The Eternal Return of Hollywood Politics
by Scott W. JohnsonI recall an article in the New York Times entertainment section that heralded the forthcoming release of three overtly political films in what must have been the fall of 1979. (My memory might be playing tricks on me. I have searched in the Times’s archives in vain for the article; if you can track it down, please let me know.) The author of the article noted the usual lack of success experienced by such overtly political films, but purred with excitement that the upcoming trio of films might change things. In the event the three films proved successful, Hollywood might get serious about using the medium to educate the masses.
I say it must have been 1979 because, as I recall, one of the three films previewed in the article was Richard Lester’s “Cuba,” starring Sean Connery. “Cuba” was a dud released in December 1979. The enthusiastic Amazon entry by Marshall Fine at least honestly notes that it is “one of Sean Connery’s least-seen films.” I went to see the film at the Grandview Theater in St. Paul because of the Times article, and I can testify that there is good reason for the film’s status as “one of Sean Connery’s least-seen films.”
The release of war-related films in the fall of 2007 brought the old Times article to mind. The AFP story on the films called Hollywood a ”casualty of war” in view of moviegoers’ shunning of the Iraq-related films. The article quoted one Lew Harris making a trenchant observation:
“These movies have to be entertaining,” Harris told AFP. “You can’t just take a movie and make it anti-war or anti-torture and expect to draw people in.”
The AFP story also quoted Harris, as you might expect, blaming the victim (i.e., the audience for these films):
“People want war movies to have a slam-bang adventure feel to them … But Iraq is a difficult war to portray in a kind of rah-rah-rah, exciting way.”
One of the war movies that is deemed a commercial failure was “The Kingdom.” Lewis’s explanation does not account for its failure. It had plenty of slam-bang adventure; it was lacking in slam-bang intelligence. The film was critically compromised by a hectoring muliticultural stupidity.
I hypothesize that the failure played out here is the general failure of leftist politics to fuel viewership of big commercial films. Among the few items worth reading on 2007’s crop of Hollywood anti-war movies was the pseudonymous David Kahane’s NRO column ”What’s wrong with America?” In the AFP story, Steven Bochco asserted that it is hard to engage audiences in entertainment based on “a hugely unpopular war.” Mickey Kaus suggested that we needed a ”thought-controlled experiment” to determine the cause for the failure of these films:
Are Hollywood’s Iraq dramas bombing because a) people don’t want to hear about Iraq or b) people don’t want to hear about Iraq from Hollywood liberals? … Several hundred commenters at Breitbart.com (most, presumably, sent by Drudge) seems to think they know the answer. It’s not Steven Bochco’s. … If there were an Iraq film not made by Hollywood liberals, we might be able to settle the argument. …
I think if we stretch the horizon beyond the crop of 2007 anti-war films to include the Hollywood bombs of yesteryear such as “Cuba” — and thus see the films as part of the recurring manifestation of leftist politics fueling commercial failures — the need for a controlled experiment might be obviated.
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21 Comments
I like to say that the Kingdom wasn’t a multi-cultural pushing film. If it was, the terrorists and Jamie Foxx would of sat down and talked about the differences between Islam and America. Rather, it had the Americans and the patriotic Saudi soldiers (even one that was beaten by his own forces for no reason) hunt down and eradicate the vermin that threaten us and our friends around the world.
The key scene in “The Kingdom” is when Jamie Foxx and the Saudi policeman are in a car in traffic and Foxx asks why the Saudi got into being a cop. At the end of a humorous exhancge, the Saudi says the terrorist and their bloodlust scare him. He’s a father. He says he doesn’t care what it takes to protect his family. He’ll kill anyone who tries to harm him, his family or his country.
That isn’t multi-cultural at all. That’s EXACTLY the kind of Middle Eastern patriots we need. I see the Kingdom as movie, while made for entertainment, gives a good example of how to fight terrorists.
No, Jordan, the key scene is at the end of the film.
Spoiler:
This is when we see an FBI agent pledge vengeance for the killing of another FBI agent coupled with a child pledging vengeance for the just killing of his father, a terrorist.
The film equates the search for justice by duly appointed law enforcement agents with random acts of terrorism. The film was pretty good up to that final, awful moment.
When I finally saw “The Kingdom” on DVD, I thought it was more anti-terrorist than Scott seems to think. (I didn’t even think it was a failure. I’d heard it had done better than most and it was because the politics were more even-handed.)
As I recall, the director of The Kingdom was upset to find out that the audiences were cheering when the protagonists start shooting the terrorists. I think that says it all. If Hollywood would just make ONE MOVIE where we kill terrorists with gusto and it doesn’t have a single torture scene or a soldier whining about not knowing what the war is for, it would make a ton of cash. The fact that the director of Kingdom heard enthusiastic movie fans and got worried is proof that Hollywood is not interested in giving us the movie we WANT to see.
“Anti-war film” is really a misnomer. No war movie ever produced depicts war as a good thing. Even the propaganda films of WWII show the destruction, the loss of life, the sad reality of armed conflicts. Thus there really is no such thing as a “pro-war” movie as they all, in one way or another, depict the ugliness of war.
In reality, it’s the left that christened the term “anti-war” and uses same to promote their anti-American agenda.
What we have coming from Hollywood nowadays arent “anti-war” films, they are “anti-victory” films, where Hollywood promotes their post-modern, multi-culti, no one is good, no one is evil, there’s only death destruction and mayhem caused by the evil capitalist American hegemony.
Vengeance is vengeance, and not justice. It’s just as wrong for the FBI agent to pledge vengeance as it is for the child to do so.
That’s not to say that justice should not be retributive; it should. But private vengeance is a Bad Thing.
I too am surprised at that characterization of The Kingdom– other than the lamentable, throw-your-drink-at-the-screen stupidity of the “deep thoughts” ending. On the whole, I thought it fit Hollywood’s usual profile of a town of liberals advocating fascist solutions (usually involving very large weapons as the solutions to all problems).
I think the post-9/11 era has been quite fascinating. Every time Hollywood has confronted the middle east/terror situation directly, expressing its lefty point of view, it has made an astonishing stinker, like Lions For Lambs or Redacted. Yet every time it has done so allegorically, it has tended to take the rightwing point of view– and cashed in immensely. The Lord of the Rings is a movie (or three) about how you can’t just hide in your little part of the world, evil is growing and will come get you eventually and must be confronted at the source. Batman Begins is about how a fundamentalist quest for purity inevitably turns nihilistic; we will likely never have a better Osama Bin Laden on screen than Liam Neeson’s charismatic, heartlessly puritan Ras al-Ghul. The Dark Knight is about how we must resist the social pressures created by mindless anarchy and destruction coming from similar sources, destroying them but not in a way that destroys us (we will likely never have a better Ayman al-Zawahiri on screen than Heath Ledger). 24 and Battlestar Galactica have dealt with issues like torture and infiltration and almost always come down on the pro-harsh-interrogation-methods side. And so on (just wait for World War Z, the ultimate exterminate-the-threat-one-by-one epic).
Simpletons may think conservative movies only mean An American Carol (see the thread at Jeffrey Wells’ site for all the evidence you need), but when it wants to make money, Hollywood takes a red meat position far beyond any working politician, and gives audiences the vicarious viciousness real life doesn’t afford.
I agree with perfecttommy. The end of The Kingdom was the point at which I realized the horrible message the movie was sending: FBI agents are eqivalent to terrorists. I stopped the DVD player at that point and explained to my two teenage sons what treacherous and traitorous propaganda we were watching. It was a good lesson on how subtle the leftists in Hollywood can be in plying their evil trade.
I agree with PERFECTTOMMY (2nd post). The movie made a de facto moral equivalence between an FBI agent who was tracking down terrorists–who recently murdered his colleague–and the call to arms *by* a terrorist. It was essentially the kind of foolishness that lends the morally unwise to say things like “An eye for an eye leaves the world blind” and other feel-good pap.
Otherwise, I thought the film was quite good and was very pleased at the anti-Islamist Saudi characters and their thoughtful portrayal. It is striking how an enjoyable ~90 minutes can be ruined by a two-second-long sentence.
There IS a worthwhile “war” movie available on DVD. The title is “Traitor,” starring Don Cheadle. Story written by Steve Martin. Yes, THAT Steve Martin. No moral equivalence in this one!
The moral equivalence bit at the end of THE KINGDOM was slapped on after the fact (as Michael Hutchison noted, the producers famously got scared when a test audience cheered the deaths of Arab terrorists) and IMO it’s so out of phase with the rest of the movie that it’s easy to ignore. If you hit STOP at the right time on the DVD the rest of the film is quite enjoyable and the closest we’re likely to come this decade to a realistic depiction of the War on Terror.
It does not stop with these anti-Iraq movies. Movies like the recently released “Che” or Sean Penn’s “Milk” also tell the same kind of story. Hollywood tells us that there are “good guys” and “bad guys”, and then they explain to us which are which. The problem is that sometimes, Hollywood gets things backwards. Che was an evil murdering bastard and deserved to be butchered in a South American jungle. And people who are against special rights for homosexuals are not necesarilly homophobic or hatemongers. There is a review for “Revolutionary Road” on this site also, and it has the same kind of Hollywood problems. It basically says that people living in 1950’s suburbia had boring, sheltered, and despondent lives (much like that wonderfully underhanded “Pleasantville”).
Because Hollywood as has cloistered itself in the bubble of west coast liberalism it misses out on what a majority of American society really feels.
The Rambler – January 6th, 2009 at 11:18 am
“It does not stop with these anti-Iraq movies. Movies like the recently released “Che” or Sean Penn’s “Milk” also tell the same kind of story.”
There is an upside to this… the far left always is completed to create idols and push them. Just explain who these people really were and then the left looks bad.
Che, mass murdering totalitarian psychopath. Who would like this guy? Oh yeah, lefties…
Milk, actually a person with a lot more dimensions that the left tells you about. Veteran, Goldwater supporter, got into politics in large part because as a small business owner he was disgusted with SF City Hall (re: kind of Palin-esq). Oh yeah, he was gay too.
The Kingdom was a fine movie until the sophomoric ending dialogue designed to be ironic (the usual moral equivalency). What a waste. Hollywood writers continue to think that they are clever when they are only immature.
Yes, I second the recommendation of the “Traitor”. Didn’t know it was a “Cruel Shoes” Martin though. Sweet.
Great post Scott. Been reading Powerline for years, and it is great to be a co-contributor with you here on BH!
The ending of The Kingdom felt to me, like an apology to the leftists for daring to make an otherwise fairly reasonable film about terrorists.
I didn’t think it was a great movie but it was enjoyable. That end bit everyone keeps referring to didn’t convey anything to me other than reality, a kid irrelevant of the situation is going to want to avenge his fathers death, especially if his not old enough or smart enough to grasp the circumstances of that death, if I’m a child and want to avenge my fathers death and while getting older come to realize what a scumbag he was, the desire for vengeance would subside dramatically.. i don’t see any moral equivalencies, just human nature, people need to stop reading too much politics into movies, they exist, but i don’t see it in this case..
This is mostly exactly beside the point. As a group, with no exception that I know of, movies about Iraq have been made by liberals and have been dismal commercial failures.
Maybe I missed something re: The Kingdom.
I saw the movie when it came out and loved it. I didn’t take the end as saying the FBI and the terrorists were moral equivalents.
I thought it was simply portraying the reality of the situation, which is that the terrorists are going to keep coming, because that is their goal, to “kill every one of” us. And we, in turn, are going to have to “kill every one of them” if we are going to defend ourselves against their evil intentions.
I didn’t see moral equivocation. I saw the reality that violence will continue until one side or the other wins by destroying the other.
And I sure hope it’s US who wins.
I didn’t see any of these movies, but art does not mix well with politics. Art can have political overtones if it starts out as art and stays that way, but politics cannot be made into art. Theatre must ring true to the human condition.
As soon as an audience sees something that doesn’t fit, there is no massaging the outcome and suspension of disbelief is violated. Most if not all of these films try to adapt a plot and create characters and relationships that are flawed so as to affect the theme and political point, taking the long way around and trying to force something on the audience. Even for those who are inclined to agree with the point find themselves with an inferior artistic experience. Hence a flop.
Classics don’t indulge in the petty concerns of the time they are made, but are universal.
I stop at the same gas station every morning for coffee and there is a rack of inexpensive DVDs next to the checkout counter. On the top of the rack is “Redacted.” It’s been there for 6 months+ and I can’t help but wonder what person would see that movie in a gas station and be inspired to buy it. Apparently that person has not yet been to this gas station.
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