Hollywood’s Backlash to the War on Terror

It’s easy to assume that Hollywood has a history of anti-war movies, but films criticising the Vietnam War didn’t appear until several years after the 15-year conflict. Although some consider the present dissenters five years too late, the fact remains that to have a wide release intervening in a live debate with a mass audience is new to American pop culture.

The start of the current line can be found before the war even began, at a Los Angeles celebrity teach-in in 2002 organised by documentary filmmaker and activist Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed, Iraq For Sale). Some 200 filmmakers prepared arguments against war and launched their own organisation, Artists United. Former Screen Actor’s Guild president Ed Asner described the movement that followed as “the most diverse and inspiring of my lifetime”.

A significant minority of Hollywood A-listers participated through protest, public speeches and media activism, reaching a peak when trying to oust George Bush at the 2004 elections. Then came the movies. First with documentaries, then art-house and analogous pictures like Good Night, And Good Luck, and finally intelligent A-list dramas, the movement slowly crept into the American Cineplex.

The peak of the trend came late last year during the annual post-summer scuttle for Oscar nominations. In the Valley of Elah earned Tommy Lee Jones a Best Actor nomination. Then came Rendition starring Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal, Brian De Palma’s Redacted, Robert Redford’s Lions For Lambs starring Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep, and Grace Is Gone with John Cusack.

It would be foolish, however, to treat the current trend without a little caution. In The Valley Of Elah only deals with the politics of Iraq obliquely. Grace Is Gone forgoes the big political canvas for a personal story. Rendition deals with terrorism, but is sentimental with a traditional white American heroine and happy ending. The only film that critically attacks Iraq head on is Redacted. The result was catastrophic; and even though the other films broached the sticky subject cautiously they still paid a price at the box office.

Redacted received a five minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival, and despite a huge wave of publicity De Palma’s film took in just $25,628 in its opening weekend in 15 theaters, which means roughly 3,000 people saw it in the entire country. 94% of its profits came from abroad. The public’s appetite for self-criticism isn’t as wetted as De Palma had presumed.

The closer to the bone a movie is, it seems, the less people are willing to face it. The old adage that people look to Hollywood for escapism is truer than ever. The War On Terror-related movie to have grossed the most profits is Harold And Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, a crude frat-boy comedy with plenty of boobs and bongs. Hollywood seems to have got the message. This year’s latest anti-war offering, War Inc. starring John Cusack, was touted as a “political cartoon”, and is a dumbed-down satire on the war in Iraq. If you can’t beat them, join them.