How Film Might Go Beyond a Sobering Reality

As a New York-based novelist, screenwriter and director who’s had success in both the independent and studio worlds, Henry Bean has a distinctive perspective on what the events of Sept. 11 mean to the film universe.

Bean’s “The Believer,” a based-on-fact story of a Jewish neo-Nazi, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in January. It was scheduled to air on Showtime this past Sunday, but elements of terrorism in its plot made its postponement almost inevitable.

The co-screenwriter on “Deep Cover,” Bean also did uncredited rewrites on “Enemy of the State” and the upcoming “Murder by Numbers,” directed by Barbet Schroeder.

Kenneth Turan: As a person and as an artist, you probably reacted on several different levels to what happened on Sept. 11. What were some of the things that crossed your mind?

Henry Bean: These people are operating from a different system than ours. They have mastered death in way we haven’t. They kill without qualms, and don’t seem to be afraid of dying, so they don’t seem quite human to us. They seem to have transcended one of the basic human limits: our fear of death, and our compunction about killing people. Jingoism forces us to treat them in a conventional way as an enemy, but they’re a very different kind of enemy than we’ve faced before. They’ve blown our minds. What they’ve done is a world-bestriding thing. It’s like Napoleon in the 19th century: Nobody could stop thinking about him. He forced himself into their imaginations.

Turan: Where do art and culture fit into all this?

Bean: I’m not trying to make light of these events--my own life is being affected terribly by them--but what Stockhausen said about this being a work of art haunts me. It’s hard to imagine any work of art having the immediate power of the event itself, but people probably felt that was true of the French invasion of Russia, and that did produce great works of art. It’s hard to imagine a movie able to address this event head-on right now. I can imagine much more oblique approaches, like a drama set inside the towers, with people looking out the windows, making telephone calls, but never going outside.

Turan: How might Hollywood respond?

Bean: I can’t imagine Hollywood art taking this on directly, but I’d like to make a little prediction. A friend once advanced the theory that Bruce Lee became a movie star as a bow by American culture to the superiority of an Asian army we were not able to defeat in Vietnam. I suspect we’ll see coded, disguised versions of our imaginings of Osama bin Laden appearing as heroes. The people who make those films might not have that as a conscious thought but they will do it inevitably.

Turan: Where were you and what was your initial reaction when you heard the news?

Bean: I was in LaGuardia, waiting to get on a plane, and my first thought, before I knew the extent of what happened, was if it makes more Americans read the newspapers, this will be a good thing. It sobered us up briefly, and if you put aside the terrible human suffering, I rather like us sobered up. Suddenly our lives matter. We’ve been given our lives back; we have to focus on real things. There was a way in which our previous lives had this frivolity about them; they were almost floating away from us. That’s not so now. Our lives are weightier, graver. We feel like we can actually engage with our lives.

Turan: If Hollywood does try and deal with some of the issues involved, who would you like to see doing that?

Bean: With Hollywood, my sense of what they can accomplish is so small, I don’t even know what to wish for. I’ve seen them do such poor work for so long, the quality of filmmaking has gone down and down. I know who could have done it 20 years ago: Stanley Kubrick. And Roman Polanski, before he went to Europe--there was a mind that knew how to talk about important matters in commercial ways. Of current directors, David O. Russell could do something. He thinks big and he thinks small at the same time. “Three Kings” was one of the most interesting and serious political films of our time. And both Spike Lee and Oliver Stone have consistently taken on political subjects; I revere them both, and it’s not inconceivable they could make a good film about this. What I’m afraid of is not so much jingoism as simplicity, an absence of a critique of this country. You hope we get beyond this ennobled victimization, this “We’re going to show them.” This is a moment when it feels like the future of our world is at stake. If we respond complexly, intelligently, we could succeed. If we fail, we could lose so much of what we have.

Turan: Do you hold out any hope for standard major studio movies?

Bean: There’s no reason why they can’t make a movie that would be serious and entertaining at same time. You can always point to the Godfather films, for example. That’s what genre is for: make ‘em laugh, scare ‘em, then you can do what you want. “Cure,” by Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, is an example of what Hollywood might be able to do. That film knocked me out. It was the most exciting thriller since I don’t know when, and it did it within the genre. It begins with what you think is strictly a police procedural about serial killings, and without abandoning that, it explodes beyond the confines of the genre. It explodes into a philosophical contemplation of the world and the nature of Japanese society. And the more it becomes philosophical, the scarier it gets.

Horror films are another way to talk about this. Because it’s a very poetic, allusive genre, it can embody ideas that people don’t have to confront head on but in a dream. We love to experience our fear in a safe, contained environment, where we can work it out. That’s what we’re going to need to do, and the horror film is a great way to do that.

Turan: Which brings us back to the artist.

Bean: It’s artists who must take those events and reinterpret them for us. This thing was done, but what did it mean to us? How did it make us different? That’s what we would want from a work of art.

A friend of mine who saw the second plane hit said it wasn’t like in the movies. I naively started talking about technical things like close-ups and master shots, and he said no, the real difference is that in the movies the crashes don’t happen amidst all my thoughts, in the midst of my life. One of the things art could do is to bring these events into the midst of our lives. Tolstoy could do both, juxtapose the petty and the daily with the grandiose. A plane hits the tower and blows my personal life out of the water. My personal life returns altered by these events. That takes an artist.