Fighting The War On Terrorism, Hollywood Style

It always amuses me when the American Right gets all hot and bothered about the way Hollywood is meant to be the great moral corrupter of the United States. Not that they’ve been making much noise on that front of late, what with their sights trained on Iraq, Iran, North Korea and whoever else might find themselves on the Axis of Evil enemy list. Ever since 9/11 and the claim by many that America was the target of terrorist attacks because it is the Great Satan, once vocal critics of Hollywood have become its de facto defenders with their jingoistic, chest-beating rhetoric about what a wonderfully free and democratic nation they live in, Hollywood and all.

No need to worry about what Tinsel Town is getting up to in the absence of its usual detractors. If the romantic comedies and recent box-office successes Sweet Home Alabama and My Big Fat Greek Wedding are anything to go by, the fare Hollywood is churning out is as middling, predictable and safe as ever.

Take Sweet Home Alabama. It stars Reese Witherspoon as Melanie, a born and bred Southern gal who trades in the big hair and chicken-fried steak of her hick hometown for the slick sophistication of Manhattan, where she’s a fashion designer. When her boyfriend, a Democrat (naturally) and son of the city’s mayor pops the big question, she heads back to the tractor-trailer and the deep-fat fryer to get a divorce from her childhood sweetheart, whom she left some seven years before.

No prizes for guessing what happens next. Initially Melanie looks down her surgically altered nose at the rednecks she left behind, flaunting her Yankee credentials with righteous relish. Sho ‘nuff, she begins to realise the error of her ways and that it is her and her New Yorkness that are wrong, not the good folks of Greenville, Alabama, and certainly not the charming and virtuous blond hunk of a husband.

So the Democrat is dumped at the altar, and the two Southerners get back together, though not before Melanie decks the ex-boyfriend’s mother for insulting Dixie. To which Melanie’s father, who takes part in Civil War re-enactments, responds: “The South has risen again!” Yee-haw.

In-between a truckload of cringe-inducing stereotypes is indulged in. You know them: Northerners are soulless, materialistic and immoral; Southerners, well, aren’t. At one point Melanie is even made to say to her hapless boyfriend, “It isn’t about money down here.” It isn’t? And where was Enron headquartered?

Of course there’s the Token Gay, Billy Ray. (I did not make that up.) He’s lived all his life in the closet for fear of what those good ol’ boys down at the bar would say. But when Melanie outs him, his buddies, after a brief bout of discomfort, go all gay-friendly. Because the South ain’t homophobic, no sir.

But what more can one expect from a film named after a Confederate-flag waving rock tune, written as a response to a song about the South’s slavery legacy (Neil Young’s “Southern Man”.)? If you expect it to be at least better than My Big Fat Greek Wedding, you might find some consolation there. Because as stereotypical as Sweet Home Alabama is, My Big Fat Greek Wedding is stereotype central.

Nia Vardalos is Toula, a frumpy 30-year-old woman who lives with her parents in a tightly knit Greek community in Chicago. She works in the family concern, a restaurant called Dancing Zorba’s, waiting for her prince to come and liberate her from her family’s cloying and oppressive grasp. (Aside: could the film’s makers have found a more cliché reference than Zorba? The fact of course, being that Zorba, the most famous movie Greek, was played by Anthony Quinn, a Mexican.)

Anyway. The family expects Toula’s eventual beau to be a nice Greek boy. But instead who comes to dinner is a Waspy longhaired vegetarian English teacher, Ian, played by John Corbett.

No one in Toula’s family, immediate or extended, has married outside their community. But Toula is a modern, educated, independent American woman and she will marry whoever she pleases, even and probably especially if, he isn’t Greek. (Let’s just forget the fact that even though she is a modern, educated, independent woman, priority number one is still to get hitched and make babies for her loving man.) The thing is, though, although Ian starts off as being one of Them, by the movie’s end he’s very firmly one of Us.

In order to win Toula’s family’s approval, Ian takes a crash course in how to be Greek – the customs, the food, the language and such. Very commendable of course, but then he decides to get baptised a Greek Orthodox. Surely an unnecessary step in the Land of the Free, and the Home of the quickie Las Vegas wedding?

Then there are Ian’s parents. A more caricatured representation of effete, Beaujolais-swilling upper-class snobbery you’d be hard-pressed to find. They condescend to their son’s love match, but only just. And when they meet Toula’s big, loud, roast-lamb guzzling family, they’re less than impressed. But what do you know, by the time the wedding bells ring, they’re drinking Greek liquor and dancing with the rest of them, and I swear I saw veggie Ian munching on a piece of lamb himself. Transformation complete.

The great irony of this film is that its broad stereotyping insults Greeks more than anyone else. I suppose that enough of the American populace is not Greek to make that a non-issue, and most Greek Americans perhaps are just happy to see their community portrayed in film, however stereotypically. Yet one wonders: had this been, say, My Big Fat Jewish Wedding, would Jewish Americans have found it as funny?

Most worrying here is the ultimate message that these films so clearly and so unapologetically deliver: religion, “family” values and the like, good, everything else bad. But whose religion, and whose values? In the post 9/11 world, the answer has become increasingly and disturbingly obvious. Sweet Home Alabama and My Big Fat Greek Wedding have no doubt whose side they’re on, and that, I’m sure, makes GW Bush sleep a little happier at night.