Mark Steyn: Hollywood doesn't get Sept. 11

National Post ^ | March 28 2002 | Mark Steyn

[knighthawk]

Personally, I thought this year's Academy Awards just zipped by in no time. But that's because I'm on the road in Europe. Because of the time difference, the rest of the world gets the big show a day late, edited down to a little over an hour in some countries and barely longer than a Billy Crystal opening number in others.

The non-starry awards -- Best Documentary Short, Best Original Score -- are the first to get chopped. That cuts it down to three hours forty-five. What else can we lose? How about some of those lifetime achievement and humanitarian things? Arthur Hiller and his hairdo of the night wound up on the cutting-room floor. But so did Robert Redford's woozy ramblings, Barbra Streisand warm-up and all.

That leaves 'em with three hours. What else can go? Well, here's what the BBC, among others, decided to do: Every single reference to September 11th got deleted. The moment of silence. Kevin Spacey's sonorous platitudes about the need to celebrate life in the face of death. Whoopi Goldberg spinning round and revealing the New York Fire and Police Department acronyms emblazoned on the back of her frock. The lame jokes about how "America suffered through a great national tragedy, but we have recovered. Mariah Carey has already made another movie." All scrupulously excised by the publicly funded broadcasters of America's allies, leaving nary a trace except for the occasional weird jump in mid-speech.

Given that the message of the evening was supposed to be the "new seriousness" of post-9/11 Hollywood, the removal of any mention of the dread date meant what was left was flat and subdued but with no particular reason why. It was like watching a celeb show played by lookalikes recruited from a funeral home. The dress code no longer made sense. Actor after actor appeared not in "black tie" -- i.e., bow tie and tux -- but in long, droopy, black necktie, sober shirt, dark suit, as if they'd just dropped in to present a Best Screenplay award on the way back from Auntie Mabel's funeral. Otherwise, all that survived of the show's big theme was the sub-text to Tom Hanks' assertion, before the nominations for Best Picture, that "when we're at the movies, we're not alone."

This is a traditional theme: movies make us a community, they're therapeutic, they bind us together to heal the wounds of the world by showing how art transcends the petty divisions of our troubled times, etc., etc. Well, I'm in Europe and every multiplex you pass in London, Paris and Berlin is showing five Hollywood films plus one token local product. In London, the biggest poster on the concourse of Waterloo Station advertises The West Wing. In Paris, the oldies station plays American records you never hear in America anymore (Honey by Bobby Goldsboro, good grief). In Berlin, I switch on the TV and Sarah Michelle Gellar is speaking German. In Cairo, they considered banning The Mummy Returns because they felt the scene where Brendan Fraser flees an Egyptian toilet in terror on account of its filthiness was disrespectful to Egyptian culture, but in the end they let it through anyway. Around the world, everyone's watching American movies -- and they all hate America.

Sometimes they actively hate it, sometimes they just quietly despise it. But, if decades of exposure to the healing balm of Tom Hanks and his fellow "artists" have really united the world, it would appear to be mostly in the cause of anti-Americanism. Somewhere right now, in a council flat in the English Midlands, in Frankfurt or in Rotterdam, an Islamic terrorist is sitting in a Yankees cap, Disney T-shirt and Nike sneakers plotting to blow up the White House.

One of the lessons of September 11th is that every day millions of people wear baseball caps, listen to Britney, watch Friends, eat at Dunkin' Donuts, and go see Ali -- and they don't have a clue about America. In London, the broadsheet newspapers that devote most space to American cultural trends -- The Guardian, The Independent -- are the most vehemently anti-American. You can easily like American pop culture without liking America. On the other hand, if you dislike American pop culture, it'll make you dislike America even more. Thus Jean-Pierre Chevenement, French presidential candidate, and his famous statement that the United States is dedicated to "the organized cretinization of our people." There was a whiff of this yesterday when another presidential candidate, Alain Madelin, described this week's massacre in a French town hall as an "American-style byproduct." One Frenchman -- a left-wing eco-nut -- kills eight other Frenchmen, but somehow it's evidence of America's malign cultural influence.

You can sort of see what he's getting at. Wherever you live around the world, the landscape of the imagination is America: In the movie in your mind, the car chase takes place on the Golden Gate Bridge, the love scene in Central Park, the massive explosion at the World Trade Center. The world watches Hollywood's America in a kind of post-neutron-bombed way: You get the sex and the shoot-outs, but the spirit of the country remains as foreign as ever.

In Britain, they played up the "black Oscars" angle because, being a racially relaxed society, they find American breast-beating and self-flagellation on the subject hugely enjoyable. On the Continent, where real racism of all kinds is pervasive, they took Hollywood's bizarre determination to muscle in on the civil rights struggle 40 years too late as confirmation things must be far worse over there. I'd gladly award a lifetime achievement Oscar to each of Halle Berry's breasts, which reportedly received half-a-million apiece for their exposed role in Swordfish -- that's $19-million less than John Travolta got, and they gave a much better performance. I'm certainly happy that Los Angeles' limousine liberals have finally caught up with those right-wing racist Republicans who handed out starring roles to Condi Rice and Colin Powell. But to suggest that giving one beautiful, talented actress a statuette is some kind of civil-rights breakthrough is absurdly self-regarding even by Hollywood's standards. It was compounded by the "tribute" to Sidney Poitier, which solicited testimonials only from black actors and thereby ghettoized his achievement, making "black acting" seem a specialization award, like Best Foreign Language Film.

When Hollywood has such difficulty liking America, it's no wonder its foreign audiences find it so hard. Deprived by their networks of the 9/11 content, the Europeans weren't missing anything: It was victim stuff, strangely outdated, like a movie that's been in development too long. The stars expressed sympathy for New York, but not the Pentagon. They saluted the firemen, but not the heroic passengers of Flight 93, never mind the brave men of the 10th Mountain Division -- or, if we're being multicultural, the Princess Patricias and the Australian SAS. The montage of vox pops that opened the show included Laura Bush plus Willie Brown, Mayor of San Francisco, Jerry Brown, Mayor of Oakland, Lani Guinier, onetime Clinton Administration nominee, and Al Sharpton, New York's pre-eminent racebaiter. That's not just a four-to-one Democratic advantage, that's four far-left ideological Dems to one non-political Republican spouse: A very Hollywood idea of balance. No wonder that when Robert Redford started peddling his boilerplate about how it's more important than ever to cherish "freedom of expression," Mr. and Mrs. America switched off in record numbers.

Hollywood has had a problem since September 11th. It knows the plot has changed but it can't quite find the tone. It wants to be in tune with the masses, but can't quite bring itself. On Sunday the only unashamedly patriotic sentiment was voiced by Julian Fellowes. Picking up the Best Screenplay Award for Gosford Park, he kept the lists of lawyers' and agents' names to a minimum, thanked the U.S. for being so welcoming to foreigners and ended with the words "God bless America." And so at the post-9/11 Oscars, the one participant who expressed any love of country was a Briton, a Tory and occasional Conservative Party speechwriter. How did he get past security?

[LBGA]

Thanks for pinging me to Knighthawk's comments.

Heck, before the last election, we believed that most people in this country were like the ones Hollywood portrays. It sure was good to see the election map so that we know we are not alone in our morals and principles, and patriotism.