Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Bambi B on January 28, 2003 at 10:58:35

In Reply to: Some films they wouldn't make after 9-11. posted by edta on January 27, 2003 at 16:44:31:

edta,

The parallels between "Dune"- the idea of desert dwellers attempting to regain control of their own resources from the exploitation of a remote culture and continuous US oil imperialism is a strong one. The use of the word "jihad" for this kind of struggle sounds overly simplistic to us now- it was undoubtedly unknown to the English- speaking public when Lynch's film was released. The idea of the natural leader arising out of a semi-nobility is also thinnly disguised. The difference then is that this struggle is shown as admirable whereas in the US today, the idea of a desert leader protecting his territories' natural resources through armed struggle with an imperial power would not play as well.

"Starship Troopers" may have been a fantasy allegory of modern American gung-ho militarism but frankly I was so annoyed by the tactics of the soldiers just standing in front of the giant bugs that I didn't stay long enough to pick up the 'message'. The film does demonstrate the stupidity of blind patriotism and the treating of soldiers as cannon fodder, but this was not a good allegory of the US Department of Killing Foreingers as the protection and survival of US combat personnel is of absolutely prime importance and highly successful- it is the foreigners that die in large numbers.

911 will have strong emotion attached for a long time, but you can bet that those windbag rabble-rousing novelists like Tom Clancy that need a popular ememy to fantasize subduing will make use of it at the earliest opportunity and these will become Harrison Ford movies with big box office.

Feeding Hollywood films is a kind of Orwellian US "enemy quotient" which has to constantly throw up some individual or nations as the enemy. After the fall of the USSR, the enemy quotient was filled by Khaddafi/ Libyans, Columbian drug cartels, the Chinese, Castro, even the Irish! These are always foreign enemies too -never the extreme right in the US which is responsible for almost all of the terrorism here- Oklahoma City, the KKK, militias, abortion clinic bombings/shootings, and anthrax. We need to remember this side of terrorism too, but it is not popular in the US to have any large scale self-examination.

In movies, we have to cycle through all the approved -and foreign- enemies. In the US, the post-911 film will have to fit the traditional molds more than ever.

Bambi B