I hate saying this because it makes me sound a bit MAGA instead of the sensible left-centrist that I am, but I sorta kinda get the Trump administration being against all of those “white people bad” installations at the Smithsonian and other significant cultural museums.
I’m not suggesting that anyone should accept this whitehouse.gov page as gospel, but it highlights a rundown of various “white people are evil and need to be scolded if not diminished” installations at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Portrait Gallery and so on.
I kinda get all this because four years ago I was repelled by the Academy Museum’s unmistakable denigration of Alfred Hitchcock and North by Northwest in a Mount Rushmore exhibit that i saw in 2021. It was driven by the same basic woke mentality that is apparently manifesting in other museums today.
“Apology House“, posted on 10.9.21: The Academy Museum is a huge, four-story, super-expensive apology installation.
In room after room and in display after display, the museum says the following: “The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is very, very sorry that white men ran the film industry for 100 years straight, and there are doubtless too many white men running things now, but at least things are changing now for the better — women, Black artists, Asian-Americans, Native Americans and other POCs are making significant inroads, and we the Academy are proudly standing beside them and doing what we can to give them more power and say-so.
“So again, please understand our profound sorrow about how Hollywood’s film industry was run between 1915 and 2015, but the Academy is helping to make things right. Onward, progressive soldiers!”
I was especially entertained by two apology statements that are mounted on walls next to the “Backdrop An Invisible Art” exhibit. It partially salutes the huge Mount Rushmore painting used in Alfred Hitchcock‘s North by Northwest (’59) but mostly condemns it, or at least condemns the U.S. government for betraying the Lakota by allowing Mount Rushmore to be carved into a mountain in virgin Lakota territory, and by association condemns North by Northwest.
You’re given the distinct idea that North by Northwest is kind of an evil film, and that it might be better if Hitchcock, Ernest Lehman, Cary Grant and others involved were to be cancelled posthumously.
Hitchcock’s terrible failure to respect the Lakota Sioux’s sacred Paha Sapa (Black Hills) in South Dakota…this callous faux pas dogs his reputation to this very day. Because Hitch callously and obliviously staged the thrilling climax of North by Northwest atop the shamefully chiselled and misappropriated Mount Rushmore. Never forget that the British-born Alfred Hitchcock couldn’t have cared less. Sic semper auteurists!