November 16, 1997

The Two Hollywoods; Peace Is Hell
By Fareed Zakaria

Foreign-policy wonks in Washington are said to be hopelessly at sea in today's brave new world. They supposedly pine for the good old days of the cold war with its Soviet threat, nuclear danger, proxy wars and perpetual arms-control meetings. (Be still my heart!) But another town is struggling with this balmy time of peace as much as Washington -- Hollywood. Even though movie stars held cocktail parties for nuclear disarmament, the cold war was good for their profession. It nourished that distinctive American genre, the action-and-adventure movie.

The cold war gave us genuine international tension. The stuff of its movies -- nuclear threats, blackmail, espionage and terrorism -- had a gripping, dangerous feel. The forces of the West were represented perfectly by James Bond -- elegant, inventive, hedonistic and always successful. But now, without an all-encompassing moral, political and strategic struggle, Hollywood has to stretch to find dangers that seem real enough, villains who seem evil enough and stakes that seem high enough. To be sure, it is easy to overplay the cinema's interest in the Red menace. Perhaps because it was not a hot war, perhaps because of Hollywood's political culture, the cold war never worked as well on film as did World War II. There were, of course, movies with evil Communists, like "Funeral in Berlin," "Red Dawn" and "The Hunt for Red October."

Still, the Soviets never achieved the supervillain status of the Nazis. In two great cold-war series they were not the villains at all. In Bond movies, evil was usually represented by an international crime cartel led by a weird plutocrat, and in John le Carre movies the Western agents were always equally flawed. "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" is more anti-cold war than anti-Communist. But at least the moviegoer could be against something important.

Action movies thrive on national enemies. They quickly identify the bad guys, usually by skin color, accent or uniform. Our two most successful villains, American Indians and Nazis, have been quite distinctive in dress and in language. Both were Hollywood's staple for decades after World War II and almost a century after the last Indian wars. When the makers of "Die Hard" wanted to create an intelligent, brutal criminal, they had Alan Rickman, an English actor, adopt a vaguely Germanic accent. His lieutenant was a blond Teutonic-looking guy named Karl. When things got really nasty they would actually speak to one another in German. But national enemies are now an endangered species, victims of three of the most powerful forces sweeping the world today -- peace, political correctness and globalization.

Washington has no truly threatening great power foes, a situation that Hollywood has been trying to rectify since the late 1980's. First, the Japanese seemed a good bet, and "Black Rain" and Michael Crichton's "Rising Sun" could have been the beginning of a new wave. But while many in America -- including movie makers and policy wonks -- were willing to demonize Japan, Tokyo's economy fizzled out. Today it almost seems bad sportsmanship to mention the Japanese threat. Then came drug dealers, the featured attraction in the first post-cold-war Bond movie, "License to Kill." But they're not really a national group. Irish nationalists, as in "Patriot Games," and Kazakh terrorists, as in "Air Force One," are more persuasive. National liberation movements have that old-time passion. But the Irish, Kazakhs, Azeris and Serbs can work for a movie or two, not as set-piece villains in a continuing drama. They're local bad guys, not threats to world (or American) peace. When was the last Azeri bombing in New York?

It's also hard to create national villains without national stereotypes -- a big no-no in the current multicultural atmosphere. Not only can American Indians no longer be stereotyped, they can barely be mentioned. A Princeton, N.J., mother says that her children, at a private school, are now taught to play "Cowboys and Pirates." (I wonder what the teacher would say if one of those bright, young things asked how Nevada ranchers could have fought Mediterranean sailors?) For a while it seemed acceptable to portray Arabs as fanatical and villainous, hijacking planes while praying to Allah. But people began to notice this double standard. Reviewing the Arnold Schwarzenegger film "True Lies," David Denby wrote in New York magazine: "The terrorists are treated contemptuously as a bunch of losers -- as fuzz-faced buffoons, shouting gibberish at one another. Shot, stabbed, torched, blown up, the Arabs, or whatever they are, drop like flies." Oh, well, back to the drawing board.

And then there is globalization. Until recently, Hollywood earned most of its money from domestic audiences; foreign business was gravy. Today, entertainment is America's largest export industry. A first-class blockbuster can expect to make half its revenues from abroad. In this context, globalization has had a particularly dismal effect on movie making, writes David Kipen in The World Policy Journal. First, there is little need for dialogue: "Why bother writing good lines if they'll only be mistranslated?" Second, what takes the place of good writing is violence -- the Esperanto of the modern media world. An explosion means exactly the same thing in Taipei as it does in Dubuque. So do 10.

Globalization also requires that characters perceived as bad guys in America must also be considered bad guys in East Asia. That's why the Chinese are problematic candidates for villainy. Not that the entertainment industry is averse to testing the waters with the upcoming Martin Scorsese movie "Kundun"; "Seven Years in Tibet"; "Red Corner" (a Midnight Express set in China), and the next James Bond movie. But while many people in East Asia worry about the rise of Chinese power, the Chinese do not have the historical reputation for aggression that the Japanese do. Besides, there are 1.2 billion potential Chinese movie buffs to think about. Dealing with the China problem highlights a tension between two powerful strains not limited to Hollywood: superficial moralizing and rapacious moneymaking.

In the end, however, the movies have a solution. Like so much of fiction and nonfiction today, film has moved to the realm of the personal. Memoirs, autobiographies and psychobabble are in; history and politics are out. Villains are not villainous because they are Nazis or American Indians or are devoted to any larger cause. They are bad individuals, acting for entirely personal reasons. The terrorist in "The Peacemaker" is motivated not by ideological concerns but by narrow, solipsistic ones -- he is avenging the murder of his wife and child.

The emphasis on the personal is, in a way, perfect for modern movie making because it allows for violence. First we must establish that the villain is bad, so we watch him blow up innocent people for 20 minutes. Then, in the next hour, we watch the good guys battle him. This need for violence to establish character spins out of control in a movie like "Face/Off," in which the good guy (John Travolta) and the bad guy (Nicolas Cage) change faces, so the director, John Woo, keeps reminding us which one to hate by having him kill a few dozen strangers. All of which is necessary to keep the audience on the right side. The key to a successful action movie today is righteous violence. Audiences cannot simply partake in gruesome barbarism; they must feel redeemed by it.

But does this make for great cinema? "The Guns of Navarone," one of the most gripping adventure movies ever made, has very little violence. The moral and political context gives the movie its chilling tension. So it was with most of the best movies of this genre from the 1940's to the early 80's. Until the great global drama petered out.

"The end of history will be a very sad time," wrote Francis Fukuyama in the concluding paragraph of his famous essay. "The willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands." In his book, "The End of History and the Last Man," Fukuyama asks whether human beings, increasingly bored by the banality of life, will yearn again for some larger meaning and thus be "ready to drag the world back into history with all its wars, injustice and revolution." And also its movies -- great, spine-tingling action movies.