I think the genre is about to undergo a revival, politics to the foreground and the action more psychosocial. Always the threat of violence lurks, more frightening from the shadows and more insidious because those shadows reside in the soul.
Movies inspired by real events hit the screens a few years following those events. You can be sure that at this very moment, several scripts derived from the Snowden revelations and the federal shutdown are being shopped around. Most of them will hew to the familiar tropes about our government out to get us and the ruthless ambition of politicians, tropes that are throwbacks to the 1970s culture of paranoia.
I have in mind something different, a political thriller that turns tropes upside down.
In my story, terrorists, the usual suspects, are vastly overrated bunglers, struggling against their increasing irrelevance.
The Tea Party "patriots" are subversives in the legal as well as the rhetorical sense of the term.
Mainstream Republicans show themselves to be nothing more than money mongering opportunists with no moral center.
Journalists worthy of the name are few, and most with bylines and televised faces are self promotional hacks addicted to sensational speculation.
Liberal righteous rage finally, foolishly and fatally bursts out of its fabled self restraint, a serious menace posed by rational, overly tolerant people gone mad with vengeance.
Intelligence services are concerned primarily with avoiding culpability by erasing their tracks. In a strange way they are pathetically innocent of what they hath wrought.
The villain is not a secret movement, it is the American brew of apathy, self righteousness and impetuous power. The conspiracy is not about cover ups and murder, it is about collective denial in a culture where people nurture their favorite nemesis in order to justify their own agression.
Amongst the military are the good guys, the only adults in the room, and the Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs is the wisest woman in the world.
The NSA fishing pond stocked with archived phone calls and emails becomes an asset vital to the survival of a democracy that is most threatened by a public too lazy and too ignorant to sustain it.
The main practical question to be faced by a story that leaves few unscathed by disdain is, will it sell?
I think that so much self disdain roils beneath the surface of our national shame, that, yes, it will sell. Our dissatisfaction with ourselves craves an outlet.
