Hollywood fuels the panic years

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 1995 by Christopher Sharrett

THE RECENT FILM "Outbreak" probably is less significant as a metaphor for the AIDS crisis than as an entertainment for a particular moment of social unease. It is true that the movie, although rigidly formulaic and improbable, has some fairly deep hooks into the current collective psyche, playing off of not only AIDS, but the flesh-eating virus, new appearances by supposedly long-dead ailments, and, most particularly, a resurgent distrust of "the government."

The presence of Donald Sutherland gives the movie special intertextual resonance. He almost always is sinister, but his performance as "X" in Oliver Stone's "JFK" most likely will associate him permanently with government's evil underside as surely as Erich von Stroheim became known as the "Terrible Hun." Of course "Outbreak" tries, in true Hollywood fashion, to recoup legitimacy for power by personalizing the conflict into a struggle of good general vs. evil general, deflecting criticism of societal systems, much less how people truly behave within institutions.

"The Nervous 90s"

These days, Hollywood's meditations on the rotten world that surrounds us seem more honest than opportunistic politicians who rail on about "the government" and its ills. These politicians irresponsibly are attempting to bundle together an enormous raft of problems in a manner that fuels what Newsweek has termed "the Nervous 90s." The arts usually are the target for critics who look for "irresponsible" sectors of the country that exploit, rather than analyze, Americans' fears. Such rash actions lead to what passes for political discourse--people don't seem to need to distinguish HUD from the CIA when they fulminate about "the government." Meanwhile, filmmakers have taken notice of this nervous condition and know what buttons to push.

Barbet Schroeder's "Kiss of Death," a thoroughly revamped remake of the 1947film noir classic, continues the genre's tradition of catching the collective paranoid edge, showing viewers a world drastically out of joint. While Nicolas Cage's Little Junior probably is every bit as psychopathic as Richard Widmark's Tommy Udo (Cage's vastly inferior performance aside), the new version's real difference from its predecessor is its sense of an all-pervasive governmental corruption.

This is not a new theme for crime films. The genre has been very prescient in this regard, touching on the topic by the early 1960s, with its most incisive contemporary examples being Sidney Lumet's "Prince of the City" and "Q&A." The crime movie is the natural territory for an exploration of corruption, having gone from individuals being born evil to the notion "we have met the enemy and he is us" between the Great Depression and the Greed Decade. A disbelief in ourselves and our institutions is not all that is eating away at us, if we believe the movies.

The latest "Die Hard" installment looks timely in a manner that would equal the most repugnant exploitation had the movie not gone into production months before the Oklahoma bombing. Mad bomber films have had great currency in recent Hollywood films. "Die Hard with a Vengeance" comes off like an amalgam of "Speed" and "Blown Away," and the idea of explosions occurring out of nowhere, devastating an otherwide pristine gentrified culture, seems even more threatening than AIDS.

Apocalyptic ailments

Explosions and plagues become apocalyptic ailments that address a nervous society in a manner that keeps it from systemic study of what really is making it so jittery. An analysis of how and why companies lay off thousands of people as they declare record profits at the end of the cycle is replaced by something more visceral, though thoroughly irrelevant to the nature of things. Bombs going off in buildings are a symptom of something more profound than the heart of darkness that Hollywood casually forays into, even as cinema cuts a wide swath with its indictments of governmental corruption.

The real dishonesty in this already hoary theme is the constant attempt to recoup a sense of normality, with the hero able to cut himself loose from all evils, the system in particular. Notwithstanding his victimization by thugs and state and Federal authorities, good guy David Caruso can outwit everybody in "Kiss of Death," just as Tim Robbins succeeds in a 20-year jailbreak plan that could have been scripted by Horatio Alger in "The Shawshank Redemption," and Dustin Hoffman is able to talk sense to the top brass as well as the pilot with the doomsday bomb in "Outbreak."

The message is perfectly in keeping with the times, yet absolutely basic to American fiction: Leave the common man to himself and all problems will be taken care of. Organizations create more problems than they solve, and, when left on their own, individuals usually can appeal to each other on an emotional level--that is, if they can't outwit each other.

The paranoid style in American politics that historian Richard Hofstadter wrote about more than 30 years ago came home to roost in American cinema almost before he left his typewriter. The more recent films are about a complicity in a newer crisis, one where we have convinced ourselves, with politicians' help, that we are encompassed by an amorphous evil. Such a dread hardly can be assaulted head-on by budget slashing and tax cuts.