Sometimes there are movies like that. There are good reasons and bad reasons to see certain films (consider Salo, in this regard, and how it has notoriety among some pretty trashy moviegoers, who consume it for gross-out yuks, without appreciating how serious, subversive, and painful a film it is). You can't just take Rules of Engagement as an entertainment, any more than you can watch Triumph of the Will just for its cinematography, exceptional as that might be. The film, if you missed it, has a group of protesting Yemeni civilians gunned down en masse by a group of Marines, and sets up its narrative to show that the massacre was in fact totally justified, because even the women and children in the crowd were shooting guns (!). Calling out the American military for perpetuating a massacre is one thing (the film even has the shamelessness to begin in Viet Nam, home of the My Lai massacre); providing an ending that completely exonerates said massacre (and by implication, other massacres) is another. It came shortly before 9/11 and, who knows, maybe actually helped influence (along with other immoral/ Islamophobic film fare like The Siege) the American response to those attacks, helping in its own small way to poison the public's view of Muslims and Arabs alike. I've wanted to revisit the film for awhile now, and even share it with my wife, but haven't had a good enough reason to do so until tonight.
I will explain.
A bad reason to see Rules of Engagement, for example, is that you really need another good Tommy Lee Jones movie. My wife and I are fans, and have shared plenty of good ones - The Three Burials of Meliques Estrada, The Homesman, In the Valley of Elah, even Ron Howard's The Missing - and a few not so good ones (I won't try to share The Eyes of Laura Mars with Erika, even if John Carpenter did write it). Short of playing Erika The Sunset Limited (also with Sam Jackson!) or, maybe, The Package, I've kind of run out of appealing choices, and Jones is good in the film, where he's just young enough that they can disguise his telltale eye-pouches and make him look like he's in his 20's (see the poster, above). Even still, it just doesn't cut it as an excuse.
An even worse reason is wanting to see a Samuel L. Jackson movie ("because that motherfucker is in everything," which should be read in the voice of Samuel L. Jackson; if I needed a Sam Jackson movie to play your wife, I could play her that chess movie, for example. Fresh, or any of a dozen other films I have). Needing a good Tommy Lee Jones movie is a better excuse, because you have fewer good movies that he is in: there are options with Sam (Jungle Fever? Actually, I don't have that one. But he's just more prolific than Jones, who has been in 84 movies since 1970, compared to Sam's 189 credits since 1973 [!]).
I believe I have found a unique and sufficient moral justification for watching The Rules of Engagement, however. G. Gordon Liddy is in it (or at least his voice; he's some sort of talk show host).
See, G. Gordon Liddy was one of the criminals involved in the Watergate scandal. Now retired, his ability to parlay his criminality into a career in the entertainment business is more impressive even than Oliver North's, and somehow less objectionable. His name today came up alongside his fellow conspirator and "self-proclaimed dirty trickster" Roger Stone in a Facebook discussion about Donald Trump and the Republican Party's interests in sabotaging the current, apparently legitimate, American election - a very ironic phenomenon when you consider the long association of the Republican Party with the tradition of "ratfucking." This colourful idiom refers to attempts to interfere with legitimate domestic elections and suppress voting. Watergate itself exemplified this tradition of ratfucking - a term I first encountered in All the President's Men (the book, not the movie, which I *think* I read before I saw the movie, as a kid - I read it at a stupidly young age, like, 13 or something, and it stuck with me). There is some irony in the party most associated with ratfucking trying to ratfuck an election by accusing the party least associated with ratfucking of, yes, ratfucking: multi-tiered, meta-level ratfucking of the highest order, a real one party ratfucking circle jerk.
Besides association with attempted election sabotage, there are also plenty of interesting areas of overlap between Liddy and Trump. Both are Republicans, both are TV personalities, both have written books, and both appear to be without much capacity for shame. Just as we might ask whether Rules of Engagement had any influence on the response to 9/11 (which included at least one totally illegal war, to say nothing of Gitmo and torture and so forth), we might ask if the G. Gordon Liddy playbook has had any influence on the Trump administration. Does Trump dig Liddy? Did he read Will? How does Trump interpret Watergate? Have Trump and Liddy crossed paths? What does Liddy think of Trump? (I have searched, but Liddy does not appear to have written about Trump, at least not in any article that pops up on the first page. Kind of a shame - it would be a hell of a grace note to end his career on, looking at Trump and the long history of deceit and treachery that characterizes the Republican Party as we have come to know it.)
Anyhow, the association of Liddy with Rules of Engagement - sadly not discussed by Friedkin in his book - is more than enough reason for me to want to see it again. It's like getting a backdoor view of the mindset of Republicans in America, and how low they are prepared to sink - from endorsing massacres to subverting elections - as long as they can stay in power and stay wealthy. They have begun, with Trump, to register as the "overt Mafia" of America - a kind of crime-and-warfare syndicate dressed up as legitimate actors. I gave up hope for them facing serious legal consequences for their crimes back in the days of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld - though Trump may just be ugly enough to turn that tide, who knows? But Rules of Engagement should make a fine refresher course in how grotesque, how evil they can be. And what role will Liddy play, exactly? I'm very curious.
Plus Erika would probably enjoy it. I mean, it's an enjoyable film - it's just immoral reactionary propaganda, you know? Might as well watch fuckin' True Lies!
Post-script: Well, the film was actually a little different from how I'd remembered it. In my memory, the video images that completely exonerate Jackson's character, of the entire, soon-to-be-massacred crowd shooting at Jackson's men, show up near the end of the film and are vital to Jackson being found innocent; in fact, things are a bit trickier than that, with sprinkles of said video throughout the film, but not appearing anywhere near the climax. So I'll grant that it's a bit subtler than I made it sound above. The most offensive image, of a little girl shooting a gun at the camera, is even framed as if it *might* be Jackson's faulty memory, though video images elsewhere mostly exonerate him. It is still an unavoidable aspect of the film that the crowd deserved what it got - it's just less overt in how it brings the viewer to that concluion. In my mind, that makes it maybe even more dangerous than the film as I remembered it. Still a very problematic film.
That said, I'd forgotten how good Guy Pearce was in it, or that Bruce Greenwood was even in there. But in terms of pretexts for watching the film, I was completely unable to spot or hear G. Gordon Liddy anywhere. Maybe his scene was cut? He's credited at the very end as a "Talk Show Host" - maybe it's a radio talk show? Completely blew by me, if he was in there.
Anyhow...
No comments:
Post a Comment