No one wants to see Iraq war movies. The latest major Hollywood release about Iraq, Stop-Loss, cratered at the box office in its opening weekend, and flop sweat is already pouring by the bucketful from the editing bays where the remaining three Iraq pictures are being readied for release. Conservatives say these movies are failing because their general antiwar stance is offensive to a great many Americans. Liberals say these movies are failing because Americans are so upset by an unpopular war they cannot bear even the thought of it at the multiplex. Box-office analysts make the point that downbeat movies always face an uphill climb.
It is high time to cease the armchair analysis of those who refuse to attend war-in-Iraq movies and ask them directly to explain their behavior. The moviegoer must be permitted to speak. So committed am I to this straightforward approach that I will now attempt it by interviewing–myself.
ME: You were going to see Stop-Loss today.
MYSELF: Yes, I was.
ME: There you were, in a taxicab, driving down Broadway toward the movie theater in Times Square . . .
MYSELF: And I told the cab driver to let me out at Columbus Circle. I felt as though I had had an appointment for a root canal and received a cell phone call informing me that my dentist had just been named Client #8 and was pursuing an immunity deal with the U.S. attorney’s office.
ME: This is a shocking dereliction of duty! You are the film critic of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. It is your job to see this film and offer a nuanced and brilliantly insightful discussion of its virtues and, dare I say, its flaws.
MYSELF: I don’t have to see it to do that. I’m about to turn 47. I have seen thousands of movies in my time. Life is too short to spend even two hours in a theater watching Stop-Loss. Its virtues are, I expect, that it is very well made, with vivid scenes of terrifying battles in the streets of Karbala or Falluja–and touching moments of reconciliation. There’s probably a well-done scene in or just outside a Wal-Mart. Its failings are that it tells a schematic story that stacks the deck.
ME: What do you mean?
MYSELF: The movie is about American military personnel who serve tours of duty in Iraq and then are compelled by the policy of “stop loss” to return there. Our hero begins as a gung-ho guy and ends up going AWOL. In other words, he grows in office. He begins by obeying orders in an unjust war and ends by breaking the law to protest injustice. He begins immature and ends mature. He begins a conservative and ends a leftist. He begins in a red state and ends up Code Pink. He begins–
ME: All right! Enough with the parallel sentence structure. You gathered all that from reviews?
MYSELF: I haven’t read a single review. This is from three trailers and a few minutes watching Showbiz Tonight.
ME: So it’s schematic. Most movies that feature a character taking a “journey,” following an “arc” that causes his growth as a human being, are schematic.
MYSELF: Yes, they are. And that is why I hate them.
ME: But a character’s journey, following an arc . . . that’s Screenwriting 101!
MYSELF: It’s only Screenwriting 101 over the past couple of decades. It’s a perversion of the classic principle of fiction, which is that people are changed by experience. That doesn’t mean people automatically grow from experience, or get better through experience, or become wiser, or become more enlightened. It just means that they are affected by what happens to them. In what passes for serious filmmaking in Hollywood, this change always occurs on a straight line. It is always for the better, and “better,” in these instances, means that its lead character or characters start out as unthinking cogs in a status-quo machine and then, following a few dark lessons in the nature of evil (as represented by corporations or a Republican-led government), emerge from their cocoons to write angry and passionate blog items for the Huffington Post. Or the equivalent.
ME: Stop-loss your disingenuousness right now. You know you didn’t want to see this because you are a bloodthirsty neocon who thrills only to the drumbeat of war, war, war!
MYSELF: When did my superego turn into James Wolcott? If I found it impossible to see movies with which I disagreed ideologically, I would have given up on the medium a long time ago. The truth is that there is nothing more disagreeable than an antiwar movie, and for reasons that have little to do with politics. These movies are exercises in hypocrisy. They depict battles in ways that are supposedly intended to demonstrate the horrors of war but actually revel in its glories. They leech off the powerful emotions generated by personal heroism and sacrifice to run down the value of personal heroism and sacrifice.
ME: Chickenhawk.
MYSELF: Surely not everyone who stays away from antiwar movies is a chickenhawk. The reason people have always loved war movies is that they are depictions of men challenged by the most extreme circumstances, who achieve a kind of selflessness and heroism that those of us who have not fought can only imagine–and that make those who have fought feel as though they are being honored in the telling. Making a war movie that denies an audience this kind of satisfaction is an act of storytelling perversity. -Moviegoers can smell it from miles away. And they stay away.
ME: How can you be so crude as to assume that all writing about war is binary? What of Tolstoy, who captured perfectly the heroic and the senseless in his portrait of the sudden death of 15-year-old Petya in War and Peace:
War, in its glory and horror, and in the greatest novel ever written.
MYSELF: When Hollywood begins to approximate the merest semblance of the greatness of Tolstoy, then maybe we can talk.
ME: Why would I ever want to talk to you?
John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
