DC and Hollywood: Half-time Report

Art is nothing more than a reflection of society. If that maxim is true, then what is coming out on the big screen this summer is pretty scary. Troy is the perfect movie metaphor for the Bush administration’s Middle East war. The film has jettisoned the gods, who played a very big part in the original, in favor of a simple revenge tale. Like the president and his generals in Iraq, the Greeks and Trojans talk about the deities, but never seem to follow their teachings. Also like Bush, King Agamemnon goes to war on a false pretext. Instead of bringing democracy to a downtrodden people, this king’s lie is saving a “kidnapped” Greek woman, but the realities for waging the war are the similar ignoble traits of control and power. The filmmakers even scaled back the Trojan conflict from its original ten years to just over two weeks. After all, who wants to deal with a war that drags on forever and untold numbers are sacrificed in the name of truth and justice? All that was lacking in this filmic parallel was a scene with Agamemnon standing on the deck of a ship giving his troops a “thumbs up” and saying, “mission accom- plished.” 

When has Hollywood ever been interested in good writing and sticking to the story? Films featuring well-developed characters facing complex conflicts are flukes for the most part. One has only to look at the studios’ summer line-up to the see this. Movies such as Catwoman, Princess Diaries 2 , and A Cinderella Story only confirm this observation. While the current Hollywood mindset might think it is cutting edge for Tom Cruise to trade in his Top Gun grin and play the heavy in Collateral , A-list actors like Lee Marvin, William Holden, and James Cagney did it on a regular basis a generation ago and without the CGI-laden effects that drive nearly every movie coming out these days. Bill Holden delivered more menace with his opening line in the Wild Bunch than any character in any Quentin Tarantino movie. Instead, Hollywood now gives us pretty boys with big guns or, in the case of Brad Pitt, shiny swords, who wouldn’t last an hour with Marvin on a deserted Pacific island. 

Hollywood purports to give us the true story about King Arthur later this summer. This claim is coming from the producer who gave us such silver screen classics as Flashdance and The Rock . The fact that King A r thur is being marketed as a true story should send up a flag like a scud missile exploding over Baghdad. T.H. White is generally credited as being the author who first put together the various King Arthur legends. King Arthur like Troy will undoubtedly be long on effects and short on sticking to the facts.  

George Orwell said it best when he wrote, “He who controls the past commands the future. He who controls the future controls the past.” What other reason than to dumb down Americans with yet another season of lame comedies and supercilious dramas? The answer is simple, other countries have revolutions, the U.S. doesn’t. As long as we have our six pack of beer, Paris Hilton on the tube, and Brad Pitt kicking butt on the silver screen, most won’t bother to ask why National Guardspeople are dying by the dozens each week in a foreign country that was as big a threat to us as Pia Zadora’s last recording. 

Ted Koppel spends a half hour reading a list of dead Americans and Sinclair Communications pulls the plug on his show with their affiliates. What is Sinclair’s agenda? The company owns 62 stations and is the largest broadcaster of its kind in the country. Sinclair has lobbied successfully in Washington to be allowed to grow even bigger. Many of Sinclair’s executives are big contributors to the Republican Party. Yet a Sinclair spokesperson accused Koppel of  “…doing nothing more than making a political statement.” There are reports that Sinclair and other broadcast behemoths required on-air talent to deliver statements that affirmed that company’s 100 percent support for President Bush and his policies. This is a broadcasters’ prerogative. These rights are protected by the Constitution. It is one thing though to speak one’s mind and something entirely different when you use that power to prevent others from presenting theirs. Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, and Ed Morrow used to give nightly editorials. Now the closest any television news program comes to presenting anything other than a lockstep opinion is Andy Rooney. 

If one thinks that the 1950s were conservative with witch-hunts or that the 1960s were unenlightened when it came to prosecuting a guy like Lenny Bruce, look again. The current climate in the White House and in Hollywood boardrooms makes one pine for such days. When was the last time an oldies station played Edwin Starr’s War ? A film like MASH wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting made today. Michael Moore had trouble finding a distributor for his latest film, Fahrenheit 9/11 . This is the person who won an Academy Award for the best documentary last year and the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year. Clear Channel has put together a list of songs that are banned from their radio stations. John Lennon’s Imagine is on that list. 

As long as the policymakers in Washington think they can do anything they like, in any country they like, without facing the repercussions and blow-back from such deeds, we are losers. As long as Hollywood thinks they can censor films and put out whatever mindless drivel they choose to, without any repercussions, we are losers.