Vaughn Against the Machine

Libertas has posted a review of the Vince Vaughn/Jennifer Aniston thing, The Break-up. Apparently, Vaughn is supposed to be one of the rarest of all earthly creatures: a Hollywood conservative. Here's a selection from the post:

...personally, I would prefer my romantic comedy to come without partisan politics at all, but I suspect that’s almost impossible nowadays. The left has so much control over the narrative assumptions that underlie most movies that merely to work under a different set of assumptions is to declare your position. In movies, the big corporation is always bad, the environmentalist always good; the gun-lover is always crazy, the religious guy always repressed or insane. The patriot is always a jingoist, wise men are always black, gays are always friends and advisors and, if you watch carefully, a poor man’s crimes are almost always traceable back to a rich man’s perfidy. The suburbs are always either comic or stifling, abortion may be rejected but never for moral reasons and – my personal favorite – the United Nations is always a force for truth and justice instead of the loathsomely corrupt gang of child-molesting, sex-trading kleptocratic tyrants we know and abhor.

In short, at the movies, as on the network news, liberal fantasy is the steady state of affairs, conservative truth a more or less ugly aberration. As a result, even the slightest indication that the hero of a movie might be, say, a Heston fan is bracing, a noticeable statement nearly shocking in its aggression. As for patriotism, faith, energetic capitalism – what some of us call normal on a good day – these become ferocious political pronouncements measured against a radical baseline.