Maestro, the new film starring Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan, is in many ways a terrific movie . The actors are first-rate. The movie is based on the life of conductor Leonard Bernstein, so the music is incredible.
Yet Maestro is also an example of what I call Hollywood’s “retroactive repression.” Liberal filmmakers like to make movies about conflict and overcoming bullies. Because America is the freest country on Earth, with gay marriage and severe punishment for racism , Hollywood has to go back in time to find the bad guys — bigots, homophobes, rednecks, and anti-communists.
This is the case with Maestro. Bernstein was a towering figure in American cultural life, but the film focuses on his bisexuality and how it presented a serious struggle in the 1950s. This is an important part of the story, to be sure, but not the entire story. It’s one small part of a symphony. Yet this aspect of the great man’s life is the main theme of Maestro. This is sad because Bernstein’s life was absolutely remarkable, overflowing with drama, politics, family, and triumph. He lived enough for two men.
Film critic Norman Lebrecht nailed it: “Bernstein revolutionized New York’s repertoire with injections of Mahler, Nielsen, Shostakovich and two-dozen American composers. He launched Saturday morning televised talks for young people at Carnegie Hall, educating a whole American generation in the elements and excitements of orchestral music. He and [wife] Felicia were shining lights of New York society, equivalent in fame and glamour to the Kennedys in the White House. The film of West Side Story carried his fame worldwide. He combined the roles of composer, conductor, teacher, social commentator, and reformer, too much for one man, one life. This context was entirely missed in Cooper’s film.”
Bernstein was also falsely accused of being a communist. Hollywood lives for those false accusations. But they’re not too big on people who were actually destroyed by communism. Where’s the movie about Whittaker Chambers?
Homosexuality might be taking over racism as the main thrust of Tinseltown’s retroactive repression. But only because the films picking the scab of racism have been endless: The Butler. The Help. Or Mississippi Burning. Or The Long Walk Home, Men of Honor, Malcolm, Mona Lisa Smile, Pleasantville, Hairspray, and Remember the Titans. Hollywood just never seems to tire of making movies that rub our faces in our own erstwhile iniquity. It’s a form of what Sir George Frazer in The Golden Bough called “sympathetic magic” — by devouring something belonging to someone else, you take on those attributes yourself. Thus, liberals get to feel virtuous for just making a movie.
Retroactive repression infantilizes both the white and heterosexual evildoers, which is understandable as many of these historic villains were indeed childish and evil. But often, the black and gay protagonists get diminished as well. Gays become weak, passive victims, as opposed to the great gay writer Quentin Crisp, shown as a funny, brave, often happy, and hugely talented artist in The Naked Civil Servant. Black people become one-dimensional figures whose purposes are to stand there and look wounded or nobly guide their moral inferiors to an enlightened position. The holy aura surrounding them robs their characters of flesh and blood humanity.
One of my favorite films of all time is In the Heat of the Night, and there is a reason why I did not include it in the list above. It stars Sidney Poitier as a 1960s detective who is falsely accused of murder in a small town in the South. He is exonerated but then asked to stay on and help solve the case. Seems like typical retroactive repression stuff, except for the fact that Poitier and Rod Steiger, who played the white town sheriff, give extraordinary performances as complex human beings.
In the film, there is no downplaying the racist power structure in the South of the 1960s — the scene where Poitier’s character is first arrested for no other reason than he’s black is terrifying. But it soon becomes clear that the two lead characters are not simple cutouts but men with flaws and the ability to forge a friendship despite their environment.
In one of the film’s most remarkable scenes, Poitier’s character, Virgil Tibbs, begs the sheriff, Steiger’s Bill Gillespie, to let him arrest a rich white man Tibbs is sure committed a murder. For once, Tibbs loses his cool, arguing that he can “pull this fat cat right off his hill.” Gillespie watches, realizing that Tibbs himself is capable of the unthinking prejudice that is rampant in Sparta, Mississippi, where the film is set. “Man,” he says to Tibbs, “you’re just like the rest of us.”
You’re just like the rest of us — a powerful line whose sentiment most likely won’t be expressed in Hollywood.
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
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Maestro and Hollywood's retroactive repression - Washington Examiner
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