American Consequences

John Podhoretz

August 2019

America Rides Again

God and the movies love this big, dumb place By John Podhoretz Everybody’s favorite quote from Alexis de Tocqueville is a fake. The author of Democracy in America actually did not say, “America is great because America is good,” in his peerless 1835...

July 2019

America the Frenemy

How Hollywood Just Can’t Quit Loving the Country It Wants to Hate By John Podhoretz Back in the 1980s, a writer-director friend of mine was pitching a World War II movie to development executives at a Hollywood production company when an...

December 2018

Christmas: Looking In

How Dickens and pop culture gave us the Christmas we know today By John Podhoretz In his wonderful 2008 book The Man Who Invented Christmas, Les Standiford reveals how the triumphant success of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in 1843 placed...

November 2018

Larger Than Life and Twice as Ugly

America’s Love Affair With the Post-Apocalyptic Movie By John Podhoretz The greatest twist ending in Hollywood history came in 1968 when Charlton Heston rode shirtless on a horse down a beach, saw something horrid, and threw himself to the ground...

July 2018

Not So Great Expectations

By some reckonings, the two most successful movies ever made are 1915’s The Birth of a Nation, and Gone With the Wind from 1939. Birth was the movie that ensured the endurance of the medium and inaugurated the idea that its creative talent should be...

April 2018

Wall Street on the Big Screen

Finance is the great neglected subject of American art. Among the enduring American writers, only Theodore Dreiser took up the serious study of the “Lord of Finance” as a central figure in the national story. His extraordinary novels The Financier...

February 2018

The Not-So-Great Wall

How China Hasn’t Taken Over Pop Culture Yet By John Podhoretz American moviegoers scratched their heads in early 2017 when a trailer appeared out of nowhere for an epic movie about rival warlords in medieval China. It was big and vast, with special...

January 2018

Invasion of the CGI

There might have been a moment of late when you sat in a movie theater struggling to remain awake as some entirely convincing space battle between two starships a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away took place in front of you. (It was so...