Like American Beauty, Donnie Darko was an adolescent favorite of my generation that, looking back, was actually caught up in the same moralizing melodrama it was trying to critique.
The liberal backlash against the conservative 1980s was bound to become its own moral majority and produce the conservative counterculture of the current era. the liberals have became the moralizing majority in the last couple decades. This coincides with them ceasing to make good comedy–i.e. the downfall of SNL.
There are funny conservatives now though. When I was growing up it was conservatives that were tone deaf and overly sincere and therefore easy to ridicule. It is strange how that flipped.
The shame is that the liberals still run hollywood and so the quality of the writing has really gone down hill in dramatic film as well recently, especially as they feel the need to moralize everything. Two of the most ambitious films the past year were about architecture and the nature of the artistic genius’s role in society, “Megalopolis”, and “The Brutalist”.
Though they are both beautiful films to look at and I have mad respect for Coppola for what he was trying to do, the blatant political preaching really ruined both, especially “the brutalist”, where the message wasn’t even a cheesy triumph of beauty over suffering like in “Megalopolis”, but a celebration of the suffering artist externalizing his pain as a heroic victim. At least that was my take (I hate brutalist architecture).
In any case, we need to be able to both laugh and cry, empathize with suffering and lovingly ridicule weakness. But in the liberal moral universe, tragedy and comedy are impossible and increasingly only the melodrama of not only heroes and victims but only heroic victims remains.
