American Cinema of the 2000s: Themes and Variations

2007

2007 Movies and the Art of Living Dangerously DINA SMITH Exhausted after playing tennis on their new Christmas Wii game consoles, a few Americans stayed in to celebrate the New Year, logging on, for the first time, to YouTube. Forget Yahtzee and Scrabble: the video interactive website, recently acquired by Google, contained inventive narrative shorts and video clips, providing a double click to media fun. Indeed, many that night must have clinked champagne glasses and shamelessly watched the YouTube sensation: the cell phone video capture of Saddam Hussein’s execution, by hanging, that had been uploaded onto the site the day before. “Should old acquaintance be forgot” had become an ironic turn of phrase that evening, as, during the height of the war, many watched the gruesome death of Iraq’s former leader. Days later President George W. Bush announced a surge of U.S. troops to Iraq—“I’ve committed more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq”—making the total 170,000, at a time when 70 percent of Americans opposed sending more troops (“Timeline”). By year’s end, 899 American troops, hundreds of contractors, and thousands of Iraqi civilians had died, making it the deadliest year since the 2003 invasion (“Timeline”). In addition , in May the New York Times reported that between “100,000 and 300,000 barrels a day of Iraq’s declared oil production over the past four years has been siphoned off through corruption or smuggling,” leading many to believe that this had indeed been an “oil war” (Glanz). Adding to the year’s corruption, the security firm Blackwater faced charges of the indiscriminate killings of Iraqi civilians, requiring the U.S. House of Representatives , in October, to pass a bill making all private contractors subject to prosecution in U.S. courts, ending four years of legal immunity (Broder). A week later a Philadelphia law firm filed suit against Blackwater U.S.A. for its “senseless slaying” and “lengthy pattern of egregious misconduct in Iraq,” suggesting that Blackwater had in effect become a mercenary fighting force in the region, one financed by the U.S. government (“Iraqi”). By 172 year’s end, with approval ratings at 32 percent, George W. Bush’s administration , like the war, reeked of failure (“Presidential”). Against this backdrop of violence and American swagger, Hollywood saw the resurgence of that most American of genres, the western. There were the real westerns, the spirited and successful remake of 3:10 to Yuma and the poetic and introspective The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Then there were the disguised westerns, There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. Nevertheless, all these films possessed paternal anxieties: a father emasculated in front of his son, trying to regain his respect (Yuma); an outlaw prodigy Oedipally obsessed with his gunfighter hero, portrayed as the ultimate father (Jesse James); an oil man pursuing the frontiers of capital only to abandon his adopted son, inevitably left to die alone (Blood); and a third-generation lawman who sees the border reconfigured , changed since his father’s days, impotent to invoke justice (No Country). These films all configure an emasculated and/or deranged cowboy hero, laying bare the way in which the “western [had historically] served as one of the principal displacement mechanisms in a culture obsessed with the inevitable encroachments on its gradually diminishing space” (Ray 75). A genre embedded in a mythology of American exceptionalism, the western had moved beyond simple revision and started to impose upon itself, suffering from an Oedipal crisis that gets narrativized in stories about impotence , failure, and dying fathers. Given their critical, if not box office, success , the films act as displaced allegories for a failed war and administration (one film literally focuses on oil-as-capital), narratively signaling the end of American empirebuilding, if not the western itself. Thus, not even the western could mediate us out of this mess, especially since the self-styled “cowboy president” seemed intent on creating foreign policy based upon the most reactionary of colonial westerns. Seemingly inured or completely oblivious to the war and to a shifting ideology of nation, a record number of Americans bought homes, spurred on by subprime mortgages, 80 percent of which were adjustable rate mortgages . By this year, the credit and housing boom started to feel the pinch of rising interest rates, leading to the inevitable financial crisis the following year. In the wake of the decade’s housing boom, the United States...