Do not read this
Dec. 27th, 2005 03:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbAnd if you do and are offended, you have been warned.
Rape of the Marlboro Man
By David Kupelian
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
"Brokeback Mountain," the controversial "gay cowboy" film that has garnered seven Golden Globe nominations and breathless media reviews – and has now emerged as a front-runner for the Oscars – is a brilliant propaganda film, reportedly causing viewers to change the way they feel about homosexual relationships and same-sex marriage.
And how do the movie-makers pull off such a dazzling feat? Simple. They do it by raping the "Marlboro Man," that revered American symbol of rugged individualism and masculinity.
We all know the Marlboro Man. In "The Marketing of Evil," I show how the Philip Morris Company made marketing history by taking one of the most positive American images of all time – the cowboy – and attaching it to a negative, death-oriented product – cigarettes.
Hit the pause button for a moment so this idea can completely sink in: Cigarette marketers cleverly attached, in the public's mind, two utterly unrelated things: 1) the American cowboy, with all of the powerful feelings that image evokes in us, of independence, self-confidence, wide-open spaces and authentic Americanism, and 2) cigarettes, a stinky, health-destroying waste of money. This legendary advertising campaign targeting men succeeded in transforming market underdog Marlboro (up until then, sold as a women's cigarette with the slogan "Mild as May") into the world's best-selling cigarette.
It was all part of the modern marketing revolution, which meant that, instead of touting a product's actual benefits, marketers instead would psychologically manipulate the public by associating their product with the fulfillment of people's deepest, unconscious needs and desires. (Want to sell liquor? Put a seductive woman in the ad.) Obviously, the marketers could never actually deliver on that promise – but emotional manipulation sure is an effective way to sell a lot of products.
The "Marlboro Man" campaign launched 50 years ago. Today, the powerful cowboy image is being used to sell us on another self-destructive product: homosexual sex and "gay" marriage.
'People's minds have been changed'
In "Brokeback Mountain," a film adaptation of the 1997 New Yorker short story by Annie Proulx, two 19-year-old ranchers named Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) have been hired to guard sheep on a rugged mountain in 1963 Wyoming. One night, the bitter cold drives Ennis into Jack's tent so they can keep each other warm. As they lie there, suddenly and almost without warning, these two young men – both of whom later insist they're not "queer" – jump out of the sack and awkwardly and violently engage in anal sex.
Too embarrassed the next morning even to talk about it, Ennis and Jack dismiss their sexual encounter as a "one-shot deal" and part company at the end of the sheepherding job. Ennis marries his fiancée Alma (Michelle Williams, Ledger's real-life girlfriend) while Jack marries female rodeo rider and prom queen Lureen (Anne Hathaway). Each family has children.
Four years later, Jack sends Ennis a postcard saying he's coming to town for a visit. When the moment finally arrives, Ennis, barely able to contain his anticipation, rushes outside to meet Jack and the two men passionately embrace and kiss. Ennis's wife sadly witnesses everything through the screen door. (Since this is one of the film's sadder moments, I wasn't quite sure why the audience in the Portland, Oregon, theater burst out in laughter at Alma's heartbreaking realization.)
From that point on, over the next two decades Ennis and Jack take off together on periodic "fishing trips" at Brokeback Mountain, where no fishing actually takes place. During these adulterous homosexual affairs, Jack suggests they buy a ranch where the two can live happily ever after, presumably abandoning their wives and children. Ennis, however, is afraid, haunted by a traumatic childhood memory: It seems his father had tried to inoculate him against homosexuality by taking him to see the brutalized, castrated, dead body of a rancher who had lived together with another man – until murderous, bigoted neighbors committed the gruesome hate crime.
Eventually, life with Ennis becomes intolerable and Alma divorces him, while Lureen, absorbed with the family business, only suspects Jack's secret as they drift further and further apart. When, toward the end of the story, Jack dies in a freak accident (his wife tells Ennis a tire blew up while Jack was changing it, propelling the hubcap into his face and killing him), Ennis wonders whether Jack actually met the same brutal fate as the castrated "gay" cowboy of his youth.
Ultimately, Ennis ends up alone, with nothing, living in a small, secluded trailer, having lost both his family and his homosexual partner. He's comforted only by his most precious possession – Jack's shirt – which he pitifully embraces, almost in a slow dance, his aching loneliness masterfully projected into the audience via the film's artistry.
Yes, the talents of Hollywood's finest are brought together in a successful attempt at making us experience Ennis's suffering, supposedly inflicted by a homophobic society. Heath Ledger's performance is brilliant and devastating. We do indeed leave the theater feeling Ennis's pain. Mission accomplished.
Lost in all of this, however, are towering, life-and-death realities concerning sex and morality and the sanctity of marriage and the preciousness of children and the direction of our civilization itself. So please, you moviemakers, how about easing off that tight camera shot of Ennis's suffering and doing a slow pan over the massive wreckage all around him? What about the years of silent anguish and loneliness Alma stoically endures for the sake of keeping her family together, or the terrible betrayal, suffering and tears of the children, bereft of a father? None of this merits more than a brief acknowledgment in "Brokeback Mountain."
What is important to the moviemakers, rather, is that the viewer be made to feel, and feel, and feel again as deeply as possible the exquisitely painful loneliness and heartache of the homosexual cowboys – denied their truest happiness because of an ignorant and homophobic society.
Thus are the Judeo-Christian moral values that formed the very foundation and substance of Western culture for the past three millennia all swept away on a delicious tide of manufactured emotion. And believe me, skilled directors and actors can manufacture emotion by the truckload. It's what they do for a living.
Co-star Jake Gyllenhaal realized the movie's power to transform audiences in Toronto, where, according to Entertainment magazine, "he was approached by festival-goers proclaiming that their preconceptions had been shattered by the film's insistence on humanizing gay love."
"Brokeback Mountain," said Gyllenhaal, "is that pure place you take someone that's free of judgment. These guys were scared. What they feared was not each other but what was outside of each other. What was so sad was that it didn't have to happen like that." But then, said the article, Gyllenhaal jumped to his feel and exclaimed triumphantly: "I mean, people's minds have been changed. That's amazing."
Changed indeed. And that's the goal. Film is, by its very nature, highly propagandistic. That is, when you read a book, if you detect you're being lied to or manipulated, you can always stop reading, close the book momentarily and say, "Wait just a minute, there's something wrong here!" You can't do that in a film: You're bombarded with sound and images, all expertly crafted to give you selected information and to stimulate certain feelings, and you can't stop the barrage, not in a theater anyway. The visuals and sound and music – and along with them, the underlying agenda of the filmmakers – pursue you relentlessly, overwhelming your emotions and senses.
And when you leave the theater, unless you're really objective to what you've experienced, you've been changed – even if just a little bit.
Want to know how easily your feelings can be manipulated? Let's take the smallest, most seemingly insignificant example and see. Sit down at a piano and play a song, any song – even "Mary Had a Little Lamb" – as long as it's in a major key. Then, play the same song, but change from a major to a minor key; just lower the third step of the scale by a half-step so the melody and harmony become minor. If you watch carefully, you'll note this one tiny change makes the minor-key version sound a bit melancholy and sad, while the normal, major-key version sounds bright and happy. (As the expression goes, "Major glad, minor sad.")
Now take this principle and apply it to a feature film by expanding it a million-fold. A movie's musical score has one overriding function – to make the viewer feel a certain way at strategic points during the story. And music is just one of dozens of factors and techniques used to influence audiences in the deepest way possible. Everything from the script to the directing to the camera work to the acting, which in "Brokeback Mountain" is brilliant, serve the purpose of making the movie-makers' vision seem like reality – even if it's twisted and perverse.
Do we understand that Hollywood could easily produce a similar movie to "Brokeback Mountain," only this time glorifying an incest relationship, or even an adult-child sexual relationship? Like "Brokeback," it too would serve to desensitize us to the immoral and destructive reality of what we're seeing, while fervently coaxing us into embracing that which we once rightly shunned.
All the filmmakers would need to do is skillfully make viewers experience the actors' powerful emotions of loneliness and emptiness – juxtaposed with feelings of joy and fulfillment when the two "lovers" are together – to bring us to a new level of "understanding" for any forbidden "love." Alongside this, of course, they would necessarily portray those opposed to this unorthodox "love" as Nazis or thugs. Thus, many of us would let go of our "old-fashioned" biblical ideas of morality in light of what seems like the more imminent and undeniable reality of human love in all its diverse forms.
A "Brokeback"-type movie could easily be made, for instance, to portray a female school teacher's affair with a 14-year-old student as "a magnificent love story." And I'm not talking about the 2000 made-for-TV potboiler, "All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story," about the Seattle school teacher who seduced a sixth-grade student, went to prison for statutory rape, and later married the boy having had two children by him. I'm talking about a big-budget, big-name Hollywood masterpiece aimed at transforming America through film, just as Hitler relied on master filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to make propaganda films to manipulate the emotions of an entire nation.
In place of "Brokeback Mountain's" scene with the castrated homosexual, the "adult-child love story" could have a similar scene in which, as a young girl, the future teacher's mother took her to see the body of a woman who had fallen in consensual "love" with a 14-year-old boy, only to be brutalized, her breasts cut off, and bludgeoned to death – all by Nazi-like bigoted neighbors. (So that's why she couldn't be honest and open about her later relationship with her student.)
Inevitably, such a film would make us doubt our former condemnation of adult-child sex, or at least reduce our outrage as we gained more "understanding" and sympathy for the participants. It would cause us to ask the same question one reviewer asked after seeing "Brokeback Mountain": "In an age when the fight over gay marriage still rages, 'Brokeback Mountain,' the tale of two men who are scarcely even allowed to imagine being together, asks, through the very purity with which it touches us: When it comes to love, what sort of world do we really want?"
OK, I'll bite. Let's talk about love. The critics call "Brokeback Mountain" a "pure" and "magnificent" love story. Do we really want to call such an obsession – especially one that destroys marriages and is based on constant lies, deceit and neglect of one's children – "love"?
What if I were a heroin addict and told you I loved my drug dealer? What if I told you he always makes me feel good, and that I have a hard time living without him, and that I think about him all the time with warm feelings of anticipation and inner completion? And that whenever we get together, it's the only time I feel truly happy and at peace with myself?
Oh, you don't approve of my "love"? You dare to criticize it, telling me my relationship with my drug dealer is not real love, but just an unhealthy addiction? What if I respond to you by saying, "Oh shut up, you hater. How dare you impose your sick, narrow-minded, oppressive values on me? Who are you, you pinch-faced, moralistic hypocrite, to define for me what real love is?"
Don't laugh. I guarantee Hollywood could make a movie about a man and his drug dealer, or an adult-child sexual relationship, that would pull on our emotions and create some level of sympathy for the characters. Furthermore, in at least some cases, it would make us doubt our conscience – a gift directly from God, the perception of right and wrong that he puts in each one of us – our inner knowing that this was a totally unhealthy and self-destructive relationship.
Ultimately, propaganda works because it washes over us, overwhelming our senses, confusing us, upsetting or emotionalizing us, and thereby making us doubt what we once knew. Listen to what actor Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays Jack, told the reporter for Entertainment magazine about doing the "love" scenes with Heath Ledger:
"I was super uncomfortable … [but] what made me most courageous was that I realized I had to try to let go of that stereotype I had in my mind, that bit of homophobia, and try for a second to be vulnerable and sensitive. It was f---in' hard, man. I succeeded only for milliseconds."
Gyllenhaal thinks he was "super uncomfortable" while being filmed having simulated homosexual sex because of his own "homophobia." Could it be, rather, that his conflict resulted from putting himself in a position, having agreed to do the film, where he was required to violate his own conscience? As so often happens, he was tricked into pushing past invisible internal barriers – crossing a line he wasn't meant to cross. It's called seduction.
This is how the "marketers of evil" work on all of us. They transform our attitudes by making us feel as though our "super uncomfortable" feelings toward embracing unnatural or corrupt behavior of whatever sort – a discomfort literally put into us by a loving God, for our protection – somehow represent ignorance or bigotry or weakness.
I wrote "The Marketing of Evil" to expose these people, and especially to reveal the hidden techniques they've been using for decades to confuse us, to manipulate our feelings and get us to doubt and turn our backs on the truth we once knew and loved. Indeed, whether they're outright lying to us, or ridiculing us for our traditional beliefs, or trying to make us feel guilty over some supposed bigotry on our part, the "marketers of evil" can prevail simply by intimidating or emotionally stirring us up in one way or another. Once that happens, we can easily become confused and lose the inborn understanding God gave us. We all need that inner understanding or common sense, because it's our primary protection from all the evil influences in this world.
As I said at the outset, Hollywood has now raped the Marlboro Man. It has taken a revered symbol of America – the cowboy – with all the powerful emotions and associations that are rooted deep down in the pioneering American soul, and grafted onto it a self-destructive lifestyle it wants to force down Americans' throats. The result is a brazen propaganda vehicle designed to replace the reservations most Americans still have toward homosexuality with powerful feelings of sympathy, guilt over past "homophobia" – and ultimately the complete and utter acceptance of homosexuality as equivalent in every way to heterosexuality.
If and when that day comes, America will have totally abandoned its core biblical principles – as well as the Author of those principles. The radical secularists will have gotten their wish, and this nation – like the traditional cowboy characters corrupted in "Brokeback Mountain" – will have stumbled down a sad, self-destructive and ultimately disastrous road.
Rape of the Marlboro Man
By David Kupelian
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
"Brokeback Mountain," the controversial "gay cowboy" film that has garnered seven Golden Globe nominations and breathless media reviews – and has now emerged as a front-runner for the Oscars – is a brilliant propaganda film, reportedly causing viewers to change the way they feel about homosexual relationships and same-sex marriage.
And how do the movie-makers pull off such a dazzling feat? Simple. They do it by raping the "Marlboro Man," that revered American symbol of rugged individualism and masculinity.
We all know the Marlboro Man. In "The Marketing of Evil," I show how the Philip Morris Company made marketing history by taking one of the most positive American images of all time – the cowboy – and attaching it to a negative, death-oriented product – cigarettes.
Hit the pause button for a moment so this idea can completely sink in: Cigarette marketers cleverly attached, in the public's mind, two utterly unrelated things: 1) the American cowboy, with all of the powerful feelings that image evokes in us, of independence, self-confidence, wide-open spaces and authentic Americanism, and 2) cigarettes, a stinky, health-destroying waste of money. This legendary advertising campaign targeting men succeeded in transforming market underdog Marlboro (up until then, sold as a women's cigarette with the slogan "Mild as May") into the world's best-selling cigarette.
It was all part of the modern marketing revolution, which meant that, instead of touting a product's actual benefits, marketers instead would psychologically manipulate the public by associating their product with the fulfillment of people's deepest, unconscious needs and desires. (Want to sell liquor? Put a seductive woman in the ad.) Obviously, the marketers could never actually deliver on that promise – but emotional manipulation sure is an effective way to sell a lot of products.
The "Marlboro Man" campaign launched 50 years ago. Today, the powerful cowboy image is being used to sell us on another self-destructive product: homosexual sex and "gay" marriage.
'People's minds have been changed'
In "Brokeback Mountain," a film adaptation of the 1997 New Yorker short story by Annie Proulx, two 19-year-old ranchers named Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) have been hired to guard sheep on a rugged mountain in 1963 Wyoming. One night, the bitter cold drives Ennis into Jack's tent so they can keep each other warm. As they lie there, suddenly and almost without warning, these two young men – both of whom later insist they're not "queer" – jump out of the sack and awkwardly and violently engage in anal sex.
Too embarrassed the next morning even to talk about it, Ennis and Jack dismiss their sexual encounter as a "one-shot deal" and part company at the end of the sheepherding job. Ennis marries his fiancée Alma (Michelle Williams, Ledger's real-life girlfriend) while Jack marries female rodeo rider and prom queen Lureen (Anne Hathaway). Each family has children.
Four years later, Jack sends Ennis a postcard saying he's coming to town for a visit. When the moment finally arrives, Ennis, barely able to contain his anticipation, rushes outside to meet Jack and the two men passionately embrace and kiss. Ennis's wife sadly witnesses everything through the screen door. (Since this is one of the film's sadder moments, I wasn't quite sure why the audience in the Portland, Oregon, theater burst out in laughter at Alma's heartbreaking realization.)
From that point on, over the next two decades Ennis and Jack take off together on periodic "fishing trips" at Brokeback Mountain, where no fishing actually takes place. During these adulterous homosexual affairs, Jack suggests they buy a ranch where the two can live happily ever after, presumably abandoning their wives and children. Ennis, however, is afraid, haunted by a traumatic childhood memory: It seems his father had tried to inoculate him against homosexuality by taking him to see the brutalized, castrated, dead body of a rancher who had lived together with another man – until murderous, bigoted neighbors committed the gruesome hate crime.
Eventually, life with Ennis becomes intolerable and Alma divorces him, while Lureen, absorbed with the family business, only suspects Jack's secret as they drift further and further apart. When, toward the end of the story, Jack dies in a freak accident (his wife tells Ennis a tire blew up while Jack was changing it, propelling the hubcap into his face and killing him), Ennis wonders whether Jack actually met the same brutal fate as the castrated "gay" cowboy of his youth.
Ultimately, Ennis ends up alone, with nothing, living in a small, secluded trailer, having lost both his family and his homosexual partner. He's comforted only by his most precious possession – Jack's shirt – which he pitifully embraces, almost in a slow dance, his aching loneliness masterfully projected into the audience via the film's artistry.
Yes, the talents of Hollywood's finest are brought together in a successful attempt at making us experience Ennis's suffering, supposedly inflicted by a homophobic society. Heath Ledger's performance is brilliant and devastating. We do indeed leave the theater feeling Ennis's pain. Mission accomplished.
Lost in all of this, however, are towering, life-and-death realities concerning sex and morality and the sanctity of marriage and the preciousness of children and the direction of our civilization itself. So please, you moviemakers, how about easing off that tight camera shot of Ennis's suffering and doing a slow pan over the massive wreckage all around him? What about the years of silent anguish and loneliness Alma stoically endures for the sake of keeping her family together, or the terrible betrayal, suffering and tears of the children, bereft of a father? None of this merits more than a brief acknowledgment in "Brokeback Mountain."
What is important to the moviemakers, rather, is that the viewer be made to feel, and feel, and feel again as deeply as possible the exquisitely painful loneliness and heartache of the homosexual cowboys – denied their truest happiness because of an ignorant and homophobic society.
Thus are the Judeo-Christian moral values that formed the very foundation and substance of Western culture for the past three millennia all swept away on a delicious tide of manufactured emotion. And believe me, skilled directors and actors can manufacture emotion by the truckload. It's what they do for a living.
Co-star Jake Gyllenhaal realized the movie's power to transform audiences in Toronto, where, according to Entertainment magazine, "he was approached by festival-goers proclaiming that their preconceptions had been shattered by the film's insistence on humanizing gay love."
"Brokeback Mountain," said Gyllenhaal, "is that pure place you take someone that's free of judgment. These guys were scared. What they feared was not each other but what was outside of each other. What was so sad was that it didn't have to happen like that." But then, said the article, Gyllenhaal jumped to his feel and exclaimed triumphantly: "I mean, people's minds have been changed. That's amazing."
Changed indeed. And that's the goal. Film is, by its very nature, highly propagandistic. That is, when you read a book, if you detect you're being lied to or manipulated, you can always stop reading, close the book momentarily and say, "Wait just a minute, there's something wrong here!" You can't do that in a film: You're bombarded with sound and images, all expertly crafted to give you selected information and to stimulate certain feelings, and you can't stop the barrage, not in a theater anyway. The visuals and sound and music – and along with them, the underlying agenda of the filmmakers – pursue you relentlessly, overwhelming your emotions and senses.
And when you leave the theater, unless you're really objective to what you've experienced, you've been changed – even if just a little bit.
Want to know how easily your feelings can be manipulated? Let's take the smallest, most seemingly insignificant example and see. Sit down at a piano and play a song, any song – even "Mary Had a Little Lamb" – as long as it's in a major key. Then, play the same song, but change from a major to a minor key; just lower the third step of the scale by a half-step so the melody and harmony become minor. If you watch carefully, you'll note this one tiny change makes the minor-key version sound a bit melancholy and sad, while the normal, major-key version sounds bright and happy. (As the expression goes, "Major glad, minor sad.")
Now take this principle and apply it to a feature film by expanding it a million-fold. A movie's musical score has one overriding function – to make the viewer feel a certain way at strategic points during the story. And music is just one of dozens of factors and techniques used to influence audiences in the deepest way possible. Everything from the script to the directing to the camera work to the acting, which in "Brokeback Mountain" is brilliant, serve the purpose of making the movie-makers' vision seem like reality – even if it's twisted and perverse.
Do we understand that Hollywood could easily produce a similar movie to "Brokeback Mountain," only this time glorifying an incest relationship, or even an adult-child sexual relationship? Like "Brokeback," it too would serve to desensitize us to the immoral and destructive reality of what we're seeing, while fervently coaxing us into embracing that which we once rightly shunned.
All the filmmakers would need to do is skillfully make viewers experience the actors' powerful emotions of loneliness and emptiness – juxtaposed with feelings of joy and fulfillment when the two "lovers" are together – to bring us to a new level of "understanding" for any forbidden "love." Alongside this, of course, they would necessarily portray those opposed to this unorthodox "love" as Nazis or thugs. Thus, many of us would let go of our "old-fashioned" biblical ideas of morality in light of what seems like the more imminent and undeniable reality of human love in all its diverse forms.
A "Brokeback"-type movie could easily be made, for instance, to portray a female school teacher's affair with a 14-year-old student as "a magnificent love story." And I'm not talking about the 2000 made-for-TV potboiler, "All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story," about the Seattle school teacher who seduced a sixth-grade student, went to prison for statutory rape, and later married the boy having had two children by him. I'm talking about a big-budget, big-name Hollywood masterpiece aimed at transforming America through film, just as Hitler relied on master filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to make propaganda films to manipulate the emotions of an entire nation.
In place of "Brokeback Mountain's" scene with the castrated homosexual, the "adult-child love story" could have a similar scene in which, as a young girl, the future teacher's mother took her to see the body of a woman who had fallen in consensual "love" with a 14-year-old boy, only to be brutalized, her breasts cut off, and bludgeoned to death – all by Nazi-like bigoted neighbors. (So that's why she couldn't be honest and open about her later relationship with her student.)
Inevitably, such a film would make us doubt our former condemnation of adult-child sex, or at least reduce our outrage as we gained more "understanding" and sympathy for the participants. It would cause us to ask the same question one reviewer asked after seeing "Brokeback Mountain": "In an age when the fight over gay marriage still rages, 'Brokeback Mountain,' the tale of two men who are scarcely even allowed to imagine being together, asks, through the very purity with which it touches us: When it comes to love, what sort of world do we really want?"
OK, I'll bite. Let's talk about love. The critics call "Brokeback Mountain" a "pure" and "magnificent" love story. Do we really want to call such an obsession – especially one that destroys marriages and is based on constant lies, deceit and neglect of one's children – "love"?
What if I were a heroin addict and told you I loved my drug dealer? What if I told you he always makes me feel good, and that I have a hard time living without him, and that I think about him all the time with warm feelings of anticipation and inner completion? And that whenever we get together, it's the only time I feel truly happy and at peace with myself?
Oh, you don't approve of my "love"? You dare to criticize it, telling me my relationship with my drug dealer is not real love, but just an unhealthy addiction? What if I respond to you by saying, "Oh shut up, you hater. How dare you impose your sick, narrow-minded, oppressive values on me? Who are you, you pinch-faced, moralistic hypocrite, to define for me what real love is?"
Don't laugh. I guarantee Hollywood could make a movie about a man and his drug dealer, or an adult-child sexual relationship, that would pull on our emotions and create some level of sympathy for the characters. Furthermore, in at least some cases, it would make us doubt our conscience – a gift directly from God, the perception of right and wrong that he puts in each one of us – our inner knowing that this was a totally unhealthy and self-destructive relationship.
Ultimately, propaganda works because it washes over us, overwhelming our senses, confusing us, upsetting or emotionalizing us, and thereby making us doubt what we once knew. Listen to what actor Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays Jack, told the reporter for Entertainment magazine about doing the "love" scenes with Heath Ledger:
"I was super uncomfortable … [but] what made me most courageous was that I realized I had to try to let go of that stereotype I had in my mind, that bit of homophobia, and try for a second to be vulnerable and sensitive. It was f---in' hard, man. I succeeded only for milliseconds."
Gyllenhaal thinks he was "super uncomfortable" while being filmed having simulated homosexual sex because of his own "homophobia." Could it be, rather, that his conflict resulted from putting himself in a position, having agreed to do the film, where he was required to violate his own conscience? As so often happens, he was tricked into pushing past invisible internal barriers – crossing a line he wasn't meant to cross. It's called seduction.
This is how the "marketers of evil" work on all of us. They transform our attitudes by making us feel as though our "super uncomfortable" feelings toward embracing unnatural or corrupt behavior of whatever sort – a discomfort literally put into us by a loving God, for our protection – somehow represent ignorance or bigotry or weakness.
I wrote "The Marketing of Evil" to expose these people, and especially to reveal the hidden techniques they've been using for decades to confuse us, to manipulate our feelings and get us to doubt and turn our backs on the truth we once knew and loved. Indeed, whether they're outright lying to us, or ridiculing us for our traditional beliefs, or trying to make us feel guilty over some supposed bigotry on our part, the "marketers of evil" can prevail simply by intimidating or emotionally stirring us up in one way or another. Once that happens, we can easily become confused and lose the inborn understanding God gave us. We all need that inner understanding or common sense, because it's our primary protection from all the evil influences in this world.
As I said at the outset, Hollywood has now raped the Marlboro Man. It has taken a revered symbol of America – the cowboy – with all the powerful emotions and associations that are rooted deep down in the pioneering American soul, and grafted onto it a self-destructive lifestyle it wants to force down Americans' throats. The result is a brazen propaganda vehicle designed to replace the reservations most Americans still have toward homosexuality with powerful feelings of sympathy, guilt over past "homophobia" – and ultimately the complete and utter acceptance of homosexuality as equivalent in every way to heterosexuality.
If and when that day comes, America will have totally abandoned its core biblical principles – as well as the Author of those principles. The radical secularists will have gotten their wish, and this nation – like the traditional cowboy characters corrupted in "Brokeback Mountain" – will have stumbled down a sad, self-destructive and ultimately disastrous road.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-12-27 03:46 pm (UTC)News flash - no one is ever satisfied and all sex sells. Tom Cruise couldn't keep married. Neither could Cary Grant. Neither could Angelina Jolie. Beauty and sexual desire may make it easier to stay together, but it's still damned hard. The problem isn't the other people on the planet - it's the two inside the marriage.
People drank before girls in bikinis started jello-wrestling over a six-pack and Absolute started making interesting ice cubes. And cities were destroyed over sex and children were destroyed over sex and marriages have always been unhappy.
To say that my life will be better - that my husband will love me more and my children will be safer and happier - if I spend my time and energy protesting images is insulting to me personally and mankind generally. The screens aren't any more constructive filled with hetrosexual love, perfect families, saintly patience, divine sacrifice, or heroic bravery. Hollywood does not define my morality or my faith, nor does this pitiful author who blames his less-than-perfect existance on Madison Avenue.
America's core biblical principals were abandoned somewhere between Plymouth Rock and Jamestown hundreds of years ago. If they aren't in people's hearts, they surely will not be on the movie screens. Putting the cart before the horse serves no useful purpose.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-27 03:55 pm (UTC)As for the notion that any of this was intended to make your own life better, I do not see the point. This is about a pack of lies wrapped in gorgeous cloth, plunked before all the world's spectators just in time for Christmas Day, and promoted at the height of their voices by the whole media community across several countries. It is not about you. It is about telling lies about human life in general, and doing so with a perfectly clear purpose. If you do not want to protest about something, well and good, nobody asked you. IN fact, I seem to remember that I actually warned you against reading this.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-28 01:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-28 06:59 am (UTC)meh
Date: 2005-12-27 07:08 pm (UTC)You know, being from a family that homesteaded in Wyoming, and lived in Wyoming for all those generations, and now has a ranch of 167+ SECTIONS, I can say that in 1963 in WYOMING (yes, WYOMING), most male ranchers would have rather been closer to their COWS than another man.
I personally think that the whole premise of "Brokeback Mountain" is just...TMI. Too much information. Not because I'm homophobic (my older half-brother is gay and I love him all the same), but because, HONESTLY I really DON'T want to SEE or HEAR of other people's bedroom business, STRIAGHT or GAY.
That probably didn't make much sense...eh.
Re: meh
Date: 2005-12-28 06:32 am (UTC)Nice, by the way, to hear from someone with a real Western background and who knows what she is talking about. The lovely thing about LJ is how many different kinds of people you get to meet.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-27 07:42 pm (UTC)I realize you will probably say that I missed the point, but I would say that the author of this article missed the point. And perhaps I have missed the point, but this hits a bit too close to home for me to be entirely objective. Much of the pain of this situation could have been avoided had the two men accepted themselves and allowed themselves to be together and not marry people they did not love and did not really wish to marry. I have seen what happens to people who try to deny who and what they are, and it isn't pretty for them or for their friends and family. Living a lie takes a lot out of a person and the people around them often know that something is wrong, but have little idea what it actually is. I have not seen the movie nor read the short story, and most likely won't, so I can't offer any analysis of how all realtionships are handled in this story, but I just can't give any credence to analysis like this and rather than feeling indignant about it, I just feel very sad about it. Take this as you will.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-27 09:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-28 06:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-28 10:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-29 02:27 am (UTC)I'd be curious to read the reasons for it.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-27 07:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-28 03:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-28 07:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-29 05:44 am (UTC)Mainly it's this bland assumption that everyone is affected by exposure to media (music, film, advertising, etc) in the same way, that's getting somewhat under my skin.
I make a living by working on some of the more complicated technical aspects of corporate marketing, and am more than capable of drawing distinctions about the elements of a film, commercial, ballet, print ad, novel, whatever, which are geared specifically to turn the attention of the audience in the desired direction. It's especially insulting when you can actually see the puppet strings they're using, to try and yank you around with.
..."marketers of evil..."?
...brazen propaganda vehicle...?
All I can tell this author is, "Dude, calm down. I can think for myself, thanks. And don't think I can't see you trying to pull the same manipulation number you're ranting about."
It is important, I think, to be conscious of one's influences, and own up to those viewpoints that take up space in one's own brain. And I fail to understand how Kupelian's impassioned insistences that we take note of his viewpoint, are any different than all the noise we hear For or Against Just About Everything, all the time. If you ever get the opportunity, check out our military's television campaigns for recruitment. I could spend ages picking that video editor's brain. It's great looking stuff, very hot, very action-oriented, and no great surprise they're targeting the youth market; the second MTV generation (no doubt there are very specific terms for the demographic).
Honestly, I wasn't that curious to see Brokeback Mountain (despite all the mad press) until I saw Larry McMurtry's credits for the screenplay. I've been a fan of McMurtry's writing for years, and any effort I make to see the film will be motivated by the desire to study the work of a writer I much admire. I want to see how this consummate Cowboy Author tackles the summary which Kupelian gives us. I might even read Annie Proulx's short story, to study the evolution from short story to feature film, and try to perceive what McMurtry has brought to the process; primarily because I'm very familiar with the author, and it'll be a sort of textbook example I can relate to.
And I seriously doubt the opinion I currently hold of "Teh Gay Cowboy Movie AKA The Avatar of America's Moral Disintegration OMG," or whatever, will be the least bit altered as a result. I don't have the occasional cigarette because of all that ridiculous and irrelevant advertising, I do it because nicotine makes alcohol more fun. And I'm not going to join the army because their commercials kick ass; I'm going to steal all the eye-candy aspects of their television advertisements because they're aestheically neato, and try those effects in my own video editing projects.
Oh, crimeny. You've hit my *Blather On At Random* button again. Sorry. It's just so exasperating, when people write articles based on the assumption that I'm too stupid to tie my own shoes, and have to be told what and what not to think, lest The Bad Guys get ahold of my brain and take it hostage.
*sigh*
(Thanks for posting this, by the way. Seriously. Somehow, engaging in this discussion was just the right thing to help me unwind tonight.)
no subject
Date: 2005-12-29 05:06 pm (UTC)This response, and I do not want to be sarky, is absolutely typical. It is all about America, what this means to America and whether or not this movie is important in America, how the American military goes about recruiting its levies. Well, I could tell you about the British military and the Italian military, but, for obvious reasons, I have never seen an American military recruitment ad.
To me, the point with Brokeback Mountain is that it is the most aggressive attempt yet to normalize in the conscience of the whole West, indeed of much of the world, a whole set of assumptions about sex and relationships, of which homosexuality is only a part. It is a matter of genuine party politics, the more genuine for being transnational; all the real parties in modern history, from Metternich's reactionary version of Enlightenment politics to Communism, were transnational. Party politics at the national level, with the possible exception of the United States and of India, is more than dead, it is putrefied and resurrected into a zombie-like puppet life. Nobody can see any difference between Chirac and his opponents, between Blair and Cameron, between Prodi and Berlusconi, in terms of ideology; in Germany, the death of any meaning in the party system has been sanctioned by the Grand Coalition. But where great ideological forces face off across continents, angrily throwing the most debased insults and the most elaborately intellectual arguments at each other, then, by God, ideological struggle is alive and well.
This is not about America. It is not even about Catholicism, because many forces that will never be Catholic have aligned themselves with the Church upon realizing how much they have in common and how much they stand to lose. It is about politics in the highest sense, about a view of man in the world, man in society, and its opposite, and it has the most practical point imaginable - policies across the board will change, must change, according to whose view triumphs.
Finally, a small point. You say you are into something connected with corporate marketing. So was my father. And I have been a comic book writer-artist. I think I may say that I know as much as you do about what it takes to reach the public.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 02:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-29 07:39 pm (UTC)I mean, what would the author prefer, fast-forwarding to show them both dying of AIDS and going to hell like in a Chick tract?
no subject
Date: 2005-12-29 08:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-30 02:43 am (UTC)Perhaps all he's saying is that it doesn't follow that same-sex relationships are moral just because a semi-sympathetic film can be made about them. Well, that's trivial (would anyone disagree?), and I'm puzzled as to why he needed 2 688 words to say it. For most of the article, he just states his view that same-sex relationships are immoral, but he doesn't argue it.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-31 10:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-31 11:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-30 02:48 am (UTC)Oh my goodness
Date: 2005-12-29 08:23 pm (UTC)BaaaaaaaAH!
Re: Oh my goodness
Date: 2005-12-29 08:29 pm (UTC)(Even more inept joke about Sardinian shepherds.)
Re: Oh my goodness
Date: 2005-12-29 08:56 pm (UTC)I hate sardinians.
Especially on pizza.