November 25, 2007
What audiences want
Since I've been talking about Brian De Palma's anti-American film, this is as good a time as any to mention that Mark Steyn has issued another of his well-aimed barbs, this time targeting Hollywood's refusal to give the audiences what they want: movies where we're the good guys.
A few months back, Peter Berg attended a test screening of his new film in California — not Malibu or Beverly Hills, but out in farm country. The Kingdom is about FBI agents (Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, etc.) investigating a terrorist attack on Americans in Saudi Arabia, and finally, about two hours in, the star talent gets to kill a bunch of jihadists.
As Entertainment Weekly described it, "the packed house went completely bonkers, erupting in cheers" — and poor old Berg was distraught. "I was nervous it would be perceived as a jingoistic piece of propaganda, which I certainly didn't intend," the director agonized. "I thought, 'Am I experiencing American bloodlust?' "
You really want an answer to that? Okay, here goes: No. It's not American bloodlust. As they say on Broadway, the audience doesn't lie, and, when they're trying to tell you something, it helps not to cover your ears. For all Mr. Berg's pains, The Kingdom was dismissed by the New York Times as "Syriana for dummies." That's to say, instead of explicitly fingering sinister Americans as the bad guys, it merely posited a kind of dull pro forma equivalence between the Yanks and the terrorists. It came out, oh, a week and a half ago and it's already forgotten in the avalanche of anti-war movies released since. There's Lions for Lambs and In the Valley of Elah
and Redacted — no, wait, Rendition. No, my mistake. There's a Redacted and a Rendition — one's about American soldiers being rapists, one's about American intelligence officials being torturers.Every Friday night at the multiplex, Mr. and Mrs. America are saying, "Hmm, shall we see the movie where our boys are the torturers? Or the one where our boys are the rapists? How about the film where the heroic soldier refuses to fight? Or the one where he does fight and the army covers up the truth about his death?" And then they go see Fred Claus, which pulled in three times as much money as Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs on both films' opening weekend.
As Roger L. Simon of Pajamas Media (and a screenwriter himself) put it: "Hicks Nix Peaceniks' Pix." These films tank at the box office, and disappear from the shopping malls before you've had time to refill your popcorn, and next Friday there's a brand new critically acclaimed anti-war movie in its place. The faster they fall, the more Hollywood is convinced of the "courage" of its "dissent."
But the rot has been endemic in the film industry for a long time, maybe as long as 35 years. Apart from Band of Brothers and Mel Gibson's We Were Soldiers, I can't recall the last time a major studio released a film wherein American troops were portrayed as heroic, the enemy as fighters who needed killing.
Steyn says it's all about looking for the subtext; the enemy is never just the other side.
A decade or so back at some confab at Paramount, I met Lionel Chetwynd, a writer and producer who was raised in Montreal and in his pre-showbiz days served in the Black Watch (the Royal Highland Regiment), in the course of which he met several Canadian veterans of the Dieppe raid. After recounting their story one night at a party in Malibu, he was invited to pitch it as a project to some network honcho. He laid out the bones of the plot — a suicidal dry run for D-Day against a heavily fortified European port.
"Who's the enemy?" asked the network exec.
"Hitler," said Chetwynd. "The Nazis."
"No, no, no," she pressed. "Who's the real enemy?"
"It was the first time I realized," Chetwynd later told Cathy Seipp, "that for many people, evil such as Nazism can only be understood as a cipher for evil within ourselves." Who's the real enemy? Ike. Churchill. The Imperial General Staff. Us.
Ed Driscoll, who's been scanning the shrivelled horizon of an ever more parochial movie industry for some years now, likes to cite that anecdote as a kind of shorthand for the Hollywood aesthetic: who's the real enemy?
In this season's crop of movies, the enemy is never al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Baathists . . . Sure, they're out there somewhere at the fringe of events, but they're just Hitchcock's MacGuffin — the pretext for the real story. And that means the heroes can never be, say, a bunch of U.S. Marines who leap from their Humvee on the outskirts of Ramadi because something goofy's going on.
No, the heroes have to be dogged journalists or crusading lawyers or obstinate wives who refuse to swallow the official explanation. And the real enemy are renegade government officials, covert agencies, right-wing senators, Halliburton. And, unsurprisingly, despite the unpopularity of Bush and the Iraq war, the public simply doesn't buy the idea of their country as a 24/7 cover-up for rape, torture and war profiteering.
Which brings us back to those yelps of delight when the Americans clobbered the jihadists two hours into the test screening of The Kingdom. Pace Peter Berg, it's not "bloodlust" ... What the preview crowd were telling Berg is, hey, we'd love to see one film where our guys kick serious terrorist butt — and there isn't one, and there hasn't been one for six long years.
If you buy the argument that Hollywood's anti-Americanism derives necessarily from its role as purveyor of entertainment to the entire planet, well, so what? Terrorists killed a bunch of people in Bali, Madrid, London. Alongside the kick-ass Americans, sign Hugh Grant as an MI6 agent and Penelope Cruz as his Spanish dolly bird and Cate Blanchett as the head of the Australian SAS and Russell Crowe as her Kiwi bit of rough. As long as the enemy's the enemy, and not a Dick Cheney subsidiary.
It's fine to show the American war machine warts and all, but Hollywood is showing only the warts — and, even if you stick perky little Reese Witherspoon in the middle of it, it's still just another pustulating carbuncle.
And, if Hollywood made just one war film where America gets to be — what's the phrase? — the good guys, that would be swell not just for blood-lusting redneck warmongers but also for Hollywood liberals. After all, one reason why Rendition and Lions for Lambs and Co. bomb on a weekly basis is because it's hard to have a functioning counterculture when the culture you were countering no longer exists.
If you take it as a given that we're living in a 50-50 nation -- and I don't believe we are; 60-40, maybe -- then Hollywood deliberately alienates fully half its audience as it churns out relentlessly negative portrayals of America and the West, foisting ever-so-nuanced and evenhanded portrayals of our enemies while striving to avoid taking sides.
I'd love to see a well-made movie depicting the heroism of our troops fighting and killing the throat-slitting, civilian-slaughtering Muslim jihadis, as evil a bunch of bastards as ever needed dispatching.
Until then, I'll be amongst the countless Americans who find something -- anything -- better to do than pay for the dubious "entertainment" coming from Hollywood.
Posted by Mike Lief at November 25, 2007 08:25 PM
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Comments
"Enchanted" because it is nice. "Mr. Magoric" because it is nice and the special effects are wowzers.
Posted by: The Little Coach at November 26, 2007 07:47 AM