I'm not quite sure what to think about HBO's Angels in America. Andrew Sullivan describes it as "a pretentious left-wing screed," and I'm inclined to agree. Because I've only seen the first half, however, I can't say with 100% certainty that it's always "left-wing." But the bid to sell the story as profound by clumsily bolting on segments of phantasmagorical religious imagery strikes me as not only pretentious, but sophomoric. And the leftist ideology seems dredged from the same source. So far the element of the drama that is most clearly leftist involves the willfully ignorant presentation of patriotism as either cynical or naively conflicted, through the portrayals Al Pacino as the infamous Roy Cohn and his Mormon/gay acolyte.
But the notion that a group of highly talented entertainers can get together and present a drama filled with deliberately manipulative emotional nuance in order to sell a false version of reality is a little frightening. For an example of the corrosive potential of such a project see almost any Oliver Stone movie, especially JFK which sells the travesty of Garrison's destructive and half-insane conspiracy theory (planted by the KGB, according to recently revealed documents) as fact, even though it has been thoroughly debunked and even though the climactic court case resulted in the wrongful conviction and public destruction of an innocent man.
Other ensemble lies have been less obvious, from The Matrix series, to HBO's inscrutable Carnivale, primarily because they've been so heavily camouflaged that they're all but incoherent. (Although it isn't surprising that the Washington, DC sniper, John Lee Malvo, was apparently addicted to the Matrix series.) Scorsese's Gangs of New York belongs in the same destructive category as JFK, because it deliberately distorts history in order to sell an ideological perspective that is otherwise insupportable: the notion that the anti-war riots in New York City weren't exactly what they seemed, a short-sighted and ugly manifestation of naked racism and traitorous self-interest. It's the sort of distortion the Stalinists turned into an art form. No creative rendering of "fact" is too outrageous or off-limits. The race riots in New York during the Civil War couldn't possibly have been motivated by the same Democrat susceptibilities that infected the Copperheads and McClellanites (and the current anti-war, anti-American left). It must therefore have been the result of capitalist manipulation of some sort, as transparent and shameless an example of Karl Marx's discredited "theory of false consciousness" as one can imagine.
Considerable talent and resources are invested in these orchestrated ensemble lies. I'm not certain what distortion Angels is ultimately selling , because only the first half has been presented so far, and I never saw the stage production. Sullivan says it's the fiction that the right deliberately sought to perpetrate genocide on the gay community by denying treatment, undermining or failing to fund research efforts to find cures or a vaccine. Something like that anyway. This has become an almost universally accepted meme of the gay/left establishment, even though nearly all empirical evidence points to a contrary conclusion.
But one image in the first part of the series is particularly repellent. This is the scene that presents Ethel Rosenberg as a magnanimous ghost/angel, played by Meryl Streep, appearing in order to mildly scold and then phone in an ambulance request for the man who helped ensure her execution, Roy Cohn. The not-so-subtle suggestion is that traitors are well-intentioned and admirable people that ought to be trusted. This rehabilitation of an executed criminal through the device of fantasy actually reveals the preposterous nature of the ideology that underlies the production. And, fortunately, the effort even confuses those in sympathy:
But maybe "Angels" is not meant to be thoroughly understood and fully dissected. Maybe all the noble speeches and crazy tangents are supposed to wash over you, like Al Green's music or Robin Williams at full rant.
And maybe it's just camouflage for vaporous crap? The problem with these orchestrated Hollywood ensemble lies is the substitution of "virtual reality" for fact, because the contest has already been lost in the world of ideas, and the left's fantasy has been thoroughly rejected in the objective world of reality. The only hope is subjective emotional deception and misdirection. And it's all getting to be a tiresome waste of time and talent, isn't it?
Posted by Demosophist at December 12, 2003 01:51 PM | TrackBack