On this week’s episode of “Now that you’re on the left you’re not allowed to enjoy
any media!
Hey!
Stop it right now! presented by Second Thought” we’re going to look at Hollywood’s crucial
role in the military industrial complex.
From Marxist analysis of superstructures, to FOIA’d documents, and the propaganda
of the American Office of War Information, we’re going to examine how it is that the
American disease of perpetual war gains public support from our film industry.
Come on!
It’s gonna be fun!
We’re doing a Marxist Analysis of Shrek but for all of Hollywood!
So where do we start?
Well, a good place to begin talking about all of this is with the Department of Defense’s
direct involvement in Hollywood movies’ depiction of the United States and its armed
forces.
To be clear, if you go to the DoD’s website, they are very upfront about the fact that
they are involved in Hollywood productions and the way scripts for major blockbusters
are written.
What you might not expect is the, let’s say “interesting” way they like to phrase
that involvement.
Here’s what the website reads: “The Defense Department has a long-standing
relationship with Hollywood.
In fact, it’s been working with filmmakers for nearly 100 years [...] Production agreements
require the DoD to be able to review a rough cut of a film, so officials can decide if
there are areas that need to be addressed before a film is released.
[...] While Hollywood is paid to tell a compelling story that will make money, the DoD is looking
to tell an accurate story.”
Sure.
We’ll get to that last part in a second.
First we should get an idea of the actual scale of DoD involvement.
In a series of publicly accessible documents, you can get a list of all the movies and TV
shows that the DoD admits publicly to have contributed to or denied assistance.
The list goes back decades, and what’s great about it is that there’s little notes about
what the DoD changed in each of these movies or the reasons they were refused assistance.
For a good number of these movies, it’s very clear that in return for access to military
equipment and locations (that would otherwise be incredibly costly to reproduce for even
big budget studios) certain storylines and dialogues were altered or removed entirely.
I’ve already talked on this channel about the media wing of the US Military, specifically
its influence on Twitch and in animated shorts targeting Gen-Z, in this video.
Now, that’s a nice video.
Boy, I love that video.
You better watch that video after you’re done with this video, I’ll tell you right
now.
You won’t forget, right?
But that episode focused on recruiting.
While that is a major goal of the military’s propaganda campaigns and it’s meant to make
war institutions look wholesome and good, it’s really just one part of a much bigger
project.
And it’s also much more obvious what’s going on.
It’s the military saying how the military is great on it’s own platform, not on someone
else's platform like a big budget hollywood movie.
What the FOIA’d documents reveal is the much more subtle ways, the insinuations, the
detailed rewrites that don’t necessarily make the military look great, but that gloss
over the realities that make it look bad or that make sure more critical movies have a
harder time getting produced, that they don’t get access to the privileges the pro-military
movies do.
From the military’s point of view this kind of favoritism makes complete sense.
Why would they promote a movie that makes them look bad by accurately reflecting the
imperialist project the United States has undertaken, particularly since the end of
the second world war?
They wouldn’t and they don’t.
The result of this favoritism is that the films that do get DoD support paint a pretty
uniform image of the US military as heroic and exemplary in most cases and only accidentally
ineffective, but ultimately well-meaning at the very most critical end of the spectrum.
And because these pro-military movies end up saving so much on production costs and
get access to military equipment and facilities for shoots, they are far more likely to get
produced and to become blockbusters.
It’s the case for some MCU movies.
It’s Top Gun.
It’s Bond movies like Tomorrow Never Dies.
Those are the movies that get DoD support and that get the cleanup treatment.
To be clear, movies that portray the military apparatus more accurately, with less of a
rose-tinted hue, are still going to be made.
But without state department support, they might not reach the same blockbuster status
as often or to such a degree as their more profitable box office neighbors.
Surprisingly, the DoD’s goal is incredibly transparent.
Philip Strub, director of entertainment media at the US department of defense, said it pretty
plainly:
"Our desire is that the military are portrayed as good people trying to do the right thing
the right way, [...] That's probably our single most important imperative.”
And to make sure that it does happen that way, military organizations are willing to
leverage the billions they have at their disposal in the form of military equipment and shoot
locations to keep the movies on that line of “the military can do no wrong.”
Here again we have a quote, this time from Robert Anderson, the Navy’s Hollywood relations
person:
“If you want full cooperation from the Navy, we have a considerable amount of power, because
it’s our ships, it’s our cooperation, and until the script is in a form that we
can approve, then the production doesn’t go forward.”
So, you know.
That’s the military’s media relations team openly admitting to using Hollywood as
a vehicle for pro-military propaganda.
No biggie.
But, concretely, what does this influence look like?
What needs to change for a script to be approved?
To answer those questions you could use literally hundreds of films and TV shows in that database,
and countless examples of how lines that don’t exactly fit into the US’s narrative have
been, let’s say, “tweaked.”
For the sake of brevity, let’s just take a couple.
In the movie “12 Strong” DoD rewrites were minor: cleaning up the physical image
of the protagonists and taking homophobic slurs out of their dialogue to present a more
sanitized image of the elite American soldier.
In the movie “Lone Survivor,” not so much.
Rewrites included removing the main character’s urge to commit war crimes and murder civilians
while in Afghanistan.
In the real story no war crimes were committed, but they were considered by the military officer
who ended up writing the book the movie was based on.
In the movie, the protagonist has a clear conscience, no war criminal thoughts here.
No sir.
In “Charlie Wilson’s War,” a movie meant to humorously recount the story of the US
arming the Mujahideen, the sanitized, approved script removes from the original any mention
of the US’s support leading, at least in part, to the power al-Qaeda and the Taliban
would eventually accumulate.
Sometimes it’s a small rewrite, sometimes it's a big rewrite.
Every time, though, the rewrite conceals some part of the truth because the truth doesn’t
look good.
These are just a few examples I got from this article.
There are hundreds more.
And, ok, look.
I know how this sounds.
It sounds like I’m peddling a conspiracy.
How could something so clearly objectionable be going on with no one doing anything about
it?
These are possibly violations of the first amendment.
Government-sanctioned speech receiving preferential treatment is an issue, and that it’s being
carried out by the US government itself to justify war?
It seems like too big a deal to not be a bigger controversy.
On my side of things, it feels weird, and probably does for you too, that to make my
case I’m pulling up FOIA’d documents and sending you to websites you’ve probably
never seen before.
I get that.
No offense to the Mint Press team, you guys do excellent work.
Regardless of the evidence I have presented here or the fact that much of it is coming
directly from the mouths of the people involved, that several articles linked in the description
are published in mainstream media, it’s going to sound like I’m some tinfoil-hat
wearing nut.
The thing is that you don’t have to believe me on this one fact, that the DoD is censoring
Hollywood scripts, to be convinced that Hollywood, as a whole, is an institution that promotes
the interests of the military-industrial-complex.
Even if the DoD had never addressed its involvement in the script writing of today’s blockbusters,
which we’ve seen it does, the existence of the beneficial relationship between our
military and our entertainment industry is plain as day and you can thank two pieces
of evidence for that: the history of military propaganda in the US and thematic analyses
of the last decades most popular movies.
Roll clip!
That’s a
short clip from the National WW1 Museum and Memorial Youtube channel, the rest of the
video is in the description.
What the host is talking about here is the propaganda efforts of the Committee on Public
Information, a US agency that sprung up during the first world war.
Posters, news articles, everywhere Americans looked they were being sold the war effort
by their government, including in movies.
And, wouldn’t you believe it, it really worked.
Most Americans were on board with the war just years after many were firmly opposed
to American involvement or simply disinterested.
Movies like the animated short “The Sinking of the Lusitania” galvanized American public
support for the war, presenting America’s entry into the conflict as a moral duty with
its dramatic visuals and depictions of violence, rather than getting the country to rally behind
the more accurate and crucial role that war profiteering played in the decision to ship
soldiers abroad.
Less relevant to the war, but a great example of this sort of propaganda effort, is the
white supremacist movie “The Birth of a Nation,” widely credited to have revived
the KKK in the early 20th century.
It turns out that that movie was the first Hollywood venture to receive military support,
according to Tanner Mirrlees’ book “Hearts and Mines: The US Empire’s Culture Industry.”
The reason it’s an important tangent is because its box office success supposedly
proved to then-president Wilson the effectiveness of movies as a popular medium for propaganda,
triggering much of the subsequent military involvement in Hollywood.
After WW1, the CPI shuts down and the story picks up in WW2, when the Office of War Information
created the Bureau of Motion Pictures.
What’s the point of a motion pictures bureau you ask?
Just ask the head of the OWI, Elmer Davis:
“The motion picture is the most powerful instrument of propaganda in the world, whether
it tries to be or not.
The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go
through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being
propagandized.”
Elmer, my guy.
I don’t think you’re supposed to say that part out loud.
And this kept going.
The majority of the big war films that came out between the start of the Cold War until
the 60s, and then once again from the 80s to the present, have done so under the direction,
approval, and support of the DoD.
That’s not good, but why does any of this matter?
Here we get to the Marxist analysis of superstructures, and you’ll see that it’s a really helpful
concept we can use to break down this stuff.
To be very, very brief about it, superstructures in Marxist analysis are the elements of our
society that aren’t directly economic.
Law, media, culture, religion, education, whatever you want, if it’s something that
molds or represents a form of ideology, some ideas we can have about the world, it’s
probably going to be part of the superstructure.
Let’s focus on culture.
According to Marxist theorists the production of cultural texts (like movies) is rooted
and influenced by the economic context in which it appears, and, in a mutually-reinforcing
way, can often come to justify and support that economic situation.
TLDR: Not only does the idea behind the creation of a random movie get influence from its environment
(that’s not too difficult to imagine), so too does its ability to be distributed widely,
to reach many people, to interest an audience.
It needs to be relevant to someone to get made and so will often find relevance by reaffirming
the present societal order.
In a neoliberal, imperial, capitalist society like the US, that has lived war-to-war for
close to a century, it’s going to be pretty obvious then that war is going to feature
prominently in our culture.
It makes it into so many films, not just because it satisfies someone's monetary interests
when it does, but because we couldn’t not talk about it.
The sinister part of that inevitable truth about media in a society, is that the military’s
influence on media in our society is so large.
Meaning that even if we want to talk about war more critically, that type of cultural
production will always be at a disadvantage.
But ok, let’s assume that there wasn’t any military influence at all; that the DoD
had never, and to this day does not give a leg up to pro-army movies or effectively censor
its critics.
If you look at the biggest blockbusters of the last decade, you’ll have an incredibly
easy time finding that they glorify, or offer only weak, superficial critiques to the military
apparatus and its logic of imperialism.
Look, I’m not a film critic, by the way.
Just like you, I watch stuff with my friends, point to the TV screen and say “that’s
actually a metaphor for capitalism” and look down while everybody rolls their eyes.
But I don’t have to be a good film critic, I have youtube.
Both this video by the channel Skip Intro and this one by the channel Just Write are
great and thorough breakdowns of the way American exceptionalism and imperialism come to be
justified in a prototypical example of pro-military media: the Captain America movies The First
Avenger and The Winter Soldier, two movies that unsurprisingly benefitted from a close
collaboration with the DoD.
Throughout the films, America’s role as a global superpower, embodied in Steve Roger’s
character, is hardly interrogated.
He has a great power, but he’s being a very responsible little man and doesn’t abuse
it because he’s just a good dude and so is America by the way just trust me on that
one really come on guys would I ever lie to you about this?
No!
So, in these movies, when US institutions are brought under scrutiny, and the heroes
turn against SHIELD, the organization meant to represent the Department of Homeland Security,
the only real problem the movie ends up portraying with the institution is that it was infiltrated
by the evil Hydra.
SHIELD in and of itself was always okay, we just need to get rid of the baddies and then
we can get back to the completely justified global police stuff.
These are just two movies, but these kinds of messages are rife in American cinema and
are discussed a lot more thoroughly in the video’s I’ve linked in the description.
And the reason I’m even talking about this is that the result of all these thematic implications
is that the overall picture we get of the US and its military efforts is not one characterized
by the greed behind domination of oil or other natural reserves in the Middle East, the subjugation
or outright murder of civilians by military territorial control and drone strikes, the
unjustifiable interventions made to oust popular and democratically elected leaders across
the world.
Thanks to Hollywood, the military almost exclusively looks like a force for good, an industry we
can keep justifying giving nearly a trillion dollars to every year so that the Lockhead
Martins and Boeings of this world can continue driving up their stock prices.
Movies have powerful propaganda potential, and in giving us only weak tools to critique
the military, if any at all, they have successfully allowed for the ever continuous American support
for its most massive imperial project to date.
Of course, as media consumers we’re not just passive propaganda sponges, but in the
absence of good, popular critiques and under a barrage of pro-military propaganda, even
our best defenses can weaken over time.
Just something
to keep
in mind.