Hollywood and War

An interesting article appeared in this week's Entertainment Weekly entitled Hollywood Goes to War. The first line of the article is interesting:

              On Oscar night, the Academy overlooked American Sniper in every category except for sound editing, which doesn't do much to disprove stereotypes about show business being full of liberals with an antigun bias.

Frankly, I was surprised by this, but continued reading where it listed movies, their domestic box office grosses and the timeframes in which they were made:  Before 9/11, after 9/11 but before the death of Osama Bin Laden and after his death.  The article suggests that war weariness led to the disappointing showings of the movies made between 9/11 and OBL's death, but after his death, Hollywood suddenly found a greater interest in war movies now that we seemed to be winning. Perhaps there's something to that logic, but I think there's another element to this.

The article cites seven movies that were made during the 9/11-OBL death period:  Black Hawk Down, Jarhead, In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, Stop-Loss, The Hurt Locker and Green Zone.  Of the seven, only Black Hawk Down made more than $100M ($109M).  That movie had nothing to do with Iraq and 9/11; the other movies were related to Iraq and 9/11 one way or the other.  Most of the others -- although I've only seen Green Zone -- deal with decidedly anti-war but mostly anti-Bush themes.  This I've gleaned from reading about the movies.

Amazingly, movies without either an anti-war or anti-Bush theme did better with the public.

It should be pointed out that this analysis included four World War II movies -- Saving Private Ryan, Fury, Unbroken and Pearl Harbor (if that's really a war movie) -- that don't or really shouldn't factor into the analysis.  These four movies have nothing to do with the public's perception of wars that we believe we can win, because we've already won that war.  From Black Hawk Down to American Sniper, the basic subject is radical Islam, an asymmetrical warfare unknown to us even after Vietnam.

The true problem, in my opinion, is that Hollywood is out of step with the rest of the country.  When Ben Affleck shouts down Bill Maher and says that labeling it Islamic terrorism is racist, that just doesn't resonate with the rest of the country.  The public is dumbfounded, in large measure, by the administration's cognitive dissonance on the subject and abject unwillingness to do what is necessary to defeat it.

New movies are in the works, according to Entertainment Weekly, but sadly they're centered around special units.  Although this is asymmetrical warfare, there are still conventional forces fighting.  A movie on Fallujah would be exciting, showing the terror of house-to-house fighting in an urban setting.  There are any number of stories that could be used for movies that don't revolve around special units, but for Hollyweird, that's not sexy enough.  Besides, it couldn't be as surgically precise about its tales.

The other concern I have about this is how politically correct Hollyweird will treat the terrorists for fear of alienating the billions of Muslims in the world.  Let's face it:  Hollywood was wrong to caricature the Japanese and Nazis during World War II, but we've come a long way since then.  To portray an Islamic terrorist the way he really is isn't wrong.  The truth is what should be offered, not a sanitized version that Hollyweird wants the world to believe.

It will be interesting to see if the likes of Liam Neeson, Ben Affleck and Michael Moore have any roles in these movies, although I doubt it.  Even moreso, will conservative Hollyweird get its chance?Or will the leftists change their colors and spin the story as some sort of political rallying cry for the 2016 elections?

(c) 2015 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles