Voting is under way for the Writers Guild leadership positions. I have already cast my vote for the opposition slate, for reasons which I have explained in two previous posts. The Guild needs new leadership and must return to negotiations with the talent agencies so that its members, especially the young members, can get back to the business of earning a living. However, while I am hopeful of a change I am not sanguine about it. The solidarity mentality pummeled into our heads is a powerful anesthetic, and the entrenched leadership with its fifties labor union mentality will be hard to deracinate. Still, I have voted and hope for the best.
I would like to make here a point which I have forborne to do in the past. I hesitated, I shall be frank, because of my fear of reprisal, for which I apologize. It has become so clear to me that the Writers Guild now exists primarily for the sake of television writers that the implication of this shift can no longer be avoided. Just today a prominent Guild member, in writing to support the current leadership, admits that we must recognize that "TV issues are going to determine our life in the next decade."
As a feature writer, this leaves me out in the cold. The last strike and the current labor action have largely ignored the needs of feature writers, who increasingly have little in common with their television colleagues. This is more than a matter of emphasis; it represents, to my mind, a bifurcation in the interests of the Guild. For this reason I believe that the Guild itself should split into two parts, a screenwriters guild and a television writers guild, and devote equal resources to servicing the needs of both sets of writers. (Those who work in both media can be members of both wings.) This is the very kind of cultural shift for which I argued in my recent post on the Guild, and I believe it is time we Guild members began this discussion. The entertainment industry is changing, and this is the sort of change in our thinking that we ought to consider.
I have just read three reviews of the new Joker movie. One declares it a masterpiece, another an "aggressively terrible" film, and the third splits the difference at great length calling it a brilliant but failed attempt at psychoanalysis and social commentary. Opinion is equally divided on Joaquin Phoenix's performance, which (the critics apparently are unable to decide) is either glorious, gratuitous or implacably ghoulish. I have never seen a Marvel Comics movie and never wanted to, but given this schizophrenic hoopla about Joker, which is already being cast into the murk as Oscar bait, perhaps I will break my rule so that I may judge for myself. I will let you know.
I may mention in passing that this film appears to be yet another example of the phenomenon I discussed in my post about binge-worthy streaming TV. The Joker character, a secondary villain in the Batman series, has now become the protagonist of a film, elevated from an execrable villain to an object of curiosity and even of sympathy. It is a cultural development which I find troubling for what it says about the state of our social consciousness - we grasp now at role models precisely because they are anti-heroes of an unredeemable sort, admired for having sold or surrendered their souls. Mark Twain once said that Satan was admirable because he was the spiritual leader of four-fifths of the human race and the political leader of all of it. He was, of course, being facetious, but it seems his remark is no longer a joke.
I follow the Hong Kong protests with great interest. No matter where you stand on this story, you must admire the sheer courage of the, mostly, young protesters in defying the Communist Chinese monolith and demanding something as fundamental as freedom. Today the students of Hong Kong staged a boycott of classes, a tactic which I applaud and with which I can identify, since we did the same sort of thing in my school days. In that case we were defying the American military-industrial-political monster that was destroying the culture of Vietnam and devouring the lives of our friends. In some ways, the struggle that the Hong Kong protesters face is even greater. Communist China is not only an anti-democratic tyranny, it is a leading military power and also a leading economic one. And that means that other nations, democratic nations that ought to know better, are reluctant to criticize the police state's creeping oppression of Hong Kong because they have so much money invested in China. It is crass, cowardly self-interest turning a blind eye to a minority's courageous call for freedom.
This rather reminds me of the civil rights struggle in the Sixties in the South, when an oppressed minority put everything on the line for the sake of freedom, while the invested powers, North and South, tried to maintain an immoral status quo for the sake of stability. And while stability is desirable for economic and political reasons, it is never to be valued over the basic human right which underlies all human progress - the right to liberty and self-determination. I watch in dismay as our own government, which is so deeply in debt to China that it may never extricate itself, remains mute or largely so while the brave people of Hong Kong teach us the lesson we ought to have learned in the 18th century: If you buy stability at the price of liberty, you deserve neither.
On this score, let me repeat a suggestion I made after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting. At that time, I urged students to organize a nationwide school boycott until the paralytic political class changed the gun laws in this country to help ensure the students' safety. Walk out, I argued, and stay out until your schools are safe to attend. Do not march lemming-like into classrooms that are open targets for lunatics who should never have gotten guns in the first place. Demand absolute background checks, deny guns to anyone with a history of violence or mental illness, hire veterans as armed guards in schools, institute a ban on private ownership of all military-style weapons and ammunition, and launch a national gun buy-back campaign to get rid of at least some of the 400 million guns in America.
The young people of Hong Kong are giving us a brilliant example of how to organize and implement mass protests in the 21st century. They are risking their lives and freedom for the values that our young people take for granted. And so I plead once again with students: Use your smart phones and social media not as sources of mindless entertainment, but as tools to create a movement in your own interests - the interests of your safety and your lives. Walk out of school and stay out until the mad culture of gun worship in this country is quelled, and you can go safely back to your most important business, the business of education. Without fear.
Finally, there were several stories in the news today that make it clear that the intolerance of the Hollywood left for dissent is not a fabrication of the conservative mind. Two prominent actors have demanded the publication of the names of Trump donors so that "we will know who we don't want to work with." This is shameful. To refuse to work with people with whose politics you disagree is exactly the same as refusing to work with them because of their race, religion, gender or class. These Hollywood liberals do not realize the utter hypocrisy of their position. In flaunting their so-called progressive mindset, they are, in fact, joining the very ranks of the race-baiters and blacklisters whom they claim to despise. The personality of the president aside, the right to free expression and association remains sacred, whether it makes you uncomfortable or not.
