Terror's not entertainment

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

Imagine, if you will, a movie, embraced by critics, hailed as "brilliant," "extraordinary," and "a cause for celebration," about an SS officer, who kidnaps, tortures and kills Jews - but is portrayed as a guy with a kind heart. He kills without glee, you see. He's troubled by his actions.

If this is hard to envision, don't worry. The movie will make you see the goodness in this man. The camera will linger on the killer's sensitive eyes as he's interrogating his prisoner. The music will swell as Mr. Nice SS Guy lifts the hood off a shackled Jew so that he can more easily breathe. If you still can't see past the officer's actions to the purity of his soul, the movie's manipulative subplot and eye-for-an-eye ending will take you there.

Is it possible that a plot like this would ever sell? Hidden inside a conniving, butchering, murdering SS officer is a heart of gold! Would the world buy this lunacy? I doubt it. But then again, maybe it would. People are certainly smitten with "The Crying Game," and it's the same story. Change SS officer to IRA terrorist, and Jew to Englishman, and what you have is what the critics are calling "one of the best films of the year."

"The Crying Game" has already won six awards and has been nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Critics love it. Audiences praise it.

But why?

The movie has a sub-plot, which is more sleaze than substance - the much talked about "secret." But the secret's just a gimmick. It gets your attention, but it fails to develop it. If the gimmick had been the main plot - man meets woman, man falls in lust with woman, man discovers there is more to woman than meets the eye, man actually learns to care for and about woman - "The Crying Game" might have been an illuminating film.

But as it is, it's nothing but propaganda. It's designed to make you feel sorry for the bad guy. Poor Mr. Nice Terrorist wakes up one day in a room full of bandits, a machine gun in his hands and a British soldier at the end of the barrel. Woe is he. How did he get there? Who did this to him? What's a nice guy doing in a mess like this?

Mr. Nice Terrorist signed up for the job, that's how he got there. No one did this to him. He chose to spend his life blowing up buildings and people, taking orders to kill. He doesn't deserve sympathy. He deserves disdain.

Off the movie pages, in the news section - where real people live real lives and die real deaths when they're blown to smithereens - there was, last week, yet another in a long line of true stories about the Irish Republican Army.

This time the merry band of murderers, planted two bombs in a busy shopping center in Warrington, England, a city 200 miles northwest of London. A 3-year-old boy was killed in the explosion. A 12-year-old "savagely injured," as the Associated Press put it at the time, has since died. Some 56 others were burned, cut and maimed.

Are we, for even a second, to entertain the notion that among the people who planted these bombs and are responsible for all this pain, is a murderer with a kind and loving heart? Are we to sympathize with his or her plight?

In a statement issued in Dublin, the IRA said it had given "adequate and precise warnings" to police, and that civilians were not the targets of the bombs.

But civilians died anyway. That's what happens. Bombs explode and people die. When you're a terrorist, terror is the name of the game.

In the movie, "Sophie's Choice," Sophie, who, is in a concentration camp, works for a while in the home of the camp's commandant. This man who orders the death of thousands every day, who ordered the murder of Sophie's own daughter, is a good father, kind to his children. The audience sees this. And the contrast between who he is and who his children think he is makes him even more of a monster.

If Hollywood had focused on the commandant as father, produced an entire movie about his relationship with his children and only alluded to his role as a murderer, would it have been an honest movie?

Of course not. It would have been a lie. And the lie on a big screen shown in theaters around the would have diminished the deaths of millions.

That's what "The Crying Game" does. It diminishes death and cheapens life. It makes a hero of a murderer and a mockery of truth.