Mark Royden Winchell (1948–2008)

Mark Royden Wynchell’s God, Man, and Hollywood is a collection of fifteen article-length essays on some twenty films, and shorter pieces on a hundred others. The analysis is thoughtful, the writing fluid, and the films worthy of attention, but the book as a whole is dragged down by the author’s (or perhaps the publisher’s) determination to make it a celebration of “politically incorrect cinema.”

Wynchell seems to use the phrase as shorthand for: “Films whose worldviews are likely to annoy members of the political and cultural left.” Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind (among others) qualify for their sympathy to the Confederacy. Patton makes the list because of the lead character’s enthusiasm for war, Straw Dogs for its endorsement of the right to use lethal force in defense of one’s home, and The Passion of the Christ for its religiosity. All this is fair enough, and Wynchell, clearly in sympathy with these films, pleads their case well.

The analytical waters, however, get very murky, very quickly. What, for example, is a film like A Clockwork Orange doing in this book? The film is brilliant, and Wynchell’s analysis is thought-provoking, but notions of “political correctness” (or its absence) seem beside the point. What, for that matter, is “politically incorrect” about Martin Scorcese’s flawed epic The Gangs of New York? Its vision of grotesque economic inequality and white “nativists” warring against a despised immigrant “Other” (the Irish) seem just the opposite. Many on the political left have little love for the Catholic church as an institution, but that that hardly makes Shadowlands—a drama about the Catholic faith of an individual—an affront. By the time Wynchell declares the 1930 pacifist drama All Quiet on the Western Front “politically incorrect,” there is an inescapable feeling that he is playing tennis with the net down.

All this is made still more perplexing by the sheer number of films that would neatly fit Wynchell’s working definition but are, nonetheless, ignored. If Dirty Harry, with its unapologetic right-wing politics and endorsement of righteous violence, why not also The Green Berets or Death Wish or Rambo: First Blood, Part II? If Song of the South, with its unfortunate-in-retrospect image racial imagery, why not the jaw-dropping likes of cartoon shorts like Coal Black and the Sebben Dwarfs or Tokio Jokio, from the early 1940s? Why, for that matter, not look at mainstream films whose conservative subtexts that go (mostly) unremarked. Casablanca is, after all the story of a woman who forsakes the great love of her life to selflessly support the work of the man she married. Forest Gump is an endorsement of small-town Southern values over everything that the political/cultural left of the 1960s and 1970s stood for. The first and third Indiana Jones films are, at the end of the day, ringing declarations that God lives, and faith is necessary.

It would have been interesting to read Wynchell’s essays on such films, or others like them, and to have a book that took an expansive—if not comprehensive—view of eight decades of culturally conservative films. The fact that God, Man and Hollywood is a pale shadow of that book suggests a failure of imagination on someone’s part—Wynchell’s or his publisher’s. It remains an undeniably interesting failure, however, and the essays, taken in isolation, are well worth reading.… (mais)