Lines between truth, fiction in politics blur more each day

We’re entering an era in which life seems as strange as the movies.

No, what’s strange is that life anymore is just like the movies.

That was made clear by a Maureen Dowd column that ran in Sunday’s New York Times. In her commentary on the upcoming presidential election – you’ve heard we’re having an election, right? – Dowd used movies to illustrate her points.

First up was “The Godfather,” Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 study of the Italian mob. Outlining the perceived images of the two presidential candidates, Dowd began with John Kerry, comparing the Democratic candidate to singer Johnny Fontane. In Coppola’s movie, Fontane is the Frank Sinatra-type character “who shows up at the wedding of Don Corleone’s daughter,” Dowd wrote, “and whines that a studio chief is being mean to him.”

You remember what happens then. The don slaps Fontane and says, “What’s the matter with you? Is this what you’ve become, some Hollywood finnochio that cries like a woman?”

“What am I gonna do?” Fontane whines. “You can act like a man!” the don answers.

Dowd then moved to John Sturges’ 1960 Western, “The Magnificent Seven.”

A remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece “Seven Samurai,” Sturges’ film transferred Kurosawa’s Japanese setting to the American West. Even so, Sturges stayed true to the basic story – seven members of a dying breed, in this case the gunfighter, come together to protect a Mexican village. As a friend of mine once said, “Everybody needs a Mexican village” – meaning, I always understood, that there’s no better way of proving yourself a man than by defending the weak in the face of overwhelming odds.

Laugh if you want, but such stereotypes hold an amazing amount of power.

As Dowd wrote, that’s how the Republicans have been successful – “because they cast their convention as a Western. They were the ‘Magnificent Seven,’ steely-eyed, gun-slinging samurai riding in to save the frightened town.”

Vice President Cheney even let ABC interview him at his ranch in Wyoming, which led to Dowd’s third movie reference. The segment featured the vice president, but as Dowd quoted Times television columnist Alessandra Stanley, “The cowboy riding tall in the saddle and holding the reins for a little girl on her pony could have been Shane.”

Shane, you’ll recall, is the title character in George Stevens’ 1952 Western about a cowpoke – another gunfighter – who sides with the settlers in their fight against the local cattle baron. When the talking is done, it falls to Shane to pick up his gun and settle the issue.

And, finally, Dowd returns to Kerry, comparing him to the effete title character that Ronald Colman played in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1947 satire “The Late George Apley.”

”(T)he White House has cleverly co-opted the imagery of Westerns,” Dowd wrote, “leaving Mr. Kerry to star in a far less successful movie genre: the Eastern.”

So, OK, say that all this image-making is true. Where does that leave the rest of us?

As Woody Allen implies in “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” movies work both ways. We see them the same way we do politics: through the filter of our own attitudes and, in many cases, prejudices.

But moviegoing doesn’t have to be a passive act. To use one of the trendiest buzz words, moviegoing can be “interactive.” That’s how Tom Baxter, the lead character in Allen’s film-within-a-film manages to step off the screen and talk to the mousy waitress Cecilia.

Cecilia wants, she needs, for Tom to walk into her world. And she wills it to happen.

“I just met a wonderful new man,” she says. “He’s fictional, but you can’t have everything.”

He’s not Shane, he’s not George Apley, he’s not even real. But he is “wonderful,” you see.

Which leads me to another movie, and you can probably guess where this is going. The movie is “Network.” The character is Howard Beale.

And what is Howard’s cry? Forget the depressed economy, the crime in the streets, the unemployment – the war in Iraq? – and, most of all, the attempts of others to convince you that their view of the world is the correct one.

“You’ve got to get mad,” Howard says. “You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a human being! My life has value!’ “

As Howard says, “I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ “

If nothing else, you’ll feel better. Because if you’re going to embrace life as a movie, you might as well embrace the movie that you’ve chosen.