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 THE
SKULLS WARNS THAT YALE MAY RULE AMERICA
Who
runs America? Although academic answers to this question vary
from a power elite of some sort to a large set of organized
interests who check one another, Hollywood's frequent answer
has consistently been that a secret clique runs the country.
In The Skulls, we learn from the titles before
the film that secret societies exist in all Ivy League schools.
The screenwriter, John Pogue was indeed a member of one of
Yale's secret clubs, though Rob Cohen, the director, was doubtless
excluded at Harvard, Al Gore's alma mater. When the film begins,
Ivy League teams are competing in a rowing contest, a paradigm
for the social Darwinistic notion that the human race is won
by the strong, the smart, the quick, and the clever. Yale
wins, thanks to the muscles of Luke McNamara (played by Joshua
Jackson), a Yalie who pays some of his tuition with income
from a job as dorm cafeteria server, while the rest of the
tuition is defrayed by loans that will take years to pay off.
Luke has ambitions of rising from working class status to
become a lawyer, but he also knows that he can only afford
law school if he joins a secret society, the Skulls (which
is supposedly patterned after Yale's 200-year-old Skull &
Bones Society), which will provide the finances. As the tagline
of the film claims, the Skulls is a "secret society so powerful,
it can give you everything you desire . . . at a price." The
film intends not only to expose the existence of secret societies
among the power elite but also the snobbery of the East Coast
wealthy few who believe that they rule the country, since
Skull members after college are a fraternity of powerfully
placed bigwigs in business and government who help each other
to rise to the top. Will (played by Hill Harper), Luke's African-American
suitemate at the college dorm, tries in vain to dissuade Luke
from joining the elitist Skulls, arguing that "If it's secret
and it's elite, it can't be good." As Will acquires considerably
more information about the Skulls in his role as a journalism
major, he is confronted physically by Luke's Skull "soulmate"
Caleb Mandrake (played by Paul Walker) and left for dead,
though executed by his father Judge Litten Mandrake (played
by Craig Nelson) and then strung up as if he committed suicide
in his room at the dorm.
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Disturbed
that the suicide was an obvious fake, Luke digs up more evidence
that points to Mandrake as the real culprit, who chairs the
executive committee of the Skulls. An inevitable showdown
occurs, and Luke triumphs, but only because a rival to Mandrake,
a Virginia Senator (played by William T. Peterson), wanted
to become the new head of the Skulls, which continues to operate
as before at the end of the film. Although the cartoonization
of an Ivy League secret society is clearly an exaggeration,
the filmmakers clearly want us to believe that the Ivy League
is home to an Anglo version of The Godfather
(1972). They seek to inform us that Ivy League secret societies
are impregnable and continue their rivalries from college
sports into the worlds of business and politics. In short,
power in America is elitist, though different elites continually
vie for dominance. Strangely, the film seems to agree with
the thesis in Pat Robertson's book The New World Order
(1992) that the "Illuminata" controls America. The Skulls
also appears to alert filmviewers to the pedigree of George
W. Bush, who possibly joined one of the secret societies at
Yale, doubtless sponsored by his father, and now appears to
be on the verge of buying an election by assembling contributions
from a select few. MH
NEW
WORKING PAPERS AVAILABLE
Three
new papers, recently presented at the annual convention of
the Western Political Science Association, have been published
in the Political Film Society's Working Paper Series:
#11: Peter J. Haas, A Typology of Political Film
#12: Phillip L. Gianos, The Cold War in U.S. Films:
Representing the Political Other
#13: Michael A. Genovese, The President as Icon & Straw
Man: Hollywood & the Presidential Image
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