Hollywood at War
Thank God the foreign policy geniuses of Hollywood aren’t in charge of national security. The first line of defense would be a psych ward. Crit at PJM on Hollywood’s 1-yard stare.
Speaking of psych wards, has Dr. Sanity got a straightjacket for you!
Topics: Hollywood, Iraq, military
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:48 am on Sunday, September 30, 2007
5 Responses to “Hollywood at War”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
September 30th, 2007 at 10:58 am
Good write up on Hollywood’s inability to produce a non-ironic, non-moralistic movie that captures the realities of war, Jules. Pretty much spot on, it seems to me.
But I think it’s useful to note that this inability is a recent trend, a mutation perhaps, cropping up in the last generation or so. And I agree that it’s past Hollywood’s abilities to capture the realities of war, but that does not mean they can’t try.
Let’s go back a few generations: “Sergeant York”. “Sands Of Iwo Jima”. “The Longest Day”. “Stalag 17″. More recently, “Gettysburg”, “Gods and Generals”, and your example “We Were Soldiers”. There are other examples, but I don’t care to use up that much bandwidth! :-D
But there is a common denominator to these sort of films: Most of them deal with a war that took place before 1965 or so. Even “We Were Soldiers” took place in the early part of the Vietnam War, when (I suppose someone in Hollywood rationalized) that war was a”just war” (don’t ask me how…..I was utterly stunned at the near absence of morale high tones when I saw it).
Movies dealing with post-1965 wars after, by and large, are “Propa-tainment”. There may be exceptions to this, but I can’t recall any of them right now.
Is it a coincidence that this was about the same time as “The Summer of Love”? When the hippies started their “cultural revolution”, it seems that one of their successes was Hollywood…..who seems to be permanently stuck in 1967.
September 30th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
I have now come to the point where I only rarely bother seeing Hollywood’s films If there is something I’ve been assured won’t raise my blood-pressure, I wait til it comes to pay-per-view. It isn’t even that they present a point of view with which I disagree, rather that they do it so badly. They are uniformly one-dimensional, with all the moral subtlety of a five year old.
September 30th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
Seems strange that actors and actresses earning $20 mil + a picture assume they have the rights to lecture the rest of America on how to feel or think, yet off camera, when the red carpet is rolled up and the Klieg lights are off, they desire the utmost in privacy and seculsion.
In the past ten years, I’ve been to the movies (as in purchased movie tickets right inside the theater) eight times. The movies I saw were laugh-out loud, politically incorrect films (one exception: Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman in Man in the Moon). I went to those movies for one reason: politically incorrect entertainment that Hollywood’s too afraid to put out anymore because the movie houses don’t want to offend people, or are too busy putting out garbage for profit, or want to make a vapid, shallow, irresponsible agitprop. The independent movie houses do the same, although with paranoia or history revision mixed in.
October 1st, 2007 at 9:34 am
The reason Hollywood manufactures this claptrap is because the greater part of its profits are now gained in overseas markets. Anything that uplifts Americans will put off Islamic moviegoers, disgust Western Europeans, won’t be seen by the Chinese, and so forth. In short, it’s the market, stupid. Beyond this, the hollowed-out depiction of war as mere savagery bereft of moral value was foreseen in the death of old-fashioned westerns, those early victims of politically-correct multiculturalism. More briefly, Hollywood is the kind of brainless leftism that has claimed the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.
October 1st, 2007 at 10:59 am
TRJ, perhaps the romantization of early Vietnam is political as well. It was the Democrat’s war in 1965, which means it was “just and right and characterized liberal intervention”, as opposed to 1969 when it became “Nixon’s War” and became imperialist and exploitative and “poor black people being sent to kill poor yellow people on behalf of rich white people”.
See also “The Green Berets”, which although portrayed by the early 70’s as an out of touch laugher, showcased a counterinsurgency strategy and capability advocated and supported by JFK. In fact I believe their stateside training base in the movie was named after JFK.