Better movies than The Princess Bride have charmed conservatives out of their principles — GoodFellas, Pulp Fiction, Avengers: Endgame, Gladiator, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. But reader defenses of TPB, spurred by my review of the TPB DVD, show how some conservatives have given up the moral high ground. Having never learned to defy Hollywood, they’re unprepared to fight the culture wars.
Being a conservative means being proudly unhip, yet few Americans — Bible-toters, teetotalers, or not — can resist the urge to be one of the Cool Kids. (Real Cool Kids remember 1987 not for TPB but for genuinely advanced pop art: Sign O’ the Times, Law of Desire, “Bring the Noise,” What Have I Done to Deserve This, “Girlfriend in a Coma.”) Nerd envy can last into adulthood, and that’s why readers who are TPB advocates fall back on naïve terms such as “bedtime story” and “entertainment.” But those sympathies are incompatible with political integrity. Defending TPB indicates an urge to return to the irresponsible fantasies of childhood.
Sloane Crosley’s Criterion booklet essay confesses that TPB is “a building block of our worldview.” This generational dilemma may well spell doom for conservatives’ battle strategy in the culture wars. Loving a film so trite and so morally vacant requires ignorance about our cultural legacy and how to use that legacy for spiritual and political defense. Immature fans betray how art teaches them to think and to live. So they become saps for the easiest, morally dubious grifts of the largely left-wing film industry.
Fans willing to overlook the obvious vapidity of director Rob Reiner, a hostile Democrat-progressive zealot, prove that some conservatives are bamboozled by liberalism’s kindly pretense. Reiner lives in their heads rent-free despite his immoral and immature mangling of fairy-tale morality. Culture clash is real, as Carl Higbie’s Newsmax segment attests.
Can conservative movie-lovers ever get real, and then recognize and resist dishonest pop art? This challenge is more complicated than supporting outright polemical films such as Land of Freedom, 200 Mules, and The Plot against the President. Conservatives need to develop responses against movies with flashy surfaces. TPB isn’t harmless just because its fairy tale avoids relevant moral challenge; it falsifies life’s challenges. (Even Elon Musk misquoted TPB when defending his takeover of X.) The argument defending art above the artist might be relevant for Richard Wagner, but not Reiner, whose trivial films are uncompelling.
Pop culture’s turn-of-the-century decline (Star Wars to Pulp Fiction to Lord of the Rings) has damaged the public’s ability to think for itself and consider its own well-being. If conservatives never take movies seriously, then movies become nothing more than escapism — undermining their side in culture wars they can never win.
Conservatives fudge the intersection of pop culture and politics, resulting in a genuine culture clash and a retrogressive canon: garbage such as Pulp Fiction, Avengers: Endgame, Gladiator, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, and TPB that gets even worse with television’s Mad Men, The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Succession.
Allegiance to the new hipster canon means that today’s conservatives willingly forget Bob Dole’s 1995 warning against Hollywood’s culture of depravity. Some conservatives look past TPB’s fatuousness to satisfy their adolescent enjoyment.
Their weird personal stakes in TPB suggest they are deeply invested in how the Hollywood system operates — the immoral ideology that even Theodor Adorno critiqued, in The Culture Industry. Conservatives who refuse to think about movies in mature ways are in danger of being had by Hollywood’s stealthy left-wing ideologies; they may even come to share them (ensnared by Pixar’s Toy Story trap). The TPB mob has no Family values, only Hollywood values. Feeling grateful to industry schlockmeisters like Reiner lets Democrat mountebanks have their way. Even conservatives who dislike being woke are in need of a cultural awakening. Rise up, movie-loving conservatives!