Motion Pictures: Politics and History

Motion Pictures: Politics and History

Life Imitating Art?

Movies of the 1990s expressed Americans' cynicism about politicians and the political process. In Wag the Dog, released in late 1997, presidential advisers create a nonexistent international crisis to divert attention from a breaking story that accuses the president of fondling a young girl. The president's advisers and aides, experts at letting the tail wag the dog, hire a Hollywood producer to give the illusory incident a sense of reality. With his help they create footage of bombed-out villages and manufacture a true-blue American "hero" for public consumption. The following year, during revelations about President William J. Clinton's sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, pundits frequently accused the president of trying to "wag the dog" to divert attention from the scandal—particularly in December 1998, when he ordered the bombing of Baghdad just as the House of Representatives began debate on whether he should be impeached.

Art Imitating Life?

The Time magazine cover for 16 March 1998 featured a photograph of John Travolta and the words "Lights! Camera! Clinton!" to spotlight coverage of the new political movie Primary Colors, adapted from Washington columnist Joe Klein's anonymous 1996 novel, which was based loosely on President Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign. Released in the midst of the Lewinsky scandal, the movie focuses on a young campaign aide whose idealism is destroyed by the pragmatic, no-holds-barred attitude of the candidate and his staff. Though Klein claimed that his characters were not exact matches to real people, critics and viewers easily identified Jack and Susan Stanton as the Clintons, Lawrence Harris as Clinton primary rival Paul Tsongas, Fred Picker as third-party candidate H. Ross Perot, campaign operative Richard Jemmons as James Carville, and Henry Burton, the idealistic young aide, as George Stephanopoulos.

Truth versus Fiction

Primary Colors and Wag the Dog depict politics as unconcerned with truth and fairness. Another movie of the late 1990s, Warren Beatty's Bulworth (1998), contends that, despite its avowals to the contrary, the American public does not really want politicians to tell them the truth. Beatty, who also wrote and directed his movie, plays Jay Bulworth, a middle-aged, liberal California senator who is sick of the state of American politics and culture. After putting out a contract on his own life, he begins to state publicly what he really thinks. Charging that there is no fundamental difference between the two political parties because special interests rule both, he asserts that politicians will never say Hollywood produces "mostly crap" because they are too dependent on the money and publicity clout of movie-star backers. Conversely, he says politicians will never do anything about black issues until blacks have enough money to buy power within the political establishment. By the end of the movie he has offended nearly everyone, making the point that the public prefers pleasant lies to uncomfortable truths.

Rewriting History

Cynicism about government was also apparent in movies about earlier events in the twentieth century. Director Oliver Stone, who revisited recent American history in the 1980s with Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), began the 1990s with JFK (1991), a $40-million movie that revived conspiracy theories about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Stone began with a theory advanced by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, played by Kevin Costner in the movie, selected some of his ideas, omitted others, and then added new information and conjecture to create his own theory of why President Kennedy was assassinated: "the Beast" (a conspiracy of Wall Street, the CIA, the military, and the FBI) killed him because he was planning to pull U.S. troops out of Vietnam. Stone also combined computer animation with real news footage, prompting some journalists and historians to express the concern that viewers might confuse fact and fiction. Unlike traditional historical dramas, JFK showed moviegoers what no one could have seen in the same frame with what everyone remembered seeing. One critic commented that nobody "can cook up imagery as arrestingly oddball as Stone." In response to such criticism Stone defended his movie "as something between entertainment and fact," and he implied that he had "angered the powers that be" because he had hit on the truth. One of the most judicious views of the movie was expressed by Thomas Reeves: "JFK is an entertaining and at times moving film. But it is not to be confused with history.… Oliver Stone is waging war against America, which he sees as ultraconservative, repressive, imperialistic, greedy, immoral, and homicidal. There is a case for polemicism, of course, as long as it is accurately labeled."

Revising Nixon

Another Stone project was Nixon (1995), which one critic described as "Hollywood's controversial director meets America's most controversial president." Critics and historians noted that Stone's Richard Nixon, played by Anthony Hopkins, was a creation that neither Nixon loyalists nor Nixon haters could easily recognize. This Nixon claimed that liberals hated him because he "fixed" the "tear gassing, the riots, [and] burning draft cards." Continuing his obsession with conspiracy, Stone suggested the same "Beast" that killed Kennedy targeted Nixon because he pursued, and achieved, detènte with China. As in JFK, Stone mixed historical news footage with new docudrama-style footage to reenact Nixon's best-known moments. He portrayed Nixon in an enigmatic, yet surprisingly sympathetic, light, humanizing an unpopular leader.

History According to Gump

Not all movies of the 1990s were cynical about American politics. Starring Tom Hanks in the title role, Forrest Gump, one of the most popular movies of 1994, is the story of a man with an IQ of 75 who takes part in every major event in American history since World War II. Among other things, Forrest wins the Medal of Honor for heroism in the Vietnam War and helps President Richard M. Nixon bring détente to China. Critic Roger Ebert characterized the movie as "a meditation on our times, as seen through the eyes of a man who lacks cynicism and takes things for exactly what they are" and noted that Forrest survives these turbulent decades "with only honesty and niceness as his shield." Time magazine critic Richard Corliss commented that Forrest is "an innocent on loan to a cynical world" and said the movie "wants to find an optimism in survival."

The Movie of the Decade

Steven Spielberg's Schindle's List (1993), a motion picture about the Nazi Holocaust, has been widely acclaimed as the best movie of the 1990s. Adapted from a 1982 novel by Thomas Keneally, the movie depicts the conversion of Oskar Schindler (played by Liam Neeson), a businessman who belongs to the Nazi Party but is less interested in politics than in profiting from the German occupation of Poland by using Jewish laborers to make cooking utensils for the German army in his factory. Yet, he becomes increasingly affected by the plight of his workers and ends up spending his fortune to create a safe haven for 1,200 of them, a munitions factory that never produces a usable shell. Filmed on location in Krakow and Auschwitz, Poland, the movie was shot in grainy black-and-white creating the effect of old newsreel footage and intensifying the horror of Nazi atrocities. Commenting about filming the movie on location, Spielberg said, "This has been the best experience I've had making a movie. I feel more connected with the material than I've ever felt before." The movie won seven Academy Awards including best picture, best director, best cinematography, and best screen adaptation. When he accepted the Best Picture Oscar for Schindler's List, Spielberg thanked "the six million who can't be watching this, among the one billion watching this telecast tonight" and called the movie the "culmination of a long personal struggle with my Jewish identity." After the success of the movie Spielberg founded the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which records the testimonies of Holocaust survivors.

World War II in the Movies

Later in the decade Spielberg returned to his examination of the war era with Saving Private Ryan (1998), a tribute to the American soldiers who fought and died in the D-Day invasion of Europe. The movie starred Tom Hanks and earned Spielberg another Oscar for directing. Critics, including Leonard Maltin, faulted conventional plotting in the script but were impressed with its "complex examination of heroism" and its Oscar-winning cinematography, which Maltin called "the most realistic, relentlessly harrowing battle footage ever committed to a fiction film … [creating] the ultimate vision of war as hell on earth." Critics also praised The Thin Red Line (1998), directed by Terrence Malick, best known for two critically acclaimed movies of the 1970s: Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). Focusing on the Pacific campaign to retake Guadalcanal from the Japanese, the movie is a remake of the 1964 movie of the same name, both of which are adaptations of James Jones's 1962 novel. Contrasting Edenic scenery of the Pacific islands with the horrors of battle, the 1998 movie, whose stars include Sean Penn and Nick Nolte, is Malick's meditation about moral chaos. It does not really address (or intend to address) what happened at the real battle of Guadalcanal. Viewers are deliberately left confused about the plot, which is subordinated to a larger existential theme. The movie opens with a question—"Why does nature contend with itself?"—and focuses on the ways "in which all living beings are founded on the necessity of killing one another."

The Gulf War in the Movies

Edward Zwick, director of the Civil War drama Glory (1989), returned to historical filmmaking with Courage Under Fire (1996), the first attempt to depict the 1991 Gulf War in a Hollywood movie. Starring Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan, the movie examines what it takes to be an officer, a leader, and a hero. Another noteworthy Gulf War movie was the gritty action-adventure drama Three Kings (1999)—directed by David O. Russell and starring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and Spike Jonze—about four renegades who try to pull off a big gold heist. The movie tells a good story and includes some perceptive digs at Bush administration policies. Critics compared the movie favorably to the motion pictures of Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Robert Altman, and Quentin Tarantino.

Sources

Margaret Carlson, "A Terminal Case Of Telling The Truth," Time, 151 (11 May 1998): 78.

Tom Carson, "Stone Alone: Kicking Nixon Around," Village Voice, 2 January 1996, p. 17.

Richard Corliss, "Death of a Salesman," Time, 146 (18 December 1995): 74.

Corliss, "Hollywood's Last Decent Man," Time, 144 (11 July 1994): 58.

Corliss, "True Colors," Time, 151 (16 March 1998): 64.

Pat Dowell, Dan Georgakas, and Herb Boyd,. "Warren Beatty's Bul-worth: Will the Real Bulvvorth Please Stand Up?" Cinéaste, 24 (15 December 1998): 6-11.

Roger Ebert, Review of Forrest Gump, Chicago Sun-Times, 6 July 1994.

Ebert, Review of JFK, Chicago Sun-Times, 20 December 1990.

Ebert, Review of Nixon, Chicago Sun-Times, 20 December 1995.

Ebert, Review of Schindler's List, Chicago Sun-Times, 15 December 1993.

Leonard Maltin, ed., Leonard Malting's Movie & Video Guide, 2001 Edition (New York: Signet, 2000).

Joseph McBride, Steven Spielberg: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

Marita Sturken, "Reenactment, Fantasy, and the Paranoia of History: Oliver Stone's Docudramas," History and Theory, 36 (1997): 64-79.

Steve Vineburg, "Wag the Dog," Boston Phoenix, 5 January 1998.