Last Friday saw the long-delayed opening of Paul Greengrass's Iraq-war thriller The Green Zone. Why it did not open this Friday, which is the seventh anniversary of the start of the Iraq campaign, I do not know. As expected, Paul Greengrass uses his Bourne-tricks to craft a thrill-infused version of just what went down during the earliest days of 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'. For those who want the same discourse without the somewhat generic thriller elements, just rent the fantastic documentary No End In Sight, which deals (as objectively as possible) with the hopelessly bungled occupation which led to the protracted post-invasion conflict. Or, if you've got five hours to kill, rent the PBS/Frontline documentary Bush's War.
But is The Green Zone a true liberal screed? Not really. Like a lot of recent films that are tagged as liberal, the film deals with moral absolutes and is tagged as left-wing by those who would disagree with the scenarios at play. When it comes to normal fiction entertainments, mainstream movie-making is relatively apolitical. Conservative commentators love to claim for their own various films (Groundhog Day, The Incredibles, A Simple Plan, etc) that merely espouse mainstream values of good vs. evil, self-defense, family loyalty, monogamous relationships, and personal responsibility, as if liberals actively oppose these bedrock tenants of our current society. Ironically, many of those 'American values' derived from the character of Superman, who started his days as a pro-FDR, pro-press muckraker who was in favor of joining the war in Europe and regulating business when many on the political right were opposed.
Many conservative pundits also presume that just because characters in a film act in a way with (Knocked Up) or against (Million Dollar Baby) their values means that the film and the filmmakers are firmly on the side of their characters. Just because Juno decided against having an abortion does not mean that Jason Reitman and/or Diablo Cody are anti-choice. While there are certain mainstream entertainments that could be classified as solidly conservative (Phone Booth, Bad Boys 2, The Devil's Advocate, or The Eighth Day), most mainstream entertainments are just about characters making life choices and moral decisions ignorant or uncaring about which side of the political spectrum those choices might fall under at a given time.
And we liberals love to claim for our own films like Avatar. Sure the picture may contain swipes at the Iraq war and its propaganda and the film is certainly liberal when it comes to environmental concerns. But at least where it concerns issues of war and peace, the James Cameron opus merely states that land-theft and murder is not a nice way to operate, and that an indigenous populace has the right to fight back against aggressors. Do mainstream conservatives really want to claim that being anti-genocide is somehow left-wing? Most movies classified as 'liberal' are thrillers that deal with faceless corporations using their unchecked power to engage in various sorts of skulduggery (think The Constant Gardener, State of Play, or Edge of Darkness). Sure, the GOP has allowed themselves to get tagged as the party of corporations, but aren't these movies merely stating, as a hard moral bedrock of free enterprise, that giant corporations shouldn't kill people or commit treason as a matter of public policy? At what point did 'business shouldn't poison/murder people' become a left-wing idea?
Remember ten years ago, when it was the liberals who were being tagged as the party of 'oh, there's an excuse/mitigating circumstance for everything' and the conservatives who preached hard morality and the rule of law regardless of circumstance? I'd argue that one of the unfortunate effects of post-9/11 discourse is to render seemingly mainstream views regarding a whole host of issues, such as torture (no), preemptive invasion (no), the rule of law and due process (yes), and constitutional rights (yes) into amoral gray zones for political discourse. Of course, that's what The Dark Knight is really about, which is why it hit such a nerve in audiences of all political stripes (it was certainly no neocon fantasy). Believing in 'the right thing' is meaningless if you don't stick to those principles in times of great strife, which used to be a pretty mainstream philosophy.
On the surface, the fact that we are discussing a movie like The Green Zone as left-wing at all is a little disconcerting. The film surprisingly goes out of its way to avoid partisan name-calling, as the film basically faults a single fictional corrupt Bush administration official (played by Greg Kinnear) with using a single overeager reporter ('not Judith Miller', played by Amy Ryan) in order to sell the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. For those so politically-inclined, this is the biggest problem with the picture as it basically lets the Bush administration, the mainstream media, and the American public off the hook by holding up mustache-twirling figureheads as the culprits (the finale also fatally plunges the picture into wish-fulfillment fantasy). In the end, The Green Zone simply argues that the people who lie and deceive a populace into waging war against a nation under false pretenses are the bad guys. And the people who fail to adequately plan for various contingencies associated with that war, a failure that results in years of protracted slaughter and loss of national blood and treasure, should not be commended. It was wrong when Lyndon B. Johnson did it and it was wrong when George W. Bush did it. The fact that such an opinion is now viewed as a politically partisan one and movies that espouse it are considered liberal screeds is a troubling sign of how far down the rabbit hole we've plunged since the second week in September of 2001.
Scott Mendelson
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Interesting column - and right on the money - though I am still trying to wrap my head around why "Phone Booth" is a 'solidly conservative film". :D
If any criticism of their crimes is socialism - then we need a LOT more socialism around these parts.
The fact is though that criticising the lying bastards who tear the world apart for profit is not socialism at all. And they know it. All they do is put criticism into the defensive by labeling it in a way they created.
Commusims is not the bane of our existence. - What they call free market IS:
They call anything but feeding the parasites averything they want communsim because it works. We are so conditioned to fight communism that we didn't even protest when they went to South America to fight communism. - Communsim that was nothing but free democracies NOT giving the parasites everything they wanted. So they installed dictators who DID wigve them everything and poverty and death rose to incredible heights. - But WE made profit. Yoooo f-ing hoooooo
Camerons work could name those parasites massmurdering f-heads and it would not be liberal. - It would be true.
And that is the core of it all: truth. We are fed lies to such an extent that truth becomes liberal bias. - Just think about that for a minute. The parasitic criminals are so vile that truth becomes bad for them.
Does ANYONE need more incentive to get rid of those bastards?
Funny how people see this as relating to Iraq (or Afghanistan), but NOT to Palestine. How many "mainstream" commentators in America are willing to concede Palestinians the right to fight back against their aggressors the Israelis, busy stealing their land and murdering their people?
This morning Tom Friedman opines for "non-violent Palestinian resistance." I heard from two of them last week in a talk at Stanford, leaders of the non-violent protests against the wall in Bi'lin. One of them had to talk by Skype because the U.S. wouldn't grant him a visa. And one of the things they noted was that 19 people have been killed by Israel (usually by "non-violent" weapons like rubber bullets and tear gas cannisters) during the non-violent Palestinian protests). Any wonder why there isn't more of that?
Maybe the problem is that the Right wants to always choose one over the other (and in the process make the other seem completely evil and entirely unacceptable), while the Left (and not just the Left, really anyone not on the far Right) wants both.
We want liberty -and- security.
We want church -and- state.
We want progress -and- tradition.
We want life -and- choice.
We want personal responsibility -and- social justice.
We want individual initiative -and- equal opportunity.
We want to promote America's greatness -and- acknowledge its flaws.
We want to help business succeed -and- protect the environment.
The Right has gotten a lot of mileage by telling itself and others that they have to choose one or the other, all or nothing. I've believed for years that the difference between Right and Left is not that one wants X and the other wants Y. One wants X, the other wants X, Y, and Z.
We are pretty far down the rabbit hole now.
Really? How about " We can't wait for the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud" Condi also said it. Wanted us to believe Saddam could nuke us. Which was never true, and they knew that for a fact when they said it, i,e., they lied.
Just wait as the pendulum swings further and further to the right. "Torture is wrong" used to be an American value across the spectrum, but now it's considered left-wing. Before we know it, "Slavery is wrong" or "Compulsory religion is wrong" will be considered left-wing ideas as well.
It doesn't matter that the characters are fictional. The story is basically Matt Damon's character looking for WMDs. But remember, the UN Inspectors had been crawling around Iraq for 10 years (from the previous Bush's War) and had never found anything - there wasn't anything to find. Also recall that just a couple of week's after Bush was sworn in the US bombed a communications center outside of Baghdad. It was all going to be downhill on roller skates from there. Finding a way to get the American people behind an invasion was paramount. Funny, suddenly we had Sept. 11. The poor guys that had to go in a clean it up. What a mess. Imagine how they felt (which is what the film asks you to do) as they realize it was all made up. That lives had been lost for an excuse.
As far as Saddam goes, he was an old man, and fairly toothless. He had a big roar and no bite. He had pretty much been emasculated since the first Bush. For the stability of his country he made his protests loud and long before America invaded. But Bush/Cheney were determined.
It's a good flick.
"This picture has done better than most of today's modern war stories," said Nikki Rocco, Universal's domestic distribution president. "But we were hoping for better."
Universal and its financing partner Relativity Media spent about $100 million to produce "Green Zone" and tens of millions more to market the picture, meaning it will be a major money loser.
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/14/1529543/green-zone-is-latest-iraq-war.html#ixzz0iUiQ8L9j
It has come to that. And it is shocking. No matter how often it happens, it remains shocking. I'm almost 42 years old, and I guess I'm still naive, because I am still shocked that so many right wingers would rather be wrong than admit left wingers are right.
...though I feel awfully young, when I try to consider how "unique" the current state of our political dialogue is. IS it so unique? I feel all too strongly that we're poised on the bring of a collapse into fascism... but how many times has this country been here before? How often does a democracy like the U.S., find itself facing problems like the problem our "political dialogue" currently has?
(I guess none, because I believe that it's the media causing a big part of the problem, and no one anywhere in the world has ever faced or been blessed or saddled with a post information explosion media "configuration" like we currently have... it is still just a guess...)
We were told he had and was planning on using WMD on us. We were told he had a hand in training/preparing the 9/11 hijackers. We were led on a long train of FUD that ultimately turned out to be BS.
Don't try to misdirect people to cover up what happend, TYVM.
I don't ever recall Bush saying that there was any imminent wmd attack expected from Saddam. For all the slick degrees out there, many people missed the quite explicit message from Bush's team: if we wait until the attack is imminent, then it is too late. They are absolutely correct. There isn't much you can do to stop an asymmetrical wmd attack. In a post 9/11 world, the President was not going to allow a rogue dictator with a history of making war against the US (among others), using wmd against women/children, and with a history of aiding/abbetting terrorist organizations, etc., to ignore wmd disarmament requirements.
The precedential risks were too high in their opinions. Maybe you don't like their decisions, but the whole bush lied/people died and blood for oil mantras are just ridiculous. I'd say there is a 90% chance that someone on this thread has already blamed this on Haliburton...
Anyway you can all relax now, instead of Bush listening in on your phone calls, its now Obama.
Boooo!
(((Fanned)))