Don't Challenge Me!

Jack Gustafson

In a previous column, I presented the idea that Hollywood is not of a liberal bias, and with this column, I must reiterate that stance. I am not going to say that Thirteen Days is not biased towards the Kennedy family, it most certainly is, however I must argue that the Kennedy family holds a certain place within the American Mythology. Americans, for the most part, do not care about the facts behind the Kennedy Administration, we want to hear things that go along with what we think, and this is a perfect task for Hollywood. Most Americans think of JFK as a good to great President, and we don’t want Hollywood mucking up our belief structure. Same goes with Nixon, we know he was a “bad guy”, which is why all movies about Nixon eventually show him as the flaw character that he was (and that we all are). With movies like Thirteen Days, we allow Hollywood to hold our hand as we “venture” into unchallenged myths.

Thirteen Days takes special care to convince the audience of its’ authenticity. Several scenes within the film are filmed in black and white, an effort by the director to make the movie seem based on specific facts, which I won’t deny. Artists have always messed with their medium to convince the audience of its’ authenticity, and even though I would hardly call this film “art”, and would also say that the use of black and white is a failure, I must respect the attempt. What does work is the use of real news clips to help guide the story while maintaining as sort of historical accuracy. Sadly, in this film with little character development, and lack of suspense, the news clips were the most exciting parts.

While the movie makes it obvious that it favored the Kennedy family through the attention paid toward the characters, I believe that it fails to successfully heap praise on them. If Hollywood was so liberal, you would think that they would take special care to make a good film, but in the end we get flat characters, a story that the national audience is already familiar with, and more Kevin Costner than should be allowed by law. I mean, look at the guy, his character seems to be a mold of like five or six different characters since the real Kenney O’Donnell had nowhere near the amount of power as the fictitious one did. It seems that Kevin Costner is only acting out his dream of hanging out with the Kennedy family.

Since the national audience is already familiar with the story within the film, the idea of creating this film should have been aborted, unless the director decided to add aliens, zombies, or alien zombies. The problem with making a movie like this is that everyone already knows how it will end. The only way to make the movie watchable is to show a different side of an already known character or to actually change history. Kevin Costner was not enough to keep me interested, and (surprise!) we beat the Ruskies. The result is that this film suffers the same fate as all Hitler assassination movies.

If this movie is deemed “Liberal” (capital l is intentional), then I have to believe that this is all part of the vast right-wing conspiracy; the movie does not entertain. In the end it is not about the story, but the size of the director’s ego.