THE NEW FILM SEAL Team Six: The Raid on Osama bin Laden
appeared on the National Geographic Channel on November 4 and on
Netflix the following day. On the day after that, I’m told there
was some sort of election scheduled. And although it’s true that
the thrilling tale of SEAL Team Six had been re-edited to give a
larger role in this military operation to the commander in chief,
we have it on no less an authority than the New York Times
that the added tribute to the heroism of our wartime leader had
nothing to do with politics. The film, write Michael Cieply and
Brian Stelter, “is being backed by Harvey Weinstein, a longtime
Democratic contributor and one of the Obama campaign’s most
vigorous backers,” but what of that?
In a joint interview on Tuesday Mr. Weinstein; the film’s
director, John Stockwell; and others said the changes to the film
were not politically motivated but were meant to give the film a
stronger sense of realism.…And Howard T. Owens, the president of
the National Geographic Channel, who joined the call, said his
company had insisted on removing a scene that showed Mitt Romney
appearing to oppose the raid. “We wouldn’t air this if it were
propaganda,” he said.
Of course not! The idea! Yet even the Times’s own
Alessandra Stanley had to admit that the film “is no more, or less,
a work of propaganda than ‘DC 9/11: Time of Crisis,’ a gauzy 2003
salute to George W. Bush’s leadership by a conservative filmmaker,
Lionel Chetwynd.” One gathers that she thinks both are propaganda.
Like Mr. Obama’s own claims of moderation and bipartisanship in
contrast to Romneyesque “extremism,” the renunciation of
propagandistic intent is so obviously untrue that no amount of mere
love for the president would be enough by itself to prevent it from
failing the laugh test. No, what does that is the sort of
partisanship that approaches religious faith in eliciting the will
to believe. Hence the “stronger sense of realism” that the
filmmakers say results from the increased presence in it of Mr.
Obama.
I take it that by “realism” they don’t mean the quality
of being more true-to-life but something like “more in keeping with
the model of reality we believe in.” Given the
Weinstein-Stockwell-Owens model, the president’s heroism is mere
verisimilitude. Yet we can see in the disclaimers of propagandistic
intent, even if we assume they were made in good faith, a tacit
admission that there are other models of reality in which this is
not the case, in which the president only did what any president
would have done by giving the go-ahead for a mission planned and
executed by others and then attempted to turn those others’ efforts
into a political advantage for himself. “Is all in how you look at
it,” as Stan Freberg’s parody Indian chief says to Columbus in
claiming to have discovered him rather than the other way
around. So, too, we must suppose that Harvey Weinstein has his
reality and I have mine. We each have a presumptive right to our
own version of the real. Is there then no way to resolve the
dispute between the rival editions of reality—to get, as it were,
at the real reality?
Perhaps we need to take another look at the idea of “realism.”
Verisimilitude must retain some attachment to real reality
and not just the subjective kind. Which picture, for example, looks
more real to you: that of the strong, confident leader inspiring
SEAL Team Six with the heart and stomach necessary to pull off
their extraordinary mission, or that of the guy who, when the plea
for help came in from our guys in Benghazi, had urgent business
elsewhere (a fundraiser in Las Vegas) and left them to die? Since
both cannot be real, which picture looks more like the President
Obama we have come to know over the last four years? If Messrs.
Weinstein, Stockwell, and Owens say the former rather than the
latter, they are deceiving themselves.
Their version of reality, in other words, just doesn’t look
real. What does look real is the emerging story of Benghazi,
in which help was denied, or sent too late, to the besieged
Americans in the consulate, presumably for fear of being
“provocative” or “escalating” the conflict. It fits with the
“antiwar” mentality, which supposes any attack on America or
Americans must be as a result of something America or Americans
have done to provoke it—a mentality that has been typical of the
president since his now infamous “apology” tour—itself another
reality that his backers keep loudly insisting isn’t real.
You can see this mentality at work in Ben Affleck’s movie (he
both directed and starred in it) Argo, which in one way is
a classic American success-story—the extraction by subterfuge of
six American diplomats who hid in the Canadian ambassador’s
residence in Tehran in 1979 when their diplomatic colleagues were
taken hostage by Iranian revolutionary guards. You might even call
it patriotic, in that the Americans are the good guys and the
Iranians the bad. Just like old times! But look more closely and
you will see that it is the Americans of the 1970s who were the
good guys. The Americans of the 1950s, however, are carefully set
up to be the real bad guys, since they helped the British
engineer a coup against an Iranian good guy named Mossadegh in the
interest of Western oil companies. “We did it to them first,” as
one of Mr. Affleck’s CIA guys says to another, by way of
explaining, if not justifying, the Iranians’ hostage-taking.
In the mouth of a Carter-era diplomat, one with the glasses, the
moustache, the wide tie and lapels of the 1970s, that kind of
reasoning sounds all too real. It’s the sort of thing that Jimmy
himself might have said. Coincidentally, the former president
himself appears in voiceover at the very end of the film to give it
his imprimatur—and, by the way, to take his share of the credit for
the real-life hero’s efforts in effecting the diplomats’
exfiltration, just as President Obama does for SEAL Team Six. But
time has a way of exposing the realities hidden beneath
adventitious surfaces. You have to be pretty far gone in your
attachment to the Carter version of reality, which is also the
Obama version, not to see how false it looks in retrospect.
THE SAME IS TRUE of so much else about the 1970s. The death at
age 60 in October of Sylvia Kristel, star of Emmanuelle,
that quintessential soft-porn classic of 1974, provides another
reminder of how that decade seems to have specialized in generating
new and exciting realities that now look risibly fraudulent. Yet
how many people continue to cling to their belief—if only by
avoiding any temptation to go back and see Emmanuelle
again with the benefit of hindsight. “At last,” said the movie’s
tagline, “a film that won’t make you feel bad about feeling good.”
People could only take such stuff seriously in the 1970s because
they could also believe in the fantasy of what Miss Kristel’s older
contemporary and fellow sex goddess Erica Jong described as “the
zipless f***.” Not many people believe in that anymore, which is
why Emmanuelle (and Fear of Flying, for that
matter) look so comically dated to most of us. One who still
believes, alas, is the great Lena Dunham, creator of
Girls, about whom I wrote in this space a few months ago
(see “Laughing on the Wrong Side,” TAS, June 2012). How,
one wonders, can she be so blind to the astounding tastelessness of
her “Great Guy” ad for President Obama, which teasingly compared
her casting her virgin ballot for him in 2008 to the loss of
another kind of virginity?
For Ms. Dunham, it appears, sex is still no more than the
wonderful liberation, the great adventure that it seemed to the
original audience of Emmanuelle. How disappointing to find
her still living in the 1970s, after Girls has shown so
much brilliance satirizing that same ’70s view of sex—along with
its ’90s incarnation as an adjunct to shopping porn in Sex and
the City. The Obama campaign’s invention of a mythical
Republican “War on Women,” alluded to in Miss Dunham’s ad, depends
on the persistence of this 1970s mentality, which reduces “women”
to their supposed freedom—so new and exciting then, so problematic
now—to engage in frequent, promiscuous, and consequence-free sex
acts. Whatever you think today about abortion or birth control or
the sexual freedom they have helped to create, you can’t look at
them any longer with the simple-minded enthusiasm affected by Lena
Dunham, not unless you have signed up for some real
propaganda—which is the kind that doesn’t look real.
