Reality Supression
Today is a travel day, so I watched a couple of movies: Iron Man on the flight and Vantage Point in the hotel. I enjoyed the first; I wish I could get the time back for the second. I am well aware that watching any movie requires the suppression of our reality belief system to a certain degree. It is a movie. Depending on the genre (and the mood and a host of other factors) the level of suppression may go pretty deep. I expected Iron Man to require quite a bit of suppression: the premise of the movie makes this pretty obvious. Vantage Point required, at least on a number of occasions, pretty strong suppression as well, which I did not expect (maybe mild suppression).
The plot, as action flicks/thrillers go, is pretty weak. The perspective angle isn’t there as far as I’m concerned. I could live with that. But the devil’s in the details. For it would appear it is perfectly normal for American Secret Service agents to wave their guns and fire them around civilians in front of local and national Spanish police, as well as the Civil Guard. In sovereign Spanish soil. Is it the looks? The stern faces, the black suit and [conservative] tie, the ear piece. Because when Richard T. Jones is chasing Eduardo Noriega, he first fires his gun in the air once to get people moving, and then, a few seconds later, starts shooting at Eduardo, who by now has dived into a relatively thick crowd. None of the Spanish cops seem to even blink, let alone take an unidentified male shooting into the crowd out after a foreign dignitary has been assassinated. Of course, some video-camera-toting tourist on vacation from his family can be the everyday man hero who a) records several pieces of critical footage, b) also chases Eduardo Noriega (while filming the chase!), and c) saves the little girl who chooses to stand in the middle of what appears to be a relatively busy thoroughfare at some key moment in the movie, seven blocks from where a) a president has been assassinated on live TV and b) a bomb has taken out what it would seem like a large number of people.
Sigh.
We may be a lot of things in Spain, and we aim for a relaxed lifestyle and all that, and Spanish police may not be be poster civil order force. But the assertion that they would simply stand there in such circumstances has nothing to do with suppressing reality checkpoints while watching a movie. It’s plain stupid, and it says something about the mainstream American vantage point as packaged by Hollywood. And if those involved with the project in Salamanca knew their own police forces were going to be portrayed a complete morons, ya les vale.
