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The Hollywood War Machine

The newly expanded and revised edition of The Hollywood War Machine includes wide-
ranging exploration of numerous popular military-themed films that have appeared in
the close to a decade since the first edition was published. Within the Hollywood movie
community, there has not been even the slightest decline in well-financed pictures focus-
ing on warfare and closely related motifs. The second edition includes a new chapter
on recent popular films and another that analyzes the relationship between these movies
and the bourgeoning gun culture in the United States, marked in recent years by a dra-
matic increase in episodes of mass killings.

Carl Boggs is Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, Adjunct
Professor at Antioch University in Los Angeles, and author or editor of numerous
books including Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War (Rowman &
Littlefield 2004) and Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in an Era of American
Empire (Routledge 2003).

Tom Pollard is Professor of Social Sciences at National University in San Jose and a docu-
mentary filmmaker whose work has appeared on BBC, the Discovery Channel, the Life
Network, Canadian Broadcasting System, and various PBS channels. His most recent
books include: Loving Vampires: Pop Culture’s Undead Metaphors (2015) and Holly-
wood 9/11: Superheros, Supervillians, and Super Disasters (2011).
The Hollywood War Machine

U.S. Militarism and Popular Culture,

Second Edition

Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard

First published 2007 by Paradigm Publishers
Second edition published 2016
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 Taylor & Francis
The right of Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard to be identified as authors of this
work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-61205-797-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-61205-798-9 (pbk)

Typeset in Sabon & Gill Sans

by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

Preface vi

1 Media Culture in the Imperial System 1

2 Militarism in American Popular Culture 15

3 War and Cinema: The Historical Legacy 36

4 The Vietnam Syndrome: Politics and Cinema 64

5 Recycling the Good War 93

6 Cinematic Warfare in the New World Order 127

7 Hollywood after 9/11 167

Postscript: Blowback and American Sniper 189

Notes 195
Index 203
About the Authors 216
Preface

In the span of nearly a decade since the first edition of The Hollywood War Machine
appeared, the trends at work in American political and popular culture we explored
have only accelerated, taking the United States further along the path of militarism,
authoritarianism, and oligarchy. It takes no genius to see that media culture—not only
film but TV, the Internet, video games, and print journalism—is integral to these trends,
both reflecting and contributing to their development. If during the George W. Bush
years, the United States had become the most militarized society on the planet, the ascent
of Barack Obama to the White House has unfortunately done little to change this real-
ity. Violence in its multiple expressions still pervades the landscape, visible in a massive
gun culture, increased rampage killings, thriving global arms trade, military operations
in several countries, and a media thoroughly saturated with violent images and narra-
tives. As we elaborate further in the following chapters—including a new chapter, new
postscript, and numerous revisions—the progressive militarization of American society
has been a thoroughly corrupting influence, not only on the conduct of foreign policy
but on domestic politics, everyday life, and the media system itself.
The American pursuit of unchallenged global supremacy—sometimes referred to as
“full-spectrum dominance”—has set in motion conditions in which democracy, human
rights, and truth-telling are being sacrificed at the altar of elite economic and geo-
political agendas. As the worsening global situation reveals, imperial power generates
heightened blowback against U.S. interventions, nowadays centered in the Middle East,
with its legacy of invasions, bombings, killings, destroyed public infrastructures, politi-
cal destabilization, civilian displacements, and of course longstanding support for brutal
dictatorships. Since the 1990s this legacy has impacted mostly Arab and Muslim regions,
with the result that the “war on terror” has ensured rapid growth of what it is osten-
sibly meant to defeat—jihadic resistance, mass insurgency, local militias, and terrorist
organizations like al Qaeda and its spinoffs. Indeed U.S. foreign policy could not have
been more efficiently designed to produce blowback, as empire gives rise to the very
political violence its managers and apologists so righteously oppose. The central global
phenomenon of the present era is the unfolding dialectic between empire and blowback,
between imperial power and forces aligned against it, usually referred to as “terrorism”
in the West.
Empire simultaneously corrupts the domestic political sphere—its lopsided and irra-
tional costs, risks, and entanglements subverting the social and political health of American
society in general. As the drive for international supremacy brings recurrent, some would
argue perpetual, warfare, those who benefit include the military-industrial complex, state
power, huge corporations, weapons traders, and a media complex that thrives on hyper-
violent spectacles. Tightly interwoven with the neoliberal global order, the U.S. warfare
 Preface vii

system fuels an authoritarian state, shrinkage of public debate, and collapse of political
agency under the enormous weight of patriotic conformity. Since war (and orientation
toward war) demands a public discourse of lies and myths, politicians, the government,
and media all end up as conduits of duplicity and deception.
At the very heart of empire, Americans now face a daunting reality: war and milita-
rism are deeply embedded in the very fabric of society, in everyday life, and in the deep
attitudes and values of the general population. It might thus be appropriate to refer to
a widening “culture of militarism”, a phenomenon that will be difficult to overturn in
the absence of powerful counter forces. As one element of this culture, the gun craze—
with its estimated 270 million guns, including untold numbers of automatic weapons—
is by far the largest in the world. The United States now leads all countries in the
number of random massacres, rampage killings, and serial murders. It is the biggest
manufacturer and seller of all types of military-style weapons on the international mar-
ket. The systematic violence of the warfare state ultimately saturates and deforms civil
society as well as the political system.
Regarding the primary focus of this book—media culture—its wide panorama of
militaristic images and discourses (most visible in Hollywood cinema) helps rationalize
and legitimate the imperial system: a swollen Pentagon budget, bases around the world,
record arms sales, military interventions, a global surveillance network, and continued
modernization of nuclear weaponry. If the established media functions as a linchpin of
ideological hegemony, nowhere is this more pronounced than in U.S. military and foreign
policy. Warfare-state needs turn the media into a serviceable propaganda instrument,
one that relies more heavily on dissemination of “news” and “entertainment” than on
outright government censorship and controls. While its opinion leaders champion a free
press and diversity of opinion, when it comes to the global scene, the United States can
be said to possess one of the most restrictive, ideological media systems anywhere: the
TV networks, for most Americans the main sources of “news” and commentary, typi-
cally follow a uniform, formulaic (pro-military, pro-war) line, with alternative voices
confined to the wilderness. Media culture is both a conduit and an enabler of military
power, which seems to give Americans a special pride and sense of identity.
This second edition of The Hollywood War Machine appears at a time when political
conditions in the Middle East and nearby regions appear to be spiraling out of control,
marked by extreme chaos in Iraq and Libya; massive insurgencies and civil strife in Syria,
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine; mounting conflict between the United States and Russia;
new Israeli assaults on Gaza; and the readiness of U.S. military forces to bomb or oth-
erwise intervene at any number of crucial flash points. In this global Hobbesian state
of nature, the corrupting force of empire can only intensify, further exacerbating the
dynamic of imperial power leading to international blowback. If so, a compliant and
jingoistic American media culture is destined to work overtime, ever more zealous in
feeding patriotic mobilization and cheerleading for war. Under such circumstances, future
international disasters might well be inescapable. As we further set about deconstructing
the “Hollywood War Machine”, we can only hope for a more enlightened, progressive
outcome.
This project is an outgrowth of several earlier works, going back to a book on con-
temporary film culture we co-authored, A World in Chaos (2003) and continuing through
Carl Boggs’ Imperial Delusions (2005), our collaborative effort The Hollywood War
Machine (2007), and Tom Pollard’s Hollywood 9/11 (2011). From the outset, our con-
ceptual focus has been on the convergence of several discourses: film studies, social
theory, cultural criticism, and global concerns related to military power and warfare.
viii Preface

Carl Boggs owes a special gratitude to his longtime friend and colleague, Ray Pratt, a
superb scholar of film, politics, and social theory, for his generous intellectual and per-
sonal support spanning more than four decades. In writing these volumes, both authors
benefited enormously from the help extended by several colleagues and administrators
at National University. Carl Boggs further owes a deep personal and intellectual debt to
Laurie Nalepa, whose faith in this project has been very sustaining. Tom Pollard wishes
to thank Sue Dickey for her critical feedback as well as constant personal support. He
also wishes to thank Michael Parenti for informative insights and sage advice through-
out the development of the manuscript. He also thanks Julie Tsoi for her insightful
suggestions. We are, finally, much indebted to the reviewers and editors at Paradigm
Publishers and at Routledge.
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
October 2014
Chapter 1

Media Culture in the Imperial System

One of the remarkable features of American public life today is the extent to which
Hollywood studios continue to turn warfare into stunning media spectacles—a phenome-
non shared with TV and video games, like movies, beneficiaries of the same high-tech
assets. Violence and bloodshed, endemic to military combat, are now the artistic and
technological essence of modern cinematic overkill, whether at the hands of Tony Scott or
Oliver Stone, Edward Zwick or Quentin Tarantino, Michael Bay or Steven Spielberg (cel-
ebrated directors all). It is Bay’s work that today probably best exemplifies the Hollywood
war frenzy that we explore throughout this book, for he is master not only of the battlefield
genre (Pearl Harbor, 2001) but of similar violent fare (Transformers, 2007). If graphic
scenarios of death and destruction wind up as the predictable offshoot of empire, they are
also the stock-in-trade of blockbusters, both mirroring and contributing to the culture of
militarism that permeates early twenty-first century America.
Beyond accelerating the twin processes of economic crisis and social decay, the George
W. Bush years (2001–08) spurred the militarization of both political and popular cultures,
reflected in escalating incidents of rampage killings, expansion of the Pentagon war
machine, a more belligerent foreign policy, and a corporate media increasingly saturated
with images and narratives of violence. The indicators are rather difficult to miss: two
bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; stepped-up war on terrorism accompanied by inter-
ventions (often by drone aircraft) in Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia; constant
military threats against Iran; continued nuclear buildup; and growth of a security state
fueled by the stepped-up work of the National Security Agency (NSA), Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA), and kindred federal agencies. Domestically, a sprawling prison-
industrial complex, with some 2.3 million detainees, seems to be taking on a life of its
own. By 2013, the United States was spending nearly $700 billion yearly on its military
colossus—more than 40 percent of the world total and dwarfing such purported com-
petitors as China ($166 billion) and Russia ($90 billion), not to mention North Korea (at
$10 billion).1 The Barack Obama presidency has, despite many promises, done relatively
little to alter or reverse these worsening tendencies, either domestically or globally.
To sustain U.S. global supremacy, a legacy of World War II, the Pentagon now has ten
command zones covering most of the planet as well as more than eight hundred armed-
forces bases in dozens of nations. Since no country or empire in world history has even
approached this scale of military power, it would be astonishing if conduits of imperial
ideology did not function continuously to invest that power with maximum domestic
support—without which the burdensome risks and costs of war would likely be resisted
by much of the general population. Given the lack of an ambitious state propaganda appara-
tus in the United States, these hegemonic functions become the domain of established
2 Media Culture in the Imperial System

media and popular culture, their mission being to furnish legitimation for empire. As might
be expected, military virtues transmitted not only through movies but TV and video games
have today become more deeply entrenched in American society.

Legitimating Empire
Postwar imperial expansion that ultimately brought the United States to lone superpower
status gained new momentum after the events of 9/11, fueled by George W. Bush’s war on
terror. The attacks gave rise to a mood of fear and anxiety, seized by the media, rightwing
politicians, think tanks, and sectors of the warfare state, giving the White House a green
light to pursue new military ventures. While carrying out two costly (and woefully under-
financed) wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration brought crisis to the
domestic banking system and larger economy while stoking trends toward plutocracy.2
With trillions of dollars earmarked for bases, wars, arms supplies, intelligence operations,
surveillance, and law enforcement, combined with tax cuts for the wealthy and further
deregulation of Wall Street, the United States faced its worst economic debacle since the
Great Depression. An oligarchic social structure coincided with an authoritarian political
system, global empire, economic instability, and mounting poverty. By 2011, according to
the Economic Policy Institute, the richest 1 percent of Americans laid claim to more wealth
than the entire lower 90 percent.3 The Obama presidency did little to overturn any of these
trends.
During the Obama reign, Washington has intervened militarily in several countries: not
only Afghanistan and Iraq, but Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Syria, with Iran
remaining on the U.S./Israeli target list. U.S. drone strikes have been regularly launched
across the Middle East, with mounting civilian casualties. The counterproductive war on
drugs, militarized in some zones, continues full-force in Mexico, Central America,
Colombia, and parts of the Middle East as well as the United States itself. American power
is being extended and consolidated throughout the Pacific region, ostensibly to counter
the China “threat.” Meanwhile, every international move undertaken by Bush and
Obama has been endorsed or celebrated by the mainstream media: CNN, Fox, other TV
networks, Time magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall
Street Journal.
As of this writing (late 2014), the U.S. military had left in its wake conditions of
Hobbesian anarchy in most nations where it intervened—in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans,
and Libya. Years of uncritical Washington support for Israel had contributed to the much
same conditions—violence, chaos, breakdown—in Gaza. The result, of course, was not
only anarchy and instability but blowback, as demonstrated by the spread of insurgent
groups usually dismissed in the West as “terrorists.” Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick write,
in their book The Untold History of the United States (2012): “The consequences of years
of misguided and short-sighted U.S. policies were coming home to roost around the
world.”4 Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the Middle East, where the social
fabric of several countries (Iraq and Syria) has been eviscerated in the wake of military
operations. Chalmers Johnson had anticipated exactly such outcomes in his seminal 2000
book Blowback.5
President Obama, following President Bush, has proclaimed that U.S. warfare against
enemies serves to make the nation stronger, protecting its seemingly fragile “security.” The
problem is that this official rationale—along with pretenses of promoting democracy and
human rights—clashes starkly with the historical reality. Such claims are met with derision
around the world yet, sadly, are taken seriously by most Americans, including the educated
 Media Culture in the Imperial System 3

elite. One reason for this yawning gulf is the pervasive influence of media culture, which
does so much to legitimate the warfare state and its repeated foreign ventures.
The steady growth of a militarized society in the United States coincides with the expan-
sion of the media in its diverse forms: movies, TV, radio, Internet, video games, print
journalism, and mobile technology. A great font of information, opinion, communication,
and entertainment, the corporate media is a linchpin of ideological hegemony, a vital
repository of values, attitudes, beliefs, and myths that shape public opinion on a daily
basis. Transnational media conglomerates like Disney, Time Warner, Microsoft, Apple,
Viacom, and News Corporation—all sites of unfathomable wealth and power—ritually
celebrate the wonders of a “free-market” economy, the virtues of personal consumption,
the blessings of a political system built on freedom and democracy, a benevolent U.S. for-
eign policy, the need for globalized military superiority, and of course old-fashioned
patriotism. We should thus hardly be surprised to find a constant flow of militaristic images
and discourses across the media landscape, perhaps nowhere more so than in Hollywood
cinema.
From its earliest formative period, the United States had moved inexorably along the
path of colonialism, racism, and militarism, first conquering Indian lands and vast areas
of Mexico and then, following settlement of North America, pushing outward into Latin
America, Pacific islands, and Asia at the close of the Spanish-American War. For a good
part of the twentieth century, the United States was in a state of war (or preparing for war),
spanning two World Wars, interventions in Korea, Indochina, Central America, the
Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, with further warfare in the Middle East (to
advance economic and geopolitical priorities) a virtual certainty. In this context, the ruling
elites naturally want the mass public to believe this global power is being wielded for
entirely noble ends around universal principles of freedom and democracy consistent with
the long-held myth of Manifest Destiny.
Here the always-crucial mechanisms of legitimation take on special meaning. All power
structures require systemic ideological and cultural supports—popular consensus—but the
imperatives of empire add more complexities to these ordinary requirements. Imperial
ambitions, a bloated war economy, a surveillance network, constant armed interventions—
these must be made to appear somehow “natural,” ordinary, worthy of sacred duty. Motifs
of national exceptionalism, superpatriotism, high-tech warfare, and civilizing mission help
satisfy this legitimation function, as does the national chauvinism associated with eco-
nomic, technological, and military supremacy. To translate this ideological matrix into
popular language and understanding, to integrate it into the political culture, is the task
less of a classical propaganda apparatus than of an education system, communications
network, and media culture appropriate to modern capitalism. In the United States today,
the sprawling media complex is an extension of megacorporate operations that comprise
the largest and most influential media-entertainment system ever known. And Hollywood
filmmaking, as we indicate throughout this book, is increasingly central to that system—an
indispensable bulwark of empire.
U.S. pursuit of global domination, a goal shared equally by Republicans and Democrats,
feeds concentrated government, corporate, and military power, not to mention a massive
law-enforcement and surveillance order that cannot by itself provide legitimation. That is
precisely the role of media culture. As we argue in later chapters, Hollywood filmmaking
contributes generously to this function, despite the release of motion pictures here and
there that might run counter to the dominant patterns. Legitimation, it should be empha-
sized, gains force not primarily through state censorship or controls but through ordinary
work carried out at all levels of media, where crude propaganda or “conspiratorial” efforts
4 Media Culture in the Imperial System

are scarcely needed to enforce hegemonic codes. The repetitive formulas, images, myths,
and illusions contained in popular Hollywood movies and TV programs can be expected
to influence mass audiences in rather predictable ways, much like advertising, public rela-
tions, and think-tank operations. One likely response to the yearly flood of violent combat,
action/adventure, sci-fi, and horror movies is quicker readiness to support U.S. military
ventures that, in an ideologically-charged milieu, generally require little intellectual ratio-
nale. Noble objectives, when taken for granted, usually speak for themselves.
To be sure, complex industrialized societies possess diverse agencies of hegemony and
politicization, but none today rival the power of a globalized corporate media culture. As
Douglas Kellner points out: “Media culture spectacles demonstrate who has power and
who is powerless, who is allowed to exercise force and violence and who is not. They
dramatize and legitimate the power of the forces that be and demonstrate to the powerless
that if they fail to conform they risk incarceration or death.”6 It is a culture geared both
to established power and to young people—not only film but TV, video games, social
media, and music—whose political views are just forming and therefore much easier to
shape. That such views might be partial, uneven, or lacking coherence hardly detracts from
their salience or intensity, especially when it comes to issues of foreign and military policy.
Despite its liberal reputation, moreover, Hollywood makes expensive, high-tech movie
entertainment that, directly or indirectly, dramatizes ideological themes that fit the consen-
sual requirements of empire.
Here Henry Giroux argues that American militarism must in part be understood partly
as an ideological construct that permeates every corner of society. He writes that
“Militarism and war have not only changed the nature of the political order but the nature
and character of American life.”7 For Americans in the early twenty-first century, reports
of military assaults, bombings, drone attacks, special operations, black sites, and covert
actions—and threats of more warfare—are a routine feature of everyday life. Media spec-
tacles of violence and killing on a large scale can be linked to what Giroux calls the “neo-
liberal dystopian dream machine” rooted in fear, anxiety, and despair.8 One result, no
doubt intended by the political and media chieftains, is a collective moral numbing in the
face of terrible human and material costs accumulated by the warfare state. With moral
numbing comes something akin to “zombie politics”—a national psychosis of alienation
and retreat that undercuts political debate.

Cinematic Imperialism
The Hollywood War Machine has moved full-speed ahead over the past several years,
capitalizing on the post–9/11 American sense of a wounded, vengeful, but still internation-
ally powerful nation ready to set the world straight, by military force where necessary.
Several recent films deserve special attention for their embrace of strong, pro-military
themes and capacity to reach large audiences with messages celebrating U.S. armed might.
No better example of this cinematic direction is likely to be found than the popular
Rambo series, spanning 1982 to 2008—the latest edition directed by Sylvester Stallone,
main protagonist of each graphically-bloody movie. We have written extensively about the
earlier Rambo phenomenon elsewhere in this book, especially in the context of Vietnam.
It is enough to note here that Rambo as warrior hero seems to have achieved permanent
status within American media culture, surpassing even the legendary John Wayne. Rambo-
inspired films are explicitly designed to evoke audience pride in and identification with the
U.S. military as a vehicle of imperial power—tales of a warrior charged with fighting
evildoers in Communist-infested Asian countries.9 The latest Rambo movie features one
 Media Culture in the Imperial System 5

of the goriest Hollywood celebrations of violence ever, where human beings are bombed,
blasted, stabbed, shot, blown up, incinerated, bludgeoned, beaten, beheaded, and tossed
out of planes—all to advance U.S. military agendas. Rambo alone kills eighty-three villains,
perhaps short of a record but surely enough to uphold his reputation as “the beast.” (Were
Rambo given such representation in another culture, the American media would surely
ascribe to him Hitlerian dimensions of evil.)
In the film Vantage Point (2008), a box-office hit, Peter Travis depicts the assassination
of a U.S. president attending a global war on terrorism summit in Spain. With anti-American
fanatics assaulting the very citadel of Washington power (center of the “free world”)
the crowd goes into shock and panic as the drama unfolds repeatedly from different cam-
era angles. This familiar good-versus-evil narrative was heavily promoted as a cinematic
trope alerting Americans to new threats against national security. In the movie Live Free
or Die Hard (2009), Len Wiseman brings to the screen a reprise of Die Hard pictures star-
ring Bruce Willis as New York City police detective John McClane, here seen taking on
(and routing) a group of sinister high-tech terrorists ready to hack into (and bring down)
U.S.–based computer systems—a formula that would be repeated in movie after movie. In
the cultish film Transformers (2007), Michael Bay revisits his fixation on technowar by
means of a narrative framing combat between opposing robotic forces: between noble and
heroic Autobats and evil Decepticons, the latter repelled when they assault a U.S. military
base in Qatar. Bay’s more epic 2014 sequel, subtitled “Age of Extinction,” pushes the same
images and narratives of hyper-violence toward more dystopic and mysterious outcomes.
Predictably enough, many post-9/11 Hollywood movies and TV programs are set in the
Middle East, their story-lines typically riddled with anti-Muslim and anti-Arab stereotypes.
Islamophobia has long permeated the American entertainment industry, as Jack Shaheen
shows at great length in his book Reel Bad Arabs (2001).10 The Middle East is not only
overwhelmingly Muslim but is the site of roughly two-thirds of the world’s recoverable oil
reserves, making the region a certain battle ground of future resource wars. U.S. political
and military strategy there heavily depends on the success of media propaganda of the sort
we discuss here and elsewhere.
The Showtime production of Homeland, in 2014 entering its fourth successful season,
fits this requisite perfectly. Widely acclaimed and winner of several awards, the program
revolves around the escapades of CIA officer Carrie Mathison (played by Claire Danes),
forced to handle the case of brainwashed Marine Nicholas Brody, who returns from Iraq
to enter an Islamist conspiracy to kill American political leaders. Based on the Israeli series
Hatufim (Prisoner’s War), the program won the 2012 Golden Globe Award for best TV
series, after TV Guide selected it as the best program of 2011. Not surprisingly, Muslims
received consistently shabby treatment: writing in Salon, Laila Al-Arian called Homeland
the most Islamophobic show on television, saying it depicts Muslims in the most crudely
fashioned stereotypes—as a monolithic, ruthless, single-minded populace obsessed with
violence and hurting Americans.11 The show has been broadly criticized for misrepresent-
ing Islamic culture and spreading hysteria about Muslim terrorist “infiltration” of U.S.
domestic society.
As for Islamophobia, few Hollywood pictures are likely to surpass Ben Affleck’s much-
ballyhooed thriller, Argo, winner of best-film Oscar for 2012. Like Homeland, this produc-
tion revolves around a CIA operative, here Tony Mendez (played by Affleck), who sets
out to persuade the agency to create a fake movie set, enter Iran, and then liberate six
Americans in hiding at the Canadian Embassy under siege in 1979 Tehran. Although
Affleck goes to great lengths to vouch for the political veracity of Argo, the movie was
largely fictional: no mention is made of U.S. complicity in the Shah’s brutal dictatorship
6 Media Culture in the Imperial System

or CIA operations carried out from the U.S. Embassy—while the critical role of Canadians
in the hostage crisis is virtually ignored. More problematic, Iranians are portrayed through-
out the film as uniformly menacing, infantile, and stupid. Rob Williams comments: “In the
world of American cinematic triumphalism, such [historical] details are easily replaced by
more Hollywood-esque endings, complete with obligatory, national high-fiving, score-
keeping, and nose-thumbing toward Iran; the film’s final few intoxicating nationalistic
minutes would make any pro-American public-relations professional sit up and cheer.”12
To this, Williams adds: “In the final analysis, we can thank Argo for perpetuating
destructive Middle East stereotypes, distorting history, and eroding cross-cultural under-
standing among peoples.”13 This flaw did not prevent the film industry from its wondrous
and endless celebrations of the movie—Argo receiving no less than seven 2013 Academy
Award nominations. Nor did it deter the political establishment: Best-Picture award was
handed out by Michelle Obama via live White House video feed, surrounded by military
personnel. At the same time, real-life Iran was being targeted economically, politically, and
militarily by the United States and Israel around claims (unverified) that Tehran is develop-
ing a nuclear-weapons program.
As in the case of Homeland and Argo, Kathryn Bigelow’s widely praised (but less-
honored) Zero Dark Thirty (2012) dramatizes the heroics of a CIA agent, here named
Maya (played by Jessica Chastain). Like these other productions, ZDT is best viewed as
an imperial propaganda effort, its storyline legitimating several post-9/11 U.S. agendas in
the Middle East: torture, black sites, extrajudicial killings, special operations, CIA maneu-
vers. The loosely constructed narrative of Osama bin Laden’s discovery and killing—
described as the “greatest manhunt in history”—ZDT relies heavily on Bigelow’s and
writer Mark Boal’s access to officials and documents at the Pentagon and CIA. The movie
was acclaimed for its “historical realism,” though many viewers (across the political spec-
trum) were troubled by opening scenes in which a CIA agent tortures an al Qaeda detainee
to unearth crucial information leading to Bin Laden’s whereabouts. (The veracity of this
narrative has never been either proven or refuted.) There is of course undeniable evidence
that detainees in the war on terror have been tortured (with waterboarding and other
methods) at numerous CIA black sites in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere.
What ZDT demonstrates best is an historical connection between destruction of the
World Trade Center buildings and later U.S. interventions in the Middle East—here repre-
sented as Pakistan. Put differently, Hollywood cinema shows that even the most horrible
actions carried out in Arab/Muslim nations can be ritually justified by the unprovoked
terrorist attacks on 9/11. Much like Homeland, the idea of casting a lead female CIA agent
lends an element of softness, indeed femininity, and thus credibility to the operations in
question. While torture is universally considered outrageous and a violation of human
rights, it seems likely that movies like ZDT will, as Williams puts it, “push audiences to
an acceptance of behavior they might normally deem reprehensible,” when viewed in the
aftermath of 9/11.14 After all, despite many second thoughts about depictions of torture,
the film did garner several Oscar nominations.
Looking at the general impact of media culture on popular consciousness, these produc-
tions raise questions about not so much whether but how and to what extent the content of
motion pictures and similar fare influences public opinion. While no precise conclusions are
likely to be forthcoming, some generalizations seem warranted. What first needs to be
stressed is that, contrary to views advanced by media apologists, the immense power of mass
communications in all its forms—film, TV, advertising, print, music, Internet—is now so
deeply embedded in American society that resolute denial of its impact seems foolish. Studies
have shown that Americans have grown increasingly desensitized to violence as they are
 Media Culture in the Imperial System 7

exposed to a constant barrage of violent images and narratives. The repetitive and graphic
violence of media culture has saturated daily life: one can argue that a massive weapons
industry, a virulent and large gun culture, high levels of criminal violence, a vast prison com-
plex, and perpetual U.S. warfare on the global stage follow similar trajectories. While no one
yet possesses the tools to accurately measure media influence on popular attitudes and
behavior (just as human consciousness in general remains difficult to measure), claims that
the media exerts little or no impact on public life seem hardly worth considering.
Some commentators have suggested that the endless parade of ultra-violent war movies,
action/adventure fare, and combat video games might be seen as harmless diversions, with
few social or political consequences.15 Others, however, have been less sanguine about media
images of violence and warfare. President Richard Nixon, while managing the Vietnam
carnage, was known to have relished viewing Patton (1970) again and again, apparently
moved to action by that and similar uplifting combat pictures, while President Ronald
Reagan made no effort to hide his enthusiasm for the 1980s Rambo episodes, repeating the
warrior’s famous utterance (about Vietnam) that “we get to win this time.”16 As for President
Bush, his inspiration reportedly came from watching Black Hawk Down (2001), said to be
worth many viewings in the buildup to real war against Iraq where, presumably, “we get to
win this time” (finishing the job his father started with Desert Storm in 1991).

“Descent into Barbarism”

The most iconic contemporary representation of cinematic violence (much of it unseen) is
probably The Hunger Games—starting with two episodes in 2012 and 2013, with yet a
third scheduled for late 2014. The movies project a dystopic future (read: the United States)
of political tyranny that somehow coexists with a Hobbesian state of nature in which civic
violence, economic misery, and social breakdown appear common. As in the best-selling
trilogy (by Suzanne Collins) that preceded the films, both mega Hollywood blockbusters,
this work (directed first by Gary Ross, then by Francis Lawrence) features televised battles-
to-the-death “games” among children ages twelve to eighteen—something of a bloody
reality-show type contest where just one victor is ultimately left standing. The “games,”
held by rulers of a brutish Capitol to keep the twelve districts in conflict with each other,
are extremely violent, the various combatants dying from spears, arrows, knives, poison-
ous insects, and head-bashing.
The Hunger Games can be viewed as symptomatic of a deteriorating American society
in which authoritarian rule is sustained and legitimated by a creative mixture of police
controls and media spectacles. Perhaps more than any films of their time, they project a
future marked by steady decline into mayhem and savagery—a “descent into barbarism”—
in the context of an out-of-control military apparatus. The only hope would seem to reside
in local rebellion, to be led by the female warrior and central protagonist Katniss (played
by Jennifer Lawrence).
At one level, the films bear resemblance to earlier caricatures of dictatorial politics,
including The Great Dictator (1940), Fahrenheit 451 (1966), and most famously 1984
(1956, 1984), not to mention several movies about the Roman Empire as well as modern
fascism. At another level, however, they more closely resemble Lord of the Flies (1963,
1990), where a group of kids stranded on a remote island eventually find themselves
immersed in an ugly state of anarchy, devoid of political governance, social cohesion, and
moral values. Scenes from these and kindred films are visible throughout the first two
episodes of the Games. The second director, Lawrence, said he watched mostly war
pictures—especially those set in Vietnam—in preparation for the shooting.
8 Media Culture in the Imperial System

The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, 2012, Lionsgate). Based on the first part of a trilogy by Suzanne Collins, this
film (starring Jennifer Lawrence as the main protagonist, Katniss Everdeen) features a televised battle to the
death among children 12 to 18 years old–a bloody reality-show type contest in which one victor prevails.
The “games” are a form of entertainment where combatants die from spears, arrows, knives, poisonous
insects, and head-bashing. The movie can be understood as symptomatic of a deteriorating social order
where violence–as entertainment, spectacle, and warfare–enters the new normalcy, part of everyday life,
media culture, politics, and the military system. It projects a dystopic future marked by Hobbesian descent
into chaos and savagery. This cinematic trilogy was completed with the appearance of Catching Fire (2013)
and Mockingjay (2015). Copyright Lionsgate/Kobal/Art Resource.

The Hunger Games productions were so well received by American viewers, especially
youth, as well as critics that they were advertised as one of the great civics lessons for our
times, a graphic warning about what can happen when state power expands and takes on
a momentum of its own. This narrative clearly resonates with contemporary libertarian
sentiment, popular in the Tea Party and elsewhere, that revolves around the supposedly
innate evils of big government. The Games could be a useful lesson in the virtues of
democratic politics pitted against nightmarish authoritarian rule. Audiences can be
expected to grasp the dangers of government-controlled propaganda. Opposed to all this
tyranny, Katniss as female warrior-rebel—like the protagonists of Homeland and ZDT—
calls forth everything that is noble: resourcefulness, independence, creativity, combat skills,
and dedication to human freedom. In other ways, however, Katniss exemplifies something
of a classic Ayn Rand heroine, role model for those embracing the goal of a “free society”
devoid of “state intervention.”
As dystopic narratives featuring tales of savagery and heroic attempts to overcome it,
the Hunger Games episodes might possibly offer some enlightenment. Who can opt for
unfettered dictatorial power—or a descent into barbarism? As ostensible civics lessons,
 Media Culture in the Imperial System 9

however, the movies fall woefully short, feeding the most reactionary forces at work in
American society. One problem is that the horrific images of a monolithic totalitarianism
found in the Games are nowhere on the horizon for the United States—or indeed any
country, aside from North Korea. Even if historical fascism is the dystopic example in
question, the simplistic and crude depictions of state power are entirely misplaced. Those
depictions are further riddled with deceit: the very conservative interests aligned with a
Randian view of the world are the same forces championing the warfare state, military
buildups, U.S. global supremacy, and the surveillance order—all basic pillars of “big
government.”
Entirely missing from the rendition of authoritarian power in the Games is a far more
pervasive system of domination: corporate power, including its financial and transnational
forms, that not only bends government towards its own purposes but shapes economic
development on a world scale. In real life, it is corporate interests that presently create the
kind of impoverished workforce shown in the Games—whether in the Walmart style retail
industry, the McDonaldized fast-food system, global sweat shops, or the banking system,
all dependent on a large army of underpaid, voiceless employees. It is corporate power that
dominates the federal government, including not only elections and legislative activity but
the military, law enforcement, and intelligence. It is corporate power, moreover, that owns,
manages, and controls the media system at the core of a huge propaganda apparatus that
is now more effective than the familiar Big Brother of state tyrannies. Like most Tea Party
ideologues, the Games has nothing to say about this destructive and oppressive reality.
The projected dystopia of the Games is frightening enough—perhaps very believable on
the surface. We see a civil society riddled with poverty, violence, and impotence. We witness
endless scenes of personal suffering, alienation, and conflict. Yet the actual sources of this
Hobbesian state of nature are quite different from what is shown—the result not so much
of totalitarian rule (which does not exist) as of a feebly regulated capitalism driven by
extreme individualism, harsh competition, and Darwinian struggles for survival in a system
that fetishizes money, wealth, and profits. Such a “civil society” in fact easily leads to the
very anarchic conditions theorized by Thomas Hobbes—conditions requiring a strong
Leviathan (big government) to impose social order and political stability.
As for the Games episodes in general, largely ignored is that the pressures toward
authoritarian rule—if one simply considers the American example—come just as much
from corporatism and militarism as from statism as such. Focus on the causes of violence
ought to turn on the consequences of poorly regulated capitalism, evident in high levels of
poverty, alienation, substance abuse, and crime that has fed the largest prison complex to
be found anywhere. With civic violence, the problem of global blowback must inevitably
be faced: the warfare state, superpower politics, and military and imperial pursuits sooner
or later bring vast human and material costs.

A Militarized Culture
To speak of blowback focuses attention on the domestic and global repercussions (not only
military, but political, economic, and cultural) of chronic superpower entanglements
around the world. As we assembled the second edition of The Hollywood War Machine
in late 2014, some of those repercussions had grown more visible than in the past: mani-
festations of rampage killings on the home front and a trail of militarism, terrorism, and
chaos across the Middle East, extending from Iraq and Syria and rural areas of Pakistan
to Afghanistan, Libya, and Palestine. Viewed thusly, the domestic and the global realms
are more dialectically interwoven than ever, both ensnared in the downward spiral of
10 Media Culture in the Imperial System

militarism and blowback that has notably engulfed Iraq, the sordid legacy of “shock and
awe” still palpable. Charles Derber and Yale Magrass write: “A militarized society devel-
ops a culture and institutions which program civilians for violence at home as well as
abroad.”17 Guns and the gun culture are celebrated in war, political rights, grassroots
movements, and media culture. Heroic virtues are all too often associated with graphic,
bloody expressions of extreme violence.
As the United States strives to dominate much of the world, resistance and opposition
among those most directly impacted (often defined as “terrorism”) seem predictable, an
expression of blowback. That is exactly what Washington (with contributions from Israel)
has reaped in the Middle East: “evildoers” are indeed destined to be found everywhere. In
this context, Hollywood movies (most genres) are frequently inhabited by assorted dia-
bolical monsters, usually with dark skins and more often than not Arabs or Muslims. One
function of media culture today is to mystify the phenomenon of blowback, so that (as
Tom Engelhardt notes) “in our deluded state, Americans don’t tend to connect what we’re
doing to others abroad and what we’re doing to ourselves at home.”18 What has long been
abundantly clear to people across the globe remains thoroughly (and happily) obscure to
the American public.
As the imperial system generates new cycles of blowback, ideological supports become
all the more essential to legitimacy. Media culture, vital to this imperative, is shaped not
only through the film and TV industries but by Internet websites, think tanks, public rela-
tions firms, and newspapers where “information” is systematically managed, filtered, and
controlled for mass consumption. Even such apparently diversionary entertainment as
sports enters the picture here.19 All the above sectors can be expected to cheerlead for any
war U.S. leaders decide to wage. What media culture most effectively achieves is a framing
of external threats—challenges to be dispatched by means of armed force.
It is hardly true, however, that an enlarged American media complex in the service of
imperial power constitutes a propaganda apparatus along lines of some earlier authoritar-
ian states. Many critics, referring to the influence of a modernized culture industry, like to
cite the Nazi example, but that is misleading. The very solidity of mass consensus behind
U.S. militarism could be viewed as evidence supporting a simple propaganda model.
Propaganda is undoubtedly a feature of corporate media—whether as news, commentary,
or entertainment—but it is “propaganda” of a different sort, more integrally merged with
the larger popular and political cultures. The type of communications onslaught associated
with governmental agencies like the U.S. Information Agency or outlets like Radio Free
Europe scarcely merit consideration in the present milieu.
David Robb, in his book Operation Hollywood (2004), adopts something close to the
full-blown propaganda model.20 He suggests that the film industry has developed into such
a system, now amounting to one of the most powerful opinion-shaping mechanisms ever.
Most agree that “propaganda” is alien to the American experience, where freedom of the
press and diversity of opinion have long been cherished. But Robb convincingly describes
a process largely unseen by the American public, where strong backing of the Pentagon is
routinely and sometimes brazenly transmitted to viewers convinced they are getting noth-
ing but “entertainment” (in movies) or “objective” reports and commentary (in TV and
print journalism). According to Robb, it is the very invisibility of present-day media pro-
paganda that renders it more efficacious. Thus: “the military propaganda that is inserted
into our television programs in the form of films and TV shows is done so subtly that the
American people don’t even know it’s there.”21 Who needs Joseph Goebbels at a time when
the chieftains of media giants like Time/Warner, News Corporation, Viacom, and Sony can
sell and market products that influence popular consciousness in ways that are largely
 Media Culture in the Imperial System 11

intangible. The fact that the United States has grown more warlike over the last fifty years
is cited by Robb as evidence that a sophisticated propaganda regime is at work.
Robb is no doubt on the right path in calling attention to more widespread ideological
manipulation in American society in the past few decades, a trend accelerated by three
factors: expansion of media culture itself, the aftermath of 9/11, and a general rightward
shift in American politics. He is also on the mark when he points to increased public
readiness to go along with military ventures, despite occasional mention of “isolationism”
which, of course, hardly resonates in a globalized world dominated by U.S. imperial power.
At the same time, whether film (or any medium) can rightly be described as simple
propaganda is another matter. While certain motion pictures might fit this modality, and
many bear the imprint of Pentagon or CIA assistance, the deeper problem is that most
filmmakers are already immersed in the political culture of patriotism and militarism,
requiring no formal government (or corporate) censorship or controls as they produce
movies and other fare consistent with U.S. international agendas. In fact heavy handed
manipulation and crude messaging run counter to entertainment values and box-office
receipts, not to mention political influence. For producers like Jerry Bruckheimer and direc-
tors like Bay, patriotic war spectacles are merely business as usual at Hollywood studios—
just as for Rupert Murdoch and his rightwing TV empire.22
As the corporate and banking sectors extend their hold over public life, the political
system becomes little more than an organized machine in the interest of those sectors.
Political views on the grand issues (economy, military, foreign policy) have dramatically
narrowed. Beliefs, attitudes, and myths at the summits of power tend to shape public
opinion. Polls conducted during and after the 2002–03 U.S. buildup to the Iraq War, for
example, revealed a strong majority of Americans that was convinced by repeated outland-
ish lies and distortions used to justify the (grossly illegal) invasion, including the preposter-
ous claim that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to the U.S. homeland. The
Pentagon stratagem of “regime change” and “preemptive war” was stage managed at the
White House and Pentagon, with full media complicity (the Fox TV network eagerly tak-
ing the lead)—the Iraq disaster perhaps best understood as “Rupert Murdoch’s War.”
The deeper forces of culture and ideology—complex elements of mass consciousness—
are nowadays inscribed in American history and politics, rendering crude propaganda
efforts somewhat useless. For the United States, uniquely among contemporary nations, a
tradition of perpetual warfare has endowed militarism and combat with nearly sacred
properties. Indeed Americans seem to have a special veneration of military spectacles, now
perhaps more than in the past. Patriotic mobilization has always had rather smooth sailing,
especially when monstrous enemies threaten. Still, warfare as a process of wholesale killing
usually entails great risks and costs, which must always be rationalized and legitimated—
and here media culture performs its most critical function.23 From this standpoint, what
Hollywood and the Pentagon share in common is glorification of violence as an instrument
for defeating evil adversaries.
Referring to the warfare state, Chris Hedges writes that “armed movements [or states]
seek divine sanction and the messianic certitude of absolute truth.”24 War attaches to itself
qualities that go beyond mundane concerns for morality and truth which, for the United
States, coincides with pretenses of national exceptionalism. American wars have often
involved what John Dower calls a “culture of deception”—that is, discourses built on end-
less myths and lies. Thus: “Mendacity and deception are standard operating procedures in
the cultures of war as in politics more generally.”25 Of course mass publics must somehow
be persuaded to believe all the lies and myths, usually achieved by calling forth imminent
threats—yet another contribution of media culture.
12 Media Culture in the Imperial System

If the “Hollywood War Machine” connotes a primary focus on movies, media culture
as such refers to a broader range of venues including TV, print journalism, video games,
and the Internet. The TV networks, more popular and even more influential than film,
have generally offered a mixture of “news,” commentary, and entertainment, with the line
separating the three increasingly blurred. While news is often regarded as factual and
objective—and commentary a matter of diverse viewpoints—both are fused with similar
ideological content, differing little from other media sectors. The TV networks, despite
nuanced differences, advance the same corporate interests they so profitably represent.
Glenn Greenwald writes: “Those who thrive within the structure of large corporations tend
to be adept at pleasing rather than subverting institutional power. It follows that those who
succeed in corporate journalism are suited to accommodate power. They identify with
institutional authority and are skilled at servicing, not combating it” (233). “Institutional
power” here clearly refers to the government and military as well as big-business interests.
At those times when the United States carries out war agendas—and in the postwar years
this has become most of the time—the TV networks can be relied upon for undivided
patriotic support, reinforced by a parade of government, military, and academic “experts.”
Standard and formulaic talking-points are easily marshaled: the United States is being
dragged into combat as a reluctant superpower, national security is threatened by a savage
enemy, democracy and human rights are at stake, and so forth. Deceit, exaggerated claims,
manufactured crises, protests of innocence—these mark the buildup toward military inter-
vention, from Vietnam to Panama, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Any violations of
international law (and for the United States, they are many) tend to be ignored or, where
mentioned, roundly dismissed. Genuine dissent, rarely heard, becomes unpatriotic, irratio-
nal, siding with the enemy.26 Establishment media is always obsessed with “managing the
narratives,” especially when it comes to global conflicts. For so much of the film industry,
TV networks, and newspapers, the world depicted through those friendly “narratives” is
one of menacing chaos and violence, a threat to civilized order. However valid this
picture—and it usually contains some kernel of truth—Americans are constantly exposed
to messages of fear, anger, and apocalypse, even as American power becomes more global-
ized than ever.
What is largely missing from this media construction of political reality—indeed from
the mass public—is any contextual understanding of those Hobbesian tropes. Viewers of
CNN, Fox News, and rival networks will see graphic threats coming from many sources:
Russian aggression under Putin; the Iranian nuclear menace; anarchy and militia violence
in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria; resurgence of terrorist groups in the Middle East;
North Korean madness; Palestinian militancy. What all these sources have in common, as
media culture repeats daily, is readiness to carry out unspeakably violent acts against the
United States, Europe, Israel, and indeed Western civilization. Here “terrorism” winds up
as another linguistic turn to convey how enemies of the United States have descended into
political extremism and abject barbarism.
What media accounts systematically lack is historical and social context—above all an
understanding of escalating blowback against U.S. power, especially in the Middle East,
where military interventions have a record of unspeakable death and destruction, from
Iraq to Afghanistan to Gaza. This is where Washington maintains dozens of armed-forces
bases, conducts recurrent drone strikes, carries out satellite-based surveillance, and sup-
ports the Israeli occupation and oppression of Palestinians. This aspect of blowback
remains almost entirely invisible to the American public, thanks in great measure to the
achievements of media culture. Since the benevolent superpower is a tireless supporter of
democracy and human rights, who could respond to U.S. efforts with anger and hatred—
 Media Culture in the Imperial System 13

aside, of course, from a few groups of jihadists envious of U.S. economic prosperity and
political freedoms? That U.S. foreign policy might be a recipe for endless and devastating
blowback—while empirically true—is a concept few Americans are likely to entertain.
By 2014, blowback was engulfing broader areas of the Middle East and North Africa,
with prospects of spreading: “terrorism” seemed more pervasive in the region, perhaps
ineradicable. Opposition to American power was indeed mounting—in Syria, with the
explosive growth of radical groups; in Libya, a nation taken over by rival militias; in Iraq,
a country that has descended into utter chaos and violence; in Afghanistan, site of ongoing
insurgencies and persistence of the Taliban; in Ukraine, where ethnic Russians fight a
neo-fascist government backed by the United States and Europe, eager to extend NATO
further eastward; and in Syria, where a variety of terrorist groups, including some financed
by the United States, threaten the government of Bashar Al-Assad. In the American media, such
opposition is uniformly depicted as manifestations of merciless “terrorism,” having no
rationale or interests behind its indiscriminate violence. Everywhere, of course, a peace-
loving United States wants nothing more than order, democracy, and keeping evildoers like
Vladimir Putin at bay. In contemporary media culture, “evildoers” naturally consist of a
motley assemblage of Arabs, Muslims, and Slavs—the same groups that movies and TV
programs dehumanize with impunity.
Americans watching standard TV network fare would be led to believe that an expan-
sionist, “revanchist” Russia poses an imminent threat to the United States and Europe,
with all-out war (even nuclear confrontation) a possibility. Political reality, however, is
completely at odds with this distorted picture: for years Russia has been thrown on the
defensive, the culmination of years of NATO efforts to isolate and weaken Russia not only
militarily but economically. It is Russia that is surrounded by American and NATO forces
(including nuclear weapons), not the reverse. It is Russia that is being hit hard by economic
sanctions imposed by the United States and Europe, not the reverse. Anyone in the U.S.
media who questions the tortured motif of Russian “aggression” led by evil dictator Putin
is denounced as a Putin “apologist” or friend of “the oligarchs.”
Might we expect greater clarity, or semblance of objectivity, from the corporate media
as attention shifts to the Middle East? To be sure, daily TV news reports depict escalating
chaos and violence in the region with graphic urgency. We see the rise of ISIS (Islamic State
of Iraq and Syria) reputed to be a more brutal incarnation of al Qaeda, a militant organi-
zation that has taken over large amounts of land in both countries. We see U.S. and U.S.–
led coalition air strikes in the region, at a time when both Iraq and Syria are overcome by
anarchy and militia violence. Where the media falls into total silence, however, is in its
failure to present an historical understanding of how these conditions arise—in this case,
from a series of devastating U.S. interventions: two deadly wars, a military occupation, a
decade of ruthless economic sanctions, and imposition of a corrupt, sectarian, puppet
government. Viewed thusly, a narrative of “blowback” on the rise seems far more appro-
priate than one of “terrorism” on the march, but it is the latter that will resonate with
Americans. That narrative of course calls for more U.S. military involvement and thus
more blowback—that is, more “terrorism”—but that reality will be lost amidst a maze of
“expert” views offered by the parade of military officials, politicians, and academics.
The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq left the country with no livable civil society,
no functioning infrastructure, no stable government—just a terrain of local militias, sectar-
ian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, and mounting everyday carnage. By 2014 nothing
short of anarchy was spreading rapidly throughout the nation, leaving a vacuum in which
ISIS and other groups (including some linked to Iran) could struggle for ascendancy. As
Washington moves to create a broad coalition of regional forces to fight ISIS, many states
14 Media Culture in the Imperial System

and groups across the region are themselves fearful of blowback should they decide to align
with American interests.
Meanwhile, new Pentagon strategic doctrine allows for the possibility of six wars being
waged simultaneously—most presumably in or around the Middle East. Six wars? That
would indeed elevate U.S. status as an “exceptional” global power, increasingly reliant on
new modes of technowar. It would also require inflated media contributions—better “man-
aged narratives” to cover, filter, and interpret the many points of crisis. It would further
exacerbate those trends, mentioned above, behind the further militarization of American
society. One war, two wars, or six wars, a system oriented toward perpetual warfare is
destined, as Hedges observes, to “dominate culture, distort memory, corrupt language, and
in fact everything around it.”27 This system can sustain its hegemony, however, only inso-
far as an expanded media complex functions as a mechanism of imperial power.
In his provocative 2005 documentary Why We Fight, Eugene Jarecki builds an indict-
ment of the U.S. warfare state on President Dwight Eisenhower’s famous warning about
an out-of-control military-industrial complex, which a half-century later comes across as
rather understated. Neither Eisenhower nor Jarecki, however, called sufficient attention to
a crucial pillar of the system—a militarized media and political culture needed for legitima-
tion. If this system does not amount to a 1984-style propaganda apparatus, its role in
furnishing ideological support equals or even surpasses that of any previous such apparatus.
As noted earlier, its spectacular images and narratives, produced and marketed as “enter-
tainment” and “news,” probably end up more effective than any crude attempts at govern-
ment censorship and control—or indeed any agency devoted to the simple manipulation
of public opinion.
Chapter 2

Militarism in American Popular Culture

At the start of the twenty-first century the United States has emerged as the greatest military
power in history, an empire possessing all the features of a mature warrior society: perma-
nent war economy, expanded security state, vast armed presence around the world and in
space, a militarized order unlike anything ever known. It is a system increasingly grounded
in—more accurately, addicted to—the deadly but profitable mobilization for warfare, a
system that celebrates the spectacle, technology, great successes, and above all power that
militarism brings to a political order bent on global domination. While such an order
cherishes and indeed fetishizes the ethos of armed power, its reproduction demands a far-
reaching culture of militarism that enters into and transforms the daily life of a population
willing (under definite conditions) to give its consent to imperial adventures. Militarism
appears as a form of ideology, a rationality that deeply influences the structures and prac-
tices of the general society through storytelling, mythology, media images, political mes-
sages, academic discourses, and simple patriotic indoctrination. While the intimate
connection between institutional and cultural modes of power, between the military and
daily life, is scarcely new, it has taken on new dimensions with the dramatic growth of
media culture (including film) over the past few decades. If the culture of militarism
endows warfare agendas with a popular sense of meaning and purpose, it also represents
the hegemonic facade behind which corporate and Pentagon domination can more or less
freely assert itself, both domestically and worldwide. The decay of American economic,
political, and social life cannot be understood apart from this destructive cycle, bound to
worsen owing to the frightful consequences of 9/11 and what is expected to be an endless
U.S. war against terrorism that, in effect, amounts to a desperate struggle to maintain all
the advantages of empire.
The phenomenon of war and warmaking both reflects and gives further impetus to a
developmental pattern associated with this deepening culture of militarism. Beneath the
“civilized” or “enlightened” norms of democratic society and modernity it is possible to
detect a legacy of domestic and global violence that brings out some of the darkest impulses
and contradicts familiar expectations of human progress tied to industrial and techno-
logical development. This was the compelling message of Michael Moore’s Oscar-winning
2002 documentary Bowling for Columbine, which established a close linkage between
regularized outbreaks of violence in everyday American life and continuous U.S. armed
interventions around the world since World War II. A long history of aggressive foreign
policy—carried out in the name of grandiose ideals—has been made possible not only
through the workings of the political system and economy but also through the legitimat-
ing mechanisms of culture understood in the broadest sense. Here “culture” incorporates
a syndrome of beliefs, attitudes, and myths running through the mass media, popular
16 Militarism in American Popular Culture

culture, education, the workplace, family, and community life. Militarism is integral to an
ultrapatriotic, Manichaeistic view of reality in which the forces of light and goodness are
destined to confront evildoers seen as lurking everywhere, with the United States (by defi-
nition) representing the forces of light and goodness on a global scale.
The evolution of a permanent war system reveals just how deeply ingrained and multi-
faceted the military realm has become, involving the systems of production, consumption,
work, communications, politics—and, inevitably, collective psychology. The Pentagon
labyrinth has firm roots in historical and cultural patterns going back to the first Indian
wars of conquest. If the United States does not yet qualify as a “warrior society” at the
level of Sparta, ancient Rome, Nazi Germany, or even contemporary Israel, its military
influence is surely just as pervasive, likely even more so owing to the unique international
scope of American power. While few Americans strongly identify with outright U.S. pursuit
of armed conquest, invasion of foreign countries, and empire, the vast majority do remain
intensely patriotic, easily seduced by ideological justifications for continued U.S. military
adventures abroad. Indeed for many decades the United States has been a kind of fortress
order sustaining popular beliefs around expansionary goals: nationalism, ethnocentrism,
rights of intervention and entitlement to resources, the use of massive armed violence in
the service of political ends. Never in history has a culture and ideology of militarism been
so far-reaching, so sophisticated, and yet so illusory, dependent upon powerful myths.

Patriotism as Secular Religion

The second Gulf War demonstrated, like Desert Storm before it, the extent to which a rabid
patriotic mobilization has been sustained by American mass psychology—in popular fears,
needs, aspirations, and prejudices. The ordinary person encounters a seemingly monolithic
wall of myths, lies, distortions, and celebrations that it would be tempting to attribute to
the propaganda apparatus alone, but which goes far beyond the discrete functions of the
media and the political system in manufacturing consent, vital as that is. Spectacular cel-
ebrations of war, violence, conquest, and triumph have a profoundly cathartic, empower-
ing dimension grounded in discourses of patriotism, American exceptionalism, and racism,
in the midst of a society that prides itself on its special enlightenment, its wondrous edu-
cational and technological achievements, its sophisticated civic culture. While systemati-
cally ignored throughout the intellectual and academic culture, military discourses in
reality become fully integrated into the vast framework of ideological hegemony, crucial
to the reproduction of corporate and imperial domination.
The web of military institutions and belief systems in American society demands a
simple yet highly romanticized image of the national interest and mission, an ideology
strong enough to call forth heroism, conquest, and armed missions in faraway places. Seen
in this light, probably no country in the world is more intensely patriotic than the United
States, where the mass media, educational system, culture, and politics converge to gener-
ate pervasive hegemonic ideals. As Mary Wertsch writes: “In the theatrical world of the
warrior society, where costumed actors rehearse their movements and their lines, patrio-
tism is in the atmosphere of every set.”1 The doctrines of Manifest Destiny and the
American Century were organically tied to such notions, justifying the early colonial push
westward and then (beginning around 1900) outward toward Asia and Latin America.
Patriotic sentiments reached their zenith during the “good war” against Nazi Germany
and Japan but later sank to its low point during and after the Vietnam War, followed
by a resurgence during the two Gulf Wars, when national military pride became an all-
encompassing media spectacle.
 Militarism in American Popular Culture 17

In upholding war and warmaking as a noble, heroic calling, patriotism serves to rational-
ize the horrors and irrationality of military action: death, destruction, uprooting of local
populations, environmental chaos, the very threat of planetary extinction. The ideology of
warfare justifies, even celebrates, moral atrocities such as the saturation bombing of civil-
ian areas or use of terrible weapons that would ordinarily be met with scornful outrage.
Pursuit of “national interest” is invoked to legitimate the atomic leveling of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, harsh economic sanctions and blockades directed at civilian populations, the
torture of prisoners, scorched-earth policies, and occupation of distant nations. Patriotism
furnishes a convenient framework defining common objectives, shared fears and dangers,
agreed-upon enemies. Barbara Ehrenreich refers to the “sacralization of war” in which
patriotic feelings take on the character of a “civil religion” endowing large populations
with a sense of loyalty, solidarity, commitment, and empowerment.2 As both the ends and
means of war become sacred, enemies are readily demonized while mass killing is all too
often turned into a heroic obligation.
Americans’ national identity has been shaped by a long history of military engagements
sustained by a complex variety of experiences, attitudes, beliefs, and myths. From the
outset patriotism converged with militarism, both having deep foundations in the early
revolutionary and settler periods and continuing through the twentieth century. As Ward
Churchill observes, “Racially oriented invasion, conquest, genocide and subsequent denial
are all integral, constantly recurring and thus defining features of the Euroamerican
makeup from the instant the first boatload of self-ordained colonists set foot in the ‘New
World.’”3 The legacy of colonization tied to military conquest has been reproduced end-
lessly in literature, art, music, film, TV, and ultimately within the daily lives of ordinary
citizens; this is no strictly elite phenomenon but resides within the larger collective
national psyche. Chris Hedges writes that this pattern of warmaking amounts to a power-
ful drug peddled not only by business leaders and politicians but by writers, journalists,
filmmakers, and others within the popular culture: “It dominates culture, distorts mem-
ory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it.”4 Tied to the twin legacies of
patriotism and militarism, the idea of war has provided Americans with a large ensemble
of impulses: sense of purpose, adventure, heroism, nobility, superiority. Warmaking per-
mits, indeed encourages, depiction of other nations and cultures as alien, primitive,
uncivilized, barbaric—eligible to be attacked, conquered, occupied—always framed by a
self-conception that is noble and benevolent.
Patriotism is usually understood as a higher value, a source of unquestioned political
truths, yet as a mass belief system it typically embraces the worst of human behavior,
legitimating ethnocentrism, racism, and violence while sanctioning any variety of atrocities
and war crimes. It offers a simplistic, anti-intellectual, parochial view of a world reduced
largely to “us” and “them,” “friend” and “enemy,” “allies” and “demons,” liberators and
terrorists. It lifts popular spirits, especially during war mobilizations, furnishing a sense of
collective empowerment that, however, is neither genuinely empowering nor very durable.
It inspires and glorifies warfare as a virtuous human activity, rationalizing conduct that,
as Hedges writes, “breaks down long-established prohibitions against violence, destruc-
tion, and murder.”5 In the United States this syndrome has become more pronounced over
time, as patriotism mobilizes popular support for the Pentagon system, military priorities,
and pursuit of global power. Here the Gulf Wars represent a turning point, helping rekin-
dle American patriotism linked to armed adventures, glorification of weapons technology,
and celebration of war as media spectacle.
The impact of the military on American political culture thus turns out to be just
the opposite of its benign representation in high-school textbooks. Military action that
18 Militarism in American Popular Culture

stimulates mass xenophobia not only legitimates the war economy but also protects elite
governance by deflecting attention away from urgent domestic issues. This works most
effectively where military campaigns are waged against a well-defined diabolical enemy
with a demonized leader (Noriega, Milosevic, Hussein), are dramatically and quickly suc-
cessful, and result in minimum (U.S.) casualties—as in the first Gulf War and the Balkans.
We know that warfare by its nature requires mass subordination to norms of loyalty and
obedience, but for the United States, with its entrenched war system, the ideological con-
sequences are more profound, more long-term than elsewhere, having transformed crucial
elements of popular consciousness and culture. Hence the widespread jingoism (stirred up
by the media), the ease with which a majority of Americans can be mobilized behind
military ventures, the willingness of so many (up to 45 percent during Desert Storm) to
consider use of nuclear weapons against the designated enemy, the often-callous indiffer-
ence toward foreign casualties, the public celebrations of armed violence. While such
attitudes can be attributed to the power of media and governmental manipulation, in real-
ity they have a strong resonance within the popular culture and national psyche. Both Gulf
Wars, for example, revealed a virulent nativism embedded in a mass psychology that ste-
reotypes and demonizes Arabs and Muslims. The conclusion of the first Gulf War brought
Bush I a resounding 91 percent approval rating, not quite reached by Bush II in 2003, when
military victory (short-lived) produced a 73 percent rating. It seems that the mass public
was prepared to believe any lie or myth spun by politicians and the media, allowing war-
makers greater flexibility.
American politics has always been informed by a messianic belief in national destiny
merged with notions of historical progress—a sense that people could have mastery over
the course of events, a certitude about national supremacy and its entitlements, a unique
civilizing mission. Here we have an ideology, simultaneously elite and mass, embracing
American exceptionalism, religious fervor, and national supremacy, mixed, inevitably, with
the idea of attaining virtue through military action. No U.S. president epitomized these
values more than Theodore Roosevelt, with his fervent belief in Manifest Destiny and its
colonizing agenda. Bush II fits perfectly within this trajectory, holding to the idea of a
uniquely American crusade to establish global hegemony, ostensibly to rid the world of
evil. For Bush and a small group of neoconservative ideologues, military power and impe-
rial expansion become the centerpiece of renewed fundamentalist, messianic goals, a recy-
cling of the “white man’s burden” in which theocratic and humanitarian ideals help
crystallize and justify the struggle for domination. In January 2003 Bush said, “We’ll do
everything we can to remind people that we’ve never been a nation of conquerors; we’re a
nation of liberators.” It follows that such “liberation,” as experienced by the Indian tribes,
the Vietnamese, Koreans, and Iraqis, would have to be a matter of considerable death and
destruction.
From all we can glean from Bush’s personal background and outlook, what emerges is a
fierce patriotism associated with Christian evangelical notions of good triumphing over evil,
U.S. global ambitions being endowed with the blessings of a higher power. Empire, though
scarcely acknowledged as such, is the manifestation of God’s will, justified as religious
imperative. Where monstrous evils must be extirpated by any means, where biblically
inspired apocalyptic visions of the future are embraced with great fervor, then reliance on
military force cannot be far from sight. For Bush and his circle, therefore, the United States
possesses not only the right but also the obligation to remake the world in its own image—
a sentiment reflected in the president’s bizarre contention (in early 2003) that it would be
immoral for the United States not to attack Iraq. While it has been argued that a small nucleus
of neoconservative “defense intellectuals” were able to “hijack” American politics after Bush
 Militarism in American Popular Culture 19

II’s ascension to power, in fact the values they represent and the policies they advocate have
strong resonance throughout U.S. history, shown in the strong bipartisan support for the
illegal invasion of Iraq. The agenda is roughly the same, the main difference being how
aggressively it is pursued. Here Bush has not really deviated from well-established imperial
priorities, as can be seen from a reading of Bob Woodward’s Bush at War.6
The two Gulf Wars galvanized patriotic feelings on a scale rarely seen in U.S. history,
owing in part to the jingoistic influence of the mass media, in part to efforts to purge the
Vietnam syndrome, in part to the spectacular appeals of technowar. Seemingly new depar-
tures in foreign policy made war fashionable again, indulging the popular attraction to
spectacles, games, heroic victories, and technological gimmickry. Outpourings of patrio-
tism come with quick military conquests of weak yet easily demonized opponents. For a
populace conditioned by media culture, war is easily reduced to seductive images of com-
bat violence that saturate people’s living rooms, where they remain at a safe, passive,
sanitized distance from the immediate horrors of combat. Political and ethical concerns
are readily jettisoned, leaving the “audience” in a state of catharsis linked to the miracle of
military victory with its destruction of a hated enemy. As Hedges writes: “We dismantle
our moral universe to serve the cause of war.”7 It is a world where media representations
of armed intervention help aestheticize acts of human violence to an extent previously
unknown in human history. The aftermath of war brings not horror, shame, and forgive-
ness but rather the celebration of war itself, now increasingly commodified and glamor-
ized. Thus following the second Gulf War, vast merchandizing operations came to the fore
to take advantage of the (destined to be temporary) triumphal euphoria: on eBay alone it
was possible to buy three thousand war-related items, including Iraqi coins and bills,
Hussein condoms and puppets, wrist-watches, terrorist body bags, wacky T-shirts, talking
military dolls, Iraqi most-wanted playing cards, and special flavors of Iraqi ice cream.8
For the United States as unchallenged world superpower, patriotism and militarism
underwrite the increasingly overt struggle for world domination. The narrative of military
adventure and conquest—often denied or obscured in the official discourse—winds up
fixated on a particular target (mostly Arabs and Muslims today) that can be defined as
irrationally hostile to the West, modernity, and democracy. It follows that American
patriotism is tightly interwoven with the presumed civilizing process itself, a bulwark
against brigands, criminals, outlaws, gangsters, and terrorists, indeed against the historical
legacy of irrationality and barbarism. And the logic of this connection seems absolutely
overpowering: the stronger the armed power of the state, the stronger must be the patrio-
tism, which legitimates virtually any U.S. military intervention regardless of its distance
from American shores. Such political ideology at the start of the twenty-first century is the
belief system of a chosen nation, to some degree internalized by the vast majority of the
population, justifying its peculiar historical destiny that can only be realized by means of
awesome global power.

Gun Culture and Civic Violence

Aurora, Colorado; Columbine, Colorado; Blacksburg, Virginia; Fort Hood, Texas; Isla
Vista, California; Newtown, Connecticut; Washington Naval Yard, Washington, D.C.—
many now recognize these locales because of the sensational media coverage given to mass
rampage killings. In these episodes, an assortment of gunmen fired weapons at innocent
people, murdering and wounding scores of human beings—crimes made famous through
spectacular media coverage, though in fact only a small percentage of violent outbursts
that occur with increasing frequency in the United States receive media coverage. The
20 Militarism in American Popular Culture

number of mass shootings has actually tripled in recent years, according to FBI data. From
2000 to 2013, there have been 160 cases—70 percent at schools and workplaces, with
1,043 casualties—as the average number per year increased to 16.4.9 One obvious major
factor here is the ready availability of firearms, including a wide variety of military-style
weapons. Assailants have wielded semiautomatic assault rifles, shotguns, and handguns
with brands like Bushmaster, Minuteman, Colt, Ruger, Beretta, and Glock. Some donned
body armor, while others were decked out in full camouflage. A few carried bombs and
other explosives, while some packed and used knives. Although some perpetrators were
able to purchase their weapons illegally, more than three-quarters of the firearms used in
mass rampages were legally obtained.10
Like rampage killers, serial killers are also routinely subjects of media blitzes. Estimates
of the overall number of serial killers active average around forty, and the total of serial-
killer victims—long assumed to be around sixty per year—may actually reach over two
thousand annually, according to criminologist Kenna Quinet.11 Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer,
Dennis Rader, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and David Berkowitz actually became media
celebrities after killing, often raping and torturing multiple victims. Some of these ruthless
criminals were able to seamlessly blend into mainstream society. In fact Bundy, who easily
passed for a highly respectable citizen in Seattle, later warned: “We serial killers are your
sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere. And there will be more of your sons dead
tomorrow.”12 Astonishingly, true-crime writer Ann Rule worked for many months along-
side Bundy doing police work in Seattle, without ever suspecting he could possibly be a
killer.13
Reflecting on the culture of violence, it is worth noting here that private gun ownership
in the United States has for many years been off the charts—totaling (in 2013) an esti-
mated 270 million firearms, or nine for every ten Americans. This is more than double
the ownership level of the next-highest nation, violence-torn Yemen, and twelve times that
of such nations as Russia and Israel. The majority of developed nations have fewer than
10 million privately owned guns. Not surprisingly, gun-related murders in the United
States (while down from the early 1990s), remain close to the top worldwide, with over
90 per 100,000 of the population compared to 15 per 100,000 in Australia, 7.3 in Iran,
and fewer than 1 in Japan (with the strictest of all gun-control laws). As for other violent
crimes, in 2013 the United States ranked third globally in rapes, seventh in robberies, and
sixteenth in personal assaults—all crimes often committed with the use, or threatened use,
of handguns.14
Gun-related criminality in the United States is immeasurably facilitated not only by
ubiquitous media violence but by the easy (and cheap) availability of high-powered weap-
ons, most obtained legally. In the case of the Aurora massacre carried out by James Holmes
in 2013, the family of one murder victim has filed a lawsuit through the Brady Center to
Prevent Gun Violence against several websites where the shooter readily purchased ammu-
nition, tear gas, and body armor. These sites include BTP Arms, Lucky Gunner, and Ammo.
com. There is a problem here, however: in 2005 the U.S. Congress passed a law designed
to shield the gun industry from liability lawsuits, rendering this effort an uphill battle.
The perpetrators of grisly massacres follow an increasingly common pattern in which
the attacker functions as a “pseudocommando,” characteristic of an angry, disturbed per-
son who openly and randomly kills in daytime, plans his or her maneuvers in advance, and
brandishes a powerful arsenal of weapons. They rarely make escape plans, often perishing
during the attack.15 Pseudocommandos of this sort include Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold
at Columbine; Holmes in Aurora; Jared Loughner in Tucson, Arizona; Seung-Hui Cho at
 Militarism in American Popular Culture 21

Virginia Tech; and Elliot Rodger at Isla Vista, though many others could be added to this
list. One virtual certainty—we can expect this list to grow.
Psychologist Polly Palumbo, examining “psychocommando” rampage killers’ prefer-
ences in media consumption, concludes: “Most were into violent media—movies, video
games, books, etc. More than a third wrote violent poems, essays or stories.”16 Psychiatrist
Michael Welner observes that virtually all rampage killers are males because, masculinity
in contemporary culture is increasingly defined by media icons whose destructiveness is
their masculinity. Welner explains that, “Some of those who are alienated and with high
expectations of themselves, and entitlement, and propensity to blame others in broader
society, degenerate to the end that they choose mass killing as the mark with which they
can be men.”17 This small yet growing population of alienated, violence-addicted males
grappling with masculinity issues poses a significant and mounting threat to American
society.
The 1994 Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers, once a reputed inspiration behind mass
killings, has in recent years become less appealing to protagonists, now increasingly
seduced by newer, more graphically violent, cinematic, and videogame fare. Take, for
example, the Batman craze within American popular culture. Batman’s Joker, considered
by many the ultimate media villain, seems to have emerged as the primary cinematic model
for rampage killers. The Joker’s popularity stems in part from his satirical comments on
society and in part from his chilling murders and kindred violent crimes. At one point in
the Marvel Comics series, the Joker looks at viewers and exclaims, “It’s all a joke!
Everything everybody ever valued or struggled for. . . . It’s all a monstrous, demented gag!
So why can’t you see the funny side? Why aren’t you laughing?” The Joker loves cruel
jokes, as when he extends a hand to someone and electrocutes him, chuckling “Oh, I got
a live one here!”
Batman, of course, serves as the Joker’s nemesis, the two characters defining and reshap-
ing each other’s roles: one upholds the established social order; the other seeks to under-
mine it. Their antagonism generates dramatic tension, especially after readers and viewers
learn about both characters’ weaknesses and how their fates are conjoined. The Joker
exclaims, “I have put a name to my pain, and it is Batman!” Yet behind the scarred smile
lurks a character struggling against overwhelming sadness. “I’m only laughing on the
outside/My smile is just skin deep/If you could see inside I’m really crying/You might join
me for a weep.” Perhaps because of this inner pain and sadness, the Joker takes sadistic
delight in mayhem and murder. When ready to murder citizens of Gotham City, he sadisti-
cally quips: “Now comes the part where I relieve you, the little people, of the burden of
your failed and useless lives. But, as my plastic surgeon always said: if you gotta go, go
with a smile.” The Joker’s perennial goal is to terrorize the populace, reacting angrily when
someone else receives credit for terror. Upon reading a newspaper headline about Batman
that states “Winged Freak Terrorizes,” he threatens “Wait till they get a load of me!”
Heath Ledger portrayed the Joker in the 2008 film The Dark Knight, Christian Bale
taking on the role of Batman. Ledger’s Joker was a shrewd psychotic who takes sadistic
pleasure in creating mayhem and murder, at the same time commanding an army of hench-
men. Ledger joined a list of illustrious actors who played the Joker, including Jack
Nicholson, Mark Hamill, Gene Hackman, and Cesar Romero—Ledger’s performance
garnering a posthumous Academy Award. Because of his striking face carved into a gro-
tesque smile and his psychopathic actions, Ledger’s performance ranks as the top film
villain for many critics.18 The Joker’s allure arises precisely because he threatens everyone
and strives to jolt people out of their complacency.
22 Militarism in American Popular Culture

In his iconic clown makeup, the Joker launches a crime spree in The Dark Knight by
assassinating his gang of bank robbers, also dressed as clowns. He manages to escape in a
school bus that merges with a long convoy of school buses. The buses, of course, symbol-
ize children, but the Joker threatens not just them but everyone else in Gotham City. As
for his approach to terrorism, he comments: “Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the estab-
lished order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the
thing about chaos? It’s fair!” To the Joker, chaos becomes synonymous with death. At one
point Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) shows a special coin to the Joker:

Dent [showing Joker the good side]: You live.

The Joker: Mm-hmm.
Dent [showing the scarred side]: You die.
The Joker: Mmm, now we’re talking.

Like the gun-worshiping Mickey and Mallory in Natural Born Killers, the Joker appears
to have inspired a number of real-life rampages in the United States. On July 20, 2012,
James Holmes entered an Aurora movie theater showing The Dark Knight Rises, sporting
orange hair and dressed like the Joker. He indiscriminately opened fire on the large audi-
ence, employing a small arsenal of weapons, killing twelve people and wounding seventy.
Yet Holmes represents simply the most infamous of Joker influences. On August 7, 2012,
Westlake, Ohio, police arrested a man sitting in an empty theater armed with a loaded
9 mm Glock pistol and several knives waiting for the audience to arrive for a screening of
The Dark Knight Rises.19 Other copycat attempts reportedly took place in Maryland,
Oregon, and New York City. Holmes himself might have drawn inspiration from an attack
that occurred on January 23, 2009, at a Belgium daycare center by a man dubbed the
Dendermonde Joker, who arrived dressed as the Joker and proceeded to stab two children
and a teacher to death while slashing and wounding twelve others.20
Sigmund Freud observed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) that “the goal of all
life is death,” an impulse rooted in the compulsion he named Thanatos—after the ancient
Greek god whose name signifies death that carries souls off to the underworld. Thanatos
is associated with impulses toward aggression, sadism, destruction, violence, and death—
the opposite of Eros (signifying life, love, creativity, and sexuality). As twin human drives,
Eros and Thanatos inhabit the unconscious, which constitutes a vast, unknowable, timeless
entity.21 Freud would no doubt recognize the Joker as modern descendant of familiar
Romantic characters such as vampires and demons, the Frankenstein monster and Dracula
serving as the best known examples—all resonating within contemporary American soci-
ety. Both villains, like the Joker, are in fact creatures of the very established social order
they have come to threaten. Mickey and Mallory, along with Batman’s Joker, serve as
modern embodiments of Thanatos, Osiris, and other ancient deities, possessing the timeless
appeal of outlaw heroes who flaunt conventional values but are motivated solely by naked
self-interest. Such characters elicit perennial audience appeal, in the tradition of such char-
acters as Robin Hood, the Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Billy the Kid,
Jesse James, and of course Bonnie and Clyde.
Present-day Hollywood cinema abounds in killing sprees of one sort or another, as we
explore in other parts of this book. One striking example is Uwe Boll’s 2009 movie
Rampage, which graphically depicts a mass killing while adding a few conspiratorial nar-
ratives. The film stars Brendan Fletcher as Bill Williamson, an angry, death-obsessed young
man filled with hatred directed mainly at overcrowded urban life, who decides to kill as
many people as possible in his local community. Williamson clothes himself in body armor,
 Militarism in American Popular Culture 23

dons an armored helmet, assembles machine guns and explosives, and arms himself with
knives before embarking on a carefully planned rampage attack on the surrounding com-
munity. Walking along a crowded street, Williamson begins firing two machine guns at close
range, mowing down dozens of bystanders. In the midst of his spree he notices a terrified
woman staring at him, whereupon he says “Oh hi, scary shit huh? Here we go!” as he kills
her. He then enters a coffee shop and asks the barista, who had previously served him a
coffee drink he didn’t like, “Why don’t you make me a double espresso . . . Macchiato . . .
with extra foam? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Why don’t you make it like your life depends on it?”
Getting the coffee, he asks “Why is it so difficult? I mean, how hard could it be?” Raising
his guns, he says, “I’m gonna give you five seconds to get out of here!”—before killing him.
Vigilante-type protagonists currently populate some of Hollywood’s most successful mov-
ies. Kick-Ass (2010) and Kick-Ass 2 (2013) exemplify the trend towards ultra-violent char-
acters who slash, shoot, and blast their enemies. In the first film Dave Lizewski (Aaron
Taylor-Johnson), a nerdy and insecure high school student, reinvents himself as Kick-Ass,
a crime-fighting superhero. However, when he encounters two street gang members engaged
in a robbery, he fails to stop them and ends up in the hospital, bleeding from multiple stab
wounds and injured from being run over by their car. Doctors attach metal sheets to his
head and body, which only has the effect of strengthening him. The attacks on Lizewski
produce neurological damage that reduces his sensitivity to pain. Armed with these two
advantages, Kick-Ass overpowers three thugs attacking a lone victim, and he ends up
famous after witnesses record his deed and post it on the Internet. Meanwhile, a supervillain
named Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) appears on the scene to confront him. In the
final scene Red Mist dons a new, more sinister costume, announcing, “As a great man (the
Joker) once said . . . wait till they get a load of me!” The film’s effective combination of
superheroes and supervillains attracted record audiences, and Kick-Ass more than tripled
its $30 million production budget with total box office receipts of over $96 million.22
In Kick-Ass 2 the costumed superhero joins with other superheroes to combat a gang of
supervillains. The costumed superhero, again played by Taylor-Johnson, confronts Chris
D’Amico (Mintz-Plasse), son of a notorious crime boss, who morphs into a supervillain
named the Motherfucker. Kick-Ass joins Justice Forever, a group of superheroes battling
the Motherfucker. He and his henchmen brutally murder ten New York policemen and
launch a nuclear missile aimed at Manhattan, but Kick-Ass and Justice Forever fend off
the attacks, leaving the Motherfucker maimed and crippled. Kick-Ass’s ally, Mindy
Macready, also known as Hit-Girl, summarizes the film’s message: “You don’t have to be
a bad-ass to be a superhero. . . . You just have to be brave.” Kick-Ass 2 also did well at the
box office, racking up more than $60 million in ticket sales with a production budget of
just $28 million.23
Recent cinematic warfare often takes place in dystopic settings and landscapes, as in
World War Z (2013), Oblivion (2013), Pacific Rim (2013), and The Last Ship (2014
video). Why do we find such a current appeal of post-apocalypse scenarios in American
culture? As Barry Wacker observes, “These films are not merely giving us warnings about
what we might be doing wrong on the planet, but they’re also giving us a sense of what it
means to be a human in the vast universe.”24 Human beings nowadays live with the ever-
present danger of violent crime, terrorism, environmental crisis, violent weather events,
and weapons of mass destruction. What do audiences see in the vast range of dystopic
movies produced in Hollywood? Perhaps romance has something to do with it. Bleak,
dystopic landscapes and cityscapes possess considerable romantic appeal, especially when
inhabited by savage “Monsters from the Id” villains. Obsession with the dark side, includ-
ing death, began with the Romantic Movement and continues today. Pop-culture dystopias
24 Militarism in American Popular Culture

impress themselves vividly in the imagination far more readily than more realistic everyday
settings. When mundane suburbia competes with dystopic violence, the result is that
aggressive characters typically prevail against the power of law enforcement and govern-
ment, leaving only superheroes to defend humanity.
Rampage killers, as with all Americans, currently inhabit a deepening culture of violence.
Despite sharp declines in some violent crime rates, mass rampage killings in the United
States, as noted above, have been steadily on the rise. Ari Schulman observes, “Whether
or not the perpetrators are fully aware of it, they are following what has become a ready-
made, free-floating template for young men to resolve their rage and express their sense of
personal grandiosity.” Most rampage killers crave media attention to assuage real or
imagined grievances while perhaps also burnishing their egos.
As Americans wind up exposed to more rampage killings, as well as elevated violence in
popular culture, for the first time they have chosen to buy more firearms for self-defense
than for hunting animals.25 People now prepare for person-to-person violence by stocking
up on firearms and ammunition. After all, they inhabit a milieu of recurrent mass killings,
urban gang violence, a swollen prison complex, and an aggressive United States foreign
policy backed by the largest war machine ever built—not to mention media violence. It is
possible that the culture of violence extends its hold over American society with so little
criticism and opposition because, as H. Rap Brown commented in the 1960s, “violence is
as American as cherry pie.” And perhaps Bundy was correct when he observed there are
lots of kids playing in streets around this country today who are going to be dead tomor-
row, and the next day, and the next month, because other young people are reading and
seeing the kinds of violent media spectacles that are so pervasive in American society today.

Warrior Culture and Patriarchy

With few exceptions the military has been a domain of patriarchal, masculinist traditions—
social hierarchy, violence, conquest, sexism, homophobia, gun worship—and the United
States has never been one of the exceptions. The warrior culture (from training to combat)
has always been a repository of patriarchal values, from the early Minutemen to the fron-
tier settlers, cavalry, and cowboys to the later uniformed participants in global wars and
more recent gangs, cults, militias, terrorists, and weapons fetishists. It is within and around
these historical activities and legacies that the predominantly male mythology of warfare
has evolved, built upon the motif of fighting off demons and evildoers with maximum
force, on imposing order by violent means in a chaotic world. This is a milieu dominated
by masculine action-heroes looking to make history, to achieve redemption by means of
conquest and domination. Warfare has routinely provided an opportunity for men, as
warrior protagonists, to rebuild psyches beset with some combination of anxiety, crisis,
defeat, and impotence.
The Rambo phenomenon, dramatized in a series of 1980s Hollywood films starring
Sylvester Stallone, was simply one example of male warrior heroes being endowed with
iconic status in American popular culture, Arnold Schwarzenegger in his Terminator series
being another. A superpatriot and gun cultist, Rambo embodies a heroic individualism won
through protracted military action. Aligning strong masculinity with the power of the gun,
the films construct a larger-than-life mythic personality who relishes violence as an instru-
ment to rid the world of evil—a narrative falling within the tradition of Superman, the
various Star Wars heroes, Indiana Jones, Top Gun, and literally hundreds of combat and
Western films or TV shows. Wars giving visceral expression to patriotic valor, technologi-
cal virtues, and masculine conquest fit this pattern. Within such a narrative the Vietnam
 Militarism in American Popular Culture 25

war wound up frustratingly messy and confusing, while the first Gulf War easily fit into
the desired historical pattern, reinvigorating the national psyche (deflated by the Vietnam
syndrome) in a triumphal war over a demonized opponent (Iraq). Desert Storm furnished
some of the most dramatic, compelling images of technowar replete with sophisticated
gadgetry, flashy spectacles, graphic explosions, victory celebrations, and male expertise
used to decode (and justify) the events witnessed by mass audiences. If Vietnam disinte-
grated into a terrible “quagmire,” then the Gulf Wars could be understood as clean, neat,
resolute, and technically efficient, with obvious winners and losers, all packaged within
the masculine philosophy of victorious military power standing for moral rectitude.
In her path-breaking exploration of military life, Mary Edwards Wertsch analyzes a
socialization process that is distinctly patriarchal, rooted in norms of discipline, order, and
obedience in the service of a (masculinized) national ideal. She refers to a “fortress moral-
ity” known for its uncompromising rigidity, where easy acceptance of violence is combined
with a “purity of vision” regarding duties and obligations.26 An indelibly male vision
saturates the military world, with women deemed valuable in nothing more than supporting,
adorning roles. Thus: “Women are tolerated inside the fortress on one all-encompassing
condition: in appearance, dress, speech, and behavior a woman must at all times reflect
her complete acceptance of the ultimate patriarchy and its implications for women. By that
rule any woman inside the fortress is automatically an accomplice in her own devalua-
tion.”27 Within such a patriarchal culture—caricatured in the film The Great Santini—
women are expected to live out male expectations and fantasies. Wertsch’s generalizations
are based on dozens of interviews with members of military families conducted in the early
1990s. While more recent socialization patterns have been altered by increased entry of
women into the armed forces, the change seems not to have fundamentally transformed
gender relations in the U.S. military.
Wertsch observes that within military culture it is male authority figures who prevail in
both professional work and everyday life, where virtues of duty, conformism, and hierar-
chy operate to keep women and children in line. The sense of powerlessness experienced
by women, and above all wives, can be rather extreme in the military setting.28 Moreover,
all this is exacerbated by other dysfunctions permeating military family life: rigid controls,
alcoholism, frequent travel and separation, fear of intimacy resulting from constant loss
of friendships, and so forth. It goes without saying that the trauma of war itself, with its
emotional horrors, uncertainties, and exposure to violence, creates added tensions and
conflicts that inevitably further marginalize women and children; family relations are com-
monly harmed by feelings of guilt, rage, and violence. The armed-services milieu gives rise
to extremely high rates of domestic violence and child abuse insofar as the familiar dys-
functions of “normal” family life and gender relations are greatly aggravated. As Wertsch
states: “One of the things characterizing life inside the fortress is the exaggerated difference
between masculine behavior and feminine behavior, masculine values and feminine values.
Macho maleness is at one end of the spectrum; passive receptive femininity at the other.”29
Conflict often turns out to be especially harsh and violent. The problems that arise within
military families—domestic violence, child abuse, alcoholism and drug abuse, relationship
breakdowns—are rarely if ever adequately handled by the military brass, which remains
trapped within the same “fortress.” The capacity of women to confront marital distress is
undermined by their already devalued role within military culture. In the end, the ongoing
travails and miseries of military family life are concealed (not always effectively) by an
elaborate social facade of order, harmony, duty, patriotism, and outward status. Everything
takes on greater significance as the military comes to occupy an increasingly central place
in American foreign policy and social life.
26 Militarism in American Popular Culture

In the conjuncture of an expanding war economy, empire, and recurrent U.S. armed
interventions, one can detect a merger of corporate, bureaucratic, military, and patriarchal
forms of domination. The stubborn fact is that military institutions continue to be ruled
by men and pervaded by masculine norms; at the start of the twenty-first century men make
up more than 90 percent of U.S. armed-services personnel, and fully 100 percent of those
entering direct combat. The historical impact of the feminist revolution on Pentagon cul-
ture has been limited. As Claire Snyder observes, militarism in American society reinforces
a wide range of conventional social and sexual values, a tendency strengthened by anti-
feminist backlash linked to official fears that a large-scale influx of women into the military
will inevitably compromise training standards, weaken morale, create sexual tensions, and
disrupt combat situations.30 The dominant Pentagon thinking is that a kinder, gentler
armed forces cannot win wars: it is best to rely upon the skills of men, with their suppos-
edly innate drive toward aggression, violence, and martial exploits. Given tough leader-
ship, military organizations can harness those masculine traits into forms of bonding,
heroism, and brute physical strength required for combat—although the shift from con-
ventional ground warfare to new modes of technowar would seem to render such assump-
tions obsolete. In any event, deeply entrenched patriarchal values defining military life can
easily shade into misogyny, as reflected in the canons of basic training in which drill
instructors often use woman-hating ridicule to shame recruits seen as lacking “manhood”
and sexual potency. As depicted in films like Full Metal Jacket, femininity is repeatedly
deprecated while the weapons of combat are identified with male genitalia; sexism becomes
a medium to secure male bonding and preparation for killing. As elsewhere, the U.S. armed
services thrive on authoritarianism, conformism, a cult of violence, and misogyny that, in
civilian life, are generally regarded as signposts of fascist ideology.
As the military extends its presence throughout governing institutions and civil society,
it further contributes to gender inequality and a social hierarchy consonant with increased
violence against women; militarism and patriarchy together generate an even more explo-
sive culture of violence. The forms of sexist outlawry in wartime are well known: women
routinely become victims of combat, atrocities are visited upon civilian populations, homes
and neighborhoods are destroyed, people are dislocated, and prostitution spreads along
with sex-trafficking, rape, torture, and domestic violence.31 Established social and moral
restraints against extreme patriarchal violence usually disappear in warfare, giving women
fewer protections and fewer safe havens as they often wind up the targets of ideologically
and sexually charged acts of violence. It might be argued that women actually suffer more
grievously with the advent of modern technowar characterized by aerial bombardments,
long-distance attacks, and destruction of civilian infrastructures.
Domestic violence seems to have become an enduring feature of military family life even
in the absence of wartime experience. The hypermasculinity and misogynism that flourish
in and around battlefield situations often enter directly and tragically into the household.
Wertsch’s interviews reveal dozens of such violent episodes. A more recent case in point is
five highly publicized domestic killings at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in the summer of
2002, three of which involved elite Special Operations troops. The murders grew out of
extreme marital conflict resulting, in part, from harshly aggressive behavior that military
men so regularly bring home from work, from their entire hypercharged milieu. In many
instances common taboos against violence simply disappear as the warrior mentality gives
men permission to behave as if they are above the law. Problems like marital infidelity can
be met with such extraordinary anger that they can, as at Fort Bragg, lead to brutal attacks
and even murder. Those killings were no doubt the tip of the iceberg, made visible because
they fell into a cluster of actions spanning a relatively short time.32 Marital conflict in the
 Militarism in American Popular Culture 27

armed services is aggravated by regular (and sometimes lengthy) periods of separation and
by the fact that men—themselves victims of suffocating hierarchy and discipline—have
very little control over their lives, a power they can easily reassert with a vengeance in the
household. In the tragic Fort Bragg episodes, marital conflict quickly got out of control,
helped along by the army’s own code of silence as well as a traditional devaluing of thera-
peutic solutions. Military culture serves to inhibit families from getting badly needed help.
The Pentagon brass, moreover, usually turn a deaf ear to reports of distress that might harm
the image of the U.S. armed forces.
The predicament of women in the military academies reflects this pattern. At the Air
Force Academy in Colorado Springs, for example, several years of reports by women
claiming rape, stalking, and general harassment were ignored or downplayed by adminis-
trators and students steeped in patriarchal military values and the code of silence surround-
ing them. This history of charges came to light when a female student in the 2002 class,
Andrea Presse, filed charges against a male classmate who was accused of stalking and
harassing her for more than a year. In the end, her desperate complaints were turned
against her by the academy: she was charged with dishonesty and summarily expelled.
Subsequent investigations discovered an educational milieu largely devoid of respect for
women—a milieu actively fostered and defended by the male officers in authority. Officials
found no less than fifty-six reports of rape and sexual assault that were not acted upon;
perhaps hundreds more were never reported to what had become an unresponsive bureau-
cracy. As Presse’s mother stated: “These boys just don’t get it. They are being raised to have
no respect for women, and the attitude is fostered by the male officers in charge. My
daughter asked for help, and they ignored her all the way up the chain of command.”33 As
in the case of Presse, who had spent four (wasted) years studying to become a pilot, charges
brought forward by other women were frequently turned against them, as victims. After
dozens of reports, in fact, not a single air force cadet was court-martialed. The situation
was reportedly no better at West Point or Annapolis, where an entrenched code of silence
was maintained by patriarchal gatekeepers to avoid “scandals” detrimental to the upper
echelon of the armed services.
Many features of patriarchal militarism thus remain firmly embedded in American soci-
ety, despite the historic gains of feminism and increased entry of women into the different
services. It is staunchly defended by such intellectual figures as Christina Hoff-Sommers,
Robert Bork, Lionel Tiger, and Stephanie Gutmann, not to mention the vast majority of
male politicians across the ideological spectrum. It continues to draw cultural strength
from the male warrior mythology that serves the Pentagon’s elitism so well. If women are
valuable to the U.S. military, it is mainly in peripheral, subordinate, devalued roles conso-
nant with the traditional sexual division of labor, exactly the pattern of gender relations
that has been challenged (and to some extent overturned) within the larger society.

Corporate Media: Reservoir of Militarism

If the familiar ideal of an open, diverse, accessible popular media is the sine qua non of a
thriving democracy, prevailing trends at work in American society have for many years
been moving in just the opposite direction: corporate megamedia structures now colonize
the political and cultural terrain, including TV, radio, film, cable TV, print journalism, and
the Internet. Through giant multinational business empires like General Electric, Viacom,
Disney/ABC, and News Corporation, elites have achieved greater capacity to influence the
flow of ideas, information, and entertainment than at any time in the past, increasing the
power to shape governmental decision making and mass consciousness. The mainstream
28 Militarism in American Popular Culture

media have become an extension of corporate interests, not to mention government and
military agendas, hardly a recipe for viable democratic politics based in active citizen par-
ticipation.
The erosion of media culture in the United States can be attributed to multiple factors:
corporate mergers and growing concentration of media power; commodification of the
entire public sphere; continuous expansion of the war economy; globalization and the col-
lapse of popular, democratic leverage over vital areas of decision making. Add to this a
protracted right-wing crusade to transform the popular media into agencies of conservative
ideology (a point we return to later). Today we have a communications system mostly
designed to serve the needs of Wall Street and Madison Avenue, with any notion of the
public interest jettisoned owing to increased privatization and deregulation of the entire
media structure. The result is a narrowed, commercialized, increasingly undemocratic
political culture that is thoroughly stifled by profit-driven corporate media. American
journalism at the start of the twenty-first century suffers mightily under the weight of these
trends, unable to provide a genuine diversity of sources and outlets, much less critical
investigations into major news stories of the day. What is generally true, moreover, is even
more telling when it comes to the critical issues of foreign and military policy. As Robert
McChesney writes in Rich Media, Poor Democracy, the “corruption of journalistic integ-
rity is always bad, but it becomes obscene under conditions of extreme media concentra-
tion, as now exist.” Such “obscenity” is now endemic to what has become a largely
one-dimensional media culture, prompting McChesney to ask: “What types of important
stories get almost no coverage in the commercial news media? The historical standard is
that there is no coverage when the political and economic elites are in agreement.”34 The
reference to “no coverage” might be amended to include the probability there will be uni-
form coverage in support of elite priorities where the news in question concerns interna-
tional politics (and most emphatically where U.S. military action has been initiated).
As David Brock shows in The Republican Noise Machine, the mainstream media have
been the focal point of an ideological shift engineered by right-wing partisans over the past
three decades. This epochal shift is the product of a well-organized, lavishly funded, sus-
tained, politically driven crusade to completely transform the contours of American public
life. Brock speaks of “a deliberated, well-financed, expressly acknowledged communica-
tions and deregulatory plan that was pursued by the right wing for more than thirty years—
in close coordination with Republican Party leaders—to subvert and subsume journalism
and reshape the national consciousness through the media, with the intention of skewing
American politics sharply to the right. The plan has succeeded spectacularly.”35 One out-
come of this crusade is Republican control of all three branches of government for the first
time since 1929. Meanwhile, “free market” myths associated with Reaganomics have
become the prevailing wisdom, deregulation motifs have overtaken the political culture, the
idea of U.S. global domination linked to exorbitant military spending has gained currency
among the elite—and “liberalism” (including the social contract inaugurated by the New
Deal) has fallen into disrepute. By the 1990s Democrats, taking their cue from the trans-
formed ideological terrain, moved to assimilate these conservative views, campaigning and
governing essentially as moderate Republicans—witness the presidency of Bill Clinton.
Right-wing efforts to colonize the popular media, as Brock argues, were inspired by a
fierce sense of ideological battle, a form of cultural “guerrilla warfare,” rooted in a patient,
long-term strategy that, in effect, derided longstanding notions of media objectivity and
genteel debating etiquette. The battle respected few ethical or political limits. The elaborate
strategy was tied to a marketing of ideas, relying on the most sophisticated advertising and
public relations techniques, aimed at discrediting liberalism and capturing the political
 Militarism in American Popular Culture 29

landscape for the right, now able to frame the terms of public discourse. It was a no-holds-
barred propaganda campaign pure and simple.36 Supported by such wealthy scions as
Adolph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife, the mechanisms of this cultural revolution were
many: right-wing think tanks (American Enterprise, Hoover, Cato, Hudson, Heritage
Foundation, etc.), book publishing, public relations firms, political-action committees and
lobbies, talk radio, magazines like Commentary, National Review, and the Weekly
Standard, the Internet, and a growing presence within the print and electronic media gen-
erally owing to the largesse of think tanks and the rise of TV giants like Fox.
Carried along by a “savage partisanship,” right-wing objectives were sweeping and
comprehensive: deregulation of corporate power, tax breaks for the rich, an assault on the
welfare state, attacks on gains made by sixties’ and seventies’ social movements (including
affirmative action), loosening of gun controls, revitalized law enforcement and intelligence,
an aggressive foreign policy dependent upon vast increases in the Pentagon budget. While
the new generation of conservatives, bolder and more ideologically driven, loved to speak
of reducing “big government,” in fact they eagerly embraced vast increases in government
bureaucracy when it came to the military, intelligence, and criminal justice systems. They
championed an expensive Star Wars program, agitated for a stronger worldwide U.S.
military deployment, and pushed for new weapons programs as part of an overall techno-
logical restructuring of the armed forces. They were, and continue to be, champions of a
greatly expanded security state. This milieu provided the ideal breeding ground for the rise
of a new stratum of neoconservative “defense intellectuals,” themselves skilled at manipu-
lating public opinion on foreign-policy issues, who came to shape Bush II’s global agenda,
which gained new momentum in the wake of 9/11.37 The lies, myths, and distortions used
to advance the war on Iraq—indeed to justify the entire Bush Doctrine of preemptive
attack—probably never would have triumphed had not this deepening militarization of the
political culture laid the groundwork.
The vast majority of Americans receive the bulk of their “news” and its interpretations
from TV and talk radio, hypercommercialized venues that depend almost entirely upon
advertising for their revenue. These outlets are not only emphatically conservative but also
generally (except for times of crisis or war) devote little actual coverage to foreign affairs.
In global politics the focus turns toward images of chaos, corruption, and violence that are
usually considered ordinary facts of life for other nations and cultures—especially those
(like Russia, China, and the Middle East) seen as potentially hostile or threatening to U.S.
geopolitical interests. The larger consequences of media culture, both domestic and global,
are depoliticizing where they are not conservatizing, the exception being those moments
when warfare consumes public attention. As McChesney notes: “The commercial basis of
U.S. media has negative implications for the exercise of political democracy: it encourages
a weak political culture that makes depoliticization, apathy, and selfishness rational
choices for the citizenry, and it permits the business and commercial interests that actually
rule U.S. society to have inordinate influence over the media content.”38 At first blush this
closing of the public sphere might seem to be contradicted by the national frenzy generated
by round-the-clock coverage of war and its preparation; the outcome would seem to be
greater collective political intensity. Such “intensity,” however, is linked to media-inspired
spectacles, an essentially manipulated process inducing an altogether different kind of
involvement. Its overcoming of fragmentation and privatism, made possible by the glori-
fication of military prowess and national triumph, is not only ephemeral but false, instill-
ing a parochial zealotry hardly compatible with a progressive, engaged citizenry. In effect
the media war spectacle of the sort witnessed during the two Gulf Wars gives rise to a
caricature of politics.
30 Militarism in American Popular Culture

The American media offer the public an entirely mythological view of the world, one
populated by foreign demons and evil monsters plotting to bring terrible harm to a benev-
olent, innocent, peace-loving country. While the existing order is celebrated as a beacon of
democracy, prosperity, and enlightenment, the global terrain as seen through the lenses of
Fox and Disney appears riven with anarchic chaos where corruption and violence rule,
where dark “others” regularly violate human rights and norms of democratic governance.
This is a world, predictably enough, requiring U.S. economic and political involvement and
(where that turns out to be inadequate) military intervention. These views are rather uni-
form across the mainstream media, a taken-for-granted representation allowing for only
minimally divergent opinions. TV, radio, and print media are colonized by officials and
“experts” drawn mostly from the corporate, government, and military sectors—a severely
limited range of voices usually falling within the patriotic consensus. On Nightline and
similar news shows, discussion of foreign policy is framed by distinctly U.S. interests, out-
looks, and values, the rest amounting to a nebulous totality that vanishes into a Hobbesian
nightmare where competing or dissenting viewpoints are routinely devalued.39 If there is
more than one side to any military discourse, the difference is usually reduced to matters
of tactics and phrasing, especially once the United States is engaged in warfare. Media
coverage has all the character of a propaganda spectacle.
In the case of military operations the spectacle often becomes something akin to a sports
extravaganza, with its epic contests, winners and losers, heroes, and huge crowds, all
reflecting the extent to which media culture becomes subservient to the imperatives of
power, relying on double standards, myths, and self-serving platitudes. Thus the label “ter-
rorism” as commonly employed has relatively little informational or analytical value owing
to the manner in which the term is simply meant to describe the actions of designated
“enemies”; more useful references to agencies that use violent methods toward political
ends are strenuously avoided insofar as they would inevitably extend to state as well as
substate terrorism, implicating military powers like the United States and Israel. Moreover,
gruesome combat episodes are sanitized or aestheticized, transformed into remote, medi-
ated experiences. In the electronic media age all the production values of TV advertising
and digital imaging, notably useful in depicting warfare, are used to the fullest. This is
imperative, for, as Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich write: “No product requires more
adroit marketing than one that squanders vast quantities of resources while slaughtering
large numbers of people.”40 Combat operations carried out by a high-tech military turn
out to be effective marketing, with staged events and exciting viewing for audiences already
saturated with sports images, reality TV, and true-crime programs; in warfare, life and
media seem to converge. Leading TV commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Brit Hume
on Fox speak freely about bombing Afghanistan and Iraq to rubble, as if the carnage will
mean little to viewers, especially young viewers weaned on militaristic video games and
action movies. If Iraq can be personified by a Hitler-like monster in Saddam Hussein, then
when combat to destroy the monster is initiated, all is rendered possible (bombing civilian
targets, raiding people’s homes and places of worship, committing massacres, torturing
prisoners) in a war made larger than life by the media embellishment of an epic moral
crusade pitting good Americans against evil (foreign, terrorist) scoundrels. Referring to the
prolonged media-charged buildup to the second Gulf War, former UN weapons inspector
Scott Ritter, disgusted with repeated lies by the Bush administration and the media, com-
mented: “We made it impossible for anybody to talk about Iraq in responsible, substantive,
factually-backed terms.”41
Although the U.S. media have faithfully served patriotic ends and imperial agendas since
at least the Spanish-American War, which marked the advent of Hearst’s famous “yellow
 Militarism in American Popular Culture 31

journalism,” it reached a pinnacle during the first Gulf War—in great measure a TV war
glorifying American high-tech military exploits through repetitive, graphic, live depictions
of modern warfare.42 Crowning each victory as a great extravaganza, the media emerged
as a powerful agency of the war hysteria that swept the country, creating a milieu in which
the dreaded “Vietnam syndrome” of defeat, humiliation, and impotence could finally be
put to an end. One result of this was a deepening militarization of American culture,
already set in motion during the cold war but having been practically reversed during the
1970s and 1980s owing to the Indochina debacle.43 Never in U.S. history had media power
turned so flagrantly propagandistic, so technologically seductive, so capable of molding
public opinion. At the time of Desert Storm and throughout the 1990s the media succeeded
in colonizing social life largely along lines theorized much earlier by Marshall McLuhan
and Guy Debord—a reality never achieved at the time they were writing. Following the
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the political consequences would be ominous, as Douglas
Kellner points out: “And so, George Bush, the U.S. military, and the military-industrial
complex were the immediate beneficiaries of the Gulf War. Bush was transformed from
wimp to warrior and the U.S. military was able to overcome its humiliation in Vietnam
and its past failures. The United States appeared to be the world’s sole remaining super-
power, a high-tech military colossus dominating Bush’s New World Order.”44 It would be
a remarkably short-lived, rather pyrrhic victory for both the senior Bush and U.S. global
policy, as foreign and domestic problems (momentarily obscured by Desert Storm) would
quickly reemerge, though the structure and ideology of militarism was not about to disap-
pear from the U.S. landscape.
Since the first Gulf War, and particularly since 9/11, the American press has taken up its
patriotic role and pushed it to new heights. Where foreign policy is concerned, the increas-
ingly conservative media have dropped all pretense of journalistic objectivity and fairness,
embracing instead a one-dimensionality in which a (civilizing, democratic, peace-loving)
United States is reluctantly compelled to face off against a wide array of demonic forces.
Since its inception Fox TV has been especially shrill in its jingoism, although a similar pat-
tern is readily visible at such outlets as CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS, along with the bulk
of newspapers, magazines, and talk radio. This fiercely intense partisanship means that the
general historical context of events will never be addressed by enterprising media. Events
surrounding 9/11 offer a case in point: from the terrorist attacks onward, the media did
little to situate and interpret the news, investigate its circumstances, scrutinize Bush’s mis-
takes, report egregious intelligence lapses, or question the efficacy of a single-minded
military solution to terrorism—though matters would begin to change once the occupation
of Iraq turned into a political quagmire for Bush. The effects of blowback—that is, the
negative, counterproductive consequences of U.S. foreign policy—were never confronted,
as if to do so was somehow “anti-American.” Instead, the media chose the simpler path
of national celebration, focusing on wondrous American freedoms that people around the
world so angrily resented.45 The terrorist episodes were framed as the work of demonic
Muslims lacking a moral compass or political motive, a narrative willfully overlooking the
clear ideological significance of the targets selected. Events were depicted so as to justify
immediate military response, a pattern duplicated later as the media culture helped legiti-
mate the mobilization toward war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The patriotic media came fully into action as Bush’s drive toward the invasion of Iraq
picked up momentum by late summer 2002. It was an ideological campaign based upon a
series of half-truths and lies that elites and pundits across the political spectrum repeated
ad nauseam: false statements about an imminent Iraqi military threat and possession of
WMD, ridiculous claims about Hussein’s collaboration with Al Qaeda, phony evidence
32 Militarism in American Popular Culture

brought forth to support the myth that Iraq was rapidly accumulating nuclear materials,
shameful coercive methods (often futile) used to win UN members’ support, disinformation
about projected costs and consequences of war and occupation, and so forth. Few media
outlets paid attention to these issues, dispensing with any watchdog or investigative role—
long a journalistic staple—in favor of unabashed warmaking propaganda. The ostensibly
liberal media derived their initiatives mainly from government and Pentagon sources,
avoiding even mild dissent, which the guardians of public opinion considered particularly
noisome as U.S. military operations got under way. As in the case of Desert Storm, TV now
shifted to nearly round-the-clock coverage of U.S. military operations, dwelling on the
Pentagon’s initial “shock and awe” tactics, which targeted Baghdad alone with more than
four hundred cruise missiles just during the first days of war. The campaign, labeled “Plan
Iraqi Freedom,” was now uncritically packaged as the liberation of Iraq from despotism
and its transformation into a political democracy. The media lens focused largely on the
logistical and technical aspects of military action, with political and ethical questions
pushed aside. Guests on TV news programs, interview shows, and talkfests were drawn
from the familiar stable of right-wing pundits: Fred Barnes, George Will, Charles
Krauthammer, Ben Wattenberg, William Kristol, Ann Coulter, Max Boot, Robert Kagan.
Many pro-war intellectuals were anointed media stars at Fox and other networks. And the
“defense experts,” as on the occasions of Desert Storm and Yugoslavia, were omnipresent.
The antiwar side of the debate was basically ignored until popular demonstrations in the
United States and around the world became much too large to ignore, at which time they
were grotesquely caricatured. As the Pentagon was getting ready to invade, spurred on by
resource and geopolitical aims, the inevitably costly material, human, and global conse-
quences of the U.S. imperial gambit were overlooked or downplayed.
In the period 2002–2003 the Washington Post ran a series of op-ed pieces, editorials,
and news reports that, taken together, helped fuel the push toward the second Gulf War.
The paper served as essentially a mouthpiece for government and Pentagon agendas, voiced
by such writers as Jim Hoagland, Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Richard Holbrooke, and
Robert Novak. The ensemble of pro-war articles and op-eds seemed moved by a sense of
imperial arrogance, indifference toward the costs of war, and rigid intolerance of anyone
dissenting from the decision to invade. A few critical voices making their way into the Post
were concerned with mostly tactical issues of timing, logistics, and the need to mobilize
broader support. Most contributors were present or former Washington insiders, typically
referred to as “experts” in world politics, terrorism, or the Middle East. Foreign viewpoints
were extremely hard to locate.46 The Post series established the prevailing trajectory for
U.S. print journalism in the lead-up to war. The Wall Street Journal enthusiastically joined
in the ideological mobilization for war, as did The New York Times, Newsweek, and Time,
which devoted a number of special issues to the imminent threat of Iraq and the evils of
Hussein’s rule, while glorifying the blessings of U.S. military technology.
Diversity of opinion, long understood as fundamental to American democratic politics,
now largely vanished from a public sphere increasingly saturated with outpourings of
patriotism, militarism, and imperial arrogance. Opposition to Bush was smothered by the
patriotic onslaught, dismissed as outright propaganda or siding with the “enemy.” Some
media outlets felt a responsibility to cover official Iraqi statements, but of course anything
coming from Baghdad was immediately discredited as the diabolic machinations of
Hussein or Al Qaeda. In January 2003 CNN was preparing to cover a live press announce-
ment from Baghdad where Iraqi officials wanted to refute Bush’s warmongering statements
and policies—the very statements and policies that were carried nonstop throughout the
U.S. media. Soon after an Iraqi spokesperson began laying out the case against war, the
 Militarism in American Popular Culture 33

network cut away to “breaking news” from the White House: Bush would be giving a
preview of his State of the Union address. But there would never be any return to the Iraqi
official, whose argument had been interrupted in midstream. Although Bush said little
beyond what was generally known, the abrupt break gave CNN a plausible excuse for
ignoring a strong, vocal counterpoint. There was also Dan Rather’s famous interview with
Hussein in late February 2003—itself roundly condemned as an unpardonable indulgence
of the enemy. Giving his first extended foreign interview in several years, the Iraqi leader
made a passionate appeal for peaceful solutions, for stepped-up diplomacy, even for
friendly relations with the United States. A nearly full-page report of the interview in the
Los Angeles Times (February 27, 2003) began with the bizarre observation that Hussein’s
statements could not be regarded as newsworthy (they were just propaganda), then pro-
ceeded to totally ignore what was said; the report strangely contained no quotes of
Hussein’s responses to specific questions. In their place was a lengthy series of attacks on
Hussein, five in all, by hawkish supporters of Bush’s policy, including White House spokes-
person Ari Fleischer. Hussein’s views, for better or worse, gained attention only by virtue
of their negation—an unconscionable journalistic practice, but one that would become all
too familiar during the rush to war.
Even the slightest inclination toward media objectivity is abandoned once we enter the
sacred “bipartisan” realm of U.S. foreign and military policy; official propaganda comes
to the fore, transforming “news” into the modality of a sports contest and political dis-
course into expressions of patriotic conformism. Rival governments are vilified for exactly
the same international behavior the United States carries out with much greater regularity,
on a larger scale, and with impunity. Media coverage dwells on a long list of abuses in
Russia, China, and Iraq, while more grotesque violations by the United States and its client
states go unreported or, where reported, are downplayed and “contextualized.” Thus pos-
session of WMD by other nations is treated as an unmitigated horror, a threat to human
civilization, while the taken-for-granted and infinitely larger WMD arsenal of the United
States fades into the natural terrain, scarcely worthy of notice. When embarrassing realities
cannot simply be ignored—for example, the Gulf War syndrome or the Abu Ghraib prison
scandal—government spinning of events warrants more attention than basic fact-finding
investigations. The very idea that U.S. leaders might be guilty of war crimes is simply never
contemplated by the media. What occurred during the prewar situation in Iraq constitutes
just one of many recent examples: U.S. military action, routine bombings, and harsh eco-
nomic sanctions for more than a decade, leading to hundreds of thousands of casualties,
scarcely registered on the media radar scope.
Partly owing to an increasingly one-dimensional media, American political culture seems
to have less space for genuinely open debates and diverse sources of information: “terror-
ism,” for example, has become merely a shibboleth referring to an evil scourge, the work
of foreign monsters addicted to hatred and violence, while supposedly good intentions
underlying U.S. military actions remain a simple matter of faith. As Sardar and Davies
observe, American public opinion is today shockingly provincial, reflecting a widespread
lack of curiosity about how people around the world live, think, and act.47 Despite unprec-
edented affluence, mobility, and access to information, despite huge enrollments at institu-
tions of higher learning, Americans at the start of the twenty-first century are shockingly
insular and ethnocentric, inclined toward superpatriotism. Surveys reveal a frightening
ignorance of global affairs. It is easy to see how, with the end of the cold war, the label
“terrorist” could so routinely be fastened onto individuals, groups, and states deemed
hostile to U.S. interests or policies, just as the “Communist” stigma was successfully
invoked before it. The frequently asked question in the media “Why do they hate us?” says
34 Militarism in American Popular Culture

volumes about the political culture. While “they” now typically refers to Arabs, Muslims,
and terrorists, the “us” part of the equation assumes a wounded innocence, a victim status
appropriate to a nation surrounded by threatening enemies. If the focus shifted to the real
policies and actions of an aggressive superpower, entirely different sets of questions would
have to be posed, directed at issues of why and how the United States so routinely inter-
venes in matters outside its own borders, why it has been so quick to use ruthless military
force on behalf of its geopolitical interests, and why it so often violates international laws
and agreements.
In any truly balanced forum, such questions would inevitably enter into public discourse
in a manner that would enhance the general political culture. One reasonable point of view
within such an open debate would be that “hatred” directed at U.S. leaders might be the
understandable reaction of people who are the victims of destructive superpower interven-
tions over which they have no control. That some people might want to channel their
hostility in violent directions will not be surprising to any informed observer. Yet this very
idea is dismissed as crazy, even treasonous, by the mainstream media. For those tens of
millions of people in some way harmed by U.S. imperial power, the same “terrorism” is
automatically taken as a justifiable (if not always efficacious) response to state terrorism.
History is of course replete with instances of violent popular struggles against governmen-
tal oppression: American and Irish independence movements against the British, the
Algerians against the French, the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, partisan battles
against the Nazis in World War II, to name only a few. Within the U.S. corporate media it
seems comforting to frame violence committed by others as nothing but random, unmiti-
gated evil, devoid of human rationality or motive. Sardar and Davies point out that the
well-worn media fixation on foreign evil ultimately serves as a useful cover for willful
ignorance, xenophobia, and, in the end, military action against the designated malignancy.
In the weeks preceding the second Gulf War, the airwaves of the major TV networks
were colonized by virulent pro-war voices, according to a well-known study of the
American media by the watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). Of
397 total guest appearances during that period, fully 75 percent of U.S. sources were pres-
ent or former government officials, often national-security and military people, all strongly
behind Bush’s decision to wage “preemptive” war on Iraq. Just four voices from what had
become a massive, global antiwar movement were given even a limited forum. A few anti-
war critics (just twenty in all) were chosen from largely foreign sources, many of them Iraqi
government officials—the implied message being that such views were not to be taken
seriously. The bulk of TV broadcasts covered the quest for distinctly military solutions—
“solutions” to a “crisis” that was, in the final analysis, clearly American-made. Official
news releases and press conferences, many from the Pentagon, State Department, and
White House, were routinely and uncritically passed along by the patriotic media, taken
wholly at face value, as were Bush’s endlessly repeated pretexts for war.48 Such intense
media partisanship was visible at a time when opinion polls in the major industrial nations
showed an average of 80 percent of the population opposed U.S. military intervention,
with more than half of the American respondents also taking an antiwar stance. Given the
historical trajectory of U.S. media culture, most of the public now receives news and infor-
mation almost exclusively from mainstream outlets—their sources directly tied to govern-
ment, the military, and right-wing think tanks along with a small circle of academics with
hawkish military views. One problem here is that news organizations that want ready
access to the centers of power, especially vital during wartime, are forced to go along with
the hegemonic limits set by those same centers of power. Pentagon influence on the corpo-
rate media has grown measurably, especially since 9/11, a trend reflected in the increased
 Militarism in American Popular Culture 35

glorification of military power common at Fox, CNN, ABC, Time magazine, The Wall
Street Journal, and most talk-radio stations (the majority owned by right-wing Disney/ABC
and Clear Channel)—not to mention the more frequent release of Hollywood combat
movies dramatizing good-war themes since the late 1990s, a theme we shall take up in the
following chapters. The dominant media culture, organically tied to corporate power and
the war economy, has become more integral than ever to the legitimation of U.S. imperial
and military agendas.
Chapter 3

War and Cinema: The Historical Legacy

The term “the Hollywood war machine” refers to the production of studio films depicting
and glorifying U.S. wartime heroic exploits while embellishing the military experience itself
in all its dimensions, from the Revolutionary period to the present. While our focus is
primarily on the contemporary movie industry, familiarity with the century-long evolution
of what has been called the combat genre—a centerpiece of American popular culture—
provides the needed historical and conceptual backdrop to the analysis developed in later
chapters. We argue that the motion picture tradition has from its inception at the turn of
the last century been fascinated with military action as a vital part of the American patriotic
tradition. For most of cinematic history war films have rivaled the Western genre (itself
arguably a variant of the combat form) in terms of box-office appeal. A survey of the
Hollywood film legacy reveals that an astonishingly large proportion of studio films have
dramatized U.S. wartime experiences, heroics, and triumphs, often indirectly within the
framework of other genres such as the male action-adventure picture that gained popular-
ity in the 1980s. In exploring the rise and impact, both culturally and politically, of the
Hollywood war machine, several questions inevitably emerge: Why do U.S. filmmakers
remain so intensely interested in the phenomenon of armed conflict? Why do producers
and directors emphasize some wars over others? Above all, why at the start of the twenty-
first century are war films, as well as closely related genres, enjoying such a powerful
renaissance? The answers to such questions will help illuminate the intimate historical
connection between the U.S. military and the film industry—not to mention the broad
contours of a militarized culture that we laid out in chapter 1.
In helping sustain a deep culture of violence, the legacy of the Hollywood war machine
has been something of a reciprocal one in which warfare has provided filmmakers with
some of their most exciting, lucrative storytelling material while the studios have furnished
the military with continuous, free, highly effective advertising and marketing that has often
done wonders for recruiting. With few exceptions, the movie industry has presented an
image of the U.S. armed forces as heroic, noble, all-conquering, and above all exciting,
with World War II furnishing the ideal example of a “good war” fought by good, civilized
people for exalted causes against hated, barbaric enemies. This was indeed an image that
simultaneously benefited Hollywood and the military: the films, trading on fascinating
action narratives, male heroics, and patriotism, generally made profits while at the same
time audiences became conditioned to accept real-life U.S. armed interventions wherever
they occurred. Despite the occasional appearance of movies that put forth rather negative
images of the military—for example, the bulk of those portraying the Vietnam experience—
it is probably fair to say that the American filmgoing public today embraces an overwhelm-
ingly positive view of the U.S. armed forces along with a patriotic willingness to support
their foreign ventures. This is the product of a reconstituted and oligopolistic studio system
 War and Cinema: The Historical Legacy 37

in which corporate interests have engineered an unprecedented merger of entertainment

and politics, money-making and global agendas. Within what has become a vast, global-
ized megamedia structure it is easy enough to see that warfare has emerged as a kind of
sacred activity befitting the broader culture of militarism. Building on the time-honored
tradition of the male-warrior ethos, it extends in Hollywood movies well beyond the famil-
iar combat genre to Westerns, action-adventures, sci-fi films, horror pictures, comedies,
and ordinary historical dramas. Since the late 1970s many blockbusters have been war-
themed films. In all of these, to one degree or another, military action serves as the setting
for uplifting, patriotic, violence-saturated narratives and myths, all the while rendering
large-scale acts of violence more legitimate, more socially acceptable—the larger the acts,
one is tempted to add, the greater the legitimacy.
From the Revolutionary War period and the ruthless campaigns against native tribes to
the recent Gulf Wars, Americans have shown a consistent love of warfare and its call to
patriotic duty and military heroism articulated by the likes of Andrew Jackson, Theodore
Roosevelt, George S. Patton, George W. Bush, and a long list of film military protagonists
portrayed by such actors as Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Errol Flynn, Henry Fonda, Clint
Eastwood, and Tom Hanks. Even those movies in which the mantra is “war is hell” in
fact usually carry forward a martial spirit that glorifies the action, camaraderie, adven-
ture, and technological wizardry of the war experience. To simply label the combat genre
as escapist diversion is therefore completely inaccurate; the addiction to military violence
and armed conquest runs across the historical panorama, shaping the political culture and
mobilizing people for the real thing. Indeed, military films have from time to time con-
tributed enormously to particularly virulent expressions of nationalism and militarism,
perhaps never more so than at the turn of the twenty-first century as the United States
moves aggressively to consolidate its global hegemony.
Warfare and its glorification in Hollywood cinema speaks to a recurrent common
impulse, especially salient in U.S. history, to transcend the ordinary—those frustrating,
boring, anxiety-ridden features of daily life that violent struggles against threatening evil
forces might seem to overcome. Thus, to legitimate war and its horrific consequences,
powerful enemies are needed, and these of course have been furnished in great abundance
by a long list of producers, writers, and directors in Hollywood: Indians, Mexicans, Asians,
Arabs, Communists, Muslims, terrorists, drug traffickers, serial killers. Without such real
or imagined enemies there can be no war mythologies, indeed no war movies as we have
come to know them. Enemies are by definition demons, forces of darkness and evil that
inhabit a world of anarchy and savagery—forces that appear all the more threatening
because of their mysterious character. For combat narratives to work effectively, a
Manichaeistic framework is required, pitting good against evil, light against dark, order
against chaos, democracy against tyranny. In this scheme of things, villains generally are
cold, remote, ghostly, and elusive while heroes are immediately knowable, concrete
personae who embody the whole range of everyday feelings and emotions, who inhabit the
real world of families, neighborhoods, and workplaces. A villain who kills is filled with
unmitigated evil, devoid of purpose and rationale, which fits the media stereotypes of
Nazis, Communists, and terrorists, whereas the hero is identified with fully intelligible and
laudable goals or ideals—true of Gary Cooper in High Noon, John Wayne in Sands of Iwo
Jima, George C. Scott in Patton, and Sylvester Stallone in Rambo. Owing to such an
immense social and moral gulf between the two, killing becomes not only justifiable but
praiseworthy, perhaps an existential moment on the path toward individual and collective
self-actualization. Few Hollywood movies that address warfare narratives, whatever the
genre, significantly depart from this structural pattern.
38 War and Cinema: The Historical Legacy

Hollywood Mobilizes for Combat

The symbiotic relationship between Hollywood and the U.S. military was first solidified
at the time of World War I, labeled the “Great War” in the press, but soon enough the
focus turned to disillusionment and second thoughts—both in the film world and in
American society as a whole. Even before the United States entered the war in 1917,
motion pictures had become great recruiting vehicles for the armed forces, especially for
the navy in the wake of its decisive victory over Spain. Not only had the navy grown rap-
idly after 1900, it also provided a colorful, exotic, adventurous backdrop for movies that
rarely departed from formulaic romance tales, buddy stories, and comedic meanderings
onboard ships. Routinely approved by the military, such films presented the navy in a
highly glamorous, patriotic light, filled with images of handsome, dynamic, competent
officers and men even as overtly pro-war messages were typically resisted. In lending the
studios military facilities, men, and equipment, as well as logistical support, Washington
was able to exercise rather strict control over filmmaking, always vigilant regarding any
deviations from established military codes and norms. It was a relationship that worked
splendidly for both sides.1
While military-themed movies of this period tended to romanticize life in the armed
services, never failing to indulge feel-good patriotic sentiments, they rarely glorified war-
fare as such, preferring a more nuanced approach. When the popular mood of the country
seemed to favor pacifism and nonintervention—as during the years immediately preceding
both world wars—films rarely stressed the war motif. Before the United States entered
World War I, several films actually conveyed something of an ethic of nonviolence, an
outlook far more plausible at a time when the famous military-industrial complex was
barely in its infancy. One such film was Thomas Ince’s Civilization, or He Who Remembered
(1914), in which the spirit of Christ returns to earth in the body of a great soldier who
restores world peace as he sets out to redeem all humanity. This movie reputedly helped
elect Woodrow Wilson to the presidency on an antiwar platform. During the election
campaign, he was often compared to the film’s Christ-like pacifist hero.2 D. W. Griffith’s
epic depiction of the Civil War, The Birth of a Nation (1915), contains powerful scenes
that illuminate the senseless brutality of warfare. While Griffith devoted massive footage
to battlefield carnage, his major preoccupation was with the horrors of combat, its debili-
tating effects on soldiers from both sides, and the devastation of civilian life—even as
he winds up romanticizing the Ku Klux Klan. Griffith followed this enormous box-office
success with Intolerance (1917), which constructed elaborate images of war that were
bound to instill jaundiced views of military violence in audiences. Unfortunately for
Griffith, Intolerance reached theaters just as the United States was mobilizing for war,
when a previously isolationist public was being transformed into a flag-waving, jingoistic
mass. The antiwar message was drowned out by an outpouring of superpatriotic sentiment.
The production of films like Intolerance would be unthinkable during and immediately
after the Great War.
The decades between World Wars I and II marked something of a retreat from the jin-
goistic mood of the late teens—a shift at least partially reflected in the cinematic output of
the period. Just a small number of movies fit the combat genre strictly defined, and these,
while presenting largely positive views of military life, were not especially known for their
outright xenophobia or militarism. Some dwelled on the peacetime mission of what was
still a relatively small global deployment of U.S. armed forces. Those few productions that
re-created the Great War gravitated toward the “war is hell” motif, featuring spectacles of
death and destruction that, terrible as they were, could nonetheless be justified by resorting
 War and Cinema: The Historical Legacy 39

to such a noble cause as Woodrow Wilson’s claim to be “making the world safe for democ-
racy.” Along these lines, Griffith’s Hearts of the World (1918) depicts the general horrors
of an especially brutal (and futile) World War I while at the same time showing German
troops as especially demonic as they invade and terrorize a peaceful French village. Some
local inhabitants resist and are quickly tortured and murdered by the Hun barbarians. The
heroine (Lillian Gish), the daughter of an expatriate artist, meets the son of another expa-
triate (Robert Harron), who enlists in the French army to defend his adopted homeland.
The two fall in love and on their wedding night are bombarded by a German assault: Gish
survives but her husband is killed. Driven mad by his death, she spends the entire night
with his corpse. Behind Griffith’s graphically depicted abhorrence of war lies another,
perhaps more compelling, theme: whatever the costs of military conflict, the German beasts
simply had to be defeated. Rex Ingram’s film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)
follows roughly the same narrative structure, dramatizing the carnage of warfare while
showing American objectives to be noble and heroic.
The Great War did inspire a series of more emotionally patriotic and militaristic films
in the immediate aftermath of the armistice. The Edison Company’s Star Spangled Banner
appeared in late 1917 but was viewed for several years afterward as a powerful recruiting
device for the U.S. armed services. Its focus was less on the combat experience than on the
more seductive, adventurous elements of military life (here the marines) such as training,
marching, drilling, and ceremonial activities. A huge commercial hit in 1918, The
Unbeliever presented an array of perilous but inspiring trench-warfare scenes in which the
Germans were shown in all their Prussian ruthlessness. A major U.S. distributor of the film,
George Kleine, is quoted as saying that The Unbeliever was “inspired with patriotism of
the kind that leaves you restless and eager to do something, whether enlisting or assisting
the government in other activities that are necessary to win the war.”3 Anticipating later
World War II combat pictures, The Unbeliever graphically portrayed, in scenes of bloody
encounters at Belleau Wood and Chateau-Thierry, an enemy so unspeakably barbaric that
the worst suffering of combat was easily justified. For this reason The Unbeliever, when
viewed alongside Star Spangled Banner, established something of a paradigm for future
“good war” epics, enlisting the passions of military life and warfare—although here in
much cruder form than the more smoothly propagandistic movies of World War II. And
these films, like the later productions, received the full blessing and support of the U.S.
military.
After 1921, Hollywood produced few movies that embellished or glorified warfare in
this fashion. Returning to the “war is hell” theme, King Vidor directed The Big Parade
(1926), which depicted the lives of soldiers struggling to survive the horrors of World War I.
Known for its powerful realism and emotional intensity, this film straddled both sides of
the fence: war has few redeeming virtues but nonetheless comes across as something natu-
ral, part of the human condition. In refusing to glamorize combat, Vidor’s work was widely
understood to be an “antiwar” statement, although the filmmaker himself disavowed this
label, presenting the film as simply a more rational, intelligent expression of patriotism. If
war brought few rewards to its participants, victors and victims alike, it would be utopian
to think it could ever be eradicated; peace and disarmament were the pipe dreams of a few
misguided pacifists. In What Price Glory? (1926), Raoul Walsh presented a highly comedic
but still romantic image of marine life in an entertaining movie that served the goals of
military recruitment. While mocking some aspects of service life, Walsh adhered strictly to
the War Department code, which required that no play or film bring discredit to the U.S.
military—the sine qua non of winning needed military assistance. The strong critical and
box-office success of The Big Parade was followed by William Wellman’s spectacular air
40 War and Cinema: The Historical Legacy

force epic, Wings (1927), a realistic rendering of World War I aerial warfare that won the
first Academy Award for best picture. A patriotic film dedicated to “young warriors in the
sky,” Wings too served for many years as an effective recruiting device for the nascent U.S.
Army Air Force. A precursor to such later combat extravaganzas as Twelve O’Clock High
(1949), Midway (1976), and Top Gun (1986), Wellman’s classic, according to Lawrence
Suid, “became the yardstick against which all future combat spectaculars have had to be
measured in terms of authenticity of combat and scope of production.”4
During the 1920s only a few military-themed films were produced, and fewer yet
attracted large audiences at a time when Westerns and comedies were on the rise; the pub-
lic seemed anxious to forget about the horrors of the Great War. This pattern continued
throughout the 1930s as a mood of international disengagement swept the country as
people grew fearful that the United States might get immersed in yet another meaningless
conflict. By the late 1930s the combat genre had reached its low point, surpassed now by
musicals, screwball comedies, gangster films, Westerns, and historical dramas that appealed
to a mass of viewers looking to escape the harsh material realities of the Depression.
Military pictures made in Hollywood during this period in fact incorporated some of these
trends, turning to romance stories, comedies, and a variety of personal dramas against the
backdrop of peacetime military life. The studios embraced movies about the navy, attracted
mostly to the idyllic setting of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, relying on depictions
of marching midshipmen, a beautiful campus, dances, gorgeous women, and football
weekends to present a romanticized image of the military world outside combat. Examples
included Shipmates Forever (1935) and Navy Blue and Gold (1937), both filled with for-
mulaic stories about rites of passage in which young men encounter minor obstacles on
their way to full adulthood marked by professional status and exciting relationships.
Consistent with the Hollywood code, such movies ignored or downplayed the more prob-
lematic aspects of military life, its boredom, long hours, regimentation, and so forth. Made
at low cost and approved by the Navy Motion Picture Board, these films still resonated
with patriotism even in the absence of wartime scenarios, offered glorified versions of the
armed services, and were ideal recruiting vehicles. John Ford’s Men without Women
(1930), another film revolving around peacetime navy life, fit this motif, as did a series of
submarine-disaster pictures like Submarine D-1 (1937), starring a young Ronald Reagan,
and Frank Capra’s Dirigible (1931), the first movie to depict the glories of naval aviation.
Many of these films were shot in Hawaii, which, like the military academies, furnished
the perfect milieu for tried-and-true formulas: exotic physical settings, handsome men in
uniform, weekend romances, rites of passage, happy endings. As wartime narratives and
themes vanished, navy and army personnel were shown leading the good life in locales
devoid of armed conflict, excessive hardships, unsavory characters, and, of course, har-
rowing story lines. Dress Parade (1927) became the model for such fare. An accurate
subheading for these pictures—again, fully monitored and sanctioned by the War
Department—might have been “The Army and Navy in Paradise.” Everything corre-
sponded nicely to the spreading ethos of isolationism, deeply reflected in such later films
as Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939), which painted a bitter portrait of the
Civil War and its aftermath in the South. Indeed, Scarlett O’Hara’s (Vivien Leigh) first
lines in the movie, directed at two of her suitors, perfectly illustrate this detachment from
war: “Fiddle-dee-dee. War, war, war. This war talk is spoiling all the fun at every party
this spring.”
The outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939 did little to change American public
opinion, but it did give rise to a resurgent patriotic consensus at the studios, permitting
something of a return to the familiar combat genre. Films dramatizing male battlefield
 War and Cinema: The Historical Legacy 41

heroics appeared in 1940 (Flight Command) and 1941 (Dive Bomber), regarded as jingoistic
propaganda by the isolationist crowd preoccupied with avoiding another U.S. entry into
global conflagration. Critics viewed the studios, notably Warner Bros., as seeking to push
the United States into war against Germany and Japan, to the point where the Senate began
in late 1941 to investigate Hollywood war-themed pictures as “subversive.” It was Howard
Hawks’s popular narrative of World War I, Sergeant York, released in 1941, that was most
harshly accused of fomenting extreme nationalism and militarism, thereby aiding Franklin
Roosevelt’s scheme to mobilize the United States for war. Of course it took the Japanese
bombing of Pearl Harbor to finally bring the United States into the war, after which essen-
tially propaganda films like Sergeant York gained favor. There was the return to a Manichaeistic
worldview in which the noble, heroic forces of American democracy were pitted against an
array of brutal, menacing enemies in a struggle to protect civilization from the hordes of
barbarians. The old “peacetime” military pictures vanished entirely from the scene.

The Western as Combat Genre

From the earliest days of Hollywood the Western emerged as the quintessential American
film genre—part historical drama, part colonial saga, part military epic, part folk mythol-
ogy. It might be argued that Westerns, in their dominant form, were always most represen-
tative of the combat picture, complete with all the battlefield mythology that attracted
millions of viewers to the standard military productions. Across many decades this output
has glorified something else: in more than two thousand movies American Indians have
been the victims of a brutal, cinematic process of colonization, their history distorted and
mangled by a film industry moved according to its own ideological agendas. The
Hollywood myth of the Western was built on the epic frontier expansion of white Euro-
American settlers who stopped short of nothing—including genocidal rampages—to
ensure their conquest of North America. This reality was inverted by hundreds of filmmak-
ers anxious to show the “civilizing” effects of an idealistic westward migration that would
eventually overcome the resistance of Native American savages. The Hollywood myth, in
other words, depended on obliteration of the historical record, giving the myth full rein.
In Ward Churchill’s words: “Having attained such utter decontextualization, filmmakers
were free to indulge themselves—and their audiences—almost exclusively in fantasies of
Indians as warriors. Not just any warriors, mind you, but those of a most hideously bestial
variety.”5 Thus, if it is true that Westerns represent “without question the richest and most
enduring genre of Hollywood’s repertoire,” as Thomas Schatz writes, this legacy has been
an overwhelmingly false one tied to discourses of colonialism, racism, and militarism.6
The combat and Western genres share a venerable cultural myth: courageous warriors
fighting noble battles against demonic foreign savages, enemies lacking any shred of
humanity. The myth is galvanized by bold, creative protagonists, usually white men, pre-
pared to sacrifice their lives for common patriotic objectives. One thinks of the Concord
irregulars leading a guerrilla insurgency against the British Redcoats, George Washington
crossing the Delaware River to take on the Hessians, Civil War generals like Ulysses S.
Grant fighting valiantly to save the Union, and later combat heroes like Sergeant York,
Eddie Rickenbacker, Colonel James Doolittle, and Audie Murphy. Movie icon John
Wayne’s long series of warrior roles in both combat and Western pictures—from Stagecoach
to Sands of Iwo Jima to The Green Berets—fits this pattern to perfection. The virtues of
such warrior champions are well known: tenacity, tough-mindedness, honor, selflessness,
nobility, and of course patriotism. Combat heroes have become an inseparable part of the
American cultural landscape, occupying a special niche within cinematic history.
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