Too Soon

The ever-awesome Frank Rich has a really interesting article on the country's Iraq war fatigue.

There's just one point I disagree on, and it plays into an argument I've been having with the crew lately. Rich blames the box-office failure of movies like Rendition and Stop-Loss primarily on war weariness. It's entirely possible that these movies did badly because they were terrible, as I've heard; but he mentions that remarkably few people went to see them in the first place.

I think another possibility exists--we're naturally wary of the too-soon factor, which is more than a joke. Is it possible that you can't do these movies until after the historical moment has passed, and there's room for reflection?

The obvious counter-example is Casablanca, my favorite movie. It came out in the early 1940s just after the U.S. entered the war, and you can read it as a summons for the U.S. to abandon isolationism. This isn't just an English major's pipe dream--Rick, the American protagonist, goes from "I stick my neck out for nobody" to helping Laszlow the resistance leader to escape. Laszlow's near-last words to him are, "Welcome back to the fight. This time, I'm sure our side will win."

But there are a lot of important differences between Casablanca and the bevy of Iraq war movies, such as:

1. Casablanca is set overseas, and involves only two Americans--Rick and Sam. The Iraq war movies are set mostly in America and are almost exclusively about Americans. This means Casablanca has important physical and psychological removal from our current lives.

2. If the main political thrust of Casablanca is 'isolationism is insupportable and ultimately self-destructive', then it was old news to this country, which had already joined the war in part for those reasons. But with the distortion this war's reasons have undergone, it's impossible to do a movie about the war's reasons that isn't politically charged (not to mention depressing.)

3. The Iraq war movies are mostly political stories. But Casablanca is as much a love story as a topical political story. The call to arms remains reasonably subtle beneath the major plot, and the characters are symbolic instead of allegorical. (If it was a pure allegory, then the U.S. had an affair with Norway and still loves her even though she seemingly betrayed him.*)

4. Casablanca is pro-war, and the Iraq movies are anything but. 'Pro-war' makes all liberals post-Vietnam cringe, but I think it's important to keep in mind how completely unique WWII was. I can't think of very many wars in history where the right side and the wrong side were that obvious (which is why it's so irritating and ignorant when people compare anything they don't like to Nazis.) Clear good and evil make for good cinema (Star Wars!). On the other hand, complex and ambivalent wars where neither side is right are hard to do well in movies, or in any other forum for that matter. A pro-war Iraq movie would be even more terrible, as no one sensible would believe a word of it.

5. Casablanca is one of the best movies of all time.

It's too bad, because rendition and stop-loss as concepts are so shocking and fascinating that they have the potential to spawn very powerful movies. The problem isn't historical distance--it's political distance. The Iraq war movies are consistently described as 'heavy-handed' and 'obvious' because they're bent on making a political point. Casablanca, which is more a product of its time than a propaganda piece, doesn't run into that sort of trouble.

However, the documentaries that Frank Rich also mentions--that's another can of worms. Fiction is one thing, but documentaries are supposed to collect facts (theoretically, anyway.) I think we don't watch the Iraq documentaries simply because they're depressing, and we already know it's rotten over there. We don't watch them for the same reason there hasn't been much mass protest of the war--we're just not that angry.

I mean, we're angry. But we've entered a kind of pure and lazy democracy, where we say, "This president is terrible! Let's work hard to elect the next guy who will fix it." To be honest, this is probably a healthier and more humane response than rioting. It also demonstrates just how much power the executive branch has abrogated to itself in that we can only see a change in our country's policy through the election of one person.


*Norway is such a tramp.