THE TALKIES: Crockumentaries
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES James Bowman Crockurnentaries W HICH CAME FIRST, t h e impoverishment of America's political discourse or Hollywood's inability to think politically in anything more complicated...
...Yeah, that's what the defenders of the ratings think: that without these pictures in the movies they watch, kids would never know anything about sex or even their own bodies...
...Even if she thinks they shouldn't be doing it, she can have nothing useful to say about it if she doesn't at least explain what they think they're doing...
...One former soldier says of his friends who died, "I told myself that they died for a reason, but I couldn't find that reason...
...Take Kirby Dick's movie Tb is Film Is No t Yet Ra ted, which attacks what it sees as the "censorship" of the Motion Picture Association's Ratings Board-that is, the hitherto anonymous folks who decide whether movies are classed G, PG, PG-13, R, or NC-17...
...For a flavor of the film's rhetorical jejuneness, consider some of the following statements...
...That is the kind of comment you want to take with a grain of salt, at least if you have any more discernment than a documentary filmmaker...
...Guess they won't make that mistake again...
...The naivet6 of such remarks is far greater than that of the guy who wanted to blow s*** up...
...OCTOBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 67...
...and not a part of nature...
...Why should she when she knows that the movie-going public, like the political culture, no longer expects anything more cogent or intellectually engaging than the most arrant propaganda...
...Who knew...
...But in today's documentaries, it's always open to you to assume that they don't think about it at all but are mindless nincompoops-like the Marine who tells her camera that what attracted him to the Corps is that "they're mean, they're tough, they've got cool uniforms and chicks dig 'em...
...About anything...
...Needless to say, that is the very question that The Ground Truth never for a single moment considers...
...Some may notice a certain irony in Mr...
...Russo's paranoid rant negatively on AmSpec's website, I got hate mail from those who would defend him for, I must suppose, the sole and sufficient reason that his inclusion of the income tax and the Federal Reserve System among his dark conspiracies is a congenial idea to some conservatives...
...O F COURSE, THE REASONS are not far to seek, In the movies, emotion sells and reason is a bore...
...One sympathizes, of course...
...THE TALKIES James Bowman Crockurnentaries W HICH CAME FIRST, t h e impoverishment of America's political discourse or Hollywood's inability to think politically in anything more complicated than the crudest sort of slogans...
...Dick's opposition to "censorship" and what one of his talking heads calls "brainwashing" in view of his own ruthless censorship of the other side, or the reduction of it to nothing but a bit of PR fluff...
...Hiding behind politics...
...All suchvacuous remarks are just variations on the film's one and only idea, which is that the attempt to protect children from sexual images is irrational, wicked, and oppressive-in short, as Mr...
...One reason I resist using the term "Islamofascism" increasingly popular among those who otherwise share myviews of it, to describe the currently most exigent threat to America's security is that virtually every other use of "the F-word"-as Mr...
...There must be others who feel the same way...
...And dufffully, one after another, her subjects tell us that nobody told them, before they went to war, how awful it would be...
...Even a much better film, like Kevin Knoblock's Border War, which actually includes a sympathetic and articulate opponent of its own views about illegal immigration, doesn't allow him to make more than a personal case and offers no spokesmen for the more abstract political and economic arguments in favor of some form of legalization...
...Just look at Aaron Russo's America: From Freedom to Fascism, which is even more sloppy and promiscuous about its use, charging that, because of a smorgasbord of nefarious conspiracies by those in power, "Americanism is now like Nazism, Communism, Fascism...
...I want to blow s*** up...
...Thus the anti-war, anti-military documentarian Patricia Foulkrod writes in her "Director's Statement" that "I produced and directed The Ground Truth because I felt it was time to stop hidingbehind the politics...
...They don't tell you the consequences...
...James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and The American Spectator~ movie critic...
...As if anyone could tell you the consequences...
...as if it were possible, by telling them, to avoid them...
...His new book, Honor: A History, has just been published by Encounter Books...
...But, equally, there must also be some who could find the reason, and it's just a little bit difficult to believe that Miss Foulkrod made any very exhaustive efforts to find them...
...Finally, Becky, the Lesbian P.I., says of her awakening to the joys of lesbianism: "How could something that makes me feel so good be wrong...
...Likewise, Maria Bello, a glimpse of whose pubic hair in The Cooler very nearly doomed that movie to an NC -17 rating, says that, in contrast to uptight Americans who have "desexualized sex.., because we are so afraid of it," sophisticated Europeans think that sex is "just a part of life...
...For all those centuries past, moral philosophers have agonized about right and wrong when all they needed to rememberwas that, if it feels good, it's right...
...kinky...
...This effort provides the film with a narrative thread on which he then hangs a number of talking head interviews...
...So when the recruitment officer had brought out the list of occupational specialities, he had said: "I want to be a grunt...
...Dick's camera, "fascist...
...The only serious question then becomes when, if ever, do you choose war...
...Ray ironically puts i t - i s of this type: that is, absurdly hyperbolical...
...There's no surgeon general's warning" says another of these morally, physically, or psychologically traumatized vets...
...I say "hitherto" anonymous because it is Mr...
...For although there are many more parallels between the political philosophy of Benito Mussolini and that of Osama bin Laden than there are between Mussolini and Jack Valenti, the use of the latter comparison and others like it have spoiled "fascism" for any serious analogical purposes...
...Dick's idea of a merryjape to hire a lesbian private investigator to track these people down in order to name and shame them, as if their being hidden away from the public gaze were itself evidence of wrongdoing...
...Well, guilty of every other sort of rhetorical carelessness, whyshould the picture stop at that one...
...It's got to the point now where any time I hear the word, alone or compounded and not used in a narrowly historical 66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2006 JAMES BOWMAN context, I immediately assume that the speaker can have nothing serious to say...
...Why, people are badly wounded and even die in wars...
...But politics is what the war is about...
...Like the converted sinner who needs to exaggerate his former sinfulness in order to stress the wonder of his conversion, Miss Foulkrod's collection of antiwar Iraq veterans have to stress their former stupidity or naivet~, as they now see it, in order to impress us with the wisdom of their newly enlightened state...
...Gosh, what a concept...
...By showing graphic cinematic sex, says one interviewee, "I'm not teaching this broad"--referring to a typical 16-year-old girl--"anything she doesn't know...
...I f you say war, you also say wounds and death and maiming and psychological anguish a-plenty, often that of civilians and others who did nothing to choose it as well as to the soldiers who did choose it, however innocently...
...Mary Harron, director of American Psycho, talks scornfully of "the fear that sex will dissolve the social bonds'-as if we didn't see sex dissolving social bonds every day...
...Another palpable hit there, my fellow blue-no ses, for do we not stoutly maintain that sex is not a part of life (is it part of death, perhaps...
...Bingham Ray of October Films puts it to Mr...
...What they all have in common is what they also have in common with an ever-increasing proportion of the larger political debate, not only in America but in the Western world, namely the assumption that the political opponents whose views they caricature are either knaves or fools-and frequently both...
...Yet when I reviewed Mr...
...This is like saying that she wanted to describe a football game without hiding behind the rules or the scoring-but just to show a bunch of guys running around and hitting each other with no reference at all to why they are doing it...
...It's yet another example ofrhetoricalimpoverishment that for so many the only question to be asked or answered about a putative political argument is whether or not it advocates one's own point of view or that of one's political enemies...
...These are of two types: those that are designed to embarrass defenders of the ratings system and make them look ridiculous and those that express, with varying degrees of vehemence, the film's own point of view of the systemwhich, like the preacher's view of sin, boils down to the fact that it's agln' it...
...They seem to me to be coming along at an ever-increasing clip, these Michael Moore-inspired crockumentaries, and the style of them has become so, well, stylized by now that it is readily adaptable to any subject from terrorism and the war in Iraq-still the documentary world's favorite subjects-to McDonald's hamburgers...
...I couldn't justify it to myself...
...just a part of nature...
...It's a chickenand-egg problem whose further discussion is pointless, but it suggests a connection between the two things that should not be lost sight of when we emerge, blinking, into the light after seeing yet another so-called documentary designed to outrage us with its Manichean view of the world...
Vol. 39 • October 2006 • No. 8
