The Talkies: Presidentolotry
Bowman, James
by James Bowman Presidentolotry Nuking Iraq is Hollywood's idea of patriotism. H ollywood cynicism isn't what it used to be. At least not quite what it used to be. True, we can see in Reindeer...
...has some nukes of his own and a delivery system with which be can hit American and European cities...
...Surprise...
...He believes in power...
...In Miss Taymore's production, it also uses a framing device of a child playing at warfare with his toy soldiers to suggest a becoming skepticism about the codes of honor and revenge according to which the subsequent action is to be played out--without at the same time becoming self-righteous about it...
...For some reason, the president decides that this is the time for an ultimatum: Either Saddam Jr...
...This rather spiritual view of power is missing from the Chinese film The Emperor and the Assassin by Chen Kaige (who as a child ratted his parents out to the thugs of the Cultural Revolution), but the moral difficulties confronted by the king (Li Xuejian) who unified the six Chinese kingdoms under a single emperor in the third century B.C...
...So obviously is this not it, the alleged "end of story" (at least not if the story were in any way a real one), that you've got to suppose such an authorial flouting of the most elementary demands of verisimilitude to be deliberate and not merely inadvertent or the result of Elliott's incompetence as a film-maker...
...The really remarkable thing about this movie is that in the end (cover your ears and hum the "Star-Spangled Banner" if you don't want to know this) the prez does incinerate Baghdad and with it, presumably, a few million towel heads, but this is obviously meant not to interfere with our admiration for him...
...Once again, pointlessness is the point...
...Her weird and jokey amalgam of ancient and modem ("Thousands Mourn Death of Caesar" a tabloid headline reads, while Andronicus's grandson appears in a high school jacket with the image of the Roman she-wolf embroidered on the back) delights in the implausible as much as does Stephan Elliott in Eye of the Beholder...
...No sooner has the president ordered a chili-burger than word is received that the son of Saddam Hussein, now the man in charge in Iraq, has invaded Kuwait 58 Marc h 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator and massacred the tripwire force of U.S...
...are impressively dealt with...
...These can be traced back through existentialism and absurdism and surrealism and other sub-varieties of modernism to the wholesale slaughter of the First World War...
...We call off our bomb or he orders his missiles into the air...
...There is something of this quality, I think, in the Movie of the Month, Julie Taymore's Titus, which persuades us that Shakespeare himself was, at least until he learned some better tricks, the greatest of the postmodernists...
...Even the unexpected news that the girl is pregnant could be a symbolic amplification of her sacrifice: Her loins are to bring forth not just one new life but a new birth of freedom for her people...
...In The Terrorist by Santosh Sivan, an Indian girl (Ayesha Dharkar) becomes a suicide bomber whose mission is to assassinate a prominent politician...
...There's cynicism for you...
...Indeed, pointlessness is the point...
...Miss Taymore tricks out this grisly circus of a play with even more of them...
...We are never allowed to keep for very long the comfortable illusion on which American power is based, that world domination comes without any, or any serious, costs...
...But in this context the implausible seems not only plausible but inevitable...
...When the time comes to do the deed, however, even this most political of beings shows that she is capable of being pulled back into the world of ordinary people for whom powerlessness itself is a kind of saving grace...
...The image of the good king dies hard in the Great American Republic...
...Set in the near future, it stars Kevin Pollak as President Walter Emerson, an appointed vice president who unexpectedly succeeds to the presidency and who is now campaigning for election in his own right...
...Marines still stationed in that country...
...Anthony Hopkins plays Andronicus as a combination of Hannibal Lecter (more postmodernism there) and King Lear, and the scene in which, dressed in a chef's toque and jacket, he serves up to Tamora the Goth (Jessica Lange) her two sons baked in a pie is a classic of black comedy...
...Saddam Jr...
...The American Spectator _9 March 2 0 o o 59...
...It all makes as little sense as the role of K.D...
...Their nobility in suffering is as much a joke as anything else...
...pulls his forces out of Kuwait and presents himself at the American embassy where he will be placed under arrest, or our boys drop the big one (loo megatons) on Baghdad...
...VII not reveal the details, but the president knows something that none of the others knows and that makes it fairly easy for him to remain cool under fire...
...Its senselessness is his own little blow struck against the gods for the ultimate affront they offer to suffering mankind, the outrage of their not existing...
...y ou have to look to foreigners for anything like a true picture of the exercise of power...
...government for decades, it has always been ready to revert to its traditional and sentimental attachment to the idea of the presidency...
...They pitted their little-guy heroes against a pitiless universe that was bound to crush them in the end...
...The presidential secret is kept not only from the people but even from the president's closest advisers-and yet it is a nice surprise...
...Yet it is not quite true to say that the postmodern artiste believes in nothing...
...But guess what...
...The world (and the world's oil supply) is to be made safe for American power at no cost to you whatsoever...
...It is enough for Elliott to present us with the clich6d image of Ashley as a little girl abandoned by her father, and to make it correspond to MacGregor's quite literal haunting by a missing daughter of his own...
...Like all the best postmodernism, its absurdities do not easily allow us to feel superior to them, and that humility is the beginning of belief...
...But neo-noir, postmodern noir, is cynical about the heroes (or anti-heroes) as well...
...It has always been difficult to take this play seriously, but its comic excesses are the very essence of postmodernism...
...Although often referred to as anti-heroes, such little guys were heroes nonetheless...
...Consider, for example, the way in which, although Hollywood has implicitly believed in every crackpot conspiracy theory about the U.S...
...As he is fighting and winning the Colorado primary, a sudden snowstorm forces him and his rather abbreviated entourage to seek shelter in a roadside eatery called Morty's Home Style Diner, where are gathered a miscellaneous collection of awe-struck locals...
...Like other kinds of cynics, he believes in power, and that is a belief which tends to involve him in a degree of credulity that makes belief in God seem like basic common sense...
...As the fledgling playwright he was when he wrote Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare was understandably inclined to indulge in exaggerated and theatrical effects...
...Likewise, in Eye of the Beholder, the writer-director Stephan Elliott never thinks it worth his while to explain why the young and pretty Ashley Judd has embarked on a cross-country rampage of seducing and murdering men, nor why Ewan MacGregor as a British surveillance expert falls in love with her for it...
...Now we have Deterrence, written and directed by Rod Lurie, which gives us what is perhaps the weirdest combination yet of conspiracy theory and presidentolotry...
...And postmodemism at its best has the truly subversive effect of undermining the false pieties of both sides--those who forget the human cost and those who promise an easy way of avoiding it...
...The universe makes no sense, he seems to be sayingnot even the kind of malign and oppressive sense that it made in the old-fashioned noir movies-so why should my movie make any sense...
...For every Clear and Present Danger, there is a Dave or an Independence Day, an American President, or My Fellow Americans to give the president back his lustre...
...The sheer cleverness and Yankee ingenuity (President Emerson is Jewish, but I'm not going to be caught indulging in cheap stereotypes) of the conspirators is enough to trick those dumb A-rabs out of their misguided challenge to the American world-imperium...
...Sivan cleverly treats almost everything up to the moment at which the girl is to press the button and detonate the plastic explosives strapped It is not true to say that the postmodem artiste believes in nothing...
...Is he bluffing or are we...
...But one of the advantages of postmodern cynicism-at least if you are a writer stuck for an idea-JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...In Reindeer Games, for instance, Ben Affleck becomes the victim of a plot so fantastically convoluted that even the gods could not have thought of it...
...Therefore, as nothing is meant to correspond, at any but the most superficial level, to anything in the real world, criticism is as superfluous as the fake little-guy's fake struggles...
...Even noncynics could admire such these latter-day Prometheuses who challenged what were made to look like the implacable decrees of the gods, even though they were bound to be destroyed in the unequal struggle...
...I guess that's it...
...is that, for the first time in history, belief is no longer necessary...
...This point of view may or may not amount to "cynicism," but, to me at any rate, it does not show up as being at all like the contempt for the audience I saw in Reindeer Games and Eye of the Beholder or the breathtaking moral obtuseness of Deterrence...
...r ]ames Bowman welcomes e-mail at ]amesBowman@home.com...
...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on TAS Online at www.spectator.org...
...End of story...
...As they show the successive strands of treachery unwinding in the d6nouement, neither John Frankenheimer (the director) nor Ehren Kruger (the writer) can possibly have expected that anyone would actually believe in such a story...
...I'm just a daddy who lost his little girl, and I guess you're just a little girl who lost her daddy," says Ewan to Ashley...
...In fact, the enormities which war makes routine lie at the roots of postmodernism...
...Traditional noir films were only cynical about convention and especially conventional moral ideas...
...Lang (in these pages she'll damn well be upper-cased like everyone else) as MacGregor's control officer in British Intelligence who finds him so unbearably charming that she can deny him nothing...
...around her waist as a propaganda film...
...I hate to admit it after years of writing about Hollywood's anti-Americanism, but I'm afraid that the crudest sort of jingoism is never far beneath the surface of Hollywood's much vaunted cynicism...
...The conspiracy in this film is a benign one (unless you happen to be Iraqi, of course...
...True, the power game at the time involved rather more razing of cities and slaughtering of women and children than we have been used to for some time, but Deterrence suggests that those happy days may be due for a comeback, now that machines can do the slaughtering from a long way off...
...True, we can see in Reindeer Games o r Eye o f the Beholder further pointless contributions to the genre ofpostmodern noir--a genre already stuffed to capacity, one might have thought, with pointless contributions...
Vol. 33 • March 2000 • No. 2
