Culture Vultures: Boy Martian
Steyn, Mark
CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn Boy Martian he White House counsel, Charles T F.C. Ruff, couldn't have been clearer: the use of President Clinton's "image and words" in the Jodie Foster...
...The first time we see him, he's talking about the significance of communications from aliens...
...Every summer Hollywood makes a point of releasing movies with the kind of president it would really like...
...If the question for Nixon was, "What did the President know and when did he know it...
...Dee Dee Myers, a "consultant" to Contact, got it right...
...This is outrageous...
...Ruff, couldn't have been clearer: the use of President Clinton's "image and words" in the Jodie Foster film Contact was "fundamentally unfair" and contravened White House policy by "using the President for a commercial purpose...
...Instead, he decided he couldn't pass up the chance to make for real the speech the fictional Clintonesque president gives at the beginning of Independence Day...
...If you haven't seen Contact, in which Miss Foster receives a message from aliens and then jets off to outer space to meet them, I should explain that footage of Clinton is used at several points...
...In what will go down as the classic Clintonian equivocation, he replied that sometimes he liked boxers, sometimes he liked Y-fronts...
...The White House's objection is that the scenes in Contact manipulate the president's image to change the meaning of what he originally said...
...The use of Clinton's image, she said, was "respectful" to the president's "dignity...
...Presumably, he'd also have invited the aliens round to the Contact had reason to exploit the President from Mars...
...Like most of the public, I'm blasé about state-of-the-art movie technology—Tom Hanks edited into a scene with LBJ, Spielberg's T-Rex rampaging around San Diego, big deal...
...Clearly, someone's been squirting it at the president ever more furiously, for his memory shrinks a little more with each passing week: Making fundraising calls...
...You may remember that similar responsibilities were entrusted to Dan Quayle during the Bush administration: vice presidents are always being put in charge of the empty vastness of space, presumably because of the empty vastness of space on their own desks...
...Next, Contact shows the president on TV addressing the nation about a mysterious explosion...
...The White House should be on their knees with gratitude...
...44 September 1997 • The American Spectator White House, were it not for the fact that, lacking a convertible currency, they'd have been unable to afford it...
...7 Berlin Wall, the media definition of "right-wing" has dwindled down to "the side you're not meant to like"), Harrison draws on his combat experience from Vietnam and takes back his plane from the Wackistani maniacs...
...Clinton Hails Discovery of Life on Mars," thundered the front page of the Times of London in August of last year...
...in Air Force One, when President Harrison Ford's jet is hijacked by "right-wing" terrorists from the breakaway Soviet republic of Wackistan (if I heard correctly—oh, and actually, they're left-wing terrorists, but, since the collapse of the44 Robert Zemeckis has pulled off a first: he's edited Clinton into sounding presidential...
...Even if you believe that the various carbonates found on the rock aren't the result of post-discovery contamination, to which many Antarctic rocks are prone...
...Finally, Contact shows the president inviting Jodie Foster back to his place, dropping his pants and ordering her to "kiss it...
...In other words, if the White House's complaint is that the president's speech was taken out of context, the question is: what context...
...But, since the complaint is that the president's words were taken out of context, we may as well remind ourselves just what the context was...
...It's when you weigh his involuntary participation in Contact with the TV shows he chooses to do that you appreciate the gulf between him and the likes of Harrison Ford: from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to Arkansas Bill and the Fruit ofthe Loom...
...So, in Contact, art is imitating life imitating art...
...possibly the inclusion of "Clinton" in the headline was felt to be sufficient—one implausible, resourceful, endlessly mutating life form reaching out to another.4 But just in case you've forgotten, nobody had been to Mars and discovered anything or anybody...
...Incidentally, Clinton's not the only politician to turn up in a sci-fi blockbuster...
...In fact, as you've probably guessed, this comes from a speech at the recent summit in Madrid, vetoing NATO applications from Romania and Slovenia...
...But the president is one of life's natural hailers, with a sure instinct for what the public will swallow: the front page could have screamed "Clinton Hails Discovery of Life in Dole Campaign," but who'd have believed it...
...even if you believe all of that, it still requires an enormous leap to get from that piece of Antarctic rock to the existence of life on other planets...
...In fact, his remarks come from a speech last year about possible life on Mars...
...In that film, the president, played by Bill Pullman, tells his fellow Americans that at last we know the answer to one of the oldest mysteries of all and then goes on to say how much he's looking forward to getting the space monsters round to the Oval Office to shoot the breeze...
...Being Governor of Arkansas for much of the 1980's...
...Think that welfare bill he signed is too harsh...
...Only the president is permitted to manipulate his image to change the meaning of what he originally said: Think MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...
...Think that he...oh, but never mind...
...But, again, it's the spirit of Clinton that seems to hang over the picture...
...no "My second cousin thrice removed was an alien who died from second-hand smoke...
...My own suggestion is that, instead of Contact, Clinton should have been signed to a central role in Men in Black...
...He does, too — except when he's campaigning in parts of the country where they think it's not harsh enough and therefore tells them that it's only the first step...
...Only the other month, he kept the Egyptian president waiting because he was doing a show for the rock-video channel VH-i in which he reminisced about his favorite pop records...
...I have no recollection of meeting her...
...One of the most stunning insights into the universe that science has ever uncovered," declared the "real" president, doing his best Bill Pullman impersonation...
...Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, but celluloid presidents have to be from both—adept at both the Clintonesque touchy-feely stuff, but also willing to kick alien butt: in Independence Day, when Bill Pullman's Clintonian strategy of talking the monsters to death comes to naught, he gets in touch with his masculine side, climbs into the cockpit, and takes off to zap the space invaders himself...
...As for the real speech and its "context," whatever happened to the grand "bipartisan space summit" the president promised, to be chaired by Al Gore...
...I have no recollection of any such calls...
...Robert Zemeckis, director of Contact, ought to be congratulated on finding a use for it...
...I have no recollection of holding any such position...
...The first half of Clinton's speech was much the same...
...in the Clinton version of Air Force One, the Wackistani terrorists would attempt to hijack the presidential jet only to find he's happy to sell it to them and, while he's at it, throw in a couple of Californian naval dockyards...
...After all, left to his own devices, how "respectful" is the president of his "dignity...
...If anything it was over-respectful...
...The only dis- covery dated from twelve years ago — a rock found in Antarctica and given the name of what sounds like a suburban zip code, Allen Hills 84001...
...This is a chief of state who joins with his vice president to dress up as the Blues Brothers, whose principal screen appearances to date have been a mawkish but all too credible cameo in a diseaseof-the-week 'TV movie, and a discussion on MTV in which he answered questions about his underwear...
...he raised your taxes too much...
...The star gizmo is a Neuralizer, which Tommy Lee Jones uses to wipe out people's memory of troublesome incidents...
...It was a speech without context, without point, without meaning...
...The American Spectator • September 1997 45...
...No mere film-maker, with only humdrum computer technology to work with, could come up with as spectacular a special effect as this...
...But, even so, we've heard not a peep out of Gore—no "I am informed by counsel that in space there is no controlling legal authority...
...You'd think Britain's "paper of record" would have been cautious enough to put quote marks around "Discovery" and "Life...
...even if you believe that it took off from Mars 4 billion years ago and wasn't contaminated during the time it took to get here...
...even if you believe that the chemicals in the cracks didn't get in there during the 13,000 years it supposedly spent lying around Antarctica, though all the elements found in the rock are in plentiful supply on earth...
...But Robert Zemeckis has pulled off a first: he's edited Clinton into sounding presidential...
...Even more mysteriously, Clinton seems to have been zapped by a uniquely advanced Neuralizer: for, in place of things that did occur, he has "vivid" and "painful" memories of things that never happened—like a racist campaign of black church burnings during his Arkansas boyhood...
...He's lucky Zemeckis didn't decide to make Attack of the Killer BVDs...
...In short, there was nothing for the president to "hail...
...y ou have to feel sorry for the president at this time of year...
...As we know, no one is allowed to use the president for a commercial purpose, except the Chinese government...
...In the Clinton version of Independence Day, he'd be on his way to zap the aliens but unfortunately trip on the steps leading down from his hot tub and be out of commission for the rest of the picture...
...Clinton was trying to sound like the president in a summer blockbuster about space aliens and he did it so well he's wound up as the president in a summer blockbuster about space aliens...
...Meeting Paula Jones...
...The film, after all, slyly suggests he may already be one: when you join the organization you have your distinguishing characteristics removed...
...In Men in Black, Newt Gingrich, along with various other celebrities, is revealed to be a space alien who has temporarily taken human form (not very convincingly, if the polls are anything to go by...
...In fact, the comments come from a speech about Iraq...
...the question for his successor is, "What does the President remember and why does he still remember it...
...I sat there and held his tentacle as his life force ebbed away...
...But, despite the uncanny detail in all these celluloid administrations —for a while, no movie was complete without its own George Stephanopolookalike— it's hard to imagine the real president in the central role...
...Hey, he does too...
Vol. 30 • September 1997 • No. 9
