September 2001 was not a happy time for New York City, but it may have been one for the family of our possible next mayor, Zohran Mamdani. I say that not because I think he harbors terrorist sympathies or hates America but because that’s roughly when his director mom Mira Nair’s one really financially successful film, Monsoon Wedding, came out. Art creates, politics destroys. (Monsoon season also destroys, as Texas is painfully aware at the moment, but I avoid imposing a political lens on weather, be it an environmentalist, conspiracist, or wrath-of-God lens.) Would that creative people stuck to their non-political activities, then.
On some level, Mamdani probably means well when he talks in his ads about fairly bourgeois, mainstream values such as “dignity” (and his mom’s movies often depict people rising above family and ethnic squabbles to take responsibility for their own lives and past mistakes). But it doesn’t follow that government controlling more and more of our lives will yield the nice, liberal-autonomy-enhancing things Mamdani apparently wants for us all. A bureaucracy run by an optimist can still crush and impoverish, perhaps especially one run by an elite-bourgeois optimist who’s narcissistic enough to think he can improve the second-richest city in the U.S. through additional government.
Doing my small part to nudge the world toward creativity and away from politics, then, I’ll devote this and my next three columns to examining a few offerings from what is still our culture’s most psychologically influential art form, film.
Lest I be accused of thinking politics has no influence on art, though, I notice the YouTube channel of the un-P.C. site Film Threat has essentially declared this year the fortieth anniversary of political correctness as we now know it. Or at least, they note that in the turning-point year 1985, per a 60 Minutes piece from that time, even people like old-fashioned animation producer Joe Barbera of Hanna-Barbera increasingly had to face grillings by liberal, offense-avoiding, female committees to sell new cartoon ideas (Hanna-Barbera would cease to exist in 2001, absorbed into Warner Bros.)
The committee seen in the 60 Minutes piece explicitly tells Barbera that times have changed since he created the likes of Yogi Bear, and new cartoons will have to conform to their rules, which include: no ethnic or sexual stereotypes, only limited violence, and almost no words of multiple syllables. Political correctness was always for simpletons more than sophisticates, though we’ve since forgotten that.
By the end of the 1980s, by contrast, I’d be writing for the weekly publication the Film Bulletin (no relation to Film Threat save in spirit) at Brown University and mocking both pop culture and the rising tide of P.C. in conjunction with some of the smartest and funniest writers I’ve ever known. But we only had to look around us on campus to know the future probably belonged to socialists like Mamdani whether we tried to counter them with humor or long rational arguments. Groupthink tends to win out, whether in a governmental, racist, or religious form.
That’s why a subset of the population, I think, has lately responded by valuing apostasy and heresy for their own sakes more than any particular dogma—beneficial confusion leading to ongoing skepticism and healthy periodic rethinking.
And so it is that I keep revisiting the strange, taboo, potentially embarrassing topic of UFOs in recent years. One of the biggest, most mysterious objects looming on the pop culture horizon is next spring’s Spielberg UFO drama Disclosure, the film’s plot still unannounced but likely this time dealing with some of the more political aspects of the UFO phenomenon, such as the military reports, congressional hearings, and corporate investigations of the topic lately in the news.
For all of us who spent the late-20th century seeing UFOs through one of two lenses—dismissive skepticism about what were presumably misidentified mundane objects or gullible New Age-style belief in whatever cosmic contact was alleged—it should be humbling and mind-expanding that all of us, Spielberg included, are nowadays faced with two competing prominent narratives on the topic, neither wholly mundane, neither wholly uplifting.
Roughly speaking, there is now The New York Times narrative, which is that paranormal phenomena are probably real and have for decades been studied covertly by the Pentagon and others, and The Wall Street Journal narrative, which is that it was all a colossal, expensive, decades-long hoax used by the Military-Industrial Complex to cover up exotic, advanced but earthly weapons and surveillance projects. I wouldn’t want to have to bet my life which of these two narratives is true, especially since humility demands that I acknowledge neither of them is vindication of the narrative on which I would’ve bet big back in the late-20th century, namely that there’s really nothing extraordinary going on at all, aside from people being very gullible and stupid—which is also true, of course.
The nice thing about art, though, as I’m sure Spielberg would agree, is that you can juggle theories and possibilities without government decreeing the one permissible answer or spending billions of taxpayer dollars deceiving the public about the answers—though even Spielberg does propaganda videos for the Democratic Party (no one’s perfect). Maybe he’ll be doing an upbeat video for President Mamdani one day.
But speaking of film, “crises,” and 1985: next week, let’s look at the possible collapse of the DC Universe after about four decades of instability, at the hands of the villainous James Gunn, director of the impending Superman.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey