Rewriting the Script

November 13, 2005 06:49 PM

Matt Bai is always interesting.. in his latest piece for NY Times magazine, he grudgingly admits that yes, Hollywood was completely right about the war, and then proceeds his intellectual deconstruction. Like this graf on the bullshit pre-war intelligence:

To Hollywood, however, such a story not only seemed credible but also entirely likely. These are people, after all, who flourish in a world of make-believe, who understand the raw persuasive power of narrative arc, moral dilemma and dramatic revelation. They were willing to accept - in fact, they recognized almost viscerally - that the president's story about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction was too richly timed and too tightly wrapped, and they understood that once a storyteller began to tinker with facts, there was no end to the scenarios he might invent that he might dubiously claim to be "based on a true story." Hollywood was so out of touch with what seemed like reality that it was, in fact, entirely in touch with the new political ethos of Washington, where facts are elasticized in pursuit of box-office approbation.

He ends with this: "Like other constituencies that once ruled Democratic politics (Big Labor, for instance, or urban machines) but are now finding themselves displaced, to some extent, by financiers and online activists, the people who make movies aren't writing the Democratic script anymore. What they've got left is mostly special effects."

I like to think there's value in both... borrowing from Hollywood, mushing it with the internet, and re-writing the script, again and again and again.

Measuring success (11.16.2005)
The Right-eous Hollywood movement (09.15.2004)
Warner Brothers kills documentary "that condemns, basically, war" (09.02.2004)

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