News Reporter: Act Four: The ‘Kingsman’ movies are full of conservative ideas. But does that make them conservative movies?

Wednesday 27 September 2017

Act Four: The ‘Kingsman’ movies are full of conservative ideas. But does that make them conservative movies?

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

From left, Taron Egerton, Colin Firth and Pedro Pascal in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle." (Giles Keyte/Twentieth Century Fox via Associated Press)

My dear friend Peter Suderman is one of my favorite critics, so I was particularly interested to read his latest essay on the “Kingsman” movie franchise. Peter makes what to my mind is a fairly convincing argument for the movies’ conservative values, from their opposition to social engineering around issues such as global warming and the war on drugs to their contempt for liberal elites and for classist snobs. But as I was reading the essay, I had a thought: The “Kingsman” movies are chock-full of conservative sentiments and ideas. But that’s not the same thing as saying that conservatives have broadly claimed the movies as their own.

The franchise, and that thought, raises a broader question. Obviously, Hollywood has long been a punching bag for conservatives who regard it as a bastion of liberal values, despite the industry’s long-standing illiberality when it comes to who it hires and what it pays people, its worship of the military and police violence, and many other tics and tendencies. But it’s not entirely clear to me what conservatives would consider a politically balanced output from the entertainment industry. And the case of “Kingsman” suggests that another complication is who would get to define what success looks like for conservatives in Hollywood.

As Peter points out, “Kingsman” is definitely not a franchise that would resonate with conservatives who see the entertainment industry as fundamentally immoral. It’s got lots of sex, a fairly obscene sense of humor and glamorizes violence at every turn. On the other hand, its action is driven, at least on a shallow level, by some big-picture conservative ideas, even as it avoids the bluntness and badness of Dinesh D’Souza’s forays into the propaganda business. Is that enough to convince D’Souza-like critics, or does its dedication to narrative somehow disqualify it?

I don’t necessarily have the answers to these questions. But I would love to hear from the conservatives in the Act Four audience what it means to you for a movie to be conservative.

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