The Broken Back of Counterfeit Liberalism
By Karin S. Coddon
6-26-06,
Months after the event, an event that I concede is the quintessence of triviality, I am still pissed. I’m pissed that the Academy Awards snubbed Brokeback Mountain in favor of the “surprise” choice of Crash, a film described by Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan as a “feel-good movie about racism.”
It’s not that I am a rabid cinephile or that Brokeback, which I truly loved, was the best or boldest film I’ve ever seen. Nor is it simply that the Brokeback slight was clearly fueled by a combination of homophobia and cowardice. But several friends and I remained angry for the next couple of days after the Oscars. My sister and I remained angry for a good two weeks.
Here it is months later, and I’m still fuming. My spleen was jump-started by my coming across an old issue of Entertainment Weekly in which one of my literary heroes, Stephen King, also takes the Academy to task over bypassing Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture.
One of King’s comments particularly struck me, gesturing as it did toward the true basis for my umbrage in excess if not of the facts, then of the context. The Academy, observes King, is at heart “as conservative as the current U.S. House of Representatives” (EW 858, Mar 17, 06, 126).
Exactly – yet mainstream political culture continues to label Hollywood “liberal” and thus out of sync with the values of the heartland, just as the right-wing punditocracy assails “tenured radicals” whose rarefied and indecipherable post-fill-in-the-blankism is cited as proof of a concerted leftist indoctrination project. Both targeted and demonized by the right-wing side of the “culture wars,” Hollywood and academia alike proudly wear the banner of contestation while remaining in essence as reactionary in membership and institutional practices as their adversaries on the right. The banner of contestation is in reality the emperor’s new clothes. These liberal bogeymen play the valuable role of lightning rod against which the right wing can rally the troops even while knowing that these threats are as counterfeit as the Red-under-every-bed of the 1950’s.
Thus for me the Brokeback Mountain incident embodies – and lays bare – the vacuity at the core of much of what passes as culturally subversive in this, the Bush era: the self-deceived complicity of those demonized as much as the facile demonization. I am left to ponder two questions. First, what are the available modes of leftist contestation if popular and academic culture offer only safe, sham versions? And second, with the rare acts of honest liberal/leftism – Fahrenheit 9/11, gay marriage legislation, even Randi Rhodes’s passionate anti-Bushism on Air America Radio – appropriated as mobilizing tools by the right no less effectively than the faux liberalism of Hollywood and the university, is a refusal to engage at all the only remaining option? Is it better to say nothing than to risk feeding the reactionary beast?
Let me address this latter point first. A friend of mine in the Bay Area, with whom I generally see eye-to-eye on political matters, is bitter to this day over San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s attempts to legalize gay marriage. For her, all Newsom’s doomed gesture did was play into Republican hands in 2004, providing sure impetus for a big evangelical Christian turnout. But consider the alternative, I counter. Should our various elected leaders affect either indifference or acquiescence to oppressive social policies for fear of galvanizing the opposition? This, sadly, is the strategy of most Democrats in Washington: keep quiet and wait for the bastards to hang themselves. It is a strategy that played a key role in inflicting two terms of Bush upon the nation, and one whose continued practice bodes ill indeed for 2008.
The same friend of mine, though she was just as outraged by the Brokeback snub, argues that the film industry merely blinked in the face of a guaranteed right-wing backlash had it given its top honor to Ang Lee’s controversial movie. But I think it’s perilous to downplay the role of homophobia. After all, isn’t cowardice precisely what allows us both to obfuscate and rationalize bigotry? Moreover – and I admit this may be erroneous and indicative of my own prejudices – does anyone really think Jack Nicholson cast his vote for the gay cowboy movie?
Or maybe Jack is one of the good guys, for all I know. Honest liberalism, though often chastised by many of us on the hard left for its timidity and accommodationism, can serve a progressive function; while it may not provoke sudden, radical epiphanies leading to structural intervention, it can help nudge the undecided, or provoke reflection from those who might not have given much thought to an issue theretofore. It’s probably true that most of the people who went to see Brokeback Mountain or Fahrenheit 9/11, for that matter, were at least not predisposed against these films’ respective themes. (To be fair, you couldn’t have paid me to see The Passion of the Christ.) But nearly impossible to quantify are the subtle shifts in social and political attitudes these works of popular art might have germinated. Coincidence or not, two years after Fahrenheit 9/11, the highest-grossing documentary to date, most people oppose the war in Iraq and believe Bush lied in making his case for the invasion. Might Brokeback Mountain yield similar, incremental changes in attitude? Perhaps, but how much stronger a chance the movie would have had to foster such a shift had it received the Best Picture award, a proven catalyst for increased box-office and DVD revenues.
Obviously, then, fear of rocking the right-wing boat is as unacceptable as outright prejudice. But, to return to my first question, is authentic contestation even possible in the current political climate? I write this in the immediate aftermath of the May Day boycott by immigrant workers and those in solidarity with them. Already the mainstream media is dismissing the notion of any tangible effects of the nationwide one-day strike, but this perspective is as short-sighted as it is self-serving. The boycott was a costly wakeup call to those who both exploit and denigrate immigrant labor. Moreover, there is good reason to hope that it will spark similar collective activism against the war, the epidemics of poverty and racism exposed by Katrina, the institutionalized inequities of our economic system. Given the importance of collective activism, the boycott is a reminder that radicals and honest liberals can, and should, work together.
My sister, who really is a film aficionado, told me that the Oscar results tempted her to boycott all Hollywood movies. While not even I think the Academy’s shameful decision merits mass protest, the point was well made. Each of us has the powerful right of refusal – to work, to purchase, to remain silent in the face of injustice. It is a right rendered all the more potent when exercised en masse. And it is a right abdicated every time the “safe” choice is made, whether in the faux-liberalism of Hollywood, the confusion of teaching Deleuze and Guattari with active radicalism, or worst of all, the conviction that protest is futile.
--Karin S. Coddon is a freelance writer living in Southern California. Send your letters to the editor to pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/3700/1/195/ 
