DARN CLEVER, THOSE ULTRALIBERALS

                     

Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro probably overstated the case when he claimed (and I paraphrase) that most or all of Hollywood had become obsessed with liberal concerns. Nevertheless, the rise of the so-called Progressives on the political scene has had an unmistakable impact, one mirrored in not a few fictional narratives. There’s no knowing whether the proponents of the narratives sincerely believe that their messages can change the world, or whether they’re chasing the latest trend to grab the attention of an increasingly fragmented mass audience. But the purveyors of Progressive fiction have for the most part been marked by a unique tone of strident righteousness, a determination to lecture rather than to persuade, much in common with such political types as Cory Booker and Rashida Tlaib.

Ultraliberal concoctions like THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI and the BLACK LIGHTNING teleseries are a long way from the earnest humanist works produced by Classic Liberals like Rod Serling and William Gaines. The latter worthies never doubted that American culture was seriously beset by demons like racism and rampant consumerism, and they were passionate to save America’s metaphorical soul.
But for ultraliberals and Progressives, that soul is not worth saving. In an earlier essay I pointed out how a couple of penny-ante ultraliberals touted their TV show by describing America’s history of slavery with the happy term “foundational.” This is a fancy way of restating an old Catholic formula: the newborn infant is guilty of original sin, and the only way to compel good behavior is to wash out—or maybe beat out—the devils.

However, the downside of condescending lectures is that few people like to be lectured, and that leads to counter-reactions. Some reactions are from unalloyed conservatives like Shapiro, and Hollywood is likely to ignore such protests.  However, producers are not nearly as likely to overlook box-office failures like 2018’s GHOSTBUSTERS and 2016's BIRTH OF A NATION. In the last few years Youtube has become rife with reviewers who continually protest the spread of Progressive hectoring, ranging from amateur film reviewers like the Critical Drinker to professional comics-artists like Ethan Van Sciver. Whenever a Progressive film or comic book fails to win an audience, such pundits exult that they have, at very least, discerned a meaningful counter-reaction against the politicizing of entertainment.

Of course, sometimes politicizing does make money, and Hollywood never forgets anything that makes money. Additionally, such raconteurs are also masters of camoflague, and some of them may seek to propound their beliefs more by implication than by righteous rants.

Case in point: a new 2020 NBC broadcast series, LINCOLN RHYME: HUNT FOR THE BONE COLLECTOR. The opening episodes of the series follow the general template of the 1999 Denzel Washington vehicle THE BONE COLLECTOR, showing the attempts of Rhyme and his team of profilers in their hunt for the elusive serial killer of the title. However, given that LINCOLN is a series, Rhyme’s team also has to go after other psycho-killers as well.

Episode two, broadcast on 1-17-20, hurled the Rhyme team against a serial murderer known as “the Wrath of God” because he terminates victims, whom he considers morally deficient in some way, with methods patterned on Greek mythological stories. Judgmental serial killers are nothing new in the crime and horror genres, of course, and the program doesn’t spend much time justifying the Wrath’s peculiar myth-happy psychology. But the script does seem unique in finding an additional scapegoat for the killer’s crimes.

The Rhyme team is unable to stop the Wrath from committing myth-murders in the show’s first half hour, but one of the killings supplies a clue, and that clue leads them to a local college. It seems that a female Classics professor, name of Antoni, is not only teaching mythology in that college as a guest lecturer, she’s also taught such classes in all of the cities where the Wrath operated. This association is enough for two of Rhyme’s detectives to seek Antoni out. The audience doesn’t find out exactly what Antoni teaches, since the detectives show up as her class ends, so the audience only hears Antoni describing some of the deaths of sinning mortals in Greek myths. The detectives, anxious to make a bust, act in a confrontational manner with Antoni, but since they have no actual evidence, she ignores their threats and takes her leave. Afterward, one detective says to the other, “Did you see how angry she was?” The script does not actually show Antoni being angry, only mildly annoyed, which suggests that the writer wants to set her character up for a fall.

In the last quarter-hour the team tracks down the Wrath and captures him while preventing one of his ritual murders. The Wrath’s reason for crafting his myth-deaths is not expanded upon, while his identity, an ordinary-looking middle-aged white guy, is also underplayed. This leads to Antoni’s second and last scene, which I argue is what the scriptwriter really wanted to portray. The detectives return to the college and arrest Antoni, claiming that they went through the Wrath’s effects and found a journal that implicates Antoni in the crimes. Case closed.

The unjustified remark about Antoni's "anger" proves interesting, since in modern times there’s a lot of very justifiable concern about murders arising from anger, particularly from spree-killers like the white supremacist Dylan Roof. However, it often seems like Progressives don’t care about murderers when they don’t conform to the model of  “the angry white male.” One sees an example of this attitude in Rashida Tlaib’s attack on the New Jersey supermarket killers, an attack she deleted when she found out that they were not white.

The episode does not make race an issue. However, the script’s insistence that the mythology professor MUST be implicated in the serial killer’s crimes strikes me as peculiar, given that the same script does not really justify this implication, aside from one detective’s remark. In the real world mythology and mythology professors usually have nothing to do with serial murder. However, one prominent celebrity professor, clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, has been (incorrectly) labeled an alt-Right apologist by many Progressives. Peterson does not teach or lecture exclusively about mythology or even about the literature of Classical Greece, though such subjects have appeared in his online lectures. But purely because Peterson questions the beliefs of the Far Left, he’s often labeled not only as alt-Right, but as an intellectual who appeals to “angry white men.”

Whether or not readers agree with my interpretation of this single episode, I predict that Hollywood scriptwriters will continue to propound ultraliberal scenarios. But in the near future, some may be a little less strident, and a little more sneaky, than was the case earlier.