What movie directors tend to be like

Here's a profile of Peter Berg, a not hugely distinguished but often competent director (e.g., Hancock and Friday Night Lights -- he's FNL author Buzz Bissinger's cousin) and actor (he was Linda Fiorentino's mark in The Last Seduction). He's currently directing Mark Wahlberg in Lone Survivor, a true story about SEALs fighting Taliban in Afghanistan.

Berg is fairly representative of contemporary filmmakers in a variety of ways: e.g., he comes from an upscale mixed Christian-Jewish background. And, like so many directors, he's a macho guy who loves the U.S. military, boxing, and football. 

Berg had been trying to make “Lone Survivor” for five years. “I’m a patriot,” he said. “I admire our military, their character, code of honor, belief systems. I lived with the SEALs, their families, went to their funerals. I went to Iraq. Did you ever see anyone killed? I did.” Berg is infatuated with heroes, military, sports and, sometimes, because of his teenage years, misfits.

It's partly the personality demands of directing -- a film crew consists of a large number of people who need ordering about, many of them beefy guys who lift machinery for a living. And it's partly the subject matter of current movies -- blowing stuff up. So, you end up with authoritarian personalities as directors.

But, it ought to be rather obvious that one consequence of this is that the creative people in movies and the nice liberal dweebs who explain what their movies are about to us aren't always in sync. The NLDs seldom notice, however.

On another note, here's an interesting description of the real SEALs who are technical advisers on Berg's film, which pretty much matches what Zero Dark Thirty showed:

The SEALs stood off by themselves, eating standing up, in silence. They were ordinary-looking men in baseball caps, T-shirts, jeans. Many of them were big, well over 6-foot-2, 230 pounds. Wahlberg was 5-foot-8, maybe 155 pounds. Yet he looked more like a SEAL than they did, at least a film version of a SEAL. 

Berg said that what defines SEALs is their “extraordinary competitiveness. It’s not that they’re stronger or more violent, it’s that if you ask them to throw rocks at a hill, they’ll do it until they drop. It’s about will.” I asked how they were adjusting to helping make a movie. “They’d prefer to be anonymous,” he said. “They don’t covet attention. They even resist a project that glorifies them.”

Okay, terrorists, try to figure out which SEAL is which

That's exactly how Zero Dark Thirty portrayed SEALs: as a bunch of major league first basemen-sized guys who are hard to tell apart. As SEALs, Kathryn Bigelow cast Chris Pratt, the first baseman in Moneyball, plus a whole bunch of guys who look like Chris Pratt. I thought this haziness of identity was to confuse and depress Al Qaeda terrorists looking for clues about whom to take retribution upon, but maybe that's just what SEALs are like.

It's interesting that commandos tend to be such big men these days. Other military specialties often aren't. For example, Marine drill instructors are not generally tall, imposing figures like Lou Gossett Jr. in An Officer and a Gentleman. Instead, they tend to be wiry bantamweights whose knees can stand up over the years to all the running that boot camp recruits and their DIs must do.

But, SEALs tend to be tall and wide, probably due to all the gear they must carry.

The Pentagon is currently working on whetherthey can have the first female SEALs by Obama's last year in office. If SEALs tended to be Mark Wahlberg-sized, this would still be a bad idea, but since the ideal SEAL is built more like Liam Neeson, this women SEALs plan is that much more derisible.