Who will write our red badge of courage? Camille Paglia on why in times like these we need our artists and poets more than ever

INGRID SISCHY: War, antiwar--this is a time in America, and in the world in fact, that has been full of uncertainty. People are struggling to figure out what they think. And what's been remarkable recently is the speed with which the peace movement has rippled through the culture. Up until then, it felt like there was little atmosphere for real debate.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: At times like this, one must not be silent--especially when people who are speaking out are being denounced as anti-American or as crypto-communists for expressing an unpopular opinion.

IS: In the past, we have looked to our artists--our poets, writers, philosophers, performers--to illuminate. Do you think that's going on here?

CP: Actors have been speaking up, but there's been a dismaying backlash against them. For many mainstream Americans, actors' celebrity is a reason why they should not speak. Their politics look like a pose--a fashion statement or publicity stunt. But actors are citizens, too.

IS: Why do you think celebrities are often not taken seriously when they get political?

OP: Take Barbra Streisand--a pioneer in shattering conformist gender roles in the early 1960s. But she's turned preachy and self-righteous, going on about the evil Republicans on her Web site, with its frilly Laura Ashley decor. Hollywood has gotten a bad reputation in Middle America over the past 30 years because of the glaring contrast between its professed populism and its limousine-liberal lifestyle.

IS: In fact, it's not just celebrities who seem to be typed, but also artists. Why is that?

CP: Hollywood leftists were ostracized in the McCarthy era after World War II, and Beat writers and artists were vilified as pinko subversives during the Cold War. Since the antiwar protests of the '60s and early '70s, when Jane Fonda went to Hanoi, Middle America has identified show business and the art world with monolithic liberalism. Conservatives in Hollywood are rare--Charlton Heston, Tom Selleck, Mel Gibson. The problem right now is there are very few major, venerated, artists, writers, poets, or visionaries who could help illuminate the state of the world. Our only iconic cultural figures now are in showbiz.

IS: Where does this expectation that creative people have important viewpoints come from?

CP: The entire avant-garde tradition is one of opposition and defiance. But before Romanticism--except for Voltaire and the French libertines and philosophes--artists and writers didn't think their obligation was to expose. On the contrary, they celebrated national origins and connected their current regimes with past glories, as Virgil did in tracing the dawning Roman Empire back to ancient Troy. For the last 200 years, however, the most original art making in the Western world has been bohemian.

IS: And anti-authoritarian, right?

CP: Yes, and also anticapitalist. The mind-set among artists today is to be suspicious of hidden commercial motivations in government action. It's originally a Marxist critique of economics.

IS: Going back to Hollywood, what can our filmmakers today learn from their predecessors?

CP: For me, the most resonant films about war were made following World War II--the great age of European art cinema--from Italian neorealism through Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. Some European films were shot in the rubble of devastated villages, so you had a sense of the harsh reality of war. Those films had true philosophical depth as well as technical virtuosity, an instinct for the photographic medium of cinema. I'm very underwhelmed by what Hollywood is turning out right now, compared to those films. Movies are collapsing into TV--the visual presentation is banal, the characters are slick and depthless, and the worldview is simplistic.

One of the great antiwar movies of all time is Gone with the Wind [1939], which is often dismissed as a soapy melodrama or apologia for slavery. But it's a superb illustration of war's total destruction of a civilization. It shows the horrific reality of war without any of the action-adventure entertainment or voyeurism of violence that Hollywood is into these days. Gone with the Wind doesn't try to pretty up the ravages and sickening aftermath of war. There's an extraordinary scene where Scarlett O'Hara [Vivien Leigh], who's caught in Atlanta when it's being shelled, goes to find a doctor because her sister-in-law is in labor. Scarlett is totally self-absorbed, trapped in her personal worries. Suddenly, as she's crossing a railway yard, the camera slowly pulls back and way up in this breathtaking, panoramic crane shot, and you see the entire yard covered with the dead and wounded. There are 1,600 bodies lying like heaps of rags--a tremendous spectacle of death and suffering. Then this tattered Confederate f lag comes into the frame, and you hear a few elegiac notes of "Taps." It makes you realize that no war ever ends well and that every possible, prudent, effort has to be made to avoid it. Great war movies show the palpable destruction, not just the glamour of action and heroic victory. You must feel loss--permanent loss-- because there are no real winners in any war.