The Hollywood Myth

Jack Gustafson

I must say that I disagree with the nature of this question. First off, I see no evidence that Hollywood intentionally lionizes Liberal Presidents and demonizes Conservative ones. In fact, I can only think of a short number of movies dealing with the American Presidency, and of these few movies, I see no evidence of a hidden plot to paint a particular ideology in a negative or positive light.

Hollywood makes movies to make money. It is financially ignorant to attach any sort of political affiliation to any movie, as a certain portion of the population will commit themselves to not see it if they think it will directly challenge what they believe in. It is also a mistake to think that the Hollywood establishment is progressive, when the Hollywood power brokers have much more to gain from a Republican administration. With this said, why is there this myth that Hollywood is “out to get” conservatives?

To answer this question, I must ask two more: What makes a good movie? What makes people want to see a movie? The answer to both of these is the desire to witness conflict. We must not view Richard Nixon in Oliver Stone’s Nixon primarily as the Historical Nixon, but rather as a fictional one. The same goes for any other movie. In Oliver Stone’s Nixon, we get a character study of one of America’s most scrutinized Presidents. It is the breakdown of character, the ability for the audience to feel empathy, which allows the film to succeed. To make a good movie, one has to take artistic licenses in order to keep the audience’s attention: A director won’t succeed by being preachy; the film has to show and not tell. The story cannot stick to the absolute truth or else people would be asking for their money back.

Because there is this historical inaccuracy, we can presume that ideologues will be miffed. So back to part of the original question: Why are conservatives demonized? We can presume that since conservatives have held the Presidency for the majority of time since the acceleration of mass media that conservatives will be featured more than liberals in the media. Because of this prominence and because of the historical inaccuracy, we can presume that some will feel that Hollywood is demonizing conservatives.

To lay this non-answer aside, why do conservatives have such a distain for Hollywood in general? I believe that the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s are emblematic of why conservative do not trust Hollywood. Conservatives of the Rush Limbaugh/Jerry Falwell bent were taught to believe that real Americans don’t drink to excess, use drugs, have sex before or outside of marriage, question authority, question God’s will, or be gay. Because Hollywood uses many of these issues within their films, we can assume that these types of conservatives will not take kindly to them, even if they do have to tackle these issues in their own lives, however quietly they do. The fact is that these issues are exciting and prone to cause conflict, which is why they are in films. People want to see something that will shock them; people want to see sex and violence.

To say that Hollywood is biased toward a particular political ideology follows the same sort of illogic that goes with saying that the media is biased in a particular political way. The fact is that money talks. The media will be biased to a certain degree, as long as it is profitable, just as a given film may attach itself to popular beliefs. Hollywood stopped being relevant a long time ago, so to even have this conversation bolsters the Hollywood myth.