Hollywood’s D.C. Distortions
By ANDREW FERGUSON
It’s no surprise that “Legally Blonde 2,” the new Reese Witherspoon movie, is almost unwatchable limply written and incoherently directed, performed by actors who really should go back to waiting tables.
So lame is it that every frame taunts the viewer: “You’d have to be an idiot to take this thing seriously.”
Which I’m now about to do.
I won’t take it as seriously as columnist Arianna Huffington, who wrote that she had discovered a subtext of political agitation in the movie “a clarion call to movement-building,” which could mobilize America’s young people to rise up and “demand reform,” whatever that might mean.
Rest easy: It won’t, and Americans should be grateful. Even so, “LB2” will be of clinical interest to students of democratic politics, because it confirms yet again a defining fact of American life: Hollywood and Washington hate each other.
Washington’s hatred for Hollywood is usually well disguised, since politicians are reluctant to offend the same moviemakers they routinely hound for campaign cash. It breaks out only when a political scold like Sen. Joseph Lieberman or former Education Secretary Bill Bennett gets huffy about violence in cartoons or sex in pop music, in hopes of tapping some “anti-Hollywood sentiment” among voters.
Such campaigns quickly fizzle because there is no anti-Hollywood sentiment among voters. Anti-Washington sentiment, on the other hand, is as dependable as a Swiss railroad, and Hollywood moviemakers count on it whenever they try to dramatize the nation’s capital.
“Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” directed by Frank Capra, is their model the Washington movie from which all others flow. Jimmy Stewart played the innocent rustic whom political bosses appoint to a Senate seat, assuming he’ll be as easily manipulated as a movie audience.
Smith discovers an illicit land deal, then exposes the Senate as a den of thieves. With a floor speech that rouses a populist outpouring, he restores the nation to its democratic ideals.
Capra saw “Mr. Smith” as a hymn to those ideals, but in reality it is no such thing. Like all Hollywood depictions of Washington, “Mr. Smith” seethes with impatience and contempt for the raw material of democracy: debate, deal-making, log-rolling, compromise all the tedious, unsightly mechanics that turn democratic ideals into practice.
In Hollywood’s rendering, Washington can only be rescued by anti-democratic means; it requires an appointed (not elected) savior who employs a filibuster (favorite parliamentary trick of bullies and autocrats) to touch off the volatile pressure of a disenfranchised mob (the great fear of every democratic theorist since Aristotle).
“LB2” falls far below Capra’s genius while drawing on his anti-Washington animus. The heroine, Elle Woods, is an updated Mr. Smith. She glides into Washington unaware of its squalor, and as an outsider, she alone can save democratic government from its practitioners.
And she does so, of course, with a climactic, Smith-like speech reiterating a Smith-like theme: The voice of the people has been drowned out by the mendacity of politics. “I’d forgotten I had a voice,” she says, echoing dozens of other anti-Washington Hollywood speeches, such as Goldie Hawn’s in “Protocol” (“I’d forgotten to say what I think”) and Richard Gere’s in “Power” (“Go out there and say what you think”). And when the people regain that “voice,” the bad dudes of the Beltway will be gone.
This is a creepy fantasy, and its popularity is not good news for democracy. It is designed to let us all off the hook, by faulting alien creatures in Washington for whatever ails our government. The people the paying customers stand blameless, always.
Andrew Ferguson is a columnist with Bloomberg News. Business Journal Editor Mark Lacter is on vacation.
