“(It’s) partly because public opinion has really shifted on the war, so there might be a marketing aspect to that,” says Ron Eyerman, a professor of sociology at Yale, about the sudden flood of Iraq-themed or related films. “But of course it takes a long time to make a film, so you’re not going to watch public opinion polls and then start to make a film. The timing of that just doesn’t work.”
Films that have already played include Paul Haggis’ “In The Valley of Elah,” about a retired veteran (Tommy Lee Jones) trying to find out why his son was brutally murdered after shipping back from Iraq, and “The Kingdom,” a look at homegrown terrorism in Saudi Arabia dressed in the clothes of an action thriller.
More recently, Reese Witherspoon and Meryl Streep top-lined “Rendition,” about a woman whose Arab-American husband is seized and tortured by the U.S. government.
The documentary “No End in Sight,” a critical analysis of the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq, surfaced on DVD last month after a limited theatrical run.
Still to come is director and star Robert Redford’s “Lions for Lambs” (Nov. 9), which tells three stories about war, patriotism, and the media build-up to the invasion; Brian de Palma’s reportedly brutal “Redacted” (Nov. 16), which uses video-cam footage for an ultra-realistic take on the true story of U.S. soldiers who raped and killed a young Iraqi girl; and “Badland,” (Nov. 30 in New York and Los Angeles) which deals with one returning soldier who cannot return to normal life.
Further down the road, “Grace is Gone” (Dec. 7) features John Cusack as a husband and father trying to tell his kids that their mother has been killed in the conflict.
“The Kite Runner” (Dec. 14 limited), set in war-torn Afghanistan, has led to death threats in that still-troubled country against its young stars for a scene of homosexual rape.
And, in March 2008, director Kimberly Peirce (“Boys Don’t Cry”) presents “Stop-Loss,” which finds Ryan Phillippe ordered to turn around and head back to Iraq after returning home to Texas, due to what many war critics have labeled a back-door 룰렛 시스템배팅 draft.
Not surprisingly, the movies all address the Iraqi situation in terms that one would hardly call positive.
Hollywood’s reputation as a liberal bastion has been around for decades. But at the same time, there’s no question that the majority of the public has turned against the President’s foreign policy. Despite this, however, there are no signs that movie-going audiences are interested in seeing current events unspool at their local multiplex.
“In The Valley of Elah” practically disappeared right after opening, while “The Kingdom” and “Rendition” have vastly underperformed at the box office even with the star power of Witherspoon, Streep and Jamie Foxx.
“People generally don’t have the same kind of personal involvement in this war that they did (in the past),” suggests Eyerman as one reason for the public’s disinterest. “This is not like the Vietnam War, where the mass public saw its sons and daughters out there. Now there’s a professional army and it does seem very far removed from most people’s everyday lives. My mother used to say over and over again: ‘When I go to the movies, I don’t want to see bad things. I want to go and have a good time.’ That’s sort of continual in terms of mass media and things like films.”
In addition, public views are more or less fixed at this point. Chances are that a staunchly conservative Bush supporter isn’t going to spend his money to see liberal Robert Redford hammer his hero’s presidency for two hours in “Lions for Lambs.” And if you oppose the war, most of the new films aren’t going to teach you anything you don’t already know, or are only going to make you angrier.
Eyerman also theorizes that the public is simply more cynical about its government now. “People say things like, ‘Well, that’s just how politicians behave,’ or ‘Sure it’s about the oil, but that’s how things are,’ or ‘Sure we torture, but that what’s they’ve got to do,'” he says. “This may be my own generational bias, but there may have been a little moral concern about Watergate and Vietnam that made films about those subjects popular back then, while movies about today’s current events are not.”
Indeed, topical movies like “All the President’s Men” and “The Deer Hunter” were popular and critical successes when they arrived in the late 1970s. It remains to be seen whether any of the upcoming Iraq films engage the public in the same way and possibly even move them to further action, like wider protests demanding the withdrawal of the troops.
“The anti-war movement of the ’60s and ’70s was important in that it helped create public interest in protest and social critique,” says Eyerman. “This must have helped create a wider audience for such films. But today there are many more vehicles to find and express critical voices, especially on the Internet. It might well be that movies, like print media, have declined in significance in this sense. People turn elsewhere for critical discussion and to movies for fun.”
By Don Kaye
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