Cultural explorations with axe-wielding maniacs around the world

In an alarming bit of culture blindness, I've only just recently taken a good look at the general thematics of American cinema.

Let me say it clear. I was born abroad, in Belfast, and while I consider myself a child of two cultures there's always been a certain ability to keep a critical eye on both. I love both my homes, and I also hope that I'm not so in love that I can't discuss their flaws intelligently (and with a minimum of double negatives).

So it was to my abject shock that a group of other screenwriters were discussing which horrible crime against celluloid they loved more, Olympus Has Fallen or White House Down, that I realized I was actually really color blind when it came to the language of American film.

Hell, I can analyze film on a cultural level. Irish film is the result of not owning your own stuff for generations. Even the comedies are bleak and depressing, like A Film With Me In It. Even Dylan Moran, Ireland's finest comedy export, can't keep this from being an awful date movie. And yes, I first saw it with a young lady of recent acquaintance. That went well.

Don't get me wrong, it's a well-made film and if you like your comedy dark, this is the very bottom of that particular pit. But it takes a very certain kind of person to wring the laughs out of it.

Anyway, cinema of the world. Japan, having had a mandate that they were unbeatable in major conflict (and if you staved off a joint invasion of Koreans and Mongols, you'd probably feel the same way), had a bit of a national identity crisis after World War II. Through the 80s, you could see the vast majority of their film as a reinterpretation of their role in that war as they sought to reconcile reality with the legend they had lived under.

British film; obsessed with the class system to this day. What they produce that isn't about living in a manor or the modern interpretation of such is very introverted, very inward-focused. Great Britain had an empire and a rather embarrassing period of religious warfare, they're quite content with a mature exploration of where they are right this moment as a society.

Korean film, while often impressive lately (see The Man From Nowhere for a bleak, violent action film or The Good, The Bad, The Weird for a brainless popcorn... Asian western), still seems determined to portray the Japanese as greedy, stupid, and easily defeatable. You'd think it was some national mandate that this point be made at least once an hour.

So yes, imagine how it felt to flop face-first into this discussion and realize that I had the cultural blinders on, keeping me from connecting the dots from the two above-mentioned White House under siege films, the recent Red Dawn retread, back to virtually anything by Michael Bay; American cinema, as often as not, is fanfiction written by the secretary of defense.

Hell, for the gamers out there, let's not even touch what Call of Duty says about us. The latest one involves all of South America ganging together to invade the US and a dog bringing down an attack helicopter. I am not kidding, nor am I high.

I think the basic message of these films, beyond what the writers and directors intend to say, is that our national identity is kind of fucked. It's fairly obvious that we've been pining for an enemy as great as the Germans in WWII, fueled by an economy that has been glad to pump money into the military-industrial complex but as little as possible into the civic infrastructure. We could stop and regret that, or analyze it, but that's a pretty tough pill to swallow and as far as we keep telling ourselves, films are about escapism.

Well, no, they're about whatever we damn well want them to be. I'll not argue against escapism, I recently saw The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (which I shall review shortly) and loved it, as fluffy and inconsequential as it was. I'm not even going to defy "America under siege" as an automatically shit concept, but the current attempts at the genre read as a beast that knows it's dying and is determined to find it off with sheer wrong-mindedness, like a mad old elephant. Point is, it's telling that we have the chance to use a medium to dissect these things, to look for identity and answers in an uncertain world, but mostly we use it as a fantasy that someday, some worthy enemy will attack us and justify the fact that we have brain-powered smart rockets or whatever.

This is all broad strokes, obviously. There are certainly exceptionally thoughtful pieces out there, I do know that, but when speaking in trends, well, I believe this is plainly the way it is.