European Document/U.S. out of NATO? A French Scenario
Kaplan, Roger
EUROPEAN DOCUMENT T he European allies paid very little 1 attention to the U.S. election last year. Press and politicians alike borrowed the American liberal elite's line that voters were faced...
...But whether it does or not will not depend on us Americans...
...Now, the old studio bosses and producers were hardly connoisseurs of art...
...And why aren't they...
...As its author, Andre Soussan, has been pointing out in television and radio debates all over Europe, it need not happen this way...
...by Roger Kaplan capitulation...
...His characters, their way of thinking, their control or lack of control over events, all have a frightening ring of truth...
...The debate in Europe will gather momentum as the new American administration defines its attitude toward "burden-sharing" and "decoupling...
...To judge by Le Jour le Plus Court, Soussan agrees with Irving Kristol, who has been provoking passionate arguments in the U.S...
...N o doubt, one would be hard put to defend most of the products of Hollywood's so-called Golden Era as art...
...In this deceptively benign context, a mysterious terrorist organization launches an aggressive assault upon U.S...
...Now this: Before the public has recovered from the shock of the hundreds of young soldiers murdered on Christmas Eve, the terrorists grab a little girl, the daughter of a U.S...
...The principal weakness of today's films, by contrast, is that most of them by Bruce Bawer are written by people who don't know anything about dramatic structure or character development, who have seen every movie in the last ten years but have never read a word of Aristotle or Aeschylus or, for that matter, Noel Coward...
...This is "high-concept" moviemaking at its lowest...
...In West Germany, Gorbachev is the most popular figure on the international stage...
...is virtually pushed out, thereby forcing the Europeans to make up their minds...
...It is a fictionalized version of what could be an eventual reverse D-Day...
...ever (and in some ways more impressive), but that the scripts are just plain awful...
...Although some will dismiss Soussan's novel as a fanciful and improbable thriller, the fact is that he has written a book that is perhaps the most starkly straightforward to date on the question of whether or not, or under what circumstances, U.S...
...Thus he presents a drama wherein the U.S...
...Barbara," takes off in the United States, clamoring for a cave-in on the grounds that the Europeans are ungrateful and are certainly not worth the lives of our sons and daughters...
...published here...
...the remarkable thing about these films—the majority of which are so obscure (Ina Claire in Rebound...
...Omit the foreign releases, and the limited-distribution films that 95 percent of your readers will never get a chance to see anyway, and what remains...
...To be sure, every year miraculously brings a handful of fine and memorable American movies...
...In general, however, George Bush was preferred as the mediocrity they knew, and as soon as he was elected, he began winning points in the European press as a tough guy who had been mistaken for a wimp all these years...
...the latest specimens of post-E.T space garbage, namely Cocoon: The Return and My Stepmother Is an Alien (these days, the unusual twist would be a stepmother who isn't an alien...
...forces stationed in Germany...
...The United States is led by the sort of hard-line anti-Communist Democrat that evidently exists only in the fantasies of Ben Wattenberg and Richard Perle...
...It is against this background that a remarkable new thriller, Le Jour le Plus Court (The Shortest Day), was Roger Kaplan is a Paris-based associate editor of Reader's Digest...
...By positing a crisis leading to a U.S.-Soviet poker game that results in a "global Yalta," Soussan succeeds in making it very clear that the discussion has been about not only money and defense resources but also the ultimate shape of our strategic position in the world...
...Perestroika is chugging along on Western credits, and an immensely attractive Soviet premier named Gorchkov is assuring everyone that his fondest wish is for peace all around...
...But Andre Soussan knows his subject...
...Greece has left NATO...
...On the contrary, American movies—on the whole—are slicker than at any time in history...
...which proliferated in the seventies, are no longer being made in great numbers...
...Does this tell us anything profound about the gestalt or the Weltanschauung or whatever of the contemporary American screenwriter...
...Western Europe, except France, has relapsed into muddleheaded social democracy, with the chancellor of the Bundesrepublik a functioning traitor, committed to the Soviet cause...
...Kauffmann is, of course, absolutely correct about the awfulness of most contemporary screenplays...
...Le Jour le Plus Court is, of course, fiction...
...After the INF treaty—which in public they approved but in private they view as the beginning of the long-dreaded "decoupling" between the Atlantic allies—they considered it much better to have a conservative in the White House than a liberal...
...This being the case, however, I don't understand how Kauffmann can suggest that current movies don't represent "slick engineering" geared to a specific audience...
...As Soussan himself admits, his scenario is just that, a scenario...
...A FRENCH SCENARIO 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 tion that "NATO is dead" ("Men don't give their lives for NATOs or SEATOs or CENTOs or any other Os," he said at Columbia University last year...
...In a recent issue of that journal, Kauffmann unburdened himself of some interesting observations about contemporary American screenwriting...
...And a message: one month to send the troops home...
...They'll never be mistaken for masterpieces, God knows, but they "work," because they're put together properly...
...that they are new to even the most fanatical of contemporary cineastes—is how watchable they are, how well they hold up...
...Le Jour le Plus Court begins in 1993...
...with his suggesU.S...
...They're aimed at teens and pre-teens...
...Largely, Kauffmann argued further, because filmmaking expenses have gone through the roof and producers, eager to reach the widest possible audience and thereby recoup their investments, have quashed "the spirit of adventure" that flourished in the seventies...
...In a few days, the pressure on the American leadership becomes unrelenting, as the press hypes the story for all it is worth, including the fact, purely symbolic but potent, that the little hostage is the same age and bears the same name as the President's daughter...
...The worst attack comes when a transport carrying GIs home for Christmas is blown up just after takeoff...
...They didn't read literature, didn't care about books like The Great Gatsby or The Sound and the Fury...
...The Americans are occupiers, they spread AIDS...
...Most American screenwriting," Kauffmann wrote, "now seems a bid at a roulette table, neither slick engineering for a reliable audience [as in the old Hollywood] nor personal conviction [as in the seventies...
...Then the mom's head comes back in a bag, along with a little child's finger...
...But the overwhelming majority of new commercial films are as mindlessly conceived, constructed, and composed as they are competently produced...
...The U.S...
...No, it doesn't (Kauffmann's fancy analysis to that effect notwithstanding...
...The President, Mike Harkins, is advised by Jeane Kirkpatrick and Edward Luttwak look-alikes, and they counsel firmness...
...Congress increasingly gives vent to the proposals of isolationist politicians, including the Speaker of the House, a demagogue who, though a member of the President's party, is one of his worst enemies...
...The average American film script today is more artificial and more cynically contrived than ever, and is aimed at a far more puerile mentality than mainstream Hollywood pictures ever have been...
...Among those currently on tap: something called Mystic Pizza that proudly advertises itself as "this year's Dirty Dancing...
...Screenwriting," he remarked, "lags behind every other aspect of filmmaking...
...Week after week in this column and in the box on this page [i.e., of "Films Worth Seeing"], I note films in which all the elements except the scripts are commendable...
...Yet the Europeans may well err if they think decoupling will be a consequence of American rather than European foreign policy...
...At the moment they are waiting and seeing, with the French foreign minister stating that the question of "modernization," current jargon for Kennedy's "third pillar," should be postponed until Gorbachev's intentions become clearer...
...Get it...
...The media, lulled by glasnost and the long period of peace that the American Army maintained on the Continent, slant their coverage of the tide of terror with a "blame America" thesis...
...But the immediate problem remains: the terrorists are apparently not under direct Soviet control, and the media circus, complete with a television interview of the brutalized child in an unknown location, renders the President's position untenable...
...1=1 THE TALKIES THE SCREENPLAY'S THE THING erhaps the most difficult part of 1 reviewing movies for any monthly publication above the level of Teen Beat is deciding which ones to write about...
...Largely, he argued, because arty, quirky, personal, and/or message-bearing films like The Hired Hand, Pocket Money, and Go Tell the Spartans (ugh...
...Soussan sees NATO as a net strategic minus: it obfuscates our sense of national purpose, while on the European side it substitutes gimmickry for serious defense planning...
...Or, the Germans (like the Spaniards) may soon add: your soldiers...
...Dick Powell in The Singing Marine...
...The most recent innovation of the Ted Turner empire is a network called TNT (for "Turner Network Television"), which devotes most of its airtime to half-century-old B-movies that Turner picked up a while back in a package deal with MGM...
...So far, this situation has not become a major public issue—defense issues rarely are here—but there is a great deal of pressure, especially in Denmark and West Germany, to take Gorbachev at his word, ask the Americans to leave, and expect—or hope for—the best...
...Relative, that is, to contemporary commercial films...
...If American policy-makers do not figure out a way to control this issue and turn it to our nation's advantage, it will control them...
...For the plain fact is that—as anyone in certain sections of Los Angeles, anyway, is well aware—a considerable proportion of the population of Southern California is writing screenplays nowadays...
...A powerful movement, "S.O.S...
...Well, for what it's worth, I agree, and so does Stanley Kauffmann, the longtime film critic of the New Republic...
...It is time for them to get out...
...But they knew enough to recognize the importance of good writing to a movie, and when a writer like Fitzgerald or Faulkner made a name for himself as a literary figure, the studio bosses, who had knowledgeable subordinates around to inform them about such occurrences, were THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 33...
...Why is this the case...
...This interpretation was all the more pleasing because the one thing Western Europeans are truly worried about is the future of the grand old alliance that has kept the peace here for forty years...
...Press and politicians alike borrowed the American liberal elite's line that voters were faced with mediocrities who rendered the whole contest an embarrassment to American democracy...
...A simple message is circulated: the presence of American troops brings insecurity to Europe...
...One of them is very short and plump and the other is tall and muscular...
...And what's most woefully missing from them is not the "spirit of adventure" of the seventies but the relative sophistication and dramatic craftsmanship that routinely characterized the better American movies of two or three generations ago...
...Leafing through the movie advertisements in your daily newspaper, you feel as if you've seen all these films before, every last one of them—and not months or years ago but the day before yesterday...
...They want the world...
...Soussan is an international security specialist, a former Israeli paratrooper who works in both broadcast and print journalism in France and Denmark, and an editor at the quarterly Politique Internationale (which in format resembles Foreign Affairs but in content is closer to the National Interest...
...and an obviously-notdestined-to-be-a-classic one-joke "comedy" in which Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger play twins...
...But in 1993 no one listens to him much anymore, although his quip expresses Soviet thinking exactly...
...And there would be nothing harmful in this state of affairs—let them scribble away, if it makes them happyl—except that the film business today is largely dominated by people who don't know anything about drama, either, and who have no respect for writing or writers...
...After INF, the ball is really in their court: they can become the "third pillar" John Kennedy encouraged them to be, thereby turning INF and its aftermath into a great political victory for the West, or they can wait and see...
...President Nixon used to say, "The Soviets don't want war...
...People who have never read a book are writing them...
...Indeed, many an intelligent moviegoer in the late eighties may well conclude that movies are technically as impressive as Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...
...Air Force ace, and her mother...
...By resorting to a fast-paced genre, Soussan makes accessible to a large public an issue that thus far has been confined to war colleges, think tanks, high-powered political jet-set conferences, specialized journals, and editorial pages...
...The Israelis come to the rescue with information on Mikhail Gorchkov that Harkins can and does use to force him into a deal that would not seem to be a complete U.S...
...people who wouldn't write a short story because they can't manufacture a coherent grammatical sentence are writing them...
...troops should stay in Europe...
...But it is not inconceivable that a comparable conjunction of circumstances could put an American President in the bind Mike Harkins finds himself in...
...What makes this task difficult, however, is not that there are so many movies to choose from, but that there are so few...
...Yet matters do not appear precarious, except to people like the editors of The American Spectator...
...Rather, it reflects an extremely simple—but thoroughly devastating—failing on the part of the producers and studio chiefs who select and approve and initiate projects...
...they have focus, shape, conflict, tension...
...Although we used to worry about an eventual "Finlandization" of Europe, the biggest problem may appear in the form of German acceptance—whether or not from terrorist pressure, as Soussan suggests—of "Denmarkization," which is a very selective acceptance of the American umbrella: you may promise to protect us, especially if that keeps the Soviets on their best behavior, but you may not base your evil weapons on our soil...
...OUT OF NATO...
...In the average month, very little...
...But to watch even some run-of-the-mill Hollywood movies of the thirties and forties is to marvel, time and again, at the intricacy and tautness of their dramatic structure, and at the economy and wit of their characterization...
...SALT III has effectively denuclearized Europe...
Vol. 22 • February 1989 • No. 2
