MGM’s decision to release Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn on July 4 was more than just a clever Transformers counter-programming gambit: it was an implicit attempt to mark the German director’s POW drama, a dramatic remake of his own documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly, as a red state-targeted tribute to American patriotism. And to some extent, it worked: conservative film blog LIBERTAS called Rescue “a good old-fashioned patriotic war film”, but reserved their highest praise for the film’s director. “Herzog is a genius and a true iconoclast. He’s a rebel and a free-thinker. The lemmings desperate to be loved and fit in make the other kind of war film, the true counter-culture makes this kind.” And in blog post dated July 27, conservative commentator Debbie Schlussel named Rescue Dawn “the best movie of the year.”

Less than a month later, Schlussel has changed her tune considerably. In a post on her website dated August 16, Schlussel points to site called Rescue Dawn: The Truth, which claims that Herzog altered facts in Rescue Dawn in order to make Dieter Dengler appear to be more of a hero than he actually was. The site bears the signature of Pisidhi Indradat, who says he was imprisoned alongside Dengler but was omitted from Rescue Dawn; and Jerry DeBruin, brother of Gene DeBruin, who was played in the film by Jeremy Davies.

DeBruin and Indradat are primarily upset that Herzog gave the Dengler character the bulk of the credit for planning and executing the escape from Laos. They insist that, in real life, these plans were already in the hopper before Dengler ever got to the camp. In fact, they say they waited a few weeks to tell him about the escape because they didn’t know if they could trust a guy with a German accent. DeBruin is also angry at Herzog’s depiction of his brother as an antagonist to Dengler, played by Davies as a “deranged and derelict Charles Manson type entity.” Schlussel adds fuel to *that* fire by pointing out that Davies played Manson in a 2004 TV movie. It’s clearly a conspiracy!

Rescue Dawn: The Truth has inspired Schlussel to revise her initial review of Herzog’s film. “If Herzog was so intent on twisting events and characters for dramatic purposes, he could have used fake names for fake personas. There is no decent explanation for giving an honorable and decent man–a hero, no less–the undeserved persona of Charles Manson…Herzog and his Hollywood friends cannot take Gene DeBruin’s honor and heroism.” In her earlier piece on Rescue Dawn, she accused the “lexicon of the left” of the same crime against Dengler: “If anything, this movie understates his suffering and heroism.”

Reactions to this around the bloggy world are, predictably, mixed. A commenter on this post says Schlussel shouldn’t be trusted because she “denonced [sic] Spider-Man 3 based primarily on the fact that he *cries* in the movie.” Another blogger gives Schlussel credit for getting “the goods on a libel for ages” and hopes that “Hollywood will get sued for 50 million.”

Beyond the fact that I don’t think you can actually sue for libel based on omission (and, that it would be difficult to get anyone to respond to a court filing addressed to “Hollywood”), I love the transformation Herzog has undergone in the eyes of these conservative bloggers. Before, he was a “rebel,” defying the system to represent the “counter-culture”; now he and his “Hollywood friends” are in cahoots to defile the honor of American heroes. This willful transmogrification of the actual economic stratification of the film industry based on the whims of ideology is amazing to me. I only hope Herzog (who is presently preparing to hit the festival circuit with a self-financed documentary about Antarctica) is going to find a way to cash in on his sudden, apparent collusion with Hollywood giants.

[via The House Next Door]