Justine Bateman Calls For Filmmakers And Showrunners To "Leave Politics Out Of Their Projects"
Actress Justine Bateman, known for playing Mallory on Family Ties, called for filmmakers and showrunners to “leave politics out of their projects.”
Bateman posted on X, “Best thing filmmakers and series show runners can do right now is leave politics out of their projects. People are besieged with politics online and on TV. When they watch entertainment, they want a break from all that.”
Bateman’s call to action is something many cinephiles, moviegoers, and TV viewers have said for the last decade. However, the solution is not as simple as removing politics from films and TV given much of the politics that we are inundated with is in actuality immorality. Our struggle for the most part is not political, but moral. Our big “political” issues are not about tax rates and infrastructure spending, it’s about whether you can murder children and butcher children, whether sodomy is legal, and whether criminals should be arrested and jailed.
As an example, most recently as Elon Musk was calling for a boycott of Netflix, numerous shows aimed at children were pushing transgenderism or the idea that one can change their sex from male to female or female to male, something that is impossible no matter how many drugs or surgical butchering one undergoes. This is immorality.
On top of this many shows and movies now depict the protagonists committing heinous acts. The goal behind this is so that the audience will associate with the protagonist and buy into his wicked thinking and actions and eventually start adopting it in their lives. There is a clear correlation in the acceptance and toleration of sodomy and its positive depiction in shows like Will & Grace and Modern Family.
So the answer is not to get rid of politics as Bateman calls for albeit much of the moral degradation should be outright banned to protect the common good and the objective moral order.
No, the answer as Brian Niemeier has posited is “to bring movie audiences around to your way of thinking, show characters they like being successful by acting in line with your moral standard. … To renew the culture, tell stories with appealing heroes who win using Christian moral principles.”
Take Hollywood’s formula and use it against them. In fact, it’s something that many of our filmmakers used to do. Examples of this can be seen in films like Rocky, Braveheart, Apocalypto, The Patriot, as well as the early Marvel Cinematic Universe films such as Captain America: The First Avenger and Thor not to mention Christopher Nolan’s Batman films and the plethora of westerns featuring icons like Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, and Jimmy Stewart.
This advice is not dissimilar to what St. Basil wrote in his letter “Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature.” He stated, “Since we must needs attain to the life to come through virtue, our attention is to be chiefly fastened upon those many passages from the poets, from the historians, and especially from the philosophers, in which virtue itself is praised. For it is of no small advantage that virtue become a habit with a youth, for the lessons of youth make a deep impression, because the soul is then plastic, and therefore they are likely to be indelible.”
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