Last week, thanks to a technical glitch involving technology, a large portion of this essay by Steve Bornfeld—about the influence of film on national issues—was missing from the published version. You got halfway through and whoops! It just stopped making sense. We blame technology. Because it was a pretty good piece, we're trying again.
How do you prefer your politics—buttered or unbuttered?
Your social conscience—in a box of Milk Duds or a bag of Jelly Bellies?
Your religious doctrine—slathered with cheese nachos and washed down by a bottle of (not holy) water?
In 2004, to engage in the intellectual life of these United States is to debate ... movies.
Michael Moore's polarizing—and to conservative Republicans, pulverizing—political screed, Fahrenheit 9/11, is only the newest of a fistful of films that have broken free of the media's back-of-the-book ghetto and skyrocketed onto front pages, op-ed columns, cable scream-fests and the covers of national newsweeklies. Total up the titles and the issues they've inflamed: The Passion of the Christ (anti-Semitism and religious devotion), The Day After Tomorrow (global warming), Super Size Me (America's dismaying dietary habits) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (George W. Bush as Satan's spawn). Each has gazed down at its competition from atop the box office, with Fahrenheit at a $93.8 million domestic gross and a fifth-place box-office rank as of Monday, and the golden $100 million mark a dead certainty. (That's with two Midwestern chains refusing to show it.) It's even rippled across the pond, where it racked up $2.5 million over its opening weekend in the U.K. and $3 million over five days in France on its way to a wider international rollout.
A secondary tier of smaller films is further fueling public discourse: The Hunting of the President (the alleged right-wing/Ken Starr persecution of Bill Clinton through the eyes of FOB Harry Thomason), Control Room (a portrait of Arab satellite news channel al-Jazeera), Uncovered: The War on Iraq (deconstructing what led us to war) and Bush's Brain (an ideological assault on senior adviser Karl Rove). A DVD entrant in this docu drama is Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, seemingly a Fahrenheit companion weapon for the left, attacking the right from its media flank.
Back on mainstream turf: In September, as the presidential campaign hits the final laps, expect John Sayles' Silver City—a fictional, thinly disguised Bush-bash about a "grammatically challenged," son-of-privilege gubernatorial candidate (played by Chris Cooper)—to reignite political passions. And coming soonest to a highly partisan shouting match near you: the July 30 release of The Manchurian Candidate remake, which several Democrats have already lacerated for allegedly coloring the manipulative Meryl Streep character a distinctly Hilary-esque shade.
Left-leaning Hollywood and the estimable Ms. Streep—who earlier this month, at a star-stuffed, fervently anti-Bush fund-raiser for Sen. John Kerry, said she hoped Iraq would someday forgive us—are vilifying a Clinton and getting Democratic panties in a bunch? It's a world gone mad, and it's at a multiplex near you here in the United States of Entertainment.
• • •
Time thought the phenomenon intriguing enough to plaster Moore's bespectacled mug on a recent cover, next to the headline "Michael Moore's War—The Maker of Fahrenheit 9/11 Heats Up the Election Year with a New Kind of Political Weapon. Is This Good For America?" That's a question the mag pondered but did not answer. But movie critic Richard Corliss nailed the issue inside: "Fahrenheit 9/11 may be the watershed event that demonstrates whether the empire of poli-tainment can have decisive influence on a presidential campaign. If it does, we may come to look back on its hugely successful first week the way we now think of the televised presidential debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, as a moment when we grasped for the first time the potential of a mass medium—in this case, movies—to affect American politics in new ways."
• • •
In an extraordinary display of cinema's civic firepower, four films muscled their way into the national conversation within five months. Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ—for which buzz had been building for a year, much of it generated by the media-savvy Gibson—landed like a nuclear blast in theaters in late February and obliterated every box-office prediction that only a fringe audience would embrace it. While fending off charges of anti-Semitism in its depiction of Christ's crucifixion, it also handed the religious right a massive political/propaganda tool to espouse what they labeled the hunger for spirituality and abiding faith of most Americans. (Just crunch those box-office numbers in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, the gold standard of intrinsic worth in the postmodern U.S. of E, to verify the power of The Good Book.)
It was especially potent dovetailing with the Pledge of Allegiance/"one nation under God" uproar and the left's questioning of President Bush's theological influences (he famously named Jesus as his favorite philosopher) and its role in his decision to send troops to Iraq. A movie playing a prominent role in the latest church-and-state dustup.
Less than three months later, in early May, Super Size Me, in which documentarian Morgan Spurlock force-fed himself nothing but McDonald's meals to graphically examine America's dangerously ballooning waistline, triggered a media feeding frenzy that put our fast-food addiction on the table for discussion and shoved a defensive McDonald's into an uncomfortable spotlight. The Big Mac of the grub-on-the-run industry has since ushered in a get-healthy campaign, scrapping its super-size portions (a decision it claims to have reached before the movie's release), offering a more health-conscious menu and even handing out a cute plastic gizmo, a step-counter, to promote walking as exercise.
Late May brought The Day After Tomorrow, a blockbuster-wannabe purportedly about the disastrous results of unchecked global warming, which the media strained mightily to elevate into a controversy magnet. But the nation's scientists, most crossing political/ideological lines, overwhelmingly agreed that the movie, with its special-effects-soaked meteorological catastrophes, was mostly juvenile overreaching for drama's sake. However, just when it appeared that the news potential of the multiplex was waning, the big screen's 800-pound partisan gorilla, Fahrenheit 9/11, roared into theaters and smack into the political fire late last month. That compelled pundits to wonder whether Moore's agitprop grenade could actually sway undecided voters or sew up entire swing states, tipping the election toward Team Kerry.
Think a summertime film phenom with a roundhouse political punch will fade to black by the November election? The Fahrenheit DVD is due in October.
• • •
This is new? No. At least not in smaller bites.
Any movie with a point of view—and what film doesn't have one, from Fahrenheit 9/11 to a teen flick about the joys of getting laid?—is on some level political (in its larger meaning), with a cultural message to convey. But in terms of affecting group-think and even cultivating public unrest, film has a storied history. Reach all the way back to the genesis of American moviemaking—D.W. Griffith's artistically groundbreaking, socially repulsive Birth of a Nation in 1915, in which Griffith had this nation cheering for the Ku Klux Klan. Jump to Germany in 1934 and Leni Riefenstahl's infamous Triumph of the Will, credited (more accurately, blamed) as a highly persuasive tool encouraging Germans to rally behind Adolf Hitler. Conversely, during World War II, Hollywood contributed innumerable patriotic movies that strengthened the resolve of the U.S. citizenry to see that war effort through, and stars of the era filmed spots urging Americans to purchase war bonds.
Closer to modern times, Oliver Stone leapt into the news columns as a cine-provocateur extraordinaire. His hotly debated JFK, a fictional theorizing of a complex web of conspiracy—Cubans, mobsters, politicos, Joe Pesci—to murder President John Kennedy, was slammed as an irresponsible slice of revisionist history, while his Nixon traced the disgraced president's life from boyhood to political ruin. Certainly, Stone's Platoon, alongside Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July (Stone again), The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill and others—made ardent antiwar statements. Political, social and sexual themes converged in The Laramie Project, which dealt with Wyoming locals' reaction to the hate-crime murder of gay student Matthew Shepard. Even otherwise undistinguished films of today embrace overt political messages, from the bungled anti-capital-punishment cant of The Life of David Gale to the PETA-loving heroine of cotton-candy comedy Legally Blonde 2: Red White and Blue.
• • •
So what's new? An unprecedented, you-scratch-my-back/I'll-scratch-yours media alliance between movies and cable television, for one. CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, with their notorious 24/7 search for raw material, can construct weeks of screaming-meemie TV out of a movie with even the slightest hint of a subjective viewpoint, never mind the red-meat feast provided by The Passion of the Christ. On MSNBC, right-wing crusader Joe Scarborough made a nightly pilgrimage to the subject, sometimes pitting priests and rabbis to wrangle over its alleged anti-Semitism, but more often stacking his show with its defenders, who'd do a pile-on against token detractors, with ringleader Scarborough feigning a modicum of objectivity. An hour of priceless publicity repeated several times per broadcast day, in between handing off the hot potato to hotter-headed Hardball-er Chris Matthews.
And, as a courtesy to its corporate parent, MSNBC would kindly lend out clips of Scarborough's hollering holy men to NBC's Tom Brokaw, who would package the media-sweetened hullabaloo as news to an even wider viewership on a network already assembling entire Dateline broadcasts on the movie, plus Passion-inspired specials on the life and death of Christ. Then multiply that by the Larry Kings and Aaron Browns of CNN and the Bill O'Reillys and Tony Snows of Fox News, plus additional broadcast and cable nets egging on and exploiting the snowballing hype directly or indirectly (hokey '50s religious epics and shlocky, forgotten Christ telepics and miniseries suddenly resurrected in prime-time).
Super Size Me inserted a more sociological vibe into this crazed cacophony. With its poli-exploitation potential pretty low, the likes of Scarborough and O'Reilly and Geraldo could take a cursory sniff, then leave it for the less confrontational Deborah Norville to examine the behavioral aspects, while cable food experts picked apart the culinary facets, movie critics tackled its entertainment value and even legal eagles like Fox's Greta Van Susteren and MSNBC's Dan Abrams could comb through it for litigious angles.
Then came Fahrenheit 9/11. If you've experienced all the coverage, our condolences. If you haven't, we'll immediately launch a search-and-rescue party to pick up you, Gilligan, the Skipper and the rest. By the way: Notice, lately, the preponderance of TV shows sponsored by Name That Movie, opening Name That Day at theaters everywhere? Caught the pre-trailer previews at the multiplex graciously hawking cable films and network sitcoms? Media consolidation begets corporate synergy supreme.
• • •
So What's New II? Whatever medium most bonds citizens to each other most impacts our political, social, cultural, religious and intellectual lives. And increasingly, that medium is movies. Once it was newspapers and radio—editors of major dailies, especially, harnessed the power of the political gods, their endorsements akin to planning the election-night victory party weeks or months beforehand. Most daily newspapers are struggling now, the entire industry coping with relentlessly shrinking readership. Once, the preferred tool of shared expression was television, when a handful of networks linked neighbors coast to coast, and everyone drew their news from the same few sources, named Cronkite, Huntley-Brinkley, Reasoner, Rather, Brokaw and Jennings.
But owing to the contemporary multichannel monster that has shattered the nation into slivers of niche viewers scattered across our remote-controlled media landscape—with the occasional exception of increasingly rare shared shows, such as the Friends finale—those communal ties have weakened.
Movies, however, remain a vital foundation—perhaps the sturdiest foundation—of our commonality. Despite thousands of films flooding theaters each year, they are at least staggered in their release, allowing us to digest them—and swap opinions about them over the watercooler, the lunch counter and the dinner table—a few at a time, unlike television, which has morphed into a noisy, dizzying, overwhelming pastiche of programming. And with their eternal allure—nothing trumps that towering screen for the pure power of presentation, that larger-than-life authority—they are surely the medium to master for political strategists of the future.
• • •
So What's New III? Baby boomers are arguably the final generation to consume relatively bias-free news in their formative years. Point-of-view news in entertaining, preach-to-the-choir packaging, once a limited subset in our living rooms and on our newsstands, is close to ruling the American media—this newspaper, this story, both clear examples. Documentaries have transformed into arguments—Fahrenheit 9/11 is hardly an old-school documentary; it's a cinematic firebomb from a first-class propagandist and polemicist.
When news is now absorbed from the unregulated, factually suspect Internet, from Jon Stewart's snarky, satirical Daily Show, from windbags Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly on the right side of the radio dial, and whiners Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo on the left side, from the laughably right-tilting Fox News Channel (which compounds its insult to the audience by flacking its "fair and balanced" approach), from the left-tinged CNN (an overreaction to Fox), from the extremist ideologues on the scream (nee "talk") show circuit, and from a culture thriving more on invective than information and elevating entertainment over perspective for new generations of voters raised in the bosom of pop culture ... well, whaddaya expect?
• • •
Perhaps it was pure happenstance, an inexplicable collision of timing and fate that suddenly shot a pack of movies into the heart of the American Dialogue. As coincidences go, the same might be said of the Big Bang. Consider the fallout from that modest flicker of energy.
In this new millennium, we are, after all, The United States of Entertainment. Where else should we look for political, social, religious, cultural and intellectual guidance but toward ... the multiplex?