February 13, 2005
PAULINE KAEL WAS RIGHT IN THIS INSTANCE:
How Dirty Harry Turned Commie (Frank Rich, 2/13/05, NY Times)
Just when it seemed that Hollywood had turned a post-election page in the culture wars, the commissars of the right cooked up a new, if highly unlikely, grievance against "Holly-weird," as they so wittily call it. [...]Hence, the campaign against Clint Eastwood, a former Republican officeholder (Mayor of Carmel, Calif., in the late 1980's), Nixon appointee to the National Council of the Arts and action hero whose breakthrough role in the Vietnam era was as a vigilante cop, Dirty Harry, whom Pauline Kael famously called "fascist." There hasn't been a Hollywood subversive this preposterous since the then 10-year-old Shirley Temple's name surfaced at a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in 1938.
No matter. Rush Limbaugh used his radio megaphone to inveigh against the "liberal propaganda" of "Million Dollar Baby," in which Mr. Eastwood plays a crusty old fight trainer who takes on a fledgling "girl" boxer (Hilary Swank) desperate to be a champ. Mr. Limbaugh charged that the film was a subversively encoded endorsement of euthanasia, and the usual gang of ayotallahs chimed in. Michael Medved, the conservative radio host, has said that "hate is not too strong a word" to characterize his opinion of "Million Dollar Baby." Rabbi Daniel Lapin, a longtime ally of the Christian right, went on MSNBC to accuse Mr. Eastwood of a cultural crime comparable to Bill Clinton having "brought the term 'oral sex' to America's dinner tables."
"What do you have to give these people to make them happy?" Mr. Eastwood asked when I phoned to get his reaction to his new status as a radical leftist. He is baffled that those "who expound from the right on American values" could reject a movie about a heroine who is "willing to pull herself up by the bootstraps, to work hard and persevere no matter what" to realize her dream. "That all sounds like Americana to me, like something out of Wendell Willkie," he says. "And the villains in the movie include people who are participating in welfare fraud."
What galls the film's adversaries - or so they say - is a turn in the plot that they started giving away on the radio and elsewhere in December, long before it started being mentioned in articles like the one you're reading now. They hoped to "spoil" the movie and punish it at the box office, though there's no evidence that they have succeeded. As Mr. Eastwood has pointed out, advance knowledge of the story's ending did nothing to deter the audience for "The Passion of the Christ."
Your scorecard is likely to look a tad cluttered if you try charting those paragraphs. Among other things Mr. Rich and Mr. Eastwood between them suggest that conservatives shouldn't be upset because the director is associated with California, Richard Nixon, Wendell Willkie, and fascism and comparable to God. Meanwhile they avoid the ugly irony that the story of a 'heroine who is "willing to pull herself up by the bootstraps, to work hard and persevere no matter what"' ends with her being killed like a dog, as the movie puts it. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 13, 2005 6:43 PM
Rich targets Limbaugh, Medved, et al, because for the people he's writing for, they're easy staw men to demonize. Far more troubling for Frank and those on the left will be if disabiled activists stage a major protest outside the Oscars against "Million Dollar Baby," especially if anyone from this family happens to show up in Los Angeles that night.
Posted by: John at February 13, 2005 7:01 PMIs it just me, or did Rich compare Michael Medved to the ayatollah? That alone has got to be some kind of corollary of Godwin's Law.
Posted by: Ed Driscoll at February 13, 2005 7:39 PMSomebody who posts here not frequently enough can render this properly. Frank Rich is a character out of 1984 (the George Orwell Novel), he is able to do duckspeak in the New York Times. It is like reading the script for ten minutes of hate, but instear of hating O'Brien, we are hating Bush.
I haven't read a whole Rich column in a long time. He is just as incoherent as MoDo and his mischpocha is not known to make any sense.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at February 13, 2005 7:45 PMJust another example of how all past sins will be forgiven if you just "grow" a little.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at February 13, 2005 8:20 PMEd Drisoll:
Murphy's Corollary to Godwin's Law -- "As a political debate grows longer, the odds of a liberal comparing a conservative to people whom the conservative wishes to forcibly remove and the liberal does not (Taliban, Islamicists, etc.) approaches one."
Posted by: Matt Murphy at February 13, 2005 8:59 PMRaoul,
I think your post is the closest to what is happening here. I heard the Rush bit and some of the Medved piece. I didn't feel either one was attacking Eastwood, or even opining that he must be cast from the fold for heresy. They loathed the direction the movie took and its positive take on euthenasia. This Rich piece seems to be trying to say, "Come home Clint. All is forgiven."