Tim Robbin’s Embedded
Libertas — David Ross @ 11:36 am
Thirty-seven minutes and fifty seconds. That was all I could take. The final straw was the scene in which the members of the Bush war cabinet vigorously masturbate as they conduct a candlelit black mass in homage to Leo Strauss. I pulled the plug as the Paul Wolfowitz character cried out, “I’m hard! I’m rock hard!”
The underlying difference between modern conservatism and liberalism is that the former is a movement of books and ideas while the latter is a movement emotions. The texts of modern conservatism are argued works of philosophy and economics (Edmund Burke, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and, yes, Leo Strauss) while liberalism is without texts or ideas or even the impulse to engage in rational discussion. These days it has only fits of self-righteousness, tantrums of frustrated superiority. Embedded – an agitprop stage play written and directed by Robbins – is typical: an exercise in moronic, thoroughly juvenile ridicule at a time when it’s incumbent on all of us to reflect soberly and seriously.
I noted recently the dehumanizing tendency of Tony Kushner’s rhetoric; there is an analogous tendency in Embedded. Bush and his cabinet officers wear grotesque masks: they are denied human faces, rendered literally monstrous. The left makes a disturbing practice of this kind of dehumanization, the crucial mechanism of the pogram and the lynching, as here:
And from the pages of The Village Voice:
I will bother to grind one more ax. Robbins inevitably makes the point that our soldiers – apparently all of them – are the victims of economic coercion; in one instance he offers the example of a single-mother who had no choice but to join the military after her welfare benefits were revoked (courtesy of Bill Clinton, one presumes, but that’s another story). Jason, Govindini and myself are graduates of Yale University. It takes at least two hands to count our college friends who have served or currently serve in the military. These people are exceedingly smart, exceedingly talented, and exceedingly dedicated, and they chose their path freely and proudly. Tim Robbins insults them – spits on their uniforms – by suggesting otherwise. Let the soldiers speak for themselves; they don’t need Hollywood activists putting words in their mouths."
libertyfilmfestival.com |
