From the Archives: Cultural critic Paul Cantor assesses the politics of the new TV season

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on September 30, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Cultural critic Paul Cantor assesses the politics of the new TV season

While best known in academic circles as a scholar of Shakespeare and of 19th-century English Romanticism, University of Virginia English Professor Paul Cantor is also a well-regarded critic of popular culture whose 2001 book, Gilligan Unbound, took a close look at TV staples from the 1960s through the 1990s, including Gilligan’s Island, Star Trek, The Simpsons, and The X-Files.

Cantor’s most recent book, co-edited with Stephen Cox, is Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture, which applies concepts of Austrian economics to the analysis of literary works.

At an event hosted by Students for Individual Liberty on the UVA grounds on September 29, Professor Cantor was in the audience and, afterward, spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about the new television season.

'CSI' and Justin Bieber

His first thought was about the season opening episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (the original franchise, set in Las Vegas).

Paul Cantor

“I read a description of” the episode in TV Guide, he said, and “was a little suspicious of it.”

After viewing the first episode, Cantor suggested that it may have been “first salvo in Hollywood’s attack on the Tea Party,” because, as he described the show, “it more or less treated Tea Party types as if they were some sort of 1960s-style militia, as if they were terrorists.”

He explained that, “on the one hand, it [showed] a gathering of dissident political figures [who] clearly were attacking -- though not by name -- the Obama administration. On the other hand, they were then connected with bombings and terrorist acts,” including exploding a policeman’s coffin at his funeral.

“I’m afraid,” Cantor said ruefully, that “this is the Hollywood take on the Tea Party. This is the beginning of a lot that we’ll be seeing on television.”

Cantor is not alone in his assessment: political commentator Alex Knepper made a similar point on Big Hollywood on Wednesday.

The fact that Canadian singer Justin Bieber made his debut as a dramatic actor in the season opener of CSI was not coincidental, Cantor said.

“They were certainly exploiting” the teen idol’s celebrity, he explained. “Clearly they were trying to get him to get more interest in this episode.”

The producers “probably got a lot of people to watch the show who might not have watched it” otherwise. Bieber “actually gave a surprisingly good performance. He was supposed to convey an aura of innocence and yet then turn out to be involved,” in the domestic terrorism. Moreover, the ending of first show is “setting him up as a returning character.”

'The Event'

Cantor said the new NBC mystery-thriller series, The Event, is “clearly a recycling of The X-Files. I don’t know where it’s headed but it does seem to be the first attempt to portray Obama on television.”

In terms of plot, The Event is “an allegory of the issue of shutting down Guantanamo, though in this case it’s a holding area for extraterrestrials in Alaska. (Don’t ask me to explain that.)”

Veteran TV actor Blair Underwood plays a Cuban-American president, who is also black, and, Cantor said, “he’s being portrayed as a sympathetic character.”

In the second episode, the Underwood character is shown “in charge of things,” Cantor explained, “but there was this amazing line where he was trying to get information out of one of the aliens and he said, ‘I hope I’m not being too narcissistic, I hope I’m not being too obsessed with my place in history.’”

For Cantor, that line “was very interesting because it’s such an accurate characterization of Obama.”

'X-Files,' 'Weeds,' 'Breaking Bad'

Today’s cultural climate, Cantor agreed, is “absolutely” open to conspiracy-type shows along the lines of the 1990s Fox cult hit, The X-Files.

Having written about The X-Files in his book, Gilligan Unbound, Cantor said he gets “annoyed when people treat The X-Files as dead and buried and said it was, ‘a show for the ‘90s.’”

Virtually “half the shows on television now are conspiracy shows,” Cantor said, naming Rubicon, Sons of Anarchy, Weeds, and Breaking Bad as examples.

Shows like Weeds and Breaking Bad, he added, are rather sympathetic to (in this case) drug dealers” and they also “portray DEA officials in a very negative light.”

That, he said, is “an interesting sign of what’s going on in popular culture.”

Cantor’s personal “must-see TV” is Breaking Bad on AMC. He notes that it is produced by X-Files alumnus Vince Gilligan and judges it to be “the most powerful show dramatically.”

As an aside, Cantor adds, Breaking Bad “has a strong libertarian element in it, so I can recommend it on political as well as on aesthetic grounds.”

Marilyn Monroe and the Real Value of Profits

An obscure 1951 film that fell out of copyright gained some new life in the home video market simply because a then practically unknown Marilyn Monroe had a small supporting role.

DVDs of Home Town Story, written and directed by Arthur Pierson, are sold with big photos of Monroe on the cover, as though it is a “Marilyn Monroe movie.” It isn’t, but even if a few thousand people are induced to buy it for that reason, that’s a good thing, because the film has an important lesson about business and economics.

The actual marquee star of the movie (which runs a short 61 minutes, more like a TV teleplay than a feature film) is Jeffrey Lynn, who plays Blake Washburn, a small-town newspaper publisher who has just lost his seat in the state senate to the scion of a local manufacturer, John McFarland (played by veteran character actor Donald Crisp). Monroe plays a secretary at the newspaper and appears on screen for no more than five minutes.

Washburn is bitter about his campaign loss and, when he takes over the newspaper from his uncle, he embarks on an editorial crusade against big business, in particular railing against the profits made by large industrial corporations. His sometime foil in this is reporter Slim Haskins (played by Alan Hale, Jr., best known as the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island), who tells his boss to tone down the rhetoric.

While I watched Home Town Story, I initially thought this would be a typical left-wing agitprop piece from the early Cold War era, where the crusading newspaper editor would be the hero and the capitalist businessman would be the villain.

I was wrong.

About halfway through the movie, the whole tone of the film changes as business owner John McFarland shows up in the newspaper’s office. He wants to talk to Washburn about his editorials and offer an alternative point of view. Here’s the dialogue from that scene (which can be watched in full on YouTube):

McFARLAND: I’m interested in profits, both for myself and the customer. My main reason for coming here was to see if I could perhaps interest you in printing something about a pet theory I have. I call it “Profits to the Customer.”

WASHBURN: What do you mean?

McFARLAND: As I say, it’s my own private little pet theory. It’s very simple, not very complicated. You see, I’m not an economist, I’m just a businessman. I have to make a profit to stay in business.

WASHBURN: Sure, we all know that.

McFARLAND: I make a profit on every electric motor I sell but the customer must make a larger profit, because if he doesn’t, he won’t buy my motors and I’m out of business.

WASHBURN (incredulous): The customer must make a profit?

McFARLAND: That’s right … Yes, the customer must make a profit. For example, you have some typesetting machines out there. The manufacturer who sold them made a profit on them. But your paper would never have bought them in the first place if they couldn’t deliver something beyond their original cost. They must continue to work for your paper to be worth more to you than you paid for them. As a customer, that’s your profit.

WASHBURN (skeptical): My profit?

McFARLAND: Yes, you sell your newspaper to a man for five cents. He gets news, advertisements, and all kinds of information for his home and business. He gets service beyond the value of his five cents. As a customer, that’s his profit. The same story for everything else: the light bulb, the refrigerator, the telephone. For this, we pay a few dollars a month. Our profits are enormous in steps alone. In case of an emergency, it’s value can’t be estimated.

SLIM HASKINS: That’s a different slant from what we’ve been printing.

WASHBURN, after a long pause: As you say, that’s just a theory. But you can’t deny that you are a big business.

McFARLAND: In your editorials, you’ve been insisting that because a thing is big, it’s bad. It takes bigness to do big things. Our industries turned out equipment for our armed forces in a remarkably short space of time. It was a big job and it was well done. It helped us to win the war and preserve our country. That’s what American industry with its bigness was able to accomplish. Was that bad, Blake?

The last fifty years, we’ve come a long way. It used to take a week to get a letter across the United States. Now we do it in one day. The difference in time alone could affect the happiness of a family. It might even mean a matter of life and death.

In my time, I’ve seen advances in industry that have added twenty years to the average span of life. My father died in the old country at the age of forty, an old man. His work was absolute drudgery, slavery, on his own farm from five o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night. But because I live in America, I feel like a young man, and I’ll be 65 in April.

WASHBURN, irked: Why are you telling me all this?

McFARLAND: Well, I thought perhaps you might be interested in both sides of this profit question, and print something else for a change.

WASHBURN, steaming: Mr. McFarland, I don’t tell you how to run your plant, so please don’t tell me how to run my paper. I’ll print my own conception of business profits. Good day, sir.

McFARLAND: Well, I just thought I’d come in and talk – which I have.

Remember, Blake, when this country was first discovered, there was nothing here. Now look around you, everything you see is profits. Our transportation, communication, household appliances, medical equipment. Notice them sometime, Blake. They’re the real profits.

The plot soon turns to a school field trip, where Washburn’s young sister is trapped in an abandoned mine. With the help of equipment made by McFarland’s factory, and because McFarland has a private airplane he offers to Washburn to take the girl to a hospital in Capital City, the little girl’s life is saved. As a topper, as the girl is wheeled out of surgery, McFarland notices the motor operating a respirator helping the girl breathe: “Hmm,” he says quietly. “That’s one of ours.”

As a result, Washburn’s next editorial has a different approach.

“You know, Slim, seven hours ago, John McFarland with a pet theory I didn’t think was worth printing. Theories have a funny way of becoming facts.”

Curious about the writer and director of Home Town Story, and wondering where he might have come up with the ideas that inspired the film, I did a bit of research.

Arthur Pierson only directed two other feature films. Most of his work was in television, and he ended his career as an executive at Hanna-Barbera, the animation company best known for producing The Flintstones and The Jetsons.

Something early in Pierson’s career stood out, however. It turns out before he became a director and screenwriter, he was an actor. Between 1929 and 1940, he appeared in eleven Broadway plays.

In fact, in 1935, he was in the original Broadway cast of The Night of January 16th, written by Ayn Rand.

Now, you don’t suppose that Arthur Pierson, Hollywood director, got some of his ideas about business and profits from the Goddess of the Market herself, do you?