The Talkies: Reality Bites

...He seems to have no fear of exposure...

...One of the POWs, Ron Bliss, says that after a while their North Vietnamese captors stopped bombarding them with Communist propaganda and simply showed them the speeches of liberal, anti-war politicians back home...

...So, with the help of her only close friend, a closeted homosexual army psychiatrist, his daughter stages a re-enactment of the circumstances of the rape, in which she adopts the posture mentioned above: spread-eagle, naked, and lashed to tent pegs in the middle of the base in the middle of the night...

...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS wehsite—www.spectator.org...

...In this movie —whose ending, in case you are foolish enough to want to see it, I am about to reveal—we are asked to believe not only that a group of West Point cadets on a night exercise would gang rape a fellow (female) cadet and then successfully cover it up, but also that the victim's father, a prominent general, would be complicit in the cover-up for fear of derailing his own career...

...This kind of reality has thus become like the ideal it replaced—that is, something that people believe in because it satisfies some psychic need, rather than because there is any very good reason to think it actually is the case...

...But for those like Hollywood's "creative" elite whose commitment to the model runs deep, there seems to be no tiring of the cliché of military honor as a hypocritical disguise for murder and cowardice and conformity and corruption and kinky sex...

...Instead, left alone, she is discovered by one of her more disgruntled lovers, a high-ranking military policeman, whom she proceeds to taunt with a catalogue of his inadequacies as a man until he kills her...

...Here is a film that not only looks realer than any you will see this year but that also, because of its authentic look, comes tantalizingly close to making witchcraft look real too...

...The story goes like this...

...Neither the star power of John Travolta and Madeleine Stowe (as the odd-couple detectives who crack the case) nor the undoubted charms of Miss Leslie Stefanson, who spends most of her time on screen naked and staked out in a suggestive posture with tent pegs, can disguise the fact that the assumptions in this case particularly have been Hollywood clichés for 30 years...

...Moreover, the superannuated assumptions built on it may blind us to those cases where the world actually conforms to the contrary pattern, in which the sordid and ugly ideal to which we have become so unreasonably attached may be found to mask a heroic and beautiful reality...

...The film purports to be nothing more, and nothing less, than that raw visual record whose authenticity is attested to by classic cinema verite techniques—a jerkily moving camera and a soundtrack cluttered with extraneous noise, for example —but without any apparent editing...

...That made it even more remarkable that these American soldiers were so faithful to a standard that so many considered outmoded and that were already under attack by Hollywood in the precursors of The General's Daughter...

...A year later some more students, on an anthropological excursion, discover their equipment, including several cans of film and rolls of videotape which provide a chilling if still less than conclusive record of what happened to them...

...Freud neatly summed up what will come to be seen as the twentieth century's characteristic worldview when he claimed that the id was "true psychic reality...

...But for the most part, the movie attempts to prove no point about the war or the people who fought it on either side except for the rather obvious one that the North Vietnamese were often cruel to prisoners and that there is every reason to believe that these prisoners bore their sufferings like soldiers...

...Perhaps he thought the old man was so sure to respond in some appropriately paternal way that he simply went home to his well-earned bed and left father and daughter to their tender reconciliation...

...What does it take to get some people to take a fresh look at, say, the U.S...

...The ideal comprises pretty much everything that those who lived in previous centuries learned to revere: the heroic, the beautiful, the sacred, and the virtuous...

...same time have the presence of mind to catch it all —or so much of it—on film...

...This need, this "reality" hunger, may be partly owing to the excessive number of fictions to which we are exposed in a culture where, for instance, Quentin Tarantino went from being a bold original to an utter cliché in the space of about six months...

...Or so it seemed to me upon JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...Regular readers will recall my strictures of the month before last in these pages upon movie fantasy...

...They have come up with something their press materials call "first person" or "method" filmmaking which partially depends on a back story elaborated in great detail, as if it were a genuine news story, and posted on the film's Internet website...

...In fact, the illusion works rather well, and unprepared audiences might almost believe that this is, as it claims to be, the film they shot while lost in the woods, looking for evidence of witches, since its drama seems to be more or less incidental and unintended...

...The prisoners were also shown footage of anti-war demonstrations in the U.S...

...Far-fetched...

...I hope it is not necessary for us, too, to lose everything for honor to regain for us its old —and real — importance...

...Though soldiers up to and including those of the two World Wars routinely paid tribute to their adversaries' courage and fighting ability, the qualities that they themselves valued, ideological warfare entails scorn for even the most universally honored of soldierly qualities if they are not placed in the service of the Revolution...

...Army now is said to provide a "wiccan" chaplain for its practicing "wiccan" recruits of both sexes...

...armed forces...

...Only near the end do we begin to grow skeptical that kids who were frightened out of their wits would at the44 Its implausibilities make The Matrix look like gritty realism by comparison...

...but the cumulative implausibilities of The General's Daughter make The Matrix look like gritty realism by comparison...

...But it makes perfect sense compared to what, in fact, General Daddy does do on finding her so situated...

...If that seems just the tiniest bit unlikely, try this: The girl takes her revenge on daddy by seducing every man under his command — many of whom, by the way, join in her own enthusiasm for the kind of sex that involves whips and chains and leather gear...

...There seems no longer (if there ever was) any compelling scientific reason for accepting this model without question...

...You be the judge...

...N o wonder the obliging and (not coincidentally) rather shorthanded U.S...

...The picture consists almost entirely of interviews with American prisoners of war, most of them Navy or Air Force pilots, who were held in North Vietnam between 1965 and um...

...As a model of the way the world works this has by now become an unexamined assumption for most people —at least for most people who are engaged in the business of the arts and entertainment, even though the model is increasingly showing signs of having outlived its usefulness...

...They hike into the woods with their cameras and sound gear one day in October 1994, and they do not come back...

...Without any particular hurry or panic, he simply turns his back on her and drives away, leaving her helpless and naked in the middle of the night...

...With a bit of stock footage of the war—and in some cases of the men's captures—these are edited so as to produce a roughly chronological narrative, held together by certain recurring themesincluding capture, torture, the hardships of prison life, the spiritual resources which helped men to get through the ordeal, and so forth...

...In the meantime, it is nice to savor the irony of the fact that Return With Honor, directed by Freida Lee Mock and Terry Sanders, and our Movie of the Month, presents us with military talk of honor which is not only not a smokescreen used to hide unpleasant realities, but is indisputably a far more real reality than that which advertises itself as such...

...Filmmakers have to keep coming up with new ways to make their product look real, however fleetingly, and the latest to follow the Tarantinan trajectory may be Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, authors of The Blair Witch Project...

...for the same purpose...

...Only at one or two points does the movie become political...

...One experiences the interviews simply as the men telling their own stories, and such stories as to render criticism respectfully mute...

...As Ron Bliss puts it, "all that we had left was our name and our honor...

...Three student filmmakers, Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard, set out to make a documentary about a witch legend, tied to a series of local murders 5o years ago, in rural western Maryland...

...Apart from that, the thing is frighteningly believable, at least if you believe in witches...

...Perhaps it won't be long before The General's Daughter will look like a documentary of everyday Army life...

...What happened to the gay shrink—who, like the general's daughter herself, is supposed to be formidably intelligent—is not quite clear...

...As he tells us this, the film cuts to a contemporary picture of Ted Kennedy appearing on "Meet the Press...

...Or, to be precise, the "real...

...And there, you might say, is the beauty part, since witches, despite their long association in folklore with all that our scientific age considers most "real" — murder, child molestation, sex perversions of all kinds—have never yet quite managed to establish themselves as real...

...Yet it is paradoxically precisely on the grounds of the cultural predisposition to locate rape, murder, and unnamable sex perversions in the realm of the "real" that the filmmakers—Simon West, the An unexamined ugly life is not worth living—or filming...

...To this theatrical entertainment, her unfeeling father is invited so that he can —well, we're not quite sure what he is supposed to do on finding his daughter thus exposed and vulnerable...

...Daddy, who has political ambitions, refuses to react to this provocation, even though his daughter and his principalaides are behaving with flagrant disregard for army regulations about fraternization...

...my grateful release from The General's Daughter, a movie so awful that only unexamined assumptions of a particularly noxious kind can explain why it was made at all...

...James Bowman welcomes e-mail at JVBowman@cs.com...

...The American Spectator August 1999 65...

...64 August 1999 • The American Spectator director, and the writers Christopher Bertolini and William Goldman—make their tired appeal...

...These things all came to be thought of, for reasons too complicated to go into here, as little more than masks or façades designed to hide from ourselves the "real" things — selfish, cowardly, ugly, violent, sexually licentious, profane, and wicked—that lurked always beneath life's surfaces...

...But of course the filmmakers do not have to tell us that, in the aftermath of Vietnam and perhaps partly as a result of these men's experiences, just behaving like a soldier was to become a political act...