November 24, 2003 - November 30, 2003 -- Variety Times

Hollywood's shifting winds
By Neal Gabler - Variety

It has been scarcely eight months since rumpled provocateur Michael Moore took the podium at the Oscarcast to accept his trophy for documentary feature and then proceeded to excoriate President Bush for dragging the country ever closer to war with Iraq.

Attendees were clearly flummoxed that night. Despite the industry's liberal proclivities, they were in no mood to attack what promised to be a popular war, and Moore's rant got a surprisingly cool reception.

Even by Hollywood standards, Moore had gone too far. He was out of the mainstream. The impending war, after all, was supposed to be good, simple and quick --- a payback for 9/11.

What a difference a year makes!

The good and simple war has turned out arguably not to be as good and inarguably not as simple as the Bush administration said it would be. Many Iraqis, who, we were told, would greet us as liberators, see us as occupiers. The country's infrastructure which, we were told, would quickly be repaired using Iraqi oil money, remains in shambles, and as for the oil money, there is none. Casualties mount while security declines. Meanwhile, no weapons of mass destruction have been found and no evidence of ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda has been unearthed. All of which leaves Hollywood, like the rest of America, far more skeptical today than it was in March.

In retrospect, it would be tempting to view Hollywood's support for --- or at least its less than whole-hearted opposition to --- the war as a brief aberration and to look for signs of resurgent anti-war sentiment. Is the enthusiasm over "Mystic River," for example, an expression of a new cynicism? But the film industry's disillusionment with the war may be different from the general public's because the industry isn't just reacting to events; it helped define them by providing narratives that the politicians, the public and the media could use to frame the conflict. Public policy had been deliberately "cinematized" or turned into a movie. Understanding that process is critical in understanding how Hollywood's political consciousness has changed since the last Oscar telecast. What detractors see as the film industry's reflexive return to anti-war liberalism now that the Iraqi conflict hasn't gone according to plan may actually be something much deeper: a realization that public policy framed in cinematic terms is dishonest and dangerous.

Still, it has been an irresistible impulse. The Sept. 11 attacks were themselves a kind of "movie," and it was imagined cinematically. The devastation of the World Trade Center was right out of a special effects blockbuster and so was the subsequent expectation that the arch-villain, Osama bin Laden, would be captured. This is exactly what the president promised, even invoking the language of a sheriff from some old Western --- "dead or alive."

When the administration realized that events wouldn't conform to the movie they had plotted and that bin Laden would not be captured so easily, it changed the narrative to one whose expectations they thought would be much easier to fulfill --- from a anti-terrorist thriller to a war movie. They would catch Saddam Hussein and free Iraq.

Certainly among the reasons why the Iraq war initially elicited such widespread support across the political spectrum --- and led to Moore's Oscar rebuke --- was that it was proposed with such perfect cinematic contours. Saddam was an ideal villain. He looked sinister, and the footage of him firing his rifle in the air didn't help soften his image. More, the idea of this madman having a nuclear or biological capability was a familiar and frightening plot element from just about every James Bond movie, every Jack Ryan thriller and scores of genre pictures where an intrepid hero must stop a nefarious scheme. Similarly, the idea of a criminal cabal, Saddam and Osama, was familiar from "Superman," "Batman" and dozens of other comicbook spectacles where bad guys team up to commit mayhem. In the end, the war was conceptualized aesthetically rather than politically. It was made audience-friendly.

If the narrative contours of the war were cinematic so too was its prosecution. This wasn't going to be any bloody Vietnam picture with our soldiers ambushed and blown apart. The Bush administration encouraged the public to visualize a hypertechno epic where America's superior gadgetry would immediately dismantle the Iraqi hierarchy and win the day. Even the term "shock and awe," which the Pentagon circulated to describe the initial days of the battle, could have been cribbed from the ad campaign of any teen blockbuster or videogame. And at the end of it all, we would have the president in his flight suit --- anyone remember "Independence Day"? --- landing on an aircraft carrier and appearing before cheering troops and a banner that read "Mission Accomplished." The hostilities were over and America had won. Mission Accomplished. Fade to black. Cue music. Roll credits.

It was a pulse-racing, patriotic climax, but it had a problem. While it is easy to rally support by casting a conflict as a movie, war as a genre piece only works if the war abides by narrative conventions. This one obviously hasn't, which even then might not have undermined support for it if the administration hadn't insisted on bumping up our expectations in the first place or tacked on its phony ending. We did get the stirring penultimate image of the statues of Saddam being hauled down, but we never got the image of the Iraqis rushing to embrace our soldiers and handing them flowers as the liberated did in World War II pictures.

Instead the war has defied those conventions and come very close to the narrative entropy that defined Vietnam films like "Apocalypse Now" and "Platoon." Even the heroic subplots of Iraq proved hollow. Jessica Lynch is a decent and brave woman, but one doubts whether she was heroic as well. In losing its frame, the Iraq War is also in danger of losing its sense. Or put another way, he who lives by movie conventions may also die by movie conventions.

If anything, this, as much as the mess in Iraq, explains Hollywood's disillusionment with the war now. Having a special responsibility for providing the "plot" for the war, the entertainment community seems to have recognized sooner than anyone else that entertainment and politics don't really mix. That also helps explain Hollywood's tepid response to the gubernatorial candidacy of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was, after all, one of their own. It wasn't because Schwarzenegger was a Republican in a Democratic community. By any measure, he was a moderate. It was because he turned his campaign into a movie just as President Bush had done with the war, and Hollywood had come to appreciate the difference between fiction and reality, even if California's voters didn't. Schwarzenegger had no policies, but he did have a narrative: He would single-handedly make things work in Sacramento the way he did in his movies.

When he made his Oscar speech, Moore seemed like the loudmouth in the theater who shouts during the movie that it's all fake. In the months since, the loudmouth seems to have become a prophet. That's what Hollywood has discovered with a vengeance about the war in Iraq. It's not a movie. Unfortunately, it's life.