Cowboys, Politicos and Primes
I took screenwriting from Thomas Pope, Hollywood screenwriter. His as-yet-unpublished second book focuses on script doctoring. Well- he would say it focuses on second drafts, since in an ideal world redrafts are done by the original writer. I have a wire-bound proof of this yet-to-be published volume (which he used to teach the class) on my ( Read more... )
Gore was a Teacher. Giuliani was a Cop.
AFAIK the last time the world saw an Achilles-- universally admired for his skill in war without regard to who he fought-- was Rommel. (We vilified Patton for the same approach.) You can probably find a more recent example in sports... Muhammad Ali maybe? (Not a perfect fit, he had other stuff going on.)
It's about what kind of 'heroes' Americans universally relate to. Cowboy and Idealist Politician are the only two that still 'work' in a broad-based fashion. (My brief historical sampling happened to fall on a republican/democrat divide, but I think that's a coincidence. Both sides have fielded cowboys and idealists.)
Americans don't trust cops. We might want one for certain jobs, but we sure as hell don't want one in charge. We don't particularly want a preacher in charge either. These are all heroic, admirable archetypes... but they're no longer UNIVERSAL ones. And for movies the heroes HAVE to be universal.
Every successful cop movie in the last 20 years has been about Cowboy-cops who dispense justice in a corrupt or indifferent system-- not about kind helpful police officers who do their duty, rescue people and help us resolve problems. Part of that is that cowboys make better cinema, but a bigger part is that we no longer guy into the view of cops as a pure force of law who blah blah blah. We avoid and shun them even when not doing something wrong instead of valuing them.
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