There's a worthy enough post over at The Brussels Journal here about Superman, Harry Potter and the War on Terror. The thesis is that the current vogue for superheroes is due to the War, with America desiring (and needing) strong moral characters to stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood, and so on. It may be right, up to a point, but it misses one crucial element, which is that America and Britain actually have real heroes in Afghanistan and Iraq who are fighting and dying almost every day. Superhero of the celluloid variety are an altogether different kettle of fish.
What is interesting to me in fact, quite on the contrary, is that in the late 1990s, during the last few years of the period when America was supposedly taking a nap from reality, there were plenty of serious thriller-type films about Muslim terrorism and American foreign policy and military intervention. Most obviously there was The Siege (1998), which admittedly devolves into a liberal wet dream with Bruce Willis as a fascistic American general and the FBI agent played by Denzel Washington as the good guy. Yeah, right! But there was also Courage Under Fire (1996), with Denzel re-visiting the 1991 Gulf War, there was Three Kings (1999), which is to date still the best movie about the 1991 war. Then there was Independence Day (also in 1996) with Bill Pullman as a Gulf veteran, there was Rules of Engagement (2000) with Samuel L Jackson as a US Marine in Yemen, there was a delightful but dull Steven Seagal effort called Executive Decision (1996, again), which actually starts with an Islamist suicide-bomber in London and then proceeds with some standard aeroplane hijacking stuff, there was Air Force One (1997) with Gary Oldman as the fascist, there was Black Hawk Down (2001), which was accurate as far as it went but much more cleaned up and PC than people realise, and then there was Behind Enemy Lines (2001), and on and on.
Well, that was all pre-9/11. And what have we had since? Denzel's been back as a Gulf War vet, only this time in the absurd remake of The Manchurian Candidate (2004) -- only this time the Gulf War veterans are brainwashed homicidal maniacs and the Enemy is American big business. And the really bad baddie is Meryl Streep as a Hillary Clinton-type character. Well, who'd've thunk it? What else? Well there's been the absurdist fantasy of Michael Moore, the sometime TV-comedian who is no longer funny and now gets mistaken for a serious leftwing agitator. (Reality check, people! He's a multi-millionaire with shares in Halliburton and all the other nasty corporations he claims to despise. He's a businessman media-mogul. He's no more a leftwinger than Arlen Specter is a conservative.) The disturbing thing is not so much that Moore's fantasy masquerades as reality but that it's been remarkably popular with slow-Joe US public. Moore says Americans are the stupidest people in the world, and his fans would seem to be trying to prove him right.
Shortly after 9/11, there was a particularly dire Tom Clancy film called The Sum of All Fears (2002). In the book the baddy had, quite logically, been an Islamist. In the movie he'd been transformed into a neo-Nazi. Personally I don't have much of a problem with that, given that modern Islamism of the al-Qa'eda variety is nothing more than fascism with a Muslim gloss. But it is worrying to wonder why this sort of thing seems to be happening more and more. Why, for example, in the new Alex Rider film is the baddy de-Islamised? In the book Stormbreaker, written by a clever little Jewboy called Anthony Horowitz, the baddy is an old boy of Fettes College who was born in Beirut but then whisked away by some rich Americans to go to school with Tony Blair, where he was picked on too much by the future Prime Minister, and now he wants to get his own back on every grotty little school-kid in the country by gassing the lot of them. His name, somewhat outrageously, is Herrod Sayle.
Well, it's a standard Bond-baddy type of name. I dare say though that the producers were worried about lawsuits from Mohammed Fayed. The man who helped George Soros to bring down John Major's government, and who has convinced half the world that Nicholas Soames bumped of Princess Diana, presumably wasn't going to think twice about taking out a tiddly-push little production company on the Isle of Man (of all places). At the same time, though, I would not put aside more disquieting possibilities. (Conspiranoid? Moi?) The thing is with 87 % of the current population of Lebanon supporting the radical Muslim terrorist group Hezbollah, and as Hezbollah's rockets rain down on the Jewish state of Israel everyday, and as polls show that a huge majority of British voters now think that Israel's response to Hezbollah has been "disproportionate", could we really have expected a British film to tell British children that not all Lebanese former street-urchins actually have their best interests at heart?
In the case of The Sum of All Fears the issue may well simply have been credibility. In the late 1990s, after all, there was a deliberate attempt by the leftwing governments of the world, from Clinton's in America to Blair's, Jospin's and Schroeder's in the EU, to portray the great enemies of civilisation as white neo-Nazis and neo-fascists. In this country the Soho bombings helped to push things Blair's way, as did the Macpherson report and even the Saville Inquiry. And of course Operation Allied Force in 1999, which in reality was the last throw of the dice in the Cold War, was repainted in red as a "progressive war" to end "ethnic cleansing", with Slobodan Milosovic (a Socialist) re-branded as a new Hitler, with the Muslim terrorists in Kosovo themselves standing in for the Jews of 1940s Europe, and so on. I didn't buy it at the time and I certainly think that now we ought to know better. The only fascists we need really fear at the moment (apart from the ones in government in this country and the European Union, that is) are Muslim fascists, and even then I'm now starting to feel that it is with Hezbollah and the other radical Muslims backed by Iran, including presumably the Mahdi Army in Iraq, that the real trouble is and is going to be. Iran after 1979, after all, was just as much an enemy of the West in the Cold War as Russia or China, and unlike Russia or China we have neither defeated the Iranians nor made "peace" with them. And now Russia is looking interested in some sort of military alliance with them.
In general terms, my suspicion is that Hollywood's blind spot when it comes to the War on Terror probably comes down to two things.
Firstly, Hollywood does have its rightwingers such as Bruce Willis, who has an Iraq War film in the pipeline. In general though there is a lot of ideological resistance in Hollywood to any movie which might help the Republicans at the polls, and especially George W Bush. In fact Hollywood's fat-cat media-moguls would almost certainly feel more comfortable bankrolling rightwing movies if there were a leftwing Democrat in the Oval Office.
Secondly, of course, it is simply too soon after 9/11 to be making serious war movies about Afghanistan or Iraq. There's a nervousness about painting events on the ground with the colours of make-believe, whatever one's ideological position. And so this year, for example, we have had to make do with movies that are really about the War on Terror but are actually about other things, such as Spielberg's Munich (which I haven't seen, but looks as if it's pro) and Mendes's Jarhead (ditto, though it looks as if it's anti).
And of course on with the superheroes! There are two types of escapism - that of the hero in his POW camp, and that of the coward on his way to the front line. Superheroes such as Superman and Wonderwoman, and of course Captain America, were born in an evil hour and were meant in the former vein, to encourage young boys and girls to think and feel with a moral clarity in the face of their nation's enemies. (See here and here for a war-time Superman bringing justice to Hitler and his sometime ally Stalin in equal measure.) My fear now is that the new, post-9/11 superheroes do exactly the opposite. As the Brussels Journal's reviewer points out, the new, sexually immoral Man of Steel is also not particularly pro-American, and this was a deliberate policy decision by a leftwing screenwriter. (On the other hand, Christopher Reeve was a serious enough actor to deal with lines like "I believe in truth, justice and the American Way!" Richard Donner could end a film with an American policeman saying "This country's safe again Superman, thanks to you." And in Superman II we even had Krypton's last son dealing with the villains and then flying to the White House with Old Glory borne aloft to apologise to the President for not being there when America needed him - the most patriotic alien on the planet! It takes artistic guts and integrity to get away with this sort of thing, and Bryan Singer and Brandon Routh probably wouldn't have been able to manage it even if they'd wanted to.) Spider-Man a few years back was happy to pose with the Stars and Bars in the background, but that too seems to have gone since Dubya was re-elected. And the same tends to go for the all the other superheroes. Daredevil has always been a lefty. (A disabled lawyer who works on frivolous health-and-safety lawsuits gratis! Puh-lease!) The Fantastic Four were always pretty nondescript, though it was great seeing the Human Torch. (The HT as an underpants model! Classic!) Batman is as batty as ever, though at least he's a bit more serious and kiddie-friendly now that he's played by Christian Bale. James Bond stood up to the North Koreans, of course, but then the main villain turned out to be an English toff played by Toby Stephens, which sort of spoiled that. And George Lucas actually completely re-modelled the Reaganite politics of the Star Wars universe in Revenge of the Sith, if only to try to prove that the Empire really are the bad guys. (Personally I'm not so sure!) And Harry Potter of course is almost as leftwing as Daredevil. (The Order of the Phoenix is modelled on the Fabian Society. And JK Rowling herself is a close personal friend of Mrs Gordon Brown -- see here, here and here if you don't believe me.)
In fact by comparison with almost all that's gone before it, Stormbreaker is a rightwing breath of fresh air. The credits include thanks to the Royal Green Jackets and the Household Cavalry. Tony Blair doesn't take quite the pasting he did in the book in 2000, but he is played here by Robbie Coltrane as a sort of overweight Amalgam with John Prescott, and the "Education! Education! Education!"-soundbite is once again played for laughs. Alex Pettyfer, who plays, er, Alex, turned out one of the most miscast Tom Browns in a generation the Christmas before last, so it's good to report that he is perfect as the new "young James Bond". (There have been various attempts at the formula before, but they've all been American, and therefore crap.) Unfortunately Stephen Fry seems to have followed Alex from Rugby and is now playing the "Q" character. Bill Nighy hams it up as "M" -- although somewhat knowingly the character here is called Alan Blunt. Ewan McGrgegor, somewhat pleasingly, has reprised his role of trainer-of-blond-teenage-boys-to-be-superheroes from Star Wars. (Not that we ever see Obi-Wan Kenobi doing much Jedi-training, but Liam Neeson got essentially the same job in Batman Returns, so why not?) And of course "Herrod Sayle" is now "Darrius Sayle", and he's a camp American who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. Well, you can't have everything, I suppose! (Personally I think "Darrius" sounds Iranian. Darius, King of Persia? Anyone?)
As if to prove a point to myself though, I pondered on my way home from the cinema what Daniel Radcliffe would have done with the role of Alex Rider, especially considering that he's now going to be in a dirty play on in the West End. Amusingly, he and Pettyfer were actually at school together (here, for what it's worth). Hmmm! Harry Potter or Alex Rider? Neurotic, lefty, Jewish-looking kid vs. Anakin Skywalker's replacement -- raised in Chelsea, trained by the SAS! And he shot Tony Blair! Personally, if I had to choose a fictional teenage boy to save Britain from the forces of evil, I'd choose Alex every time!
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