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When the politics of film meet the film of politics


We live in a time when every image seems to be political. I’m not just talking about images of torture emanating from Abu Ghraib or Janet Jackson’s breast from her half-time performance at the Super Bowl either. No, these days, simply going to the movies is a political act, a statement about whether you’re “with [Bush] or with the [Democratic] terrorists.”

Act one: The Passion of the Christ

Mel Gibson’s highly controversial — and highly politicized — film The Passion of the Christ kicked off a year of moviegoing that could be construed as anything but non-partisan. In an election year where the sitting president has made no secret of the relevance of his Christian faith to his political project, Gibson’s film seemed to offer what a friend of mine called “free advertising” for the Bush/Cheney 2004 ticket. As film critic Jay Bliznick noted, Mel Gibson’s film is “for Christian followers who haven’t really read their scripture … those who have been preached to and forced to memorize verse out of context.” Needless to say, this cultural rebirth seemed to feed right into the Bush team’s plans to secure the president’s base and ensure that the estimated four million evangelical Christians who weren’t inspired enough to vote in 2000 don’t stay home again this November. By reminding evangelical Christians that Jesus died for their sins and that they must lead “moral” Christian lives to be saved, The Passion encouraged viewers to distance themselves from the immoral behaviors of Janet Jackson and all those gays and lesbians who had the nerve to demand the right to get married in San Francisco this past February. After all, says Richard Goldstein of The Village Voice, “Religious beliefs and biblical teachings are the most common reason people give for opposing same-sex marriage.” So by claiming the war on immorality as its territory, the GOP got to cast the Democratic alternative as the harbinger of immorality, obscenity, and dissolution of what Bush termed the “sacred institution between a man and a woman.”

I don’t recall the day the media stopped covering The Passion so religiously, though I’ll admit that I thought that day might never come. All I know is that fateful day came sometime after Easter (when The Passion did wonders for the box offices) and sometime shortly before that fateful day when we learned about the torture occuring in Iraq.

Act two: “The Passion of the Election”

Enter the countdown to the election and the films that are as political as they come — with or without a spin. Filmmakers and artists have long been some of the more liberal elements of their respective societies. It’s no coincidence that writers and artists were subjected to many a McCarthy hearing during the 1950s and purged from the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. Writers and artists, after all, are often the ones who are the most willing to openly criticize, though there are always some who say that their work is simply art and thus apolitical. But the filmmakers who have made the political films of 2004 don’t hide their agenda. They don’t make any pretenses about being apolitical. Rather, they seek to reject the passivity that has overcome the American electorate and explicitly (or implicitly) question the Bush administration’s failure to hold itself accountable to the interests of the American people.

It’s no coincidence that most of these films are the product of the independent film industry. This may be partially because big corporate film companies such as Miramax don’t think political films can sell given the political apathy of so many Americans. And, of course, as Michael Moore’s run-in with Disney/Miramax over his contentious film Fahrenheit 911 has taught us, even movie corporations don’t want to anger the hand that feeds them in D.C.

Consider Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential (based on the book by James Moore and Wayne Slater). Completed just months before the election, and it’s no coincidence that the producers of Bush’s Brain are struggling to find a distributor. As Slater revealed in a panel discussion concerning the making of the film at the South-by-Southwest (SXSW) film festival in Austin, Texas, this past March, the fact that the film exposed the whisper campaigns and political manipulation of Bush and his right-hand man, Karl Rove, caused many potential interview subjects to back out of scheduled interviews for the film for fear of losing their jobs. Similarly, many film distribution companies have been reticent to pick up the film — at least before the election — since they’ve seen the damage the Rove can do to those who interfere with his political schemes or challenge his authority.

Why did the filmmakers make this film? As Elizabeth Reeder, one of the film’s producers, suggested, the goal of film is to demonstrate that “Rove is out of control and is playing a dangerous game that is destroying democracy.” Do Reeder and her colleagues want to get their film distributed before the election? Absolutely. As Reeder, Slater, and Moore emphasized, Bush’s Brain “makes people think and brings to light stuff we normally don’t hear about because of the White House’s tight ship.”

Die-hard Republicans might dismiss the film — and the book — as propaganda, but the producers insist: “We made a valiant effort to show all sides, and if [certain] perspectives (including Rove’s own) aren’t present, that’s the fault of those people and of Karl” (who threatened prospective interviewees for the film). And while many of the people whom the filmmakers were unable to interview were interviewed in the book, the reason for their presence in the latter and absence from the former can be attributed to the fact that Rove and Bush had initially written off the book, thinking it wouldn’t be very successful. By the time the film project came around, they’d learned better — and feared the power of the silver screen. “Unfortunately,” noted Slater, “not participating in [the film] becomes a way to dismiss it as liberal propaganda.”

As one person who was fortunate to see the film at SXSW and the strong reaction it inspired (what one woman I met termed ”rock concert meets political rally”), it’s not at all surprising that the Bush administration might not want people to see the film. Some people who traditionally vote Republican walked out of the theater after seeking the film in shock, questioning whether they could really justify voting for Team Bush/Rove for another four years. But there were only 1200 people in that theater — enough to decide the election in Florida, but certainly not enough to change the outcome in the Republican stranglehold that is Texas.

Bush’s Brain hasn’t received all of the press that Fahrenheit 911 has, however. That’s likely because, to the best of my knowledge, no major distributor has even tentatively struck a deal with the producers. If one had done so, the story would most certainly be making headlines. But the attention given to Michael Moore’s film is a good indicator of the fate Bush’s Brain might have (minus the attention-grabbing that Michael Moore typically brings with him).

When I was watching some news show on TV last week, the commentators were debating about whether Fahrenheit 911 should be distributed at all — by Disney or anyone else. There were several commentators — not all of whom are Bush fans — who suggested Moore simply didn’t have the right to make such a film and that it wasn’t in the best interest of filmgoers to be inundated with stories of “conspiracy” regarding 9/11. But that was a cop-out. Do these people seriously think that moviegoers just take everything they see at face-value? Are we not intelligent enough to form our own opinions — not just about the cinematography, the acting, the directing, but about what we’re told and how we’re told it? More significantly, if we are going to vote, if democracy is going to be representative and represent a wide array of opinions, then shouldn’t films like these be distributed so that people can make more informed choices, so that a wider array of perspectives can be represented? That doesn’t mean people have to go see such movies. If moviegoers and voters believe they’ve already made up their minds, if they find movies of a particular political persuasion offensive, then they can choose not to see them. But by the same account, shouldn’t the undecided, those who want to see a good movie, and those who are interested in seeing films that are consistent with their own views get to choose to see those movies?

All of this is not to say that the media hype over Fahrenheit 911, like that over The Passion of the Christ, is uncalled for. In many ways, such debates can be productive; they can promote discussion not just of the limits to freedom of speech and expression at a time when civil liberties are being curbed but also about the qualifications of our leaders and their political agendas (overt and covert). But, ironically, while The Passion may have been political as a result of its context — the Bush administration’s religio-political agenda and the election year timing — no one questioned whether Gibson had the right to make his film and the right to distrubute it. Sure, there was outrage about his characterization of the Jews and the violence that saturated the film. But no one seemed to question his right to make the film. Why is it that when the content of a film is explicitly political (as is the case with Bush’s Brain and Fahrenheit 911), we start to question whether filmmakers have the right to criticize our leaders? Perhaps it has something to do with Gibson’s reknown as a filmmaker compared to the relatively smaller political and film clout of the independent filmmakers who made the films about Bush’s agenda. But that cannot possibly suffice as the explanation. The context/content distinction must mean something. Whatever it is, my fear is that by boiling these debates over films with overtly political content down to “this filmmaker has/does not have the right to have this film” distributed, the more important debates don’t get had, undermining the political and creative potential of such films and their filmmakers. And in the process, they just might undermine the creative potential of democracy that Hollywood tends to pride itself on.

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