Andrew Klavan argues Thanksgiving’s cultural leftist dominance stifles dissent, citing Trevor Noah’s exit and NYT op-eds as proof of their self-righteousness while conservative media thrives. He ties marriage to wealth—married couples outearn cohabiting pairs by $10K/year—claiming its structure curbs chaos, contrasting it with "crazy" modern cohabitation’s instability. On art, he rejects pornographic exploitation in Game of Thrones or Hostile, insisting true art (like The Sopranos) elevates suffering into meaning, not sensationalism, while dismissing cursing as mere realism. His defense of traditional values—from media to marriage—frames them as societal anchors against liberal decay. [Automatically generated summary]
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Clavin.
I hope you had a great Thanksgiving.
I hope you are sitting around like a snake that ate a pig, just digesting.
And while you're digesting, you can listen to some great content.
What we're going to give you here are some of the episodes from Members Block that you don't get if you're not a member.
When we get behind the members wall, we start to talk about things that are dear to my heart.
Talk about, we'll be talking in this segment about porn, about the way the culture protects the left from facing itself, about the differences between married and unmarried people, the kind of thing that sometimes get pushed out of the main show by politics and the news of the week.
So these are the deeper dives than we sometimes get to take in the normal show, and you will get to hear it, and it will maybe entice you to subscribe, which I know you're dying to do, but if not, it'll give you something to listen to while you're digesting.
This is also a good time for you to subscribe to the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel, where you also get exclusive content, and if you leave a content there and the content is absolutely indefensible and unforgivable, we sometimes read it on the show because it fits right in with the rest of our content.
This week's comment is from Corey R. who says he finally received my signed copy of Strange Habit of Mind.
And I must say that so far it is my favorite Andrew Clavin book.
Although to be fair, I say the same thing about every Andrew Clavin book that I'm currently reading.
Either way, well done, sir.
I'm looking forward to reading more Cameron Winter stories in the future.
And as I told you last week, I've just turned in the third book, the manuscript for the third book to my publisher.
You know, members get this member block content all the time.
So if you enjoy this content, it is a good time to become a member and use code DW50 for 50% off your new membership at dailywire.com slash subscribe.
So members block, welcome to the members.
I like, if I can, to talk as much about the culture in the members block as I can.
And we've been talking all this time about this kind of shroud of unknowing that the left lives in because of their dominance of the media and how that shroud is being perforated by reality because of the internet, the change in the internet, and how they're panicked in this panicked way.
They're trying to have the counter-reformation where they basically bring in Torque Mata and torture all of us who disagree with them and they torture us by throwing it off to Twitter.
The wonderful sense of that they have that they are entitled to do this, that the opinions that disagree with them are completely out of court.
That if you say like, no, there should be literally no abortion, there's something terribly, terribly wrong with you.
It's not like, you know, I said I was talking to Megan Kelly yesterday and we were talking about both of us sort of having a lot of gay people in our lives and people that we love in our lives who are gay.
And I said, but that doesn't mean I think that people who feel that this is a sin shouldn't be able to speak.
I think, of course, they should be able to speak.
I don't want to hear their ugly language.
I don't want to hear them spitting, you know, nasty things at me.
But, you know, gay people perform actions and you have a right to pass a judgment on whether those actions are correct or not.
And you have a right to comment on the role of sexuality in our lives and in our society.
One of the things I love about the left, I just love it because they, you know, make corruption always makes me laugh.
I love when they kill people, abortion.
They lie, they say trans women are women, and then they attack central institutions of the world, like marriage, and then you say, well, maybe this isn't a good idea, and they say, why is it so important to you?
What are you obsessed with sex?
You know, the answer to that is like a pie in the face, kind of like.
But anyway, there was an article in the New York Times on Knucklehead Row, the op-ed section of the New York Times, a former newspaper.
And by the way, if you put a strange habit of mine on the New York Times bestseller list, for four weeks, I will stop saying a former newspaper.
I'll just say the New York Times and then be silent for a moment while you think to yourself a former newspaper, just to thank them for putting me on the New York Times list.
However, there's an article by Tressie Macmillan Cottam, C-O-T-TO-M, in the political talk show race, Outrage is winning.
And she is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of Fic and Other Essays, and a 2020 MacArthur Fellow.
Now, the MacArthur Fellowship is essentially welfare for leftists.
So they call it a genius grant.
That's the way leftists think of themselves.
So we know who she is.
So she's talking about the retirement of Trevor Noah.
And she's talking about the fact that liberals appear to dominate the late night TV show.
And I just want to read this because it is a masterpiece.
It is a masterpiece of non-self-awareness.
I don't think there is a word for the opposite of self-awareness, for what it means to be not self-aware.
But whatever it is, you know, this is a masterpiece of that genre.
She says, liberals appear to dominate the late night TV show genre.
The reason for that dominance is complex.
It's complex.
What is the reason?
It wouldn't be that they blacklist anybody who doesn't say what they want him to say.
No, it couldn't be that.
It's complex.
Audiences have different orientations towards humor and political talk.
Those orientations have some underlying psychological needs, and styles of comedy have political and cultural histories.
Bluntly, she says, scholars who study political communication and humor often find that liberals are ironic, smart alex, and conservatives are outraged moralists.
Some of us are a bit of both, but most of us have a psychological need to be one over the other.
A lot of research on psychology, and by the way, psychology is wholly dominated by the left, psychology, history, and media to explain why we find funny what we do.
The need for closure is a big one.
If you have a high need for clear-cut moral rules, then satire, which asks us to skewer our own beliefs, is going to make you pretty anxious.
Ouchy stuff, if us versus them, makes you feel safest.
In other words, leftists are willing to skewer their own beliefs.
We see this all the time.
Stephen Colbert, every time we see Stephen Colbert, he's going after those leftists and Nancy Peloton.
I mean, he's always, you never hear him attacking the right.
You never hear him say a word about Trump, but he's always attacking those left.
I mean, this is how pur-blind, a wonderful old word, this is how pur-blind they are.
They do not see.
They think that they are open-minded and they're skewering their own beliefs.
When in fact, as we talked about earlier on the show, the minute the New York Times says something about the fact that Joe Biden is clearly deteriorating, it's like, no, no, don't say that, don't say it.
Do not tell us the truth.
Liberals may be drawn to ironic humor like satire because it reflects their antagonism toward the status quo.
But outrage plays better to the political psychology of conservatives.
As outrage has become a more viable media model than satire, it has gotten harder to sell liberal politics.
It's a wonderful piece.
I love this piece.
All of our political, cultural, and economic messages risk being filtered through an identity-driven ecosystem that proportionally rewards not just conservatism and republicanism, this is a quote, but also conservative populism on the far right.
The irony isn't lost on me.
The conservative audiences complain about how vilified they are in popular culture.
Conservative media seems to be doing quite well.
Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro are two of the most popular podcast hosts in the nation.
I just want to pause here for a minute.
You know, a lot of people argue about whether Matt Walsh or I am funnier.
The right answer is I am.
That's just the correct answer.
I don't want to be, it's a spoiler alert, but still.
But, you know, Shapiro is a pretty funny guy.
It always makes me laugh anyway.
I think he's a pretty witty guy.
I don't listen to Joe Rogan that much, but Shapiro doesn't strike me as being outraged all that much at all, really.
He's just fact-based.
He and I have very different value sets, but every time he talks about the facts, I usually think yes, that's pretty much what's going on.
But she says there's no liberal counterpart to Shapiro or Rogan.
Fox News lost some of its big names when Megan Kelly and Bill O'Reilly left, but while MSNBC looks for its footing after Rachel Maddows' exit on most weeknights and a CSN pivots to centrism, Fox is beating them both in the ratings.
When you look across media platforms, it's easier to see how conservative psychological preference for outrage bodes better for their growth in satellite radio, lifestyle media, and of course, social media.
The interesting thing about this, the interesting thing about this, is there are outrage mongers on the right, and I think all the left are outrage mongers.
I think Stephen Colbert is pure outrage.
I think that's all he is.
I mean, he's funny because he's got 100 writers, but still, I think he is an outrage monger.
That's what he is.
All these people punch Trump in the face, shoot Trump.
When was the last time an actor shot?
Oh, what the hell?
Why is that not outrage?
Why is it not outrageous?
It is just an amazing, amazing thing to me.
The level, the level of lack of self-knowledge.
And as I say, there should be a word for that, but there's not.
The level of lack of self-knowledge.
They think seriously that they are cool, hip, ironic people against the status quo.
They are the status quo.
The reason Shapiro and Rogan are dominating podcasts is because podcasts are a new, untested territory.
Believe me, believe me, if the right, if the left could shut us down, they would.
They took the Babylon B off Twitter.
The Babylon B, which is pure comedy, pure mockery.
They've taken them off Twitter.
They suppressed me, I'm sure of it, because all of a sudden my views are going up and all of a sudden people who haven't heard from me in months are hearing from me.
You know, and who could be more benevolent than me?
Who could be less outraged and sweeter?
I mean, really, butter would not melt in my mouth.
I'm so sweet.
I just, I do not understand why anybody would come after me, but come after, they come after Jordan Peterson.
Now, Jordan Peterson can bring some outrage, but the outrage is really about people mistreating themselves.
You know, when Jordan gets outraged, it's not because sometimes he gets outraged of the things that they want him to do, like they want to force him to use pronouns and things like this.
But most of his outrage is against people hurting themselves.
Still, still, the left is all outrage.
Who burned Kenosha?
Who set Kenosha on fire?
Who turned Seattle into a trash pit?
Who turned San Francisco into a trash pit?
You know, it's just amazing.
You know, here's the thing.
I won't say I do this every day, but often I ask myself, am I wrong about everything?
You know, is everything wrong?
I constantly question my politics, my faith, my beliefs, and my beliefs about the left, because I know that it's very easy to fall into demonizing leftists.
I think leftism is a bad philosophy, just like I think radical Islam is a bad religion, right?
I think that not treating women as equal people in the world, I think that's a bad philosophy.
I think communism, bad philosophy, Nazism, bad philosophy.
But I understand that there are many, many Democrats who aren't leftists, but who don't understand how far the left has gone, has taken over their party.
So I try very hard not to demonize the voters on the left, even if I say, talk about the philosophy of the left and the people who instantiate or embody that philosophy.
These people like this lady, who write for the New York Times, who read the New York Times and nothing else, they simply do not know what is going on.
I can't even think of anybody on the right like this, anybody operating on the right at a high level who is like this.
But this woman has a MacArthur Fellow, and she has no idea, no idea of the comedy.
How could she see the Babylon B?
It's been canceled.
How could she see it?
She has no idea of the fact that we're laughing over here.
We're having a good time.
Everybody who comes to the Daily Wire says, how come you guys are having such a good time?
It's because we're not outraged.
We know we're fighting for the right, and we know in the long run, at the end of the story, we're going to win.
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Marriage and Wealth00:11:09
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So in talking about the Republican Party becoming the party of married people and the fact that single women flock to the Democrat Party.
And as I said before, single women are, I think.
the easiest people to manipulate with fear.
I really believe that to be true for all kinds of reasons, which I outlined before.
But it is really interesting to watch the way people deal with marriage and the threat of marriage to them and the way they can't think about marriage in certain ways.
There's a piece I want to share with you from the Wall Street Journal.
And a lot of their kind of lifestyle pieces have to do with money because they're the Wall Street Journal.
And the piece is called Moving In Together Doesn't Match the Financial Benefits of Marriage.
But why?
Subhead is married couples are four times, four times as wealthy as unmarried couples who live together.
This is by Julia Carpenter.
So she says, a walk down the aisle can be a route to greater wealth and prosperity for couples in the U.S. Married people have higher net worths and are more likely to be homeowners than their unmarried counterparts.
The mystery, though, is why cohabitating but unmarried couples struggle to build wealth in the same way.
As of 2019, the median net worth for cohabiting couples aged 25 to 34 was $17,372, a quarter that of the $68,210 for married couples.
And that is the median couple, that's the median range, right?
For singles, it's 7,341.
So being married makes you richer, right?
The wealth gap between partnered and married couples is larger than one might expect.
And Anna Kent, a senior researching searcher at the St. Louis Fed, says, it's so intriguing.
Americans are moving in together at higher rates, according to data from Pew Research.
And the share of U.S. adults who are currently married steadily declined from close to 60% in the 1990s to under half in 2019.
Over the same period, the share of adults aged 18 to 44 living with a partner climbed to 59%.
So people are moving in together, but they're not getting married.
And somebody says here, Andrew Trulin, a professor, Johns Hopkins, he says, marriage has become a capstone event.
In other words, you wait until you are established and have money, and then you get married, right?
And that is the opposite of the way, for instance, I did it.
My wife married a starving artist.
I mean, she married a guy with no prospects whatsoever.
And yet we have done quite well for ourselves.
And we put all our money together.
There was never a question.
This is really interesting.
We're kind of the last generation or the last people to have done this.
Basically, we got married, so our money was in, we got one bank account.
Now people discuss it.
You know, should we put our money in one bank account?
It's really interesting.
So now they give an example.
Melissa Maury is a 30-year-old communications manager in Asheville, North Carolina.
She's been with her boyfriend for five years, living together nearly four.
They don't share a joint bank account, but they split the cost of rent and other bills.
And even so, Miss Mowry said she can't make sense of the financial gap between her relationship and that of married couples.
We're already saving a lot of money and splitting the cost on most things.
She said, I don't understand how married couples are accumulating wealth in ways that we're not doing.
And then the author says there are legal and tax benefits to marriage, but research suggests the financial security and long-term mindset of those who tie the knot may also be a powerful driver of wealth.
And married people may be much more likely to have conversations around what goals they have for their financial future.
And they go on with these very practical, you might call them materialist reasons why people are, married couples get so much richer.
And this one lady they're interviewing says, most of my married friends have bought a house.
I just don't know how they did it.
Everyone talks about how when you get married, you accumulate wealth, but I don't know what that means.
And everybody in the article, including the author, is baffled by this.
And I was thinking, you know, what's interesting about this article is the things you're not allowed to think, the things you're not allowed to think about marriage, about men, about women, about what makes a couple do so well.
And I'd like to just put forward a couple of ideas that, A, people who get married are living in a way that is conducive to human thriving.
You know, capitalism is the way we manage our greed.
And I've said a million times that capitalism doesn't solve our problems.
It's simply a way of managing our greed by putting our greed into a machine where the greed is forced to serve other people in order to thrive, right?
And marriage is, in the same way, puts our romantic and erotic impulses into an institution that helps society to thrive because our romantic and erotic impulses are very, very chaotic.
You know, they're very powerful.
They sweep us away.
But marriage helps us put them in a place where they can be served, just like our greed can be served in capitalism, but also we don't become antisocial.
We don't destroy society through our sexual impulses.
But on top of that, of course, there's also this spiritual factor to marriage, which is that a man and woman become one flesh.
As I've said before, I think you begin to develop a truer, fuller, more three-dimensional vision of the world as you become a kind of team that you simply don't become if you haven't committed yourself to each other for the long term, for essentially eternity, for your whole lives.
On top of this, I wouldn't be surprised if married people are more conventional in some ways than people who live together.
Living together, obviously, is not the conventional choice.
Marriage is.
And so it wouldn't surprise me if married people take more gender-oriented roles, if wives and husbands do not act more like wives and husbands than boyfriend and girlfriend living together do.
And here's what I think that does.
I think that when a woman makes a home for a family, she not only satisfies a very deep instinct in herself, but she sets off a very deep instinct in her husband to support her and to support those children.
I mean, I did not really become a good earner until I had a child.
And then the minute I brought that child home, the first thing that occurred to me is, oh my God, what happens if this child, if I don't make a good living?
And the thing is, when the government says to you, well, what we need is more child care, what we need is more gifts to parents so they can take care of that.
No, no.
The whole nature of marriage is that when a woman creates a home for a man and her children, she ignites this instinct to protect them and to serve them and to support them in this man.
On top of which, on top of which, by taking care of a lot of the things in his life, sex would be one of them, a place to live, a place to be, someone to be, which men are very chaotic people.
They go after pleasure, they go after money, they go after things, you know, and suddenly with those things taken care of, I mean, I really do not know how a man as offbeat as I am would thrive at all without a home, which I would never have had on my own.
I would never have made a home on my own.
I'm just too much, I lived too much in my head to have done that.
And my wife, by giving me a home, set me free to do the things that make the money that we have, right?
I mean, suddenly I was free to do what I do.
And so, you know, happily, my wife loved raising children.
She loved homemaking.
And, you know, I didn't want to marry somebody who didn't want to do that.
I didn't want to force it on somebody.
I didn't want somebody to be unhappy.
But also, you know, it meant that when she was ready to move on and to do other things, we had the income to let her do that.
And then she started contributing her income to a career that was to my career, which was already well along.
And we were able to sustain, you know, get through periods.
You know, an artist's life is not a steady one.
It never was.
It never has been.
It never will be.
We were able to get through those periods because we had now created this machine for doing the, that took care of a lot of our spiritual needs.
It took care of a lot of our spiritual needs.
It took care of a lot of our creature comforts.
And it brought out the best in us.
And those are the things that you can't talk about in marriage.
I've written about this in my memoir, The Great Good Thing, and I've talked about it before maybe.
I didn't want to get married.
We'd been living together for years when my wife and I decided to get married.
I didn't see the point of it.
It was just some silly ceremony.
The moment the ceremony was over, absolutely true story, I walked into the bathroom and I just looked in the mirror and I gave myself the high sign, not a white supremacy sign, just the high sign.
Okay, you did a great thing.
And the reason was I knew the minute the ceremony was over, I had gone through a spiritual change.
I had been living with this woman.
I loved this woman desperately.
I thought there was no reason to get married, but marriage changed everything.
We became a different entity.
I became a different entity.
And everything that came of that and all the good that came of it came of it because we made the commitment.
We leapt into the dark.
You heard Stephen Meyer with that great quote from Augustine, believe in order to know.
I think that there are some things in life, love and God, are good examples that you can only prove by living them.
You live them over a period of time and you find out that they bring something out in you you did not even know was there, but it is.
But is everything.
It is everything about you.
Marriage is a spiritual state as well as a social instrument, and you don't get married to help society.
You get married because it actually brings out the best in your spirit and that, in a good capitalist society, is also going to make you probably a lot wealthier and a lot more secure.
And those are just things you can't talk about in the WALL Street Journal or almost anywhere, and these people who are not getting married are just plain crazy.
They just are.
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I want to talk about one more letter in the mailbag, but I want to use it to talk about a broader question.
This is from Otto.
Uh, he says I was listening to backstage live and he was talking about pornography.
Uh, my question is, how is viewing pornography any different on a porn site than it is on a show like Game Of Thrones?
All of you mentioned that you were watching the new show and even mentioned the nudity.
Why is this different than viewing naked women through a porn portal?
I'm very confused at the lack of any explanation for the distinction between nudity and the arts and the porn industry.
Thank you for your time.
It is, in fact, very different um, but that doesn't justify it, doesn't mean it's justified.
Okay, that's two different things.
It's not porn, but it doesn't justify it.
It may have pornographic scenes, but it is not porn, and i'll tell you the difference in a minute uh, but but I want to use this to answer a broader question of, is there art that you simply shouldn't watch?
And the quote that is usually hurled at me uh, is from Philippians.
It's, finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things and they say, well then, how can you watch uh ugliness uh, you know um cruelty, um bloodshed and uh nudity and sex?
But, to answer the question directly, that's in the mailbag, Game of Thrones, the first one, was an excellent, excellent story about characters affected by the lust for power in a world in which power is a very important factor.
And sex was part of that story and was used sometimes effectively.
However, there were scenes in there that were simply put in for exploitation.
What do they call it?
It was like when I can't remember what there was a word, oh, exposition.
They call it a sex position.
Because whenever somebody had to explain the relationships between the families and the Targaryens and the Valerians or whatever the hell they were, there were always like two women, naked women, having sex in the background.
That's HBO's way of saying, like, yeah, we'll get you through this.
Let's just watch the naked people first.
And excellent sex scenes, I have to say, and excellent nude scenes.
But the point is that they were in this context of a terrific story that was in fact enlivening and did, in fact, deepen your sense of what life is.
And when people quote this Philippian thing at me, they mean that you shouldn't look at anything.
But of course, if you don't look at art that has all the evil and tragedy and cruelty of life in it, you're not going to have the benefit of art, which is to understand life more deeply.
I really truly do believe that beauty is a path to God, and beauty can come in terrible forms, like King Lear, which is a story of horrible evil.
A man has his eyes taken out on stage, but it's just a heart-crushing tragedy.
But like the Pieta of Michelangelo, it's the worst, a depiction of the worst thing that can happen, a mother having her child die, God being persecuted and tortured to death, and yet the beauty of it reminds you that even in our suffering and even in the worst of life, there is this incredible beauty that connects us to the creator of life.
And so that is what art can do.
Having said that, right, is there stuff that you shouldn't watch?
Well, you know, a while back, I noticed that while I was channel surfing, I may have mentioned this once before, I'm not sure, but while I was channel surfing, I noticed I had a very weird habit, which was that I would think to myself, I wonder if there's a horror movie on.
And then I would find a horror movie and I turned it on and the minute it would start, I'd think, why am I watching this?
I hate horror movies.
I like ghost stories.
I like creepy movies, but I hate slashers and gore and all this stuff.
And I would stop watching it.
And I thought, that's a really weird mental habit.
It must be related to a trauma.
And in fact, I think it is related to a trauma.
When I was about 10 years old, I saw a horror movie and it traumatized me for weeks.
I wrote about it in one of the Another Kingdom trilogy books.
I think it's in A Nightmare Feast where there's a horror movie that traumatizes someone.
And I wasn't writing about me, but I used that incident from my life to inform that.
And it has, as I've gotten older, there are things that I will no longer watch.
I watched them when I was younger because I'm an artist and I wanted all of art to come through me.
I wanted to see everything there was.
And I'm glad I did that.
If I were young again now and starting out again now, I'd do it again.
But now that I've seen them, I don't think I need to see anymore.
I don't want to watch people tortured.
I don't want to watch stories in which the torture is the subject of interest.
I want to watch stories in which the beauty and nobility of human life is where the interest comes from.
I have frequently told the story of how when I was selling a lot of ghost stories to Hollywood, I was invited in to do what was essentially slasher porn.
And the guy pitched me the idea and he said, it's about a woman who's kidnapped and she's tortured.
And I said, yeah.
And he said, no, that's what it's about.
I said to him, you know, I'm sorry, but when a woman is running across screen being chased by a guy with a knife, I'm ruining for the woman.
And they threw me out.
And so I think the point of the point of a work of art, the motivation of the work of art, the energy of the work of art is what determines whether in fact it is a work of art.
And when you watch something like the film, the horror film Hostile, which is basically a film that shows you naked women and then rips them to shreds and rips people to shreds, what they're essentially saying is this is the thrill.
This is the heart of the thrill.
And Hollywood makes this mistake all the time.
They make a film like The Matrix, which is a really good and interesting film, and then it's so successful, they think, well, why was it so successful?
Ah, it was slow-motion action scenes.
And then they make just two pieces of garbage to follow on because it's all slow-motion action.
They thought that's what people were coming to see instead of the great idea of the movie, the depth of that idea and the interest of that idea.
And so I do think that there are shows that you shouldn't watch.
I think that there are shows that are demonic in purpose, if I can put it that way.
Shows that seek to excite you and titillate you through the torture of your fellow human beings, through the abuse of your fellow human beings.
I think there were scenes in Game of Thrones that qualified for that.
You know, that I thought the overall work was worth watching, but I think that they were scenes that were just, you know, two fat executives in a room going, yeah, putting some naked women in there.
You know, and that was the motivation of those scenes.
And I think that that is a degrading experience.
Why should you degrade yourself?
So yeah, just by being art, this idea of art for art's sake, I'm totally against it.
Art is there to communicate with the inner meaning of life.
It's there to bring you through beauty into communication with the inner meaning of life.
The point of art is that beauty is everywhere.
It is even in the empty streets with the litter blowing over them.
It is even in the death of someone you love.
It is even in the suffering of someone you love.
And so that's a very hard thing to learn.
And you don't want to learn it through life.
You want to learn it through art because you hope to get through life without seeing any of those things, although nobody does.
And so I don't think, I don't feel the same way I felt in my youth.
As an artist, I felt I should watch everything.
I should see everything.
But there came a point when I started to think, no, if it is deriving sensation from cruelty, if it's deriving sensation from ugliness, then I'm totally uninterested.
And that's why there are movies that I've seen that I wish I hadn't seen.
I certainly don't want to watch slasher movies.
I don't care how funny they are.
I don't care how witty they are.
If you are thrilling me by the killing of a human being, I'm not into it.
If you have an action sequence in which killing is part of the action, but basically it's the excitement or the skill of the good guy or whatever, there's something more to it.
I'm perfectly happy to go along.
But I really do think that there came a point when certain branches of the arts became pornography.
To go back to Otto's question, they became pornography by using what should have been the enlightening upraising of heroism instead of doing that, making the villainous and the ugly and the gory the point of the scene.
A great example of something that has gore and terror and excitement in it, but is a great piece of action fiction is a quiet place, where the family is the center of the story.
Their heroism, their love for one another, the danger that they're in just basically highlights their love for one another.
Another reason why I like the show The Sopranos, in spite of how degraded the characters are, how degraded the language is, how much violence and sex there is, all the time you are seeing it, it brings out what these people aren't.
I don't know, you know, that's how an artist works.
He does it.
It's done brilliantly.
Maybe he didn't even mean to do it, but I think he did.
And it comes across that what you're seeing is how these people you're getting, is no question you're getting the thrill of evil and the thrill of ugliness, but the overall effect is to highlight the goodness that they don't have.
It's Scorsese, who's a master of that.
He can show you sex scenes and violence scenes and ugliness and show you the joy of sin.
He can show you the joy of sin because sin is blissful.
But after it's over, you think like, boy, I'm glad I don't live like that.
So that's my rather nuanced answer.
People, I got a letter the other day of someone saying, you curse in your books, so I'm not going to read your books.
I'm not going to read anything that has cursing in it.
Well, knock yourself out.
But to me, to see the depth and ugliness of life and yet find beauty in it is part of what the arts give you.
And I think it is part of what the gospels give you and part of what the Old Testament gives you as well.
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All right, that's it for today.
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