Three Heroic White Films
I’ve put aside two hard-hitting essays regarding the ongoing assault on Whites in the United States because I suspect readers need a break from the relentless negative news we’ve all been exposed to. I confess I’m more than guilty of pointing out how rapidly the situation of Whites has become exceedingly bleak, I suffer from that situation in real life, and like readers, I need a break, too. So perhaps the current relative lull in The System’s assault on us will allow readers a chance to watch one, two or all three of the uplifting Hollywood films I’m going to recommend.
Thus, in this essay I will celebrate these three implicitly pro-White films that since 2016 have somehow survived the gauntlet of our modern commissars to emerge as honest, realistic stories of White men doing heroic deeds. No Numinous Negroes, no Wakanda, no “Jews to the Rescue.” Just White men like we really have been since time immemorial, placed now in modern technological settings that we White men have ourselves created. The three films are Deepwater Horizon, Sully (both 2016) and Only the Brave (2017).
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Deepwater Horizon
Deepwater Horizon (2016) trailer
The disaster film Deepwater Horizon stars three A-List actors: Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell and John Malkovich. It tells the true story of a huge oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico that suffered a series of fatal explosions, resulting in a massive oil spill that made world headlines for weeks. Deepwater deals with hard men who work with their hands. They are the kind of men who keep America humming, putting gas in the tanks of the cars and trucks we drive, providing the backbone to the globe-girdling U.S. military, and keep toasty warm the homes of Americans in subzero locales such as Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Mark Wahlberg plays the lead with grit and seriousness. He has a man’s job to do — and he does it.
Ditto for “Mr. Jimmy,” the rig manager played by an aging Kurt Russell. No cute jokes for either man or knowing winks at the audience. Instead, they are gruff, no-nonsense employees in the high-stakes world of oil drilling, where mammoth machines can chew up a man in an instant and hellish infernos can erupt from liquid gold far under the ocean. Deepwater Horizon captures these dangers in spades and blasts them out at you without mercy.
Not only is there non-stop suspense and action in this flick, there is also a depiction of the unyielding business pressures to get the job done no matter the cost or risks. Here we are treated to masterful dialog by the trio of engineer Wahlberg, rig manager Mr. Jimmy, and John Malkovich as Donald Vidrine, a senior British Petroleum supervisor.
I know little about the South, but it sounds as if Malkovich is using a Louisiana Creole accent, which I found fascinating. As Mr. Vidrine, he cloaks his no-nonsense demands in folksy sayings and metaphors, which Wahlberg and Russell take in stride. I’ve already listened to this dialog half a dozen times but could stand to listen to it a dozen more times. Experience the best part here.
Once you’ve enjoyed the theater skills of the voices and dialog, watch it all again for the attempt to give an inside view into the workings of one of the biggest corporations on earth. I don’t think any knowledgeable film buff could watch this scene without thinking of Ned Beatty’s amazing soliloquy about the world of money in the 1976 classic Network. Both speeches are pure magic.
The business considerations as cause of the disaster out of the way, we next enter into the fires, explosions, deaths & injuries, and heroics of the men on the doomed oil rig. Truly it is a glimpse of hell.
Some crewmen survive, some die, some are gravely injured. One man selflessly sacrifices his life to save fellow crewmen, the vast majority of whom are White — and male. An exception comes in the form of a subcontractor position played by Gina Rodriguez, a Puerto Rican American actress. She has one line where she clearly makes a better decision than her male boss, but when the fires rage hot, she breaks into an uncontrolled panic and is saved by a daring and level-headed White male (Wahlberg’s character).
As we will see later with Only the Brave, Deepwater honors the eleven men who lost their lives by showing their photos at the end of the film. The postscript reads: “The blowout lasted for 87 days, spilling an estimated 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It was the worst oil disaster in U.S. history.” The men lost in that disaster were not “deplorables,” “insurrectionists,” “right-wing terrorists” or “White supremacists.” They were White men like our fathers, brothers, classmates and neighbors. They equal the Real America. It is proper that they are honored in this film.
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Sully
Sully (2016 – watch trailer)
The second film of my trio is the Clint Eastwood-directed Sully, the true story of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who glided a crippled airliner away from the towers of New York City and safely landed on the frigid waters of the Hudson River. What is so wonderful about the film is the fact that it is so true to real life, something Hollywood is not always known for.
Let me explain with this little experiment. Think about the last time you walked through an American airport, particularly one that is heavily domestic. Who were the pilots in uniform you saw strolling down the corridors pulling their leather flight bags?
A Nice White Flight Crew — Airport (1970)
Admit it — you saw White males in uniform. That would make sense, since unlike most other professions today, piloting airplanes in America has remained in the vicinity of 95% White and male. This must gall liberals and social engineers, for these groups dream of a world of “equality,” that is, one in which White males are purged, punished, eliminated, or at least relegated to humiliating positions of impotence.
Sully came out in 2016 in the face of endless promotion of non-white diversity and “vibrancy,” going against all that Hillary Clinton and her vast entourage represented, and supported the reality that it is White males who built the public manifestations of Western civilization and to a large degree still keep it going.
Oh, how delicious it was to watch Tom Hanks as a competent, seasoned pilot, making the best decisions in only seconds.
Next to Hanks sits the first officer, played by Aaron Eckhart, who is tall, square jawed and tough. Dare I say he’s almost Aryan?
Hats off to Eastwood for casting Hanks and Eckhart as the cockpit crew of Sully. Further, most of the supporting cast is White as well. Real life, real celluloid representation. Sometimes, that’s all I can ask of Hollywood, a wish I don’t often have granted.
Because of its unvarnished heroism, I’m going to give a somewhat detailed description of the action in Sully. It was frigid in New York on January 15, 2009. “Sully” Sullenberger sat in the left-side seat, while first officer Jeffrey B. Skiles sat to his right. Skiles was slated to fly this leg of the journey, and the plane lifted off uneventfully, turning northwest. As it neared 3,000 feet, the A320 struck a flock of large Canada geese, some of which were ingested into the two engines. The collision resulted in a full loss of power. Coming at such a low altitude over a major city filled with skyscrapers, the situation was critical.
To provide backup power, Sullenberger switched on the tail-mounted APU, a generator which provides auxiliary power. The pilots had only seconds to decide whether to return to LaGuardia, try to reach Teterboro Airport on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, or find some alternative. Drawing on his vast experience, Sullenberger determined that trying to reach either airport was a poor choice, so he opted to land on the calm winter waters of the Hudson. Passing less than 900 feet over the George Washington Bridge, the plane landed safely in the middle of the Hudson, where all passengers and crew were rescued by nearby boats.
Eckhart, Capt. Sullenberger, Eastwood and Hanks
Enjoy looking at the faces of White men like this while you still can. Unlike so, so many other “reenactment” and “based on” films and documentaries, Eastwood’s Sully panders not at all to liberal pieties, not even in minor roles such as air traffic controller or captain of a ferry boat. We don’t have the cheesy cabin ensemble of multiracial passengers, something ushered in by the likes of Airport 75 and other such dreck from the seventies. Sully is like the cast of The Waltons, imagined as if John-Boy had grown up and become a pilot like Sullenberger. No drinking, no drugs, no wild sex. Just traditional White Americans living their lives and dealing with the challenges life inevitably throws their way.
Surprisingly, despite its debut during the run-up to the Hillary-for-President season, the same press that so blatantly supported Hillary and savaged Trump as “literally the next Hitler” gave Sully overwhelmingly positive reviews. For instance, reviewer Simon Thompson awarded the film nine out of ten points, writing: “Sully is a beautifully balanced, classily nuanced and hugely engaging film that avoids all the clichéd pitfalls it could have slipped into. Tom Hanks gives one of the best performances of his career and Clint Eastwood’s direction is beautiful and rich. It’s not just a great movie, Sully is one of the best pieces of cinema that a major Hollywood studio has released this year.”
A reviewer at ebert.com wrote:
As Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the plain-spoken, cool-headed veteran pilot who pulled off the impossible under immense pressure, Tom Hanks once again reminds us why he continues to be Hollywood’s best personification of the all-American Everyman since James Stewart’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Who else is so good at encapsulating such red-white-and-blue values as never-say-die commitment, pride in a job well done, doing your duty no matter the cost and selfless courage in the face of disaster without being a goody-goody bore?
Even the Village Voice said kind things about the film: “This is a talky, mild-mannered drama about stoic, middle-aged white men exhibiting poise amid chaos and illustrating the sanctity of simply doing one’s job.”
If you’d like more background on Sully, see my original 2017 review here.
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Only the Brave
Only the Brave (2017) trailer
Only the Brave is another story about the lives of White men who get their hands dirty. Early on, we see a scene where a moderate forest fire is being handled by a hot and sweaty crew. Miraculously, there are no affirmative action minority hires in this scene, no tough Puerto Rican chick, no sensitive black guy. Just garden-variety White men — tough men. And the entire movie remains that way without exception. Even the men’s families are nice White people:
Like Deepwater Horizon and Sully, Only the Brave is based on a true story, the incredibly tragic demise of 19 out of 20 members of an elite firefighting crew called “Hot Shots.” On June 28, 2013, dry lightning ignited a fire near the hamlet of Yarnell, Arizona, just northwest of Phoenix. While the situations in the first two movies discussed above involved sudden accidents that unexpectedly overtook the White heroes, in Only the Brave, these firefighters knew they were always living on the cusp of danger, thus making these men the truest of heroes because they knowingly risked their lives to protect their fellow Americans.
The film is centered around crew chief Eric Marsh, played by a man’s man, Josh Brolin. At every turn, the film succeeds in portraying Marsh as a thoroughly admirable character who is a natural leader of men.
The film includes a number of softer scenes of Marsh with his wife, likely inserted to drawn some women to the film, but it is clear that Marsh’s life is out in the mountains facing fires that aim to kill him. I suppose that conflict with his wife provides some of the tension in the film, but the wife is grossly outclassed by Marsh’s masculinity and intense focus on his job. At one point, for instance, while the couple is sharing a candle-lit bath, the wife asks a taciturn Marsh, “Do ya wanna talk about it? Or do you wanna do your John Wayne thing?” Marsh remains silent.
Of course she already knew the answer. Immediately, the movie cuts back to the male action. How appropriate, though, that the wife referenced John Wayne, for this 2017 film and its characters belong back in the Wayne era when men were men and women were women. Right and wrong are clearly understood, and there is no hint whatsoever that these men’s world will soon be overtaken by foreign immigration, Black Lives Matter degenerates, or feminists running amok on the streets. America is still a White man’s country.
To be sure, these men are not cardboard characters lacking flaws. Indeed, they are human. Second to Marsh is Brendan, a young man who in the beginning of the movie is shown smoking meth, committing petty larceny, and getting one of his throw-away girlfriends pregnant. His struggle to grow into a mature man is a central theme of the movie, along with Marsh’s decision to take Brendan under his wing and keep him from reverting to an aimless drug addict. (Careful listeners will catch a fleeting conversation revealing that Marsh himself had addiction problems, so his decision to mentor Brendan is rooted in that sense of identification.)
Brendan indeed grows, slowly taking responsibility for his girlfriend and baby daughter. Like Marsh, however, his life is largely focused on the wild land, where all plant material is nothing more than “fuel” to a firefighter. None of the men here put their women or their wives above their duty and bonding with their firefighting brothers. Nineteen of them pay for this focus, too.
In short, one day the men are caught by unpredictable winds and overtaken by torch-like flames. Here it is not “toxic masculinity” that is pilloried but the very best traits in real men that are celebrated and duly honored. Death through sacrifice is the highest calling of the Granite Mountain Hot Shots.
Again out of character, Hollywood critics lavished praise on this traditional film, with the critics of Rotten Tomatoes praising in unison with average viewers the merits of the film. “Only the Brave’s impressive veteran cast and affecting fact-based story add up to a no-frills drama that’s just as stolidly powerful as the real-life heroes it honors.” Another wrote that, “Only the Brave is a visually splendid, spellbinding, and surreal movie that also happens to be an emotionally shattering, over-the-top ugly-cry for the ages.”
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Viewing these films is easy with Amazon streaming rentals, but for the same price you can buy new DVDs if you still have such archaic equipment lying around. Move fast, however, for our post-insurrection respite will likely not last long. In a thousand ways, The System has announced that characters like all the White men in the films just reviewed are now Enemies of the People. In self defense, will real White American men now show the bravery and determination seen in the noble acts of participants in these movies, as well as the real men they were based on? Time will tell.
Apropos is my comment, yesterday, over at Fash The Nation:
Cognitive psychology studies indicate that showing people consequences of their bad behavior can backfire and put them further into denial if they are not provided immediate guidance as to how to go about breaking the bad habit. If they are provided that guidance they frequently improve. Something similar goes on when people are confronted time after time with violations of common sense and decency by people in power. If you don’t provide them with remedial actions they can take, many will tend eventually to simply turn off and go into denial. This has already happened to a vast population: Normies.
The reason I bring this up is two-fold:
1) This is something white nationalists have not paid sufficient attention to — including this website’s manifest torrent of Reality compared to the relatively scarce suggestions for Remedial Action.
2) In the present context of TBS (Trump Betrayal Syndrome — the conservative side of Trump Derangement Syndrome) laying it on thick about how FTN/NJP/etc. provide unspecified remedial action should be accompanied with more specifics including, at the very least, a URL to a page specifying remedial action.
Now I’m going to have to point out once again that I was out there in 2015, publicly:
* Calling Trump “The Likud Candidate” (the “Likuds” being essentially the National Socialist branch of Jews).
* Calling attention to Roy Cohn’s relationship to McCarthy, Trump and pedophilia.
* Supporting Trump.
* Calling attention to my predictions of a “Jewish Reichstag” or “panWestern Fascism” prior to 2001/09/11. (I get you guys are hyper-sensitive about any terms that might, even tactically, utilize Jewish propaganda about 1930s Germany to reach the “Normies” — so if it will help shorten your autistic fit, I offer my humblest apologies.)
I continue to offer sympathetic support to Trump supporters while continuing to “Name the Jew”.
The reason I do this is my recognition that Jews are in power and people quite literally have no credible alternatives than to side with the Jewish faction that seems least likely to damage them. You can point to the “throwing supporters under the bus” or, as Mike (“Enoch”) has described it, “loading up the Ship of Trump with white identity to sink it”, but you’ve not offered any credible alternatives — nor have you made your case adequately that Trump’s actual policies were as bad as Biden’s actual policies. If you’re accelerationist, be clear about it, but don’t just do an in-zone dance on the heads of people for whom you’ve offered no real power alternatives.
What an interesting and important concept. Is there a general term for this phenomenon in cognitive psychology? Is the underlying concept that inertia is the default state For motivation? And by offering no alternative one is left with reinforcing the behavioral inertia? There’s got to be a better way to explain this? Please help. I think of a person that resorts to violence when he is angry. A friend tells him that will get him in jail and gives him examples to reinforce his point and “scare him straight.” But unless he offers alternative behaviors to deal with anger the violence will only be reinforced. Is this because the denial mechanism is already operating? And subconsciously if there is no alternative to this denial mechanism then it is reinforced? And example would be if I hit this guy he’ll be too scared to report me to the police. This being his denial mechanism. I’m probably way off base here so please help. I think the point you were making is critical to our movement and provides a framework for the next step. Thank you.
@James Bowery – it reminds me of our side (and normies also) suggesting ‘just don’t watch the TV propaganda or Hollywood films’ as if that is a solution – as if whatever 1% or even 5% of us do will make the slightest difference to the other 95%. All that matters is not what we think, but what the 95% majority think and do, and the way Trump can help our cause is to shift the thinking of the majority to the right, and make what is ‘normal’ more to the right than it is now. It is not helpful therefore to dwell on Trump giving aid to Israel, or being surrounded by Jewish influence, as these are things that neither Trump or any politician can hope to deal with at this stage in the journey to the right. They are for later.
Sudden and massive shifts in majority opinion are only possible in civil war, but as the enemy controls the armed forces (the top ranks), the state budgets, the executive – the admin, and, most importantly, the MSM, then our side would likely lose as did the Confederates to the North.
Yes. Unrelenting critique without event a hint of what to do is dysfunctional. There are more people on Gab with actionable ideas than anywhere else I’ve seen.
(Mod. Note: Thanks Pierre. Got ’em)
Interesting article about films. Now does anyone remember Red Adair?
“A spokesman for Saar Ferngas, the German natural gas company, expressed deep admiration for Adair’s meticulous way of doing things.
“Mr. Adair’s precautions and exact style of work and his calmness on the job visibly allayed the anxieties we all had before his arrival,” one of them said.
I don’t follow anything that comes out of Hollywood these days because it’s all offensive garbage, with the exception…okay…of the three movies mentioned by Edmund Connelly in the article. So I’ll have a look if the opportunity presents itself. But for the “sure thing”, I’m currently revisiting many of the old B&W TV shows from the 50s – like Highway Patrol, the original Dragnet, and even Treasury Men in Action. Really good stuff and it brings me back to the America that I remember. Good therapy too!
Tom, thanks for the comments. I completely understand your message. I think it is helpful at this juncture to go back and enjoy how things used to be portrayed — because that’s how life used to be: A Nice White Country.
As we all know, now we are in the thick of a tremendous battle.
You could also do a fun review of “native alienist” movies, ones in which whites are deliberately played in an insulting or humiliating manner. Tough to choose, of course, there being so many! One suggestion that I just rewatched via YouTube that I hadn’t seen since I was a teen in the mid-70s and had caught it on tv: CHATO’S LAND. I recall it being cool, esp as everybody then was into Charles Bronson. It’s less cool now in terms of violence, suspense or effects, but actually more interesting dramatically. However, it is also viciously antiwhite propaganda wrapped up as an action film. I think 2021 is its 50th anniversary.
Thank you for the movie suggestions! We watched Deepwater Horizon this evening and it was really well done. Great that they focused on the personal people-side of the story. It’s a tear jerker, but leaves one feeling good about family and loved ones at the end.
Another recent film that hits the target is ‘Ford vs. Ferrari’. Realistic depictions. Overwhelmingly male (as it should be considering the subject). Entirely white (ditto). Historically accurate. Highly entertaining. Excellent film on many levels.
Hello Mark. Yes, “Ford vs. Ferrari” is a great example of a pro-White male film. Thanks for mentioning it. I enjoyed it last year. I also enjoyed the 2013 racing film “Rush”: The merciless 1970s rivalry between Formula One rivals James Hunt and Niki Lauda.
Director: Ron Howard
So Ron Howard got away with another White male film. If you go back and watch his “Apollo 13,” you’ll see yet another accurate all White male film. Good stuff.
I wonder how long it will take for these movies to be ‘cancelled’. Anti-white bigotry is being churned up to a frenzy. Now we see a ‘woke’ NY school demanding white parents show penance for their whiteness.
https://nypost.com/2021/02/16/nyc-public-school-asks-parents-to-reflect-on-their-whiteness/
I worked on offshore oil rigs in the 70s and 80s crewed by Texans and Coonasses. They are the salt of the earth.
I decided a few years back that Eastwood is not one of us; he’s a silly libertarian and a greedy fraud; watch Million Dollar Baby if you want to se him at his slimy, lying worst.
Clint Eastwood came out and endorsed the virulently anti-Second Amendment, gun hating jewish liberal Michael Bloomberg during the Democrat Primaries. One could try to make a case that, due to his advanced age, Eastwood is suffering from dementia – but, I would not buy that defense. Eastwood is a race mixer and has also had a relationship with a very unattractive jewish actress who’s name escapes me at the moment. She appeared in one or two of his movies.
I mean, consider the fact that Eastwood has made a very lucrative career by depicting characters who use firearms for self defense against bad guys – yet, he would vote to put the biggest gun grabber and anti-Second Amendment creep in the USA into the White House?
Conclusion: Clint Eastwood is a phony.
Frances Fisher’s father was Jewish, her mother, not.
Luke,
One of Clint’s girlfriend’s appeared in at least two of his films, I think you mean Sondra Locke -who appeared with Clint in the 1978 film ‘Gauntlet’.
In the 1980’s the movie catch-phrase ‘Make my day’ was ubiquitous; and it was first used in the original Dirty Harry film in the bank robbery scene.
Yes, Eastwood is not perfect. See, for instance, his 2008 film “Gran Torino,” which I understood as a parable about the inevitable replacement of White men in America by non-whites. (I couldn’t bring myself to actually watched the film, though.) Still, “Sully” was amazing in its casting and positive view of White males. Maybe Eastwood played the old Hollywood game of “You gotta give one to get one,” which I guess means do one that the (((studio bosses))) want in return for one closer to your artistic vision.
Thanks for the ‘ only the brave’ recommendation , just watched it.
there’s an homely and no homo undercurrent in hollywood, given enough experience you too can see it.
lead in the brave is also a lead in ‘sicario’, despite the genre’s war spirit, i can’t recommend it enough
as for eastwood, parodoxally, i think his best is the chris kyle story, ‘americano sniper’. get those fasces while you still caan.
I could do a piece on libertardian/our satire, page me on that. lol
Kee Bird
The Kee Bird was a United States Army Air Forces Boeing B-29 Superfortress, serial 45-21768, of the 46th Reconnaissance Squadron, that became marooned after making an emergency landing in northwest Greenland during a secret Cold War spying mission on 21 February 1947. [Recovery decades later]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2g3ZU0ZEVRk
new meme, starting right here
AIR FORCE ONE now known as AIR FARCE ONE
TJ,
My film title play on words has to undoubtedly be ‘No Country for Old Men’ into the more zeitgeisty ‘No Country for White Men’.
What about the movie Zulu?
May we hope to see one or both of them—and see them at TOO—sooner rather than later, Ed? It’s approaching three years now since such remarkable non-film-related articles as the pair on E. Michael Jones and the polite but incisive examination of John Derbyshire’s Jew-conscious high-wire act appeared here. I know I’m not alone in wanting to see more of your work.
all the three films are worth looking at. I’ll dig into them. As for Gran Torino, I did see it, and it was aptly called a film of the Obama era. It can be best described as Clint dying for the sake of two ungrateful Hmong, and his attempts to pass on white culture sterile, and noteworthy was how his character rejected his own family, church, and grandchildren to bond to these outlanders.
An Eastwood movie is never bad to look at, but the elegy to white life was pretty obvious, although there was a fun scene where he beats up some blacks harassing the poor (ungrateful) Hmong.
if you’re interested, there are reviews of two films on Countercurrents Publishing you might like, Santa Fe Trail, where the abolitionists are bad guys and (yay!) Jefferson Davis, Lee, and Stuart are good guys, and Allegheny Uprising, where John Wayne does a Trump against the British.