The Sleepwalk of the West

French cinema is the high-visibility indicator of a great country’s cultural hara-kiri. Awards ceremonies are always fundamentally political, but in France they’re actually… fundamentalist. After winning at Cannes last years, the film A Prophet was fawned over at the Césars, with no less than nine awards. Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best… [...]

If you haven’t seen Avatar, it’s a half-a-billion-dollar adaptation of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, where Mr Meek gets to be Mr Hero, kill Baddies, and get Big Chief’s ethnically-optimised uber-daughter into the sack. All in his sleep. Apart from being more visually stunning than anything you’ve ever seen, it’s nothing new. Except, many [...]

Talking of Cannes festival winners – and the politics they embody – last year’s Entre les Murs (The Class) is another example of the agendas lurking in our culture, in this case French but more generally Western. The ideas behind the film are best illustrated by the perennial debate – or its paucity – over [...]

Allan Bloom traces the popular enthusiasm for criminality to the 19th century German philosophers. Culturally – according to him – the new appetite hits the mainstream with “Mack the Knife” from Brecht’s and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, in 1928 Weimar Germany. It was the first time the bourgeoisie could blithely – almost compulsively – sing [...]