Conservative Flix: I See [almost] Dead People

Howdy howdy, friends, neighbors, children of all ages. The General has, to some degree, returned. Freshly moved and relatively beaten... The pace of posts may not be as consistent as we all would like, but that's what happens. Sorry bout that. Deal with it.

On to the goods:

Anybody go to the movies this weekend? If so, you likely went to see the romantic yawn-fest Just Like Heaven with a half-dead wandering ghost-spirit Reese Witherspoon. In a recent continuing trend with other media either openly or latently espousing a strange conservative ideology or being adopted by conservative groups for seemingly doing so, AO Scott at the NYT breaks down the conservative relations to the romantic ghost-comedy, and this one looks a lot like a Terri Schaivo wedge issue [Spoiler warning]:

Elizabeth, as it happens, is not dead, but rather in a coma from which she is given little chance of awakening. To make matters worse - and to set up a madcap climax in which Donal Logue rescues the film's faltering sense of humor - she has signed a living will, which her loving sister, urged on by an unprincipled doctor, is determined to enforce. But Elizabeth's spirit, along with Mr. Ruffalo's character, David, has second thoughts because she is so obviously alive, and the two must race to prevent the plug from being pulled, which means running through hospital corridors pushing a comatose patient on a gurney.

Would I have been happier if Elizabeth died? The very absurdity of the question - what kind of romantic comedy would that be? - is evidence of the film's ingenuity. Who could possibly take the side of medical judgment when love, family, supernatural forces and the very laws of genre are on the other side? And who would bother to notice that the villainous, materialistic doctor, despite having the religiously neutral last name Rushton, is played by Ben Shenkman, a bit of casting that suggests a faint, deniable whiff of anti-Semitism? Similarly, it can't mean much that Elizabeth, the ambitious career woman, is sad and unfulfilled in contrast to her married, stay-at-home-mom sister.

- and -

Now, thanks to the culture wars and the Internet, the game of ideological unmasking is one that more and more people are playing. With increasing frequency, the ideology they are uncovering is conservative, and it seems to spring less from the cultural unconscious than from careful premeditation.

Last fall, "The Incredibles" celebrated Ayn Randian libertarian individualism and the suburban nuclear family, while the naughty puppets of "Team America" satirized left-wing celebrity activism and defended American global power even as they mocked its excesses. More recently we have learned that flightless Antarctic birds, according to some fans of "March of the Penguins," can be seen as big-screen embodiments of the kind of traditional domestic values that back-sliding humans have all but abandoned, as well as proof that divine intention, rather than blind chance, is the engine of creation. I may be the only person who thought "The Island," this summer's Michael Bay flop about human clones bred for commercial use, indirectly argues the Bush administration's position on stem cell research, but I have not been alone in discerning lessons on intelligent design and other faith-based matters amid the spooky effects of "The Exorcism of Emily Rose." That movie, by the way, came in a close second behind "Just Like Heaven" at the box office last week, following an initial weekend in which it earned more than $30 million, one of the strongest September openings ever.

The secret conservative movie: here to stay...?

I, myself, am looking forward to all the wonderful conservative films that are on the way. Bring 'em On!