Over on Pajamas, we have another article I am proud of [oh, shut up-ed. give me a second], Drima of Sudanese Thinker’s Wild Parties in Sudan. We are working very hard to expand our global spread via the blogosphere to give people something they wouldn’t get elsewhere. We hope you appreciate it. Finding and publishing such things take up a lot of my time nowadays.
Meanwhile, what used to take a lot of my time has a way of encroaching on my present reality. Apparently, someone I used to know…Brian DePalma… may have resurrected his career, seemingly scoring a hit at the Venice Film Festival with his new film “Redacted.” The subject is a particularly gruesome real-life rape case, concerning a 14-year old Iraqi girl raped by US servicemen who also murdered her family.
Now I don’t know the details of this case. (Some of the servicemen involved have been given long sentences and it sounds truly hideous.) Yet, according to Reuters, the film is halfway between documentary and fiction. This to me is a highly suspect form, especially when based on recent events (2006), which are more verifiable than most. You would think the truth would be enough.
But what interests me more is Brian’s selection of material and his intention, as he states it, to stop the war. “The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to motivate their Congressmen to vote against this war,” he said.
Really? Does DePalma really think that the American public doesn’t realize that such things occur in war on all sides and always have? No doubt a few American troops raped German and French women, murdered innocent people, etc. during World War II. War is Hell. Who disputes that?
So why would DePalma choose to tell this story now?
Propaganda, of course. But there’s a bit more. We are all creatures of our times and of our great successes. This is perfectly human. DePalma, quintessentially a man of my generation, equates Iraq with Vietnam not just because he may think they are the same (ridiculous as that is) but because Vietnam made him the man he is today. In other words, he was able to live a fantastic Hollywood life (even with the normal vicissitudes),including the fancy houses, cars, women, etc., by being a “groovy” man of his generation – militantly opposed to Vietnam War and for all traditional PC things. Why change? Indeed, why not drill down further into the old well when things aren’t as they once were. Why think about the specifics of the current situation or about history? They would only disrupt personal progress.
(For the record, I have not seen the movie, am only going on reports. )
If Brian DePalma wanted to make a movie about rape in Iraq, why not a movie about Uday Hussein? That went on for years…
There have been two shuttle disasters. You got drunk and stalking astronauts, not to mention all that money and harm to the environment.
Shut down NASA now.
Stop the carnage
re Uday: why not a movie about Uday?? De Palma and his friends are anti american and Uday, whatever his crimes, was not an American.
Have you noticed that MSM headlines NEVER EVER mention a soldier’s heroism? The MSM never attends a medal award ceremony.
A lot of this is about class: that soldiers are lower class, poor and therefore stupid; that patriotism is lower class, hugged by ugly people with bad teeth; and if you associate yourself with that, you may as well move back to the trailer park…
I grew up in trailer parks.
Also, thank you for adding the Sudanese Thinker to Pajamas Media. For some reason, I am fascinated by that part of the world.
Roger, you say, “I don’t know the details of this case,” and “I have not seen the movie.” Nor, apparently, have you discussed either with your old acquaintance DePalma. Nevertheless, you go on to say that “This to me is a highly suspect form,” and that DePalma has made the movie for two reasons: “Propaganda” and to continue his “personal progress,” without a thought for “the specifics of the current situation or about history.”
Roger, since you haven’t seen the movie and since you have no specific knowledge about the factual matrix on which the movie is based, how do you know all this?
Bob, no good reason. Just call me psychic. Or a fool. But that’s my view. Otherwise I wouldn’t have published. And of course admitted my lack of complete knowledge.
Bob, I think De Palma’s own words justify Roger’s comments.
Side note: the Americans involved were court-martialed and given up to 110 years in prison. Think that will be in the film?
Roger, I doubt you’re psychic, and you certainly are not a fool. You have an absolute right to your view, and the absolute right to publish whatever you want to; it is, after all, your blog.
I’d just point out that when you say that one of the reasons DePalma has chosen to tell this story now is “propoganda,” yet you have “admitted [your] lack of complete knowledge,” you probably shouldn’t use the expression “of course” — which implies possession of complete knowledge, or at least no room for argument.
We’ll know soon enough. When we do, someone will have earned a meal of crow and we’ll see if they show up to eat it.
Simon’s isn’t the first, or last, “rush to judgement”. It would be interesting to see when else critics of that sin mention it.
Oh, please God, no more split screen action scenes.
For some interesting points on how Iraq could end up as another Vietnam.
Yes, it is NOT another Vietnam, not yet anyway.
http://tinyurl.com/ytatxh
… according to Reuters, the film is halfway between documentary and fiction. This to me is a highly suspect form …
Let me put it this way. Why doesn’t a film “halfway between documentary and fiction” ring alarm bells in your head. It does in mine. Once you add fiction, it isn’t a documentary anymore. And if it’s not labeled a work of fiction, then it’s inherently dishonest.
Plus, there’s this; “The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to motivate their Congressmen to vote against this war,”
Sure sounds like propaganda to me.
And how does one get invited to one of these parties?
http://www.americanlegends.blogspot.com
If DePalma really wants to stop the war, why not create a film that might help America *win* it?
“One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to motivate their Congressmen to vote against this war,” he said.”
Oh, the humanity. The MSM can embargo the films of planes hitting the World Trade Center, killing thousands, but Brian DePalma is going to change the world by overdramatizing a brutal episode that cost the lives of… six people?
Talk about agitprop, thy name is DePalma. Where is his ‘concern’ about Saddam’s hundreds of thousands of brutalized victims? Or his ‘concern’ about the intentional murder-of-the-week of dozens or hundreds of Iraqi civilians that gets ‘insurgents’ the free publicity and the US the blame?
Why is it that the propaganda films we see in this country are all monotonously uniform in demonizing the US? DePalma isn’t ‘concerned’ about death and rapes unless they point in that direction. His human feelings are deliberately as full of selective omissions as a NYT story.
seriously, why would anyone pay to see such a movie?
Why not send a copy of ” I WAS SADDAM’S SON ” by Latif Yahia &
Karl Wendl to DePalma, if he want’s to expose RAPE as criminal, and
America’s involvement in thse countries, WE DID NOT CAST THE FIRST STONE, at least we punish the perpetrators when caught, can
he justify women’s torture, unpunished in his film?
What interest me is who is financing this film , as that would shed some light on the messenger’s, and I personally feel it is multiple
backers…Making any film is not cheap. Anti American films should not be allowed to get major theater distribution, they should only
be viewed in foriegn film theaters and receiving the boards stamp of approval. Afterall they do it to film makers all over Europe .
Roger:”No doubt a few American troops raped German and French women, murdered innocent people, etc. during World War II.”
Actually, if I remember correctly, about 25 soldiers were executed by summary justice for such crimes during WWII. But we don’t talk about that- it was the good war.
(Sorry, looked but I can’t provide a cite- so salt accordingly.)
I have no intention of seeing the film, and this has nothing to do with the propagandistic elements – though when I see reviewers in the Guardian and the Independent coming in their pants over the film, that makes me mighty suspicious of the filmmaker’s good faith.
No, it’s the fact that Brian DePalma is a no-talent hack. The Untouchables was a piece of crap and Scarface even worse, while Dressed to Kill was an insult to the medium.
Dr Johnson once opined that “patriotism is the last resort of a scoundrel”, though he was commenting on scoundrels, not patriotism. In our day, anti-patriotism is the last resort of a scoundrel; and it appears that we can add Brian DePalma’s name to the long list of scoundrels who’ve resorted to it.
Bob, call me crazy, but when De Palma says “The pictures are what will stop the war” it seems pretty darn clear that we’re talking about propaganda. As a literature professor used to say, read. the. words.
I can imagine a movie hitting the theaters say a year form now that deals with the story of the woman who claims she was raped by Bill Clinton many years ago. In addition to the alleged rape itself, her reaction over the years to Clinton’s subsequent career and various high profile peccadilloes and as well as the Bill’s responses and those of his immediate family members would make a compelling story. The movie Primary Colors dealt with Clinton’s response to the weakness of others, and despite telling a harrowing story, somehow left Bill bathed in a warm Hollywood glow. How odd.
Has anyone else noticed that the new Hollywood formula for “visionary” filmaking, in both content and marketing, is to be ever more solicitous of what is generally perceived to be the prevailing European world view?
And that usually means projecting the US in the worst light possible.
Wouldn’t it be fantastic if the true, emerging character of Europe, combined with conditions on the ground in Iraq, were to prove those “visionaries” oh so wrong in all respects?
Honestly they can make whatever movies they want, the quote that really bugs me is
‘When I read about the Mahmudiyah incident in Iraq 2006 — five U.S. soldiers raped a local girl, killed her and her family and later tried to disguise it as an insurgent attack — I knew I had a story.’
My beef is that it seems no one in hollywood ever reads about an act of heroism by US troops and thinks ‘I have a story here’
For years we get sanctimonious lectures from Hollywood about how we can’t let the actions of a few define the entire group.
Now a mediocre director with delusions of importance tells us he hopes the actions of a few will so define the entire group that we’ll immediately end the war.
And throw 25 million people into the arms of al Qaeda, the Ba’ath Party, and the Iranian mullahs.
Because it’s the moral thing to do.
Go have another drink, Brian. Stick to making lowbrow, overlong, testosterone-soaked epics and leave the life-and-death stuff to those with actual empathy for their fellow humans.
A leaky rowboat is the last refuge of scoundrals. Ask Sean Penn.
Its sad. People like De Palma think that what happened in this case is what happens all the time. In reality, these people were freaks in the system. They acted out and they were caught and punished. There are 600,000 thousand troops in the Army and Marines. Just like in civilian society, there are some bad apples. There are a lot of Murders in LA. Just because De Palma works there doesn’t mean I think he is a murderer. Whats even worse is that these people immediately presume guilt on people when they hear of instances like this, such as in Haditha. Now, it turns out, they were most likely innocent. I wonder if he is going to make a movie about the rush to judgement for the Marines that were involved. Its funny, as many times as my Soldiers and me delivered medical supplies, food, toys, games and water to Iraqis, I never once saw a reporter interested in seeing us do it. And all the awards ceremonies I have been to, no reporters were there for that either.
DePalma serving as the conscience of the nation is as dysfunctional as Whoreyweird preaching to us rubes.
You make a movie about atrocities committed by Islamic fascists and you are accused of jingoism, warmongering, and fomenting hatred of Muslims, and that�s for openers; you are branded a dread neo-con, and may wind up being the object of a fatwa issued by some bloody-minded little iman. On the other hand, you make a movie about atrocities committed by American soldiers and you are lionized at Cannes and Venice, your career is resuscitated, and your status in Hollywood moves up several notches. For people who are otherwise unmoored except for attachment to status, ego, applause and money, the choice is fairly simple.
Dryfuss,
You’ve gotten one point completely backwards when you say:
“Anti American films should not be allowed to get major theater distribution, they should only
be viewed in foriegn film theaters and receiving the boards stamp of approval. Afterall they do it to film makers all over Europe .”
Anti American films are fine in the USA. We’re big boys and girls here and we don’t need to be protected from the likes of Brian DePalma. The real danger of these films is that they are going to be shown over and over again in the Madrassas, on Arabic cable channels and any other medium available in the Middle East. Suicide bombers in training are going to be forced to watch this movie over and over again while being told “This is what you are fighting against. They rape our women and spit in our faces. Only you (and 15 pounds of cordite) can stop them.”
And after being fed this high production values propaganda, these kids will happily blow up in the middle of a bunch of American soldiers attending the ribbon cutting ceremony at a new preschool.
That is the real danger of this propaganda. And I would be willing to bet an awful lot of money that is exactly how it will be used.
Sneaking up on unsuspecting American audiences at the end of September is a new movie from director Peter Berg called The Kingdom. If all you know of it so far is the poster of Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner wielding machine guns, let’s just say this pic presents a challenging marketing problem, and be grateful it was ever greenlighted at all. I was fortunate enough to catch an early screening recently, and — well, let’s just leave it at this: The whole time I was sitting there, my mouth agape, unable to stop muttering “How on Earth did Hollywood accidentally allow this movie to be made?”
Notwithstanding a few moments of seemingly muddled moral equivalency at the end, The Kingdom may be the closest thing we’re ever going to get to an honest, pro-American movie about the “Long War” anytime in the foreseeable future. Yes, at its core, it’s basically just a buddy picture, where Foxx is the “fish out of water,” forming a reluctant alliance with the mysterious Saudi guy “in a world where everything is topsy-turvy and anything can happen.” Still and all, when the alternatives to DePalma’s forthcoming Redacted and its ilk are practically nonexistant, The Kingdom deserves to be widely seen and heavily discussed when it goes into general release next month.
Without giving anything away, there will be absolutists who argue that its morally ambiguous ending negates the whole premise of the film — but I would profoundly disagree. In fact, the case can be made that exactly the opposite is true: The ending actually illustrates the utter vacuity of the argument put forth in some quarters, that both (small-L) liberal democracies and (capital-I) Illiberal Islamic societies are driven to conflict by mutual fear, suspicion and illogical hatreds. Indeed, the hollow falseness of that conclusion is convincingly laid bare by the entire rest of the film.
Those who cringe at the thought of DePalma’s agitprop setting the national agenda need to vote with their dollars and make The Kingdom a huge surprise Fall blockbuster! Because, at the end of the day, Hollywood doesn’t care about pro-war or anti-war. Box office is the only language that studio moguls understand, and collecting your dollars is their only agenda.
As Brown Line pointed out, De Palma is a hack. In addition to the movies mentioned in that comment, I will never forgive him for the hatchet job he did on the Black Dahlia. The upside to his making this movie is that 1) no one will see it and 2) those who do will walk out of the theater wondering what the hell they just saw.
You know, the one thing that disgusts me the most about some of the denizens of Hollywierd (our gracious host excepted) are those who spend so much time overseas handwringing in interviws about how very violent, crass, vulgar, et cetera, et cetera Americans are percieved as being (or actually are!) and manage to overlook their own part in making movies (or music) that portray us as such, over and over and over again. These are movies that are exported around the world, and having done their bit to make the US look like a perfect sink, then they worry about how violent and uncultured we appear, and move to London, or the South of France.
Thanks, guys. Couldn’t have done it without you.
Along the lines of what Dougie pundit said, this movie is going to get soldiers killed. There are more anti-military movies coming out this fall, too.
If Hollywood were attacked, or needed the National Guard to help with a natural disaster, I wouldn’t blame the military if they stood down and refused to help. Of course, they would never do that, and I’m not advocating that they do so.
I like what naval aviator/blogger Neptunus Lex had to say about San Francisco when the city tried to ban the Blue Angels from performing.
“As a city, San Francisco has long ago stopped pretending that they support their military. We could stop pretending that we like San Francisco.
We don�t have to like San Francisco. We get paid to defend them. It�s our job.
The rest of the country?
We�re doing that for free.”
I think you could easily substitute “Hollywood” for “San Francisco” in that quote.
For years we get sanctimonious lectures from Hollywood about how we can’t let the actions of a few define the entire group.
Tom,
You are so correct. And in this instance, we are talking about the actions of a handful of soldiers out of 150,000.
I suppose we can now look forward to a movie insinuating that all homosexuals are pedophiles since a small handful happen to be so.
They can also make the film about every illegal immigrant committing vehicular manslaughter while under the influence.After all, we do happen to have a few disturbing cases in the news right now, and stuff like that supposedly gets DePalma’s attention.
De Palma gives away his intention by his choice of subject. Then he adds the fiction to heighten his drama of questionable relevance. The publicity stills show him absolutely radiant with happiness. What a creep.
Dougie, I agree in your correction regarding my wording and bow to your analysis, however if you think these films are not being distributed in terrorist training camps by those who furnished the money to make them, I fail to agree. Film makers such as DePalma are used due to there in ability to look at past history and future history. They are ignorant to what makes our country what it is & condeming those out there protecting the likes of him & his fellow film makers doing the same thing. For some reason they think the word “RAPE” IS DIRECTED TO WOMEN, it is a word that can be administered to all societies in countries around the world, raping the coffers, but he
is not intelligent enough to see or care about anything but self interest.
However, we must be aware of all propagander in order to call it just that. By calling it what it is we can inform our service men around the world that we are behind them and inform the public
what the truth is. DePalma and his ilk will always be around to help the enemy for 24 hour fame and the almighty green back. There was that time frame in history & hollywood, that beining connected to a subversive party in any way got you blacklisted from writing & making a film, that no longer happens due to so much foriegn investment in our film industry.
More and more, I am wondering exactly who are they making these movies for. Not an American audience, surely. We’re known about how the market for most of the krep churned out these days is overseas.
But who makes movies for flyover-country Americans these days? I know the stories are out there, and the way people line up for the occassional movie that does resonate with the American mass audience… I mean that would be a clue, wouldn’t it?
Sadly, I conclude that Michael Medved was right, when he wrote Hollywood VS America; it’s almost wilfully perverse, how just about every virtue and value we cherish is trashed in the movies. I can think of a dozen Iraq war stories that would make great movies, and as many more stories from American history that would do the same… hell, I even wrote one of them myself! (here – http://www.booklocker.com/books/3004.html )but would Hollywood ever give up the foreign market and their own sense of self satisfaction?
The stories are out there, but Hollywood just looks away… which is terribly sad, really. We used to enjoy going to the movies…
“People like De Palma think that what happened in this case is what happens all the time.”
You’re giving De Palma too much credit. De Palma may not know and certainly doesn’t care whether this “happens all the time”. He is using it deliberately for anti-American propaganda.
As a Marine having fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan, DePalma’s anti war propaganda is a worthless piece of junk that serves only the insurgents and fails to represent the Marine Corps in any respect. The film was made before the Marine Corps investigated the incident. Subbsequently, many of the Marines in this incindent have been found innocent. DePalma is a traitor. The blood of US servicemen is on his hands. As an advisor, my opinion is not speculation but based on my experiences in combat. An example of how the simplest proproganda can be used in the Islamic culture: I commanded a US base in Afghanistan. Someone told the Afghan Army Command that I allowed an Afghan female onto my base. This false rumor caused a major outcry from the Afghan Army until I could assure them that I had not allowed any Afghan female on my US base. In DePalma’s film, Marines killing and raping innocent muslims will ensure many more attacks on us due to this worthless film and director.