Social Matter

I suppose I’m a pretty typical Millennial when it comes to my TV habits. I don’t watch too much network television, but I do love my Netflix, which I trawl regularly for good war movies and 80s action flicks. (If you’ve got any, post suggestions below.) I don’t, however, have the typical Millennial predilection for watching bad movies ironically. So the other day when I queued up King Arthur, I only made it about twenty minutes in before I had to switch it off and just watch Black Hawk Down again.

The premise of the movie wasn’t the dealbreaker. It was supposed to be one of those “gritty facts behind the glorious legend” type deals, which tend to skew bad but aren’t categorically so. (I don’t care what anyone says, The 13th Warrior rocks.) It wasn’t even the opening fight scene, which was admittedly pretty bad. It was more the fact that the writers of King Arthur had obviously never met a feelgood liberal trope that they didn’t like and seemed to be in some kind of contest to squeeze as many into their screenplay as possible. Even in the brief span of runtime before I tapped out, they had racked up quite a count.

First of all, things were shaping up so that some Catholic bishop from Rome was going to be the bad guy. So they were going full steam ahead with the r/atheism notion that institutionalized religion (that is to say religion) was cooked up as a scheme by the rich and powerful to consolidate their power over the credulous masses. The bishop was this shifty Italian fellow, jealous of accolades and luxury and seemingly looking for an excuse to burn someone at the stake. There’s a scene where his page is giving detailed instructions to one of Arthur’s knights about how the bishop has to be seated at the head of the table when he arrives for his conference. And then of course the bishop is visibly incensed when he gets to the hall and the table is round. Better luck next time, Catholicism! Take your church hierarchy and shove it.

There were also a few moments that favorably contrasted the noble-savage paganism of the Round Table knights (in this version Galahad is some Sarmatian nomad from the steppes rather than the paragon of Christian chivalry) with the ritual and reliquaries of the Church. And Arthur himself, although Roman and nominally Catholic, has no use for pomp and circumstance or the clergy either. So we can go ahead and check the “everyone should be spiritual but not religious” platitude box as well.

For my money, though, the saddest part of the whole affair was the way the movie went about establishing the superhero bona fides of Arthur and the villain bona fides of the Saxon he presumably beats in the closing act of the film. The audience is supposed to gather that Arthur is a good guy because he talks about “freedom” and the “equality of all men” at every given opportunity, whereas the Saxon is a bad guy because he’s racist. I wish I were exaggerating. But they really did put liberal democratic talking points into the mouth of a fifth century Roman, and they really did make a point to underscore how prejudiced the warlord of the Saxon invasion was in his first few lines. There’s a scene where the Saxon fellow comes across one of his soldiers in the process of raping a native Briton. He prohibits the coupling on the grounds that his superior race shouldn’t mix with the inferior peoples they conquer and then kills the solider and the woman both. Him allowing the rape of the inhabitants wouldn’t have been evil enough. They had to go bigger, better—really evil. They had to make him a eugenicist.

The wife informs me that Guinevere (Kiera Knightly) turns out to be woad-bedecked, kickass warrior grrrl from north of Hadrian’s Wall. But I never made it far enough to see her. I had seen enough.

The common thread in all of these sins against silver screen, of course, is that they are failures of imagination. And in this King Arthur differs from the vast majority of Hollywood’s output by degree only and not by kind. One of the longstanding attractions of fiction is that it allows you to inhabit exotic places and times, see the world through different eyes, that sort of thing. But the modern liberal doesn’t seem to want anything to do with that practice. Why would he take the time to imagine how the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain might have looked to a Roman? Or what it might have looked liked to a Saxon? Why go through all that effort to think about what honor, virtue, courage would have looked like at a distant and receding frontier of a once-omnipotent empire? It’s much easier to assign standard, progressive American sensibilities to your protagonists and have the guys who are out to thwart them be religious and/or racist. That’s what “The Narrative” boils down to, of course. Enlightened egalitarians nobly defying backwards reactionaries who are clutching to old ways. Why improve on a perfect formula?

It’s a fundamentally stunted worldview. And, to be honest, I don’t know why it has such a hold on the contemporary Left. But it does. It does to the point that they insist on the narrative not just in their entertainment but in their news as well: “#BlackLivesMatter Protestors Take A Stand Against Police Brutality!” “Gay Americans Fight for the Basic Human Right to Sue Bakeries!” The details of the situation never matter, the countervailing evidence, the complexities. They’ll have their narrative come Hell or high water.

I’ve argued before that the core assertion of the social justice critique (i.e. that we are all fundamentally the same and would achieve similar outcomes in a fair world) means that people have to actively shut down their pattern-recognizing capacities, which makes them functionally stupider, less able to process reality. And I’m confident that’s part of it. It could also be, though, plain old victor’s complacency. They’ve been winning the culture war for nigh unto seventy years now. Their narrative has triumphed, and, with no credible challenges to necessitate ingenuity on their part, they’re just stuck in something of a conceptual rut.

All I know is that their movies, their books, their blogs are chock-full of tired liberal tropes that have only the faintest and most tenuous relationship to reality. Zombie thoughts shuffling along doggedly, long after their decomposition has set in. And I know that, while you’re out there on the Right scheming up how to present credible challenge, you should feel free to flick off the programs that have been infected by those tropes. Go read a book by a more vital, hungrier writer. From a more thoughtful time. Or, hell, just watch Black Hawk Down again.