01.26
One of the most anticipated films to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this year was Kevin Smith’s Red State. The plot of Red State isn’t overtly political (it’s a horror film), but its portrayal of small town America and conservative Christians is pretty unflattering.
The film drew protests from the anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church, whose leader, Pastor Fred Phelps, was the inspiration for one of Red State‘s characters. The liberal Sundance goers enjoyed sparring with and ridiculing the group. And all this played to Red State’s advantage, as I’m sure many people (wrongly) saw the Westboro Baptists as representative of Christian fundamentalism and American conservatism.
It’s easy to identify the crazy in other people, especially when those ‘other people’ are the Westboro Baptists. But I also identified another kind of crazy at Sundance.
The Sundance crowd is wealthy, educated, urban, very liberal, and white as the snow on the ground. (And I more or less fit that bill too, unfortunately.) These are among my least favorite people—as a group, not necessarily as individuals. (Caution: reckless generalizations ahead.) They’re smug, pretentious, fake, judgmental, and materialistic, despite their professed love of nature.
What irked me about their gleeful derision of the Westboro Baptists and their condescension toward Red America more generally is the fact that we liberals have our own crazies among us. And to prove it, let me share with you my experience at Sundance last night.
My brother and I went to Sundance on a whim yesterday. We didn’t pre-order tickets to a particular movie, so we just stood in a wait line to see whatever was playing soonest at the nearest theater. That movie happened to be Letters From the Big Man. Nobody standing in the wait line with us had a definite idea of what the movie was about. All we heard was that it had some connection to Sasquatch (Bigfoot). I was intrigued, because growing up I had a fascination with UFOs, alien abductions, the Loch Ness monster, and the Bigfoot. I was still unsure what exactly to expect, though.
We were allowed into the packed theater, and, after some brief remarks from the director, the movie began. I was hoping it’d be a cinematic gem, being my brother’s first Sundance film, but what played out on the screen was one of the most bizarre films I’ve ever seen (and this coming from a guy who watches a ton of MST3K!). Here is the film’s synopsis from the Sundance site:
In the breathtaking, remote wilderness of southwestern Oregon, Sarah Smith, a hydrologist, embarks on an expedition to conduct a government water survey. An intrepid outdoors woman, Sarah craves a solo journey so she can reconnect with herself and nature. Venturing deep into the forest, she intuits another presence. Gradually, the elusive figure reveals himself to be a Sasquatch, and the two interact tentatively. As their bond intensifies, Sarah finds she must take bold steps to protect the Big Man’s privacy, as well as her own.
You can almost sense the rustling of trees and fresh air as Munch reverently explores the possibility of communicating directly with the ineffable mysteries in nature, fashioning a powerful metaphysical love story with resonance for our times.
Yes, folks. Letters From the Big Man is just another repackaging of Avatar—the beauty-and-the-beast love story, the clichéd ecological message. The film, like Avatar, even had an anti-military element (the CIA and the Defense Department were trying to capture Sasquatch for weapons research; Sasquatch apparently have the powers of invisibility and telepathy).
It was a terrible movie, save for some of the cinematography. I suspended final judgment, though, because the director was again going to take to the stage to discuss the movie and answer questions. I was hoping that he’d explain that Sasquatch was just a metaphor for something, and that the movie was not actually a call for truce between humans and Sasquatch. But the director’s comments only made matters worse.
He approached the microphone with a letter in hand. The letter was purportedly from the Sasquatch ‘people’, which an inter-species communicator translated from the telepathic messages she received from the leader of one Sasquatch tribe. (Seriously, you cannot make this stuff up.) The director proceeded to read the letter with a straight face. It was a plea from the Sasquatch people to us for mutual understanding and respectful interaction.
What horrified me most was that when the director opened the session for questions, nobody asked him the question that was burning most within me: “WTF?!” I don’t know if it was out of politeness or agreement, but not a single person pushed him on his belief that there are invisible Sasquatch with telepathic powers. I looked around the audience, and while I (thankfully) saw a few furrowed brows, I also saw several nodding heads.
This kind of nonsense from the Left is probably more innocuous and less pervasive than the bigoted religious nonsense from the Right, but it’s equally silly. This Sundance experience was yet another reminder of the need for skepticism, and that unreason doesn’t always take a religious form.
Any chance the reading of the letter was just part of the “performance”?
Possible. Maybe it was a joke gone terribly wrong (nobody laughed). The director was just so earnest about the whole thing; there wasn’t the slightest hint of irony or anything. But who knows.
I had a similar reaction to the flawed movie I saw last night at Sundance, though sounds like the movie you saw was much, much worse.
The whole pretension of that set of people really bothers me. We had to design some stuff for Park City small businesses, and instead of just using the paper we had on hand, we had to special order and ship here recycled paper because we were told PC people get upset if it’s not eco-friendly.
My father-in-law is also finishing up a 20,000+ sq foot house in the Deer Crest area of PC, which is being looked at by some big celebs, many of whom are very concerned about the environment. It just makes me sick almost to see a house that big and know that someone who claims to be so concerned about the environment will buy it and not think twice about the hypocrisy.
I wish that the Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) had been gay, so we could have the two groups going after each other.
Uhhhh… everyone needs a dream, I guess.
Seriously, could someone moderate comments like these? I’m very offended by gay bashing.
@ Amy:
In my response to your comment, I’m going to assume two (2) things about you:
1. You find the state of being offended (e.g., when you are offended by gay bashing) unpleasant.
2. You would like to avoid states of being that you find unpleasant.
What follows is a guide designed to help you in your goal (viz. assumption 2, above) of avoiding unpleasant states of being. Although you have already expressed interest in the achievement of this goal by requesting that comments like Mike L.’s (above) be moderated, this unpleasant state avoidance strategy is not practicable, for reasons discussed below, namely:
1. It’s not clear what Mike L. meant.
2. It’s less clear how whatever he meant could be called “gay bashing.”
In support of point 1 (above), you may wish to consider that from the solitary sentence above, the only apodictic knowledge we can gleam is that the speaker wishes the bigfoots/bigfeets had been gay, so that some two groups could “go after each other.” What are the two groups? Although it’s not entirely clear, the only two groups mentioned in Jon’s post are the lily-livered liberals and batshit crazy fundy conservatives; it seems likely that these are the two groups the speaker meant to “go after each other.” What is “going after each other?” It usually means fighting, or something of that sort.
In support of point 2, you may wish to consider how wishing that entitled liberal douches and ignorant racist conservatives would fight could be considered gay bashing. Even if Mike L. meant that he wished the bigfoots/bigfeets were gay so he could be treated to some hot furry gay sex, it’s unclear how this is gay bashing; perhaps Mike L. just likes hot furry gay sex? What’s most unclear of all is how this simple conjunction of two clauses could be read with enough prescriptive content to send you into the unpleasant state of gay bash offense.
In light of all that, then, I would like to present the aforementioned guide to avoiding the unpleasant state associated with offense taken at gay bashing:
OFFICIAL GUIDE
Take a breath, count to three, and think before you shoot your mouth off.
Really I just thought it would be hilarious and awesome to see Westboro Baptist Church get attacked by a clan of gay Bigfoots. Sorry if if you interpreted that as gay bashing, it was, if anything, an attempt at WBC bashing.
What the? I don’t even…
Sounds like typical HuffPo people… but might even be too crazy for that.
Good essay. It is good to be skeptical — Especially of self and one’s own group.
“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” — Bill Shakespeare (1564-1616) from “As You Like It”
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How do you tell a right-winger from a left-winger on sight? The right-winger has a tinfoil hat on his head; the left-winger has a crystal pyramid.