"... should be enlisted in the service of good works; but
no one has ever had his mind changed by a play or movie. That’s not how they function—they’re entertainment, with as little ability to alter ones thinking as does a meal.
Exodus no more reduced anti-Semitism than tacos clarify the border crisis.... Islamists at home and abroad have been demonizing the Jewish State since 1948: Why would a bunch of septuagenarian Jews in Hollywood conclude they could be defeated by 'changing the narrative'? The answer: they did not conceive of them being defeated; they merely wanted peace, which to their minds might be achieved rationally, without war, through mere dialogue, as if murderous savagery were the result of misunderstanding...."
I'm reading
"The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment" by David Mamet (Amazon Associates link).
Wait. What about
"The Birth of a Nation"? Did Mamet consider the movies and plays that have changed people for the worse? How about all the pornography?
Posts
81 comments:
"...but no one has ever had his mind changed by a play or movie."
He's wrong.
If the author starts the project with the intention to change minds, then, yes, he will fail. But an honest, vulnerable piece can and does succeed. What a strange thing for a writer to say.
I recall being changed by movies, but it's been a long time now.
"no one has ever had his mind changed by a play or movie" Wrong in general. But if true, entails a paradox, in the sense that we can have our collective minds changed by the movie image of an era, even if individual change is hard to pin down. Plus our minds are changed by what we don't see: few honest portrayals of the evils of communism and the harshness of women's life under Islam compared to the relentless media focus on the "rightwing" Nazis.
Secular religions.
Movies and stories help shape your world view, especially when you are young. That's why activists want to put picture books showing sex acts into libraries where they can be accessed by grade school kids. Though I don't know why the bother because "How about all the pornography?"
If kids have access to the internet, or their friends have access that stuff is shaping their brains.
Words, images, expressions have the potential, but not inevitability to influence, modulate Anthropogenic Intelligence (AI).
Griffiths adaptation of William Dixons the Klansman, probably accentuated pre existing sentiments, that were already present in Jim Crow South,
However, unlike a Mechanical Intelligence (MI), AI has an intangible, immeasurable conscience, a soul that science can neither discern nor characterize, the origin and expression of humanity.
That little guy in yesterday’s post quantified it- win hearts and minds of only 3.5 percent! (It’s to a decimal place so its truth is very accurate…)
What about novels? Did Uncle Tom's Cabin make the North more determined to abolish slavery some day, even with no real plan for Reconstruction? Lincoln suggested to Stowe that her book caused the Civil War.
Has Handmaid's Tale made women and others more determined to preserve the sanctity of one's own body?
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
It's the cumulative effect, not one movie or play or book. And it's the cumulative effect on many minds, not one. And the effect does not last forever. A decade? The streams of culture are fed, the old washes away.
In 2000, the American Film Institute ranked Birth Of A Nation at #35 of its Greatest Films Of the 20th Century. A decade later they updated the list and that movie was gone.
Several mid century movies & productions, including "Porgy & Bess", and pretty much any Sidney Poitier movie, focused on portraying black people as humans who whites could relate to as human.
This was a new experience to a lot of whites, many of whom had never known a black person in person.
I believe these productions had a crucial role in mid century civil rights progress.
Another thing so obviously false that only an intellectual could believe it.
"but no one has ever had his mind changed by a play or movie." That was a spectacularly bad way to make a point, using an idea that is false. The phrase implies that popular culture has no impact on the belief systems of people. This, from a playwright that has made quite a name for himself doing precisely that. Israelis trying to survive are not consumed with plot devices, they're worried about explosive devices.
I wonder if Mamet regrets saying it this way, comparing apples to hand grenades. No, a movie isn't going to make Hamas change its mind, but it can convince a lot of people to think about an issue and treat Hamas differently as a consequence.
I think people's minds (opinions) are changed through plays and movies (I'd add TV in there). It's usually not one movie equaling one ah-ha moment but slow change where ideas become normalized. It's like filling a bucket with an eye dropper.
'Disenlightenment': I like this. For the last few years I've really felt like we're watching while the Enlightenment is cast aside in favor of myth and superstition and tribal warfare.
Mamet's as competent a hater as those he accuses of hate. For example, in his Leo Frank book, the already raped-and-murdered adolescent factory employee Mary Phagan, who, being already raped-and-murdered and thus having nothing to do with Frank's killing, is represented by Mamet as being both part of his lynch mob and a sickening "gynecological odor" tormenting him.
That's like calling Anne Frank a sickening gynecological odor to justify claiming that she just died of cholera instead of at the hands of the Nazis.
Woodrow Wilson premiered Birth of a Nation at the White House. That's pretty influential. By modern trial standards, I believe nobody can look back and know if Leo Frank; his black janitor, Jim Conley, or both men were involved in Phagan's murder. The time frames of others coming and going are pretty detailed in Frank's ledgers, as it was payday at a factory. Of course that does not justify lynching Frank. But Frank and his supporters used racism (in the New York Times and in court) to accuse Conley, just as Conley's supporters used anti-semitism to accuse Frank (there were also Jewish men who voted guilty on Frank's jury -- women and blacks were still excluded from being jurors). And today, even more than in 1915, it is most popular to implicate Mary Phagan and the impoverished "slutty white factory girls" she now represents (see the beloved musical, Parade) for Frank's murder.
Mamet is pretty blinkered. Of course cultural influences affect cultures, maybe not a single book, but a zeitgeist in a free culture or the imposition of one creation in a less free one. He's a prime example.
I don't know if Uncle Tom's Cabin changed minds, but it certainly solidified anti-slavery sentiment.
I would say Mamet is being a bit of realist, no single element, had this kind of impact, the marketing of Exodus is a subplot in one of the early mad men episodes, along with a sneer against Cuban patriots later down the line,
yes Wilson's sponsorship of Birth certainly had an impact,
"no one has ever had his mind changed by a play or movie"
Ten years of All in the Family, MASH, et al. was followed by the biggest political correction of the postwar era, and it broke in the opposite direction.
There's a lot of mashing up of cause and effect in these comments. The Poitier movies, for example, were as much the result of changes taking place already as they were influential. The same for Uncle Tom's Cabin and other examples.
I doubt Birth of a Nation did anything political except to confirm the viewers' prejudices -- every viewer nursing every stereotype that arises from uninformed perceptions of the South.
As for pornography, I think it was Aristotle who first classified the elements of dramatic structure. I doubt he was thinking of sexual orgasm when he proposed the dramatic arc.
I believe To Kill A Mockingbird shaped a lot of young people’s thinking. 1984 certainty had an affect on me as a kid and a bigger affect when I reread it as an adult. One of the earliest novels for me to read was Huckleberry Finn. It absolutely affected my thinking. I was probably 9 the first time I read it.
Mamet is more right than wrong.
Of course, I say that as a person who has gradually lost all respect for, and almost all interest in, plays and movies and
the people who make them, and has never followed Mamet's work.
How ridiculous. Of course, ONE particular play or ONE particular film has no impact. But when its part of a barrage of movies and TV shows all pushing the same message, it has an impact. And the movies and TV shows also even more impactful when they are reinforcing the message pushed by the "Education Industry", books, magazines and Political leaders.
That's why most dumb libtards squawk out the party line. They're incapable of independent thought and are easily brainwashed.
"Several mid century movies & productions, including "Porgy & Bess", and pretty much any Sidney Poitier movie, focused on portraying black people as humans who whites could relate to as human.
This was a new experience to a lot of whites, many of whom had never known a black person in person."
I'm mostly a sitcom fan. In that genre, at least, it seems like the audience is always ahead of the producers. Producers, sponsors, networks, press, all have incentives to pretend they're leading the audience but it seems the audience is happy to take in controversial material, if it's entertaining.
BTW, has anyone watched Birth of a Nation? It was made in 1915, and there's nothing particularly "evil" or even "racist" about it. Most of it is boring.
And for every 1 movie portraying the KKK in a good light, there were 30 movies portraying racists as bad - and that's in the 20s and 30s.
Liberal propaganda against racism in the 50s and 60s was effective because it was subtle. Rodgers and Hammerstein are a perfect example. You cast Hunky Yul Brynner as the King of Siam and have him flirt with Deborrah Kerr in "Shall we dance" and have a play about "Uncle Toms cabin".
Or you show Asians as cute and 'murican in "the Flower drum song". Or you sing about "You must learn to hate" in South Pacific, and that you really shouldn't get upset that your incredibly attractive French Planter/lover has a couple of cute halfwhite/half polynesian kids.
And of course the message of the Sound of Music is "Nazis Bad".
The other thing they did was always cast black suppporting characters as authority figures. They were policemen, Judges, Military officers, Lawyers, Priests, Doctors, Engineers, etc. If they average joes - they were likable "Nice" people who usually were helping the lead characters or fighting the villians in some way.
Sidney Potitier was a perfect example. The doctor in no way out. The nice Ex-GI who helps nuns. Another doctor (who works for the UN) in "Guess whos coming to Dinner". A schoolteacher "In to SIr with love" teaching those trashy English kids good manners and Shakespeare, and of course the Homicide x-burt who helps the trashy rednecks in "IN the heat of the night".
If all you knew about black people was what you saw on TV and movies in the 50s/60s you'd think they were the greatest group of people in the world.
Interesting the Mamet only really seems to care about Israel and Anti-Semitism. That must be the motive for him turning "Conservative" in the last couple decades.
"An Inconvenient Truth," a work of fiction, changed a lot of minds.
It's not about one writer's or one director's one play or one movie changing minds. It's about orchestrated campaigns of propaganda. Scriptwriters in the 30s and 40s weren't concerned about putting their individual vision on the screen. They were promoting the party line along with journalists and folk singers. More recently, one film about South Africa didn't change people's minds about apartheid, but the cumulative effect of film, drama, fiction, and reportage encouraged people to reconsider their thinking.
"Exodus" wasn't about anti-Semitism, but about Zionism. Mamet notwithstanding, those aren't the same issue. "Exodus" did do something to encourage positive attitudes towards Israel in the US, but why would it have had any effect in Arab or Muslim lands? Was it really going to outweigh the real issues and circumstances in the region? Watching it here and now, is it really very convincing in its pro-Zionist message? Should we really be surprised that Hollywood Communist Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay?
BTW "Islamists" isn't the best description of Middle Eastern thinking in the 40s/50s/60s. Secular nationalism was a major factor in the region.
I'm with Mamet on this one. It is inconceivable that someone who had purchased a ticket to see D.W. Griffith's epic, took his seat respecting black Americans as human beings and fellow citizens and after twelve reels and two intermissions arose from that seat thinking of blacks as rape-obsessed anthropoids, just as it is equally inconceivable that a KKK member exited the exhibition hall drenched in self-loathing and contrition.
Was Birth of a Nation influential? Undoubtedly, yes. It certainly contributed to the appearance of racist organizations patterned after the revanchist bands that arose after the fall of the Confederacy, but those who joined the KKK were like-minded long before they donned the robes.
If drama, particularly film, really could change minds, why did Lenin create the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (Cheka) in 1917 and allow it to expand to exercise even greater police powers after the Bolsheviks had decisively won the Russian Civil War. Was Sergei Eisenstein an insufficiently competent filmmaker?
"I don’t know how one changes the minds of others. Through fifty years of writing, I’ve regularly heard that film and drama..."
"... should be enlisted in the service of good works…”
The secret is to write for the money but preen over the good works.
Diversity (i.e. colors judgment, class bigotry). DEI (i.e. systemic, institutional Diversity). Are umbrella philosophies and practices of class-disordered ideologues. #HateLovesAbortion
I dunno. Look what Chucky did to clowns.
Kate with the win right off the bat.
See also Chuck at 11:26.
"You are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.
And I would nominate Casablanca as a powerful piece of Hollywood propaganda that moved the USA into entering the war. Casablanca is so damn good, you don't even realize you're watching propaganda.
If you've ever seen Nazi propaganda or Commie propaganda, they suck at it. Not even close.
Billy Wilder attacked Communism at least three times, writing the screenplay for Ninotchka and writing/directing Sabrina (his defense of capitalism and his response to Marx) as well as One, Two, Three.
Speaking of writers, Marx caused some fucking trouble. And I think Crouch's point about Roots has some merits as well. Whitewashing Africa's slave trade and telling people that it's a USA problem, isolated to our evil country. Slavery is a worldwide problem.
In Mamet's defense, he's probably not thinking of books (which obviously influence people, hello), and just limited himself to his own spheres of influence (plays and films). And Mamet's works don't change people's minds. He's not that kind of writer. And how would you measure successful mind-change anyway?
I never know who I've convinced or which argument I've won. Jesus teaches us that we plant seeds and God does the rest.
Slavery is a worldwide problem.
That should be the past tense. Slavery was a worldwide problem (knock on wood).
Some Islamic countries are trying to bring it back.
Grooming. Transmental therapy. A modern, ancient religion with "benefits".
Questor, the problem with your analysis is that you picked an incredibly shitty writer (Griffith), whose characters are in two dimensions at best.
My personal experience of Exodus is that the extremely Christian folk in the small town I grew up became pro-Israel after not knowing it was now a country again. Paul Newman had weight with public opinion. (We were the only Jewish family who lived in town at the time.)
My review on Birth of a Nation. I gave it an F.
5794 The Birth of a Nation (1915) Yeah yeah, I am Ranting on the Classics. Now, this is a pro-Klan movie. And a lot of PC people will hate it for that reason alone. That's not why I hate it. I rate Nazi propaganda almost 4000 movies higher than this. Commie propaganda, too. I can admire propaganda if it's well executed. What makes me jump up and down is not your propaganda. I am immune to your propaganda.
What I am not immune to, what makes my eyeballs bleed, is all your damn melodrama. D.W. Griffith is the worst screenwriter in the history of the English language. Sure, his black people are offensive racial caricatures. You know what? His white people suck, too. His whole movie is a horror show.
By the 1920's, nobody was watching his stuff. You know why? Because American society stopped being racist in 1920? Uh, no. Because he sucks! He sucks! Sucks, sucks, sucks!
My review of Broken Blossoms. Another F.
5853 Broken Blossoms or the Yellow Man and the Girl (1919)
A lot of film people give D. W. Griffith props for being an innovator in cinema. He's an evolutionary step up, a cinematic frog-man, and we must recognize his contributions to the art form. Yeah, whatever. He can’t write. His screenplays are horrible. Insipid writing. Twain is flippin' over in his grave. It's not just the racism; all his characters are flat and boring caricatures.
I remember the stereotypical cartoons of my childhood--Pepe Le Pew, Foghorn Leghorn, Speedy Gonzalez, the black crows from Dumbo--with fondness and affection. Yeah, these cartoons are simplistic, reductionist, maybe even racist. But they are also human and fun. Griffith's racism is beneath childish cartoons. He is literally unable to create or suggest real characters. I think his racism is intertwined with his romanticism and his melodrama. He is unable to see people as they are, and utterly fails to create realistic and human people on the screen.
Even Griffith's historical importance is overrated. He made the first feature-length movie. Well, whoop-to-do. Everybody and his mother was making short films. Louis Feuillade was making 45-minute vampire movies, ten of 'em in a row. And Griffith makes one 3-hour monstrosity? That's the lamest contribution I ever heard of, the long-ass movie that makes your butt sore. Just another reason to spit when you hear his name.
"Casablanca" had its heyday in the 1960s when college kids rediscovered it. I'm not sure it had much of an effect in 1942. It was one of many, many films about the war that shaped American attitudes.
Communist and Nazi propaganda isn't convincing to us, but it was convincing to people whose whole environment supported its message. Also to some who came to it without much understanding of the issues involved.
"Liberal propaganda" of the 50s seems pretty conservative today. It's similar with "The Twilight Zone." The "liberal" message became mainstream. But outside events played a big role in convincing people to change their attitudes. "Show Boat" in the 20s didn't convince people to support integration. It took WWII and MLK to do that.
Mamet thrives on controversy. He lives to make people nervous or get a rise out of them. If he lived in Israel would he say the same things he does here, or would he go against the prevailing thinking there?
"should be enlisted in the service of good works..."
One interesting insight that I gained from ChatGPT is that traditional storytelling, the kind that resonates with human beings, has to do with the character arc, generally of the protagonist. He or she learns something, something worth writing a book or movie about, he or she changes. But modern movies aren't about the transformation of characters, but the transformation arc that they aim for is the transformation of society. In a direction that they have pre-conceived, BTW, not that they have explored themselves in the writing of the movie or novel. Hence they are all preachy, and nobody wants to subject themselves to it.
As for whether not supporting what Netanyahu is doing in Israel is "anti-semitic," well I must know a lot of strangely anti-semitic Jewish people. In fact the only IRL Jewish person I know, and I know many, who wholeheartedly supports what Netanyahu is doing is 90+ years old.
OK, I might have broken fast at the house of another who supports Israel fully, but he moved away, so I don't talk to him much anymore, so sorry for the oversight.
Jesus was an action man, not a writer. Other people witnessed what he said and did. Jesus did not write the Bible. He was doing actions out in the world, saying things. And what he said (along with the miracles) blew so many people away, that a lot of people remembered what he said. And there were oral histories. And finally some scholars (i.e. people who could write) wrote it down.
So Jesus was not an author (as far as we know). Some would quibble on whether he was an artist who was doing some happenings 2000 years ago. (He often had an audience).
Jesus is the prime example of how the word can change people's lives. Christians are so impressed, we call it the Word.
Saint Croix: interesting thoughts, though I'd argue Islam never stopped slavery -- see: slave trade, especially women.
I've been told by more than one refugee or dissident from the Soviet bloc that three things contributed mightly to bringing down communism: samizdat (smuggled) books, American blue jeans, and the Beatles. I'm going to recommend my favorite Russian film again: Burnt by the Sun.
It's interesting that you say Nazi and commie propaganda sucks. Just yesterday I was reading James Burnham's sadly not prescient 1949 book, The Coming Defeat of Communism (in my defense, I later watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- I'm a cultural polyglot). Anyway, he wrote that the point of Soviet propaganda being so bad was that it forced people to be demoralized enough to become cynical about anything except power, which was the state. They forced you to believe the lie while you knew you were believing the lie to maintain a paranoid sense of fear.
You're right about Mamet. He's an acquired taste. I never acquired it.
no one has ever had his mind changed by a play or movie
Does improved and enhanced qualify as changed? I used to watch movies i liked over and over again. How many things do we go through before we say 'I've changed my mind' about this or that. Most changes are a process. At least that's how it is approached in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, which I adhere to. The manifestation of a change could be sudden, but the process getting there could take some time and it is influenced by other things other than art.
Like my thoughts on gay marriage, for example, was greatly influenced by having a gay friend from work, who hesitated coming out to me because he heard me say I was against it. Later when he finally came out to me, I started analyzing the issue differently.
One time I remember getting free tickets to a pre-showing of an unfinished cut of 'Three Weddings and a Funeral', where they held a kind of focus group after the movie. I asked the gay friend of mine (i didn't know he was gay yet) and we went to see it. After the movie, but before the focus session started, had asked me to have coffee, but after the focus session, he remembered he had something he needed to take care of and we went our separate ways.
He finally came out to me at an apt warming party at his new apt. He introduced me to a former girlfriend and I was like, what happened? that girl is hot... that's when looked straight at me and said "I'm gay". I didn't respond, I didn't know what to say. But the process of reevaluating what I thought about gays started.
When the movie came out on video, I saw it again and by that time, my mind had changed. I was able to apréciate that funeral scene with the poem in ways I was just incapable of before. The movie played a part, but it was the friendship that was did it.
Olympia. Reifensthal. We owe the modern Olympic Games to her vision for Deutschland and der Führer.
Leora: most of my friends growing up were Jewish, Ukranian refugee families from the Holomodor, or Chinese, and Exodus, movie and book, had a huge influence on our family. I still have our well-worn family copy.
Birth of a Nation -- originally the book, but the movie captivated --- wasn't really about rapacious blacks. That part was just assumed. It was about reuniting northern and southern whites after Reconstruction, and at the time, this was a crucial national mission.
Judah Priest, yeah lets all trash "Birth of the Nation". Why if only I could go back in time and tell Jeff davis he was wrong about slavery. I'd punch him in the nose, and give him a piece of my mind. Cause nobody hates racism more than me. LOL
Triumph of the Will is good Nazi propaganda. Because we see a lot cute and handsome Nazis just hanging up at Nurumberg and having a good time. Then Hitler shows up, and gives a speech about its all one nation, one people, with one leader and then sieg heil - the end. You'd be forgiven if thought the Nazis were just a bunch of patriotic German Boy scouts.
And that's how you push it. Same with the commies. In their best propaganda, the Commies are just average joes fighting for the workers and peasants. The jargon is kept at a minimum, and occasionally you'll see the great leader (Mao or stalin) show up in his peasant tunic speaking a few wise words.
"Ukranian refugee families from the Holomodor,"
A lot of these were nazis fleeing "persecution" in Europe, especially in Canada, which looked the other way. Lots of other people suffered in that famine, but they don't count because they are inconvenient to the Ukrainian narrative. The collectivization of farms by the Soviets was going on, as was a terrible drought, but I guess this was all aimed by the Georgian, Stalin, at fellow Soviets, the Galacians, on behalf of the Russians. Lots of Ukrainians were heavily involved in the Soviet leadership, like Khrushchev, for example, who apparently was not Ukrainian because a GPS fix on the spot he was born in falls outside of modern borders, when he was born at a time when modern borders didn't really exist. But Wikipedia!
Tina, thanks for that movie rec, I haven't seen it.
When I first saw Wag the Dog, I was a smart young man, just out of law school. And my reaction was, "That's too cynical. That could never happen. It's ridiculous."
Now that I'm older and wiser, I'm like, "You changed my mind, Barry Levinson! Nice art, man."
Transgender marriage? Homosexuals are in the spectrum. Couplets are politically congruent ("=") couples. All sexual orientations (e.g. pedophilia, sadomasochism, polygamy) are legal under Democratic law. Myopic advocacy.
That said, civil unions for all consenting adults. #NoJudgment #NoLabels #HateLovesAbortion
The two counter-examples to Mamet that most readily come to mind are Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair. I give the edge to Stowe, because she obviously meant to cause (or increase) the public’s revulsion towards slavery. Uptown Sinclair raised people’s consciousness, but not the way he meant to. As he later said, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
During the Civil War Harriet Beecher Stowe met Abraham Lincoln in the White House, a meeting she described as “very droll.” One of the attendees, her son, said that when Lincoln met her, he said “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War.”
Jaq: “ the only IRL Jewish person I know, and I know many, who wholeheartedly supports what Netanyahu is doing is 90+ years old.”
Hmm, what did 90-year-old Jews live through that might make them appreciate what Netanyahu is doing? Can’t quite remember….
JSM
So my favorite pro-life movie is a documentary called, In the Womb. It was produced by National Geographic. I don't know why Naked Science has a free version up on youtube.
I can't promise that it will make you more respectful of the pro-life position. Will it change hearts and minds? I don't know.
I do think that sex educators ought to be playing In the Womb in sex education classes across the country. People ought to know what's going on in the womb. A lot of pro-choice people seem to be opposed to that. And they don't want people to see this movie.
They also got five other versions, with animals. You know how National Geogrpahic loves animals. So you can see inside the womb of animals, too. But the In the Womb documentary with humans is the important one.
so wag the dog, was derivative of an even crazier screed by larry beinhart, which suggested the Gulf War, was some sort of stunt, in part engineered by Hollywood,
Mamet then took it, and applied to a fictional war in Albania,
then certain figures, chose to use that template, to frame Clinton's response to Bin Laden,
the source material for Birth, was Thom Dixons Klansmen, that made a bunch of ex confederate veterans some noble band of knights, phooey
My latest watch of "Oklahoma" made me think that, rather than light musical theater, it was 'hicks' seen through the worldview of NYC. Granny's line "But it's for the children!" brought to mind the rationale for property taxes, the more burdensome, the better.
Seeing it that way changed my mind about the script. The music is still witty and catchy, though.
Mamet certainly exhibited an anti establishment vibe in Spartan, later in the Unit scripts, he turned to the right,
"The Sorrows of Young Werther" changed a lot of minds. Many young men committed suicide after reading it. So you can say it definitely altered the course of their lives. Even worse many young men took to wearing canary yellow trousers in emulation of the book's hero. You can't tell me that this had nothing to do with the rise of Hitler.
I think David is just expressing - out - from his inner self - a lament of his - a quite common one it is - even for a great playwright or screenwriter - the insignificance of his work product. What playwright or screenwriter can confidently boast that its work changed the world? It's a cry.
I can think of several movies that changed my opinion: Johnny Got His Gun and I Want To Live.
I can think of several movies that changed my opinion: Johnny Got His Gun and I Want To Live.
"You can't tell me that this [Goethe's suicidal protagonist] had nothing to do with the rise of Hitler."
An older, German-born friend of mine used to say that Goethe, the Enlightenment Poofter, had a lot to answer for.
Kudos to narciso for reminding me that David Mamet co-wrote that screenplay. Doh!
Kamala: "I need you to Wag the Dog on the Trump campaign."
De Niro: "Okay. What's our budget?"
Kamala: "I'm not sure. I'm still waiting on my check from Lady Biden."
De Niro: "How did you get rid of the big guy?"
Kamala: "George Clooney. Really expensive."
De Niro: "I'm expensive."
Kamala: "We got a lot of money."
De Niro: "Are we going with a Nazi theme?"
Kamala: "I think this time, he's a felon. We got his mug shot."
De Niro: "That's good. I've got a speech in my head. He's a punk. He's a dog."
Kamala: "Also, we need to make our side pretty. We need transvestites and Mexican flags."
De Niro: "Do we have a screenplay? We're not doing improv, are we?"
Kamala: "I'm thinking about blaming the Jews."
De Niro: "Zionists. You blame the Zionists. You really suck at this."
Kamala: (laughs)
De Niro: "Bozo. What do you think of Bozo. He's a Bozo!"
Kamala looks around for the liquor.
Did Mamet consider the movies and plays that have changed people for the worse?
Yeah, I think there's an asymmetry in what media can do -- it's easier for movies and plays to build hatred and contempt than affection, which is why propaganda films more often focus on the supposed evils of the enemy than on the virtues of the heroes, and satire is wholly directed at tearing down the dignity of its targets. But even so, I don't think movies or other media have much power to change minds that have already been made up. They work more on the neutral and impressionable.
I don't think movies or other media have much power to change minds that have already been made up. They work more on the neutral and impressionable.
That's exactly right. And it's not just movies, it's teaching in general. It's a lot easier changing a kid's mind than an adult's mind. That's why Republicans are right to not trust the Democrats on schools, and to fight for school choice.
I like public schools. I always went to public schools. And what I found out, 10 or 20 or 30 years later, is that I had some wrong ideas implanted in my brain. "Oh, that's not right."
Two party states suck. But one party states are far, far worse. Despise any university that has a 90-10 faculty, or a 95-5 faculty. Ask these questions as you visit schools and consider paying them tuition. "Is it a fact that Republicans aren't seeking jobs here, or are you discriminating against them?" Universities that are one-party states should be ashamed of themselves.
William at 7:03. LOL
Jaq: the Ukranian families who befriended us were (then adult) children and grandchildren sent to Canada by their parents to avoid starvation by the commies. They were raised in orphanages, and some were transported to America. Sorry, no Nazis.
Oh, I see you use Wikipedia for your "source." Automatic D-minus. Maybe F.
Rcocean: I've taught Birth of a Nation. I'm in no way endorsing it, of course, just stating the historical milieau in which the original book was written. Society evolves with parody too. From the later French B-movies purportedly set in Texas (you can see the Eiffel Tower in one), to the awful stuff Sartre filmed, to grindhouse classics like My Baby is Black, to the Mandingo series, based on novels by gay Austrian Poodle breeders, the slope is steep but always ends in the same place as Mamet and To Kill a Mockingbird: blame the impoverished slattern Southern white woman, while the Klan was actually upper and merchant-class town leaders and politicians. That charge against poor whites has always stuck. Funny, about a century ago, brave black female journalists opposing lyinching bothered to differentiate between real rapes and rape-murders resulting in lynchings while still opposing lynching and sought to identify the real accusers, frequently white men. Even Scottsboro is misrepresented: the women told police they had not been raped, and tried to flee in the hope of not being arrested as prostitutes. They were imprisoned. One changed her story in prison (and they had been roughed up on that train car after the white men were thrown off the car by the black men); one became a communist and tried to free the men. History is hard. You won't find it on Wikipedia, movie screens, or college campuses.
Trent, sorry, but as an academic you know "novels by gay Austrian Poodle breeders" fails the Althouse Headline Test.
Are the breeders gay and Austrian? Are the poodles? Are the poodles Austrian but the breeders gay? Etc.
JSM
John Mosby, I assume sarcasm, but the comment was factual and not suppressed from the thread. Maybe I misplaced some commas, and I think dogs are the only real bisexuals, but those Mandingo writer guys were just plain weird.
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