God, Man, and Hollywood: Politically Incorrect Cinema from The Birth of a Nation to The Passion of the Christ

by Mark Royden Winchell

It takes no great powers of observation to see that Hollywood has long been far to the left of the general American public. Even in stories that have no overt political content, the social and moral assumptions in films rated from GP to R are often at odds with the deeply held values of most of the viewing audience. But that’s not the whole story, argues the literary and cultural critic Mark Royden Winchell in God, Man, and Hollywood . A surprising number of films articulate culturally unfashionable attitudes—and it is from these movies that we learn the most about our society and ourselves.

Beginning with D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and ending with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ , Winchell reveals the politically incorrect notions at the heart of eighteen classic films, including Ben-Hur, Intruder in the Dust, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Patton, The Deer Hunter, A Clockwork Orange, Gangs of New York , and Gettsyburg . Along the way, he shows how a number of filmmakers, sometimes unwittingly, have produced unconventionally honest explorations of the nature and meaning of race relations, love, family, community, worship, and other aspects of our shared human experience. Winchell ends with synoptic assessments of an additional one hundred politically incorrect films, from About Schmidt to Zulu . The result is an indispensable film guide showing that sometimes even Hollywood has done better than we typically give it credit for. 

490 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2008

About the author

Mark Royden Winchell was a prolific biographer, historian, and literary critic who served as Professor of Literature and European Civilization at Clemson University. A Vanderbilt University alumnus, he was often characterized as a literary traditionalist and a political conservative of the "Old Right." Winchell’s extensive bibliography focuses on Southern culture and influential modern critics, with notable works including Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism and Where No Flag Flies. His posthumous publications continue to explore the complex intersections of cultural politics and the American South.

Reviews

[A. Bowdoin Van Riper · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 defense 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,” the feeling that he is playing tennis with the net down become inescapable.

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.

[Joel Everett · Rating 4 out of 5]

A highly interesting discussion of various films throughout the 20th century; especially films that - nowadays- would be considered problematic.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

He recommends some R rated movies that I would never watch, but I learned a few things about the history of Hollywood.