Matt Dillon: I was wonderin’ if you were going to come to say goodbye.
Kitty Russell: I was wonderin’ too. It isn’t easy.
Matt Dillon: No, Kitty, it isn’t.
Kitty Russell: Matt, I-I don’t you want to think… Well, it isn’t that it’s…
Matt Dillon: Kitty, we’ve never needed explanations, have we?
Kitty Russell: No. Goodbye, Matt
Matt Dillon: Goodbye, Kitty
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Thanks for this. It brings back great memories not only of Gunsmoke but of Wyatt Earp, Have Gun Will Travel, Wanted, Dead or Alive. I looked forward each week to all of them. They took the Lone Ranger formula and raised it to a higher level. Then came Maverick which added a degree of wry humor. These helped raise a generation of young boys giving them models of young men to emulate.
Why?
Compare what children watch today, vampire stories and soft core porn, to what was watched 50 years ago. Will the lessons yield different results? The Boomers created a mess despite the fine examples of self reliance and justice that prevailed in popular entertainment they grew up with during the 1950s – 60s. Is there a connection bewteen inputs and outputs?
2. walter sobchak – go ahead – complete it – what, when where how – why is a comment ??
I have always thought that if reality was sustained by facts, progress was formed of dreams. By definition all dreams are “lies” insofar as they are not truths. But in that untruth lies the hypothetical of our freedom; the dreams we choose may paradoxically be the most important choices of all. GB Shaw in “Back To Methuselah” has the Serpent telling Eve that he could define the road forward by choosing what he wanted:
It would be interesting to write a history of our civilizational dreams, how they changed over the years; and whether we are better off with our new ones. As a teenager I read the Prisoner of Zenda, The Four Feathers and books of that sort. For entertainment I watched Gunsmoke and Father Knows Best. And though they were fictions, perhaps those fictions guided my search for the truth.
At least they told me, when I was confused or uncertain, how “Rudolf Rassendyll” would act, or what “Matt Dillon” would do in a similar situation and by that suggestion, subtly guided me along. The fictional characters provided me, and probably millions of others, with a yardstick of what I regarded to be honor. And by that belief, these fictions came, by a degree, to be true. I can’t help but think of the last lines of the Velveteen Rabbit; of the power of choice to make dreams real.
Well, goodbye Marshal Dillon, and thanks.
I didn’t realize until I read his Wikipedia entry that he was awarded a Bronze Star for his actions during the Anzio assault.
2. Walter Sobchak
“Why?”
Why not?
Sorry Richard but I didn’t think the FNG’s would catch it.
Slow freight through the junction lately.
Velveteen Rabbit
I don’t get it, doesn’t this like reverse the meaning of Pinnochio? Should dreams come real of themselves?
One of my top-ten-for-all-time favorite quotes came from Gunsmoke. In a scene where Doc was telling Festus Hagin how much wisdom would be available to him if he would only learn how to read, Festus balked at whether books were trustworthy, and replied:
“How do you know the feller what wrote the readin’ wrote the readin’ right?”
No one could answer him in the show, and I’m still working on figuring out the answer, too.
m/6, you can see him limping –he made it look like that longtime-on-hossback roll.
w/5, went looking for a good youtube performance of Guantanamera back on that nearby thread, and noticed that the slow three quarter time i was used to, was back in the 1960s way upbeat –even samba time, like Celia Cruz in the vid i linked. Couldn’t help but have thje same thought about the dream –Somber Guantanameras? Oh no time for THAT back in the 60s. Ms Cruz is full of joy, and it ain’t nostalgic, either.
Last thought, the old fascist GB Shaw, with his insanely arrogant ‘i dream of what never was, and ask ‘why not?’ (which Bobby Kennedy worked into his speeches, tho i’m surprised he didn’t use TS Eliot to contrast his brother’s Robt Frost), contrasted to the powerful quartet from Gunsmoke –esp when they were all together, parsing a problem. Doc with his mumbling cantankerous judgement, Chester with his sworn duty never questioned, Dillon, dangerous fires banked by the close watch of the steady and magnetic Kitty, the four of them improving the world where they found themselves. Shaw and his drawing room Fabians, cooking up My Fair Lady because we all know there is something terribly wrong with being a Cockney lass, but if young and beautiful one might merit the master’s effort to change her –and make her like it, to boot. Naw, Dillon and crew would not have even thought to think that way –they’d have welcomed her as is, and enjoyed her company.
I vote for–
” I know what you’re thinking, punk.
You’re thinking
“did he fire six shots or only five?” Now to tell you the truth I forgot myself in all this excitement.
But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and will blow you head clean off, you’ve gotta ask yourself a question:
“Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?
There was a Terry Pratchett book “Hogfather” that had a passage in which the character Death talks about the importance of myths. I can’t remember it verbatim but Death makes the point that it is by accepting the lies that are myths as truths that makes it possible for concepts like honor, justice, mercy, and decency become real. If you crushed the universe down and sifted through it you would not find those things.
Former Spook has an excellent write up of Arness/Gunsmoke here:
http://formerspook.blogspot.com/2011/06/james-arness-rip.html
Long ago, and far away. . .
onesimus
Before Gunsomke on television, there was Gunsmoke on the radio.
Okay guys, no fair googling. Which one of you can tell me who was
the radio Matt Dillon? Come on now. Gotta be somebody with a long memory out there.
William Conrad.
It’s 2 am and the neighbors are emptying a rifle at something. Heard about a dozen shots, obvious reloading and rinse/repeat efforts.
Well, I hope it needed killing whatever it was. Unfortunately, I suspect it was a late night altercation taken to it’s conclusion.
Bugs me. And not just cause it woke me up…
Buddy at #10.
“Guantanamera” was the codename for an attitude, which has to be poorly understood to truly enchant. Maybe youth is like that: the possession of things in the half-light of ignorance, made magical by that partial darkness. So you are right, there are no somber Guantanameras. Any somber version is emotionally inauthentic.
Of a piece with Guantanamera was “La Bamba”. Although everyone associates it with Ritchie Valens it really derives its power from suggestion and ambiguity of its many variants. The Sandpiper version of La Bamba has the same quality of indefiniteness. It intimates romantic tragedy to an audience that can feel it only in the anticipation of youth. Not the thing in itself but the imagination of it. “Yo no soy marinero, por ti sere”. It’s a place you come to after “Gunsmoke”, the land of chiarascuro that succeeds the bright day. The time when you want to lose it after being so sure of it all.
When you think about it, “Guantanamera” and “La Bamba” come from a different place in the soul than Chester, Miss Kitty or Doc. And I would venture to say that no one should attempt the desperately romantic until his feet has first been set on the ground by Marshal Matt Dillon.
w/18, so true –to dodge Ambiguity, you start in Dodge City, where the four directions in form as Chester, Doc, Miss Kitty, and Marshall Dillon are in the Long Branch just upwind of the Stables. They already know, but you don’t yet, that you cain’t git to Ambiguity without taking the trail through Certainty, a seemingly quiet place which goes all to Hell at night.
A/17, how’d it come out? Is you amongst the living still?
PS, maybe worth a chuckle, as a mental image, but those Spanish language ‘yearning for her’ songs that made it big in 60s USA, often have the girl coming close but then passing, as La Bamba hints, or the Girl from Ipanema, or the Guantanamera ‘guajira guantanamera’ second line, as if she’s approaching in the first line, ‘ah, the girl from Guantanamo’ but then passes on by, becoming the ‘guajira girl from Guantanamo; the rustic peasant girl from Guantanamo (who passes me by, no doubt because as a rustic peasant she has no taste). It’s the same rue as the ‘Borscht Belt’ comics used –such as Rodney Dangerfield,
“My girlfriend called me up and said ‘come on over, nobody’s home’ –so I went on over. Nobody was home!”
one more comment, to note that ‘Gunsmoke’ lasted one whole classic generation, 20 years, 1955 – 1975. And that gunsmoke is what lingers in the air afterwards –after the gunfire stops –smelling of struggle, obscuring the aftermath, requiring of you to peer through the gunsmoke with some effort, to see what stood the ground: a man who must be a warrior who can win, a woman who must be brave and loyal, a young fella whose character must matter more than his sophistication, and an elder whose experience must be valuable.
15/16—yes, I listened to the old radio show; Conrad had a great voice. Years later I saw him in a supporting role in a movie (more than once, actually) and he didn’t look heroic at all: plump, saggy mustache, looked like the villain.
re #3 Blast from the Past
It’s interesting to note the not uncommon examples of blogers from the Gunsmoke generation,like Vanderleun and Neo-neocon, who breathed deeply of leftism and liberalism but in the end came to the more tragic and noble view of life embodied in programs like gunsmoke. So maybe the stories we immersed ourselves in as children and adolescents formed something within us that remained after all the leftist delusions wore away.
When looking at his bio, I was astounded to see that the brother of James Arness was Peter Graves – I had never known that before!
Now that I think of it, they did both have the same, square jaw and tall, athletic frame.
WWS #24: I knew they were brothers. And how many remember Peter Graves’ first TV show the Saturday morning “Fury?” It was about a spirted horse with the title name, and that is about all I recall. I think it basically was “Lassie” or “Rin Tin Tin” with a larger animal for the star. I recall reading that Arness complained that his brother Peter got a larger salary for “Fury” than he did for Gunsmoke. I wonder how much Fury the horse got.
I recall reading of a noteworthy episode of Gunsmoke, one that I do not recall seeing. Dillon and Festus hid in a barn to ambush a dangerous gang of criminals. Festus asked “Are we gonna arrest them Marshall?” Dillon replied “No, we are going to kill them.” And they did, shot 12 men down. No “Put your hands up!” And certainly no “You have the right to remain silent.” Just “Bang!”
I think that is the reason that films like “Die Hard” are so endearingly popular. It satisfied a deep American desire to get back to the basics. Don’t agonize over what you have to do. Just do it. The villan says “I’ll take it under advisement, Roy.” and the hero replies with “Boom!”
I wonder about foreigners who deride us as being “Cowboys” as they did Bush. It appears they have not seen Gunsmoke for 20 years straight or seen Die Hard 400 times like we have; if they had they might understand why we think that “put down” is so funny and how it typecasts them as being the people who say things like “I’ll take it under advisement.”
Strangely enough, the WWII Luftwaffe warning call over the radio when they were attacked by our fighters was “Indians.”
Back when they were writing on clay tablets it was, “What is it that a man should do?
Ride well, shoot straight, and always speak the truth.” Heard a lot of versions of that in cowboy movies.
I’ve noticed that for the most part, veterans and people who have seen the elephant don’t get upset about small stuff. Things that would drive me insane in the work place would roll of their backs like water off a duck. The WW II vets who went through the tail end of the Depression seemed to feel that everyday they had a job and no one was shooting at them was all gravy.
Later today, I will raise a glass to James Arness/Matt Dillon, and play my DVD video of Toby Keith’s “I Should Have Been A Cowboy”. Its first line is a tribute to Gunsmoke, Matt, and Kitty.
“I bet you’ve never heard ole Marshall Dylan say
Miss Kitty have you ever thought of running away
Settling down would you marry me
If I ask you twice and beg you pretty please
She’d of said Yes in a New York minute
They never tied the knot
His heart wasn’t in it
He just stole a kiss as he road away
He never hung his hat up, at Kitty’s place”
“I shoulda been a cowboy
I shoulda learned to rope and ride
Wearing my six-shooter, riding my pony, on a cattle drive
Stealing young girl’s hearts
Just like Gene and Roy
Singing those campfire songs
Oh, I should’ve been a cowboy”
Compare what children watch today, vampire stories and soft core porn, to what was watched 50 years ago. Will the lessons yield different results? The Boomers created a mess despite the fine examples of self reliance and justice that prevailed in popular entertainment they grew up with during the 1950s – 60s. Is there a connection bewteen inputs and outputs?
I’m assuming everyone or near everyone here has read or heard about Ben Shapiro’s new book on Hollywood, “Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV.” There is much to comment on in Shapiro’s book, worthy of a post in and of itself, but there’s one angle from the book which I think is especially relevant to this thread, and that is Shapiro’s observation that American TV shows have reflected those who create them & have transformed everything else. That’s Shapiro’s rebuttal to the argument that TV (and movies) just reflect the prevailing culture. No, he argues (and presents for evidence the myriad interviews he conducted), the content creators, esp. those in the last 40 years, have deliberately and intentionally injected messages into the content that were antithetical to the culture, reflecting the creators’ own views and NOT those of the majority of the American audience, for the purpose of mainstreaming those views.
So, yes, there is a connection between inputs and outputs. It may not be visible in a short period of time in the instance of a particular show … but, given time (a generation or two) and critical mass … the outputs will line up with the inputs to a degree that will either greatly please or greatly dismay, depending on whether you happen to agree or disagree with those inputs.
On a tangential but related note, last fall my screenwriting students asked me at one point whether there was anything that was well and truly verboten in terms of screenplay (movie) content. They were trying to gauge where the boundaries were.
I started my reply with six words: “Well, in the age of ‘Borat’…”
And everyone laughed.
Except it wasn’t just a laugh of easy amusement. It was a laugh of somewhat embarrassed self-recognition. “This is what our culture has come to ….”
Only it would not be true to say that there are no longer any boundaries. As Shapiro’s expose makes clear, and as has been observed on Belmont Club in plenty of other posts, there are boundaries and enforcers and penalties aplenty. It’s just that they are vastly different than they used to be as of a couple of generations ago. In some cases the new boundaries are the exact flip-side of the old boundaries. X or Y, which used to be condemned in virtually every instance, can now no longer be condemned at all and must be praised in virtually every instance. Trangressors of the new boundaries risk having one of THOSE labels slapped on them. Or worse. It costs you your livelihood.
I don’t even blame, per se, the Norman Lears and Larry Gelbarts and Fred Silvermans for writing and creating shows they believe in. That’s an inherently human thing to do — write what you believe in, believe in what you write — and conservatives, when in position to do so, have done and would do the exact same thing. It’s also a given that each side thinks the other’s views are wrong and considers it a negative when those ideas show up in creative content.
But there has to be an objective measure somewhere, and for me it’s the outputs — what kind of culture results from those views when taken to their logical conclusions. The left has fetishized transgression (not just transgression to produce ‘social change’ but transgression for transgression’s sake, i.e. transgression for the purpose of creating cultural chaos, “chaos” being valued as a good thing). Does this input of transgression result in a culture that is better to live in?
Let’s just take “bathroom humor” (the literal kind) as but one example of the kind of cultural transgression that the left has foisted on Americans via our entertainment.
Back in the early ’70s, “All in the Family” gave us, for what I believe was the first time, at least on TV, the sound of a “turlet” flushing. It brought huge laughs. The Flush became a staple joke in the series. And the point of the flush was ….? Probably some combination of: to be real, to be funny, and to shock.
The problem with shock comedy is that you must always increase the degree of the offense in order to keep getting a reaction. From The Flush, the leftists in Hollywood escalated to showing us: discussion of bathroom functions; taking the camera into the bathroom (but without showing urinals, and while people were not in there “doing their business”); to showing urinals and people in the act of, er, elimination; to fart sounds migrating from R movies (Blazing Saddles) to PG movies with tots en masse in the audience (Shrek); and, finally (so far), to showing Borat handing a bag full of feces (supposedly) to a female etiquette teacher.
Try as I might, I really can’t find the upside of this “get laughs by getting real” effort that Norman Lear kicked off. How are we a better society, a better people, for all this tidal swill from the bow(e)l?
A lesson for every culture wanting to know its future might be, “Show me your heroes, and I’ll show you your destiny.”
Matt Dillon was a hero archetype who stood for courage, honor, loyalty, and leadership. A culture that honors such virtues, via the inputs of its stories and myths, will reap rewards via outputs of citizens of high character. OTOH, a culture whose heroes are punks, snark artists, cowards and moral degenerates, will also reap accordingly, but it will be a considerably more ugly picture than the first culture.
The funny thing about art (or, to use a less high-falutin’ term, storytelling or creativity) is, it more or less requires boundaries in order to (A) have any meaning and (B) approach excellence. That is why transgression for transgression’s sake is, ultimately a self-defeating approach to creative endeavors, because it results in a race to the bottom where, after all the original taboos have been destroyed, a whole new set of taboos must be invented. Because, for whatever reason, the human psyche, the human soul, cannot seem to exist without taboos of some kind. Unfortunately, those 2nd-gen taboos, constructed ad hoc and in reactionary fashion, turn out to be uniformly far, far more petty and tyrannizing than the age-old taboos they replaced.
Conservatism’s taboos may be seen as harsh by some but they produce, IMO, a better culture. In the first place, conservatism gets points for honesty — it acknowledges, even advertists, that taboos exist. In the second place, conservatism gets points for realism — it argues that taboos are necessary for a healthy culture.
What leftists in the American entertainment business have dumped on us for 40+ years has been neither honest nor realistic. They decried the necessity of taboos and proceeded to systematically trash and violate every one of conservatism’s cultural boundaries, while constructing an empire of boundaries of their own that, surprise surprise, turn out to be wayyyyy more dehumanizing than what they replaced.
And they tried to argue and convince the rest of us that that empire of boundaries wasn’t there. But, like the invisible dog fence, we darn well knew it was there because, even though we couldn’t see it, we were getting zapped by it all the time.
Shapiro’s book shines the light on the fact that these jerks (my kind word) have known all along EXACTLY what kind of culture they were constructing, both in Hollywood and in America at large; have made no secret of it to each other all these years, while at the same time denying it over and over again to the rest of us; and have taken great pride in what they have wrought, which just so happens to have resulted in beaucoup material and power privileges for themselves.
to me, Gunsmoke may be set in the 1800′s (1850′s, 60′s, ??) but it is not “of that era”. Compared to say “The Searchers”, “Gunsmoke” just doesn’t seem right; it feels kind of generic late 50′s early 60′s tv fare. Plus, there is a reason Arnett was a tv star, and not a movie star…he just wasn’t that good/interesting of an actor. Still, nostalgia has it’s place in the scheme of things, so enjoy the memories
Compared to say “The Searchers”, “Gunsmoke” just doesn’t seem right; it feels kind of generic late 50′s early 60′s tv fare.
How do you define “right”?
Does “right” = “authentic”?
If so, then “The Searchers” also fails on a lot of counts. (While getting certain other things right.)
I dunno, “Gunsmoke” was before my generation and so it was never, personally, my cup of java, and TV Westerns as a genre had pretty much played out by the time I was growing up — it was mostly cops and doctors and private eyes in the late ’70s and early ’80s — BUT … there must have been a reason for “Gunsmoke” to have lasted for 20 years and to have been more or less THE king of TV Westerns. I suspect “generic” wasn’t that reason. A lot of people saw something, or many things, pretty darn good in it.
–it’s wild how close in time that whole era is to us. If you’re a boomer, your grandparent’s ma and pa were right in it. And the Industrial Age came up against the Stone Age, for real, in places like the Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee, while your grandma’s mom and dad were back east a ways wearing kneepants.
PS, –skipping right over the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, The revolution of agriculture and city, the Hellenic Golden Age and the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, the Gunpowder revolution & Medieval Era, The Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, Age of Reason and Age of Enlightenment. It should have a name, that collision –maybe the Age of Hallucination –except it wasn’t.
BTW, I have made this observation before on BC and it is not original to me …
… but, speaking of Westerns and urban cop shows, the latter are basically the modern iteration of the former. Both genres are (A) morality tales, about (B) the maintenance of civilization (or the breakdown thereof), with (C) a preoccupation with the role of violence in that civilization/breakdown, and (D) a particular moral stance on the merits of “the frontier” versus “civilization.”
If you want to get nit-picky, Westerns as a genre in movies (starting off with “The Great Train Robbery”) were nostalgia from the get-go, since the frontier was pretty much closed by the time the nickelodeons started popping up. But demographic trends usu. take a couple generations to unfold fully, and the urbanization of America was no exception.
The interesting thing is not so much the TV trend from Westerns to cop shows, as Americans moved off the farms and into cities and suburbs, BUT, what will the next iteration of morality tales about civilization be, genre-wise? (Some may argue that it is already here, in the form of sci-fi, and I guess there is a case to be made for that … wasn’t “Star Trek” originally pitched by Gene Roddenberry as ” ‘Wagon Train’ in space” ?) However, in terms of reflecting the de-urbanized and de-industrialized demographic trends of contemporary America, what is the physical setting of the tale of civilization, if not Western or cop drama?
–it’s wild how close in time that whole era is to us. If you’re a boomer, your grandparent’s ma and pa were right in it.
Buddy, I have marveled at how much changed in so short a time in the 20th century, if you were living in the West and esp. in America. Kitty Hawk > supersonic jets > Apollo 11 > Hubble and the ISS. And that is in just ONE area of technology, aero(nautics/space) travel.
Talk about your hockey stick graphs. Thousands and thousands of years in effort just to achieve sustained mechanized flight a few feet off the ground. But from THAT flight to the moon to Jupiter and beyond … just a century. Boom. What a trajectory.
“there must have been a reason for “Gunsmoke” to have lasted for 20 years and to have been more or less THE king of TV Westerns”
only 3x channels, and inertia.
the fact that it did last 20 years, tells you that it wasn’t particularly creative or original. they probably had a dozen or so plots they re-jiggered over and over. anyway…
–bw, the Big Themes are ‘operatic’ –and the westerns are ‘horse operas’.
Add ‘western’ to ‘civilization’ in your last sentence and the question answers itself. We found the stage to play our themes. In the western, the complexity is contained inside character, so the wide open spaces can be as wide and open as all outdoors, with plenty of room for a newborn future. The anti-hero movement is just the opposite –the character is simple, and lost in an exterior of complexity, where that room for a future has turned out to have meant the frontier, which the railroad men rode off with. But the possible is still out there -the Restoration –a legit goal says history, for them as can hold still fer gettin’ hoorah’d.
Oops fell off into True Grit! wot a flic –nother story –
bogie, don’t step on your line –kitty hawk to the moon, no century but merely 66 years –a Route 66, from one world to another, hey hey
cjm/35, if you take that cynicism with you to the Long Branch, Miss Kitty ain’t gonna take a second look at ya
…but this’ll cure ya.
http://www.cowboypoetry.com/strays.htm#Lasca
(scroll down and take a look at ”Lasca”, the real thang)
“Be careful, Matt.”
RWE@25: wonder about foreigners who deride us as being “Cowboys” as they did Bush.
It’s complicated.
From the Willie Nelson hit, music and lyrics by Ed (and Patsy) Bruce (1976):
…………..
Cowboys like smoky old pool rooms, clear mountain mornings
Little warm puppies and children, girls of the night
And them that don’t know him won’t like him and them that do
Sometimes won’t know how to take him
He ain’t wrong, he’s just different but his pride won’t let him
Do things to make you think he’s right
………………
This one song comes closest to defining the nostalgia evoked by the Cowboy profile. It is also pure Americana. It belongs to us and us alone.
But, in an interesting turn of fate, it is Willie Nelson himself who best exemplifies the fatal flaws in the psychological construct as we move into the 21st century: even strong silent types are required to pay their taxes and generally play by the rules.
Kissinger sullied the profile by subverting strength of character to service his personal ego. The FBI’s Cowboy phase came to an end after Ruby Ridge and Waco. The CIA trajectory has been a little different – from the wild days of the Cold War free-for-all to emasculation by The Church Commission, humiliation by the eruptions in the ME, and now looking at Petraeus who is no Cowboy.
I neither dislike nor worship the Cowboy. I think the profile is anachronistic and artifactual.
bl @ 37:kitty hawk to the moon, no century but merely 66 years –a Route 66, from one world to another, hey hey
yeah but since then it’s been all downhill, the road to Obamaville.
ok mebbe not all downhill, we got this here interwebs thingy, and that ain’t bad, and a powerful lot of new knowledge in astronomy and biology that isn’t always as appreciated as it might be. but riddle me this when will the next human step foot on the moon and just who is it that will put her there?
j/42, Lt. Col. Sum Yung Gai
Very interesting discussions. Movies and films can be for good or ill. Perhaps the good, as Wretchard and others indicated, creates frames of reference more than plans for action. The ills however, especially on television, is probably more powerful and corrosive than the good.
The observation regarding Doc, Matt, Chester, and Kitty drew me to reflect on Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, and on Sulu, Checkov, and Uhura. They were a softer group but shared many of their characteristics and had a greater “cowboy” factor than the subsequent Star Trek version.
The pioneer spirit existed in the first pilgrims to leave England. In its refined form it produced our Founding Fathers. It allowed us to win the west all the way to the Pacific. It is lost today. Neither the universities nor the MSM like it. Perhaps it is the casualty of progressivism; perhaps it was wounded by the left whose seeds were planted in the 1930′s. Or maybe it was urbanization and the separation from the earth and the wilderness. Electrification played a part, as did radio and then television itself. Together they homogenized the country over the next two generations, nearly eliminating regional accents and regional sensibility — for better and for worse.
Contempt for the pioneer spirit whose men carried “peacemakers” and whose women came across the plains in conestogas, stopped briefly to give birth to their babies, climbed back on the covered wagon, and proceeded west with their families, helps explain the way women like Sarah Palin are portrayed in elite circles.
I’ll take Matt Dillon as my chief law enforcement officer over Eric Holder any day.
Random ramblings:
Gunsmoke was High Noon, except a little longer.
The most popular branch of science fiction is called “space opera”, derived from “horse opera” derived from “soap opera” It was made popular by E.E. “Doc” Smith.
People love to watch the good guys win. It reflects, inspires and encourages them.
The Toy Story trilogy, especially TS3, was inspired by “The Velveteen Rabbit”.
Toy Story 3 and Up are the best movies made in the last 20 years.
Enough geezer blabbering.
When I was young and scared of the dark I imagined The Lone Ranger sat on my front porch and Tonto on the back step all night.
I then fell asleep comfortably believing that good was vigilant over evil and I was safe.
Would that I could still conjure this image when I awake at 4 am worrying about the dangers surrounding our Constitution, our freedoms and our economy.
No Matt Dillon or Lone Ranger will appear to protect our American way of life. As adults now the job is ours.
YBR #41: “I neither dislike nor worship the Cowboy. I think the profile is anachronistic and artifactual.”
You seem to have both gotten my point and missed it entirely. WE don’t call ourselves “cowboys” except perhaps for the graduates of OSU and the people who really do herd cattle, but the Nazis called us that and many of the Yerps still do, as a derogatory term. There aren’t exactly a lot of Westerns still on American TV. But the idea of The Cowboy seems to have more effect on Europeans than it does us, even today.
It is interesting that the Luftwaffe called American fighters “Indians” rather than “Cowboys” like their furher. My guess is that they did not want to fight Cowboys because that was who always won. “Men, today we are going up against a bunch of American Cowboys.” could not have been a good pep talk in 1943. Images of daring and resourceful men who shoot like demons and ride like they were born on a horse is not how you want to imagine your enemy.
Meanwhile, the USAAF training manual for the P-51 as well as North American Aviation trade journal ads featured Indians riding a certain breed of horse. You have to wonder what the German pilots thought when they realized the “Indians” had showed up mounted on Mustangs.
And when we sent forces to Afghanistan in 2001 some of them rode into battle on horses.
one of the funniest things i ever saw was an episode of Bonanza, dubbed into german:
“Hoss! Mach schnell!!”
I was more of a Wild,Wild, West fan
bogie wheel,
My short version of your elegant prose; Art is Grace under constraint. Without boundaries you do not have a Craft and you do not have Art. That is why any profession is called a Discipline.
My theory or may be really only a working concept is that the link from didactic inputs is only one factor molding the culture of each generation. Another force that may be on occasion greater is the natural tendency to react against the mores of the generation who are composing those lessons that are being delivered. The parents of the Boomers were the generation that experienced from their parents the full tide of Progressivism and the disillusion with Western Civilization after WW-I. The Boomers were fed Matt Dillon by their parents, the “Greatest Generation,” and many responded with socialism, bad sex, drugs, and toilet humor. The generation raised on the results and the preachy Leftist homilies of Law & Order and Without a Trace are rebelling in their own way.
Just as a point of interest….
Germans have been obsessed with the Cowboy and Indian genre for over a century. Karl Friedrich May popularized the western novel in Germany in the late 19th century and it is taught today in many German universities. The genre is as popular as ever in Germany and there are hundreds of Western Camps and powwows held across Germany each year attracting tens of thousands of participants.
It seems that the Germans actually have had more sympathy for Indians than cowboys, however.
“Ekehard Koch, an expert on relations between Native Americans and Europeans, has said hardly any other people have the same sympathy towards the Indians as the Germans. Dr Koch believes that the”myth of the noble savage”, the discontent with civilisation, the”restricted freedom caused by modern life and the wish to escape from the narrowness of German life” have all contributed to Germany’s fascination with the Hollywood ideal of the West.”
Blast from the Past @ 3: “Compare what children watch today, vampire stories and soft core porn, to what was watched 50 years ago. Will the lessons yield different results?”
If Whiskey were still with us, he would undoubtedly note that the only children watching vampires & soft porn are female. TV has become a female ghetto, and young males are now playing video games — mostly of the “shoot ‘em up” variety — rather than watching TV.
Whatever lessons young women learn from TV will be lost when the decades of budgetary stupidity result in inevitable “Peak Government”. For once, the New York Times will be right, and women & minorities will be hardest hit when big nanny government runs out of money.
Speculatively, both the young men who grew up playing video games and the young women who grew up watching slim female cops in high heels outrunning and outfighting young thugs may be more inured to violence as an answer when things go wrong. That could be tough on politicians and bureaucrats.
Nothing is forever and “Hollywood” is at the beginning of its sunset. Because of costs fewer movies are being made in California. Due to technological driven price reductions less and less of the equipment needed to make a movie is Hollywood dependent. For a long time you heard that they didn’t worry about money losing shows in the domestic market because they’d make it up with foreign sales. However production costs have gotten so high that they are starting to need those domestic sales. Now I read that foreign viewers are starting to consider it Hollywood productions misleading crap because more and more of them have spent some time in the US. I remember speaking to a guy from Iran that the US movie industry had done a lot of damage to the US in the Middle East. Good stories and scripts are starting to come from elsewhere. I’ve seen movies from South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and etc. with better writing and directing than what comes out of LA. Nothing is forever especially if you keep trying to sell a crappy product that nobody wants anymore. The monopoly is ending and alternative producers are starting to creep in.
On another note those early cop shows were allowed to be shown in repressive countries as an examples of how crime ridden the US was. Reports from some Eastern Europeans said what they remembered were policemen informing criminals of their rights and the restrictions the police operated under. Their own police had no such restrictions.
34: bogie wheel
At the start of my career I worked along side Gunnar Edenquist. Gunnar started his engineering career working for Glenn Martin while Martin still had his shop in Glendale, CA (c. 1919). He knew, and worked with, the young Donald Douglas, Jack Northrop, Bill Boeing and the Lockheed (sp.) brothers. Later, I worked with several of the principal designers of the Apollo and Shuttle rockets.
Then, too, my great uncle, Chet Sayles, told me stories that his mother told him: of crossing the continent in a covered wagon, of indian attacks, of giving birth to twins while sitting under a tree, and so on. He himself remembered wild indians and desperado, murderous, outlaws.
Things have happened fast in this, our very great, nation.
Look up T. R. Fehrenbach on the enduring legacy of the cow culture. Its heyday was the time of the trail drives, a brief period of time. However, the culture stayed on in less dramatic fashions.
Also read up on James Burnham and the managerial elite.
In the cow culture, the most elite of all was the Trail Boss. He had more authority and more power than industrial management ever dreamed of.
BUT: That authority and power came from having sucessfully shouldered full responsibility, and from nowhere else. Same ethic pertained back at the ranch
and went on and on. Where that ethic prevails, all men, including those “riding drag” consider themselves free men and rightfully so. Those societies function well and survive. Where authority is not balanced by responsibility, men do not consider themselves free and it is but a manner of time before those societies implode with or without outside influences.
Those who use cowboy as a perjorative are almost invariably those whose notions of propriety require the dysfunctional authority. Unless duly nuetralized they will wind up being mass murderers in search of helpless victims.
Those who use cowboy as an honorific have a much higher standard of personal behavior.
I have had the term applied to me both ways. Said experiences dovetail with lifelong observations. The cowboy will endure and help the rest of the human race to do the same.
The cowboys are still amongst us. Travel through the still formidable undeveloped areas of Arizona and you will find rodeos – not those WWF productions but real competitions demonstrating mastery of basic skills in bringing the steak to your plate. No pay. Just pride. Debate them if you will. Just don’t insult them. Bad decision.
RWE@47: You seem to have both gotten my point and missed it entirely.
I do that sometimes.
I’m ambivalent on the subject.
The Europeans can be so … European.
It is the ‘discipline,’ endurance and unwavering focus that gives substance to the Cowboy, but that makes for one boring movie so the image got sexed up by Hollywood, and, in the process, caricatured (to the point that the only stone left unturned was Brokeback Mountain which is neither here nor there.) The solitude of quiet character and unflinching resolve is not very Hollywood. That is the part that the detractors miss. As per usual, it’s what is left unspoken that’s important – something else I think the Europeans missunderstand on occasion. The ‘good’ Cowboy is skillful with his quietude; the ‘bad’ Cowboy not so much.
t@42: I’ve seen movies from South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and etc. with better writing and directing than what comes out of LA
Foreign product is running circles around Hollywood. It’s embarrassing. You’d think the shame alone would do in the industry.
56. YBR:
“Shame, Shame, come back Shame!”……another cowboy quits the movie biz.
t@57: Hollywood’s attitude seems to be more along the line: Frankly my dear I don’t give a d@mn.
A fascinating article for buffs; movie, and history.
“‘the Lone Ranger and Tonto” are given a bow:
Ugh. Hi Ho Silver ….
…-
“Stalin at the Movies
Peter Wollen
The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism by J. Hoberman
Temple, 315 pp, £27.95, November 1998, ISBN 1 56639 643 3
J. Hoberman’s book, appropriately enough, is a cinematic montage of reflections on the long-drawn-out demise of the former Soviet Union, seen through the eyes of a New York journalist and film critic: a process that began with the death of Stalin and ended with the sale of chunks of the Berlin Wall in Bloomingdale’s. Hoberman chronicles these events from the point of view of three related personae: the thoughtful Jewish New Yorker, reading the novels of Victor Serge or reconsidering the Rosenberg case; the compulsive film aficionado, intrigued by the representation of the Communist world in Soviet films, Hollywood movies and the work of the East European New Wave directors, such as Gyula Gazdag or Dusan Makavejev; and then the cultural historian, provoked by the appearance in a New York gallery of Sots Art, an ironic appropriation of ‘socialist’ art by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, into trying to understand the deeper significance of Socialist Realism. This fascinating book swoops and lurches from topic to topic, but the reader’s feeling of disorientation is more than compensated for by the exhilaration of the ride, which ends in a nightmare dream-sequence, a crazy amalgam of Hellzapoppin’ and October (‘an imaginary documentary projected on actual locations’) with the Rosenbergs cast as ‘the Lone Ranger and Tonto of Knickerbocker village’. In other words, a provocatively chaotic and hilarious book about a rigorously controlled and tragic era.
The most extraordinary section deals with the Soviet region of Birobidzhan, created by Stalin as a new Jewish homeland and located in the far east of Siberia, on the north bank of the Amur River. Established in May 1934, Birobidzhan was supposed to provide a shining alternative to Palestine, Yiddish-speaking and playing a positive part in the construction of socialism. Supported largely by fund-raising abroad – especially in New York – the dream project never attracted more than a few thousand Jews, only 20 per cent of the population by 1939, less than 5 per cent fifty years later, although a Yiddish newspaper and radio programme still plodded bravely on. Birobidzhan had been the victor in a struggle within the Jewish Section (yevsektsia) of the Bolshevik Party in the Twenties between the Far East, Belorussia and the Crimea as contending sites for a homeland for the Jewish nationality, in which the diaspora could gather and share joyfully in the task of constructing socialism, just like all the other nationalities – Georgians, Armenians, Chechen-Ingush and so on.
Stalin, it should be remembered, cut his teeth as a Party theorist on the conundrums of what was called ‘the nationalities question’ and was eager to try his hand at solving the Jewish problem once and for all in the real world of socialist construction, funded, to a considerable extent, by gullible comrades in America. Besides which, Birobidzhan was a long way from anywhere and might even serve as a bastion against Japanese expansion into Manchuria – two birds with one stone. For Hoberman the whole doomed experiment, a utopian scheme for modernisation and kolkhozisation of the luftmensh, was just another exemplary twist on Jewish Luck, the title of a strange Yiddish-language Soviet film of the Twenties, which shows the pathetic adventures of a down-at-heel marriage-broker, whose misfortunes in the Pale of Settlement should have led him to embark on the long journey to the banks of the River Amur, had Stalin already had his brainwave: instead, he ends his days in squalor, humiliation and defeat in the waterfront district of Odessa. The main part in the film was played by the great Jewish actor, Solomon Mikhoels, whose murder marked the beginning of Stalin’s anti-semitic campaign (‘rootless cosmopolitans’) after the end of the Second World War.
At the very end of his life, Stalin turned his mind once again to the ever-irritating Jewish Question.”
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n23/peter-wollen/stalin-at-the-movies
17. aaron
Target practice? 90% of gunfights occur at night. So one needs to practice at night.
I have a 15 meter steel hawser running between two trees. One end is higher and the tree is up hill. When I click the remote it releases a string bag with a medium sized fruit ( cantalope, pumpkin or watermelon) in it. Then we blast away as it slides down the hawser. Practice for head shots at moving targets in the dark. One never knows.
Muzzle blast become important in the dark. What is easy to ignore in daylight becomes all important in the dark. I don’t let people use rifles on my ‘range’. I use a garage door opener to bring the bag back up the hill and it is very jury rigged. Lots of loose wires, batteries, etc, for a stray round to find.
Buddy @ 39
Laska – Wylie & the Wild West
Momma, don’t let your cowboys grow up to be babies…
To follow up on the contrast between Hollywood versus foreign films, the Millenium Trilogy by the late Stieg Larsson (The Girl w/ the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played w/ Fire; The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest) is being adapted from the original Swedish into an English language version by David Fincher (with Daniel Craig cast as Michael Blomkvist and Ronney Mara as Lisbeth Salander.)
Early reviews of the highly anticipated remake of this cult classic suggest that Fincher is out to elevate his version of the film and seems intent from the trailer on capturing the full-on nihilistic depravity that Larsson sought to portray.
We’re a long way from cowboy country.
Mama don’t let your cowboys grow up to be depraved nihilists.
This thread is filled with nostalgia and sentimentality. It was something GB Shaw, who began his career as a critic, worked to eradicate even as the wildly popular musical (whose creation he blocked while alive) is filled with moving, elegiac tunes.
But his political influence won the day as the papers hired only critics — that we grew up with — who panned works of art that were filled with beauty or any strong sense of heroics — hence the rise of the anti-hero.
A few of us resisted, and so many fine works endured past the critics’ poisoned pens. Works such as It’s a Wonderful Life and Gunsmoke.
The danger is real that the fond memory of such creations may die with my generation commenting here today.
a/61, THANK you for that –who’d of ever thought that old poem –in verses like horse gaits, a walk here a trot there, some canters and a gallop –could be put to music. The performers solved the problem using that second lead, talking the text while the singer just lets the melody sort of tumbleweed thru the song. It’s great. It’s real purty, it brought a tear to an old fool’s eye.
Sigh. The edit feature did not appear, so I could not connect 64 to Buddy’s earlier inspiration, nor clarify “wildly popular musical” with “based on his play ‘Pygmalion,’” so that the connection was clearer to younger readers.
PS, out of respect to old Frank Desprez who wrote the poem back around 1880 somewhere around Langtry on the Pecos River in what is now Val Verde County, i need to advise that the musicians in ari’s link left out the tragic ending (see my link way above), taking leave of the story, no doubt because a live audience likes the upbeat, in the flush of romance.
ybr/63, a guy from Knopf –i think larrson’s editor as well as publisher –was on Imus show some months back saying the trilogy is an absolute publishing phenom, that they never can print enough copies by the formula. It’s in many languages now. The guy –Sonny Mehta –thinks the explosive interest is due to a feeling of real-world truth in the fictional vast and powerful world control conspiracy that eliminates obstacles with bribe and dope and snuff films and honeytraps, and because the protagonist pair, Swedish reporter and idiosyncratic female tech wizard, are standing up against this power like a couple of cowboys –deciding they had to fight, tho they knew it would mean their death.
So, that full-on nihilistic depravity, that’s what the heros are discrediting, not glorifying. And the writer (because, giving rise to much speculation, he died in his 50s, heart attack, a few years back with one or two of his trilogy not yet published) is actually the hero of his own fiction–which, if he’s the real life hero of it, then whatever it is, it ain’t fiction.
But if the work itself was full-on nihilistic depravity, we’d never have heard of it, it would have joined much other consumptive languishments in that niche market, if it got written at all in the first place, much less submitted and contracted and edited and staged thru all those profit and fame and influence-seeking optimistic capitalist work projects needed to bring it to market.
It’s like poor old Nietzsche, whose career was spent warning against exactly what he now is accused of advocating.
Cowboy integrity:
“I won’t be wronged; I won’t be insulted and I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people and I require the same from them.”
–John Wayne; The Shootist
Notice, he doesn’t say what will occur if he is wronged, but you kinda know what’s coming.
Today we call our lawyer…whether we’ve been wronged or not.
pf/66, thanks for using the ‘i’ word anywhere near –but it is wretchard’s ‘i’ word, and i had completely forgiotten about Pygmalion, wrongly attributing ‘My Fair Lady’ tyhe adaptation, to the old fabian plutocrat ambulatory oxy moron.
bl@67: So, that full-on nihilistic depravity, that’s what the heros are discrediting, not glorifying.
I know. I watched the full Swedish version. Larsson did ‘portray the nihilist depravity’ of the Swedish government and the Nazi exiles as a plot element. There is also a considerable element of nihilistic depravity in the sexual violence, which is raw and brutal. But I agree the two protagonists were classic cowboys – the good kind.
Some of the early buzz from the trailer is that the English adaptation may portray the sexuality of the Salander character as more objectified than sympathetic, which one would have to describe as typically American. To get a better sense of what I am trying to say, take a look at the movie poster with Daniel Craig’s arm carefully draped over Salander’s unclothed torso. The point being that the American version will likely be very gothic, dark, sexual, and, yes, with an emphasis on nihilistic behavior, which is a cultural realm removed from Roy and the gang.
On the Larson films. I had something of a giggle watching them as subtitled releases because the corruption and depravity was being portrayed as a product of the right. Whereas when I watched them there had been a spate of stories about members of the left in Europe getting nailed for taking foreign money from Russia and Middle Eastern despots, engaging in pedophilia,general government money stealing, and general donkey showing. I kind of wonder if this kind of cowboys “revenge” themed movie would have been made if had been about corrupt socialists?
ybr, but not from the guys Roy and the gang wuz up against –them black hat bank robbers & sich wuz so much inside Roy’s cultural realm that he had to quit singing and strumming his songs to the chirping zephyrs and strap on one of Mister Colt’s life or death machines, and go use it, or mean to.
bl/69: As our humble host is apt to note from time to time, he may set the stage (and he’d n’er admit how eloquently), but its the contributions of club members such as yourself who make this place the gem that it is.
Your comment opened the door for me to note how the critics HATE shows like that remind the audience that there are values worth having one cannot hold in one’s hand.
Your comment opened the door for me to note how the critics HATE shows like “Gunsmoke” that remind the audience that there are values worth striving for that one cannot hold in one’s hand. Marxism attempts to force all attention on economics — the material — and so cultural Marxism’s goals was and is fostered and abetted by the economic impact that its critics wield on artists and their art. Hence they tried to eradicate all noble sentiments by deeming anything that contained as the equivalent of pig excrement in which only pig’s like to languish. (I just thought of that simile, but I am willing to bet it’s too good to have been missed by earlier “progressives” and so I’m sure it’s been thought of before, if only in private letters.)
I still remember with nostalgy Steve McQueen from my youth. From then we played “cow-boys and Indians” in school play-grounds.
The equivalence by us would be “the gendarmes and the robbers”, though the “goods” weren’t always winning like in “westerns”, depends on the characters psychology and cleverness.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x849l4_generique-au-nom-de-la-loi-steve-mc_shortfilms
This thread is filled with nostalgia and sentimentality.
Wellllll, kinda-sorta-yes, but in a good way (which is probably how you intended the observation), and not just those things.
“Nostalgia” is, among other things, a connection with the past. Conservatism’s recognition that we stand on the shoulders of giants, and should therefore tread lightly and tinker little and only after much thought, is nostalgic in that fashion.
But sentimentality? I think emotion drives the left far more than it does the right.
There is a vastly practical need for myths and storytelling. Shared stories, esp. the more widely shared they are, are cultural mortar. They hold the bricks of a civilization together. The stories transmit such things as: (1) identity (here’s who we are as a people), (2) beliefs, and (3) what is expected of individuals (characters in the stories exemplify either lauditory or execrable behavior).
It is not “sentimental” for conservatives to insist on stories that perform a conservative function, i.e. to preserve the best of, in this case, Western culture and the traditional American identity. It is vastly practical.
OTOH, if your goal is to undermine and destroy a culture, a really good way to go about it would be to demolish that culture’s myths and replace them with an alternate library of stories with completely different “heroes” and values. Out with the original identity, beliefs, and expectations of individuals … in with the new stuff.
It’s no accident that David Mamet, now out-of-the-closet as a conservative, has subtitled his new book, “On the Dismantling of American Culture.”
A lot of people were aghast that the Taliban blew up the Buddha statues in Hindu Kush.
But leftists in Hollywood have done something far, far worse, with much greater negative consequences. They blew up American culture. The misery in human grief and human lives has been vast and will continue to grow. But have these people been held accountable? For the most part, no. They still enjoy their power lunches and their Malibu mansions and their private jets, and they sneer at the rest of us, on the rare occasions when they bother to think of us at all.
But God is not mocked. I’m grateful for that.
For what it’s worth, the murder rate in the US first peaked in the mid- thirties about the time of the introduction of the Hays Code for movies in 1934, and declined continuously to the mid- sixties when mores began to change and the murder rate again rapidly climbed. The Hays Code was abandoned in 1968. http://www.jrsa.org/programs/Historical.pdf
bl@72: them black hat bank robbers & sich wuz so much inside Roy’s cultural realm
I was trying to say that the crystal clear line that separated Gunsmoke et al from their antagonists might be blurred in the English adaptation which (allegedly) encroaches onto the ‘goodness’ of the Salander character, a trend in modern cinema. Compromising or maybe I should say complicating the Salander character with some nihilistic depravity of her own, doesn’t mitigate the guilt of the antagonists but it sure changes the movie – opens the door for more skin for one thing which of course is a distraction. Fincher, the director, is talented and experienced, coming off of the highly successful film bio of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Scheduled release date: 12/21/2011
“For what it’s worth, the murder rate in the US first peaked in the mid- thirties about the time of the introduction of the Hays Code for movies in 1934, and declined continuously to the mid- sixties when mores began to change and the murder rate again rapidly climbed.”
because movies in that era never showed murder
the murder rate is related to the ratio of young males to mature males, in society. now what happened to cause a spike in young males during that time frame ? [hint, it rhymes with "maybe broom"]
PF@64: This thread is filled with nostalgia and sentimentality.
Back in the 1960′s/70′s, child psychologists embraced the reward/punishment system as an effective means of behavior modification. It was used on the mentally handicapped as well as average kids with behavioral issues. The ‘subjects’ learned to engage in specific behavior in exchange for a ‘reward’ and to refrain from specific behavior to avoid ‘punishment.’
The use of the word sentimentality reminds me of the reward/punishment context for engaging in ethical behavior. Much of the teaching on the subject is still couched in terms of ‘Do this and burn in h^ll for eternity.’ Ouch, extreme. IOW to cut to the obvious point, engaging in ethical behavior should not be motivated by reward/punishment – and yet that is the caricature-like simplification that emerges from some of the earlier dramas. Empathy for another’s pain is a far cry from getting a chocolate brownie.
Some quotes from Frank Capra:
“The individual is divine, he’s worthy, he’s unique and he’s the most important thing there is.”
“The strength of America is in the kind of people who can plant a seed, sow the grass. I wanted to glorify the average man, not the guy at the top, not the politician, not the banker, just the ordinary guy whose strength I admire, whose survivability I admire.”
“I fell in love with Americans, just fell in love with them. These goddamned Americans I thought, they were so free on their own, individuals, not taking their hats off to anyone. If somebody got sick they’d do something about it, I thought Americans were the gods of the world.”
” ‘Masses’ is a herd term—unacceptable, insulting, degrading. When I see a crowd I see a collection of free individuals, each a unique person; . . . each a story that would fill a book; each an island of human dignity.”
“The art of Frank Capra is very, very simple. It’s the love of people. And add two simple ideals to this love of people – the freedom of each individual and the equal importance of each individual – and you have the principle on which I’ve based all my films.”
You don’t have to read the quotes to know what Capra believes about people, the individual, and America. His movies are all infused with every statement above.
Watching a Frank Capra film is a humanizing experience in exactly the way that watching,say, a Stanley Kubrick film is a dehumanizing experience. (Sorry to all the Kubrick fans but that’s my firmly established opinion.) Capra loves people. You can tell. He loves individuals especially. It comes through in the way he treats the “minor” characters. None of them is written or directed as a throw-away character. A hallmark of a Capra film is the many great moments, reactions and lines that are given to these bit players. NOBODY is unimportant. Capra notices everyone — the maid, the street-sweeper, the kid on the sidewalk, the wino on the park bench — and in calling our attention to them in film, he enjoins us to live our lives the same way: to look for the humanity in everyone we meet.
OTOH you can tell who the directors are who are in love with their own style or the filmmaking process, infinitely more than they are involved with their characters (and, by imputation, with flesh-and-blood human beings). Kubrick and George Lucas come to mind. They are cold and their films are cold.
Hitchcock might have been cold, too, except for his ginormous sense of humor.
Scorcese cares about people but, unlike Capra, has an essentially tragic vision.
Spielberg cared not so much about people per se but about entertaining them. A task at which he was excellent. A first-rate storyteller. But Menschian? “Schindler’s List” and “Jaws” are the only films where I get the sense that there’s some moral imperative for humanity to survive. By the time we got to Jurassic Park, the dinos were cooler than the people & it pretty much didn’t matter who got eaten. What a difference from Jaws. Even though Quint got eaten by the shark, he was still better than the beast & it was a tragedy that he perished. The man was noble. The shark was a killing machine, no more admirable than a chain saw. Once upon a time, Spielberg seemed to know this distinction.
I don’t know if we have any Capras today. I don’t know if they would get hired if they were out there. Ron Howard made a few films that kinda sorta approached Capra but he doesn’t seem to have a consistent vision. “Cinderella Man” was the last good film he made and that was 6 years ago. Which he followed up with by making that piece of dreck, “The Da Vinci Code.”
pf/73, that may be the reason the wild popularity of ‘My Fair Lady’ is itself an icon all its own –that proves in the real what it could but fantasize on the screen: those values you cannot hold in your hand can be obliterated by intellect and furthermore, they ought to be.
After all, tho it seems inevitable that a ‘Pygmalion’ would be selected for the star treatment, and that luminous beings such as Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn would be brought into it, that a fortune would be spent on perfecting the fifteen feet tall luminous beings in tyhousands of temples for the masses around the cities of the world, it could not logically ever been inevitable at all.
And no harm done, it’s entertainment for gosh sakes, after all –but the deviltry is that you are to see through the mass message of generous betters helping unfortunate lessers, and with your raised consciousness leave the theater satisfied that you got the unintended message that it’s only the learned manners that divide the aristos from the common, and as such anyone –meaning everyone is aristos –and therefore nobody is aristos, just some have learned the manner of aristos, which you could too, but why bother, we’re all the same anyway.
So now you’re a little bit naughty, you ‘got’ the revolutionary message subtext of tghe film, and know now how close you are to ideal. You’re smart, you realize that with the age of cameras and television you were gonna get close enough to them to copy them anyway, sooner or later.
The thought you won’t have, is why SHE isn’t the ideal –she’s the one not trying to mold humanity, after all. And the damn film would have been SO much better if she’d said to him, “Tell you what, just trade me your mansion for my hovel, and we’ll just forget about the fricken rain in Spain falling mainly on the plain, OKAY?”
And then the rest of the film is HER teaching HIM –how to talk Cockney, how to eat fish and chips, how to riot at the football game, get blasted at the pub, walk into a light pole and knock himself out, where to go to get his head stitched, how to wake up in a jail cell and light off a proper tirade at the constable. And how quickly he becomes very good at all of it.
Can you imagine GB Shaw masterminding THAT film? Of course you can’t. However, within the film’s theme of contrast, the alt.hist version is the egalitarian version. Both versions are about, ”we’re all the same” –but one admonishes to desire hope and change from on high, revealing a vision of a possible godlike intercession under the total control of the intercessionary, and the other is just a guy trying to cope with the world as it is, as is the filmgoer, who exits chuckling, less a fool than he entered, precisely opposite of that quality exeunt the actual film.
The other thing to remember about Capra is that his career peak was very brief, but very intense at the same time.
He won 3 Best Director Oscars in the span of 5 years, all for comedies. All in the middle of the Great Depression.
When WWII rolled around, he rejoined the military (he had served in WWI), made documentaries (the “Why We Fight” series), and after the war had only one more great film in him, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” (but his best, IMO)
IOW there is something weirdly providential about his career. Right man, right time, right audience. A director passionately for the little guy in the midst of the Depression, when the little guy was hurting mightily. A director who scored with comedies when people badly needed a reason to laugh. And a director who reminded everyone of America’s greatness when American institutions and the ideas of America seemed to be failing in spades.
A director with Jimmy Stewart and an angel for his curtain call.
buddy -
Pygmalion and, by extension, MFL have what I have long thought of as a very English (and Yurp to a large degree) theme, a strong element of which is a preoccupation with class. The alternate universe version you imagine, in which she goes about edumacatin’ HIM in all things Cockney, and both he and we come to aquire a great fondness for the Cockney world, would be a quintessentially American approach. The common girl outspunks and outshines the aristo. Americans love the underdog. America is the great leveler.
“Trading Places,” “The Cowboy Way,” “Doc Hollywood” and other fish-out-of-water movies that focus on the class or regional (city vs. country, itself a form of class) differences of the characters take the American approach of giving the edge to the common-guy character. The ones with the most to learn are the aristos and city slickers.
OTOH while in Pygmalion it is true that Eliza goes to Higgins (her “better”) to “better” herself, by the end of the play it’s pretty clear that in some ways she was already better all along. Higgins is revealed to be quite the jerk. Unlike the movie versions there is no romantic get-together in the end between Higgins and Eliza in the original play. The play ends with Eliza going off to marry Freddy and open her flower shop, and Higgins, having predicted the marriage will be a failure, laughing his head off. Some happy ending. (not!)
The all-but-telegraphed message was that Liza, having “bettered” herself, was now a creature who belonged in nobody’s world. She would have been better off remaining a guttersnipe.
A more snobby message I cannot imagine! And so very, very alien to the American mind.
bw/84, one of if not THE funniest scene in hollywood –’Trading Places’ –it’s Christmas, and Santa-suited Dan Ackroyd, Master of Wall Street, has just learned he’s been outplayed and outsmarted and is now busted, broke, and unemployed, has just drunk a fifth of whisky and, weaving toward the fourth wall looking straight at you, opens his mouth to say something, you’re sure it’ll be a torrent of in-character baloney logic, but what comes out is “BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!”
bw/76 Yes, nostalgia and sentimentality, both, in a good way.
Sentiment is the feeling most associated with the cerebral, with felling, affection, emotion, and passion covering the sense in English. If someone can supply a word that connotes seeking to align ones feelings with what is thoughtful, I’ll be happy to use it instead.
I doubt I need remind you that it was the “progressive” drive to separate the sharing of sentiment between the generations was why C.S. Lewis wrote “Men Without Chests.” Meaning the “Progressives” aimed to rip the heart out of Western Culture leaving us who remembered the forgotten virtues to sadly recall his conclusion of the consequences of allowing cultural Marxism to advance.
Now how is it that the adjective sentimental retains almost none of what is positive in sentiment? Worse, how is it that the noun sentimentality — the inclination to seek out the sentimental — altogether has no positive? I’m not talking bathos and melodrama — is there no positive sense that the sophisticated intellectuals will allow for such sentiments? Sure seems like it’s their deficit projected upon what is essentially human. What more needs be said to recognize how much sophisticates hate humanity?
Slightly more emotional than the sentimental is the romantic, yet contemporary liberalism and indeed progressives like Shaw, willingly exploit it without any attendant scorn. Well, almost no scorn; here’s George Bernard yet again: “the process of growing from romantic boyhood into cynical maturity.” Each time you hear the Progressives view as sophisticated, can you not see that “yep, that’s adulterated alright” is how you ought react? It helps you preserve your perspective that they so crave to warp to their advantage.
Marshall Dillon only cared that you did not threaten innocent human life. GB Shaw and his ilk obviously have a whole different view of what constitutes you being innocent. “You are of no legitimate use? Then you cannot be innocent.”
#28 BW
Look up “rural purge” on Wikipedia and other places.
“Progressives” took apart a highly successful and profitable lineup of programming and filled it with leftist, anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-family programming which ended up making less money. Pointing out the fact of the rural purge is the ultimate way to shut up a leftist who attempts to make the claim that Hollywood isn’t left, it’s only interested in profit.
Not to get in the middle, but Sentimentality from wiki:
Sentimentality originally indicated the reliance on feelings as a guide to truth, but current usage defines it as an appeal to shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason’.
In current literary terms, sentimentality is both a device used to induce a tender emotional response disproportionate to the situation at hand,[2] (and thus to substitute heightened and generally uncritical feeling for normal ethical and intellectual judgments), and a heightened reader response willing to invest previously prepared emotions to respond disproportionately to a literary situation.[3]
“A sentimentalist”, Oscar Wilde wrote Alfred Douglas, “is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.”[4] James Baldwin considered that ‘Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel…the mask of cruelty’.[5]
Ah yes … Wilde & Baldwin –men of great rectitude and hard on sentiment.
Is it not remarkable YBR/89 that over the decades it’s been the political descendants of these sophisticates (of whom Lewis sought to warn us of the consequences of their deriding the ennobling sentiments) who’ve employed sentimentality — wagging their fingers at us on the Right for allegedly lacking empathy — to enlarge their political base?
So remarkable, YBR/80, that they not only studied behavior modification in youth, but they employed it.
Guaranteed there was no sentimentality in the Khmer Rouge youths as they built that mountain of skulls ’75-’79, just as there is none in the Green Bombers of contemporary Zimbabwe.
Yes, the removal of the organ reduces to hopelessness the plea for the function.
Though I lack Wretchard’s grace in piercing the veil, and have not the pictorial aids typical of Zombietime, let me suggest applying to our prospects a famous line from an obscure bit of art that, as I recall, was hugely sentimental about the loss of a great civilization. The Shaws and Wests and Baldwins and Wildes have advanced us to the dawn of releasing the monsters from their id on the civilization they so loathed.
bl: Just putting it out there. The Wilde/Baldwin formulation of sentimentality as literary criticism seems like a third way between the traditional definition and the so-called ‘rural purge’ mentality (although my reading of wiki suggests that the young demographic had moved away from the farm, leaving advertisers to complain.)
You know, and I don’t want to take this to the mat, but the ‘price of emotion’ is a valid concept, in the sense that it is possible to be overwhelmed by circumstances, in which case, one uses one or several of the tried and true techniques to get through to the other side.
I think the young people started to tire of the situational repetition of offerings like Gunsmoke. I did. It also seems not unreasonable to posit that I am not the anti-Christ.
I particularly took to the Baldwin quote. The modern media is thrives on ostentation of emotion, which surely is not what was intended by the traditionalists.
Next to that old curmudgeon Nietzsche, W&B’s pronouncements seem a little lightweight, if I can say that without getting pounded.
PF@91: wagging their fingers at us on the Right for allegedly lacking empathy
You asked for a better word above – I nominate empathy. Sentimentality has truly evolved to embrace a variety of negative saccharine-like connotations, learned zombie-like behavior included, which are almost subliminal in their evocative power.
As I wrote above, W&B both have points that are far from cynical, as anyone who has stared into the abyss can attest, which puts them somewhere between the traditional and the ‘purged’.
Emotion without restraint is surely no more radical a concept than worshiping pure reason.
ybr, we never watched it for chic or to ape the avant garde –we watched it for continuity –for custom, for ritual. Sure it was kinda pokey and plain –but coming home from school where invisible aliens were randomly kidnapping the stick-shaped girls you knew so well and replacing them overnite with Mae West clones who still had their names and voices and eyes but not much else, well that was all the drama and plot turgidity we could stand in a day –a nice slow familiar Dodge City after sundown and supper, well it was like a resort, like a sojourn in one o them nervous hospitals where you could rest awhile.
YBR/93 Emotion without restraint is surely no more radical a concept than worshiping pure reason.
This addresses my point, and was Lewis’ from the start! He analogized the head as the center of the cerebral, the gut the center of feeling. It takes the heart to balance them. The progressives wished to remove all of that so they could remold the world to their liking.
They’ve largely succeeded by inculcating the lying flattery in the youth that their untouched virginal innocence (naivety is so ripe for the power-hungerers!) made them more pure than their forebears. “Self-esteem” movement ring a bell?
Thus we witness what happens from removing the heart and leaving nothing but cold thought driven by primitive wants at the seat of our culture in Greece and moving to take over everywhere.
The Left’s monstrous destroyers thus conditioned are poised to unleash themselves. These are now found where nobler — not perfect — men would have previously been schooled before those scheming pseudo-intellectuals you’ve named took over the culture.
PF@95: This addresses my point, and was Lewis’ from the start!
I understand, but like, bw, I too stumbled over the word ‘sentimentality’ which is very unflattering. It evokes the ‘don’t be a cry baby’ taunt from our younger years – or the use of a false sentiment to gain psychological leverage. One hopefully acquires some degree of more sophisticated ‘command and control’ over the wild ride of emotions in order to permit a reasonably civil society to exist. Surely the suggestion is not to abandon all sense of propriety and decorum. Of course not. Practicing emotional restraint isn’t the road to h^ll. It’s what polite people do out of civilized deference – one might say empathy – for the public sensibilities.
Maybe bogie wheel will return with a different take but really it seems that the word is the thing here.
As a footnote, the more modest suggestion is that viewers who abandoned Gunsmoke did so for more mundane reasons relating to personal preferences vis a vis the style and production of early TV dramas, and not all of us joined the dark side after the ‘rural purge.’ (Of course I can only speak for myself.)
bl: well that was all the drama and plot turgidity we could stand in a day
Worked the other way too for those who weren’t living The Life of Riley with the Girl Next Door.
bl: we watched it for continuity –for custom, for ritual.
And yet the Oprah audience gets regularly beaten up.
YBR/96: I understand all that you said from the start, and conceded that when I asked for an alternative to sentiment-ality (for which I think empathy misses the mark as it can and has been feigned without having that implication) given the hash the Incrementals have made of our language.
Sentimentality is as divorced from the proper use of sentiment as contemporary liberalism is divorced from classical liberalism. The work of the “Progressive” movement to sophistically adulterate our language largely aided their Culture Coup.
It has become our duty on the Right to make clearer distinctions out of the Statist-empowering manufactured chaos. I thank you for engaging me in this important quest.
PF@99: Sentimentality is as divorced from the proper use of sentiment as contemporary liberalism is divorced from classical liberalism.
Wilde and Baldwin obviously disagree, and not everybody considers them pseudo-intellectuals:
“A sentimentalist”, Oscar Wilde wrote Alfred Douglas, “is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.”[4] James Baldwin considered that ‘Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel…the mask of cruelty’.[5]
Sentimentality is very much related to sentiment.
Although I agree about the migration of liberal thought.
It has become our duty on the Right to make clearer distinctions out of the Statist-empowering manufactured chaos.
And a little chaos is healthy – acts as a guard against one’s innate impulse to control the life experience.
i’m learning too, pf. It’s ok to like oprah better than gunsmoke, but not ok to like gunsmoke better than oprah. And living the life of riley with the girl next door is unfair unless everyone is doing likewise.
And to imagine, i started this evening thinking success radiates 100% more aspirational motivation than failure, and that de gustibus, non est disputandum.
bl@101: Nah I think you learned the wrong lesson: living the life of riley with the girl next door just means you have no taste in TV shows, given that one can afford a TV, which of course we all aspire to do – one for each room – so we can watch the Sunday sermon condemning the modern acquisitive culture in HDTV as good little consumers hypnotized by the pulsating heartbeat of a growing economy. Sentimentality not being a particularly robust competitor with a new wide screen Samsung.
And of course not to mention that everybody better have their eyeballs glued to Gunsmoke or the Sentimental Police will write you up for a values violation with intent to commit a third degree chaotic misdemeanor.
YBR /96 “the word ‘sentimentality’ which is very unflattering.” As I explained before, that was not my intent. Also too that was what BW, who knows me well inferred, at least as pertains to nostalgia. And my attempt to use sentimentality as I did fits and is consistent with the context of everything I’ve written. I’m reasonably sure I’ve conveyed it to you by now. You’ve certainly gone to lengths, perhaps for reasons unstated, not to accept it.
Now there is indeed a word you ought to feel slandered by, yet you applied it to yourself. While you’re not alone in not comprehending its origins, that’s about to end. You wrote approvingly: “One hopefully acquires some degree of more sophisticated….”
You believe the word sophisticated means having acquired polished and agreeable tastes. It is something many invariably seek, and is most often thought of as a good thing. But it also means adulterated and not genuine. In either case it literally means “made to be or appear to be sophistic,” and also “acceptable to the sophist.”
Sophistic means of or as a sophist.
Sophist means one who engages in and advocates sophistry.
And sophistry, whatever its lofty facade long lost in antiquity, now strictly means the employment of deceptive argumentation for personal gain.
IOW, sophisticated is a condition sophists seek to see accomplished.
Should you be more offended by which word now?
Although sophisticates like W & B may have disguised their sophistry to aid the goals of progressives, most of us on the Right have good cause to no longer accept their clubby admiration of each other as good sophisticates should.
It is without doubt that were clever and creative. But being bright and ready with a quip does not make one laudable by default, else there may be no limit to the number of demagogues gone mad whom you might still admire. Maybe you get my drift here, and maybe you will choose not to.
YBR/100: You didn’t need to repeat your quotes of W & B — I got it the first time. Without equivocation I’m inclined to side with Lewis as to the meretriciousness of their thoughts and deeds. Progressives hate common humanity, and their hatred appears to be strictly visceral no matter how cerebral they claim to be.
No Pascal, I answered one post at a time. The sequence was very logical as I was interested in a more substantive response to Wilde & Baldwin other than a flip dismissal. Unfortunately the good faith was not conducive to a rewarding discussion. You take care now.
As expected. Thanks for verifying.
You as well.
………….
bl@101: It’s ok to like oprah better than gunsmoke, but not ok to like gunsmoke better than oprah. And living the life of riley with the girl next door is unfair unless everyone is doing likewise.
Nowhere did I criticize people who enjoyed the subject TV series – unless you count defending those who did not from charges of a suspicious lack of sentimentality. The goal-post moving came faster than a speeding talking point at the end, which wasn’t worthy of either of you.
ybr, sorry –i never know what mode we’re in –kidding, not kidding, semi-kidding, quasi-kidding –it keeps me feelin sorta quasi-modal.
bl: OK I was staring to think that we were moving towards Congressman Weiner getting in touch with his inner sentiment. I’ve some hay-toting and barge-lifting to do myself.
Wretchard — another great discussion, although I read many of the earlier comments trying to figure out who the heck is this Chester dude on Gunsmoke!?!
Chester???
Clearly before my time, Chester was and is unknown to me. Festus was my man; as a poor black boy living with my mother and father in a two-bedroom concrete-block house with five other siblings — we all *loved* his character. Hell, we loved *all* of the main characters!
Again, this discussion has been truly rewarding. Special thanks to bogie wheel. “Well, goodbye Marshal Dillon, and thanks.”
r/110, testing old fool memory here, but Chester was Festus firstest, he was played by (whirr clank clank puff puff churnnnn) DENNIS WEAVER, who left the show midway-ish and time-traveled to the contemporary west, where he wove the character “McCloud”.
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((PS, general info: ‘bogey wheel’ on a tank neither drives (the drive wheel in back is powered) nor keeps the track in tension (the idler wheel in front does that), but is strung along the side in severals, transmitting through the track into the ground the weight of the whole machine. Without bogey wheels, no traction, tank ‘high-centered, drive wheel driving nowhere and idler wheel truly idle, other than (if engine fueled and tranny in gear) spinning the track in place.))
Pascal Fervor
on your blog, isn’t it a Mont Saint-Michel pic?
Oui
MC, Tide, Mudflats, and Quicksand may provide you more insight as to why I made that my backdrop. Those who think it wise to deride human sentiment would rather we not discuss how powerful the site attracts one’s spirit. Especially so given the moral quicksand of the half-witted sophisticate.