Sometimes conversations stick in your head for decades. When I was a sixth grader in 1982, HBO had become a thing in our Colorado Springs’ subdivision. My friend Drew and I would spend Saturday nights watching R-rated comedy movies in between building plastic 1/72 scale models of WWII tanks and aircraft. One night, we’d just finished watching Bill Murray in Stripes and were painting a winter camouflage pattern onto an ME-109.
“People copy what they see,” Drew said, “and we like watching assholes. What if everyone becomes an asshole?”
It was true. All our friends enjoyed watching Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield et al, act like assholes. Transgression at other people’s expense had its rewards as our leading men always got the girl and sometimes the money. The dearth of cheap home entertainment options meant these movies were ingrained into our heads through multiple views. Grown men still quoted lines from Fletch into the 1990s.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote that Americans, “ridicule themselves and glorify their betters.” Comedy lead roles in our culture generally represent the average person (clerks, mall cops, waiters and starving artists) while dramatic lead roles represent the elite (ex-special forces, district attorneys, rags-to-riches musicians and mafia dons).
Our parents watched assholes having a good time in their movies too: Al Pacino in Scarface, Michael Douglas in Wall Street. Micky Rourke in Nine And A Half Weeks, Jack Nicholson in anything. The leading men in these films got their good times at other’s expense during the film instead of at the end. I won’t even go into 80s action movies, which all boil down to: asshole with a gun, beautiful woman and explosions.
We absorb this behavior into our minds each time we sit down in front of a screen. It seeps deep into our social subconscious, taking a few years for the influence to surface. My Bradley gunner used to laugh as he recalled the men of his platoon competing to see who could hit an Iraqi refugee the hardest with an MRE thrown from a moving armored vehicle during the first Gulf War. “We were assholes,” he admitted. Of course they were, it’s how they’ve been trained to behave.
Our comedy leads changed post Gulf War. They became kind-hearted but so stupid they didn’t realize they were behaving like assholes: Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler and Mike Myers. A new idea, unbelievable to our rational minds, grew in the dark recesses of our lizard brain because we’d seen it – you could be a stupid asshole and still wind up with the girl and the money.
Hollywood’s post-Schwarzkopf programming added a new layer to our dramatic leads: criminal assholes. We were given John Travolta in Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty, Robert DeNiro in Casino, Heat and Analyze This and Ed Norton in American History X and Fight Club. Tinsel town closed out the century with a character that dropped like a bomb on the American subconscious, Tony Soprano. The fictional mob boss was a selfish asshole who lived off other peoples’ misery and dominated American TV and Awards for 6 seasons.
9-11 detonated in the American zeitgeist, addicting Americans to media updates from the towers’ collapse through the well-executed, strategically-disastrous Iraq invasion. American studios didn’t know how to react, they used the writer’s strike to get rid of old inventory and turned to union-free reality TV as both an income and asshole generator.
When Hollywood finally found its War on Terror box office footing, the final pieces of our present reality were put into place. Comedy leads, we the people, dealt with a world of assholes by getting high (Harold and Kumar, Knocked Up, Superbad and Pineapple Express) and dramatic leads, the elite, are asshole billionaires willing to level entire city blocks to keep the ‘system’ in place (There Will Be Blood, The Dark Knight and Iron Man).
All those Republicans out there who heap scorn on Hollywood should be praising it instead. It took forty years of programming but it finally paid off with the election of Donald Trump, a ‘billionaire’ criminal asshole, as our President.
Wes Clark Jr. 