The REAL problem with Hollywood

I love escapist movies. Stories in which valiant, righteous heroes vanquish unambiguously evil foes have been a staple of human storytelling since before stories were written down. What makes escapist fantasies so powerful, seductive, and satisfying is rooting for the good guys as they deal justice and death to irredeemable bad guys who clearly deserve it.

Americans have been served that storyline in movies for decades, to the point where protagonists can be easily identified as the characters that are killing bad guys. It is easy to dismiss critics of violence in Hollywood movies by arguing that watching fictional villains get what they have coming to them is therapeutic for the frustrations of everyday living, and that people can separate fiction from reality. However, recent events suggest that our exposure to these storylines has more pernicious effects.

Very few people respond to problems in their personal lives with murderous violence. There are numerous clever and effective ways of dealing with troublesome bosses, intimidating rivals, even people who stalk or threaten us, that do not involve taking up weapons against them. We would never advise a friend who was having a property dispute with his neighbor to murder him. The ridiculousness of that idea is evidence that we can still separate the black and white world of the movies from the grayscale reality of living peaceably in a complex society. Yet, on a national and international level, we have fallen into a bad movie storyline, told to us by our leaders.

The Bush administration, having failed to protect our country from a deadly, criminal attack despite months of forewarning, immediately began casting itself in the role of movie hero. America, they said, would respond to this attack by killing Bad Guys: shadowy, nefarious, shifty, Bad Guys. In the language of the movies, killing Bad Guys makes us the Good Guys. Because we are the Good Guys, we never have to question our actions, motives, or strategies. We can kill innocent people, even children. We can torture prisoners. We can preemptively invade countries that have no connection to the attack. We can establish a system of international gulags that completely abolish our previously cherished notions of due process and the humane treatment of prisoners. We can threaten, bully, bribe, and cajole the rest of the world to go along our program of aggressive violence. Good Guys would never do anything wrong. To suggest otherwise implies that one is paying insufficient attention to the script. In our movie, anyone who we do not like is one of the Bad Guys, and they deserve what they get.

Facing a real physical threat, but not an existential threat, to our country, the Bush administration turned away from numerous intelligent, real world solutions. They could have craftily starved the terrorists of funding, shored up international police cooperation, strengthened ties to moderate Islam, and frustrated, marginalized, and outwitted Bin Laden’s organization at every turn. Not having the wit or wisdom to execute an actual effective strategy, the Bush administration chose the worst possible alternative, pandering to our primitive bloodlust, and painting us into this fantasy version of St. George and the Dragon. As we squander billions of dollars that could be used to improve our domestic situation, as thousands of American servicepeople are killed and maimed in mind and body, as our inhumane actions provide an endless list of recruiting points for our radical enemies, and as the bodies of thousands and thousands of our demonstrably innocent victims pile up, it is clear that our steady diet of “good guys are people who kill bad guys” movies has left us unprotected against politicians who sell us that storyline.

Enlightened philosophies and religions like Christianity advance the idea that people should not be engaged in the business of killing others, because we are too flawed and foolish to be able to determine who the “bad guys” are accurately. If we cast ourselves in the role of protagonists who kill bad people, we risk becoming the bad guys who kill innocent people ourselves. Our country has willfully and directly fallen into that very trap, in just a few short years. Maybe it is time for us all to lay off the simplistic, violent, escapist fantasy movies for a while. It is clear that they leave us poorly equipped for dealing intelligently with life in the real world.

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