The Weekly Standard’s Jonathan Last didn’t care too much for The Sum of All Fears, but he does find it instructive in other ways:

For the uninitiated, ‘Fears’ is the fourth installment of the Jack Ryan franchise adapted from Tom Clancy’s best-selling novels. In the book version of ‘Fears,’ a group of Middle-Eastern terrorists tries to start a war between Russia and the United States by setting off a nuclear bomb at the Super Bowl. The producers were squeamish about the idea of portraying radical Muslims as terrorists, so they turned the bad guys into neo-Nazis (for an excellent description of the decision-making process, read Reihan Salam’s piece in Slate). One of the producers, Mace Neufeld, says that complaints from the CAIR crowd started coming into the studio before they even had a script, and Affleck now cavalierly says, ‘The Arab terrorist thing has been done a million times in the movies.’ Which is true. Of course, in all of the World War II movies, America is fighting Germany and Japan.

‘The Sum of All Fears’ is a case study in how Hollywood handles September 11. Now the movie was greenlit and shot long before September 11. But in the shadow of Khobar Towers and the USS Cole and the embassy bombings, Hollywood flinched from showing Arab terrorists at work. The question now is, does September 11 make Hollywood more or less likely to depict terrorists as being Islamist?

So far, the only clues we have come from two television shows, ‘The West Wing’ and ‘Law Order’ (the production lag is so long in film that the first truly post-September 11 movies won’t come out until next Christmas).

This season ‘The West Wing’ opened with an episode about terrorism where the Secret Service suspected that a member of the White House staff might be a terrorist. The Middle Eastern fellow was detained by the Secret Service and questioned at length by the president’s chief-of-staff. Naturally, since the show is written and produced by Aaron Sorkin, the episode centered around questions of freedom and racial profiling. The Arab staffer is indignant that he is singled out. Sorkin sets up a conservative straw man in the chief-of-staff who voices concerns about national security, but his arguments are methodically taken apart by the more enlightened members of the cast. And then, at the end of the episode, we find out that the staffer is innocent, that he was just doing his job. The chief-of-staff looks at him sadly (I forget whether or not he apologizes). Lesson learned.

Last week ‘Law Order’ concluded its season with a September 11 centered episode. An Arab man is found dead and the perp who killed him is an ex-Special Forces soldier. The soldier insists that the man he killed was a terrorist. The show’s producer, Dick Wolf, also a Hollywood liberal, has the district attorney prosecute the case with special attention given to the soldier’s paranoia and the idea of racial profiling. The DA tells the jury that we can’t just go around killing people who look Middle Eastern just because we suspect them of being terrorists. The jury votes to convict. But then Wolf does something truly shocking: In the coda we learn that the ‘victim’ really was a terrorist, and that when he was killed he was about to start an operation that would have led to an attack.

It seems a foregone conclusion that Hollywood will never return to the type of patriotic movies that it cranked out in the ’40s and ’50s — movies like ‘Lifeboat,’ ‘The Sands of Iwo Jima,’ and ‘Casablanca.’ We’re much too sophisticated for that nowadays.

But we are at war. The question is whether Hollywood will act more like Sorkin — high-minded and committed to a liberal distrust of American power — or more like Wolf — high-minded and committed to a liberal distrust of American power, but open to the evidence on the table.

Remember the brouhaha over the release of Edward Zwick’s The Siege in 1998? Go back and look at that movie in light of 911.

Does Bruce Willis’ Major General still seem quite so silly?