In June 1992, the screenwriter Jonathan R Reynolds published a letter in the New York Times complaining of Hollywood’s liberal bias. “I defy you to name a movie, primetime network television series, or made-for-television movie that espouses any sort of intelligent conservative position,” it read. He exhorted the paper to send a journalist to meet with studio executives to pitch a film which held conservative values at its core. He ended the letter, ominously, saying that “historically, the pendulum will swing back sooner or later.”

If you’ve been reading conservative blogs this week, you would be excused for thinking that this moment had come. In The Giver, released on Friday, the rightwing commentariat has found a Hollywood film which they can wholeheartedly embrace.

The American Spectator ran a column in which activist and Tea Party founding member Mark Meckler, said: “Conservatives, especially pro-life people of faith and liberty-loving Tea Partiers, will identify with certain elements of the movie. In fact, in a few moments, I had to remind myself that this film actually came out of Hollywood.”

There has been a deluge of similarly admiring pieces – headlines include “The Giver: A Portent Of What Might Be?”, “The Giver Is A Glimpse Of Progressivism Gone Wrong,” and “The Giver: A Movie About Life under Liberal The Giver Progressive Control”. Even Sarah Palin has enthusiastically endorsed the movie, in a video posted to her video channel, saying “this movie shows us exactly where we’re headed.”

The Giver is based on a 1993 science-fiction book of the same name by Lois Lowry. It is set in a dystopian future, where an all-powerful government has eliminated all love, color, music, art, dissent and difference; every aspect of life is centrally-controlled by an elite cabal, and humanity has been forced to give up even the memory of individuality. One quote in particular from the film resonated with the film’s rightwing fans; spoken by Meryl Streep’s character, the sinister and all-controlling Chief Elder, who delivers the line straight to camera with intense menace: “when people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong.”

Erik Telford is senior vice-president of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, a conservative online news organisation, and was one of the first conservative commentators to write positively about The Giver.

“I think it draws out to an endpoint, a conclusion of where those progressive policies can lead,” he told the Guardian, pointing to the example of former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s ban on “gulp cups”. “It’s really about the freedom to choose,” Telford said.

For Telford, the film’s resonance is more symbolic than literal. “I would stop short of saying that what this film portrays is the end point for Obama,” he said. “But it’s a reminder of why freedom and liberty are so important, and why people should be allowed to make their own choices.”

Cal Thomas, on the other hand, sees the danger as more literally imminent. One of the most-syndicated writers in America – his column is printed in more than 250 newspapers and appears in many more online publications – he wrote admiringly about The Giver, ending with the words: “It’s time to seriously think about where we’re headed. The Giver shows us in ways few movies do.”

“The US is between decadence and decay,” Thomas told the Guardian. “We don’t know where we’re going. We don’t have the political leadership, or the moral leadership that we once had. We’re tolerating everything now, from abortion to same-sex marriage. I think there’s a general feeling of moral, political and economic chaos in the US.”

It is interesting that all the conservative commentators expressed surprise that such a conservative-friendly film could have been produced in a major Hollywood studio and distributed by, as Thomas describes them, “the liberal Weinstein brothers”. It has for a long time been received wisdom that Hollywood is a hotbed of liberalism and progressive thought, a natural enemy for conservatives.

“A lot of conservatives, especially the kind who grab a movie for a political cause, have a love-hate relationship with Hollywood,” Elias Isquith, the political editor for Salon, said. “They are frustrated by what they perceive as liberal bias – how many celebrities seem to be liberal – but at the same time it stems from an understandable envy, because Hollywood is very influential; for a lot of people the entertainment they consume informs their values.”

Conservatives’ surprise that Hollywood has produced a film which resonates with their worldview is to some extent disingenuous. The Giver is actually the latest in a long line of such films, from the drill-happy Armageddon and the “Fuck yeah, air power” tone of Independence Day and Top Gun, to the “CIA saves the day” plot of Argo or the gently pro-life theme of Juno, which conservatives have been happy to laud. The staunchly anti-authoritarian V for Vendetta was thematically incredibly similar to The Giver, except that it came out under the Bush administration. In fact, it isn’t the movies that have changed – it’s the politics.

“With the Obama presidency, you see a large reaction from rightwing activists who believe that America is on the brink of a dystopian dictatorship – or possibly has already reached that point,” said Brian Tashman, a writer for the blog Right Wing Watch. “There is a move in the conservative media to paint Obama as this evil spellcaster on America, slowly transforming the country into a tyrannical totalitarian state.”

Meckler, whose column in The American Spectator concluded with the words “To all of my Tea Party friends, get to the movie theater to see why we’re fighting,” told the Guardian that he thinks the film, and others like The Hunger Games series, have struck a nerve: “people are feeling that largely government has run out of control.”

“I think these dystopian movies and the themes they represent is evident of an undercurrent in American society,” he continued. “People are frustrated by the scope of the federal government.”

But films in which the bugbear is a tyrannical government are by no means a new phenomenon. As Tashman said, “there have always been dystopian films.” Despite what the right may believe about Hollywood’s liberal bias, actually the morality of most films just don’t fit onto a left/right or Republican/Democrat axis.

The heroism of the hero, and the villainy of the villain, depends on a much more direct narrative exchange of good and evil. The enemies Batman fights in
Christopher Nolan’s Batman series “just want to watch the world burn”, while even Reynolds acknowledges that the difference between liberals and conservatives comes down much more mundanely to “a difference in belief in what benefits humanity”.

Thus, in most movies – especially blockbusters – the social wrangling of liberalism vs conservatism means comparatively little. Ultimately, it is just as silly to think The Giver is an argument against Obama’s policies of socialised medicine and gun control as it is to think Mad Max is an argument against individual liberty and lower taxes. It is a reductio ad absurdum argument, because Hollywood’s belief in the power of the individual is driven by narrative imperative, not ideology. John Wayne does not equal Rand Paul.

Isquith agrees. “A lot of the time,” he said, “stories or pieces of entertainment can speak to truths that transcend normal political categories, and we lose something if you try to turn every piece of art into propaganda.”

Nikki Silver, the film’s producer, was fascinated – and a little bewildered – by the reaction from the rightwing blogosphere. “None of us want the world that The Giver represents,” she said. “There’s too much talk about your side and my side. Lets talk about what we have in common.”

“It’s not a warning,” she added. “It’s not about one administration.”