Time for some serious art about war - Mark Steyn
Bob Cooper
Time for some serious art about war
June 6, 2004
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
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Once again, flash forward six decades: We've been in the new war
now for almost three years, and, unlike Donald Duck and Bogey and
Bergman, and Eleanor Powell tapping her patriotic heart now,
Hollywood has absolutely nothing to say on the subject, except for a
couple of Michael Moore crockumentaries.
I went to see ''The Day After Tomorrow'' the day before yesterday,
and it's a hoot, highly recommended -- the best enviro-doom comedy
I've seen in years. The director, Roland Emmerich, has made an
entire career showing famous Washington and New York landmarks
getting destroyed by space aliens (''Independence Day'') and
underwater monsters (''Godzilla''). Before 9/11, this was cheesily
opportunist. Now it just seems perverse. When the Chrysler Building
comes crashing down due to a freak cold snap brought on by Dick
Cheney (I hope I'm not giving any plot details away), it's the
reductio ad absurdum of the lengths Hollywood's willing to go to
avoid saying a word about the fellows who actually did bring down
a New York landmark.
Even when some hapless studio exec accidentally options a
property that happens to have Islamist terrorists in it -- like Tom
Clancy's The Sum Of All Fears -- the first thing they do is change
the enemy to German neo-Nazis. Imagine it's 1943, you're in a
script meeting about ''Casablanca,'' and Jack Warner says, ''I like
it. But do the bad guys have to be Germans? How about if we reset
it in Massachusetts and make them sinister British neo-Redcoats?''
Something has gone badly wrong when (with the exception of a
few country songs) our popular culture visibly recoils from the biggest
event of our time. Hollywood has plenty of ''courage'' when it comes
to Michael Moore conspiracies or Madonna's bottom. But ask them
to make a post-9/11 thriller in which Americans are the good guys
and the enemy is, well, the enemy, and they'd tell you there's no
audience for it. Just like they told Mel he'd lose his shirt on ''The
Passion of the Christ.'' It's not about economics, it's about the loss
of that ''cultural confidence'' James Lileks wrote about.
(.........)
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