So Judd Apatow Kills People Now?

A disturbed 22 year old son of Hollywood privilege went and killed two sorority women after stabbing his roommates. So naturally, a Washington Post film critic blames Seth Rogen?

The gunman in his manifesto described his inability to get the girl and  proclaimed his intent to go out as a "true alpha male."

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post film critic, blamed "outsized frat boy fantasies like Neighbors."  The Judd Apatow directed film starring Seth Rogen features a 30 something year old couple.  Rogen plays an undermature, kind of dumpy looking guy married to a beautiful woman.

Hornaday must assume that such men never "get the girl" and claims that such "fantasies" frustrate men in the real world.  It is actually the case that many men, regardless of looks, have some sort of charm and promise of providing for a family someday.  Even without dashing looks, they still get the girl.

Insanity often is a strong barrier against meeting a nice girl.

Another odd part of Hornaday's analysis lies in her assumption that "alpha males" are represented in these movies.  Apatow movies boil over with admitted and unadmitted insecurities.  Like them or not, they portray individuals dealing wit and overcoming insecurities in a demanding world.  Alpha males are the best produced by the military, also CEOs, Peyton Mannings, John Walls, and other men in control, capable, respected, disciplined, and decent. When not perfect, they find ways to confidently achieve whatever it is they have set as a goal.   Apatow characters reach their goals, but stumble and bumble their way to them.  Their charm lies in their perseverance, despite the fact that in many ways all men are not created equal.

Hornaday's use of the word fantasy is perplexing.  Hollywood markets fantasy.  Why on earth would people go to the movies to see exactly what they see in real life?  The crime gets solved, the polis gets re-established, the wrong is set right.  And yes, the hero gets the girl.

Society's problem, not unnoticed, lies in the fact that much of the country has simply abandoned the idea of teaching boys how to be boys.  One author explained that schools now treat boys like "defective girls."  Traditionally, boys were expected to be rougher around the edges, more fidgety, more prone to fistfights and quick reconciliations, less able to handle sitting still for long periods.  Boys have got to be boys, we used to say.

Boys now get taught that their behavior is bad, that playing war is anti-social (even though boys have done this for millenia), that they need pills to make them behave.  Boys need to learn discipline, but they also need more outlets for the pent up energy most of them have growing up.  And the problem gets progressively worse.  In fact, if you didn't want a boy, no worries, you can send him to re-education camp.

From day one, males need to learn responsibility, discipline, responsibility, work ethic, leadership, responsibility, how to defend themselves, responsibility, and how to treat women.  They also need to learn that, starting at age 18, they need to start putting away childish things.  This means getting a job, helping to provide for your family whether you intended to start one or not, making commitments and meeting them.

Hollywood is not to blame for boys not knowing how to be boys, not when young people watch fewer movies than ever.  Schools, experts, and parents are to blame for not recognizing that boys are different.  

Dan Aykroyd, the Free Market, and Saturday Night Live

Hollywood deserves its bad rap for endless left wing sermonizing, but not everyone should be wedged into the same box.  Some major stars have put together a body of work that reaffirms the values of individual work in the private sector.

I don't know Dan Aykroyd's politics and really do not care to research them.  They do not really matter.  Time and time again Aykroyd has played important roles in work that affirms a free market, perhaps a fully libertarian, message. It's possible too that the unique role that Saturday Night Live plays in the careers of performers like Dan Aykoyd may have helped to inspire a slew of movies that rely on traditional free market values.

At the very beginning of his career, Aykroyd teamed up with John Belushi to create one of film's most memorable partnerships.  Their love of music inspired the creation of the "Blues Brothers."  This started out as a nightclub act, moved onto television's Saturday Night Live, then became one of the most expensive films ever made at that point.

The Blues Brothers portrays Jake and Elwood Blues efforts to save their childhood home, a Roman Catholic orphanage.  It faces an insurmountable tax debt from Cook County and the Blues brothers resolve to pay it off and save the orphanage.  To do it, they put together a business plan.  Reform their old band.  Earn enough money to help the nuns.  Entrepreneurship saves the day, regardless of the extra legal hijinx necessary to save the day.  Underlying the story is the stock placed in the underlying goodness of Jake and Elwood, taught to them by the nuns.

Aykroyd's best work might be his collaboration with another Saturday Night Live star, Eddie Murphy.  Their 1983 film Trading Places casts Aykroyd as Louis Winthorp III, a trader working for a classic example of established crony capitalism, the firm of Duke and Duke.  Randolph and Mortimer Duke, the brothers who own the firm, form a wager.  They bet over whether or not a homeless man could be trained to do as good of a job as the culturally cultivated, Ivy League educated Winthorp.

The Dukes engineer the complete ouster of Winthorp from his society.  He loses everything and has to rely on a prostitute, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, for help just to survive. Eddie Murphy's character, Billy Ray Valentine, uses his street smarts to figure out the ins and out of commodities trading.  Winthorp becomes desperate and broken, criminal and suicidal.

The plot turns when Valentine figures out the plot.  Winthorp and Valentine come up with a scheme to enrich themselves and the butler and prostitute who help them while at the same time landing the Dukes in complete privation.

The best part of Trading Places? At the end, no one makes a false sounding sermon about learning that there are things more important than money.  The four conspirators take their riches to the Caribbean and live the good life.  The very last line of the movie comes as Valentine and Winthorp yell between yacht and sandy white beach. "Looking good Billy Ray!"  "Feeling good, Louis!"  Murphy shortly thereafter stars in his own movie extolling starting at the bottom and working your way up combined with a healthy dose of respect for small business in Coming to America.

In Ghostbusters, Aykroyd is part of a team of academics turned businessmen who tackle New York City's supernatural epidemic.  Their main human foe?  The Environmental Protection Agency, who meddles with their operation and almost causes the Apocalypse.

Aykroyd later teamed with Chris Farley and David Spade, again the Saturday Night Live connection, to give the 1990s film Tommy Boy some star power.  Farley played a character who in modern slang would be called a "bro."  No responsibilities except rugby and doing the minimum to get through school.  Tommy Boy does not rely on the same tired father son tension that infuses almost every other such relationship in film or television.  The love that Tommy and his father share is deep and unconditional and underscores every aspect of the film.  It is also the element that makes Tommy Boy superior to all of Farley's other work.

Tommy's father Big Tom Callahan, played by Brian Dennehy, dies suddenly, leaving Tommy in control of the family auto parts company.  Aykroyd plays Zalinsky, a hard bitten and remorseless auto parts magnate wants to buy the company just for the respected name and close all operations.  This would put the workers out of a job and hurt the town.  To save the business, Tommy teams up with Richard, played by David Spade.  On the road, Tommy learns about responsibility, hard work, and salesmanship.  At the end of the day, he makes the sales and convinces Zalinsky to back off of his plans.

Zalinsky's character is not a typical anti-capitalism portrayal of big business.  He is aggressive and hard nosed.  At the end, Tommy makes a hard won deal with Zalinsky that will profit both companies.  Zalinsky is not made to look like a capitalist devil.  The free market is the catalyst of a resolution that benefits everyone who deserves benefit.

Two other films show Aykroyd's libertarian streak, at least in filmography.  In Coneheads, Aykroyd plays an actual space alien who builds a business and raises a respectable middle class family, despite the constant threat of detection by Immigration and Naturalization Services agents.  Nothing But Trouble is a funny, but bizarre story about New York travelers falling into the trap of a corrupt, and possibly mutant, local New Jersey judge.  Again, government emerges as a villain (although coal companies get blamed for causing the whole mess.)

The Saturday Night Live alumni include quite a few conservatives and libertarians and that should surprise no one.  Some have moved onto political activism, others stay outside of politics.  But the show's unique use of talent might be conducive to giving its performers more individualist mind sets.  It takes performers who are nearly all struggling when signed on, an opportunity to work extremely hard and advance their careers.  Some connection may exist between that and, at the very least, a fairly large number of films that celebrate hard work, entrepreneurship, learning on the job, and other similar values.

One can't prove it, but it is an interesting point.

Conservatives Should Not Knock "Knocked Up"

At first glance, a movie called "Knocked Up" may sound like the typical Hollywood flick that trashes traditional values and mocks morality. After all the title suggests the kind of vulgar insensitivity that Hollywood seems to have about sex, children, and commitment. Some conservative writers panned the film, probably without seeing it. I am glad I gave it a chance.

Certainly this film has its moments that you do not want your children to see. The main male character smokes more pot than George Burns smoked cigars. On the other hand he also is unashamedly proud of his religious faith, in this case Judaism. Like many men of his age, twenty-three, he devotes his life to good times, meaning getting high and chasing women. The female lead has just found out that she has gained an on air position with that most shallow of networks, E!. Both have lifestyles into which a child will not fit.

They meet at a bar and end up at her place, the back room off of her sister's house. Here comes another scene that you would not want your children to witness. As you might have guessed, she gets pregnant.

The film's important message starts here. Its two least appealing characters encourage the couple to get an abortion, although neither can actually say the actual word. The male character's fat and obnoxious friend advises that he take his girl to a shmabortion clinic. The girl's mother, a shallow and materialistic baby boomer, tells her that her career is too important and that she must "take care of it." The mother gets particularly nauseating when she mentions that another family member preserved her career by "taking care of it" and "she has a real baby now." Obviously the writing team, led by Harold Ramis of Ghostbusters fame, wanted to make the abortion option look as unpalatable as possible. Neither character considers it for a second. The rest of the film shows the two trying to figure out how to commit to each other as much as they have to the unborn child. The male gives up drugs and gets a real job, enabling his girlf friend to move in with him. Along the way the girl's sister's marriage comes close to divorce, but they manage to struggle back to happiness.

This movie in the seventies would have shown a happy pair of people going their separate ways after an abortion while the married family would have broken up. Although "Knocked Up" is no traditional morality tale, it shows people struggling through real life challenges and making the right decisions along the way. Hollywood does excrete a lot of filth, but this film carries some good messages.

The Pursuit of Happyness

Panning the Hollywood stream of movies looking for little gold nuggets of American values presents a real challenge. Most films reflect the liberal, if not extremely left wing, element that tends to dominate the entertainment industry. Last night I watched on DVD a film that shocked me in its dedication to good old fashioned capitalism.

"Pursuit of Happyness" stars Will Smith as Chris Gardiner, a down on his luck entrepreneur trying to hold his family together. He invested all of his money into medical equipment that resembles much less expensive technology and naturally has difficulty selling the products. The backdrop of this film is San Francisco in 1981 during the deep recession that preceded the Reagan era prosperity. At his lowest moment his wife leaves him and he is evicted from his apartment for non payment of rent. However he takes a six month unpaid internship at Dean Witter. Twenty interns get a chance to compete for one position as a stockbroker.

The film runneth over with positive messages of hard work, sacrifice, and opportunity. Ronald Reagan himself appears during one of the low points, giving America a pep talk in some of the worst economic times of his presidency. Of course now we know that his policies helped to build twenty five years of prosperity. This definitely seems to be foreshadowing teh development of Gardiner's own life. The Dean Witter executives come across as real people, not cariciatures of evil capitalist monsters. Material reward for hard work is Gardiner's ultimate goal throughout the movie and never is he presented as "learning a lesson" that some things are more important than money. Gardiner could take a menial job and support himself, but he chooses to live in homeless shelters and on the street while making connections in the business world to help him succeed. His words to his son are to not let anyone ever tell him he can't do something. Even characters that are presented as positive in most other Hollywood films come off as negative here. Gardiner entrusts a hippy girl on the street with a valuable machine, which she steals as soon as he is out of sight.

This film teaches more about what capitalism is all about than any economics class I have ever seen. Chris Gardiner chose to sacrifice, to work hard, and to never make excuses. He risked a great deal for an uncertain shot at success. In the end he was rewarded, but even if he was not, the film suggests he would simply try something else.

"The Pursuit of Happyness" inspires not just because it is a great story. Chris Gardiner is a real human being who eventually founded his own firm. He is a modern day hero in that he endured hardship out of faith. Gardiner had faith in America and its capitalist values. We could all learn from his example.