Amid the scads of writing and commentary that were amassed in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, one of the most lucid insights came from Stephen King in a 272-word missive for the New York Times Magazine: "People keep saying 'like a movie,' 'like a book,' 'like a war zone,' and I keep thinking: No, not at all like a movie or a book -- that's no computer-generated image, because you can't see any wash or blur in the background. This is what it really looks like when an actual plane filled with actual human beings and loaded with jet fuel hits a skyscraper. This is the truth."
Certainly, King's insight can be reversed to reveal another truism -- that real had become so horrible and atrocious as to render fiction ridiculous. Nowhere is this more obvious than in movies like Collateral Damage. This brand of fiction is something notoriously American and especially prevalent in our films -- the notion that the world is divided without ambiguity into platitudes of good and bad, and that a lone, temerarious everyman could crush evil on his own terms and save the day.
John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, our imagined soloists against the denizens of terror, are now powerless. Where a movie like Collateral Damage would have been delightfully unbelievable before, it is now a spooky tribute to a bygone innocence, something we may have finally, woefully outgrown.
But another, more eerie aspect of Arnold's latest ode to machismo is that it appears to be visionary, at least in its production, immediately pre-dating the horrific subject matter with which it deals. And there are many other films that seem to follow suit -- most especially the war films and miniseries that have been released or will be in the coming month. The list is long and uncanny: Pearl Harbor, Band of Brothers, Black Hawk Down, Hart's War, We Were Soldiers and Windtalkers. Even more uncanny is the fact that these productions depict war, for the most part, as an earnest, tragic and, finally, patriotic endeavor. If there were ever movies useful as catalysts for rallying Americans behind a war, these are they.
According to Carrie Rickey, a film critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, films preceed similar real-world events "all the time." In a phone interview last Friday she said, "I would call it kind of a coincidence or eerie prophecy." She cited Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation -- a 1974 thriller that stars Gene Hackman and deals with wiretapping and espionage -- as a prime example because it was released just before the unraveling of the Watergate scandal. "That was a little creepy, the uncanny sense of prophecy that movie had," she added.
She went on to mention others: Nashville, directed by Robert Altman and released in 1975, which tangentially deals with an obscure Southern governor who wins the presidency (Jimmy Carter). And recently, Dave, which concerns a philandering President who literally dies during intercourse with one of his interns, (Bill Clinton, except for the dying part). All in all, Rickey believes that "once the movies come out, [they may have] a sense of prophecy, but it's just pure coincidence." She added, "Aristotle said there [were] only 35 or 36 fundamental plots... and we're always recycling them."
Jacqui Sadashige, a Penn Classical Studies professor, teaches a course called "Hollywood Classics," which deals with film and its cultural reverberations.
Sadashige expressed a wariness about grouping all the war films together in the first place, yet she speculated about some other logical links between the films.
"On the one hand," she said, "once somebody starts the production of a major war film like Pearl Harbor, it sets the stage for other filmmakers to address that topic." She suggested that it was necessary to "think of the general climate in which those films were produced." Subtracting about two years to get the time when the projects were likely conceived, that would leave us in the heart of the Clinton era, when, according to her, "we were concerned about the moral fiber of America because of the scandals of Monica Lewinsky and so forth, but for the most part, fairly confident about our situation in the world."
That being the case, a wave of patriotic war films, and even another dose of Arnold's one-man show, would seem relevant and ordinary. Sadashige went even further on this point to discuss the trailers of Mel Gibson's We Were Soldiers. She said, "The two things that [the movie trailer] pushes really hard are family and marriage. So even though it's a war film... one of the things it is driving is morality." So, instead of blatant war propaganda, the films might have been forecast as a vehicle for morality and confidence.
Finally, there may not be a comprehensive explanation for why the films have anticipated reality, except for this last caveat: that because of what has happened, we see in them something that was altogether not intended, but that was always there anyway.
