Because man (and blog readers) cannot live by politics alone

I love westerns!

Why are they so damned awesome!? They're like pizza, even when they're bad, they're still pretty good. I think what appeals to us about Westerns is the way they strip away all those layers of stuff that separate modern humans from the realities of daily life and force characters to deal with things head on, and often all alone. Think about the lives we lead... has there ever been a more cushioned, protected, leisurely generation than we?

I don't say that as if it's a bad thing, in fact, I think this is what we've been striving for lo these 230 years... a peaceful easy existence where we are free to pursue life, liberty, and happiness in all the ways we, as individuals, see fit. The harsh realities of life on the Western Frontier are things to be regarded from afar, like exhibits in a museum... not to be longed for like a lost treasure. Life in the old West was cruel, difficult, and often tragically short... and even though it was crucial period in the building of our national character, we are well rid of it.

Now, of course, in modern America, every now and then, desperate problems DO enter into our lives... but we have doctors, and policemen, and soldiers to deal with things that get too crazy for us to handle individually. Not so much for Western heroes. Out on the frontier, law was what you made of it. There was a basic moral code that everyone instinctively understood... don't kill anyone unless it's in self defense, and keep your hands to yourself. Other than that, it was... well, it was the Wild West.

But of course bad men were drawn to the relative anarchy of the lawless frontier. And as energetic, ambitious Americans made their way west to seek their fortunes, the predators and parasites followed. A soldier, or a real man of the law might be a hundred miles away when trouble started, and so early Westerners had to learn to take care of themselves in a way that no modern American ever really has to.

I think John Wayne put the frontier philosophy best in his tour de force performance in THE SHOOTIST...

"I won't be wronged. I won't be insulted. I won't be laid a-hand on. I don't do these things to other people, and I require the same from them."

But to be fair, Wayne's character was a gunfighter, and was quite used to living that sort of life, and to backing up those words with decisive action when required. In HIGH NOON, however, Gary Cooper faces a different reality... the reality of what happens when that SHOOTIST philosophy runs smack dab into men who are more adept at killin' than you are, and who aren't interested in a "fair fight."

HIGH NOON is not about a gun fight, not really. HIGH NOON is a philosophical treatise on civic responsibility. Gary Cooper sends a man up for murder, and as a result, criminals far and wide get the message that law and order is here to stay in Cooper's town. Because of Cooper's sacrifice, putting his life on the line for his fellow townsfolk, women and children can once again walk the streets in peace. But a northern judge pardons the murderer who then comes back to town looking for revenge.

And yet Gary Cooper's life is not all that hangs in the balance... this is not just a battle over some long lost grudge... within this battle, and hundreds of others just like it across the West, hung the very fate of the Western frontier itself. Would it be a land of justice and peace in the best spirit of a fledgling Democracy? Or would it descend into lawlessness... on this day, one man, Gary Cooper, will have to answer that question, and not the US Army, or the President himself, can help him. That's what's great about these stories... within this structure, one single man can hold the future of the entire country in his hands.

Of course, I'm no screenwriter, and it shouldn't surprise anyone that Cooper's charcter's ex-girlfriend in the film puts it much more succinctly...

"Kane will be a dead man in half an hour and nobody's gonna do anything about it. And when he dies, this town dies too. I can feel it. I am all alone in the world. I have to make a living. So I'm going someplace else. That's all."

She knows the message Cooper's death will send back East... Cooper's friend Martin knows it too... he makes an impassioned speech to a Church congregation in which he talks about how the big money men back East are watching this town, trying to decide if they should invest money in their stores and factories... and tales of death and murder on the frontier will convince them to put their money into safer investments. Their town will die, and with it, the entire idea of "The West."

In other words, Cooper has a civic responsibility... or to quote last summer's box office champ TRANSFORMERS... "There can be no victory without sacrifice."

Hollywood development executives talk about these kinds of movies in terms of stakes... always asking the writers they work with to raise the stakes so that the audience will care about the story and engage itseif in the action that will determine how those stakes shake out. Harder to imagine bigger stakes, isn't it, than the very future of the entire western half of a developing nation?

It occurs to me that we have become a country that does not understand this simple reality anymore. Maybe that's why I like watching Westerns, because it reminds me of an America that people believed was worth fighting for. Now we expect wars to be over in a week and we don't want to see a single body bag on the news. Hell two soldiers wandered off during the bombing of Bosnia back in the 90's... WANDERED OFF mind you... they weren't captured, they weren't lost securing some beachhead or taking out some critical enemy position, they just got lost... and a local politician here in Southern California (where one of the men was from) named a particular day of the week in their honor.

Watch most modern action movies and you'll see these themes of honor, responsibility, and self-reliance hashed out over and over again. So desperate must we be to be tested as men, women, and Americans that we go to dark movie theatres on Friday and Saturday nights to watch made up men and women sacrifice for what's right. John McClane, Indiana Jones, Will Kane...

And it's not just westerns... a lot of modern cinema owes it's basic struture to westerns like HIGH NOON. Take DIE HARD as an example.

One man trapped in a skyscraper (or a small western town) facing overwhelming numbers of gunmen, who struggles to find even a single competent individual willing or able to help him. And in the same way that Gary Cooper assumes it will be a simple thing to deputize a handful of able-bodied men, but then spends an entire day going from Justice of the Peace, to Churches, to saloons looking for help and getting turned down at every location, John McLane turns to 911 dispatchers, cops, SWAT, even the FBI before realizing that if this thing is going to be stopped, he's going to have to do it alone.

They say DIE HARD created a new genre... for years, agents, producers, and executives pitched movies as "it's DIE HARD on a plane" or "it's DIE HARD at the zoo" or "it's DIE HARD at the petrified forest"... but was DIE HARD's structure really all the revolutionary?

Most good action movies and thrillers (hell even the bad ones) follow the same pattern. Think about THE FUGITIVE, THE BOURNE TRILOGY, UNDER SIEGE, CHAIN REACTION, and IN THE LINE OF FIRE... what must you do in order to make your hero into someone the audience can relate to? First you must take away his safety net... you must strip him bare. Now none of those movies I listed above do anything as overt as trapping their hero in a tall building... but that's not the only way to utterly isolate a human being.

In THE FUIGITIVE, Harrison Ford's Richard Kimble is a wealthy surgeon with the world at his fingertips, and so we must take that all away from him and set him out on his own in order to begin his journey... or IN THE LINE OF FIRE's Clint Eastwood is a Secret Service agent with 40 years of experience and an army of agents willing to die for him... but to make his character interesting, we must strip all that away and set him out in the wilderness... discredited and alone... only then do we get to see what he's really capable of.

Now I do not intend for this to be some neo-conservative "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" screed... though I certainly think that there's a lot to learn about our responsibilities with regard to Iraq and Afghanistan by watching HIGH NOON... rather, it's worth noting that the best Westerns are melancholy about sacrifice, rather than celebratory. When they come to the house of an old friend looking for any escape from the expert mercenaries tracking them to Hole-In-The-Wall, Butch and Sundance (populist, Robin-Hoodian heroes that they are) are told...

"You know, you should have let yourself get killed a long time ago when you had the chance. See, you may be the biggest thing that ever hit this area, but you're still two-bit outlaws. I never met a soul more affable than you, Butch, or faster than the Kid, but you're still nothing but two-bit outlaws on the dodge. It's over, don't you get that? Your time is over and you're gonna die bloody, and all you can do is choose where."

When Chico tells Vin in THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN that his gun has gotten him everything he has, Vin replies soberly...

"Yeah, sure. Everything. After awhile you can call bartenders and faro dealers by their first name - maybe two hundred of 'em! Rented rooms you live in - five hundred! Meals you eat in hash houses - a thousand! Home - none! Wife - none! Kids... none! Prospects - zero. Suppose I left anything out?"

There is no victory without sacrifice...

Westerns are great because they break that equation down to its simplest, starkest terms... They strip away all the layers of law, bureaucracy, and authority that protect everyday Americans from the harsh realities of life and force us to face responsibility and consequence without filters and without safety nets.

Because that's really what we fear isn't it... being alone at the moment of truth? Hearing the sound of someone kicking your door in at 3 am and knowing that by the time the cops get there it will all be over? What would you do? Could you protect yourself? Your wife? Your kids? Fortunately most of us will never find out... but the reason why we love watching Chris and Vin turn a village of Farmers into the defenders of their own freedom to live and prosper as they see fit, is because it gives us faith and confidence in our own abilities to do those things for ourselves when and if the moment ever comes.

I've often said that if you really want to connect with an audience, figure out what they're afraid of, and hit them in the face with it. Sometimes that happens by accident... as it did when Steven Spielberg found out quite by accident that most humans have a fear of the things that hunt us in deep dark waters.

I think what keeps us coming back to westerns, action movies and thrillers is our basic fear that when the shit hits the fan... we won't be smart enough, or tough enough, or resourceful enough to make it on our own.

But Gary Cooper and Yul Brynner and Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne and Steve McQueen and James Coburn and Charlton Heston and Burt Lancaster and Paul Newman and William Holden give us hope that maybe, on the right day... we can be.

A shout out to HBO

For taking time out from making polemics like RECOUNT and GENERATION KILL to show the original unaltered version of E.T.

Happened to catch the last 15 minutes this morning, which by the way is maybe the best 15 minutes of motion picture ever captured on film... certainly top 5. And as the army of government agents converged on the empty van in the park at the end, I felt excitement suddenly replaced by annoyance and my attetion was drawn away from the story as I looked at the hands of the agents, expecting to see flashlights and radios being held, for some unexplainable reason, the way one might hold a gun.

I can't tell you how annoyed I was when I heard Spielberg was going back into the film to change all the guns to flashlights and radios. You want to grab him by the lapels and ask him who, exactly, he thinks he's protecting. Because when I was 14 and I fantasized about being a hero on some mission or another, the bad guys chasing me always had guns. That's part of what made them the bad guys, fer crissakes!

Without danger, there is no adventure. Why are we so anxious to take the drama and excitement out of people's lives these days?

Repeat after me Steven... it's only a movie. Let us be scared a little. Really, it'll be OK.

Hollywood and our Dystopian (near-term?) future

So I really like watching apocalyptic (28 DAYS LATER; DAY AFTER TOMORROW; THE CORE), post-apocalyptic (THE POSTMAN; WATERWORLD), and Dystopian future (THE MATRIX; JOHNNY MNEMONIC; CHILDREN OF MEN) movies, even when they're bad.I can watch them over and over and over... probably has something to do with my fascination with history and politics... there's always some fun little detail to pick out that reflects a fear or belief specific to the politics or history of the time in which the movie was made (note the detail in DAY AFTER TOMORROW where a female newsie gleefully points out that Americans are now illegally crossing the border into Mexico, rather than the other way around).

But in the end they rarely move me in a deep and meaningful way because they always seem overwrought. I mean if global warming turns out to be manmade and real, then the Earth is going to very VERY slowly warm up and winters will slowly disappear, farmable land will VERY slowly wither away, and populations will EXTREMELY gradually migrate elsewhere, they will not pack up all their things and become instant refugees, literally overnight. And we're not going to wake up one morning to an ice age that deposits 500 feet of glacial ice on New York City in a single afternoon.

Likewise, I don't see us becoming slaves to a race of machines, or spending the majority of our lives jacked into computer terminals interacting in a made-up world, or living in burned out cities where rich people inhabit gleaming apartments a thousand feet above the slums that have been left at ground level for "everyone else." I just don't think it's going to be as dramatic as the movies need their stories and visuals to be in order to get butts into theatre seats.

That said, I was shocked last night to find that a movie I have consistently made fun of over the years (even though it occupies a special place in my heart because of it's fun goofiness), showed me what I find to be the most plausible dystopian future you'll see in any modern movie.

I watched DEMOLITION MAN (DM) last night.

Most dystopian future worlds you see in the movies are immediately terrifying. If someone dropped you into the world of THE TERMINATOR or THE MATRIX or THE CORE, you would instantly shit your pants. Not so in San Angeles (the city where Sly finds himself in DM circa 2032).

If you woke up in San Angeles tomorrow, your first impression might be "hey, this is kinda nice." The streets are clean, the cars are electric and make almost no noise, the buildings are beautifully designed and built, there are plenty of trees and grass and there are no fast food joints, liquor stores, or billboards. Everyone is polite and nice, no one curses or fights, clothing is relaxed and attractive, as are the people. It looks like a utopian dream.

But San Angeles 2032 is ruled by a government made up of officials that I might call "benign fascists." At some point, it was decided by (presumably rich, well-educated progressives) that the behaviour of average Americans must be legally restricted "for their own good." Sandra Bullock explains the world pretty succintly when she points out to Sly that anything considered "bad" has been outlawed... everything from gas, smoking, guns, and salt, to cursing.

But I say these are "benign" Fascists because there is no secret police force that whisks "criminals" off to the gulag. This fascist government is much smarter than that. Physical threats, jails, and executions breed revolutionaries. If the only thing that happens when you curse or eat salt, is that a machine tells you that you've been "fined one credit for violation of the verbal morality statute"... well that's no so bad, is it? We can live with that... right?

Maybe, but the world in DM is not static, it's still evolving... and maybe today it's a fine of one credit, but governments that seek control MUST maintain that control at any cost. What happenes when one credit is not enough to dissaude cursing... it becomes two credits, then one hundred, and if people are still ignoring the statute, maybe THAT'S where the gulags and the executions come in... remember, when we join the story in DM, the leader of this utopian world has just re-awakened a dangerous criminal whom he hopes will assassinate the leader of an underground movement seeking to restore basic freedoms that have been given up or lost, and he doesn't seem to care how many people die as a result, as long as his goal is achieved. That's a pretty aggressive escalation.

And so, here in 2008 I look around me and I see helmet laws, cigarette laws, CAFE standards, and campus speech codes, and I hear politicians pushing laws to tell you what kind of lightbulbs you can buy (I buy Compact Flourescents but I don't think you should be forced to if you don't want them), or wether or not we should start taxing candy bars and soda... or I read an article like this one, where one side of a political debate on Affirmative Action points out that the only way to win is to keep the issue off of ballots because even though they'd lose in the court of public opinion, they're right and that's all that matters... or note how with each new election cycle, politicians manage to convince us of one more thing the government should have control over in our lives (now it's health care and mortgages... tomorrow it may be whether or not you can have a child and raise it on your own) and I start to wonder if, of all the dystopian future movies ever made, DEMOLITION MAN might be the most prescient, the most plausible, and ultimately, the scariest such movie ever made.

If Americans ever lose our freedoms, it will not be overnight, to force of arms... we will give them away, voluntarily and perhaps happily, over the course of many years, to people who consider themselves "our betters", and we will do so with the best of intentions... and while some things might seem nicer, or safer in the aftermath, we will have made ourselves slaves... make no mistake about that.

In response to which, I can do no better than to quote Denis Leary from DM...

"You see, according to Cocteau's plan I'm the enemy, 'cause I like to think; I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I'm the kind of guy likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder - "Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?" I WANT high cholesterol. I wanna eat bacon and butter and BUCKETS of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section. I want to run through the streets naked with green Jell-o all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to, okay, pal? I've SEEN the future. Do you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing "I'm an Oscar Meyer Wiener". "