ONLY ONE STORY:

Left Good. Right Bad. It's Called Art.: A conservative hero in a movie? That'll be the day. (Andrew Klavan, October 18, 2004, LA Times)

Here's my new idea for a thriller. An ordinary guy wakes up one morning and his wife — who has joyfully devoted her life to him — has disappeared. His neighbor — a kind and intellectual Christian conservative — has become invisible. And his best friend — a peaceful man who supports the war in Iraq — has lost the power to speak. It's scary stuff, all right. I'm going to call it: "The Arts in America."

I don't like to make sweeping statements about the arts because there are always many exceptions. But I have a solid observational berth — I'm a novelist and screenwriter; I'm well read; I go to the movies often — and I can't help noticing that, in the last 25 years or so, large segments of the American population have practically vanished from our fictional landscape.

When was the last time you saw a conservative politician who was the hero of a movie — as opposed to the slavering villains of "The Manchurian Candidate," "The Contender" or "The American President"?

When was the last time you read a serious novel in which a full-time wife — not just a mother, but a wife — was happy with her life choice as opposed to being a Stepford robot or a trapped bird a la "The Hours"?

When was the last time — outside of pabulum like "Left Behind" or "Seventh Heaven" — you saw an intelligent Christian who wasn't a priest or a milquetoast or Mel Gibson?

It's not that I don't enjoy the stories being told by American artists — I do. And I'm not suggesting that the arts should be traditionalist in intent. I just think they should be more — pardon the word — inclusive.

To the contrary, all movie heroes are conservative--if the plots of their films weren't moralistic we wouldn't accept them as heroes. A case in point: watched XXX this weekend, in which the hero is a libertarian extreme sports type guy who becomes a secret agent. What's his mission?: to stop an anarchist group that is trying to destabilize the worlds governments and unleash complete "freedom." It was like a buff Bill Bennett vs. the Cato Institute.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 24, 2004 8:46 AM