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November 15, 2005
Hollywood Goes to War (Again)
I learned about the New York Times Magazine special movie issue on Hollywood and war via Alterman's discussion of Matt Bai’s backhanded compliment of Hollywood Liberals. I think Alterman's take on the article is just about right. Bai clearly seems angry that Rob Reiner and the Hollywood Liberals were, as Alterman puts it, "righter about the war than most of his colleagues in the mainstream media." It's clear that Bai wants to retain the image of Reiner and company as either politically unsophisticated or perhaps politically insincere, unwilling to "take to the streets" in support of their convictions.
Bai's evidence for suggesting that Hollywood types are unsophisticated relies on one anecdote about a Hollywood party in which Ben and Jerry's Ben Cohen describes economic poilcy using Oreo cookies. In fact, the opposition to the war among many Hollywood players is attributed to the very fact that "Hollywood was so out of touch with what seemed like reality that it was, in fact, entirely in touch with the new political ethos of Washington, where facts are elasticized in pursuit of box-office approbation." Because critically thinking about the problems with Bush's case for the war wouldn't have worked now, would it?
Perhaps more troubling are Bai's claims that Hollywood stars failed to take to the streets in protest of the war in Iraq. This July 31, 2003, Altermedia article tells a much different story, reporting that stars including Tim Robbins, Christine Lahti, Martin Sheen, and James Cromwell (to name but a few) did take to the streets (quite literally) in stating their opposition to the war in Iraq.
I didn't intend to write such a long response to Bai's article because the Magazine has published several other articles on war and cinema that are far more interesting. Tom Bissell's "Rules of Engagement" offers an intriguing critique of the current crop of war documentaries, arguing that they are sometimes too close to the action and released too quickly to give us a sense of what's going on. Bissell criticizes Control Room and Gunner Palace, among others, for not offering a long view of the war, including the history of Iraq, arguing in favor of a film like Dreams of Sparrows as an alternative to the "partial maps" that produce what he calls "journalism in a hurry."
I think it's reasonable to argue that many of these documentaries seem "hurried," and Bissell is absolutely right to fault many of these films for not offering Iraqi citizens an opportunity to have their voices heard, but I'd also like to defend the role of multiple documentaries as "partial maps" rather than expecting that any documentary will offer a complete picture of the war. In fact, these "partial maps" (a term I like quite a bit) often structure within them the impossibility of a complete understanding of the war, their inability to offer a definitive portrait of what is happening in Iraq as we continue to learn new information and to watch things unfold.
The entire NYT Magazine issue is worth checking out, and I might have more to say later, but I have some other work that is calling my name.
Posted by chuck at November 15, 2005 1:21 PM
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