Hollywood as therapy for 9/11?
First watch this (if you’ve seen it already, watch again) : this is the trailer for 300, a new movie where 300 Spartans fight against 100 000 Persians…
“They came from the blackness”…”thousand nations of the Persian empire descend upon you”.. “Sparta will burn to the ground…”.
We are under attack.
“Ask yourself, what should a free man do ?”.. “We will stand and fight”…”A new age has begun, an age of freedom”.
The Persian Empire… Irak is the former Persia…
“Thousand nations” : Kurds, Shiites, Sunnites.. It all seems so transposable. As if Hollywood was looking for an allegory of modern times.
“Tonight we dine in hell”…
I have a theory : since 9/11, Hollywood is trying to help us overcome the trauma. A lot of movies seem to relate to the situation in Middle east. Only this time, the good guys prevail. In therapy, it would be called “reliving traumatic experiences”.
Let me take a few other examples :
1/ “Superman returns”.
Superman, who has been out for some vacation in space, suddenly decides to return to save us from evil.
First, Superman prevents a plane to crash into the city.. If only a super-guy or two had been there on 9/11.
Lex Luthor, the bad guy, wants to destroy America with his bizarre weapon… that creates things that look a hell of a lot like ground Zero.
Superman lifts up the damn thing from the ocean, and (achtung spoiler) sends it away into space… Or how to get rid of our nightmares.
Dump them into orbit.
2/ Kingdom of heaven
This one is really obvious. The Arabs took Jerusalem so we need to go for a crusade.
And the bad guys.. they sort of look like Talibans, don’t you think?
3/ Alexandre :
A white hero fights the oriental bad guys.
Alexander is the only Western king who conquered the whole middle east and established his capital in … Babylon. Babylon is in Irak.
But it started well before…Remember Star Wars Episode I, when the emperor escapes from the cave on a flying bike ? That’s Mollah Omar fleeing away on his scooter…
