I’ve mentioned this before, but, where I live in rural Minnesota, the world is so upside-down it’s now beyond comical and into clinically self-destructive. Either that or Hollywood has had me fooled for 70+ years. For all that time, I thought I knew which side was good and which was evil in those pulp fiction stories I grew up watching (and still watch). From It’s A Wonderful Life to Chinatown to Cool Hand Luke to James Bond movies to the Die Hard collection and every other “good vs evil” movie and television series, it never occurred to me that half of the American audience was cheering for who I knew, without a doubt, were the bad guys.
I’m not sure I ever want to be in a full movie theater again, knowing that half of the audience is likely to be rooting for the worst characters screenwriters can imagine and invent. In those states where every other nitwit is carrying a loaded weapon, I don’t even want to take a bathroom break on a long drive across the country. I’ll take my chances pissing on the side of the road over being in a building with those nutjobs.
Little Bill Daggett, from Unforgiven, has to be the role model for every scumbag “Constitutional sheriff” in the country; although the Fargo series’ libertarian Sheriff Roy Tillman might have jumped that shark. One of the things you can count on is that, no matter how badly they do their job of enforcing the actual law, Constitutional sheriffs keep getting re-elected because a substantial number of Americans love bad guys and want to be just like them. Al Pachino played the freakin’ devil in The Devil’s Advocate and that character is a lightweight compared to Musk and Trump and the Republican House lunatics. And Hans Gruber? He’s just a typical CEO, I guess. How about Jeff Bridges? Was he a good guy as “The Dude” in The Big Lebowski or an even better guy as Stark Industries CEO Obadiah Stane in Iron Man?
Out of boredom and escapism, last night Mrs. Day and I watched a really terrible Liam Neeson B-movie, “The Ice Road.” Neeson is, supposedly, the good guy; a down-on-his-luck trucker and his Iraq War PTSD and aphasia-damaged brother who are part of a “team” trying to get equipment to a a collapsed mine a few hundred miles north of Winnipeg in early spring. Spoiler alert: one semi-member of the “team” is working for the corporate assholes who paid some of the miners $100 a day to shut off the methane alarms to save money. Of course, they hit a pocket of methane which causes the mine explosion, collapse, and the trapped miners. The corporate assholes (aka Musk/Trump/Bezos/etc clones) are paying one of the rescue characters to sabatog the rescue attempt and kill the rescuers. As usual, the hired assassin is practically indestructible (sorta like thye robots or drones that Musk/Trump will use to put down any sort of citizen revolt) and at least 40 minutes of screen time is burned trying to escape and kill him.
If you are a Trumper/Republican, the movie had a really sad ending with the assassin dying, the executives getting caught for blowing up the mine and sabotaging the rescue, and they get fired and arrested by Canadian government officials. All through this movie, I tried to put myself in the mindset of the 76M Republican voters who, obviously, would be cheering on the executives and their hired gun, but I failed.
Seriously. In what world do middle and lower-middle and even poor people celebrate the trashing of the United States by someone as obviously evil and outright treasonous as Elmo Musk and Two Face . . . whoops! Harvey Dent . . . I mean Donald Trump? I clearly need a new bifocal prescription. Maybe it’s time for trifocals?
