Texas Film-School Massacre

DALLAS - Call them Ishmael, the fans of director Mike Wilson, transported on a quest of mad righteousness rivaling that of Herman Melville's Ahab. Just as Melville's hoary old sailor took to the seas to hunt down a murderous white whale, Wilson goes in search of a similarly terrifying nemesis: the elusive, bloated doppelganger that scarred his soul and smashed his dream of home. The beast in question? Michael Moore.

Moore was the unseen but omnipresent bogeyman at the American Film Renaissance (AFR), the nation's first conservative film festival, where he was like a great black hole that pulls everything, inexorably, into its gravitational field. Some of the draw was a sort of attraction. A number of the younger conservative filmmakers expressed exasperated admiration for Moore's films and looted from the director's bag of signature tricks to craft their own documentaries – a hopeful bit of artistic exchange that seemed to run counter to the notion of a whistling, impossible gap between the conservative world and the liberal one.

But the overwhelming majority at the AFR wouldn't brook even this slimmest of cultural bridges. Every screening and question-and-answer session I attended featured some jab at the filmmaker's girthy greasiness, his god-awful documentaries. For many, Moore was a convenient Goliath upon which to project conservative rage at America- and religion-hating, traditional-values-shredding left-wingers. So when one wit at a screening of Wilson's Michael Moore Hates America asked if Wilson's favorite book was Moby Dick, I had to marvel at the erudition of the barb. It was, after all, the cleverest iteration of what the majority of the AFR's moviegoers and filmmakers – inflamed with rage but muzzled by the nice manners characteristic of many conservatives – were dying to say: Michael Moore is a fat fuck.

As the fan's Ahab reference makes clear, just as important as the chance to see conservative films was the merry mythmaking that accompanied them. For the three-day duration of the AFR festival, founders Jim and Ellen Hubbard ran through the festival's creation legend with a weary cheerfulness. A year and a half ago, the two former law students got the idea to start up their pro-American film festival after they saw that their local theater in Little Rock, Arkansas, was screening only two movies: Frida, about a "communist artist," and Moore'sBowling for Columbine.

"Where were the films for normal people?" Ellen Hubbard asked.

Sadly, not at the AFR. Among the cinematic offerings were plenty of conspiratorial tracts – discourses on the potential fall of Western civilization due to the forces of immigration, terrorism, and a low birth rate for native-born U.S. citizens (The Siege of Western Civilization); on Bill Clinton's cover-up of the Islamic terrorist operations behind the Oklahoma City bombing (The Mega Fix); and on the astounding thesis that the genocides of Rwanda, Cambodia, and Bosnia stemmed from gun-control laws (Innocents Betrayed). When they weren't weaving an unlikely web of cause and assumption, the films banged on single-note themes: the piousness of our president, the heroics of our veterans, the insanity of the "Islamo-fascist" agenda of the anti-war left.

Underlying the AFR's films was a sense of disenfranchisement at being cut out of the circles of the "cultural elite" in Hollywood, on campuses, and in the blue states. Adding a dose of additional heat was a touchy outrage at the left's criticisms (perceived or made) of the righteousness of American policies, the accessibility of the American dream, and the honorable conduct of the American military in forays past and present.

In their identification with being downtrodden, they would be displeased to know, the festival attendees have much in common with the hated Moore, the self-made Everyman champion of minorities and the underclass. Just as this rich, white man indulges a sense of ersatz oppression to speak for the "voiceless," so the AFR moviegoers displayed a curious myopia to the larger situation in America – that for the imbalance of Republican views in Hollywood, a conservative president sits in the White House and Republicans have control of Congress. Conservative power in the government mattered little to the attendees, who saw only their second-class status in Hollywood. They roared with righteous anger when keynote speaker and conservative culture columnist Michael Medved railed that those on the right are "just now, as creative people, getting out of bed."