Category Archives: Hollywood

"Brokeback" Bluster

Hollywood, Homosexuality, Media, The Zeitgeist

Letters received in response to “Brokeback Mountain Revisited” demonstrate that, to a difference in opinion, liberals mainly (only one conservative got nasty) respond with ad hominem. They can’t seem to argue, but boy, can they whine, vilify, and psychologize. I’d be ashamed to write the bunk they have written me, a complete stranger.

Contra conservatives, who demand that cultural products be primarily “moral,” I ask that they be good—there are objective standards by which popular culture or art can be judged. “Brokeback Mountain,” in my opining, didn’t meet these. So what’s the big deal?

A “homophone” would not have written this about another film—albeit a good one—involving sexuality and love:

‘The Crying Game’ is a truly unorthodox love story. Directed by an Irishman, and starring Stephen Rea, the superlative Jaye Davidson, Forest Whitaker, Miranda Richardson (Queenie of “Black Adder”), and Adrian Dunbar—the 1992 British drama/thriller was everything Brokeback wasn’t. There was no accompanying advocacy, only an achingly bare and beautiful love story with a twist, against the backdrop of terrorism and intrigue.”

Here’s a note from Roger Lord, who says he is an academic. This is the face of academia (and it’s not unique: read more about the exploits of liberal academics here). The gist of his Rumpelstiltskin’s rage is that I’m a fraud and a homophobe because I disagree with him. And this simpleton teaches? Can you imagine what he inflicts on dissenting students?

Hello,
I’m a University Professor in Canada. I read your pretentious comment on Brokeback Mountain on-line and find it totally stupid and ridiculous. I think you’re way off track… as well as an obvious homophobe. [Is that why I wrote that the love scene in “Midnight Express” was “artful and achingly sad”? There you have it: he lobs insults irrespective of the evidence against his thesis]
So you happened to see Brokeback Mountain on an airplane screen during a flight!? And you find that you have the right to make a judgement!? You can’t be serious! It’s like judging the quality of a pizza by eating the advertising flyer that was put in a mail box. You’re obviously simply a fraud.
….I think that Brokeback Mountain is undeniably one the best and most important films in recent years… nothing short of a true masterpiece! Surely, one of the most moving and well paced films I have ever seen in which silence speaks louder than words… love speaks louder than words.
Brokeback Mountain might have simply been too subtle, too true, simply “too good” …. yes, the feelings expressed in BBM are probably much too sincere and too profound for you.
I won’t bother reading your column again…
—Roger Lord

**
James J. Barker also didn’t like my take, but for the opposite reason. He declares me “as perverted as the ‘Brokeback’ crowd,� bolstering his claim with passages from the Bible, after quoting these few lines from the column:

“…the artful and achingly sad … scene in ‘Midnight Express’â€? and “Once interesting and iconoclastic, all gays seem to crave now is the State’s pension and seal of approval.”

“Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination” (Leviticus 18:22).
“If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them” (Leviticus 20:13).
“Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient” (Romans 1:24-28).

**
Here’s another fit of pique. It starts by articulating perfectly reasonable differences, then descends into insults:

“I am a middle-aged, life-long heterosexual Englishwoman: “Brokeback Mountain” changed my life. I have never been a particular fan of the sort of exhibitionist gays who go on Gay Pride marches and thrust their sexuality down everyone’s throats, making claims for themselves as a group who should be specially privileged, but this movie had nothing to do with them. Some of the scenes had the most amazing beauty of composition and content; the story itself is an authentic tragedy. I find your views to be insensitive, ill-informed and altogether typical of those with a pre-detemined [sic] agenda. How sad to be cut of [sic] by closed-mindedness and the desire to make cheap, supposedly entertaining, points.”

—Jan Thomas

**
Writes Lyle Palaski (and I’ve disposed of the worst personal insults):

Dear Ilana Mercer,

I read your “Return to Brokeback” article. What “you” returned to was spouting your own fears and prejudices. For people of any stripe, who cannot look at a great piece of art like Brokeback Mountain, and relate it to their own lives in some way is very sad.
…I know that writing to you is futile, but it’s more sad [sic] to me that there are people like you in the world, although it helps me understand why it’s in such a terirble [sic] mess as well…I suggest you look in that mirror and see what is reflecting back to you.

**
There were others, but this is quite enough of a sample of what passed for discourse these days.—ILANA

Brokeback Mountain Revisited

Film, Hollywood, Homosexuality, Media, Private Property

From “Brokeback Mountain Revisited“:

“That gays have such a vested interest in this dreary and dull film indicates that, like Hollywood, they too have become colossal bores. Once interesting and iconoclastic, all gays seem to crave now is the State’s pension and seal of approval. They ought to go back to the days of the Stonewall Riots, when the police’s violations of privacy—and private property—were the object of their anger and activism.

More poignantly, if, in Ayn Rand’s magnificent words, ‘civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy,’ then sexual activism or exhibitionism—homo or hetero—is anathema. All in all, it’s most regrettable that the closet has come to signify oppression rather than discretion”.

Brokeback Boredom

Film, Hollywood, Homosexuality

The film “Brokeback Mountain” was available for viewing on my BA flight back from the Britain, last month. As a captive audience, I twitched through half an hour of the thing.

I have very little patience for Hollywood fare. I used to love the cinema. But that was before the motion picture industry forsook good scripts and well-developed characters for storylines fit for a stun-gunned audience, with the attention span of a nit, and an ability to focus only on fast-moving or imploding animated objects and characters as flat as pancakes.

Movies with a message are especially irksome, although film has almost always come with a moral. “Midnight Expresses” or “Deliverance” had messages, but they were incidental to the story. Because the people involved in movie making are much less talented nowadays (not an implausible thesis, and perfectly compatible with Charles Murray’s in his monumental, “Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950“), and because they think in clichés, the overall effect on the viewer is that of a giant wagging, prodding finger. They really get in your face and stay there—for two hours, plus.

Peggy Noonan once said succinctly that “George Clooney is a fellow who read an article and now wants to tell us the truth, if we can handle it.” George Clooney or Ang Lee (Brokeback’s director); it’s all the same to me. To pay for a two-hour-long sermon in the guise entertainment is not my cup of tea.

About the gay thing I’m agnostic. If, however, in Ayn Rand’s magnificent words, “civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy,” then sexual exhibitionism—homo or hetero—is anathema. All in all, it’s most regrettable that the proverbial closet has come to signify oppression, rather than discretion.

Like Hollywood, gays too have become colossal bores. Once interesting and iconoclastic, they now want nothing more than the State’s pension and its stamp of approval. They ought to go back to the days of the Stonewall Riots, when the police’s violations of privacy—and private property—were the object of gay wrath.

After sampling bits of Brokeback—it was horrible—I quickly went back to my book. Heath Ledger as Ennis (an unfortunate name) Del Mar tried to emulate Marlon Brando’s potato-in-the-cheek mumbling in The Godfather. A bad idea today as it was then. The “love scene” between the two men was, as my daughter suggested, like a bear fight. And as sexy. The only sympathetic, ever-so-sad character was the betrayed wife and her neglected babies.

Brokeback’s bathetic tagline was “Love Is A Force Of Nature.” I didn’t get that feeling at all from this flick. I got it in spades from, say, “The Crying Game,” a truly unorthodox love story. Directed by an Irishman, and starring Stephen Rea, the superlative Jaye Davidson, Forest Whitaker, Miranda Richardson (Queenie of “Black Adder“), and Adrian Dunbar—the 1992 British drama/thriller was everything Brokeback wasn’t. There was no accompanying advocacy, only an achingly bare and beautiful love story with a twist (which I cracked right away), against the backdrop of terrorism and intrigue.

Holland Keeps Afloat; Why Can’t New Orleans?

America, Europe, Government, Hollywood, Technology

It ought to be called The Anatomy of a Disgrace. The latest word on why the levees of New Orleans failed, faults their design, construction, and maintenance. In shorthand: everything about them!

I have not read the report, however, if it didn’t, it ought to have mandated, first, that the US Army Corps of Engineers be summarily dismissed—and then dismantled. And second, that the job be privatized. And pigs will fly, I know. Since these solutions are a pipedream, let our excuse for an Engineering Corps be forced to visit The Netherlands, and and learn from the masters who designed the great Maeslant Storm Surge Barrier in Hoek van Holland.

You must have heard the saying, “God created the world and the Dutch created the Netherlands.” This is not an exaggeration:

“The name the Netherlands refers to the low-lying nature of the country (nether means low). Its highest point is the Vaalserberg hill in the south east, which reaches 321 meters above sea level. Many areas in the north and west, constituting more than 25% of the total area of the country, are below sea level. The lowest point near Rotterdam is some 6.7 meters below sea level.

I believe New Orleans is only about 3 meters below sea level.

Earlier this month I visited the Maeslant Storm Surge Barrier, a true monument to human ingenuity. Engineers should find the information on this site fascinating. The mechanism is described as follows (I watched the mini-models in action):

“If a water level of 3.00 meters above NAP is anticipated for Rotterdam the Storm Surge Barrier in the New Waterway has to be closed. In these circumstances the Storm Surge Barrier computer – the Command and Support System (Dutch acronym BOS) instructs the Control System (BES) to shut the barrier. The BES implements the BOS’s commands.

In the event of a storm tide, the docks are filled with water, so that the hollow gates start to float and can be turned into the New Waterway. Once the gates meet, the cavities are filled with water and the gates sink to the bottom, thus sealing off the 360 meter-wide opening. After the high water has passed the gates are pumped out and the structure begins to float again. Once it is certain that the next high water will not be another abnormally high one, the two gates are returned to their docks.

When the New Waterway is sealed off it is no longer possible for shipping to pass. The storm-surge barrier will only be closed in extremely bad weather—in probability once every ten years. A test closure will probably be conducted once a year in order to check the equipment. This will be done when there is little shipping. With the rise in sea levels the storm-surge barrier will need to close more frequently in 50 years time, namely once every five years.

Incidentally, CNN subjects us to endless Katrina kvetching from its edgy, newest, girl reporter, Anderson Cooper. But Cooper is no journalist; he’s an instrument in the Oprahfication of the news. Has he done a story on how the Dutch stay afloat? Of course not; why supply your viewer with useful information, when you can continually tug at their heartstrings instead? Or has he deigned to report on how many people died due to the colossal collapse of these Third-World compatible structures? We still don’t know.