I’ll get to that somewhat nervy assertion in a bit, but first a little background.

Among the cinematic slew released during those years of cold, are two of my favorite films, Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe. Both dealt with strikingly similar themes, unintentional nuclear holocaust, yet in entirely different tones.  But cold war themes weren’t that varied by their very nature, since inevitably the worst case scenario was the best case plot device and nothing brings down the house like bringing down the house.

With that said, still, there’s so much similarity between the two stories that law suits were indeed filed and production schedules slowed. This worked out to Stanley Kubrick’s advantage as his Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was released almost a year ahead of Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe. In my opinion Kubrick’s is a better film than Lumet’s and not due to slowed schedules, either. But both are magnificent, and because of their approaches to the topic, very different  and essential part of the genre.

Based on Peter George’s novel Red Alert, Dr. Strangelove is, if there’s anyone alive out there who still hasn’t seen it yet, a comedy. The novel, however, is not satire and does not even contain a Strangelove at all, since Terry Southern who worked on the script with Kubrick and George, added that character during pre-production.

Fail-Safe, based on a novel by the same name, was written by two gents who do not have the same name, namely Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. When George Clooney re-enacted this story in LIVE television format, which I personally think was a marvelous idea, he enlisted the help of veteran broadcaster and news legend Walter Kronkite to introduce the landmark teleplay. Kronkite brought weight and nostalgia to the production, he also brought a big flub. As he concluded his up to then flawless introduction of ‘what you are about to see’, he awkwardly stumbled and stammered with the authors’ names. Well, that’s LIVE television, warts and all. Nobody’s perfect, least of all television icons. And it didn’t harm the presentation at all. It probably even made it more enjoyable, if one can use that term with a story about nuclear holocaust. Judging by Dr. Strangelove, that’s exactly what Kubrick wanted us to do.

By a strange coincidence both of these films were foolishly screened one after the other at Harvard Square’s famous Brattle Theater. I had seen them both before several times each, so I knew them backwards and forwards. I also knew one was a comedy and one was decidedly not, though the endings were not all that different, in fact, the comedy turned out a whole lot worse in the end.

The folks that work at the Brattle, probably still to this day, are a smug lot. Using the current vernacular, snarky might even be a way to describe them. Naturally, most are students at Harvard and quite confident in making profound statements they’ve overheard (that one I borrowed from Gene Kelly in An American in Paris, if anyone’s checking). When I saw the lineup with Dr. Strangelove scheduled first, I knew then what many of you who know these films are thinking now, that the staff at Brattle either hadn’t yet seen the films, or they had and were just smug and snarky enough to think it would be cool in this order. For either error, they deserved to be gingerly removed from their employment with the finesse of a General Ripper or a ‘Bat’ Guano, warts and all.

Now, there are very few times when I’ve felt the need to walk out of a movie before the credits finished. Much fewer times due to reasons other than the quality of the film. Well, one such occasion happened here in Japan. At approximately the same time that the quite serious staff of the Tokyo International Film Festival scheduled a screening of Lawrence of Arabia an earthquake was scheduled by the even more serious staff of mother nature. Colonel Lawrence, having just seen the horrors left by the Turks at Tafas was about to echo his famous “No prisoners!” yawp, when the screen went black, then white, then the chandeliers in the theater started swaying like we were on an ocean liner in the wrong part of town. All I could think of was The Poseidon Adventure.  I knew, prisoners or no, it was time to get out of that cavalcade of stars. The last person I would want to be was that guy hanging from an upside down dining room table who ended up in the stained glass. That was one time I left a screening early. The other was at the Brattle. It was during Fail-Safe after Dr. Stranglove had already played.  Their clever lineup. No, there was no earthquake and only one prisoner. Me.  I opted to stay and slog it out. Maybe the overly snarky crowd, I thought, which had laughed way too loudly in classic ‘look at me, I get it’ fashion with the subtle humor of Kubrick’s  would settle down a bit with Lumet. Well, so much for that idea. What followed was constant, again, much-too-loud snickering and feigned muffled laughter by the Ivy proud crowd. I couldn’t take it, so I left. The fools, the mad fools let the comic tone of Dr. Strangelove poison the same serious message that Fail-Safe emitted with fatal solemnity. The horror was negated by the association. I was pissed. And I’m pretty darn sure Henry Fonda – as the President – would’ve been, too.

Dr. Strangelove, enjoyable masterpiece that is it, was of course not intended to frighten. Well, not really. You could say it was intended to frighten about as much as 2001: A Space Odyssey, the most expensive movie about religion ever made, was intended to evoke prayer. The story goes that Kubrick was making Dr. Strangelove as a serious narrative when he felt that it was just so absurd and yet so very possible, that he had to make it a comedy, the irony of it was just too funny.

Fail-Safe was another matter, though. Not filled to the brim with over the top characters with clever names, it very clearly laid out the ease with which a nuclear war could be started, not by purposeful insanity, nor tampering with bodily fluids, but by accident, and even with the best intentions and correct safe guards in place. To human eyes, working flawlessly, by the numbers.

The U.S. Air Force had a disclaimer on the film stating that what you have seen could not happen.  Dr. Strangelove had a similar disclaimer that Kubrick was all too happy to include feeling it lent even more gallows humor to his already hilarious film. He was right. It did.

Well, let me stop for a second. I have a confession to make. I lied. There’s another cold war film that I was fully planning on mentioning and is of particular interest here. In fact, it’s the reason for the whole darn thing. So, I apologize with the sincerity of a Merkin Muffley. This film is not a comedy, nor a drama but rather a TV documentary. It’s called The War Game.  It was made by Peter Watkins and originally scheduled to be released in 1966 on the BBC. It’s what could be described as a docudrama or dramatization. But, we’ll call it a documentary because if [Ray Bradbury's Stolen Title] 9/11 is called a documentary, then this certainly is. And like all documentaries, it’s meant to sway.

For those who haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil it. But I will say, what happens to us, to England specifically, isn’t pretty.

In documentary fashion, and using an omnipresent “voice-of-God” narration the film shows what precautions and procedures are in place in the event of a nuclear emergency, in this case, an exchange of hostilities with tactical nuclear weapons between NATO and those forces of communist Soviet Union and China. It interweaves man-in-the-street bits, creating a very realistic portrayal of then contemporary English urban and suburban life as only a Richard Lester could appreciate. These go on to show what the average person was thinking in terms of perceived threat.  Experts are interviewed – civil defense and emergency services workers, politicians and theologians. Many of the ‘expert’ interviews, particularly the ones that keenly show the message of disparity between wishful thinking and reality, do not provide us with real names, but rather titles to match their out-of-place statements such as ‘the war of the just’  by ‘an Anglican Bishop’ or the American nuclear strategist’s belief that both sides in a war would refrain from destroying cities. These staid interviews are contrasted effectively with the fire, flying debris and screams as well as with the narration that shares information with us such as, ‘in this car a family is burning alive’ or ‘these men are dying’, as if we didn’t know already.

There’s a wide range of citizenry shown, rich and poor, educated and not. A lot of opinions are expressed, some sound, others not, and none of them are from experience. The film then goes on to graphically provide that.

The ensuing chaos and horror is remarkably realistic in its incoherence. When Kubrick made Dr. Strangelove, he wanted the defensive missile strike on Major Kong’s B-52 to be incomprehensible, chaotic, out of focus and over modulated. Going against conventional filmmaking, Kubrick didn’t want us to know what was happening. He wanted real.

With exception to the narration, much of The War Game mirrors Kubrick’s approach and philosophy as if he had been lobbing grenades at the cameraman himself.

The film was met with tremendous resistance from within BBC, a thoroughly more responsible outfit in those days, and from the British government itself, keen not to highlight the fact that nuclear war is not something that can be mopped up quickly and that no nation can adequately prepare for war, conventional or nuclear.

The director Watkins resigned over this resistance and the film was not shown on that network until 1985. It is noteworthy that it is during the Reagan and Thatcher years, not the liberal and labour party administrations of the 1960s and 1970s of Britain and the U.S., that the ban was lifted on this harshly critical-of -government, distinctly anti-nuclear film and finally allowed to be shown to the public. However, it did get limited private exposure during the banned years of Liberal party administrations by making the college circuit rounds and being shown to film critics by prints provided by Watkins himself. His work would go on to receive not only accolades but awards by these same critics, most likely enjoying the privilege of seeing something banned by the government and the BBC.

From the outset, the film, like all film, is designed to influence thinking. That it was scheduled for the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima makes this fact no secret at all.

The film’s fictional deadline of when the festivities were to occur if we didn’t disarm in 1966 came and went. So did ‘76, ‘86, ‘96 and 2006. A lot of years has passed since this warning of imminent extinction if we didn’t act immediately to disarm. 43 years in fact, have passed. So have a few other things like the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan had a lot to do with those. A very big heaping ‘a lot’, if you ask me.  But whether you want to debate that or not, like the end of the world, it’ll have to be postponed for another doomsday. What’s important, to paraphrase Reagan himself, is not who takes the credit for preventing nuclear holocaust, but that it was prevented. The super power nuclear exchange did not happen. The film’s message was a misfire. We all know, however, that the new threats we face today are just as possible and just as destructive as the previous ones that The War Game effectively addressed. I’m afraid, as horrible as The War Game suggests, in reality, it will be a whole lot worse.

There is a lot of emotion connected with any discussion of a war more nuclear than conventional. And that’s as it should be, I suppose. Because unlike any other weapon system, nuclear weapons have lingering effects that are unparalleled in our history.

As long as such arsenals exist, the horrors of Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe and The War Game could become reality. Will they? Who knows? No one certainly wants it to happen. No sane person anyway. But the sane aren’t always calling the shots, both government and freelance.

We’ve all seen what much smaller atom bombs were capable of. The fission bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are in essence the detonators for the awesome fission/fusion thermonuclear devices in most stockpiles now. We’ve all watched the grainy footage from New Mexico, Bikini atoll, and the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We’ve watched with passing car wreck fascination the horrors of the children maimed, the shadows burned on the walls and the few remaining structures that withstood hell. It’s all unforgettable and very emotional.

But there are some points that get misplaced in all this emotion. Many people are aware of them, but many more are not, it seems. Anyway, let’s see if we can touch on a few right now.

1. The U.S. using atomic weapons targeted two Japanese civilian cities: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Not entirely correct. Certainly the U.S. dropped atom bombs on those two cities, practically destroying them entirely and killing tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people. But, a point often overlooked is that neither city was strictly ‘civilian’ as we know it. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were industrial, armament, military producing centers that contained both residential and industrial components, often side by side.

Japan was a cottage industry culture at that time. Businesses that you or I might think of as ‘war industry’ firms, such as Ford, GM, Boeing, etc, were unheard of in Japan. Small shops built everything. Well, almost everything. Some large conglomerates, powerful family samurai shogunate holdovers, called Zaibatsu, did exist, welding tremendous influence in shipping, construction, manufacture and practically all of the large scale design and development of war industry business. Mitsubishi, yes, the same one as the car maker, produced the A6M Zero-Sen , Zero or Zeke as it was referred to by many American fighting men who crossed swords with the formidable aircraft. Mitsubishi made many of their aircraft in Hiroshima. From the start of the war, the Mitsubishi shipyards in Nagasaki were heavily involved in contracts for the Imperial Navy. The Japanese military relied on Hiroshima for the supply of its aircraft and on Nagasaki for its ships. The region was used as a center for other industrial construction as well, by other smaller Zaibatsu and the aforementioned cottage industry houses. In other words, both cities could be considered military targets.

2. Only Japanese were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Wrong again. There were tens to hundreds of thousands of P.O.W.s and foreign slaves in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many of the slaves were Koreans and Chinese used as labor in these war industry factories. None of those who perished in the atomic bombings are mentioned in the casualty lists for that city, nor on any plaque within Hiroshima Peace Park where all other honored names are displayed. The city and governor consistently refused to permit it. Those killed are considered unmentionables. Like the ‘comfort women’, sex slaves conscripted from other nations such as Korea, China, Philippines, Singapore, to service Japanese military, they simply never existed. Not even in death. Recently, there has been acknowledgment and changes to this official stance, but it has come very slowly and with a long fight.

3. The United States was eager to test the atom bomb on a population.

Still wrong. The use of the then-new atomic bomb on a city, was an absolute last resort for the Americans. To have to use it on two cities was beyond last resort. There is no one living or dead who wished to use it on anything but a weathered steel tower if there was any chance in not having to. Unfortunately, the last resort became an option after the Battle of Okinawa demonstrated that the Japanese would not only fail to surrender, but would execute the civilian population as well, as they did with impunity on Okinawa. It’s worth considering that to this day, the only military the people of Okinawa despise more than the still occupying forces of the U.S. is the Japanese military, and that’s after several high profile rape incidents involving American military against local Okinawan children. Even with that, the Japanese of Okinawa still despise the Japanese military more.

The Battle of Okinawa displayed in stark relief what Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima had earlier hinted at. That it would take Operation Olympic, a total land invasion by Allied forces, planned and readied by hundreds of thousands to millions of veteran and new troops in staging areas across the Pacific, to stop the Asian nation. The astronomical amount of logistics and enormous cost, financial and human, in support and training alone would not have been expelled had the U.S. always intended to use the atomic bombs as many critics suggest.

The total deaths at the Battle of Okinawa have never fully been studied. But estimates show that more died there than in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, including those who died after the initial blast from radiation related illnesses. The figures that are often associated with Hiroshima and Nagasaki are almost always those in the most upper range of the estimates. In any case, many, many people died in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and places like Okinawa. No one can deny that. Yet, do we cringe at the mention of the Battle of Okinawa? No, we do not. Why not? Because it’s conventional war and conventional death. But more importantly, I believe, the primary reason is because there are very few images to evoke our emotion. So, it becomes a mere statistic. Numbers not images. Math not art. Faces move us far more than figures.

4. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved Japanese lives.

It is a sad and strange truth that in the end the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually saved Japanese lives.  This is not an unsupportable claim. For if Operation Olympic was to proceed there is no denying that millions of Japanese would have died, along with millions of Allied soldiers all in the name of getting the Emperor to sign a piece of paper.

Number 4 is a hard pill to swallow. Because of the images of nuclear war, and the effects of it, we tend to regard such an event as the complete and utter end of the world.

But it did not end the world. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, leveled, incinerated. Yet, combined, they don’t add up to the casualties suffered in Okinawa. But many might argue that Okinawa was not leveled, it’s towns were not stamped flat. No, they were not. But this discussion is about life, not things. People, not buildings. Humanity not machinery. So, we must not veer off our humanitarian quest only to pick up broken shields and count structures razed. This is about loss of life, human life. It is the heart targeted message of The War Game and all other anti-nuclear statements that life is what we are fighting for.

In previous wars, whole populations were decimated, entire nations were removed from existence, wiped off the map. In relative terms of populations, it would be like the earth opening up and swallowing all of North America, or Africa, or Europe in one single messy gulp. We’re talking mind numbingly large scale destruction. But the difference is, there were no cameras to record such horrors, no witnesses to give any heart wrenching accounts. No screaming children, no frustrated doctors applying salves to blackened, shiny skin. None of that. Because nothing lived.

Years ago, I had the good fortune to meet one of the last remaining members of the First Motion Picture Unit of the U.S. Army Air Force and the American in charge of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey which went in days after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki detonations to record and film what was left of those former cities. Any footage you have seen is most likely the footage that group and their Japanese counterparts took. He remarked that they had a few armed soldiers with them as they drove into the flattened city. He and his colleagues were scared to death about going in. Not because of the radiation. They were certain that they were going to be torn limb from limb by whatever survivors were remaining and with whatever strength those poor souls had left in them.

But they were not. They were saluted.

Those cities were sacrificed, perhaps we can look at it this way, to save the world from further and almost certain nuclear death. It is their example in the pictures and film which were taken, also with sacrifice, which can remind us what horrors are possible in our own time if we allow them. Images.

Thanks to those men who went in after the bombs, we have that visual legacy to consult. But think for a moment of those images of nuclear war, in footage and in films like The War Game and the power it commands. Certainly, the horror deters us, makes us think. So consider this. Isn’t it possible that we might have had another tragedy like the Nazi Holocaust, for example, if there were no pictures or film of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Buchenwald to shock us, to remind us what we as humans are capable of? Films like The War Game were made for just this purpose. To remind. To fill in what is missing in our visual library of real horrors. Yes, let them be reminders, but not propaganda.

The image is a remarkable thing. None of us would be sharing our thoughts here if images didn’t move us, didn’t sway us. Places like this site exist because images affect us. But we must remind ourselves that there are many horrors, different, but perhaps equally horrible and inconceivable to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the events depicted in The War Game, but which we have no image to relate to, to recoil from, to get sick looking upon.

If you have seen someone’s head explode from pressure applied into the ears, or an armless woman stumbling down the street with her forced-birth child dangling behind her legs, still attached by its umbilical chord and dragging on the road looking like a dirty, old shoe, except it’s screaming – or a naked man, standing in sub zero temperatures, having water poured on his arm, freezing it, and then having it intentionally smashed off like delicate glass with the blow of a hammer – or children hung on poles in the sun, being flayed alive, their skin peeled off them slowly as they try to scream but cannot because their vocal chords were cut out – or seen animal limbs sewn onto humans in place of the perfectly healthy ones that were chopped off – or the insertion of germs and disease into patients wide awake during operations – or the cannibalism of prisoners of war, the beheading for amusement, or any of the other myriad of tortures that went far beyond what the Nazis ever did, then you have seen war BEFORE the atom bomb, before the nuclear age. You have seen the Japanese in China.

War is horrible. All forms of it. Whether it is nuclear or non nuclear. It is horrible. Human beings can be the most – let me correct that – are the most horrible creatures on the planet. We have proven this time and again. We are the most dangerous creatures, because, as the Orson Welles’ Zaroff confesses in The Most Dangerous Game, we can reason.

If you ask an older Chinese, Indonesian, Southeast Asian, Singaporean or Filipino about whether or not the A-bomb was necessary to stop the Japanese, you will get a very different answer than the one usually given by most western college students. Very different, indeed. I’ve been to Hiroshima several times. On more than one occasion as a a teacher on a class trip. Visiting the Peace Park Memorial during one of these occasions,  I was accompanied not only by fellow Japanese teachers who were old enough to remember World War II, but by a survivor of the Hiroshima blast, an old Japanese gentleman, who was a small boy when that B-29 made its run, and who has seen things, horrors, none of us could dream up in our worst nightmares. Many of the people who come to visit the Hiroshima Peace Park and other places like it are Japanese school children taken there by their schools. This makes me wonder how many schools in America conduct similar visits to places where Americans perished in war. I can only hope that they do, because I think it would be more worthwhile for them than Disney Land or the Philadelphia Zoo. Foreigners, many of them from the United States, Canada, Europe also visit the memorial in great number. Many of them leave without understanding why the bombs were dropped, though. They see evidence of the horror and destruction, but very little in terms of explanation of what led up to that day. Images. Emotion. Ironically, it is the Japanese school children who are taught in school at least a small measure of the horrors of Nanking, about the gas and germ weapons tested on civilians, about the flaying in Burma and the beheading and torture at Bataan. Westerners are generally not taught this. And yet westerners are the biggest critics of the U.S. for the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, aside from those who lived through them of course. But even there, such as my elderly friend pointed out to me, ‘we Japanese brought it upon ourselves’.

Even a single warhead in today’s nuclear arsenal dwarfs the initial three detonations (including Trinity) as a Howitzer would a spitball made and spit by an ant. I think most people agree that total disarmament would be an ideal situation, but, like gun ownership, only if it was unilateral and guaranteed. But neither of those two conditions can be met with the degree of certainty needed for the stakes at hand. Today, it would only take one bullet, so to speak, to stop the world.

So, where does it leave us? Stuck in M.A.D. status until a clever person develops something that can disable nuclear warheads remotely, making them obsolete.

In The War Game man-in-the-street interviews it was quite clear that the filmmaker intended to show exactly how uninformed both the citizenry and experts were. The gap between what they thought they knew and what they actually knew was so great once the chaos started, like the absurdity of Dr. Strangelove, it would have been humorous if it wasn’t so tragic. Looking back on 1965 when The War Game was made, we think we are not uninformed as they were. We look at those people with skeptical eyes, marveling at their naivety. We think our parents and grandparents generations were so gullible, so foolish to think the way they did. Now, we’re certain we’re different. We think we have tons of data because of the internet, because we read this article or that book, follow this podcast or that blog, we think we have reams of inside information. We’re informed. We’re in the know. Like the Brattle audience, we’re savvy, sophisticated and knowledgeable. Nothing can harm us that we’re not prepared for, neither comedy nor horror.  We’ve smugly laughed the danger away. We’ve whistled past the graveyard and we’re fine.

But the reality is it won’t matter if we’re laughing or not. Because relatively speaking, we are those same people who were depicted in The War Game, those foolish folk, bumbling around in the dark, with simpleton plans and childish things. We distance ourselves from that lot.  We think we know as much as is knowable minus only a small fraction, a negligible amount. This is fantasy. It is the inverse that is true. We know very little compared with what can happen. And very few of us have experience beyond the images or emotion, neither of which can prepare us.

But what can happen? We’re making friends around the world, aren’t we? We’re beloved again, right? We’re on the right track, are we not? There’s no U.S.S.R. and no Berlin Wall. The missiles have been out of Cuba for a long time and all is well.

I sincerely hope so. But, in the warm and sometimes wet blanket of good relations we can also misplace other kinds of things, like the historical fact that we were friends, good friends with Japan in the years preceding the attack on Pearl Harbor, that we were allies with the Soviets, even war buddies just prior to the outset of the Cold war, and that we had agreements with China prior to the Korean war.

Only the foolish don’t hope for peace while remaining prepared for war. Even organisms in nature, from bacteria to orangutans, are linked to the concept that the defenseless perish. Period. Except those in captivity, that is.  But of course, as human beings, we believe we have evolved to a stage where ruthlessness and barbarity are no longer useful, no longer needed, and no longer effective. Yet, how many times has Captain Kirk had to confront that issue with powers greater than his Enterprise? Plenty.

In the magnificent film Ben Hur, Hugh Griffith’s character Ilderim disagrees with Balthasar’s plea for pacifism. He voices it to Judah Ben Hur, who will soon fight his nemesis in the arena of the chariots:

ILDERIM: Balthasar is a good man. But until all men are like him, we must keep our swords bright!

JUDAH BEN HUR: And our intentions true!

ILDERIM: One last thought… there is no law in the arena. Many are killed. I hope to see you again, Judah Ben-Hur.

Films like The War Game, Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe were made to sway us, to warn us, not of the Soviets nor the Chinese, but of ourselves, each of us. Of what we are capable of and what we can’t control. They may look antiquated and evoke surly chuckles in all the savvy places but each, in its own way, is no less real now than when they were made.

Though anachronistic, they are also timeless because they speak about our fears, and that never goes out of style. The dangers, now different, do exist and have always existed. Facing the different horrors of war, cold or hot, conventional or nuclear should be done equally and indiscriminately with the same even and steady hand that we choose to hold a candle by.

The atom and hydrogen bombs are not the most powerful weapons ever devised by man. The image is.

Aside from the many frustrating projects making demands on his time Schizoid Mann has begun work on a thriller about the cold war.

The War Game at Google Video.

Fail-Safe at Google Video.

Daniel A. McGovern at IMDB.

For nearly a century now, Hollywood has inspired generations of Americans with the central truth behind the American Dream: in this country, people are free to choose their own destiny. It’s the moral message found in every film that features the classic Hollywood Hero. Here’s a look at how our movie heroes were shaped by American values, a personal look at how the Hollywood Hero can inspire our lives, and the belief that, despite the rise of explicitly anti-American movies, the Hollywood Hero will continue to ride to the rescue.

The late Stanley Kubrick awakened my interest in films. But it was a one-eyed fat man that launched my career in the movies.

The first time I started thinking about films as something more than Saturday afternoon’s amusement was in 1968 with the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was a Midwestern boy in the 8th grade at the time, and it was the first film I kept thinking about after I left the theater: Who made it? How was it done? What does it mean?

2001 was unconventional, modern filmmaking and I was fascinated by it, discussing it endlessly with friends and family. Yet, as much as I admired and was intrigued by what Kubrick had done, the film held no personal message for me.

The following year, however, I saw a very different type of movie that did have a message…an inspiring call to action that changed my life.

Unlike 2001, this movie was conventional – even retrograde – Hollywood moviemaking and I was ashamed to let anyone know I was going to see it.  As I stood in line at the box-office near my high school, I furtively scanned the crowd, hoping none of my classmates would see me. My social crime? I was about to buy a ticket for a John Wayne movie.

True Grit was released in June of 1969. In those days, we still wore onions on our belts and the “New Hollywood” was just getting started, fueled by the rise of the “New Left.” At that time, the New Left was a catch-all phrase for the youth movement, the counter-culture movement, the anti-war movement…in sum, the entire political shift of the left towards radical social activism. In the 60s, the New Left was a minority, but they understood that influencing the culture was key becoming a majority.
 
Hollywood, of course, was one of their targets. Films that featured heroic figures were replaced by a surge of anti-hero movies such as Bonnie & Clyde and Easy Rider. In the growing counter-culture, a movie like True Grit was hopelessly old fashioned and out-of-date. Not only did the movie feature John Wayne – considered by New Hollywood to be an embarrassing cultural and political throwback – but the picture was a western.

By 1969, the western, once a staple of Hollywood, had become a threadbare, dying genre fit only for radicalizing, like the shocking bloodlust featured in The Wild Bunch released the same year.  The only other picture with a cowboy I remember from that year was Midnight Cowboy, which tells you a lot about the times!

           This is a cowboy.                                     This is not a cowboy.   

What drew me to the movie that day was actress Kim Darby, who in the newspaper ads looked very much like a girl I had a crush on at the time. It was her I was going to see, not John Wayne. Aside from Darby, I was certain I would hate True Grit, but the movie turned out to be a revelation to me.

The story and characters were terrific, both Wayne’s part as an old, disreputable yet cagey U.S. Marshall called Rooster Cogburn and Darby, who played the part of a girl named Mattie who hires Cogburn to find the man that killed her father. What made them fascinating was that both characters had different moral perspectives, yet the same unyielding strength at the core of their personalities. Rooster was a heavy-drinking, violence-prone lawman, and Mattie was raised as a Christian moralist. The central characteristics of each, however, were perseverance, resolution and courage in the face of danger. Both characters showed true grit in the course of the movie…and it was inspiring to see.

The moral theme of the movie was the importance of fortitude, as reflected in the title. No matter if you were an old man or a young girl, sometimes only fortitude – the strength of mind that enables one to endure adversity with courage – will get you through the rough spots in life. Watching the film was an exhilarating experience, and for the first time it struck me that writing and directing movies was something I’d like to do…and the inspiring message of True Grit gave me the courage to pursue it. Walking out of the theater, I knew I was going to be a filmmaker.

Fill your hand you son-of-a-bitch!

But, of course, I couldn’t tell that to anyone. How shameful it would have been to admit to my friends in 1969 that I was inspired by a John Wayne movie. How doubly shameful to admit that I was inspired by a 15-year-old girl! And yet I was inspired, and I wasn’t the only one. At a time when John Wayne and what he represented was considered by many to be corny and embarrassing, True Grit came in at #3 overall at the box office that year and Wayne won a Best Actor Academy Award for his performance.

My point is that nearly everybody – even sophomoric 15 year olds – needs the emotional and ethical inspiration that the dramatic arts offer. When asked about the success of her book, and later hit movie, Seabiscuit, author Laura Hillenbrand said “I think people need to see examples of individuals succeeding in spite of all the obstacles in front of them.”

In other words, people need heroes. In Hollywood, the films that make the most money are usually the ones with just this type of heroic inspiration.

Take a look at the all-time world-wide box office champions here. Nearly every one is a Hollywood movie and nearly every one features a heroic main character who succeeds, despite all the obstacles in front of him. Even the lightweight comedies on the list such as Night at the Museum features a main character who succeeds in changing his life for the better after a heroic showdown with his antagonists.

In the classic sense, a hero is defined as somebody who commits an act of remarkable bravery or who has shown great courage, strength of character, or another admirable quality. In a dramatic sense, the hero is the main character of a story who is “good,” that is, he exhibits some admirable moral quality that relates to the moral theme of the work.

The character doesn’t have to be (although he frequently is) a hero in the classic sense, that is, someone who has remarkable bravery or great courage. But he does have to possess some quality that the author defines as “good” and this “good” quality must impact the choices he makes in the story, ultimately supporting the moral theme of the work. In True Grit, Rooster and Mattie had their faults, but the ethical choices they made – especially the choice of fortitude – achieved their goal of bringing justice to a murderer.

Don’t forget that the author’s purpose of drama is to answer the question What should I do? for the audience. Heroes serve as a clear and vivid example of what the audience should do…and why.

One of the reasons movie heroes move our emotions so strongly is because film is a potent medium for identification, that is, the attribution to yourself of the characteristics of another person. Most films are constructed so that we experience the drama though the eyes of the main character. We get inside the character’s thoughts and emotions, and so we judge things the way the character judges them.

As a result, when heroes like Indiana Jones feels frightened, we feel frightened. When Indy feels angry, we feel angry. When Indy acts bravely, we feel brave. Most dramatic works allow identification with its characters, especially its main character. So it’s not surprising when, after experiencing the same thoughts and emotions as the main character, we understand and agree with the ethical actions and moral conclusions that the character expresses at the end of the story. Identification leads to emulation – this is one of the methods by which the author gets us to agree with the moral theme of the work and to adopt the theme in our own lives.

Cinema seems to heighten our emotional identification because film is paradoxically both highly realistic and highly stylized. On screen, the photographic image of Indy makes him appear real to our eyes, yet he stands two stories high. We can hear him speak just like a real person, yet he has his own theme song whenever he appears. This combination of realism and stylization heightens the emotional impact of film. We feel the bravery of Indy deep inside our hearts in a way that a mere textbook description of bravery could never accomplish.

Now, it is quite possible that anti-heroic films can be inspirational to you, if you live in a culture where anti-heroism is celebrated. From the late 60s to the mid-seventies, large segments in America were in a distinctly anti-heroic mood, thanks to the cultural and political turbulence of the 60s followed by the malaise-ridden, downsized expectations of the 70s. Many films reflected this anti-heroic mood back to their audience with characters and plots that argued that life is absurd, the good times are over and it’s useless to struggle against the collapse of the American Dream. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jimmy Carter!

But this is, after all, America – where anti-heroic inspiration is a passing fad for most people and of enduring interest only to the leftist elite. The need for heroic inspiration re-asserted itself and the spell was finally broken in 1977 with the release of Star Wars. After that, heroes were in fashion, again. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ronald Reagan!

I don’t think it was a coincidence that, in the wake of Jimmy Carter, America embraced as president a figure from the movies who exemplified the iconic American hero: the cowboy. Paraphrasing Yankee Doodle Dandy, Ronald Reagan was the whole darned country squeezed into one pair of cowboy boots.

I have to laugh at European intellectuals who sneer at cowboy movies, and think they insult Americans when they call us “cowboys,” call Bush and Reagan “cowboy” presidents, or complain about a “cowboy foreign policy.”

They don’t get it. They don’t understand that most Americans – indeed, most of the non-elite of the world – love cowboys and what they represent. To be called a cowboy is a compliment. It means heroic qualities such as individualism, integrity, risk taking, strength, courage and…well…fortitude.

 
Even commies like cowboys.
Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev meets The Rifleman.

John Wayne was a film star, not only in America, but around the world. His films sold tickets and inspired millions of people in every country where they ran. European films about nihilism or the absurdity of life inspire hardly anyone, which is why there aren’t any Nihilist film stars of comparable fame.

Cowboys hold our imagination because they are the embodiment of the American sense of life. That’s no accident. Hollywood movies were not born in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America or the Middle East. They were not born in Canada or Mexico.

They were not even born in Hollywood.

The first “Hollywood” movie was shot 3000 miles away from Hollywood in New York City and in the countryside of New Jersey, in 1903. It was called The Great Train Robbery and it is considered by many to be the world’s first narrative movie.

What made it a Hollywood movie was not the location it was shot, but the moral theme it expressed. It was born in America because, at that time, the people in America were the most likely to express that moral theme. And that first dramatic film was – significantly – a western. Few genres are more up-front about their moral values than the American western.

In an image that startled audiences in 1903, a bad guy
from The Great Train Robbery draws a gun
on the audience and shoots! The effect was
so sensational that nearly 100 years later
the moment was commemorated on a postage stamp.

The film only lasted 10 minutes, but it managed to establish most of the vocabulary of the classic Hollywood western: horses, hold ups, dance halls, posses, shoot-outs – and the beginning vocabulary of classic film technique: parallel editing, location shooting, pan shots and so on.

Just as importantly, however, it established the moral vocabulary of the western and the Hollywood movie in general: good guys, bad guys, the moral choices they make and the consequences of their choices. In short, it created the Hollywood Hero.

When motion pictures were born at the turn of the last century, cinema was viewed as merely a curious novelty. People were entertained by movies the same way they were entertained by jugglers and magic acts. Moving images of trains, waves breaking on the shore, famous people and so on were new and surprising amusements, but nothing more.

Movies did not become a phenomena of mass entertainment until the filmmakers began to tell stories in film. Only then did people become passionate about cinema. That’s because the story contains the stuff we really care about, which means, it’s the stuff we can really get emotional about. Cinema was a new way of creating drama that expanded the vocabulary of storytelling.

Almost from the beginning, and certainly by the mid-1920s, America dominated world cinema. The classic Hollywood Hero was a potent inspirational figure because it represented a unique moral force in the world – American Exceptionalism.

American exceptionlism can been defined as:

…the idea that the Untied States and the American people hold a special place in the world, by offering opportunity and hope for humanity, derived from a unique balance of public and private interests governed by constitutional ideals that are focused on personal and economic freedom.

Freedom is fundamental to American Exceptionalism. The central moral idea of America is that individuals, by right, should be free to choose their own destiny and that the purpose of government is to insure the freedom of individuals.

And freedom is fundamental to the Hollywood Hero. Hollywood filmmaking assumes that the hero has free will. The Hero is presented with numerous moral choices during the course of the movie, just as we are faced with moral choices in life. When he makes the wrong moral choice, things go badly. When he makes the right moral choice…well, things may still go badly and it will be a tough fight, but in the end the good will win out.

The blessings of Freedom are the “opportunity and hope” that America Exceptionalism brings to humanity. And freedom is the inspirational message behind the Hollywood Hero.

As one example, there’s this 2005 shot from a huge protest rally in Beirut after Syria brazenly assassinated a Lebanese politician.

The two things I want you to focus on…er, ah…I mean the one thing I want you to focus on is the sign. It reads “They can take our lives…but they can never take our freedom.”

It is, of course, a quote from this scene in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. And it is one example of how the American movie culture influences politics – not just here in America, but across the globe.

Modern authoritarian leaders from Stalin to Hugo Chavez (aided by their useful idiots) understand the need to control the production of movies within their countries and limit the influence of American films. Why? Because they fear the call to freedom that the Hollywood Hero can inspire in their audiences.

Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush believed in American Exceptionalism. Both men believed that freedom can inspire the hearts of all humanity, whether they lived behind the Iron Curtain or the beneath the heel of despotic Arab/Islamic rule.

And what of the current President?

Barack Obama recently traveled overseas and was asked by a reporter if he believed in American Exceptionalism. As he so often does, he tried to please everybody with carefully worded nonsense.

First, he admitted that America has a leading role in the world by virtue of its political principles and past sacrifices. But the politician in him quickly followed up with boilerplate internationalist palavar, saying that Americans should be “humble” and create “partnerships” and “compromise” with other countries. However, he prefaced his remarks with the following, which tips us off to his real state of mind:

“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

Even a cartoon character knows enough to call Barbara Streisand on this political blather. Quoting from The Incredibles:

Dash: But Dad always said our powers were nothing to be ashamed of, our powers made us special.
Helen: Everyone’s special, Dash.
Dash: [muttering] Which is another way of saying no one is.

Obama doesn’t really believe in American Exceptionalism because every nation thinks it is exceptional, which as Dash rightly points out, means nobody is.

For Obama – as it is with all leftists – values are subjective and relative; one nation’s values are as good as another, which is why compromise is always the ultimate virtue. That’s why Obama has no misgivings about “fundamentally transforming” our nation away from it’s traditional American values and towards the values of socialist Europe. It’s better to be just another humble, compromising, partner nation of the G20 than a “shining city upon a hill.”

But even then, he gets it spectacularly wrong when he “suspects” all nations believe in their own exceptionalism.

They don’t. And that’s one of the things that makes America exceptional.

The Pew Research Center conducted a polls of 91,000 people in fifty nations and found that “Three-quarters of Americans say they are proud to be Americans; only one-third of the people in France, Italy, Germany, and Japan give that response about their own countries.”

And more: “Two-thirds of Americans believe that success in life depends on one’s own efforts; only one-third of Europeans say that.”

This is precisely why the Hollywood Hero was not born in France, Italy, Germany or Japan. We Americans take pride in the moral principles that guide our country and the Hollywood Hero is the cinematic expression of these American values. And since we believe that our success in life depends on our own efforts, we give our heroes a Hollywood Ending.

Along with “The American Dream” and “The American Way of Life,” “The Hollywood Ending” is a favorite epithet of intellectuals – both American and European – to heap scorn on the inspirational principles that shape the American experience.

That’s because the Hollywood Ending is the very definition of inspiration. The Hollywood Ending makes us feel that we want to do something and believe that we can do it.

When the guy gets the girl, it’s a Hollywood Ending, and it makes us makes us feel that getting the girl is worthwhile and we can get the girl in our own lives.

When the soldier wins the battle, it’s a Hollywood Ending, and it makes us feel that winning battles is worthwhile and we can win the battles against our enemies.

When Rooster and Mattie bring the killer of Mattie’s father to justice, it’s a Hollywood Ending, and it makes us feel that showing fortitude like Rooster and Mattie is worthwhile and we can call on fortitude in our own lives.

All of these are Hollywood Endings, that is, a story ending where the hero’s moral choices lead logically to happiness. Often the hero is fighting for more than his own personal happiness; he is fighting for the happiness of his loved ones, his friends or his country. And, as is often the case in real life, he will sacrifice himself for the sake of others. The deaths of Walt Kowalski in Gran Tornio and William Wallace in Braveheart are examples of the sacrifices heroes suffer so that others may benefit from freedom. It’s no accident that the final shout of defiance from Wallace before his death – Freedom! – is achieved by the film’s ending. The hero dies, but the audience still gets its Hollywood Ending.

There is one sense in which it is proper to sneer at a Hollywood Ending…when the ending is not justified by what has gone before it, that is, it is not a logical plot outcome. But then, that’s a knock on bad writing, not the Hollywood Ending itself.

The Hollywood Ending is identified with American movie making and American moral values. The Hollywood Ending is a reflection of the basic American optimism. It is not a blind optimism, which is a belief that things will work out no matter what, but it is a pragmatic optimism, which is a belief that things will work out if we apply ourselves towards that end. It’s the difference between an unjustified Hollywood Ending and a justified one.

Americans believe that individuals are efficacious, that is, producing or capable of producing an intended result. Because individuals are efficacious, the main characters are able to influence the outcome of the plot. This is the justification for the Hollywood Ending…because we are free to choose, we are able to influence the course of our lives. This is the central inspiration that the Hollywood Hero and the Hollywood Ending offers.

In many ways, the Hollywood Hero is alive and well today. He may no longer work as a cowboy, but he’s found new employment in dramas, police thrillers, science-fiction and fantasy movies. While modern film heroes often embrace conservative (and I would argue, fundamental) American values, the leftist filmmakers themselves are loath to admit it.  (Remember the “Is Batman Bush?“ debate?) Creating a heroic character whose virtue is fortitude is something people want to see. But it’s hard to create an inspiring hero out of someone who wants to be “humble” and create “partnerships” and “compromise.” There’s Ghandi and…um…well, there’s Ghandi. That’s why leftist screenwriters in Hollywood always talk like Obama in public, but write like Reagan on their scriptwriting word processors.

I believe that Hollywood Hero will continue to thrive because there is something that Hollywood loves and respects more than leftist ideology.

It’s called money. You may have heard of it. 

The producers of Hollywood can read the all-time top-grossing film chart as well as you. They know that the Hollywood Hero is a good bet, and they will continue to back that horse. After all, they won’t get to keep their front lot production bungalow if they keep betting the rent money on last-place anti-America nags like Rendition, Redacted, Syriana, and Stop Loss.

That’s why I’m optimistic about boss Andrew Breitbart’s belief that “The revolution must begin in Hollywood.”  My advice to conservative/libertarian/Republican screenwriters is to simply keep writing the Hollywood Hero, with moral themes that emphasize conservative/libertarian/Republican principles that will inspire the audience. Remember: everyone in Hollywood talks like a socialist, but acts like a capitalist. Use that to your advantage.

Oh, and give your hero a Hollywood Ending…he deserves it, and so does your audience.

Enough theory! Next time, some practical advice on how to write your screenplay.