Just like I do! But instead of mocking the wacky beliefs of his correspondents, Dreher likes to praise them and agree with them. I guess he gets better letter-writers than I do.
But no! This guy is nuts. He senses omens of cultural armageddon in the Academy Awards. He is apparently very concerned that the Best Picture award went to a movie that was all about…bestiality. It’s not just cats and dogs living together, it’s human women copulating with fish! That’s all that movie was about!
Full confession: I very much liked The Shape of Water, although I would actually have favored Get Out winning the big award. It’s a nice, gentle story of love triumphing against adversity in a fantastic context. I guess that makes me a sexual prevert and degenerate now.
They haven’t seen the movie, but these two are aghast at what they think is the plot.
He’s talking about The Shape Of Water, a movie in which the female protagonist falls in love with a humanoid amphibian, and has sex with it (“cod coitus,” according to Sonny Bunch). The reader continues:
Even more astounding is that no one seemed to care: the critics, the media and now the Academy all applauded at director Guillermo Del Toro’s “boldness”. The Best Screenplay and Best Foreign Film winners — respectively about a pederastic love story and a trans woman fighting prejudice — look almost tame in comparison, though they’re symptomatic too.
But the movie is so much more! The villain, the excellent Michael Shannon, is a deeply conservative, materialist man who is also a kneejerk Christian — see? Dreher’s ilk have a prominent role in the movie. One of the protagonists is a gay man. The heroine is a disabled poor woman with a mysterious past, who also seems to have gills. The “humanoid amphibian” has supernatural powers, and is actually a kind of god, worshipped in his native land.
There’s so much they could have hated if only they’d seen the movie.
But gosh, they must suffer greatly at the movies if the idea of a trans woman fighting prejudice repulses them. They see everything as an attack.
I agree with the things you say most of the time, but something I think you miss is how the turmoil we’re witnessing is basically a transfer of power from “regular” people to the freaks. Everything previously deemed inferior, abnormal, marginal, obscene is now not only normalized but embraced, even glorified. In his book The Antichrist, Nietzsche denounced Christianity as a perversion of all good and healthy values. He called for a total revolution in values, to overturn Christian morality and replace it with its opposite. That’s what we’re seeing now, at a very deep level.
This wouldn’t matter that much if our new lords weren’t so full of rancor and determined to get their revenge on those who humiliated them, hence the attacks on the various “privileges” that systematically target the representatives of the old order: patriarchy, masculinity, heterosexuality, “whiteness” and — yes — Christianity. As a member of a minority group, this shouldn’t worry me so much, as many aspects of said “old order” were not worth preserving or friendly to me. But I’m telling you, what is coming threatens to be much worse because it’s revenge, not justice.
The Shape of Water is not a revenge story. It’s a love story about people finding happiness outside of conventionality. If you want to see a movie about rancor and revenge and people who attack those who are different, the remake of Death Wish is playing right now. I’m sure torture-porn is more in keeping with Christian values.
Dreher ends with an apocalyptic warning:
Listen to me, conservative Christian readers:
- there are no politicians on earth capable of turning this tide of decadence; the power of culture is far too strong;
- you cannot expect your children to be salt and light to a culture that gives its highest honor to a movie celebrating bestiality as an act of liberation, and a “love letter to love”;
- soon, people who believe the things you do will be regarded as perverted and dangerous to the common good; are you ready for that?
You had better be ready for that. The handwriting is on the wall, and the cracks are widening in the foundations.
Again, if we’re going to prognosticate on the future of our nation based on movies, The Shape of Water gives me far more hope than Death Wish. I’d rather see a love letter to love than a celebration of bloody violent murder.