"Shared Responsibility = Censorship"...

So says Oliver Stone on the eve of his new 9/11 flick, World Trade Center. In an interview published in the WP today, Stone offers us a fascinating look at himself. While Stone has always admitted that his personal politics are left of center, he has consistently fought against people pigeon-holing him because he genuinely believes that he is capable of respectfully understanding and even portraying on film, those with whom he disagrees. And, as it turns out, WTC may be the movie that convinces some people that Stone's self-appraisal has been right all along. By all accounts, WTC is a movie that casts patriotism, religious faith, and 'American values' in a very positive light. Among many, Stone is known as someone who disdains all of these things. But many prominent conservatives who have already seen the movie are praising it and are heaping kudos onto Stone. While this may strike some as a really oddball phenomenon, Stone himself thinks that despite his own views, he believes he has to give credence to those who cherish religious faith, and/or a strong patriotic devotion to America.

The interview is quite honest and revealing. For example, Stone wishes he could be a pacifist, but he can't bring himself to fully adopt this position given the realities of 'the real world'. In addition, Stone wishes he could ascribe and even dedicate his artistic endeavors to some higher or 'great god', but he can't, presumably for philosophical reasons.

In the end, Stone believes his conscience needs to be accountable only to himself. This then leads to his assertion that adopting some kind of communal or shared responsibility amounts to censorship, because he seems to feel that having to align his conscience (and his art) to a larger shared responsibility is a kind of freedom-quashing submission of his individuality as an artist. It's a very interesting way of thinking, and is, of course, correct in a way. It is certainly true that a person who feels a sense of responsibility to something larger than himself, whether it be to a god, a family, a community, a city, a nation, etc, necessarily means some degree of individual submission to a higher good, whatever that is. It is most ironic that we find the uniquely extremist American obsession with individuality in a guy like Stone who so often has provided us a vision of America that is hardly flattering. Stone recognizes the seeming paradox. He says in the interview that he loves America because America is unique in all the world in allowing people to be themselves or to change themselves at will. Again, the stress on radical individuality that has become a mainstay of American life in the last 50 years can be seen in Stone in spades. He truly is a child of the 60s.

I guess what strikes me as highly interesting is that WTC seems to celebrate the very kind of shared responsibility and shared communal duty that Stone himself intensely resists. His movie is about 2 officers who go into the burning buildings to try and save people they don't know. Selflessness, not selfishness, is what Stone is positively portraying here. And oddly enough, he thinks that such selflessness (shared responsibility) and concern for others is one of the great traits of America that we should take pride in. Yet, he himself resists it fervently as a matter of artistic suppression. This has been Stone's attitude for years. When he was pressed on the consequences of his JFK movie, to when he was dogged by the assertion that his movie Natural Born Killers promoted and glorified senseless violence, Stone always said that he did not have a larger responsibility to the public in his art. He always said that his conscience is beholden only to himself. He absolutely believes that asking his art to be sensitive to larger responsibilities is censorship, pure and simple. Yet in WTC, he is going to depict as noble and courageous, a commitment to shared responsibilities in the most extreme of circumstances. Stone is a smart guy, but I wonder if he sees the irony. Frankly, the same could be said of the American church's creeds of shared responsibility being contradicted day after day by its vigorously individualistic deeds and attitudes. I don't think we're much better than Stone in principle, and that should scare us plenty.