Henry Fonda. Peter Sellers. Michael Douglas. Morgan Freeman. They've all played presidents in front of Hollywood cameras. Heading up dazzling story-lines of international intrigue and danger. Overseas villains...CIA operatives...special ops...night-time raids...White House command centers giving the orders and watching the results.
Lately, though, it's getting harder and harder to distinguish Hollywood from Washington...movie stars from presidents ....screen plays from actual events. Now, as of this week, it's official...! All the confirmation we need for this new national wedding of fact & fiction can be studied in that official White House photo of President Obama with his national security team. A real cast watching a real military op in real time taking out a real enemy.
And they pulled the whole thing off even without Bruce Willis! What will they think of next?
This blurring of the lines between duty and dazzle, blood and ketchup, is not exactly new. Americans have been eating their popcorn and venting their primal screams in front of movie screens for generations. But without a national draft, 90% of us have no longer any real-time, real-blood experience with the military. Something like other specialties -- from oil rigging to brain surgery -- warfare has become something far-off that you mostly read about while going about making money.
If you look closely, the only woman in that photo is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And if you look even closer, she is the only one holding her hand to her mouth. I read that as an intuitive gesture of awe. Concern. Angst in the midst of bloodshed. Some might say it's a typically feminine gesture. Maybe so. Whatever it is, isn't it perhaps the most authentic response to a world over-flowing with violence and vendettas, causes and counter-causes? And isn't the message to this movie-of-the-month really the human tragedy that our species has not -- in all these hundreds of millions of years -- really learned how to walk out of the jungle...?
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Jack, the room full you refer to will never make it as Hollywood actors thank goodness!
ReplyDeleteJerry ~ I guess you're right. Not a Tom Cruise or Julie Roberts ion the pack. But then, what would Tom and Julia do working without a script?
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