Bridge to Margaritaville
Commentary by Aslan, 2.23.2007
The realization that Hollywood is more than just rotting cultural compost hits conservatives at different times, but there is always a moment when you suddenly and clearly see the elitist preaching buried beneath the rotting lettuce and apple cores, when the relentless effort to push leftist dogma abruptly swims into focus like the hidden image in a 3D stereogram. And like a stereogram, once you see the image within, there’s no avoiding it ever again. Much to my wife’s dismay, this has forever impaired our ability to enjoy the simple pleasure of a good movie.
With me, it was the movie Dave, some 14 years ago. In retrospect, a moronically simple plot where a good liberal double stands in for a comatose evil "conservative" president and, like a commie Midas, everything the liberal touches turns to love and peace and flowers. Lauded by critics as a "delightful social fable," Dave was the clumsy, puppyish precursor to more serious flirtations with Hollywood’s ideal president: The American President, The Contender, and TV’s West Wing.
Every movie is now like an easy-to-solve stereogram. Dads are dysfunctional, lawyers are noble, cops are crooked, criminals are heroes, corporations are evil, artists are wise, whites are racist, and Christians…well, a Hollywood Christian has an IQ in the seventies, the imagination of a bar of soap, hates everyone, and just loves hellfire and damnation, praise Jesus!
Whether it is the subtle, seductive brilliance of Crash or the laughable transparency of any George Looney directorial effort, the frantic pushing, pushing, pushing of the Hollywood catechism pervades every genre, except maybe children’s movies.
Not so fast.
The new Disney offering, the Bridge to Terabithia, is the Crash of children’s movies, a watchable production with interesting characters so overloaded with liberal social stereotypes that it takes a while to notice what’s going on.
The plot is harmless: two outcast school kids turn to a world of imagination to escape the pressures and pain of real life. The boy at first resists and is then liberated by the wild, fanciful imagination of a neighbor girl. The characters are interesting – particularly the girl – and the storytelling, while not gripping, is pleasant enough.
So where’s the leftist boogeyman? At every opportunity, the writers put forth good liberal heroes and contrast them with evil non-liberal antagonists. The young girl star of the film is a proto-hippie, decked out in the 21st century equivalent of a tie-die shirt, peace sign necklace and platform shoes. Her parents are the perfect parents, both writers who take uninhibited pleasure in dancing and singing around the house and painting a room speckly gold on a whim in time for the sunset to light up the walls. The boy begins the movie uptight, a fledgling repressed artist kept down by bad parents: an unloving dad that works at a hardware store and a stay-at-home mom who has no control over a messy household populated by obnoxious children. Neither parent, of course, understands the boy’s artistic side, and they pound the snot out of his creativity with chores, scoldings, bad shoes and more chores. The only other parent we hear anything about is the obligatory drunk, child-beating dad of a schoolmate. The writers were undoubtedly worried that their positive portrayal of a father – hippie writer though he is – would run them afoul of the screenwriter thought police, and so they whipped up a violent, deadbeat dad to uneven the score (2 bad, 1 good).
At school, kids as savage as the raptors in Jurassic Park mock the proto-hippie and the repressed artist, who languish during rigorous classes only to come alive in everyone’s favorite class: music! No boring music theory here, no Grand Staff and treble clefs, just a perfect, cute-as-a-button folk singer/teacher who somehow extracts a grade out of watching her swaying, tambourine-banging, desktop-sitting charges sing variations of "Kumbaya."
Our little leftist protoge learns many things over the course of the movie: that his dad is even more evil than first imagined for wanting to kill a rodent that keeps eating his prized plants in the greenhouse, that art museums are the temples of the modern world, that Christianity is all about hell and damnation, that the worst person in the school is that way because she is a victim (of the violent, drunk dad, of course!), and that visualizing a troll is somehow more profound and liberating than drawing a troll.
Why waste ink on another example of Hollywood’s juvenile view of life? The Bridge to Terabithia is very clever – more subtle than I have made it appear here – and a direct application of compost to the brains of our proto-conservative kids. As adults, we can watch Dave and laugh. We can enjoy Crash, well aware that the whole world isn’t racist and filled with hate. We can even watch the comical enviro-indoctrination film Ferngully and share a chuckle with our kids. But movies like the Bridge to Terabithia are an exercise in bait and switch and a damned clever exercise, too. Come watch the next Narnia, the previews cry; only it’s not Narnia, but Margaritaville that your kids will get to visit. Consider this commentary, then, a PSA: watch the Bridge to Margaritaville and laugh (and be sad, too – there is a really sad part), but be sure to use this hippie trip as an anthropology lesson for the little conservatives in your life.
Copyright © 2007 Dan Hallagan. All Rights Reserved.