Film After Film. J. Hoberman

Ross (The Graduate) as his therapist, and Patrick Swayze (Dirty Dancing) as a demonic motivational speaker, the movie’s casting is both showy and inspired. Holmes Osborne is a sympathetically smooth and spineless Darko paterfamilias; Mary McDonnell, his wife, full of false cheer, carries hilarious intimations of early 1991 and the Gulf War, through her status as Stands With a Fist, Kevin Costner’s righteous mate in Dances With Wolves. But the movie rests on the hunched shoulders of its spaced-out protagonist. Jake Gyllenhaal refuses to make direct contact with the camera. Goofy, poignant, frozen and shambolic, he convincingly portrays Donnie’s eccentric genius—riffing on the sex life of the Smurfs, arguing with his science teacher on the nature of time travel. Gyllenhaal’s sidelong performance allows him to take spectacular delusion in stride—he tries to kill Frank when the rabbit appears in his malleable bathroom mirror, and hallucinates ectoplasm emanating from his father’s chest.

      Although the big influence on Kelly seemed to be Paul Thomas Anderson’s wildly ambitious and similarly apocalyptic Magnolia, released in time for the millennium, Donnie Darko is steeped in Reagan-era ’80s pop culture. The movie’s metaphysics are largely derived from Back to the Future, there’s a particularly strange and funny allusion to E.T., and in one of the most haunting scenes, Donnie and Gretchen watch Sam Raimi’s 1987 Evil Dead II in an empty theater. The sub-Toni Basil MTV-style routine performed by Donnie’s kid sister and her dance group, Sparkle Motion, is as lovingly choreographed as the soundtrack has been assembled.

      Premiered in January 2001 at Sundance, Donnie Darko received a mixed response. While Village Voice critic Amy Taubin praised it as her favorite film of the festival, others appeared to resent its ostentation (big stars and special effects) or complained about its hubristic shifts in register. No less than Donnie, the movie has its awkward moments. Kelly makes too much of Beth Grant’s uptight New Age gym teacher, and there are more than enough sinister cloud formations racing across the sky. But the writer-director has a surefooted sense of his own narrative, skillfully guiding the movie through its climactic Walpurgisnacht—or, should we say, carnival of souls.

      The events of September 11 rendered most movies inconsequential; the heartbreaking Donnie Darko, by contrast, felt weirdly consoling. Period piece though it is, Kelly’s high-school gothic was perfectly attuned to the present moment. A splendid debut under any circumstances, as released for Halloween 2001, it had an uncanny gravitas.3

      Donnie Darko was not a hit. By mid November, after weeks of US air strikes, Taliban fighters abandoned Kabul; on December 7 (the sixtieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor), Kandahar fell to the US-led coalition, although bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar eluded capture. Rushed into theaters in late December 2002, the great box-office beneficiary of what was called the new bellicosity (and another movie predicated on a fallen aircraft), Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down proved perfectly attuned to the present moment in its tone of aggrieved injury. Adapted from Mark Bowden’s best-selling minute by minute account of the Battle of the Bakara Market in Mogadishu, the worst incident in the ill-fated US humanitarian mission to Somalia and the most costly firefight to involve American troops since Vietnam, Black Hawk Down originally ended with a specific reference to 9/11. A print screened for select journalists in mid November 2001 had a closing crawl listing events that followed the Mogadishu mission that the movie depicts, ending with terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.4

      The events of September 11 allowed Americans to feel like victims and act like bullies—just like the hapless soldiers of the 1993 Somalia mission. (There were eighteen American casualties and more than ten times as many Somalis killed.) It’s difficult to construe Black Hawk Down as a pro-war movie, but to question its representation of us-versus-them is the next worst thing to being an American Taliban. My own less-than-enthusiastic review prompted an instant invitation to spar with cable TV’s preeminent right-wing gasbag, Bill O’Reilly. I declined.

      Rereading my review I’m not sure what prompted O’Reilly’s interest. It’s possible that he might have seen me as a useful foil against which he might praise the movie. I made no mention of the movie’s patriotic core of revealed truth, rather suggesting that “American soldiers don’t seem to know exactly what they doing here” and that Black Hawk Down was possibly “the most extravagantly aestheticized combat movie ever made,” which is to say—a movie. “Very little emotional capital is invested in the characters, and as the various choppers, tanks, and snipers converge in the bloody vortex of downtown Mogadishu, Black Hawk Down becomes pure sensation … Scott’s ambition is to trump Steven Spielberg’s D-Day landing and Francis Coppola’s aerial assault.” Although I made a closing reference to the film’s “racial color-coding,” others, notably New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell were blunter in accusing Scott of “glumly staged racism” in depicting the Somalis as “a pack of dark-skinned beasts.”

      Arnold Schwarzenegger’s long-awaited, well-advertised Collateral Damage succeeded Black Hawk Down as the nation’s premier (and most-protested) box-office attraction. Its release tastefully postponed after September 11, this once routine tale of an LA firefighter’s revenge on the Colombian terrorists who blew up his wife and child was reborn as an Event—endorsed by no less an authority than former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and subject to demonstrations a week before its opening.5

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      2002: THE WAR ON

       TERROR BEGINS

      NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 19, 2002

      An embarrassment on September 12, a patriotic vision five months later: Warner Bros. evidently began testing, and perhaps tweaking, the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Collateral Damage back in November, discovering, to no one’s surprise, that audiences were far more responsive to the scenario than before the terror attacks. (The intra-studio paper trail would doubtless provide a crash course in emergency marketing.) Thus the movie’s release version begins as if in the fiery heart of the World Trade Center holocaust, with Arnold and his fellow smoke-eaters saving lives. “Heads up—let’s do it!” the star cries, as if anticipating the signal for passenger rebellion given on the fourth hijacked plane, Let’s roll!

      One scene later, Arnold’s central-casting wife and son are vaporized before his eyes when a bomb detonates outside the Colombian consulate. Small by WTC standards, the explosion reportedly leaves nine dead and twenty-four injured, but it is more than sufficient to light the fuse of Arnold’s one-man war on the El Lobo terrorist cadre. Perhaps newly added to the film is the scene wherein the hooded guerrilla leader sends a videotape blaming “American war criminals” for provoking his group’s action. Even more key to the movie’s emotional thermostat is the Colombian leftist who openly sympathizes with the terrorists, using the US Army phrase “collateral damage” to rationalize Schwarzenegger’s dead family, thus prompting Arnold to redecorate the guy’s grungy headquarters with a baseball bat.

      In publicizing the movie, Schwarzenegger has claimed that Collateral Damage showcases his vulnerable side. True, he does have to fight mano-a-mano with a girl. (As usual, a signifier of revolutionary cadres is a heavy sprinkling of grim-faced warrior-women in their combat-fatigued ranks.) But, whether sprinting through the rainforest or digitally diving down a waterfall, Our Arnold is tough enough to wipe the smirk from beneath El Lobo’s mask. The revolutionaries’ quotes are largely from the Al Qaeda fakebook: “Americans hide behind family values … they have forgotten the reality of war, not like us.” This reality is apparent when the sadistic guerrillas prove their native cruelty by exotically forcing one of their own to swallow a live coral snake.

      Intermittently attempting to articulate a coherent argument, Collateral Damage shifts from pulse-pounding mode to something more migraine-conducive. It takes a sudden segue to fisticuffs and ear-chomping for the movie to escape from a tautological debate on moral equivalence between good vengeance and bad. (“You Americans are so naïve. You never ask, why does a peasant need a gun? You think you are the only ones to fight for your independence?” The non-sequitur riposte: “Independence to do what—kill women and children?”) Similarly, in the aftermath of Arnold’s single-handed decimation of the guerrilla camp, El Lobo asks the Fireman (as he is usually known) to explain the difference between them, prompting Arnold to ponderously elucidate, “I’m just going to