Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan...and Beyond

It's odd to rate a book both 4/5 and mark it did-not-finish, and yet here we are. Wood is insightful, his writing is lucid, and when he's socially/culturally interpreting films he's riveting (especially when it's a film you know). The problem is simply that Wood and I exist on different planets. I'm pretty liberal, but I'm not a communist and Wood is explicitly one. I have the same general issue with Wood that I have with most Marxists by the way: they are phenomenal at diagnosing societal issues, but they are terrible at prescribing solutions. That being said, I wish Wood stuck more to interpreting films in light of culture and society: his writings on the horror film are easily the best I've ever read on that genre (how monsters are stand-ins for white people's fear of otherness, the way women are objects of violence at the hands of men, and, furthermore, how all of those distinctions break down). I mainly got tired of being told that I'm actually a repressed bisexual and that Freudian psychology is the secret to understanding human actions...ehh, sorry, Wood, but I'm not so sure on either of those two points.

This Robin Wood guy was a nut, but he understood the way movies are used to express ideology really, really well.