WAR IS NOT HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN OR OTHER LIVING THINGS… But it makes for some profound pop-art

War results in terrible things. In spite of its occasional merit, its arguable inevitability, the solutions and resolutions it can result in, and the possible undesirable outcome which sometimes concludes it, war is a catalyst for provocative, meaningful art. Consider the era of the Vietnam Conflict. Some of history’s greatest films were a product of its disillusion. There is a relevant argument that only art can truly bring the catastrophes of war into tangibility for a culture. Art forces people to confront issues they may otherwise write off as trivial. It forces them to see the other side of an argument they might otherwise never change their position on. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, and the downward spiral the war in Iraq appears to be on, popular film has once again taken on the heart of issues journalism and philosophy sometimes fail to report or comprehend. Films like M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield, Frank Darabont’s The Mist, and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Night unflinchingly satirize the issues that endanger our crumbling democracy in the face of combating terror.


Shyamalan’s The Village was doomed to be misunderstood when Touchstone Pictures decided to market the movie as a conventional horror film with a trademark Shyamalan twist. Upon its immediate release, the buzz about The Village morphed from confusion to negativity. Sadly, I hypothesize that a great deal of the American public who bashed the film did not understand what the confusion was: and the confusion was and still is us, the people who carry the burden of preserving this endangered democracy. Yes, it is understandable that the American moviegoer expects to be entertained; what has been lost since the Hollywood Renaissance circa 1960 – 1980 is the idea that we are to entertain the possibility that what we’ve witnessed could possibly be a commentary on life beyond celluloid. In order to do so, consider The Village’s symbolic representation of what is happening in our culture.


In the case of The Village, the symbolism is hardly buried in the visual text. The plot is the most obvious device in Shyamalan’s film; a story about an extremely conservative society which has been paralyzed by the fear of what lurks beyond its borders. The society within the village adheres to strict, ritualistic guidelines which assure the citizens that the borders will not be breeched by the enemy. If it does not sound plausible that Shyamalan’s intention was to comment on the impact of terrorist threat, consider the color pallet of the film. When the villagers must travel near or beyond the border of their settlement, they are instructed to wear yellow robes. The characters call yellow the “safe color.” Yet when wearing the yellow hoods, the characters approach the travel situation with heightened caution and trepidation. The villagers recognize the color red as the “bad color.” The color represents the creatures that live in the woods beyond the border of the village. The director contrived the color pallet as a means of tapping the audience on the shoulder and saying, “Ever hear of the Homeland Security Advisory System?” According to the system, when the threat level is at yellow, the level is elevated; there is a significant risk of terrorist attack. When the color coded system reaches red, travel – particularly foreign travel – is strongly discouraged. It is equally difficult not to wonder if the fact that the village’s leader, a man named Walker, who by the way has two daughters, is a tongue in cheek reference to America’s beloved W. And if so, this is where Shyamalan achieves total greatness.


Much of the American public who scoffed at Shyamalan’s film did so because the plausibility of Shyamalan’s ridiculous plot seemed preposterous. Yet, this is the America we live in. This is the America we’ve become since 9/11. So the question is this: if the average American refused to buy what Shyamalan was selling, how did a man like George W. Bush get elected twice? How is it that America responds to the Homeland Security Advisory System without so much as a huge WTF? And perhaps this is what really pissed the audience off. The joke was on them. Yet, Hollywood cashed in at the box office with two other low budget/high grossing successes with social commentary just as blatant as Shyamalan’s movie, the first of which was much more easily accepted and embraced by the same public who lambasted The Village.

Matt Reeve’s Cloverfield faired well at the box office. The cross over action adventure/sci-fi/horror film garnered high praises at the theater and impressive DVD sales after the theatrical run. How can this be accounted for? For one, it did not premiere until 2008. At this point, George Bush’s approval rating had gone down the tubes and public opinion about the lingering war in Iraq had shifted from blind patriotism to outspoken disapproval. Cloverfield fed off the changing tide of the public’s dissatisfaction. The commentary in Cloverfield was also buried deeper in the action of the film and the motivation of the movie’s gargantuan villain. The first report of the creature’s attack was of an oil rig being overturned in New York’s harbor: subtle commentary there. Next, the monster goes on to decapitate the Statue of Liberty, a mammoth symbol of America’s democracy. When the military are brought in to destroy the enemy, the battle is much more difficult that one would anticipate. A conventional barrage of aggressive military action was not enough to defeat what seemed to be an enemy that could easily be destroyed in spite of the massive threat it posed to America’s most weary city. It is also conceivable, given the disaster in New Orleans, that the nation’s military was spread too thin due to other conflicts. After all, the last thing the American Military could imagine being deployed for would be an unforeseeable disaster on American soil. In addition to the plot devices Reeves’ employed to tell his story, there is the unmistakable style in which the story was told.

The film’s first person narrative through the single video camera of a stander-by insinuates that perhaps the only truth behind a story can be told by the protagonists caught in the disaster. Government reports on the handling of the New Orleans disaster were greatly disputed by the residents who lived through the event. Surprisingly, especially after audiences’ negative reaction to Shyamalan’s twist ending, audiences were much more accepting of Reeves’ open ended conclusion. Reeves offered no resolution to the problem. The audience is led to believe that there is no salvation for the characters that they came to care for during the course of the film. And for the most part, audiences were fine with it. And why shouldn’t they have been? The conflict America is currently in the midst of has no ready resolution in sight. Perhaps the one thing that is shocking about the audience’s reaction to a film makers’ commentary is the mixed, if not mostly negative reaction to Frank Darabont’s The Mist, another film which chronicles an unexplainable disaster brought upon by mysterious creatures from another dimension.

Frank Darabont took Stephen King’s short story, The Mist, and beefed it up into what one could arguably identify as a two hour promotional reel for Hilary Clinton as president. One major theme that the movie touches upon is the failure of men to lead stunned civilians through an unprecedented disaster. Women are the true leaders and innovators in the film. Much like Shaymalan’s picture, The Mist was criticized for its plausibility. Is it really possible for human beings living in an age where technology is so advanced that weaponry beyond our wildest speculations could be left so helpless? Could they really be so clueless as to fail to find a means of rescue for themselves? If you find this hard to believe, again, I direct your attention to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In addition to this, Darabont paints a disturbing picture of how the far fanatical right wing moral majority are perhaps the greatest threat to democracy and civil liberty than any terrorist attack.

Marcia Gay Harden’s portrayal of the character Mrs. Carmody riveted theater goers into screaming at the silver screen. Her anti-climactic demise brought forth a burst of cheers from the audience I was sitting with during the second week of the movie’s theatrical run. And I’m sure that some of those spectators voted some of the same people into office that Pat Robinson funded. Darabont dared to do the same trick Shaymalan used in The Village: remove the audience enough from reality as a means of forcing them to confront a political issue they would typically support and make them see the folly in the character’s motivation. Darabont did this brilliantly. But he didn’t stop there. His criticism of the far left liberals was equally scorching. Bad decision after bad decision by Mrs. Carmody’s adversaries resulted in the protagonists finding themselves in the same dire situation in spite of their good intentions and liberal positions. And by the time the film reaches its remarkably shocking conclusion (which I will not spoil, but will say that it is easily the ballsiest, jaw dropping conclusion that I’ve seen to a film since the 1970s) the liberal party find themselves in what is an equally, if not more discombobulated state than their conservative counterparts. Interestingly enough, the final film in this analysis does something that its predecessors did not do as effectively; it presents the position of the conservative viewpoint and dares the viewer to consider the merit in conservative thinking, and allows the viewer to decide if the middle of the road is perhaps the safest place to be. Another film that challenges the viewer to take the mid-road perspective fared far better at the box office than The Mist, and won an Academy Award.

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Night touches on a controversial topic. Nolan’s film doesn’t question the Patriot Act and its ramifications; it asks the viewer to question the ethics of the Patriot Act. Gotham City is besieged by a terrorist named The Joker. The Joker threatens to kill innocent citizens everyday until the masked super-vigilante turns himself in. Unable to risk exposure, Batman presses on in pursuit of The Joker. At one point, in attempt to protect the citizens of Gotham City, Batman uses technology which enables him to locate an individual by tracing the location of all the cell phones in the city. This is a gross violation of civil liberty, yet, it assists Mr. Wayne in finding The Joker and keeping Gotham City safe. Obviously, many liberals have watched and loved this movie. Though they may criticize George W. Bush and his tactics in combating terrorism, I’m sure they cheered Batman on as he captured his foe. And this is what good art should do; make the viewer question their own code of ethics and whether or not they actually understand what it is they love or hate about their respective parties, and whether or not they should be so easily partial because of party lines. Many of the same liberals who lashed out at conservatives for voting based on what left wingers would call non-issues, and many of those same liberals are one issue voters, and for most of them, their one issue is that they hated George W. Bush.

The most important thing art in the early twenty-first century can do is make us question everything. It is easy to get caught up in what appears to be symbolic propaganda, but many times when an artist appears to be supporting an issue, their true intention is to get people thinking about the issue, not to convince them to wear the issue as a mantle. In any case, twenty-first century Hollywood appears to be in the midst of a new renaissance. The bold social commentary of recent films has made a successful cross-over from the small indie-scene to the mainstream blockbusters, and this is a good thing. Many other mainstream movies are addressing issues with the intent of making the viewer think: Watchmen, though originally created to comment of the cold war fears of the 1980’s, touches upon a great deal of modern cultural and political concerns… but that my friends is its own essay, coming soon. If you do not have a tendency to watch films closely, I suggest you strive to see beyond the barrier of plot and mechanics. Even the film Orphan slipped a tongue-in-cheek cultural joke. When the couple is unable to bear a third child, they refuse to stop trying and eventually adopt a child. The third child seems to be the one who tipped the scales of balance in their home: the couples’ names are John and Kate. Films are fun and entertaining, but the modern film seems to want to re-introduce the notion that they can be intellectually stimulating as well, and that being intellectually stimulated is fun. And it is. And please understand, the issue that endangers our democracy is not the solitary issue that threatens us, it is America’s irresponsibility of not thinking outside the box which is the most horrific threat.