Last time we looked at accidentally right-leaning movies, I was forced to cull a much longer list of candidates to a more wieldy top ten. But since art is truth and truth is nature, hierarchy and God, whenever a movie is good it must in some sense also be rw. With that in mind, here are some more subtly self-defeating recs and how to parse them:
Hud
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| Imagine putting this line in your movie having no idea what it means. |
One of the most revealing instances of the propensity for audiences to misunderstand and/or improve upon the intended messaging of a film is 1963's Hud, in which Paul Newman plays the titular shitheel son of an old-timer cattle farmer (Melvyn Douglas). Simmering resentment between the two prompts a hard choice of role model for Hud's young nephew (Brandon de Wilde). Loosely adapted from the novel Horseman, Pass By, the film greatly expands the Hud character with the aim of rendering him an embodiment of that perrennial pseud boogeyman, cApItAlIsM.
What's most fascinating about audience reactions is that both sides took the wrong intended message - libsoys (who today would presume to lecture you on media heckin literacy) just saw Hud as a cool rebel, while affable chuds empathised with the old man set in his ways who sings along enthusiastically to the corny classics at the movies, proving yet again that economics isn't as important to the right as values, and that leftardry is just a thousand shades of fuck-you-dad.
Zulu
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| The best part of this flick is the random cattle stampede in the middle of the battle. |
I never really understood why chuds like Zulu so much. The British are portrayed as loutish, arrogant, ignorant, quarrelsome, lecherous grotesques. Despite all they do in the movie being to defend themselves, they conclude by agreeing that they feel ashamed of their actions, as though they should have unpacked their heckin privilege and let themselves be massacred instead. In spite of this highly dubious messaging, the sole pacifist character is also portrayed as a buffoonish strawman, because it gives the lib filmmakers a pretext to give Christianity its customary kicking.
But flash forward to the 2020s and Zulu was named alongside such other dangerous works as those of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R.R. Tolkien, and Shakespeare, on a list of things your kids might read that will radicalise them into ebil far right natzees. Apparently the fear that someone, somewhere might root for any white faction against any black faction for any reason renders this lib fantasy of yesteryear unacceptable to today's right-thinking people. Perhaps this fear set in long before the thoughtcrime list was published, since a prequel, Zulu Dawn, was released in the 70s hammering home the message that The White Guys Are The Villains with the subtlety of a late night talk show monologue. What a pity, because the Zulus had a cool, innately cinematic aesthetic, and had this material been treated intelligently, it could have produced the classic its cheerfully oblivious fanbase imagines it to be.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy
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| Trust the experts, biggot! |
There are so many ways the big screen treatments of Tolkien's beloved novels might have turned out awful that it is a movie miracle they didn't. Many deserve credit, but the core reason they worked was the decision Jackson et al made not to impose their own politics on Tolkien's stridently Catholic, traditionalist vision. While the great man's autistic refusal to confirm any direct allegorical meaning to his writing afforded him plausible deniability that let his work inspire everyone from John Boorman (who planned to make a film version with the Beatles as the hobbits) to Gary Gygax to every single heavy metal band, it's scarcely possible not to see your slimy lib ""friends"" in the prideful, glory-supporting sellout Saruman and his odious gimp Wormtongue, who whip up historical ethnic grievances in the men of Dunland against the Rohirrim and poison the king's mind against his loyal but blunt and guileless friends (compare Eomer to Kent and Theoden to Lear for an idea of how things might have turned out had not Gandalf set things right). The extended editions make the parallels with today's rainbow flag dystopia even plainer: the orcs, who make nothing beautiful themselves, have torn down a statue of one of the old kings of men. Mostly Peacefully, one assumes.
A Few Good Men
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| Hilariously, this famous line appears on all these inspirational quote templates, and is attributed to Nicholson, as though he just randomly said it. |
For years I legit thought the entire point of this movie was that Jack Nicholson is right. Of course he is right, but I would later learn that wasn't meant to be the point - the point was that he's Wrong Anyway. The steelman version of this flick I had imagined I had seen acknowledged two realities: that Nicholson & co.'s treatment of Pvt. Santiago was harsh at the interpersonal level, but that it was necessary at scale, because no man is an island and a society requires that each man do his part. This seemed intelligent, nuanced and tragical, and allowed every character in the drama to follow his or her convictions with an implicitly disastrous result for the country down the line. Astonishing how poorly Sorkin understands his own writing - if, indeed, he doesn't, and has not simply retreated to keep pace with the Overton window's endless leftward slide.
Glengarry Glen Ross
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| What did he mean by this? |
David Mamet wrote Glengarry Glen Ross while a lib, intending it as a critique of - you guessed it - meanie grim bleak peepee poopoo capitalismerino. Later, he became a pro-market ziocon, perhaps upon realising there existed strange new worlds of loathsome cuntery in which to wallow just across the aisle. None of this has any bearing on how I read Glengarry Glen Ross, though - it's obvious the seething commie Moss (played by the seething commie Ed Harris, who sulked through Elia Kazan's Oscar moment because how very dare he Name Names in the face of the worst ideology in history totally dominating the most powerful propaganda machine that's ever existed?) is meant to be a thin-skinned, narcissistic douche, while amoral hotshot Roma (Al Pacino, as himself) justifies his grandiosity by being funny, and talentless-but-diligent token autist Aaronow (Alan Arkin) survives by keeping his head down as the the neurotypicals steal, cheat and bicker all around him.
The Star Wars prequels
While I'm ancient enough to belong to a world that saw the prequels as new-fangled trash, it must be said that prequel fans are much less douchey than OT purists and the prequels, having had a second lease of life as memecore, now work wonderfully as unintended comedies. While everything Lucas has ever written was intended as a Boomer Truth allegory of World War Heckin Two, the story arc of the prequels belies a far more striking and relevant historical resonance. An elected leader manipulating a secession crisis to create a war to grant himself tyrannical emergency powers isn't the story of Heckin Hitl0r, it's the story of Abraham Lincoln.
The Matrix
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| "Are you telling me I can dodge bullets?" |
The Wachowski brothers now insist the movie about SS-cosplaying übermenschen triumphing by will over the matrix of mass media and global finance was t-totally intended as a transsexual allegory instead, biggot! I believe them (not that it was trooncore; just that it was meant to be a pozfest) due to the prior history of pinko messaging in their flicks. It's just funny that the term "red pill" was immediately co-opted by all the filthy thought criminals they despise because they hid their agitprop intentions a little too well. Note that H*llywood hasn't made that misstep (or a good movie) since. On a similar note...
They Live
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| Never forgetti Dobson's spaghetti. |
John Carpenter accidentally made the most old/pol/ movie of all time, which he predictably protests was about CaPiTaLiSm you guys!!! (how strange that CaPiTaLiSm, like The Patriarchy and Hegemonic White Supremacy allows, funds and markets these critiques of it, and nothing else). I believe him that it wasn't meant to be about Jews, but, hilariously, Jews did not, and protested the movie because apparently bright blue aliens brainwashing everyone made them think of themselves. You think I'm making this up, but I'm not. To be fair, Carpenter's intended message doesn't make any sense because CaPiTaLiSm isn't a secret (or a real thing), and the rich of the late 80s didn't hide in plain view. The movie's implicit metaphor has to pertain to a powerful group that looks like anybody else, but, as we've seen, understanding their own writing isn't H*llywood's strong suit.
Halloween
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| This guy was the real MVP. |
And while we're on the theme of John Carpenter (long the sovlless to Wes Craven's sovl), we'd be remiss not to mention that his first major hit, Halloween, was rendered retroactively reactionary by the academic and critical libstablishment insisting that The Shape was obviously meant as a divine punishment for the teens of Haddonfield, IL smoking pot and having premarital coitus. The theory went that (spoilers!) Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis, the IMAGINE copypasta) is the sole survivor of the rampage because she's a morally pure straight edge virgin. Never mind that Carpenter protested this was never his intent, nor the fact that Curtis' character does smoke weed in the picture, contradicting one of the only two pillars of the theory. Shitlibs who would call you schizophrenic for noticing blatant leftshit in 99% of movies projected that Carpenter just must have been hiding a based & redpilled agenda in his low-budget slasher. Carpenter, the basicest of basic bitch libs, being unable to shake the shitlord label foisted on him in an act of unforced friendly fire for decades is one of the funnier meta-stories in cinema.
Once Upon a Time in the West
But by far the greatest of all accidentally-rw movies is Once Upon a Time in the West. Perhaps incensed that no one picked up on his subtle yet embarrassingly dumb messaging, Sergio Leone later went on to quote all-time mass murder and pie-eating contest champion Mao Tse-Tung in his rightly forgotten tantrum Duck, You Sucker, but, seethe though he might, his legacy will always be giving chud icons Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson the spotlight in his better-known works.
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| Imagine putting THIS line in your movie having no idea what it means. |
Bronson's enemies are crippled businessman Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti) and his slick hired thug Henry Fonda (as himself). Leone wants you to believe Bronson and Fonda are sort of kindred spirits as opposed to Morton, who is a pathetic loser incel who can't even walk, and represents...well, you know the drill. The thing is, though, the film escaped Leone's clumsy grasp, as great works often do, because the Good is stronger, wittier and wiser than the Adversary, and the Muse serves the Good as the artist serves the Muse. When Morton dies crawling in the dirt, a muddy puddle echoing his failed dream to reach the ocean with his railroad, Leone wants us to jeer like subhumans, but the scene defies his spite-filled designs and resonates with the pathos of tragedy. When Bronson whacks Fonda in the kino's climax, we don't see two equal-and-opposite giants in an honourable duel; we see ascended chud Bronson righteously executing slimy Marxoid Fonda for the crime of lending his blue eyes to the cause of ugliness and evil. In the end, Fonda and Leone lost the creative mandate of Heaven, and the movie closes out with based shitlord Cheyenne (Jason Robards) telling Claudia Cardinale not to be a hash tag me too drama queen as she brings water, her smile and beauty to a flourishing frontier town to the Wagnerian strains of Morricone's score.
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| "They" cannot conquer forever. |
