- Jeff Bridges and Tim Robbins in Arlington Road
Channel surfing the other night, I came across a movie I’d never heard of—a 1999 thriller called Arlington Road. It had an A-list cast—Jeff Bridges, Tim Robbins, Joan Cusack—and something to say, and its subject was domestic terrorism.
Contemporary and ephemeral. The movie wouldn’t have been made before 1995, when Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, a hideous act of destruction that everyone originally assumed was the work of radical Muslims. And it wouldn’t have been made after September 11, 2001, when Muslim terrorists shoved the domestic variety completely out of the picture.
They are silent. The media have other fish to fry. Hollywood too—movies like Arlington Road seem incredibly dated. America has moved on.
