This fall, the Hollywood left once again cranked up its
propaganda machine, flooding American theaters with anti-military,
anti-Iraqi Freedom films in hopes of capitalizing on the perceived
abysmal public opinion of the War on Terror, the Bush
Administration, and the United States military.
The latest of these was Redacted, which opened in
fifteen theaters on November 16. This grisly movie from Director
Brian DePalma (a man whose career has been built on filling the
silver screen with pornographic levels of violence) deals with the
2006 rape of an Iraqi girl, and murder of her family. The film is,
in DePalma’s own words, an attempt to “stop the war” in Iraq — a
goal he pursues by attempting to portray this depraved act by four
soldiers as being representative of all people and all actions in
that country.
“The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is
happening in Iraq to the American people,” said DePalma after he
took home the Best Director award at the Venice film festival. “The
pictures are what will stop the war….One only hopes that these
images will get the public incensed enough to get their congressmen
to vote against the war.”
Unfortunately for DePalma and the rest of the Redacted
crew, the film at this point has been seen by barely enough people
to fill a high school football stadium — not exactly the beginning
of a massive, grassroots movement against the war in Iraq. In the
two weeks since its release, the $5 million film has pulled in a
whopping total of $1,709 per screen (reaching as high as 50th on
the box office chart) — meaning that just over 3,000 people in
this nation of 300,000,000 have bothered to go see it. Further,
among the minuscule number of people who have bothered, the
response to the film has been overwhelmingly negative. Fifty-four
percent of professional reviews of the movie were negative,
according to RottenTomatoes.com, a website that compiles movie
reviews. Further, 74% of amateur reviewers posting on the site
found Redacted to be worthy of a four or lower rating out
of ten (the average amateur rating for the film is currently 3.2
out of 10). “A Joe Strummer documentary [of punk-rock band The
Clash] playing in fewer theaters made more in its third week,”
said the New York Post. “Not even
people who presumably agree with the movie’s antiwar thesis made
the effort to see it.”
The poor performance of Redacted and of the other
anti-military films being put out by Hollywood this fall can most
likely be chalked up to two main factors. First, people go to the
theater for an enjoyable escape from reality, and to take their
minds off of their real-life troubles. Films that echo (or
embellish) the horrific scenes that make up a large part of the
fare Americans are already treated to on evening news broadcasts do
nothing to accomplish this. Second, it just may be
possible that a far smaller percentage of Americans really opposes
the War on Terror and the United States military than the fringe
leftists in Hollywood think. Tough to believe, isn’t it?
However, those behind the current rash of anti-military films
are having trouble gaining traction even with their ideological
brethren. MTV News — as far left a media outlet as any on cable
television — found the film “talky, torpid, and
borderline-hysterical.” Longtime MTV News anchor Kurt Loder,
writing on the cable station’s website, had this to say about the movie:
What is there left to say about the Hollywood
assumption that Americans are too clueless to realize that war is
hell, that the war in Iraq is particularly troubling and that only
moral instruction from, well, Hollywood can bring a benighted
nation to its senses? Moviegoers have already signaled their
disdain. Three recent antiwar pictures that reflect the film
colony’s imperious self-regard — In the Valley of Elah,
Rendition and Lions for Lambs — have been
quickly fitted with box-office body bags. Soon they’ll be joined by
Redacted….
According to DePalma, the gruesome images in the film — which
include a scene in which the throat of an American serviceman is
slit and his head severed — need to be put before the American
people not only because they exemplify the common, everyday actions
of the U.S. military, but also because “[t]he media is now really
part of the corporate establishment,” and therefore, without his
heroic effort, no such stories will ever be made available to the
public.
Writes Loder:
The movie’s implication is that such horrific incidents
are not unusual, but that they’re covered up by the military and
the craven mainstream media.…DePalma’s use of
an abominable crime as an emblem of U.S. conduct in Iraq is a gross
insult to American soldiers who’ve never done such things — which
is to say, the overwhelming majority of them. But the director
thinks he’s courageously lobbing a truth-grenade into the cultural
conflict over the Iraq war.
In his film-based rant about “the reality of what is happening” in
a country he has never seen in his life (and most likely never
will), DePalma does get one thing correct: the rape and
quadruple-murder in question (which the guilty soldiers attempted
to cover up by setting fire to the family’s house) did, in fact,
take place. However, the idea that such acts as this are the norm
in Iraq, rather than the vast exception, belies not only a profound
ignorance of actual events in that country and of the character of
the typical serviceman or -woman, but also an intense, irrational
loathing for one’s own country, as well as for those who represent
it and guard its security and way of life.
Further, those who are so quick to use such scandals and
atrocities as evidence that the military tolerates — or even
encourages — such behavior in its members completely miss the fact
that every single individual who has been caught for such acts has
been punished for them, in most cases very severely. From the Abu
Ghraib perpetrators to the Pendleton Eight, those who commit atrocities in
Iraq (and elsewhere) have routinely seen their actions met with
lengthy jail terms.
Although DePalma conveniently left it out of his shock film, the
five soldiers who were complicit in the gruesome rape and murder
portrayed in Redacted are no different. Far from being a
stock example of “the reality of what is happening in Iraq,” the
crime committed by those soldiers was so appalling to the same
organization that the anti-military left wants to paint as being
tolerant of such acts that the young man who simply served as the
lookout for his fellow soldiers, while they committed the
rape and murders inside the house in question, was sentenced to
110 years in prison by a military court. Another will be
facing the death penalty.
That doesn’t sound like an organization that accepts,
encourages, or covers up such actions as those portrayed in
DePalma’s flop of a film. However, in the big picture, neither
Brian DePalma nor his disgrace of a movie is of great importance.
After all, for a film to matter to anybody outside of the Academy,
somebody has to actually go see it — something which, in
the case of Redacted, very few people are in danger of
doing.
