The following contains exerpts from an artical written by Andrew Klavan which seems to succinctly sum up the problem with Hollywood. The author makes some really good points which puts into words what most of us feel. You can find the entire article at :
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_urb-war.html
The Lost Art of War
Hollywood’s anti-American war films don’t measure up to the glories of its patriotic era.
In Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), John Wayne’s Sergeant Stryker (center) must steep himself in violence, and make physical and spiritual sacrifices, to defend civilization.Hollywood has gone back to war. And this time, it’s appalling. All autumn long, the film industry released movies about America’s battle against global jihad. With one exception—the competent actioner The Kingdom—each of these movies distorted an urgent, ongoing historical enterprise through the lens of a filmmaker’s unthinking leftism. Redacted, Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, and Lions for Lambs characterize our soldiers and government agents as rapists, madmen, murderers, torturers of the innocent, or simply victims caught up in a venal and bloodthirsty American foreign policy. All this at the very moment when our real-life soldiers and agents are risking, and sometimes losing, their lives fighting the most hateful and cancerous worldview since Nazism.
But I guess that’s showbiz.
Needless to say, it wasn’t always thus. During World War II, Hollywood stars like James Stewart and directors like Frank Capra enlisted in the military to combat dictators as willingly as Sean Penn and Michael Moore now tootle down to Venezuela and Cuba to embrace them. More to the point, yesteryear’s studio heads—many of them conservative Republicans—worked in cooperation with a Democratic administration to produce top-notch entertainment supporting the war effort. The result was not only rousing combat tales like 1943’s Sahara, Bataan, and Action in the North Atlantic—all still watchable today—but also some of the finest motion pictures ever made: 1942’s Casablanca and Mrs. Miniver, for instance, and the terrific yet all-but-forgotten They Were Expendable (1945). It was one of the film industry’s finest hours.
Much has changed in Hollywood since then. The fall of the business-driven studio system has freed creative types to make more personal films, just as the internationalization of markets and multiple methods of distribution protect them from the financial consequences of alienating the nation’s mainstream. If their anti-American labor of love bombs in Peoria, their investors will probably still make their money back in Europe and on the DVDs....
Liberals often argue that in criticizing American actions and culture, artists are actually defending American principles by holding the nation to its own standards. That argument would make sense in an atmosphere of contending visions that showed both America’s greatness and its imperfections. But when the arts purvey only a consistently anti-patriotic and anti-military message, it seems clear that they have in fact detached the ethos from the country that embodies it. In doing so, American artists are adopting European-style cosmopolitanism, which leaves them virtually incapable of depicting warriors as heroes. “International society has ideas to defend—ideas of universal justice—but little actual ground,” the political thinker Robert Kaplan wrote recently. “And without ground to defend, it has little need of heroes.”.....
Despite its virtually perfect cast, 1998’s Saving Private Ryan is no classic. It is marred by two of director Steven Spielberg’s most prominent traits: sentimentalism and a tendency to turn characters into archetypes. These (related) traits served the director well in great films like Jaws, E.T., and Raiders of the Lost Ark. But they render even his most-lauded historical epics mawkish and intellectually shallow.
Still, Ryan is an important war movie for two reasons. First, Spielberg is, as Jaws author Peter Benchley once bitchily remarked, the nation’s “greatest second-unit director”—that is, the guy assigned by the chief director to handle action scenes. Ryan opens with a D-day sequence that is epoch-making in its realism, rendering every battle scene before it obsolete and every one after it derivative.
Second, the movie is a sincere attempt by a great post-Vietnam director to recapture the American argument for the warrior. After the invasion sequence, the film goes through the usual scenes of dehumanizing combat—including, as in Sands of Iwo Jima, the one in which the men have to remain in hiding while their wounded comrade dies. But each scene is soon followed by another showing why the brutal warrior attitude makes sense under the circumstances: a German soldier mercifully left alive returns to wreak havoc; a child taken in out of tenderness nearly gets everyone killed. There are no self-serious patriots here, only businesslike citizen soldiers doing what has to be done. The final sweeping pan up from a field of soldiers’ graves to a fluttering American flag makes it clear: these soldiers fought and died not as the instrument of princes but as free men defending a nation that was an extension of themselves.
Here, as in the war movies of the 1940s and ’50s, American values are embodied in the men who fight for them. The American way is most effectively dramatized in the person of Captain John Miller, through Tom Hanks’s awe-inspiring genius for communicating the complexities of decency. A former schoolteacher, Miller suppresses his gentler peacetime character and forces himself into the role of warrior with discipline and self-knowledge. In direct contrast with the Nazi foe, he leads not through militaristic worship of rank but by example and simple worth. He is the exemplar of the Democratic Man.
Shot down in battle, Miller whispers his last words to the rescued Private Ryan: “Earn this. Earn it.” The words touch off the film’s embarrassingly maudlin final sequence, in which an older Ryan, representing all America, weeps at Miller’s grave, wondering if he’s been good enough to have earned his salvation.
As ham-handed as Ryan’s moral lesson may be, it also seems irrefutable. The warrior’s sacrifice finds its purpose in the defense of the nation, and the nation, in turn, owes him glorious memory and the preservation of the values for which it stands.
Perhaps, if the post–cold war peace had lasted longer, this thought would have become more acceptable to our artistic elite. Black Hawk Down, a movie of martial valor, though released after 9/11, was in the pipeline beforehand; perhaps it would have become part of a larger movement. In time, American artists and intellectuals might have felt secure enough to wonder if European aversion to the nation was merely a symptom of a civilization on the wane, irrelevant to us. Perhaps even Vietnam would have begun to seem, not an ill-advised European-style colonial venture, but, like Bataan, a lost battle in a larger ethical struggle. It don’t matter where a man dies, as long as he dies for freedom.
But, of course, the peace didn’t last. With 9/11 violently awaking us to the fact of ongoing global jihad, real war came again. And not merely war, but a war that made nonsense out of cherished cosmopolitan left-wing doctrines like multiculturalism and moral relativism. Rather than face the obvious failures of their philosophy, intellectual and creative elites retreated into their present high-sounding but secretly selfish antinational moralizing......
Locked in an echo chamber of fashionable leftism, our filmmakers have lost the ability to question those discredited assumptions. Only in fantasy war films—films like Spielberg’s undervalued War of the Worlds, Michael Bay’s amusing Transformers, or Peter Jackson’s wonderful Lord of the Rings trilogy—does the truth of our present situation emerge. Here, filmmakers don’t have to confront the deathblow that radical Islam deals to the logic of leftist ideology. They can portray evil without giving it a human face and affirm our values without paying too particular a tribute to the nation in which those values become flesh. The warrior’s sacrifice makes sense again, martial virtues can be openly honored, and those who protect us are given back their glory.
That glory, however, is not the stuff of fantasy alone. The threat of global jihad is all too real, and the stakes are all too high. Liberty, tolerance, the harmony of conflicting voices—these things didn’t materialize suddenly out of the glowing heart of human decency. People thought of them, fought and died to establish them, not in the ether, but on solid ground. That ground has to be defended or the values themselves will die. The warriors willing to do this difficult work deserve to have their heroism acknowledged in our living thoughts and through our living arts. We should hear their voices every day, saying: Earn this. Earn it.