It may be premature to think that the events of Sept. 11 will have much more effect on Hollywood other than the mad scramble we've already seen -- typified, so far, by Warner Bros.' indefinite postponement of an ill-timed Arnold Schwarzenegger movie and the mad, fluttering butterfly sound of countless CGI experts' tapping away at their computer keys to erase images of the World Trade Center from every movie already in the can.
And of course, it's unrealistic to expect that Hollywood will actually respond to a crisis by giving us more of what we really want (especially when we don't know exactly what that is). But if the past few weeks have taught us anything, it's that we can't predetermine what we can "realistically" expect from people. Nothing I've ever seen in my life prepared me for the grace, kindness, decency and good sense I saw, and continue to see, among New Yorkers (not to mention people across the country) in direct response to the World Trade Center attack; now I wonder why I ever expected less of them. An unrealistic expectation is not the same as an unreasonable one -- and even if it were, let's just say that now is the time for American moviegoers to be unreasonable.
These next few months are likely to be viewed by Hollywood as a testing ground for what audiences will and will not tolerate. "Hardball," a reasonably entertaining formula picture about a guy whose life is changed by the inner-city Little League team he coaches, did particularly well in the wake of Sept. 11: Baseball is, after all, the national pastime, and audiences tend to like stories about personal transformation, particularly if they're not too sappy.
In this brave new world of movies, sappiness may be our biggest worry. In his study of the Second World War, "Wartime," Paul Fussell explains the effects a major war can have on the popular writing of its day, and it's easy enough to extend the metaphor to other popular art forms: "It will mean, among other things, that E.B. White will replace H.L. Mencken as one of America's most attended-to observers and commentators. ... That is, the age will demand that analysis, criticism, evaluation, and satire yield to celebration, charm, and niceness."
Whatever shape the United States' battle against terrorism takes, Hollywood will definitely respond with some sort of propaganda -- that's simply what Hollywood does during wartime. We shouldn't assume, though, that that propaganda will necessarily take the shape of movies like the World War II-era "Mrs. Miniver," or even like the movies we all readily acknowledged as Reagan-era propaganda, things like "Top Gun" or "Rambo." Those are only the most obvious examples of the way Hollywood goes to work on us. Propaganda takes all kinds of insidious forms. "An Officer and a Gentleman," a movie generally viewed as just a swoony love story, is actually an exceedingly artful example of Reagan-era propaganda: Richard Gere's character becomes worthy, grown-up, respectable, only after he has been "tamed," transformed from a tattooed biker into a spit-and-polished officer. His worth is dictated by how well he conforms; it's OK if he cries, but only in the service of reinforcing the movie's cowboy-soldier rhetoric.
It's very likely that in the coming years, young Americans will be treated to their own version of "An Officer and a Gentleman," or worse. (Plenty of people have been able to block out the politics of that movie enough to at least enjoy its elementally satisfying love story -- which, admittedly, is one of the things that makes it so insidious.) Whether or not people actually become more sentimental during wartime, you can bet Hollywood is going to try to milk them. We'll have to be more vigilant than ever in guarding against dreck, but it's crucial to remember that we don't have to fall for it. As Fussell notes, even "Mrs. Miniver" -- a 1942 romance "showing Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon heroically suffering through the Blitz and Dunkirk" -- was met with jeers when British audiences watched it in theaters in 1944, even though it had been perfectly acceptable to everyone just two years earlier, before those audiences had a grasp of what war really meant.
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