Posted on 03/27/2008 7:15:33 AM PDT by rightwingcapitalist
Less than two weeks before the United States and its allies invaded Iraq, in March of 2003, Sony Pictures released a war movie called Tears of the Sun. The director was Antoine Fuqua, fresh off the success of 2001’s Training Day; the star was Bruce Willis, playing a Navy SEAL lieutenant whose platoon is assigned to extricate an American caught up in a Nigerian civil war. The plot was a straightforward brief for moralistic interventionism
Tears of the Sun was a relatively modest film, budgeted in the tens rather than the hundreds of millions, but it was significant even so for being precisely the sort of movie 9/11 was supposed to spawn: righteously patriotic, confident in American might, and freighted with old-fashioned archetypes, with the rugged Willis saving the helpless Africans (and the lissome Monica Bellucci) from a horde of machete-wielding savages. It represented the kind of culture-industry sea change anticipated by the Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s famous remark that 9/11 had slain irony. It seemed to vindicate the conservative columnist Peggy Noonan’s prediction that the attacks would resurrect the spirit of John Wayne. And it was the sort of movie the left-wing critic Susan Faludi presumably had in mind when she lamented, in her recent book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, that “the cultural troika of media, entertainment and advertising declared the post-9/11 age an era of … redomesticated femininity, and reconstituted Cold War manhood.”
Nothing in this commentary, however, bears much resemblance to the way American popular culture actually has evolved since 9/11. The latter-day cowboys have conspicuously failed to materialize: in the past six years, the movie industry has produced exactly zero major motion pictures dedicated to lionizing American soldiers fighting on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
I will always be proud to be a Vietnam veteran, will always remember the sacrifice of so many and, Hollywood's efforts notwithstanding, that we are actually winning the Vietnam War everyday as we move toward eventual victory in the War On Terror.
“It’s getting really disappointing to go to the movies in the last few years if you want to see Americans portrayed as the good guys...”
The good news is that hollywood is falling on it’s can, and the anti USA movies are tanking.
The term “popular culture” is a misnomer, because what we have is a Ministry of Culture that produces the movies and television shows with only approved messages. If they wanted to, they could make movies that portray the war, soldiers and even the evil president in a good, heroic, light, and those movies would be very popular. But they choose not to, and they forbid anyone from doing so, by way of a liberal blacklist system far more draconian than their phony dreams of what the McCarthy was.
Tears of the Sun, while well made and indeed a positive portrait of American warrior Willis, was a failure at the U.S. box office.
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