Art and Politics

I am not the first (by a wide margin) to note that films got more political this year, but it's a fact that is still worth celebrating. The day of the 2004 election, as the exit polls turned out to be wrong, I realized then and there: it was time to start focusing on politically-themed art again. Why has the "culture war" become so important in determining the results of elections, and why are we Liberals so often on the losing side of the culture war? Seems to me that it's because at some point, we Liberals got complacent; we decided, at some undetermined moment in time, that our position on various issues was so unassailable that we no longer needed to keep arguing the point. (Once Bill Clinton said that abortion, for example, should be "safe, legal and rare," didn't it seem to you so eminently sensible that there wasn't any point in arguing the matter further? Come on, didn't it seem just that way, just a little?)

Trouble is, the Other Guys never stopped setting forth their side of the various arguments. And in the vacuum, their voices were the only ones being heard. Of course there was also some mind-boggling timidity involved: the moment George Bush Sr. called Michael Dukakis "a card-carrying member of the ACLU," Dukakis should have immediately squared his shoulders and said "Of course I am. The real question is, why aren't you?"

As clever as I want to feel for having had this minor-key epiphany in early November 2004, obviously some of my Hollywood brethren were way ahead of me. Crash; Good Night, and Good Luck; Syriana; Brokeback Mountain (which does have a political point to make no matter how much the filmmakers talk about its being "just a love story"); Munich; and The Constant Gardener, to name only the most prominent films of the past year, would obviously have been at least in pre-production in November 2004, so I wasn't at all alone in thinking that the time had come for us to stand up and start making some noise again. (Hell, even Star Wars was getting political--whatever else you may think about the last movie, Amidala's line about democracy ending "to the thunderous sound of applause" does have some bite.)

And this notion that Hollywood's "liberal elite" should just stick to making mass entertainments and keep their big yaps shut is of course the most blatantly dishonest form of hypocrisy. We all revere Frank Capra's blatantly political films now that they're safely in the decades-ago past, now that they're no longer dangerous; we all talk about the Great Works of Art that were "ahead of their time," once upon a time, and how brave and how bold those artists were--back in the day. I suppose it's part of the rose-hued nostalgia that everyone feels, that sense that things were better in the past but that now, everything is simply screwed up. But there is also, as I said, pure hypocrisy involved: George Clooney should keep his big yap shut, but Arnold Schwarzenegger is a hero. It has nothing to do with Hollywood types not having a right to speak out, and it has everything to do with Hollywood types speaking out about things you don't agree with.

(Personally, I could take or leave Mr. Clooney back when he was just a fidgety actor on ER, but now that he is a capital-A Artist doing his damnedest to create work that means something, he's become one of my favorites. And his company with Steven Soderbergh, Section 8, is consistently doing the sort of stuff I find most interesting.)

I'm not going to get into which film should win the Oscar this year (though I may succumb as the date draws nearer because everyone does), and that's because the films are so very different, and they're all really quite good this year, and they all succeed at what they want to accomplish. (Caveat: I haven't yet seen Capote.) But I just saw Munich the other night, and if you want my guess as to which film means the most, that one is it. The box office for this film may never have taken off, which makes it a failure in Hollywood terms and it will probably get punished accordingly by the Academy; but I think that in twenty or thirty years, this will be the film that people end up remembering, the one that feels really significant. It may even go down as Spielberg's great achievement; because as the New York Times review noted, "Mr. Spielberg has been pummeling audiences with his virtuosity for nearly as long as he has been making movies; now, he tenders an invitation to a discussion." And what is present in Munich, what makes it difficult for an audience to take but is exactly why it is so good at inciting discussion, is ambiguity, the absence of easy answers, the unadorned presentation of multiple points of view. Eric Bana's character Avner is supposed to represent us: in these times, don't we all feel a little of his paranoia, his regret, his unease? All the way through the movie, we keep hearing about the virtues of home and family; but we keep hearing it from both sides. (There is a brilliant scene when a safehouse gets double-booked, and our undercover Mossad agents find themselves sharing a room with, among others, an agent of the PLO, who reveals that he wants for his people exactly what Avner wants for his.) And after I walked out of the theater, I was torn neatly in half: on the one hand, I felt yet again that Gandhi was right, that violence only breeds violence; at the same time, I knew that if I were the leader of a country, I would have to do exactly as Golda Meir did.

That's good art. That's significant, powerful, meaningful art. It's been a great year for movies, no matter what the box office numbers say, and I for one am hugely gratified that once again, the culture war is beginning to resemble a dialogue and not a monologue.

(Note: Apparently I've said some of this before, back in October. But what the hey, it deserves repeating.)