Oliver Stone’s “W.” is surely the first of its genre: a mockumentary-while-the-guy’s-still-in-office. But I don’t want to see this war criminal Hollywood-ized.
It isn’t merely that the content is too awful for portrayal — after all, one can stand to see all sorts of distressing things made into movies if the approach is respectful and informed (e.g. the ubiquitous nazi-era films like Claude Miller’s “Un Secret“). What feels twisted is the idea of this moral pygmy of a man, the agent of so much global suffering, being stylized with popular-entertainment tropes.
It’s not that we don’t deserve, every one of us, to see George W. made a fool of. It’s just that no amount of recreational schadenfreude could staunch these still-bleeding wounds. Mick LaSalle of the S.F. Chronicle pointed out that Sure, this man is a fool, but he has a nasty canniness to him (my paraphrase) that the movie doesn’t address; to ignore it would be to miss what makes his darkness tick. And as my son Alexander says, What’s the point of making a movie that reduces America’s most destructive presidency into merely a “personal” G.W. Bush, framed as that lovable anti-hero: the goofy loser?
Received wisdom suggests that a certain amount of time has to pass before a people can cop enough distance to view a troubling chapter of their history. But this presumes that the American mass mind will, even given the requisite time, understand the scope of what the Bush cartel set in motion. On that subject Americans as a group have come up with every conceivable variation on denial over the past 8 years, undistracted by any genuine curiosity about what their government was actually doing.
Maybe we’re too young, as a country, to know how to process the meaning of our own disasters with moral hindsight.We’ve had 2 centuries to come to grips with slavery and the genocide of our indigenous people, but as a group we’re not even close. By contrast, there have been individual Americans, artists and thinkers with enough vision to have meaningfully tackled these issues, as there are in every age and in every place. I guess collective wounds can be trusted only to the most subtle of artists. Others should leave them alone, respecting them through silence.
Meanwhile, if and when someone makes a W. movie that talks about his CIA father’s creation of the petro-political alliances that underlie the dystopic global situation we now inhabit, and/or one that talks about what really happened on 9/11/01, I’ll be first in line to buy a ticket.