The original dustup with Osiris was over his notion that fiction cannot carry messages of moral guidance or ought not to. I was complaining about Million Dollar Baby as typical demoralizing (literally) Hollywood (pro-euthanasia in the case of that film) propaganda.
Ronald Reagan used to tell a story about Louis Mayer of MGM, who had come to America as a young Russian Jew fleeing the anti-Semitic pogroms of 1907. Some unnamed malefactor visited Mr. Mayer at his office at MGM in the late 1930s to complain about such films as the Andy Hardy movies which the malefactor felt were embarassingly moral. The malefactor suggested that MGM just had to deal with more "adult" themes (i.e. promote immorality) and that Mayer would just have to comply with the need for Hollywood to trade positive moralizing in for negative demoralizing.
Mayer responded by telling the malefactor that when Louis Mayer's time of crisis occurred in Russia in 1907, Louis Mayer could flee to an America that was not perfect but was perfect enough to welcome Louis Mayer and many others like him. Mayer told the malefactor to get lost because Mayer would NEVER use his studio to harm the good America that had welcomed him.
Mr. Mayer never made a movie about young women voluntarily beating one another senseless and on into brain damage and quadriplegia in a prize-fighting ring for money and regarding suicide as a solution to the resulting loss of "quality of life" as a good of some sort. Yes, in Mayer's time such trash was inconceivable, but it is also true that he would not have been caught dead devoting studio resources to such poisonous and lowlife dreck.
Our beleagured society also seems to have lost the understanding that the mere absence of morality is, in and of itself, a message in such arts as cinema. It would also be our peril to forget that pop libertarianism (I gotta be ME!!!!) is NOT conservatism.
Good for him!
Not in any way.
My apologies on an incomprehensible post. It's a little difficult to concentrate amidst chaos.
The entire idea that fiction has nothing to do with morality is absurd on its face and goes well beyond Louis B. Mayer (who may not have denegrated the US in his movies, but...). Read the latest Tom Wolfe novel. It says a lot about morality - and lack of it - in the US.