In 1983 an American director, Michael Apted, then at the height of his game hired a stellar cast including at least two current movie stars (William Hurt and Brian Dennehy) and one aging movie star (Lee Marvin) to make GORKY PARK, a thriller about the endemic corruption and soul-killing evil of Cold War Soviet Society. The movie was a classy affair, big-budgeted, made by the industry’s best craftsman and released by a powerful American movie studio. And then millions of Americans flocked to theaters to see how dingy, awful and depressing life was in the Soviet Union.
There were plenty of Marxists in America at the time, there always are, but there was one thing almost all of us could agree on in those days… it was better to be here, than there.
The hard evidence of that reality was all around us at the time. American consumer goods were sumggled into the Soviet Union by the ton, while the Soviets couldn’t give their own homemade shit away. Defectors streamed to the United States in every way they could, while almost no one traveled in the other direction. The walls around the Soviet Union weren’t there to keep invaders out, but to keep their own people in.
Did the Soviets of that era make movies about the corrupt American capitalist system for their own audiences? I’m sure they did. But certainly those films were not made with movie stars or directed by internationally acclaimed directors like Michael Apted. And while I’m certain that Soviet citizens tried to smuggle VHS copies of GORKY PARK into the USSR, I’m also certain that Sovet films about corrupt capitalists were not a hot commodity on the black market streets of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
It wasn’t even a fair fight.
Hollywood was a righteous weapon in those days, a weapon wielded against an oppressive regime that abused and tortured its own citizens and sought to do the same to us. And in the end, as with so many other critical Twentieth Century battles, Hollywood helped win the Cold War.
What a difference 30 years makes…
Now, as then, there is no doubt amongst the American citizenry that China is every bit as oppressive as the Soviet Union was, and yet these days when Hollywood makes a movie where the Chinese would make not only the most logical enemy but the most narratively satisfying one, they can’t quite bring themselves to do it. There’s too much money in bending over, you see. Ditto for our major sports leagues, who get rich off the slave labor that makes their sneakers and who dream about the billions of Chinese eyeballs they might one day attract to their TV product. Like a twisted version of Michael Jordan’s famous “Republicans buy sneakers too” quip, guys like LeBron James and Mark Cuban can’t even bring themselves to criticize obvious genocide being committed in plain sight. In fact, when one high party official of the NBA did manage to say something in defense of Hong Kong, he was cancelled for his trouble. And unlike just about every other disease on Earth (Ebola Zaire, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Spanish Flu, West Nile Virus, etc etc…) it’s suddenly racist to note that the Covid-19 virus came from China simply because the CCP, and its house organ the WHO, say it is.
We’ve already lost the culture war with China, and now we are losing the broader war. We are losing badly. And part of the reason we’re losing is that the soldiers of the American culture war turned their guns on us.