The kind of liberation the rude gesture brings has turned out to be not that liberating after all, but along the way it has crowded out previous ideas of what liberation meant—ideas that had to with equality, with work, with ownership. And still our love of simple, unadorned defiance expands. It is everywhere today. Everyone believes that they’re standing up against unjust authority of some imaginary kind or another—even those whose ultimate aim is obviously to establish an unjust authority of their own. Their terms for it are slightly different than the ones in “Animal House”—they talk about the liberal elite, the statists, the social engineers, the “ruling class.” But they’re all acting out the same old script. The Tea Party movement believes it’s resisting the arrogant liberal know-it-alls. So did Andrew Breitbart, in his brief career as a dealer in pranks and contumely. So do the people who proposed that abominable gay marriage discrimination law in Arizona. Hell, so do the pitiful billionaires of Wall Street—even they think they’re standing bravely for Ayn Rand’s downtrodden job creators.
Maybe the day will come when we finally wake up and understand that insults don’t always set us free. But until that happens, my liberal friends, don’t ask for whom the bird flips: the bird flips for thee.
Tom Frank points to something that is at the heart of what confuses and ennervates the American Left, which is that its liberation project, insofar as it amounts merely a an f-you to "the Man", whoever the Man of moment might be, is at its heart a nihilistic project.
The occasion for this piece in Salon is the recent passing of Harold Ramis, the creative mind behind Animal House, Caddyshack, and Ghostbusters, movies of the eighties that he argues are celebrations of Reaganism. The flippers off are not in the mold of Che and Angela Davis, but more in the mold of Gordon Gecko and Jordan Belfort. As Frank points out, Otter and Bluto's fraternity was modeled on one at Dartmouth that mainlines its alums to Wall Street. Isn't Scorcese's recent Wolf of Wall Street just Animal House for forty year olds? Isn't Kappa Beta Phi described in Kevin Roose's new book Young Money any different from Bluto's Delta Tau Ki.
Caddyshack pits the down-to-earth, wise-cracking, lovable Rodney Dangerfield character against the Ted Knight prig, the way The Howards of Virginia pit the Cary Grant character against Sir Cedric Hardwicke. It's a classic Hollywood trope--we are made to love the lively, clever, freedom-loving, no-rules-or conventions-left-unbroken character as he pits himself against the fascists who run the 'Establishment', only the Establishment in the 1970s and 80s was the New Deal Regulations Regime. The 'rules' were all the restrictions imposed on financial markets, you know rules like Glass Steagall. Glass Steagall is for squares. Who's the real American--Family Ties's Alex Keaton or his cluelessly bland, conventionally liberal parents?
Here's the point: those on the cultural left share common ground with those on the libertarian right insofar as both want to crash old conventions. This has been the liberal project at least since Luther posted his 95 theses. The good guys are for individual freedom and the bad guys are those who stand for discipline and restraint. And this is where it gets confusing, because so many on the political left are also on the cultural left, there is very little in their code that justifies restraint, and so it is hard for anyone on the Left to support a program in which restraint and discipline play a role. And so, at best, you get ineffectual things like Occupy or Jon Stewart's silly Rally to Restore Sanity.
The problem, of course, is that the hard right has no problem with discipline and restraint. It knows how to organize and get things done, and it has a warrior mentality when it comes to discipline and sacrifice. It understands and embraces the will to power in a way that the feel-good, can't-we-just-get-along left cannot even begin to fathom.
Remember the scene in Freaks and Geeks when Nick wants his garage band to get better to prove to his father he can have a career as a drummer so he won't have to go into the army. Well the rest of the freaks refuse to practice--they say it's too much like school. Daniel says to Nick something like, "It's Rock and Roll, man; it's supposed to come from the crotch. If you got any, you'd know that." And the band breaks up.
That scene for me is a metaphor for the American cultural/political Left. It's not just the bad boys like Daniel, it's the good girls like Lindsay, too. She aligns with the Freaks because she wants something "real", and the Freaks represent that because they are so, what . . .? Well, it doesn't amount to much more than living from the crotch and bird flipping the Man. And so she rejects the path of discipline and restraint, a path with the right guidance that might lead her to realize a deeper kind of freedom and capacity. But that's sooo square. Better to set forth on some amorphous journey of self-discovery.
And in the meanwhile the wolves circle.
Judd Apatow is for the Millennials what Harold Ramis was for the Boomers--same old, same old Hollywood nihilsm with a happy face.