Movies, Musk and A Long Drive

I am driving across our big, beautiful country to see my daughter in Brooklyn. This is a drive I do at least once a year, though the route varies. This is the first time I’m doing it in the winter. That means there will be snow here and there for this California girl. We’ll see how that goes. Back when I was briefly at Graduate School in New York, I used to wear too many winter clothes and a classmate of mine would say, “here comes California.”

I missed the Elon Musk drama on Twitter, but it looks like he’s run a poll to remove himself as head of the company. That was sad news for me. Musk was acting out a “Mutiny on the Bounty,” and had taken over a ship he didn’t know how to run. But he should understand that he was set up to fail. There is no way the “apparatus” would ever allow a free man, a free THINKING man, a rich, white man run their propaganda outfit.

What I mean by that is they wrote the headlines before any of this happened. He was already a threat to blah blah blah. He doesn’t know how to run blah blah blah. Put us back in charge, they say, we’ll take care of you. Yeah, right. Sure.

Any person put in that post will be attacked. It doesn’t matter who it is, unless it’s an obedient FBI lapdog. Then it should be fine. Musk’s version of Twitter is Democracy in action, something the Democrats pretend to care about but don’t really. Democracy is not what they want. Totalitarianism is what they want. They want the bad people, the non-compliant, to go away.

Of course, not all of them do. But anyone who is reading the New York Times or watching MSNBC is being told what to think and how to think. Hollywood is in the same business now. They will tell you what you are supposed to want to watch. The box office of late shows that if left to the market, the message is loud and clear.

In her podcast with Rep Ro Khanna, BariWeiss asked the Congressman about regulating speech on social media. Right away, Khanna, who has to be the least crazy Democrat in Washington, began using words like “hate speech.” My mind flicked to Twitter, where just the other day, the words “platforming genocidal Nazis” was used about Elon Musk.

Once, when I had pointed out that the spate of Asian hate crimes in New York was not due to “white supremacy,” a wild-eyed fanatic accused me of being a “white supremacist” and started a virtual pitch-fork mob to chase me down, contact my advertisers, humiliate people who work with me. It was a terrifying moment in my long life online, 28 years now.

When I pointed out that Kamala Harris had reacted badly in her debates, I was called a racist. I watched Twitter mobs swarm the film Green Book, calling it “racist” to prevent it from winning an Oscar. And on and on it goes. They seem to need daily sacrifices to toss into the churn to keep the village pure and righteous.

These are small examples of a big problem on the Left. Most of them are nuttier than a fruitcake. And no, I don’t mean “fruitcake” to mean anything other than the hard, lumpy dessert people sometimes bake at Christmas.

But I just did a double-take. That image above says “white fruitcake.” Is that racist? I don’t mean racist against whites — I’ve been told that can’t exist — but can I use that word? Fruitcake? It was a slur against mentally ill people and occasionally gay people. Now I’m cascading into a world of self-doubt. Can I say “nuttier than a fruitcake” and not be attacked?

To many on the Left, it isn’t a big deal to always watch what you say for fear of offending people. If they did mean offensive words only, like the N-word, that would be one thing. But we know that isn’t true. There is a broad spectrum of things you can’t say without being tagged as a bad person.

The thing is, Ro Khanna seems to be more reasonable than most Democrats. But when asked by Bari Weiss why people who read the New York Times or MSNBC had never heard about The Twitter Files, he had no answer. This was breaking news. The FBI was involved in policing users on Twitter. Yet, on the Left, it was yet again, See no Evil, Hear no Evil, Speak no Evil.

Then they got to the subject of policing “hate speech” online. But we’re living in a time when the people who are nuttier than a fruitcake are in charge. They get to say what counts as “hate speech.” And it could be anything. It changes all of the time.

Khanna is, by all accounts, a decent man. The only person who sounded the alarm when Twitter was debating banning the sitting President. He talks about how much he wants to hear from people who disagree with him, and that he doesn’t want to dwell in an echo chamber.

Before I left the Left, I used to joke with my friends about how shocking all of the movies in the past were. There was no path back to sanity in any of it because the youth was leading the charge. The poor things had been shaped into puritanical zealots who see thought crimes everywhere. The Great Awokening was a transformative period in American culture that called out the past for a wide array of crimes and misdemeanors. We’re all expected not just to change, but to condemn and abandon the past.

When I watch movies with my daughter, we both know exactly the moment when a crime is being committed on screen. This is Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman “sexually harassing” women and it being a running gag. This is a gay slur in the film Breaking Away with a man in a pink shirt sees Dennis Quaid and says, “do you want to roll some balls?”

This is the cheery Indian character standing behind Judy Garland in The Harvey Girls. This is Fred Astaire in Black Face. This is Michael J. Fox being responsible for Chuck Berry’s stardom. And on and on it goes. At some point, at least where my very cool daughter is concerned, you just have to say - well, that’s how it was. We have no choice but to forgive the past.

Scent of a Woman is a good movie because of its universal message. Ultimately it is about how to have integrity when the heat is on. Since my life has been shaped mostly by movies (I am writing a much longer piece about this), I often return to them again and again to sort out life’s complications.

I always go back to this scene because it’s about standing up for what is right, no matter what it cost you:

Does he “sexually harass” women in the movie? I guess so. To me, he’s flirting more than anything else. But I guess everyone has their own idea of what crosses the line and what doesn’t. I can tell you as an older woman, you miss it when it goes away, when you stop getting the kind of attention you used to get from men.

Breaking Away has that one scene but it also has this great ending where the Cutters, against all odds, win the race.

They don’t make movies like this anymore, movies for everybody. We always counted on them to make us feel like winners. But now, so many of them seem like they want to FIX what’s wrong with you. That’s why people aren’t showing up.

I wanted my daughter to see the messages in these movies because they stick somewhere deep inside.

Maybe because she is my daughter, she has learned to shrug it off. Our favorite movies are Sideways — which is about two badly behaving men on a wine tour, The Edge, which is about men being trapped in the wilderness and having to survive — written by David Mamet. Burn After Reading by the Coen brothers.

I had to teach her to chase down what she loves, to write what she wants to write, and hope that eventually, things will change. Recently she sent me a picture of the inside of the Harry Potter store. I told her that I was glad people were visiting. She said she was glad her friends didn’t care that she was going. Much of the madness we’re all living through is still confined to online spaces.

Avatar The Way of Water is not a Movie You Can See At Home

Avatar is a wild ride. But you have to go to the movie theater to see it. It will lose its magic if you wait for streaming. But in this case, it’s worth every penny. There is no “woke” lecture in the film, mercifully. The villains are people who hunt down the “whales.” The 3-d is much better than the original, and I found the story quite moving. What was odd to see in 2022 was how much the film revolved around the idea of the nuclear family. You have expected someone to have shown up with a clipboard and said Jim Cameron should have tried harder to be more inclusive. But he’s Jim Cameron. You can’t really tell him anything. You have to be that famous and that powerful to glide over the tide.

My Long Drive

I will write dispatches from the road and hopefully record a piece or two. Since I’m driving and stopping in motels here and there, I won’t have much time to tinker, I might do a sort of free-form podcast that isn’t scripted. I am prone to typos and errors unless I tinker. So be warned.

I love driving across America. It is my happy place. Perhaps I am a nomad at heart. There will probably be something else Elon Musk did that people are mad about tonight. I’m grateful for him - or anyone brave enough to take on the machine.

All the best to you, dear readers.