JOHN STOSSEL: Hollywood vs. Individualism.
In my new video, I interview libertarian Timothy Sandefur, author of the new book, “You Don’t Own Me.” He says, “The title comes from the famous song by Leslie Gore, saying, I’m in charge of my own desires, dreams. I’m responsible for my own self.”
“That’s kind of obvious.” I point out.
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The flop “Strange World” is a kid’s movie about a society that relies on a power source called Pando. Leftist scriptwriters, selling climate hysteria, have the hero say: “If we want to survive, Pando has to go.”
The good guys happily destroy their main source of energy.
Sandefur mocks the stupidity, “Living without today’s energy technology doesn’t just mean doing without warm coffee. It means doing without ambulances when you have a heart attack, doing without an airplane to carry people’s organ transplants. Doing without today’s energy technology would be a colossal disaster for the human race. Yet the movie kind of ridicules that concern.”
When woke movies fail, Hollywood often blames the audience.
After remaking “Charlie’s Angels,” director Elizabeth Banks said, if this movie doesn’t make money, it’s because “men don’t go see women do action movies.”
But that’s just dumb.
Didn’t Banks notice that men helped make the original “Charlie’s Angels” TV series a hit? Did she not notice “Kill Bill,” “Aliens,” “Tomb Raider,” “Resident Evil” — lots of successful action movies feature female leads.
“The reality,” says Sandefur, “is that people are not interested in another lame remake that satisfies all the politically correct tests.”
“Films that are individualistic,” he adds, “tend to be very successful.” But “Hollywood wants to propagandize to us about the evils of individualism.”
As “George MF Washington” wrote last month in “Movies as Weapons of Spiritual Warfare:”
Even the great comedies of the 80’s featured men of no special ability courageously laying it all on the line for Civilization against overwhelming odds. At the end of “Ghostbusters” after it becomes clear that the only way to stop Gozer from destroying the world is to sacrifice their own lives, blue collar “scientists” Venkman, Egon, Ray and Winston head out to meet their fate with stoic good humor.
“See you on the other side, Ray…”
“Nice working with you Doctor Venkman…”
“Edelweiss… Edelweiss…”
One of the reasons why American men, from Generation X in particular, keep coming back to movies like “Ghostbusters”, “Master and Commander”, “Gladiator”, “Braveheart” “The Great Escape”, “The Lord of the Rings”, and even “Die Hard” and “Predator”, is precisely because, as Men of the West, we are hard-wired to fantasize about how we will meet our own confrontations with “The Big Evil”, when and if those confrontations come. Modern American culture tends to look down upon this uniquely male instinct with ill-humor, if not outright derision. These kinds of male-coded sentiments are considered old fashioned at best, explicitly toxic at worst. Which is a shame, because the big studio movies we once made to cater to this male instinct for adventure, risk-taking and the instinctual defiance of Evil remain some of the greatest and most compulsively rewatchable films ever made.
Related: Mark Hamill Tried Give Star Wars’ Original Trio A Reunion.
Hamill was also right on a narrative level. As he pointed out, Star Wars is never strictly “Luke’s story” or “Obi-Wan’s story,” but an ensemble myth where veteran characters guide the next generation. Alec Guinness’ Obi-Wan played a pivotal role without overshadowing Luke’s arc. Bringing Star Wars‘ original trio back would have only reinforced the sequel’s trilogy passing of the torch. Instead, brushing Han, Luke, and Leia aside in the name of focus ultimately weakened the sequel trilogy.
When it comes to storytelling, Hollywood has been determined to defy its audience for many years now, so it shouldn’t be surprised when that audience reciprocates. In 2024, James Lileks predicted the future of AI art and video: Art That’s Just for Me.
In the end, we will watch our own movies more than others, and the theatrical experience will have gone from the great shared silver screen in the communal dark, to niche streaming, to watching our own particular curiosities and desires played on our own glowing rectangles. Millions of hours of movies, made for an audience of one.
Which is the logical conclusion of Hollywood making movies for its boardrooms instead of its audiences.
