*/****
starring Thomas Jay Ryan, Tilda Swinton, Peter Coyote
written and directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson
by Alex Jackson On May 11, 2004, artist and college professor Steve Kurtz called 911 to report the death of his wife Hope by heart failure. When medics arrived, they saw his art supplies and called the FBI: in preparing an installation that would let patrons test whether food had been genetically modified, Kurtz had ordered biological materials over the Internet. The feds detained Kurtz as a suspected terrorist and confiscated his equipment. After a grand jury rejected the charges of terrorism, Uncle Sam tried to nail him with "federal criminal mail and wire fraud." Those charges are still pending and Kurtz currently faces up to twenty years in prison. It's a chilling tale of injustice in the Patriot Act era, to be sure, but it's hard to feel much ire while seeing this story as realized by Lynn Hershman Leeson's Strange Culture. This is a film made for, by, and about smug liberal assholes; I can't imagine what it would be like to lose my wife and have bullshit federal charges pressed against me on the same day, but if it ever happens and I start referring to the event as "5/11," as Kurtz does here, please give me a nice swift punch in the nose. Leeson enlists Tilda Swinton, Thomas Jay Ryan, and Peter Coyote to re-enact key events in the story for the non-reason that Kurtz is unable to discuss the case for legal reasons. (He of course does exactly that and with great frequency during the film). Her real motives for blurring the line between "fiction" and "reality" are considerably more suspect, since the decision enables her to artificially inflate the significance of Kurtz's case (if all these actors are playing out Kurtz's persecution and breaking out of character to discuss it, this must be some major political issue), ennoble and lionize Kurtz himself (Ryan, who plays Kurtz, is considerably more photogenic than the real deal–even in washed-out digital video, the fictional aspects of the film bring out elements of a traditional Hollywood biopic), and best of all alienate the plebes who aren't quick enough to play along with the self-deconstruction. To his credit, Kurtz indirectly calls Leeson on her nonsense, saying that the prosecution is creating a version of him as a terrorist that is every bit as inaccurate as the "hyperreality" of Ryan's performance. At the end of the film, he says that his friends demanded he be played by Steve Buscemi, who bears a much greater resemblance to him than Ryan does. The only possible reason Leeson could have for leaving these statements in the finished film is to rub our noses in her smug sense of superiority. Don't be fooled by Strange Culture's claims to artistic significance: this is facile Bush-bashing at its most callow.
