I have seen two movies in the past ten days, "Julie & Julia" and "The Time Traveller's Wife". I heartily recommend both of them to those who haven't seen them. The purpose of this diary is to call attention to some similar dialog and contexts in the two movies, dialog and context that is essentially propaganda against Republicans and the Republican Party.
In "Julie & Julia", Julia Child's sister comes to visit her in France, meets a man there, decides to marry him, and then to hold the wedding there. This results in the parents of Julia Child and her sister coming to the wedding in France. At one point, Julia and her sister are talking happily, and refer to their father in a dismissive, nearly scornful, tone as (paraphrased) "He's a Republican!", and say that he supports Sen. Joe McCarthy (this is the early 1950s). Subsequently, Julia's husband, a nice man in the US Foreign Service, is grilled roughly by McCarthyite investigators who suspect him of disloyalty and who ask him if he is homosexual. He and his job survive the ordeal, but he is psychologically scarred. To a 21st-century American, this portrayal of an unjust interrogation is disgusting, and the association with McCarthy, and of McCarthy with the father, means that "He's a Republican!" smears the 21st-century Republican Party with the general revulsion against McCarthyism. I doubt that this association is unintended -- rather, I suspect that Julie & Julia's writer/director/producer combination is tired of taking hits from Republican propaganda, and is happy to give some back.
In "The Time Traveller's Wife", the hero and heroine decide to get married, and naturally the hero must meet the father of the bride-to-be. Once again, we are told in advance, as a warning, (again, paraphrased) "He's a Republican!". When the hero arrives for the meeting, the father is shooting clay pigeons from the back porch of his lavish house, and he tells the hero that he hunts real animals too, saying that "life is a hunt". The heroine bride is an artist, and the father, who is clearly a wealthy businessman, does not understand his daughter, and essentially tells the hero that he thinks the bride-to-be, his daughter, is a failure in life. In the context of the movie, this father character is unattractive, almost disgusting. The result is that the movie is associating some unattractive and nearly antisocial behavior with being Republican. So here is another current example of a Hollywood writer/director/producer combination distributing anti-Republican propaganda in the midst of a movie which is otherwise apolitical.
I wonder, have there been any other analogous hits on Republicans in recent movies? Is this a trend that I have detected?