The
Hollywood Economist
The numbers behind the industry.
Why Businessmen Wear Black Hats
In the new Warner Bros. political
thriller, Syriana, the villain is not al Qaeda,
an enemy state, the mafia, or even a psychotic serial killer.
Rather, it’s the big oil companies who manipulate
terrorism, wars, and social unrest to drive up oil prices
(which have risen almost as much as movie ticket prices
have in the last 10 years). One doesn’t need to look
far to discover that the root-of-evil corporate villain
is hardly atypical of post-Cold War Hollywood.
Consider,
for example, Paramount’s 2004 remake of the 1962 classic,
The Manchurian Candidate. In the original, directed
by John Frankenheimer, the villain-behind-the-villain is
the Soviet Union, whose nefarious agents, with the help
of the Chinese Communists, abduct an American soldier in
Korea and turn him into a sleeper assassin. In the new version,
the military abduction is transposed from Korea in 1950
to Kuwait in 1991, and the defunct Soviet Union is replaced
as the resident evil. The new villain is—you guessed
it—the Manchurian Global Corporation, an American
company loosely modeled on the Halliburton Corporation.
As the director, Jonathan Demme, explains in his DVD commentary,
he avoided making the Iraqi forces of Saddam Hussein (who
the US was battling in the timeframe of the movie) the replacement
villain, because he did not want to “negatively stereotype”
Muslims. Not only were neither Saddam Hussein nor Iraq mentioned
in a film about the Iraq-Kuwait war, but the Manchurian
corporation’s technicians rewire the brains of the
abducted US soldiers with false memories of al-Qaeda-type
jihadists so that they will lay the blame for their terrorist
acts on an innocent Muslim jihadist.
Why
don’t the movies have plausible, real world villains
anymore? One reason is that a plethora of stereotype-sensitive
advocacy groups, representing everyone from hyphenated ethnic
minorities and physically handicapped people to Army and
CIA veterans, now maintain a liaison in Hollywood to protect
their image. The studios themselves often have an “outreach
program” in which executives are assigned to review
scripts and characters with representatives from these groups,
evaluate their complaints, and attempt to avoid potential
brouhahas.
Finding evil villains is not as easy as it was in the days
when a director could choose among Nazis, Communists, KGB,
and Mafiosos. Still, in a pinch, these old enemies will
serve. For example, the 2002 apocalyptic thriller Sum
of All Fears, based on the Tom Clancy novel, originally
had Muslim extremists exploding a nuclear bomb in Baltimore.
Paramount
decided, however, to change the villains to Nazis residing
in South Africa to avoid offending Arab-American and Islamic
groups. Yet, even if aging Nazis lack any credible “outreach
program” in Hollywood, no longer can they be creditably
fit into many contemporary movies. “The list [of non-offensive
villains] narrows quickly once you get past the tired clichés
of Nazis,” a top talent agency executive pointed out
in an e-mail. “You'd be surprised at how short the
list is.”
For sci-fi and horror movies, there are always invaders
from alien universes and zombies from another dimension,
but for politico-thrillers the safest remaining characters
are lily-white, impeccably dressed American corporate executives.
They are especially useful as evildoers in foreign-based
thrillers since their demonization does not run the risk
of gratuitously offending officials in countries either
hosting the filming or supplying tax or production subsidies.
The “Mission Impossible” franchise replaced
the Russian and Chinese heavies that populated the TV series
with, in Mission Impossible 2, a Waspish-looking
financier who controlled a pharmaceutical company that unleashed
a horrific virus on the world in the hope of cashing in
on the antidote. Here, as in other movies in this genre,
businessmen’s killings are not just figurative. Unlike
other stereotype-challenged groups, CEOs and financiers,
lacking a connection with the studios’ outreach programs,
have become an essential part of Hollywood’s new version
of the axis of evil.
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