Not So Pretty in Pink

     I'm going to do something stupid. I'm going write a movie review about a movie that I have not only not watched, but I have no inclination of ever watching. I've thought it over a lot, I feel like I have something I need to say on the subject, but I would rather watch two hogs engage in a farting contest than pay ten dollars to watch a movie about a Barbie doll. So, instead, I'm going to base this review on the opinions of two people who have seen the movie and have publicly commented on it, one is someone who's widely considered one of the most intelligent, independent thinkers in the world today, and the other, well, not so much.

    In fiction, they have this thing called poetic license, a device that allows the author to the present and manipulate the details of the story in any way that he or she chooses in order to achieve the desired artistic vision.  Non-fiction, in contrast, is supposed to be objective and deal strictly with the truth and the facts that support it. In my opinion, things changed on February 22, 1968, the night that Walter Cronkite, the so-called "Most Trusted Man in America" sitting at his news desk at CBS, renounced his journalistic integrity to call for an end to the Vietnam War. Although he received much adulation for publicly reflecting the country's growing displeasure with the war, his timing was extremely suspect coming as it did on the heels of a major military victory where our troops, in the opinions of many, had thoroughly routed and destroyed most the enemy's ability to carry on with the war. Cronkite also later revealed himself as a supporter of One World Governance  and stated that he had only kept this belief on the down low because of his job at CBS. Most Trusted?

     Ever since that night, it seems that every journalism student coming out of the elite East Coast schools, do not want to report the facts as they present themselves but seek to play God and manipulate the truth in order to achieve not so much an artistic vision, but an ideological one, one that not only plays fast and loose with the truth, but more often than not, leaves out the parts that don't match the narrative. Now more than ever, they also seek to silence those who can call out the scam. As recently as 2018, a group of reporters working for the New York Times and Washington Post shared a Pulitzer Prize for a so-called "deeply sourced" story on Russian collusion in the 2016 Presidential Election. If I remember correctly, they even used the writings of someone from Fusion GPS, the group that created the hoax in the first place. Watergate reporter Bob Woodward, another of these most trusted guys if you count up all his appearances on the main stream news, was quoted, referring to faked story that he had submitted for the 1981 Pulitzer prize consideration while acting in his role as a managing editor for the Washington Post, "Fake and fraud that it is. It would be absurd for me or any other editor to review the authenticity or accuracy of stories that are nominated for prizes."

      It's not that I would want to misrepresent facts, I just don't desire to see a movie that probably would make me want to vomit,  a movie that's ironically presented using much the same color palette of the stuff I used to drink in order not to vomit. Recently, I walked out of a movie named Joy Ride that had a near perfect rating from the professional critics. If that movie had any more of a resemblance to a pile of dog crap, they would have had to hang fly-strips in the theater and pump Fabreze through the air ducts.

       Whoopi Goldberg, responding to the backlash to the movie Barbie from conservative voices like Sen. Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro was quoted as saying, "It's a movie! It's a movie about a doll! I thought y'all would be happy. [Barbie] has no genitalia, so there's no sex involved. Ken has no genitalia, so he can't — it's a doll movie! And the kids know it's colorful and it's Barbie," To drive her point across, she also wore boots made from the heads of Barbie dolls. The rant was warmly received by her myriad of kool-aid drinking fans and blasted all over the Internet in an effort to depict conservatives as being silly and overly focused on matters of sex.

           Elon Musk watched the movie too. The billionaire wrote, “If you take a shot every time Barbie says the word ‘Patriarchy,’ you will pass out before the movie ends.” I have to take him on his word, and I am pretty certain, I would probably emerge from the theater with the same observation. Why? Well, it's not so much that I have to place any faith in the words of Elon Musk. It's more because I can have absolute trust in Whoopi Goldberg to behave like a Leftist influencer.  Once upon a time, she used to be funny and talented, but it sure seems like she has decided to forego a real career and instead made a Faustian bargain with whoever runs the show on her side of the aisle and pretend to match wits with her erstwhile co-host. Calling their show The View "the most important political TV show, a priority destination and a source of invaluable conversations, " (NY Times), is about the same as someone claiming that the dialogue in the Dumb and Dumber movies was written by William Shakespeare. In spite of the well known truth that Shakespeare has been dead for hundreds of years, I would suspend my belief in science before I would ever believe that The View is essential to our nation's well being.

           And I actually think Whoopi knows it. I don't buy into the idea that she is as silly as she pretends to be on the show. Joy Behar, now that's a different story; she's like the Jim Carrey character in that comparison. What is it exactly that Whoopi  knows? I believe she knows exactly the message that the movie is sending. She probably knows that over a billion Barbie dolls have been sold since 1959 giving the movie not only one of the largest potential movie going markets in human history, she should know that that market is a potential political gold mine, a way to indoctrinate millions of naive and unsuspecting movie goers. This makes her statement, in my opinion, particularly insidious and evil as she attempts to downplay the threat of such indoctrination. She also probably knows that the political Left has long since taken over most of the talk and comedy shows on television. Such shows consistently spew out left wing talking points and an intense hatred for counter viewpoints instead of humor. They actively tailor their message and seek out an audience of those who, in their view, need to be told how to think. (Why else would someone tune in to listen to someone who made the remarkable claim that the Holocaust was not based on racism).

      She does however, not seem to truly understand Hollywood's history. That is probably justifiable because Hollywood has worked assiduously to cover up the tracks of the Soviet penetration of the movie business prior to WWII and after. There's an article entitled Hollywood's Missing Movies printed in Reason, a Libertarian magazine, which points out just how deep Hollywood's association with the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin really was. (Something that's still easily provable if you understand what's been left out of recently released Oppenheimer movie.) "There was never an organized, articulate, and effective liberal or left-wing opposition to the communists in Hollywood," concluded John Cogley, a socialist, in his 1956 Report on Blacklisting. As former party member Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront) put it, the party was "the only game in town."  The article goes on to state that the Communist Party viewed writers as 'artists in uniform'. The highest paid screen writer in Hollywood at the time, author Dalton Trumbo, was a party member, one of the few who seemed to have some qualms about the blood on his hands from his work on behalf of the party, he was thoroughly rebuked by most of his colleagues for expressing such doubt. The recent movie starring Brian Cranston about Trumbo's career, left most of this back story out. Remember what I said about telling only half the story.

    It's even a deeper issue than mere political chicanery. Writer Jay Dyer in his book Esoteric Hollywood: Sex, Cults, and Symbols in Film makes the argument that "Film and our mass attendance at theaters is fundamentally religious in character. It is a ritual process at work." He goes on to suggest that many of Hollywood's insiders, producers, and directors have that same mindset. He makes valid points about how modern culture is pretty much all about the formation of mass consciousness via mass media, an idea that most people living are unaware of the consequences of, yet, Vladimir Lenin, one of the first political thinkers to recognize the potential of the new media, would have fully appreciated. Dyer points out what religious scholar  Mircea Eliade had to say about mankind's primal desire to inhabit a sacred space and not be trapped in their purely subjective realities and the need to construct such spaces that are viable in the efforts, "to reproduce the work of the gods." These new temples are to be found "wherever the television screen or the theater feeds him his new narrative by which to read his world." This helps to explain Elon Musk's perceptive take on the movie. Why the need to keep echoing the word Patriarchy a thousand times if it's only a movie about a doll? Why make such a big deal about Ken's/Ryan Gosling's lack of testicles and his complete worthlessness? I suggest Ken take a gander in a certain little pink purse. 

​     Whoopi's disingenuous comments, as always, sure seem calculated, and in this case, thoroughly depraved and evil because of what I perceive to be her motives, and also the motives of all them other late night political prostitutes. What is it? I'll just leave it by saying I no longer feel any need to place the adjective nonsensical or silly before referencing her name, from now on, I think I should just substitute the word "well-compensated".

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