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But I'm A Cheerleader, a comedy about a teenage girl sent to a "sexual reprogramming" camp because her parents suspect she is a lesbian, turns out to be only surface-deep. "The filmmaker gets a case of the cutes," complains the Dove Foundation, "leaving his actors looking like cartoon characters. Nothing is seriously addressed. … Perhaps the producers would have given viewers a more powerful film had they seriously examined the subject of sexual orientation and whether it could be changed." Movieguide agrees that the characters are "obvious, shallow, and vulgar, [playing] on both homosexual and Christian stereotypes." (The mainstream media agrees; Owen Gleiberman of the Entertainment Weekly says "any self-respecting lesbian should rear up in horror at a movie that tells her that this is how she's supposed to be.") Movieguide offers as an example a scene where "one of the other teenagers confronts Megan about her sexual relationship with her boyfriend, Megan replies, No, I'm a Christian. This, however, does not stop her from participating in promiscuous behavior with a girl."

With the controversial Revolutionary War film The Patriot crossing the $100 million barrier, and the little-seen Civil War film Ride with the Devil making its debut on video, this week saw a lot of discussion on the best way to make a war film.

World magazine says that The Patriot is the great war movie that cultural conservatives have been waiting for. "It is all here: the passionate commitment to family; the celebration of America and its heritage; the cultural impact of Christianity. … What makes the movie a triumph of a distinctly conservative approach to culture is that the final emotion viewers feel from the movie is inspiration, a sense of exaltation and gratitude for America, its heritage, and the lives that were laid down for its cause." But others saw The Patriot as manipulative, inspiring white American audiences to feel good about themselves only by tearing others down. Already well documented are the British press' objections to the portrayal of the Redcoats as "church-burning, baby-killing brutes," and African-American director Spike Lee's protests that The Patriot "completely ignored slavery." Christian critic Jeffrey Overstreet of Greenlake Reflections points to an even deeper fault: a misrepresentation of what freedom truly is. "'Freedom' is all too often explained as 'my right to pursue happiness and I'll knock down anybody who gets in my way.' If the character is charismatic, he's a hero, and we want him to be happy. If he's nasty, who cares about his right to be happy? Off with his head! In the end, it isn't freedom in a large sense, but merely 'survival of the coolest' that seems to matter in American movies." Christian satirist Betty Bowers mirrored that argument with a fake photo caption that captures Patriot hero Benjamin Martin "in the process of firing warning shots into the stomachs of pesky Indians who didn't understand that our God didn't inspire us to fight for freedom so that we would waste any of it on them." Mainstream sources, too, argued that the film has a shallow understanding of patriotism. Slate's Michael Lind contends that "this movie is deeply subversive of patriotism . …It appears that today's audiences can't imagine any cause that could justify political violence other than injury to a child or wife (your own, not your neighbor's--that's their problem). … A morality in which your duties do not extend beyond your clan is the oldest and most universal human ethic. The rivals of amoral familism have been religion and patriotism. … The message of The Patriot is that country is an abstraction, family is everything." (And, one could infer, religion becomes an abstraction as well.)

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July (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44