It’s been an intense and frightening past five years since the attacks on Sept. 11. Not only thanks to the events of that infamous day, but also because of the media. While the media’s need to shock people into watching their programming had always been somewhat of an unrealized sleeper cell, the day those horrible things took place, something new was awakened. Everything in entertainment became a matter of life and death.
More recently, cinema and television have fully embraced this ideology of creating hype about their products by making them as controversial and scary as possible. Now both fields have begun attempting to employ terrorism and war as central subjects in their respective art forms. Not just for the subject’s obvious relevance to current world events but also to frighten the audience into paying attention – make their movie or TV show almost a matter of life and death.
This is exactly the motivation behind a British television network’s plans to broadcast a dramatic, documentary-style movie about a fictional assassination of President Bush.
The film, titled “Death of a President,” uses actors and digital manipulation of real footage to show a fictional account of Bush being shot dead after giving a speech in Chicago.
Having recently been premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on Sept. 10, the film concentrates on all those linked to the pretend crime. Focusing on groups of nearby anti-war protesters, suspects, Secret Service guards and investigators; the film is being marketed as “not sensationalist, or simplistic but a very thought-provoking, powerful drama.”
While the producers of “Death of a President” may argue differently, there really is absolutely no reason for including President Bush in the film beyond the obvious factor of shock value.
Why use a leader’s exact name and image?
You can achieve the exact same desired plot scheme and emotion without mentioning a specific name. After all, Fox’s fast-paced, politically themed thriller “24” does this weekly, and without the use of even so much as a political figure’s likeness, let alone name.
Ed Board sees the assassination of President Bush in “Death of a President” as an attempt at creating a gimmick to help better market the film. Not only is this simply a cheap trick to create buzz; it’s also in bad taste. Whether you love him or hate him, President Bush is still a significant political figure, and even more importantly, a person. And to insert not just his exact image, but also his name into a film whose plot is based around the details of his hypothetical death, does nothing more than to trivialize his current life.
