Doubts about Dubya
War of the Worlds is more than just multiplex fodder - it's the first nail in the coffin of George Bush's presidency
John Patterson
Friday July 8, 2005
The Guardian
Political scandals in America often take a while to percolate into the national consciousness, and in much the same way, it customarily takes big studio movies a long time to reflect attitudes that have already been broadly noticeable in wider society for a while. The only movie of note to deal with Vietnam while it was going on was John Wayne's flag-waver The Green Berets in 1969. Thereafter, no movies were made directly about the war until Go Tell the Spartans, The Boys in Company C and The Deer Hunter, all released in 1978. While the events themselves were transpiring, Hollywood barely addressed them. Perhaps this isn't altogether surprising. The years between the Kennedy assassination and Nixon's resignation constituted a grievous national political trauma that many citizens wished to cast out of their minds.
These days we live in a faster-moving world, particularly since the advent of the internet, and of a mainstream American media that is largely hostage to corporate interests and no longer bound by the Fairness Doctrine that once ensured political balance in reporting. Nonetheless, stories of political skullduggery still take time to metastasize into actual cancers of scandal, or to be reflected in mainstream popular culture.
So it was gratifying over the July 4 weekend to witness the simultaneous naming of Bush hatchet-man Karl Rove as a leading suspect in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, a story that may ultimately prove the undoing of the Bush administration, and a new movie - the biggest studio blockbuster of the summer, no less - that to some degree, no matter how wishy-washy or mealy-mouthed, reflects many of the anxieties and fears that have plagued Americans since 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Iraq. What is most surprising is that the movie in question, an adaptation of The War of the Worlds, is directed by that dedicated defender of the status quo, Steven Spielberg. And it's a monster hit, having netted over $200m in its first five days.
Now, it's foolish to proclaim War as some fierce dissenting blockbuster. Spielberg doesn't make movies like that; he aims for Middle America, the middlebrow audience, the middle class and seeks to placate both Blue and Red State audiences, all of which requires political agnosticism if fortunes are to be made. Spielberg does however, consciously establish that the alien invasion is taking place in the post-9/11 world. As the daughter of Tom Cruise's character (Dakota Fanning) asks plaintively at one point, "Is it the terrorists?" The invaders - who seem earlier to have formed sleeper cells - suck human victims from their clothes and we see shirts and blouses floating to the ground in some sequences, eerily redolent of the blizzards of paper drifting from the Twin Towers. And surely it is no accident that Hollywood's most prominent, articulate, and avowedly left-wing political dissenter, Tim Robbins, is the person chosen to utter these words about the alien onslaught, directly into the camera: "Occupations always fail."
This at precisely the moment time when, in opinion polls, a majority of Americans have begun expressing extreme doubts about the Iraq war, and profound, albeit retrospective unease at the way the country was stampeded, by fear and fabrication, into accepting its necessity. The gears of creativity grind slowly in Hollywood, so it's all the more surprising that War of the Worlds was a fast-track project for Cruise and Spielberg, shoehorned into their hectic schedules when both became suddenly available, and shot very quickly.
If Spielberg contents himself with pointed doubts about the direction in which America is being led internationally, another movie, George Romero's Land of the Dead - backed by Universal Studios - is a much more explicitly satirical view of where America is headed domestically. Back in 1968, Romero claimed that the flesh-eating zombies in his Night of the Living Dead were, metaphorically, the "Silent Majority" of voters who Nixon claimed had ensured his election victory that November. In Land, Night's third sequel, Romero posits a giant gated society, in which the wealthiest surviving humans live in guarded fortresses, lording it over a lumpen class of servile non-zombies who fetch and carry for them, while outside the poignantly depicted flesh-eaters live their Hobbesian nightmare of bloodhunts. However, much like the present-day electorate, zombies have begun to develop the ability to communicate - a necessary preface, in the movie's metaphor, to achieving political consciousness. The zombies who voted Bush in are finally waking up ...
But Romero has long been a canny and dependable dissident. The real point here is that if Bush has lost Spielberg, who for all his shortcomings remains the presiding cinematic visionary of Middle America, he suddenly looks a lot like Lyndon Johnson in 1968, when CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, the reassuring TV uncle of the nation, turned publicly against the war in Vietnam. And Rove's smears have their roots in Iraq, just as Watergate arose directly from Vietnam and the release of the Pentagon Papers, so perhaps it's not too soon to start wondering if Bush's remake of the Vietnam quagmire will soon be followed by a remake of Watergate. Sequels and remakes - sometimes they work out nicely for everyone.
