[lbo-talk] the Kultur Krisis

Eric Beck ersatzdog at gmail.com
Wed Mar 17 11:56:56 PDT 2010


On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 12:55 PM, farmelantj at juno.com <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:


> As I recall, the last
> "golden age" for Hollywood
> was back in the 1970s when
> were having our last major
> economic crisis

1) Many of the great 70s Hollywood films predated the actually predated the crisis and the 70s (e.g., The Wild Bunch). 2) That so-called golden age amounts to at most two dozen films, some of which aren't looking all that great these days. (The other night I watched The French Connection; it was fun, but as aht or a reflection of the zeitgeist, it's very bad.) The ratio of crap to not-crap produced by Hollywood in the 70s was very high, as it is today. 3) That golden age has a nice narrative to accompany its films, one that's popular: the rebellious group of actors and directors (alas, nearly all white and male--Elaine May proves the rule) who stuck it to the Hollywood studio system and made quality cinema. Problem with that story is that that system had actually long been dead, killed at least in part by actors in the 50s who were tired of the old feudalistic way studios operated, and Hollywood operated pretty much the same way after the 70s as it did before it. Everyone loves a good Oedipus story, though.

This article doesn't seem to want to take into account the at least a dozes films about apocalypse and decay that Hollywood has produced in the last couple of years. Aren't those a reflection of the crisis in some way? Or are they not politically correct enough? Which begs the question (and even accepting the crappy social-realist premises): when their have every been these films produced by Hollywood? The Godfather? Greed and power=bad. There's a unoriginal thesis, one completely embraced by Christians as well as capitalist.

I love it when Trots turn their critical eye to culture. It's when their idealist, reactionary politics become more obvious.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list