Mayhem Is Everywhere

I did not watch the 2013 Super Bowl and probably will not watch this year’s contest, either, being as I am more or less the effete Manhattan-dwelling, Whole Foods–shopping, theater-going caricature, though I’ve never been to one of those Georgetown cocktail parties that our more populist comments-section denizens are forever going on about. Okay, National Review did host Rand Paul at Café Milano once, but I don’t think that’s exactly what they have in mind.

I do like Super Bowl commercials, though, and the 2013 game included one that was practically a video essay in Kirkian conservatism. I refer of course to the Allstate advertisement featuring Dean Winters in his role as the insurance mascot known as Mayhem, which ends with a motto to warm right-wing cockles: “Mayhem has been, and always will be, everywhere.” The commercial begins with Mayhem tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden — “Not to brag or nothing, but I’m pretty much the most amazing apple ever” — thereby launching his chaotic career through history: The lion turns to chomp on the lamb, a meteorite wipes out the dinosaurs, the naïve Trojans get suckered by Odysseus’s horse, the proud tower at Pisa turns out to have been built on a weak foundation. Mayhem deadpans one word — “Moo” — and knocks over a lantern, burning Chicago, and we are treated to a highlight reel of private tragedies caused by Mayhem: cars crash, homes burn. In the final scene, Mayhem takes a hungry bite out of that forbidden fruit while the rumbling voice of Dennis Haysbert assures television viewers that Mayhem is eternal, omnipresent, inescapable.

Property insurance is an inherently conservative proposition, not in the ideological sense but in the sense of prudently seeking to mitigate risk. An eleven-minute Mayhem compilation, with its insistent reminders that “Mayhem Is Everywhere,” is in its way as conservative as anything you will find in the speeches of Ronald Reagan, and in some ways more so: President Reagan was, at least in public discourse, as sunny an optimist as you could hope to encounter, as indeed a political candidate needs to be. “Whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone,” he said, “I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts.” Great stuff, but what conservative can listen to those lines without thinking that our worst fears and our doubts have done a great deal to ensure our survival and to lead us away from foolishness, buffoonery, and catastrophe? Conservative optimism is a limited proposition: Bad things will happen, the Garden of Eden is long behind us, the future is uncertain, and while it is more fun to be the grasshopper, it is wiser to be the ant.

It is significant that the bitterest political battle of the past several years has been fought over insurance. Conservatives insist that people have a responsibility to protect themselves and their families against future risk, and that the government’s role in helping them to achieve this is limited. Progressives fundamentally reject the idea that this is a private responsibility — What do you imagine “Health care is a right!” means, if not that? — and further, with their insistence upon the logical and temporal impossibility that insurance be provided against things that already have happened — What do you imagine that “coverage of preexisting conditions” means, if not that? — reject the idea of insurance itself. Conservatives believe that Mayhem has been, and always will be, everywhere, and progressives believe that they can regulate it away.

Conservatives often lament that the culture is lost, while Adam Bellow recently argued in National Review that a conservative cultural counterrevolution already is in the making. The point, he writes, is not to create cultural propaganda that mirrors that of the Left but to create excellent works of literature that unobtrusively incorporate the conservatism of their authors:

I do not find much to argue with in Mr. Bellow’s essay, but I would add this: The most profoundly conservative works of popular culture in recent memory were not produced by conservatives and certainly were not conceived of as conservative projects. In fact, many of them were produced by people one assumes are hostile to conservative views.

Quentin Tarantino, for example, has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Democrats over the years, and was a maxed-out Obama donor in 2012. Mr. Tarantino has (mostly) not been loved by conservatives; Armond White, writing here, listed his Inglourious Basterds as one of 20 films that “effectively destroyed art, social unity, and spiritual confidence,” and “constitute a corrupt, carelessly politicized canon.” John Simon dismissed Pulp Fiction in the November 21, 1994, issue of National Review as hollow and shallow, concluding that “from Mr. Tarantino’s anything-goes filmmaking to true art is still quite a distance.” In his review of Kill Bill, Michael Medved rehearsed a familiar complaint: “Even though fantasies may not kill or maim, they still can corrupt and degrade.”

Mr. Simon criticized Pulp Fiction on artistic rather than philosophical grounds, as is proper. But consider the story that frames the film’s complicated plot: Jules, a mob hit man, among the most fallen of men, experiences a miracle and explicit religious epiphany, and resolves to go forth and sin no more. But though he may be through with violence, violence is not through with him, and he finds himself at the film’s end with a gun in his hand and a dilemma in his soul. Reflecting on the (made-up) Bible verse that he had been in the habit of reciting before gunning men down, he explains his situation to the stick-up artist who has fecklessly put himself into his pistol sights:

The significance of that was not lost on David Kahane, National Review’s imaginary man in Hollywood: “Vincent Vega, the unbeliever, dies unredeemed in Butch Coolidge’s bathroom, while Jules, who accepts the reality of miracles, grants absolution . . . and is thus saved.”

It is unlikely that Mr. Tarantino set out to make something conservative any more than did the people who write Allstate commercials. Propagandistic entertainment, from the left or the right, generally fails as it approaches specificity: Consider that raft of dopey anti-war movies a few years back that nobody went to see, or the silly anti-Bush stuff in the Star Wars prequels, or the failed attempt to create a conservative answer to the Jon Stewart show with The Half-Hour News Hour. Conservatism, as Kirk understood it, is not ideology but “the negation of ideology.” Great works of art — Mr. Simon’s “true art” — and good insurance commercials, for that matter, command our attention because they speak to the truth, whether the speaker is Mayhem or Macbeth. Didacticism is an enemy of art, and as such it should be in artistic matters rejected by conservatives, whose allegiance should be to aesthetic standards rather than to narrow political and cultural agendas. If we understood culture the way Matthew Arnold did, we would not be surprised to find themes pleasing to conservatives even in the works of Mr. Tarantino or Allstate’s advertising writers. In a way that is not always obvious, they cannot help but be conservative, as great storytellers have been from Aesop’s day to our own, intentionally or not.

His point about Pulp Fiction is well taken. The film had at its core a message of redemption from the total ugliness of evil. I'm sure that was inadvertent, but there it is nevertheless. Art is like that. It can easily take on a life of its own and get away from the artist.

For my money one of the most conservative films of the past couple of decades was made by uber-libtard Tim Robbins, together with Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn. It's called Dead Man Walking.

This film is based on the true-life story of a Roman Catholic nun who is an anti-death penalty partisan. It concerns the story of a totally degenerated scumbag (played brilliantly by the painfully PeeCee Sean Penn) who violates and murders a couple of high school kids on Prom Night.

Susan Sarandan is the "mommy" character who breathlessly yammers on and on about the injustice of the "legal murder" of Sean Penn. She gets into a bible-quoting contest with a prison guard on the subject that's really quite entertaining. She wants to brighten little Sean's life, play music for him, bring him the love of Christ (I'm sure the real life nun, one Sister Prejean, is sincere in that desire).

The prison Warden and, to a lesser extent, the local Bishop are the "daddy" characters. They're all about enforcing the rules and holding little Sean accountable for his actions. The Bishop wants Sister Prejean to look and act like a nun (she's totally liberal and secularized), again in accordance with the rules. Sister Prejean is all about feelings - she's not much for objective rules.

Ultimately, despite Susan Sarandon's best efforts, the degenerated murderer is executed. And here where the strong conservative law-and-order message comes shining through. Once Sean realizes that the jig is up and that he'll be dead in a few minutes, he repents. He admits that he murdered those kids. He says he is sorry. And he means it. It's a very moving scene of a sinner coming to Jesus. Note: it's only when he is finally held accountable and is looking imminent death in the face does he see that he must submit to God's law. His soul is saved. The local Bishop and the Warden thus accomplish that which Sister Prejean tried to accomplish but failed due to her "mommy" instincts to protect the wayward child from the full consequences of his choices.

Now, the dramatic effect of the conversion of this horrible sinner is unfortunately attenuated by the next scene in the actual execution room, where Sean is strapped to the gurney and propped up so the victim's families can see him. He apologizes to the families of the murdered kids but says some stupid nonsense about the unfairness of the death penalty. It was the proverbial mustache on the Mona Lisa. It detracted from the powerfully acted repentance scene that came just moments before. It was completely gratuitous and inserted for clearly PeeCee reasons. It made no dramatic sense at all.

But, be that as it may, the real magic is about to happen. As Sean is dying from lethal injection, the ghosts of the child victims appear in their Prom clothes in the execution room. They behold justice being done. Their spirits are put to rest. We next see much-needed closure for the families, as the father of one of the kids is praying in church with Sister Prejean.

A sinner has repented and a soul is saved. Jesus tells us that there is much rejoicing in Heaven when that happens. Justice is done and outraged spirits are put to rest. Families find peace and can reach out to God again in prayer.

The conservative (and profoundly Christian) message is clear: we need daddy rules that hold people accountable for their actions. We need this "daddy" justice to bring desperately-needed closure to the victims of the crime, both living and dead. And perhaps even more importantly, we need to hold the criminal responsible to for the salvation of his own soul.

And, yes, I'll grant, we might just need "mommies" like Sister Prejean to hold the hand of the sinner through it all.

It's really a very powerfully conservative film. It's probably the most explicitly pro-death penalty film ever made. And as a double bonus, it's a fine work of art. Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn may be liberals, but they're brilliant artists in their own way. They clearly intended to make an anti-death penalty film that propagates liberal, nanny-state "mommy" values, but just as clearly they shot themselves in their collective foot, because this film is the best argument for the death-penalty imaginable.

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