Brian Beutler: Where's all the good press!

July 09, 2007

Where's all the good press!

I wouldn't think anybody would wonder seriously why, four full years after the invasion of Iraq, there have been no wildly propagandistic movies out of Hollywood celebrating the unalloyed victory we've enjoyed at the hands of the terrorists. But I'd be wrong.

[I]sn't it a little strange that going on six years after 9/11, there hasn't been a single Hollywood offering that offers a consistently positive portrayal of any post-9/11 U.S. military action? Or that the only major motion pictures in which radical Islam is portrayed as straightforwardly villainous have been docudramas about the events of September 2001 and their aftermath (A Mighty Heart, United 93, World Trade Center)....Hollywood's approach to the post-9/11 world is embodied by the remake of The Manchurian Candidate: The original film was at once anti-McCarthyite and anti-Communist, suggesting that the two forces were actually hand in glove; the remake just ignores the external threat and focuses on the enemy at home, which is to say Republicans and corporations.

Fortunately, buried in that ellipses Ross acknowledges that shows like Sleeper Cell and 24 present the U.S. in a wholly positive light. I'd add that they go further than that and in fact glamorize the roundly discredited tactics we've used against our captives, but at least he's not under the impression that there's been radio silence from the small right wing wedge of Hollywood in the years after September 11.

But what has been truly surprising to me is how quickly movies like United 93 came out. Apocalypse Now came out in 1979, way, way more than six years after the Vietnam war started, or even got really out of hand. And it's unclear to me why it would have been better if it had been accompanied by a film portraying the U.S. military as an unerring force of righteousness pitted against the baby-eating, freedom-hating Vietcong and other anti-U.S. forces in Indochina. That version of events, while perhaps appealing to the right, would have been utterly incorrect. And not just about the facts but also as a reflection of the American attitude to the whole debacle.

The situation in Iraq and/or against al Qaeda is even more complicated because it's a struggle that is still ongoing. It would be an unusually irresponsible and delusional director/producer team that made a blockbuster movie for current consumption that presented any portion of our post-9/11 military action as both welcome and successful against an enemy that was evil at a level we've never seen. Some of that has been true some of the time, but I can't think of a single (even small) instance wherein everything went so well against an enemy so vile that the sort of movie Ross envisions could have been made with any degree of honesty.

Posted at 03:46 PM | Permalink

Comments

You can be more specific and more telling. Apocalypse Now came out 4 years after the Vietnam war *ended*. (And The Deer Hunter and Coming Home both came out about the same time - well after the war was over.) In a sense, of course, Apocalypse Now was no more "about" the Vietnam war than 2001: A Space Odyssey was "about" NASA.

As others online have pointed out, what these people really want are the kinds of war movies that were made during World War II. Fat chance getting those.

I wonder if the guy you're citing remembers Over There (I think that was the title), the Iraq War TV series that was on FX a year or two ago and lasted only one season. Of course, IIRC, it took years, if not decades, to get a Vietnam War TV series, Tour of Duty, and it was fairly controversial when it first came on. It was not too bad, as I remember it, and it lasted for maybe 2-3 seasons, I think. Neither of these shows was what I would call particularly "antiwar," but neither of them was the sort of propaganda piece that the warboys want to see.

Posted by: spinozista | July 09, 2007 at 05:32 PM

As others online have pointed out, what these people really want are the kinds of war movies that were made during World War II. Fat chance getting those.

Posted by: spinozista | July 09, 2007 at 05:33 PM

Well, movie viewers tend to like being able to make sense of the plot and distinguish the good guys from the bad (sorta black and white). For that to happen the writers, producers, and directors have to understand what they are trying to say. Now their are exceptions - like the third Matrix movie, which no one I know was able to explain;.

But, lets assume some really gifted people came up with a script and were looking for money backing. And let's make me a fat, cigar smoking money cat, but with a genuine regard to making some money, not losing my ass financially. I will want to know who is going to actually want to pay real money here in the US and around the world to see some US in Iraq movie unless it is a dark ribald comedy. Those tend to be hard to make and and hard to predict success for. So, I say, no thanks. I'm betting on Transformers - and GM is a friend of mine.

My guess is that a Iraq War movie with the US as a major protaganist would piss off either 30% (the GOP true believers), 60% (the anti-Iraq war folks), or 90%+ (essentially everyone) of the viewers and non-viewers. Of such sentiments a money-making film is not made. It's not a question so much of honesty, but inability to think of a way to make money when so many will take their pre-existing passions into the process and just denounce it without ever seeing it. And the reviews.... oh my!

Posted by: JimPortlandOR | July 09, 2007 at 05:36 PM

Presumably the Vietnam equivalent that the GOP guys are thinking of is 1968's 'The Green Berets' which was pretty simplistic and appeared at the height of the war, starring John Wayne. I don't think that there have been any Iraq war movies like that recently.

Posted by: JohnTh | July 10, 2007 at 12:23 PM