Cinema Wars

Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era

Douglas M. Kellner

• Editorial: Wiley-Blackwell
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444360493
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Categoría: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

Cinema Wars explores the intersection of film, politics, and US culture and society through a bold critical analysis of the films, TV shows, and documentaries produced in the early 2000s

• Offers a thought-provoking depiction of Hollywood film as a contested terrain between conservative and liberal forces
• Films and documentaries discussed include: Black Hawk Down, The Dark Knight, Star Wars, Syriana, WALL-E, Fahrenheit 9/11 and other Michael Moore documentaries, amongst others
• Explores how some films in this era supported the Bush-Cheney regime, while others criticized the administration, openly or otherwise
• Investigates Hollywood's treatment of a range of hot topics, from terrorism and environmental crisis to the Iraq war and the culture wars of the 2000s
• Shows how Hollywood film in the 2000s brought to life a vibrant array of social protest and helped create cultural conditions to elect Barack Obama

1

Confronting the Horrors of the Bush-Cheney Era

From Documentary to Allegory

It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that the administrations of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have been the most rightwing, extremist, ultraconservative, and contested in recent history.¹ In retrospect, the 2000 election that pitted Bush against Al Gore was one of the most fateful in history and its outcome shocking and consequential. In particular, the presidential campaign of November 2000 displayed an astonishing conclusion, as on election night, it appeared that Al Gore was on his way to triumph as the big Eastern states of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Florida were called for him. However, suddenly, Florida flipped over to Bush, who had swept the South and was accumulating enough electoral votes in the Middle West and West to be named the winner when Florida was called for Bush. Yet, in another reversal that a Hollywood drama writer would be hard pressed to imagine, Florida was deemed too close to call, and a recount was ordered, a process that would go on for 36 days and generate a media spectacle that would seriously divide the country (see Kellner 2001).

Following a series of Florida court decisions that more recounts were necessary, the Bush team, led by family consigliore James Baker, fought to stop the recount and freeze a Bush lead by a few hundred votes. The US Supreme Court then jumped in and ruled by a slim 5 to 4 margin that the state-wide recount of Florida’s votes, ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, should stop and Bush should be declared the victor. The obviously partisan vote was certainly the most controversial in US history and was damned by its critics as a misuse of the Supreme Court that violated the Constitution (see Bugliosi 2001; Dershowitz 2001), generating what I call “Grand Theft 2000” (Kellner 2001).

After taking a hard-right course for the first nine months of 2001, and losing a Senate majority when a Republican senator jumped ship to caucus with the Democrats, Bush regained the initiative after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, discussed in the next chapter. He continued to push through an extreme rightwing agenda and to rush to war, first against Afghanistan and then Iraq – with momentous consequences.

In this chapter, I first highlight how documentary cinema portrayed the Bush-Cheney years, beginning with discussion of some provocative works that dealt with the 2000 election and the first years of the Bush-Cheney presidency. Then I examine how documentary and Hollywood fictional films portrayed environmental crisis and dealt with the issue of global warming and climate change, which had been initially denied and suppressed by the Bush-Cheney administration. I discuss how Davis Guggenheim’s 2006 Academy Award winning documentary about Al Gore’s crusade against global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, and a steady flow of environmental documentaries address these issues. I next show how a series of fiction and animated films allegorically present environmental crisis, and conclude with a discussion of how Hollywood genre films can be read as commentaries on the socioeconomic crises and fears of the present moment.

This chapter combines analysis of documentary and fiction film because both together provide critical insight into events and problems of the present age. For instance, allegories like The Day After Tomorrow (2004) warn about environmental catastrophe, while mutant monster and various horror, fantasy, and science fiction films point to the dangers of social horrors and even apocalypse. Documentaries at their best provide cogent contextualization and advance knowledge. However, I want to question the line between fiction and non-fiction films, as the former can provide experience and access to issues that may penetrate deeper, or awaken individuals more dramatically, than documentary, and thus may help cultivate insight and vision into contemporary issues, as well as deal generally with the human condition. On the other hand, documentaries may also have resonant images and characters that impress themselves deeply on audiences and change their perceptions and perhaps even behavior, as well as providing historical-contextual understanding and factual information. Yet documentaries themselves are constructs and have their biases and entertainment and fictive components, as I will emphasize.

The Golden Age of Documentary

The contours of the key events of the Bush-Cheney years and the struggles over their policies are visible in the US cinematic visions of the era. Enabled by the revolution in documentary production and distribution during the early 2000s (discussed below), and due to the number of fictional films that chose to allegorically criticize the Bush-Cheney administration, the regime of Bush-Cheney and their Republican Party allies was one of the most documented and critically portrayed in US cinematic history.

The Golden Age of Documentary was fueled in part by the bankruptcy of corporate news and information in the United States, in which a small number of corporations controlled the major television networks, as well as important newspapers and Internet sites, and failed to be adequately critical of the state and major corporations.² Corporate news media never adequately informed the country concerning the rightwing radicalism of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in the 2000 election, treated Bush as a savior after 9/11 (see chapter 2), and served as propaganda machines for Bush-Cheney disinformation concerning alleged Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” and ties to al Qaeda that provided legitimation for the invasion and occupation of Iraq (see chapter 5). The corporate media failed as well to cover the magnitude of environmental crisis intensified by Bush-Cheney policies, the dangers to the economy of a growing federal deficit and consumer debt, and the deregulation of financial institutions and other sectors of the economy. The magnitude of social problems generated by the Bush-Cheney administration propelled documentary filmmakers to fill the gap provided by the conformity and complicity of corporate news media and to take advantage of new digital technologies and modes of distribution which helped fuel the documentary explosion.

Hence, a variety of documentaries present critical visions of the Bush-Cheney administration, ranging from the films of Michael Moore to a series of docs produced and organized by Robert Greenwald which criticized various aspects of Bush-Cheney policy and dealt with the social problems that intensified during their reign of error. The proliferation of quality documentary films is due in part to a revolution in the production and distribution of documentary film in the last decade, resulting from the widespread use of inexpensive digital video cameras, computers, and other multimedia technologies that have made the production of films and videos more accessible and much cheaper. In addition, political groups on both the left and the right have created distribution networks to circulate material promoting their causes, and general audiences can buy documentaries and other films at a discounted price from a number of sources, including Amazon, or can rent them by mail from companies like Netflix or Blockbuster, or in video/DVD rental stores and websites. Finally, as we shall see in this and following chapters, the success of films by Michael Moore, Robert Greenwald, and other documentary filmmakers, in conjunction with pressing social problems and political scandals, inspired perhaps the most prolific and hard-hitting wave of documentaries in US, and perhaps world, cinema history.

Grand Theft 2000

Unprecedented (2001), directed by Richard Ray Perez and Joan Sekler,³ presents a fast-moving and well-documented examination of the Florida fiasco, beginning with the efforts of Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State Katherine Harris to purge voting lists of so-called “felons” who turned out to be predominantly African-American and working-class voters, in largely Democratic Party strongholds, who were illicitly forbidden to vote because their names resembled those on the felon list. This dastardly deed perhaps blocked over 50,000 votes and is illustrative of the dirty tricks and illegal maneuvers whereby the Florida Bush machine allegedly stole the election with the complicity of the US Supreme Court (see Palast 2003; Kellner 2001).

Unprecedented unfolds the variety of dirty deeds whereby Al Gore lost votes in the Florida election. The film addresses the infamous “Butterfly Ballot” in which Gore supporters voted accidentally for Pat Buchanan, showing on screen the absurdly designed ballot that misled thousands of voters, mostly liberal senior citizens, in Palm County, Florida. Various other confusing ballots around the state, dysfunctional voting machines, irregular procedures, and obstacles to counting and recounting the vote, all of which tainted the Florida vote count and set the country into constitutional crisis, are critically interrogated in the film, which culminates in showing the Supreme Court pull off what many saw as a coup d’état for the Bush-Cheney Gang.

Narrated by Peter Coyote, Unprecedented is rich with documentary footage and insightful interviews with observers and experts like Allan Dershowitz and Vincent Bugliosi, who criticize the Supreme Court decision. The documentary footage shows that three of the Supreme Court Justices had conflicts of interest in that they had direct links to the Bush-Cheney administration, including Clarence Thomas’s wife, who worked directly for the Bush campaign, and one of Justice Scalia’s sons, who received a job in the legal division of the administration.

Unprecedented reveals how Republicans sent down operatives to attempt to stop the vote count through demonstrations and a sit-in in a Miami-Dade government office, where a vote recount was being attempted. Footage documented their attempts to disrupt the recounts, and photos identified that they worked for Republicans like Tom DeLay and were not local demonstrators. The film also shows how the media spectacle of the struggles around the recount was orchestrated for the television cameras and how the Bush team was able to manipulate the media, creating the impression that Bush had already won and that the Gore team were “sore losers” delaying the inevitable. Eventual counting of the votes of the entire state, as was occurring when the Supreme Court intervened, showed that Al Gore would have been elected had a fair recount been allowed, although the right wing circulated the mythology and Big Lie that the recount demonstrated Bush actually won.⁴

Both Unprecedented and Danny Schechter and Faye Anderson’s Counting on Democracy (2001) examine the dangers of computerized voting, how Republican firms received most of the contracts, and how there was a clear racial and class gap in access to reliable voting machines that strongly benefited Republicans. Counting on Democracy uses the Florida example to make the case for reliable voting machines and accountable voting procedures, a problem that would continue to plague elections in the United States, as I suggest below.⁵

Another 2000 election film, Journeys with George (2001), made by Alexandra Pelosi, a former NBC News producer and Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, puts on display the superficial, smug, and nasty side of George W. Bush while on the campaign trail, with his trademark smirk, simplistic slogans, and insulting comments to aides and the media. Yet while the film presents critical images for viewers inclined to view Bush negatively, the documentary also humanizes him, as he banters with the documentary crew and reporters, presenting his likeable and affable side as well. The fact that Bush allowed intimate access to his campaign to the daughter of a California congresswoman, Nancy Pelosi, who would eventually rise to be the first woman Speaker of the House, shows the interconnection between elite political families who often exaggerate differences and are part of the same “political club” (although political polarization would rise significantly during the Bush-Cheney era).

While Journeys with George focuses on the Bush campaign, The Party’s Over (2001, released 2003 and originally titled Last Party 2000) provides documentary investigation of key issues and events on the 2000 campaign trail, examining both parties and focusing on youth and other protests against the two major political parties’ conventions and platforms. The Party’s Over is a follow-up to Marc Benjamin and Mark Levin’s documentary Last Party 1992, which featured the inimitable Robert Downey on an excursion exploring the US political scene during the 1992 presidential election campaign. The Party’s Over centers on Academy Award winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman as a politically uninformed and alienated Gen-Xer who seeks to learn about American politics through filming the Republican and Democratic Party conventions and attempting to interview key figures. Hoffman questions why young people are so apathetic politically and are not more involved in the system. Discussing this with both famous and ordinary younger people, as well as politicians and pundits, the film documents widespread dissatisfaction with the current political system.

Much of The Party’s Over appears to take the Ralph Nader line, endorsed by Michael Moore in 2000, that there is no real difference between the two political parties, both of which are dominated by corporations and money. Yet the interview footage (and subsequent results of the election) show clear differences. Moreover, in retrospect, the documentary makes Al Gore and the Democrats look very good, and, in view of their disastrous record, the Republicans and their figurehead Bush appear quite negatively, raising the question, how could this guy and this bunch ever capture the presidency?

Against party politics, The Party’s Over champions social movements and struggles, opening with a montage of the civil rights, anti-war, gay and lesbian, and environmental movements. There is also sustained focus on contemporary youth movements like the Ruckus Society, as well as youth demonstrating at both the Republican and Democratic Party conventions. The message, highlighted in interviews with Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, John Sellers of the Ruckus Society, and other demonstrators, is that many young people are fed up with politics as usual, want to get involved, and are seeking to develop their own autonomous political movements and political culture – which dispels dominant media stereotypes of apathetic youth. There is also sustained focus on Cherie Homulka and the homeless movement, providing access to voices rarely heard in the mainstream media. The film reveals an amorphous range of activist groups in strong opposition to the conservative hegemony that would dominate during the Bush-Cheney years, and suggests that many individuals and groups were ready for activism and change, as in the 1960s and 1970s.

Just after the 2000 election, the Hollywood Director’s Guild had a program honoring Michael Moore’s television work. A highly upset Moore came out on stage and said he needed to talk about the 2000 election before anything else. Moore acknowledged that he had campaigned hard for Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader in 2000, but saw that the contest between Gore and Bush was a cliffhanger with the election probably going to whoever prevailed in Florida and New Hampshire. Moore claimed he went to Nader to discuss this problem and proposed that Nader tell voters in Florida and New Hampshire to accept the lesser evil so that the country would be spared the likely disaster of a Bush administration. According to Moore, Nader resisted the argument and Moore claims he himself went to Florida and New Hampshire to plead the case that Nader supporters should vote for Gore in this instance. Moore’s arguments did not prevail and the election was close enough to allow the Bush-Cheney Gang to steal it (see Moore 2003). Ralph Nader thus appeared to be a spoiler and was viewed critically by many of his previous supporters.

The documentary An Unreasonable Man (2007) by Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan addresses Nader’s entire life history. The film makes both the most positive and critical cases for and against Nader, documenting his unquestioned record of public service and achievements, as well as what now appears as his gross misjudgments in the 2000 and 2004 elections. Nader’s refrain that there wasn’t “a dime’s bit of difference” between Bush and Gore now appears monumentally misguided, and the film makes clear that for many this blunder seals Nader’s legacy. The film, however, is very fair, showing Nader’s long list of anti-corporate campaigns and legislative achievements, ranging from car safety laws to OSHA and workers’ safety regulations, the Clean Air Act, the Freedom of Information Act, and many other laudable achievements.

An Unreasonable Man probes Nader’s personal life and finds no scandals, indicating that Nader is ascetic and almost monk-like in his dedication to causes, although many former associates find grounds to criticize him. The film suggests that Nader veered to the left during the Reagan years that undid much of the progressive legislation of the previous decades and was alienated during the Clinton years because he was not called upon to promote reform and found the Clinton administration too cozy with corporations. Yet the man and his motivations ultimately remain a mystery and his role in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections continues to generate endless controversy, while his quixotic effort to run yet again for president in 2008 poses further questions about Nader’s motivations (he appeared to have had little effect on this election).

The wave of progressive political documentaries during the Bush-Cheney era included homages to stalwarts of the left such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, and there is a fascinating documentary called Senator Obama Goes to Africa (2007) which made it appear to me that Barack Obama was the real deal, although the film could have been used against him to document that he’s a flaming liberal and even radical. Another documentary, Giuliani Time (2006), takes on New York Senator Rudy Giuliani by exposing his family connections to organized crime, the covering up of his problematic family background while he was a New York and federal prosecutor, and the countless scandals and conflicts he was involved with in New York.

As the 2008 presidential primaries heated up, with Barack Obama engaged in a fierce competition with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, and then facing Republican presidential candidate John McCain in the general election, once again the country faced the specter of a stolen election through the high-profile presentation of an HBO docudrama on the Florida election struggle titled Recount. Directed by Jay Roach of the Austin Powers movies and starring Kevin Spacey as Gore stalwart Ron Clain and Tom Wilkinson as Bush family consigliore James Baker, the docudrama focused on the two sides’ behindthe-scenes maneuvering with the courts and media to push the election tally toward their candidate.

While Recount made it clear that it was a stolen election, with references to the erratic loss of Gore votes in certain precincts, the scrubbing of tens of thousands of “felons” from the voting account, and the unconscionable halting of vote tabulation by the US Supreme Court, it did not centrally focus on the mechanics of the election theft, barely scratching the surface of the greatest crime in US political history. To be sure, it put on display the hardball machinations of the Bush-Cheney team, the partisan antics of Katherine Harris (deliciously played by Laura Dern), and the failure of the Gore team to fight as fiercely as the Bush-Cheney Gang, signaling out video clips of Joe Lieberman, Gore’s vice-presidential running mate, saying that suspicious votes coming from “military” voters should be counted, even if there was no postmark and they arrived days after the election. Yet Recount did not deal with how votes were systematically pilfered from all over the state, the statistical anomalies between previous voting records, polling, and the actual count in precincts where Bush performed much better than he should have and Gore much worse. Nor did it dwell on the scandal of the Supreme Court intervening to stop the hand ...

Índice

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• List of Plates
• Introduction
• 1: Confronting the Horrors of the Bush-Cheney Era
• 2: Hollywood’s 9/11 and Spectacles of Terror
• 3: Michael Moore’s Provocations
• 4: Hollywood Political Critiques of the Bush-Cheney Regime
• 5: The Cinematic Iraq War
• Conclusion
• References
• Index