POLITICAL ENTERTAINMENT
By Jeanette Hendler
The movie Fahrenheit 911 is only one of the many vehicles that have been recently released to both enlighten and fill the entertainment medium with political content.
The latest arrival is The Patriot Act, also titled A Public Meditation. It is housed in one of the more important off- Broadway theaters in the East Village, the New York Theater Workshop. It is not billed as a work of theater, but is billed as a provocative, funny and scary expose of threats to American democracy and freedom.
Media critic and political commentator Mark Crispin Miller says the Republican and Democratic parties, the Christian Reconstructionists and the federal government are undermining and erasing our liberties by their relentless contempt for democratic practices and free speech. He further states that the media compounds the problem by not reporting contradictions, equivocations and downright falsehoods uttered in interviews and press conferences, effectively giving these groups a free ride to say or do whatever they please.
In the Patriot Act, Miller diagrams, pulls apart and leads you through a multimedia presentation of material drawn from official government reports, press conference transcripts, and news service material to evidence his case. He absolutely succeeds in making you aware of the political climate that is currently prevailing. However, it’s all done in a very entertaining and contemporary fashion.
At the end, half the audience remains glued to their seats to wait for a talk-back session with Miller. Pointed questions come from the audience regarding topics such as what should one read and what should you watch on television, in order to be better informed. Many, many younger people are present in the audience and crowds even mill around the lobby afterwards to continue the discussion and it’s obvious that a lot of eyes have been opened to current affairs.
In London, at the National Theater, David Hare, the world famous playwright, has written Stuff Happens which is playing there currently and through the summer. The words Stuff Happens is what Donald Rumsfeld responded to regarding the looting of Baghad at a press conference on April 11, 2003. The play tells about the process leading up to invading Iraq. It is both a historical narrative and a human drama about the frustrations of power and the limits of diplomacy. The main characters portray Condoleeza Rice and George W. Bush. It’s currently the talk of London and a very hot ticket.
The actor Tim Robbins also wrote and directed and acted in
Embedded, recently at the Public Theater in NYC. The production also played at the Actors Gang Theater in Hollywood, California, prior to coming to New York. Robbins tells the story of a fictional war where U.S. soldiers and embedded reporters are getting ready to leave for a war in an oil-rich land called Gomorrah "to fight against the butcher of Babylon". It’s a definite anti-war commentary, which Robbins felt was necessary in response to the events that preceded the play.
New films include Robert Greenwald’s expose about Fox news where Greenwald used leaked internal memos and unlicensed footage. He calls his documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism. Greenwald states that he uses a "guerrilla" style of filmmaking. The film is being partnered with organizations such as Moveon.org. Greenwald also did a film in 2003 called "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War". This was also a documentary critical of Bush taking the U.S. to war.
Political entertainment has been around since medieval times.
The court jesters were practicing political entertainment in an oblique way and directed to a narrow audience. Today’s political entertainment is seen and heard worldwide and in many different forums allowing it to influence a slew of international attitudes.
