The Dichotomy of American Cinematic Egotism

The following was first published in the Villager newspaper.

The Villager is a weekly Namibian newspaper.

The dichotomy of American cinematic egotism

The United States of America sure loves itself doesn’t it? Hopefully this doesn’t piss of any American aid funding agencies in the country, but let’s be honest, the country is the international superpower equivalent of Narcissus, the Greek mythological hunter who fell in love with his own reflection.

You mostly see this in movies. It’s as if the cinema is America’s giant lotion bottle for the proverbial obvious. Red Dawn is a movie about North Korea hostilely occupying American soil; with no clear purpose apparently; simply because they can. The result? A large, trained North Korean army division gets their buttocks handed to them by a bunch of American teenagers. Seriously. They had zero training, just a chorus of American patriotic chanting, because that’s usually how winning a war works.

When you look much closer at this you realise just how frequent this occurs. Two of the new blockbusters are practically the same movie. White House Down is about terrorists attacking the White House and subsequently getting their rear ends kicked. Olympus has Fallen is about terrorists attacking the White House and subsequently getting their rear ends kicked. You would think they copied off each other for the script.

Almost all the big hit movies revolve around America. If it’s an alien invasion, whatever the extraterrestrial visitors are looking for is hidden in America. If the world is coming to an end, the most interesting moments will be occurring in the Land of Opportunity.

Now a lot Afro-centric voices are displeased with this and this is very understandable. They hate that America is so focused on itself in its artistic expressions but I think we have to realise a major contributing factor for this is that the movies are being made in America by Americans. I’m sure if Namibians had the budget (and talent?) to pull off an alien invasion blockbuster, Martian kwaitos would be pitching up in Independence Avenue.

The reproaching finger has to be wagged for the right reasons. In the new Die Hard movie, our American hero, played by Bruce Willis, erects an arrogant middle finger at his about-to-die Russian villain as he jumps to safety. In the high grossing film Armageddon, starring the same Bruce Willis, meteorites fell to the earth and caused much destruction. Paris, the French city gets totally destroyed by an asteroid fragment. But that wasn’t a big deal, everyone cheered when America was saved.

I think this is where the real issue lies. Despite tensions in North Korea reaching boiling point, American film makers still received epiphanies to make movies that depict Koreans as bulling, incompetent jerks with an air of sexual deprivation. With great parts of the world already hostile towards America due to this perceived attitude, which they totally have, you would think their PR work would be more PR and less mud smearing.

So I think there should be fairness in our disparagement. There’s nothing wrong with feeling patriotic about one’s own country and depicting it in film. If we made a good movie showing how awesome Namibia was, we’d want others to watch it and I’m sure America feels the same. It’s only when that patriotism becomes jingoism and pokes at other countries that it becomes a problem. What’s the solution? Does anybody have Michael Bay’s number?