Big Hollywood is a unique and long needed institution – a place where conservatives can gather and talk about pop culture and entertainment, the ultimate goal being, as I understand it, to encourage conservatives to engage in the culture war through the arts.
While the best tactics to achieve this goal are open to debate, its ultimate worth and necessity are indisputable – for too long, conservatives have ceded the most influential segments of society, from academia to Hollywood, to the Left with nary a fight. The current sorry state of our movement is in no small measure the result of this refusal to engage the battle of ideas where it impacts people the most- the culture that they absorb every day through radio, Internet, television, and movies.
The piece which will appear in eight installments, one chapter each Saturday and Sunday, over the next four weeks, however, will deal more specifically with the literary world, and the conservative’s place therein. For contemporary literature (by which I mean drama, poetry, and written fiction) is also more or less the exclusive province of left-wing thinkers and practitioners.
Some may argue that literature these days is not nearly as influential as movies, say, or television, and therefore perhaps not as worthy of conservative efforts to engage. On the face this is true – far more people watch Sex and the City, for example, than read The Kenyon Review. But in a larger sense, this argument misses the point and dangerously underestimates the influence of literature as a vehicle for poisonous ideas to enter the cultural mainstream.
Let us say that a talented young person, whose passion is film-making, enrolls in an elite educational institution. At that institution, he is exposed daily, both directly and indirectly, to the works of left-wing literary authors; in his university writing class, for example, he is given an essay by Susan Sontag to analyze and exemplify.
Let us suppose as well that this person is not inherently opposed to conservative ideas; nevertheless, having studied film and literature for four years without having been exposed to any conservative authors, he enters the film-making profession steeped in liberal thought.
Let us next suppose that this film-maker goes on to make a powerful movie which becomes a hit and is enjoyed by a wide audience, every member of which now exposed to the left-wing thought present in the subtext of the film.
This scenario, the trajectory of countless artists, illustrates the complex intersection between literature, art, education, and entertainment – all too often, it is on campuses and in literature where artists of all stripes are first exposed to left-wing ideology, to which they then give form in their work, some of which inevitably becomes popular and therefore a part of “pop” culture.
And it is precisely because literature has a foot in all of these worlds that I feel it is both worthy and fertile ground in which conservatives may stake a claim – if they are willing.
It seems, however, that by and large they are not willing. There are terribly few conservative poets, fiction authors, and dramatists working in America today. The aim of the following essay is two fold; 1) to discover why this is so, and 2) to explore ways in which this atrocious state of affairs may perhaps be corrected.
Tomorrow we will start by interviewing blogger, critic, and publishing expert Michael Blowhard.
Matt Patterson is a columnist and commentator whose work has appeared in The Washington Examiner, The Baltimore Sun, and Pajamas Media. He is the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story.” His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.