When Liberals Attack

Violent movies don't sell when the heroes are racked with guilt.

By Kyle Smith
Friday, September 28, 2007 12:01 a.m.

What has come over liberals? Suddenly they've turned bloodthirsty. And they're not just lobbing "Daily Show" coffee mugs or brandishing the rusty business end of their DEAN 2004 campaign pins. Liberals are locked, loaded and licensed to kill--at the movies.

The new Jodie Foster film, "The Brave One," is the latest in a string of left-wing Bush-era movies about violence. These films--which range from popcorn flicks (the "X-Men" series, "The Hills Have Eyes 2") to more ambitious works and Oscar nominees ("A History of Violence," "V for Vendetta," "Munich," "Blood Diamond")--so deeply entangle killing with liberal idealism, though, that at times their scripts are as muddled as EEOC directives or U.N. rules of engagement. For all of the critical acclaim that attended most of these films, few are as effective as "Dirty Harry" or "Death Wish."

In "The Brave One," for instance, possibly the first vigilante movie to feature a Sarah McLachlan soundtrack, a New York radio personality (Jodie Foster) specializes in monologues about the sounds of the city. She speaks with a maximum of NPR narcoleptic condescension, chewing each syllable of her airy drivel ("Are we going to have to construct an imaginary city to house our memories?") as if reading to a toddler out of "My First Book of Cultural Anthropology." Strangely, however, she is not the bad guy.

After her fiancé (apparently a Briton of Indian descent) gets killed when both of them are jumped by vicious white youths, Ms. Foster's character spends weeks in a coma. One of her first remarks when she wakes up is directed at some white cops: "You're the good guys. How come it doesn't feel like that?" Shattered, she helps regain her poise with the aid of a black cop (Terrence Howard) and a saintly black woman friend. Meanwhile, in addition to the murderous gang of white kids, another villain emerges: a white businessman who owns parking garages.

This is more a checklist than a plausible plot, particularly when Ms. Foster's character goes on a "Death Wish"-style rampage that requires the New York of 2007 to be portrayed as a place where you're liable to witness a shooting every time you walk into a deli for a pack of gum. Nevertheless, she takes action, sometimes in self-defense but also by launching a pre-emptive, non-U.N.-sanctioned war against big-city thuggery. Behind her she leaves a trail of surprised-looking corpses, the audience cheering each one.


How can this be, since liberals renounce violence, even when directed against antlered pests or convicted serial killers, and greeted Mayor Rudy Giuliani's crackdown on crime with, at best, sullen silence? The movie lets its heroine off the hook by implying that victim status has left her without control of herself, a notion she articulates with more NPR-speak ("inside you there is a stranger, one that has your arms, your legs, your eyes--a sleepless, restless stranger").

This paper's movie critic, Joe Morgenstern, derided that element as "modern-day Jekyll and Hydeism," but it dovetails with two favorite liberal habits: to follow the psychological chain of causation behind a crime so far back that responsibility disappears in a blurry landscape of greater evil, and to maintain a fig-leaf of deniability for lawless actions.

Two of the most highly acclaimed films of recent years are "The Bourne Ultimatum" and "A History of Violence," which received respective approval ratings of 97% and 94% from prominent, or "cream of the crop," critics polled on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.com ("Brokeback Mountain" managed only 90%). Both "Bourne" and "Violence" are built on Jekyll-and-Hydeism, with Hyde out for revenge against those who made him. National Review's Ross Douthat put it neatly, calling Jason Bourne, an amnesiac CIA assassin bent on destroying his trainers in the agency, "a John McClane that even Noam Chomsky can love . . . because Bourne himself resolves the great contradiction bedeviling the liberal action movie--namely, how do you make your hero a killing machine . . . without making him politically incorrect and illiberal along the way? The ingenious solution is to make Bourne an unwilling killing machine, a man whose body is a weapon that his amnesia-ridden mind doesn't understand, or even quite control." Scenes of a captive Bourne being hooded and waterboarded in intentionally dehumanizing training sessions also tickle one of the left's most accessible pleasure centers, the one marked Gitmo guilt.

Similarly, in "A History of Violence," the hero, a diner owner who calls himself Tom Stall, spends most of the movie seemingly unaware that he is actually a mob soldier named Joey Cusack. But when push comes to shoot, he is able to unearth his buried brutality and kill his gangster bosses. Critical acclaim for this formula mob drama centered on the guilt and malaise that suffuses its bloodbaths. "There's something undeniably exciting about Tom's heroic actions . . . but there is something irredeemable and soul-killing here, too," said New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, and the film hints that America itself is a kind of two-faced assassin. Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times called it "a tightly controlled film about an out-of-control situation: the predilection for violence in America." The film's Canadian director, David Cronenberg, noted the adoring New York Times, "is taking aim at this country, to be sure." High praise indeed.


You are only a little more likely to see a clearly pro-American film at theaters today than you would have been to see a pro-Stalin one in the 1950s. One exception is the new thriller "The Kingdom," about a terrorist bombing in Saudi Arabia, but even in that one the American hero is obliged to say he knows his country isn't perfect.

Left-wing talking points pop up in genre films, too. The X-Men saga, for example, is a thinly veiled plea for greater acceptance of gays, and the otherwise unremarkable horror flick "The Hills Have Eyes 2," in which a woefully underprepared National Guard unit wanders through the Southwestern desert while being jumped and mauled by bloodthirsty mutants (who are in turn a legacy of American nuclear testing in the region), is an allegory for the Iraq War, and maybe the war in Afghanistan as well.

The makers of these films must be disappointed, though, that audiences remain more interested in crisp revenge than messy guilt. Steven Spielberg's "Munich," for instance, which chastises Israel for retaliating against the Palestinians involved in the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, was completely misread by a character in this summer's hit comedy "Knocked Up," who was cheered by audiences when he said: "That movie was [star] Eric Bana kicking f--ing ass! In every movie with Jews, we're the ones getting killed. 'Munich' flips it on its ear. We're capping motherf--ers!" Americans made it clear which film they thought missed the point: In the U.S., "Knocked Up" earned more than three times as much at the box office as "Munich."