The Hollywood War Machine: U.S. Militarism and Popular Culture [Paperback]

 

 

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"The Hollywood War Machine" by Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard offers a penetrating critique of the significant role that the culture industry plays in legitimizing the U.S. military/industrial complex. Mr. Boggs and Mr. Pollard's sober narrative of growing U.S. militarism and political hegemony over the course of the early 20th century to today provides a solid foundation upon which hundreds of noteworthy Hollywood films are discussed and analyzed. The authors succeed in demonstrating how Hollywood has consistently produced movies that have overwhelmingly promoted a celebratory but uncritical perspective on U.S. military aggression, helping us understand how the American public has come to accept imperialism as a just cause and, by extension, how the decline of meaningful democratic debate about the U.S.' relationship with the world community has come about.

Mr. Boggs and Mr. Pollard recount the historical legacy of the movie industry to show how the orientation of films has become progressively more militarized as the U.S. has grown to become the preeminent world power. We discover that prior to WWI, the few films produced about war tended to depict a revulsion to violence; during the war, Hollywood at best promoted a positive image of the U.S. military but not about combat. Few films were produced about war until WWII, when an abundance of propagandistic but wildly successful films helped break U.S. isolationism and promote the idea of a 'good war' mobilized against the fascist threat to democracy. Interestingly, the authors connect popular post-war genres such as westerns, sci fi, spy, thrillers and film noir with increasingly militarized scripts in which struggles between good and evil were overwhelmingly depicted in sexist, racist and nationalistic terms. The authors argue that the repetition of such images have tended to instill an uniquely skewed and nativistic worldview among audiences, which in turn has afforded U.S. policy makers with opportunities to regularly invoke claims of exceptionalism and to increasingly declare war against America's perceived enemies at little risk of public opposition.

While one might think that some of the Vietnam-themed movies that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s presented a more critical view when compared with prior Hollywood fare, Mr. Boggs and Mr. Pollard contend that almost none of these films goes beyond depicting the horrors of war to more challenging discussions of U.S. imperialistic motivations or Vietnamese perspectives. In fact, the authors point out that a significant number of Vietnam-themed films such as the 'Rambo' series preposterously attempted to recast the U.S.' effort in heroic terms. In perhaps the book's most compelling passage, the chapter on Vietnam concludes with a powerful critique of the misgivings expressed by Robert McNamara in the documentary film 'Fog of War', in which the authors explain why it is imperative for the U.S. to face up to its legacy of war crimes as requisite to restructuring its relations with the rest of the world.

The authors go on to discuss how the 'good war' theme has more recently been recycled in movies about terrorists, the Gulf War, and a slew of nostalgic and hyper-patriotic films about WWII. Mr. Boggs and Mr. Pollard believe that the emergence of the U.S. as the sole superpower and the rise of the corporate media have conspired to present the spectacle of technowar as a glorification and legitimation of violence in service of U.S. corporate interests. Furthermore, we learn that Hollywood's close working relationship with the video game industry has produced intensified narratives that may be conditioning the public to accept war by remote control; the authors point to the deployment of robots to combat zones and weapons into space as evidence of this trend. However, the authors believe that the asymmetric response of the Iraqis and others to the U.S. military machine demonstrates the limits to power, suggesting that the public would be far better supported by a media that promotes peace and democracy instead of conflict, violence and domination.

I highly recommend this outstanding book to everyone.

Anyone coming of age during the conformist 1950's knows how the movie screen can nourish unquestioning patriotism. Then, it was the proverbial piece of cake for a film industry coming off the hugely patriotic WWII. War films of the 50's-- including the darker ones such as Attack (1956) or Bridges of Toko-Ri (1954)-- never raised serious questions about America' going to war, any war. Even Korea, an unpopular conflict, raised no doubts behind that misnamed "police action". Ditto, the assumed right to annihilate a native population as portrayed in the hundreds of "combat" Westerns of the same period. What followed, it can be argued, was a backlash during the Vietnam years when many movie myths were finally exposed. And that's the overriding strength of this analysis. The authors never for a moment buy into the popular legends surrounding America's expansionist role in world affairs. Thus a critical distance opens between the authors and their Hollywood subject, a very necessary distance for getting at the propaganda dimension.

Unfortunately, the book doesn't really hit stride until Chapter 3 on Vietnam. Too much in the first 50 pages tends to be repetitive and could have been honed down. At the same time, Chapter 2-- though strengthened by an illuminating definition of the "good war"-- suffers from sloppy scholarship in surveying the pre-Vietnam period. Most errors amount to inconsequential matters of names and dates (e.g. John Wayne was not in Battle Cry, p.72; Detour was released in 1945, not 1949, p.80); a more serious gaffe refers readers to the mutant grasshopper epic Beginning of the End {1957}, p.84, instead of the more pertinent atom-bomb saga Beginning or the End (1947). Such errors are not pointed out just to be picky. Rather they suggest the authors are not as interested in the pre-Vietnam war films as they are in more recent periods, and frankly, the quality of that early text shows it.

However-- getting on to the stellar chpter 3-- just how anti-war are the so-called anti-war films of the Vietnam era. Here alone the book earns its purchase price. The authors show in both concise summary and compelling detail how Hollywood served the imperial war machine, despite popular beliefs to the contrary. Sure, dark and bloody films like Platoon did nothing to help Pentagon recruitment drives. On the other hand, none of these dramas question the central political or historical context of the war itself. Instead, as the authors show, the soldiers' plight is framed by abstractly dark forces beyond human control, thereby avoiding the touchy topic of who makes war and why. In short, forget about Johnson, the Repubocrats, and imperial ambitions-- rather the chaos results from an unavoidable cosmic condition beyond our collective reach. Thus the fault lies not in the people but in the proverbial stars. At the same time, the authors point out how battlefield portrayals-- no matter how gruesome or unflattering-- never rise beyond the isolated American experience. As a result, the enemy stands as little more than a faceless demonic force, to be exterminated at will. In sum, these Vietnam-era films are stripped of those larger contexts that might raise embarrassing questions. As a consequence, the central myth of America's Manifest Destiny goes unquestioned, even now as it dodges around the streets of downtown Baghdad.

Essentially similar themes are applied throughout the remainder of the book, ending with the calamitous Iraq adventure, circa 2006. The analytic proves very effective in examining such later films as Steven Spielberg's "good war" series, especially the spectacularly brutal Saving Private Ryan. Of course, many critics will use WWII stereotypes to dismiss the work as anti-American, at the same time as the often hidden history of that war is neglected as well. The fact is that neither we nor the enemy are faceless nor without historical context-- a seemingly unassailable truism. However, Hollywood's dark genius has been to get around these paramount truths in undeniably entertaining fashion. Nevertheless, propaganda remains propaganda, no matter how artfully dressed up. The great strength of the Boggs-Pollard study is to show how propaganda can happen even when it is not the intended result. All in all-- an indispensible work.

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