culture: Don't ignore Quiet Americans
Stephen Buckley, The Peak

March 4, 2003, 2:45 p.m.: I walk from my dentist's office to Tinseltown Cinemas to see Al Pacino and Colin Farrell's new movie, The Recruit, and Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser's The Quiet American. En route, I pass Covenant House on West Pender, a crisis intervention centre for youth, only to see Jean Chrétien's entourage spilling onto the street. Inside the building, Chrétien is under the lights delivering a speech on government efforts to address homelessness. One fascinating statement points to the irony in his use of that location: "British Columbia is also a key partner in our efforts to address homelessness and many other social and economic issues."

The covenant in our society between citizens and government to take care of the needy through a fair, progressive system of taxation - our social contract - is eroding before Canadians' apathetic eyes. In the last 22 months, the B.C. Liberals have trimmed almost $2 billion from health, education and care for our weak, aged, handicapped and disenfranchised, all while delivering a tax cut that has overwhelmingly eased the tax burden of the richest.

March 4, 2003, 3:10 p.m.: After 10 minutes of ads and previews of bad movies opening in the next few months, The Recruit begins. While not quite having the compelling plot intrigue of The Usual Suspects or The Spanish Prisoner or the surprising North Korean political poignancy of the latest Bond film, The Recruit successfully explores the notion of lies and truth, not in via exploring the grey area in between but by constantly flipping notions of black and white, lies and truth, mistrust and faith. Pacino's character's introduction of why the new CIA recruits wish to be in training rests ultimately on their faith in the moral sanctity of the American Way (as truth) and the immoral demonism of America's enemies (as lies). Within that context, instead of negotiating life in a world of grey morality and truth, we flip from one side's version of truth to another's, always unsure of where we stand.

March 3, 2003, 2:53 p.m.: I flashback a day to an email press release from the American Forces Press Service that reports four North Korean planes intercepted an American Air Force reconnaissance plane in international airspace off North Korea a day earlier. They are reported to have approached within 400 feet and locked fire-support radar on the U.S. plane.

Tuesday, March 4, 2003, 9:26 a.m.: The Pentagon releases an amended press release indicating that the planes approached to actually 50 feet! More odd, though, is that the reported North Korean radar lock only "may have" occurred. To me, a radar lock seems like a binary condition, like being pregnant or not. Radar is either locked on you or it is not. What is black and what is white? What is truth and what is a lie? Who are we to have faith in?

February 26, 2003, 8:40 a.m.: in another American Forces Press Service, the U.S. assistant secretary of defense for media affairs, Victoria Clark, reports that "cooperation between major media outlets and the Pentagon has been extraordinarily close in recent months to determine how best to facilitate news coverage" of the upcoming war in Iraq, including conceivably live battlefield coverage. Forget the lack of independence and objectivity in Pentagon media pools in the first Gulf War, it seems even closer now.

August, 2 - 7 1964: U.S. President Johnson escalates American military involvement in Vietnam in response to a fictitious Pentagon report of a North Vietnamese attack on them in the Gulf of Tonkin.

March 4, 2003, 4:55 p.m.: Back to the present. After 10 minutes of ads and previews of bad movies opening in the next few months. The Quiet American starts. The story is of Michael Caine's Thomas Fowler, a British journalist in 1950s Saigon, Phuong, his Vietnamese mistress, and an American "aid" worker who falls in love with her.

This movie is a masterpiece of navigating in the greys. While The Recruit kept teasing us into investing in a constantly flipping black and white dichotomy, The Quiet American acknowledges the sludge of greys in politics and morality. Caine's performance as Fowler is profound and subtle as a wise, observant, seasoned, pragmatic chronicler of the shift from one colonial power in the region (France) to another (U.S.A.). But Brendan Fraser's character, Pyle, is fascinating. I once heard the United States described as the guy at a party who gives everybody cocaine, but still nobody likes him. Pyle is this kind of character, on the surface. He's a benign aid worker with a naïve, innocent, sponge-like desire to learn about the world he's landed in. Yet he also has surprisingly strong, assertive and timely skills with a machine gun, and a fluency in Vietnamese that he earlier lied about.

He's even so off-putting as to virtually propose to Caine's mistress in front of him; think about him as the naïve, well-meaning, bumbling, harmless Gomer Pyle from the 1960s. Quite the buffoon. But he's CIA, greasing America's way into what became a distasteful police action through the third quarter of the 20th century.

During an American orchestrated "communist terrorist" bombing of civilians in Saigon, while Fowler roams among maimed bodies of men, women and children, Pyle calmly wipes blood from the cuff of his pants; this time, think of this cold, sociopathic Fraser character as Private Leonard "Gomer Pyle" Lawrence from Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, who decays in an overnight bathroom murder-suicide.

November 20, 2002: Think also of George W. Bush, the bumbling, naïve, maybe a little slow, functionally illiterate, sociopathic, moron. That's the day François Ducros, Chrétien's press secretary, is overheard calling Bush a moron. Mark Miller, a professor at NYU, has studied Bush's verbal errors and concludes, "he's incapable of empathy.... And in all the snickering about his alleged idiocy, this is what a lot of people miss."

He appears a moron, but he uses it as a cover, much as Brendan Fraser's Pyle does in The Quiet American.

February 26, 2003: Liberal MP Carolyn Parrish mutters, "Damn Americans. I hate those bastards," after a press scrum fielding questions on the upcoming Iraq war. While she has apologised, she's received many supportive emails from Americans, among the complaints, who fear being so publicly critical of their own country for fear of retribution against their "lack of patriotism."

December 12, 2002: Jon Wiener writes in The Nation that The Quiet American, though finished and previewed just before 9/11, has been the victim of Hollywood distribution censorship because of its perceived anti-American sentiment. Odd: director Phillip Noyce also directed the not even remotely anti-American movies, Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger.

I hope your day with The Quiet American is equally fruitful.

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