Hollywood, the cultural epicenter of the “resistance” to the faux totalitarianism attributed to President Trump, has a vastly different approach to the real totalitarianism of Communist China: capitulation and self-censorship.
As noted by Mark MacKinnon, the senior international correspondent for The Globe and Mail, the sequel to 1986’s “Top Gun”—which, after 33 years of intermittent thought, the creative geniuses behind the project have christened with the inspired title “Top Gun: Maverick”—has the rare quality of being a nostalgia trip that performs the deft, duplicitous trick of including a bitter dose of revisionist history.
“There’s a new Top Gun movie coming out. And Maverick is wearing the same leather jacket—only this time it’s Communist Party of China-approved, so the Japanese and Taiwanese flag patches are gone . . . ”
Why did Hollywood change the patch and stuff the Japanese and Taiwanese flags down the memory hole?
“‘Mystery’ solved,” MacKinnon reports. “China’s Tencent Pictures is one of the main producers of Top Gun: Maverick.”
In agreement is Alan Tonelson, the founder of RealityChek, which is “a blog covering economics, national security, tech, and their intersections”: “i.e., Hollywood Values . . . the filmmakers clearly bowed to the censorship demands of a major China investor.”
Spoiler alert: for a dumpster full of money and access to the censored Chinese marketplace, Hollywood is more than happy to self-censor and pretend (like the Beijing regime does in its heartless soul) Taiwan and Japan have gone into the ashcan of history.
This is “Resistance” Hollywood, which falsely accuses the United States of operating “concentration camps” on its southern borders, while simultaneously kowtowing to a barbarous Beijing regime that is running actual concentration camps for Uyghurs in Xinjiang province.
There is no mystery to this state of affairs. Dumping on the United States is box office gold in the eyes of Communist China’s totalitarian rulers, who will deign to grant access to Hollywood’s venal, beautiful people desiring to line their pockets from a literally captive audience; and, of course, these sanctimonious celebrities know a dirty but not so little secret: there’s no box office bank in decrying the Beijing barbarians’ oppression of the Uyghurs.
This sequel is less “Top Gun 2” than “Pop Gun 2,” with its self-censorship in deference to a Communist junta that spent this summer censoring all reference to the 30th commemoration of its butchering young freedom-seekers in Tiananmen Square. This is yet another despicable exhibit in the decades long amorality of the American business community, in which Hollywood is just another fellow traveler appeasing a heinous regime to enrich itself at the expense of the Chinese people, the American people, and indeed all who yearn for a world free of totalitarian oppression.
True, too, Hollywood’s kowtowing to the Communist regime once again reveals that “progressive” policies and practices are actually regressive.
Merriam-Webster defines “kowtow” as “to show obsequious deference: fawn” and, more specifically, “to kneel and touch the forehead to the ground in token of homage, worship, or deep respect.” Historically, the word derives from the “Chinese ‘koutou,’ formed by combining the verb ‘kou’ (‘to knock’) with the noun ‘tou’ (‘head’).”
In imperial China, this groveling was required when appearing before a “revered authority,” such as “commoners making requests to the local magistrate, by the emperor to the shrine of Confucius, or by foreign representatives appearing before the emperor to establish trade relations.” (Emphasis mine.) “In the late 18th century, some Western nations resisted performing the ritual, which acknowledged the Chinese emperor as the “son of heaven.”
Recognizing no master but mammon, Hollywood’s “Pop Gun 2” nostalgia trip includes a servile return to the days when a totalitarian’s every sin may be overlooked without even bothering to ascribe its omission to some enlightened, albeit bogus pretext. Nope, Hollywood’s shameful self-censorship is about naked self-interest—and not of the kind one finds in an “art film.”
Oh, Hollywood! Thy name is hypocrisy!
That, you can bank on.
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Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures/Skydance/Jerry Bruckheimer Films