Film After Film. J. Hoberman
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leather jumpsuit and a bionic arm. Her default setting on permanent hissy fit, this svelte femmebot has an irresistible habit of cocking her head and glaring with impersonal curiosity at the victim she’s about to vaporize. What’s more, she can fry Arnold’s circuits.
Back in the mid ’80s, Terminator inspired an impressive degree of academic discourse—thanks to its tough-girl heroine, the convoluted, bizarrely oedipal time-travelling premise that had John Connor being fathered by his future best friend, and Arnold’s then new-minted status as Hollywood’s reigning action superstar, the blockbuster personified. As befits a third outing, Rise of the Machines offers little that is novel. All temporal mind-bending and kinky genealogy are subsumed in the comforting notion that our world is about to come under the malign control of a single, giant, self-aware computer program. Indeed, the program probably wrote the movie, which could be most efficiently described as a quasi-videogame featuring a pair of unkillable antagonists.
The opening joust’s mega-bumper-car ride makes for nearly as impressive a carnival of destruction as the great freeway battle in The Matrix Reloaded. The fighting, however, is much more hands-on. Responding to Mostow’s directorial joystick, the endlessly regenerating Terminator and Terminatrix alternately lift and slam, shove and hurl, toss and pound, crush and heave each other, in a clanky ballet mécanique that could easily be re-imagined as terminal foreplay.
Terminator 3 was still in movie theaters when a special election to recall California’s governor was announced on July 27. Schwarzenegger declared his candidacy on The Tonight Show on August 7—a different sort of “cybernetic organism”: part performer, part politician. In a sense, the president followed suit. The following piece, headlined “Lights, Camera, Exploitation,” was the cover story for the August 28 edition of the Village Voice.
NEW YORK, AUGUST 28, 2003
In the end, 9/11 turned out to be a made-for-TV movie, or rather, the basis for one—a shameless propaganda vehicle for our superstar president George W. Bush.
The upcoming Showtime feature DC 9/11: Time of Crisis is a signal advance in the instant, ongoing fictionalization of American history, complete with the president fulminating most presidentially against “tinhorn terrorists,” decisively employing the word problematic in a complete sentence, selling a rationale for preemptive war, and presciently laying out American foreign policy for the next eighteen months. “We start with bin Laden,” Bush (played by Timothy Bottoms) tells his cabinet. “That’s what the American people expect … So let’s build a coalition for that job. Later, we can shape different coalitions for different tasks.”
Scheduled for cablecast on September 7, DC 9/11 inaugurates Bush’s re-election campaign fifty weeks before the 9/11 Memorial Republican National Convention opens in Madison Square Garden. DC 9/11 also marks a new stage in the American cult of personality: the actual president as fictional protagonist.4
That Bottoms is reconfiguring his role in the Comedy Central series That’s My Bush! (a gross-out sitcom canceled a month before 9/11) provides a uniquely American twist. In the aftermath of the first Iraq war, Bush the elder was brought down in part by Dana Carvey’s devastating campaign of ridicule on Saturday Night Live. Drafting the clownish Bottoms effectively preempts that strategy. Indeed, casting a former Bush travesty in the role of the serious Bush only reinforces the telefilm’s agenda, namely that the events of September 11 served to render divine Bush’s dubious mandate.
A movie that attempted to reconstruct Bush’s actual activities on 9/11 would be fascinating, if not entirely heroic. A detailed attempt to account for the president’s movements and actions on what he later termed that “interesting day” may be found at the Center for Cooperative Research website (cooperativeresearch.org): Bush had just arrived at a Florida elementary school for a pre-planned 9 a.m. photo op when he was informed that a plane had crashed into the WTC fifteen minutes before. Bush would later make the impossible claim that he saw the event televised live. (In early December, the president told an Orlando audience he’d been watching TV that morning and saw “an airplane hit the tower of a—of a—you know … and I said, ‘Well, there’s one terrible pilot.’ ”)
As Secret Service men evidently were watching TV in another classroom, however, news of the second crash reached him almost immediately. Bush’s startled response, documented on video for all eternity and seen by millions, is restaged in the movie: As Chief of Staff Andrew Card appears beside Bush and whispers in his ear, the president responds with visible shock and panic (the real Bush was more expressive than Bottoms). Missing from DC 9/11 is the president’s next move—picking up a children’s book called The Pet Goat.
By then, back in the real DC, Secret Service men had already burst into Dick Cheney’s office and bodily carried the vice president to a secure location in the White House basement. Meanwhile, responding to Press Secretary Ari Fleischer’s hastily scrawled instructions (“DON’T SAY ANYTHING YET”), Bush actually remained in the classroom for almost ten minutes, taking his time thanking the kids and the teachers (“Hoo! These are great readers …”) shortly before boarding Air Force One, where he was informed that his plane was the next terrorist target.
DC 9/11 subtly re-jiggered these events so that Cheney was hustled into the White House basement only after Bush is aloft—the inference being that the entire leadership was equally dazed and confused, and that relocating Bush was part of the solution rather than one of the problems.
According to The Washington Post, Cheney, seconded by Condoleezza Rice, instructed Bush not to return to Washington. Nevertheless, the movie does attempt to deal with the circumstances that had the president largely incommunicado for the rest of the day. According to the Post account, there was little debate on Air Force One—the plane banked sharply and flew south to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where Bush’s first official statement was made at 12:36 p.m. He appeared hesitant and nervous—as does Bottoms in the movie. Within the hour, Air Force One had taken off for another base, and not until that evening, after eight hours flying from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska to Washington, did the president address the nation.
The threat to the president’s plane was soon recognized as bogus, although it took weeks for the White House to acknowledge it. By September 13, however, presidential image-maker Karl Rove had released his script: “I’m not going to let some tinhorn terrorist keep the president of the United States away from the nation’s capital,” Bush had supposedly complained, a line further improved in DC 9/11 as “If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come and get me! I’ll be at home, waiting for the bastard!” Simultaneously, the real Rice was detailing Bush’s instant grasp of the situation, explaining that he was the first in his administration to understand the meaning of the events.
This is the story of DC 9/11. Screenwriter and co-executive producer Lionel Chetwynd had access to top officials and staffers, including Bush, Fleischer, Card, Rove, and Rumsfeld—all of whom are played by look-alike actors in the movie (as are Cheney and Rice, John Ashcroft, Karen Hughes, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and Paul Wolfowitz). The script was subsequently vetted by right-wing pundits Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer, and Morton Kondracke. Chetwynd, whose vita includes such politically charged movies and telefilms as The Hanoi Hilton, The Heroes of Desert Storm, The Siege at Ruby Ridge, Kissinger and Nixon, and Varian’s War, is a prominent Hollywood conservative—a veteran of the 1980 Reagan campaign who, after Bill Clinton’s election twelve years later, was recruited by right-wing pop culture ideologue David Horowitz to set up the Wednesday Morning Club (“a platform in the entertainment community where a Henry Hyde can come and get a warm welcome and respectful hearing,” as Chetwynd later told The Nation).
Chetwynd bonded with Dubya in March 2001 when, at Rove’s suggestion, Varian’s War was screened at the White House; Chetwynd was subsequently involved in various post-9/11 Hollywood–Washington conclaves and currently serves Bush as part of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Shot largely in Toronto, DC 9/11 was eligible for Canadian film subsidies, but it is, in nearly every other sense, an official production.5
Would JFK have had the audacity to promote a docudramatization of the Cuban Missile Crisis as part of his bid for reelection? As political as PT 109, DC 9/11 models Bush on Kennedy’s appearances