The Last Three Movies I Watched
were Blood Diamond, Children of Men, and Casino Royale, in that order. These are very similar movies--you might say they're all the same movie. They feature three very manly actors playing deeply scarred characters who come to struggle against global domination. Now Susan Douglas and others have made the point that generic characters and plots usually don't come out of thin air. Douglas pointed this out in connection with early 1960s television, in which suddenly lots of sitcoms featured women with supernatural powers whose husbands/male partners wanted them to hide them. (The three that come immediately to mind are The Flying Nun, I Dream of Jeannie, and Bewitched.) At the same time, sitcoms like Gomer Pyle and Hogan's Heroes featured goofball hijinx in the US Marines and Nazi POW camps. Surely these commented in an obscure (ideological?) way on feminism and the war in Vietnam.
The War on Terror speaks to me through these movies. All three of them express reservations, on the surface, about the world order that the War on Terror is being fought to protect; all of them, in fact, see terror as a fiction of the inequalities in that world order. The Children of Men is most impressive in this regard, with the seige of a refugee camp in Britain filmed as if it were in the West Bank, with sympathies fully arrayed on the side of the nonwhite population of the camp. (I wonder if this sequence will be perceived as a comment on the Palestinian situation?) Likewise, though Blood Diamond showcases demonically cruel black guerillas and mercenaries, these are clearly epiphenomenal to the international diamond cartel that bankrolls them. Casino Royale's mad bombers--there are two great action sequences in which Bond tangles with unspeaking and almost superhuman mayhem artists--are the pawns of international capitalists. So it is the War on Terror's rhetoric upside down, as it were--it's not that fanatics that threaten us, but the money power or the establishment.
But this terror comes, at a deeper level, out of the very vortex of globalization. All of these movies are about a stateless world and the manly men who must police it. In each case, the hero is thrown back into a state of nature. Women, of varying degrees of constancy and usefulness, are there to accompany them, but in the end the men must prevail through blood and sacrifice. Now I must not give away any of the endings of these movies, but not all the good guys make it out alive, this despite dodging an awful lot of bullets.
Bond, of course, does. He must recur as a character, even as he mutates as an actor. Bond is essentially comedic, though. At the end of each episode, the status quo is restored with a mating. This one ends a bit differently than the usual, but that's because it's a prequel. It breaks with formula in another way, though: it lacks the smirk, or the camp, of previous Bond movies. This is the War on Terror. The Cold War could go campy. From Russia with Love, indeed. The War on Terror is no laughing matter, or at least no giggling matter.
It's by now redundant to point to the phallic significance of 9/11--the felling of two stationary penises by two flying ones. What stands out in the rhetoric after is the wholesale transference of the performance of victimhood from women and nonwhites to the white male nation in the form of the Pres-O-Dent. The movies I've recently chanced to see--certainly this is no representative sample of current cinema--comment wrily on all that jazz, but don't have sufficient irony at their disposal to shake free of the gender politics of 9/11. And two of em are British. Imagine that. Then again, I saw them while Tony Blair was hanging out in Miami with one of the Brothers Gibb--his own "BeeGee Rebozo," if anyone old enough to get the pun reads this. Happy new year.
were Blood Diamond, Children of Men, and Casino Royale, in that order. These are very similar movies--you might say they're all the same movie. They feature three very manly actors playing deeply scarred characters who come to struggle against global domination. Now Susan Douglas and others have made the point that generic characters and plots usually don't come out of thin air. Douglas pointed this out in connection with early 1960s television, in which suddenly lots of sitcoms featured women with supernatural powers whose husbands/male partners wanted them to hide them. (The three that come immediately to mind are The Flying Nun, I Dream of Jeannie, and Bewitched.) At the same time, sitcoms like Gomer Pyle and Hogan's Heroes featured goofball hijinx in the US Marines and Nazi POW camps. Surely these commented in an obscure (ideological?) way on feminism and the war in Vietnam.
The War on Terror speaks to me through these movies. All three of them express reservations, on the surface, about the world order that the War on Terror is being fought to protect; all of them, in fact, see terror as a fiction of the inequalities in that world order. The Children of Men is most impressive in this regard, with the seige of a refugee camp in Britain filmed as if it were in the West Bank, with sympathies fully arrayed on the side of the nonwhite population of the camp. (I wonder if this sequence will be perceived as a comment on the Palestinian situation?) Likewise, though Blood Diamond showcases demonically cruel black guerillas and mercenaries, these are clearly epiphenomenal to the international diamond cartel that bankrolls them. Casino Royale's mad bombers--there are two great action sequences in which Bond tangles with unspeaking and almost superhuman mayhem artists--are the pawns of international capitalists. So it is the War on Terror's rhetoric upside down, as it were--it's not that fanatics that threaten us, but the money power or the establishment.
But this terror comes, at a deeper level, out of the very vortex of globalization. All of these movies are about a stateless world and the manly men who must police it. In each case, the hero is thrown back into a state of nature. Women, of varying degrees of constancy and usefulness, are there to accompany them, but in the end the men must prevail through blood and sacrifice. Now I must not give away any of the endings of these movies, but not all the good guys make it out alive, this despite dodging an awful lot of bullets.
Bond, of course, does. He must recur as a character, even as he mutates as an actor. Bond is essentially comedic, though. At the end of each episode, the status quo is restored with a mating. This one ends a bit differently than the usual, but that's because it's a prequel. It breaks with formula in another way, though: it lacks the smirk, or the camp, of previous Bond movies. This is the War on Terror. The Cold War could go campy. From Russia with Love, indeed. The War on Terror is no laughing matter, or at least no giggling matter.
It's by now redundant to point to the phallic significance of 9/11--the felling of two stationary penises by two flying ones. What stands out in the rhetoric after is the wholesale transference of the performance of victimhood from women and nonwhites to the white male nation in the form of the Pres-O-Dent. The movies I've recently chanced to see--certainly this is no representative sample of current cinema--comment wrily on all that jazz, but don't have sufficient irony at their disposal to shake free of the gender politics of 9/11. And two of em are British. Imagine that. Then again, I saw them while Tony Blair was hanging out in Miami with one of the Brothers Gibb--his own "BeeGee Rebozo," if anyone old enough to get the pun reads this. Happy new year.
posted by jnerone at 12:33 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home