accentuate the negative

A lot of ink has been spilled about Iraq-themed movies bombing at the box office. I contributed my share back in September, before the movies started bombing. It wasn’t that hard to foresee: Even the most casual student of the culture (never mind the political culture) could have predicted the financial failure of these films.

For example, Sheila Nevins of HBO had this to say to the NYT’s David Carr, also in September:

“Paying money at the door of a movie theater to see the suffering of others is different than watching [a documentary] on television. It is a much tougher sell in a theater.”

So everybody involved should have known the risks.

Thus, the really interesting question is why, despite such knowledge, Hollywood “creatives” chose to make these movies and why Hollywood “suits” chose to green-light them. Note that this is a two-part question, because in Hollywood, as just about everywhere else in life, it takes two to tango.

Brian De Palma for one wasn’t shy about announcing his intentions for his highly controversial Redacted. It was propaganda—the good kind, that is.

In October, before the movie was released, he told Karen Badt that he wanted to shake people up. Images, he said, are a very powerful tool of persuasion.

[K.B.] What was your aim in making this film?

[B. DeP] With the Vietnam War, I remember picking up Life magazine and seeing pictures that would horrify me. The pictures are what will stop the war. If we put these pictures in front of a mass audience, maybe we can stop the war, The hope is to get Americans to be incensed enough to stop the war. Americans have not learned from their past mistakes because the architects of this war are the same that were right there

So De Palma’s aim was to make propaganda. As I’ve written before, propaganda efforts can fizzle, as Civil War photographer Mathew Brady found out.

In this piece, Roger L. Simon nails De Palma for ignorance, and nails Hollywood’s reflexively anti-war stance for reeking of phoninessness.

[T]here is a subtler and more treacherous roadblock to authenticity in all this that is not frequently acknowledged. While the Vietnam and Iraq Wars are often equated by the liberal-left, the differences between the two are greater than the similarities, especially in the critical area of who is the adversary. For Vietnam: The evils of communism could be and were rationalized by the left as a plea for social equality in an economically unjust world. For Iraq: The evils of Islamofascism and just plain fascism are considerably harder, indeed almost impossible, to rationalize.

This problem is particularly true for Hollywood because the evils of Islamofascism – notably extreme misogyny and homophobia – are justifiably big no-nos to people in the Industry. In fact, they are close to the biggest no-nos of all for them in their daily lives. Who is worse than a sexist pig? Only a violent, murderous sexist pig who wants to take over the world. It then becomes a complex balancing act indeed to make a movie that ignores or downplays this in order to criticize the US as the larger villain. No one has been able to come close to pulling off this balancing act in a film. In fact, it may well be impossible because it is fundamentally dishonest.

Finding credible villains and credible good guys for the movies is Hollywood’s big challenge, of course. It’s going to take a long time. I don’t expect the search to be over anytime soon, because America’s got a self-image problem. That, I believe, is what’s reflected on our movie screens. Like the rest of us, the people making our entertainments are confused. They’ve lost the thread of the American narrative. They focus relentlessly on the dark, the deviant, the dispossessed, and the disenfranchised. Or on the transgressive.

For a change, they should look to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. I think they’d find a nice surprise awaiting them at the box office.***

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*** Politicos should also take note of this. Der Spiegel’s Gabor Steingart published a piece last week on America as a “depressed superpower.” Here’s his (uplifting) conclusion:

Sometimes real life mirrors fiction. Three of the country’s most renowned political consultants recently got together for the first time in a lecture hall at the New York Public Library: George Lakoff of the University of California at Berkeley and a close advisor to the Democrats, Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, and Drew Westen, a psychologist from the University of Michigan, also a Democrat. The three men have spent decades practically at each other’s throats.

But now they were talking about ideals, the best way to run a campaign and language, including the wrong kind of language. The Republican said that he was troubled by the term, coined by Bush, “War on Terror,” because it spreads fear and stifles optimism.

Westen, one of the two Democrats, said he had fond memories of Ronald Reagan and his legendary campaign ad titled, “It’s morning again in America.” The ad tells the story of a country in which inflation is down and marriages are up, a country that is “prouder and stronger and better” than it was before. The rich voice of the announcer tells Americans that they can “look forward with confidence to the future. It’s morning again in America.”

Westen insisted on playing the ad for the 500 people in the audience. The effect was dramatic, as if someone had suddenly declared a cease-fire in an era marked by political conflict.

The three experts on the stage were also visibly moved. Luntz, the Republican, was the first to speak, and his words were in the language of reconciliation: “Can’t we understand each other again? Can’t we come together again? Can’t we all regain hope again?”

His words were met with thundering applause.