OT:PC in Hollywood

[Glenn X]

[Firstly, here is the URL to the Reihan Salam article posted by Riggo-toni: http://slate.msn.com/?id=2066272&device= ]

It Doesn't Add Up to Much

"The Sum of All Fears" fails miserably as a movie, but succeeds as a window into Hollywood's PC soul.

by Jonathan V. Last

05/31/2002 12:00:00 AM

ONE OF THE LITTLE GAMES I play at the movies is keeping a list of Least Plausible Actors in the Role of a Ph.D. It's a long list.

Some actors play smart effortlessly. Richard Dreyfuss in "Jaws," Russell Crowe in "The Insider," Stellan Skarsgard in "Good Will Hunting"--all credible as academics. Jeff Goldblum may be the Most Plausible Actor in the Role of a Ph.D., with believable turns in "The Fly," "Independence Day," and "Jurassic Park" (he gets extra credit for playing believable smart guys in dumb movies). His "Jurassic Park" co-star Sam Neill was also a fine academic; cast-mate Laura Dern was somewhat less believable--but she wasn't bad enough to make my list.

To make the list, you can't just be implausible, you have to be laughable. Kevin Bacon in "Hollow Man." Nicole Kidman in "The Peacemaker." Jennifer Jason Leigh in "eXistenZ." Nicholas Cage in "The Rock." For many years, the leader board was topped by Elisabeth Shue for her work in "The Saint," where she played not some garden-variety Ph.D., but a nuclear physicist who was on the brink of creating cold fusion. She has withstood many challenges during her five-year reign--most memorably from Denise Richards's bubble-bod nuclear arms inspector in "The World Is Not Enough"--but Shue has finally been topped. There's a new sheriff in town and his name is Ben Affleck.

In "The Sum of All Fears" Affleck plays Jack Ryan, a Marine turned Ph.D. It really, really doesn't work. In his most pensive moments, while he's unraveling the mysteries that will prevent nuclear holocaust, he looks as though he's about to say, "Hey Prez, is it Schlitz'o'clock yet?" And while he's utterly implausible as a Ph.D., he's equally implausible as a former Marine. Or a movie star, for that matter. He's too dim to play smart, too pretty to play tough, and too self-satisfied to play charming. Stepping into a role previously inhabited by Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford, he lacks both Baldwin's accessibility and Ford's gristle. Thanks, in part, to Affleck's performance, "The Sum of All Fears" is a disaster of a movie.

But it isn't all his fault. "The Sum of All Fears" is, objectively speaking, one of the worst-made big studio films in recent memory. The editing is ham-handed and often incoherent. The direction is suspect. And the production decisions are both mystifying and instructive.

For the uninitiated, "Fears" is the fourth installment of the Jack Ryan franchise adapted from Tom Clancy's best-selling novels. In the book version of "Fears," a group of Middle-Eastern terrorists tries to start a war between Russia and the United States by setting off a nuclear bomb at the Super Bowl. The producers were squeamish about the idea of portraying radical Muslims as terrorists, so they turned the bad guys into neo-Nazis (for an excellent description of the decision-making process, read Reihan Salam's piece in Slate). One of the producers, Mace Neufeld, says that complaints from the CAIR crowd started coming into the studio before they even had a script, and Affleck now cavalierly says, "The Arab terrorist thing has been done a million times in the movies." Which is true. Of course, in all of the World War II movies, America is fighting Germany and Japan.

"The Sum of All Fears" is a case study in how Hollywood handles September 11. Now the movie was greenlit and shot long before September 11. But in the shadow of Khobar Towers and the USS Cole and the embassy bombings, Hollywood flinched from showing Arab terrorists at work. The question now is, does September 11 make Hollywood more or less likely to depict terrorists as being Islamist?

So far, the only clues we have come from two television shows, "The West Wing" and "Law & Order" (the production lag is so long in film that the first truly post-September 11 movies won't come out until next Christmas).

This season "The West Wing" opened with an episode about terrorism where the Secret Service suspected that a member of the White House staff might be a terrorist. The Middle Eastern fellow was detained by the Secret Service and questioned at length by the president's chief-of-staff. Naturally, since the show is written and produced by Aaron Sorkin, the episode centered around questions of freedom and racial profiling. The Arab staffer is indignant that he is singled out. Sorkin sets up a conservative straw man in the chief-of-staff who voices concerns about national security, but his arguments are methodically taken apart by the more enlightened members of the cast. And then, at the end of the episode, we find out that the staffer is innocent, that he was just doing his job. The chief-of-staff looks at him sadly (I forget whether or not he apologizes). Lesson learned.

Last week "Law & Order" concluded its season with a September 11 centered episode. An Arab man is found dead and the perp who killed him is an ex-Special Forces soldier. The soldier insists that the man he killed was a terrorist. The show's producer, Dick Wolf, also a Hollywood liberal, has the district attorney prosecute the case with special attention given to the soldier's paranoia and the idea of racial profiling. The DA tells the jury that we can't just go around killing people who look Middle Eastern just because we suspect them of being terrorists. The jury votes to convict. But then Wolf does something truly shocking: In the coda we learn that the "victim" really was a terrorist, and that when he was killed he was about to start an operation that would have led to an attack.

It seems a foregone conclusion that Hollywood will never return to the type of patriotic movies that it cranked out in the '40s and '50s--movies like "Lifeboat," "The Sands of Iwo Jima," and "Casablanca." We're much too sophisticated for that nowadays.

But we are at war. The question is whether Hollywood will act more like Sorkin--high-minded and committed to a liberal distrust of American power--or more like Wolf--high-minded and committed to a liberal distrust of American power, but open to the evidence on the table.

Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/301ejkvq.asp

[Glenn X]

Here's the article from CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) regarding The Sum of All Fears that Reihan Salam referred to above.

http://www.cair-net.org/asp/article.asp?articleid=118&articletype=2

New movie drops

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(Washington, DC, 1/26/2001)

Alhamdulillah, CAIR today announced the end of a two-year campaign to have Paramount Pictures drop "Muslim" villains in the new film "The Sum of All Fears" currently beginning production in Montreal, Canada.

Director Phil Alden Robinson told CAIR that unlike the Tom Clancy novel on which the movie is based, "The Sum of All Fears" will not have Muslims as the villains. (According to the book, terrorists detonate a nuclear device at the Super Bowl in Denver. The bomb comes from an unexploded Israeli nuclear device found on the Golan Heights.)

In his letter to CAIR, Robinson wrote: "I hope you will be reassured that I have no intention of promoting negative images of Muslims or Arabs, and I wish you the best in your continuing efforts to combat discrimination."

For the past two years, CAIR has been in contact with Paramount Pictures and Mace Neufeld, the film's original director, to discuss Muslim characters in the book and their possible use in the screenplay.

"Given the existing prejudice against and stereotyping of Islam and Muslims, we believe this film could have had a negative impact on the lives of ordinary American Muslims, particularly children. We are pleased that Mr. Robinson took the initiative to help eliminate religious and ethnic bias from his film. This move should set a precedent for other movie producers," said CAIR Board Chairman Omar Ahmad.

Ahmad added that each year, CAIR issues an annual report on the status of American Muslim civil rights outlining hundreds of incidents involving anti-Muslim discrimination, harassment and even physical violence. He said that many of these incidents result from the negative images of Islam and Muslims put forward in the entertainment industry.

"The Sum of All Fears" is not the first film that had the potential to stereotype Muslims and Arabs. In recent years, films such as "Rules of Engagement," "True Lies" and "Executive Decision" portrayed Muslims and Arabs as irrational terrorists who only wish to kill innocent Americans.

In 1998, CAIR led the Muslim community in a sustained campaign to educate the public about what it said were negative stereotypes in the 20th Century Fox film "The Siege." That film was set in Brooklyn, N.Y., and involved a series of terrorist bombings by "Muslims" that prompted the American military to declare martial law and carry out a mass arrest of American Muslims and Arab-Americans. The scenario was similar to the detention of Japanese-Americans during WWII.

CAIR has acted as a consultant on other films such as DreamWorks SKG's "Prince of Egypt."

[Glenn X]

groups like the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the Council on American-Islamic Relations have condemned movies like 1994's True Lies and 2000's Rules of Engagement, both of which featured violent, fanatical Muslims (as opposed to 1996's The Rock, which featured violent, fanatical Gulf War veterans or 2001's AntiTrust, which featured violent, fanatical software executives). They even protested 1998's critically acclaimed The Siege, a searing critique of anti-Arab hysteria.

To me, this last sentence really cuts to the heart of the matter here. The ADC (which was co-founded by Yasser Arafat apologist James Zogby) and CAIR completely lost whatever shred of credibility that they may have had in my eyes when they slammed The Siege as “anti-Arab” and “anti-Muslim.” The Siege was co-written and directed by Ed (thirtysomething, Glory) Zwick, one of the most cautious and liberal filmmakers in Hollywood, and features Arab American actor Tony Shalhoub, playing Arab American FBI Agent Frank Haddad, tossing his badge to the dirt about halfway through the film and exclaiming, “I’m tired of being Uncle Sam’s sand-n*gger!” If ever there were a film that attempted to deal with the vast complexities of an American law enforcement/military response to (what was only then) a potential attack on America by Islamist terrorists, it is The Siege. The fact that the ADC and CAIR completely missed the boat on this readily comprehendible fact does not speak well of their (alleged) powers of perception.

I understand the dismay of the ADC and CAIR over the paucity of what they deem as “positive” images of Arabs/Muslims in the mass media. However, these Arab American groups must be realistic about this situation. The reason there were so many Arab/Muslim bad guys in ‘80s and early ‘90s action movies, for example, was because Hollywood was responding to real life news stories, namely the hostage crisis in Iran, the terrorist bombings of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, as well as the utterly antisocial antics of Muammar Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein. The ADC and CAIR cannot seriously expect Hollywood filmmakers, whose job it is to capture and reflect what’s going on around them, to not deal with these types of stories and characters out of some prima facie fear of potentially making certain Arabs/Muslims -- particularly the ones who are card-carrying members of the ADC and CAIR -- “feel bad.”

Good art is supposed to be provocative... and sometimes even controversial. It’s supposed to spark debate and make people think about what can sometimes be difficult issues to broach. Just because one declares him/herself a member of a “downtrodden, disenfranchised” group does not automatically grant that person some kind of special privilege, allowing him/her to force the rest of society to obsequiously and uncritically kowtow to his/her “unique” sensibilities.

This is my primary problem with P.C. Despite what certain “enlightened,” touchy-feely academics have to say, Political Correctness is not really about encouraging understanding and tolerance or freedom of speech and expression. It’s about regulating speech and expression, setting certain “difficult” topics and issues outside the purview of discussion and examination. No need to deal with all that thorny stuff because, well, someone might get his or her feelings hurt, don’t ya know? And we can’t have that.

As a poster from the CPND board who goes by the handle of 101proof keenly observed: “It doesn’t get anymore chickensh*t P.C. than changing the bad guys [in The Sum of All Fears] to Nazis.” “Better to be historically accurate than politically correct,” he advised. Amen, 101proof. Amen.