“This used to be a hell of a good country,” Jack Nicholson’s pot-smoking lawyer George Hanson laments in 1969's Easy Rider. “I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it...”
He didn’t know the half of it.
And yet, even after seven-plus years of the Bush administration, the United States is still, for the most part, a hell of a good country, and next week, as the nation barbecues and cherry bombs itself into a frenzy of patriotism over the 4th of July weekend, we here at the Screengrab will join the celebration with a list of movies that show just exactly how and why America kicks ass.
But this week, partly in tribute to the passing of beloved comedian (and scathing social critic) George Carlin, we thought we’d take a cinematic tour of the nastier side of the American Empire. From slavery and the near-extermination of the nation’s indigenous population to rampant corporate greed, bigoted religious fanaticism and horrific military fiascos, the U.S. (and its citizens, including me and possibly you) have a lot of skeletons in our collective national closet.
Fortunately, we’ve also managed to (more or less) hang onto that whole freedom of speech thing, resulting in the following films (some by outsiders, but mostly homegrown) that, to paraphrase Toby Keith, put a boot in the American way.
THE WIRE (2002-2008)
Again, as with last week’s inclusion of Angels in America among the Gay Pride Top Twenty, I’m cheating a bit, since HBO’s epic, five-season dramatization of the death of the American working class, the devastation wrought by the “War on Drugs,” the failure of inner city public schools, the inherent corruption of organizations and the helplessness of the individuals trapped within them is, technically, “just” a TV show. But, taken as a single, sixty-hour cinematic exposé, David Simon’s epic, multi-layered, deeply human depiction of the drug dealers, junkies, cops, dockworkers, teachers, lawyers, politicians, reporters and regular civilians of modern day Baltimore (and, by extension, Anytown, U.S.A.) trumps just about any movie ever made in its unflinching depiction of the ways that Americans become trapped in their own delusions and systems of organization, allowing hacks and sociopaths (like Jamie Hector’s drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield, Michael Kostroff’s sleazy lawyer Maurice Levy and corrupt cops Herc (Dominic Lombardozzi) and Burrell (Frankie Faison)) to flourish while system-bucking firebrands like Detective McNulty (Dominic West) and Michael K. Williams’ iconic stick-up artist Omar Little are marginalized or destroyed. But, unlike grim civics lessons like the recent slate of doomed Iraq films (typified by Robert Redford’s deadly earnest Lions for Lambs), The Wire (even at its most harrowing) was never a slog, thanks to the work's relentless humor, suspense, virtuoso writing, astonishing performances and, for all its pessimism, a crucial, inspiring sense of gratitude for the men and women (like Sonja Sohn and Wendell Pierce as “good police” Kima Greggs and “Bunk” Moreland, Deirdre Lovejoy’s tough, incorruptible state’s attorney Rhonda Pearlman and Jim True-Frost’s ex-cop turned schoolteacher “Prez” Pryzbylewski) who somehow manage to keep their heads down, plug away and, ultimately, hold the world together for the rest of us. (Now if only the not-racist-at-all Emmy voters would notice and finally honor The Wire with at least one friggin’ award.)
DOGVILLE (2003)
Lars Von Trier's Dogville (the first of his proposed – and still uncompleted – "U.S.A. – Land of Opportunities" trilogy) certainly got the job done in terms of provocation. Von Trier, already one of the most controversial and divisive directors working today, sure wasn't going to win a lot of friends on this side of the Atlantic when he announced, not long after September 11, 2001, his intention of making three films whose intent was to turn a gimlet eye on some of the ugliest aspects of American culture. And when Dogville was released, it had a polarizing effect almost immediately: for everyone who praised its uniformly excellent cast, its stark, eerie direction, and its brilliantly minimalist set design (which served as an unsettling visual reference to that most all-American of plays, Thornton Wilder's Our Town), there was someone who condemned its inflammatory rhetoric, its brutal tone, and its determination to poke at the festering sores of everything bad about America, from racism to sexism to crime to class inequity. Some critics – no names, no pack drill – apparently became so unhinged over the movie that they spoke of it in terms better suited to hate crimes, or even war crimes, than to movie reviews. But the deeply dividing effect that Dogville had on audiences and critics may have proven nothing more than the fact that the reaction Von Trier gets out of his movies is exactly the reaction that he wants.
ROGER AND ME (1989)
No list of films critical of America could be complete without a Michael Moore documentary (strangely enough, no one at Screengrab headquarters was lobbying for Canadian Bacon), so it was only a matter of choosing which one. In the end, there was no real choice. Fahrenheit 9/11 may be the most incendiary grenade Moore has lobbed, but it's marred with some cable access-level conspiracy mongering. In both The Big One and Bowling for Columbine, the messenger overwhelms the message. And I'll confess I haven't seen Sicko yet – I'm simply Michael Moore-d out. But that wasn't the case back in 1989, when Roger and Me arrived in theaters as a most unlikely breath of fresh air. How unlikely? Here was a film released by a major American corporation (Warner Bros.) openly criticizing another major American corporation (General Motors) for its outrageous treatment of its employees. Here was a movie about the economic devastation wrought on an American city by the closing of its auto plants – and it was funny. Moore hadn't worn out his welcome, because we didn't know who the hell he was; he was just this shambling schlub in a ballcap trying to get an audience with GM CEO Roger Smith to find out why his hometown of Flint was being put through the wringer. If his shtick has long since grown stale, it was fresh then, enlivened by such real-life characters as Deputy Fred (who tries to evict the newly unemployed in the friendliest possible way) and the woman who offers rabbits in two varieties: "Pets or Meat." We know now about the manipulations of chronology (Horrors! In a movie?) and many of us have soured on Moore's self-aggrandizing style, but the impact and influence of Roger and Me on documentary film – for better and for worse – cannot be overstated. And if you lost your job on the assembly line and nobody gave a shit, you'd probably be grateful to have a high-profile advocate – even a self-righteous schlub in a ballcap.
BLOW OUT (1981)
The critic J. Hoberman called Brian De Palma's conspiracy movie the last great film of the 1960s, even though it was released during the first summer of the Reagan administration -- a moment that it also memorializes quite well in its own sick way. Set in Philadelphia, De Palma's picture stars John Travolta as a motion picture sound man who inadvertently records the gunshot that sends a car containing a potential presidential candidate and a hooker (Nancy Allen) into a river, killing the politician. Another figure, a photographer played by Dennis Franz, claims to have recorded the crash in a series of photos that are published in a national magazine. Meanwhile, the man who shot out the tire -- Burke, played by John Lithgow -- is committing a series of murders so that he can take out the Nancy Allen character and make it look like the work of a serial killer the papers have dubbed "the Liberty Bell Strangler." Not satisfied with this amalgam of Chappaquiddick, the Zapruder film, and G. Gordon Liddy gone off the reservation, De Palma invented his own bogus patriotic holiday, "Liberty Day", so that he could show his hero failing to save the heroine against a backdrop of oblivious citizens garishly celebrating the country whose promise we in the audience can see openly turning to criminal rot.
THE CANDIDATE (1972)
Robert Redford uses his Kennedyesque qualities -- "Kennedyesque" having once been code for anyone really good-looking who might plausibly read his subscription copy of Newsweek -- as a double-edged sword in this collaboration between a director, Michael Ritchie, with a special knack for throwaway slapstick and bits of offbeat Americana and a screenwriter, Jeremy Larner, who was regarded as a walking mother lode of inside political knowledge from his having worked as a screenwriter for Eugene McCarthy's 1968 presidential campaign. The film has plenty to say about the importance of money and image, at the expense of substance, in American politics, though what really sets it apart is the absolute hopelessness that comes attached to its cheerful, Zippy-like grin. Redford's Bill McKay is the son of an former governor and old-style pol (Melvyn Douglas) who, thanks to watching his father at work, knows that nothing can be achieved through conventional politics and so works as a liberal lawyer for good causes. He's talked into running against the despicable old conservative incumbent Crocker Jarmon (Don Porter) so that he can shake up the campaign and bring attention to the real issues he favors; he signs on with the understanding that he can't possibly win. But when he does so badly that he risks becoming a joke, he agrees to let the handlers polish the rough edges on his campaign style, and damned if he doesn't end up winning -- after which he turns to his chief handler (Peter Boyle) and asks, in a state of mild panic, "What do we do now?" Other movies in this period, such as The Parallax View and Executive Action, jumped on the JFK-assassination-theory bandwagon and took it on faith that if anybody decent ever ran for office in this country, the big boys would have him whacked. The Candidate's Nader-esque attitude -- that politics is such a total shuck that nobody decent would ever get involved with and if, by some accident, they did, the compromises they'd have to agree to would reduce them to a dithering nothing -- seems less doom-laden on the surface but is actually much worse, if only because so many intelligent people find it irresistable as a reason for bowing out of political engagement altogether.
Click here for Part Two and Part Three
Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent