Even Paranoids Have Enemies

Everyone's been making fun of this overheated Michael Fumento post, in which he gripes about Hollywood anti-anti-terrorism. And with good reason. Nevertheless, isn't it a little strange that going on six years after 9/11, there hasn't been a single Hollywood offering that offers a consistently positive portrayal of any post-9/11 U.S. military action? Or that the only major motion pictures in which radical Islam is portrayed as straightforwardly villainous have been docudramas about the events of September 2001 and their aftermath (A Mighty Heart, United 93, World Trade Center)? We've had the CIA as villains; rogue arms dealers as villains; even the Knights Templar as villains; but never, ever, jihadis. (It's telling Daniel has to go all the way back to True Lies, which was more than a decade ago, to find an example of a summer action blockbuster that pitted its hero against Islamists.) Sure, there have been some examples on TV, from 24 to Sleeper Cell, but at the multiplex Hollywood's approach to the post-9/11 world is embodied by the remake of The Manchurian Candidate: The original film was at once anti-McCarthyite and anti-Communist, suggesting that the two forces were actually hand in glove; the remake just ignores the external threat and focuses on the enemy at home, which is to say Republicans and corporations. Maybe this will buck the trend. I'm pretty sure this won't.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2007/07/even-paranoids-have-enemies/54540/