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The Fall and Rise of American Culture
For the past couple of weeks, the hilarious yet insightful Daily Wire podcast host Matt Walsh has challenged his audience to answer one question. What caused the radical decline of American culture post 2008? That the culture nosedived is undeniable to everyone except Democrats. It inspired my first article here an astonishing seven years ago, positing why a solid action thriller like Taken (2008) was beyond the capability of Hollywood just 10 years later. Walsh gives two correct reasons for the cultural nosedive, but he’s only half right on one of them and has reversed their order of importance.
For one thing, all the works Walsh elevates have one factor in common which has pervaded the entire 21st Century screen craft. They’re dark.
This is not criticism of Walsh, who is one of the most effective cultural warriors of the decade. His campaign against the transgender butchery of children, including his hit documentary What Is a Woman?, led directly to the anti-medical practice getting banned in Tennessee in 2023. Rising to his own latest challenge, Walsh suggests that the cultural collapse is primarily due to the breakup of the monoculture, driven by the explosion of mobile devices, and, to a lesser extent, the woke infestation of the arts. He’s right but has it exactly backward and is imprecise on the second cause.
Yes, the proliferation of portable computer screens totally fragmented the once uniform society. For 30 years, one third of TV viewers from all parts of America and all political stripes tuned in to The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, around 70-million people. Currently, less than two million — and few conservatives or independents — watch The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. At 11:30 p.m., the vast majority of people are checking out their cellphone screens for personal entertainment.
Walsh concedes that even today, some movies like Avatar and Barbie can break through the division and make more money than previous titles, even though they’re much worse. True, nobody spoke again about either of those stinkers a week after they stopped running, but their success still weakens Walsh’s fragmentation argument. For it proves that enough consumers will come together for a picture that appeals to them. Which leaves reason number two for the cultural meltdown — the wokeness cancer.
Here, Walsh hits the target but misses the bullseye. Because he’s too close to it in age, 39, and manifests what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery,” the notion that one’s own enjoyment time was culturally the highwater mark. By this measure, Walsh cites the films and shows he revered — No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, The Dark Knight, The Wrestler, Apocalypto — and The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men — as the zenith of screen art. Although he’s smart enough to mention the great works of earlier years like 1939 (Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz) and 1972 (The Godfather) while sticking to his 2000s stance.
There’s no question that the films and series Walsh names are far superior to any in the last decade and a half, other than Quentin Tarantino’s sublime Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. But none in turn, except Apocalypto, can equal countless earlier masterpieces. For one thing, all the works Walsh elevates have one factor in common which has pervaded the entire 21st Century screen craft. They’re dark. They replaced the strong masculine hero with the strong male masculine antihero. It’s possible Walsh’s chronological snobbery minimizes the degree of skill and talent required to create the former. As Hollywood did for its entire hundred-year history, before the woke mind virus poisoned it.
If Walsh subscribes to The American Spectator, he might have read Bruce Bawer’s engrossing article last week on the 75th anniversary of All About Eve. None of the titles Walsh put forward come anywhere close to Joseph L Mankiewicz’s masterpiece in character, dialogue, theme, and general humanity. Or to the best of John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and many others.
Walsh himself replied to an X post asking for the best three films in a row from one director, listing The Godfather, The Conversation, and The Godfather, Part Two by Francis Ford Coppola. You can add North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds by Hitchcock, and For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, and Once Upon a Time in the West by Sergio Leone. And zero three this century.
As for TV shows, for all the undeniable quality of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and the like, they’re overmatched — in brilliance if not darkness — by series like The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, The Big Valley, Columbo, Kung Fu, The Rockford Files (episodes written and produced by The Sopranos creator David Chase), Miami Vice, and Twin Peaks. The late great David Lynch’s Twin Peaks can give the modern shows a run for their darkness with one notable and superior difference — a noble male hero who confronts the evil.
In fact, the artistry and durability of vintage American television came into international perspective late Saturday night in the most enchanting scene of the Trump Presidency so far — the President’s welcome in Malaysia. It reflected the wonderful upgrade to U.S. geopolitical prestige in less than a year. Instead of people falling from a plane at Kabul Airport, you had the flower of Malaysia at Kuala Lumpur Airport — a dozen performers in colorful native clothing singing a lovely ballad and a crowd waving American flags — as the majestic jet (Sorry, No Kings whiners) with the words UNITED STATES OF AMERICA touched down.
When President Trump descended from Air Force One, he was greeted by Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, passed through an honor guard, and shook hands with other dignitaries. Then the military band switched to a familiar theme tune from a classic TV show — Hawaii Five-O. And President Trump began to dance along with them.
Nothing from the 21st century, including Walsh’s selections, could have had the same stirring effect.
READ MORE from Lou Aguilar:
A Novel Look at the Culture War
When the Movie Legends Die
Battling the Hollywood Hydra
Have yourselves a romantic little Christmas. Get your love interest my Yuletide romance fantasy novel, The Christmas Spirit. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and fine bookstores everywhere.
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