Fashions of thought and material things can dwell up from the bottom as in a free market economy with a new technology, catching stodgy elites by surprise. They can also permeate downward from academia to the movie studio, for instance. Astride the forceful demise of western civ courses, the lefty capture of most of the academic universe has dispensed with The Great Man Theory of History because, according to their lights, there are no great men, only cis-gender, patriarchal oppressors. You know the tripe. Has Ridley Scott succumbed to this half-witted zeitgeist in his latest offering, “Napoleon”?
Of course, there are great men (and women). Their status can’t be attributed to so-called misogynistic agitprop of an older, crueler age. In fact, today’s real agitprop actually comes from the shallow rhetoric masquerading as grand theory emanating from the stilted minds in our faculty lounges. Conversely, there were great men and women because they were so very influential in what followed for decades and centuries, maybe millennia.
Honestly, I haven’t seen the movie yet. There’s so much trash coming out of Hollywood – and probably that’s always been true – that I wait for the critics’ reactions. Some cinematic subjects just don’t interest me (all the Marvel/DC effusions come to mind). Some are so scurrilously riddled in lefty bromides (men as inherent abusers, most villains are rich, etc.) that I can’t bear to plunk down the 10 bucks for a ticket. Does “Napoleon” come draped in the same set of presumptions that are drilled into the heads of today’s Humanities students?
Bringing down The Great Men can involve reducing them to also-rans, or dullards according to one critic. In the assessment of Kyle Smith writing in The Wall Street Journal, the Napoleon who took over a continent was diminished to a simpleton in Scott’s rendering to such an extent that the great man “could never have commanded so much as a squadron of the Salvation Army”.
The 10-dollar-threshhold remains. Is it worth 10 bucks? Or, would I be better off reading Andrew Roberts’s biography of Napoleon and drop the movie? I suspect the latter.
On second thought, I may just take the hit to my meager pocketbook and go see it. I can walk and chew gum at the same time.
My main worry, though, is that after a few decades of a movie-going audience marinated in lefty agitprop in their public schools, and the sense of awe produced by big-screen audio-visual, an unread people will mistake a movie for the real thing, er, person. We’d best not forget that reality.
RogerG