my review I’m not sure what prompted O’Reilly’s interest. It’s possible that he might have seen me as a useful foil against which he might praise the movie. I made no mention of the movie’s patriotic core of revealed truth, rather suggesting that “American soldiers don’t seem to know exactly what they doing here” and that Black Hawk Down was possibly “the most extravagantly aestheticized combat movie ever made,” which is to say—a movie. “Very little emotional capital is invested in the characters, and as the various choppers, tanks, and snipers converge in the bloody vortex of downtown Mogadishu, Black Hawk Down becomes pure sensation … Scott’s ambition is to trump Steven Spielberg’s D-Day landing and Francis Coppola’s aerial assault.” Although I made a closing reference to the film’s “racial color-coding,” others, notably New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell were blunter in accusing Scott of “glumly staged racism” in depicting the Somalis as “a pack of dark-skinned beasts.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s long-awaited, well-advertised Collateral Damage succeeded Black Hawk Down as the nation’s premier (and most-protested) box-office attraction. Its release tastefully postponed after September 11, this once routine tale of an LA firefighter’s revenge on the Colombian terrorists who blew up his wife and child was reborn as an Event—endorsed by no less an authority than former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and subject to demonstrations a week before its opening.5
CHAPTER EIGHT
2002: THE WAR ON
TERROR BEGINS
NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 19, 2002
An embarrassment on September 12, a patriotic vision five months later: Warner Bros. evidently began testing, and perhaps tweaking, the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Collateral Damage back in November, discovering, to no one’s surprise, that audiences were far more responsive to the scenario than before the terror attacks. (The intra-studio paper trail would doubtless provide a crash course in emergency marketing.) Thus the movie’s release version begins as if in the fiery heart of the World Trade Center holocaust, with Arnold and his fellow smoke-eaters saving lives. “Heads up—let’s do it!” the star cries, as if anticipating the signal for passenger rebellion given on the fourth hijacked plane, Let’s roll!
One scene later, Arnold’s central-casting wife and son are vaporized before his eyes when a bomb detonates outside the Colombian consulate. Small by WTC standards, the explosion reportedly leaves nine dead and twenty-four injured, but it is more than sufficient to light the fuse of Arnold’s one-man war on the El Lobo terrorist cadre. Perhaps newly added to the film is the scene wherein the hooded guerrilla leader sends a videotape blaming “American war criminals” for provoking his group’s action. Even more key to the movie’s emotional thermostat is the Colombian leftist who openly sympathizes with the terrorists, using the US Army phrase “collateral damage” to rationalize Schwarzenegger’s dead family, thus prompting Arnold to redecorate the guy’s grungy headquarters with a baseball bat.
In publicizing the movie, Schwarzenegger has claimed that Collateral Damage showcases his vulnerable side. True, he does have to fight mano-a-mano with a girl. (As usual, a signifier of revolutionary cadres is a heavy sprinkling of grim-faced warrior-women in their combat-fatigued ranks.) But, whether sprinting through the rainforest or digitally diving down a waterfall, Our Arnold is tough enough to wipe the smirk from beneath El Lobo’s mask. The revolutionaries’ quotes are largely from the Al Qaeda fakebook: “Americans hide behind family values … they have forgotten the reality of war, not like us.” This reality is apparent when the sadistic guerrillas prove their native cruelty by exotically forcing one of their own to swallow a live coral snake.
Intermittently attempting to articulate a coherent argument, Collateral Damage shifts from pulse-pounding mode to something more migraine-conducive. It takes a sudden segue to fisticuffs and ear-chomping for the movie to escape from a tautological debate on moral equivalence between good vengeance and bad. (“You Americans are so naïve. You never ask, why does a peasant need a gun? You think you are the only ones to fight for your independence?” The non-sequitur riposte: “Independence to do what—kill women and children?”) Similarly, in the aftermath of Arnold’s single-handed decimation of the guerrilla camp, El Lobo asks the Fireman (as he is usually known) to explain the difference between them, prompting Arnold to ponderously elucidate, “I’m just going to kill you.”
This is the sort of burly action flick where one coincidence pummels another, narrative necessity is a drunken roundhouse, and whatever passes for logic is a factor of the last plot device left standing. It’s a small world after all, particularly in comparison to Arnold. When the star instructively yells, “You cannot fight terror with terror,” at the resident CIA sleazebag (Elias Koteas), he’s creating his own foreign policy; when he extends his protection to El Lobo’s consort (Francesca Neri), he’s acting as a nation unto himself.
Collateral damage is something that Americans have inflicted far more than they have suffered, but in this case, the phrase is synonymous with windfall profits. Just as George Bush’s questionable presidency was consecrated by the War on Terror, so Schwarzenegger’s flagging career should be revived. Perhaps the Fireman would again decide to run for governor of California. All together now: “Heads up. Let’s … do … it!”
Fifteen months later, Schwarzenegger did successfully cast himself as protagonist and beneficiary of another extraordinary crisis, namely the drive to recall California governor Gray Davis.
The beat went on. Hollywood rolled out a well-hyped succession of combat films and the public lined up to see them. More were said to be in production. Not all would come to fruition; that they were announced was sufficient to define the moment. Titled “The Art of War,” the following piece was the cover story for the Village Voice’s June 19, 2002 issue.
NEW YORK, JUNE 19, 2002
A landscape of smoky rubble littered with American corpses: Mogadishu, the Ia Drang valley, downtown Baltimore. For seven weeks out of the past twenty-two, the nation’s No. 1 or 2 box-office attraction has been a spectacular war film. Add to these hits—Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers, and The Sum of All Fears—such crypto-combat, high-body-count chart-toppers as Collateral Damage and Attack of the Clones, and 2002 has been springtime for carnage, at least at the movies.
As Black Hawk Down instructed, “Leave no man behind.” Last weekend’s Windtalkers may have been butt-kicked by Scooby-Doo, but more spectacles of organized mayhem are on the way: To End All Wars continues the World War II revival, Men in Black II envisions warfare in outer space, K-19: The Widowmaker and Below bring back the Cold War nuclear submarine drama, Gods and Generals resurrects the Civil War. Meanwhile, on television, CBS floated the since-canceled AFP: American Fighter Pilot, and the VH1 reality-based series Military Diaries will soon be joined by ABC’s Afghanistan-set Profiles from the Front Line.
Not since the flurry of Vietnam movies in the late 1980s has the combat film been so viable or so visible. And not since the gung-ho Reagan-era warnography of Rambo and Top Gun had the brass been so pleased. Vice President Dick Cheney took a breather from his undisclosed location to join Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at the gala Washington premiere of Black Hawk Down, the first movie for which (thanks to Rumsfeld’s personal intervention) US troops were dispatched to a foreign country to aid in its production. We Were Soldiers and The Sum of All Fears were similarly treated as official art. Mel Gibson’s Vietnam War vehicle We Were Soldiers was previewed for George W. Bush, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Karl Rove, and sundry military VIPs at a well-publicized White House screening. (An aide summarized the president’s evaluation of the movie as “violent” but “good.”) The Sum of All Fears had its world premiere in Washington, DC, as Paramount took care to alert the media that the producers had enjoyed considerable, even unprecedented, CIA access and Pentagon support.1
All
