W. (2008)
Lion's Gate DVD (region 1)
d. Oliver Stone; pr. Bill Block, Moritz Borman, Paul Hanson, Eric Kopeloff; scr. Stanley Weiser; ph. Phedon Papamichael; m. Paul Cantelon; ed. Joe Hutshing, Julie Monroe; cast. Josh Brolin, Richard Dreyfuss, Elizabeth Banks, James Cromwell, Ellen Burstyn, Stacy Keach, Scott Glenn, Thandie Newton, Toby Jones, Bruce McGill, Jeffrey Wright, Noah Wyle (129 mins)
THIS REVIEW IS AN EXTRACT FROM THE BOOK TERRORISM IN AMERICAN CINEMA.
W. fulfils two trends in Oliver Stone’s cinema, one consistent throughout his career and one relatively recent. On the latter note first, it is the great director’s completion of a War on Terror trilogy: W. comes after examining the patriotic sentiment that consumed America in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 in the admittedly maudlin and surprisingly apolitical World Trade Center and the deconstruction of the Israeli-Palestinian terrorism crisis as centred on the enigma of Yasser Arafat in Persona Non Grata. In that aspect, W. essentially examines America’s political response to the surrounding War on Terror, specifically the role that Iraq plays in Republican Imperialism. But as a Presidential biopic, W. completes a trilogy that began with the controversial JFK and continued with Nixon. These trends jointly conclude with W. a radical, rationalist portrait of nothing less that the political failure of Patriarchal Christian America as epitomized by the George W. Bush Presidency and indeed endemic in Republican political ideology.
Director Stone systematically and carefully establishes George W. Bush as a born-again Christian who believed that God wanted him in power at a crucial time in American history. He, and vice-President Dick Cheney, believe that 9-11 was a fulcrum point in American history and that the task is now before them to re-configure America for the post-Cold War “new world order”. Bush prays for guidance repeatedly through this film adding to W. a discourse on the role of religion and politics in America mostly absent from the preceding Stone Presidential bio-pics. Indeed Stone shapes W. as a film about the “new world order” as envisioned in specifically Republican politics since Ronald Reagan saw an end to the Cold War as birthing the Christianization of the White House and, in Bush’s Presidency, the disastrous fusion of Church and State.
Although W. does not address the mechanics of terrorism with the immediacy of the post 9-11 wave of terrorist films in 2007-8 it importantly confronts the specifically Christian agenda behind America’s action in the War on Terror from a distinctly Rationalist perspective which at times incorporates a Brechtian alienation strategy to make its deconstructive comments about Church and State. It sees this in the fusion of President and Vice-President, Bush and Cheney. Indeed, Stone first shows them together discussing the use of radical interrogation strategies against even American citizens, strategies which Cheney denies are torture but which Bush incorporates in stride into his Presidential ambitions, which an hour later into the film are shown to be the result of his belief in being “called” by God to run for the Presidency. Stone establishes, by inter-cutting the drama surrounding Bush’s decision to (mis-)lead the War on Terror by invading Iraq with flashbacks to the events leading up to his religious conversion, that the issues which the wave of 2007-8 terrorist films examine for their ethical compromises to American Constitutional ideals of democracy were essentially put in practice as a result of what amounts to an ignorant, religiously deluded ambition rooted in one man’s desire to live up to his family name.
It is thus in W. that the various issues which have led such films as Taxi to the Dark Side to condemn the Bush administration as war criminals find their most cogent political context, and one which implies that behind America’s actions in the War on Terror era lay Christian delusional ignorance.
Stone introduces this theme gradually, first exploring the engineered rhetoric of the “axis of evil” (the formulation of which begins this fascinating biopic) – one of the meaningless jargon terms invented by the Republicans in the desire to “beat” the achievement of Reagan in ending the Cold War and the germ through which Bush entered the Iraq War on the grounds of weapons of mass destruction, re-directing attention from the War on Terror in Afghanistan and in the process obfuscating American ideals of freedom and democracy in the pursuit of divine-inspired Empire. In that Bush’s favourite refrain was “God Bless America” (and the fact that he was determined never to be “out-Christianed” in politics and won office after coaching from advisor Karl Rove about how to court the conservative Christian vote), Stone’s biopic makes it clear that Bush’s strategy in Iraq and the War on Terror – concluded by prayer meetings in the Oval Office – was to him a “holy war”. Bin Laden is not the religious enemy of humanity here – Bush is.
In going after Saddam convinced that the Iraqi leader was in possession of weapons of mass destruction with which he would possibly aid terrorists to attack America, Stone’s Bush is an uncultured Texan cowboy with delusions of spiritual grandeur. Stone reveals this in two scenes: (1) when the decision comes to invade Iraq, Bush says that he is giving Saddam 48 hrs to “get out of Dodge”; (2) after the statue of Saddam Hussein in a Baghdad square is torn down, Bush flies triumphantly onto an aircraft carrier and announces victory, adding that he prays God will continue to bless America. And what is God’s answer to His chosen President? Stone immediately cuts to news footage of a terrorist insurgency in Iraq that claims life after life in ever mounting atrocities, coupled with the inability to find any evidence whatsoever of weapons of mass destruction and finally evoking Bush as a President who, as the final scene in this film reveals, merely looked to the heavens for guidance but was so blinded by the “light” of God that he lost all chance of acting in a way that would bring America to victory in the War on Terror, invading Iraq without any idea of an “exit strategy”.
Stone’s W. reveals the Bush Presidency as the ultimate failure in American political history, the compromise of democracy in the fusion of theist delusion and the Patriachal traditions so dear to Republicans. But in that Bush was a Christian and his Presidency a Christian Presidency, the vision of a Christian America that brought him to power and took him to war is also, to Stone, a hypocritical failure.
In that, Stone renounces the fusion of Church and State he sees at the core of this failed Presidency. Indeed, the delusional hypocrisy of the Bush Presidency is increasing in evidence as the film proceeds, albeit in subtle details – the same man who appeals to God for guidance says little when informed by Iraq commander General Tommy franks that the US will only bomb Iraqi schools at night. When Colin Powell suggests that Iraq is irrelevant to the War on Terror, Bush turns to his vice-president Dick Cheney for justification, Cheney being the man who begins the film “selling” Bush on the ethics of torture only to have Bush when told of interrogation procedures that violate the “pesky” Geneva Convention says that they remind him of his own experiences pledging the college fraternity.
Cheney proposes that the USA has 5% of the world’s population but uses 25% of its energy resources, resources that are finite unless the US can gain strategic control of the Middle East, specifically Iraq and Iran (two of the three countries, alongside the nuclear ambitious North Korea, comprising the “axis of evil” and, by implication, seeking WMD capability). For Cheney, the US must gain military control of the Middle East to secure the world’s oil reserves, securing the US dependence on the oil economy and ensuring that the US is a world power that can never again be challenged – Cheney unites Bush’s belief in God-given power to guide the American people with the concept of American Imperialism as centered on power over oil in the Middle East. A God-driven Christian American empire in control of the world’s energy resources: that is what Bush ultimately means in his continued evocations for God to bless America. “Freedom” and “democracy” are here no longer terms of any Constitutional meaning, but rhetoric re-defined alongside the “axis of evil” in order to justify a war policy in reaction to 9-11. The War on Terror is a construct of this agenda which begain in Afghanistan with noble intentions but was misdirected by the Iraq policy.
Bush’s naïvely optimistic belief in peace and bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East are the smokescreens of American Imperialism, a uniquely Republican agenda that began with Ronald Reagan “winning” the Cold War against what he had skilfully (and equally religiously) termed “the Evil Empire”. Indeed, Bush partly models himself on this Republican victory and director Stone subtly probes from the outset of this biopic how the manufacture of the term “axis of evil” re-designs the Reagan rhetoric for the War on Terror, in effect re-packaging it for the American people and demonizing the very countries that Cheney sees as standing in the way of American Imperialism – Iraq and Iran. For Stone, the shift from the immediate impetus to go after Bin Laden (who is dismissed in a throwaway line of dialogue as a “religious nut in a cave”) to go after Saddam Hussein was the appropriation of justifiable outrage against terrorism into an American Imperialism driven by oil concerns and underpinned by theist visions of a Christian America. The irony for Stone is that this awful Imperialism was essentially enabled before the world community by a speech by Colin Powell, previously depicted as the administration’s sole voice of reason, before the UN concerning Saddam’s anthrax capabilities: the fabricated myth of WMD.
Rather than being a worthy man of God, Bush is depicted as an uncultured, partly educated and rather folksy believer. He is little concerned with the truth of matters and holds onto his religious belief, content to pray rather than discuss. Impetuous, he is driven by advisors who believe that they can only stay in power at the next Presidential election if Bush becomes a literal “war President” and that Afghanistan, though the real focus in the War on Terror (at least according initially to Colin Powell) is simply not enough of a war to guarantee victory in the next election. The elevation of WMD paranoia – the fear of a nuclear terrorist attack – to national political priority enables this new war to be carefully constructed as not based in the evident home of terrorism in Afghanistan but in Iraq: a war only possible by a radical shift in American foreign policy from containment to pre-emptive engagement. Yet, when Bush realizes that there are no weapons of mass destruction he feels betrayed and grapples to find an historical analogy, commenting that he feels like “that Roman” betrayed by his senators but lacking the education to mention Julius Caesar by name.
By the end of the film, the President who felt that God was calling him into power to guide the American people at a crucial time in its nation’s history is a powerless, deluded, confused and unapologetic fool. And, for Stone, his failure is the failure of the ideals of a Christian America to live up to true Constitutional ideals of freedom and democracy. Indeed, when Bush is asked what kind of democracy he intends to set up in Iraq to replace the Saddam regime, he merely says that he doesn’t care, as long as it is a democracy – his religious beliefs have removed from him any ability to understand the real meaning of the terms, construing them as he does solely in the Patriarchal traditions of American family values and the authority of the “father” that also underlies Christianity. With his advisors – who have no planned “exit strategy” in Iraq and indeed, via Cheney, hope to stay there to control the oil reserves – American democracy is reduced to an empty, meaningless concept. Yet, in the “great” American democracy, the President is granted unique powers in wartime, powers which Bush fails to comprehend in any meaningful way, content to pray for guidance rather than think. Bush’s failure, the failure of a Christian America is also, for Stone, the failure of the theism underlying American Patriarchy and even the unprecedented “faith” it gives the President in times of war.
This is the purpose of the film’s many flashbacks – to Bush’s alcoholism and his discovery of Jesus Christ – to reveal what Stone considers the burden of the American ideal of family and faith-based tradition. For instance, the fraternity that Bush pledges consists of youths who have been part of the fraternity for generations and whose leader says that their family fortunes will sweep them into power – power as rooted in Republican money. And the head of Bush’s family is his father, George Snr (who calls his son “junior”, something that George W resents). The younger Bush lives in the shadow of his father, driven to rebel but finally determined to prove himself worthy of the family name. In this George W. Bush is a slave to Republican Patriarchal tradition – the law of the father being a precursor to his Christian reformation. Theism, for Bush, allows him to believe in a higher Patriarchal authority than his father – God. Belief in God validates the law of the father just as it gives Bush a purpose: unable to ever live up to his father’s expectations, Bush’s divine “calling” by God to be President is merely a delusional escape from his own un-resolved psychological inability to reject the law of the father and seek out an individual identity beyond Patriarchal Christian tradition. To meet the responsibility of the Patriarch, Bush turns to God.
In this, Stone’s film is the most important political movie to emerge to date post 9-11. It deconstructs the obfuscation of the War on Terror in terms of a Patriarchal Christian-driven desire for American Imperialism in which Constitutional ideals of “democracy” and “freedom” cease to have any meaning. Although as a director Stone keeps this intent subtle, a distinctly satiric intent emerges in W. much more so than in any of Stone’s Presidential bio-pics. To ensure that Bush’s Christian agenda is never accepted as valid, Stone subtly deploys a music selection as an ironic counterpoint to those scenes establishing Bush as a Christian figure – indeed, the song selection here by undercutting the notion of God-given authority instead creates the impression that Bush is a mere folksy, deluded and inadequate representative of his country. So too his beliefs – Patriarchal Christian authority, American Imperialism and the theist justification he takes for granted – mislead America in the War on Terror years. And Stone is clear in staging a press conference scene near the end that, when confronted by the complete failure of his beliefs and his “democracy” and questioned about it, Bush is unable to think on his feet, finally even deserted by the God he once prayed to, unable to live out his dream of “winning”.
