Movies Without Manipulation

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

At some point in this century, I began to watch movies with grave trepidation. There is a good chance that somewhere in whatever film, the moment would come when the producer would send some strange political message with a barely guarded attack on some fundamental tenet of bourgeois society. They began eschewing art for hectoring.

A poster of the movie “Snow White” (2025). Walt Disney Pictures

We watch movies by choice. We pay to see them mostly. Why should we do this if the point of the movie is to sneakily attack core values and preach some strange woke creed? Stung too many times, I’m far more careful to avoid anything that seems coded with a political purpose in mind. Life is too short.

This is why I never bothered to watch the live action version of “Snow White” that came out this year. It was coded left and revisionist even in the promotion. It was met with terrible reviews, and goes down in history as one of the worst film investments ever made by Disney. It could easily have been otherwise.

The mystery to me is why Disney could not have known the result from the beginning. Why would this company spend $250 million on a sure loser? To understand, we need to explore the ways in which ideological fanaticism eats away at rationality.

Fortunately in our times, anyone can hop over to a free movie site that is ad-supported like Tubi (the third most popular service after Netflix and Amazon Prime) and have thousands of great shows and movies immediately available. It’s not all there but there are true treasures awaiting.

I vaguely recall when “On Golden Pond” came out in 1981. It was considered old-fashioned and slightly boring, an attempt to deploy two scions of Hollywood (Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn) in their late years toward box office success. The movie then won three Oscars and was a huge triumph. Apparently Fonda and Hepburn had never met before the film but they were just magic together.

The beauty of the film is indescribable. It is set at the classic New England lake of a New Hampshire summer cottage at the height of nature’s beauty, revealing the tender relationship of this aging couple. She is an ebullient lover of nature, games, and life, and he is a crabby retired professor with a crusty outer way but beautiful inner soul. The theme of death looms large throughout. I cannot think of a film that more authentically portrays the struggles of aging.

Their daughter is played by Jane Fonda at her prime. She arrives with a new boyfriend who is a single father of a boy of 13 who is already jaded and cynical. A relationship forms between the old man and the boy, based on various activities of summer like boating, fishing, and swimming.

The father reveals a secret that there is a big trout he calls Walter who has evaded capture for many years. They hunt this fish for weeks, catching many others along the way but not the one they want. As the movie closes, they finally do snag Walter but let him go out of respect for his size, might, and long life.

All of which recalls the huge drama of another great book made into several films: “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville. It’s one of the great American novels, oddly dreaded more than thoroughly read. Written in 1851, its tremendous fame is due to its detailed accounting of the whaling industry and culture in a time when whale oil was the resource most in demand for lighting before electricity came along.

Captain Ahab puts together a whaling expedition but with a fanatical desire to get the biggest whale of all, the one that caused him to lose a leg. The purpose of the trip is not profits but revenge, which the sailors on the boat knew but had underestimated the power of their captain’s obsession. The journey takes them as far as the South China Sea and ends with a grave lesson about the problem of single-minded obsessions untempered by concern for others and the larger context.

The reader or viewer is a fan of the Captain and his genius for as long as possible, truly hoping that he gets his wish. The lesson of the story only comes with the ending of doom, and only in reverse is it obvious that he allowed his obsession to cloud all his judgment.

A poster of the movie “On Golden Pond” (1981). IPC Films/Universal Pictures

The search for the fish in “On Golden Pond” is rational and sporting by comparison. Both stories are set in New England and surely the parallels here are not accidental. One shows destructive fanaticism and the other shows a tempered and loving ambition.

Both films are what my mentor Murray Rothbard called “movie movies,” meaning that they are deep, exciting, emotionally rich, wonderful and evocative to watch, and barren of hidden and manipulative attempts to browbeat or manipulate the politics of the viewer. Young people today who don’t watch older movies probably do not know the meaning of such things.

Murray did not review “On Golden Pond,” so far as I know, but I feel sure that he would have adored the film. Truly, I was taken aback by the innocence of the plot and the comfort that comes with realizing that at no point in the movie would the other shoe drop and we would be presented a lecture on the evils of normal society.

That’s true for most movies made in the 20th century before ideology came along to ruin them. We can think of identitarian politics as the equivalent of Captain Ahab’s whale, something the left has pursued with fanatical vigor even to the point of its own self-destruction. I see this operating at the New York Times, in large corporations, and in sectors of government where a single idea has swamped all rationality and even concern for the metrics of profitability.

The role of Moby Dick in this case is occupied by a malevolent vision of “white” Christian society—and the values that undergird it—as irredeemably corrupt and worthy only of being destroyed. In the past 10 years, it got so out of hand that a small but powerful coterie of writers tried to change the date of the founding of America and wage a wild war on the president who they believed to represent everything they hated.

There is truth to the observation that “Trump Derangement Syndrome” has ruined vast amounts of art, journalism, commentary, and culture. There is plenty with which to disagree in Trump’s first and second term, and nothing wrong at all making that clear. The problem comes with the single-minded obsession that pursues the whale at the expense of everything else.

The right approach is the one taken by Henry Fonda toward “Walter” the trout. There is adventure in the hunt. Politics as a normal sport is a great thing. It sharpens skills at observation, argumentation, and rhetoric. Unlike Henry who lets the fish go once it is caught, Trump’s enemies have raised the stakes to the highest-possible level, attempting to jail him and worse.

We live in changing times when woke ideology is on the ropes, banned in many sectors of society and defunded according to policy. That said, the apparatus of understanding behind the ideology will long endure in culture, deeply institutionalized in academia, professional societies, and media. It’s true for films too.

Good movies might make a comeback—and perhaps that is happening now—but if you are like me, I wait until the reviews are out and eschew anything coded left simply because I don’t want to pay to be insulted. For now, I take recourse in the beauty and luxury of the older movies without the fanaticism that has compromised so much elite culture.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.