THE TALKIES: Spielberg Stress Disorder

...The last-named flick is worth particular notice because of the number of political clichds it manages to cram into its slightly more than two hours: a sensitive, soulful, and sympathetic suicide bomber, PTSD in not one but two main heroes--one of them the victim of a bereavement whose only purpose is to make him a victim-and a couple of old favorites that, one would have thought, were done to death back in the 1970s: a giant corporation and a CIA untethered by moral or legal restraint...

...Take the strong, silent type of hero typified by Gary Cooper, the anti-type of the fashionable PTSD-sufferer...

...No more...

...And this is a film about terrorism...

...Can it be that they actually don't know we're now governed by neo-Wilsonians, busily trying to export Americanstyle democracy to the unfree world...

...Though you might not have expected it, he has thoroughly absorbed the Hollywood view of violence, which is that killing terrorists is an act morally equivalent to the terrorist acts that are being avenged...

...Serious discussion of political and military matters ground to a halt the instant the Military Industrial Complex was mentioned...

...For in "On Sex and Violence" I had described for TheAmerican Spectator's readers the characteristic Hollywood view of violence before I knew that Mr...

...Avner may suffer from agonies of conscience but not the sympathetically portrayed terrorists in The War Within, Paradise Now, and Syriana, all of which opened last fall...

...Jarecki does, that the simpletons who are prepared to engage in violence against terrorism and who erect vast Military Industrial Complexes to that end are themselves to blame for terrorism...

...Previously, "shell shock" or "battle fatigue" had been a recognized affliction of men who had had an immediate and adverse mental reaction to combat...

...Spielberg's routinely suffering hero suggests that it is not so...

...Large numbers of psychologically damaged veterans were primafaeie evidence (if evidence were needed) for the evils of the military and diplomatic policies that were supposed to have created them...

...In the years since the 1970s, the left has of course retained its hostility to the Pentagon and defense contractors, but the looniness of attributing American foreign policy decisions-which, however mistaken, always had a serious rationale of their own-to the mere desire to keep the Pentagon and defense contractors in business was mostly held in check...

...Yet it is not an excuse of which the terrorists themselves have any need...

...There are exceptions to the shame-imperative-certain acts of violence that are allowed to carry no moral or honorable qualifications-and to these we shall return presently...

...PTSD was an ailment unknown to medical and psychiatric science until about 30 years ago when its first appearance in psychiatric handbooks, partly at the instigation of psychiatrists like Robert Jay Lifton who had been prominent in the anti-Vietnam War movement, had an unmistakable political dimension...

...It was by definition that of which we could know nothing directly, except for the evil effects it caused...

...But who is reacting to whom, exactly...

...But nearly always the sympathetic movie hero must pay for his violent acts with agonies of conscience and with one or more of the psychological and physical symptomsets-including insomnia, nightmares, paranoid behavior, drug or alcohol abuse or addiction, suicide, or criminal behavior-that now go under the collective and clinical name of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD...

...But in that night he runs the gamut of symptoms from nightmares to substance abuse to paranoid anxiety so that, in the morning, he is ready to abandon not only his highly secret mission but all connection with the state of Israel...

...Fortunately for Avner, he learns to think well of himself once again, secure on his morally superior perch because, even though he believes he has done deeds morally indistinguishable from those of the terrorists, unlike them he feels really bad about it afterwards...

...At one point, in 1990, the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study concluded that fully half of those who had served in Vietnam in both combat and non-combat roles were suffering from at least "partial" effects of PTSD...

...The what...

...Eric Bana plays the semi-fictional Avner, chosen by the 64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2006 JAMES gOWMAN Israeli government and Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen) in person to avenge the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics of 1972 by assassinating an equal number of those who were thought to have been involved in that terrorist operation...

...Spielberg with what remains in their own eyes a morally unassailable excuse for the violence they have to offer...

...James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and The American Spectator's movie critic...

...Bana struggles with his PTSD, apparently, only for a single night...

...Not the least of these was the opportunity to identify themselves with the victimheroes featured in virtually every movie Hollywood produced about the war-from Comin9 Home to The Deer Hunter toApocalypse Now to Full Metal dacket to Platoon and beyond...

...Now whatever may be the truth of such diagnoses there can be no doubt that there are strong incentives for the sufferers to seize upon them as descriptions of their own condition...

...When Hollywood glamorizes the consciencestricken vet, is it not reasonable to suppose that the numbers of conscience-stricken vets will increase...

...The cranks are out of the closet again, and Hollywood is only too happy to offer them a forum...

...By now, so familiar a figure is the victim-hero, tortured by his "demons" for what he has seen and done as a soldier, that he is retrospectively showing up in every other war that finds its way onto the big screen including, inevitably, the war in Iraq...

...The movie business has always been dependent on the artful marketing of cliches and stereotypes, and it takes decades for most of them to run their natural course and become recognized as cliches...

...This pride of intellect is even more likely to be gratified, of course, if it is able to demonstrate to its own satisfaction, as Mr...

...Those of you who, like me, can remember the Vietnam era will recall what a workout that particular boogeyman got in the late 1960s and 1970s...

...Thus does PTSD provide both him and Mr...

...As Orwell said, there are some things that only an intellectual can be stupid enough to believe...

...THE TALKIES JAMES BOWMAN Spielberg Stress Disorder V HEN I LAST WROTE IN THIS SPACE I hadn't yet seen Stephen Spielberg's Munich, but when I did I found that I had alreadywritten the review of it...

...And for the same reason that Hollywood believes in the mystery of "violence...

...I wish I could say that this agonized successor were now approaching the end of his tenure of the public's affections, but Mr...

...He held sway right through the silent era and into the 1950s before turning into a joke-and, not coincidentally, into his opposite...

...Because both "violence" and the Military Industrial Complex are self-sustaining systems, vast impersonal forces that you have to be an intellectual to understand...

...To recap, an industry that owes so much of its revenues to the sale of images of violent acts has learned to think of those acts as something both necessary and shameful...

...When Hollywood thinks of political or military matters, it's always 1974...

...The predicted flood of sufferers from PTSD among returning veterans of that war--the Army's Surgeon General last summer put the expectation at 30 percent-will be met with a flood of movies whose heroes are sufferers from PTSD...

...Spielberg was about to create such a lasting if unattractive monument to it...

...It takes a certain amount of blinkered self-absorption to make such a film in the first decade of the 21st century whose bad guys are the same old corporate chieftains and rogue CIA agents who have been busily filling those roles in movies going back 30 years and upwards, but Hollywood showed that it was up to it a year earlier in its risible re-make of The Manchurian Candidate...

...PTSD was different in that it could afflict even those who had seen no combat but who were merely made anxious by being in close proximity to it...

...Also, it could and usually did pop up years later in men who had seemed to be unaffected by traumatic experience at the time...

...It was a paranoid's dream come true: avast and impenetrable bureaucracywhose very existence made bad things happen all over the world...

...Let the proles and the peasants blame terrorism on terrorists...

...if you're an intellectual-like, say, a college professor--or, more importantly, a would-be intellectual-like, say, a Hollywood film actor, director, producer, or writer-you will be inclined to take it for granted that blame lies in secret places that only clever fellows like yourself have the wit to discover...

...FEBRUARY 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65...

...ITET EVEN SUCH UNDYING--Or at least undead-~ " paranoid fantasies as Manchurian Candidate 1 _ andSyriana pale into insignificance next to Why We Fight, Eugene Jareeki's much heralded attack on the Military Industrial Complex...

...Forgive the spoiler, but it turns out to be crucial to Avner's self-esteem that he should be able to continue to think of himself as better, purer, more civilized, and more righteous than the people he has undertaken to kill...