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quietprofanity Oct. 23rd, 2008 10:37 pm)
quietprofanity Oct. 23rd, 2008 10:37 pm)And now for part two, where I stop my overly-long introduction on everything I think EVER (with some restraints), and get down to the business of the movie, at least the A Christmas Carol portion.
Oh, but wait ... there's one thing I kind of forgot to talk about when it comes to the movie: the character of Michael Malone. In the film, I kept thinking of the character as "Moore," as that’s who they're really talking about and actor Kevin Farley is made to resemble Moore. But as I think about it more, the movie's portrayal of the character has a tin ear for how Moore actually acts.
Moore is accused of being a grandstander and a bit of an ass. I don't think these claims are without merit. I think some of his stunts are more about the stunt than the effect. The attempt to recruit the children of the men and women in Congress to go to the Iraq War in Fahrenheit 9/11 was a big example of this. But Moore's on-screen persona is actually VERY low key, even when he's arguing with someone with whom he totally disagrees. Compared to what Chris Matthews does on Hardball, or even compared to how Penn and Teller treat their interview subjects on Bullshit!, he's almost softballing them. Could you imagine Bill O'Reilly managing to shut up so much when interviewing a guy like this?*
But the movie portrays Malone as an obviously bombastic grandstander at every occasion. A liberal equivalent would be satirizing George W. Bush by portraying him as a cowboy, instead of portraying him as a "cowboy" who settles down in a huge mansion every night. Those who hate Moore see him as a guy with false humility, and the film really should have exploited that. Instead, they go for a portrait that feels really false. To be fair, though, Zucker's gag-a-minute, no-matter-how-dumb comedy style may have more to do with this than his conservatism.
Malone is really a really strange protagonist. The past films Zucker films I've seen seem to center around likable dolts; people who you're supposed to like even as they do stupid and occasionally mean things. Malone, on the other hand, is presented right off the bat to be an object of the audience's scorn and derision, crowing about Cuba's superior healthcare system with fruity drink in his hand and beating off potential refugees as he tries to head back to America.
In some ways, this isn't far too different from what Dickens did. Scrooge represents everything Dickens hates. He's uncaring, he's willfully ignorant, he's obsessed with money and he believes in the "undeserving slothful" rather than the "deserving poor." When he's introduced, he too is set up as a figure of the audience’s antipathy.
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.
But the big difference is while we are first placed in opposition to Scrooge, Dickens slowly pulls us in to understanding and rooting for him. This doesn’t happen in this film, because Zucker can't allow it.
The film's Carol elements come into play semi-early, when Malone is working at his headquarters where he and his contemporaries, some of whom are ugly lesbians who Malone thinks are men, are planning to abolish the Fourth of July, because Independence Day celebrates an evil, warlike country. Malone's nephew Josh, the movie's stand-in for Fred, comes to visit.
This scene starts off a few of the movie's favorite motifs: 1.) Take something that's sort of similar to what a liberal stance, like the criticism of Columbus Day, and then twist it out of proportion and miss the point of the criticism entirely.** 2.) Gay bashing is funny.*** 3.) U.S. soldiers are Saint-y St. Saintersons.
Josh, like most of the soldiers in the movie, is white, male, clean-shaven and surprisingly dovish. He never says a bad word about any of the liberals, even though they're all clearly WRONG. The soldiers are just SUCH good people that they would never say a harsh word, even to LIBERALS. And liberals are such BAD people to even THINK about criticizing the war, because that is criticizing the troops. And the troops are SO GOOD. Don't you realize how good they are?
Dickens also had a tendency to idealize his heroes, but he could make them at least a little forceful on occasion. This is Fred's line defending Christmas:
"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say", returned the nephew. "Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut–up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow–passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"
It's perhaps a quaint speech, but compared to Fred, Josh's coming in to invite his uncle to a party for a holiday he's outright trying to do away with and then defending his stance on the war with a "But I want to go," Fred comes across as the tougher and more practical one ... which is really bizarre when you think about it. (I mean, seriously, think about how many Christmases Fred would have been rejected by his uncle before the fateful ghosts-spirits Christmas.)
Nevertheless, I have to give Zucker points for at least keeping those basics of the original story down, because when the spirits begin to show up he says to hell with all that shit.
Malone's "Marley" pops up sometime later. Malone has gotten involved with the moron terrorist subplot nonsense and has settled down to his apartment**** with a TV dinner to watch a replay of JFK's inaugural address. As Malone watches, he crows about how wonderful JFK is, and how he’s a peace president who would have never led us into the Vietnam War.
But then JFK pops out of the TV! After the initial surprise, JFK heaps abuse upon Malone. Malone is wrong to call JFK a peace president. JFK knew that sometimes war is necessary. In fact, JFK said he was willing to go into war right in his inaugural speech! Also, he will be visited by three spirits who will tell them how he's wrong.
OK, a few things:
1.) How the hell would a supposed fan of JFK conclude he was a 100 percent, peace-keeping, appeasing-over-warring hippie president in light of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the response to the Cuban Missile Crisis?
2.) The movie quotes JFK saying ... um, you know what? I really hate to say this, but I kind of forget. Sorry. To be honest, I read the whole speech the other night and I was thinking, "Wow ... everything is very non-hawklike ... says we'll talk before we shoot ... says we need to work with other countries ... shout out to the U.N. ...” But I think they quoted this:
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility--I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it--and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
Which, well, OK, yeah, that's rather pro-war in that the-RNC-would-never-let-this-shit-fly-if-a-Democrat-said-it way, but, y'know ... whatever. Still, I could easily play the turnabout game with this.
Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.
We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.
But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course--both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind's final war.
So let us begin anew--remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.
I’m just saying ...
3.) DUDE, that is NOT how you do a Marley character!
Marley is Scrooge's other half. In life, he was Scrooge's business partner and essentially the same person as him (seven years after his death, Scrooge will readily answer to Marley's name). When he comes back to visit Scrooge, wearing the shackles of the money he so treasured in life, telling him the shackles he will wear shall be much longer if he continues, he essentially says "if you continue on your path, YOU will be ME."
There is absolutely no way that JFK lecturing Malone about war resembles the Marley character at all. JFK is good, unlike the bad Marley, and JFK and Malone are nothing like each other. To be fair, I can't really think of who would be a more proper analogue for Marley to Michael Moore's Scrooge. Call Moore a loudmouth liar and have Walter Winchell show up wrapped in radio wire? Say the mix of journalism and fiction is bad and have Hunter S. Thompson blaze in as bats constantly attack him? Attach him to the loopiness of Gore Vidal? OK, so Vidal's not dead yet but I AM AT LEAST THINKING ABOUT OUR THEMES HERE, FOLKS!
But actually, I know why they didn't do it. Although David Zucker may have been liberal before, part of the movie's mission is not only to say that liberals are wrong, but that liberals are so wrong that there is no possible way they can come to those views naturally besides some evil, inexplicable hate for America deep within their souls.
This is why the movie’s version of the Past Ghost is so fucked up.
An American Carol's Past Ghost, as I mentioned before, is Gen. George S. Patton. I also mentioned that Patton is largely the filmmakers' personal hero-puppet. Partly because he's the one who gets to spout most of the Republican talking points, but mostly because he's the one who gets to slap Malone around.
Patton takes Malone on a journey that ... doesn't make a whole lot of sense as a Carol match. First he takes Malone to America's past, then he takes Malone to America's ... present, then he takes Malone to his personal past. Most of the movie is spent with Patton. They may have been less willing to joke about George Washington, who is the Present Ghost ... but I do think, as I said last time, that Patton fits more comfortably with the filmmakers' hawkish worldviews.
Patton comes to visit Malone during one of Malone's speaking engagements at a campus, where the college students repeat Malone's anti-war statements with a blindness and regularity that annoys even Malone. After slapping Malone around a bit, Patton takes Michael Malone to America's past, specifically before America's involvement in World War II, where students had also protested a war.
There's a scene shown in the commercials here that I want to touch on briefly, but I'll get into it in more detail later. At this point, Malone, thinking he's invisible, tries to feel up a hot female protester. In one of the earlier scenes, Malone was also portrayed as a skirt-chaser. Considering Moore, at least to the best of my knowledge, has never been reported to be a skirt-chaser, a cheater and has been married to the same woman for 18 years, I think this is kind of a shitty joke to make. If you’re going to criticize a guy, how about do it for the stuff he did and not just make stuff up, huh?
Anyway, after we're shown the WWII protesters, we then cut to a scene of Neville Chamberlain, fawning over and shining the shoes of Adolf Hitler as he signs the Munich Agreement. (Although the film decides that subtlety is a mug's game and has him sign over most of Europe, not just the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia.) Patton warns Malone that these are the results of appeasement, and warns Chamberlain of what a horror he's allowing to happen, which Chamberlain ignores.
These scenes, on a very general level historically accurate, actually contain a sleight of hand. It's true that a number of Americans protested involvement in World War II, but associating them with them with the modern, liberal protests against the Iraq War – which had their basis on a belief that the war was pre-emptive without evidence and perhaps a helping of 1970s-era pacifism – is historically wrong. American World War II protests largely came from The Old Right, a mostly-conservative, isolationist group who believed America had no business getting involved in "Europe's War." Incidentally, Chamberlain was also a conservative.
But what actually annoys me the most out of this scene, now, is Patton's condemnation of it. I mentioned before that I knew little about Patton before watching this movie. How little? I actually didn't get that Patton slapping Malone is a reference to history. But I ran across something in some preliminary research for this article: The Dark Side of Patton. It has some interesting bits, to say the least:
General George S. Patton's diaries, which were published after his death, reveal that Patton was an anti-Semite, and not just akin to the garden-variety, country club anti-Semite that was common in America up to and through the Second World War. According to Leonard Dinnerstein in his book Antisemitism in America, (Oxford Univ. Press, 1995) Patton would not allow Jewish chaplains at his headquarters. (p.139). In light of the fact that the U.S. was engaged in unconditional warfare with the genocidal Nazi regime that had singled out "World Jewry" for liquidation, and the fact that as a commander of a corps and later an army, Patton had many Jewish soldiers, including staff officers, under his command, such as refusal is unconscionable.
...
Patton at the end of World War II disparaged the Jewish inmates of Hitler's death camps who had been re-interned in Displaced Person (DP) camps maintained by the U.S. Army in the Allied Zone of Occupation. He also expressed the injudicious opinion that the United States fought the wrong enemy, meaning that he would rather have had the country allied with Hitler's Germany for a fight against Stalin's Soviet Union.
...
Joseph Bednersky, in his book about anti-Semitism in the U.S. military, The 'Jewish Threat' (2002), revealed that Patton's egregious anti-Semitism actually affected the U.S. Army's policy toward the Jews. In November 1942, after the Allies had pushed the Axis powers out of Morocco in the North African campaign, Lieutenant General Patton, commander of the 7th Army, asked General Eisenhower to maintain the Vichy regime's anti-Jewish laws in Morocco. The laws were modeled after Nazi Germany's Nuremburg laws, themselves inspired by the Jim Crow segregation laws of the American Southeast. A man of vastly poor political judgment, Patton believed the Jews were involved in a conspiracy to "take over" Morocco, and this conspiracy justified the maintenance of the anti-Semitic laws on the basis of cultivating the favor of the Arabs. Even more egregiously, Patton persuaded General Eisenhower to prevent the release of Moroccan Jews held in forced labor camps. (After the War, while Military Governor of the U.S. Occupation Zone, Patton would be similarly obsesses with a "Jewish conspiracy".)
So the man who the filmmakers have used as their voicebox to warn the country that if those evil, evil, liberals get their way we'll have another Holocaust on our hands would have been perfectly content to side up with the creator of the Holocaust and let my people fry, and in fact as actively participated in their oppression. Thank you, David Zucker. Thank you, Myrna Sokoloff. Thank YOU, Kelsey Grammer. You've certainly proved yourselves to be intelligent, incisive, sensitive commentators on our political scene, and not fear-mongering liars at all.*****
And please don't bring up this and say turnabout is fair play. They're sinking to Moore’s level, here, is what they’re doing.
But, the filmmakers aren't done with making George S. Patton act totally inappropriately given his real character, so then Patton shows Malone an alternate present of America, where Abraham Lincoln decided not to fight the Civil War. How he managed to do this when it was the Confederacy that attacked first I'm not sure, but whatever. Anyway, Patton said in this alternate America, Michael Malone moved from Michigan to Alabama to become a cotton plantation owner. You know what that means? Malone has SLAVES! And has BIRACIAL BABIES with his slaves! He runs away ... oh God, he has slaves! It's horrible.
Um, well, Patton didn't approve of blacks much either. Still, I have to say this scene bothered me. I'm sure David Alan Grier and Gary Coleman knew what they were doing when they signed up for these scenes but ... considering most of the scene is the two of them (and others) acting acquiescent and begging "Massa Malone" not to hit them while Malone is horrified that HE HAS SLAVES and might have HIT them and RAPED them kind of misses the point. Shouldn't slavery be horrible because it's SLAVERY and not so much because it's embarrassing to white people?
But, the movie has more fish to fry in the modern era, and I'll get to that next time. And hopefully the present and future ghosts, depends on how long this runs.
* Yeah, I know. Moore's movies aren't a trustworthy source and all that. I'm talking about public persona. And, if you will, he has been able to keep up a low-key persona when he’s not controlling the message (like here.)
** Or maybe this is some historically-conscious tribute to Frederick Douglas? Nah.
*** At another point Gen. Patton threatens to shoot Michael Malone for suggesting Abraham Lincoln might be gay. Hilarity!
**** Apartment? Guys, what about the bitching about his million dollar house and sending his step-daughter to a private school? How do I know the spin better than you guys? On the other hand, leaving Moore's family out of it was probably the more honorable thing to do ...
***** I'm very angry at the filmmakers for this artistic choice, as I feel it's bad history and whitewashes a man at the expense of a whole swath of people. Nevertheless, my anger does not extend to the man himself. I understand that it was a different time. No matter what his personal beliefs, he is an American hero. Even if Patton hated Jews, he saved a lot of them. And he was good enough to recognize a good soldier no matter who they are, which suggests that in a sense he had his priorities in place. Dickens, while he changed later in life, had some anti-Semitic views too (although he later changed) so I understand the aspect of admiring one part of a person while disapproving of others. I have no animosity toward Patton now or anyone who considers him a personal hero, but I nevertheless maintain this was a poor and insensitive move by the filmmakers.
Oh, but wait ... there's one thing I kind of forgot to talk about when it comes to the movie: the character of Michael Malone. In the film, I kept thinking of the character as "Moore," as that’s who they're really talking about and actor Kevin Farley is made to resemble Moore. But as I think about it more, the movie's portrayal of the character has a tin ear for how Moore actually acts.
Moore is accused of being a grandstander and a bit of an ass. I don't think these claims are without merit. I think some of his stunts are more about the stunt than the effect. The attempt to recruit the children of the men and women in Congress to go to the Iraq War in Fahrenheit 9/11 was a big example of this. But Moore's on-screen persona is actually VERY low key, even when he's arguing with someone with whom he totally disagrees. Compared to what Chris Matthews does on Hardball, or even compared to how Penn and Teller treat their interview subjects on Bullshit!, he's almost softballing them. Could you imagine Bill O'Reilly managing to shut up so much when interviewing a guy like this?*
But the movie portrays Malone as an obviously bombastic grandstander at every occasion. A liberal equivalent would be satirizing George W. Bush by portraying him as a cowboy, instead of portraying him as a "cowboy" who settles down in a huge mansion every night. Those who hate Moore see him as a guy with false humility, and the film really should have exploited that. Instead, they go for a portrait that feels really false. To be fair, though, Zucker's gag-a-minute, no-matter-how-dumb comedy style may have more to do with this than his conservatism.
Malone is really a really strange protagonist. The past films Zucker films I've seen seem to center around likable dolts; people who you're supposed to like even as they do stupid and occasionally mean things. Malone, on the other hand, is presented right off the bat to be an object of the audience's scorn and derision, crowing about Cuba's superior healthcare system with fruity drink in his hand and beating off potential refugees as he tries to head back to America.
In some ways, this isn't far too different from what Dickens did. Scrooge represents everything Dickens hates. He's uncaring, he's willfully ignorant, he's obsessed with money and he believes in the "undeserving slothful" rather than the "deserving poor." When he's introduced, he too is set up as a figure of the audience’s antipathy.
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.
But the big difference is while we are first placed in opposition to Scrooge, Dickens slowly pulls us in to understanding and rooting for him. This doesn’t happen in this film, because Zucker can't allow it.
The film's Carol elements come into play semi-early, when Malone is working at his headquarters where he and his contemporaries, some of whom are ugly lesbians who Malone thinks are men, are planning to abolish the Fourth of July, because Independence Day celebrates an evil, warlike country. Malone's nephew Josh, the movie's stand-in for Fred, comes to visit.
This scene starts off a few of the movie's favorite motifs: 1.) Take something that's sort of similar to what a liberal stance, like the criticism of Columbus Day, and then twist it out of proportion and miss the point of the criticism entirely.** 2.) Gay bashing is funny.*** 3.) U.S. soldiers are Saint-y St. Saintersons.
Josh, like most of the soldiers in the movie, is white, male, clean-shaven and surprisingly dovish. He never says a bad word about any of the liberals, even though they're all clearly WRONG. The soldiers are just SUCH good people that they would never say a harsh word, even to LIBERALS. And liberals are such BAD people to even THINK about criticizing the war, because that is criticizing the troops. And the troops are SO GOOD. Don't you realize how good they are?
Dickens also had a tendency to idealize his heroes, but he could make them at least a little forceful on occasion. This is Fred's line defending Christmas:
"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say", returned the nephew. "Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut–up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow–passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"
It's perhaps a quaint speech, but compared to Fred, Josh's coming in to invite his uncle to a party for a holiday he's outright trying to do away with and then defending his stance on the war with a "But I want to go," Fred comes across as the tougher and more practical one ... which is really bizarre when you think about it. (I mean, seriously, think about how many Christmases Fred would have been rejected by his uncle before the fateful ghosts-spirits Christmas.)
Nevertheless, I have to give Zucker points for at least keeping those basics of the original story down, because when the spirits begin to show up he says to hell with all that shit.
Malone's "Marley" pops up sometime later. Malone has gotten involved with the moron terrorist subplot nonsense and has settled down to his apartment**** with a TV dinner to watch a replay of JFK's inaugural address. As Malone watches, he crows about how wonderful JFK is, and how he’s a peace president who would have never led us into the Vietnam War.
But then JFK pops out of the TV! After the initial surprise, JFK heaps abuse upon Malone. Malone is wrong to call JFK a peace president. JFK knew that sometimes war is necessary. In fact, JFK said he was willing to go into war right in his inaugural speech! Also, he will be visited by three spirits who will tell them how he's wrong.
OK, a few things:
1.) How the hell would a supposed fan of JFK conclude he was a 100 percent, peace-keeping, appeasing-over-warring hippie president in light of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the response to the Cuban Missile Crisis?
2.) The movie quotes JFK saying ... um, you know what? I really hate to say this, but I kind of forget. Sorry. To be honest, I read the whole speech the other night and I was thinking, "Wow ... everything is very non-hawklike ... says we'll talk before we shoot ... says we need to work with other countries ... shout out to the U.N. ...” But I think they quoted this:
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility--I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it--and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
Which, well, OK, yeah, that's rather pro-war in that the-RNC-would-never-let-this-shit-fly-if-a-Democrat-said-it way, but, y'know ... whatever. Still, I could easily play the turnabout game with this.
Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.
We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.
But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course--both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind's final war.
So let us begin anew--remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.
I’m just saying ...
3.) DUDE, that is NOT how you do a Marley character!
Marley is Scrooge's other half. In life, he was Scrooge's business partner and essentially the same person as him (seven years after his death, Scrooge will readily answer to Marley's name). When he comes back to visit Scrooge, wearing the shackles of the money he so treasured in life, telling him the shackles he will wear shall be much longer if he continues, he essentially says "if you continue on your path, YOU will be ME."
There is absolutely no way that JFK lecturing Malone about war resembles the Marley character at all. JFK is good, unlike the bad Marley, and JFK and Malone are nothing like each other. To be fair, I can't really think of who would be a more proper analogue for Marley to Michael Moore's Scrooge. Call Moore a loudmouth liar and have Walter Winchell show up wrapped in radio wire? Say the mix of journalism and fiction is bad and have Hunter S. Thompson blaze in as bats constantly attack him? Attach him to the loopiness of Gore Vidal? OK, so Vidal's not dead yet but I AM AT LEAST THINKING ABOUT OUR THEMES HERE, FOLKS!
But actually, I know why they didn't do it. Although David Zucker may have been liberal before, part of the movie's mission is not only to say that liberals are wrong, but that liberals are so wrong that there is no possible way they can come to those views naturally besides some evil, inexplicable hate for America deep within their souls.
This is why the movie’s version of the Past Ghost is so fucked up.
An American Carol's Past Ghost, as I mentioned before, is Gen. George S. Patton. I also mentioned that Patton is largely the filmmakers' personal hero-puppet. Partly because he's the one who gets to spout most of the Republican talking points, but mostly because he's the one who gets to slap Malone around.
Patton takes Malone on a journey that ... doesn't make a whole lot of sense as a Carol match. First he takes Malone to America's past, then he takes Malone to America's ... present, then he takes Malone to his personal past. Most of the movie is spent with Patton. They may have been less willing to joke about George Washington, who is the Present Ghost ... but I do think, as I said last time, that Patton fits more comfortably with the filmmakers' hawkish worldviews.
Patton comes to visit Malone during one of Malone's speaking engagements at a campus, where the college students repeat Malone's anti-war statements with a blindness and regularity that annoys even Malone. After slapping Malone around a bit, Patton takes Michael Malone to America's past, specifically before America's involvement in World War II, where students had also protested a war.
There's a scene shown in the commercials here that I want to touch on briefly, but I'll get into it in more detail later. At this point, Malone, thinking he's invisible, tries to feel up a hot female protester. In one of the earlier scenes, Malone was also portrayed as a skirt-chaser. Considering Moore, at least to the best of my knowledge, has never been reported to be a skirt-chaser, a cheater and has been married to the same woman for 18 years, I think this is kind of a shitty joke to make. If you’re going to criticize a guy, how about do it for the stuff he did and not just make stuff up, huh?
Anyway, after we're shown the WWII protesters, we then cut to a scene of Neville Chamberlain, fawning over and shining the shoes of Adolf Hitler as he signs the Munich Agreement. (Although the film decides that subtlety is a mug's game and has him sign over most of Europe, not just the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia.) Patton warns Malone that these are the results of appeasement, and warns Chamberlain of what a horror he's allowing to happen, which Chamberlain ignores.
These scenes, on a very general level historically accurate, actually contain a sleight of hand. It's true that a number of Americans protested involvement in World War II, but associating them with them with the modern, liberal protests against the Iraq War – which had their basis on a belief that the war was pre-emptive without evidence and perhaps a helping of 1970s-era pacifism – is historically wrong. American World War II protests largely came from The Old Right, a mostly-conservative, isolationist group who believed America had no business getting involved in "Europe's War." Incidentally, Chamberlain was also a conservative.
But what actually annoys me the most out of this scene, now, is Patton's condemnation of it. I mentioned before that I knew little about Patton before watching this movie. How little? I actually didn't get that Patton slapping Malone is a reference to history. But I ran across something in some preliminary research for this article: The Dark Side of Patton. It has some interesting bits, to say the least:
General George S. Patton's diaries, which were published after his death, reveal that Patton was an anti-Semite, and not just akin to the garden-variety, country club anti-Semite that was common in America up to and through the Second World War. According to Leonard Dinnerstein in his book Antisemitism in America, (Oxford Univ. Press, 1995) Patton would not allow Jewish chaplains at his headquarters. (p.139). In light of the fact that the U.S. was engaged in unconditional warfare with the genocidal Nazi regime that had singled out "World Jewry" for liquidation, and the fact that as a commander of a corps and later an army, Patton had many Jewish soldiers, including staff officers, under his command, such as refusal is unconscionable.
...
Patton at the end of World War II disparaged the Jewish inmates of Hitler's death camps who had been re-interned in Displaced Person (DP) camps maintained by the U.S. Army in the Allied Zone of Occupation. He also expressed the injudicious opinion that the United States fought the wrong enemy, meaning that he would rather have had the country allied with Hitler's Germany for a fight against Stalin's Soviet Union.
...
Joseph Bednersky, in his book about anti-Semitism in the U.S. military, The 'Jewish Threat' (2002), revealed that Patton's egregious anti-Semitism actually affected the U.S. Army's policy toward the Jews. In November 1942, after the Allies had pushed the Axis powers out of Morocco in the North African campaign, Lieutenant General Patton, commander of the 7th Army, asked General Eisenhower to maintain the Vichy regime's anti-Jewish laws in Morocco. The laws were modeled after Nazi Germany's Nuremburg laws, themselves inspired by the Jim Crow segregation laws of the American Southeast. A man of vastly poor political judgment, Patton believed the Jews were involved in a conspiracy to "take over" Morocco, and this conspiracy justified the maintenance of the anti-Semitic laws on the basis of cultivating the favor of the Arabs. Even more egregiously, Patton persuaded General Eisenhower to prevent the release of Moroccan Jews held in forced labor camps. (After the War, while Military Governor of the U.S. Occupation Zone, Patton would be similarly obsesses with a "Jewish conspiracy".)
So the man who the filmmakers have used as their voicebox to warn the country that if those evil, evil, liberals get their way we'll have another Holocaust on our hands would have been perfectly content to side up with the creator of the Holocaust and let my people fry, and in fact as actively participated in their oppression. Thank you, David Zucker. Thank you, Myrna Sokoloff. Thank YOU, Kelsey Grammer. You've certainly proved yourselves to be intelligent, incisive, sensitive commentators on our political scene, and not fear-mongering liars at all.*****
And please don't bring up this and say turnabout is fair play. They're sinking to Moore’s level, here, is what they’re doing.
But, the filmmakers aren't done with making George S. Patton act totally inappropriately given his real character, so then Patton shows Malone an alternate present of America, where Abraham Lincoln decided not to fight the Civil War. How he managed to do this when it was the Confederacy that attacked first I'm not sure, but whatever. Anyway, Patton said in this alternate America, Michael Malone moved from Michigan to Alabama to become a cotton plantation owner. You know what that means? Malone has SLAVES! And has BIRACIAL BABIES with his slaves! He runs away ... oh God, he has slaves! It's horrible.
Um, well, Patton didn't approve of blacks much either. Still, I have to say this scene bothered me. I'm sure David Alan Grier and Gary Coleman knew what they were doing when they signed up for these scenes but ... considering most of the scene is the two of them (and others) acting acquiescent and begging "Massa Malone" not to hit them while Malone is horrified that HE HAS SLAVES and might have HIT them and RAPED them kind of misses the point. Shouldn't slavery be horrible because it's SLAVERY and not so much because it's embarrassing to white people?
But, the movie has more fish to fry in the modern era, and I'll get to that next time. And hopefully the present and future ghosts, depends on how long this runs.
* Yeah, I know. Moore's movies aren't a trustworthy source and all that. I'm talking about public persona. And, if you will, he has been able to keep up a low-key persona when he’s not controlling the message (like here.)
** Or maybe this is some historically-conscious tribute to Frederick Douglas? Nah.
*** At another point Gen. Patton threatens to shoot Michael Malone for suggesting Abraham Lincoln might be gay. Hilarity!
**** Apartment? Guys, what about the bitching about his million dollar house and sending his step-daughter to a private school? How do I know the spin better than you guys? On the other hand, leaving Moore's family out of it was probably the more honorable thing to do ...
***** I'm very angry at the filmmakers for this artistic choice, as I feel it's bad history and whitewashes a man at the expense of a whole swath of people. Nevertheless, my anger does not extend to the man himself. I understand that it was a different time. No matter what his personal beliefs, he is an American hero. Even if Patton hated Jews, he saved a lot of them. And he was good enough to recognize a good soldier no matter who they are, which suggests that in a sense he had his priorities in place. Dickens, while he changed later in life, had some anti-Semitic views too (although he later changed) so I understand the aspect of admiring one part of a person while disapproving of others. I have no animosity toward Patton now or anyone who considers him a personal hero, but I nevertheless maintain this was a poor and insensitive move by the filmmakers.
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