Are the Movies Liberal?

One of the surprises of this strange, not-quite-post-pandemic movie year has been “Dog,” a modestly budgeted road picture that opened in February and grossed almost $80 million in its theatrical release. (It’s now available on various digital platforms.) That’s a very good number for a film that isn’t part of a franchise or cinematic universe.

The appeal of “Dog” isn’t much of a mystery: It’s right there in the title. Who doesn’t like dogs? And who doesn’t like Channing Tatum, who co-directed and who stars alongside a charismatic Belgian Malinois? Americans may not agree on much these days, but this man-pets-dog story managed to rise above our much-lamented divisions of taste, background and belief.

Those fractures are, both overtly and obliquely, what the movie is about. Tatum’s character, Jackson Briggs, is a former Army Ranger with multiple deployments behind him and the psychic and physical scars to prove it. Lulu, his canine companion, has also been traumatized by combat, and by the loss of her handler, a buddy of Jackson’s who died in a car crash.

Jackson and Lulu wind their way across the American West, with stops in Portland, San Francisco and San Diego, on their way to the funeral in Arizona. Politically, too, “Dog” is all over the map, or perhaps deliberately blurry. It loves the warriors and hates the wars. It tweaks what one character calls “the woking class” and rolls its eyes at their intolerant antagonists.

At times, in his disaffection, his loneliness and his latent, proven capacity for violence, Jackson Briggs recalls John Rambo. Not the shirtless jungle avenger of the movie that bears his name, but the sullen, fatigue-wearing Vietnam vet of “First Blood,” which introduced the character to movie audiences in 1982. Like Jackson, he was adrift in the Northwest and alienated from the country he had risked his life to serve. The difference, of course, is that almost no blood is shed in “Dog.” Rather than a fable of regeneration through violence, it’s a gentle, therapeutic parable built over a deep reservoir of pain and hard feelings.

One of the reasons I’m still thinking about “Dog,” months after publishing a lukewarm review, is that it manages to feel at once politically charged and steadfastly neutral. That’s quite a feat in the current culture-war climate, when movies and their makers are perpetual targets of populist rage, and also, frequently, of progressive finger-wagging. “Dog” offers a smooth ride over scorched earth. Which makes it a throwback: That’s what movies have always done.

SOME IDEAS IN AMERICAN LIFE are so widely held and frequently invoked that it can seem like bad manners or outright delusion to suggest that they might not be true. There is a class of facts — it would be more accurate to call them myths or shibboleths — that everybody knows and nobody entirely believes. The Supreme Court is above politics. Rock ’n’ roll will never die. Hollywood is liberal.

It should go without saying that every myth has some grounding in reality. Los Angeles is a deep-blue city in a mostly blue state. The film industry has been a hub of Democratic Party fund-raising and activism at least since the McGovern campaign 50 years ago. Executives and actors are proud to associate with progressive causes. Everybody knows that.

And everybody is aware of the “what about” argument that consists, mostly, of a roster of well-known or suspected conservatives. What about Kelsey Grammer? James Woods? Mel Gibson? Clint Eastwood? And don’t forget that most of the celebrities who have crossed over from Hollywood into electoral politics have been Republicans, including Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger and (once again) Eastwood. Behind them is a long history of Hollywood conservatism, a tradition that embraces moguls like Louis B. Mayer (who according to Lillian Ross’s book “Picture” kept a GOP elephant figurine on his desk at MGM), directors like John Ford and Cecil B. DeMille and screen idols like Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne.

The counter-counter-argument is that these are exceptions that prove the rule, representatives of a red minority that has been tolerated and sometimes persecuted in blue Hollywood. Our 21st-century ideological color-coding, somewhat confusingly, reverses an older one. In the McCarthy era, the specter of Reds — which is to say Communists — lurking in the studio commissaries and writers’ bungalows and smuggling their subversive messages onto the screen was a source of considerable alarm.

Today, the ghost of that Red Scare — with its legacy of blacklisting and betrayal — is sometimes invoked to suggest that the tables have been turned, that conservatives are now the reds who face purging and intimidation in a town ruled by the tyranny of wokeness. Maybe it’s true that entertainment-industry conservatives face hostility and mockery from their peers, but a sense of grievance and victimization has come to permeate the modern conservative identity. In particular, the modern right defines itself against the cultural elites who supposedly cluster on the coasts and conspire to impose their values on an unsuspecting public. In this account, Hollywood acts in functional cahoots with academia and the news media, and what drives the populism of Republican politicians like Ron DeSantis in Florida and J.D. Vance in Ohio is full-throated opposition to those institutions.

Maybe it’s folly — or bias — to raise an eyebrow at such partisan political rhetoric, or to challenge the emotions and assumptions that underlie it. And perhaps a defense of Hollywood against the charge of leftist propagandizing will seem, well, defensive. But the argument I want to make doesn’t really concern the sociology of the business. I’ll stipulate that the people who make movies may skew progressive in their beliefs, commitments and voting patterns. The movies themselves tell another story.

MANY DIFFERENT STORIES, OF COURSE. About the grit and glory of the American military; about the heroic, essential work of law enforcement; about the centrality of revenge to any serious conception of justice; about the superiority of common sense over credentialed expertise; about the lessons ordinary small-town folks can teach fancy city slickers; about individual striving as the answer to most social problems; about the need for heroes.

None of these stories can be said to reflect or advance the agenda of anything you might call the left. Mainstream American movies have, for decades, been in love with guns, suspicious of democracy, ambivalent about feminism, squeamish about divorce, allergic to abortion, all over the place on matters of sexuality and very nervous about anything to do with race.

I know there are exceptions, and I’m not trying to flip the script and reveal the reactionary face of Hollywood, though it’s true that in the years of the Production Code (from the mid-’30s until the late ’60s), Hollywood upheld a fairly conservative vision of American life. Nonmarital sex was strictly policed, interracial romance completely forbidden. Crime could not pay, and the dignity of institutions had to be protected. Even in the post-Code years, what mainstream American movies have most often supplied aren’t critical engagements with reality, but fantasies of the status quo. The dominant narrative forms, tending toward happy or redemptive endings — or, more recently, toward a horizon of endless sequels — are fundamentally affirmative of the way things are. What they affirm, most of all, is consensus, an ideal of harmony that isn’t so much apolitical as anti-political, finding expression not in the voting booth but at the box office.

At least since the end of World War II, the production of consensus has been integral to Hollywood’s cultural mission and its business model. During the war, the studios worked closely with the military to deliver morale-boosting, mission-explaining messages to the home-front public, a collaboration that helped raise the industry’s prestige and its sense of its own importance. In the postwar era, even as they faced challenges from television, the antitrust division of the Justice Department and the demographic volatility of the audience, the studios conceived their mission in universal terms. Movies were for everybody.

That article of faith has always been a hard sell in a society defined by pluralism and, perhaps more persistently than we’d like to admit, by polarization. The notion that movies in the second half of the 20th century reflected a now-vanished consensus is doubly dubious. The consensus was never there, except insofar as Hollywood manufactured it. Perhaps more than any other American institution, Hollywood worked to foster agreement, to imagine a space — within the theater walls and on the screen — where conflicts could be resolved and contradictions wished away. In the westerns, the cowboys fought the Indians, the ranchers battled the railroads, and the sheriffs shot it out with the outlaws. But the outcome of those struggles was the pacification of the frontier and the advance of a less violent, more benevolent civilization. In the dramas of racial conflict, Sidney Poitier and an avatar of intolerance (Tony Curtis, Spencer Tracy, Rod Steiger) found common ground in the end.

This wasn’t propaganda in the usual sense, but rather an elaborate mythos, a reservoir of stories and meanings that didn’t need to be believed to be effective. We’ve always known that movies aren’t real — we like to insist that watching them is a kind of dreaming — and that’s partly why we love them so much.

By “we” I mean the movie audience, a collective that for a long time implied a parallel form of citizenship, a civic identity with its own ideology. The best cultural history of American movies, by the critic and scholar Robert Sklar, is called “Movie-Made America.” The corollary to that title, and one of Sklar’s arguments, is that moviegoing made Americans.

So now what? Every time I type the word “Hollywood,” I feel a twinge of anachronism, as if I were speaking a dead language or writing about a country in the process of being erased from the map. Moviegoing is no longer what it used to be, and the machinery that fed it is at present a Frankensteinian hybrid of tech, media, private equity and precarious labor. It’s Amazon and Apple, Netflix and Discovery. And Disney, of course.

Which is not “the left,” any more than the old empire of Fox, Universal, Columbia and, of course, Disney ever was. The question is whether this new thing can still manufacture consensus with the same coherence, and the same confidence, that used to be the signature of Hollywood.

IF “DOG” WAS THE SURPRISE HIT of the late winter, “Top Gun: Maverick” — another movie about a man who serves in an elite section of the American military — is the first big movie of the early summer. A sequel more than 35 years in the making, it has been hailed by many critics as a sign that some of the old vigor and swagger is back. Much as I would like to think so, the movie feels to me more like an exercise in nostalgia, a wistful, perhaps desperate throwback to an old normal.

The politics are perfectly opaque — almost literally, since the enemies Tom Cruise and his brave fellow pilots face are invisible behind their helmets — and the detachment from reality is more thorough than what you find in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” or “The Batman.” That last film, aware of the allegorical responsibilities inherited from “Joker” and “The Dark Knight,” at least gestured toward seemingly timely issues of law and order and societal malaise.

That has been the dominant style of modern Hollywood: to project vague vibes of real-world relevance into imaginary spaces. From Middle Earth to Hogwarts, from the expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe to the rising Planet of the Apes, what look like political questions — about the problem of evil, the nature of authority, the possibility of justice — bubble up and evaporate. Those movies invite arguments — is Batman a conservative? Are the Avengers woke? Is Caesar the chimpanzee a dictator or a democrat? — that are unresolvable because the movies finally lack all conviction.

“Top Gun,” in contrast, is downright utopian in its projection of a nearly frictionless world of camaraderie and courage. There is almost no real dramatic conflict, and nothing not to like. It wants to be a movie for everyone.

Which gives it a strangely nostalgic power — not because it looks back fondly on the Reagan era or the Cold War, but because it summons up the myth of a hegemonic Hollywood. Which was never perfect, and never what it claimed to be. But like American democracy, we’ll miss it when it’s gone.