Conservative Gore



Rocky Balboa's broken, oily torso was hoisted onto the political landscape and tossed aside like a side of gnarly beef by hardened southpaw, Senator Hillary Clinton (Exaggerated cough suggesting feigned detachment).

If Hillary likes to project machismo -- and her position on the Senate Arms Services Committee -- to offset the perceived political weakness of her gender among men, it is the Republican Party that goes way over board in citing ultra violent movies. What is it about conservatives and sanguinary cinematic fare? Evangelicals held church parties to view Mel Gibson's sado-masochistic representations of Christ's cathartic life mission. Of all the key themes of the life of Christ -- the courageous stance against the meaninglessness of the Caesarean power, the transformation of Greek Tragedy into existential actuality -- Gibson fixated, with all the subtlety of a gagged BD/SM aficionado, onto the "wetwork (Averted Gaze)."

Arnold Schwarzenegger, in a sense, is the perfect, oily Republican pol. He probably farts gunpowder. As the archetype of the cowboy receded into the lonely horizon, hat-tipped obligingly, like something out of a Saul Steinberg lithograph,and The Action Figure, ominously, takes center stage (Averted Gaze).

Republican-conservative regimes oftentimes remain mum on violence in films -- but voluminous on the subject of film sex -- because their maintenance onto Power rests on fostering an atmosphere of national (in)security hyper consciousness. During the second Reagan administration, in the thick of the Cold War, films like the Friday the 13th series, the various Nightmares on Elm Street and Clive Barker's Hellraisings bloomed like dark flowers in our national public parks.


How curious, how positively Rovian, that in the run-up to the 2004 election, that the colors of the national security alerts moved our collective anxieties with kaleidoscopic nimbleness. Where now are those so niftily color-coded national security alerts to remind us to vote Republican? Oh yes, the Presidential elections are still far away. Bravo, Karl Rove: way to get that second term ...

South Korea, in the shadows of the monstrous Kim Jung-Il regime, has some of the most spectacularly violent films on the planet. And Japan, watching the encroaching shadow of the Chinese dragon similarly is finding its appetite for gore. Films depicting gore and horror flourish in the public marketplace during times of war as a sign of our collective anxieties. Catharsis and whatnot. The Cold War had "The Blob," South Korea has the cinema of Park Chanwook.

And Rocky Balboa/Rambo, by the way, is voting for Senator McCain.