Hollywood, the Wars and an Untrusting Audience

Where does the American public stand, really, on the Iraq War specifically and the War on Terror generally?
Many people have, since these wars began, protested vociferously, loudly and repeatedly for them to end (indeed, in the case of Iraq, for it not to begin).
And yet they go on.
Is it because we've, collectively, failed to persuade elected representatives of our rejection of them? Is it that those representatives feel safe to disregard that rejection out of the belief that only fringe elements feel so strongly? In short, is it that, at bottom, there simply aren't enough people who stand against perpetual war compared with those who reflexively support the Bush Administration?

According to recent polling data from Rasmussen Reports, "46% of likely voters believe the U.S. and its allies are winning the War on Terror," while a combined 49% say either "the terrorists" are winning or neither is the case.
"Short-term optimism about the War in Iraq is greater than long-term optimism" where "45% say it will ultimately be judged a failure".
Gallup, meanwhile, polled Americans in late January/early February and found "that a majority of Americans continue to express opposition to the war in Iraq, attitudes that are unchanged in the last two months ... 57% of Americans say it was a mistake for the United States to send troops to Iraq, while 41% say it was not a mistake. Those numbers are identical to what Gallup measured in late November/early December.
This broad measure of the correctness of the U.S. decision to go to war in Iraq has not changed much, even with more positive assessments of U.S. progress in Iraq in the last three months."

It seems safe to say that most Americans aren't generally happy with their government's war-related policies.
Yet Hollywood's attempts to to address the issue through such films as Redacted, Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, Grace is Gone, Lions for Lambs, and A Mighty Heart (which, I suppose, doesn't count since it's a non-American film) have been met with a box office thud. Surely they weren't all poor films (although Time's Richard Corliss says, fairly or not, "the great Iraq movie--like a solution to the current Iraq quandary--is still a thing to hope for").
Rendition brought in less than $10 million. The Valley of Elah under $7 million. Redacted slightly more than $65 thousand. Lions for Lambs a little more than $15 million. And A Mighty Heart with Angelina Jolie generated a mere $9 million.
How did they do on dvd? According to Rotten Tomatoes, Rendition has brought in $5 million thus far. In The Valley of Elah some $4.5+ million.

What, then, does this reveal about public attitudes and Hollywood's efforts?
NY Times critic A.O. Scott, in a November 2007 review of Brian De Palma's Redacted, wrote that "Mr. De Palma’s premise, implicit in his choice of title and stated in many interviews and public pronouncements, is that the truth about Iraq has been edited and obscured, kept away from the American public," but that "I think he may have misdiagnosed the condition of the audience, which is not lack of information about Iraq but rather a pervasive moral and political paralysis."

But "pervasive moral and political paralysis" is a better description of American politicians than its citizens.
Many have tried to explain why it's taken so long to make such movies and/or why audiences aren't responding.
Michael Cieply of the NY Times noted that "in the past, Hollywood usually gave the veteran more breathing space. William Wyler’s 'Best Years of Our Lives,' about the travails of those returning from World War II, was released more than a year after the war’s end. Similarly Hal Ashby’s 'Coming Home' and Oliver Stone’s 'Born on the Fourth of July, both stories of Vietnam veterans, came well after the fall of Saigon."
But today, according to Scott Rudin who's a producer of the upcoming Stop-Loss, "media in general responds much more quickly than ever before. Why shouldn’t movies do the same?"

To John Patterson of the Guardian, this has been anything but a quick response: "The Hollywood studios have taken their own sweet time facing up to the Iraq war. The conflict has dragged on for four and a half years, longer than America's involvement in the second world war, yet only now is Hollywood beginning to address it head on. And even though documentarists have been tearing into the subject almost from the beginning ... Iraq seems to have utterly paralysed Hollywood's ability to address war with its usual vigour and bloodthirsty enthusiasm."

Lew Harris of Movies.com said, in an AFP article, that "these movies have to be entertaining. You can't just take a movie and make it anti-war or anti-torture and expect to draw people in. That's what happened with 'Rendition' and it has been a disaster. People want war movies to have a slam-bang adventure feel to them ... But Iraq is a difficult war to portray in a kind of rah-rah-rah, exciting way."

Equally bizarre was the view of John Cooper of the Sundance Film Festival that audiences are "ready for funny. Film-makers haven't said all there is to say about the war in Iraq, but I think audiences are saturated."

I suspect audiences are less saturated than wary and are simply not inclined to trust Hollywood or other media when it comes to coverage--dramatic or otherwise--of these wars.
Why should they? The mainstream media, inclusive of Hollywood, is part of the elite and the seller of bills of goods.
When Harris Interactive found that "over half of Americans say they tend not to trust the press," they were of course referring to cable and network news, print media and radio. Had they included Hollywood, those numbers might have been worse.