The Babysitters at Hollywood and Vine

Article posted Mon Jun 9 12:00:37 2003

Hollywood is not known for its bravery, but in the last few years it seems that the industry has gotten even more weak-willed and hypersensitive than ever. Hollywood marketing departments also have a long tradition of treating their filmgoing audiences like children. For example, they usually assume Americans can’t handle sad endings. For a remarkable example of this, compare the gritty, original, 1988 European version of the thriller The Vanishing to its limp, Hollywoodized 1992 U.S. version—by the same director, no less! And remember the mandate in the 1980s that most Saturday morning cartoons had to end on a “happy” tone? This resulted in the cast of Thundercats or Scooby-Doo laughing hysterically in unison to some contrived, unfunny event in the final scene. This was presumably done for the childrens’ benefit, though I can’t imagine it had any actual effect other than irritation.

Instead of appreciating Hollywood’s facile attempts to give audiences what they (they think) we want, the public often responds to films that buck the usual industry sensibilities. Smaller, lesser-known films are sought out specifically because they don’t have to conform to the Hollywood homogenization process by which content that may be daring or offensive or depressing is blunted or removed. A big part of the reason that breakout, grassroots hits (such as Blair Witch Project, Pulp Fiction, Bend It Like Beckham, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding) were celebrated so much was that they went against typical Hollywood conventions.

Hollywood goes out of its way to make sure it does not offend or isolate any of its audience. This is not, of course, borne from some genuine, sincere sensitivity but simply a financial issue: offended patrons don’t spend nine bucks apiece to see movies. There are exceptions, of course. Michael Moore’s acerbic and pointed film Bowling for Columbine actually won an Academy Award last year (due in part to a somewhat thin documentary competition). But for the most part, Hollywood treats its audiences like stupid, capricious, hypersensitive ninnies who can’t deal with even unintended references to tragic reality. It is, however, Hollywood that is populated with stupid, capricious, hypersensitive ninnies. A few recent examples:

Changed commercial artwork

• Print advertisements for the teen comedy What a Girl Wants originally featured a photograph of star Amanda Bynes wearing a tank top with an American flag on it and flashing the peace sign as she stands between two British royal guards. But Warner Bros., jittery that the peace sign would somehow be viewed as a political message during the war on Iraq, quickly changed some of the ads (the new version has Bynes with her right hand at her side).

• Advance posters for the blockbuster film Spider-Man were redone following the September 11 attacks. The original art showed the Twin Towers reflected in Spider-Man’s eyes. The image was brushed out and the posters reissued to avoid offending anyone who might be reminded that the World Trade Center towers were no longer there.

• For similar reasons, the New York edition of Daily Variety dropped the city’s trademark skyline from its logo days after September 11, 2001. Rather than show the new, actual skyline the image was scrapped altogether.

Delayed, altered, and shelved films and TV shows

• In late May 1999, the WB network pulled the second part of Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s season finale “out of sympathy and compassion” for the families of the Columbine High School shooting victims. It’s unclear what the sympathy and compassion had to do with it: the show featured violence in a high school, but by a giant, 60-foot serpent, not two students with guns.

• Phone Booth (starring Colin Farrell and directed by Joel Schumacher) was set to be released in November of 2002 but was delayed until April 2003 because of the Washington, D.C., sniper attacks. The film is about a sniper who threatens a Manhattan publicist in a phone booth, but clearly had nothing to do with the real-life sniper attacks. Director Schumacher said he felt that his film and the shootings were “such different cases” that he didn’t see the need to delay the film. “I mean, there are many serial killers that haven’t been caught. Should they not release Red Dragon?” Fox Studios disagreed, postponing the release.

• Trapped (starring Charlize Theron), about a kidnapping, had the bad luck to be slated for September of 2002, right around the time that national hysteria about child abductions was reaching a crescendo. The film appeared in the wake of the high-profile abductions of children such as Danielle van Dam, Samantha Runnion, and Jessica Cortez. (Despite all the hysteria and publicity, law enforcement statistics show that stranger abductions were actually on the decline in 2002, and have been falling every year since 1999.) The film was released with virtually no publicity or support, garnered mostly poor reviews, and quickly disappeared from theaters.

• Zoolander had a scene with the Manhattan skyline in the background; the Twin Towers were digitally edited out of the shot.

• Serendipity (starring John Cusack) also had an establishing shot of the Manhattan skyline, the scene was edited out.

• Collateral Damage (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger) was delayed because of concerns over scenes of terrorism in the film. The terrorism themes, however, had nothing to do with any real-life terrorist attacks.

• The Core (starring Hilary Swank and Stanley Tucci, directed by Jon Amiel) included a scene of a space shuttle crash-landing. One reporter for Entertainment Weekly asked Amiel about the scene. “Now the film arrives in the aftermath of the Columbia tragedy, and there’s a scene in which a space shuttle is forced to make an emergency landing in a Los Angeles riverbed.” Amiel’s response: “When the Columbia disaster happened, we thought seriously about what we should do. We finally felt that in our sequence, you not only see the crew surviving, but many other lives are saved by their heroism. We thought the sequence stood as a testament to what these guys do.”

Apparently the film’s artistic integrity, which is unaffected by external events and tragedies, is not a major reason to leave the film unchanged. The reasons must be couched in patriotic or heroic terms to be publicly acceptable. Sherry Lansing, head of Paramount Studios, even had to defend the film, saying that “We want to be very, very respectful. Nothing in the movie is like [the Columbia disaster].…Nobody dies, and there are no scenes of a shuttle being destroyed.”

• Big Trouble (starring Tim Allen and Rene Russo), a comedy, was delayed by Disney from its opening date due to scenes showing a bomb on board an airliner. (Of course, none of the terrorist attacks have involved a bomb detonating on an airplane.)

• Armageddon (starring Bruce Willis) was scheduled to air on the FX Network in early February 2003, but was abruptly removed following the Columbia shuttle accident. FX spokesman John Solberg released a statement saying that “In light of the tragedy, we felt it would be inappropriate to run the movie.” He did not explain why exactly that would be inappropriate.

Idiots in the Theaters

The problem is not that studios are insensitive to their audience’s sensibilities and opinions, it is exactly the opposite: they are far too sensitive. Admittedly, part of the problem is a tiny but vocal and thin-skinned group who occasionally complain about insensitivity in their entertainment. In one case of stupefying stupidity, an Albany, New York, Fox affiliate actually received complaints of insensitivity from viewers after airing a rerun of The Simpsons. In the episode “Lisa of Little Faith,” Bart builds a toy rocket and fires it into the air; it comes down and sets a building on fire. In light of the Columbia shuttle accident, this outrageous and inflammatory action, committed by an animated ten-year-old cartoon character, was apparently offensive enough to spark an upset phone call or two.

These are people with too much free time, and spend it looking for something to complain and protest about. If watching a cartoon that has a scene of a toy rocket falling from the sky offends you, the problem is not with The Simpsons or Fox television but with your head. There will always be a few of these people, but if studios and broadcasters are going to pander to the most easily offended among us, we will end up with material that only the dullest among us will enjoy.

Does any sensible person really think that film studios are trying to exploit the terrorist attacks by showing the Twin Towers in a poster? Or that Warner Brothers is trying making a political, anti-war statement with posters of a girl making a peace sign that were designed and printed months before the war started? Or that seeing images of the Twin Towers in films will reduce us to tears? We seem to have fallen through Alice’s looking glass into a land of make-believe.

The Bell Tolls Too Soon for Irony

Much of the current concern over sensitivity stems from a media myth that sprung up after the September 11, 2001, attacks that American tastes in entertainment would be forever changed and Americans would yearn for non-violent, wholesome family programming. Entertainment Weekly devoted much of its September 28, 2001, issue to, as the cover put it, “The challenge to our culture.” The magazine joined in the media chorus talking about the death of irony and the dramatic impact terrorism would have on nearly all facets of the entertainment industry. Jeff Gordinier wrote that “it’s hard to believe that we’ll ever see anything the same way.…it took only an instant of excruciating reality to render our old [entertainment] appetites moot, piddling, even nauseating.” The effect was so profound, Gordinier melodramatically wrote, that “the mere glimpse of a quippy sitcom was enough to induce a sour grind of physical revulsion.”

The magazine filled pages and pages with well-intentioned but mawkish commentary second-guessing America’s taste in entertainment——nearly all of which turned out to be overstated or flat-out wrong. Less than two months after the attacks, writers began backpedaling, noting that, “‘Nothing is ever going to be the same,’ showbiz experts intoned on Sept. 11, predicting that in a newly threatened and threatening world, pop-culture junkies would now avoid all things violent, dark, and cynical.” The article cited an online poll of over 20,000 people showing that 75 percent of the respondents said that their taste in films and television had in fact not changed in the two months since the attacks.

Susan Whiting, president of Nielsen Media Research Company, confirms that the “everything changed” myth just didn’t pan out. “All of the pundits who said this would happen were wrong. Shows like The Osbournes became wildly popular, along with shows like Fear Factor.” A look at the films released in the year following the attacks shows that the filmgoing public didn’t shy away from horror, violence, or even terrorism-themed entertainment. Geraldine Sealey, writing for ABC News on the anniversary of the attacks, confirmed that “we have not changed as drastically as many once imagined.” In fact, Sealey reports, fewer than a third of Americans said the terror attacks actually transformed the way they live.

The second-guessing continues. Two months ago, (April 11) Good Morning America’s Joel Siegel discussed the better turnout for comedies than action films. He wrote in his commentary that “Americans don’t want action. In wartime, movie-goers are turning to comedies.” (Maybe; or perhaps it’s which films happen to be out. He compared box office results for current comedies to the action films Basic and A Man Apart, both of which got poor reviews before the war on Iraq started. Here Siegel commits the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc: “after this, therefore because of it.”) As recently as the March 28, 2003, issue of Entertainment Weekly, showbiz writers were still questioning whether or not “American moviegoers still have an appetite for Hollywood-style destruction.” Myopic, hand-wringing writers and moralists aside, of course blowing big things up is entertaining; it always has been and it always will be. People all over the world like to see films with shootings, violence, and explosions. It’s human nature, and little affected by rare (but spectacular) tragedies.

Denying Reality by Closing Your Eyes

The media’s reaction to the absence of the Twin Towers serves as an excellent example of the futility of trying to comfort the public through pop culture. A myth emerged in Hollywood that something needed to be done about visual references to the World Trade Center. The myth seemed to have two, polar opposite theses: On one hand, the idea was that references to (and images of) the twin towers should be removed because they might remind audiences of the loss and tragedy connected with them. In this view, it is best to simply remove the image to avoid the association. This was done in TV show opening shots, the Spider-Man poster (mentioned earlier), and even newspaper and magazine banners.

On the other hand, thousands of images appeared specifically featuring the buildings (on hats, shirts, posters, collectibles, etc.), for the express purpose of reminding people that the towers were there. Spike Lee, in his film 25th Hour, included extended gratuitous scenes of the World Trade Center site. Lee seems to just assume that extended shots of Ground Zero (and the Twin Towers columns of lights) will speak for themselves, but it’s cheaply-bought weight and often seemed extraneous (the novel and screenplay were written before the September 11 attacks). The scenes appeared, apparently, just to make sure that everyone knows that Spike Lee (like New Yorkers and all Americans) was affected by the attacks and that the city had changed. Thanks, Spike; we hadn’t heard.

The Twin Towers, as symbols of freedom, New York City, or America, meant anything and everything to Americans, and their image (or lack thereof) served as Rorshach blots. For some the towers were symbols of tragedy; for others they were hope, patriotism, defiance, defeat, Apocalypse, or unity. There was no consensus on the right thing to do, the right interpretation to embrace. Rather than just leave things as they were, people scrambled to add (or remove) images of the Twin Towers, justifying their decisions based on some unexplained, arbitrary patriotism or sympathy.

Idiots in Studios

Filmmakers and studios tend to be scared to take a position on retaining a scene that may cause even the faintest imaginable whiff of unease or protest. In an interview with Jeff Jensen in the March 28, 2003, Entertainment Weekly, Jon Amiel, who directed the disaster movie The Core, partially justified keeping in a scene of the space shuttle crash-landing by suggesting that NASA said it was okay. “NASA made it very clear [that] their show would go on. We felt our show needed to as well.” I’m not sure that the importance of continuing NASA’s space shuttle program is comparable to that of the production of The Core.

Some studios try to justify their schedule changes because they feel that “people don’t want to see real-life tragedies in the movies.” This is absurd, and not borne out in reality. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, moviegoers returned to theaters as they had before. Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations, said that, the week after September 11, “There was a great amount of fear and apprehension about how the box office would shake up, but it appears there was no negative effect.”

As I discussed earlier, other media “experts” came out from behind their computers and proclaimed the opposite: that Americans would not have an appetite for anything non-serious, because everything else had been trivialized by the attacks. Many predicted that the ratings for “fluff entertainment” and stupid reality TV would plummet; instead it returned to levels that were just as high as before the attacks. Two years later, as I write this (and just after attacking Iraq), glitz like American Idol and Fear Factor are soaring in the ratings.

There are some brazen exceptions to the notoriously skittish Hollywood dump-or-delay mentality. One example was The Sum of All Fears (showing America being attacked by a terrorist’s nuclear bomb) which went ahead with its release date. Though it garnered mediocre reviews, I don’t recall any protests claiming the film was insensitive or audiences threatening lawsuits because the film re-traumatized them. Far from audiences shying away, as Gillian Flynn, wrote in the June 14 issue of Entertainment Weekly, it “seems audiences still have a taste for mass destruction. Even with terrorists nuking a Baltimore football stadium, the Tom Clancy thriller added up to a $31.2 million number one opening weekend.”

Still, star Ben Affleck felt he had to defend the decision to go ahead with the release. Affleck, presumably with a straight face, claimed that the film was released on schedule essentially as a public service: “As a cautionary tale, the idea is to make it disturbing, to raise awareness about nuclear proliferation.”

Bloated Self-Importance

There is another, more subtle reason all this entertainment shuffling is distasteful: It reveals Hollywood’s grossly inflated sense of importance to our lives. As providers of entertainment, they also somehow feel that they must coddle us in our times of need, keep bad images away from us, and make sure that our delicate sensibilities aren’t offended by something they might accidentally show us.

Joel Stein, in an Entertainment Weekly column on April 4, 2003, discussed why he “was bothered by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ decision, in deference to the war, to abandon the traditional red-carpet entrances at the Oscars.” The decision, he says, “has all the fake humility and overinflated self-importance that makes everyone hate the movie industry.” That same fake humility and overinflated self-importance is evident in Hollywood’s attempts to avoid offending us.

I’ve got news for you, Hollywood: We are not going to break down and cry because we see a space shuttle crash-landing in a movie. We are not going to think that you support terrorism if you leave up images of a peace sign in ads for a forgettable bubblegum teen comedy. We are not going to storm out of theaters or boycott your studios for some imagined insensitivity.

Don’t try and second-guess what we want to see; put it out there, and, as always, if we like it we will go and if we don’t, we won’t. Despite what you tell yourselves, and what your bank accounts say, you are not so important to Americans that we look to you and your entertainment for emotional guidance in times of crisis. Get over yourselves.

Parts of this article will appear in my forthcoming book Media Mythmakers: How Journalists, Activists, and Advertisers Mislead Us, due out in July from Prometheus Books.