Opinion

The perfect post-9/11 movie

By Douglas Lummis

Recently I took the long flight across the Pacific from San Francisco to Narita. Unable to sleep, I had to watch all three in-flight movies. One of them, "The Core," was interesting. I mean, it is a terrible, even ridiculous, movie, but often terrible, ridiculous Hollywood movies like this give us insight into what the American Beast is dreaming.

In a way, "The Core" resembles that superhit "Independence Day." In that film, aliens threaten to destroy all life on Earth. The U.S. military destroys them with nukes and saves the world. The day is July 4, so the U.S. national holiday becomes a festival day for the whole world. The perfect pre-9/11 film: America dreaming about becoming ruler of the world.

In "The Core," too, all life on Earth is threatened, and the U.S. military comes to the rescue with its nukes. But this time the threat comes not from the sky but from deep underground. The Earth's core (the movie's scientists explain) ordinarily rotates, generating the magnetic field that envelops the globe. This field protects us from terrible electrical storms and solar winds. But now the core has mysteriously stopped rotating. If it doesn't start again, Earth is doomed.

Begin adventure: the Pentagon quickly builds a submarine that can "swim" through stone, metal, or magma. In this submarine, the heroes begin their journey to the center of the Earth. They are to set off a nuclear explosion, which will (for reasons that are not clear) start the core rotating again.

But as they approach the Earth's center, the Pentagon scientist who is among them reveals why the core has stopped. He himself had designed a secret weapon for the Pentagon that would use the forces at the center of the Earth to destroy any country with earthquakes and volcanoes. When the Pentagon tested this weapon, the test unexpectedly stopped the rotation of the Earth's core.

This is what makes "The Core" remarkable. It is a war movie, but there are no enemies. No Russians, no aliens, no terrorists. Rather, America's enemy is itself. The U.S. military is desperately trying to save the world from a threat that the U.S. military has caused.

Isn't this the perfect movie for a country fighting a war against al-Qaeda, when everybody knows al-Qaeda got its start under the CIA as a "secret weapon" against the Soviet Union?

Isn't this the perfect movie for a country that just fought a war overthrowing the dictatorship of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, when everybody knows that the dictatorship was used by the United States as a "secret weapon" against Iran?

Isn't this the perfect movie for a country that just invaded Iraq because Iraq supposedly had weapons of mass destruction (in fact, it didn't) when everybody knows the greatest producer, possessor, and user of weapons of mass destruction is the United States?

Isn't this the perfect movie for a country fighting a war against its own shadow?

Isn't this the perfect post-9/11 film?

Shukan ST: Aug. 15, 2003

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