I wasn’t going to see “Straw Dogs” anyway but now there’s no way I’m going to see it.
Here’s the funny thing. The director Rod Lurie said the following quote as a way to ameliorate concerns that he was putting down red state folks. Yup. He actually thought this statement would help. You’ve gotta’ read this.
I certainly never intended for the film to send any political message about a conservative-liberal issue, and I do not see this film as a red state/blue state film at all. The reason why I set it in the South is because to me, it was a way of creating the best fish-out-of-water situation that I could find for my lead character. I wanted to find two extremes in lifestyles, and it seemed to me that taking somebody from an intellectual world and planting him into a world that is almost purely physical made sense. Now, some of the greatest thinkers and writers of our time have come out of the South. However, this is a community where everything about it is geared towards violence: football, hunting, preachers talking about a God that will smite you from the earth if you behave badly. It’s the principal difference, I think, between the two films in my opinion. Peckinpah was making a movie about a man, and men in general, who are biologically-inclined to violence. My movie seems to be stating that violence is conditioned from how you grow up and where you live.
Gasp! They like football?! Because we all know that Northerners don’t like football, right?
And what’s this about preachers talking about God smiting people from the earth? What? I’ve been going to Church my whole life and there’s not a lot of talk of smiting.
Well guess what, Mr. Lurie, those savage beasts from the South and those idiotic smite-fearing Christians aren’t going to reach their dirty paws into the pockets and shell out the money to see your idiotic remake of a movie.
This is how Hollywood sees the South and Christians. We’re animals with money.
September 18, 2011 at 3:37 pm
*snerk* I wish I could stick this guy with my dad for a week….
Rancher, as far from "intellectual" as you can get, conservative, Army vet, scary smart and his favorite class in college was "music appreciation." Not because it was easy, but because you went in and listened to different classical music for an hour a week.
Bets on if the bigot's head would explode on finding out that someone can love bull riding, mixed martial arts and Gilbert & Sullivan operas?
September 18, 2011 at 3:44 pm
And what's this about preachers talking about God smiting people from the earth? What? I've been going to Church my whole life and there's not a lot of talk of smiting.
To be fair, we are Catholic, and "traditionally" southern Baptist is quite different from Catholic.
That said, in reality, when I was down south the Baptists were sweethearts– even though, as a Catholic, they considered me about as Christian as the Buddhists. ;^p
Like to know how much time he spends organizing rotas so that kids spending their first holiday away from home ever have someplace to go, something besides galley food on base to look forward to, let alone the smaller things like offering a place that wasn't on base or at the colleges to hang out. Then again, it's so much more intellectual to stereotype than to actually research, or– random fluctuations of chance forbid!– act like those who you disagree with are fully human.
September 18, 2011 at 4:04 pm
i saw the movie and enjoyed it very much. didn't see any of that political type red/blue bias. i was watching a story unfold, and good retelling of it too.
if i took anything political away from it, it would be against the supposed 'blue' side. although a political opinion was never formally offered cept for the lead dude claiming to eschew personal violence as a matter of principle. the movie did show the idiocy of that ideal in the end.
September 18, 2011 at 5:52 pm
"…this is a community where everything about it is geared towards violence: football, hunting, preachers talking about a God that will smite you from the earth if you behave badly." Sounds like Chicago to me …. Bears, Rev J Wright and street gangs …
September 18, 2011 at 8:15 pm
"preachers talking about God smiting people from the earth"
Was that talking about Johnathan Edward's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"?
Probably not, because Connecticut is part of the liberal elite North; not the backwards violent South.
September 19, 2011 at 3:57 am
Was a Southern Baptist for most of my life. Can't remember EVER hearing a sermon about "smiting".
September 19, 2011 at 9:57 pm
"Because we all know that Northerners don't like football, right?"
No, they just can't play football.
September 20, 2011 at 4:49 pm
Easy there, Robert. You don't want any of that "smiting" happening to your team this season…LOL
September 20, 2011 at 6:08 pm
Matthew: And from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.
Mr Lurie woud not do well in the traditional South. On two different occasions, Jesus made a whip and drove the money-changers out of the Temple, and in the God-haunted (as the great Southern lady, the Milledgeville wonder, Flannery O'Connor, called it) South, they don't cotton to smart-alecs dumping on tradition.
Now, just because the Pac-Ten (or is it Pac Ten 12 today?) and, especially, USC and UCLA football teams can no longer compete with the SEC (Southern Evangelical Christian?) Conference is no reason for a Hollywood elite person to ignore the violence his area of the country generates.
Now, which part of the country is it that celebrates and promotes sexual perversion, especially homosexual sex?
It aint The SEC. It is Hollywood.
And, I tell ya, there is nothing like, say, a West Gainesville, Florida like there is a West Hollywood, California and the scourge of AIDS was originally called GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency Disease) and it began in the Homosexual Bath Houses in San Francisco, not in a stadium in Athens, Georgia.
And what is the leading cause of death in the USA?
Abortion.
It ain't the SEC or the Local Hunter and his Blue Tick Hound who is making sympathetic movies of those who abort their children.
No I think Mr. Lurie is not giving Hollywood and California its due.
September 30, 2011 at 7:09 am
No doubt, the director is being clumsy and lazy with his generalizations. Generalizations that just so happen to be true. Football and hunting are popular nationwide but especially so in the South. Similarly, the South has no monopoly of intolerant, mean-spirited, self-described Christians, but no other region is associated with those strands of fundamentalism the way the South is. The director does not generalize about Christians in the material quoted; Christians not prone to fire and brimstone moralizing shouldn't be offended, but perhaps Southerners who engage in a thoughtful theology have an extra reason to resent Lurie for his associations.
Historically, from the violence of slavery, the fact that most of the most gruesome combat in North American occurred in the South, the thousands of lynchings, the persistence of capital punishment, and the disproportionate percentage of military volunteers from the South, the region has a lot to associate with violence. But that is not remotely the same as asserting that "everything about it" is about violence, that is just a ridiculous overstatement that probably reveals how simplistic and judgmental Lurie views Southerners.
Now, educated people can make a distinction between a generalization and applying that generalization to actual individuals; that would be stereotyping and prejudicial. But in general, lazy generalizations are just to close to being prejudiced to be clever or iconic.
"I am not Spartacus" does not appear to be one such educated person.
HIV has nothing to do with violence. It crossed into the human population in Africa decades ago. In North America, a slutty gay flight attendant (I believe he was from Montreal IIRC) infected several hundred men that comprised a huge % of the first cases, and unsurprisingly became endemic in the gay ghettos (ghettos that would not need to exist in a respectful society, and are dying off as most gays are choosing serious relationships over the bathhouses now that they can live openly in most communities). HIV started in neither San Francisco or Athens, but 'not Spartacus' is eager to place blame for the existence of a virus on people, a virus that killed very many of their friends and companions. What a jerk.