Originally Posted by
Amelia G
I think Schwarzenegger could have done it, if they'd run him circa Total Recall. I would have voted for him then. He waited too long, did too many unattractive things in the interim, and became too much of a politician for it to work for him now, though. There is a whole generation of voters who never saw him in anything good but who may have heard about how he sued a widow while she was grieving because her contractor husband died while working on his house.
A really wonderful HBO production you might be interested in is The Wire. It is exactly about the types of questions you are bringing up re: the nature of policing and crime and such. I recommend watching the DVDs in order and not trying to catch it on television. Not that you seem like you'd be into HBO in general anyway. But this is a brave and interesting series which really examines, in a serious but entertaining way, why things are the way they are in terms of inner city crime and policing of that crime.
On the issue of people remembering John Hughes movies with fondness, I feel like I've certainly had it drummed into my head that I am supposed to relate to the shallow twats in his flicks and feel fondly about them. All the press releases were about the warmth and nostalgia of his movies, long before they were past tense. I think that whole fondness for his nonsense thing is just what some quality PR people told the world to think. I think you are right that general social assumptions lead people to their interpretations, but the notion that one should feel such fondness for such shallow and materialistic characters is, in my opinion, mostly the product of ingenious PR. But that sort of thing is like the Emperor's New Clothes. If someone, like yours truly, points out that the emperor is naked, the whole thing can collapse.
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