celluloid nightmares, part deux

The NYT’s David Carr is much more polite and circumspect than I was when I wrote “one, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war,” but he is just as skeptical as I am about Hollywood’s prospects for success with its current crop of antiwar movies:

“In the Valley of Elah,” a mystery about a returning veteran who disappears, starring Tommy Lee Jones and directed by Paul Haggis, opened last Friday. It will be followed into theaters over the course of the fall and winter by “Grace Is Gone,” “Stop Loss,” “Nothing Is Private,” “Lions for Lambs,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” and “Redacted.” They all take as their central concern the price of America’s military and security activities since the attacks of Sept. 11. HBO, which has already waded into bloody waters with “Baghdad ER” and “Alive Day,” has commissioned “Generation Kill,” written by David Simon, creator of “The Wire.”

All of this is undoubtedly well intended, but will it be well attended?

No, it won’t. As Carr notes,

[H]istorically, audiences enter the theater in pursuit of counter-programming as an antidote to reality***

Yep. But Hollywood elites these days—like book and magazine publishing elites—make cultural products for themselves and for their own supposedly sophisticated crowd. That’s fine. They just shouldn’t expect to gain traction for them in the wider culture.

So it goes.

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*** The writer/director Billy Wilder, whom I’ve written about a lot, put it rather more plainly:

People don’t go to the movies to see the awful truth, which hurts.

That’s why Wilder snuck up on them with biting satires. Hollywood is both too stupid and too earnest for that these days. More’s the pity for those of us in the audience.