So Newsweek asked a bunch of folks to select one cultural artifact from the past eight years that "exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush." Nobody picked W., thank God--instead, there were votes for a Jeff Koons knickknack ("Much as the Bush administration has waved off an intimacy with Big Oil and professed down-home empathy for regular "folks," Koons likes to pretend that he's not an avatar of irony for billionaire collectors.") and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, the long-in-the-writing novel that dropped weeks before September 11, 2001, and which "conjures up a nation kept awake at night by nameless dread."--but a few movies did slip by the guy at the door. Specifically, Black Hawk Down, Ridley Scott's re-staging of the Battle of Mogadishu (based on the nonfiction book by Mark Bowden) and Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen's road trip through an America that had just started reconsidering whether this all-hail-the-retarded-boy-king business was really the best defense against national decline.
In this context, they do make for an intriguing double bill. Black Hawk Down, which was made before 9/11 but released some four months later, is about a mission that, at the time, was widely used as Exhibit A by politicians and pundits who wanted to denounce the Clinton administration for its use of military intervention overseas in the name of "nation building." But the movie itself was a hit with many supporters of the Bush administration's plans to spread democracy in the Middle East by kicking ass and taking names. It was also a big success with Somali audiences who turned out in mass numbers to cheer the sight of American soldiers getting blown to pieces. However you want to take the ironies involved, none of these reactions are surprising, nor are the testimonies of soldiers, including those who've been to Iraq, that the movie captures how it feels to be under fire. Scott achieved the movie's visceral effectiveness by eliminating anything that might get in the way of it, including historical and political context and even much in the way of character definition. The movie includes a number of fine actors, but it's all boiled down to the sensory overload of creating how it feels to get shot at, over and over and over, from every direction. So it's no wonder that different audiences would decide who they should be rooting for based on which non-characters look more like them, and also no wonder that the film, which features a predominately white U.S. military, had to endure charges of racism from both Somalis and American writers. For all its technical mastery, the movie goes charging too scarily far in the direction of other Jerry Bruckheimer productions, whose only intent is to make you raise a fist and go, "Whooo!" Five years later, Borat, which was the number one movie in America around the time that the president's party took a battering in the 2006 midterm elections, made that triumphant war whoop sound like a cry for help. It's a candid snapshot of a country that seems populated with people who want to dazzle the world with their indomitable swagger but who reveal the depths of their insecurity with how badly they take being teased. (The movie made headlines while it was in production with stories that Baron Cohen had barely escaped from a Texas rodeo with his life after daring to mangle the National Anthem, and it says a lot that the rodeo organizers seemed, if anything, more eager to brag about how hot-tempered their audience was than the filmmakers.)
Still, a lot of people of a geekish bent will agree with Joshua Alston that no movie released during the war president's time in office quite caught the national mood as well as a small-screen offering, Battlestar Galactica, which Alston hails for presenting "a world that looks nothing like our own, and yet evokes it with chilling accuracy." Alston also scores a direct hit when comparing it to 24, "with its neocon fantasies of terrorists who get chatty if Jack Bauer pokes the right pressure point. Of the two shows, Battlestar has been more honest about the psychological toll of the war on terror. It confronts the thorny issues that crop up in a society's battle to preserve its way of life: the efficacy of torture, the curtailing of personal rights, the meaning of patriotism in a nation under siege. It also doesn't flinch from one question that 24 wouldn't dare raise: is our way of life even worth saving? Plus, the guy who looks like John McCain turned out to be a robot. How's that for prophecy!?