June 24, 2004

Unfair-enheit, Cont’d

Here’s embedded film critic Jonathan Foreman, in the New York Post:

"And if Moore weren't a (left-wing) version of the fat, bigoted, ignorant Americans his European friends love to mock, he'd know that prewar Iraq was ruled by a regime that had forced a sixth of its population into fearful exile, that hanged dissidents (real dissidents, not people like Susan Sontag and Tim Robbins) from meathooks and tortured them with blowtorches, and filled thousands of mass graves with the bodies of its massacred citizens."

Foreman’s piece is flanked on the op-ed page by an autopilot anti-Hollywood column by Coulter wannabe Michelle Malkin, who runs through the litany of all the awful things people in the movie business have done in the last year. But then she tosses this nugget in:
"Similarly, Steven Spielberg's new movie about an asylum-seeker, "The Terminal," indulges in weak-willed liberal escapism by demonizing Department of Homeland Security officials just trying to do their jobs."

Say what? Is Malkin saying that Spielberg is somehow undermining the war effort by making the villain in his film a DHS bureaucrat? Malkin either hasn’t seen “The Terminal,” or she completely misunderstood it- it’s an allegory of the American immigrant experience, and clearly, the War on Terror has nothing to do with the film whatsoever. (Indeed, much like the conservative attack last week on “Saved!,” the Village Voice review of the ‘Terminal’ took the opposite tack, criticizing the film for not making enough of a big deal about DHS immigration detentions).

Also, never mind that Spielberg, along with Tom Hanks, helped raise millions of dollars for the recently completed World War II memorial, while he also made both “Saving Private Ryan” and “Band of Brothers,” two of the greatest cinematic evocations of patriotism in recent years.

Ms. Malkin: if your goal is to bash the vacuousness of Hollywood liberals, sorry: Spielberg’s not your guy. Don’t criticize what you can’t understand, indeed.

Posted by Stephen Silver at June 24, 2004 12:34 AM
Comments

Malkin's column aside, I think you are making a leap with respect to Hanks and Spielberg. It is generally acceptable in the Hollywood (and the anti-America left) world to be patriotic regarding WWII (Tom Brokaw's greatest generation), but once we start creeping northward of 1945 then America became evil (or at least starting with Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

I am not saying Spielberg or Hanks fall into this category, but have you noticed that Spielberg has not said one publically positive thing in support of Israel or America in the War on Terror. His Shoah work is paramount (and he is actually making a movie about 1972 Munich) but when it comes to the war against Islamism, Hollywood has been anti-american at worst and dead silent at best.

So I don't think you can conclude that because someone has nostalgia for America's WWII heroics, they have not become akin to an Oliver Stone - steeped in loathing of America and its defensive measures like DHS. Indeed a WWII centrism can often be a slap at modern America. I hope that does not describe Hanks and Spielberg (both of whose work I enjoy), but one cannot extrapolate from their support of WWII America that they share the same love of our modern America and our rights of self defense.

Posted by: J. Lichty at June 24, 2004 10:44 AM

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