It is hardly surprising that pop culture protesters in zombie-masks are now intent on occupying Wall Street.
For the past decade, Hollywood has been casting financiers as the villains of society. In the multiplexes, businessmen have even replaced terrorists as villains. In the Warner Bros. political thriller, “Syriana,” for example, the villain is not al Qaeda, an enemy state, the Mafia, or even a psychotic serial killer.
Rather, it’s the big oil companies who manipulate terrorism, wars and social unrest to drive up oil prices. One doesn’t need to look far to discover that the root-of-evil corporate villain is hardly atypical of post-Cold War Hollywood.
Consider Paramount’s 2004 remake of the 1962 classic, “The Manchurian Candidate.” In the original film, directed by John Frankenheimer, the villain-behind-the-villain is the Soviet Union, whose nefarious agents, with the help of the Chinese Communists, abduct an American soldier in Korea and turn him into a sleeper assassin. In the new version, the venue is transposed from Korea in 1950 to Kuwait in 1991, and the defunct Soviet Union is replaced as the resident evil.
The new villain is -- you guessed it -- the Manchurian Global Corporation, an American company loosely modeled on the Halliburton Corporation. As the director, Jonathan Demme, explains in his DVD commentary, he avoided making the Iraqi forces of Saddam Hussein the replacement villain because he did not want to “negatively stereotype” Muslims.
Not only were neither Saddam Hussein nor Iraq mentioned in a film about the Iraq-Kuwait war, but the Manchurian corporation’s technicians rewire the brains of the abducted U.S. soldiers with false memories of al-Qaeda-type jihadists so that they will lay the blame for terrorist acts committed by American businessmen on an innocent Muslim jihadist. So Hollywood depicts greedy corporations deluding the public about terrorism.
Why don’t the movies have plausible, real world villains anymore? One reason is that a plethora of stereotype-sensitive advocacy groups, representing everyone from hyphenated ethnic minorities and physically handicapped people to Army and CIA veterans, now maintain a liaison in Hollywood to protect their image.
The studios themselves often have an “outreach program” in which executives are assigned to review scripts and characters with representatives from these groups, evaluate their complaints, and attempt to avoid potential brouhahas.
Finding evil villains is not as easy as it was in the days when a director could choose among Nazis, Communists, KGB and Mafiosos. Still, in a pinch, these old enemies will serve. For example, the 2002 apocalyptic thriller “Sum of All Fears,” based on the Tom Clancy novel in which Muslim extremists explode a nuclear bomb in Baltimore.
Paramount decided, however, to change the villains to Nazi businessmen residing in South Africa to avoid offending Arab-American and Islamic groups. Yet even if aging Nazis lack any credible “outreach program” in Hollywood, no longer can they be creditably fit into many contemporary movies since they would be in their 90s by now.
