Culture War of the Worlds

I felt morally obliged recently to go see “War of the Worlds.” Tom Cruise is taking a lot of raps recently, partly I think for being publicly religious. This bothers me: the least I can do is see the movie he is promoting.

It was a good movie in the Hollywood tradition: a great spectacle, one big chase, full of sound and fury. The good guys were good, and the bad guys were bad. There was no character development, and the good guys won in the end.

And it showed, I thought, a shift in the Hollywood ethos reflecting the recent conservative victories in the culture wars. The hero is a redneck. His wife has run off with a rich guy from Boston—possibly John Kerry himself. The men in the movie are generally heroic and self-sacrificing. The women are vulnerable, self-absorbed, and, frankly, tend to get in the way. Fathers, and absent fathers, are represented as good guys for a change. The point is made (at long last) that this absence is hardly their choice.

Still, the movie has troubling prejudices. At one point Cruise kills another man; and there is no evidence he sees this as a moral dilemma. The man, after all, is making noise; he might attract the Martians. Never mind that he had taken Cruise and his daughter in and shared his supplies with them; I should have thought the hero’s obvious option was to leave and find his own hideout.

In the context of the movie, though, this is apparently okay, because the man had spoken to Cruise’s daughter in her father’s absence. Any man who talks to a child, apparently, is a pedophile. Does the same rule apply to women? Nope. And any pedophile deserves to die. And any citizen has the right to pass judgment and execute this sentence. Hang ‘em high.

Hollywood hasn’t quite gotten the knack of this values thing yet.