So Long, and Thanks for All the Propaganda

Steyn dissects Hollywood's drive to destroy itself, with special attention to Brokeback Mountain, Munich, and the fact that, four and a half years after 9/11, we have yet to see a major motion picture that envisions Middle Eastern Islamists as actual enemies.

Dreamworks has just been sold to Paramount. As The Daily Telegraph in London reported:

“Dreamworks, founded in 1994, has had a series of costly flops this year despite its early successes with blockbusters such as American Beauty and Saving Private Ryan.�

Hmm. Steven Spielberg’s studio is going out in style, with Munich—a film about the PLO’s murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. As the great director sees it, the problem is “intransigenceâ€� on both sides, which has led to a tragic “cycle of violenceâ€�. “A response to a response doesn’t really solve anything,â€� he says. “There’s been a quagmire of blood for blood for many decades in that region. Where does it end?â€�

Bye, bye, Steven. That’s why we have “culture wars�: Those who fancy themselves of an artistic bent recoil almost reflexively from the “simplistic�, and so they take refuge in a sophistry that is itself laughably simplistic. The average joe rightly recognizes this as a crock. In my experience Americans aren’t particularly pre-disposed toward Jews, but at a basic level they get the difference between the two sides – as Leon Wieseltier puts it, “the death of innocents was an Israeli mistake but a Palestinian objective�. So all the artful symmetries Spielberg and his screenwriter Tony Kushner find between the men who killed the athletes and the men who killed the athlete-killers ring false to most of the potential audience. After all, even as the film was opening, the President of Arafatistan, Abu Mazen, was signing off on a new law that rewards suicide bombers by providing a lifelong welfare check to their relicts. That’s the difference.

Likewise, there are millions of Americans who reckon Islamism is a psychotic death cult with nothing to commend it, least of all if you happen to be a woman or a gay or an “artist�, none of which liberal-approved groups prospered under Taliban rule.

If you’re making ten straight cowboy movies, a gay one’s neither here nor there. Similarly, if you’ve made ten movies in which Jake Gyllenhaal or Heath Ledger kick terrorist butt from here to Peshawar, there’s plenty of room for a contrarian take in which it turns out to be the stewardesses who pulled off 9/11. But, in a conflict that’s already lasted longer than America’s participation in World War Two, Hollywood still can’t bring itself to make a film in which America’s heroes whump America’s enemies. That’s just lousy business sense.

Which is one reason why Dreamworks flopped. Dreams may work, but hallucinations don’t. And so Spielberg’s no longer a mogul and his company is a subsidiary of Paramount – the non-brokeback mountain. Yet.

Read the whole thing (link here; it's the third article down).