Secretariat was not a Christian - Roger Ebert’s Journal
Lest we think wingnuts have monopolized Teh Crazy:
Andrew O’Hehir of Salon is a critic I admire, but he has nevertheless written a review of “Secretariat” so bizarre I cannot allow it to pass unnoticed. I don’t find anywhere in “Secretariat” the ideology he discovers there. In its reasoning, his review resembles a fevered conspiracy theory.
In this example , we do not find proof that Obama is a Muslim Communist born in Kenya. No, the news is worse than that. It involves Secretariat, a horse who up until now we innocently thought of as merely very fast. We learn the horse is a carrier not merely of Ron Turcotte’s 130 pounds, but of Nazism, racism, Tea Party ideology and the dark side of Christianity.
Oh, and I forgot the Ku Klux Klan: “The movie itself is ablaze with its own crazy sense of purpose,” O’Hehir writes, “…as if someone just off-screen were burning a cross on the lawn.”
Say what? We saw the same movie. I am a liberal who has found more than his share of the Dark Side in seemingly innocent films. But in my naïveté I attended “Secretariat” and saw a straightforward, lovingly crafted film about a great horse and the determined woman who backed him against a posse of men who thought she should get her pretty little ass off the horse farm and get back to raisin’ those kids and darnin’ those socks.
O’Hehir’s review is a cri de coeur against evil in the shape of a film. While showing how this woman “lucks into owning a genetic freak,” he says the film papers over all of the historic wrongs in American history, including those of its own period: “The year Secretariat won the Triple Crown was the year the Vietnam War ended and the Watergate hearings began.” It is “creepy, half-hilarious master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl,” he writes, about how “all right-thinking Americans are united in their adoration of a Nietzschean Überhorse.” In fact, “Big Red himself is a big, handsome MacGuffin, symbolic window dressing for a quasi-inspirational fantasia of American whiteness and power.”
I’m not making this up. How did a lifelong liberal like myself manage to leave peacefully at the end, instead of organizing the audience and leading a demonstration right then and there?
O’Hehir’s reading is wildly eccentric, and commits a logical error best outlined as: A is evil because it does not acknowledge B. Or perhaps: Although A and B are represented as separate circles, they should overlap.