I have a soft spot for Oliver Stone, that Pablo Neruda of the steady-cam. Never has a left-wing filmmaker matched the skill with which Stone's political lessons back-fire on him. Apart from making a Turkish prison look realistically unpleasant, just how failed has his agitprop oeuvre actually been? Let's tabulate:
1. Stone wanted to create the cautionary tale of the Eighties, a glamorous financial thriller about overnight millionaires, steak tartare and limousine sex acts that would snuff Wall Street careers before their Series 7's got going. Instead, he created a primer on self-conscious decadence that's more quoted on the floor of the Exchange than Sun Tzu's The Art of War or Yeats' "The Second Coming." So unsuccessful was Stone at de-romanticizing insider trading that he's made a sequel to Wall Street. Its working title was The Misunderstood Collateralized Mortgage Broker.
2. Stone set out to depict John F. Kennedy as the victim of a hydra-headed government conspiracy that reached all the way to the top (or all the way to the top, as it was probably transcribed in the screenplay). An overlong, inter-spliced masterdud starring Kevin Costner in his first post-apocalyptic role, JFK is probably best remembered today as the template for a cute Seinfeld bit about spitting on Keith Hernandez. And JFK himself? Almost as anticlimactic in history as Barack Obama is in real-time.
3. No easy task to make Richard Nixon look pitiable and sympathetic, but in Stone's less-than-Shakespearean telling, the disgraced president was a paranoid mama's boy who rightly wondered why when he did something naughty, it was wrong, but when a well-coiffed Democrat from Massachusetts did it, it was Camelot.
4. "Daroosh is dead and I am king / Of everywhere and everything." Alexander the Great exaggerated, but as a bi-curious bleach-blonde Oedipal case with an army, he must have also wondered where he found the time to conquer half the known world. The great Macedonian's martial and imperial legacy remains in tact on The History Channel whose DVDs of his exploits are less remaindered than one catastrophic biopic.
I haven't seen Stone's hagiographies of Castro and Chavez (although the latter "documentary" has been ably demolished by Ron Radosh and Antonio Rumbos). But rest assured, now that he's celebrated them on celluloid, their regimes can't be long for this world. Nor is Stone deterred in his Alice-in-Wonderland efforts at counterintelligence filmmaking. Evidently unsatisfied with the creep of ultraconservative patriotic sentiment in the United States, he is subtly trying to foment a Tea Party coup by offering his take on the occluded history of the nation. According to Camilla Long at the Sunday Times:
His next task, the leviathan Secret History of America, tackles received versions of events in the last century, an extension, perhaps, of what he did in 1991’s JFK, when he suggested that the president’s assassination was in fact a high-level conspiracy. The 10-part documentary will address Stalin and Hitler “in context”, he says. “Hitler was a Frankenstein but there was also a Dr Frankenstein. German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support.”
He also seeks to put his atrocities in proportion: “Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30m."
Why such a focus on the Holocaust then? “The Jewish domination of the media,” he says. “There’s a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has f***** up United States foreign policy for years.”
A cheque to Palin Headquarters would have sufficed.
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