Eileen Jones, the reviewer of "Stop-Loss" said: >But director Kimberly Peirce ... has figured out a way to sugarcoat this pill for the average filmgoer. She gives us a protest movie about the war that -- follow me closely here -- doesn't actually protest the war.<
huh? if having a US Army staff sergeant yelling about how the war is horrible and is being fought for the wrong purpose isn't "protesting the war," I don't know what is. Ms. Jones seems to be objecting to the fact that this movie has an "incorrect line" on the war. It doesn't protest _enough_ or in the _right way_, as determined by her abstract principles. >Because that would be a bummer, getting us into that whole thing again about Bush and Cheney and the WMDs that weren't there and the no-exit-strategy. Not to mention the 4,000 dead Americans we're sort of peeved about. We support our troops, you know! In this movie Peirce insists on supporting our troops so hard it's impossible to figure out what's ailing us, watching these fine boys with their fine parents all having fine values in this fine country of ours. Nagging questions hang over the whole project: if our Texas-style patriotism is so great, and our mission to defend America is so great, and we've got hordes of studly young guys leaping at the opportunity to go fight whoever they're told, and they're all great, too, and their families and communities are great, then uh ... what's the problem? < I dunno. The flick doesn't make Texas-style patriotism look great. What it points to is that some of those Texas-style patriots are _human_ and that they go through emotional and physical hell because reality doesn't fit with their US-flag-blurred vision of it. They are stuck in a big contradiction. They have "mixed consciousness," not having come to the complete level of consciousness of that Ms. Jones has attained. > Why isn't everybody happy? Well, for one thing, it turns out that if you go > fight in a war, you can get SHOT. Yeah! It's true! Even a righteous American, > with a big gun, and a Kevlar vest, and a Hummer! That's the movie's first-act > revelation. We see our boys in Iraq, doing their jobs chasing insurgents into > local people's apartments, and those bastards start SHOOTING at 'em!< revelation? it's supposed to be a war movie, which suggests that it should have some war scenes. Why are the Iraqis "bastards"? they may be so from the point of view of the US soldiers _at the time_, but they are clearly not "bastards" from the point of view of the film-maker. (BTW, my OW friends object to the use of the word "bastard" as an insult.) > But okay, the young Texans do their duty anyway under these testing > conditions. They're all best buddies from the same town, see, and when a > buddy is threatened they naturally have to slaughter a whole Iraqi family, > per the army training manual, down to the littlest child. Lingering close-ups > of the dead family will come in handy later as fodder for those post-war > flashbacks. < doesn't Ms. Jones realize that in real-world wars, real-world people go bezerk, doing things that don't fit with the training manual? and then feel horrible about doing horrible things afterwards? (thus, the flash-backs.) > Then, just when the guys get home and get their medals pinned on and think > they're done servin' their country, they're threatened with the presidential > stop-loss order sending soldiers who've done their tours back to active duty. > This is the second-act revelation, that George W. Bush, the pride of > Crawford, Texas, might be kind of a dick.< Jones seems to want to pound movie viewers over the head with correct-line propaganda. I don't think this film is going to be financially successful, but neither will a film that tells people what they should think (unless, of course, that film fits with the currently dominant ideology). Why isn't it possible to have a film about someone who doesn't agree with us lefties (and doesn't live like us lefties or share our culture) but is working his way toward our point of view the hard way? and then finds himself in an untenable position?? It seems to me that if we want to actually _communicate_ with people outside the currently-shrunken lefts and _convince_ them of our (presumed) rectitude, we have to try to look at the world from their point of view now and then. Stop-Loss is trying to do that. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
