Hollywood and 9/11
I wrote this at The Guardian in reply to Peter Bradshaw's article on Hollywood's response to the 9/11 attacks. As usual I might have got a little bit carried away.
I think Hollywood was compromised in a really brutal way by the Bush administration. Freedom of speech seemed to be seriously impinged upon lest you sounded like a freewheeling moron who is disrespectful to the people who had died on September 11th and to the many troops that were fighting in Afghanistan and later Iraq. Perhaps they were frightened to take a route purely because if so, their backers would pull out for being grossly unpatriotic. Instead of making films that took on the political mood at the time, they couldn't, their backers wouldn't allow it or the product sponsors would seize up the money. They had to thread a very delicate line on how to deal with the issue.
I think it's a shame really that Hollywood reacted the way it did. It needed to be more balls out and proactive. Instead, and I still feel that this is relevant today, what we've seen is Hollywood withdraw into itself even more to the point where they don't want to see the outside world, they're only concerned with escapist movies that take people's minds off the world. Don't get me wrong, escapist movies are all well and good but there has to be some element of confronting what is around you, otherwise I feel it's rather dangerous thing to tell people "Ssssh go back to sleep, all this was just a rather bad dream."
There are exceptions and of course George Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck is a terrific example of that. I just feel that it came a bit too late. And certainly it's been a little thin on the ground in Hollywood......I somehow feel resistant to most American/Hollywood films that deal with war at the moment because I always feel that there's going to be some form of knot tying over how best to portray the events that happened. When quite simply, the single shot of newsreel of the twin towers being attacked is without a shadow of a doubt more real and more visceral than anything Hollywood can come up with.
I think Hidden/Caché is quite possibly one of the few films that really tackled the problems that we are currently facing as humans alone. And with the onslaught of extreme right wing politics, this has only been exacerbated even further. I also agree that Oliver Stone has really been damaged by his last couple of films. It seems that he is still living in fear of being deemed unpatriotic by the American media and is having to compromise himself in order to satisfy the public. It is my one wish that directors would stop living in fear and just go for it and to hell with the consequences. But of course, that's easier said than done.
How could cinema respond to 9/11? It seemed for a while as if Hollywood considered silence the only patriotically supportive response: this was thoughtful and reasonable on one level, and yet also indicative of being unwilling to acknowledge or mythologise the attacks.
I think Hollywood was compromised in a really brutal way by the Bush administration. Freedom of speech seemed to be seriously impinged upon lest you sounded like a freewheeling moron who is disrespectful to the people who had died on September 11th and to the many troops that were fighting in Afghanistan and later Iraq. Perhaps they were frightened to take a route purely because if so, their backers would pull out for being grossly unpatriotic. Instead of making films that took on the political mood at the time, they couldn't, their backers wouldn't allow it or the product sponsors would seize up the money. They had to thread a very delicate line on how to deal with the issue.
I think it's a shame really that Hollywood reacted the way it did. It needed to be more balls out and proactive. Instead, and I still feel that this is relevant today, what we've seen is Hollywood withdraw into itself even more to the point where they don't want to see the outside world, they're only concerned with escapist movies that take people's minds off the world. Don't get me wrong, escapist movies are all well and good but there has to be some element of confronting what is around you, otherwise I feel it's rather dangerous thing to tell people "Ssssh go back to sleep, all this was just a rather bad dream."
There are exceptions and of course George Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck is a terrific example of that. I just feel that it came a bit too late. And certainly it's been a little thin on the ground in Hollywood......I somehow feel resistant to most American/Hollywood films that deal with war at the moment because I always feel that there's going to be some form of knot tying over how best to portray the events that happened. When quite simply, the single shot of newsreel of the twin towers being attacked is without a shadow of a doubt more real and more visceral than anything Hollywood can come up with.
I think Hidden/Caché is quite possibly one of the few films that really tackled the problems that we are currently facing as humans alone. And with the onslaught of extreme right wing politics, this has only been exacerbated even further. I also agree that Oliver Stone has really been damaged by his last couple of films. It seems that he is still living in fear of being deemed unpatriotic by the American media and is having to compromise himself in order to satisfy the public. It is my one wish that directors would stop living in fear and just go for it and to hell with the consequences. But of course, that's easier said than done.
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