Political Fiction
Warning — spoiler alert! The bad guy in Mission: Impossible 3 turns out to be a government crony who wants to sell lucrative Middle East reconstruction contracts to companies like Halliburton in the wake of an engineered war. I admit it is not much of a spoiler. It is hardly surprising, after all.
Our culture’s refusal to engage with the reality that 9/11 clarified — that we are locked, whether we like it or not, in a mortal struggle with fundamentalism — has been almost total these past five years. Here we are in what is effectively World War 4, and the cultural establishment thinks the real baddies are the ones in the White House, not the Afghanistani mountains.
24 is really one of the only slightly daring portrayals of the West’s real-life enemies, and their utter, ruthless defeat. But it wasn not always this way. During the Second World War, war films were turned out almost weekly throughout the conflict. America and Britain killed their enemies on screen, whilst simultaneously doing so on beaches, landing grounds, streets and fields.
Even to this day, Germans and Nazis are the go-to guys when a filmmaker wants a bunch of baddies that can be uncomplicatedly loathed by the audience (see: the Die Hard and Indiana Jones franchises). People have been complaining “too soon, too soon” over Universal’s upcoming United 93, in which the events that took place on the fourth 9/11 plane are meticulously recreated. But the fact is that cinema is a form that grew out of delivering weekly and daily news reports.
It should have — and traditionally has had — a very immediate relationship with current events. The contemporary movie industry’s palpable failure to properly engage with them could explain, in part, the ever-diminishing ticket sales. In the hilariously stupid Mission: Impossible 3, the baddie idea is not too dissimilar to the kind of cryptoconspiracy, anti-Bush fantasies of the news and media establishments in the West.
The ludicrous leftist nonsense of Syriana is roughly the cinematic version of the average BBC reporter’s political opinions. And of course we all know that mainstream media ratings and have dwindled almost as fast as cinema ticket sales.
11th May 2006