It's funny, because I used to call myself "inoffendable." There was nothing before that I've ever seen, ever been told, ever experienced that actually offended me. If something was unbelievably rude or inappropriate, my instinct is to laugh first, or at least bask in the absurdity of the moment. Being inoffendable, I thought, kept a body young, allowed for infinite elasticity and permitted you to keep friends most everyone else had long abandoned for safer acquaintances.
But then we saw Bad Company tonight, and I have to say, pretty much anything that uses nuclear terrorism to sell entertainment tickets has begun to... well, offend me. Coupled with The Sum of All Fears (which spent an unbelievable two weeks at the top of the box office), it seems like Hollywood, as well as the American moviegoer, thinks it's okay to add stakes to their stories by including the possible annihilation and radiation of an American city. Now, given that I live in and near New York, as does Tessa, and Sean, and Michelle, not to mention 40 or 50 people I adore, I'm finding the whole fucking thing hard to take. Much racist commentary has gone on about the nuclear gamesmanship between India and Pakistan, comments like "they aren't sophisticated enough to understand what nuclear war entails" but it seems to me that we're even worse.
I realize these movies were put into post-production long before Sept. 11 (and I guess we should be stunned that Hollywood even had the sensitivity to delay their release a few months), but it's going to take a lot more than digitally editing out the World Trade Center towers from every skyline shot to make me feel like caring about action movies again. In the middle of "Bad Company," Anthony Hopkins has to show Chris Rock the effects of a nuclear blast on Jersey City in order to convince him to buck up and be a good protagonist. And I can't speak for the entire audience (most of whom were 10-year-olds answering their cell phones), but I detected an audible gasp when the dramatization detonated over the East River. The bomb itself ends up in Grand Central Station, which I have always thought to be an excellent place for a pedestrian pipe-bombing, which is why I tell Tessa to only buy her tickets in the booths to the side of the grand hall.
Yeah, yeah, I should do as my therapist says (god, the stuff I hear myself saying) and avoid all contact with this kind of thing. Dr. Gorman says that most obsessive-compulsives believe, erroneously, that if they only do enough research on their obsessional subject, they'll cure themselves. The truth is, that's a path that leads to more and more compulsion, because you'll keep looking until you find something that horrifies you. In this case, however, I can't be blamed: we were meaning to see The Bourne Identity (which, I'm told, has no stolen nuclear devices) but it was sold out, along with everything else. While I was parking, Tessa and her sister Michelle got tickets for the only movie left, and I didn't know the plot points until I had already bought popcorn and Mountain Dew.
I pray that I don't always feel like this. We live in terribly interesting and interestingly terrible times, and not only that, we live in a fucking bullseye. I realize that we are going to need some good luck to get through the rest of this decade unscathed. I think I can handle the pressure of being in the nuclear shadow as long as I am surrounded by the people I love, get good therapy, pop some pills and develop a state of healthy denial. But using my dread as a plot point against me is no longer acceptable. It makes me fucking angry. I am offended.
Posted by at June 15, 2002 10:58 PM