A House Of DEI [Lex]

The Netflix original film A House of Dynamite will likely contend for Academy Award nominations and victories. The movie is directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who won a Best Director Oscar in 2010 for The Hurt Locker.

Bigelow has directed several near-classics (or camp, depending to whom you are speaking) such as Zero Dark Thirty, Point Break and Blue Steel.

From The Hurt Locker forward, however, she has become the go to filmmaker for military dramas and thrillers, and thus we arrive at 2025’s A House of Dynamite.
A House of Dynamite is another entry into what can only be called the nuclear holocaust sub-genre of war pictures. From Dr. Strangelove to Fail Safe to War Games to By Dawn’s Early Light (and on TV The Day After), the countdown to nuclear war and –sometimes— its aftermath never seems to get old. How could it really? The end of the world is inherently terrifying and addictive to think about.

In Bigelow’s latest rendering, we follow the detection of a missile launch from somewhere in Asia as the rocket travels toward the United States. The movie takes a novel approach to the topic, dividing into three, nearly real-time parts from different perspectives.

The first point of view belongs to a team at a remote military post in Alaska which detects the launch, tracks it, and fires counter measures. The second is from the national security bunker beneath the White House, as assembled personnel coordinate diplomatic efforts between foreign governments, cabinet secretaries, and the President himself— while also reviewing response scenarios. The third is from the President of the United States, as he is informed of the danger and considers counter attack scenarios that could engender Armageddon.

A House of Dynamite is well-scripted and well-paced. Some will not like the structure and the switches in point of view, but it mainly works.

Yet here is the rub: in all her years of capturing warfare and military ops on film, I am not sure Bigelow was ready for an enemy as crafty and lethal (a movie killer) as DEI.

One can make any picture one likes, but nominations and awards by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences for Best Picture of the year now come with a catch. In order to be considered for the top Oscar, a movie must allot a certain percentage of roles and work to minorities and/or underprivileged classes.

Formally, it is called the ‘Representation and Inclusion Standards’. You can follow the link to see the full set of requirements. Don’t meet the standards and you can forget about a Best Picture nomination. The rules are as decipherable as instructions on how to put a desk from IKEA together. Or to be more literary, they are Byzantine.

There are probably bean counters somewhere who help studios figure out if they are complying.

What does it add up to? It makes many movies worse than they should be and possibly some great pictures average. In the case of A House of Dynamite, DEI detracted from the tension and fluidity the film worked hard to establish. How? Allow me to explain.

As mentioned, A House of Dynamite depicts a presumed nuclear missile launch from a foreign adversary (North Korea most likely). Whether it is the Norks or not what becomes certain is the missile will hit a target in the United States in twenty minutes. An alphabet soup of agencies and departments are scrambled to assess the situation and strategize a response as well as fallout.

Interspersed through each sequence, we follow the storyline of a top FEMA agent who is charged with readying a plan should the missile attack destroy a major American city (Chicago is the projected landfall). This FEMA agent is a black woman.
Her thread of the movie bears no weight on anything that happens. She is not in any kind of chain of command that would be necessary to shooting the missile down or planning a counter attack against the aggressor.

Some might think it is interesting to see how FEMA prepares, but in the context of this narrative, these glimpses contribute nothing dramatic. They are entirely extraneous, and had they been excised it would not have affected the story in the least.

The second instance of DEI is not just mundane, it is ridiculous. It occurs only in the second sequence, when government officials are attempting to ascertain the source of the missile launch.

The entire intelligence apparatus appears befuddled, so the deputy national security advisor calls the one person alone who can validate or invalidate the North Korea theory: some woman (presumably of Korean or Asian ancestry) who is attending a Gettysburg battlefield re-enactment.

I am sure experts can point out details A House of Dynamite gets wrong in terms of who is in charge of what and how certain rooms look or operate. But it takes no technical familiarity to see it is that the two-minute appearance of this character is anything more than a DEI concoction.

I doubt DEI requirements affect every movie’s story in the negative, and perhaps sometimes the quotas are met off screen (in the crew and staff), but in A House of Dynamite, it was obvious to me DEI hobbled the script in these two very distinct sequences.

If I am being charitable, I might say these are simply bad choices—unrelated to DEI— but I do not think a veteran storyteller such as Bigelow would be this clumsy if her hand was not being forced.

The dumbest aspect to all of this is the President—in A House of Dynamite—is a black man (played by Idris Elba), and the person in charge of the subterranean, White House ops team is a woman (Rebecca Ferguson). Plenty of supporting roles are filled by minorities and women. Were these not enough to meet the quotas?

In storytelling, it has long been advised to “kill your darlings.” That is, as a writer or director, you often fall in love with a piece of dialogue or a scene, and because you are emotionally attached to it you cannot see it should be cut. But if you work up the gumption to kill that darling, you end up with a better result.
Now, the Academy is telling filmmakers not only to preserve darlings but also insert certain darlings, no matter what the narrative consequences. What an abysmal way to guide creators.

Furthermore, why exactly do we need DEI guidance for movies (or anywhere)? It is 2025. Has the work of Spike Lee, Jordan Peele, Oprah, Tyler Perry (ugh) and many others been stopped from appearing or succeeding?

As concerns, A House of Dynamite, once you exclude the two sequences I mentioned, the conservative argument against affirmative action had already won. The best people for the roles (Elba and Ferguson) got them and played them well. The movie did not need anything tacked on, unless it was to soothe the ideological egos of DEI loons.

In fact, let’s call DEI in the movies (or anywhere else) what it is: classic Marxism. In trying to right inequities and level the playing field, it destroys everything saving the technocratic class which adopted the rules and self-congratulates itself astride the ruins.

And just as Marxism discourages work and gain, I wonder if DEI standards will discourage filmmakers from making movies that have traditionally earned nominations. Many top tier filmmakers will refuse to be hamstrung by arbitrary rules, and poetasters will be the only ones left making pictures eligible for Academy Awards.

If one believes the quality of Hollywood’s best films have been declining the past two decades, that slide will become a freefall—all made possible by a faulty and pernicious house of DEI.

posted by Open Blogger at 08:40 PM

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