Big Hollywood Re Small Hollywood
John Nolte at Big Hollywood with the Top 5 conservative moments in film in the last couple of decades, and small-minded Hollywood’s tragic failure to record the great moments of our time.
One of the reasons Leftist films have been bombing at the box office (even with Leftists) is due to a one-sidedness that insults the intelligence. In just a couple years, between narratives and documentaries, there have been over a dozen anti-war films that have all flopped, and one of the reasons is that at no time was a single character allowed to stand up and point to the elephant in the room:
But wait a minute… What about the Iraqi people? There are twenty-five million innocent people there and we’re the only thing between them and annihilation. You just want to abandon them? You’re arguing we feed millions of women and children into a terrorist meat grinder? Haven’t you seen “Three Kings?” Once upon a time, even George Clooney thought that was wrong.
As a general rule, for over a decade now, no conservative has been allowed to make an intelligent case for their beliefs in a high profile studio film - whether it’s gun control, abortion, the environment, taxes, or the war in Iraq. And the reasons are obvious. When presented intelligently, conservative ideas appeal to those possessing both common sense and compassion. In other words, these arguments are persuasive and Hollywood knows it.
Good point. But before you even get to the Iraqi people, higher values and morals and all that, how about the experience of thousands of American soldiers who have gone willingly into combat, fighting, dying and ultimately prevailing side by side. Hardly seems like support to be constantly portraying them as psychological basket cases, thoughtless killers, incompetents. How about the incredible drama of self-sacrifice by young men like Ross McGinnis, described by his father as a real-life Bart Simpson who made something of himself, and then gave it away for his friends? Want a great cinematic speech? Robert Kaplan brought this one back from First Fallujah:
It was sometimes hard to imagine anyone more serious and intense than Captain Jason Smith. Yet there was a courtly quality about him too. I thought of a Confederate officer. Through his Iraqi interpreter Smith told the man, “Sir, we are truly sorry that we had to ask your family to leave the building. You can all go back in now. We will compensate you for the inconvenience. We are United States Marines, a different breed than you are used to. We do not take kindly to people shooting at us. If you have any information about the Ali Babas, please share it with us. If you know any of the Ali Babas personally, please tell them to attack us as quickly as possible, so that we may kill them and start repairing sewers, electricity, and other services in your city.”
Sound hokey? It was real, and five years of hard fighting later, it is a greater reality. Here’s another snippet of cinema-worthy dialogue captured by Kaplan, a great American war correspondent, from his attack a couple of years ago on the greater media’s “culture of victimhood” that, as Nolte notes, lies at root of Hollywood’s failings.
“Has anyone noticed that we now have a volunteer Army? I’m a warrior. It’s my job to fight.”
Need some bitter irony? Same article references this slightly famous bit of Anbar graffiti:
“America isn’t at war. America is at the mall. The Marines are at war.”
You could wrap a whole movie around that one. The HBO production of “Generation Kill” was a great disappointment. Essentially a myopic anti-war wallow in jarhead potty talk and the incompetence of some officers … in a unit that completed its objectives in three weeks of often heavy combat without suffering a single KIA. There’s another book out with a little more depth, uncomfortable nuance. Dexter Filkins’ “The Forever War” Here are a couple of cinematic moments from the dramatic house-to-house fighting in Second Fallujah and the destruction of al Qaeda there, a key mid-point in the war.
The marines were pressed flat on a rooftop when the dialogue began to unfold. It was 2 a.m. The minarets were flashing by the light of the airstrikes and rockets were sailing on trails of sparks. First came the voices from the mosques, rising above the thundery guns.
“The Americans are here!” howled a voice from a loudspeaker in a minaret. “The Holy War, the Holy War! Get up and fight for the city of mosques!”
Bullets poured without direction and without end. No one lifted his head.
“This is crazy,” one of the marines yelled to his buddy over the noise.
“Yeah,” the buddy yelled back, “and we’ve only taken one house.”
And then, as if from the depths, came a new sound: violent, menacing and dire. I looked back over my shoulder to where we had come from, into the vacant field at Fallujah’s northern edge. A group of marines were standing at the foot of a gigantic loudspeaker, the kind used at rock concerts.
It was AC/DC, the Australian heavy metal band, pouring out its unbridled sounds. I recognized the song immediately: “Hells Bells” …
That’s Filkins’ introduction to a journey through blood, dirt and a lot of highly nuanced personal business and politics, including the conflicted way Iraqis themselves feel about this. But who says a war movie has to be political? Maybe it can just be about the strange, tragic poetry of something so terrible as war. Here’s another quick “Forever War” scene:
Twilight in Fallujah. A yellow veil descended over the ruined city. Domes of mosques slouched in their wreckage. Apartments, split apart, surrendered their interiors. Minarets lay snapped at the stem. A handful of marines stood on the roof of a three-story building, trading shots with insurgents through the haze. A bullet whizzed past Sergeant Eric Brown and smashed a window behind him.
“God I hate this place, the way the sun sets,” Brown said, wiping blood from his lip. He fired into the street.
Then there’s Filkins’ naked presentation of the death of William L. Miller, the terrible, tragic, guilt-ridden story of a marine killed trying to help Filkins and NYT photog Ashley Gilbertson get a picture. Too long a story to excerpt here. Here’s the end of it, after Miller’s torn-up body has been hauled away in a track with bullets dinging off its sides.
Sam held up three fingers and counted them down. Three-two-one and we were off, out the door and into the street, me carrying Miller’s blood-soaked gun, a pair of machine guns to our east opening up as we ran. Legs like jelly, legs like wings, we were all flying together. Bulets zinged past, hitting the bricks. “I want to die” I heard Ashely say. “I hope they shoot me.” We jumped a finel fallen tree and turned a corner down an alley and we were safe.
“I know you guys are thinking you got Miller killed,” Sam said back at the house with the rest of the platoon. He was pulling on a cigarette, seated against a wall on the second floor. He seemed like a wise old man sitting there, not a line in his face, and we the children. “It’s a war,” he said slowly, like a man as old as time. “That’s what happens in war.”
Lieutenant Eckert walked in. He hadn’t gone with us.
“We take full responsibility for what happened out there,” Ashley said to Eckert. I said it, too.
“Yeah, it was your fault,” he said.
I could do this all day with ”Forever War.” I hope, when they make a movie out of it, they don’t screw it up. Its ultimate message, the moral of the story? I walked away with … you don’t always get one.
Looks like Tom Ricks’ “The Gamble” could be highly promising ground for a screenwriter to mine, as well, with its dramatic captain’s tale of engaging his enemy, “The Insurgent Who Loved Titanic.” As I’ve said before, I think “Surge” could be a heck of a movie. With as happy an ending for the American and the Iraqi people as any war could have, and no shortage of bitter ironies. Not least the bitter irony about how Congress tried to kill it, and the nation’s first black president got elected disparaging it … then immediately adopted it.
Don’t look for that tale on a big screen near you anytime soon. Those are just a few of the many great American war stories that Hollywood has thus far ignored because, much like a lot of the national press, it has for political reasons zeroed in on one of the side effects, every war’s inevitable cost of PTSD, when not limiting itself to the anti-war politics alone.
Go check the Top 5 conservative vid clips in Nolte’s post. They’re all great. By the way, if you think Mel Gibson’s flag-waving speech in “We Were Soldiers” is an excess of Gibsonian right-wing jingoistic blah blah blah, then you need to meet my friend John Eade, a 7th Cav trooper who lived it at the Ia Drang, and saw his friends die by it:
Eade recalls that his platoon was immediately pinned down in ferocious fighting as the NVA swarmed on them through the trees. “For the first hour and a half, it was intense hand-to-hand,” Eade said. “It was like a gang fight. It was small groups of us versus small groups of them. It got down to knives. It got down to choking people.”
Eade said he and three others, Wilbert Johnson, Barry Burnite and Oscar Barker Jr., had some freedom of movement along a line of brush and tried to flank the NVA.
“We wanted to hunt them down and give the platoon a chance,” Eade said. “We bit off more than we could chew.” Eade said. Burnite, a white trooper, was a machine gunner and Johnson, a black trooper, was his crewman. When the machine gun was disabled by shrapnel and Burnite was hit in the chest, Johnson dragged Burnite 30 meters in an effort to save him.
“It was the greatest feat of human strength I have ever witnessed,” Eade said. “I don’t know if Burnite was still alive.” Eade, a native of Toledo, Ohio, is white and said that growing up, he had played sports with a lot of black kids and was not subject to racism. But he said that what he witnessed that day cured him of any possible vestiges and has left him with no tolerance for it.
Johnson, Barker and Eade holed up among some trees and continued to fight. Johnson was killed, and Eade was shot in the gut and the right shoulder, forcing him to fire his M-16 left-handed. His legs and boots had been sprayed with shrapnel, with a large piece stuck into his foot, so Eade couldn’t walk. By about 3 p.m., much of the fighting had subsided around Barker and Eade. Barker tended to Eade’s wounds when they weren’t fighting, stuffing one of Eade’s dirty socks into his shoulder wound to stop the bleeding because they were out of bandages.
“I knew and he knew that everyone else was dead,” Eade said. He urged Barker, a black trooper, to try to save himself and run for the command post, where Gwin and others held a perimeter.
“He refused to go,” Eade said. Shortly after that, Barker was shot in the chest, and Eade had to watch him die. Barker had a sucking chest wound, and it took him a long time to die, Eade said.
Want more? Amazon links:
Filkins, The Forever War
Ricks, The Gamble
Kaplan:
Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos
Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan from an earlier, more innocent time.
And spinning off from all of that, with Ia Drang links and a lot more from our current wars plus, A Combat Vet’s Reading List.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:05 pm on Wednesday, February 11, 2009
4 Responses to “Big Hollywood Re Small Hollywood”
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February 11th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
More and more I blame our society’s ills on the leftwing poison being pumped out in universities. When actors and directors were veterans, or had supported war efforts, we got movies that resonated with the public. Now that they are all graduates of film schools, we get leftist dreck. When business leaders, politicians, the movers and shakers of society were military veterans, or knew military veterans, or were related to military veterans, society operated on a system of ethics and honor. Now they’re all graduates of business schools, political science colleges, etc., and we have anti-American creeping socialism.
Maybe someday these stories will be told. But, sadly, not today.
February 11th, 2009 at 10:02 pm
[...] changed, changed utterly: A terrible banality is born: (Before) you even get to the Iraqi people, higher values and morals and all that, how [...]
February 12th, 2009 at 10:22 am
RebeccaH…see my post an incident at the movies.
February 12th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
there are moments, though… on TV.
I am presently immersed in NCIS, and not just because Mark Harmon is gorgeous. It treats the US military with respect. It shows off the really great rituals of that Military. It shows the pride felt by that Military for its exploits and its way of life.
I just watched ‘Call of Silence”, from the second season (disc 2): did you know that members of the Military snap to attention at the sight of a man wearing a medal of honour? I didn’t know that.