In the movie Ali, Jon Voight does a turn as sportscaster Howard Cosell, who agreed to call boxer Cassius Clay by his new name, Mohammed Ali. The Cosells changed their name from Cohen, he reasoned. There was an air of image-making and self-promotion to Cosell’s high-mindedness, but who cares? It was admirable.

Jon Voight does a straight Cosell imitation for the film. He looks like Martin Short as Brian Linehan on SCTV. He even wears a bad wig, as Howard Cosell did. Apparently such mimicry now passes for acting.

Big deal: we live in a world dominated by familiar images rather than fresh realities. It’s a cliché, it’s the essence of post-modernism. It certainly applies in the West, and pre-eminently in the U.S.

The question of whether art imitates life or the reverse has long been settled: art, in the crass sense, won. Most of us have seen far more images of reality than we have actual landscapes, personalities, violence etc. Even an event as unique as September 11 can’t seem to stand on its own. Think of all those who said they felt they were watching a movie.

In fact it’s so common to refer realities like September 11 to a bank of familiar images that the exceptions stand out. I’m thinking of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. After the attacks, he says, he found himself searching for past events to help understand what to do. His mind kept turning to Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz.

That may sound like more image-mongering, but I don’t think so. The mayor was not rummaging around for a costume or script; he just wanted inspiration. The proof is he never tried to look or sound Churchillian; he always seemed to be himself. Contrast that to, say, Tony Blair, who often appeared on the verge of his Churchill imitation.

Or take President George W. Bush. For most of September 11, he looked blank, he got flown around, he said nothing. What we’ve heard from him since is mostly words others wrote for him. When he goes off script, he refers to Hollywood westerns (Wanted: dead or alive) and “Pakis”.

In many photos, he’s clearly been posed to look leaderly. (“Would you narrow your eyes a bit?”) This week he told an audience that he believed American prayers could create a “spiritual shield” against “the evil ones.” That may sound like his missile defence system but I think it’s drawn from another old image: Gardol, the “invisible protective shield” of a toothpaste in the 1950s.

It’s as if our whole society, with exceptions like the mayor, spends itself on problems like how to look heroic. Compare that to the Second World War, when heroes had no particular look and didn’t seem to worry about it. War hero Audie Murphy looked like a farm kid even after he became a star.

There was a period on September 11 when the scripts got lost and the bank of images appeared unavailable. But that changed as time passed. Even the mourners who got ushered onto Larry King Live often had so little time to find their feelings that they too tended to revert to the image bank.

In this light, the encounter between the U.S. and Afghanistan is truly odd: the image-ridden meets the image-bereft. Afghans had little TV or film or even electricity; then the Taliban banned all images and blew up the statues. You could say Afghans were left without much to go on except their instinct for survival and native smarts.

So they tell Americans: “Yeah, we’ll go search with you for Osama and Mullah Omar” — and return empty-handed! They make deals among themselves and set loose former enemies. U.S. officials are “dumbfounded” (Washington Post); they “struggle to sort through the confusion.”

Talk about a clash of cultures. In the 19th century, Americans were often mocked for being uncultured and unrefined — but admired too because, thus unencumbered, they made shrewd bargainers. In Afghanistan today, the locals look like theYankee traders.

Is there a way out of the po-mo image prison? I keep thinking about a 1995 film called The Freshman. Matthew Broderick plays a student hired by a Mafia don played by Marlon Brando who is the Brando character from Godfather . The kid is slack-jawed at the resemblance but the don has no reaction. It should be just a dumb joke based on a movie, yet they pull it off.

I’ve wondered for years how they did. I think it’s because Brando plays the don as a real-life guy on whom some actor named Brando based a movie role. Maybe this don saw that film, maybe not.

In other words, the basic reference moves back from art to life, where we all suspect it should rest, current evidence to the contrary. Reality again is primary, rather than images drawn from it. And Marlon Brando tosses it off with ease, because his real goal (he often seems to imply) is to have a good time in life, rather than busting his ass for art.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.