Financing Mikey
Daniel Jennings has a column up at Front Page Magazine dissecting why a company like Disney would finance Michael Moore’s latest crockumentary, Farenheit 911.
The first reason Disney is bankrolling this nonsense is a simple one: it amounts to pure profit. Moore’s documentary will cost only a couple of million bucks to produce. (A million for Moore, a few hundred thousand more for actual production costs.) Yet it could bring tens of millions of dollars of profit into the cash strapped Disney empire. “Fahrenheit 911” will surely attract large numbers of arrogant left wing intellectuals to art house movie theaters around the US. These people will pour in and pay $8 or $10 a pop to see Moore’s nonsense. Even if it earns only ten or twenty million bucks in domestic release, it’ll generate a nice chunk of change for Disney.
There’s also the shock factor here, Disney executives seeing the big money brought in by reality TV and the MTV Jackass movie may hope that the shocking nature of Moore’s film will attract viewers. They think maybe they can create a profitable brand of reality movies by promoting controversial propaganda that makes absurd and shocking conclusions. These executives may hope that lots of people buy tickets simply to see if the rumors about Moore and his movie are true.
Then there’s the overseas market. This horrendous documentary will undoubtedly attract huge audiences in Europe, the Middle East, Russia, China and other places will large numbers of people hate us. It’ll pack them in, in Cairo and Paris and Beijing and make more money over there. More importantly it’ll establish Disney’s reputation as a staunchly anti-American company overseas. Deflecting the mouse factory from terrorist violence and boycotts.
He’s absolutely right. Unfortunately the column from this point on devolves into the cind of right-wing idiocy that we hear all too much when conservatives discuss popular culture, blaming the Columbine shootings on violent video games and movies. Jennings even sides withdirector and notorious left-wing asshole Robert Altman in his criticism of violence in movies! In October of 2000, Altman chimed in on the Columbine killings, saying
I think the industry has been marketing these sorts of hyperviolent films to kids. They know exactly what they’re doing, and they got caught. And it’s about time. These kids get anesthetized, and then we end up with something like Columbine.
I wish some conservatives would get off the ridiculous blame game and quit trying to hold movies and games accountable for the actions of asshole kids and the parents that raised them. In this regard conservatives are no better than the left-wing morons who blame violence on guns.
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