The Strange Death of Liberal America

Photo: The Dark Knight

Over the holidays as I worked my way through bowl games with a few hoops contests thrown in for variety, I found myself inundated with commercials for upcoming movies. Maybe it’s just that football games attract a particular demographic, but after awhile the ads and the movies all seemed the same.

They all seemed to be about explosions. Each trailer would feature several scenes of assorted objects being blown up; each sequence designed to see which could acoustically challenge my subwoofer and make the house shake as if my neighbors were setting off propane canisters instead of fireworks on New Year’s Eve.

Now I have to admit that special effects and making my walls shake does have a certain appeal.  My guess is that explosion movies have helped to sell home theater and vice versa. Yet after awhile the explosions all seem the same because there are only so many ways to blow things up.

For several years I have harbored the suspicion that somewhere in Hollywood there exists a secret vault full of digitally-enhanced mayhem that you can rent for use in your next blockbuster. Find yourself another mutant or outsider hero, rent a few hours of explosions and you have a movie.

What is it in the current atmosphere that is generating these films and what does it mean for the present and the future? Hortense Powdermaker once called Hollywood the “dream factory,” but after viewing trailer after trailer I began to wonder if it was the “nightmare factory.”  Why have we gone from dreams to nightmares?

Let us begin by eliminating the conspiracy theory. Hollywood would not make these movies if audiences did not come to see them. The problem is that sometimes it seems Hollywood thinks the only people who go to movies are adolescent males or those with the mind of an adolescent.

This circular argument has been going on for at least four decades. Hollywood claims one of its main audiences is adolescent males so it makes lots of movies for them–many of which they go see–so Hollywood continues to make more of them. It has taken Hollywood awhile to realize that a sizable female audience existed so now we have a “gender gap” in the movies and on TV with products being aimed mainly at one sex or another.

One has only to visit a video store or multiplex to view that wedge. On one screen flickers a genre men derisively refer to as chick flicks–movies aimed mainly at a female audience. A standard plot consists of a woman with a caring husband, a saintly figure with no nasty habits–why he even does the dishes and cooks–but the woman must leave him for a fling with someone more like Clint Eastwood or Robert Redford. Another traces the tale of a single woman or group of women who must pass through a series of trials, each symbolizing a particularly thorny modern dilemma.

On the other side of the multiplex wall, a room full of guys turns into a platoon of Incredible Hulks, bursting out of their polo shirts as they take in one car crash and gun barrage after another. The theme of these macho flicks is as telling as those in movies made for their partners. They usually feature one steroid-enhanced hero matched against six thousand evil doers whom he proceeds to conquer with an assortment of karate moves and fearful weaponry that would be the envy of Soldier of Fortune readers.

Curiously, underlying both chick flicks and macho mayhem is a common theme of beleaguered individuals facing overwhelming odds. In these movies, society seems out to get you, making it hard for you to become “all you can be”-a sentiment used by advertisements for the military and personal makeovers.

Something more is at work, though, something that says a great deal about our times. First, is the plot line that runs through most of these movies which essentially views what people in the 1960s termed “the establishment” as the enemy. Both government and business are corrupt and incompetent. They care little for average people, instead delighting in ripping them off.

Note some visual scenes from explosion movies that reinforce this. The main one is the ubiquitous crowd shot where hundreds or thousands of anonymous people try to flee some menace. All you can do is run, these scenes shout. Then there is the scene where some average citizen runs into a callous bureaucrat or corporate stooge who refuses to help them.  In so many of these films the average citizen is wimpy, faceless, powerless–in short a victim.

The villain is usually some monomaniacal tycoon out to take over the world or some rogue government official who has gone off the deep end. What they all have in common is a desire for power. But in the world of explosion flicks power is largely measured as if the world were one big cage fight where anything goes. (As an aside the rise of dog fighting paralleling the rise of cage fighting and explosion movies is fascinating.)

The big picture behind this–pun intended–is that the world has become dominated by giants, big corporations and big government that are beyond the abilities of ordinary citizens to control. These huge beasts feast on us like tyrannosaurs used to feast on whatever they wanted.

It doesn’t take a lot to see that this subliminally reflects the reality we all experience every day. When was the last time you suffered some indignity on the part of one of these megacorporations, one you had no power to do anything about? Maybe you called in about a bill or to get your furnace fixed and found yourself caught in one of those infamous “press six for the next idiot” telephone answering machines or trying to talk to someone in Borneo who insisted the blue screen of death was not Bill Gates’ fault but your own incompetence.

Which is where the explosions come in. Who when faced with one of these indignities does not count to ten or even twenty to keep from blowing up? I remember standing in a long line at Logan Airport in Boston waiting for a rental car from a company that clearly was not trying harder. As usual someone in management had screwed up and the employees managing the desk were left with an impossible situation. A gray business-suited woman in the middle of the line was becoming visibly agitated until she finally snapped, screaming at the people at the desk. The police finally took her away.

The explosions both symbolize this scene and provide an outlet for it. They are the inner Hulk and Hellboys that we sometimes keep barely suppressed. Blowing things up is a sign of people who don’t know what else to do–that whatever is blown up is beyond caring about or fixing. How many of you have had the fantasy of destroying a lemon of a car, refrigerator, or computer? We can’t fix things, the explosion movies seem to be saying, so blow them up.

There is a certain apocalyptic revenge about all these explosions. Megapower can only be brought down by magatons. Things are falling apart and like some building with a rotting foundation the only way to fix it is to blow it up.

It is one thing to want to wreck mayhem on your malfunctioning computer, but another to make that a political or policy solution. That this outgoing administration at times seemed to have watched too many of these movies suggests how deeply ingrained this mindset has become.  Saddam Hussein is a problem so blow him up. Terrorism is a problem so arrest people and commit the human equivalent of blowing them up by torturing them.

The problem is that what may work for Rambo is exactly a model for how to conduct foreign policy. As we have found out in Iraq, blowing things up only makes people angry at you. It also leaves quite a mess to clean up.

There is also a more troubling subtext to these explosions–a souped-up, Dark Knight vigilantism that will exact its revenge in dramatic fashion. The worrisome undertone of many explosion movies is that a lot of people seem to be fed up with things and ready to embrace someone who will blow things up.

Barack Obama is not someone inclined to blow things up, so one of the interesting subtexts of his administration will be the by-play between the impulses behind the explosion genre and Obama’s pledges to bring us together. If you want to keep track of the impact of this new administration keep track of the number of explosion movies and how they fare at the box office. A year from now will we again be watching explosions during commercial breaks for the bowl games?