Last Thursday’s Netflix movie was “Horns And Halos,” the fascinating but ultimately infuriating documentary about the hullabaloo a few years ago over “Fortunate Son.” That anti-Bush bio, published in 1999 when Dubya was running for president, alleged (apparently, without any evidence) that Bush had been arrested for drunken driving in 1971, and was hastily pulled from the shelves when it was revealed that its author, James Hatfield, had been convicted of and served time for attempted murder.
The film, while admittedly fascinating, makes two big strategic mistakes. One, it clearly positions itself in the position that Hatfield was done a grave injustice, as though it doesn’t hurt an author’s credibility that he had hid an attempted-murder conviction. Especially the author of a book that blasts its subject for… hiding a long-ago conviction. Then at end Hatfield, somewhat implausibly, claims that Karl Rove was his source for the information about Bush's conviction.
The other mistake the film makes is that rather than give the lion’s share of screen time to the very intriguing Hatfield- who committed suicide not long after the book was published- it has as its central figure Sander Hicks, the maverick New York publisher who took the book on after it was dropped by St. Martin’s Press. Hicks- who pulls the rare feat of being both totally uninteresting and immensely unlikable- spends much of the film pontificating about the dark sinister forces represented by Bush, and by capitalism in general- that is, when he’s not seen in an East Village club performing pseudo-punk poetry that seems inspired by that of Mike Myers in “So I Married An Axe Murderer.” There's also an instructive scene where Hicks cautions his colleagues to bash "Republicans" in TV appearances, as opposed to the capitalist system itself.
Especially galling is the film’s belief that there’s some sort of climate of censorship right now, as though there haven't been dozens of other anti-Bush books that said almost all of the same things as “Fortunate Son.” “Horns & Halos” is an entertaining look at a flap most of us had forgotten about, but it’s to be taken with quite a great many grains of salt.
Posted by Stephen Silver at March 7, 2005 09:22 PM