Fred Kaplan (who I normally think is right on the money on pretty much everything) says a number of clearly wrong things in this Slate article on the best movies about international relations. He’s referencing a couple of lists put together by Stephen Walt and Daniel Drezner on that subject. The column takes issue with a number of their choices.
He begins by noting:
A couple of his selections are no-brainers: Dr. Strangelove, the ultimate satire of the nuclear arms race and the Cold War mentality; and Casablanca, the ultimate romance (though far from the best movie) about occupation and resistance.
Agreed on Dr. Strangelove, obviously, but what’s with the faint praise for Casablanca? It’s about as close to perfect as a movie can get. Frankly, any 10 minutes of Casablanca would compare favorably to just about any other movie you might find.
The next puzzling comment:
Then comes Wag the Dog. OK, the mendacity of the Bush years has made this film a retrospective classic, though it’s more about domestic politics than international affairs.
If Wag the Dog, which argues for an intense co-constitutive relationship between domestic politics and the foreign policy of nations is not about international affairs then anyone who is not a realist probably doesn’t get to show up to the IR party.
Kaplan continues:
The most jaw-dropping pick of all, though, is Independence Day, which “makes my list,” Walt writes, “because it is balance-of-power theory in action: an external threat (giant alien spaceships) gets the world to join forces against the common foe.” Here’s the thing. Walt is a classic International Realist, the author of such gravitas-beaming books as The Origins of Alliances, Taming American Power, and Revolution and War. Yet this is his view of “balance-of-power theory in action”—the one-worlder’s wet-dream cliché about how all the nations join forces to beat back monsters from outer space?
Once again, I feel like this is a relatively simplistic treatment of the genre. The reason why realists dismiss the notion of international cooperation is the assumption that states will be unwilling to bind themselves together for the sake of the greater good, and instead will pursue their own power-driven interests.
While the movie doesn’t do much to further this point, it does offer an example of what it would take to jump-start such cooperation. Not the ephermeral global interests that us liberal internationalists tend to value (human rights, the environment, etc.) but only the imminent threat of planetary extinction.
And my final complaint:
Walt’s list spurred Dan Drezner to devise his own, and Drezner’s is even stranger. He agrees with Walt on Dr. Strangelove and Casablanca, but his No. 1 pick is The Lion in Winter, which he says is “about the strengths and limits of rational choice in international politics.” Um, OK: a strange choice, especially for the top of the list, but there’s a daring quality about it.
The Lion in Winter is an absolutely brilliant film, not least because it captures just how intensely personal these supposedly grand questions of state behavior and interest really are. The idea that the foreign policy of England is not only influenced by, but appears to be almost entirely connected to the inter-relations of one twisted family is fascinating. And over the course of a two-hour movie it manages to offer an example of virtually every kind of behavior a game theorist has ever attempted to imagine.
One other film that was overlooked by all of these folks: The Transformers Movie (the good, cartoon one from the 80s, not the recent trainwreck). Seriously. Intergalactic civil war, a rampaging hegemon eating planets for breakfast, pseudo-religious belief that a small insurgent group can somehow win the war. It’s Star Wars minus Mark Hamil, with Leonard Nimoy, Eric Idle, and Orson Welles instead.
It’s particularly fun if you imagine Ultra Magnus as Neville Chamberlin and Hot Rod as Churchill. And Grimlock is clearly Dwight Eisenhower.
Even more, there’s the Pearl Harbor-esque attack on the Autobots’ home base (designed to kill off a bunch of the previous year’s line of toys so they could invent new charactes to foist on kids like me. And it worked!).
While I’m talking about this movie, a related question:
The death of Optimus Prime. One of the saddest things you’ve ever seen or the single saddest thing you’ve ever seen?
I seem to have gotten off track. So here’s my favorite song from the Transformers soundtrack. Cheers.
Dare – Stan Bush