How can the entertainment industry contribute to the war effort, to the lifting of morale at home and on the military front? Top Hollywood executives and White House officials have already discussed the issue, according to newspaper reports. The first session was held on Nov. 11; this was preceded by informal discussions immediately after the attacks with the last taking place in the first week of December. Fortunately, film producers were not confronted with the stark “You are either with Bush or Osama.” There was no need as administration officials who attended the meeting were preaching to the converted.
The White House has no intention of suggesting story lines or giving orders to producers and directors. The important thing is that everybody realizes that America is waging a war against evil. The war effort, one official said, needs narratives that are told with “accuracy and honesty.”
I wonder if he meant what he said. In any case, that is a tall order for two reasons. One is the war psychosis and the climate of hatred against Arabs and Muslims sweeping the United States. Secondly, Hollywood has always been at war with Arabs and the war was not always silent or subtle. Even in the best of times, the image of Arabs in Hollywood films has been anything but objective or flattering. When they are not gun-wielding or plane-hijacking terrorists, the Arabs inflict unspeakable cruelties on women and mutter hair-raising threats against Westerners.
Here, on the other hand, we have a situation vastly different from that facing Hollywood in the wake of the Vietnam War. There have been almost 50 films with Vietnam War-related themes, nearly all of them showing the US involvement in Vietnam for the disaster it was. And Francis Ford Coppola (“Apocalypse Now”) exposed the gap between the war as it was fought on the ground and the sanitized version given to politicians in daily press briefings. But this time, it is a different war and it seems to leave no room for honest dissent or open discussion about either aims or prosecution.
So what can we do? I asked a friend of mine this question; he is an aficionado of war movies and he told me it is not a big deal provided you suspend all your critical faculties. This is what you do in Hollywood — or Bollywood — if you produce a film with a non-war theme. My friend said that if he were a Hollywood producer, he would consider a sequel to “Rambo 3” or try to rewrite the script of “Spy Game,” “Objective Burma,” “U-571” or any other war movie in order to play to the current US mood. The story runs along predictable lines. You are either a top CIA operative checking in for your last day at the office; a call suddenly comes that a young spy is being held in a Chinese jail or a US general is surrounded by menacing warlords on all sides in Somalia. In the first case all you have to do is to replace the spy with a young Marine and the Chinese jail with an Afghan cave. The locale can shift from Mogadishu to Qala-e-Jangi fortress where the cornered general, all alone, confronts hundreds of armed Taleban prisoners and kills them.
In “Objective Burma,” a small band of American paratroopers is dropped behind enemy lines in the Burmese jungle. Their mission is to destroy a Japanese radar station. In U-571, a small band of American submariners is sent into enemy waters to capture an Enigma encryption device. In both cases the mission is to save the world. But my friend has his gaze fixed on a sequel to “Rambo 3.”
“Rambo 3” concerns the war against the Russians in Afghanistan. In the film, John Rambo is the symbol of American Cold War commando. His former commander Col. Tratman is held captive in occupied Afghanistan. Joining hands with the Afghan Mujahedeen, he eliminates all Russians he meets. In one scene, Rambo even drives a tank straight at an attack helicopter as its missiles strike all around! With a few twists here and there, anyone could produce a good “Rambo 4” that would make both money and a lot of patriotic sense, my friend said. Then he began to explain.
In “Rambo 4,” John Rambo’s mission would be to capture Osama Bin Laden and his close associates in Tora Bora. Rambo’s mission is to spare the world a nuclear disaster for Bin Laden has both nuclear and chemical weapons. Or it could be a combination of radioactive material to be detonated by conventional explosives — a so-called “dirty bomb”.
The cave complexes where Osama is hiding form an ideal setting. Several natural caves with no connecting tunnels provide the hero enough opportunities for adventure. Rambo could use some of the new earth-penetrating weapons the Pentagon has, enter the most fortified cave and capture Bin Laden, running with the risk of Al-Qaeda diehards throwing a nuclear bomb in his face. The project sounded interesting. I was curious to know whether he would call his film “Rambo 4”.
He answered negatively and said it would be titled “Rambo Goes to Tora Bora”.
