War of words

>> Hot-topic documentaries War Made Easy and Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land
lean to the left from different angles

by MALCOLM FRASER

Two new documentaries take on the sins of the U.S. media with regard to international warmongering (War Made Easy) and the Middle East morass (Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land: U.S. Media and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict). Neither is likely to change anyone’s mind on these burning topics, but their approaches are strikingly different.

War Made Easy, directed by Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp, features minimal narration by celebrity leftist Sean Penn, but is essentially a showcase for author Norman Solomon, from whose book it’s adapted. Sad to say, a great deal of War Made Easy is anti-war for dummies: collages of politicians repeating the all-too-familiar talking points and damning quotes (weapons of mass destruction, stay the course, cut and run, and so on ad nauseum), with the context explained by Solomon in the steady, patient manner of a kindergarten teacher, the information presented with the subtlety of a Fox News screed and the nuance of an infomercial. Just as the mainstream media’s capitulation to the Bush war machine was and is shocking to anyone with half a brain, so are corny tricks like juxtaposing Donald Rumsfeld’s drooling descriptions of military equipment with footage of hospitalized children recovering from an explosion.

The film is more interesting when it takes a longer historical view, whether cutting together similar statements from various U.S. presidents on the inevitability and righteousness of their pet military projects (and the invocation of World War III if they aren’t heeded) or examining the U.S. media’s tendency to cheerlead wars and then question them in retrospect.

While War Made Easy seems ideal for impressionable students, or anyone else who might need some hand-holding to reach a self-evident conclusion, Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land is more like an assembly of talking points for an audience who already knows its views but perhaps hasn’t found the means to articulate them. Within the first few minutes, the film both unabashedly lays its ideological cards on the table—opposition to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the U.S. media’s coverage thereof—and starts piling on the information in a relentless manner that almost made me pine for War Made Easy’s dumbed-down approach, with commentators describing the horrors of everyday Palestinian life, while wordy statistics fill the screen.

Luckily, the film soon slows down to methodically present a case that the U.S. media’s portrayal of the occupation is biased towards a hardline pro-Israeli stance. The film is scrupulous in its arguments, and deft in deflecting the knee-jerk criticisms that the right-wing hardliners rely on to marginalize their opponents—the filmmakers have smartly filled their ranks of commentators with Israeli anti-occupation activists, who can hardly be accused of anti-Semitism. But when two of your major talking heads are Noam Chomsky and lefty journalist Robert Fisk, it’s clear that your film is an exercise in preaching to the intellectual and ideological choir, no matter how sensibly or effectively.

The Iraq-invasion doc No End in Sight took a strong anti-war stance, but conveyed its message without resorting to the lowest-common-denominator pandering of War Made Easy or the information overload and overt ideology of Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land; it showed that when taking on controversial topics, it is actually possible to strike a balance on the smart-to-dumb spectrum, whose opposite poles are embodied by these two well-intentioned but frustrating docs.

Both films open at the Cinéma
du Parc this Friday, Nov. 16

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