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CHAPTER NINE

2003: INVADING IRAQ

The winter of 2003 was the run-up to the Iraq War—its beginning was protested, to no avail, by hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers marching in the streets.

On March 14, George W. Bush made a televised speech to the nation maintaining that “intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” War came on March 21, two days before Oscar Night. Continuing a trend that began during the Clinton presidency, movie stars had come to serve the Democrats as talk radio personalities served the Republicans. Political dissidence was a matter of celebrity.

Titled “When Doves Cry,” the following article was the Village Voice cover story for the issue of March 25.

NEW YORK, MARCH 25, 2003

A cast of Bill Clinton’s cronies, a vaunted 1 billion viewers in 150 countries: there were some who imagined that Oscar Night ’03 might be the most widely seen peace demonstration ever beamed into the universe.

As the Desert Storm sequel drew nigh, the right-wing media shifted their enemies of choice from those The Simpsons calls “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” to bigmouth movie stars. Could Shock and Awe really be upstaged by Stupefaction and Narcissism? The New York Post suggested that the Academy Awards be canceled. Meanwhile, the Internet crackled with reports that activists like Susan Sarandon and Martin Sheen were on a blacklist and that acceptance speeches would be monitored for political content. Insiders warned a UK daily that failure to award Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature would be proof that Hollywood had reverted to “the witch-hunting 1950s.”

What was appropriate—and what should people wear? The group Artists United to Win Without War was handing out green peace buttons; other members of the Academy sported a more abstract silver squiggle apparently meant to represent a dove. Monitoring the stars’ entrance on the foreshortened red carpet from her E! Channel aerie, fashion arbiter Joan Rivers wondered what they meant. “Peace,” her daughter explained. “Every idiot in the world wants peace,” Joan snorted, suggesting that the morning after, the pins will wind up for sale on eBay. But what the buttons and squiggles really meant was that, for those of us who cared, the stars were making a statement—or not.

The Hollywood left had devolved to this. But then, the movies encourage semiotic readings. The green semaphore seemed more radical, if less chic, than the silver squiggle. It was less surprising to spot a green button affixed to the lapel of Michael Moore’s tuxedo than Harvey Weinstein’s. Salma Hayek, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Adrien Brody all wore the squiggle but not their fellow nominees Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep (although it had been reported they would). Presenter Richard Gere was besquiggled, surprise loser Martin Scorsese not. Susan Sarandon sauntered confidently out with her pin and held up two fingers in a goddessy peace sign. A shell-shocked-looking Barbra Streisand was unsquiggled, although she did make a statement in praise of protest music. There were some who devised other accessories—Matthew McConaughey’s lapel had sprouted a peculiar mélange of red, white, and blue flowers—but only Jon Voight seemed to be wearing an American flag pin.

Where were movieland’s macho men? Who would defend Bush’s war? Mel Gibson, Charlton Heston, Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger all seemed conspicuous by their absence. Had they driven their Humvees into lockdown? Were they stockpiling Poland Spring and boycotting the hippie love-in? Was it the hall? The Kodak Theater’s outsize, quasi-pagan Oscar statues and the Babylonian deco splendor had the look of an Iraqi presidential palace. Had the terrorists won? There was an elephant in the room, but it wasn’t Republican.

“What is a movie star?” Oscar host Steve Martin riffed. “They can be thin or skinny. They can be Democrats or … skinny.” Throughout his presidency, Bill Clinton was identified with a “cultural elite” as personified by his Hollywood cronies Steven Spielberg and Barbra Streisand; when he ran for re-election, Variety calculated political contributions from the fabulous 90210 zip code went Democrat by more than two to one.

Clinton and Hollywood were one. The president befriended, co-opted, and ultimately hid behind movieland activists. They responded by imagining his better self. One prime Clintonian legacy was the virtuous virtual presidency of Martin Sheen (perhaps to be embodied by the actual Howard Dean, the Vermont governor who, as an anti-war candidate, was briefly the Democratic frontrunner). The Clinton saga—as well as the histories of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the Hollywood Democratic Committee, not to mention the 1968 McCarthy and 1972 McGovern campaigns—suggest that stars excel as fundraisers and campaign surrogates. Under the current Bush regime, Hollywood actors have filled a vacuum. They are themselves stand-ins without a star. The silence of elected officials combined with the exegeses of entertainment news insured that Martin Sheen and Jessica Lange, George Clooney and Janeane Garofalo would be drafted as media spokespeople to speak in opposition to Bush’s war.

The Oscar producers were scarcely unaware of Hollywood’s current role as America’s most visible opposition. Nor did they negate it. The organizers minimized wartime hoopla; the evening’s genial host never once waved the flag. Still, his deflationary razzing of the stars in attendance served to dampen their self-importance. Did they really have the right to an opinion? The anti-war remarks seemed subtle and tentative—albeit still more outspoken than those of equivocating Senate Democrats. Mexican, Irish, and Spanish presenters and recipients were far less ambiguous in their comments on the war than their American counterparts. (Of the fifty-nine Oscar winners assembled, only four—Sarandon, Day-Lewis, Anjelica Huston, and Ben Kingsley—wore the silver squiggle, and only two are American.)

The tension was palpable when arch provocateur Michael Moore advanced to the stage. But the enthusiastic standing ovation faded to silence and turned to boos when the filmmaker broke the frame by invoking the “fictitious” 2000 election and questioning Bush’s “war for fictitious reasons.” Moore succeeded in using the Oscars to reach the billion-person viewing audience. But despite his well-prepared statement, the filmmaker was not to be the evening’s hero. The Oscars are, before anything else, the industry’s main way to feel good about itself.

Would this embarrassment be the evening’s moment to remember? There was no John Wayne on hand to shoot down the obstreperous Moore. As if on cue, Jack Valenti wandered out, too stunned or clueless to defend the honor of the Bush administration. Hollywood saved itself when, in a performance worthy of a second Oscar, Adrien Brody stopped the show. The surprise Best Actor winner had the youthful energy to expend ten precious seconds and who knows how much bodily fluid kissing Halle Berry and the presence of mind to express his gratitude to the Academy, thank his mother (photographer Sylvia Plachy), and—silencing the band—cite the war, enact anguish, and invoke Allah. He even wound up by naming a childhood friend who was an actual American combatant in Kuwait.

It was only then that Academy president Frank Pierson could, speaking like the fictitious president, extend an offer of peace to the Iraqi people, who were even then being bombed, a mere flick of the remote away.

In the early hours of April 2, CNN broke the story that US Army Rangers and Navy Seals had stormed Saddam Hospital in Nasiriya and rescued a prisoner of war, Private Jessica Lynch, a nineteen-year-old army maintenance worker captured in an Iraqi ambush on March 23. That morning, newscasts and newspapers put forth a picture of Pvt. Lynch on a stretcher, sheltered by a folded American flag, and it was reported that she had sustained at least one gunshot wound in her battle with Iraqi soldiers. April 3, the Washington Post ran a front-page story headlined “She Was Fighting to the Death” that, citing unnamed government officials, suggested that Lynch was a veritable teenaged Rambo who “fought fiercely” and sustained multiple gunshot and stab wounds. “Hollywood could not have dreamed up a more singular tale,” per the April 14 issue of Time. Almost immediately, NBC announced plans for a made-for-TV movie to be called Saving Private Lynch.1

The Saving Private Lynch scenario dominated US war coverage even after Baghdad fell on April 9—symbolized by the rigorously staged and tightly framed toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in the city’s main square, an event that was made for TV and routinely compared to the fall of the Berlin Wall. (“Lights! Camera! Combat! Iraq Passes Its Screen Test,” per weekly Variety’s April 14 front page: “Viewed as showbiz, the Iraq war was a winner, as expertly executed as it was scripted.”) On May 1, in a photo op seemingly inspired by the 1986 movie Top Gun, George W. Bush piloted a Navy S-3B Viking onto the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and, standing in a flight jacket before a banner reading MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, declared victory: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” Soon afterward, US toy companies were manufacturing twelve-inch action figures of the president in a flight suit, some labeled “Top Gun.”2

As the Events of 9/11 deranged the 2001 Toronto Film Festival, so the war in Iraq was a tangible presence at the next international film festival I attended.

CANNES, MAY 30, 2003

The appropriate Hollywood ending for the 2003 Cannes Film Festival would have been a Palme d’Or garland for Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River. Directed by a seventy-three-year-old legend, rhapsodically received by French and American auteurists alike, this character-driven crime thriller offered an opportunity to end a lackluster festival with a burst of manufactured glamour.

Even more interesting, a winning Mystic River—which, like many of Eastwood’s movies, can be read as a meditation on lone-wolf, vigilante justice—would have provided a suitably ambiguous conclusion for the much discussed Franco-American tensions that, as explicated in the pages of Variety and the leftish French daily Libération, provided this festival with its particular narrative. Instead, the jury (evidently as unhappy with the quality of the competition films as the press) opted for Gus Van Sant’s Elephant—a poetic evocation of a Columbine-like American high school shooting that was attacked by Variety’s Todd McCarthy as “pointless at best and irresponsible at worst,” but that proved markedly more popular with French critics than Americans.

Elephant, though stronger on formal values and surface tension than social context or psychological analysis, was scarcely the least movie that the jury, headed by French director Patrice Chéreau and including Americans Steven Soderbergh and Meg Ryan, might have decorated. Strictly in terms of passion, originality, and sustained cinematic chutzpah, however, Lars von Trier’s allegory Dogville towered over the competition. Still, speaking of unpopular foreign entanglements, the most topical and perhaps the most universally admired movie in Cannes’ official section was Errol Morris’s The Fog of War—a documentary portrait, shown out of competition, of former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Culled from over twenty hours of interviews, annotated with archival footage and declassified White House tapes, scored to Philip Glass’s now axiomatic angst-drone, the movie allows the still-formidable octogenarian to reveal what he was taught by the Cuban missile crisis (“we came that close—that close!—to war”) and to detail his lesser-known experiences as contributor to the World War II firebombing of Japan and later, pioneer of the automobile seat belt.

Once upon a time, McNamara personified the military industrial complex. A stellar technocrat and a brilliant efficiency expert, this so-called walking IBM machine went from running the giant Ford Motor Company (the first non-family member to do so) to administering the even more colossal US Defense Department (where he was similarly credited with putting the Pentagon under civilian control).

The young McNamara was the most iconic of Kennedy’s New Frontiersmen. His bulldog look—slicked-back hair, rimless glasses—and arrogant pugnacity made him a star. Four decades before Donald Rumsfeld, McNamara invented his successor’s steely smile and jaunty certitude, which is only one reason why The Fog of War is almost ridiculously relevant. Vietnam is the war that remains to be resolved. Senator John Kerry, the leading Democratic challenger to George W. Bush, established his integrity as a decorated and wounded Vietnam vet who became an outspoken—and consequently vilified—opponent of the war. Bush, on the other hand, used his family privilege to secure alternate service in the National Guard and then dodged even that when it proved inconvenient.

Distressingly, Morris generally allows McNamara to put his own spin on the Vietnam War. Following a line advanced by Oliver Stone among others, McNamara suggests that Kennedy was waiting until after the 1964 election in order to disengage from South Vietnam and blames Lyndon Johnson for the debacle. But Johnson’s White House tapes—which is to say, the phone calls that he bugged for posterity and which were released in 1997—tell a different story. In one of the first, made six months after Johnson became president, McNamara invokes the verdict of history in warning his new boss that the US can’t allow itself to be “pushed out of Vietnam.” That summer, the exaggerated and bungled Gulf of Tonkin “incident,” which The Fog of War acknowledges without pressing McNamara on his long years of dissembling about it, served to stampede the Congress into supporting Johnson’s policy.3

While McNamara several times broaches the subject of war crimes and appears prepared to re-examine his own mistakes, he’s remarkably unwilling to accept any personal responsibility. If McNamara does not come across as a grandstanding prevaricator like Henry Kissinger, one may still well wonder how so brilliant a man can claim to have been ignorant of certain historical dynamics (the antipathy between Vietnam and China, for example) readily available to any moderately aware high school student in 1966. On the other hand, one may also be amazed to hear the octogenarian powerhouse suddenly launch into a criticism of US unilateralism. Curiously, that aside seemed to resonate more positively with American than foreign critics.

A skeptical review in Le Monde accused Morris of demonstrating too much sympathy for the devil. More than providing the satanic former secretary with an all-to-human face however, The Fog of War offers additional evidence that the road to hell—or at least, the way to Dogville—is paved with good intentions.

Opening as it did in many American cities on the same December weekend as The Return of the King, pundits might have been pardoned for subtitling Morris’s movie, “Robert McNamara and the Ring of Power”—particularly as the wrinkled and bony former Secretary of Defense appeared as a sort of animated, Gollumized husk of his younger self. Although clearly and profoundly corrupted by power, McNamara was the only senior American official to ever admit to an error under the coercion of his own conscience alone. In their year-end meetings, the various US critics’ conclaves saw more than a few votes for Best Actor cast in favor of an elderly neophyte. McNamara’s bad teeth and liver-spots notwithstanding, the beauty of The Fog of War is entirely skin deep. McNamara concedes that mistakes were made but when asked why he didn’t speak out against the war, he can only take refuge in his anguish: “I am not going to say any more than I have.” As the Frodologists of the ’60s might have put it, the former secretary carried the Ring of Power to the rim of Mount Doom, but refused to throw it in.

In another sort of Vietnam flashback, on August 27, five months into the Iraq War, the Pentagon held the first of several informational screenings of The Battle of Algiers. As the Pentagon flier put it: “Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafés. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar?” The last half of The Battle of Algiers illustrates the flier’s hook: “How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas.” French reaction is personified by the newly arrived Col. Mathieu who accepts the mission of demolishing the revolutionary FLN. “There are 80,000 Arabs in the casbah‚” he tells his men. “Are they all against us? We know they are not. In reality, it is only a small minority that dominates with terror and violence. This minority is our adversary and we must isolate and destroy it.” How familiar that must have sounded!

Mathieu’s campaign is successful but—as he, more than anyone else in the movie, realizes—history belongs to the FLN. At one point he turns on a press conference full of hostile French journalists and forces them to clarify their own privileged positions. “I would now like to ask you a question: Should France remain in Algeria? If you answer ‘yes,’ then you must accept all the necessary consequences.” A montage of Algerians subject to torture follows. This, one imagines, was the key moment of the Pentagon’s Battle of Algiers. To succeed, the American occupation must consign such abuses to the Ba’athist past—indeed, the rationale for the invasion of Iraq long ago shifted from Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction to his dungeons of horror. But didn’t the invasion itself demonstrate that, in the war against terrorism, all means are available?

NEW YORK, JULY 2, 2003

“The future has not been written …” the young narrator solemnly muses at the beginning of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. That’s true enough—although in the pre-sold universe of summer entertainment, the box-office brawn of this Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle is as close to a given as the laws of gravity.

If it’s Terminator time, there must be a Republican president running for re-election. Appearing unheralded on the eve of the 1984 election, the original Arnold Schwarzenegger robot opera, directed by then unknown James Cameron and featuring the most compelling Frankenstein monster in fifty years, provided a dystopian alternative to the Reaganite “new morning.” Released as Bush I girded his loins in the summer of the New World Order 1991, Cameron’s vastly inflated, post–Desert Storm T2: Judgment Day resurrected the president’s fitness adviser as a kinder, gentler killer cyborg. (T2 was for a time the most expensive movie ever made; Cameron modestly described it as “the first action movie advocating world peace.”)

There are no term limits on sequels, and now, as the Bush II juggernaut gets ready to roll, der Arnold—once hailed by Time as “the most potent symbol” of Hollywood’s “worldwide dominance”—returns to save the world, or at least the designated world-savior, the now grown John Connor (Nick Stahl). Soreheads will note that this JC becomes humanity’s leader either by mistake or through a strategic deception—but so what? Cameron, meanwhile, has bequeathed the franchise to director Jonathan Mostow, author of the submarine thriller U-571 and evidently a man with far less baggage. Where Judgment Day exhibited the profligate sprawl of a military operation, the leaner, less grandiose Rise of the Machines has the feel of a single Hummer careening through an earthquake in downtown Burbank.

Dispatched once more on a mission from the future, the latest model of the Arnold android materializes in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Born naked and flexing into this world, he makes his now traditional foray to an unsuspecting human watering hole; in short order he denudes a snippy male stripper of his fetishistic glad rags to re-create his own ultra-butch image. Somewhat less paternal here than he was in T2, Schwarzenegger is in fine, which is to say humorously ponderous, form. His refurbished Terminator remains an unsocialized machine—if not without a certain professional pride. Referred to disparagingly as a “robot,” he’s quick to correct: “I’m a cybernetic organism.”

The first two Terminator movies projected a sort of muscle feminism in the person of Nautilized Linda Hamilton’s warrior woman. But this time around, despite Claire Danes’s intermittent facility with a variety of guns, there’s an undercurrent of chick bashing. Arnold’s antagonist, the ultra-sophisticated T-X (Kristanna Loken), is a robo-babe with a tailored leather jumpsuit and a bionic arm. Her default setting on permanent hissy fit, this svelte femmebot has an irresistible habit of cocking her head and glaring with impersonal curiosity at the victim she’s about to vaporize. What’s more, she can fry Arnold’s circuits.

Back in the mid ’80s, Terminator inspired an impressive degree of academic discourse—thanks to its tough-girl heroine, the convoluted, bizarrely oedipal time-travelling premise that had John Connor being fathered by his future best friend, and Arnold’s then new-minted status as Hollywood’s reigning action superstar, the blockbuster personified. As befits a third outing, Rise of the Machines offers little that is novel. All temporal mind-bending and kinky genealogy are subsumed in the comforting notion that our world is about to come under the malign control of a single, giant, self-aware computer program. Indeed, the program probably wrote the movie, which could be most efficiently described as a quasi-videogame featuring a pair of unkillable antagonists.

The opening joust’s mega-bumper-car ride makes for nearly as impressive a carnival of destruction as the great freeway battle in The Matrix Reloaded. The fighting, however, is much more hands-on. Responding to Mostow’s directorial joystick, the endlessly regenerating Terminator and Terminatrix alternately lift and slam, shove and hurl, toss and pound, crush and heave each other, in a clanky ballet mécanique that could easily be re-imagined as terminal foreplay.

Terminator 3 was still in movie theaters when a special election to recall California’s governor was announced on July 27. Schwarzenegger declared his candidacy on The Tonight Show on August 7—a different sort of “cybernetic organism”: part performer, part politician. In a sense, the president followed suit. The following piece, headlined “Lights, Camera, Exploitation,” was the cover story for the August 28 edition of the Village Voice.

NEW YORK, AUGUST 28, 2003

In the end, 9/11 turned out to be a made-for-TV movie, or rather, the basis for one—a shameless propaganda vehicle for our superstar president George W. Bush.

The upcoming Showtime feature DC 9/11: Time of Crisis is a signal advance in the instant, ongoing fictionalization of American history, complete with the president fulminating most presidentially against “tinhorn terrorists,” decisively employing the word problematic in a complete sentence, selling a rationale for preemptive war, and presciently laying out American foreign policy for the next eighteen months. “We start with bin Laden,” Bush (played by Timothy Bottoms) tells his cabinet. “That’s what the American people expect … So let’s build a coalition for that job. Later, we can shape different coalitions for different tasks.”

Scheduled for cablecast on September 7, DC 9/11 inaugurates Bush’s re-election campaign fifty weeks before the 9/11 Memorial Republican National Convention opens in Madison Square Garden. DC 9/11 also marks a new stage in the American cult of personality: the actual president as fictional protagonist.4

That Bottoms is reconfiguring his role in the Comedy Central series That’s My Bush! (a gross-out sitcom canceled a month before 9/11) provides a uniquely American twist. In the aftermath of the first Iraq war, Bush the elder was brought down in part by Dana Carvey’s devastating campaign of ridicule on Saturday Night Live. Drafting the clownish Bottoms effectively preempts that strategy. Indeed, casting a former Bush travesty in the role of the serious Bush only reinforces the telefilm’s agenda, namely that the events of September 11 served to render divine Bush’s dubious mandate.

A movie that attempted to reconstruct Bush’s actual activities on 9/11 would be fascinating, if not entirely heroic. A detailed attempt to account for the president’s movements and actions on what he later termed that “interesting day” may be found at the Center for Cooperative Research website (cooperativeresearch.org): Bush had just arrived at a Florida elementary school for a pre-planned 9 a.m. photo op when he was informed that a plane had crashed into the WTC fifteen minutes before. Bush would later make the impossible claim that he saw the event televised live. (In early December, the president told an Orlando audience he’d been watching TV that morning and saw “an airplane hit the tower of a—of a—you know … and I said, ‘Well, there’s one terrible pilot.’ ”)

As Secret Service men evidently were watching TV in another classroom, however, news of the second crash reached him almost immediately. Bush’s startled response, documented on video for all eternity and seen by millions, is restaged in the movie: As Chief of Staff Andrew Card appears beside Bush and whispers in his ear, the president responds with visible shock and panic (the real Bush was more expressive than Bottoms). Missing from DC 9/11 is the president’s next move—picking up a children’s book called The Pet Goat.

By then, back in the real DC, Secret Service men had already burst into Dick Cheney’s office and bodily carried the vice president to a secure location in the White House basement. Meanwhile, responding to Press Secretary Ari Fleischer’s hastily scrawled instructions (“DON’T SAY ANYTHING YET”), Bush actually remained in the classroom for almost ten minutes, taking his time thanking the kids and the teachers (“Hoo! These are great readers …”) shortly before boarding Air Force One, where he was informed that his plane was the next terrorist target.

DC 9/11 subtly re-jiggered these events so that Cheney was hustled into the White House basement only after Bush is aloft—the inference being that the entire leadership was equally dazed and confused, and that relocating Bush was part of the solution rather than one of the problems.

According to The Washington Post, Cheney, seconded by Condoleezza Rice, instructed Bush not to return to Washington. Nevertheless, the movie does attempt to deal with the circumstances that had the president largely incommunicado for the rest of the day. According to the Post account, there was little debate on Air Force One—the plane banked sharply and flew south to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where Bush’s first official statement was made at 12:36 p.m. He appeared hesitant and nervous—as does Bottoms in the movie. Within the hour, Air Force One had taken off for another base, and not until that evening, after eight hours flying from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska to Washington, did the president address the nation.

The threat to the president’s plane was soon recognized as bogus, although it took weeks for the White House to acknowledge it. By September 13, however, presidential image-maker Karl Rove had released his script: “I’m not going to let some tinhorn terrorist keep the president of the United States away from the nation’s capital,” Bush had supposedly complained, a line further improved in DC 9/11 as “If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come and get me! I’ll be at home, waiting for the bastard!” Simultaneously, the real Rice was detailing Bush’s instant grasp of the situation, explaining that he was the first in his administration to understand the meaning of the events.

This is the story of DC 9/11. Screenwriter and co-executive producer Lionel Chetwynd had access to top officials and staffers, including Bush, Fleischer, Card, Rove, and Rumsfeld—all of whom are played by look-alike actors in the movie (as are Cheney and Rice, John Ashcroft, Karen Hughes, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and Paul Wolfowitz). The script was subsequently vetted by right-wing pundits Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer, and Morton Kondracke. Chetwynd, whose vita includes such politically charged movies and telefilms as The Hanoi Hilton, The Heroes of Desert Storm, The Siege at Ruby Ridge, Kissinger and Nixon, and Varian’s War, is a prominent Hollywood conservative—a veteran of the 1980 Reagan campaign who, after Bill Clinton’s election twelve years later, was recruited by right-wing pop culture ideologue David Horowitz to set up the Wednesday Morning Club (“a platform in the entertainment community where a Henry Hyde can come and get a warm welcome and respectful hearing,” as Chetwynd later told The Nation).

Chetwynd bonded with Dubya in March 2001 when, at Rove’s suggestion, Varian’s War was screened at the White House; Chetwynd was subsequently involved in various post-9/11 Hollywood–Washington conclaves and currently serves Bush as part of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Shot largely in Toronto, DC 9/11 was eligible for Canadian film subsidies, but it is, in nearly every other sense, an official production.5

Would JFK have had the audacity to promote a docudramatization of the Cuban Missile Crisis as part of his bid for reelection? As political as PT 109, DC 9/11 models Bush on Kennedy’s appearances in the 1974 telefilm The Missiles of October, the 1983 miniseries featuring telepresident-to-be Martin Sheen as Kennedy, and particularly, on the 2000 feature Thirteen Days—selected for the first official Bush White House screening, with Senator Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy in attendance. But however hagiographic, these were period pieces memorializing a dead leader.

The turgid DC 9/11 would doubtless have been more entertaining with Harrison Ford or Arnold Schwarzenegger or even Ronald Reagan in the role of the president. DC 9/11 is instead the spectacle of Reagan in reverse: rather than being a professional actor who entered politics, Bush is a politician who has been reconfigured, packaged, and sold as a media star—dialog included. Indeed, that metamorphosis is the movie’s true subject.

The basic Dubya narrative is the transformation of a roistering Prince Hal into a heroic Henry V. In DC 9/11, the young Bush—spoiled frat boy and drunken prankster—is subsumed in the image of the initially powerless president. The movie is thus the story of Bush assuming command, first of his staffers (who attest to his new aura with numerous admiring reaction shots) and then the situation. He is the one who declares that “we are at war,” who firmly places Cheney (Lawrence Pressman) in his secure location—not once but twice. (To further make the point, Chetwynd has Scott Alan Smith’s Fleischer muse that the press refuses to get it: “The Cheney-runs-the-show myth is always going to be with some of them.”) Rudy Giuliani, who eclipsed Bush in the days following the attack, is conspicuously absent—or, rather, glimpsed only as a figure on television.

Rumsfeld (impersonated with frightening veracity by Broadway vet John Cunningham) emerges as the Soviet-style positive hero, embodying the logic of history. In the very first scene, he is seen hosting a congressional breakfast, invoking the 1993 attack on the WTC, and warning the dim-witted legislators that that was only the beginning. Rumsfeld is the first to utter the name “Saddam Hussein” and, over the pooh-poohs of Colin Powell (David Fonteno), goes on to detail Iraq’s awesome stockpile of WMDs. But there can be only one maximum leader. Increasingly tough and folksy, prone to strategically consulting his Bible, it is Bush who directs Rummy and Ashcroft to think in “unconventional ways.” This new Bush is continually educating his staff, instructing Rice in the significance of “modernity, pluralism, and freedom.” (As played by Penny Johnson Jerald, the president’s ex-wife on the Fox series 24, Condi is a sort of super-intelligent poodle—dogging her master’s steps, gazing into his eyes with rapt adoration.)

Ultimately, DC 9/11 is less a docudramatic account of historical events than a legitimizing allegory. In glamorizing a living president, it is an opportunistic piece of political mythmaking—a scenario that effectively bridges the highly irregular maneuvering that brought a popular-vote loser to power in 2000 and the exaggerated, even fabricated, claims with which his regime orchestrated the US invasion of Iraq.

Bush’s approval rating was hovering around 50 percent on the morning of September 11. Indeed, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden have done so much for Bush’s presidency one might reasonably suspect they’re being held in a witness protection program. If the Iraq war is integral to America’s transformation from republic to empire, then DC 9/11 is part of the process, described by Mark Crispin Miller as Bush’s “incarnation as America’s Augustus.”

Several incidents in the Iraq war—the semi-fictional Saving Private Lynch saga, the made-for-TV toppling of Hussein’s statue, the outrageous Top Gun photo op with which Bush announced victory—are ready to be excerpted in Republican Party 2004 campaign propaganda. DC 9/11 is that propaganda. The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” swells as Bush flies into Ground Zero, where he astonishes even Rove (Allan Royal) by spontaneously vaulting a police barricade to hop on the rubble and grab the microphone. A nearby fireman, compelled to tell the president that he didn’t vote for him, swears allegiance, mandating Bush to “find the son of a bitch who did this.” Once Bush realizes that “today, the president has to be the country,” Rove considers the image problem solved. Bush, he explains, has become commander in chief and taken back “control of his destiny.” The climax is Bush’s televised, prime-time September 20 speech—a montage of highly charged 9/11 footage that ends with the real-life, now fully authenticated Bush accepting the adulation of Congress as he fingers the talismanic shield worn by a fallen New York police officer.

As long as there are parents and children in this world, people will yearn for the illusion of a wise, selfless, divinely inspired leader. As expressed in DC 9/11, this desire is far less complex than the bizarre wish-fulfillment provided by The West Wing—unless a political miracle occurs and that fantasy materializes with the election of Howard Dean. Both of these presidential soap operas offer utopian visions of political leadership. But unlike The West Wing, DC 9/11 gumps a fictionalized hero into real catastrophe to create the myth of a defining moment, and stake its claim on historical truth.

On October 7, in the first history-changing cinematic event since 9/11, movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected California governor with 48 percent of the vote, more than his two closest rivals combined.