Quote:
Originally Posted by humanflyz /img/forum/go_quote.gif
@blessingx:
You give us various interesting perspectives but have yet to give us YOUR own take. What gives?
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Well, I've given opinion of the film a few times, which for those that don't know I don't think much of it. I'm not even sure it is a film, but I'm certainly more interested in the issues surrounding it than the movie itself.
As for the OP theory, as I mentioned I don't swallow it whole, but I do believe in social conditions, majority options and their influence in the popular arts. When I see a top 10 pop song list from 1952, I think it says something about that era, both in creation and the group dynamics that raised it to the top. As technically challenging and exciting as
24 is, I think most agree its airing and popularity is at least partially because of the post-9/11 fears many have. I like
24, but I wonder what those in the future will think about a television series showing constantly threatened terrorist attacks as popular entertainment during a war. I certainly don't feel we should shrink from these questions. Superman and Batman for instance has been analyzed to death, and some of the theories are quite interesting.
I basically fall on both, not very attractive sides. On the one hand ignoring Lees original motivation (a film didn't have to be made), the conceiving of the film, studios to finance it (which only happens after they know how to sell it) and for it to be popular during war time with obvious connections, seems impossible not to associate. Quadruple that if you're a professor of Iranian Studies and likely spending much more time thinking about the war, its beginnings and eventual aftermath, than most of us. If you're focused on easily the largest current event going on right now, with many dying and millions displaced, and one side finances a film about a historic battle where the other side (however loosely related) needs to fought "for the sake of civilization"... you have to wonder a little about the timing, no?
Well maybe not, but that takes me to the other unattractive side. The only way for me to disconnect the movie fully from this major event (yes, even if it's bubble-gum - people place 40s musicals within the context of the war as avoidance/escape - but their subjects aren't usually war and when its referenced it's on purpose), is if the war plays no daily interference in the films viewers lives. The other side in the movie can be rouge monsters, etc. without meaning. Shifting back, can you imagine a light commercial flick at specific points of time with Vietnamese, Germans, Japanese, Italians, etc. characters that were suppose to have no meaning? I can't and while there are more than a few variables in play (casts tend now to be less mono-race/ethnic, etc.), the most obvious is that many of us go along with our daily lives with little inconvenience or sacrifice during this war. I think that's quite different than any other major military action we've experienced.
You may think I'm playing both sides, and maybe I am, but I suspect there is meaning or the situation allows it to have no meaning. Neither is a good option in my book.
And for the record I thought the same thing about
Kingdom of Heaven (even if it slipped a 'get along' message in there). A film on the Crusades now?
Edit a day later: I just want to be clear about my repeated "loosely related" comments. I'm certainly not categorizing Gulf War 2 (for whatever it's worth I was in 1), as West versus East or Christian versus Muslim or American versus Arab, etc. However with a general American public confusion and lack of understanding creating a loose entity of Muslim/Arab/Persian (as statistically and historically strange as that is), I do think "loosely related" as a character archetype is worth noting here.
