Posted on 03/15/2004 5:44:52 PM PST by Paul Atreides
If you can believe most of the critics, Tim Robbins' new play focusing on embedded journalists is a lot of bull -- and not of the Durham variety.
The satirical play, called "Embedded," opened at the Public Theater in New York City last night and has drawn scathing reviews across the ideological spectrum. The New York Times observed that even audience members sympathetic with Robbins' political views "will quite possibly go from nodding in agreement to simply nodding off... It is hard to avoid the sensation that everything said here has been said before, in some cases many years before."
And that was one of the kinder reviews. The New York Daily News called it "slapdash" and "adolescent." The Associated Press said it should have been called "Embalmed," and added, "finding genuine wit in 'Embedded' is as difficult as finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." Newsday observed that a hard look at the "upsetting combination" of the words "embedded" and "journalist" was overdue, but Robbins' play is nothing but an "agitprop cartoon." The New York Post, far to Robbins' right, actually kept its criticism muted, finding the play "just a bore."
One favorable review came from the Star-Ledger in Newark, which declared: "Performed with energy and confidence by a capable cast of fresh faces. 'Embedded' never ceases to make keen-witted mockery of what Robbins aptly terms a prime-time war."
The play portrays three groups of individuals: U.S. soldiers, embedded journalists, and a cabal of war managers in Washington (who wear funny masks) with giveaway names like Rum Rum, Dick, and Woof. A certain female rescued soldier is called "Private Ryan." Journalists sway to swing music while attending a military press conference and generally go along with the Pentagon line.
Robbins wrote and directed the play, but does not appear in it. "Embedded" opened in Los Angeles last fall.
I love that line!
Spelling it "A chill wynde..." kind of catches his silly inflection better.
agitprop (aj?it-prop´) noun 1.Communist-oriented political propaganda disseminated especially through literature, drama, art, or music.
2.The means or vehicle, such as a government department or a state-controlled press, by which such propaganda
is disseminated.
3.Something, such as a film, that is designed to impress a certain political or social perspective on its audience,
with little or no consideration given to accuracy: "It also is a conspiracy movie, agitprop against today's targets,
big government and big business" (George F. Will).
noun, attributive.
Often used to modify another noun: a massive agitprop campaign; agitprop filmmaking.
[Russian, short for otdel agitatsii i propagandy, incitement and propaganda section (of the central and local committees of the Russian Communist party); name changed in 1934.]
Excerpted from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition Copyright © 1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Simpson on Sunday: Oscar winner insists his anti-war message is one of patriotism
By John Simpson
(Filed: 14/03/2004)
They are all there, in a group on stage: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the others, plotting the invasion of Iraq in the most cynical terms. And the instruments of their conspiracy are America's journalists, innocent dupes lining up for their training as "embedded" correspondents, happy to report the grossest nonsense.
Put as baldly as that, Tim Robbins's new play Embedded, which has just opened in New York, must sound like a pretty flimsy piece of sub-Brechtian anti-war propaganda. But there's nothing flimsy about it: whether or not you agree with the message, the play's knockabout quality makes it as entertaining as Brecht, and every bit as powerful.
Most Americans don't like to think that their politics are like that. By contrast, the audience that packed the Public Theatre off Broadway on the night I went to see a preview of Embedded loved the play's interpretation. In the US, people sceptical of the war feel that they have been largely abandoned by the American newspapers and the big television corporations - dismissed as freaks and outcasts, their doubts and anxieties ignored. Many such Americans turned to the British news media during the war, in search of more balanced reporting.
Which was why I was there. A few weeks ago, I had a telephone call from Tim Robbins, who told me that his play incorporated one of my reports about a friendly fire incident I had witnessed during the Iraq invasion. He invited me to one of the previews, and to take part in a question and answer session with him on stage afterwards.
In the play, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the rest form a jocular yet sinister masked chorus. Of course, their on-stage plotting was a travesty of what really happened, but literal realism is no part of Robbins's intention. His play is, Robbins says, in the punk spirit of rude satire, and the satire is indeed savage and extremely effective. One character, Col Hardchannel, trains and brainwashes the embedded journalists - "maggots", he calls them - and tries to convince them that he is a man of culture by roaring out tunes from old musicals. And he orders them to lie. "If a Babylonian [i.e. Iraqi] granary is bombed, it is to be called a poison factory."
Satire is a difficult medium for the less sophisticated to comprehend. "Bad, bad theatre, bad taste," said one US marine officer, interviewed on a website by the unashamedly Right-wing Fox News network. "He isn't a journalist," someone else wrote of Robbins on another website, "nor is he a soldier." That, of course, would have ruled out Shakespeare. "Unless you have the guts to pick up a rifle and go to a foreign land," wrote another, "then you have [no] right to say what's true and what is false."
Over dinner that night, less than a week after winning his Oscar for best supporting actor in Mystic River, Robbins told me that he felt that opposition journalism in the United States was dead, and nothing much was left except voices of agreement. Not that Embedded seeks to portray all American journalists as government toadies; two of Robbins's characters are painstakingly honest in their reporting.
However, in the current climate in the United States, anything short of outright support for the administration's line can be attacked as unpatriotic. There was plenty of good, objective American reporting during the invasion of Iraq and yet the big news organisations seemed to accept the basic enterprise in the terms outlined by Mr Bush and his colleagues.
NBC is owned by General Electric, a leading defence supplier to the Pentagon; it would scarcely be in GE's corporate interest for NBC News to examine the reasons for the war too critically, or to give prominence to the peace demonstrations in the US and elsewhere ("the great unwashed", as one Fox News commentator described them).
Many American journalists seemed to find the basic concept of balance hard to grasp. If the Pentagon had indeed told them that an Iraqi granary was a poison factory, they would have reported it unquestioningly. "For me," announced a smug television news presenter with an expensive hair dye job at a post-war conference I went to in Chicago, "the American fighting man can do no wrong." He had dropped a leading military commentator from his programme for being "too political" - that is, not sufficiently supportive of the invasion.
Whether you agree with Robbins or not, he has written a sharp and extremely effective satire in primary colours. He has also rallied the people who think like him but have stayed silent, fearful of being accused of insufficient patriotism.
"How can it be unpatriotic for Americans to say what they believe?" Robbins asks.
He hasn't stayed silent, and he has incurred a lot of hatred as a result.
Embedded has an answer to that too. "Like war," says one of the better journalists in the play, "hatred keeps us from loneliness."
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