Paul O'Donnell: November 2008 Archives

In "Milk," Gus Van Sant's new political bio-pic starring Sean Penn, there are frames within frames, some of them intended by the filmmaker, some the accidents of history.

There is Harvey Milk, played by Penn, talking into a tape deck at his kitchen table, narrating the story we're watching. Wrapped around that story are the real-world events that created Harvey Milk's place in history as a gay activist and martyr: archival footage of men being arrested in gay bars and loaded into paddy wagons, colorful news video of Milk's nemesis, the evangelical Christian and anti-gay campaigner Anita Bryant, as well as vintage street scenes from the Castro, San Francisco's first gay enclave and Milk's adopted home.

There is, finally, the election of 2008, with its elevation of an African-American president on the same day that Californians ratified Proposition 8, banning gay marriage in their state. "Milk" comes at a perfect time to remind us that we're all more free when some of us become more free.

When rock goes up against religion, why does it always start with heavy metal? The New York Times recently reported on an all-girl rock band in Saudi Arabia that has a hit with their song "Pinocchio," a wail about love gone wrong. They aren't Muslim rockers, per se, but in the Middle East's most conservative Islamic nation just using the words "girl," "rock," and "band," represents a pushback against the Saudi culture's stiffly enforced moral codes, based in Wahhabist Islam and enforced by government.

Like early Christian rockers Resurrection Band, the taboo-defying teens of The AccoLade and other bands mentioned in the Times piece rock hard. Wouldn't it be easier to start off with a little Muslim Amy Grant?

Actors in Goth costume pantomiming stories of cannibalism, rape, empassioned beheadings, wild scenes fueled by throbbing rock... Not another Biblical musical?

At Northwestern College, a Christian institution in Orange City, Iowa (and not to be confused with the Chicago-area university), drama students have remounted "Terror Texts," a musical performance of what Northwestern theater prof Jeff Barker calls "six of the most violent and mysterious stories in the Old Testament." In an AP story published last weekend, Barker calls the Bible "a repository of ancient plays" that, before they were set down on paper, were probably more often performed as poetry. Take a peek:

University of Maryland researchers have concluded that unhappy people watch more TV than happy people.

What do happy people do instead? Visit friends, have (a little bit) more sex--and go to church, of course.

Hollywood is a conspiracy, all right. Movies tell the same stories over and over again, Hollywood thinking that we won't notice if the movies show ogres or animals fall in love and live happily ever after, or that the planet has already been saved twice this year.

According to the Anti-Defamation League's national director, Abraham Foxman, a new poll shows that Americans are on to another devious Hollywood plot: almost half of us believe that Los Angeles is the center of "an organized campaign by Hollywood and the national media to weaken the influence of religious values in this country."

This is a pretty astonishing claim, amplified by further finding that 61% of the country thinks, organized or not, the media has put religious values "under attack." Why does Hollywood want to attack our religious values? Easy. Almost 60% of those polled last month by the Boston-based Marttila Communications Group said, "the people who run the TV networks and the major movie studios do not share the religious and moral values of most Americans."

What's most astonishing about these numbers is that even though movies and TV shows make producers money, more than half of the intended audience finds the movies distasteful or downright morally aggressive. As one conservative commentator ruefully put it last year, "The culture wars are over and capitalism won." In short, sex sells.