Brett Cooper and Conservatism’s Creative Bankruptcy
Actress and conservative influencer Brett Cooper was just profiled in a lengthy piece in The New York Times. Once a star at the Daily Wire, Cooper has now been signed to Fox News. I have bad news for right-wingers waiting for a young messiah for the culture, however. Brett Cooper is not coming to save you. In fact, she will do what every other conservative on TV and social media does—the same thing Cooper, although only 23, has been doing for years.
She’s going to sit behind a microphone and react to liberalism. From the Times:
On YouTube, where nearly 1.6 million people subscribe to “The Brett Cooper Show,” she publishes twice-weekly monologues about celebrity and trending news with a conservative bent. She uses headlines about stars like Katy Perry or Simone Biles to argue against feminism and abortion rights, or the “trans craze with young people.”
Ms. Cooper, whom Fox News signed in late June, represents a new evolution of Republican commentators: an entertainer playing by the internet’s rules, rather than the established customs of right-wing media. Her speech is quick and jocular, like a red-state mash-up of BuzzFeed and “Gilmore Girls.”
She does not aspire to be a serious anchor, or a party leader influencing Washington policy debates. Though Ms. Cooper supports President Trump, her cause is culture—specifically, making conservatism look cool and normal to young people.
What Brett Cooper will not be being doing is writing novels or making music or movies—least not real movies. Like most “personalities” on the right, she will not be creating. She will be reacting. It’s a familiar, and tired, formula that does little for the culture—though quite a lot for the bottom line of the influencer.
At some point, conservatives are going to exhaust the supply of “hey-look-at-the-crazy-lefties” commentariat. We’re going to have to make something. That task is not an easy one, as people like Cooper, who washed out of film school, know all too well. Again, from the Times:
Ms. Cooper was a child actor, home-schooled by her mother and emancipated at 15 amid her parents’ divorce. Her roles included Trailer Parker, a bullied high school student on the 2018 streaming series adaptation of “Heathers.” Ms. Cooper enjoyed acting but not the lifestyle. Filming locations and schedules were out of her control, and scripts were too “raunchy,” she said. She enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, but found herself socially alienated. Her peers embraced Bernie Sanders, protested racial injustice and could not tolerate her support of Mr. Trump, she said. She left her sorority in 2020 as it wrestled over whether to congratulate or condemn its alumna Amy Coney Barrett, the new Supreme Court justice who would later vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.
One can appreciate Cooper’s disgust with Hollywood, particularly if she was asked to do inappropriate things at the tender age of 15. Yet there’s an alternative to hiding behind the skirt of Fox News. Go back to drama or film school as an adult. Do what the liberals have been doing for decades—work, sweat, take on a difficult challenge. Don’t back down to them.
Many conservatives won’t like what I have to say here, but they nevertheless need to hear it. Conservatives have not had the guts to tackle anything truly great in Hollywood for decades. On the International Movie Database list of the “50 Best Conservative Movies” (complied by National Review) the most recent film, Juno, came out in 2007—almost 20 years ago. Other films on the list are indeed brilliant, but most are more than two decades old: The Incredibles, Metropolitan, and The Lives of Others.
Reading about Cooper’s complaint that filming locations and schedules were “out of her control,” I had a memory from when I was in college and my brother Michael was an actor. It was 1988 and he was starring in How I Got That Story, a play set in Vietnam and for which he’d win the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Washington Actor. The night I saw the play, I happened to be backstage when my brother come off of his curtain call. He was drenched in sweat from head to toe. A stagehand tossed him a white towel. It was then that I realized that acting and directing is much harder work than it appears to be—and that’s part of what makes great acting great. Conservatives love to mock Lena Dunham, but what she accomplished, not only with Girls but also with her film Tiny Furniture and the book Not That Kind of Girl, like it or loathe it, required remarkable work, skill, and dedication—not to mention adapting to the unpredictability of filming on location.
There’s an irony here. Artists who attempt to create something of lasting impact or that can have a huge financial playoff, do not balk at the work. They understand that it requires a lot of sweat and long, tedious days. It’s like starting a business.
Opposing them is the conservative pundit who is lecturing actors on the meaning of struggle and hard work. In their own way, these conservatives and their parasitical careers are a version of the “special snowflake” college students they often make a living criticizing.
For the past 100 years, beginning with James Joyce’s Ulysses, liberals have been the greater artistic entrepreneurs. They founded magazines like The New Yorker and movie studios like United Artists. Orson Welles put on groundbreaking plays in the 1930s and in 1940 put in 18-hour days while filming Citizen Kane. The Beatles worked all-nighters in Hamburg, playing until they had blisters. Jann Wenner turned a $7,500 loan into Rolling Stone magazine. Punk rockers toiled in basements, risking destitution for the chance at creating something immortal. And Lena Dunham was only 24 when she wrote and directed Tiny Furniture. Go ahead and hate on her and decry the film. Then shut up and make a better one.
Back in 2018, I was contacted by an actor who was interested in an adaptation of my book The Devil’s Triangle. The book describes how I was targeted by the left during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination. This actor, who shared the screen with stars such as Johnny Depp, instantly saw the rich material in my story. “It’s a psychological thriller,” he said, noting that the story had everything—politics, scandal, sex, flashbacks to the 1980s. Then he named the budget: $10 million.
That would not be a lot of money for outlets like Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire that make a comfortable living criticizing Hollywood. Of course, the film would be provocative, insightful, and because it is real, sometimes even raunchy. The Daily Wire, where Cooper used to work, is now producing films. The three they’ve released are Run Hide Fight, Shut In, and Terror on the Prairie. All are damsel-in-distress dramas wherein a woman with a gun fights off outside marauders. In other words, they are all are basically the same movie. Another one, The Pendragon Cycle, stars Cooper. Let’s just say it doesn’t look like Blood Simple.
Another actor the right loves mock is Alec Baldwin. Yes, Baldwin is a hectoring, often obnoxious liberal. He also happens to be a fantastic actor. I briefly intersected with Baldwin in 2014, when he admired some short films I made and expressed interest in working together. I read a copy of his autobiography Nevertheless, in which he describes being a working-class Catholic kid from Long Island who rolled the dice, went to acting school in Washington, and didn’t drop out. Despite his obnoxiousness, public ranting, and repetition of liberal talking points, I’ve always had some respect for Baldwin because of his real talent as an actor.
To be honest, despite being more closely aligned to Brett Cooper’s politics, I have more respect for Baldwin than I do for Cooper or any of her countless imitators in the conservative commentariat. Conservatives need to uncover the boldness required to do more than talk about Hollywood, or to make religious movies or genre films offering simplistic moral choices and cloying melodrama. Why can’t they tackle films with some ambiguity, ribald humor, and even darkness? The films Baldwin is in, like Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, do that. Conservative filmmakers too often avoid films with flawed protagonists and challenging dramatizations of the real world, preferring to stick with the dogmatic. This year, for example, there were three different movies about Jesus that were released by faith-based movie studios. There is nothing wrong with a film about our Lord and Savior, but conservatives who can talk of nothing else run the risk of becoming just as boring as a Hollywood that can’t move on from comic book films.
So, Brett Cooper will go to Fox, where she will sit behind a microphone and make a great living lambasting creative people like Alec Baldwin. Yet her entire career won’t ever match Baldwin’s two minutes of screen time in Glengarry Glen Ross, where he plays a ferocious motivational salesman. Much as it pains me to admit it, his words in that film have always felt like a fitting rebuke to conservatives who prefer to criticize the hard work of others rather than create something beautiful and original: “They’re sitting out there waiting to give you their money,” Baldwin says in Glengarry Glen Ross. “Are you man enough to take it?” Too many on the right are not, alas.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/brett-cooper-and-conservatisms-creative-bankruptcy