By James Bowman on 5.19.09 @ 6:02AM
Another last hurrah for the noble journalist of the dying
newspaper business.
There were two things that I particularly disliked about Kevin
Macdonald's State of Play. What? I seem to hear you ask,
only two? I'll get round to them in a minute. This is a
big-screen adaptation of a British TV series transplanted from
London to Washington, so presumably, its big themes of political
corruption and the plight of the newspaper business are the same
the world over, or at least the media world over, and therefore
quite unaffected by the change of nationality. Actually, this
makes three things I disliked, but against the main one, which is
the movie's very movieish glorification of journalists and
journalism, I'm afraid it is futile to protest. The presence of a
journalist in a movie nowadays is like that of a priest 50 or 60
years ago. That is to say, he is automatically a lodestar of
moral certainty in world of corruption and ambiguity. Come to
think of it, a priest (or devout religious believer) is still an
infallible indicator of moral certainty, only now he indicates
the presence of evil rather than of good.
State of Play itself makes the point by having one of
its numerous bad guys -- basically, everybody in it who isn't a
journalist is a bad guy -- rebuke the central journalistic hero,
Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe), for taking the Lord's name in vain.
Astute observers will instantly spot that he is a double-dyed
villain. Not that you need the allusion to religious belief to
tip you off. The man also wears a flag pin in his button hole,
after all. Enough said. There are a lot of military men too --
now all retired and working for a private security firm called
Point Corp, or possibly Point Corps. They're all bad guys as
well, of course, though one of them is a troubled bad
guy, probably suffering from PTSD and certainly from feelings of
betrayal by his superiors. Instead of killing the hero, he
suddenly decides to kill himself, as troubled ex-soldiers so
often do. There are also a number of politicians. One of them,
played by Ben Affleck, seems to be sort of OK, since he is a
friend of Cal's and appears to hate the private security firm. I
won't reveal whether or not he continues to be OK.
But back to the things I didn't like that don't grow
directly out of the movie culture itself. Except that, now I
think about it, they sort of do. For the film follows what has
become the usual procedure of today's thriller by omitting lots
of information that would be required for you to work out for
yourself the details of the fiendish plot being uncovered by the
hero-journalists. Don't try this at home, folks! Nothing to see
here. No user-serviceable parts. You'll just have to take the
film-makers' word for it that the plot that makes little enough
sense to start with and none at all once it has been given the
inevitable "twist" (which I must, of course, forbear to reveal
here), really does make sense. At least, it must make sense in
that self-contained media-movie world that will just have to make
do as a stand-in for the real one about which this movie is so
characteristically cavalier.
Sour grapes, perhaps. Or stupidity. For I admit that someone
smarter than I am might be able to make sense of the plot, even
though the only thing I can see in it is the media's bedrock
certainty that pretty much everybody in the world is corrupt
apart from the paladins of the media, together with a select
group -- pimps, whores, thieves, junkies, street people,
waitresses, bartenders and clueless cops -- who act as their
principal sources. And that brings up the other thing I didn't
like. For the movie is also an illustration of why thrillers in
general don't thrill anymore. This is because of the handicap
they labor under on account of Hollywood stereotyping. The movies
have done too good a job of teaching us who the enemy is, just as
they did back in the days of cowboys and Indians. Then, there
were many pleasures to be had from watching movies about
confrontations of one sort or another between white men and red
men, but suspense as to which were the good guys and which were
the bad was not among them.
Once we discovered, in the 1960s, that the Indians were "really"
the good guys and the cowboys (or, a fortiori, the U.S.
Cavalry) the bad, neither the Western nor the movie industry ever
recovered from the shock. Ever since then, at any rate, the
industry has been trying to get back to those halcyon days of
moral certainty. Now, the monolithic political culture of
Hollywood has locked film-makers into an equally inescapable
presumption that the bad guys are (a) never going to be
anyone of a different race or religion from the white and
Christian variety, and they are (b) always going to be
racists, secretive corporations, smooth-talking politicians or
military straight-arrows, preferably any or all of the above who
are also Christian believers. Apply this knowledge to State
of Play and you don't even have to bother watching it -- or
the final "twist" which only twists the movie into incoherence.
In fact, I wonder if the incoherence isn't meant to act as a kind
of apology for the predictability of the moral set-up. If you
can't understand the chain of causation that they used to call
the "plot," at least that's some sort of originality.
Not seeing the next event coming because it makes no sense might
even make you forget that you could see it coming anyway, since
the racist or private security guy or religious believer or
whatever was always bound to be up to no good. To me it makes no
difference. The unpredictability is as bereft of charm as the
predictability, since both are the hallmarks of fakery and
artificiality and a political parti pris. I can't imagine why
anyone would want to see such a movie. But there must be lots of
people who go because they like having their prejudices about
religious believers or private security guys or conservatives or
politicians -- or journalists, for that matter -- confirmed.
At least that's one theory of why there has not been more of a
drop off than there has been in the audience for movies, like
that for the newspapers about whose fate they are so solicitous,
both in State of Play -- where the parlous state of
Cal's paper, the "Washington Globe," is a constant, and
constantly irritating topic of discussion -- and in The
Soloist. Movie attendance, however, fell off a cliff
back in the 1960s, which was about the same time as that
revolution in moral sensibility, the one about the cowboys (or
cavalry) and Indians that I mentioned earlier. Ever since then,
as the media business has managed to stay alive by hyping to
within an inch of its life one scandal or putative calamity
(Iraq! Torture! Global Warming!) after another, the movie
business has kept going by making special-effects-laden superhero
movies that twelve year-olds, eager to get out of the house and
too young for bars, will want to go to again and again. But,
underneath, the problem with the pictures is the same as the
problem with the papers: their ersatz excitements no longer
excite. I'm inclined to see them both as dead men walking. But
what do I know?
topics:
Movies, Newspapers in Decline
