Category Archive

Ross says:

Meanwhile, even 24, ostensibly the most right-wing hour on television, features what Martha Bayles, writing in this season’s Claremont Review of Books, terms a “timid selection of villains,” including “vengeful Serbs, a bitchy German, red-handed Mexican drug lords, a turncoat British spy, a greedy oil executive, power-mad government officials (including one president), and—once in a blue moon, when the Council on American-Islamic Relations is looking the other way—violent jihadists.”

Once in a blue moon?  Really?  They happen to be among the main players in no less than three of the six seasons.  Even if you take the view that they were phoning it in during the sixth season and simply recycling old plotlines from earlier seasons (e.g., Arabs with nukes, the Vice President trying to force the President out via the 25th Amendment, terrorist youths in our suburbs!, etc.), 24 has assembled a small army of Middle Eastern actors and extras over the years.  Perhaps the only thing more annoying than general hysteria  about “Islamofascists” is the rather bizarre obsession with pretending that American pop culture has not endorsed this hysteria with gusto.

Megan McArdle makes some of the right points in response to this.  I would add that totalitarian regimes have been perfectly willing to regulate sexuality in particular throughout the 20th century, and it was frequently the case that revolutionary communist forces were extremely demanding in their expectations of moral and ideological purity to the point of a secular asceticism.  There is a larger problem in the argument that theocracy is somehow inherently worse or more intrusive than totalitarianism, which is that historically theocratic governments ruled states that were not especially administratively effective, nor were they powerful enough to enforce their restrictions with the kind of thoroughgoing interference of the modern totalitarian state.  The idea that you don’t have to believe in the rules and doctrines of a totalitarian system seems to show a complete lack of awareness of the practices of indoctrination and denunciation that were certainly present in communist states.  The particularly terrifying thing about, say, a Stalinist regime was that the rules and doctrines would change from year to year and adherence to the old doctrines, which had been up until the day before perfectly acceptable and mandatory, became proof of deviationism.  At least with religious orthodoxies, whatever else you might think about them, they remain generally quite stable and fixed once they are set down.  Under Stalinism, you were expected to confess a party line that changed along with shifts in policy, and the longer you had been around the more evidence of your past deviation from the current line, whatever it happened to be, there would be.   

The post did remind me of something I have read before about the “alternative history” of the universe of The Golden Compass:

The conservative Protestant churches seem to have missed the part of Pullman’s alternative history where Calvinism was absorbed into Catholicism to create the corrupt Magisterium.

This is revealing of the author’s view of Christianity and the apparent absurdity of the world he has imagined, in which two utterly, starkly opposed confessions that are about as far apart from one another as possible somehow came together in common cause to become part of the same religious authority.  I should think that any Presbyterians who heard about this alternative history would be having so much difficulty stopping their spasms of laughter that they would not have the energy to register a protest. 

“The Golden Compass” is a blatant attempt to duplicate the success of the “Harry Potter” franchise. The only thing missing is richly imagined characters, a comprehensible story line, good acting, and satisfying special effects. ~Peter Rainer

So, I take it that that’s a thumbs down.  I have been interested to read some reviews of The Golden Compass after commenting on this Atlantic article about it.  While it has received some good press, many reviewers are saying that it is confusing and mediocre.  (The title has also provided easy fodder for mocking the film’s direction, or lack thereof.)  I wonder if the movie has so softened and dulled the ideas in the book (even if they are ideas that would have made the movie much less popular and lucrative), as the article suggested it did, that it lost whatever coherence it may have had as a novel.  The Chronicle’s reviewer certainly thought this was the case:

It’s a story without a soul.

Perhaps materialists will take that as a compliment?

Via Ross, here’s the most cutting criticism of the quality of the characters in Lions For Lambs that I’ve seen so far:

These aren’t human beings; they’re sentient position papers.

While I’m thinking about the topic of atheism and “hard secularism,” I thought I would make a few remarks about this Atlantic piece on the making of the movie version of The Golden Compass.  I haven’t read the Dark Materials trilogy, nor am I exactly rushing out to pick up a copy of the first book, so I am relying pretty much entirely on the article for the background, but something did strike me about an idea contained in one version of the script.  From the article:

The earlier scripts made passing reference to the Fall. In the Stoppard script, Asriel, in a rage about the Authority, mocks the “apple of desire” and the “fig-leaf of shame”; a few scenes later Coulter, the evil Nicole Kidman character, yells at Asriel, “You can’t conquer God!” Weitz told me he’d originally written an opening scene showing Lyra in a college chapel listening to a sermon about the alternative Genesis, “but that movie was not going to get made.” A Weitz script dated December 2004 makes no explicit reference to Genesis. Instead, the theology is mediated entirely through a discussion of Dust, which, according to your taste, is either more highbrow or just more muddled. Asriel tells Lyra that people believe Dust is sin and that it brings on misery. He says he will set out to destroy Dust and essentially reverse the consequences of original sin: “When I do—pain, sin, suffering—death itself will die.”

What this reminds me of more than anything else, aside from gnostic utopian insanity, is the Alliance assassin from Serenity, who seeks the annihilation of sin from what I think is supposed to be the other side of things.  For the assassin, eliminating sin was the ultimate goal of the totalitarian Alliance’s desire for control (against which our anarchic, vaguely neo-Confederate Browncoat heroes are resisting), which is the role that “the Magisterium” theoretically ought to be filling in a story that vilifies religious authority, but apparently it is not. 

In any case, there does seem to be something to the charge that The Golden Compass is “Hitchens taken to the kids,” though this may do a disservice to the movie, which might at least be entertaining.  Even the finished product’s somewhat more muted digs at Christianity are not going to be well-received, at least not by anyone who isn’t already a fan of the anti-clerical jabs of V for Vendetta and the dedicated blasphemy of something like Preacher. 

One of the surest ways that you can tell that it’s going to be badly lacking is the frequency with which people defending it in this article keep saying that it’s “highly spiritual.”  Talking about something being “spiritual” as a substitute for religion, or as a way of proving that something isn’t anti-religious, is a classic response, since it doesn’t actually have to mean anything and yet seems to provide some cover for the person saying it.  We’ve all heard the line: “Oh, I’m not interested in religion, but I consider myself a very spiritual person.”  How nice.  Even Sam Harris meditates, so I understand, and obviously entire sci-fi franchises are built on or involve hokey mysticism (Star Wars, Stargate) that might well have been derived from The Idiot’s Guide to Buddhism, so why can’t an adaptation of an explicitly anti-theist work of fiction also be “spiritual” in some entirely non-commital and thoroughly meaningless way?   

Three cheers for decent historians:

A Vatican-backed historian has attacked the film Elizabeth: The Golden Age as a “distorted anti-papal travesty” that risks dividing the West just when it should be rediscovering its “common Christian roots” in the face of Islam.

Stuart Reid at The Spectator’s Coffee House blog is making sense:

Any depiction of those years that depicts Elizabeth as the good guy and Philip as the bad guy is comic-book history.

He is also even more hard-core than I am:

What a pity the Armada failed.

Reid and Cardini and I are not alone in our objections to the film:

The Catholic News Service, which is run by the United States Bishops Conference, said: “With the single exception of Mary, Queen of Scots, all the Catholics in the film are twisted, embittered intriguers.”

And even then their depiction of Mary Stuart isn’t exactly flattering.

I have no excuse.  There were warnings that the Elizabeth sequel was terrible, but I made the mistake of seeing for myself.  This is a perfect example of why movie reviewers are necessary.  You really should take Chris Orr’s word for it: it’s bad!  If anyone is tempted to go see it, just don’t.

When it isn’t painfully boring (which is most of the film), it’s sappy, and when it isn’t sappy it veers into some weird fusion of Patriot-esque speechmaking and retrojected values of liberal tolerance.  As Orr noted, the dialogue is often unpardonably lame.  At one point Elizabeth even gives a little talk on the evils of the Inquisition and England as the bastion of liberty of conscience and thought.  Since pretty much no one today likes the Inquisition, this is an easy way to make her the sympathetic champion of Freedom (her appearance before the assembled English soldiers does have a bit of the Gibsonian “they may take our lives…” element in it), but pretends as if “liberty of conscience” were some universal principle here rather than an invocation of Protestant polemic.  

The director, Shekhar Kumar, has stayed strangely faithful to the original Elizabeth’s studious reproduction of Protestant and English nationalist historiography on film.  Indeed, in the sequel Kumar has ratcheted up the anti-Catholicism of the first movie.  You could just as easily call this Black Legend: The Movie or The Catholics Are Coming To Get You.   

The portrayal of Philip, were it done to an American or British historical figure, would throw certain people into fits of hysteria.  The treatment of Mary Stuart was hardly any better.  The take-home message seemed to be: “The dagoes and Scots are trying to take away your freedom, so you have to kill them.”     Since English historians have long wanted to ignore the fact that Philip II was also briefly Philip I of England, it would hardly bother many to show Philip, as the movie shows him, as some sort of decrepit, superstitious eunuch who is afraid of the sunlight and talks to himself, or whatever it was we were supposed to conclude about him.

This was also the king who sent a significant portion of the fleet that won at Lepanto over the Ottomans, and who was probably among the most accomplished, albeit flawed, monarchs of the early modern period.  Naturally, Elizabeth’s apologists and myth-makers have always had to tear him down to make their heroine appear more important than she was.  This movie is just one of the more recent and execrable efforts along these lines.   

The opening “historical” introduction manages to ignore completely the contemporary Dutch rebels, whose resistance to Philip’s rule was the reason for Philip’s wars in northwestern Europe.  “Only England stands against him,” the writers pompously tell us.  The Dutch role in defeating the Armada is also ignored.  The Golden Age is the English version of Fred Thompson bombast: England stands alone for freedom!  Never mind that the Dutch kept fighting and dying against the Spanish for another two decades after the Armada was defeated and that Spain’s bankruptcy was related to its constant continental warfare against France to protect the Milan road.  We mustn’t diminish the reputation of the most overrated monarch in English history. 

P.S. Even Mike Potemra agrees on the anti-Catholicism of the movie, so it must be pretty obvious.

When I was in a summer program in England on Tudor and Stuart history and literature, I once had the pleasure of seeing one of my classmates react with visceral horror at the historical mockery that was the original Elizabeth.  He was particularly amazed at the absurdly short shrift given to Lord Burleigh, as anyone familiar with the period would be. 

Don’t misunderstand me.  As a work of cinema and as a matter of acting, Elizabeth was impressive and deserved to beat that preposterous Shakespeare in Love (which stole its deserved Best Picture and Best Actress awards) in every category.  For their sins, Gwynneth Paltrow went on to make such masterpieces as Proof and Joseph Fiennes disappeared into a cinematic void after his weaselly character was shot in the head in Enemy at the Gates (though, I am sorry to see, he is poised to sully the good name of Vivaldi by taking on the lead role in a film of the same name). 

As Chris Orr tells us, the Elizabeth sequel is a different story, filled with dialogue that might have been scrounged from the wastebins at the writing sessions for Star Wars, Episodes II and III:

Him: “Why be afraid of tomorrow, when today is all we have?” Her: “In another world and at another time, could you have loved me?” 

On the plus side, I have heard that the music is by A.R. Rahman, who wrote, among other things, the score for the Oscar-nominated Lagaan, so perhaps there is some small redeeming virtue left in the film.

Ross offers an interesting counterargument on the crucial ”Bourne question”:

Okay, but let’s not take this too far. For instance, I would submit that a film like Braveheart (which, like the Bourne movies, I’m very fond of) qualifies as obviously “anti-English” even though it’s technically only critical of the English government and military, or that the infamous Valley of the Wolves is an anti-American movie even though it mainly concerns itself with the wickedness of certain American soldiers (and evil Jewish-American doctors, of course).

All right, I’ll grant Ross that Braveheart really is anti-English (as is almost every historical movie Mel Gibson has ever directed and almost every historical movie he’s starred in) and Valley of the Wolves really is anti-American, but it seems to me that Braveheart, at least, never gives  you any reason to think otherwise and indeed encourages you to despise the English as part of some grand Celtic vendetta for past crimes.  It is partly the anti-English-ness of Braveheart  and partly the nationalist mythology of it that have so disgusted Alex Massie.  There will be no argument over Braveheart’s anti-English quality, since I’m fairly sure that the director would happily agree that it is anti-English, just as The Patriot is very clearly anti-British (despite the moderately positive portrayal of Cornwallis).   

Now a very different kind of film made by an Australian would be Breaker Morant, which depicts some of the evils of British policy in the South African War and which has a very clear anti-imperialist message, but which is not anti-British as such.  The main character, portrayed mostly favourably, is an English gentleman, and the movie does not show the kommandos in a terribly flattering light.  However, because it recognises that the South African War was a “bad cause,” as Woodward’s Morant puts it, it does not vilify the Afrikaners, either.  It shows the war to be the cynical and senseless waste that it was.  It finds fault with certain individuals and institutions, but it does not condemn the whole of the country.

The two movies Ross mentions were designed to be exactly what Ross says they are, because they are different examples of nationalist filmmaking.  Braveheart is anti-English in a classic nationalist myth-making way where the perfidious oppressor nation with no redeeming qualities is ultimately defeated by the heroic champion of independence.  Similarly, Alexander Nevsky is intensely anti-German and was made with the intention of vilifying Germans as a group.  Valley of the Wolves was designed to be anti-American after a fashion, but mostly by way of providing a villainous adversary to bolster the strong pro-Turkish nationalist themes in it.  Your standard nationalist action/war flicks do not allow for a lot of subtlety in the depiction of enemies, which is why virtually every American and British movie made about WWII shows Germans to be a monolithic group of villains. 

When someone attempts to break with the standards of the nationalist war flick and introduce complexity and humanity into the depiction of enemies, his film typically does not fare very well with the big action movie crowds.  The crowds that turn out for their own versions of Rambo are not interested in making fine distinctions and balanced portrayals, but want very clear-cut affirmations that their people are virtuous and the other guys, whoever they might be, are either nameless, faceless opponents or they are fairly close to evil incarnate. 

Ultimatum, on the other hand, insists on conveying the message that Americans are not all like the worst people running Treadstone/Blackbriar, and that even those who have been part of the system and those who have been conditioned and brainwashed into becoming killing machines for the government can change and turn against the corruption of the system.  One of the interesting things about the climax of Ultimatum is the complaint that Bourne makes when he said, more or less, ”You said I would be saving American lives.”  Implicit in this statement is the notion that, had Treadstone actually been used in some way to help save American lives, Bourne wouldn’t have that much of a problem with it.  Besides the larger argument that there is something basically wrong with the methods being employed, the movie might also be seen as saying that the agency’s real error is in using these “assets” for the wrong things (e.g., assassinating Russian politicians rather than, say, targeting terrorists).  If a movie like that is what passes for “anti-American” these days, I fear that some of us have become hyper-sensitive.   

To ask the all-important question, “Is The Bourne Ultimatum anti-American” is a bit like asking, “Is Gladiator anti-Roman?”  Put this way, I think we can immediately see how misguided the question is, since the question makes us say whether the movie is for or against an entire country, way of life or (if you will) civilisation, when the movie in question is pretty clearly an indictment of a corrupt and/or tyrannical government.  “This isn’t us” isn’t quite “there was a dream that was Rome” in rhetorical power, but it conveys a similar idea.     

The first mistake anyone who flings the “anti-American” accusation makes is to equate the government with the society as a whole.  If someone or something is critical of the U.S. government, it is very often deemed anti-American or, if the person doing the criticising is American, unpatriotic.  This plays by the state’s rules: it makes patriotism dedication to the state, rather than to the country, and it makes the state into the embodiment of America.  This is simply not true, and it’s a very good thing at times that this isn’t true.  That doesn’t mean that the citizens don’t have some small part to play in the dreadful policy decisions made by the state (it is our government, after all), but the decisions being taken in Ultimatum are the sort that the public is never supposed to know about because the average citizen of this country would still probably be horrified at ordering the deaths of foreign journalists in the name of protecting some part of the behemoth security state.

This may be why I don’t think the word “anti-American” means very much, at least not as it is used these days.  If it applies to, say, Bin Laden, Gerhard Schroeder and Paul Greengrass in some meaningful way, it seems to me that the word is either far, far too broad to mean much at all or it is used deliberately to obscure what the user is actually trying to say (i.e., “I really don’t like this person’s views, and I’m going to tar him with a really ugly label”).  Here the criticism is that the movie pretty explicitly says that black ops, torture and breeding armies of mindless assassins are all un-American activities (ha!), which can really only offend your sensibilities as an American if you think all of these things are basically necessary and useful tools of the state for the protection of [place whichever buzzword we’re using this week here]. 

Mickey Kaus’ main complaint is that “the film is unredeemed by any sense that America or the American government ever stands for or does anything that is right.”  Here’s the crucial point, since the movie is not concerned with America in general, but is very specifically concerned with one nasty corner of the American government.  It does not, it’s true, spend even five seconds of film time noting the solid work that people in the National Park Service are doing every day, and Matt Damon does not stop his rooftop chase in Tangiers to applaud this year’s charitable giving to hospitals, but I think these things might break up the storyline a bit.  Obviously, I jest, but this sort of thing invites a bit of ridicule. 

Yes, we know that Damon and Greengrass are men with super-liberal politics (Howard Zinn is a Damon family friend, for goodness’ sake), and we know that they don’t understand James Bond (which is their true crime), but what is the basis for charging their movie with anti-Americanism?  That it doesn’t engage in a lot of feel-good, pro-American rah-rah?  This is silly.  I’ll second Chris Orr’s “jingoistic nonsense” line.

This may have already occurred to everyone, but what was the casting director thinking in putting James McAvoy in the male lead in Becoming Jane?  His most recent and famous screen credit is as the lascivious Scottish doctor to Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.  This isn’t to belittle McAvoy, who did a brilliant job in a central role in what was one of the truly superior films of last year, but it is to ask a question: do Jane Austenites want Nicholas Garrigan as their heroine’s Mr. Darcy? 

(And, yes, I understand that actors by definition pretend to be other people all the time and can play a wide variety of roles, but it still seems strange.)

Harry Potter, in fact, functions something like a Rorschach Blot: In countries around the world, it captures various national anxieties about contemporary culture and international affairs. French intellectuals, for example, debate whether or not Harry Potter indoctrinates youngsters into the orthodoxy of unfettered market capitalism [!]. Some Swedish commentators decry what they perceive as Harry Potter’s Anglo-American vision of bourgeoisie conformity and its affirmation of class and gender inequality. In Turkey, we find a significant discussion of Harry Potter that pivots around issues of Turkish civilizational identity: whether Turkey is part of the West, the East, or a bridge between the two. A few Turkish writers have even asserted that controversies over Harry Potter in the United States demonstrate how Turks are more “Western” than Americans. And in Russia, a country whose concern over international status and prestige becomes more apparent each day, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta created a minor firestorm when it claimed that the film visage of Dobby the House-Elf was a deliberate insult to President Vladimir Putin [bold mine-DL]. ~Daniel Nexon

What is the strange obsession that people have with imputing grandiose cultural significance to the Harry Potter books and films or the popularity of Harry Potter?  Why must everyone constantly be looking for clues as to its political message, or seeking some lesson of political morality from a tale of battling wizards? 

If you look very closely, and really try to see the resemblance, I suppose you can see one, but then you would have to be extremely anxious to find negative portrayals of Putin in a story about adolescent wizards.  What does it say of your own view of the Russian President that you see a similarity between him and an imbecilic, droopy-eyed elf? 

Does it actually make any sense to be offended by this?  Granted, the character in question is a slave and not terribly bright, but he does come across as genuinely good and as someone interested in helping the hero with various (admittedly dimwitted) stunts.  To put it mildly, this is not how Putin’s critics view the man.  On the contrary, his critics concede that he is smart, shrewd and ruthless, but they also regard him as utterly villainous–more Draco than Dobby, to say the least.  For Putin to resemble a character who hates his Death-Eating master is actually a kind of compliment to Putin (the realisation of which will probably lead to a flurry of anti-Potter articles as subtle pro-Putin propaganda).  At the rate these ridiculously politicised readings of Potter are going, we will shortly hear from the Kremlin’s answer to Michael Gerson, Vladislav Surkov, who will assure us that the Order of the Phoenix is actually just a proxy for Boris Berezovsky’s seditious efforts against the Russian government and the depiction of the Ministry of Magic is designed to make Russians lose faith in their government as part of Britain’s grand conspiracy to subvert Russia from within by way of the Potter movie franchise.  Enough is enough.

Potential Spoilers Below 

If I’m mistaken and there have been movies in which Islamists where the bad guys, please let me know. ~Michael Fumento

How about True Lies?  Granted, this was a very bad movie (it had Schwarzenneger and Tom Arnold in it, after all), but it was a success at the time and made very explicit that the nuclear terrorists were doing what they were doing for plain jihadi reasons.  It was a movie that made jihadis the villains even before 9/11 had happened–does that count for anything?  How about A Mighty Heart, whose entire raison d’etre is an act of violence carried out by jihadis?  How about World Trade Center?  The story is not principally about the terrorists, but obviously the jihadis are the villains of the piece.  Or Flight 93?  Did I miss something?  Does anyone really think that we have actually been completely lacking in these sorts of movies?  Against these, yes, you will also have the case of The Sum Of All Fears (also a terrible, terrible movie) where jihadis were replaced with a much more universally hated, and non-existent, neo-Nazi threat.  This is ridiculous political correctness and a crazy obsession with long-dead Nazism, but if you think we are at war with “Islamofascists” should it really matter to you whether Hollywood emphasises the Islamic side or the fascist side?

Update: This last point was intended to be tongue-in-cheek.  I was also mistaken and responded too quickly before reading carefully.  Mr. Fumento does make a point of specifically excluding pre-9/11 movies and 9/11-related movies.  Having excluded them, he is right that there are fewer movies that portray jihadis as the villains.  That exclusionary move seems a bit strange, though, since 9/11 is the iconic moment of jihadi terrorism.  Excluding movies related to the most immediately significant jihadi terrorist attack and then complaining about a lack of movies showing jihadi villains are odd moves to make.  If I ruled out Schindler’s List and Life Is Beautiful , I could also make a claim that Hollywood seems to have stopped caring about the Holocaust and no longer makes movies about it.  That wouldn’t make a lot of sense.  

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Why would anyone think that Dana Stevens has the need to take a lame Democratic partisan shot in every movie review she writes?  Via Ross comes her Transformers review, in which she writes:

That planet was once home to two alien races: the upstanding Autobots and the sneaky Decepticons. (Does anyone but me hear the echo of “Democrats” and “Republicans” in these names?)

Um…no.  But if this were the case, it would put Dick Cheney in the position of playing Starscream.  That does sound about right, given their shared capacity to grate on my nerves with their voices.

Bird has, as Slate’s Josh Levin makes clear, always been ambitious and willing to enter dark emotional territory. That’s very much to Bird’s credit, and that willingness to not condescend can make for great kid’s movies. ~Reihan Salam

Reihan is talking about the director of Ratatouille, the new animated feature that is apparently brilliantly made and which is also boring children from here to Miami.  My Scene colleague Alan Jacobs discusses it at some length here.  My Scene colleague Matt Frost adds his thoughts here. 

Rats!

My remarks are on the willingness of people making children’s movies to refuse to condescend.  Speaking of animated rodents, I have to tell you that The Secret of NIMH was one of my favourites growing up (and it was probably one of your favourites, too).  Talk about not being afraid to “enter dark emotional territory”!  It was, if the critics are to be believed today, the Ratatouille of its day, and it was also a memorable production that could enchant children without being a waste of time for parents.  NIMH would be the standard by which I would judge any animated picture, and the few more recent offerings I have had some reason to see (usually because I was visiting with some of my younger cousins) typically don’t measure up that well.

Now, I’m no great religious scholar, but it doesn’t take Pope Benedict to see that the Noah story is not a charming little tale about familial love, but a terrifying lesson about our dependence on God: a warning that we are alone in the world and always at the mercy of a wrathful and demanding Lord. ~David Plotz

Just so.  Well, that and a warning not to breed with the Nephilim (who were all wiped out, I suppose, which makes it a moot point).  It is also the main scriptural counterargument against all secular and atheist whingeing (that one’s for you, Mr. Massie) in the area of theodicy.  If God willed the annihilation of all life on earth, save those in the Ark, who can take seriously complaints against God based on “bad things happening to good people”?  First of all, it throws into doubt the “good people” part of the equation, since the righteous folks were on the boat.  The story of the Flood teaches that when calamities strike the world, the world as a whole may very well deserve what it is getting and God may even have willed these things for the chastisement of man for his edification.  What’s more, that this is an expression of God’s love, not the absence of it.  This is a hard saying, but it is true.   

This is why Evan Almighty is not really an ”appalling effort to pander to religious moviegoers,” in that it isn’t pandering to religious people to get them to come see the movie, but rather tries to appeal to people already going to the movies with some minimally religious message.  It sounds like an appalling effort to milk the vague sentimental Herrgott piety of the broad middle of barely religious Americans for some money, while teaching that the “family that dwells on a large wooden boat together stays together, because it is surrounded by floodwaters.” 

Religious moviegoers of the sort Mr. Plotz is imagining are the people who went to see The Passion not in spite of the sufferings of Christ depicted therein but because of them, because they do not want to see their religion stripped of its most powerful and terrifying moments.  Those are the moments that strengthen faith.  If you want campy feel-good stories about togetherness, you can go watch The Smurfs.  Evan Almighty may bring in a lot of money, but if it does my guess is that it won’t primarily be busloads of evangelicals who put it there.  It will be people who would like to have some nice nods towards religion in their entertainment and would like a religion that doesn’t demand too much, provided that we are all really nice people who are concerned about all the little furry creatures.  As an Orthodox priest once said to us one Sunday, “We are not called to be nice.  We are called to be perfect.”  Anything that confuses niceness with perfection is, in my view, a stumblingblock to real faith.  But perhaps Mr. Plotz and I are actually in agreement about this, since he says:

If I were a believing man, movies like Evan would make me long for the days when Hollywood just ignored God.  

From all descriptions I have read, it sounds as if it is moved by the same spirit that inspires Democratic “outreach” efforts to evangelicals and has many of the same characteristics: clumsy, embarrassing and painful to watch.  Evan Almighty sounds like a movie that would satisfy a fairly mildly religious Episcopalian who thinks that if only religion could be about the love and the togetherness and the via media (always the via media) there would be no more problems, at least not with religion.  Let there be nothing severe or harsh or (Heaven forefend!) judgemental in religion–that would seem to be the shlocky religiosity to which Evan Almighty may be appealing.  Maybe that describes more Christians in this country than I would like to think.  For all our sakes, I hope not. 

But whereas Oh, God was charmingly irreverent—a religiously themed movie even an atheist could love—Evan Almighty bears the stamp of the Bush era. Its politics may be nominally green (the Lord’s ultimate goal is to stop environmentally harmful legislation), but its approach to revelation is strictly constructionist. ~Dana Stevens

Question: is there any movie that has been released in the last year that Dana Stevens did not think bore the “stamp of the Bush era” (and in a bad way) or possessed some other sinister conservative message?  Knocked Up is a product of focus groups and pro-life political correctness, and 300 was “a mythic ode of righteous bellicosity” that prompted her to write:

But Leonidas is not above playing the tyrant himself. When a messenger from Xerxes arrives bearing news Leonidas doesn’t like, he hurls the man, against all protocol, down a convenient bottomless well in the center of town. “This is blasphemy! This is madness!” says the messenger, pleading for his life. “This is Sparta,” Leonidas replies. So, if Spartan law is defined by “whatever Leonidas wants,” what are the 300 fighting for, anyway? And why does that sound depressingly familiar?

So, as far as these recent movies are concerned, the answer to my question would seem to be no. 

Judging from her assessment of the movie, the problem with the story and all its Biblical literalism isn’t so much the nature of the story or even the Biblical literalism as such, but that the movie isn’t funny.  It sets up what could be a terrific farce, but then fails to deliver. 

What really seems to bother Ms. Stevens about the politics of the movie is that, according to her description, it isn’t so much drearily Bushian as it is idiotically saccharine because “[t]rees will be hugged, parks saved, unscrupulous legislators vanquished—and one man will learn to spend more time with his family.”  It sounds like a cross between an old Captain Planet episode and Spanglish.  Admittedly, that sounds pretty horrible (Spanglish being the movie that managed to make Adam Sandler entirely unamusing), but it sounds nothing like a movie that “bears the stamp of the Bush era.”  On the contrary, from what she says about its banality, conventional wisdom and triteness, it has the feel of an Obama speech, complete with the “quiet laughter” it provokes.   

There seems to be a pattern in her movie reviews where Ms. Stevens manages to find something politically perverse about movies she regards as terrible, rather than simply acknowledging them as films that are superficial or fail in their execution.  The rest of the time, she feels obliged to find some political flaw in movies that she enjoyed in spite of herself.   

On a different subject, speaking of George Bush, movies starring Morgan Freeman as God and Oh, God, I was reminded of this. 

In keeping with a proud tradition of not placing too much importance on most pop culture products and arguing vehemently against reading political messages in the plotlines of space operas, I had steered clear of the ever-widening circle of arguments over the political “message” of Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up (I should mention at this point that I have not seen this movie).  There is a part of me that would like to encourage left-of-center movie reviewers to see every cinematic depiction of normal human behaviour as a coded conservative propaganda effort, thus reinforcing the association of normality with conservatism that any supposed propaganda effort would be trying to achieve.  This saves conservatives some of the trouble in actually producing our own films, as it attributes the production of films in which conservatives had no role to our supposedly vast network of Hollywood influence.  In addition to being very amusing, because it is so obviously contrary to fact, this serves to increase the public perception that such-and-such a popular, entertaining movie is “conservative.”  It also gives conservative movie reviewers things to write about, as they attempt to perceive the hidden references to Burke in The Bourne Supremacy*. 

For the most part, however, I find this sort of movie criticism annoying because it is so obviously wrong and compels everyone to label quite arbitrarily different pieces of art, television and film according to mostly inappropriate or misleading political categories.  Instead of appreciating Pan’s Labyrinth as a work of magical realism, it seems as if everyone felt compelled to show off his anti-fascist credentials by talking up the supposed political lessons of the film.  Instead of trying to understand, say, the New Caprica sequence in Battlestar Galactica as an interesting attempt to tell a different side of a war story there was no shortage of observers who wanted to make it into a commentary on Iraq.  Interpretations of 300 were similarly obsessed with either its horrible Orientalism or its supposedly subversive attack on Bush.  I suppose there could be and are political messages worked into all sorts of stories (I am more sympathetic to interpreting Apocalypto as a conservative morality play, which is far less speculative given the well-known politics of the director), but I suppose I have never quite understood why this becomes the basis for criticising the story or, more dramatically, rejecting it outright.  This is my general rule of thumb: the less overt and clear the political references, the better the work of art.  If you can very readily glean a political message from a film (at least any film not explicitly intended as propaganda), it is probably not terribly well made and probably not worth watching.  Take V for Vendetta, for instance–please!  

There have been some cases where Hollywood studio politics clearly clashed with the marketing and release of films that had potentially very un-P.C. implications, resulting in their narrow release and fairly dismal box office receipts (and possibly contributing a little to their later critical acclaim).  Children of Men and Idiocracy were two films that, even in the Cuaronised version of the Children of Men plotline, seem to have conveyed messages that so horrified their respective studios that the studios seem to have tried to sabotage their success.  Both films pointed towards–probably unwittingly for the most part–the issues of “birth dearth” and demographic collapse that might be taken as encouragement for a natalist politics, and Idiocracy also had the ”bad” taste to clearly put intelligence and heredity at the center of its story.     

*In case anyone couldn’t tell, this is not a serious example.

And now for something completely different: here are Kajol and Aamir Khan in Chand Sifarish and Mere Haath Mein from Fanaa.

But there’s more than a passing resemblance between this narrative [Animal House] and classic right-wing populism. Like “Bluto” Blutarsky rallying his fraternity to ruin the homecoming parade, crafty conservatives have been riling up middle America for decades against champagne-sipping limousine liberals. The boys in Animal House aren’t, say, fighting tooth and nail for a living-wage ordinance. These mostly privileged young men are fighting for their right to party—a libertarian cause if there ever was one. And consider that the villain in Wedding Crashers is a Kennedy clone, a cultured environmentalist who hides his woman-hating ways behind earnest platitudes. ~Reihan Salam

I salute Reihan for suffering through Fletch again so that the rest of us can be reminded of just how much we resent Chevy Chase for that (and Ishtar) to this day.  He also has to be the only one–ever–to align John Belushi with the politics of the Southern Strategy.  As for the political message of Wedding Crashers, I leave that to Michael, since this is more his area than mine.  Besides, I don’t even like weddings.

In Kevin Smith’s Clerks, the lead characters discuss the morality of the assault of the unfinished second Death Star in Return of the Jedi. One character, arguing that independent contractors were unjustly killed in the attack, equates the Rebel Alliance to “left-wing militants.” But if the Anchorhead sequence is taken as canonical (there’s disagreement among fans on this point), it’s hard to cast the Alliance as a leftist movement in any conventional sense. The Rebellion, in fact, is a radically libertarian undertaking. Thirty years after Star Wars captured the world’s imagination, it’s past time that the Rebels’ fight for economic liberty was celebrated in those terms. ~John Tabin

Just so we’re all clear on this: it is good for libertarianism to be associated with the fictional violent attacks of insurgents against an empire (Tabin seems to be suggesting that the Galactic Empire invited these attacks), but it is bad for libertarianism to actually have a real presidential candidate espousing relatively mild criticisms of the neo-imperial policies of our own government.  In other words, libertarian principles are fine for fantasy universes, but undesirable in the real world.  I might even agree with this assessment of the value of libertarianism in certain cases, but it is an awfully strange thing for an avowed libertarian to say. 

There’s a scene about two-thirds of the way through in which pirate representatives of various nations meet to elect a king, that resembles the late Star Wars movies with their endless council discussions and legislative wrangling. ~Dana Stevens

You don’t vote for kings. ~King Arthur

Somehow I think I will manage to miss this Pirates epic as easily as I have missed the first two.  Haven’t the movie execs realised that the reason why the concurrent filming of Lord of the Rings worked out so well was that the complete story had already been written out and been wildly popular for decades?  Then there is the small matter that the story of the trilogy was actually interesting and engaging, unlike the heinous wastes of time that were the Matrix sequels.  Then again, they’re the ones pulling in hundreds of millions in revenues and I am writing on this blog, so why should they care whether they turn out the most appalling garbage?

Do you think any cool Trade Fair girl would give you the time of day if she knew the pathetic Bible-dancing goody-goody that you are? ~Fred (Chris Eigemann), Barcelona

Quasi-religious people attend services, but they’re bored much of the time. They read the Bible, but find large parts of it odd and irrelevant. They find themselves inextricably bound to their faith, but think some of the people who define it are nuts. ~David Brooks

While reading this, I was reminded of Barcelona and Ted’s “Bible-dancing” (in which he dances to the tune of Pennsylvania 6-5000 while reading the Bible) because late in the film one of the Trade Fair girls (Ted’s future wife) describes herself as quasi-religious.  For his part, Ted has something of a quasi-religious respect for the cult of management.  Cosa de gringos.

Alex Massie really hates Braveheart.  Fair enough.  While it is not the historical absurdities of the film that bother him the most, they are enough to make me shake my head in disbelief, so I am not going to say very much on behalf of Braveheart.  I am afraid that I’m having trouble finding the racist element in it beyond the general categorisation of Englishmen as barbarous thugs who want nothing more than to rape and pillage (oh, wait, I’ve got it now).  If I were a Scot, I would probably find it to be as dreadful as I found The Patriot as an American.  My objections to the latter may be slightly idiosyncratic, since I found the movie’s treatment of Loyalists, for one thing, absolutely awful; the happy South Carolinian beach community where our hero takes refuge is also a bit hard to take.  (In knocking The Patriot, I risk no backlash from outraged fans, since none exists.)  I think I may be able to explain why Braveheart won such a following in Scotland.  First, any group of people will respond favourably to the the dramatic re-telling of the stories from their national history that portray them as the put-upon, longsuffering people who throw off the yoke of oppression and whose hopes are embodied in a charismatic warrior figure who suffers and dies on their behalf.   Maybe this is why some Indians liked Mangal Panday–who knows?  My guess is that they liked it because of Rani Mukherjee, but that is another story.  

On a different point, I would remind everyone of the great enthusiasm Braveheart generated among many on the right, along with neo-secessionist sympathisers with the SNP, in this country.  It was frequently feted in the American conservative press as the “conservative movie of the year.”  Why?  Because Gibson was always talking about “freedom,” which was a word that had already become a substitute for alot of conservative argument back in 1995.  In fact, the redeeming features of Braveheart had little to do with some general “freedom” (sorry, that’s “freedom!”) and everything to do with waging a vendetta for his murdered woman (compelling, but totally fictitious) and fighting on behalf of his friends and countrymen.  (If I recall correctly, Wallace’s original skirmish with the authorities was actually a fight for the right to keep a fish that he had caught, which is a respectable, if less romantic, thing to fight for.)  The things that made Apocalypto worthwhile were the things that kept Braveheart from becoming a purely Eisensteinesque approach to the middle ages.  My impression is that students of film could probably learn something by comparing Alexander Nevsky and Braveheart as similar ideological treatments of medieval warfare that recast the medieval struggles in totally different, modern terms.

Setting aside their problems, the thing I find interesting about Braveheart and The Patriot is the way that they show how, for lack of a better word, “blowback” comes into being.  Gibson always sets up the story as one of the average man whose hand is forced by brutal and repressive action by the invading/dominating (always English) forces to take violent retaliatory action.  He reprises part of this sort of story in Apocalypto.  This was a Gibson action flick that I actually enjoyed, which was described to me as the most paleo film ever made and which Peter Suderman has called “the ultimate reactionary movie,” which may well be true.  When Republican audiences see Gibson leading a rebellion against a tyrannical occupying force, be it the English of the 14th century or the British of the 18th century, they tend to eat it up (though, somewhat weirdly, there was a much stronger positive response to Braveheart in America than to The Patriot), but when it comes to Americans projecting power far from home and occupying other peoples’ lands, well, they seem to forget all of this and become very incensed at the idea that people in other countries might respond to the indignities and humiliations of domination by foreign powers in a similarly rebellious way.

One final point: people tend to respond more favourably to Wallace-like martyr figures than they do to successful Bruce-like political leaders in their art and literature (not necessarily in their voting), because I think there is a broadly shared and deep sentiment that makes many people really want to believe that good leaders are firmly uncompromising and slightly mad.  Political leaders who engage in politics are always going to be considered less inspiring and less admirable, even when those leaders actually bring home the bacon, because people will receive this “bacon” with the knowledge of the supposedly unsavoury process by which it was acquired.  It was acquired by compromise, you see, which is obviously less desirable than acquiring it through a bold armed raid on the local pig farm.  This doesn’t make any sense.  It is part of the chaotic, destructive side of romanticism, and it isn’t supposed to make sense, because it is an open revolt against things that make sense.   

So I’m watching Pan’s Labyrinth at long last, and two things occur to me: Guillermo del Toro is not a subtle director, and that stupid flying mantis-like bug is really annoying.  He She doesn’t have the panache and personality of a Master Flea.  He She just keeps chirping.  I don’t like it.

He’s a nationalist…he will stand on the side of the Chinese.  That’s why they call themselves Nationalists. ~Charles Townsend (Liev Schreiber) in The Painted Veil

Maybe Reihan is right.  Maybe a sequel to 28 Days Later is one of the best movies around.  There is a long and respected tradition of endless numbers of horror sequels, so I suppose it’s only fair that the 28 crowd gets its own franchise.  As post-apocalyptic horror goes, 28 Days Later is pretty hard to beat.  I don’t see how you can even attempt a sequel of something as grim and unnerving as that one (except, naturally, that you, the studio executive, want to make a lot more money).  Of course, it could be worse–they could start making prequels.

If screenwriters don’t know the stories, they could start with the Black Book of Communism. It could introduce them to such episodes as Stalin’s terror-famine in Ukraine, the Gulag, the deportation of the Kulaks, the Katyn Forest massacre, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Hungarian revolution, Che Guevara’s executions in Havana, the flight of the boat people from Vietnam, Pol Pot’s mass slaughter—material enough for dozens of movies. ~David Boaz

Well, having just mentioned The Killing Fields, it seems odd that he seems to list “Pol Pot’s mass slaughter” as one of the things that hasn’t been treated in a film.  The Katyn massacre was part of the story of the codecracker movie nobody went to see, Enigma, and The Lost City showed briefly but effectively the beginnings of communist terror under Castro and Guevara.  The horrors and chaos of the Cultural Revolution have been depicted, albeit not in a systematic way, in the fine Chinese movie To Live and, again, One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich portrays Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Gulag.  The Last Emperor at least obliquely refers to the police state under Mao (and this otherwise movie actually exaggerates the mistreatment accorded to Pu Yi after his deposition).  Tom Hulce starred as the projectionist in an outstanding portrait of Stalin, The Inner Circle, that was as quickly forgotten as it was brilliant in depicting the dictator and his willing lackey (it was more of a portrait of the cult of personality, but very powerful all the same).  Robert Duvall played the man himself in a miniseries about Stalin.  Those are just the ones that I have happened to see or know about myself.  

Now, it is absolutely true that there are still not enough movies being made to tell the stories of the more vast, systematic crimes of the Soviet Union and Maoist China against its subject peoples, including the genocide of the Ukrainians or the famines induced by collectivisation in China, and there are obvious political reasons why telling the stories about the evils of communism does not inspire a lot of folks out in Hollywood. 

Yet if screenwriters and producers are not banging down the door to make these movies, to listen to contemporaries of all political persuasions compare current threats to the Greatest Evil Ever you would be hard-pressed to find very many who talk about how such-and-such a foreign leader is the “new Khruschev” or the “new Stalin.”  No, every pundit knows that to get people to pay attention to a foreign crisis he has to invoke Hitler, Nazism and the Holocaust.  Chauvinists and jingoes call it Islamofascism for a reason (they are ignorant), but they have another reason: fascism causes a visceral, negative reaction in virtually all who hear it, while communism may well deeply offend many but somehow lacks the emotional power that sixty years of continuous conditioning about Nazis have created.  There is a more immediate hunger for anti-Nazi stories in America, because Americans were directly involved in fighting Nazi Germany in a way that we simply weren’t with the Soviets.  Even telling stories from the Korean War are probably less appealing, because the war was enormously unpopular and ended in stalemate.    

Even so, there are a few more films depicting the crimes of communism than Mr. Boaz allows.  If they are less well known, that may be because they have smaller audiences, perhaps because the Cold War ended with a whimper rather than a bunker.  All of this may in turn explain why there are fewer movies made about the evils of communism: the stories are very dramatic and powerful, but the collapse of communism came about in large part because the system simply broke down and the many peoples who laboured under that yoke finally threw off the yoke themselves.  Sad to say, but great stories about foreigners successfully struggling against their repressive governments are not the source of big box-office results.  What kind of anticommunist movies sell over here?  Rambo.  Now you can probably see why there aren’t more of them being made.   

Some months ago, I had written a post about The Lost City that was swallowed up by a fickle browser and I never got back to giving my impressions of this truly excellent movie.  I was first inspired to see it by this Leon Hadar post, which I had commented on before after seeing The White Countess.  The Lost City has much in common with the latter, and both are outstanding antidotes to Casablanca-style abstract idealism.  Fico Fellove (Andy Garcia) is in many ways the opposite of Bogart’s Rick.  He is a lover of music and dance for their own sake.  He is one who cultivates a life apart from politics and causes not because he has become embittered and cynical in the worst sense, but because he appreciates beauty and the culture of his native city.  “Have you ever thought of living for your country?” the elder Fellove lectures his hotheaded son, Ricardo–Fico does exactly this, and he is not surprisingly the only one of the three sons who lives to the end of the story.  Once Castro comes to power, he does not go off to join a resistance movement, but instead goes to make his own way in America, to build up a life and find a way to get the rest of his family out of Cuba.  It is a moving film that still does not pretend to take itself too seriously.  So that no one becomes too philosophical, Bill Murray’s anonymous “Writer” is always ready to lighten the mood with cornball antics.   

“I don’t have a loyalty to a lost cause,” says Fico Fellove, “but I do have a loyalty to a lost city…and that’s my cause and my curse.”  Fico’s loyalty to place, even a lost place, a place to which he can never return, is inspiring to behold.  Would that more people had a tenth of the devotion.  Fico is a true family man, in that he places his loyalty to his family ahead of everything else.  Unlike his brothers, who either get themselves killed fighting for abstract freedom and democracy or join the sinister forces of Castroism, he places his loyalty to them and the rest of his family first.  If there is one moment where Fico puts principle ahead of these relationships, it is when he realises that “madness” has come to Cuba with the rise of Castro and that he cannot afford to stay, despite his love for the beautiful Aurora (Ines Sastre).   

The Lost City is a tribute to the Havana and the Cuba that were lost in 1959 and afterwards, but it is also a hint of what might eventually be there once again once the deadening shell of party rule is dismantled.  In the end, The Lost City is a sad film lamenting the disappearance of a vibrant and rich world, but it diagnoses very clearly how such places enter into oblivion: through the rigidity of ideology, revolutionary claptrap and promises of the future.     

I finally saw The Last King of Scotland this week, and Forest Whitaker’s performance in the role of Idi Amin is every bit as good as I had heard that it was.  He was certainly deserving of the Academy Award he received.  He embodied the charisma, paranoia and bombast of the dictator in what seemed to be the right proportions.  It would be too much to say that he made Amin a sympathetic figure, which is not really possible, but he did make him believable and real, and this is a tribute to Whitaker’s acting. 

As many of you will already know by now, the story is told from the perspective of a young, self-indulgent Scottish doctor who has decided to have a bit of an adventure (and to get out of the shadow of his father) by going to Uganda, where he happens to become Amin’s personal physician.  Amin’s enthusiasm for all things Scottish helps the young doctor to ingratiate himself with the dictator, and before long the doctor discovers that he has simply become the big man’s lackey and finds himself trapped in the deadly embrace of the jovial monster.  His powerlessness and vulnerability as the dictator’s lackey is brought home in two episodes: in the first, he pleads uselessly with a furious Amin to not expel the Asian merchants from Uganda, and then has this episode thrown back in his face by Amin when the dictator realises the economic consequences of expelling the merchants:

Amin: “Why didn’t you tell me not to expel the Asians?”

Garrigan: “I did!”

Amin: “But you did not persuade me, Nicholas.  You did not persuade me.”

Of course, the absurdity of trying to persuade a man who routinely has his enemies and critics murdered on the slightest hint of disloyalty is clear.

Let me preface this by saying that I haven’t yet seen Children of Men, so what follows is based on what occurred to me as I was reading this interesting Christopher Orr review of the movie.  He first notes Cuaron’s scrubbing of any meaning, polemical or otherwise, from what was originally, as Orr calls it, a “Christian fable.”  With this phrase in connection with the story’s theme of childbirth (or the absence thereof), I am reminded at once of That Hideous Strength, since it is childlessness (albeit not barrenness) that blights the main female character, Jane, in the last installment of the Space Trilogy.  Lewis makes it fairly explicit that there is something deeply awry and unnatural in the woman’s marriage and life that she doesn’t have any children, and once Merlin and the animals destroy the horrid Atlee-esque bureaucratic machine (now that’s what I’m talking about!) the trilogy’s hero, Ransom (a philologist!), is there at the end of the story to advise Jane on how to live in a God-pleasing manner.  (For some reason, no one has ever made film adaptations of these Lewis stories–I wonder why!)  Now, cue angry ranting from Amanda “Some of the Non-Procreating Women Escaped” Marcotte; score one for the natalists.  Orr then also notes the odd, incongruous introduction of anti-immigrant sentiment as a feature of the non-natal future, and cites Ross’ objection that this feature makes no sense at all.  Just as a matter of sheer practicality, dying societies will take whatever labour they can get.   

Therefore, as I was reading Orr’s review, a thought occurred to me: the movie Children for Men is a much better-made, savvier attempt at making something like V for Vendetta.  The similarities are quite plain, so it struck me as odd that I have not seen anyone else compare the two.  Perhaps someone has, but probably no one has thought of the two together since most sane people seem to agree that Children for Men is a very well-done film and those same people seem to agree that Vendetta is the most awful waste of time you were likely to have experienced last year.  Consider: both are set in the near future of an authoritarian/neo-fascist Britain, both are making not-so-subtle criticisms of 2006-07 U.S. policy, both think that the most put-upon groups in such a future authoritarian dictatorship would be improbable selections from the list of Officially Designated Minority Victim Groups (Muslims and homosexuals in Vendetta, immigrants in Children of Men) and both vest their hopes for social and political change in more or less empty symbolic actions carried out by desperate revolutionaries.  Cuaron has taken a story of redemption and renewal and turned it into a rather hollow paean to predictable leftist shibboleths of diversity and “empowering women” (which is why Marcotte thought so highly of it), much as the original Vendetta and the film version took a story of a Catholic rebel fighting for the True Faith and turned him into the symbol for nihilistic anarchism.  The difference is that the entirety of Vendetta was shot through with intellectual and spiritual emptiness, which made it an obviously bad film; Cuaron has enough talent and skill as a director that he can take something of even Vendetta-like pretentiousness and make it into a watchable movie.

When a movie review begins with references to Der Ewige Jude, it is safe to say that it is not going to be a complimentary review.  Dana Stevens of Slate starts out in heavy-handed fashion with the Nazi references and never stops to take a breath.  Then she says:

But to cast 300 as a purely apolitical romp of an action film smacks of either disingenuousness or complete obliviousness.

Only in the most general sense can one cast the telling of this story as political, in that it is a story about a battle (which takes place, after all, in Greece, not in the Near East) and therefore the conflict being depicted has some political dimension as all wars do.  It may therefore have something to say generally about the politics of independence or anti-imperialism or opposition to aggression and conquest (none of which, mind you, does much for the 300-as-Iraq war propaganda argument), but in this it is no more a commentary on current policies than Braveheart referred to the Balkan Wars because both involved questions of national independence to one degree or other.   

I have been similarly unimpressed in the past by attempts to read political messages into the third season of BSG, because it seemed clear to me that a) this was implausible given the content of the New Caprica episodes and b) it was explicitly contrary to what the directors and writers themselves said they were doing.  When everyone involved in the production of something says, “No, we’re not talking about the United States government!” it makes sense to assume that they are probably telling the truth.  After all, it isn’t as if people in the movie and television business make their predominantly left-liberal politics a secret.  If they wanted to state that their project was a pointedly political one, they would do so, because that is what politically active film and TV types do.  Had BSG decided to go that route, they would probably have won as many viewers as they would have lost, so I find it unlikely that they shied away from open criticism of the government because they feared a backlash from fans.  Those who insist that they are not using their art, such as it is, to criticise a specific policy, but who say that they are trying to tell an entertaining and perhaps interesting character-driven story, are probably just trying to tell a story.  If it is set during wartime, wartime themes will keep cropping up that people living through a real war, however remote from the fighting they are, will naturally associate with their war–but that doesn’t mean that the two have any connection at all.  I think the same would hold true for projects that tell a story that might at first seem more favourable to a pro-war view, such as 300 at first appears to be.

I have not seen 300, but I did read the “graphic novel” some years ago and I am, in any case, familiar with the story of Thermopylae.  What are the important details of this story?  It valorises courage against overwhelming odds, praises patriotic defenders of their country against foreign aggression, and espouses the importance of a society governed by nomos and not by the arbitrary will of one man.  Pretty horrifying stuff, let me tell you.  An argument could be made (perhaps I will make it after I have seen the movie) that 300 is one of the most deliciously anti-imperialist, anti-Bush movies ever made.  Bush would obviously play the role of Xerxes (as the Times has already suggested).  His opponents could see themselves as Leonidas and the Spartans, an embattled few who nonetheless prevent the ruin of their country.  It would be really overdrawn and absurd in its own way, but not nearly as absurd as what Ms. Stevens has to say about the film, the experience of which she likens to being raped.  No, really, she does. 

When this sort of story is set at Minas Tirith and the vaguely Oriental hordes of the Hradrim are pressing down on the Riders of Rohan, most left-liberals don’t bat an eye–they cheer on the Men of the West, because they have entered into the fantasy world where the forces arrayed against Minas Tirith are clearly in the service of the Dark Lord.  Not even most multicultis like the Dark Lord, and their radar for ethnic stereotyping seems to turn off as they see strange, vaguely Arab-looking archers on the backs of oliphants.  Even animal rights activists don’t seem to get too upset over the rather mean despatching of the oliphants in Return of the King.  Now, set this same story in history, indeed identify it as a specific, critical moment in the history of our own civilisation, ignoring for the moment that this is an adapted and literally comical retelling of that moment, and watch how the liberal, in this case Ms. Stevens, throws a fit.  Did I not tell you this was coming?  Earlier this week I wrote:

They are pretty much all “over the top” once you see people sprouting claws, leaping from building to building or, in this case, fighting an army depicted with such purely Orientalist imagination that it would make Edward Said spin in his grave.  Everything about 300 the “novel” is over the top.  From the few clips I have seen in previews, the costumes and ethnic stereotypes seem to have leapt full-blown from the deeper reaches of George Lucas’ mind onto the screen.  I expect the cacophony of PC screeching any day now. 

I wrote that on Thursday morning.  By Thursday night, Ms. Stevens’ review had appeared.  Apparently without any sense of irony, Ms. Stevens wrote:

The Persian commander, the god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is a towering, bald club fag with facial piercings, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a disturbing predilection for making people kneel before him.

Er, well, I don’t know about the traits of a “club fag” (a phrase which, if stated at CPAC, would probably merit denunciations from Hugh Hewitt), but to depict the Persian shahanshah as bejeweled and heavily decorated with makeup is not really that far from what we understand about Persian court ceremonials (at least in the late Achaemenid and again in the Sasanian periods) and proskynesis, which was the hateful barbarian custom that Alexander demanded of his commanders, was the ritual prostration before, or at the feet of, the emperor.  Obviously, it symbolises complete submission to the will of the ruler and represents a reminder of the prostrator’s much lower status.  Diocletian, probably not someone whom anyone would have called a “club fag” (certainly not to his face!), adopted proskynesis from the Persians and made it an integral part of what became Byzantine court ceremony.  So in other words, one of the things that really bothers Ms. Stevens is one of the things that 300 actually gets more or less historically right.  Um…okay. 

Since proskynesis is something that an imperial autocrat demands of his subjects, or indeed his slaves, it doesn’t seem so terribly outrageous to depict a ruler who demands such servility as being, well, an arbitrary ruler who demands servility.  Making the heroes of the movie into the opposite, free men who will not abase themselves before a mere mortal, also makes sense from the perspective of telling the story as a morality play (which, at bottom, almost every comic book worth its salt does).  That it actually has more than a little connection with the real Spartans and Persians of history is an added bonus! 

If the story were about heroic resistance fighters battling a Panzer division, or if there were derogatory references to “goose-stepping,” Ms. Stevens would probably be enthralled.  “Race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth” are great for most left-liberals, provided that the “race” being baited is German and the nationalist myth being promoted is that of FDR’s America.  It all depends on whose gigantic rhinoceros is being gored. 

To recount the story of Thermopylae as shown in 300, which is essentially a hyped-up version of an historically true account, is not necessarily to actually embrace the entire binary structure of Greek conceptions of identity where the free, rational Greek men are set off against effeminate, slavish barbarians and irrational women.  Of course, the point is that the Greeks perceived things in this way and understood the peoples around them through this lens, which Miller (probably unthinkingly) reproduces with his own exaggerated flourishes.  Perhaps it does not jibe with multiculti sensibilities as much as the multiracial rebels of The Matrix series, but the story is actually much the same: a dedicated few fighting off hordes of enemies, who are themselves enslaved by the ruler.  Possibly, the movie may try to subvert or alter the entire structure by making the story into one of the resistance of the relatively weak against the mighty. 

Ms. Stevens goes on:

Leonidas likes to rally the troops with bellowed speeches about “freedom,” “honor,” and “glory,” promising that they will be remembered for having created “a world free from mysticism and tyranny.”

This is apparently, from her perspective, a bad thing.  Now let’s understand something.  This is a perfect example of how Miller’s version of Thermopylae, and apparently the movie’s as well, is distorted by Miller’s own biases.  The Spartans weren’t fighting against mysticism.  Only the Romans were more superstititious than the Greeks when it came to mystery cults, oracles and divination, and the Spartans were no exception.  They may have been fighting, in some sense, for the gods of their city, but the rationalist, anti-religious strain that comes through here is entirely anachronistic and better suited to Ridley Scott’s nonsense of medieval history in Kingdom of Heaven.  In any case, these were not 5th century B.C. Voltaireans duking it out with theocrats.  Left-liberals and libertarians alike should love this angle of 300.  It is like V for Vendetta on speed in its bloody hostility to both religion and authority.  (This may be why an Objectivist friend of mine, who introduced me to 300, thought it was such a great story when we were in college.) 

It’s conservatives who should feel reluctant to lend 300 any cheers or support.  Why, after all, are mysticism and tyranny paired together?  What does one really have to do with the other, unless you believe that reason is reason-against-piety and hold that religion is the enemy of human liberty?  Isn’t this just some rehashed Gibbonian Enlightenment garbage about religion as a tool of despotism?  Yes, it is, and conservatives should be on their guard against it.  In this respect, 300 is a gorier version of Ryan Sager’s book or one of Andrew Sullivan’s madcap posts about “big-government Christianists.”  Slate readers should be thrilled by it, and it should tell religious conservatives something about him and his colleagues that Victor Davis Hanson is a big booster of the film. 

Speaking of Romney, he has been making the rounds on the national TV circuit, providing endless fodder for critics who paint him as a constant flip-flopper.

In yet another example, CNN profiled the 2008 presidential field and Romney listed his favorite movie as “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” But as recently as 2003, Romney told media outlets that his favorite was the George Clooney flick “O Brother Where Art Thou.”

Why the switch?

Perhaps the answer lies in this very Biblical description of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in the CNN piece: “Renowned archaeologist and expert in the occult, Dr. Indiana Jones, is hired by the U.S. Government to find the Ark of the Covenant, which is believed to still hold the Ten Commandments.”
And we all know how much the religious right loves the Ten Commandments. ~The Boston Herald

Even though I am a tireless Romney critic, I will actually allow that it is perfectly acceptable for someone to change his mind about his favourite movie.  They are both pretty good, as these sorts of things go, so I can’t even fault him for having bad taste.  Of course, no one would even think to bring up the change if he hadn’t been engaged in pure cynical pandering for the past year.  When you start reinventing yourself entirely as a politician, people begin to distrust you about everything you do, no matter how innocent or normal. 

As it happens, the films convey distinct messages about piety and religion, and O, Brother, Where Art Thou? has a far more explicit theme of the hubristic wanderer brought to repentance and humility (as everyone can see, it is an adaptation of The Odyssey in much of its story).  Might that message have hit too close to home for the ambitious politician who can’t decide which state he’s from? 

If politics had anything to do with the change, I would guess that George Clooney’s leading role in O, Brother was probably what put Romney off the film.

When boyhood’s fire was in my blood
I read of ancient freemen,
For Greece and Rome who bravely stood,
Three hundred men and three men;
And then I prayed I yet might see
Our fetters rent in twain,
And Ireland. long a province, be
A Nation once again!

As the old Fenian song reminds us, the story of Thermopylae has been used and reused more than a few times.  300 the “graphic novel” was no different, and shares with this Fenian song the conceit that Spartans were fighting for “freedom,” which is only true in the sense of thinking of the independence of their polis and resistance to barbarian rule as defining freedom.  In the mouths of Miller’s Spartans, the invocations of “freedom and reason” come off sounding like bad speechwriting for the current administration or, just as annoyingly in its way, the motto of a libertarian magazine.  Whether or not the lines from the “novel” sound as trite when spoken in the film, I don’t know.  When reading it, I do remember thinking that it was this forced ideological part of the “novel”–where the Spartans simply had to be fighting for some high Ideal and couldn’t just be fighting to repel the invasion of foreign conquerors–that was the least interesting.  No doubt it is only a matter of time before certain jingo enthusiasts of the movie begin referring to war opponents as new Ephialteses. 

The AP movie critic has dubbed 300 “ultraviolent.”  If the hype about how supposedly super-gory the mildly violent Apocalypto was is any indication of how squeamish modern movie critics have become, the knock on 300 for being excessively violent (which seems silly, since it is a movie about the comic version of a battle) is probably overblown.  I haven’t seen it yet, so I can’t say myself whether the other knock the AP critic gives it is justified.  Like 300 the “graphic novel,” which I have actually read (who says four years of college and five years of graduate school taught me nothing?), the movie is apparently extremely pleased with its own seriousness and insists that you, the audience, take it just as seriously:

But Snyder’s depiction of the ancient Battle of Thermopylae, in which 300 Spartans fought off a much larger Persian army, is so over-the-top it’s laughable — so self-serious, it’s hard to take seriously. 

I don’t know what it means to say that a movie based on a comic book is over the top.  There are bad comic book movies (Daredevil, Fantastic Four, X-Men 3) and entertaining comic book movies.  They are pretty much all “over the top” once you see people sprouting claws, leaping from building to building or, in this case, fighting an army depicted with such purely Orientalist imagination that it would make Edward Said spin in his grave.  Everything about 300 the “novel” is over the top.  From the few clips I have seen in previews, the costumes and ethnic stereotypes seem to have leapt full-blown from the deeper reaches of George Lucas’ mind onto the screen.  I expect the cacophony of PC screeching any day now.  But criticising exaggeration and camp in comic book movies would be like ridiculing Bollywood movies for all the song and dance numbers–these things are integral to the genre and cannot be cut out without making it into an entirely different kind of movie.  You may as well hold the moodiness of noir films against them, or discount the New Wave for its unconventional style–what’s the point? 

So a friend of mine here at Chicago recently recommended that I see Fanaa, the 2006 Kajol-Aamir Khan vehicle that saw the stunning Bengali actress return to the screen as if no time had passed since her last appearance in 2001.  Two days ago I did happen to watch it, and I was impressed.  Once you allow for the melodrama and improbable plot devices, which are inevitable, it is possible to appreciate it as a quite decent telling of a tragic love story.  The story is one that our 24-obsessed nation could enjoy: will love win out over jihad?  One of the songs has a line that is striking, and quite in keeping with what I understand to be part of a long tradition in Islamic and Indian religious and love poetry:

tere pyaar me.n ho jaa’uu.n fanaa

May your love annihilate me!

Apparently, as I discovered recently, the state of Gujarat banned the film in response to Aamir Khan’s comments on the state of some farmers displaced by a dam project.  So, while I was up tonight at the local Dunkin’ Donuts, I got to talking to the man behind the counter there, and it turned out that he was from Gujarat.  That reminded me of the story about Fanaa.  From there we launched into a discussion of the movie and Kajol (the cousin of everyone’s favourite, Rani Mukherjee), pictured just below. 

We then came around to the latest Bollywood news about the engagement of Abishek Bachchan and Aishwariya Rai, which everyone seems intent on bringing up each time I talk about Indian m