Critical Mass

Dear Readers,

I have just finished by far the busiest term of my life. I am back:

I was watching a DVD of a recent comedy called Music and Lyrics today, and things were going pretty well; it actually looked like one of the better modern movies I’d seen. But then we got to the closing credits, during which a series of little blurbs appeared on screen to let us know what happened to all of the movie’s characters “later in life.” We learn that the two main characters of the movie, Alex Fletcher (Hugh Grant) and Sophie Fisher (Drew Barrymore) go on to write many more hit songs together and that they are “now living together.” Not married – just “living together.”

“No!” I yell at the TV screen, “They’re not ‘living together!’ They’re married! They’d better be married.” (I find myself yelling at the TV set a lot these days, which is one of the reasons I try to avoid movies produced after 1967). I don’t mean to sound prudish, nor do I think that Hollywood’s liberal bent is anything new, but it just made me wonder: “Comedies,” by definition, are plays that end with marriages – at least this has been the way it has worked for about 2000 years. Remember, this happens past the end of the movie: the plot is over, we’re into the credits after all – it’s no skin off the playwright’s nose to suggest that these characters are simply married as opposed to living together (it even takes fewer letters). So why does this movie go extra lengths to make the “living together” statement? Just to express contempt: contempt for marriage, contempt for tradition, and contempt for America and the very idea of goodness.

But this is not as depressing as it sounds, provided we remember that Hollywood is an irrelevance. Asking a Hollywooder to explain morality is like asking a used-car salesman to fix your fuel injectors: there is no correlation between the ability to be loud and obnoxious and the ability to do something useful. And since Hollywood has been talking to us for a long time, I would now like to talk to them:

Dear Hollywood: Nobody takes you seriously. Hollywood’s pagan views do not interest America, except from the standpoint of a rather pathetic amusement. Hollywooders and academics and the media mercenaries can stand there all day long telling us that morality is a variable thing, that absolute goodness doesn’t exist, that out traditions are simple-minded and bigoted (in fact, this is what they do). But get this Hollywood: America refuses to believe you. A Hebrew proverb states that “silence is a fence around wisdom.” As a good neighbor, I will simply point out that there are few holes in your fence that could use fixing.

-- Dan Gelernter