Same Old Hollywood

Some conservatives are annoyed that a company that makes video games based on the characters and events of the Star Wars movies has added a planet of homosexuals to a game.  (Many of the rest of us think it is merely a bit of cosmic nonsense even Mel Brooks probably could not have made up but would have had good fun with if he did.)  They probably need to relax and surely should not have been surprised. Hollywood has always followed  the politically  correct prejudices of the day as some examples will illustrate. Of course all of this will be  broad generalization about what I think are trends, not strict patterns without variation. Counterexamples  bucking the trends are plentiful and easy to find.

The first really famous American movie The Birth of a Nation, which was released in 1915, excused slavery, glorified the Ku Klux Klan, and presented black people as dangerous semi-savages who had to be kept in line.  This fairly accurately reflected the racial prejudices of the time, the Jim Crow politics of the south, and the views of the segregationist president of the United States Woodrow Wilson (who praised the movie’s accuracy and viewpoint).

The 1920’s were a time of popular disillusionment over the Great War, more relaxed social mores particularly for women, fewer social restraints concerning sex, and greatly increased prosperity.  A good fraction of the silent movies of the decade followed those trends fairly closely.

Things changed with the coming of the depression and  the Roosevelt administration. A reaction against the licentious and freewheeling ‘20s led to a motion picture code restricting both the depiction of sexuality and the content of plots. Movies of the 1930’s  tended to extol Roosevelt and the New Deal, attack wealth, business, and profit, glorify the mistreated and exploited little guy, and reflect the general collectivist political mood of the day. One movie Gabriel Over the White House even promoted a folksy, all-American version of the fuehrerprinzip as a solution for the nation’s problems.  Political correctness still dictated favorable treatment of the Confederacy and the Old South and no discussion of Jim Crow or the injustices suffered by black people in the south (perhaps because of a fear of offending movie goers in that region, perhaps also because the solidly Democratic south was a cornerstone of Roosevelt’s political power).  Gone With the Wind is the best known example of this, but a perhaps more blatant one comes from The Santa Fe Trail in which John Brown and his abolitionists and not the slaveholders are shown as the ones exploiting the black people.

The wind of course changed again after Pearl Harbor.  Industrialists were no longer presented as villainous exploiters but rather as dedicated partners with labor as producers for the war effort.  Instead of social conflicts, movies showed us guys from all groups and backgrounds (except for blacks) coming together as harmonious units to fight the war and tended to display a syrupy, new found reverence for traditional habits, religion, and folkways. War movies gave us cruel and vicious Nazis  (though almost all actually underestimated the Nazis’ actual savagery and crimes) and utterly depraved and barbarous Japanese. While a distinction was often made between ordinary Germans and Nazis, the Japanese were generally presented as evil as a race. This  fit the national mood at a  time when the Roosevelt administration was putting loyal Japanese Americans into concentration camps. There were as also various  pro-Soviet pictures such as Mission to Moscow and  The North Star glorifying and whitewashing  our cobelligerent of the time.

Movies’ presentations of Russia and communism changed completely and with almost Orwellian suddenness in the immediate post war years as  the Cold War began and the public learned about Soviet espionage and subversion in the United States. Hollywood gave us movies such as The Red Danube  and  Pickup on South Street showing Soviet  brutality in occupied nations and Soviet spying in the United States. Pro-collectivist propaganda in movies of that time usually was both subtle and well disguised.

During the era of good feeling of the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, movies generally were less obviously political in content than either immediately before or after that time. They did tend to reflect a national mood of optimism, ability to recognize and solve problems, and pride in the country and its history.  The trend of glorifying traditional mores, beliefs, and life styles continued, as did code based restrictions on the depiction of sexual activity and  the content of plots.

Things changed rapidly in the disastrous Johnson, Nixon, and Carter years.  Pessimism, cynicism, and overt hostility to the country and its culture became commonplace in both the general milieu and  the movies. Hollywood responded to the freer sexual mores of the time by abandoning the production code and its restrictions. New taboos and stereotypes regarding race and women  replaced the old, both in movies and society. Various old time Hollywood communists and fellow travelers who had been silent or careful during the post war years joined with a younger generation of leftists to give the movies a definite leftward slant. 

The 1980’s and 1990’s saw a bit of a counter trend as the country prospered, became more optimistic,  won the Cold War, and enjoyed the benefits of peace and success. It was not quite a return to the 1950’s, but films probably were on average less political and pessimistic. Then came George W. Bush, Barack Obama, the financial crisis, two long wars, and  the dogmatic political correctness of the present day. When the winds change again, probably so will Hollywood. It is that kind of business. Indeed one reason present day Hollywood people present business people in such a bad light may be that the only business they know well is their own.