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Tapping into a perennial gripe of conservatives, Ross Douthat analyzes post-9/11 Hollywood:

The latter-day cowboys have conspicuously failed to materialize: in the past six years, the movie industry has produced exactly zero major motion pictures dedicated to lionizing American soldiers fighting on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Lest you think Douthat is about to embark on a flag-waving excoriation of Hollywood and its recent string of anti-war bombs, he instead focuses on the movies that are actually resounding box office successes...and their direct connection to a bygone era --- the 19-funky-70's:

We expected John Wayne; we got Jason Bourne instead.

The Bourne movies are the first major action franchise of the new millennium; they’re also the highest-grossing example of the revival of the paranoid style in American cinema.

Such “fear thy government” anxieties are always laced throughout American pop culture. But they belong most of all to the 1970s, when the one-two punch of Vietnam and Watergate sparked recurring visions of isolated Americans trapped in the gears of an irreducibly complex conspiracy...

Read the whole thing. Parallels to the '70s abound, well beyond war movies --- slasher flicks, zombies, vigilantes, dystopias. Douthat taps into something much larger than Hollywood's run-of-the-mill reflexive anti-American liberalism. Excellent, excellent piece.

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Except for its glaring omission of the 1980's hallmark of the arrogance of the military-industrial complex, the futility of nuclear deterrance, and post-apocolyptic survival among the inheritors of the Earth:

What is it with Paul Winfield and bugs?

Comments

[fretless]

This is exactly why i stopped going to movies. I've seen them all already anyway.

'cept, i probably will go see Iron Man today. :D