I’ll start off by saying that I am a fan of Kevin Smith. He’s one of the more interesting celebrities out there right now. He’s kind of an anti-celebrity. Yes, he made his mark as an independent(ish) film maker, with Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Dogma, but he’s also first and foremost a storyteller. Kevin Smith has an amazing ability to take a simple topic and run off with a 20 to 30 minute cognate and entertaining stream of consciousness that never seems to lose focus. Say what you will about the man, but he is truly gifted as a storyteller. He is also a P.T. Barnum of our time. He has found innovative ways to market to and profit from a niche audience. This is not a slacker/stoner who slides by on his past laurels. He is a smart businessman and entertainer who is not content with established norms.
I say all this to lead up to the movie Red State, a film that will more than likely turn many people off, but ultimately speaks well to the world we live in. Red State is tagged as a horror film, but it really isn’t. It’s the kind of film that really can’t be pigeon holed. It’s more like a big graphic novel with moving pictures and sound. I say that because the movie is lean. It is cut to the bone and only offers the basic information that we need to move forward with. Personally, I would have liked more, but I understand and appreciate the approach to this film.
Smith took the three things that you don’t talk about in polite conversation; sex, politics, and religion and he wove them together as a snapshot of how America feels right now. The story has foul mouthed teenagers, fanatical zealots, and a dysfunctional government all coexisting in a world that is a sum of all of those perceptions.
It’s good when a film can expose our world as grayer than just black and white. The only problem I see is that the people who should see this film won’t or they will be turned off by the language, which is foul by some standards (but appropriate in this context).
We live in a world where Muslims are vilified as extremists, but many fail to see that all belief systems have the zealous extremists. Christianity has a long tradition of killing those who don’t believe, but extremism goes beyond the caricature.
Any belief system that refuses to acknowledge another person’s point of view is toxic and can morph into sociopathic behavior. The key is to not try and forcibly impose your belief system on people that don’t want to accept that version of reality. A much better approach, one espoused by a radical by the name of Jesus (pronounced hey-zeus if you want to sound more subversive), is to lead by example. If your life and your actions are inspirational, then others may want to emulate those beliefs.
It’s very simple really. This world would be a much better place if people stopped worrying about what other people are doing and worried more about what they were doing. I entered the middle of a conversation at work yesterday when the first thing that I heard from the doorway was that this country was moving more toward socialism and away from free enterprise. I was dumbfounded. We live in an adult society, but people are being conditioned to think in terms of black and white (I blame FOX news, and the 24 hour news cycle, but that’s fodder for another rant). Why can’t people realize that there are some things that work well in a free enterprise system and others that are more effectively managed in the public sector.
This immediately brought up health care as an issue. My contention is that since insurance companies are out to make a profit, that health care is more effectively managed by a public sector that does not have a monetary motive. Our current system is in denial. We treat millions of people for free in emergency rooms around this country and subsidize that cost with higher insurance premiums. We have a whole segment of the population that relies on ‘socialized medicine’ known as Medicare, but many of those people don’t see the hypocrisy in defending the currently broken system.
At any rate I’m rambling. See what watching a provocative movie will do for you? It makes you actually think and talk about issues that you would rather not discuss in polite conversation. Yeah, you could look at Red State as a crude thriller, but it at least made me want to extend my blog with this wall of text, so I’ll give Mr. Smith some credit for that.
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