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 Entertainment | September 2005 
Reading From Left to Right
 A. O. SCOTT - NYTimes
| | Ideological unmasking as parlor game: Divining messages about intelligent design and other faith-based matters in "The Exorcism of Emily Rose." (Photo: Diyah Pera) |
At the beginning of "Just Like Heaven," Elizabeth Masterson, a medical resident played by Reese Witherspoon, leaves work after more than 24 straight hours of emergency-room duty and drives out into darkness and pouring rain, then promptly smashes head-on into a truck. If you haven't already seen the movie, it will spoil nothing to tell you that the accident, discreetly shown as a "Six Feet Under"-style whiteout, is not fatal.
After all, what romantic comedy in its right mind would kill off Reese Witherspoon in the first act? And "Just Like Heaven," which opened last weekend to a solid $16.5 million box-office take is, in more than one sense, a movie very much in its right mind. Elizabeth survives, but the film itself provides the latest evidence that the myth of a monolithically liberal Hollywood is dead.
Let's skip, for the moment, yet another argument about whether it was ever really alive. The notion that the American film industry is a hotbed of left-wing propaganda is a venerable one, and some determined demagogues will cling to it no matter what the studios do. But the studios themselves, especially after the stunning success of Mel Gibson's independently financed "The Passion of the Christ," have tried to strengthen their connection with religious and social conservatives, who represent not only a political constituency but a large and powerful segment of the market.
As is often the case when it comes to reaching new audiences, the big movie companies have lagged a bit behind other show-business sectors, which is to say behind their own corporate siblings. Christian music has crossed over onto the pop and hip-hop charts, while television has found room on broadcast and cable channels for programming attuned to conservative sensibilities.
One reason for this delay is that movies - big movies, hit movies, movie-star movies - remain one of the few pop-cultural forms that are supposed to appeal to everyone. The oldest and fondest dream in Hollywood has been that it might represent, and thus sell tickets to, a public ruled by harmony and consensus. Those ideals may seem especially hard to come by these days, but we should not let old movies convince us that the old days were that much less contentious than the present. Indeed, the divisive aspects of American life - the half-hidden conflicts of race, class, place and creed - have traditionally been smoothed over on screen.
But there is an equally long tradition of trying to see through the pretty, pandering pictures. Hunting for ideological subtexts in Hollywood movies is a critical parlor game. Many a term paper has been written decoding the varieties of cold war paranoia latent in the westerns and science-fiction movies of the 1950's. Now, thanks to the culture wars and the Internet, the game of ideological unmasking is one that more and more people are playing. With increasing frequency, the ideology they are uncovering is conservative, and it seems to spring less from the cultural unconscious than from careful premeditation.
Last fall, "The Incredibles" celebrated Ayn Randian libertarian individualism and the suburban nuclear family, while the naughty puppets of "Team America" satirized left-wing celebrity activism and defended American global power even as they mocked its excesses. More recently we have learned that flightless Antarctic birds, according to some fans of "March of the Penguins," can be seen as big-screen embodiments of the kind of traditional domestic values that back-sliding humans have all but abandoned, as well as proof that divine intention, rather than blind chance, is the engine of creation.
I may be the only person who thought "The Island," this summer's Michael Bay flop about human clones bred for commercial use, indirectly argues the Bush administration's position on stem cell research, but I have not been alone in discerning lessons on intelligent design and other faith-based matters amid the spooky effects of "The Exorcism of Emily Rose." That movie, by the way, came in a close second behind "Just Like Heaven" at the box office last week, following an initial weekend in which it earned more than $30 million, one of the strongest September openings ever.
The objection to such message-hunting, whether it seeks hidden agendas of the left or the right, and whether it applauds or scorns those agendas, is always the same: it's only a movie. And what is so fascinating about "Just Like Heaven" is that it is, very emphatically, only a movie, the kind of fluffy diversion that viewers seek out on first dates or after a stressful work week. Its central couple - Ms. Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo - meet cute in a gorgeous apartment to which both lay claim. Their blossoming romance faces the usual obstacles, as well as some that are not so usual. For one thing, they can't stand each other; for another, one of them is a disembodied spirit visible only to her unwilling roommate.
So far, no obvious Republican Party talking points. This is not a movie that, at least at first, wears its politics on its sleeve. It takes place in San Francisco, perhaps the bluest city in one of the bluer states in the union, in a milieu of entitled urban professionals. Mr. Ruffalo, sad, scruffy and sweet as ever, brings a decided alt-culture vibe with him wherever he goes. With his dark, baggy sweaters and his slow, tentative line readings, he represents a new movie type decidedly at odds with the norms of movie masculinity: the shy, passive urban hipster as romantic ideal.
But a movie that looks at first like a soft, supernatural variation on the urban singleton themes of "Sex and the City," by the end comes to seem like a belated brief in the Terri Schiavo case. (If you insist on being surprised by the plot of "Just Like Heaven," it might be best to stop reading now). Elizabeth, as it happens, is not dead, but rather in a coma from which she is given little chance of awakening.
To make matters worse - and to set up a madcap climax in which Donal Logue rescues the film's faltering sense of humor - she has signed a living will, which her loving sister, urged on by an unprincipled doctor, is determined to enforce. But Elizabeth's spirit, along with Mr. Ruffalo's character, David, has second thoughts because she is so obviously alive, and the two must race to prevent the plug from being pulled, which means running through hospital corridors pushing a comatose patient on a gurney.
Would I have been happier if Elizabeth died? The very absurdity of the question - what kind of romantic comedy would that be? - is evidence of the film's ingenuity. Who could possibly take the side of medical judgment when love, family, supernatural forces and the very laws of genre are on the other side? And who would bother to notice that the villainous, materialistic doctor, despite having the religiously neutral last name Rushton, is played by Ben Shenkman, a bit of casting that suggests a faint, deniable whiff of anti-Semitism? Similarly, it can't mean much that Elizabeth, the ambitious career woman, is sad and unfulfilled in contrast to her married, stay-at-home-mom sister. Or that the last word you hear (uttered by Jon Heder, first seen in "Napoleon Dynamite") is "righteous."
The ingenuity of "Just Like Heaven" is that it does not insist on its righteousness. Its spiritual conceits are not associated with the doctrines of any particular religion, and its humor, while studiously clean, never feels prim or self-conscious. "Emily Rose," which also casts doctors among its villains and favors supernaturalism over science, is a bit more overt with its message. While "Just Like Heaven" is content with a vague, ecumenical supernaturalism, "Emily Rose" wants to tell you, like the old Louvin Brothers song, that Satan is real. Or, at the very least, that we should be open to the possibility that demonic possession might offer a better explanation for the title character's torments than the diagnoses listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
Now, of course, this in itself hardly distinguishes the movie from others of its kind. As Ross Douthat, an astute blogger and journalist, has pointed out online, "the horror movie is the most conservative and religion-friendly genre in Hollywood, and the message of devil-related movies, in particular, is almost always that science is wrong." But the means by which this message is delivered is a bit unusual, not only for its didacticism, but also because the movie's climactic arguments are as much a plea for open-mindedness and pluralism as a fire-and-brimstone sermon on the nature of evil. Rather like the promoters of intelligent design, the filmmakers present a mild, almost relativistic argument, according to which the reluctance of scientific experts to rule anything out makes anything possible, and therefore likely to be true.
Claiming to be based on a true story, it squanders some of its credibility as a horror movie in lengthy courtroom disquisitions on faith and reason, topics that figure prominently on the film's Web site. But it nonetheless holds to the conventions of genre strongly enough to attract thrill-seeking teenagers, and it also attracted some impressive actors, including Laura Linney and Tom Wilkinson. Mr. Wilkinson, among other things, underwent a sex change operation in the HBO movie "Normal," while Ms. Linney received an Oscar nomination for her role in "Kinsey." Talk about crossover.
Should movies like "Emily Rose," released by Sony, and "Just Like Heavens," from DreamWorks, be interpreted as peace offerings in the culture wars, or as canny attempts to open a new front in the endless battle for the soul of the American public? Will liberals now have a chance to complain, as conservatives have for so long, that Hollywood is ideologically biased and out of touch with its audience? Will we ever be able to sit back and say, "It's only a movie"? I hope not. The arguments we are having among ourselves are too loud and insistent to be drowned out or silenced in the false comfort of the movie theater. |
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