Political undercurrents in Batman Begins and Star Wars
It's all too tempting to portray studio chiefs as quivering piles of gelatinous cowardice mortified at the merest whiff of controversy — so let's do that for a bit. The fact is, these executives do tend to be timorous creatures, especially when it comes to the touchy subject of politics. They are, after all, gambling hundreds of millions of dollars on guessing the personal tastes of maddeningly unpredictable moviegoers. ''We're all parts of huge conglomerates,'' explains Alan Horn, president of Warner Bros., the guy who signed the check for Syriana's hefty (for a political drama) $50 million budget. ''We all have to balance art and commerce.''
And during the past four or five years — starting around the time folks began planting flags on car antennas and ordering ''freedom fries'' at the drive-through — the studios have been especially timid. Sometimes absurdly and arbitrarily so, digitally editing out shots of the World Trade Center from movies like Zoolander and Serendipity, or delaying the release of such harmless fare as The Time Machine because of a scene of a meteor shower hitting New York (Paramount did release The Sum of All Fears just months after 9/11, but that was Baltimore, not Manhattan, getting blown up by an atom bomb; and Twentieth Century Fox put out The Day After Tomorrow, despite showing NYC being demolished by a snowstorm).
Over the past year, though, current events have been creeping back onto the screen; even some references to terrorists have been permitted, if disguised as something else — like supervillians. The Caped Crusader's last adventure, Batman Begins, contained so many blatant metaphoric references to al-Qaeda, it wouldn't have been surprising if Osama bin Laden had popped up for a cameo in a Riddler costume. ''There's an enormous amount of anxiety in the world right now,'' notes the picture's co-writer, David Goyer. ''And when people are scared, they tend to watch allegories to deal with their fears. Historically, those genres have an uptick when there's anxiety. The last big one was in the '50s, during the Red Scare, with all those sci-fi films that were thinly veiled allegories about the Soviet menace.'' In eras of extreme anxiety, like today, audiences sometimes see allegories where none were actually intended. George Lucas keeps insisting that Darth Vader's line in Revenge of the Sith — ''If you're not with me, then you're my enemy,'' he hissed at Obi-Wan Kenobi — was never intended as a Bush-esque elocution. But try persuading Goyer. ''You'd have to be an idiot not to see the political allegory in the recent Star Wars trilogy,'' he says. ''I don't think it was thinly veiled at all.''
NEXT PAGE: Finding laughs in the war on terror
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