Responding to reviews of Christopher Nolan’s new space epic Interstellar from politically-oriented outlets, Washington Free Beacon executive editor Sonny Bunch outlined the latest leftist critical trend which has taken the place of the outmoded Socialist Realism of the Soviets: Environmentalist Realism.
Bunch explains that, like its openly socialist predecessor, the new environmentalist iteration seeks to instruct the masses on the “correct” way to think, replacing the reality of what “is” with the ideological notion of what “ought” to be—while discarding such irrelevant notions as “artistic merit”:
The films that hewed closely to socialist realism were those that encouraged purity of thought and deed, denigrated the kulaks and the capitalists, and attacked whichever foreign power Stalin had arrayed the USSR against at the given moment.
Little things like “artistic merit” meant almost nothing to the fans of socialist realism: camera work, set design, acting—all secondary concerns to the plot and dialogue and theme.* Didacticism was all that mattered.
Many of the reviews of Interstellar from high-profile left-leaning outlets, Bunch demonstrates, expose the ideological aims of the environmentalist critic class:
The release of Interstellar, and its reception on politically oriented websites, shows that the socialist realist impulse hasn’t died out. But it has transformed for the times. We’re now living in an age in which films are criticized for failing to live up to environmentalist realism. The distinction between “is” and “ought” has once again become a fuzzy one.
“No matter how you feel about Interstellar as a piece of entertainment, one thing should be agreed upon: As a climate-change parable, it fails,” wrote Noah Gittell in the Atlantic. “Nolan fails to look inward and uncover the flaws and solutions in humanity; instead, he prefers to gaze up at the stars and fantasize. … For those who care about climate change, the film feels like a missed opportunity.”
Bunch goes on to provide excerpts of other politically-correcting reviews from other outlets—including ThinkProgress, and the Washington Post—that all similarly seek to “purify” the film to align with the proper ideology of the environmentalist illuminati.
Read Bunch’s complete discussion here.
