[warning: spoilers]
The new Uncut Gems is further evidence for a thesis I’ve long maintained: Contrary to popular opinion, Hollywood makes a lot of socially conservative movies. When you strip away the glamorous actors and cool music, the message is clear: Live a responsible bourgeois life or you will soon be severely punished.
This is most obvious for hard-boiled crime films. The lead characters in such stories engage in an array of impulsive, brutal, and parasitical behaviors. Before the movie ends, almost all of the characters have been shot, stabbed, beaten, imprisoned, or ostracized. Many are dead, often in grotesquely inventive ways. Howard Ratner, the lead character in Uncut Gems, repeatedly commits fraud and adultery. He spins a web of lies and makes high-stakes gambles. In each scene, he acts on his worst impulses. For every success his duplicity brings, two failures spring. When he thinks he’s won, another criminal murders him. Even if Ratner had survived, though, his dishonesty and lechery would have cost him his family.
The same goes for The Godfather saga, Goodfellas (or any Scorsese crime movie), Pulp Fiction (or any Tarantino crime movie), Fargo (or any Coen brothers crime movie), Snatch (or any Cockney crime movie), as well as Scarface, New Jack City, and Boyz n the Hood. In crime movies, people who engage in criminal behavior suffer, usually at the hands of their fellow criminals. If they don’t get you, the cops will.
While crime movies focus on men, their female characters also catch hell. Women who sleep with criminals – usually against their family’s advice – end up pregnant and abandoned, if not beaten or murdered. Don Corleone treats his wife with old-world gentility, but she still lives to see her eldest son full of lead. (Michael, her youngest son, has the filial piety to delay the murder of his elder brother until after her death).
The message of all this cinema: Follow the path of bourgeois virtue. Work hard, keep the peace, abstain from alcohol, have very few sexual partners, and keep your whole family far away from anyone who lives otherwise. Think about how many fictional characters would have lived longer if they never set foot in a bar.
Is this the message the writers intend to send? Unlikely. Instead, they try to create engrossing stories – and end up weaving morality tales.
True, Hollywood could make movies where criminals are “victims of their toxic social environment.” It could make movies where the people who face retribution are the self-righteous bourgeoisie who “created toxic social environment in the first place.” (This is arguably the plot of Natural Born Killers, though that’s giving it too much credit). Such stories, however, would be sorely lacking in emotional truth. You can’t credibly depict the life of a criminal without showing his choices; and when you see his choices, you see all the ways he could have done otherwise, “toxic social environment” notwithstanding.
Similarly, you could make crime movies that end before the criminals get their comeuppance. Yet such stories would be dramatically inert. If a bank robber gets killed on his eighth heist, audiences want to see heists number 1, 2, and 8. If the bad guy gets it in the end, who cares about his intermediate successes? Let’s fast forward to the Day of Reckoning.
Does this mean that Hollywood movies actually reduce crime? I doubt it. The viewers most in need of lessons in bourgeois virtue are probably too impulsive to reflect on the moral of the story. They’re captivated instead by the gunplay and machismo. Yet if you’re paying attention, the moral of these stories remains: Unless your parents are criminals, listen to your parents.
READER COMMENTS
Garrett
Dec 30 2019 at 3:45pm
I think Scarface is a good example of this. Many boys and young men thought Tony was cool and would try to emulate his style.
BucketofFried
Dec 31 2019 at 8:40am
I agree that Scarface is glorified in some circles for Tony’s swagger and “spit-in-the-eye” attitude mixed with trappings of the American dream. I also think that if you have a disadvantaged background AND a fatalistic attitude, Tony’s life and ultimate death could easily be viewed as an attractive life option. Of course, what is missing is the fact that there were hundreds (thousands?) of similar gangsters trying to be Tony but only one Tony.
Kervard
Jan 2 2020 at 6:35pm
A key part of this is how Scarface/Tony Montana got translated into cultural memory during the 1990s through hip-hop, especially gangsta rap. Brian de Palma had wanted Scarface to be a cautionary tale (no character has what could be called a good ending), but it was mostly critically panned at the time as long, boring, and relying on violence/swearing for shock and did just ok at the box office. The Cuban community in Miami protested the movie for making Cubans appear to be violent gangsters. But starting with the rapper Scarface of Geto Boys taking his name from the movie, the imagery, attitude, and dialogue of the movie all got picked up in ways that glorified the criminality and ignored everything bad that happens to Tony/Manny/his sister. So by the early 2000s, between hip-hop and then Grand Theft Auto, a generation of teenage boys were growing up seeing Tony Montana as, if not necessarily a role model, at least a cool guy with a ton of quotable lines and swagger, and the Scarface poster was a high school bedroom and dorm room staple.
HH
Dec 30 2019 at 6:51pm
Romantic comedies are very much like this, even the less traditional ones. The 40-Year-Old Virgin is a dumb guy comedy that’s explicitly pro-marriage. Knocked Up, which can’t even bring itself to say the word abortion, endorses 2-parent households. The nominally transgressive Trainwreck ends up with its heroine choosing monogamy (with a doctor!) over her prior lifestyle.
kingstu
Dec 30 2019 at 7:20pm
PLEASE Enlarge: Uncut Gems SPOILER ALERT!!! I didn’t see it underneath the photo (iPhone) until after I read the spoiler.
Phil H
Dec 30 2019 at 7:23pm
I think Caplan’s right about this, but it’s not clear just how cleanly the movie world divides between the bad and the good. Most heroes don’t get through their movies unscathed, either! Cops end up divorced, doctors usually have a parent die, parents and children scream at each other…
I wonder if the social conservative side of movies doesn’t come about to a large extent because at some point, the movie needs to signal *this character is good* about the hero(ine), and so it uses some familiar trope about being hardworking or not cheating on your partner. Giving to the poor used to be one, though I haven’t seen it so much lately. So rather than having conservative characters that win, movies contain winners and losers, and they force some conventional morality onto the winners in order to make the movie make thematic sense.
Jared
Dec 31 2019 at 2:40am
There is probably a difference between dramas and comedies/action films here. I suspect most dramas go as you have said, but (for example) nearly all heist films end with the team getting away with it (indeed, that’s usually the point). Now in many of those, we make the person they robbed even less sympathetic (Ocean’s Eleven) or a criminal to make it feel justified, but not always (see the end of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, where the two cons get fleeced by the mark, only for the mark to return… with a new set of marks for them all to fleece together!).
The other (much much smaller) exception to the drama/comedy divide is antihero movies, where the whole point is to watch the monster rise. Nightcrawler, for example–the worse he gets, the higher he rises.
On balance, though, I think this claim is more right than not.
A
Dec 31 2019 at 4:08am
Action movies are another genre with conservative tendencies. Independent, morally clear agents of change utilize martial skills to supersede ineffective government agencies.
Dylan
Dec 31 2019 at 6:58am
Most of these examples I wouldn’t describe as social conservatism, but just respecting societal morals that are generally shared among conservatives and liberals alike. To make your case, I think you would need to use examples that unite social conservatives, things like opposition to abortion, gay marriage, having children out of wedlock, drug use, etc… Here, I think you’ll find the record at best mixed, or leaning much more towards what we’d consider liberal social values.
I’m also not sure that the movies you use as examples really show what you want them to show. Take the Coen Brothers movies, sure they may have things not go well for the protagonist, who is rarely perfect, but there are often far worse characters that get away with it. No Country for Old Men is I think the clearest example of this, but that theme kind of runs throughout a bunch of their movies. More generally, lots of crime dramas will show bad things happening to bad people, but in so much as good people exist in those films, their lives are rarely all that much better. If I were to make a sweeping generalization, I’d say that crime dramas lean towards the nihilistic side more than towards any particular moral belief system.
Jeffrey S.
Dec 31 2019 at 11:45am
Dylan,
This is an excellent point — Bryan essentially makes the case that social conservatism is equivalent to: “Live a responsible bourgeois life or you will soon be severely punished.” This is absurd — as you point out, there is serious disagreement among liberals and conservatives about what goes into a bourgeois life. I disagree with my liberal neighbors on the meaning of marriage, on the morality of abortion, the morality of homosexual acts, drug use, the production and use of pornography, etc. Hollywood often glamorizes all of these acts or suggests there is nothing wrong with homosexuality, redefining marriage, using pornography, etc.
Chris
Dec 31 2019 at 7:51pm
Yes. Caplan is way out over his skis in lumping the Coen Brothers in. If there is any overarching theme to their movies (their “crime” movies–does this count Raising Arizona? The Man Who Wasn’t There?–or otherwise), it is that there is no rhyme or reason. We are all the playthings of fate. A sub-theme is that those who resist this larger lesson and try to take hold of their fate are likely doomed, but that is a far cry from endorsing a responsible bourgeois life. H.I. McDunnough and Tom Reagan are the most obvious examples of multiple felons who end up no worse than when the movie began.
Jens
Dec 31 2019 at 11:04am
“””
… the moral of these stories remains: Unless your parents are criminals, listen to your parents. …
“””
Which doesn’t make much sense, because the property “criminal” is only loosely coupled to the property “good and considerate parent” and vice versa.
AMT
Dec 31 2019 at 2:28pm
“have very few sexual partners.” Where are you getting that from? I could agree with “don’t cheat on your partner,” or “don’t have unprotected sex,” but very few sexual partners doesn’t seem to be propounded by Hollywood.
IVV
Jan 2 2020 at 11:07am
If what’s being said is “Have a partner, and don’t cheat on said partner” then that translates to “have very few partners.” There’s nearly nothing in Hollywood that suggests a polyamorous lifestyle is a good idea.
Dylan
Jan 2 2020 at 4:41pm
There’s certainly been a long history of promiscuous and/or philandering men from James Bond to Don Draper and the womanizing is usually part of the charm, if perhaps also seen as a bit of a weakness.
Actual sympathetic portrayals of polyandry in film are rarer, but they certainly exist, and I’d say seem to have gotten more common in recent years. I’ve not yet seen in But Professor Martson and the Wonder Woman supposedly falls in that camp. And CBS Morning news had a long special on polyamory on Christmas morning of all things, which suggests to me that it has gone a lot more mainstream than I would have expected.
Spaghziea
Jan 1 2020 at 4:00pm
Is Hollywood more socially conservative than we would expect after noticing that virtue ethics naturally pair well with storytelling, though? For a story to be interesting it seems important to focus on the character of its protagonists, and doing so without implying value judgments is a very narrow path to walk.
nobody.really
Jan 6 2020 at 5:37pm
The Wolf of Wall Street, a more-or-less accurate autobiography, depicts the protagonist Jordan Belfort taunting a federal agent about their relative net worths, and ends with Belfort leaving prison, going on a speaking circuit, and publishing a memoir (featuring himself, naturally) that becomes a major motion picture. Not exactly a “crime doesn’t pay” morality lesson.
Comments are closed.