The Talkies: Patriot Games

...As in the case of most pictures designed to make our flesh creep, these are secret feel-good movies...

...Even many of the movies ostensibly made for adults, if that designation can be said to mean anything at all anymore, are really adolescent fantasies at bottom...

...This is a strange little film that tells the story of a circus knife-thrower, played by Daniel Auteuil, who, having rescued a young girl called Adele (Vanessa Paradis) from a suicide attempt, employs her as his target...

...during the war they often come to seem little more than desire to stand by one's friends (or the fear of not doing so...

...What most readers were excited about was that, propaganda though the film undoubtedly was, it was our propaganda...

...From that Olympian distance-so familiar to those of us who were passionately involved in the debate over the Vietnam war--it becomes possible to persuade ourselves that war, even a war in which our own country is involved, is just an insane game, as if the opposing armies had just chosen up sides and started killing each other...

...But attempting to live apart from others proves to be what causes the destruction of his family...

...Judging by those who wrote directly to me, I would guess that most of the outrage was directed not at nay charge that the film was crude propaganda...

...But what apart from vengeance these motivations might be in the case of Mr...

...As I have noticed in past years, most of these movies are intended (even more than movies during the rest of the year are intended) for the minds and sensibilities of 12-year-olds, and so they do not rise to the level of being susceptible to criticism...

...In making this choice, one's grievances tend to be of a very particular kind, and directed at very particular persons...

...And on your choice lives, including your own, will depend...

...On the contrary, when confined to the universal level and looking down from our godlike perch on human conflict, and especially on the terrible suffering it causes, we are all pacifists...

...Otherwise, the soldiers who suffer them would stop it at once...

...It is a hard saying for the toocomfortable and for cinematic thrill-seekers, but a true one, and the sort of thing that spiritually healthy people would want to go to the movies to hear...

...Few women really believe that their husbands are serial killers, but plenty of women are willing to seize the excuse that sometimes even more perfect husbands than theirs turn out to be serial killers to justify themselves in their own little reservations of trust...

...You have to choose...

...In such a game wise and compassionate people, like those would-be draftees who affected a divine perspective, can simply decline to participate...

...Though in war the first casualty may indeed be the truth, we in peaceful, prosperous America today have no excuse for continuing to mug her, save our own vanity...

...I think it is this kind of easy pacifism, now almost reflexive among a certain class of baby-boomers, which is really the subtext of a movie like The Patriot...

...Patriot, he wrote, "does offer vengeance and love of family as motives for rebellion--but they are transcended by the theme of founding a nation...

...Or, rather, to look beyond them to the higher truths that the film was said to represent...

...They are universal truths...

...This thrill was the central experience of both Independence Day and Braveheart, two prototypes of The Patriot by Mr...

...More importantly, it makes the opposite point to that of the cheaply satisfying paranoia of What Lies Beneath --namely that love and luck are both inseparable from trust...

...It adopts, for example, the Bill Clinton/Janet Reno criterion for the application of deadly force, namely that imminent danger to children is involved...

...But it must be admitted that, in the summer at least, there is hardly a break from the incessant production of the fantasy factory to give us a moment's hope that intelligence might be good for anything other than being insulted...

...At any rate, its implicit incomprehension of any other motive for going to war is an attitude far more typical o f our own times than it is of Colonial America, 64 S ep t e m b e r 2 o o o - The American Spectator and all of Mr...

...They must be supposed to have other things on their minds...

...N James Bowman welcomes e-mail at lamesBowman@home.com...

...But that was the best they could say for the scene's accuracy...

...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on TAS Online at ~u.s#ectator.org...

...They are right, of course, in supposing that it is not otherwise possible to enjoy such preposterous representations of the world, or such appallingly self-indulgent emotions, as we find in most of American popular culture...

...If-, unlike us epigoni of the pampered fin de siOcle, yon are unlucky enough to be among those whom history confronts with the question of whether or not to go to war, you haven't got the luxury of both rejecting and justifying it at once...

...The American Spectator . September 200o 65...

...The JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...Gibson]...expresses a Tocquevillean individualism-living only for the small circle around himself and his family-born of his horrific experiences in the French and Indian Wars...

...Loosely based on the real-life adventures of the "Swamp Fox," Francis Marion, The Patriot is at bottom a story of all the wars Americans have ever fought...

...True, one or two readers were willing to defend the fihn's most notorious scene, in which the wicked British Colonel Tavington (Jason Isaacs) burns a church filled with recta, women, and children-an incident based on the exploit of a Waffen SS division at Oradour-surGlane on June lo, 1944-on the grounds that a careful search of contemporary records has uncovered a complaint that British soldiers may once have burned the body of an American rebel while he was still alive, judging by the man's outstretched arms...

...The latter's presentation of history as a continual feedback loop of the morally unproblematic fight against the Nazis produces a vicarious thrill in the wholesale slaughter and defeat of Nazis or virtual Nazis that also makes us feel good about ourselves...

...Because (I suppose) movie audiences today are deemed too stupid or lazy to make the effort of self-identification with real historical characters, or to exercise their imaginations in order to see the world as such characters would have seen it, movie characters must be made more familiar to us--in fact, made exactly like us (or like we would like to be)-and, history distorted in the process...

...Before and after the war, these things are usually supposed to be noble and patriotic...

...Emmerich and Mr...

...But I am hopeful enough to go on believing that if only the grownups could be persuaded collectively to put their inner child on a much shorter leash and to demand more adult fare, Hollywood would be forced to oblige them with something, if not of the quality of the best of French cinema, at least that of our Movie of the Month, The Girl on the Bridge by Patrice Leconte...

...Masugi's ingenuity in supplying Mel Gibson's character with penumbral emanations of the higher sort of patriotism so signally neglected by the film itself cannot disguise the fact...

...cover personal or social redemption in the use of recreational drugs, or Disney's "The Kid," which finds it in an even more straightforward reversion to childhood...

...It is thus both a movie rejecting war and a movie justifying war...

...Thus, like Love's Labour's Lost, as discussed in this space in our last issue, The Patriot is principally an exercise in self-congratulation...

...N ot too surprisingly, my review of Roland Emmerich's The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson, for the TAS Website stirred up a hornet's nest of protest among our indisputably patriotic readers, some of whom went so far as to cancel--or threaten to canceltheir subscriptions...

...It is the history, however, that is important in understanding why actual people fight actual wars...

...don't know if Hollywood's estimation of its audience is an accurate one...

...The use of black-and-white stock and various sorts of "magic realism" tricks reinforces our sense of the fihn's taking place in a sort of parallel universe, yet the quasi-sexual intimacy between the knife4hrower and his target quickly establishes itself as a much better metaphor than sexual intercourse itself-by now so familiar and cinematically debased- for the glory and the danger of tire real-world relationship between men and women...

...That seems to have been conceded...

...The Civil War, World War II, and the Vietnam War are all conflared into a fihn era...

...The fact that the couple do not sleep together, or sleep with other people, while engaging in this rather shocking intimacy makes the fihn come across as almost a reinvention of sex itself...

...The hippie dream lives on in movies like Jesus' Son or Saving Grace, which disEven many of the movies ostensibly made for adults are at bottom adolescent fantasies...

...It was in favor of what we are in favor of, and so we ought simply to overlook its historical shortcomings...

...Paradoxically...

...Thoughts either of the ugliness of war or of giving birth to new worlds are rarely high on the list of motivating considerations...

...The historical anachronisms are glaring--but so is the historical truth that every war is ugly and every war gives birth to new worlds...

...This view was expressed most forcefully by Ken Masugi in the Weekly Standard...

...Cheap art and feminist propaganda can be counted upon to pander to such feelings, which are similar to those catered to by both Oliver Stone's left-wing political fantasies and Roland Emmerich's cheap-o patriotism...

...I hope not...

...And then, of course, there are the paranoid fantasies like What Lies Beneath that encourage women's fears, and thus their defensiveness, towards men...

...At the beginning of the film, the character Benjamin Martin [played by Mr...

...But these are, precisely, not historical truths...

...it is only at a certain distance from the battle that its horrors become paramount...

...Gibson and the irregular troops of The Patriot, let alone in that of the British, is scarcely even hinted at...

...Gibson respectively...

...Like last year's Double leopard?,, this film achieves its main and most frightening effect by presenting us with an attractive woman in an ideally happy marriage who discovers to her horror that her apparently perfect husband is a dangerous psychopath and murderer, a monster who exploits her trust and is willing to stop at nothing to prevent her from knowing the truth about him...

...All the critic can do is to show how a movie like X-Men is designed to flatter the adolescent sense of loneliness and self-pity while supplying it with power-fantasies with which to console itself-or to notice that this adolescent fantasy can be as powerful in a veteran actor like Sir Ian McKellan, and in the grievance-mongers whose causes he advocates, as it is in the teen audience of such gross-out smash hits as Me, Myself and Irene or Scary Movie...

...You'd think that it would not be necessary to point out to adults that in the real world things are rarely made so easy for us, but there is something about the movies that, like popular music, seems to make most Americans feel entitled temporarily to revert to childhood...