The Vietnam War has been the inspiration for several fine films, but the best-known (and arguably the best) is probably Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Academy, Palme D’Or and Golden Globe-winning Apocalypse Now (the best version of which is 2001’s Apocalypse Now Redux). The film’s status was recognized in 2000, when it was selected by the US Library of Congress as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Apocalypse is one of the great cinematic experiences for all who have ever doubted the cults of progress; or wondered about the durability of civilization.

The production of Apocalypse was notoriously difficult and protracted (leading one commentator to ask “Apocalypse When?”), running grossly over budget—which in retrospect seems curiously appropriate for a film of its theme and scope. Martin Sheen plays Benjamin L. Willard, a traumatized but proficient US Special Forces captain. We meet him first in a seedy Saigon hotel, where he has been spending his R&R time get­ting drunk (during the filming, Sheen was a self-described alcoholic, and also suffered a near-fatal heart attack), in a vain attempt to erase the horrific im­ages that are playing on constant loop in his head—women screaming in perpetuity, men forever falling dead, forests and villages eternally erupting in napalm Technicolor. He is dragged forcibly back into the present for an­other unorthodox, unacknowledged mission.

Colonel Walter E Kurtz (Marlon Brando) is a brilliant soldier who has gone permanently AWOL, not just from the US military but also from conven­tional morality, secreting himself in the remote jungle on the wrong side of the Cambodian border with a troop of fa­natically loyal soldiers who apparently treat him as a demi-God. Like Conrad’s original (Apocalypse Now is based loosely on Heart of Darkness), Kurtz has set himself up as an absolut­ist arbiter, a man-who-would-be-king, earning a reputation for casual cruelty that has shocked even the Pentagon. The military establishment and the CIA have decided that Kurtz has be­come a liability and they want him “terminated with extreme prejudice.” A previously dispatched assassin has apparently thrown in his lot with Kurtz, so it is up to Willard to take a Navy boat up the Nung River into dan­ger from more than just the Viet Cong. While Willard is receiving his orders, the camera dwells for a moment on a recent newspaper, with headlines about Charles Manson.

A film made as recently as 1993 may not yet perhaps be called a classic, but Les Visiteurs, the highest-gross­ing French-made film ever made, is at least a classic in the making.

Les Visiteurs was co-written by director Jean-Marie Poire and Christian Clavier. The action starts in the France of 1123. A French knight, Godefroy de Papincourt, the Comte de Montmirail (played by “Jean Reno” who is incidentally a Spaniard, Don Juan Moreno y Jederique Jimenez, and a friend of Nicolas Sarkozy—perhaps a hint of where his political sympathies may lie) saves the French king in battle. He is rewarded by being granted the hand in marriage of the beautiful Lady Frénégonde (Valérie Lemercier). But he is drugged by a witch, and accidentally shoots his fiancée’s father—after which, understandably enough, she declines to marry him. In desperation, he consults a sorcerer, who says he can send de Papincourt back in time to stop the fatal arrow. But the sorcerer makes a mistake, and instead sends the knight and his squire, Jacquasse (played by Clavier) forward into the 20^th century.

This signals a rapid-fire series of vulgar, vastly amusing incidents with cars, fast-food “restaurants,” telephones, toilets, toothpaste, cling-film, and light fittings—all of which prove that the French have as much of a genius for slapstick as for Molièresque wit. One reviewer described the film justly as “a lunatic blend of Time Bandits, Tati and Benny Hill.”

Accompanying the visual jokes, there are frantic encounters with mod­ern French people—a black postman (who is set upon immediately as a suspected Moor), clerics, policemen, the incompetent sorcerer’s descendant and both Montmirail’s and Jacquasse’s own heirs. Understandably regarded as a dangerous madman by all the people he encounters (except, even­tually, by his present-day relative, Béatrice de Montmirail, also played by Valérie Lemercier), The Comte is des­perate to escape from what he sees as an ugly and diminished future. He is also outraged to discover that the fam­ily castle is now a luxury hotel owned by Jacquard, a superficially gentrified descendant of Jacquasse (also played by Clavier).

Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 The Seventh Seal has become so deeply ensconced in the cultural picture library that almost anyone hearing the title will conjure up instantly the film’s most memorable image—blanched-faced, black-cloaked Death playing chess with Antonius Block (Max von Sydow), a Swedish knight recently returned from the Crusades. At stake is not just the knight’s life, but his afterlife, because his faith has been deeply shaken by his experiences. Behind and above the game, there is a stripped-down Nordic landscape ravaged, like Block himself, by disease and despair.

Von Sydow’s angular physique, bleached coloration and depressive personality are the perfect personification of hyperboreal manhood. He is no Block but a thoughtful and hag‑ridden man, who wants desperately to believe there is more to life than the merely mundane. At his core there chews a terrible emptiness, as if the chilliness of the septentrional zone has entered into his marrow.

With his practical esquire, Jons (Gunnar Björnstrand), who still prays daily (although he is only going through the motions, as he has probably always done), Block zigzags across Scania to­wards his castle and his waiting wife, during the course of a single dreadful day. Wherever he goes, he cannot escape either Death or, what is much worse, Disillusion. Along the corpse-strewn way, he comes across cynical church­men, flagellants, and a witch being burned by panicky soldiers—and makes confession to a priest who is really Death in disguise. He asks the priest,

“Why must He hide in a midst of vague prom­ises and invisible miracles? How are we to believe the believers when we don’t believe ourselves? What will become of us who want to believe but cannot? And what of those who neither will nor can believe? Why can I not kill God within me?"

He also encounters Raval (Bertil Anderberg) the man who originally persuaded him to become a Crusader—but Raval is now a looter and would-be rapist.

The only slight relief in the other­wise unrelieved misery is when Block and Jons come across a family troupe of strolling players whose moral tales and religious tableaux are much in de­mand from a panic-stricken populace. The players are (for the moment) healthy, happy, and with a young son, Mikael, who absorbs all their thoughts. Jof (Nils Poppe), a juggler who has vi­sions of the Virgin, and his wife Mia (Bibi Andersson) represent for Block an innocence and beauty that are for him unrecoverable. He and Jons rapidly de­velop a deep solicitude for them, with Jons rescuing Jof from persecution by Raval, and the knight eating wild straw­berries with them all in a glade, forget­ting his desolation for a sunlit moment. He says

“I shall remember this hour of peace—the strawberries, the bowl of milk, your faces in the dusk. Mikael asleep, Jof with his lute. I shall remember our words, and shall bear this memory between my hands as carefully as a bowl of fresh milk. And this will be a sign, and a great content.”

On a generous impulse, he kicks over the chessboard, enabling Jof, Mia and Mikael to make at least a temporary escape while Death is picking up the pieces. But it is too late for Block, his wife, Jons and many others. Death infiltrates the castle as Block entreats God for mercy and his lady recites from Revelations.

The following morning, as he and his family jolt along the roads out of the plague district and out of danger, Jof has a different kind of vision—of the silhou­etted knight and his followers being led away over the hills in a dance of death—

“They move away from the dawn in a solemn dance away towards the dark lands while the rain cleanses their cheeks of the salt from their bitter tears.”

Few films are so beautiful or liter­ate, and fewer have so well captured a mood. Although anti-Church messages, irreligion, and the fear of death have al­ways been with us, the combination of these messages with newly fashionable existentialism and Bergman’s starkly arresting iconography crystallized the then emerging but now everywhere evident crisis of faith and confidence which has become a contagion coursing across all the countries of the North. For Westerners now, as for Block, the spectre of extinction has become a guest at our every feast—and our countries are becoming as strange and unwelcoming as Bergman’s sickness-strewn Sweden. The losing game is not yet played out, and if we choose to, there is time for us to kick over the board and change the rules. But where are the 21st century cinéastes who will capture such a new and necessary vision?

The Wicker Man (1973) is widely regarded as the best British horror film ever made, and has earned the dubious compliment of having been the sub­ject of a Hollywood remake starring Nicholas Cage. Whether one agrees with this analysis or not, few would dispute that it is the best film ever to feature Christopher Lee, Edward Woodward or Britt Ekland.

The Wicker Man’s cult status is appro­priate – because it is about what might happen in an isolated community that reverts to pre-Christian practices. Lord Summerisle (Lee) is the hereditary laird of a Scottish island. His deceased father persuaded the islanders of his genera­tion to reject Christianity, and return to (or reinvent) Druidic paganism. Summerisle has therefore inherited not just ownership of the island, but also the mantle of the island's religious leader—a potent combination.

Enter police sergeant Neil Howie (Woodward), a devout Christian, after he receives anonymous reports that a young island girl has gone missing. The film begins with Howie’s plane pass­ing over a gleaming archipelago to the accompaniment of a haunting score by Paul Giovanni. One of the film’s great­est strengths is its plangent music, in­cluding some reworked folk tunes and Robert Burns poems, performed by the ad hoc band Lodestone.

From the moment he arrives, Howie is met with polite obfuscation, and every­where confronted with what are to him appalling blasphemies – naked women in unkempt graveyards, un-roofed churches with posies, impaled birds and libations instead of crucifixes on the al­tar, very young children saying “penis” and being given magic lessons, naked girls dancing in circles and jumping over fire, and the clientele of the island’s only pub (where Howie is compelled to stay after his plane malfunctions mysteriously) singing along lustily to a rib­ald song called The Landlord's Daughter (Willow, played by Britt Ekland)—“0, nothing can delight so / As does the part that lies between her left toe / And her right toe!” the respectable-looking lo­cals (including Willow’s twinkling-eyed father) bellow joyously, while Willow wriggles lasciviously. Later that night, a nude Willow dances in her room, which is adjacent to Howie’s, drum­ming on the dividing wall and calling to him to come to her (“Heigh ho I am here / Am I not young and fair?”), while he prays, perspires and wraps the pillows around his head to drown out her song. (He has vowed not to have sex until he is married.)

Howie is predisposed to dislike the islanders, and becomes increasingly convinced that the missing girl has been abducted, and that the islanders, from the unhelpful Lord Summerisle down, are complicit in a cover-up. Not only that, but he fears she will be used as a human sacrifice in a magic Mayday ceremony—in an outlandish but insu­larly consistent attempt to improve the island’s failing (and economically essen­tial) apple crop.

He tries frantically to find her while the island is fizzing with anticipation for the big festival—ornate costumes being made, special breads and cakes being baked, shop windows being decorated with sexual symbols, songs and dances being practiced in dark corners, furtive conversations stopped when they see him coming, giggling children play­ing him tricks, costumed conspirators glimpsed for a split second down dark alleys. Exhausted, he lies down in his room for a while—then jerks awake to the repulsive sight of a smoking narcotic ‘Hand of Glory’ (a dead man’s hand), on the bedside table, seemingly left there by Willow. He dashes it to the floor in horror, and rushes into the streets, to find the islanders all grotesquely customed and dancing out of the village. He knocks out the landlord and purloins his Fool costume so he can infiltrate the procession. Eventually, they arrive at the place of sacrifice—whereupon Howie discovers that his ‘disguise’ had fooled no-one, and he has been trapped. The missing girl comes running laughingly from where she has been hiding, while a stunned Howie struggles to comprehend.

Summerisle explains with bland charm that he had been specifically targeted to come to the island, because his Christian faith and sexual abstinence mean that he will be an especially powerful offering to gods. Even as Summerisle is talking, the pinioned Howie is being dragged along the top of the cliffs to see—terror of terrors—a huge wicker semblance of a man filled with caged chickens, pigs, goats and combustible material. “Come” says Summerisle—“it is time to keep your appointment with the Wicker Man”. Howie alternately tries to reason with Summerisle, prays and screams as he is carried up the ladder and tied in his place, and as the flames rise and the dying animals squeal—while the arm-linked, swaying islanders smile gratefully, even kindly, up at him and sing “Summer is icumen in, Loude sing cucu”. The howling flames rise to the head and the screams stop; the flaming head falls into the sea and left behind on the horizon is a wintry orange sun sinking in the boundless West, where the Celts believed lay Tír na Nóg, the Land of Eternal Youth.

As well as Paul Giovanni’s soundtrack, the acting is impeccable. Edward Woodward later recalled that he had momentarily felt real terror when he first saw the Wicker Man set up on the cliff. There is also stunning Dumfries & Galloway scenery and a driving sense of impending disaster expertly created by Frenzy screenwriter Anthony Shaffer and Robin Hardy’s assured direction. But what makes The Wicker Man unique and also much more disturbing than most horror films is the way in which uncomprehending cruelty and the bas­est superstition are so deftly interwoven with domesticity.

The kindly sweetshop owner, the no-nonsense schoolmistress, the cheer­ful landlord, the joking fishermen, the tweed-wearing pensioners, the shy chil­dren—all wearing normal clothes, liv­ing in normal Victorian and Edwardian houses, holding down normal positions in society—such people could be found almost anywhere. Except that when peo­ple everywhere else are going to church or the superstore, these perfectly believable and even likeable people are harking back to a time not just before Christianity but before rea­son, when all of Nature was populated by demanding daemons and everything was ‘explained’ through sprites instead of science.

It was a real past—Hardy and Shaffer researched the rites from James George Frazer’s magisterial 1890 survey of European magical practices The Golden Bough, while the Romans recorded the Celts immolating animals and men in giant wicker figures. That remote time and sensibility in many ways have never left us, with ‘old religion’ symbols and sites co-opted but not captured by Christianity, and retaining a coherence of their own. Pagan place names and topography persist in hundreds of thou­sands of wells, woods, waters, henges, forts and mazes. Green Men, wild men, fantastical monsters and Sheela-na Gigs look down on us from cathedral roof bosses or pub signs. Ancient iconogra­phy is seen again by holidaymakers idly watching the Padstow Hobby Hoss or the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance. Pre-rational reasoning is found in perenni­ally popular astrology columns, New Age healing, ‘deep ecology’ and people who have been exposed to centuries of science still being afraid of the night-time. Much of our folk-music is immeasurably old, containing melodies and sentiments that have recurred over centuries (“Summer is icumen in”, for example, supposedly dates from the early 1200s). And perhaps paganism may even make a comeback as Christian belief goes down in the West like the sun in the last frame of the film. It is our sense of the persistence, and the strange familiarity, of our pre-Christian past which makes The Wicker Man so plausible, so powerful and possibly even predictive.

A few months back, Entertainment Weekly published a feminist screed, 'The Social Network's Woman Problem'. In it, columnist Jennifer Armstrong, reviewing The Social Network, concedes that women generally aren't interested in computer science and that they don't feature prominently in the true-life story that inspired the movie. While she grudgingly admits that it wouldn't be appropriate to lie about events, she sniffs that, "[I]f this were fiction, the snubs would be inexcusable."

How refreshing! Here we have an admission that the female computer gurus are largely fictional, but that writers have a moral obligation to depict an inverted world that corroborates egalitarian gender fantasies. It would be inexcusable for gender egalitarians to suggest that males are the primary drivers of technological innovation.

Ironically, Larry Summers, the same former Harvard President who shooed the Winklevoss twins out his office in the movie would probably shoo Armstrong out as well. Back in 2005 he ignited a firestorm of feminist outrage with his frank attribution of the “underrepresentation” of women in science and engineering to “upbringing, genetics and time spent on child-rearing.”

And how did the Ivy League audience respond to the suggestion that gender differences in academic and professional outcomes owed to something other than victimization and systemic White male bigotry?

"I felt I was going to be sick," said Nancy Hopkins, a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who listened to part of Summers's speech Friday at a session on the progress of women in academia organized by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass. She walked out in what she described as a physical sense of disgust.

"My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow," she said. "I was extremely upset." 

One lady in attendance angrily declared that, "That's the kind of insidious, destructive, un-thought-through attitude that causes a lot of harm. It's one thing for an ordinary person to shoot his mouth off like that, but quite another for a top educational leader."

Note the parallel with Armstrong’s position: that there's an empirical world of ordinary people who accept gender realities, and an intellectual one that must uphold a standard of reality denial.

Summers' remarks were correct: While there are always exceptions, women are on the whole less naturally gifted than men in science and technology. This is not to say that on the whole they are inferior to men; they simply tend to excel in different areas. The paradox underlying contemporary feminism is that feminists esteem traditional male roles more than traditional female ones, eager to achieve female equality at wage slavery, computer programming, and athleticism, while contemptuous of their natural areas of excellence, such as sociability, multitasking, organising, and holding a family together in times of crisis. Are the latter not important too?

We only need to watch the role that women play in this movie, how they are treated, to see what feminism has accomplished in the last 50 years. Zuckerberg and pals publicly humiliate them, liken them to farm animals, and use them as disposable sex toys. Armstrong describes these depictions of women as "50s-level sexist", but women in the 50s didn't act like the women in The Social Network, and neither were they treated like the women in that film. Their behavior and treatment in the movie is fully contemporary.

She and countless other feminists prefer to reside in fiction. The current degree to which women are "empowered" is unsustainable. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that their pensions and 401k plans will be raided or devalued in the coming decades, leaving them at the mercy of the families and community networks their careers left them too busy to create.

 The illusions they cling to are comfortable, while reality is anything but: They're not sexually liberating themselves—they're forfeiting the leverage nature gave them in the battle of the sexes to a subset of slick pick-up artists. Their barren wombs are not about "family planning", they're about not planning to have a family. Their careers are not making them independent, dependence is simply being transferred from husbands and fathers to Big Brother. That's well and good for their personal interests as long as the economy is strong, the government is solvent, and the pensions are well-funded. But are those safe bets?

Women around the world already envied their Western counterparts’ unusual freedom and autonomy well before feminism screamed for more. The greater freedom and autonomy traditionally enjoyed by Western women makes our society very attractive, but the current social model isn't sustainable. Like the mythical Icarus, feminists have been tempted to push the limits to breaking point and are setting all women up for a devastating fall. Feminists aren't the only ones in the West casting aside tradition in favor of illusory short-term gains, but of all the groups doing so, they have the most to lose in the long run. The continuing population replacement in the West by non-White Third World immigrants suggest that the White and Western cultural context that feminism depends on will give way to a Third Worldish social model that will rob women of their freedom... among much else.

Tradition isn’t regression and it doesn't mean a repetition of past excesses and injustices. It means working toward balancing the need for individual expression with the need to play a role in something greater than the self: in the family, the community, and the nation. It means having the humility to know your weaknesses and the wisdom to play on your strengths. We don't need fantasies about women developing virtual social network applications. We need women developing real-world families and community networks. That's the real social network problem.

The dreadful concept of the vampire is common to many cultures, but the version that is most familiar is Dracula – the Anglo-Irish author Bram Stoker’s groundbreaking conflation of central European folk beliefs, exaggerated stories about the mediaeval Wallachian princeling Vlad “The Impaler” Tepes, and 19th century obses­sions with sex, syphilis, Gothicism and occultism. The idea of a nocturnal, blood-drinking creature that is nei­ther alive nor dead still crawls in the shadows of Europe’s imagination.

Yet vampire-themed films tend to be underwhelming. It may be because we are so saturated with the concept that we cannot usually take it seriously. Bela Lugosi was risible as the Count – although he was at least more innocently employed in Hollywood than he had been in his former incarnation as minister of culture in Hungary’s bloodthirsty Bela Kun regime). Hammer was just hammy, and even Francis Ford Coppola could not make us afraid of Gary Oldman’s Count. Some vampiric variations on the theme were more successful (like Dreyer’s 1932 Vampyr) but most film fans would probably agree that the genre leader in this admittedly small field is Prana Films’ 1922 Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (“Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror”).

Nosferatu is preeminent not just because it has the spontaneity of having been the first vampire film, but because of the carefully-constructed cinematography and the lyrical script, which we relish all the more because we are not distracted by approximations of Romanian accents. Darkly Expressionist direction by F. W. Murnau ensures that every frame pulsates with feeling, like the human prey whose life-force Max Schreck’s cadaverous “Count Orlok” seeks so urgently. The distinct eccentricity of the film's chief progenitors must also have contributed subtly to the film’s outré quality. Murnau was an occultist, a fanatic and an overt homosexual. Schreck was so reclusive that many thought he was not a real person; one of the few who knew him reported that he was always in “a remote and strange world” and enjoyed long, solitary walks in forests – a suitably Mitteleuropaisch fixation. (Coincidentally, the German verb schreck means to frighten.) In Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a film about the making of Nosferatu, John Malkovich camps it up creditably as the unbalanced Murnau, so desperate to ensure authenticity that he employs a real vampire (Willem Dafoe) to take Shreck’s role.

Flannery O'Connor was an unapologetic, unreconstructed Southerner of staunchly Catholic and profoundly conservative orientation who wrote unsparingly dark, bleak, and violent stories. This disconcerted many readers, who couldn't understand why an author who believed in God and adhered to Christian precepts would so often dwell on such disagreeable subject matter.

Miss O'Connor gave reply in a 1957 essay titled "The Fiction Writer and His Country." It was precisely secular modernity's deadening effect on the individual conscience, she asserted, that necessitated her thematic emphasis on the sordid, the depraved, and the grotesque; people needed to be shocked, shaken up, and reminded of what was important. "To the hard of hearing you shout," she wrote, "and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling pictures."

O'Connor died in 1964, before the sexual revolution kicked into high gear, before the legalization of abortion, or the promotion of adolescent sexuality in public schools, or the enforced sanctification of buggery by an ascendant legal and academic elite openly hostile to traditional morality; before the preference to retain one's European-derived heritage and identity was rendered as "hate" for one's fellow man, before mass immigration and multiculturalism and the promulgation of totalitarian hate-speech laws, before the relentless shaming of whiteness, maleness, and "heterosexism" became an obligatory ritual on college campuses across the Western world.

From a conservative's perspective, things have certainly gotten worse since O'Connor's time, yet Christian social conservatives have, if anything, grown into even bigger ninnies. Witness a site like Plugged-In Online, a kind of encyclopedic collection of reviews of recent movies, TV shows, and music albums -- all of which are critiqued from an ostensibly Christian perspective. I say "ostensibly" not because I doubt the sincere religious convictions of the site's writers, but because their collective aesthetic notions leave much to be desired. Indeed, their habitual tendency is to equate sanitization with sanctification and G-rated-ness with holiness.

Peruse Plugged In's movie review pages, and you'll soon find yourself immersed in a virtual galaxy of hectoring, scolding platitudes repeated ad nasuseum. When a character in a film makes a bad choice, the incident is usually filed under the heading of "Objectionable Material." And when there is sex, violence, or profanity -- whatever the context, no matter how the viewer is meant to think about the behavior depicted -- the Plugged Inn-ers are automatically "out" on it, without deliberation or discussion.

Thus, to use a Biblical metaphor, is the wheat commonly thrown out with the chaff. Smutty, exploitative, irresponsible, and immoral junk gets lustily condemned, of course, but so does fare that, while irreverent and "adult," is actually in many ways sympathetic to traditionalism, or at the very least gives the ever-looming Zeitgeist a good, square kick in the crotch. Comedies like Juno and Knocked Up, both of which contain a scandalously pro-life message, are dismissed out of hand due to their nonstop racy and vulgar dialogue. The 40-Year Old Virgin, which, if you pay attention, actually promotes abstinence before marriage, also gets greeted with prissy exhalations of exasperation and contempt for its raucous and ribald content. Fight Club, a profound meditation on the spiritual emasculation of the modern male in a world bereft of belief or hope, is simplistically condemned for promoting violent nihilism. And on it goes...

No one would ever claim that the representative sample of movies discussed above were "family-friendly." Still, a conservative critic with even a scrap of subtlety of mind and aesthetic discernment can see that, even if they fall short in certain crucial ways, there is, indeed, much to appreciate in these films. But the good, churchgoin', God-fearin' Plugged-In folks seem almost willfully clueless to such a possibility, smarmily set as they are on maintaining their lofty perch of sanctimonious disapproval.

But even more irritating than the proclivity to reflexively dismiss and sniff at every non-Veggie Tales movie ever made, is the way the Plugged-In-style critic tends to react when challenged.

"After all (one says to him), what about the acknowledged literary greats?

Aren't Shakespeare's plays full of violence, mayhem, and sexual innuendo? Isn't Dante's vision of Hell just a bit gory and gnarly? What about all of those shocking stories from the Bible itself? Adam and Eve are naked without shame, Cain murders Abel, Lot has sex with his daughters during a drunken cave orgy, Onan spills his seed on the ground, David commits adultery with Beersheba and sends Uriah to his death, and the Isrealities wipe out just about everyone in sight over and over again... and all of that's just in the Old Testament! Yet the Bible is a holy book -- THE holy book. If it, Dante, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Homer, Milton, Poe, Joyce, O'Connor, and all the other faithful recorders of human vice, folly, perversity and corruption throughout the ages are allowed to tread in such waters, then why do you immediately look upon movies of recent years with suspicion and consternation if they deal with challenging material?"

To this, the self-satisfied Christian critic of the Plugged-In variety smiles blandly. "You're comparing Shakespeare to Pulp Fiction? I'm sorry... that just doesn't work!" While declaiming any qualitative equivalency between the Bard and Tarantino, you reply, why can't this question be asked? To this, he scoffs at first, taking the answer to be self-evident, but when you persist, he stammers that Shakespeare and everyone else who wrote a long time ago always wrote with a moral framework in mind, while contemporary writers are in almost all cases just scurrilous schlock-meisters whose only agenda is to mock all things decent. Suggest that your interlocutor is painting with the broadest of brushes and, moreover, speaking from pure ignorance, and you'll again be favored with a patronizing smirk, much like Dana Carvey's "Church Lady" character once fixed upon his guest before snarkily observing, "Well... we have our little opinions, don't we?"

Take another tack: Point out that content doesn't necessarily determine form, that even an NC-17 rated movie like Abel Ferrara's The Bad Lieutenant can be a quite moving story of faith and redemption. You may get a grudging semi-acknowledgement, followed by a hurried recapitulation of ad priori asethetic notions, which he wills to cancel out any prior ground previously ceded: "I suppose it may be argued that the message is a positive one," he'll aver, "but... when the way of relating this message is so incredibly negative it really doesn't matter what the flimmaker intended..." Again, the only way art can be legitimately Christian is if it's squeaky-clean, antiseptic, devoid of blemish or grit.

The only way to be profound, it seems, is to be boring.

There are, of course, certain exceptions to this rule, the most prominent being Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. With this film, the Plugged-Inner and all of his ilk suddenly discovered that it's permissible to shake up the audience, O'Connor-style, through the brazen, unflinching depiction of nonstop, horrifying cruelty and torture, provided the story concerns the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus.

Self-important Spielbergian historical gorefests like Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan are likewise exempt from the In-Plugged scribblers' knee-jerk condemnations, due, I suppose, to their shameless pushing of buttons that send jolts into the heart of they typical American evangelical believer: 1) the conviction of the inherent goodness of the American military and the greatness of the cause of the "good war" that was WWII, and 2) the lurid depiction of persecution of Jews under Hitler, giving rise to the modern state of Israel, which (again, in the evangelical mind) can do no wrong.

But the exceptions, as always, prove the rule, and the rule, in turn, underlines an undeniable problem among “red-state” Americans today. Cultural leftists control Hollywood and most outlets of the entertainment media, at least in part due to the fact that leftists in general, at this point in history, simply see more value in the fine arts, while right-leaning Americans' tastes typically run more towards the philistine sentimentalism of country-western songs, grocery-store romance novels, and Fox News/talk radio inspired displays of drippy, mawkish patriotism.

But we shouldn't be fooled that everyone who thinks or votes along leftist lines maintains rigidly ideological standards to an obnoxious and humorless extreme. In fact, there is clearly quite a bit of dissent among the ranks of the Lefty cultural elite, as evidenced by the not infrequent, spasmodic outbursts of brazen political incorrectness indulged in by "hip" comedians like Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle and others, and lapped up voraciously by their predominantly "blue-state" audiences.

It would be a grave mistake to ghettoize radical traditionalism, or to expect only the worst from our opponents at all times, just as it would be small-minded and shortsighted to maintain that art must be "safe," bland, and shorn of edges. Life is very difficult, and art should be true to life. If the cultural transformation we struggle to achieve is worthwhile, then it demands more than lip service or crass propaganda in its support.

In the coming years of struggle, hopefully more true cultural conservatives, be they of Christian affiliation or not, will plug out of the "Plugged In" mentality, and will begin to entertain more independent and adventuresome aesthetic principles. Whatever your faith, it's not a sin to be provocative; indeed, extreme times call for extreme art. To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling pictures.

It's summer time, and you know what that means -- movies about the destruction of the traditional family! 

Don't miss these blockbusters about smart, modern, career women, who are lesbians and single mothers, and the neurotic and irresponsible beta-males they barely tolerate.  

In all seriousness, I don't know who would go see films like these, or how they could make money. Though I haven't crunched the numbers, my guess is that every year Hollywood plans on raking in the cash with movies about comic book heroes; this leaves pleanty of room in the budget for money-losing, cultural Bolshevist propaganda flicks.  

Oliver Stone might end up being remembered as one of the last left-wing proponents of Great Man History. For much of the past century, leftish historiography and historical fiction has noticeably tended towards, 1) the tedious deconstruction of “colonial” and “hegemonic” (read: dead, white, and male) discourse and 2) “social,” “bottom-up,” “democratic” history about the working class or various subaltern ethnicities forging their own destinies.

Stone has bravely stood athwart this trend, presenting historical dramas in which the personalities, anxieties, family histories, and personal philosophies of political leaders inform their shaping of the world. (“The people” are spectators, if they appear in his films at all.)

In most of his big films, Stone has focused on history’s great villains from the left-wing perspective (his latest one, South of the Border, in which Stone appears smitten with Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, stands as an exception). Nixon, Bush, Gordon Gekko (the 1980s tycoon and Reaganaut), and Tony D’Amato (a stand-in for Bill Parchells and other authoritarians of the grid iron) -- all his great characters are modern right-wing archetypes. (Evita, whose screenplay Stone co-wrote, is ambiguous in this regard, as the Perons combined fascist elements with the Latin American-style left-wing populism Stone so admires. Alexander wasn’t Left or Right, of course, but allowed Stone to indulge in Great-Man-ness none the less.) It perhaps reveals something that in JFK, John F. Kennedy Jr. hardly appears; Stone seems only interested in probing the psyche of conservatives.

Well, they finally got Mel Gibson! His talent agency -- William Morris, run by Rahm Emmanuel’s brother, Ari -- dumped him, his future projects are in jeopardy, and he’s apparently leaving the country, returning to his native Australia and ex-wife Robyn. The Hollywood and New York media establishment appears delighted to be rid of this right-wing, über-Catholic menace.

The tabloid media has told the story in the only way it knows how -- 1) as an ugly breakup between an older leading man and his younger, foreign, long-suffering second wife, and 2) as a revelation that Mel is an unhinged maniac.

This characterization is pure fantasy, of course. Whether or not the tapes were doctored, Miss Oksana Grigorieva is clearly attempting to extort money from Gibson, whose net worth after three decades of blockbusters approaches 1 billion.

Secondly, though Mel’s rants are painful to listen to, they simply prove that he’s human. I’ve lost it with my girlfriend and some family members on a few occasions; if I were to hear recordings of my tirades, I’d be mortified, to be sure. But I’d never think that cruel words shouted in anger represent my true character.  Mel’s ex-wife has sworn that he never abused her or his children, and in a stunning show of good sense, Whoopie Goldberg told her fans that Mel always treated her with respect.  (In response to the later, I overheard a Fox News commentator speculated that Mel’s “brain chemistry” might have changed since Whoopie and Robyn knew him…)