Now that War, Inc has topped the specialty box office two weeks in a row, using the unfunny “incendiary political cartoon” (the poster’s words, not mine) as a stick with which to beat the “critics are irrelevant!” dead horse has become the new hotness.

“Despite the negative reviews, I found War Inc. innovative and subversively ironic,” Vicky Ward writes at Vanity Fair.com. Noting that Cusack was able to cull poster quotes from like-minded famous friends such as Arianna Huffington and Diablo Cody (the latter’s a new development, as she apparently hadn’t delivered her blurb as of the taping of this clip), Ward positions the success of the film as an instance of “the audience” rising up against the bullies of the critical establishment:

Yeah, I don’t know about that. I’m one of those critics who hates the film, of course (which proves Ward’s suggestion that “on the Web, voices sang a different tune” to be not quite accurate), but I do admire the way it has been marketed, and not because the film’s “potential audience” is doing the advertising––to equate a number of boldfaced names who were shown the film before its release specifically in exchange for kind words with organic word-of-mouth seems almost immoral.

One of my theories as to why the passels of War on Terror movies produced by Hollywood have failed, is because they’ve all been sold like Hollywood movies to typical Hollywood audiences. People who want to consume Hollywood films are generally looking for escapist fantasy (cough, cough); people who actually want to engage with the issues surrounding our current global situation are generally not looking for Hollywood films. By using that “political cartoon” tagline on the poster, and surrounding it by quotes from people who are generally associated with either alternative political culture or a field compatible to it, the distributors have positioned War, Inc not as a movie, but as an experience that needs to be taken in––the way one takes in a Naomi Klein book or a Keith Olbermann special comment––in order to be able to participate in a circular conversation that claims to be about dissent whilst purposefully excluding it. If there is any real audience-to-audience communication responsible for the film’s continued success, it’s got to be the choir preaching to the choir.

A story like Ward’s is its own work of marketing: it plays into that idea that War, Inc is an “alternative” product, approved by neither critics nor film festivals, and thus more attractive to a consumer who is openly distrustful of anything “official.” Because when it comes to subversion of the Hollywood system, Vanity Fair knows best…right?