lists are not registered Democrats, or that family values spokesman Ted Nugent has never been punished for his vile history of underage sex, completely misses Malkin's eye.

While the has sent shock waves throughout the industry in recent years, Hollywood's unfortunate history of sexual abuse has spanned for as long as the film industry existed:, former 1920s child actress and later memoirist and historian, recalled in her memoirs about a certain starlet who was sexually abused and later blackballed for her allegations. Shirley Temple (who would later turn out as a staunchly conservative Reagan-era diplomat), also made a sex abuse allegation against (yes, that same sleazy bastard who brought you Singin' in the Rain), whom Temple alleged to have shown his genitals to her when she was twelve years old, back when the child actress was in the process of moving to MGM after her contract with 20th Century Fox ended. Fortunately for Freed and unfortunately for Temple, the incident apparently was never investigated and thus the producer walked away scot-free from it. This was also on top of the now-questionable scenes in some of Temple's films, such as the infamous "On The Good Ship Lollipop" scene in  where Shirley's character serenades her signature song in the company of grown men.

Other things to think about
Three well-known politicians first gained popularity working in Hollywood: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. Perhaps there is a clue in that?

Some of the strongest political voices against Hollywood Values once pandered to the film, television and music industries with their support of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act (in the United States House and Senate, respectively) while the Writers Guild of America, West -- a group at the core of "big Hollywood" if ever there was one -- opposes the bills. Apparently, those godless, Japan-loving, Flying Spaghetti Monster-worshiping gamer nerds in Silicon Valley are officially a bigger threat than Hollywood now. On the other hand, Breitbart also opposed SOPA and PIPA. Hey, a stopped clock...