A movie with an anti-liberal theme

Last night I saw Taken, starring Liam Neeson, a movie that seems as though it was made for VFR. Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a retired CIA operative adoringly devoted to his 17 year old daughter, who lives with his ex-wife. The girl is invited to go to Paris for the summer with her girlfriend to stay in the apartment of the friend’s cousins. Mills is initially against the idea. This greatly upsets his daughter, who storms off, and elicits the comment, “You’re an a**hole,” from his bitterly hostile ex-wife. Faced with all this emotional pressure, he eventually yields and gives his permission for the girl to go, on the condition that she stay in touch with him regularly via cell phone, including calling him the moment she gets to Paris. As soon as the two girls, who both are uber airheads, arrive at the Paris airport, they are picked up by a handsome stranger who gives them a ride to the cousin’s apartment and makes a date to see them later. It turns out that the friends’ cousins are not even in the apartment but are away for the summer, so the two girls are alone. I won’t tell you what happens next, but the movie is a lesson about what happens to young females when liberal society liberates them to do whatever they feel like doing and go wherever they feel like going.

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February 1

A female reader writes:

Another theme in this movie was the importance of fathers and of male protectiveness, as opposed to the now customary manner of seeing men as superfluous idiots who are only valuable for sperm donation. In fact, the early scene in the movie, when his ex-wife scoffs at his caution, is a rehearsal of all the cliches of today: girls have to do what they like, explore for themselves, and so on, and rejection of old fashioned male protectiveness and caution as useless as Victorian furniture in a Swedish modern living room. Then of course the movie completely reverses that.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 29, 2010 02:23 PM | Send