it's the reductio ad absurdum of the lengths Hollywood's
willing to go to avoid saying a word about the fellows who
actually did bring down a New York landmark.
Time for some serious art about war
June 6, 2004
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
I bought a Glenn Miller CD the other day. Impulse purchase. I'd careered off the highway and into the mall to grab a big geopolitical analysis book I suddenly needed and, as I dashed in the store, I ran straight into a new best-of-Miller compilation they had on display. I had a long drive till past midnight ahead of me and it seemed just the thing.
They'd had a lot of it on the TV last weekend: featurettes about Washington's new World War II memorial, plenty of interviews with veterans and plenty of period music in the background. Though, of course, if it's your period, you don't think of it as period music. I'd caught a snatch of that marvelous, confident bounce of ''Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree (With anyone else but me)'':
''. . .I just got word
From a guy who heard
From a guy next door to me
The girl he met
Just loves to pet
And it fits you to a tee. . .''
For younger readers, I probably ought to explain that Glenn Miller was a bandleader, and when America joined the war he persuaded the brass to let him run an Army Air Force band to pep up the spirits of the boys far from home. He died in December 1944 when his plane came down over the English Channel en route from London to an engagement in France.
For older readers who've been watching the D-Day anniversary celebrations, I don't need to explain a thing. I shoved the Miller compilation in the CD player and up came his theme tune, ''Moonlight Serenade.'' I was driving through the mountains on a beautiful blue moonlit night, which ought to fit the tune perfectly. But it doesn't. That warm, sweet sound is linked to wartime forever, even for those of us who weren't there and know it only as the incidental music to films and TV drama. The serious jazz guys are sniffy about the Miller sound. That clarinet lead with the tenor saxes playing along an octave lower can sound awful cloying in large doses, but, if the mood's right, it's gorgeously romantic. It's the music oozing across a crowded floor in the dying moments at a palais de danse in southern England, and you're pressed together till the final bar because tomorrow you're shipping out . . .
Flash forward 60 years: The old Allies are gathered at Normandy for the D-Day anniversary at a time when we're well into a new war. This time around, the only pop star in uniform is Madonna. <font size=4>On her current world tour, she wears a blue burqa and, when she disrobes, as she inevitably does, she's wearing a U.S. army uniform underneath. Geddit? The Taliban and the Bush administration are both equally oppressive, see?
Not so long ago, Madonna knew her place. It was hanging naked over a wall with her bottom in the air and a German wolfhound giving her the come-hither look while a gay dance troupe cavorted in the background. See Page 67, if memory serves, of her 1992 picture book Sex. If only Madonna went to as much trouble to take a novel position when it comes to war. But no, there's only the usual lazy vapid soul-deadening equivalism: Bush, Saddam, Ashcroft, Mullah Omar, what's the diff? The herd mentality of celebrity ''dissent.'' Would it kill 'em once in a while to dissent from their dissent and try something other than the stultifying orthodoxy of Hollywood cardboard courage?
<font size=3>
Sixty years ago, it wasn't just the love songs. James Lileks wrote a column last week about an old Disney cartoon in which Donald Duck gets drafted and assigned a million potatoes to peel. So he carves the skins into the word ''PHOOEY.'' As Lileks says, ''It takes a confident culture to take the average gripes of the enlisted man and put them front and center.'' <font size=4>A ''confident culture'' is exactly the right expression: so confident it could acknowledge soldiering as a disruption both comic (KP) and painful (faraway sweethearts). It's not fake, it's not rah-rah, but it's in tune with the moment.
Once again, flash forward six decades: We've been in the new war now for almost three years, and, unlike Donald Duck and Bogey and Bergman, and Eleanor Powell tapping her patriotic heart now, Hollywood has absolutely nothing to say on the subject, except for a couple of Michael Moore crockumentaries.
I went to see ''The Day After Tomorrow'' the day before yesterday, and it's a hoot, highly recommended -- the best enviro-doom comedy I've seen in years. The director, Roland Emmerich, has made an entire career showing famous Washington and New York landmarks getting destroyed by space aliens (''Independence Day'') and underwater monsters (''Godzilla''). Before 9/11, this was cheesily opportunist. Now it just seems perverse. When the Chrysler Building comes crashing down due to a freak cold snap brought on by Dick Cheney (I hope I'm not giving any plot details away), it's the reductio ad absurdum of the lengths Hollywood's willing to go to avoid saying a word about the fellows who actually did bring down a New York landmark.
Even when some hapless studio exec accidentally options a property that happens to have Islamist terrorists in it -- like Tom Clancy's The Sum Of All Fears -- the first thing they do is change the enemy to German neo-Nazis. Imagine it's 1943, you're in a script meeting about ''Casablanca,'' and Jack Warner says, ''I like it. But do the bad guys have to be Germans? How about if we reset it in Massachusetts and make them sinister British neo-Redcoats?''
Something has gone badly wrong when (with the exception of
a few country songs) our popular culture visibly recoils
from the biggest event of our time. Hollywood has plenty
of ''courage'' when it comes to Michael Moore conspiracies
or Madonna's bottom. But ask them to make a post-9/11
thriller in which Americans are the good guys and the
enemy is, well, the enemy, and they'd tell you there's no
audience for it. Just like they told Mel he'd lose his
shirt on ''The Passion of the Christ.'' It's not about
economics, it's about the loss of that ''cultural
confidence'' James Lileks wrote about.
Which is a big problem, because the smarter Islamists have
figured out that's the way to beat us. Imagine our Iraq
and Afghanistan veterans at ceremonies 60 years from now:
Where's the soundtrack? |
