Re: Sum of All Fears

[Alan McKendree <amck@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2002 00:21:02 -0500
> From: Sroundtable@aol.com
>
> It wasn't a WW2 movie.  The villain is a terrorist bent on 
> rekindling Nazi-ism and the Aryan superiority movement.  Let's not 
> take our band so seriously that we get offended if a movie villain 
> uses a lyric.
The mention as reported (and as I've well demonstrated, I haven't 
seen the movie :-) said that the person not only quoted the lyric but 
said a "great poet" wrote it.  Lyrics, as well as other well-known 
lines of poetry, catchphrases, etc. become popular and pass into 
general use where frequently the person saying them doesn't know 
their original context and sometimes even applies them out of context 
or erroneously (e.g., thinking "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" means 
"Hey, Romeo, where are you?").  It wouldn't bother me if "meet the 
new boss, same as the old boss" had just been used without any 
special emphasis.  Who-literate folks could appreciate the reference 
and within the context of the film the character could be supposed to 
have just seen or heard a phrase that stuck in his head.

However, the mention of the "great poet" indicates that the neo-Nazi 
character had not only heard the phrase but 1) learned who wrote the 
phrase; 2) presumably studied much more of the author's work (since 
great as WGFA is, the one song by itself wouldn't be enough to 
qualify the author as a great poet) and 3) evaluated that person as a 
great poet. Within the context of the film, this amounts to the 
character endorsing the poet Pete as worthy of admiration within the 
neo-Nazi group, and thus that they have a significant number of 
values in common, not just that Pete wrote a single phrase which 
happens to be applicable in a  context of the neo-Nazi's choosing.

Of course, I do not believe that Pete's values coincide with the aims 
of a neo-Nazi outfit so I think the movie substantially misrepresents 
him.

So there ya go,

Unoffended but analytical,
--
Alan
"That's unbelievable, if that's true"
   -- Howard Stern, 5/25/00