The Military Film Complex: Destroying the Myth of Liberal Hollywood

Chapter One

Hollywood Doesn’t Fit Neatly in Any Box

One of the very first ideas I jotted down before we launched the show was to understand our culture’s fascination with the comic book universe. And I’m sure there’s a good deal of critical writing on this subject, though I haven’t really explored any of it as of yet. My working thesis is that it is indicative of our cool detachment from reality—escapism through fantasy that hits that guilty pleasure dopamine center of our brains where good defeats evil, violently. It lets us off the hook because we can get our rocks off rooting for surrogate heroes in fake worlds that aren’t conflicted or weighed down by the messiness of real life.

My idea was to put the American psyche on trial somehow to figure out how this appealed to some deeper psychological place that manifested itself in our identity. Figures like Iron Man, Wonder Woman, Black Panther or Captain America seemed pretty blunt and obvious, compared to darker and more complex characters like Batman or Wolverine. But they each say something about us, the audience.

(By the way, I know the comic purists are freaking out that I would so casually mix the Marvel and DC universes, so apologies there. It’s okay, because that’s pretty much the extent of the discussion on comic book characters because this line of thought and subsequent research actually led me down a different path.)

Trendsetter or follower? That’s really the inquiry here. Most of the time, Hollywood follows trends, and when it hits on a successful theme or genre, it’s notorious for overexposing it and bludgeoning it to death. In this way, the success of Spiderman and the Dark Knight series turned Hollywood’s attention to the massive potential of this genre that has pretty much dominated the box office returns for the past 20 years. (That first Spidey film is officially two decades old!)

Turns out there is a name for this. It’s called “wave theory.” One of the primary resources I’m pulling from today is a book titled Here’s Looking at You: Hollywood, Film & Politics, by Ernest Giglio. In it, the author describes Vietnam War films, “in terms of marketing saturation or ‘wave theory’ analysis, where Hollywood releases a batch of films within a concentrated time span.”

So, as an example, the film industry dealt with Vietnam in two distinct waves that differed in tone and messaging, as the country worked through the conflict and began to see it differently with some distance between the end of the war and the release of the waves. So, in the first wave between 1978 and ‘79, you had films like Apocalypse Now, The Boys in Company C, Deer Hunter and Coming Home. These were mostly dark and contemplative films that sought to work through the psychological toll the war took on those who served. Giglio notes that, “The films of the second wave (‘85 to ‘89) are more explicitly critical of the war and symbolize greater cynicism about American involvement.” These were films like Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill, Casualties of War and Born on the Fourth of July.

So, instead of continuing down the comic universe path, Giglio and other sources I’ll reference scratched a different itch in my brain. It occurred to me that a few things didn’t square in my understanding of the American psyche with respect to our nationalism, militarism and jingoism. So I went further back to examine the influence of Hollywood and our obsession with war in this country. Turns out, it’s really complicated.

Somewhere along the way, my brain broke into pieces because of all the conflicting messages.

• Hollywood is a bunch of leftist liberal elites. There have been five Rambo movies grossing more than $800 million total.

• Hollywood’s take on Vietnam was instrumental in turning the tide in this country against a bloated military. Our approved military budget for 2022 is about $800 billion.

• Almost no war film has ever glorified the Vietnam War. Yet Hollywood was responsible for rehabilitating our view of soldiers and veterans.

• Some films were made with funding and support of the government. Others, the government tried to censor.

• Successful anti-establishment films like All the President’s Men, Network and Serpico thrived in an era of distrust and rebellion. John Favreau and Robert Downey, Jr. visited Elon Musk to help model the Tony Stark character.

I wound up in this uncomfortable, yet familiar place. The same place I am when conservatives ask how I feel about Joe Biden, Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. I dislike them as well! But for very different reasons.

That’s how I feel about Hollywood. I view it with disdain, as most conservatives do, but not because I think it’s filled with liberal elites. Rather, it’s filled with classical liberals who think they’re doing the lord’s work while taking money from conservatives to fund their ambitions and doing more to promote a culture of nationalism. Hollywood is far from the liberal elite in this country. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Chapter Two

A Deep History of Influence

I want to be clear up front that there is a vast library of art films and documentaries that do an extraordinary job detailing the horrors of war and would have a demonstrable impact were they more widely viewed. But we’re focusing on high profile, high grossing war films that move culture and impact policy.

There are also what I’ll call “war adjacent” movies like Taxi Driver as a PTSD film, Indiana Jones and Inglourious Basterds that provide fictionalized accounts of World War II, or nuclear fallout fiction such as War Games or Dr. Strangelove. These films tell us something important about American culture and theoretically move our narrative forward, but we’re going to concern ourselves more with classic combat and combat training films.

To set the table for what it is that films—war films, in particular—are attempting to accomplish from the studio, or Hollywood’s perspective writ large, let’s hear from our buddy Krin:

“People like us prefer films that make powerful statements against war and for peace. We also want our films to be progressive in terms of race, gender, sexuality and social justice. But Hollywood filmmakers are cautious. Unless they want to turn out an art film or something else for a niche audience, producers, directors and screenwriters try very hard not to alienate audiences. And, if anything, it’s typical of the American film industry today… is that constant effort to crank out blockbusters that somehow manage to please everyone.

 

“As a result, filmmakers often try to control how audiences actually think about their films. So, for example, in 1971 when Edmund North accepted the Academy Award for Best Screenplay for his work on Patton, the film about World War II General George Patton, North acknowledged that Patton was a war film. But then he added that he hoped it was also a peace film, which was kind of a stretch.

 

“Then there is what the film theorist Robert B. Wray has called the discrepancy between intent and effect. Audiences may see films in ways that in no way did the filmmakers contemplate.”

Patton is a good starting point for us because it really does paint a picture of audience perspective. The biases one brings to the film likely impact your interpretation of it, regardless of the director’s intent.

What makes Patton such a haunting example isn’t necessarily the audience reaction to the film, whether you viewed Patton as a hero or a fool. In this case, there is a chilling, historical policy connection to the film, as it has been widely reported that Nixon made the decision to engage in the secret bombing campaign of Cambodia after a private screening of Patton in the White House. In this instance, we don’t have to guess at the direct impact of film on one’s psyche because in this case it is partially responsible for the actions of a single individual wielding life and death authority.

Now, to again broaden our perspective and build on Krin’s thoughts about what connects with an audience, I want to reference a book called Camera Politica. I’m going to reference it more later, but here goes:

“Cultural representations not only give shape to psychological dispositions, they also play an important role in determining how social reality will be constructed, that is, what figures and boundaries will prevail in the shaping of social life and social institutions.”

Let’s think about that, and go all the way back to the beginning of Hollywood and film production, so we can find even more direct and disturbing connections. I’ll give you one domestic and one foreign to illustrate the power of film as pure propaganda. Recall from a prior episode that the very first film ever screened in the White House was for known racist Woodrow Wilson; D.W. Griffith’s horrific film Birth of a Nation, which glorified white nationalism and a little group called the KKK.

In many ways, this film had as profound an effect on the national psyche regarding racism as Leni Riefenstahl’s pro Nazi film Triumph of the Will. Though separated by many years, both were considered masterpieces of filmmaking and were used to deliberately shift the public’s mindset and view. They were massively successful.

So now, back to Giglio to flesh this out even further:

“Speculating on the factors that motivate the policies of political leads is far different from documenting the influence of films on social and political behavior. This issue was raised as early as the beginning of the last century when the lynching of blacks increased after showings of The Birth of a Nation. Did the film’s release incite mob violence? Was the film a recruiting tool for the Klan?

 

“The research suggests a possible relationship, but not enough to prove causality. This issue of cause-effect has plagued Hollywood since the thirties, when publication of the Payne Fund Studies, which linked juvenile delinquency to the Hollywood crime and gangster films of that era, served as a catalyst for establishing tougher regulations on motion pictures.”

It’s interesting that we’re still having these kinds of conversations. Not every situation is as black and white as Nixon getting a hard on and jerking off to Patton before systematically murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent people. The chicken and egg question of whether Hollywood portrayals influence or reflect culture is similar to the conversations we’re still having about rap music or gaming culture.

Frankly, there’s more to suggest that it’s the egg. Or is it the chicken? Fuck it. There’s more than enough to suggest that it was understood early on that deliberately leveraging film as cultural propaganda was a way to sell policy and shift attitudes.

Woodrow Wilson himself appointed a man named George Creel to basically run a film propaganda department to “sell the war to America,” after Wilson went back on his isolationist campaign promise and decided to enter World War I. Even still, during this period, Giglio notes that early Hollywood was conflicted, saying, “Films like J. Stuart Blackton’s Battle Cry of Peace (1915) and Thomas Ince’s Civilization (1916) canceled each other out, preaching warmongering and pacifism, respectively.”

Wilson’s experience and success in selling the American people on the war even led FDR to establish the Bureau of Motion Picture to help guide the film industry as a contributor to the Second World War effort.

That’s not to say that Hollywood didn’t, or doesn’t, have a conscience. In fact, arguably the most powerful man in Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin, used his power and platform to both satirize dictators and send a powerful message of hope and peace.

Chapter Three

Hollywood Goes to War

When we talk about war films, there are a few categories and movies that crossover between them, of course. Giglio categorizes Hollywood portrayals in two ways. The “pro-war, propagandistic, patriotic flag-waving tracts, and anti-war stories aimed at changing the hearts and minds of combatants and civilians.” He does, however, note that the genre, “encompasses several sub-categories, including those about the horror and heartbreak of combat, and then those about the effects of war on the home front and society.”

With more than 5,000 war films under its belt in the first 100 years of Hollywood filmmaking, which is a staggering number when you think about it, there will obviously be exceptions, outliers and many different approaches. Although, as we’ll work through later, there is one glaringly consistent fact about nearly all of them.

So we can level set on the multitude of war treatments, I’ve listed just a small set of the highest performing and more recent films that are more familiar to today’s audiences. The ones that have likely had the largest impact on us in the past several decades.

There are the Disillusionment films that aren’t necessarily combat centric, like Jarhead, Coming Home, The China Syndrome, In the Valley of Elah, Lions for Lambs, Brothers, Green Zone and The Hurt Locker.

The Hurt Locker, in particular, is a harrowing film by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Jeremy Renner, and was notable on a number of fronts. First, it took a different look at war from the perspective of soldiers tasked with disarming improvised explosive devices. It was directed by a woman. And it took home six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. While it ultimately only grossed about $50 million, it was considered by many to be an important anti-war film, but one that also portrayed the struggle of American soldiers, male soldiers in particular, in both a gut twisting and sympathetic light. A difficult line to navigate for a filmmaker. Again, Krin:

“I have a more recent example of a filmmaker trying to control how people feel about her films. I’m thinking here about Kathryn Bigelow, who directed The Hurt Locker, the 2008 film about American soldiers in Iraq defusing explosives. I was actually at a screening of The Hurt Locker when Bigelow came out afterwards for a Q&A.

 

“Someone asked her if her film was a critique of masculinity. She started giggling and smiling and suddenly seemed almost girlish as she effectively ducked the question. I’m guessing she did not want her film to be seen as the work of an angry feminist, her fist raised in the air, going after the behavior of men. Especially the behavior of American men fighting a war.”

Being a female war filmmaker in a male dominated genre and industry put The Hurt Locker under many different microscopes.

Some combat veterans were critical of the depictions and technical inaccuracies, but believe the setting was extremely authentic. Overall, most critics fell over themselves applauding the film. And, I wonder, to Krin’s statement, if the question posed during the Q&A he referenced would have been posed to a male director. Nevertheless, The Hurt Locker stands out as a great example of Hollywood’s effort to portray disillusionment and frustration with war, in this case, the War in Iraq.

To counter this type of narrative, there are what I’ll call War Affirming films, whether or not that was truly the intent.

These are usually big sweeping affairs, such as Pearl Harbor, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Patton, The Great Escape, Uncommon Valor, We Were Soldiers, Heartbreak Ridge, Hacksaw Ridge or Blackhawk Down.

War adjacent and slightly different stories could include Private Benjamin, Stripes, Officer and a Gentleman, Taps and The Great Santini.

These are more character driven stories where troubled protagonists find redemption through military discipline. Not explicitly glorifying war, but certainly part of the affirming aspect of the genre.

Even films like those in the Rambo series speak to the horrors of war and what it does to a person, while affirming the hero’s journey through masculinity, discipline and bloodlust. Though the first in the series, First Blood, is actually a far more nuanced telling, considering the villains in the movie were themselves combat veterans of a different time.

It’s hard to believe that Sly Stallone put out an important war film, but I would argue that First Blood—while birthing an over-the-top and ultimately ridiculous series—was an important movie. Even if it contained the fatal flaw that we’ll talk about later.

Perhaps the most controversial film that falls under this category is the 2014 release American Sniper, starring Bradley Cooper as sniper Chris Kyle, directed by Clint Eastwood. It’s important not to underestimate the impact of this film on our nationalistic culture today. Despite Eastwood’s claim that it’s an anti-war film, the subject of the film became nothing short of a national hero for being the most effective sniper in the history of the military. It’s an extremely controversial film on several fronts, as Kyle would be both revered on the right and reviled on the left for his characterization of Iraqis as “savages” and how he enjoyed killing them.

Kyle was killed at a shooting range at the height of his popularity, but he lived long enough to take in much of the controversy over his statements and the film. Much of which had to do with an increasing number of people coming out of the woodwork to debunk several of his claims of heroism and actions during combat. For some in the military and on the right, however, Kyle remains a hero. Forget the fact that he harbored such hatred and contained bloodlust to murder people in a country that we were invading. He despised the very people we were supposedly liberating, adding to the already growing confusion over our operation and objectives in Iraq.

The movie wound up being one of the highest grossing war films of all time, pulling in $350 million worldwide, so far. Only a couple of movies, including Saving Private Ryan, Pearl Harbor and Gone with the Wind—if you want to consider that a true war film—have grossed more. It’s an incredible feat and, I would argue, most of those who paid to see the film likely fall into the Kyle-as-hero camp, so we have to take everything about the film and films like these seriously when attempting to define the effect these films have on our collective psyche.

Now, as a quick aside to round out the general categories of war film Hollywood loves, we have lighter, more satirical takes on war, such as Stripes, M*A*S*H, Three Kings, Good Morning Vietnam and Inglourious Basterds.

These are just a few examples of war and war adjacent films that are extremely popular and contained contradictory messages. At times glorifying war, at others the opposite. But all done with either a gentle or absurd touch that leaves the audience less conflicted about war and remembering the funny, absurd or satirical aspects of conflict.

Before we move to the next section, there’s one film that’s difficult to place: Saving Private Ryan.

As we’ll talk about shortly, World War II films are easier to digest because there’s historical consensus that this was the so called “just war.” But it checks so many boxes and makes it a compelling study. By all measures, it’s a blockbuster. Veterans were astounded by the realism. It portrayed the horrors endured by ordinary men drawn into an extraordinary situation that tugs on the heartstrings. We know there are no winners in this, and we’re saddened by what they go through. Yet, we’re uplifted at the same time.

Like much of Spielberg’s work, it is somehow simultaneously unoffensive, yet important. Cinematic, yet gritty. Some may disagree, but I find it sits neatly, almost innocuously, in nearly every camp—an example of a masterpiece of filmmaking, even if one isn’t inclined to give credit to a director many think is incapable of producing an art film.

Chapter Four

Influencer or Mirror?

Much of how we view Hollywood depends upon who the bad guy is. Nazis? Communists? Muslims? And how real or perceived are these threats? Hollywood has tied itself in knots over the past 100 years trying to walk a fine line between being on the right side of history and making money. After all, even though Hollywood is our chief cultural export, it’s a business. And that’s an important part of this conversation.

Most of Hollywood’s money is made overseas. So when it comes to war, and when you’re a country that is perpetually at war and constantly finding new bad guys, it’s an even more difficult path, because unhinged jingoism isn’t nearly as appealing in other markets as it is here. It’s one of the reasons that, save for a handful of films, the war genre doesn’t perform as well as fantasy or sci-fi. You have to go back to 1957 with The Bridge on the River Kwai, in fact, to find the last time a pure war film wound up as the highest grossing film of the year.

Hollywood since World War II can really be looked at as a bell curve, though the trajectory of the curve depends upon your perspective. Much of this can be viewed by how we define our enemy, but also by the nation’s general sentiment toward our entanglements past and present. For example, as Giglio notes, “The Russians were portrayed heroically in two 1943 films, The North Star and Days of Glory.” It wouldn’t take long for the nation’s mood to change course on the treatment of communists, though this was obviously mired in controversy, as Hollywood found itself in the crosshairs of the U.S. government during the Red Scare and McCarthy hearings. Again, Giglio:

“Hollywood’s most obvious ideological period occurred during the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s, when the film industry churned out a number of films like The Iron Curtain (1948), I Married a Communist (1949), The Red Menace (1949), I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), and Big Jim McLain (1952), all of which sought to frighten the American public into believing that a communist takeover was imminent.”

But the sure bet during this period was still World War II, with Hollywood releasing nine combat films in 1949 alone, as Giglio notes, “including Sands of Iwo Jima, which grossed $25 million, a considerable figure at the time.”

Heading out of the 1950s, there was an important shift in the government’s influence over the content of film with the formal end of what was known as the Production Code. The code was established in the '30s under Postmaster General Will Hays to, in Hays’ words, “Set up high standards of performance for motion picture producers… considerations which good taste and community value make necessary in this universal form of entertainment.” It was an acknowledgement by the government of the growing influence and power of film over American culture, initially designed to ensure that, “the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.”

By the 1950s, Hollywood had found ways to skirt the code on decency grounds, though the government would wield the very ambiguous sentiment of the code to enforce anything that smacked of communist sympathy. Curiously, the code was loosened in 1959, though it still maintained a line in the sand with respect to “homosexuality.”

In certain areas of society and in public policy, however, Hollywood was having a positive effect on the national mindset. As Giglio notes, “Cry Havoc and So Proudly We Hail [were] identical movies on a similar subject, and released the same year. Whether by accident or design, these films influenced the federal government to recognize the heroism of the women who served in World War II.”

But by the 1960s, the country began to enter into a period of moral crisis. The clear cut morality of World War II had disintegrated into a nebulous battle against unseen Cold War actors that somehow posed a threat to democracy. Outside of the clear and present danger of nuclear fallout, which Hollywood did in fact engage with often, war films began to wrestle with the growing disillusionment with our foreign campaigns.

As Ryan and Kellner write in Camera Politica:

“In 1971, American culture was still very much a contested terrain. It would be a mistake to assume that the appearance of films reacting against the sixties constituted a full-fledged capitulation on the part of Hollywood to an emerging conservative movement.”

Soon films by a new generation of filmmakers, freed of the shackles of the Production Code, were testing new grounds and painting a less-than-rosy picture of combat and the plight of veterans returning home. Films like Rolling Thunder in 1977 offered a strong reaction to what returning veterans faced, with a plot of a vet returning home to find his wife was having an affair. This motif would cross over into popular music culture with the hit song “Ruby.”

The Vietnam movies done in the aforementioned waves are still some of the most important depictions of Hollywood and the country struggling with its identity. But what we started to witness was a shift in animus from soldier to bureaucrat. Military to government. Many of the Vietnam-era films successfully split the government and the U.S. military into two distinct bodies, with the government responsible for our sins and soldiers as the unfortunate moral casualties. Here are two great passages from Camera Politica that speak to this transfer of blame:

“One major factor in the conservative triumph was the social psychology of shame that was a significant motif of American culture after the military defeat in Vietnam… That sense of loss generated resentment, as well as a yearning for compensation. One aspect of the failure of liberalism is the inability of liberals to provide a redemptive and compensatory vision that would replace military representations as a source of self-esteem. Conservatives, on the other hand, managed successfully to equate self-restoration with military renewal.

 

“In American culture, film representations of military prowess seem inseparable from national self-esteem. For conservatives especially, greatness as a nation means the ability to exercise military power. In war, the strength and courage of the soldiers who represent male national prestige are tested and proven. In post-World War II cinematic representations of this ritual, proof of manhood was accompanied by a nationalistic idealism that pictured the American fighting man as a heroic liberator of oppressed people and as a defender of freedom.”

Nevertheless, as Giglio points out, it’s difficult to measure where the intent begins. Is Hollywood a mirror or influencer in manifesting this cultural shift?

He quotes a study, for example, that demonstrates the positive impact of All the President’s Men on Americans’ feeling toward the press. Though he couches it by saying, “the long-term impact, however, remains unknown.”

Likewise, Ryan and Kellner reference the pinnacle of what we would consider classical liberal Hollywood films like All the President’s Men or “films articulating the perceptions of conspiracy among corporations and ruling elites,” such as Network and The China Syndrome. The authors point out that, “Victories also take their toll by generating countermovements, and the high point of a movement can be the starting point of another in reaction to it.”

They draw one of our favorite themes into the discussion saying, the New Right movement was “given a unified philosophy through the combination of a rehabilitated classical free market economic theory [Friedman and Laffer] with the new fundamentalist evangelism of the likes of the Moral Majority’s Jerry Falwell.” (#FMF)

Today, one of the more curious and impossible to determine chicken and egg scenarios is how the tide turned against Arabs and Muslims. Even before 9/11, The Project for a New American Century, Bush Doctrine, etc. Hollywood was in search of a new enemy at the end of the Cold War. Movies like True Lies, The Peacemaker, The Siege, Rules of Engagement, The Sum of All Fears and Unthinkable put the Arab and Muslim worlds squarely in America’s crosshairs.

Did these films help set the stage for anti-Islamic rhetoric in the nation, or was it inevitable after 9/11? It’s hard to tell. But I think it’s fair to argue that the cumulative effect of movies such as these helped pave the way for a general acceptance of Islamophobia and helped create a culture of fear that manifested in an almost universal support for perpetual war against an entire religion.

Perhaps the most egregious example of Hollywood taking liberties during the War on Terror is the dramatization of the capture of Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty. The film has become an almost laughable meme of everything wrong with Hollywood’s portrayal of American heroism in the face of evil, partly because it’s a fictionalized account of a current event with myriad inconsistencies and composite characters. But the more detrimental aspect of the film is that it leads audiences to believe that the CIA’s illegal use of torture, known as rendition, may have been responsible for unearthing bin Laden’s location, leading to his capture.

This idea has been thoroughly debunked, though it’s doubtful that American audiences who loved the film are any the wiser. Curiously, the film lists Kathryn Bigelow as a producer. And it was a huge success, grossing more than $130 million, more than three times what it cost to make. Not exactly a lesson to Hollywood not to play loose with the facts and our emotions.

Chapter Five

The Persistent Liberal Hollywood Myth

So it’s pretty clear that Hollywood has, at a minimum, an ambiguous record on war with respect to how liberal its take is. Many of the war films depicting the Vietnam era can certainly be fairly characterized as anti-war, but then again it seemed to have a minimal effect on the nation’s tolerance of or propensity for it. Nevertheless, the myth of the liberal Hollywood elite persists. I wonder why?

Oh, that’s right. Because the conservative media says so. And because so many actors and actresses are self-proclaimed liberals and have such high profiles in our culture, it’s understandable why this is an easy trope to press and pursue.

There’s also the fact we’ve acknowledged before that the movie business is indeed a business. It’s a pure capitalist enterprise where even the most liberal actor finds themselves doing the work, then hopefully someday assuaging their guilt by selecting an art film or nabbing producing credits on a documentary. These efforts, when confronted by the larger depiction of war as necessary are, dare I say, PITOTWIU. (AKA: pissing in the ocean to warm it up.)

No matter how many excellent war documentaries get made, the fact of the matter is our culture is influenced by the films that put asses in seats or eyes in front of downloads, I suppose. Plus, Americans aren’t ones to dwell, and we don’t like feeling badly about ourselves for too long.

As Giglio writes:

“With President Reagan’s election in 1980, the film studios acknowledged a change in government attitude and in the national mood and sought to take advantage of the transformation. What were described as the comic book phase representations of the war were also political tracts and propaganda pieces that tried to blame misguided bureaucrats and impotent politicians, rather than the American military, for what happened in Vietnam.”

But Giglio also makes the point that, due to lack of interest and poor box office receipts, “the days of the war movie are numbered.” And it’s true that we’ve officially moved past the blockbuster war film, as there’s really nothing to feel good about when it comes to our military engagements. Even the post-9/11 film box office receipts, with the exception of Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper, pale in comparison to the enormous success of the comic book universe.

The question remains, however, as to who is influencing whom. In the introduction to Here’s Looking At You, Giglio points out that:

“No empirical study exists to prove that merely viewing one or even several political films will affect us enough to shape our political preferences... How influential film is in developing our political character remains a matter of opinion. Government, however, can affect political behavior, depending on the amount of freedom it allows individuals and the mass media.”

I struggle with this in my own personal journey and in trying to gauge the impact of the media my children consume. Growing up, the most important films in my life with deep meaning—not the shoot-em-up or pull my finger stuff that the inner adolescent in me still loves—were movies like Mississippi Burning, Cry Freedom and Glory. For years, I maintained that these movies had an enormous impact on my worldview. Though, now, I’m not so sure. And there’s also something that at this point in my life I recognize as extremely problematic. The thing that I’ve been hinting at repeatedly that plagues nearly all successful Hollywood films.

I want to set this up with a passage from Camera Politica that knocked me out. I read the book on a recent plane trip and made this single note in the margin after reading it over and over: “Ruthless.” Here it is:

“Liberalism operates from within patriarchal presuppositions, which, like the similar procaptialist presuppositions liberals hold, limit the ability of liberals to see beyond the walls of the ideological prison in which they operate. Militarist patriarchs are okay, these films seem to say, though we’d be better off with nicer ones. But in a world in which one trigger-happy fool can send everyone to happy vaporland, even nice militarist patriarchs must be seen as pathological. It is such a shift of vision, whereby the most everyday assumptions of patriarchy and capitalism, especially the assumption that strong, rambunctious men are needed to lead and defend us, are relinquished forever, that lies beyond the capacity of liberals. Indeed, liberals should probably be defined as people incapable of such structural conceptualizations.”

The big takeaway, when you look out across the 5,000 war films that Hollywood has pumped out of the last century and nearly all of the ones we covered today, is that with very few exceptions, they’re missing the perspective of the other side. Even the great supposed anti-war films of the Vietnam era, which are as honest as any in the genre. As Giglio says succinctly, “There is one criticism of the Vietnam War film that they all share, namely that Hollywood focused on the American presence rather than on the Vietnamese people who endured and suffered through the war.”

The exceptions, by the way, are sometimes remarkable. But they’re most notable for how painful they are to watch. Movies like Angelina Jolie’s In the Land of Blood and Honey, which Giglio considers the best film on the Bosnian War, “graphically depicts a war where old wounds and personal scores are settled against innocent bystanders and not only those fighting.”

Or DePalma’s Redacted, a “a blistering expose of the brutal rape of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl by American soldiers, after which she and her family are murdered and their house set on fire.” These exceptions might be outstanding, but in terms of impact on our consciousness and psyche, they’re marginal at best.

The movies that shaped me or just fed into whatever was already inside me, are all white savior movies. Every one of them. Something I didn’t realize until much later in life.

The successful war films Hollywood produces, no matter how real, how brutal, or how provocative, can mostly be characterized as white, military, male savior films. Films that put the fighting man at the center. Even if the character performs horrific acts of violence and depravity, such as those depicted in a film like Platoon, they are explained away as the horrors that occur in the fog of war. War made by bureaucrats and thrust upon young soldiers seeking honor, perhaps revenge, or simply enough money to pay for college.

Who did you root for in A Few Good Men? It’s a question we asked in an early Unf*cking. Whether you rooted for the Nicholson character or not, he’s the more memorable figure. Because the heart of liberalism exposes the desire to have that character on the wall and the rest of us happy not to ask questions.

Did Obama illegally murder countless innocent civilians in countries we weren’t at war with? Yup. Did liberals have a problem with that? Nope. So long as we didn’t see it. Did conservatives have a problem with it? Yup. Because we didn’t flaunt it enough and do more.

Remember when we asked who became the cultural icon in Wall Street? Bud Fox or Gordon Gekko? Sometimes films have the opposite effect of what the filmmaker intended because the dastardly characters unlock some secret part of us. And they’re typically the more memorable figures.

Chris Kyle came home to publicly brag that he loved killing savages in Iraq. The civilians we were sent there to liberate. And he was rewarded with one of the top grossing films of all time based on his story, despite the fact that it was full of holes, exaggeration and disgusting brutality.

Support the troops.

Salute the flag.

Recite the pledge.

Approve the budget.

See if sand can glow.

Perhaps no institution is more responsible for normalizing these sentiments and celebrating a toxic culture of militarism and bravado more than liberal Hollywood filled with all those pinko commie leftist elites the right wing loves to vilify.

The era of the war film might indeed be over. But it’s only because it’s uninteresting. No longer fertile ground for capitalist exploitation and, so long as service isn’t compulsory, the liberal masses can look the other way while conservatives in Congress whose own kids will never see combat can just cheer them on.

Final word goes to our friend, supporter and collaborator Krin:

“Ultimately, we have to say that films are not bottles washing up on shore with messages inside. Going to the movies is not about opening the bottle and reading the message. Rather, movies are places people go to create their own meanings. And who is going to stop us from doing that? There are no viewership police. Films mean what we want them to mean.

 

“Allow me to generalize on how people think about movies, war films in particular. Audiences tend to fall into two large categories. You have the naive audience and the ironic audience. If you’re now [learning from] Unf*cking the Republic, you’re almost surely in the ironic camp. And you and I can talk about, say, the end of the film Patton, where this crazy general goes off tilting at windmills.

 

“For naive audiences, Patton is about a general who may have been a little odd, but who nevertheless got the job done. Similarly, for the naive audience, The Hurt Locker is about fearless men at war. For at least that guy in the audience who tossed the question at Kathryn Bigelow, and surely for most of us in the ironic audience, The Hurt Locker is indeed a critique of toxic masculinity. Most filmmakers look for ways to appeal to both audiences, and that is something that we have to keep in mind if we’re going to categorize a film as pro-war or anti-war.”

All films are propaganda.

Hollywood isn’t liberal.

Hollywood is capitalist.

Here endeth the lesson.