AMERICA THE BEAUTIFULFilm Flam
We have nothing to fear but reality itself.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, May 30, 2002 12:01 a.m.
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."--Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inaugural address, March 4, 1933
Maybe FDR just lived in a simpler age, but there have been moments lately when the prospect of fear itself seems to be scaring the daylights out of some of our illuminati. Turn on the TV, flip through the news, and you can end up bombarded with so much nervous chatter about the danger of raising anxieties or offending sensitivities that--never mind the war--it gets hard even to keep track of how very fearful we are presumed to be.
This past week, scarcely had I recovered from Tipper Gore's warning on CNN that daily terror alerts are "exhausting" to our mental health, than along came the current flutter over "The Sum of All Fears"--a new Hollywood thriller, premiering tomorrow, that has acquired the label of "controversial" because it depicts a terrorist nuclear bomb going off at the Super Bowl. This is fantasy, mind you, but for anyone willing to put two and two together about the threats we may--in reality--face, the worries about this film might better be described as "The Fear of All Sums."
Or perhaps, in FDR's far pithier phrase: fear of fear itself.
Adapted from Tom Clancy's 1991 novel, this film has stirred up anxieties that a nuclear scenario might be just too terrifying right now for Americans to cope with. Never mind the Hollywood deference with which the Arab terrorists of the book have been replaced in the movie version by a less probable gang of neo-Nazis. And never mind that the movie, shot before Sept. 11, falls into a genre of blockbusters, such as "Independence Day," that have already run mass mayhem galore across the big screen.
This week the Drudge Report, posted an account of "one senior Bush official" fretting anonymously that the movie might "alarm" the public, and even lead to "a numbing down of actual warnings that are issued." It might be tempting to dismiss that Drudge dispatch as a rank publicity stunt for the picture, especially with that anonymous "senior official" as the source. But then we get such disquisitions as ABC's Diane Sawyer, on Tuesday, interviewing the movie's star, Ben Affleck--who plays CIA agent Jack Ryan--about "what a sensation this movie is already causing," even before its official release, and asking Mr. Affleck, apropos of his new flick, "is there such a thing as too real, too scary, too close to the bone?"
Too real?
Sorry. Apart from the unnerving prospect of another Ben Affleck performance, the threat here is not the movie--an event in which, unlike a genuine terrorist act, no one will be forced to participate against his will. The problem is the reality of terrorist threats, which are out there whether or not we choose to buy a ticket. Thus did we have Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testifying before the Senate Appropriations Committee last week that we had better face up to the threats of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, because terrorists "will inevitably get their hands on them, and they will not hesitate to use them." Mr. Rumsfeld's point was not that we shouldn't be afraid, but that the only way to defeat these threats is to face them--however terrifying.
I'm not saying that in order to face our fears we must all line up for what the Drudge Report describes as "nuke scare" Hollywood productions. My own preference runs more in the direction of tuning in to Mr. Rumsfeld, and paying a lot less attention to the ventures of fake neo-Nazis than to the real menace of Saddam Hussein. But one does get the feeling, listening to all the fretting about our personal anxieties, that at some point between FDR and "The Sum of All Fears," some of the priorities of our mighty nation got a little mixed up. And somewhere between the airtime devoted to Mr. Rumsfeld and the debates centered on Tipper Gore and Ben Affleck movies, those priorities still need some sorting out.
Maybe we've spent so much time these past few decades striving to be politically correct, regardless of the realities, that by now we're accustomed to fear truth itself. We strove for "gender" equality, attempting a sort of weird indifference to some of the obvious differences. We tried to insist that all people be seen as exactly alike (which is different from being equal before the law), and then tried to offset that by insisting on equally unrealistic, officially prescribed attempts at achieving perfect diversity. We've worried about so many forms of sensitivity at this point that it is something of an effort to stand back and insist on taking a realistic view of such basic matters as survival.
President Roosevelt's real point, of course, was not--as modern discourse sometimes seems to have it--that we should avoid any subject that might engender fear. His famous line was a rhetorical flourish summing up the broader point that we triumph over terrible threats not by succumbing to fear, or what is known these days as "denial," but by honestly facing real dangers and dealing with them: A fuller reading of Roosevelt's speech includes: "In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory." He was referring to the Depression, but the same words applied to World War II, and I think they still apply today. As for Mr. Affleck's movie, what really worries me about this new thriller is all this fear of "The Sum of All Fears" itself.
Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."