White House Down (Emmerich, 2013) SPOILER ALERT

White House Down is one of a string of action-adventure films that revolve about an imperiled US. It is a post-911 ode to anxiety. It is also a family drama, where a clever but pouty teen-aged girl comes to the rescue. She saves the show and reconciles with her errant father, who saves the other side of the show. The recently divorced father has a chance to show his best side, after a number of bungles at the beginning.

Channing Tatum saves face. He even saves the President (Jamie Foxx) and a White House full of hostages, including his daughter--after he being rejected by the Secret Service and after failing to meet his fatherly responsibilities.

There are plenty of shoot-‘em-up scenes, with fighter planes and military helicopters looming overhead and rocket launches from the White House roof. Hand-to-hand combat occurs often. All this should have been enough to satisfy the action-adventure audience. Yet the film flopped at the box office, possibly because it tried to be all things to all people (family fun plus political intrigue plus action-adventure). This “jack of all trades” wound up being “a master of none.”

Still, the film was fun, even if the story line has grown familiar by now.  Central to the film is the paramilitary group that plans to take over the White House, and almost succeeds. The sell-out insider (James Woods) who leaks secrets is also a recurring stereotype, even though we never suspect silver-haired Secret Service Agent Walker as he cuts the cake at his retirement party.

Interestingly, James Woods starred in Videodrome (Renn, 1983), a bizarre film about a man with a brain tumor who hears his TV talk. In the film, the protagonist insists that the hallucinations caused the tumor, rather than the other way around.

When we learn that James Woods’ character in White House Down also suffers from a brain tumor—a frontal lobe tumor, specifically—we are not too shocked. No, I correct myself: those of us who know something about neuropsychiatry or behavioral neurology are shocked that the film’s medical advisors let this one pass. Frontal lobe syndromes cause apathy and amotivation and strip the sufferer of the ability to strategize. James Woods plans, plots and strategizes, even though his efforts are misdirected. Had the film claimed that he had a temporal lobe tumor that changed his behavior and made him moody and impulsive, I might have been more impressed. If it located the tumor in the amygdala, or in the rage center of the brain, it would be even better.

Temporal lobe disease can also induce “déjà vu”—a sense of familiarity or a feeling that a current event previously occurred in the past. For I had a sense of déjà vu while watching the denouement. The movie reminded me of the Iran Contra scandal from the 1980s, when then-CIA director William Casey helped to secure arms for Nicaraguan rebels (after Congress forbade such acts). Casey himself developed a brain tumor (definitively diagnosed as a lymphoma after his death). He suffered two seizures the day before he was to testify to a Senate panel about the Central Intelligence Agency's role in the sale of American arms to Iran.

The moral of the story?
This improbable paranoid plot is based on a kernel of truth. For that, I can forgive the filmmaker for an anatomical error about the location of a fictional brain tumor.