The Existential Comedy of Ben Shapiro's Awful Movie

so i typically talk about genre fiction which is usually pretty silly in one way or another even if its subject matter is really dark so normally this is about the point where i would start some ironically upbeat background music like to lighten the mood unfortunately we're talking about run height fight today and unlike the daily wire i have a conscience so this year we got an action movie about a school shooting yay it's just what everybody was asking for let's go through the whole thing together run hide fight is about a high school student named zoe hull who is experiencing alienation and separation from the world around her due to the recent death of her mother from cancer she goes hunting with her dad who is caring but doesn't really seem to know how to address her struggles on her way to school one day she sees her weird classmate doing something suspicious in a field and at lunch while she's in the bathroom a van crashes into the cafeteria and a team of four school shooters led by just an unbearable kid named tristan announced they're here to you know shoot up the school zoe's best friend lewis gets roped into live streaming the event on facebook and the incompetent school administration gets gunned down in pretty short order the police aren't there because they're dealing with a fire from the explosive device zoe saw that kid setting in the field which for some reason requires the wrapped attention of every authority figure in town so it's up to zoe to save everyone from their own sheepish reliance on law enforcement i don't feel like it's strictly necessary to cover every single bit of badassery that zoe does in this movie suffice it to say that there's a perfectly adequate rise in action where zoe just foils tristan's plans again and again but i would be remiss as a tour guide if i didn't point out some landmarks on this journey zoe encounters a few mini bosses along the way one is this girl who is clearly evil which you can tell from her alternative fashion choices go [ __ ] yourself one is her brother who's crazy nutso and who almost kills zoey until zoe's dad makes an impossible shot through an almost certainly bulletproof window then there's kip who zoe eventually manages to talk into switching sides throughout all this zoe is visited by the imaginary ghost of her mother who becomes gradually less cancery as the movie goes on it's a little heavy-handed but kind of a cool symbol kip in atonement for his crimes helps zoe distract tristan long enough for her to escape with lewis who she admits her feelings to and who lets her know that the van is full of explosives she returns to the cafeteria gets in the van and sends it out the hole in the wall where it explodes after the sheriff gives her a man-to-man handshake who should zoe see disappearing into the woods but tristan she grabs a gun follows him and shoots him leaving him to bleed out alone in the woods roll credits the movie was written and directed by kyle rankin and produced by dallas sagne through his independent production studio cinestate and was shopped around and soundly rejected before it was picked up by the daily wire and released january 14th 2021 happy birthday to me so i have a lot of thoughts about this movie but before i go into them i feel like some context is in order it seems relevant to say that this movie isn't just a one-off project prior to the release of run hide fight ben shapiro announced that the daily wire was going to start producing entertainment and the movie business fits in well with the company's motives because well i'll let him explain it the fact of the matter is that the culture is dominated by the left all the cultural institutions and it's not just that hollywood is dominated by the left that their content caters almost solely to the left if you check out the gap on rotten tomatoes between what the critics think and what the audience thinks it's often quite wide and usually where the movies are most political hollywood made atomic blonde which was an attempt to respond to james bond by basically just making james bond a woman very often the critics are just judging movies almost solely based on politics there's a reason millions of people believe lies about america there's a reason that people look at you if you don't like these movies as though you're a bad person they've been trained to do so by a culture that despises conservatives you can see it in nearly every film you can see it in virtually all tv it is it is a blanket statement about you hollywood is they won't cater to you and we need people who aren't political to engage with different sorts of content rather than disengaging entirely we need to give people a different option and so here's what daily wire is planning daily wire will in 2021 be jumping into the world of entertainment content we're going to start by putting our stamp on tv and movies we'll make edgy and entertaining films that aren't trying to brainwash you every step of the way our content may offend some of the people in our audience we can't win the culture war if we're not competing for the people we are attempting to reach it's not going to help to make a conservative more conservative we need to make moderates more conservative we need to take liberals and we need to allow them to see a conservative point of view my mentor andrew breitbart used to say the culture is upstream of politics if we never engage in the culture war how do we expect to win the political wars we are getting involved we want you to be involved too so we could say that run hide fight is a gross and extremely misguided movie which it is but that wouldn't really be telling the whole story would it because this isn't just a movie it's a means to an end this school shooting movie was produced by a conservative creative team and distributed by a conservative media outlet for the purpose of providing entertainment that is specifically branded as conservative for conservatives and if you know anything about conservative movies then you might see the challenge the daily wire is giving itself here because stories made specifically to appeal to conservatives tend to be man how do i put this most of the ones that are overtly political seem to suck pretty wildly exactly thank you so what do you do if you want a movie with conservative creds that isn't stuffy trickly nonsense well you go to dallas sonja dallas sagne is a producer who in the early 2010s executive produced on a healthy number of forgettable thrillers and dramas before he finally saw success in his own right producing bone tomahawk which i have to say just as an aside is a damn good movie like really good if you like horror and you like westerns you must watch bone tomahawk it's as simple as that and that's not just my opinion bone tomahawk has a 91 critics rating on rotten tomatoes quite a bit higher than its audience rating of 74 percent like dal sagne kind of owes his production company to the specifically underground success of that movie and the ones that followed which in my opinion get progressively meaner and more political as they go but dag gum if that man can't get a tomato meter score lower than 70 percent dao sanye is a person who is very knowledgeable about how the film industry works certainly knowledgeable enough to understand that a lot of his success is due to movie critics making an effort to point out good art that occurs outside the studio system so when he says something like this if you go independent you come out and you wave the flag and show yourself they're going to come after you in a way that most people cannot handle right uh it's the attacks are so brutal and they're so often and they're so constant keep in mind when i am with my family on the weekend or when i'm in the office building my company my enemies are on twitter attacking me 24 7. you'll have to forgive me if i don't entirely believe him because i distinctly remember him making a good movie that pleased critics and audiences and getting a lot of money and acclaim for it allowing him to make more movies would that the whole industry were that meritocratic dao sonya is a little like tarantino in that he fancies himself a sort of reincarnation of the kind of filmmaker that existed through the 70s and 80s his goal is to make movies from an era when filmmaking was less about corporate synergy and more about making stuff you think is cool and i think that's mostly good it's good that there's money going into independent productions that otherwise wouldn't really have a home anywhere and i think a good action movie depends a lot on writers and directors and producers who take action movies seriously like he does he clearly has a good grasp of what works in a dark masculine action movie which to me makes his apparent bafflement that run hide fight didn't do that well very interesting i i've made 30 plus movies i know what a good movie is run hide fight is a great movie it is great i know it i know it i know it and so when i went to venice i never understood that the critics were going to attack the movie based on a perception of politics and a subject matter issue keep that in mind while we talk about some details this is a weird movie man it's not bad exactly it's just weird maybe the best way i can describe it is that it's unlike any movie i've ever seen before but in a way that feels very conformist if that makes sense the daily wire made a point to underscore that this is a very serious movie in a few promotional videos featuring interviews with the active shooter safety consultant on set called is run hide fight realistic of course implying that it is and there are certain aspects about this movie that i genuinely think are compellingly realistic a lot of the violence is appropriately ugly and hard to watch and the movie as a whole has a sort of grim overcast aesthetic that matches zoe's attitude toward the world the color palette is muted the camera work is minimalist all indications are that this is going to be a capital s serious movie but that subtlety is constantly counteracted by writing decisions that rely on monumental stupidity to place zoe in a position to save the day this lunch hour where the shooters arrive and hold everyone hostage feels like it lasts years and no one comes in to check and see what's going on until they're told to and even if the cafeteria weren't apparently in some kind of temporally frozen alternate dimension the noise they're making is so outrageous that when tristan calls the front office to let them know there's a school shooting and the receptionist doesn't believe him it's unintentionally funny and then somehow even weirder for a very serious conservative film everything about how guns work is movie physics zoe shields herself with a locker door her dad makes an impossible shot through a window zoey gets shot in the leg and then sprints around like all she did was stub a toe and also you know i grew up in a relatively rural area and i've never heard of a situation where a town's entire law enforcement apparatus was brought to its knees by a barn fire oh i'm sorry a barn fire and a modest brush fire and just to be clear as far as storytelling goes all of this is silly but fine there's nothing inherently wrong with unrealistic action the point is not to say that lack of realism makes run hide fight a bad movie the point is to ask which inconsistencies this movie decides to ignore and how those inconsistencies help this movie tell a fundamentally conservative story such that the daily wire would want to own the rights to it so let's take a sort of macro view of what's going on here what is this movie about well literally run hide fight is a movie about a teenage girl who runs from then hides from then fights a school shooter but this isn't a documentary it's not real fiction is an artifact someone made this fake story to impart a message upon you that's true for every story ever told even if the message is just something like wasting time at your shitty job is fun and good the narrative structure we expect from modern storytelling involves a conflict and a resolution that satisfies that conflict the method by which we get to the resolution is the message of the movie and conversely because that's what we've culturally come to expect subverting the expectation of satisfaction is a message too this is what people mean when they say all art is political all art is a manufactured image of the world shaped by the perspective of the person telling it and politics in the micro person-to-person sense is basically the art of convincing another person to take your perspective seriously that can't have something to do with who you decide to vote for but just as often is about trying to form a community around something you personally think is cool to see like a semi-autobiographical portrait of slackers who work at a convenience store the politics inherent in the creation of that community depends on how seriously the story is able to make you take its point of view for example the way you process the phrase wasting time at your shitty job is fun and good depends on a particular understanding of every grammatical term in that phrase and whether the story was able to impose its understanding of those terms onto you if you're understanding a movie like clerks within its sociological context that phrase could easily be extended to something like what capitalism defines as wasting time is actually what comprises most of the exciting momentous and meaningful aspects of our lives to be good at a shitty job namely a job where you are at most a bit part in someone else's day noticeable only if you cause that person an inconvenience means that much of what we define as a work life is at odds with and disrespectful of the full and complicated lived experience of every human being choosing not to participate in that to waste time is fun and good what are either one of these any good i don't watch movies well have you heard anything about either one of them i find it's best to stay at other people's affairs movies are and always have been political because politics materially shapes our experience of the world and of each other you can't treat the two as separate entities because they are mutually constituting a chicken and an egg so engaging with run hide fight on its own terms means we should still ask what the message of this movie is which i think if we're taking it at face value is essentially a retelling of what can best be described as a sort of warrior ethos this idea that meeting the challenge of violence is not only the moral thing to do but is maybe even more importantly good for you that a battle honorably fought is a reflection of your inherent goodness and regenerative to the core of your personhood it realigns you like a chiropractor and if you make yourself watch all the promotional videos for this movie like i did you'll notice that this is the lesson everyone refers to the boys of the daily wire talk about it a lot in their premiere video which honestly is kind of worth an analysis all on its own they've dressed up the daily wire set to look like a theater lobby and everyone's wearing adorable matching tuxedos jeremy boring keeps calling movies pictures and everyone's surrounded by scotch no one drinks and popcorn no one eats and cigars no one smokes except andrew clavin who takes the first opportunity to tell a sexist joke he clearly rehearsed i you know i remember making speeches about this at conservative gatherings and getting this look i used to describe it to my wife as the look she gives me when i explained to her that when you buy something on sale it still costs money a lot that says you know i always liked you and you're very cute i have no idea what you're talking about it's just so obvious that they're all cosplaying as how they think movie people should be which is to say company men from the end of the big studio era back when men were men and women were all on tranquilizers and they talk about how hollywood has been taken over by the radical left and how this movie is such a great groundbreaking ceremony for fighting back but they make sure to tell you the one thing this movie isn't it's obviously not conservative propaganda audience not propaganda yeah there's no propaganda in the movie okay let's talk about propaganda in public discourse propaganda is very much treated as an i know it when i see it thing the obvious problem with that is that not everything you see is exactly how it superficially looks to you a productive conversation depends on shared understandings it's not enough to just say that this is a fish and this is not you need to explain why so before we continue we need to come up with a definition for propaganda which is easier said than done propaganda as we know it today didn't really exist until give or take the first world war and most of our best research about it is from that era and the cold war scholarship about how it works today is severely lacking in no small part due to the idea propagated largely by the american government that propaganda campaigns are mutually exclusive with democratic societies that real propaganda is always issued by an authoritarian state as a matter of explicit public control through lies that is increasingly not true so my favorite definition of propaganda is a more recent one by professor randall marlin and yes this man is what passes for new and cutting edge in academia the organized attempt through communication to affect belief or action or inculcate attitudes in a large audience in ways that circumvent or suppress an individual's adequately informed rational reflective judgment propaganda under this definition basically requires two main rhetorical features a preconceived ideology the propagandist is trying to encourage and an appeal to emotion over reason so the main identifying quality of propaganda isn't that it's always a lie it's that if you're the target audience it is always satisfying to hear not satisfying in your perceived state of the world necessarily you can still be outraged or upset but satisfying to the backbone of your identity propaganda makes you feel smart and good and ultimately happy to be part of the team that knows better when ben shapiro says that the daily wire is going to start making entertainment because politics is downstream of culture what he's talking about is propaganda ben shapiro understands better than most media figures that the way you get someone to attach themselves to a political cause is by making it personal a matter of identity it's important for example to take your kid to church so that when they grow up and encounter criticisms of church they're more likely to feel like a formative part of their childhood is being attacked instead of an arbitrary social structure that might cause some societal ill why one could say that it's the calculated breeding of facts that care about your feelings a successful propaganda campaign becomes ingrained in culture such a matter of course that you never recognize it as anything other than the default state of the world american conservatives are largely people who think that the myth of the inherently competent and good american as illustrated by the western a genre in large part developed for the express cause of propaganda and its descendant the action movie isn't just a good story but plain simple fact it's the assumption behind arguments like the ones that defend unregulated capitalism government-endorsed religion and yes the idea of a good guy with a gun it's the reason that even though the conservative pedigree of this movie is not only common knowledge but central to its marketing strategy i'm still gonna get a certain kind of comment on this video oh you cuck libs why do you have to make everything political why can't it just be a movie i'm sorry this is the daily [ __ ] wire ben shapiro would shred his own yarmulke before he lets anyone forget that this is about politics but i suppose that's no match for the brain power of you rational free thinkers you think i want everything to be about political propaganda you think i want to sit here and talk about kyle rank and school shooting fan fiction but that's the big benefit of any kind of propaganda that appeals to heritage right when it works it's because you've convinced people that if they just stay the course and do things the way you imagine the ancestors did they will be safe and fine and important under that understanding stories that align with politics you're familiar with aren't actually political at all that's just normal it's the stuff that questions that normalcy that's political the more we can push politics out that would be better for the movies but it's not possible it's not possible they won't let it happen and this is where we get to the illusion that run hide fight is trying to spin for you as a story about the warrior ethos it hits every beat perfectly up to and including the ending zoe has to kill tristan at the end because he doesn't deserve to live anymore she is removing him as a cancer on society as the lawmen of old due to the outlaw and in my opinion because this is fiction because it's a certain kind of story the ending works despite how callous clumsy and unrealistic it is it's an ending that satisfies the formula but to paraphrase richard powers and his novel the over story a big part of being human is constantly mistaking a satisfying story for a meaningful one and everything about this movie outside its narrative formula is meaningless now at the risk of expressing an unpopular opinion i don't have that much of an issue with tristan as a character at least i don't have a problem with him as an archetype yes he is way too cool and yes his monologues are annoying and unintelligible and he is written very badly but as a plot function i think he works fine i think if you choose to read this movie through the cultural effect columbine had on society tristan is an acceptable analog for eric harris who was also a charismatic reasonably popular and completely motiveless psychopath he was not bullied that's a myth there are people who want nothing more than to be notorious for hurting other people and sometimes they commit mass shootings kip then works as an okay approximation of dylan klebold who probably would have been okay with a good influence therapy and avoiding making friends with psychopaths the other two aren't worth talking about they're literally just there to be mini bosses but the capacity for humans to do evil things is so wide that it's honestly kind of hard to point at a fictional act of evil and genuinely claim that it would never happen so the villains aren't really the problem here it's something about zoe i remember thinking about this movie after i watched it and trying to pinpoint exactly what it was about zoe that felt so off to me and i thought about it and thought about it and then finally realized it's that she's not written like a teenage girl she's written like an adult she's written like a jaded x assassin forced to come back for one last job like for example this moment when she has escaped the school but stops and decides to turn around and go back in that's supposed to be a big character moment right it's the moment when she decides that the moral imperative of the moment has outweighed her personal principles and she starts to change but what exactly are those principles she was pretty sociable in the beginning of the movie like she has friends she's a little snippy and definitely needs therapy but she still spends time with her dad and her friends she isn't doing anything immediately self-destructive like drugs or drinking basically she just seems sad about her mom this moment only works as written if we the audience already understands zoe as being an asset to this situation the way you would if she were say an adult ex-marine who's sworn off violence but whose skills are needed in that moment or some other action character trope zoe is a high school student her reasonable actions start and stop as soon as she warns her classmates to stay out of the building even if i were prepared to accept that a teenage girl would realistically say things like if i personally hope you rotten here i'd still wonder what exactly we're meant to think of her in the end this teenager who's so disturbed that she shoots a guy and lets him bleed out without so much as a flinch i mean it's a disturbed person who's able to do that right normal people aren't naturally adept at murder no matter the justification and if you're in a situation where you must kill the act of killing will probably not help your ability to be a productive member of civilization it messes with your head the reason it's a cultural standard for military personnel to be thanked for their service whether personally or societally like with benefits is because killing people is extremely difficult and again to fulfill the warrior ethos formula tristan should die and it narratively should be zoe that kills him but it works differently on paper than it does on screen where essentially what we're watching is a child murdering another child in a way that is meant to be emotionally satisfying but where that emotional satisfaction can't help but be complicated by the real-life examples of school shootings that all of us have to carry around in our heads which this movie goes out of its way to remind you of and bum you out about the problem with the warrior ethos formula isn't so much that it's bad it's a perfectly fine way to approach the human condition some of the first stories in recorded history follow this formula and it can produce interesting meaningful narratives the problem is that certain stories are friendlier to particular ideologies so it matters if mainstream american pop culture has exactly one story to tell about what violence means i think it's telling that zoe kills tristan in cold blood and with a badass monologue when it would have been just as good a warrior ethos narrative but a more interesting story if she had been conflicted about it if the act of killing meant something different to her than it does to tristan zoe as written seems like she's processing her grief pretty naturally but the movie obviously disagrees with me and thinks she should just get over it so for the sake of the argument let's look at the movie on its own terms on its own terms the scaffolding of run hide fight lends itself pretty well to a story about the complications of death how we define the difference between a good value of life and a twisted value of life which zoe kind of has because her grief we are told stunted her ability to engage with the world you're cutting yourself off from everything you care about multiple characters comment on how she behaves as though she's at war she even eats her cereal with aggression the world took away her mother and now she's never going to allow herself another moment of vulnerability ever again this theme the eternal question of what constitutes a healthy attitude toward death is the obvious one to go with in this movie it's the subject of thomas jane's monologue about the deer well it's tempting to let nature run its course lungs will fill with blood the animal die naturally but that process comes extreme pain it's the only non-political reason behind all the adult incompetence no one believes the shooting is happening because no one believes anyone they know would be capable of mass slaughter it's even the subject of the song that plays over the credits a very good cover of barry mcguire's vietnam protest song eve of destruction the irony of which is i guess completely lost on this creative team in a normal movie all of that would exist to outline the lesson zoe needs to learn that human relationships are worth it even though all of those relationships will eventually end the recognition that life has intrinsic value is one of the things that keeps us from turning into monsters tristan and company are examples of people who for one reason or another think life has no value at all and the movie goes to some length to draw parallels between their damage and zoe's you hear voices too maybe this is a common and good storytelling tactic the innocent people zoe has to save are physical manifestations of the actual stakes of the movie zoe's humanity if zoe doesn't demonstrably change her attitude toward life then this movie has no point unless we're supposed to think of her kicking lockers and marching from room to room in a cloud of fury as aspirational but she doesn't she was right the world is at war and she successfully recognized that and prepared for it in a way that actively cut her off from the world and hurt the people who loved her but which actually saved the day in the end all right i was at war thank christ for that yay and you can see kyle rankin mimicking the shape of a character arc that's why zoey's mother's ghost gets physically healthier that's why she admits her feelings to lewis at the end but that's just set dressing nothing about her behavior substantively changes she still shoots tristan with the same chilly efficiency as she shoots the deer in the opening scene it's worse than political it's boring what's weird is that hardly anything about the movie would have had to change for this character art to make sense the absence of even a throwaway close-up showing that even after everything that's happened even though she has a clear shot it's hard for zoe to murder someone feels so stark that i would be convinced it was a studio mandate if dallas sonja hadn't built his entire business on avoiding studio mandates why did they do this well it's because modern conservatives just genuinely think life is an action movie in a typical action movie where the protagonist is generally someone who has already had a violent past this kind of thing is okay because you're given information that allows you to believe that this person is used to the physical mental and emotional stress of killing someone brutally on purpose that usually isn't realistic either but at least there's not a horrifying slew of documented real-life situations to compare to people like say john wick the lack of realism in action movies is excusable because the movie is giving you space to consume them as a fantasy it's supposed to be fun but that's not really an option here it's impossible to watch this movie and not be reminded of a lot of bad news that you've personally heard of maybe bad news that happened in places you've been to or even that happened to you personally or someone you love and that's on purpose it's a movie that wants to be important that thinks of itself as art you really took kind of an unflinching look at the evil that you're seeing yeah yeah and i feel like thomas jane gives a great performance in this this tragedy has almost given him the opportunity to to be probably the father he always should be you know and out of that out of that pain he's emerged as something more complete i mean the thing i think the themes uh in the movie are big human themes they're and to my mind they're above politics or as you guys might say they are upstream maybe of politics but i wanted to write something about bravery and selflessness and self-reliance and putting others ahead of yourself run hide fight has the structure of a fantasy but it's asking you to think of it as realistic and never reconciles those two opposing qualities it's not a huge logical jump here zoe kills tristan in cold blood because kyle rankin and everyone who enabled him are mistaking what is cool for what is real their ideology has led them to a point where they're able to regard a school shooting as just a compelling piece of lore a backdrop for the heroes we all like to come out of action movies thinking we could be but this is the first movie i've ever seen that just straight up says an action hero is what we in the real world should be isn't it ironic after all your goddamn hard work people aren't gonna remember you no no you're gonna remember me that's a kick-ass line it's an elegant trailer-ready moment that quickly sums up the thesis of the movie but clearly there's a certain way conservatives would like shooting victims to be remembered right i remember the parkland shooting survivors much more than i remember the parkland shooter they tried are still trying to draw attention to the issue and insist that something can be done about it outside thoughts and prayers in the real world speaking out is what draws attention away from the shooter and to the survivors and these are the very actions that ben shapiro and his ilk ridiculed discredited discouraged and generally did everything in their power to stop because it complicated messages that their propaganda depends on the illusion of clarity and simplicity to spread they're more interested in stories like the girl who said yes the girl who said yes is a legend about a columbine victim who was shot by dylan klebold after he stuck a gun in her face and asked her if she believed in god it's a story that not only didn't happen but which involves a child who can't speak for herself because she's dead and which became harnessed for christian propaganda campaigns across the country i had to sit through an assembly about the girl who said yes in my public middle school listen to how she had prophetic dreams about dying young how columbine was a test of faith it's a story that essentially retrofits reality to make cassie bernal into an honorably fallen warrior of god instead of what she is a murdered child ben shapiro's go-to line when the parkland survivors were speaking out was that going through a tragedy does not confer expertise of course it does going through a school shooting confers the most reliable expertise possible about what it's like to go through a school shooting and if ben shapiro's response as i imagine it would be is everyone knows school shootings are bad then i would have to ask whether he actually thinks that's true because i just watched a movie he distributed that basically says school shootings are a character building opportunity i'm not sure personally whether the specific political activism of the parkland survivors is entirely effective or well advised but within the context of how the daily wire is choosing to address gun violence namely through entertainment that's less important to me than the fact that the parkland survivor's expertise of what gun violence looks like and the ruin it leaves behind is something american pop culture has been sugar coating for decades with the comforting lie that gun violence can somehow mean personal growth for you so yes this movie is bad but it's an interesting kind of bad the way he talks about it i get the feeling that dallas sonja believes that movies made for conservatives are bad because of their productions that because hollywood hates conservatives no one gives them enough money to hire good talent and the piece itself suffers as a result i have a different hypothesis and it's twofold first i think conservative movies tend to be bad because conservatism as an ideology is in direct conflict with the purpose of art by definition conservative ideology is a set of ethics that actively rejects complication and taboo in favor of the traditional conservatism at its core is about preserving the institutions we have because it takes for granted that those institutions if respected will keep us all safe and happy it's not interested in questioning the state of society unless that state is a representation of moral rot an idea which itself has a spiritually conservative root god allows the wicked to do their wickedness oh yeah why's that so they can be judged this is a group of men who are at this point a few generations deep into the national myth of a good red-blooded american competence that was defined by narrative propaganda starting almost a century ago when westerns and war movies were first being made they grew up with it they never questioned it and now they're replicating it again because of conservatives worst moral quality which is that it allows you requires you to do the same [ __ ] over and over again regardless of the damage it does or in this case regardless of how goofy and impotent a warrior ethos is in a school shooting i stayed the same the world went left right i stayed here and so i'm simply making the movies that i grew up loving and continue to love as an audience member the other reason conservative media sucks is that hollywood as an institution is already pretty conservative yes many actors are outspoken about certain lefty issues but the visibility of actors overstates their influence on film as an industry which as a whole sits squarely to the right of any kind of actual leftism hollywood as a whole is a capitalist enterprise that is deeply pragmatic about the project it chooses to invest in in no small part as a reaction to a long history of leashing based on conservative societal standards the haze code the mccarthy trials the mpaa rating system explicit government intrusions on what movies are and are not allowed to say the likes of which hollywood as an industry would like to avoid in the future for reasons both noble and cynical to its credit and discredit hollywood makes movies that cater to what its very shrewd marketing teams recognize as popular demand the way hollywood is writing film right now is trying to appeal to a growing amount of people who would like pop culture to de-center a white male perspective and sometimes those attempts are clumsy and condescending and pandering and bad but the reason they're bad is the same reason hollywood is doing this in the first place which is to make money the demographics of moviegoers haven't changed exactly but they have become more apparent non-cis hetero identities are becoming more and more visible and more and more accepted and non-white people are likewise becoming more educated across all ethnicities and again more visible due largely to the rise of the internet and social media so amidst all this social change in a more diverse young adult viewership continuing to only make movies that privilege a white straight male perspective is a very bad investment also the fact that we're still in a phase of social change where all these experiences are still new to the screen means there's a swiftly narrowing but still very present window where studios perceive an opportunity to appear forward thinking and aware of their audience's wants and experiences if they're able to take advantage of that opportunity it might generate a lot of brand loyalty which is more important to marketing than maybe anything else the reason hollywood wokeness so often ends up being bad is because making art with the primary intention of making money means you're less interested in whether the story you're telling is true in form and spirit and more interested in how broad and therefore tame and therefore shallow you can make its appeal who's ready for disney's 12th first on-screen gay moment see what i'm saying here it's not that hollywood hates conservative values it's that hollywood couldn't give less of a fruit flies patootie about any values but because the history of american culture is in some ways a story of right-wing propaganda a lot of the past successes it tries to replicate are still died in the wool conservative i just saw a movie starring one of the most talented actors of our time about a middle-aged white guy who picks a fight with a foreign mob and then blows up his own house to prove he can protect his family because people were disappointed in him for not bashing a burglar's head in liberal hollywood strikes again and i think that particular prescriptive blindness of far-right ideology to you know reality is the source of the constant contradictions and how these guys talk about this movie run hide fight isn't political but it's from a conservative perspective it's made by brave hollywood outsiders but you know it's high quality because it's made by hollywood professionals it's just entertainment don't take it so seriously but it's very important and you should take it very seriously i don't think it's a mistake that the people who tend to push back against the phrase all art is political tend to be on the conservative side of things because the denial of politics in everyday life in the face of all opposing evidence is necessary in order to believe that all our societal institutions are perfect the way they are but the nature of most art is conflict art is an exploration of the parts of life that aren't addressed by societal institutions most artists understand that but not understanding that doesn't liberate you from that rule making a movie means you can't help but leave a lot of yourself on the table as a result and what i see in all the daily wires doublespeak here is a desperate attempt to avoid the vulnerability making art requires of you and justify what this movie is on its face which is a clumsy gross and tasteless attempt to deny the fact that there is no satisfying story in a school shooting they're not exciting they're not meaningful they're not a source of growth of character of redemption or even very much interest they're just sad up until now ben shapiro and the daily wire have been building the fire for which they then point out the smoke they tell their audience what to think about hollywood and correctly assume they'll believe it because the audience of the daily wire doesn't really seem to like movies very much anyway but now they have a problem the daily wires narrative about hollywood is that it is expressly partisan a cabal of political operatives running a giant psyop that no one actually wants diversity in their movies it's just there to appease the woke the unofficial tagline of the daily wires entertainment project is that they're going to compete with leftist hollywood by making movies that you want to see not that you think you should see but i don't think they really thought through what it means to make a movie people want to see ben shapiro accused atomic blonde of pandering to identity politics by making a lady james bond and then turned around and produced a movie that could fairly be described as die hard but bruce willis is a teenage girl with a cool black hipster love interest they are creating their own counterpoint this movie is a tacit admission that the kinds of characters and subjects the moviegoing public wants to see in film is changing while simultaneously stunningly taking a big red marker and underscoring the fundamental conservatism that's so completely baked into american pop culture that when these tight asses announced they were bravely rebelliously making movies to counter radical leftist hollywood their triumphant first example turned out to just be a normal hollywood action piece just like every other bruce willis or vin diesel vehicle except it tastes a little off like someone left it out of the fridge too long and accidentally melted the character arc never did they stop to think that hollywood might have rejected this movie not because they're terrified of conservative values but because maybe people aren't super interested in seeing an action fantasy about a school shooting and you know it's weird up until this point i kind of thought the daily wire was really just full of [ __ ] right like i know you can't say the things that ben shapiro says and not sincerely hold at least some of those beliefs but i kind of thought that the money and the power was mostly the point and that they would just say whatever they needed to say to keep it but this movie this movie represents a massive amount of money and work and coordination and it is if nothing else a representation of the daily wire and dallas sagne and kyle rankin's complete earnestness they believe that life is an action movie so hard that they don't understand why suggesting that any teenager with a casual hunter's familiarity with guns should be able to save the day is an extremely embarrassing position to take i mean i'm kind of looking forward to what they make next it might be the worst decision they ever made as a company unless no it's too genius people we need to face the facts and admit that ben shapiro is part of the radical left media machine he hates you and he hates your values and who wants them to die a slow death by ridicule making movies that pander to radical leftists and their sixth sense of cosmic humor the daily wire has been compromised conservatives the culture war is lost we'll never stop seeing female protagonists in our mediocre action movies avert your eyes don't watch anything but pure flicks nowhere else is safe anymore so you

Channel: The Morbid Zoo

Views: 486,821

Keywords: daily wire, ben shapiro, run hide fight, school shooting, parkland shooting, daily wire movie, Ben Shapiro, The Daily Wire, Dallas Sonnier, Kyle Rankin, conservative cringe, run hide fihgt, ben shapiro movie, daily wire movie trailer, daily wire run hide fight, daily wire backstage, daily wire cringe, school shooting movie, movie analysis, film analysis, movie review, run hied fight, run hied figt, run hide figt, run hied fihgt, run hide fight review

Id: KAeYtzcUGEU

Length: 46min 55sec (2815 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021