What did Darwin ever do to Kansas?
No one will suffer too much from the fact, but it’s a sobering indication of the state of things American – that the new film Creation, starring Oscar-nominee-&-winner Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly and produced by Brit producer king Jeremy “Chariots of Fire” Thomas, has not and may not find a distributor in the United States. The film is a romantic costume drama – ordinarily a safe, medium-budget bet for American theaters – about the life of Charles Darwin.
Nobody will stake the movie for an American run, despite the fact that it has been already sold to distributors in virtually every other corner of the globe. The South Koreans and Australians and Japanese and Italians will see it. But not us. It wouldn’t be a blockbuster here, but it would’ve earned.
Michelle Malkin’s books may be bestsellers thanks to a right-wing bulk-buy, and simian radio shows might gain audience share via the rubbernecking curious and amusement-starved, but here’s cold evidence of the market responding for real to the neocon forces in this country, a country in which evolution is taught in every school. Distributors have decided en masse that the uproar by the anti-evolutionist faction in our society would be too much of a hurricane to handle. “Darwin Day” — November 22 — is fast approaching, after all, and the efforts of Kirk Cameron to alter On the Origin of Species and distribute 50K copies to college students may just not be enough to stem the tide of common sense.
Creation may not be a good movie, but nothing about it can be remotely as terrifying as the simple fact that a distinctly American brand of proud ignorance has won this tiny fight over any consideration of reason, educated culture, fact, or even capitalist greed. Think about that for a minute, and tell me you don’t smell medieval brimstone in the air: a major industry has decided not to invest in a project that might earn them profits because too large a section of the American public and the froth-lipped media that stokes them are giving their ignorance primacy over the truth, and do not want that ignorance defied. (By “truth” I mean the truth of evolutionary science and Darwin’s work, not of the movie’s portrait thereof, which is probably romantic nonsense.)
In the middle ages, peasants believed in Genesis because they didn’t have any recourse to do otherwise. Today, with no excuses, the U.S. stands as, in this way, the world’s most willfully stupid country, the one industrialized nation where people like to hear the elected politicians claim to have conversations with God, and where scientific pedagogy, even in the form of a pop movie, is something to be dreaded and loathed. I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but I still am.
Postscript: As of midday today, Newmarket Films has deigned to theatrically release Creation. Somebody sucked it up and picked up the bat. Now, let’s watch the firefight — the best-case scenario is, of course, the possibility that no one will protest at all.
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Whether or not the film’s actually any good, what I find funny is that its makers, specifically in order to make it more palatable to an (American?) audience, seem to have turned Charles Darwin’s life’s work into… just another tale of tormented love. It wasn’t so much that he wrote this book of his, it’s that, in writing it: “one man… threatened to jeopardize… everything… he ever loved” (I can hear the throaty announcer now).
Oh, yes, you gotta use juice. I’m not asking for aesthetic respect towards Darwin, just elementary-school-level educational respect.
In response to another comment. See in context »Michael,
I can tell you, the best-case scenario is not going to happen. It will come out, people will watch it, and then, some Glenn Beck intern will find it, and the shit will hit the fan. There will be protests, someone will make a “Real Creation Movie”, and people will pull children out of school, etc. It’s going to be ugly.
Yes, those dumb, dumb masses. Just like on “The Simpsons.”
In response to another comment. See in context »Your piece follows the standard format–you start with the qualifying phrase “the neocon forces in this country,” and, by the end of your short piece, it’s somehow the entire country that’s comprised of anti-science morons. From a small segment thereof to the entire culture. Kind of a blatant bait and switch, no?
I’ve yet to encounter an anti-religion piece which doesn’t take this specific-to-general form, wherein some Americans (or Christians, or whoever) quickly turn into most or all Americans/Christians/etc. Why not forego the token qualifier–in this case, “neocon forces”–and launch right into your believers-are-idiots theme? It would make for less bad writing.
Oops–forgo, not forego.
In response to another comment. See in context »