| Monday, March 10, 2003 |
11:59 - Uh... heh heh
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/03/0303/031003.html
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In reading Lileks' review of We Were Soldiers:
It reminds you that a truth, repeated enough times, becomes a cliché. Once the smart set identifies something as a cliché, it?s stripped of its truth and regarded simply as a trick - regardless of how true the cliché may actually be.
... I realize that when I wrote about Black Hawk Down fourteen months ago, I fell into precisely the same too-smart-for-this-movie trap that he's describing. I saw the overt blood-and-gore as a directorial Can You Top This? ...instead of the real-life hell that the situation actually was. I assumed I was watching the War Movie To End All War Movies. I should have known that it was just sincerity making a desperate last stand.
I've been talking lately about how "sincerity is dead"... expressions of naked patriotism seem like anachronisms, and the only political statements my age group seems capable of respecting are those that enclose a wry, ironic, and usually totally bogus insight. I have friends who would roll their eyes at a Victor David Hanson article and go watch a Flash animation instead just because it has Kanji and a googly-eyed drippy-fanged Bush in it.
But for all its recent moronic pomp, Hollywood appears to have an undercurrent of sanity and integrity; unerneath the loud posturing of the stars, it seems the producers and directors and writers are yearning for a time when the emotions and values they choose to portray on screen could be taken at face value. Maybe it's a triple-layers-of-indirection self-effacing commentary on entertainment as a phenomenon, holding up the audience's very tendency to expect searing irony instead of honest heartfelt sentiments as the subject of artistic scrutiny. Maybe the filmmakers are so far removed from sincerity that even they don't know when they're being sincere.
But I'm inclined to think that maybe, just maybe, the irony bubble's about to burst just like the dot-com one did.
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