Review: Richard Grenier, Capturing the Culture, 1991

Capturing the Culture is one of my favorite books. It must have been late 1991 when my good friend Edward Cline recommended that I buy it. It was the best twenty dollars I ever spent. Richard Grenier (1933-2002) had a varied career, which fortunately included that of movie reviewer for Commentary magazine. His insightful, iconoclastic comments on Hollywood's latest offerings were the highlight of the periodical. 

Ostensibly, Capturing the Culture is a collection of movie reviews from the 1980s that should garner little interest today. Actually, as the introduction by Robert Bork makes clear, these reviews are tour de force historical analyses of how the Hollywood left has been corrupting American culture for many decades. The title is in reference to Marxist Antonio Gramsci's famous call for the left to seize Western society's cultural high ground with a "long march through the institutions." Unlike Marx, Gramsci understood that cultural ideas and values are more than just "superstructure." He knew that politics is downstream of culture and sought to poison the culture to make way for his desired Soviet police state. Beginning in America's "Red Decade," leftists of all stripes have been working diligently to fulfill the cultural Marxist agenda. 

Hollywood was, of course, an early, high priority target for the leftist takeover. In the 1930s many successful movies were produced that contained overt political messages from the left. Some of these movies are actually very good and are still entertaining. One interesting aspect of this phenomenon is how low Hollywood's propaganda efforts have sunk. Most of the more recent work examined by Grenier is of much greater artistic merit than such rubbish as The Last Jedi.  

Grenier divides his book into two sections. The first section titled "Feature Films" contains twelve masterful essays that represent some of his best work. The second half "Quick Takes" is thirty-four short reviews on various films and other cultural artifacts. Some of these movies are well-known, popular films that met box office success. Some of the reviews are of lessor known or long-forgotten films that failed to make money. But, these failures make the point that while a business, Hollywood will sacrifice monetary concerns to get their message out. 

One of the "Feature Films" is Grenier's original review of Gandhi. The article "The Gandhi Nobody Knows" was later expanded into a much longer monograph. It's a much needed antidote to ceaseless Gandhi idolatry. In fact, the cultural elites' Gandhi fetish is an excellent example of the left's inculcation of "Other" worship. In this review the gross historical falsehoods on Gandhi, his life and politics, Hinduism and India are cataloged. Grenier uses both wit and the telling anecdote to make his case. There is this example of how media lies become the "conventional wisdom," 

On my second viewing of Gandhi, this time at a public showing, I happened to leave the theater behind three teenage girls, apparently from one of Manhattan's fashionable private schools. "Gandhi was pretty much an FDR" one opined ... "But he was a religious figure, too," corrected one of her friends, adding somewhat smugly, "It's not in our historical tradition to honor spiritual leaders." Since her schoolteachers had clearly not led her to consider Jonathan Edwards and Roger Williams as spiritual leaders, let alone Joseph Smith and William Jennings Bryan, the intimation seemed to be that we are a society with poorer spiritual values than, let's say, India. (p. 101)

I'm willing to bet that these girls, now women, are still smugly ignorant and voted for Obama, twice. 

The best essay in this collection is "The Uniforms That Guard: Kipling, Orwell, and Australia's Breaker Morant." It's a dual review of Bruce Beresford's masterpiece (1980) and the popular Hollywood film Fort Apache: The Bronx (1981) starring Paul Newman. Intertwined in the review are observations on both Kipling's and Orwell's views on the "uniforms that guard you while you sleep." Harry "Breaker" Morant was an Australian officer railroaded and executed by the British for war crimes during the Boer War. Grenier notes the many similarities between it and the war in Vietnam. Grenier observes, 

But, on the most profound level, it is about something even larger. It burns with a white rage against societies as a whole, from military leaders and chiefs of state to (more common in our time) comfortable civilians in easy chairs, who send rough men out to serve their interests brutally, murderously (what is war), and then--when circumstances change and in the exquisite safety and fastidiousness of their living rooms they suddenly find these rough men's actions repugnant--disown them. (pp. 25-26)

The defense attorney's closing remarks at the trial is one of the greatest soliloquies in film history.  

Needless to say, Hollywood's Fort Apache has a different view on the uniforms that guard: 

It must be obvious that what we are dealing with here is nothing less than the full "liberal" doctrine on crime ... Some wealthy Hollywood entertainers, along with many of the tenured professors in our universities, are members of our "permanent and pensioned" opposition, and the quality of their thought has, indeed, deteriorated appallingly. For all I know, the authors of Fort Apache, The Bronx think themselves perfectly capable of making "real" decisions, and even preeminently suited to take over command of New York's Police Precinct 41. (pp. 33, 37)

I recently got into an argument with a couple of leftists who deny that there was any cultural Marxist messaging in The Last Jedi. I suspect that with the propaganda content of "popular culture" being so flagrant, and so awful, that the "it's just a movie" defense will become the Current Truth. Richard Grenier's body of work is an refutation of such nonsense. Read this book for edification and self-defense.