Oct 19, 2007 11:39 PM
by Stefan Beck
I couldn’t help laughing when, several years ago, James Wolcott referred to Bruce Willis’s rumored pro-war flick as The Smirk that Ate Mosul. As “unpatriotic” goes, there’s refusing to wear your flag lapel pin and then there’s refusing to salute the screen giant who gave us four installments of Die Hard—but I’d say one-trick Willis has made himself fair game at this point.
I thought of Willis while reading this George Packer piece about Brian De Palma’s Redacted, the latest ripped-off from the headlines anti-war drama to issue forth from Hollywood. (Others include In the Valley of Elah, Lions for Lambs, Rendition, and Stop-Loss, the latter two of which by their titles alone give the viewer a good idea of what he’s about to be browbeaten with.) The review pulls no punches. An old New York Times article about In the Valley of Elah referred to “a new and perhaps risky willingness in the entertainment business to push even the touchiest debates about post-9/11 security, Iraq and the troops’ status from the confines of documentaries into the realm of mainstream political drama.” Packer knows that not only is a film like Redacted the furthest thing from “risky,” it can also be dangerous:
De Palma has announced that his intention in making “Redacted” is to end the war. “The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people,” he said after a press screening in Venice. “The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to get their congressmen to vote against the war.” It seems unlikely to me that “Redacted” will have that effect, or even that De Palma is serious about wanting it to. The movie encourages you to abandon the very powers of analysis and discrimination that might lead you to write your congressman. De Palma presents soldiers as psychopaths and Iraqis as their nameless victims. The dialogue in the rape scene, with the ringleader babbling about weapons of mass destruction and supporting the troops, is so heavy-handed that it has the opposite effect of making the war’s violence real; instead, it makes you think that you’re watching a highly stylized cinematic rape scene. The same is true of all the “realistic” camera devices: they are so many frames around a director’s incurious and unconvincing fantasy. Every scene, down to the checkpoint where there are mysteriously no Iraqi soldiers, betrays its creator’s indifference to “the reality of what is happening in Iraq.”
So why did this remind me of The Smirk that Ate Mosul? It reminded me that, from Paths of Glory (World War I) to Three Kings (Gulf War I), I can think of far more anti- than pro-war movies I’ve thought really valuable. But the ones being made today are, like Redacted, more often concerned with flattering their audiences’ and even their directors’ prejudices than with any “reality.” An explicit portrayal of one horrifying incident is not an argument, but, unlike Packer, I’m willing to believe that Brian De Palma hasn’t grasped that.
Everyone knows that Hollywood is anti-war, and there is no shortage of conservative cultural critics to complain about it. They shouldn’t. They should complain that, in cases like Redacted, today’s Hollywood is anti-thought. The only paths of glory these propagandists know about are the emotionally manipulative formulae that lead to an Oscar nomination. When I feel like turning off my brain and pumping my fist in the air, I’ll call Bruce Willis.