Contentions has an interesting post on this.. I see this happen all the time. The sort of Liberal mindset changes in film. I see situations in the lets be honest WEST WING tv series that the liberal President have to deal with that now liberals yell about. I will not even get into the the great movie THREE KINGS and the underlying theme that so many liberals were cheering but now have seen to have forgotten.
Now comes this new movie. From Contentions:
But I have one complaint, and it is not really about this particular movie but about the entire genre of films in which the Nazis are presented as purely evil and those who pursue them as purely good. These films seem to be the only way that the concepts of good and evil can find expression in our popular culture today, and they come at the expense of our ability to distinguish good and evil here in our time. When President Bush called the perpetrators of 9/11 “evildoers,” he was condemned with eye-rolling and derision by enlightened people everywhere. What a simpleton to speak in such terms!
Yet one does not hear complaints from the same people as Brad Pitt carves swastikas into the foreheads of Nazis or when any number of other films depict World War II in Manichean terms. Inglourious Basterds in isolation is a tremendous movie, morally and cinematically. But it comes, like all films of its genre, at the expense of our current struggles. What would truly be brave is a film that places al-Qaeda and the U.S. military in such stark moral categories, or, God forbid, the IDF and Hezbollah. But that would require a difficult and unpopular acknowledgment from our filmmakers, that evil exists in the present and not only in the past.
Update: A friend passes along a quote from Johannes Gross, a German writer: “The resistance to Hitler and his kind is getting stronger the more the Third Reich recedes into the past.”
Indeed!!!! View the full post
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