Michael Moore, look out. Rick Santorum is getting into the documentary filmmaking business and he’s out to tell ”the other side of the story.”

Less than three months removed from his congressional career, the former Pennsylvania senator said in an interview last week that he is planning two film projects in part to counter what he characterized as the stream of left-wing documentaries coming from Hollywood and independent filmmakers.

The first project, Santorum said, would explore the relationship between radical Islam and the radical leftists in various countries around the world, including Latin America. It would be about an hour in length.

The second would be a longer, broader documentary that he said would aim to ”change the culture of America.” He declined to go into specifics about the proposal.

”Politics and political dialogue has some impact on America but changing the culture has a much bigger impact,” Santorum said about his new role outside the public sector and his push to make documentaries. ”That is what the left is doing and doing it in a big way, producing a lot of left content for Hollywood, and even not just out of Hollywood. Even independent films are now more and more left-wing driven, whether it is Michael Moore or Al Gore.” ~The Morning Call

Okay, you can stop laughing now.  No, really, you can stop. 

This strikes me as a really bad idea, and this isn’t just because I have been such a harsh critic of Santorum on foreign policy.  I don’t object to the suggestion that more conservatives should make documentaries.  Conservatives definitely should make more documentaries, but they should do so because they actually want to be filmmakers and want to tell stories.  They should do this because they have a talent for doing it, which ensures that they will be doing the work that best expresses their particular gifts.  Conservatives should not make documentaries just because that’s what leftists do and we need to counter their propaganda arm with one of our own.  As much as it may stun certain folks to read this, left-wing politics prevails among actors and artists for the same reason that it prevails among most journalists: it is a kind of politics that initially fits very well with the kind of work that these people do, and these professions attract people who already tend to share these beliefs.  Left-wing politics becomes an unquestioned set of common assumptions in these professions over time.  After a while, it is just a given that traditional Christianity is basically bad and dangerous, most or all forms of patriotism are retrograde, government is here to help us, the media exist to improve and reform society and all cultures and religions are OK (except for Christian culture and Christianity and those that bear strong resemblances to traditional Christianity).  I suspect conservatives don’t get into a lot of acting or art or journalism today because they know a few things about all of them: they know that these areas are all full of people who are not like them temperamentally or culturally, there are some strong entrenched forces opposing the sorts of work they would like to do (consider how difficult it was for Robert Duvall to get The Apostle made) and this sort of work strikes them as unattractive because they deem it less practical or less meaningful. 

It is the real-world impracticality of it that is especially discouraging to kids who have artistic ability, love making movies or find writing and reporting fascinating.  The same goes for fiction writing or any kind of writing–this would be my more prosaic explanation for why there are so few Republican or conservative fiction writers running around out there.  Making a living at these things is not only hard (which might not be the main problem), but sometimes it is impossible for a lot of people, and it only becomes more difficult if you have children.  The lifestyle of a journalist or actor in particular would have to put strains on the kind of grounded, family-centered life that I assume most conservatives desire to have to one degree or another.  If these conservatives are traditionally-minded people, they will be thinking a lot about being able to provide for the families they undoubtedly want to have, which means that they will pursue those professions that offer the best prospects for this.  If their parents are also conservative, they will have added pressures to pursue a practical line of work, if only for their own self-sufficiency, to say nothing of supporting a family.  Trying to become an actor is usually so unlikely to provide the means for supporting a family (and not necessarily terribly conducive to starting a stable one) that the uncertainty of it will probably discourage most conservatives, especially conservative men, to follow a different path.  The same goes for music, art, literature, academics, etc.  (Add to this conservatism’s cultivation of reflexive anti-elitism, in which the elite villains are always artists, actors, journalists and academics, and you have an endless feedback loop of increasing conservative hostility to these fields.)  Because the broad base of political conservatism in America is middle and lower-middle class, most conservatives will in their own lives be concerned to pursue stable and relatively well-paying work, which is the definition of what most writing, acting, teaching and reporting are not.  I think there is also a comfort ethic in the middle class that makes middle-class conservatives tend to shy away from professions that might not necessarily be able to provide the level of comfort to which they have become accustomed. 

Since many of the greatest conservative thinkers of the last sixty years were academics, there is nothing inherent about being a scholar that militates against conservatism (and actually a lot about it that I think could encourage this persuasion), but the impracticality of dwelling in the wasteland of graduate school for years (okay, it’s not that bad, but sometimes it can feel like it) seems to be an overwhelming argument against doing it.  As “higher education” (one of the more misleading phrases around today) becomes more and more expensive, the impracticality of continuing it through post-graduate work only increases, especially for those who do not want to take on immense amounts of debt.  Thus among professional and post-graduate students you usually wind up with fairly disproportionate conservative representation in the business and law schools (that’s certainly true here), while the other departments are almost uniformly made up of folks on the left or those who take no strong position one way or another.  Obviously, the more “trendy” fields (e.g., Gender Studies) will have no conservatives at all, since almost all conservatives can barely avoid openly snickering (if they are even trying to avoid this) when such a field is mentioned.  There is nonetheless surely something weird about American conservatives who will gladly cite Chesterton and Muggeridge and Kirk and Weaver but who usually use the words ‘journalist’ and ‘academic’ as insults, but I think most embody this apparent contradiction.  As a matter of description of the state of academia or newsrooms today, it is reasonable to refer to them with a certain open disdain for their obvious left-wing biases, but to rule out these professions (as I think some do) because they are somehow automatically tainted by that bias strikes me as odd.  

For my part, I agree with Ross’ line of thinking that fighting the culture war means actually producing some cultural products (and, no, George Bush action figures and 24 don’t really count), so there is no reason why conservatives should avoid making all sorts of films and getting into every other kind of art.  Arguably, really horrendous first attempts might even be tolerated as the first moves towards creating conservative cultural products, but it would probably be better if certain people didn’t go out of their way to make sure that the first attempts really would be horrendously bad.  Santorum’s effort seems designed to ensure that his attempts will be.    

Indeed, I don’t even object in principle to the suggestion that crazy ueber-jingoes such as Rick Santorum want to make documentaries.  It might be interesting to watch the product of someone obsessed with the military threat from Bolivia.  He could point his camera at menacing-looking Bolivian coca farmers, whose latest crops have been destroyed by defoliant chemicals dropped in the name of the drug war, and document the seething rage and the occasional remarks about the “Yanquis” who have ruined their livelihood.  He could film the crowds of exuberant pro-Morales supporters while a voiceover reads the bizarre words of the Bolivian foreign minister Choquehuanca.  It could be quite powerful stuff.  The underlying message, “These people are sort of crazy,” might even sink in, provided that it was made with subtlety and cleverness.  Why do I think that Rick Santorum is uniquely unsuited to operating in this way?  Gosh, I don’t know.

If put together honestly, a documentary on “the Venezuelan empire” would be very illuminating for all the things that it doesn’t show (rows of Venezuelan tanks rolling through Brasilia, for instance).  Santorum might even discover in the process of making his films that he had been mistaken about certain realities.   

No, it is a really bad idea for two fairly obvious reasons: 1) to the best of my knowledge, Santorum has hardly ever picked up a camera in his life and has no experience in making documentaries or any other kind of film, which makes him one of the last choices for going into this sort of work; 2) the precedent of The Half Hour News Hour.  Who actually thought that the man who brought you weekly torture sessions and constant violence, mixed with bureaucratic office intrigue and bad speechwriting, was going to produce something that was really funny?  As we have seen before, the explicit attempt to provide a “balancing” perspective to genuinely biased productions from the other side of the spectrum always fails.  Part of this may be that the temperament and general outlook of one “side” are probably better suited to certain media and certain kinds of expression than others, and the other part is that any conscious attempt to mimic and offset someone else’s project will almost always come off as stilted, derivative and uninspired…because it is stiled, derivative and uninspired.  If the knock on left-wing documentaries is that they are too politically biased, how on earth does someone make a better documentary by going into the project with the explicit goal of providing an overtly right-wing documentary?  If the problem with these documentaries is that they are poorly done because they are too political (which is what many conservatives will often say), making documentaries for no other purpose than to answer the political arguments of your opponents seems likely to create something potentially rather horrid.  Instead of a documentary, you would end up with something more like a cross between FoxNews reporting and a reality TV show. 

As is the case with anything that involves investigation and learning, it is fair to say that documentary filmmakers who already know the answers to the questions they are about to ask are probably going to miss a lot of important things about their subject.  Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary is apparently well-done (at least in the opinion of some) because in so many places she simply lets evangelicals speak for themselves.  Of course, what she chooses to film and keep in the final cut will reflect her perspective, but probably the most effective and most honest documentaries, like the best fiction writing according to the bromides of creative writing teachers everywhere, show and don’t tell.  Santorum’s project, because of Santorum’s personality, will involve an awful lot of telling and probably not much showing.  In the realm of filmmaking, even in documentaries, there is always plenty of borrowing from other directors, but the filmmaker that states explicitly at the outset, “The Originator is the movie that will provide the answer to James Cameron” usually ends up making a movie that is simply bad.  If Santorum goes out to make the anti-Alexandra Pelosi documentary and calls it “God’s Enemies,” complete with interviews with Abe Foxman and members of Americans for the Separation of Church and State, he will probably create a very bad documentary, just as Joel Surnow produced some really bad comedy by trying to create the anti-Stewart.  (Actually, he succeeded in creating the anti-Stewart in one respect: he created TV personae who were not in the least funny.)