The revolution will be edited for television

Brother Rick sent me a link to Breaking With Old Ideas, a Chinese movie made during the last Glorious Cultural Revolution. After watching the first episode, it struck me that the film has a timeless quality--it's just as applicable to our Glorious Conservative Christian Cultural Revolution as it was to Mao's.

I found that disturbing at first. Mao was a Chi-com after all. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized we're not all that different. Mao sought to destroy old ideas (bourgeois thinking and attitudes) and replace them with a new rigidly enforced orthodoxy. We're doing the same thing, only the old ideas we seek to destroy are secularism and egalitarianism.

Of course there will be those who would argue that Mao's real aim was to consolidate power for himself, but they'd also say the same thing about us. I'm fine with that. After all, we're all authoritarians at heart, and we'll need a strong leader to enforce the new orthodoxy.

Anyway, as I was saying, the film is just as valid today as it was then. Indeed, with very minimal editing, we could recycle it for use again.

See for yourself. I've storyboarded a scene from the movie, highlighting my suggested edits. I think it works. Don't you?

The scene begins near the end of the Great Leap Forward. A local party official is called into provincial HQ to discuss the problem of students complaining about being sent to work in the country.







More about this film at HNN.