here we are the absolutely innocent good guys. (Watching the movie, I thought I was at a PatBuchanan rally.) I confess to liking action films. Still, I am concerned about the presence of what seem to me to besome very dangerous trends leading to the production of more and more movies where evil is beingprojected onto an enemy so foreign and alien that it can be destroyed without any trace of regret. Myconcern is not just that such stories keep us unconscious of our own responsibility for evil and thatmovies like "Independence Day" help us forget that "the problem, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, butin ourselves," but that they may well be tapping into some very unhealthy rage and bias in our culture. When you start designing movies to be theme park rides and video games, they stop beingstories. It's not that stories don't or shouldn't entertain, and it's not that stories can't have thrills andchills. But real stories, at least good stories, have depth and character and plot. They wrestle withambiguity, conflict, even paradox; pose questions--often very unsettling ones; and are open tointerpretation on various levels. Stories inspire, upset, disturb, and haunt us. They engage, not replace, our imagination, challengeour moral sensitivities, and invite us to wrestle with the mystery of being human. They're aboutsuffering, guilt, remorse, passion, anguish, even redemption. Video games and theme parks, on the other hand, are about adrenaline. They are engineered tostimulate the fight or flight response, and, as a rule, they're geared for 12- to 14-year-olds. Likepornography, they have the thinnest of plot lines--hunt down and kill or flee from danger--and their"characters" are strictly cartoon stuff. In the midst of an adrenaline rush you don't have the time orinclination to wonder about the moral ambiguity of this situation, or the humanity of the foe. You justduck and shoot. A second problem with these fea...
