Make Hollywood Great Again? NOT!

Regular readers of this blog will know that I often post episodes of The Anchor Team, produced by Michael Hichborn and the Lepanto Institute.  Those podcasts happen on Friday evenings so I will post them on Fridays or maybe the following Saturdays.  I for one have found them to be quite informative and helpful.

This evening Hichborn himself was away on family business.  This evening's episode can only be described as ok, but somewhat odd.  The title of the podcast is "Make Hollywood Great Again".  Right off the bat we see a problem.  Hollywood never was great.  Much of what was produced was full of filth, having the effect of corrupting morals.  That effect may well have been deliberated by freemasons who seem to seize any opportunity to bring about their new world order ends.

It had two characteristics that seemed to appeal to the populace at large.  With some notable exceptions, the people who starred in their movies were physically attractive people who were often the objects of fantasies by their audiences.  The second characteristic is that the watching of the films provided their audiences an escape from reality.  Both these characteristics tended to render their audiences passive recipients of any message they may have wished to present.  Much of the populace of western civilization were all too eager to lap up whatever Hollywood concocted for their consumption.

Not all were oblivious to the dangers of Hollywood.  Good Christians of various stripes, mostly evangelical, preached against the movies and often forbade their congregations from attending.  Perhaps the greatest moral force that succeeded in at least restraining Hollywood partially was the Catholic Church, through its Legion of Decency.  At that time, the Church still held moral credibility.  The Hollywood moguls knew that if the Legion declared a film to be objectionable, that Catholics would boycott it and revenues would take a tumble.  

This was during the so-called "golden age of Hollywood".  The fact that there was a need for the Legion of Decency to even exist should point to the evil that lurked in Hollywood.  There were those films that didn't make the Legion's grade but were still released.  But even the movies that were somewhat friendly to the Church misrepresented the Church.  Those shortcomings might have been barely noticeable, but that made the errors even more likely to be introduced into audiences' minds.  I believe they were deliberately insinuated to slowly introduce error into common thinking.  The errors increased in frequency and intensity as the movie producers sensed that they would suffer no backlash from passive audiences.

It's some of those movies that were lauded in tonight's episode of the Anchor Team.  I'll now post the video and below that will comment on some of the films

I won't remember them all, but here are a few.

• Angels With Dirty Faces about two boyhood friends, one now a gangster and the other a priest.  The gangster is idolized by some boys whom the priest is trying to keep from lives of crime.  When the gangster is sentenced to the electric chair, the priest pays him one last visit.  He asks the gangster to pretend that he's afraid to die, so that the boys will think him a coward not with emulating.  Note two things. First, the priest asks him to lie, to sin against the Eighth Commandment.  Maybe the reason was noble, but the ends don't justify the means. Second, and more egregiously, the priest doesn't even offer to hear the gangster's final confession.  So the gangster goes to the chair with mortal sin on his soul.  How well was the Church portrayed by that?
• The Scarlet And The Black is based on the doings of Msgr Hugh O'Flaherty, a priest in the Vatican who hid thousands of Jews during the World War II holocaust.  It directly feeds into the lie that Pope Pius XII was a coward when it came to assisting Jews.  That lie was refuted by the Chief Rabbi of Rome who himself converted to Catholicism.
• The Sound of Music supposedly based on the adventures of the Von Trapp family during World War II was so fictionalized that it aroused the ire of Maria Von Trapp.  The Von Trapp family was not invited to the opening performance of the musical on Broadway.

I now realize when I described some characteristics of "golden age Hollywood" that I didn't touch upon the opulent and decadent lifestyles of the various stars.  It was they who made divorce and remarriage seem quite normal.  Their "parties" were often drunken orgies, some of it quite scandalous.  We now know that abortion was quite rampant in that crowd; recall this was before Roe v Wade, when child murder was still considered a criminal act.  They got away with all this because they had money.

So to that we should get back???  I should hope not!!!  So many people want to step back fifty years in the past, failing to acknowledge that if such were possible, fifty years into that future we'd have the mess in which we currently find ourselves.

I highly recommend a book called "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman.  He talks of the perils of passive reception of visual stimuli such as movies and television, even if the content is truly wholesome.  At best, the viewer should always be cautioned to watch with his mind engaged and to never allow him/herself to be emotionally affected by the content.  Saint Peter, in one of his epistles, exhorts us all to "watch always for the devil seeks to devour".

The present situation is rather unpleasant.  But let's not romanticize the past that led us into our current mess.

The False Idol Of Entertainment

How many of us have uttered - or at least heard - the sentence "we need decent entertainment that's free of moral filth"?  I have.  I think we can all agree that most of today's entertainment is rife with material that mocks God's intentions for marriage and sexuality; additionally, progressives have infiltrated almost every aspect of that industry.

This post will not focus on that aspect of the statement, but another one that is largely ignored but probably much more basic.  To start, I'll counter that question with another: "since when did entertainment ever become a need"?  Think about it; the idea that the commodity known as entertainment should be placed on the same level of necessity as food, water, air, clothing, shelter, healthy human relationships and even God Himself is rather ludicrous.  Yet even good Catholics are deluded into thinking that somehow they need copious amounts of entertainment.

Much of what passes for entertainment these days is really quite mind-deadening.  We either:

• plop ourselves in front of tv's
• attend movies, or concerts, or sports events

and just soak up whatever is being thrown at us from the screen, stage, arena, whatever.  Rarely do we evaluate the input being poured into our minds like water poured at a sponge.  In fact, peer pressure discourages critical thinking.  I recall several times watching movies with friends and pointing out holes in various plots.  During all these occasions I was scolded, with others saying that I'm "supposed to suspend thinking".  These were fellow Christians telling me that!  When the Apostle Peter warns us in his epistle to "watch always for the devil prowls like a lion", I take him at his word and denounce this concept of "suspending thinking" even for a few minutes.  This suspension of critical thinking is something that occurs with even "decent forms of entertainment.  I suspect it's very dangerous, for it encourages people to lust after entertainment that will only yank and massage their emotions and encourage mental laziness.

Besides the mind-deadening aspects of entertainment, there is also the problem of de facto voyeurism that many (even Christians!) engage when they slavishly follow the doings and sayings of entertainment personalities.  Entire industries have arisen around the insane fascination with the lives of what some call "pretty people".  Anyone who goes to a grocery store cannot help but notice the gossip rags and tabloid trash that routinely tell us who's shacking up with whom and who's having another star's baby, and a messy divorce, and on and on and on.  If an entertainment personality dies, they yammer on and on about that for months (as though no one else in the world dies).  We are also treated to their political opinions which are for the most part, progressive.  That is, they favor gay marriage, abortion, etc and are probably embroiled in those evils presently.

This voyeurism is no new phenomenum.  It has gone on for generations, probably for as long as Hollywood existed.  Even in the 1930s and 1940s, when national morals were allegedly  more sound than they are today, stars routinely played "musical marriage".  I often wondered why on earth the ordinary person seemed so fascinated by all the juvenile nonsense going on in Hollywood, especially then when morals and common sense were supposedly more valued then than in today's post-modern culture.  

Only recently did a possible reason dawn on me.  Back then, the ordinary person wasn't as wealthy as his descendents today.  In the early part of the 20th century a large contingent of the population were living on farms, and that is how they made their living.  They could not live profligate lifestyles and still have the physical wherewithall to work their farms.  Their livelihoods depended on "clean living".   On the other hand, the stars were relatively wealthy.  If they engaged in riotous activities, they had financial resources to shield themselves from consequences of their various debaucheries.  That "shielding" included abortions; yes, Hollywood was rife with baby-murder.  That didn't work all the time for enough stars did fall into ruin owing to their wanton excesses (and of course the tabloid trash would have field days with that).

I strongly suspect that the voyeurs of past generations would have liked to engage in that behavior but their circumstances militated against it.  Their fascination by the stars was borne of wishes to live as they did.  They both envied the stars and secretly congratulated them as they carried on.  In short, the so-called "moral ordinary citizen" was not all that moral in his or her heart.  As they followed the doings and sayings of their favorite stars, they lived vicariously through them, actually reveling in the debaucheries of their star-idols.  They do so to this day.

So why, on this blog that has as its purpose the restoration of Catholicism, focusing on the common but morbid fascination with popular entertainers?  Because so many of us, even decent Catholics, have glommed onto this trend and are helping perpetuate cultural and spiritual degeneration.  The "we need decent entertainment" statement indicates that Catholics have been infected with that societal sickness.  We aren't going to be able to clean up the cultural mess if we ourselves don't stop taking swigs from the swill.

So what to do?  For starters, I'd suggest procuring and reading "Amusing Ourselves To Death" by Neil Postman.  He offers some great commentary and research regarding the harm that most modern "entertainment" (even the "clean" sort) has done to people's abilities to engage in simple linear reasoning.  I'd also suggest turning off the TV; there are reasons why it is called "boob tube" and "idiot box" and "electronic deity".  For healthy entertainment, create your own by:

• reading good books that serve an educational purpose - including ones that teach the Catholic faith
• learning to play a musical instrument
• engaging in sports yourselves as opposed to watching paid athletes snub our flag when the Star Spangled Banner is played (good exercise, too!)
• learning a form of arts and crafts
• family recreations
• getting together with like-minded people for good conversation

The possibilities are endless.  The above-mentioned list does not involve dependence on major sports or mainstream entertainment industries.  Why pay one cent of your hard-earned money to fill their purses, knowing full well that some of that money will go to finance their profligate lifestyles or go to their favorite progressive causes?

Comments/suggestions welcome.

TV = Toxic Veg-Out

Most left-wing bumper strips on cars are absolute nonsense - but not all of them.  Here are a few that do contain some grains of intelligence:

• If you aren't outraged, you aren't paying attention.
• Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.
• First kill your television.

Let's look at that last one.  There is no doubt that the television has become the de facto Electronic Deity.  I understand that the average person watches four hours of the Idiot Box every day.  What a waste - in more ways than one.

I never watched that much Boob Tube.  However, when I cut it out completely over twenty years ago, I quickly noticed renewed clarity in my own thinking processes.  It wasn't just the removal of the slop and drivel that oozed copiously from that  thing.  Exposure to too much TV, even if it's exclusively EWTN, will have detrimental effects on the human brain. 

I recommend to the reading of all a book by Neil Postman called Amusing Ourselves to Death.  It's not an easy read, but well worth the time invested.  It's an eye-opener, to be sure.

Comes now a study, as reported by England's Daily Mail, that concludes that the watching of too much TV can actually deform a child's developing brain in ways that will stunt verbal intelligence.  Consider how this is coupled with the deliberate attempt by public education higher-ups to stupify the future adults.  (Google the words "public education dumbing down" for some eye-openers.)  That these two things are taking place is not a coincidence.

Take charge of what goes on in your own home and with your children.  Toss out the Electronic Deity (or at least confiscate its power cord).  Consider home-schooling.  You can do it.