Film After Film. J. Hoberman
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narrative necessity is a drunken roundhouse, and whatever passes for logic is a factor of the last plot device left standing. It’s a small world after all, particularly in comparison to Arnold. When the star instructively yells, “You cannot fight terror with terror,” at the resident CIA sleazebag (Elias Koteas), he’s creating his own foreign policy; when he extends his protection to El Lobo’s consort (Francesca Neri), he’s acting as a nation unto himself.
Collateral damage is something that Americans have inflicted far more than they have suffered, but in this case, the phrase is synonymous with windfall profits. Just as George Bush’s questionable presidency was consecrated by the War on Terror, so Schwarzenegger’s flagging career should be revived. Perhaps the Fireman would again decide to run for governor of California. All together now: “Heads up. Let’s … do … it!”
Fifteen months later, Schwarzenegger did successfully cast himself as protagonist and beneficiary of another extraordinary crisis, namely the drive to recall California governor Gray Davis.
The beat went on. Hollywood rolled out a well-hyped succession of combat films and the public lined up to see them. More were said to be in production. Not all would come to fruition; that they were announced was sufficient to define the moment. Titled “The Art of War,” the following piece was the cover story for the Village Voice’s June 19, 2002 issue.
NEW YORK, JUNE 19, 2002
A landscape of smoky rubble littered with American corpses: Mogadishu, the Ia Drang valley, downtown Baltimore. For seven weeks out of the past twenty-two, the nation’s No. 1 or 2 box-office attraction has been a spectacular war film. Add to these hits—Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers, and The Sum of All Fears—such crypto-combat, high-body-count chart-toppers as Collateral Damage and Attack of the Clones, and 2002 has been springtime for carnage, at least at the movies.
As Black Hawk Down instructed, “Leave no man behind.” Last weekend’s Windtalkers may have been butt-kicked by Scooby-Doo, but more spectacles of organized mayhem are on the way: To End All Wars continues the World War II revival, Men in Black II envisions warfare in outer space, K-19: The Widowmaker and Below bring back the Cold War nuclear submarine drama, Gods and Generals resurrects the Civil War. Meanwhile, on television, CBS floated the since-canceled AFP: American Fighter Pilot, and the VH1 reality-based series Military Diaries will soon be joined by ABC’s Afghanistan-set Profiles from the Front Line.
Not since the flurry of Vietnam movies in the late 1980s has the combat film been so viable or so visible. And not since the gung-ho Reagan-era warnography of Rambo and Top Gun had the brass been so pleased. Vice President Dick Cheney took a breather from his undisclosed location to join Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at the gala Washington premiere of Black Hawk Down, the first movie for which (thanks to Rumsfeld’s personal intervention) US troops were dispatched to a foreign country to aid in its production. We Were Soldiers and The Sum of All Fears were similarly treated as official art. Mel Gibson’s Vietnam War vehicle We Were Soldiers was previewed for George W. Bush, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Karl Rove, and sundry military VIPs at a well-publicized White House screening. (An aide summarized the president’s evaluation of the movie as “violent” but “good.”) The Sum of All Fears had its world premiere in Washington, DC, as Paramount took care to alert the media that the producers had enjoyed considerable, even unprecedented, CIA access and Pentagon support.1
All of last spring’s movies, if not the TV shows, predate September 11. Their inspiration came not from the attacks on New York and Washington or Team Bush’s war on terror but the strong showing of Saving Private Ryan (which grossed $216 million and topped the box office for a month during the Lewinsky summer of ’98, when Bill Clinton too was striving to show he was not just a lover but a fighter). Credit the entertainment industry, or at least producer Jerry Bruckheimer and writer Tom Clancy, with uncanny prescience. Bruckheimer’s Pearl Harbor grossed $200 million in the spring and summer of 2001, but what truly seemed prophetic the day after September 11 was the movie’s blend of blockbuster mega-disaster and historical war epic.
Bruckheimer’s art film Black Hawk Down was rushed into theaters in late December (and subsequently furnished on video to US military bases) to capitalize on the nation’s new bellicosity. Throughout the winter, this visceral spectacle of US soldiers pinned down under Somali fire effectively functioned as an example of virtual combat. Black Hawk Down inspired patriotic sentiment, precipitated European ridicule, and invited anti-war protest, even as it stood in for the American debacle in Afghanistan that never quite happened (and to which reporters had even less access than Operation Desert Storm).
The scenario structures the event. Bruckheimer co-produced Top Gun, the 1986 movie that military historian Lawrence H. Suid credits with rehabilitating Hollywood’s image of the US armed forces. Clancy was the nearest thing the military establishment has to a Homeric bard. The writer had been recognized by the afternoon of September 11 as a near “precog” and pundit supreme for his 1994 novel Debt of Honor’s climactic description of terrorists wiping out the entire US government by crashing their hijacked airplane into the Capitol during a joint session of Congress. The Sum of All Fears, adapted from an earlier Clancy book, opened amid international jitters that the perennial Kashmir dispute might precipitate a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan—resurrecting a cinematic mode more or less dormant since the early 1960s by bringing the Bomb home.2
A week before The Sum of All Fears opened to become the nation’s top-grossing movie, a New York Times Magazine cover story warned of the inevitable nuclear terrorism that was bound to befall American cities. “Not if but when” is how Bill Keller’s remarkably fatalistic “Nuclear Nightmares” began, going on to term the deployment of a high-radiation dirty bomb as “almost childishly simple.” The Sum of All Fears obligingly visualized the possibility of such a radiological dispersion device detonated by foreign terrorists at Baltimore’s Camden Yards, where virtually the entire US government is attending the Super Bowl. It’s the ultimate advertisement for Homeland Security. The president’s men are hustled out faster than you can say “anthrax.” A frenzied attempt at poignant montage presents the American people as goofball cheerleaders, their faces painted in support of their team, idiotically oblivious to their imminent incineration.
In the early 1960s, imagining nuclear war was called thinking about the unthinkable. What’s startling in The Sum of All Fears is that the nuke actually happens—rolling shock waves flinging cars into the air and swatting planes to the ground, a big black mushroom cloud rising over what once was Baltimore as the movie’s surviving protagonists race around the white-light radioactive inferno. As The Sum of All Fears captured its second weekend, US Customs officials called a news conference to demonstrate their bomb detection capability. Meanwhile, the Chris Rock vehicle Bad Company offered a similarly radioactive terrorist scenario played for laughs and on cable TV, Turner Classic Movies topically offered historical perspective with a triple bill of Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe, and The China Syndrome.
The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence may have officially backed off its announced intention to plant disinformation in the foreign press, but it would seem that Washington takes its cues from Hollywood—as well as vice versa. Attorney General John Ashcroft timed for the Monday morning that followed The Sum of All Fears’ second triumphant weekend his proud announcement that the currently beleaguered FBI and CIA had successfully collaborated on the arrest of one Abdullah al-Muhajir, born Jose Padilla in Brooklyn. Already detained for a month since deplaning in Chicago, Padilla was being held as a military prisoner and suspected of abetting an Al Qaeda plot to produce the very scenario The Sum of All Fears so vividly illustrated—the drama of a nuclear device detonated in an East Coast American city.3
Indeed, the attorney general received another timely cue the following month with the opening of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. Having been announced on the eve of the millennium, as the Y2K panic was reaching its peak, Spielberg’s science-fiction policier went into production in the spring of 2001 and wrapped that July. Premiering in June 2002, the director’s first post-9/11 release was a tale of precognitive police work that, as many reviewers pointed out, uncannily anticipated Ashcroft’s notions of preventative detention. “The guilty are arrested before the law is broken,” TV spots warned, strategically placed during national and local news programs