There are some things that
you can’t get out of your head even years after the fact. For nearly three and
a half years, I’ve been trying to understand a remark that Adam McKay made in a
New York Times Magazine Article three years ago in which he was being
‘interviewed’ in regard to his film making and politics. (Interview is a loose
term; McKay interrupted him more than once.) When asked to discuss his politics
McKay said something I’ve never been able to get out of my head. He claimed
that if he had an equivalent on the right in Hollywood, it was Aaron Sorkin.
My head all but exploded.
Aaron Sorkin? The man whose West Wing was at the time and twenty years
later still considered by the right as prove of the leftist messaging of
Hollywood? The writer whose follow-up show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was
essentially a political harangue on Hollywood in a post-9/11 world which
occasionally had to do with the making of a sketch comedy show? The man who had
the first season finale of The Newsroom climax with Jeff Daniels’
character, while claiming he was not ashamed to be a Republican, referring to
the Tea Party as ‘The American Taliban?” That Aaron Sorkin has been a
closet conservative all this time?
I actually wrote an article
about this back in 2021 dealing with Sorkin’s movies and McKay’s as a
comparison trying to understand if there was something going on that I didn’t
see. That served as a reason as to why Sorkin’s movies were more entertaining
than McKay’s but it still didn’t make it clear how any rational person could
reach that conclusion.
Now, having spent three
years and far too much time among the leftists in this country, I think I
finally understand how McKay could say something like that and genuinely
believe it. It has nothing to do with Sorkin’s films or even his politics but
the way that leftists see the world.
As I think I’ve made clear
throughout my articles on both Sorkin’s movies and several pieces on The
West Wing, Sorkin’s politics are clearly Democratic but throughout his TV
shows he has never gone out of his way to antagonize or dehumanize Republicans
or the people who vote for them. That was probably enough for McKay to consider
him conservative right there. But Sorkin’s TV shows and many of his movies are
stories about having faith in institutions and that if people work together
towards a common goal, you can win out. This
is idealism which leftists think is irrational.
In movies like A Few Good Men and Molly’s
Game, Sorkin tells the story of defendants who are being railroaded by an
unjust government but with the work of their counsels they manage to prevail
against impossible odds. This is anathema as to how leftists see the world, in
which if good triumphs over evil it must be a mistake or not a real triumph. You’d
think given his stories of The Social Network and Steve Jobs some
on the left might at least consider he can see the malevolence in Silicon
Valley but as we all know he tried to make these men human beings and that’s
too much.
And all of Sorkin’s
characters are literate, intelligent, well-spoken and entertaining because of
how clever they sound. If you have watched McKay’s movies with Will Ferrell,
you know the common theme: from Ron Burgundy to Ricky Bobby, the characters
played by Ferrell and John C. Reilly are charitably speaking morons and proud
of their stupidity. In The Campaign, he tells a political satire of a
campaign for a House Seat in the South where everybody from the idealistic Zach
Galifianakis to the people running the campaign are ridiculously, incredibly
stupid and proud of it. McKay’s comedies are popular because of how brainless
the characters are. That should tell you a lot about his approach to people and
it’s pretty prevalent in the left.
I think if we can compare
McKay’s more ‘serious’ movies with a similar Sorkin film you can see just how
both men view the world. Both men adapted a Michael Lewis best seller, books
that most considered unfilmable and turned them into movies that received Best
Picture nominations. But while McKay won an Oscar for his adaptation of The
Big Short, I am still inclined to find Sorkin’s Moneyball the
superior entertainment, even though Sorkin lost to The Descendants.
With Moneyball Sorkin
tells what should be an impossible subject – how Billy Beane used sabermetrics
to help the A’s contend – and turns it into a funny and gripping film. He does
so by creating composites of characters to a fictionalized version to make a
point, makes the film about Beane rather
than the A’s and goes out of his way to build to a climax, even though Beane’s
character never succeeds at his goal.
By contrast The Big
Short never makes you forget you are watching a movie. McKay constantly has
his characters breaking the fourth wall, lecturing to his audiences rather than
telling them what is happening through subtext and goes out of his way to make
sure that even the people we are rooting for are essentially profiting off a
financial disaster. While I grant you Big Short deals with a far darker
subject than Moneyball, it is conditional of McKay’s approach to
filmmaking. In his comedies, he thought the subjects were stupid. In The Big
Short, he assumes his audience is.
One could draw a parallel,
albeit a less exact one, between McKay’s next film Vice and Charlie’s
Wilson War. In the latter film Sorkin decides to tell the story that goes
against the nature of the conservative narrative that Reagan won the Cold War
by arguing that it was actually done by a Texas Congressman, a CIA operative
and a Republican fundraiser. In this film Avrakotos, the CIA man has a very low
opinion of the fundraiser and only a negligible one of Wilson. He considers
Julia Roberts’ character a dilettante but he knows there’s a larger goal. And
the movie makes it very clear, very subtly, that Avrakotos knew that this is a
long game and that despite Wilson’s best efforts, our government refused to
play it. We are living in the aftermath of that.
Vice by contrast is essentially
everything that is a part of the leftist’s repudiation of the Republican party
during Dick Cheney’s tenure in it. It goes out of its way to make Rumsfeld and
W. look life buffoons and Cheney look like a man climbing the rungs of power.
It does so with the same methods that The Big Short did but they are
less subtle, if possible. At one point Dick and Liz Cheney talk to each other
in Shakespearean blank verse. There are false endings to show to make us think
were watching a different kind of film when we know we’re not. By the time McKay gets to W’s administration,
the viewer has already been convinced that Cheney is a monster. The creation of
ISIS basically unfolds almost as an afterthought. In McKay’s mind I have little
doubt Charlie Wilson was just a tool as part of the American war machine.
Then we get to Don’t
Look Up. By the time this movie came out Aaron Sorkin had already been
nominated for writing The Trial of the Chicago 7. I don’t need to remind
you that the Chicago 7 themselves featured some of the most famous leftists of
their era, among them Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden and Jerry Rubin, along with the
infamous Black Panther Bobby Seale. These men were very deliberate in how they
felt that their trial was a mockery to justice and went out of their way to
make it a circus. One of Sorkin’s own line says as much:
Judge: “Are you familiar
with contempt of court?”
Abbie Hoffman: “It’s
practically a religion for me.”
Hoffman says the government
has contempt for him and he says he’s on trial for his faults. He says that his
bringing ideas across state lines has gotten him punished. These are the ideas
that leftists love to berate. It’s hard for anyone to hear some of the dialogue
Sorkin has his characters say and still consider him a conservative. He makes
it clear of the rage that Bobby Seale justifiably has towards white America and
some of the 7.
I think the reason that
McKay can hear this and still consider Sorkin conservative is that these days,
those on the left consider the Chicago 7 sellouts. After all, Hayden became a
Congressman and that’s the worst thing to a leftist. Plus he has Sorkin give
this exchange between William Kunstler and Hoffman:
Kunstler: How do you
overthrow or dismember, as you say, your government peacefully?
Hoffman: in this country,
we do it every four years.
To say something in favor
of the peaceful democratic process is anathema to the left who either believe
that democracy is a fraud or that both parties are fundamentally the same.
I have written many columns
in this blog referring to doomporn but Don’t Look Up (which I admit I
have not seen) actually seems like the first ever cinematic equivalent of it.
McKay uses the story of two astronomers discovering that an asteroid is coming
to destroy Earth to tell a ‘satiric’ tale of how if this were to happen, the
media, the corporations, the politicians and the internet would make sure that
the world did nothing to stop it. Ostensibly this is supposed to be a metaphor
for climate change but this film is too over the top for any metaphors to be
expressed.
McKay goes out of his way
to show that every single character in his film – except the scientists – are
too stupid, self-involved, or corrupt to do anything to solve the problem. The
scientists are idiots because they naively think that the world will galvanize
to save themselves which is another form of contempt. The movie ends with the
asteroid destroying the Earth, all of the rich and powerful people escaping to
another planet – and once they get there, all of them are quickly devoured by
aliens. Most films about the apocalypse actually have some tenor of regret or
sadness at the end. Don’t Look Up takes the approach that it might
actually be a good idea. I have sensed a similar vein of contempt in the future
in basically ninety to ninety-five percent of articles written by the left. I
have a feeling Don’t Look Up was made for them alone.
The reason that McKay can
say with no real irony that Sorkin is a conservative filmmaker is the same
reason that some leftists say that there is no difference between both
political parties. Sorkin believes in institutions, the free-flowing exchange
of ideas and that there are some good and smart people out there who can solve
problems. In the minds of the left, his movies are no doubt just propaganda for
‘the man’ because they don’t lecture the audience, consider all people who
don’t think like them beneath them, and believe we’re all doomed no matter what
we do. I imagine McKay thinks those are his people.
McKay was able to start
making ‘serious’ movies because he built his career on making ‘brainless’
comedies about idiots. His serious movies show that he seems to view all his
viewers – and humanity in general – the same way. Perhaps this is why I always
prefer Sorkin’s work to McKay’s. For all the heavy handedness of his subjects,
he never tried to insult his audience’s intelligence. His films all have a
brain. McKay’s assumes that no one does. Sadly, that explains a lot about the
latter’s ideology too.
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