The Kingdom (of Dirty, Dirty Ay-Rabs)

To be fair, I have not seen this film and should not be making assumptions about it. However, a) that is no fun, b) I have heard quite a bit about this film from trusted (aka lefty) news outlets, and c) I know enough about Hollywood movies to be able to predict the entire plot arc and sum up all the major characters in most standard Hollywood fare, including this drivel. I mean, seen one, seen 99% of them. And yes, I adore Chris Cooper and Jason Bateman, but that doesn't mean I need to watch either of them take a shit, which I suspect is basically what I would be doing if I saw this movie. Jamie Foxx I could cheerfully slap. Jennifer Garner I could cheerfully...zzzzz...sorry, I fell asleep for a second there. Where was I? Oh, of note: for some bizarre reason, Anne Deavere Smith is in this movie. What the fuck? Is this some kind of joke? The again, she was on The West Wing (never seen it, but thanks to IMDB, I know she was in it). I'm going to chalk this up to research. But it's kind of like Cornel West being in Norbit 2.

Anyway, as you all know I like to say Michael Haneke's name every five seconds or more often, if possible. Conveneintly for me, his genius ass is relevant to this discussion. There was an excellent article about him in the Times magazine last Sunday. (note: I just had a truly harrowing Bad Georgia moment when I saw that Haneke will be personally introducing a screening of Funny Games on October 15 at MoMA. This would never, ever happen here, and I am having one of those "why am I living here?" moments). He said some stuff in this article that seems especially apt in light of the latest entry in propganadistic, jingoistic genre of Ay-rab-bashin, foreign policy-advancing American cinema that is The Kingdom. Here goes:

“Political manipulation is rampant in the American media,” Haneke told me over lunch in downtown Manhattan last winter. “It’s present in the movies too, of course. It’s everywhere. I teach filmmaking in Vienna, and I like to show my students ‘Triumph of the Will,’ by Leni Riefenstahl, then something by Sergei Eisenstein — ‘Battleship Potemkin,’ for example — and then ‘Air Force One,’ the movie in which Harrison Ford plays the U.S. president. Each of these films has a distinct political agenda, but all make use of exactly the same techniques, all have a common goal — the total manipulation of the viewer. What’s terrible about the Harrison Ford film, though, especially terrible, is that it represents itself as simple entertainment. The audience doesn’t realize there’s a message hidden there.” Haneke sat back and shook his head gravely.

(then further on in the article)

Haneke has his own theory for the divergent routes taken by Hollywood and Europe, one in which, perhaps not surprisingly, the darker side of German and Austrian history plays a central role. “At the beginning of the 20th century,” he told me, “when film began in Europe, storytelling of the kind still popular in Hollywood was every bit as popular here. Then the Nazis came, and the intellectuals — a great number of whom were Jewish — were either murdered or managed to escape to America and elsewhere. There were no intellectuals anymore — most of them were dead. Those who escaped to America were able to continue the storytelling approach to film — really a 19th-century tradition — with a clear conscience, since it hadn’t been tainted by fascism. But in the German-speaking world, and in most of the rest of Europe, that type of straightforward storytelling, which the Nazis had made such good use of, came to be viewed with distrust. The danger hidden in storytelling became clear — how easy it was to manipulate the crowd. As a result, film, and especially literature, began to examine itself. Storytelling, with all the tricks and ruses it requires, became gradually suspect. This was not the case in Hollywood.” At this point, Haneke asked politely whether I was following him, and I told him that I was. “I’m glad,” he said, apparently with genuine relief. “For Americans, this can sometimes be hard to accept.”

I love this guy. I really, really love him.