No war movies

Richard Corless speculates on why there are no movies about 9/11. Only 2 so far. He gets it wrong and he inadvertently reveals the real reason in his suggestions for what kind of movies could be made: Holly Wood's ideology is too far out of touch with the way the rest of America feels, or at least felt, in the first four years after 9/11.

The kind of movie he thinks should be made is one that exposes the "real" reasons behind the invasion of Iraq or lays bare the ways that Bush manipulated public opinion to its own purposes after the attack. The kind of movies that people would have wanted to see were the kind that he gives backhanded praise to in his article, the ones that were being made after WWII, ones about a confrontation between good and evil.

Notice that Clooney portrays his two movies as being relevant to contemporary events--his movie about McCarthyism and his movie about a CIA plot to install a compliant dictator in a small Arab country. In other words, movies where America is the real villain. These are the only kinds of movies that Hollywood and contemporary intellectuals would regard as serious. Clooney made them about imaginary or long past situations because he thought, probably correctly, that movies with such a thesis would not be well received if about contemporary events. This is what Hollywood liberals mean when they talk about people not being ready for movies on this subject. People are not ready to hear that their sons are dying for a lie, and the "real" causes or 9/11 are America's own actions in the past.

This is why the only movies explicitly about 9/11 are so narrow in focus, concentrating only on the immediately effected participants. The heroism of ordinary Americans is something that Hollywood and the rest of America can agree on. Go any larger than that and the disagreements become too large.