Last week, there was an amusing piece in Slate on the alleged conservatism of John Hughes, the man who launched a thousand brat-pack actors in the 1980s:

It should have come as no surprise, then, that a faint smirk of family-values-friendly subversion stamped itself on all of late Hughes, which is to say his even more establishment period as a filmmaker. From The Great Outdoors (in-laws sure are difficult) to Home Alone (towheaded McMansion latchkey kid foils robbery, saves Christmas) to Dennis the Menace (overall-wearing scamp of the manicured lawns sling-shoots his way straight into your heart)—these were comedies for the Dan Quayle in all of us.

Gen X nostalgia is as interesting for what it remembers as for what it chooses to ignore. Every so often, you'll turn on TBS and be forced to take inventory of the popular culture of your youth. Trading Places delivered its comeuppance with a switcheroo act of commodities fraud;* the true nemesis of Ghost Busters wasn't Gozer but the EPA; Stripes is all about making a kind of screwball peace with the military-industrial complex … Sure enough, there's Harold Ramis—another Lampoon alum, who directed Hughes' screenplay for Vacation—reflecting on the Chicago Seven hearings in a recent interview with the Believer: "They ran up and down the street, smashing car windows and stuff. My first reaction was, 'Yeah, right on!' But then I thought, 'Wait, I'm parked out there.' " The polite term for this gentle rightward shift when it happens to artists and intellectuals is embourgeoisement. What a shame the philosopher of puberty never warned kids about that.

Actually, this is entirely bass-ackwards. The Hollywood of the 1980s was a return to a political middle-ground designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible after the Young Turks drove the industry leftward in the 1970s, nearly bankrupting it in the process, until two guys named Lucas and Spielberg began to make films that appealed to mass audiences again. That Hughes also followed this trend to box office success in the 1980s is hardly surprising.

With a massive collective case of BDS, Hollywood has made another turn leftward this decade and--surprise!--revenues are once again down. Who wants to spend nearly $10 a pop on tickets, and nearly the same amount for each person's snacks for two hours of P.C. agitprop politics?