Watching it again today, I didn’t think so much of righteous defiance, or underdogs and outsiders; I thought of Wall Street. This particular iteration of Ramis’ martinet vs. slob theme pits—as everyone knows—a prissy, militaristic college fraternity against a fraternity where the boys like pleasure, which is to say, where they drink beer and throw parties and actually enjoy getting laid. If this basic formula doesn’t strike you as particularly rebellious or even remarkable, that’s because it isn’t: in its simple anarchic assertion of appetite, it’s the philosophy of the people who rule us. Everyone is a fraud in this world; learning is a joke; sex objects are easily conned; Kennedy-style idealism is strictly for suckers; and in one telling moment, fratboy 1 remarks to fratboy 2, who is crying over the trashing of his borrowed automobile by fratboy 1 and company, “You fucked up. You trusted us.” What popped into my mind when I heard that line was that other great triumph of the boomer generation: the time-bomb investments of 2008; Goldman Sachs peddling its “shitty deals” to the naive and the credulous. (Tom Frank)
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 to an f-you to "the Man", whoever the Man of moment might be, is at its heart a nihilistic project not that different from the nihilism of Roger Stone. Different sides of the same coin.
The occasion for Frank's piece in Salon was the 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. The plots are all the same--lovable, earthy hedonists vs the conformist, tight-assed, right-thinking, moralistic prigs.
Caddyshack pits the filthy-rich but down-to-earth, vulgar but lovable wise-cracking, unconstrained 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 admire and root for the lively, clever, freedom-loving, no-rules-or conventions-left-unbroken character as he pits himself against the authoritarians 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, earnest, conventionally liberal parents?
Here's the point: those on the cultural left share common ground with those on the libertarian right insofar as both share a liberation project to crash old conventions. The good guys are for individual freedom and the bad guys are those who stand for discipline and restraint. This has been the modern, liberal project at least since Luther posted his 95 theses.
Right wing liberationists are really no different from their counterparts on the Left; it's just that the right-wing types haven't a shred of moral earnestness in their doing it. It's all about the joy of unbridled libido--greed, lust, will to power. The Libs, on the hand, believe their tearing down of repressive traditional forms is making the world a better place.
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. Work hard; play hard is the motto once they get inspired by their desire to own the Libs. Think Roger Stone. The Right knows how to organize and get things done, and they do it with fanatical zeal. They have a warrior mentality when it comes to discipline and sacrifice. It understands and embraces the will to power in a way that the 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 . . .? Freaky? Unbuttoned down? So uninterested in conventional success, which excludes any idea of becoming successful human beings? Well, whatever it is, it doesn't amount to much more than living from the crotch and bird flipping the Man. And so Lindsay 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 as a musician and a human being. But that's sooo square. Better to set forth on some amorphous journey of self-discovery.
Living in a decadent cultural period means that hardly anyone, especially when young, is exposed to deeply successful, i.e., authentic, genuinely menschy, full-spectrum human beings. There are only the prigs and the hedonists. And Liberals these days are doing their best to be prigs in all things except sexual license, and even that they find a way to make boringly politically correct. Liberals work so earnestly to change the rules; Conservatives would rather have fun breaking them. Contemporary Cultural Conservatism is the reductio ad absurdum of the Modern Liberation project; they have even found a way to become liberated from reality. So for the time being, at least, I can see why some think it's a lot more fun to be on the cultural right--to be Matt Gaetz instead of Al Gore.
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.
[This is a repost from March 2014 somewhat edited. I've changed the opening quote because the one used in 2014 is no longer linkable. I'm posting this now because it relates to a recent post, " Boredom, Dionysos, and the Ethic of Authenticity.]