SAM GOLDWYN had the only really sensible opinion on the idea of the film industry as a purveyor of political propaganda. “If I want to send a message I’ll use Western Union,” he said.
But Hollywood, once again, has ignored Goldwyn’s strictures. The message from this week’s Golden Globe awards could not have been clearer if it had been written on 18in cue cards delivered door to door across America by Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. It was a plea to a nation firmly on the road to conservative perdition to change course, to embrace alternative lifestyles, foreigners, non-believers and outlandish theories about the motives of US companies.
The Globes honoured, in approximate order of reverence, Brokeback Mountain, a film about a couple of cowboys who discover that there’s a lot more you can do with chaps than put them over your jeans; The Constant Gardener, an adaptation of a John le Carré novel about evil drug companies that kill innocent Africans and the honest campaigners who try to expose them; Syriana, a film so complex it defies synopsis, but you’ll get the gist if I tell you it’s about American oil companies, the CIA and Middle Eastern politics; and Transamerica, a movie that sounds like a drama about life at one of America’s prominent life insurance companies but turns out to be a paean to the life of the transgendered.
For good measure, on the TV side, they added a performance by Geena Davis for her role as the first woman president in Commander in Chief, a thinly veiled promotional video for the 2008 Hillary Clinton campaign.
To be fair, there were one or two exceptions to the politically correct roll call. But Walk the Line, an engaging biopic of Johnny Cash, presumably only got a look-in because the Globes split comedy/musicals from drama, and in the former category it was up against such innocent fare as Pride & Prejudice and Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. Doubtless if there had been a comedy about gay cowboys unmasking a plot by American drug companies to manipulate Middle Eastern oil supplies for the benefit of the CIA, Mr Cash would still be walking the line to red-carpet obscurity. (Though then again, A Boy Named Sue might at least have got an honourable mention as a plea for the better understanding of transgendered confusion.) And though there was an odd snub for Steven Spielberg’s Munich, a film that fits the Hollywood semiotics beautifully, casting an Israeli secret agent as morally indistinguishable from the Palestinian terrorists who murdered 11 athletes at the 1972 Olympics, that may have more to do with the internal politics at Paramount, whose bigger interest this year was the frisky cowboys of Brokeback Mountain.
It’s silly to get upset about the Golden Globes. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which awards them, is the most notoriously biddable and unrepresentative institution this side of the US Congress. But with the 2006 awards season now under way, the theme is clear. The Globes have bashed out the tune and the Oscars will surely pick up the chorus.
This is Message Year in Hollywood. Fed up with the direction that America is taking — all this God, patriotism, traditional family, War on Terror stuff, America’s entertainment elite have taken the courageous decision to lead the fightback from the pool decks of Beverly Hills and the penthouses of Manhattan. Voting with their Armani tuxedos and their Isaac Mizrahi gowns, they’re going to take back their country from the warmongers and religious fanatics.
No more lavish but inconsequential realisations of Tolkien masterpieces please (that other famous Oxford Christian writer, C. S. Lewis, got zero recognition for The Chronicles of Narnia this year). Give us tales of decent men, women and transgendered individuals standing up for tolerance, diversity and understanding of others. Sadly there’s not much room for tolerance, diversity and understanding of others in Hollywood itself.
I’ve nothing against Brokeback Mountain, though I do object slightly to the idea that it’s a breakthrough cultural event — haven’t we been fed a virtually non-stop diet of forbidden homosexual love on TV and in films for the past 20 years? And as for its unusual take on the western lifestyle, hadn’t we already heard from the sergeant in Full Metal Jacket that “only steers and queers come from Texas and you don’t look much like a steer to me so that kinda narrows it down”?
But one-dimensional conspiracy theories are much more malevolent. The Constant Gardener is a veritable frenzy of paranoia from start to finish, with the notorious Big Pharma in the villain’s role. And even some prominent liberals have recoiled a bit from the message of Syriana, that American foreign policy is driven by a noxious alliance of oil companies and foreign dictators. (Funny, isn’t it, how US entertainment companies think the motives of US corporate giants are always impure except, presumably, those of US entertainment companies?)
And having churned out all this bilious nonsense, Hollywood executives shake their heads in puzzlement as to why Americans have stopped going to the movies. Sure, it may have something to do with ticket prices and the easy availability of giant home entertainment systems. But having an 86in screen in the kitchen didn’t stop millions of people from going to see The Passion of the Christ or Narnia. Nor, lest you misunderstand me and think this is a plea for Hollywood to turn itself into the entertainment arm of militant Christianity, did it stop them going to see King Kong or Shrek?
Isn’t that surely the lesson? Messages, either of the kind Hollywood favours, or even of the Mel Gibson sort, will never really beat good storytelling, or even, since we’re talking box office, bad storytelling, as successful films such as Titanic or Independence Day will attest.
All of which underlines another piece of the unlearnt wisdom of Sam Goldwyn: “A good movie is one which begins with an earthquake or a volcanic eruption and then works up quickly to some kind of climax.”
gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk
