WARNING:The following post contains spoilers for the movie Troy.
Still reading? OK:
So, I was watching Troy last week at the Senator. The movie is loosely based on the story of the Trojan War, and there's a pivotal scene where Paris (played by Orlando Bloom) challenges Menelaus (who he stole Helen from) to single combat.
Paris is young and inexperienced, and Menelaus is beating him pretty easily. He wounds Paris, and is about to finish him off, when Paris crawls away to his brother, Hector. Menelaus is enraged, and demands that Hector stand aside so that he can finish the duel by killing Paris. When Hector will not budge, Menelaus raises his sword to finish off Paris, but is instead killed by Hector.
I was amazed and disgusted by the audience's reaction to this scene - wild cheering and applause! One of the supposed heroes of the movie had weaseled his way out of a fair fight, and the audience loved it. At the time, I chalked it up to female foolishness and college-age ignorance (the showing was a preview attended by a large number of college students who had won tickets).
On Monday, I walked into the Mountain Road branch of the Anne Arundel County Public Library. The staff, all female, were discussing Troy, specifically the very scene that had been pissing me off for days. But their reaction to it was 180 degrees from the Senator audience. They were all as disgusted as I was with Paris' cowardice, and were surprised that my audience had reacted so favorably. So what's going on here?
Following Mickey Kaus' First Rule Of Journalism (always generalize wildly from personal experience), I think that there's some sort of local version of the famous Red State - Blue State cultural divide at work. The college/urban whitey audience at the Senator could not appreciate or even understand the heroism depicted in Troy (and in fact laughed during several scenes that were not intended to be humorous). The exurban crowd, even though all-female, was offended by the lack of heroism displayed by a character in the movie.
It's almost too obvious to point out that Anne Arundel County went Republican in both the 2000 presidential election and the 2002 gubernatorial election, while Baltimore City went Democratic. You don't have to be David Brooks to see the cultural divide between "bobos" and the Patio Men, and I'm sure that similar reactions could be reproduced by asking the two audiences about, say, Pat Tillman, or the war in Iraq in general.
Marc
