Maverick Creators and Maverick Heroes
This section deals first with flying saucers and a trailer trash family in Kansas, then with a billionaire aviation tycoon and his conflict with a U.S. Senator, and finally with four potty-mouthed children from Colorado. Thus, at first sight, its unity may not be entirely obvious, especially when compared with the other sections, one of which deals with a single genre (the Western), another with a single figure (Edgar Ulmer), and the last with a single historical moment (9/11 and its aftermath). Nevertheless, the chapters in this section go right to the heart of this book’s subject—the tradition of challenging authority in America and championing free individuals, in short, the American conception of the hero as maverick. The term maverick comes out of the American West, where it referred to unbranded cattle, and one of the most successful television Westerns was named Maverick. The archetypal American hero has roots in the Western frontier, and is distinguished by his maverick qualities—his determination to go his own way and his unwillingness to play by the conventional rules. As we saw in discussing Gene Roddenberry in Chapter Two, the spirit of the Western has a way of migrating into other pop culture genres. We should not be surprised to find it resurface in a science fiction movie that begins with a cattle stampede (Mars Attacks!), or in the story of an authentic American hero in The Aviator (after all, we call Howard Hughes an aviation pioneer), or even in a cartoon (South Park provides a comic counterpart of Deadwood, with the same spirit of anarchy and flaunting authority, as well as the amazing ability of its children to match the likes of Al Swearengen curse word for curse word).
Despite many differences, the three works I discuss in this section have much in common, especially a kind of transposed frontier spirit and a focus on rejecting and rebelling against the establishment. South Park is, of course, anti-establishment at its core, and has drawn fire from educational, moral, and religious authorities of all stripes. Mars Attacks! takes the side of ordinary Americans against the Washington establishment, which patronizes them and tries to run their lives for them. At first glance, the Howard Hughes of The Aviator would seem to be an establishment figure himself. Rich and powerful, in command of a business empire, he appears to be the kind of big man who pushes little people around. But in the typical fashion of a Martin Scorsese film, The Aviator focuses on Hughes as a perpetual underdog, fighting first the Hollywood establishment, then the aviation industry establishment, and finally the biggest establishment of them all, the U.S. government.
Without getting too biographical in approach, it would be easy to see affinities between the maverick creators of these works and the maverick heroes they champion. Martin Scorsese is one of the most fiercely independent spirits ever to work in the American film industry, and one of the most creative. He is legendary for his artistic integrity, and has made some of the most original films in Hollywood history. Tim Burton is also one of the rare directors who has put the stamp of his individual genius on all his films, and, like Scorsese, he has often had to fight the Hollywood establishment in order to do so. The creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, would probably not be classed by media historians in the same league as Scorsese and Burton. Yet in many respects they fit the model of the auteur and might even be called the Orson Welles or the Charlie Chaplin of the cartoon world. They created South Park on their own, write the scripts, supervise the production process for each episode, compose some of the songs, and even voice many of the characters themselves. In terms of language and subject matter, they have pushed the envelop in television as much as anyone who has ever worked in the medium, and have had to struggle with network executives to achieve their creative freedom.
Scorsese, Burton, and Parker and Stone constitute solid evidence that American popular culture should not be judged by its lowest common denominator. They have shown that Hollywood rules, however rigid they may appear, are made to be broken. To be sure, they all have had to compromise at various points in their careers, and accept the interference of their corporate bosses in their creative work. They have not always been able to get exactly what they wanted on the screen. Nevertheless, because of their willingness to fight for what they believe in, they have produced genuinely original and creative works. Considering how innovative and audacious these works have been, we should marvel at what they have managed to get away with in Hollywood, rather than complain about the commercial restraints on their creativity. They have not had any magic formula that guaranteed their success, and, given their backgrounds, no one could have predicted how much they have accomplished. At key moments in their careers, they have been lucky, but only in the sense that they were fortunate to be given a chance to make a given movie or television show. They still had to prove themselves and demonstrate the truth of the principle that “talent will out.” The careers of Scorsese, Burton, and Parker and Stone show that one can be a maverick and still make it in Hollywood. As much as they have struggled at times with the commercial system of production, they have also profited from it—both financially and artistically. Hollywood has made them rich, and also given them the financial and other resources they needed to practice their craft. Burton, as well as Parker and Stone, have spoken with gratitude—and even some amazement—about the amounts of money that Hollywood has been willing to put at their disposal.
Scorsese, Burton, and Parker and Stone have all benefited from the free enterprise system in the United States, especially the freedom to take chances in one’s chosen profession and see what one can accomplish. Each in his own way has lived out the American dream, coming from ordinary and undistinguished origins and rising to the top of one’s field. It is appropriate, then, that they celebrate the principle of liberty in America in their work. Accordingly, this is the section that focuses most clearly on the libertarian impulse in American film and television. Of all the figures I discuss in this book, I believe that only Parker and Stone identify themselves as libertarians (Chris Carter of The X-Files has occasionally referred to himself as a “left libertarian”). I show that South Park explicitly and emphatically defends free enterprise, and makes fun of the way capitalism is routinely demonized in the American media. I doubt that Scorsese thinks of himself as a proponent of capitalism, and yet I argue that The Aviator insightfully portrays the visionary nature of the entrepreneur and takes his side against government efforts to regulate his activities and stifle his creativity. The fact that Scorsese could identify with Howard Hughes specifically as a motion picture entrepreneur probably helped generate the broader sympathy for a businessman hero that makes The Aviator unusual among American films.
South Park and The Aviator share a distrust of government intervention in the marketplace. In particular, they both show that government actions that claim to be in the public interest are often done at the urging of private interests behind the scene. In a form of unfair competition, one company gets the government to take action against another, often in an attempt to create a government-sanctioned monopoly. Thus neither South Park nor The Aviator is simply pro-business. A common error about libertarians is to think that, because they support free enterprise, they are always on the side of any business, especially big business. But as South Park makes clear, libertarians support big business only when it has grown big by means of legitimate market competition. When big business gets in bed with big government to seek protection and aid, libertarians are the first to condemn what they call corporate welfare or crony capitalism. The “Gnomes” episode of South Park is particularly valuable for showing that libertarians do not unthinkingly side with big business against small. Rather libertarians distinguish between businesses (big or small) that are willing to compete freely in the market and those (again, big or small) that exploit their government connections to eliminate or reduce competition. In its portrayal of the battle between TWA and Pan Am, The Aviator draws the same distinction, one that Adam Smith was already making in 1776 and that is fundamental to genuine free market thinking.
I do not see any form of specifically economic libertarianism in Mars Attacks!, but it certainly shares the anti-government and anti-establishment spirit of The Aviator and South Park. Burton’s movie is filled with a democratic respect for the self-organizing power of the American people and confidence in their ability to take care of themselves. Mars Attacks! gives a vicious portrait of America’s political, scientific, media, and military elites, and suggests their utter irrelevance to ordinary life in the United States. They are shown to be out of touch with what is important to average Americans. In a crisis, the common people in the film must act to save themselves, and draw upon their pop culture to do so. Mars Attacks! reverses the position we saw in Have Gun-Will Travel in Chapter Two. In that show’s vision of the United States, a broad-minded and cosmopolitan figure from the cultural elite (based, like Hollywood itself, in California) is necessary to protect small-town Americans from themselves and their own small-mindedness. In Mars Attacks!, the cultural elite is exposed as a sham, and people from the heartland of America band together across racial and ethnic lines to rally to their own defense in the absence of any effective leadership from Washington.
The Aviator and South Park share this suspicion of elites who claim to be concerned about the common people, but are really interested only in maintaining their own power and social status. South Park particularly attacks the Hollywood elite and the stars’ relentless campaigning for politically correct causes about which they can feel smug and self-satisfied. But the show also satirizes politicians such as Al Gore, who seize on alarmist issues as a way of clinging desperately to their celebrity and feeding their vanity (see especially the tenth season episode “Manbearpig”). The Aviator explores the paradox of wealthy elites who condemn money-making activities, because they want to preserve their elevated status against up-and-coming entrepreneurs such as Hughes. Ultimately, what the three works I discuss in this section share is a “bottom up” rather than a “top down” vision of America. They all take the side of the little guy, with the understanding that, in the face of big government, even the biggest businessman is a little guy. They question the ability of the government to run the world effectively or fairly, and turn to individuals to get things done and save the day. South Park offers the only example in this book of something approaching programmatic libertarianism, but Mars Attacks! and The Aviator embody what I speak of more loosely as the libertarian impulse in American popular culture.
My continuing effort to show that popular culture can be taken seriously in artistic and intellectual terms is most severely challenged in this section, especially when I am dealing with a movie as silly as Mars Attacks! or a television show as vulgar as South Park. But I persist in my claim that what is often cordoned off as high culture is nevertheless relevant to popular culture. In the Mars Attacks! chapter, I use Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America as a reference point, and argue that Burton shares with the French thinker an appreciation of the importance of localism in democracy. In the Aviator chapter, I draw upon the ideas of free market economics, including works by Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek, to illuminate the movie’s understanding of entrepreneurship. I also draw upon these ideas in the South Park chapter, but, more broadly, try to place the show in a tradition of philosophical comedy that goes back as far as Aristophanes, Socrates, and Plato. I use Rabelais and Mark Twain to suggest that South Park, with all its profanity and blasphemy, harks back to some distinguished cultural antecedents. Parker and Stone did not invent the fart joke. It has a long and venerable history, stretching back through Twain and Rabelais all the way to Aristophanes’ The Clouds. Works that are venerated today as exemplars of high culture are sometimes as vulgar as contemporary comedies, and were in their own day condemned as profane, obscene, and blasphemous. South Park may be my best example of how the high and the low are often inextricably intertwined, not just in popular culture, but in culture more generally.
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