In the display ‘Backdrop: An Invisible Art,’ dominated by a wall-size backdrop from the climax of North by Northwest, we learn that Mount Rushmore, which serves no historical or political purpose in the movie, ‘has a controversial and painful history.'”
The display seems to imply that Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film helped to deepen the pain and exacerbate the sense of cultural rape and pillaging. The Academy is therefore apologizing on the film’s behalf while at the same time saluting the Mount Rushmore backdrop art.
“‘[Mount Rushmore] sits within the Paha Sapa, translated into English as the Black Hills, an area sacred to the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho people. The Lakota call it Warnaka Ogna Ke Icante (The Heart of Everything That Is). The land was reserved for the Lakota Sioux under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, an agreement the U.S. government violated in 1877 following the discovery of gold.’
“The next three paragraphs detail further crimes against the Lakota. Who is this museum for? It is, we know now, for the Academy.
“Hollywood is a business. It always has been. In the late 20s, faced with charges that it was a place of scandal and sin, the industry countered with a self-governing production code to assure audiences of its wholesomeness. During the Red Scare, Hollywood initiated a blacklist for the same reason — to protect itself from public condemnation.** In neither case did these initiatives, basically P.R. fronts, reflect the actual morality of the system or its leaders. The system has no morality, not then and not now.
“But the bright side — and a very bright side it is — is that right now, if you want to, you can skip the Academy Museum and watch North by Northwest at home.
“The movie stars Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint. It was written by Ernest Lehman and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, who invented through cinema a new way of seeing, one that aligns audiences with characters so intensely that we come as close as we ever do to seeing through another’s eyes — closer than you’re ever likely to come at the Academy Museum.” — from Sam Wasson‘s “Little Gold Men, Big White Guilt,” a 9.25 Air Mail piece about how L.A.’s new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures “has little to say about movie history—but speaks volumes about Hollywood and our times.”
** What is Hollywood protecting itself from during the current wokester terror enforcement and the brutal economic blacklisting of Hollywood Elsewhere, among others? If anything public condemnation is directed toward the virtue-signalling wokester vanguard, and not towards sites like my own.