The cinetrix should state for the record that she has not seen, nor does she ever intend to see, either The Exorcism of Emily Rose or Just Like Heaven. Flicks like these make her happy that, amateur status intact, sitting through schlock is not part of the ol' job description.
Poor Tony Scott is not so lucky. In Sunday's Times he tries to make sense of the whole red state-shift at the multiplex for the blue state readers of the Gray Lady. Here's what he comes up with:
Not exactly a newsflash, even for New Yorkers. Problem is, Scott still has several column inches to go. So the gentle reader is subjected to such earthshattering revelations as this: Christians have money to spend on entertainment! You know, like going to the movies? I know, I didn't believe it either, but it's true! Somehow they're now a niche market!
[B]ig movies, hit movies, movie-star movies - remain one of the few pop-cultural forms that are supposed to appeal to everyone. The oldest and fondest dream in Hollywood has been that it might represent, and thus sell tickets to, a public ruled by harmony and consensus. Those ideals may seem especially hard to come by these days, but we should not let old movies convince us that the old days were that much less contentious than the present. Indeed, the divisive aspects of American life - the half-hidden conflicts of race, class, place and creed - have traditionally been smoothed over on screen.
But there is an equally long tradition of trying to see through the pretty, pandering pictures. Hunting for ideological subtexts in Hollywood movies is a critical parlor game. Many a term paper has been written decoding the varieties of cold war paranoia latent in the westerns and science-fiction movies of the 1950's. 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.
I love the game of ideological unmasking, don't you? [All the best grad-school dropouts know how to play, dontcha know. And now, thanks to the Interweb, the hoi polloi can learn how, too.] Here, I'll be red--I'm always red. OK, so The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a thinly disguised position paper advocating "intelligent design," and Just Like Heaven resets Terri Schiavo as an active ectoplasm with a happy ending. And they're both about women, for a change. Yeah, there must be some sort of hidden agenda. Your turn, Tony.
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. Or that the last word you hear (uttered by Jon Heder, first seen in "Napoleon Dynamite") is "righteous."
The ingenuity of "Just Like Heaven" is that it does not insist on its righteousness. Its spiritual conceits are not associated with the doctrines of any particular religion, and its humor, while studiously clean, never feels prim or self-conscious. "Emily Rose," which also casts doctors among its villains and favors supernaturalism over science, is a bit more overt with its message. While "Just Like Heaven" is content with a vague, ecumenical supernaturalism, "Emily Rose" wants to tell you, like the old Louvin Brothers song, that Satan is real. Or, at the very least, that we should be open to the possibility that demonic possession might offer a better explanation for the title character's torments than the diagnoses listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
Talk about ideological unmasking! We now know that A.O. Scott likes to brag about his record collection and probably even gives money to WFMU. The Louvin Brothers is a nice pull, to be sure, but if you're gonna find Jews in the woodpile of central casting, why not go all the way and point out that Napoleon Dynamite was the work of Mormons? Oooh, conspiracy!
The cinetrix should point out here that she hasn't seen Napoleon Dynamite, either, but the film academics over on the geeky list-serv are all in a swivet about why the kiddies love it so. Their hope is that the slow pace will teach the indie kids how to dance to Antonioni again. Riiiight.
But my question is, pace the profs and Scott, should we be worried about the liger? Forget stem cell research in The Island--are the LDS filmmakers advancing a sinister GMO agenda?
I know, I know. It's only a movie. And "Reading From Left to Right" is only a newspaper think piece, albeit a lazy one that ends on this facile "provocative" note:
Will liberals now have a chance to complain, as conservatives have for so long, that Hollywood is ideologically biased and out of touch with its audience? Will we ever be able to sit back and say, "It's only a movie"? I hope not. The arguments we are having among ourselves are too loud and insistent to be drowned out or silenced in the false comfort of the movie theater.
Ah, but who is this "ourselves," anyway? The cinetrix spent the weekend reading papers on William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience ["The Lamb" + "The Tiger" = The Liger?] written by good conservative Southern Christian kids who love reading the Bible and listening to the Postal Service. Oh, brave new world.
Vote for Pedro.
