01:00 AM EST on Tuesday, January 11, 2005

NEW YORK

I DON'T PRETEND to know why so many Americans have embraced the tenets of Bushism -- fear bordering on paranoia, power worship to the point of brutality, subservience to authority verging on infantilism -- but clues might be found in Polar Express, the sinister "Christmas" movie.

Do I exaggerate? Cranks are always blaming Hollywood for the ills of society, and their attacks -- especially the ones from right-wing moralizers -- often border on the hysterical. Writing in The Journal on Nov. 27, Bob Leddy deemed excessive a New York Times critic who wrote that "Santa's big entrance in front of the throngs of frenzied elves and awestruck children" reminded him of Hitler in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will.

Perhaps The Times's reviewer was overstating the case. But I'm neither hysterical nor right-wing, and I made exactly the same sort of associations: Hitler, to be sure, but also Don DeLillo's depiction of a mass Moonie wedding at Yankee Stadium in his novel Mao II. Moreover, in defiance of its misplaced G rating, my 4-year-old daughter certified the film's badness by hiding her face through much of it, then crying afterwards. So I didn't really need any reviews to confirm my negative opinion.

What was so awful? Well, the terrifying visions of near train wrecks on the way to the North Pole (entirely absent from Chris Van Allsburg's lovely book) weren't exactly edifying. Then there was the deafening noise.

Meanwhile, the "adults" in charge of getting the children to Santa's factoryland -- ostensibly to make believers out of young Santa skeptics -- are either incompetent slobs (the train engineer and fireman) or weirdly cold (Tom Hanks's conductor and hobo characters, as written by Robert Zemeckis).

Indeed, there's something belligerent about Hanks's invitation to the young boy to get on the train in the first place -- in the middle of the night, with no plausible explanation: Are you getting on or not? (Sort of like Bush saying, "You're either with us or against us.")

This simpleminded crudeness, also frightening for a child, was well expressed in Hanks's interview with Rebecca Murray at the movie's Los Angeles premiere:

Murray: "For people who haven't read the book, can you give me a snapshot of what the film's about?

Hanks: "It's about a kid who is waiting to hear Santa Claus up on his roof, and instead a huge express train shows up on his lawn and he gets on board."

Very sensitive; very insightful. And this from an actor who supposedly "fell in love" with the book when he read it to his kids.

But such is Hollywood -- and political -- insincerity. As any screenwriter or author will tell you, the Hollywood types always love their work. In reality, they usually hate it, because after the expression of love comes something like "But we'd like to change the priest character into a jockey, and the boxer into a nun."

I can imagine similar talk on the part of Hanks to Van Allsburg: "I loved your book, but how about if we convert it from a gentle, dream-like fable into an ear-splitting, roller-coaster ride, into a parentless netherworld of American consumerism? And Chris baby! You're going to love the gigantic bag of Christmas presents and the factory elves cracking wise!"

Bush and his ilk are the same. The president loves Muslims -- like they're regular Methodists, the same as you and me. It's a shame, he wants us to know, about all the dead ones in Indonesia. But he's also running the Tenth Crusade in Iraq, where thousands of innocent women and children are being killed in a brutal crossfire, and GIs are gunning down thousands of "insurgents" in the name of American "values."

The sort of values, I suspect, that Tom Hanks personifies. We're told that Hanks's popular success derives from his image as American Everyman. He's always playing well-meaning, innocent types, like the lead in Forrest Gump and Captain Miller in Saving Private Ryan, and his movie characters are said to reflect a super-nice real-life personality. Michael Moore has even suggested running him for president: "Who wouldn't vote for Tom Hanks?"

But Hanks doesn't seem very nice to me; he just sounds like a narcissist with a nasty edge. Remember how he outed his gay high-school mentor at the Academy Awards -- without the teacher's permission -- supposedly to dramatize his solidarity with AIDS victims? Why was he compelled to "play" (in eery, digitized form) all of six characters in Polar Express? "[My favorite]," he said, "was the big man, Santa Claus. It's tantamount to playing Elvis in an Elvis movie." And why was he smirking -- Bush-like -- during the interviews about Polar Express, in the French newspaper Le Figaro as well the one with Rebecca Murray?

Murray: "Do you have a favorite holiday tradition?"

Hanks: "I like the Christmas Eve make-out session with my wife (laughing). . . . You know, there's the Thanksgiving make-out session -- that's pretty good, too. I like that (laughing)."

The smirk, I think, is the contempt that Hollywood -- and Washington -- truly feels for the American public. We can sell you anything: Christmas spirit, democracy in Iraq -- it doesn't really matter when you're counting the cash or the votes.

But you say I'm exaggerating -- that in America we still have freedom of choice. Quite right. When my older daughter was little, my wife and I pulled her out of Toy Story, because of the gratuitous violence, and I should have fled Polar Express with the younger one. But I stayed out of deference to her older sister, thinking that she might find something redeeming -- something that remained of the beautifully quiet book I used to read to her at Christmastime. Like most Americans, I want to believe that the system means well -- I want to believe in Santa Claus, too.

Outside the theater, I asked my older girl if it had been worth staying through to the bitter, computerized end. She said we should have left.

John R. MacArthur, a monthly contributor, is publisher of Harper's Magazine.