Smith, known for his irreverent skewering of conventional mores, seems to be in the midst of production on a horror movie based on a "Fred Phelps" styled character.
UK audiences recently saw documentary journalist Louis Theroux spend time with members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, a controversial church group made largely of members of the Phelps family and run by preacher Fred Phelps. Infamous in America for taking a supremely homophobic stance and for picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq, the group see media interviews as a platform for airing their views and the word of their founder, Fred Phelps."That dude has always fascinated me and he's really informed the horror movie that I'm working on," Smith told us, "The movie's called 'Red State' and it's very much about that subject matter, that point of view and that position taken to the absolute extreme. It's certainly not Phelps himself but it's very much inspired by a Phelps figure."
Red State, huh? Can you just guess what that means? "Red" as in Republican, "horror" as in the horror of Conservative ideals? Along with another Smith attack on religion, I can imagine how badly he is going to treat the average American in "flyover" country with this one.
Think I am reading too much into it. Well, read more of director Smith's interview.
But while Smith is convinced that "horror" is the right definition for the film, he's not so sure audiences will agree. "To me there's all kinds of horror, and killing someone's not the absolute worst thing you could do to another human being," he said, "The death in a horror movie has always been the money shot in a very exploitative manner. Stabbing somebody and splashing blood all over them is the equivalent to some dude exploding over some broad's face.
All kinds of "horror" like voting for George W. Bush, I'd lay odds.
Still think I am reaching or over reacting?
Try this...
"And to me, too, the notion of using a Phelps-like character as a villain, as horrifying and scary as that guy can be, there's even something more insidious than him that lurks out there in as much as a public or a government that allows it and that's the other thing that I'm trying to examine in a big, big way."
It seems pretty obvious he is planning on attacking Republicans and Conservative America. That would be you and me, folks.
And the worst part about this is that Smith seems to equate a hatemonger like Fred Phelps to “red state” America as if all conservatives, Republicans or middle class Americans support that brand of debauchery and stupidity!
Finally, here is his last jab...
"We're going to shoot it somewhere in the middle of the country, in a true red state."
I find Hollyweird amusing. Smith, like many of his like-minded fellows, imagines himself to be a satirist of American life, haunting the human condition and mining pop culture. Yet, somehow, he never seems to find room in his supposed commentary of "things as they are" for a jab at leftist ideas or liberal icons.
Are Liberals not funny? Do they not have over the top or obscene aspects of their beliefs fit to be satirized by the likes of a Kevin Smith? Far from it, there is plenty. To make you laugh out loud all I have to do is mention the names Cindy Sheehan or Teddy Kennedy and you'd realize how ripe the left is for satire.
But, for all their claims of being equal opportunity offenders, people like Smith never attack that rich field of material that is the left. Because, to them, it's fine to ridicule religion, Republicans, the right, middle America, in fact MOST of what makes America great, because that is someone else’s beliefs… it is the beliefs of the “them”. But to attack the shibboleths of the left, well, THAT would be a step toward THEIR religion and that would be a step too close to home.
Folks like Smith are nothing if not hypocrites in their assumption of their own anti-establishmentism because they stand foursquare behind the established leftism of Hollyweird. Their oxen would never be gored because they fear the attempt would reveal the emptiness of their own world.
