REAL--LIFE BATTLE PREEMPTS SCREEN-LIFE RECAPITULATIONS : In Present World, Today’s Script Can Be Outdone by Tomorrow’s Events

The trade papers haven’t arrived yet, so I don’t know which producer has rushed to register “30 Seconds Over Tripoli” as a film title.

In the old days, half a dozen titles would have been registered while the fires were still burning (“Target: Bengasi,” “Destination: Libya” or “A Call on the Colonel”).

Then again, these aren’t the old days. Even quickie movies don’t get out as quickly as they used to. And even an exploitive film maker, acknowledging the country’s present conservative bent and suspecting that the opinion polls will show strong support for the raid, might prudently guess that in the present world today’s script could be undone by tomorrow’s events.

With a few brave exceptions, the movies try to be a consensus medium, offending no one. And what today’s producer also has to worry about is that they don’t make consensuses the way they used to--in World War II, let’s say.

As has been frequently noted, Hollywood didn’t attempt to make serious Vietnam movies while the country was torn apart over our involvement; the Vietnam movies appeared well after a majority view formed and the U.S. withdrew from the conflict.

The view that we were well out of the Vietnam War is now itself to be under a revisionist attack, if the success of “Rambo” is any indication. The feelings of humiliation and frustration that “Rambo” obviously spoke to seem to be finding relief in the Libyan raid.

The originating political problems of Vietnam and Libya are widely and wildly different. But there seems no doubt that there are direct emotional links between the Vietnam experience and the Libyan experience--both among those who deeply fear an escalating involvement and those who have thirsted for action and success after frustration.

What the quickie producer has to worry about in the present world, however, is not only the speed of changing events and the fragility of a national consensus, but the immediacy of television.

The triumph of satellite technology, making all the world instantaneously available to all the rest of the world, was a coup de grace for a certain kind of muscular you-are-there movie that seeks to re-enact current events with a dollop of actuality footage for seasoning (you can’t call it newsreel footage anymore since there aren’t any newsreels anymore).

By now, as it demonstrated on Monday, television can enrich what it doesn’t have live with computer-animated graphics--the fighters swooping over perspective maps with blinking lights showing the targets--and with stock footages of the hardware and recent coverages of the principals, all combined with the dramatic press briefings to give an immediacy and an urgency that no later docudrama or fictional film could hope to touch.

Ever since television began to saturate the society and the world, the fate of motion pictures has rested on their psychological appeal (watching in the neutral, common darkness), their social role (the date, the out-of-house diversion) and their skill at providing what television can’t do at all or can’t do as well (spectacle, certain stars, certain themes and intensities, the artistry unique to the large screen form).

For all their grossnesses and timidities (which ironically are often closely related), motion pictures have been able to compete with television at the level of intimacy as well as spectacle.

Movies can take the measure of large events or universal conditions in the plight of one individual or a few individuals: Think of Jack Lemmon in “China Syndrome,” Jon Voight in “Coming Home,” Hepburn and Fonda in “On Golden Pond.”

If the movies have had to surrender immediacy, as they have, they have the chance to interpret our times in the intimacy of individual lives, contemplated in a longer perspective, in stories that bring balance, wisdom and a sense of history to the moment recalled.

That puts the challenge to the writers, but when was it ever different?

There will, I suspect, be a movie some day about this week, but it may be about a life, or some intersecting lives, on which these events impinged, and it probably won’t be called “Thirty Seconds Over Tripoli.”