THE TALKIES: Forever Young
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES Forever Young WAS WAITING FOR SOMEONE TO COME ALONG, some young singer 18 to 22 years old, to write these songs" says Neil ung of "Living With War.' his la~est ,album of protest'...
...Or the American security services...
...As Hemingway used to say, Wouldn't it be pretty, to think so...
...The enemy that identified itself on that day knew it was challenging America in a way that could not be ignored and that would produce a long war determinative of American foreign and military policy for years, if not decades...
...Now of course the villains are invariably neo-Nazis or oil-company executives...
...Alas, of how many of my coevals can the same be said...
...Or, to put it another way, he hasn't learned a thing in 40 years...
...Greengrass's otherwise energetic camera goes slack and lazy once the counterattack begins, surveying in a detached sort of way the sea of heaving bodies without making much in the way of an effort to pick out and hold up for our inspection the heroic acts that must have been performed that day...
...The very title of Mr...
...In fact...
...And why...
...Meanwhile, the hijackers are always identified with their human and emotional reactions to what is occurring--their nervousness and fear and, on at least one occasion, their attachment to loved ones on the ground, just like the passengers--and not with the Death to America rhetoric which put them on board Flight 93 in the first place...
...In other words, like Nell Young, they've got another war to stop, so out come the l(we beads and the tie-dyes and the bell-bottoms along with all the old clich6s about America's iniquitous plan to oppress the gentle, freedom-loving peoples of the Third World...
...To concentrate on the initial shock of the opening blow of that war, and its consequences in the air and on the ground, is not illegitimate, but it's a bit like making a World War II movie about Admiral Husband Kimmel, who carried the can for Pearl Harbor, rather than Nimitz or MacArthur...
...Or, as I should say, Boy...
...But wait a minute...
...His new book, Honor: A History, has just been publisbed by Encounter Books...
...James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and The American Spectator~ movie critic...
...That was a belief that inspired idealists like Neil Young and me back in the glory days of the '60s but, looking back, some of us at least would say that it didn't work out all that well, either for America or for the world...
...Just look at the tagline fnr Sir/No S i r / I t reads: "If you've ever wanted to end a war...
...Zeiger, you'd think that American soldiers in Vietnam were of only two kinds: war criminals and those who, like his subjects, protested against their crimes and sought to expose them to public view...
...Boy...
...Yet Neil Young continues to warble of how, in that special Neil Young world that he so proudly offers us in place of reality, we "won't need no stinkin' war...
...You'd think so, but you'd be wrong...
...Nobody's going to help us...
...These guys had a war to stop, after all...
...The war part is as much a constant of human history, as wearingclothes or using tools...
...Mr Young, who turned 60 on his last birthday, isn't blushing for his youthful na'ivet(, On the contrary...
...You could at least see the point of such r propaganda at the time...
...But now, more than ,30 years later, you'd think it would be time to step back from the caricature version of the war and explain in grown-up terms what was going on duringthe eventful couple of decades that it took for American policies in and about Vietnmn to produce the catastrophe they did...
...They really were pretty clueless on that awful day, and the passengers really did have to fight back because there was no help for them from outside...
...Then I decided that maybe the generation that has to do this is still the Sixties generation...
...The essence of this movie lies in the contrast, established by constant cross-cutting, between the cluelessness of officialdom on the ground and the bravery of the passengers on the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11 who fight back after realizing that "We have to do something...
...Yet it seems to me that there is also a kind of na'ivetd in thus pretending that the emotional always trumps the moral, the human identity the patriotic, the victim the hero...
...Why the artful analogy...
...Could it have anything to do with the implausibility of casting mur60 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2006 JAMES BOWMAN dering Ba'athist thugs and al Qaeda terrorists in the role of the gentle, freedom-loving peoples of the Third World...
...For the point is, as Hollywood during that war would very well have understood, the heroism of the passengers and the wickedness of the treacherous enemies determined to kill them-and as many other Americans as they could...
...That's why United 93 downplays both the heroism and the wickedness...
...But that moral template looks crude and inadequate in the post-Vietnam media culture geared up onlyto find wickedness inAmerica's civil and military authorities, or American business, and never in America's declared enemies...
...are we ever...
...He's still---in terms of politics, anyway--every bit the lusty, protesting vigintinarian he was in the Vietnam era...
...The memorable catchphrase associated with Todd Beamer, "Let's roll," is reduced to a querulous complaint rather than a rallying cry, and none of the four known heroes is identified by name...
...one of those protesters back in the 1060s who thought that "All you need is love" and that we ought to "Give peace a chance" so we might "Make love...
...I waited a long time," continued Mr...
...For I was, I now blush to admit it...
...It's kind of beside the point...
...The director of the second and third of these, Paul Greengrass, has taken a little break from exposing corruption in the fictional U.S...
...and eventually they did stop it -thus effecting the immiseration or death of millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians and crippling .America's abiliW to conduet foreign or military policies around the world for a generation...
...Young, a Canadian by birth...
...We're still here...
...How hard can that be to figure out...
...But then that's sort of the point isn't it...
...Nut the slightest effort is made to understand why America was m Vietnam in the first place, and no credit is given to theJnhnson , r Nixon administrations even for good intentions, Theyare as peffectlybad as the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong enemies are perfectly good...
...government in United 93...
...Why make a movie about Iraq set in Vietnam...
...After all, the events of 9/11 are of a historical importance comparable to that of Pearl Harbor 60 years before...
...government in order to expose incompetence in the real U.S...
...The alternative for others was to side with the enemy, which seems to have been the course favored both by David Zeiger, director of the documentary Sir/No Sid, and by his subjects, who were the militm .w officers and enlisted men during the Vietnam era who joined antiwar protests - and sometimes actively sought to sabotage the American war effort-while still in uniform To listen to Mr...
...Unfortunately, this is a case in which criticism of America's civil and military authorities appears to be well-deserved...
...Young's album proclaims his innocence, suggesting as it does that there is some alternative to "Living With War"-besides, that is, dying with war...
...A fondness for the idea of the enemy within, concealed beneath the cloak of patriotism and honor, is another of the legacies of the Vietnam era that is making a comeback in Tinseltown--as, for example, in the two movies (a third is due out next year) in the series featuring Robert Ludlum's renegade CIA agent, Jason Bourne (Matt Damon...
...THE TALKIES Forever Young WAS WAITING FOR SOMEONE TO COME ALONG, some young singer 18 to 22 years old, to write these songs" says Neil ung of "Living With War.' his la~est ,album of protest' songs-one of which is titled, Let s impeach the president...
...I T'S NOW HARD TO BELIEVE THAT, as recently as True Lies (1994), the American security services could be portrayed as the good guys andArab terrorists as the bad guys in a mainstream Hollywood movie...
...Your simple, pajama-clad Vietnamese peasant is always going to make a better victim of Amerika and its fascist leaders than your Iraqi suicide bomber, seeking to kill his co-religionists and fellow Iraqis as well as the troops of the Great Satan, who have come to try to keep order and establish democracy among them...
...are they ever...
...JUNE 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 61...
...the first tools were probably weapons...
...Yet isn't there also something just a bit off, just a bit screwy, about making this contrast the focus of the film...
...not war...
...Naturally, the movie has been congratulated by many critics for the taste and sophistication of its refusal to commit the vulgar error of providing a strongly marked moral framework in which to understand what is going on...
...The surprising thing is not so much that a man of mature years should continue to cling to the political outlook of a child but that he should be proclaiming the fact to the world without the faintest sign of shame or embarrassment...
...Let's impeach &e president for lying And misleadin 9 our count~ into war Abusing all the powers that we gave hhn And shippbTg all our money out the door...
...There must have been something about Vietnam, either the experience of the war or of the protests against it, which did this to people, delaying the onset of political puberty, or even stopping it altogether...
Vol. 39 • June 2006 • No. 5
