Fools and Conspirators

t's so rare for federal employee characters to appear as heroes in movies that, when it happens, the President notices.

In February, President Clinton told the American Council on Education that he had watched Dante's Peak, a film about a volcano that explodes in an idyllic town in the Pacific Northwest.

"And I couldn't help thinking, you know, the hero works for the U.S. Geological Service [Survey] and his life is saved in the end by a contraption developed not here at home for uses on the ground, but by NASA for use in space," Clinton said, according to The Washington Post. "And I thought, the government is not the enemy."

Dante's Peak does more than tout the merits of inter-agency cooperation. The movie portrays its main characters, a team of scientists who work for the Geological Survey, as diverse, yet unified; they're dedicated to their jobs, yet crack jokes and play pool together in the evenings. The team keeps an eye on taxpayer dollars, postponing the evacuation of a town until their scientific data suggests it's necessary. When it turns out that the emotional premonitions of the team's rogue volcanologist are coming true-against all signs to the contrary, a dormant volcano is about to blow-the team leader immediately accepts responsibility for the delay, and they set about rescuing the town.

The film finds its villain in the federal contractor community-a money-grubbing helicopter pilot tries to bilk the government by doubling the price of a chopper ride when he knows the feds desperately need his services.

Dante's Peak admits that federal employment can be a respectable way to earn a living. But, among the movies playing at Washington-area cinemas as this story went to press, it was the only one.

In Absolute Power, Secret Service agents kill the First Lady and White House aides try to cover it up; in That Darn Cat, a cat is more adept at intelligence work than the humans who work for the FBI.

It wasn't always this way.

In the 1930s, audiences didn't laugh when a film character announced, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you"-they applauded. New Deal-era filmmakers gave government characters the "knights on white horses" roles in their movies, says Paul Boyer, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (University of North Carolina Press, 1994). The federally run migrants' camp in director John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940) is the cleanest and best-run facility the film's characters come across. In Gabriel Over the White House (1933), the country benefits when the American president dismisses Congress and assumes near-dictatorial powers.

During the two world wars, Hollywood's contribution to the war effort was to produce movies that assured Americans that the people managing the country's participation in the wars had the talent to win them. Correspondingly, the U.S. military officials that paraded across the silver screen were wise and courageous.

"Certainly there are examples of early films in which politicians are portrayed as greedy-Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, for one," says Boyer, "[but] there was a much wider range of representation."

Observers contend that filmmakers who ridicule or deride federal employees in today's movies are merely reflecting current public distaste for government.

"Blaming movie-makers is like breaking your thermometer when you don't like the temperature," says Boyer. "The filmmakers sense there's a great well of popular feeling that will respond to the characterization. The real question to address is why do these people feel they can get away with it? If government employees were adored, presumably there would be a groundswell of protest. Instead, there's usually a wave of sardonic laughter."

And the sad fact is that federal employee characters, particularly senior-level managers, make good villains. "The advisers in the top echelons of government-so little is known about them that they're fair game," says Robert Kolker, English professor and former head of the Motion Picture/Television/Radio department at the University of Maryland. Federal officials are characters that audiences instantly recognize, says Boyer-a quality liked by screenwriters seeking to sell their products to a national market.

Should feds worry that Hollywood typecasts them as fools or conspirators?

"I'm sure it has a cumulative effect on public opinion," says Robert Sklar, professor of cinema studies at New York University and author of Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (Vintage Books, 1994).

Among the accumulating messages:

• Elected officials and political appointees are clueless; civil servants run amok behind their backs. In Independence Day, the Secretary of Defense and his cronies know that government researchers have been poking at an alien in a jar for the past 50 years at a facility called Area 51; the President does not. When the President finally sees the facility, all he can stammer is, "I don't understand. Where does all this come from?"
• If you've been in government service for a while, you've perfected the art of lying. When a disgruntled major steals two nuclear warheads and crashes a stealth bomber into a national park in Broken Arrow, one federal official suggests that the Air Force inform the American public what has happened. "Tell the truth? How did you get this job?" snorts a high-ranking officer.
• Even good feds abuse taxpayer dollars. In True Lies, CIA agent Arnold Schwarzenneger and his colleagues use agency-issue equipment and personnel to find out if his wife has been faithful.
• If you're unfit for work in the private sector, there's a job for you in government. The CIA snaps up a wacko pilot to fly for them in Air America. The people working at the Postal Service's dead letter office in Dear God are endearing misfits, but misfits nonetheless.

"In many cases, when we see rangers portrayed in motion pictures we just wince," says National Park Service senior ranger Tony Bonnano. For example, in The Rock, he says, rangers leading a hike were "real slobs" and unrealistically overweight. "Audiences do put a lot of stock in what they see, so it would be wonderful if the industry came to us and asked us about accuracy," he says. Agencies might initiate fairer portrayals by "developing a better rapport with the film industry," Bonnano suggests.

Then again, "using 'responsibility' in the same sentence as 'the movie industry'-it just doesn't fit," says director John Sayles in an interview in the book, Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (Henry Holt and Co., 1996). "It's not high on their list of things to think about." Agencies may decide that all they can do is wait for popular opinion to rally behind them again. Admittedly, some movie-goers are already tiring of evil federal characters. In February, The Washington Post reviewer Tom Shales praised NBC's miniseries Asteroid because, "even the dread 'feds,' perennial kick-me boys in so many movies, come off well. . . It's refreshing to find a movie in which federal bureaucrats are not portrayed as heartless or incompetent cads."

But there's no guarantee that such a change is around the corner.