In Hollywood, Bush is finally out of the picture

Things were so bad in the first eight years of the millennium that many characters simply fled. According to a 2006 article in Interview Magazine, “road movies are back in vogue, perhaps because alienation is as common in Bush’s America as it was in Nixon’s.” Among the exemplars of alienation, the article claimed, were Jack Nicholson in “About Schmidt,” Paul Giamatti in “Sideways” and Bill Murray in “Broken Flowers.” Easy Riders, all of them.

Is there anything that wasn’t tied to the Bush administration? Well, no. Salon.com ran a piece in 2004, concerning the Lord of the Rings series villain, and titled it “Who’s Sauron—bin Laden or Bush?” ABC News asked, of 2007’s “300,” a tale of Spartan-Persian conflict, “Does Bush resemble Leonidas or Xerxes?” And yet how to explain the miserable failure of most films whose content actually related to the former president? Critical wisdom is one step ahead of us: A New York Times article on the box-office receipts of 2007, a year in which the worst performers were antiwar flicks such as “In The Valley of Elah,” “Rendition” and “Redacted,” was headlined “A Film Year Full of Escapism.” Audiences didn’t want to watch these films because they wanted to “escape” the realities of the Bush era. It’s a far easier explanation than that viewers simply didn’t like the films’ messages.