Thursday October 04, 2007

ADVICE FOR CULTURE WARRIORS. Here's one of the reasons I have Daniel Larison on my blogroll:

Conservatives definitely should make more documentaries, but they should do so because they actually want to be filmmakers and want to tell stories. They should do this because they have a talent for doing it, which ensures that they will be doing the work that best expresses their particular gifts. Conservatives should not make documentaries just because that’s what leftists do and we need to counter their propaganda arm with one of our own. As much as it may stun certain folks to read this, left-wing politics prevails among actors and artists for the same reason that it prevails among most journalists: it is a kind of politics that initially fits very well with the kind of work that these people do, and these professions attract people who already tend to share these beliefs.

Unfortunately I found this March 2007 nugget via a deep link from a less canny Larison post, in which he focuses more intently on the problems faced by conservatives who want to do more than just shake their fists at Commie Hollywood and the news media, and less on their opportunities. Are there no Limbaughs? Are there no Liberty Film Festivals? More to the point, are there no Scaifes and Murdochs to finance them?

In both posts, Larison hits the point that a life in the arts is not conducive to raising a family, which object conservatives exalt. Just so. You're not usually going to find your eiron among family men -- except in sitcoms. In fact, I would say that the ironic role of the paterfamilias in your average sitcom from The Life of Riley onwards comes from the tendency in late American life to integrate all the necessary aspects of a community into a consumer experience. Theatre being a niche experience anymore, we have had to replant our truth-telling outsiders, however clumsily, in the middle of our suburban fantasies. In fact, you might say that the whole "anti-American" tendency of American popular art in the past several decades has been a reaction to that uneasy fit...

But that's what comes of reading too much of The American Scene: that way lies madness and Reihan Salam. (Warning to posterity: link evanescent.) So forget it and we'll make it this: trying to write or film or act or sing anything is a hard job, and making it pay is much harder. You have to make sacrifices, including doing jobs you don't want to do and living like you don't want to live. If you have the stomach for that, you might get somewhere, but it will probably take longer than your childish hopes and dreams have led you to expect. The payoff may take years -- indeed, it may never happen. Internalize that, and then let me know how badly you want to drag your ideology with you into glory.

This post is written at the finish of another damn class I've taken to try and realize my own dreams. I've been at this game a long time and the brass ring doesn't look much closer. I don't know as I've acquired much of anything in its pursuit except guts. But maybe guts, as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman once said, is enough.