There was no missing a certain left-wing tilt to the films honored at last weekend's Academy Awards or to the movies released in 2005 more generally. Conservatives, not content to merely run the entire government, are predictably outraged by this turn of events. Once again, it seems, an insidious liberal cabal is running an important national institution into the ground. In a better, more conserva-friendly America, we'd get not Brokeback Mountain but perhaps a film about a happy, heterosexual family man living in Boston suddenly inspired to abandon his wife and children by the legalization of gay marriage. With the main breadwinner gone, the wife can't afford to pay the bills when the kids get sick. In crucial scenes she bemoans not the GOP congressional cuts in Medicaid or child support enforcement, but the local state government's lack of enthusiasm for discriminating against gays and lesbians.
In the conservative mind, this has all the makings of a hit, if the public's yearning for such fare weren't being stifled once again by the all-powerful liberals.
A predictable reaction, I say, given the right's penchant for whining. But on another level, it's a strange point of view for conservative free marketers to adopt. After all, Hollywood is big business. It operates in a free market. It's run by extremely wealthy businessmen who report to higher-level executives at giant conglomerates like Sony, General Electric, and -- yes -- Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Under the circumstances, it's worth considering the possibility that we're just looking at market efficiency in action. Maybe Hollywood is just making the films its customers want to buy.
Just who are these buyers? Movie-goers skew toward the young, the childless, and those who live in or near big cities. The movie industry's best audience is teenagers. Teens are old enough to want to get out of the house, and old enough for their parents to let them leave, but they're legally banned from participating in most of American nightlife. Thus, they go see a lot of movies and consequently a lot of movies are targeted with them in mind. Naturally, though, you'd like a film to appeal to a broader audience if possible, so the demographic adjacent to teenagers -- twentysomethings -- gets a certain amount of love.
On top of that, people go to the movies much less if they have children. Kids make it more expensive to go to the theater since you need to get someone else to watch them. It's cheaper, often, to just find a film your kids can watch with you and buy them tickets (kids get discounts) than it is to leave them at home. So there are always plenty of family-oriented children's movies. Another reason for the young-ish skew is that parents have less free time than non-parents, so they go out less in general. That makes them reluctant to squander a night off on an untested product, which most movies are: The movie business depends on a lot of people going into the theaters more-or-less blind.
Last, it's much easier, logistically, to go to the movies if you live in a densely populated area. The denser the local population, the more screens will be available within a brief trip from your house. So it's relatively easy to find a picture that appeals to you. Similarly, a given film only needs to appeal to a small proportion of the people in the area to be successful as long as the area is densely populated. In rural areas, by contrast, finding a movie you want to see can be very hard, and for a film to be successful it needs incredibly broad appeal.
So movies aim at the young, the childless, and the urban- or suburban-dwellers. The business is skewed, that is, toward the demographic bases of American liberalism and against those -- parents, country folk, exurbanites, and the elderly -- of American conservatism, especially when what's at issue is the cultural dimension of politics.
Network television is often produced by the same people who produce movies. The same companies are involved. But the audience is different -- older, more rural, with kids at home. Not surprisingly, the politics of network television are very different. For every Will and Grace there's a 24, where torture always works and vague references to "data-mining" as a crucial tool in the war on terrorism are sprinkled liberally throughout each broadcast. And for every 24 there are a dozen more-or-less indistinguishable police procedurals offering up a unmistakably right-wing take on the criminal justice system.
Of course, on some level, as is usually the case, the facts of the matter aren't what's of interest to conservative pundits. Rather, the point is the endless search for excuses to explain away conservative failure. During the Reagan years, it was Congress' fault. In the 1990s, it was Bill Clinton's fault. During the current period of Republican hegemony, less plausible villains need to be found -- primarily Hollywood, "the media" (defined as to exclude the huge portions of the media utterly dominated by the right), or random college professors. The real source of conservative frustration, however, is that the conservative agenda, though capable of achieving political success, is fundamentally unviable as a governing agenda. From a war in Iraq featuring unrealistic goals, to the dream of shrinking government to the point where you can drown it in a bathtub, to the fantasy of rolling back the sexual revolution at every turn, the right has set itself goals that simply can't be achieved. Serious people would consider recalibrating their goals. The people we have whine about the movies.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
