Frank Miller has written something grim, unpleasant, hackneyed, and vicious, and people are paying attention to it, for some reason.
And then also there's also this this thing he said a few weeks ago about the Occupy protests, which you'd be better off reading about here. Shorter Frank Miller: OWS protesters are disgusting subhuman swine because 9/11. Honestly, that's the nut of it. (He writes comics. His insult line for OWS protesters: "Go back to your mommas’ basements and play with your Lords Of Warcraft." [sic] Right. Because the kind of nerd-person who plays "Lords of Warcraft" is precisely not the sort of cool-person who would own copies of "Sinful City" or "299.")
Still and all, to be fair, his latest stuff seems defter, fresher, and funnier than anything Dennis Miller has come up with in a while. And yes, I'm contemning something I haven't read, but, well, sometimes you can, and should, damn a book by its cover.
In The Guardian Rick Moody, best known as the author of The Ice Tempest, casts asparagus on Miller's anti-OWS post, calling it "propaganda" of the sort that Hollywood constantly pumps out. Such "propaganda" not merely sucks, but is indeed "cryptofascist," on these grounds:
Miller's hard-right, pro-military point of view is not only accounted for in his own work, but in the larger project of mainstream Hollywood cinema. American movies, in the main, often agree with Frank Miller, that endless war against a ruthless enemy is good, and military service is good, that killing makes you a man, that capitalism must prevail, that if you would just get a job (preferably a corporate job, for all honest work is corporate) you would quit complaining.
Moody qualifies his case somewhat, which is a good idea, as he doesn't define exactly what he means by "cryprofascist," as he probably should:
Does that make American cinema cryptofascist? Is "cryptofascist" a word that you can use in an essay like this? I keep trying to find a space somewhere between "propagandistic" and "cryptofascist" to describe my feelings about Miller's screed. But perhaps it's more accurate to say the following: whatever mainstream Hollywood cinema is now, Frank Miller is part of it. And Frank Miller has done Occupy Wall Street a service by reminding us that our allegedly democratic political system, which increases inequality and decreases class mobility, which is mostly interested in keeping the disenfranchised where they are, requires a mindless, propagandistic (or "cryptofascist") storytelling medium to distract its citizenry. We should be grateful for the reminder. And we might repay the favor by avoiding purchase of tickets to Miller's films.
This is a reasonable thesis -- that big Hollywood films have a political dimension ranging somewhere from "propaganda" to "cryprofascist."
For openers, Miller was behind 300. That's a big Hollywood film. I couldn't watch more than a few minutes of it, personally, though I tried. (There are some things even Jamesons' can't make me do, it emerges.) But it made a lot of money! So let's specify that while 300 may not be emblematic of "Hollywood," it can still connote a particular tendency in modern filmic production. My sense is that 300 took certain sensibilities and assumptions about as far as they would go, and so while you couldn't say that it is the emblem of everything Hollywood, you can fairly assert that it represents a certain (godawful) trend.
And that trend is, on the one end, propagandist -- at least in the case of 300.
Observe that Miller has outed himself as a propagandist; he himself calls Holy Terror "propaganda" (see links above). The point of propaganda is to produce work that leads its consumers to take some sort of action or adopt some sort of ideology. It's not to tell a story or create images for the sake of telling a story or for producing images. That is Art, and has been ever since Flaubert started giving the French middle classes a hard time.
As for the "cryptofascist" part, in the case of 300, well, it is not too far out there. Sparta -- freedom -- honestly? The dusky hordes? The contempt for civilian soldiers and democratic structures? The hyper-masculinity? The depiction of women as, at best, props? The violence porn? The militarism? The inseperable identification of morality with unreflective nationalism? The fucking loincloths? The contempt for nuance, the bombast, the fucking tedium?
Check!
So, while Moody kind of goes over the top -- he's not done the work that would persuade me to believe that he's right about all mainstream Hollywood films of the past decade -- he sure is right about Frank Miller. And being "not persuaded" does not mean "unwilling to hear the brief."
Which is not to say that I don't have a case of my own. Overall, I'd say that the producers of big Hollywood films are hoping to make piles of money, and that very often there's piles of cash to be made in cryptofascism, or at least propaganda.
This of course is a gross oversimplification, but then as the old gag about vulgar materialism goes, money doesn't explain everything, only 90% of it.
But that last 10% matters -- just as do the 99%! For sound business reasons.
Observe. Here for instance is the ever-petulant Moe Lane on Moody's article.
So. Frank Miller – who has become incredibly, publicly, and gloriously cranky ever since 300 and Sin City gave him sufficient mojo to do so - wrote a little screed called ‘Anarchy‘ that pretty much told the Occupiers to get off of the streets and back into their parents’ basements where they wouldn’t get in the way....
Rick Moody once wrote a best-selling novel that was turned into a movie with a star-studded cast. Said movie bombed like a 19th Century Anarchist cell, the guy’s never worked in Hollywood since… and sweet merciful monkey JEEBUS but Moody’s bitter about that....
But, of course, people like Moody always seem to get it wrong: they think that the populace watches movies that are the opposite of the movies that Moody likes because the populace is brainwashed. I suppose that it’s better than dealing with the possibility that the populace watches movies that are the opposite of the movies that Moody likes because the movies that Moody likes actually suck.
Which is funny, because it's not very likely that Frank Miller will work in Hollywood ever again, because he's as likely to get Holy Terror produced by a non-Troma outfit as Moody is as likely to get one of his next novels filmed by, well, Troma. Hollywood might do crypto-fascist, if it makes them bread, but it won't do straight-up fascist, because that is box-office poison, as those stories usually suck so very hard.
This is precisely why wingnuts are always bitching so hard about the otherwise perfectly nasty capitalist machine that is Hollywood: it only churns out 90% of the propaganda crap they want to see.
Moody doesn't entertain the notion that OWS might be fascist. He blithely links Miller and fascism to the conservative side of the political spectrum.
She links Jonah Goldberg in this vicinity, presumably to show that she is a Serious Scholar.