...popular culture has pretty much skipped the Vera Lynn phase and cut straight to Basil Fawlty: don't mention the war. They'd rather talk about anything other than Islamic terrorism. The Sean Penn thriller, The Interpreter, was originally about Muslim terrorists blowing up a bus in New York. So, naturally, Hollywood called rewrite. Now the bus gets blown up by African terrorists from the little-known republic of Matobo. 'We didn't want to encumber the film in politics in any way,' said Kevin Misher, the producer.
But being so perversely 'non-political' is itself a political act. If there were a dozen movies in which Tom Cruise kicked al-Qa'eda butt across the Hindu Kush, it would be reasonable to say, 'Hey, we'd rather deal with Matoban terrorism for a change.'
But, when every movie goes out of its way to avoid being 'encumbered', it starts to look like a pathology. Whenever some hapless studio exec finds he's accidentally optioned a property that happens to have Islamist terrorists in it, the first thing he does is change the enemy. Thus, the baddies in Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears were de-Islamicised and transformed into German neo-Nazis, a very pressing threat to America in 2005.
Imagine it's 1943, you're at a Warner Bros script meeting about Casablanca, and Jack Warner says: 'I like it. But do the bad guys have to be Germans? How about if we re-set it in Massachusetts and make them sinister British neo-Redcoats?'
And, if you're stuck with a subject where it's hard to switch the Muslims to neo-Nazis - like, say, the Crusades - best to use it as an opportunity to explore our present blundering stupidity in the context of our long tradition of blundering stupidity - which is the short revi"review of Sir Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven.
Ask them to make a post-9/11 thriller in which Americans are the good guys and the enemy is, well, the enemy, and Celine Dion sings the big theme song about how she'll miss feeling his throbbing heart beating against hers all night long but she knows he's going off to do the right thing and they'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when - and the studios'd tell you there's no audience for it.
Just like they told Mel Gibson he'd lose his shirt on The Passion of the Christ. The disconnect between the headlines and the culture these last four years is not about economics, it's about a loss of civilisational confidence.
Which is a big problem, because the smarter Islamists have figured out that, while they can never win on the battlefield, there's a sporting chance they can drag things out long enough until Western civilisation collapses through sheer self-loathing.
Enjoy Vera Lynn this weekend, but spare a thought for our Iraq and Afghanistan veterans at ceremonies 60 years from now. Where's their soundtrack?
Maybe he goes too far toward negative about the results, but he may be on to something here.
2 comments:
To clarify a couple of points on which Steyn is misleading (through implication, not outright statement): The Sum of All Fears' bad guys were changed about 8 months *before* September 11, and making this change was hardly the "first thing" the studio did. It took months of protest and meetings.
But anyway. He might be missing something in his analysis of why Muslims are not the villains of choice in a post 9-11 world: following the Cuban Missile Crisis, Hollywood productions in which atomic/nuclear weaponry was used or threatened (once quite common) became virtually non-existent for about 20 years. Perhaps studio executives are avoiding Muslim terrorists now for similar reasons.
Something to consider, at least.
Uh. Just a point: "The Muslims" and "The Nazis" are not interchangeable villains. Nazi Germany in 1940 was very clearly the enemy. Clearly identifiable, clearly bad, morally black and white, go Bogart. Whereas I can't think of anything more unhelpful right now than conceptualising "Muslims" as The Enemy, full-stop, simple. There isn't a country out there you can safely point the blame and the muscular hero with the gun at: the most you can do is offer up some Brown People With Turbans. I really don't want Hollywood to do that. Islamic terrorism is a big, scary, complex thing, and Hollywood's record on dealing with complexity doesn't inspire me with confidence: I'd really rather they laid off it altogether, and I'm glad they are. If they are. Oh, and while I'm here, if they also stayed the hell away from The Iliad and the legends of Camelot, that would be nice. Troy = possibly one of the most painful experiences of my life so far. I'm still picking at the scars.
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