Midas, in honor of his peasant-turned-king father, King Gordias, dedicated an ox-cart to the gods, tying it with a knot so complex no one could undo it. It was there years later when Alexander of Macedon stopped by, and turned his hand to untying it. He couldn’t. So he took his sword and cut it open.
Some seemingly insoluble problems are best solved by stepping back and “cutting the Gordian knot.”
Take a current knot, fictional cannibalism. The auteur responsible for the gore-fest The Offspring recently sought funding for another cannibalism horror film, to be entitled The Woman.
The funder turned him down. “This film is unlikely to promote tourism in Michigan or to present or reflect Michigan in a positive light,” said the head honcho of the funding institution, the state’s film commission.
Two years ago, that tax-funded organization produced 26 separate efforts. “Isn’t that just amazing?” Commissioner Janet Lockwood gurgled.
But her turning down funding for a horror film, for reasons of content, have let loose a storm of criticism. Some say that when government says “no” to an artistic product on content grounds, that’s censorship.
They are right.
Others say they don’t want their tax dollars going to vile, disgusting depictions of cannibalism and other vices and crimes.
And they are right, too.
The solution? Cut the knot of this problem in one swipe: Governments shouldn’t fund films. End of story. [Roll credits.]
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
7 replies on “Knot Cannibalism!”
We should not government fund another Gore-fest, the fictional “global knot warming but we’re gonna tax you anyway” gala. Even as we speak the progressive insiders are all lining up drooling over the money that they are going to make with the Chicago Climate Exchange. Not just Presbo. Other major players are Maurice Strong, John Podest, Valerie Jarret, Joel Rogers, Van Jones. Everything that is produced in this country is produced generating a little CO2 and they are lining up to rake a percentage off the top.
Aided and abetted by the current Congress.
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Why is government picking favorites at all? Government shouldn’t be funding the arts or anything the free market can provide. If the free market doesn’t provide it, that means people don’t want it.
Taking money from taxpayers to give to others isn’t American or even moral — it’s using government to steal.
Arguing that government shouldn’t fund horrible horror movies, makes the assumption that funding “good” movies is OK. It isn’t.
Actually, according to Ayn Rand’s view of the world (a more constructive view than most artists agree with), the director of “The Woman” could argue that the symbolic message of his movie was the financing of films with taxpayer money. The argument could read as such: The film ought to be financed as self-referential performance art that is made into art as soon as someone who agrees with public funding of the arts pays for a ticket and walks out of the theater in disgust. Not only is it film, the act of watching the film is participatory performance art with a deeply ironic message. …LOL
They did fund the michael moore movie “Capitalism, a love story”.
It made him a millionaire
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=michaelmoore09.htm
[…] subsidies given only to moviemakers are wrong on several grounds, as I’ve argued before (see “Knot Cannibalism” and “Cinema Without Subsidy”). Of course, the red tape and high taxes associated with […]