Mr. Bush Goes to the Movies

Maureen Dowd, being Maureen Dowd, got to have the most fun with last week's prime-time PR stunt. You remember, Bush jetting into the USS Abraham Lincoln and strutting around: "This time Maverick didn't just nail a few bogeys and do a 4G inverted dive with a MIG-28 at a range of two meters. This time the Top Gun wasted a couple of nasty regimes, and promised this was just the beginning."

The Daily Show had great fun, too, but then again, that's their job (see "Rob Corddry reports from the USS Presidential Photo Op"). Poor Paul Krugman, saddled with the job of keeping the straight face on the New York Times editorial page, was stuck with reminding us that the show "was as scary as it was funny" and then pointing out, as if we didn't already know, just how very staged it was: "[A]dministration officials 'acknowledged positioning the massive ship to provide the best TV angle for Bush's speech, with the sea as his background instead of the San Diego coastline.'"

Run a search at Daypop at the moment for "Top Gun" and you get 450 returns from blogs alone. And none of those bloggers are talking about the movie. They're talking about the remake, dreamed up just days before the final production was broadcast live to tens, maybe hundreds of millions of living room screens around the world. Turnaround, even for productions as major as this one, is very, very short these days.

Bush's costume is what makes Top Gun instantly pop to mind, but Andrian Kreye, writing in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, is 100 percent correct to point out that Karl Rove's real source material is a film even more comically outrageous: Independence Day. "Was George W. Bush aware," snickers Kreye, "that it was a German, of all people, who thought up the image with which he celebrated his victory over Iraq on Thursday?" The reference, of course, is to ID4 director Roland Emmerich.

Much has been made for decades of the pomo melding of life and the movies, and many, like Slavoj Zizek, for example, have sensed that the process has been accelerated since and by 9/11, that on that particular Tuesday morning, two parallel universes were irrevocably seared into a single time-space continuum. Zizek made the point most explicitly in "Welcome to the Desert of the Real," the in/famous article he sent out four days after the event:

So it is not only that Hollywood stages a semblance of real life deprived of the weight and inertia of materiality - in the late capitalist consumerist society, "real social life" itself somehow acquires the features of a staged fake, with our neighbors behaving in "real" life as stage actors and extras... Again, the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian de-spiritualized universe is the de-materialization of the "real life" itself, its reversal into a spectral show.

Bush and Rove, Cheney and Rummy, these guys don't bust their heads much over this. They just do it. It's not hard when you don't have to worry about budgets or locations, distribution or marketing. What's more, the scripts are just lying around. Pop in the DVD, reshuffle the cast and make a few calls. Done.

Here, we get closer to the point Jarret Keene almost nails in his very fine review of X2 at Alternet. Namely, the very simple and straightforward point that filmmakers, and more broadly, pop culture makers, have more responsibility now, with the melding of the real and the extrareal in ultrahigh gear, than ever before. Movies, even summer blockbusters, don't just bubble up unalloyed from some collective consciousness. That is, in part, where they come from, yes. No doubt. But they are also made.

The bigger the movie (or album, or comic, etc.), the tighter the grasp its makers have on the knobs that fine tune the round-the-clock, round-the-globe conversation we're all in on, even if we'd prefer to be mere eavesdroppers. Emmerich may have been shamefully reckless and lazily simplistic with ID4, but X2, argues Keene, raises more questions than it answers. One of Keene's observations stands out: Director Bryan Singer "must have ordered his screenwriters and production crew to put their balls on."

In other words, que es mas macho? Having your president don a flight helmet and zap unseen aliens or demanding "Mutant Freedom Now!" in a note pinned to a dagger aimed at your president's mortal being? "X2 has everything the rubes expect from Hollywood: lavish special effects and violence," writes Keene. "The pill beneath the sugar, though, is that the violence serves as a warning about the direction our country is headed. Mindless fear and policies of intolerance will result in a cycle of bloodshed from which no one will be spared, not even the innocent."

As hard as it is to imagine Tony Scott or Roland Emmerich tackling that one, it's even harder, but all the sweeter, realizing that a global pop event could pack a pill quite like that, however sugary its coating.



Posted by dwhudson at May 6, 2003 10:06 AM