Behind the liberal mask, Hollywood’s a horror movie

Real debate is forced into hiding as Tinseltown’s deadly conformity spreads.

The Vanity Fair cover shot by Annie Leibovitz out this week.

My favourite film on the Oscar shortlist is Get Out, the satirical horror flick starring Daniel Kaluuya. It is a glorious pastiche of everything that Hollywood, home of liberal hypocrisy, stands for. When Kaluuya’s character, Chris, dates a white girl, he is astonished she doesn’t consider his colour worth mentioning to her parents before he meets them. What begins as an update of the 1960s Oscar-winning film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner ends as a slasher movie with echoes of Black Lives Matter.

The giveaway that the demons of racism lurk within a wealthy suburban family is that the neurosurgeon father loves to riff, “I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could!” As Rod, Chris’s best friend and comic foil, soon realises, the father’s opinions are closeted behind a guff of patronising liberal nonsense. His disavowal of prejudice is about as sincere as the belief that Hollywood has changed its spots with this year’s #OscarsNotSoWhite nomination list.

Moreover, despite the ostentatious adoption of the Time’s Up and Me Too movements, Hollywood remains a glamorous meat factory serving up young women to older men. For evidence, look no further than the typically sumptuous Annie Leibovitz photograph of Hollywood royalty for Graydon Carter’s last issue as the editor of Vanity Fair, published this week. Even with some fairly ripe peaches on display, such as Oprah Winfrey, 63, and Nicole Kidman, 50, the average age of the actresses, including Claire Foy of The Crown, is almost 20 years younger than that of their male co-stars.

The grizzled lions in the shot, wearing “Presidents Club” black dinner jackets, tower over the women draped submissively beneath them. If Gal Gadot, the statuesque 32-year-old star of Wonder Woman, clad in a see-through chiffon skirt, hadn’t been slouching on the arm of a chair, she would have overshadowed Harrison Ford, ever the action hero at 75. And what are we to make of the photoshopping that appears to have left Oprah with three hands and Reese Witherspoon with a surplus leg? “I guess everybody knows now ... I have 3 legs,” the actress tweeted in good sport. “I hope you can still accept me for who I am.” Chalk that one up for the disabled movement.

It is in this climate of cant that the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson is gaining such a cult following online. His stand-off with Cathy Newman of Channel 4 News has racked up more than 4 million views on YouTube — merely for his stating the obvious, such as that freedom of speech means the right to cause offence; that “women deeply want men who are competent and powerful” (and, he qualifies, “I don’t mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others”); and that “the typical woman has to have her career and family in order pretty much by the time she is 35”.

Oprah with three hands in Vanity Fair.

These views stereotype the sexes far less than Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which has sold 50 million copies, yet Peterson was chastised by Newman as if he were from another planet. His own book, 12 Rules for Life, which contains admonitions such as “Tell the truth — or at least don’t lie”, is storming the bestseller list as if he were saying the unsayable, when self-help manuals have been with us since the Ten Commandments. Newman, meanwhile, is being pelted with so much manure that Peterson has had to appeal to his hyperventilating fans for calm.

With mainstream thinkers shouted down or threatened with no-platforming, informed debate is shifting to the “intellectual dark web”, allowing public thinkers to put forward ideas on YouTube and in podcasts without attracting charges of heresy. Despite the catchy new name, it is not “dark” as in the forbidden region of the internet inhabited by drug dealers and pedophiles, but it is considered by its supporters to be excitingly samizdat.

By contrast, Hollywood has become a place of suffocating conformity behind which darkness lurks. Its liberal mask is slipping so fast that Casey Affleck, the star of Manchester by the Sea, last week was obliged hurriedly to decline the invitation to present the Oscar for best actress, given his record of settling sexual harassment lawsuits brought by women.

One of last year’s most acclaimed films, Call Me by Your Name, is a gay romance featuring straight actors, for obvious box-office reasons, and the only safe love affair on the Oscar shortlist would appear to be between a mute cleaning lady played by Sally Hawkins and an alien fish-man, in The Shape of Water.

Even Get Out comes with racial baggage and identity politics. Kaluuya had to fend off accusations from a furious Samuel L Jackson that black British actors were snatching too many roles from African-Americans.

“Daniel grew up in a country where they’ve been interracial dating for a hundred years,” Jackson said bizarrely. “What would a brother from America have made of that role?”

The baffled Kaluuya replied: “I’m dark-skinned, bro.” Wherever he goes, he told GQ, he was expected to talk about his experience of racism and “show off my struggle so that people accept I’m black. I resent that”.

For Kaluuya, the culture wars demand that “just because you’re black, you get taken and used to represent something”. This is mirrored by his character. I hope he wins the Oscar for best actor. Annoyingly, though, Hollywood liberals would congratulate themselves more than him.

The Sunday Times