What's Been Hollywood's Response to the Iraq War?
This entry was posted on 5/14/2008 2:40 PM and is filed under Politics,Musings.
Ross Douthat ("Doubt That?") assays the film industry's response to the
Iraq War, in
a piece for The Atlantic entitled "The Return of the Paranoid Style." There's
a lot of labyrinthine, sludgy generational horse-trading to go along with the illuminating bits of back story (remembrances of
Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s famous remark that the events of Sept. 11 had
slain irony, and conservative columnist Peggy
Noonan’s prediction that the attacks would resurrect the spirit of John
Wayne). All in all, though,
I wouldn't call this modern, conflicted style an exercise in paranoia; I'd dub it an exploration of heartier shades of grey. Much more interesting than most of the piece is the mostly unstated-until-the-end assertion that the response of
the Bush Administration to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 has likely
colored a certain brand of mainstream Hollywood genre cinema far more greatly and deeply than terrorism in general, or the war in Iraq. This is the
real hypothesis worth exploring, and subjecting to scientific method.
