Hollywood fuels the panic years.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher

THE RECENT FILM "Outbreak" probably is less significant as a metaphor for the AIDS crisis than as an entertainment for a particular moment of social unease. It is true that the movie, although rigidly formulaic and improbable, has some fairly deep hooks into the current collective psyche, playing off of not only AIDS, but the flesh-eating virus, new appearances by supposedly long-dead ailments, and, most particularly, a resurgent distrust of "the government."

The presence of Donald Sutherland gives the movie special intertextual resonance. He almost always is sinister, but his performance as "X" in Oliver Stone's "JFK" most likely will associate him permanently with government's evil underside as surely as Erich von Stroheim became known as the "Terrible Hun." Of course "Outbreak" tries, in true Hollywood fashion, to recoup legitimacy for power by personalizing the conflict into a struggle of good general vs. evil general, deflecting criticism of societal systems, much less how people truly behave within institutions.

"The Nervous 90s"

These days, Hollywood's meditations on the rotten world that surrounds us seem more honest than opportunistic politicians who rail on about "the government" and its ills. These politicians irresponsibly are attempting to bundle together an enormous raft of problems in a manner that fuels what Newsweek has termed "the Nervous 90s." The arts usually are the target for critics who look for "irresponsible" sectors of the country that exploit, rather than analyze, Americans' fears. Such rash actions lead to what passes for political discourse--people don't seem to need to distinguish HUD from the CIA when they fulminate about "the government." Meanwhile, filmmakers have taken notice of this nervous condition and know what buttons to push.

Barbet Schroeder's "Kiss of Death," a thoroughly revamped remake of the 1947film noir classic, continues the genre's tradition of catching the collective paranoid edge, showing viewers a world drastically out of joint. While Nicolas Cage's Little Junior probably is every bit as psychopathic as Richard Widmark's Tommy Udo (Cage's vastly inferior performance aside), the new version's real difference from its predecessor is its sense of an all-pervasive governmental corruption.

This is not a new theme for crime films. The genre has been very prescient in this regard, touching on the topic by the early 1960s, with its most incisive contemporary examples being Sidney Lumet's "Prince...