There was an article on SFGate.com/The San Francisco Chronicle a few days ago which illuminated the rather stark fact that films about the Iraq War are tanking big-time.

It’s absolutely true. The Valley of Elah, Redacted, Lions for Lambs, and Mideast-themed movies like Rendition and The Kingdom were all Box-Office dogs, despite big casts and reasonably big budgets.

Why is this? The Iraq War may be the most important issue in American politics today. It has had profound effects on this country’s essential character, and has changed America’s image abroad forever. It is absolutely true the Bush administration has carefully managed the war to have the barest minimum impact on this country’s citizenry– no draft, no war bonds, financed by money borrowed elsewhere and bolstered by mercenary corporate entities. But polls have repeatedly shown the Iraq War is the most prominent public concern, after the essential economic ones.

The article throws blame around like skeets from a CBU-97 cluster bomb. The public is burned out on war. They don’t take sides and go after Bush, so they’re muddled and ambiguous. The films depict events that are too immediate to process.

Of course, you can’t bemoan the failure of the message getting out widely without laying blame squarely on Joe Sixpack:

“All of these films were vaguely challenging, just like people’s attitudes towards the war,” [Brandon Gray, publisher of Box Office Mojo] said. “The intellectuals in San Francisco and on college campuses like ambiguity, but a lot of people in the rest of the country don’t.”

In other words, people in the flyovers didn’t get off their tractors for these films. Sheesh. I’m going to drop the cute banter for a minute and say this to anyone who thinks or writes this way: Knock it off. Treating the American public like a bunch of simpletons who are “challenged” by complexity is foolish, ugly, elitist and anti-democratic.

Not having charted any clear reasons for the dilemma, it was a somewhat open-ended article, which leads, as open-ended articles do, to a few letters to the editor– One in particular, from a Kay James of Moraga, was so righteously knee-jerk it needed to made fun of here:

Editor - I just returned from seeing the movie, “Rendition,” and I couldn’t believe how few people there were in the audience. Why isn’t everyone in this country seeing this movie and involving themselves at least to the point of learning what we are actually doing and how we are doing it i.e. managing to get people tortured?

I spoke with the theater manager afterward, lamenting the absence of more theatergoers. He said that people don’t want to see anything to do with torture and that they prefer to be entertained.

Love the line, “lamenting the absence of theatergoers.” Woe, fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! Can you get in to see Rendition for cheap if you dress in a hair-shirt? Sack-cloth and ashes might work, but you’ll make a mess. And as for the people preferring entertainment to torture, It would be my pleasure to introduce said theatre manager to Eli (Hostel) Roth and Leigh (Saw) Whannell. That’s them, standing on top of their large piles of money– Proof positive you can have it both ways.

Still looking for a reason Iraq War films are so much UXO (Unexploded Ordinance)? How ’bout this for a reason: These films were “challenging” for average audiences because they violated Hollywood’s Prime Directive: They weren’t entertaining. From the synopses I’ve read, all the movies above sounded like real snoozers, wheezy film-within-film gimmicks or movies about people “dealing” with the war’s effects.

What would be so friggin’ wrong with making a war movie with BIG ACTION in it? Something epic, with a full-court press of Hollywood visuals and production values. The fall of Baghdad, with every dropped bomb and destroyed palace rendered lovingly with every CG effect in the bag. Perhaps a filmed-in-Panavision, Dolby Digital dramatization of the Second Battle of Fallujah– considered the be the biggest urban engagement since the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, by the way. How ’bout a tight action-thriller-courtroom drama detailing the last days of Saddam Hussein?

If the will existed, the Hollywood powers-that-be, much like Mr. Roth and Mr. Whannell, could have their cake and eat it too. I can think of plenty of examples of excellent, successful war movies that still question the wars they depict: Catch-22 (1970), Apocalypse Now (1979), Black Hawk Down (2001) and Jarhead (2005). All have scenes of great spectacle and action, yet are either antiwar movies or essentially question the justness of the wars they depict. If anything, they are morally complex films, somewhat “challenging” for the viewer.

So that’s the conundrum: Nobody wants to see pedantic, “realistic” treatments on the Iraq War. This might very well be because the public aren’t fools, and can easily figure out when they’re being talked down to. The annoying thing is that if the studios went with their true creative strengths and created their own special version of “reality–” Polished, spectacular, action-packed– they could criticize the war between the lines and the public would still love it.

–Skot C.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 25th, 2007 at 8:08 pm and is filed under General, Motion Pictures, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.