John McCain has concluded a strange week of brush-back pitches against Barack Obama, dropping three different attack ads, each seemingly designed to scare up as much mainstream news coverage as anything else. The first, a blistering rebuke of Obama for failing to visit wounded troops at Landstuhl Air Force base during the return from his European swing, is undercut by, you know, a lack of facts on the ground.
The second ad — a weird poke at Obama’s celebrity, visually comparing him to both Paris Hilton (whose parents, ironically, are max-donors to the McCain campaign) and Britney Spears, i.e., “an empty vessel” — seems to suggest it’s a bad idea to support an American leader who might also be able to capture the imagination of anyone overseas. (Picking up on this assault on optimism, advocacy group MoveOn.org responded with an ad buy of their own, directed by actor Rider Strong, which mockingly presented hope as a communicable disease.)
Upping the strangeness quotient even further, McCain’s latest ad, titled “The One,” features out-of-context clips of Obama talking up his campaign as part of a movement greater than him, and then closes with a comparison to Charlton Heston’s Moses from The Ten Commandments, ceding, “Obama may be ‘The One,’ but is he ready to lead?”
To me, this isn’t so much a “kitchen sink strategy” as it is the farcical, kids movie version of this scheme, where plastic toys, sofa cushions and a blanket are thrown at a rampaging sibling in an effort to slow his or her momentum. The first ad was a bit scummy (though still fairly mild by the Karl Rove-ian standards of recent electoral politics), but mainly it’s just stupid; this belies the claims of high-road, issues-oriented outreach, and kind of underscores the arm’s-length disdain and condescension with which the McCain campaign has treated the Obama campaign. I know this, though: Treating hope as a piñata, and mocking or questioning as somehow insincere or dubious the optimism and sort of desperate desire to reconnect and repair that a lot of people — many of whom haven’t given two shits about a national political election in decades, if their lifetimes — feel is on a very basic level a bit despicable, and probably a bad political play, too. I know they’re running behind and don’t have the advantage of many intangibles, but this tack didn’t work out very well for Hillary Clinton, in case the McCain camp didn’t notice.
It likely won’t last long, given that they’re still cutting and this isn’t the official version, but the first trailer* for Oliver Stone’s W. (yep, with a period) is up on YouTube, and offers a confirmative glance at the Shakespearean familial grappling it assays. (*Note: see below.) Starring Josh Brolin as the current President Bush and James Cromwell as his daddy, #41, the film, of course, is a look at the wayward youth and young adulthood of our still-commander in chief, and how he turned things around to, you know, rule the free world.
It’s a brief, fairly simple thing, this trailer, effectively conveying the I’ll-show-you fire that, once lit, powered Dubya out of the wilderness and into the limelight. It ends with a role call of some of the bit players — Laura Bush (Elizabeth Banks), Condoleezza Rice (Thandie Newton), Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright), Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn), Karl Rove (Toby Jones), Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss) — that have helped make up the tragicomedy of the last eight years. A couple impressions: the make-up jobs range from spot-on to a bit awkward, but the musical choice of “What a Wonderful World” (nudge, nudge… yeah, I get it) is a cop-out, and only serves to underline and buttress the knee-jerk reactions this film engenders. Also, if Jason Ritter (b. 1980) really is playing Jeb Bush, that’s a bit disappointing, only insofar as it indicates the focal limitations of this pared-down piece; the flaming wreckage of Jeb’s political career, as seen through his eyes or his father’s, would have made for a really good scene or two, flash-forward.
Still, regardless of the probative value as it relates to his presidency, the movie is a pleasure to have exist, if only for the socio-entertainment coverage it will foist upon the MSNBC and CNN reporters (always good for laughs), and the spin that will emerge from the Bushies and their surrogates when they’re dutifully trotted out to nitpick over this detail or that. I’m sure it’ll make for a couple great segments on The Daily Show, too. W. releases in mid-October, from Lionsgate.
* UPDATE, 7/28:The official trailer, running basically the same length, is now online, but the version with slightly saltier language (e.g., #41’s paternal admonition about “chasing tail,” is still available here, and here, if you beat the copyright police.)
Public approval of Congress may be at shoestring levels, but the House
Republican Conference has found at least one way to boost morale among
members — give them “spirit awards” for actually speaking on the floor. Rep. Kay Granger of Texas, vice chairwoman of the Republican caucus, organized an
awards ceremony last week to honor members who expelled the most CO2 on
the subject of energy; each of the seven honorees received a commemorative oil can.
“It’s not a quart; it was like collectors’ memorabilia,” said an
impressed Rep. Joe Wilson, of South Carolina, who was not among last week’s winners. Those who
were: Georgia Reps. Phil Gingrey, Lynn A. Westmoreland and Tom Price;
Indiana Rep. Dan Burton; North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx; Ohio Rep. Bob Latta; and Pennsylvania Rep. John E. Peterson. “I’ve never won an oil can before,” said Westmoreland. “It’s on my desk, absolutely.” Still, the practice has some Republicans scratching their heads. “The idea that people who are in the House of Representatives need to
give each other awards for talking bullshit, and that’s really what it
is,” one Republican member said before he trailed off in disbelief.
“What kind of a party is that?” For the full read, from Politico, click here.
So, his endorsement of John McCain notwithstanding, Arnold Schwarzenegger has indicated he would consider a position as energy czar in an administration of Barack Obama. When George Stephanopoulous asked Schwarzenegger about the idea on ABC’s This Week, and whether he would take Obama’s call, the California governor replied, “I would take his call now, I will take his
call when he’s president — any time. Remember, no matter who is
president, I don’t see this as a political thing. I see this as we
always have to help, no matter what the administration is.” Presumably his coronation would not involve a massive chain of fireballs… but maybe it would, I don’t know. For the full read, from Politico, click here.
I don’t know what’s more amusing — the fact that Warner Bros., less than two weeks before its release, is still printing out lot passes with a code name, Rory’s First Kiss, for The Dark Knight, or the fact that it already has over 800,000 search hits on Google, since that was the phony working title for the movie during its Chicago shoot last summer. (Rory is the name of director Christopher Nolan’s son, for what it’s worth.)
More soon on the film, which is going to be huge. But in case you were wondering… yes, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy does have a cameo in the movie, even getting manhandled by Heath Ledger. Apparently he saw what that Wedding Crashers cameo did for colleague John McCain, and is working on getting his.
Gail Sheehy’s lengthy post-mortem on the Hillary Clinton campaign, for Vanity Fair, is at once a fascinating and — for anyone who followed the particulars of the Democratic primary race the past six months — familiar read. Screw Primary Colors, this may be the real political psychodrama of our time, ripe for its own roman a clef treatment. It’s all there — the perpetual bafflement at Obama’s non-belligerence; the serial campaign mismanagement and bickering between Clinton’s “Big Five” (Patti Solis Doyle, Harold Ickes, Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson and Mandy Grunwald); the ravings of pollster Penn, convinced that Hillary needed to throw around more weight than any
man in order to meet the commander in chief threshold test, and how this approach was normalized by the experience of the Clintons’ White House years; and yes, even the “dark clot of wishful thinking” that broke loose with Hillary’s invocation of Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June of 1968.
A lot of this piece is re-tilled Earth in the macro sense, but it’s got great detail. Among the notable revelations is news that, long before the Bosnia sniper-fire issue, another one of Clinton’s signature stories — about a young woman who worked for minimum wage,
was uninsured, and who got pregnant — was apocryphal at best, riddled with inaccuracies that seem to indicate a willful neglecting of facts. And then there’s this quote from Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff: “There are moments when [the Clintons] want to hear from the
dark side because that may be the only way to win. …Losing is not part
of their vocabulary. They know no limits when it comes to the energy
and tactics they will use — no matter how distasteful.” For the full read, click here.
I wasn’t really around for Richard Nixon’s Watergate flameout, but was there as much enmity toward the man as there now is toward President Bush, or was he generally regarded as more of a sad, pathetic bastard who’d merely written his own political obituary, and in the process inadvertently exposed the country to his own darkly paranoid worldview?
Largely because of the war in Iraq, of course, there’s no such oh-it’s-just-politics pass for Bush, whose current 25-30 percent approval ratings still seem kind of high to me, and have for most of his second term. After all, Bush’s impending exit has already been touted in celebratory T-shirts that have gained popularity as much more than just some whimsical Blue State item. He’s routinely booed and heckled in public on the few occasions he’s not trotted out before a scrubbed audience. Anti-smear email campaigns are used, and regularly falsely attributed to celebrities, to try to prop up his administration as something other than the flaming trainwreck of a disaster that it is. And now graffiti — like the above item, and an entire series of professionally stenciled put-downs here in Los Angeles and in other big cities — openly scorns the guy. January 20, 2009, indeed…
The John McCain campaign doesn’t really want his 96-year-old mother, Roberta, talking with the press, according to this James Rainey piece in the Los Angeles Times — a warm-and-fuzzy write-around that still intimates the generalized worry that old people are more likely to go off the reservation and say something crazy, or so wildly out of step with modern convention and language that it makes them seem unhinged or unkind. “They’ve got me muzzled,” says the (truly) elder McCain at one point, then adding with a chuckle: “Now, don’t you print that… I
really don’t like to be interviewed.” Later she tells Rainey, who relied on a preexisting relationship to circumvent the normal channels of interview arrangement, “Well, hon, they never said so, but I just don’t think they’re crazy about me talking to anybody.”
So actor Stephen Baldwin sure doesn’t do much to chip away at the Democrats’
built-in Hollywood advantage in this clip from Fox News from a couple days ago, in which
he dismisses the claim that John McCain represents a third Bush term as “the
most stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” Tip of the cap to Politico for the grab…
A documentary about Africa’s last absolute monarchy, the Kingdom of Swaziland, Without the King offers up a piercing snapshot of a distant ruler out of touch with his country — something which seems strangely timely. King Mswati III, who came to power as a teenager in 1986, rules by decree and lives a life of luxury with a dozen wives while his subjects suffer from crushing poverty, the world’s highest HIV infection rate and an average life expectancy of 31 years. Built around interviews with Mswati and his family, as well as many Swazi citizens plotting his downfall, this fascinating movie captures an agitated pre-revolutionary state, just before everything comes to a boil.
Eschewing voiceover narration and directed with a loose touch, Michael Skolnik’s film boasts extraordinary access to Mswati who, like President Bush, seems genuinely personable and perfectly willing to receive air-quote counsel, as long as it’s from those who agree with him. If there’s not much substantive plumbing of Mswati’s thought process in his bizarre decision to enact a piecemeal constitution that still bans political parties, Skolnik wisely locates a true emotional arc in the form of Mswati’s eldest child — an articulate, candid 17-year-old rap fan who comes to California for Christian boarding school. Princess Sikhanyiso is part of the future of Swaziland, and her subdued realizations about the contrast between her impoverished country and her lavish lifestyle give this already engaging movie a casually ominous subtext. (First Run/Red Envelope, unrated, 84 minutes)
Gwen Ifill, host of PBS’ Washington Week and frequent Meet the Press guest, has a nice piece of remembrance on Tim Russert on The Root, citing her experience covering the Million Man March in 1995 and disagreements with Russert regarding the Don Imus controversy as examples of his honest intellectual curiosity, and willingness to book and brook dissenting opinion, even when it made him personally look bad. Confirming the obvious, the world of journalism lost a good one.
John Cusack got his political ya-yas out recently with the limited release of War, Inc., coming soon to DVD. Now he’s taking more specific aim at John McCain in this 30-second spot, funded by MoveOn.org. A couple apolitical thoughts on the piece: First, what’s with the four quick flashes early in the ad? You gotta build to that stuff, kids. Secondly, all those cigarettes are finally starting to take a toll on Cusack’s vocal timbre.
Who has a crush on Barack Obama? Scarlett Johansson does, according to Politico, which writes about an ongoing email dialogue between “huge movie lover” Obama and the breathy-voiced actress, who reads The Economist, serves as an ambassador for Oxfam and speaks out on behalf of several charities, in addition to smoking lots of cigarettes.
Fox News long ago devolved into a broken-limbed, blinkered, self-congratulatory parody of itself, but they may have outdone themselves with their latest bit of whack-ass fear-mongering. During the June 6 edition of America’s Pulse, host E.D. Hill threw it to a commercial by teasing an upcoming discussion segment on nonverbal communication, and specifically Barack Obama‘s celebration of securing the Democratic presidential nomination, thusly: “A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab? The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently.” In the ensuing discussion with Janine Driver — whom Hill introduced as “a body language expert” — Hill at no point explained her previous reference to “a terrorist fist jab,” all of which raises the question of how we feel when the freedom of the press collides with tactics that are the moral equivalence of yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater.
For those looking to cast their eyes past the horizon of the Democratic primary battle, Todd Purdum has penned, for Vanity Fair, a fascinating piece on former President Bill Clinton which examines his successes and excesses, particularly since leaving office. “It is beyond dispute that Clinton’s foundation has done worthy work
around the world,” Purdum writes, “funneling low-cost anti-retroviral drugs to more than
a million AIDS patients, shining the singular
power of a presidential spotlight on the good work of others, and
raising millions of dollars for practical programs in places much of
the world’s power establishment never bothers with.
But it is also beyond dispute that Clinton has blended the
altruistic efforts of his philanthropy with the private business
interests of some of his biggest donors in ways that are surpassingly
sloppy, if not unseemly, for any former president.”
That means a shined light on rubbed elbows with billionaire raconteur Ron Burkle, occasional movie producer/Elizabeth Hurley impregnator Steve Bing and InfoUSA CEO Vinod Gupta, as well as smoke-if-not-fire intimations of other rubbed body parts with Gina Gershon, Barbara Streisand, Eleanor Mondale and a handful of other nameless women in positions of power, wealth and nominal fame. Purdum also ruminates in much less sexy fashion about possible mood changes and
loss of stamina in Clinton following his 2004 quadruple-bypass heart surgery. It’s not so much a firmly conclusory piece as it is an exploration of the great, inimitable shade of grey that dominantly makes up both Clinton the man and politician, but it is well written, reasonably speculative, and does provide a glimpse behind the curtain as it relates to some of the proxy campaign shortcomings of Hillary Clinton, particularly the simultaneous disbelief and disdain for Obama’s meteoric national rise.
Incidentally, it’s a no-brainer that there’s a great big screen biopic waiting to be done about Clinton. It’d be a case full of dynamite if they wanted to do it right, but Tom Hanks or maybe even John Travolta — who has the proper glad-handing charm and same gift of sartorial weight control, and previously channeled Clinton in the roman a clef Primary Colors — could do a smash-up job. Maybe Tom Wilkinson, too. Of course, you’d need to be about 20 more years removed, I guess, so who does that leave? Ed Norton and Christian Bale have shown a chameleonic ability to disappear into character. Hugh Jackman also has the right rakish charisma, if he could put on some pounds. Hopefully not Zac Efron, though, that’s all I’m saying.
Simply put, America does not much like itself right now. There are myriad domestic and economic issues at play in this anger, anxiety and depression, of course, but almost every interpretation begins with a look overseas, at the $12 billion a month being spent in Iraq, and the outlay for long-term military involvement in that country, and Afghanistan, that will cost the United States $1.7 to $2.7 trillion by 2017.
The long, seemingly endless slog of the war in Iraq, as well as re-litigation over the reasons for its launch, and a prosecution by the Bush administration beset with moral scandals (e.g., Abu Ghraib), corruption and waste (just a few days ago, CBS News revealed that $8 $8 billion was paid to multinational contractors with little or no oversight, in some cases lacking even basic invoices explaining how the money was spent), have taken their collective toll. If, as recent polling suggests, more than 80 percent of the country thinks we’re headed in the wrong direction, it’s safe to assume that number is even a bit higher in the left-leaning Hollywood creative community.
All of which brings us to John Cusack’s War, Inc., a lumpy political satire being loosely, if misguidedly, pitched as in the same general vein as Grosse Pointe Blank. The latest in a string of movies — a list that includes Brian DePalma’s controversial Redacted, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs, Gavin Hood’s Rendition and Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss — to put America’s war policies under the microscope for analysis, the film is set in the fictional country of Turaqistan, a nation occupied by an American private corporation run by the recently retired vice president.
The filmic equivalent of a bleating, hot microphone — all crossed wires and misfunneled energy — War, Inc. apparently came together via the draft. Co-screenwriter Cusack, a fan of absurdist author Mark Leyner, pulled him into the project, wanting to write about the privatization of war. Also a fan of 1998’s Bulworth, Cusack rang its writer, Jeremy Pikser, and asked him to join the tea party. The strange seams of this unusual collaboration show, with supporting characters (including a sexy, hard-charging liberal reporter played by Marisa Tomei and an outrageous Middle Eastern pop star played by Hilary Duff) jammed in at unusual angles and certain situations seeming to have no realistic bearing on others.
While beset with different problems, the aforementioned films, all commercial busts, were arguably each in some small way, to degrees, felled by their inability to reconcile their makers’ personal anger or irritation with the current administration’s political choices with basic tenets of good drama. Similarly, though more wryly than stridently, War, Inc., too, summons to mind Benjamin Franklin’s quotation that “whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.” It’s a satire, and clearly aims for interlocution just by flinging out different concepts and riffing on them (journalists “feel” the war by partaking of a battle simulator ride, apolitical local wedding videographers compensate for a drop in business with porn and insurgent be-headings), but War, Inc. doesn’t even have the tasty advantage of flinty, anger-fueled wit. Its exasperation and resentment with the current political clime has merely hardened, like oatmeal left out overnight, into something sludgy and almost unrecognizable. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here. (First Look, R, 106 minutes)
Kevin Spacey toplines the ensemble cast of HBO Films’ Recount, debuting tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern time on the pay cable channel. Directed by Jay Roach (Meet the Parents), the film revisits one of the most riveting and controversial moments in American history, recent or otherwise — the razor-close, disputed 2000 presidential election in Florida — and in exploring the story behind the headlines during the 36-day tactical battle to determine who would become the 43rd President of the United States, churns up beautifully bitter feelings of partisanship all over again, even by merely innocuously, and correctly, highlighting the differences in philosophy that informed the Republican and Democratic approaches to the conflict.
First, all the characters: Spacey (above right) portrays Ron Klain, former chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore. Tom Wilkinson portrays James Baker III, Bush family consigliere, and recount ring master for Dubya. Denis Leary (above left) plays Michael Whouley, national field director during the Gore campaign. Laura Dern portrays Katherine Harris, the Florida Secretary of State who never met a rouge stick she didn’t like. Bob Balaban portrays Ben Ginsberg, national counsel to the Bush-Cheney campaign in the 2000 election. John Hurt plays Warren Christopher, former Secretary of State to President Bill Clinton. Bruce McGill plays Republican lobbyist Mac “the Knife” Stipanovich. Paul Jeans plays Ted Olson, who represented George Bush before the Supreme Court. And Ed Begley, Jr. portrays attorney David Boies, who represented the Gore campaign before the Supreme Court.
Culled together by screenwriter Danny Strong from several books about the crisis, with CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin, ABC’s Jake Tapper, Time‘s Mark Halperin and David Von Drehle and Newsweek‘s David Kaplan all additionally hired on as special consultants, the movie both benefits and suffers from its (relative) rush to the screen in time for the end of this primary season (and its doubtless rerun in the even more emotionally fraught fall). Klain is essentially Recount‘s featured player, which gives the movie an air-quote Democratic focal point, but in the bluntest terms there’s not a left-leaning bias here (situating it from the hard-charging point-of-view of the “losers” in the contest just plainly gives it more of a dramatic punch), and in reality the film, the political narrative equivalent of an account of a palace coup glimpsed from the grimy, ground-floor servants’ quarters, is more about feeling than anything else. In fact, I’d argue that this is what it even needs a bit more of, actually.
While Klain’s increasing exasperation and consternation are well chronicled, there’s an awful lot of ground to cover, and crucial communicative links — like Gore’s explicit directions to his team, and Bush’s orders to his — are lost in the fray. Small but important details (18 of 67 counties in fact conducted no initial machine recount, in direct opposition to Roberts’ orders) are interspersed throughout, but easily glossed over, and the legal drumbeat of the narrative — while exacting — sacrifices some of the juicy mania that no doubt existed in each camp’s hermetically sealed bubble.
Wilkinson’s well-oiled Baker, previously Secretary of State to President George H. W. Bush, comes across as perhaps too smooth and stalkingly efficient by about a third; the roots of his familial allegiance are nicely highlighted in a later scene, but there’s a reason Baker was chosen, along with Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton, to head up 2006’s much touted (if ultimately ignored) bipartisan Iraq Study Group, and it’s because he isn’t driven by the same grim desire for exsiccation of political foes that drive the Karl Roves of the world.
Spacey’s performance as Klain is boilerplate — good stuff, but pretty much what we’ve come to expect from him in anything dramatic since American Beauty, which is to say sardonic, fitfully impassioned and graced with one of those moments of shutdown sadness. Dern’s portrayal of Harris, on the other hand, is thing of careening awkwardness from which you can’t quite avert your eyes. It’s brassy, and maybe (read: definitely) a little bit out of step with the rest of the movie, but it captures, I think, her warped sense of call to duty
Perhaps most amusing is Harris’ assertion — I’m assuming based likely on sourced information from the real-life Stipanovich or Director of the Florida Division of Elections L. Clayton Roberts, whose characters are present for the conversation — that she “felt like Queen Esther,” and felt that she was sacrificing herself for the Jews.
Watching Recount, as a political junkie I was immersed in its reenactments. Yet I also felt like it probably warranted an extra two hours. Heck, you could even split perspective, doing one film from both the Gore and Bush camps! That might have been just the prescription for the eight-year headache this debacle still conjures up. (HBO Films, unrated, 119 minutes)
How did this escape my attention for so long — the fact that someone actually created Barack Obama shoes?
Kinda funny. I guess it might risk being considered condescending if someone came out with Hillary Clinton-inspired business high heels. Flats, maybe? I don’t know, but one thing’s for certain — any John McCain kicks would have to rock the velcro.
So Sean Penn is heading up the jury of the Cannes Film Festival, which kicked off this week, and he had some weird words for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama
at the festival’s opening press conference, when asked about the American political landscape, and whether he would be offering any endorsements.
“I don’t have a candidate I’m supporting and I’m certainly interested and
excited by the hope that Barack Obama is inspiring,” Penn said, according to the United Kingdom’s Telegraph. But Penn then went on to
accuse the junior senator from Illinois of a “phenomenally inhuman and unconstitutional” voting record, and added,
“I hope that he will understand, if he is the nominee, the degree of
disillusionment that will happen if he doesn’t become a greater man than he
will ever be.” Errr… OK, so… he has to be a superhero? Penn also then complained that he had been
“discouraged from smoking,
before lighting up and chain-smoking his way through the press conference.” Total bad-ass. Nutty, but bad-ass…
In the mold of Stuff White People Like comes Things Younger Than McCain, the new word-of-mouth blog sensation. On a certain level inevitable, I suppose, but also nicely done; it advances its point, and it’s funny. And the Golden Gate Bridge and the area code — who knew?
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.
In a White House interview with Politico and Yahoo News — a president’s first for an online audience — George Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families: he has given up golf. “I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the
commander in chief playing golf,” the president said. “I feel I owe it to the
families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think
playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.” So… umm, yeah. There’s that. I guess he must have seen the clip of him from Fahrenheit 9/11, also lampooned in Fun with Dick and Jane. Or maybe he read about those in a briefing.
Meeting Resistance, a documentary releasing May 20 from First Run Features, reveals a wholly different narrative about the Iraq War than the one portrayed by many in the mainstream news. In the only-slightly-redacted first-person-plural statement below, co-directors Molly Bingham and Steve Connors talk about their movie, which will be reviewed later in the month:
Meeting Resistance is about the people and make-up of the Iraqi resistance. Since it was released in theaters last fall, we have shown the film in more than 80 U.S. cities, as well as to several key military audiences. We’ve made more than 200 appearances with the film to talk about our understanding of the conflict in Iraq and take questions from the audience. When the lights come up, we are greeted with the kind of silence associated with people trying to reconcile what they thought they knew with what they now understand. We’ve come to realize that our film is delivering a paradigm shift about the Iraq conflict — one audience at a time.
There are two wars in Iraq, and Meeting Resistance explores the first war — the popularly supported resistance to occupation, which contains the majority of the organized violence that is happening in Iraq. Using primary source material, critical analysis and cross-referencing, we crafted a film that tells the story of that conflict. The second war is the civil war — an internal political struggle being waged over competing visions of Iraq’s future, of which the country’s sectarian violence is a symptom, not a cause. Meeting Resistance is a journalistic documentary, not an advocacy or polemic film. Although we did not set out to challenge the narrative of the Iraq conflict — the one that has been constructed in Washington — our reporting eventually led us to do so.
U.S. military briefings in the Green Zone during 2003 and 2004 told journalists that the violence against American troops came from “dead-enders” and “Ba’athi die-hards,” from common criminals, religious extremists, foreign fighters, and al-Qaeda — characterized as “fringe elements.” While some might fit some of these descriptions, the vast majority of those involved are citizens from the core of Iraqi society. In time, we came to see the U.S. military’s misnaming of the “enemy” as an intentional act — as a key part of their objective to control the “information battle space.” They aspire to control the perception of the enemy’s identity, and through the news media persuade the American public that these “fringe elements” of Iraqi society are the only ones who oppose the U.S. presence in Iraq. A military push (or surge) to isolate and eliminate them would accomplish a perceived “victory.”
The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq delivered to the White House in October 2003 was leaked in February 2006 by Robert Hutchings, the 2003-2005 chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Speaking in interviews, Hutchings revealed that the report said that it is composed of nationalists fighting for their country with deep roots in the society and that the U.S. military, if it remains in Iraq, will be fighting a counterinsurgency war for years to come, a conclusion that echoed what we had found in our on-the-ground reporting for Meeting Resistance.
This spring, a front-page investigation by the New York Times revealed the Pentagon’s well-oiled “briefing” system for retired military analysts who are working for TV outlets and writing op-eds in ways that reflect and amplify the U.S. government’s narrative. The reporting done by the Times underscores the critical importance the Pentagon ascribes to its efforts to control the “message,” including how it defines the enemy.
If the predominant narrative about the Iraq conflict was truly based in reality, it would involve pointing out that the majority of Iraqis want a withdrawal of all foreign forces, and that the Department of Defense’s quarterly reports to Congress, on average, show that from April 2004 to December 2007, 74 percent of significant attacks initiated by Iraqis targeted American-led coalition forces. Americans would also find out that half of registered marriages in Baghdad in 2002 were mixed marriages between Sunni and Shia, Kurd and Arab, Christian and Muslim, and many of the tribes and clans and families are, in fact, mixed between Sunni and Shia. Also, nearly all of the Arab Iraqis polled oppose dividing the country along ethnic and sectarian lines, and the vast majority demands that Iraq have a strong central government, not the decentralized powerlessness imposed by the American-influenced constitution.
It is not that these points have never been reported, but the booming voice of “disinformation” — from which the Pentagon wants the American public to view the conflict — drowns much of this information out. Ultimately, our film has helped reveal the success of the Pentagon’s strategy to obscure the real nature of the war in Iraq. Unfortunately, too many in the news media have been willing to allow that to happen. Throughout the world’s history, there have been occupations — and resistance to those occupations. Why then do Americans have such a difficult time grasping that our troops are unwelcome by the vast majority of the Iraqi population? And why has reporting by our mainstream news media generally failed to recognize and draw our attention to this central, core aspect of the violence?
