Movies, Myth, and the National Security State 9781626377073

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Movies, Myth & the National Security State

Movies,

Myth & the National Security State Dan O’Meara Alex Macleod Frédérick Gagnon David Grondin

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2016 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU

© 2016 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: O’Meara, Dan, 1948– | Macleod, Alex, 1940 October 26– author | Gagnon, Frédérick, author. | Grondin, David, 1978– author. Title: Movies, myth, and the national security state / by Dan O’Meara, Alex Macleod, Frédérick Gagnon, and David Grondin. Description: Boulder, Colorado : Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015038592 | ISBN 9781626374591 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—United States—History. | National security in motion pictures. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.U6 O46 2016 | DDC 791.430973—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015038592

British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5

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Culture is not just what you put on the cassette player, it is what you kill for. —Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture

Myths are tonic to a nation’s heart. If abused, however, they are poisonous. For myths are frozen hypotheses. Serious questions are answered by declaration and will not be re-opened. —Norman Mailer, “Myth Versus Hypothesis”

Contents

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Acknowledgments Introduction

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1 The National Security State and Hollywood Movies

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2 John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy and the Didactics of National Security

41

3 McCarthyism, Film Noir, and the National Security State

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4 Hitchcock: From the Red Scare to Détente

87

5 The Hollywood Revolution

107

6 The Hollywood Counterrevolution

133

7 Vietnam—The Sequel

155

8 National Security for the “New World Order”

181

9 Hollywood and the War in Iraq

203

10 Movies, Myth, and the National Security State

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Filmography List of Acronyms Bibliography Index About the Book

239 255 257 275 293 vii

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada that financed most of the research for and writing of this book. Their thanks also go to Lynne Rienner for her encouragement and probing comments on how to improve the structure of the manuscript, and to the anonymous reviewers for their comments. Drafts of various chapters were presented at annual conferences and regional meetings organized by the Working Group on Popular Culture and World Politics, the International Studies Association, the Association française de science politique, the Association francophone pour le savoir, and the Canadian Association of American Studies. The authors thank all discussants and participants for their comments, and most particularly Charles Bosvieux, Gwendal Châton, Anne-Marie D’Aoust, Lauren Godmer, Tina Managhan, and David Smadja. Further thanks go to Beatrice Chateauvert-Gagnon for sharing her knowledge of the feminist literature on warfare and for her work on the bibliography, the filmography, and the index, and to Nour Bengellab and Alexandre Daigneault for their contributions to identifying the thematic content of a range of Hollywood movies. Alex Macleod and Dan O’Meara would also like to thank the students who, over the years, enrolled in their course on cinema and the Cold War and whose receptivity to their approach helped them to develop the ideas in this book. Frédérick Gagnon thanks the students in his undergraduate and graduate courses on US politics who commented on early drafts of chapters of this book. David Grondin thanks the students in his graduate seminar, War, Popular Culture, and Geopolitics, for their input. Responsibility for errors of fact and interpretation rests solely with the authors.

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Introduction

Thinking about September 11 [2001] is almost impossible without thinking about film.1 As the planes struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that bright, awful Tuesday morning in September, the ensuing globally televised carnage and chaos underscored a sobering new reality confronting Americans. For the first time since the war of 1812–1815, a devastating foreign attack had successfully targeted key symbols in the continental United States of the country’s military and financial power, and the lives and property of its citizens. Throughout the preceding half-century, the United States had consistently spent more on its armed forces and intelligence services than most of the rest of the world combined. Its military was by far the most capable and technologically advanced in human history. The claims of national security had so overwhelmed America from 1947 onward that historians, political scientists, and journalists alike began to characterize the country as a “national security state.” While we present an extensive definition of the US national security state in the following chapter, it can here be characterized as a mode of government in which all aspects of public life are dominated by an official doctrine of imminent and urgent threat to fundamental national values and interests, and by the primacy accorded to institutions, policies, and practices said to be essential to preserve national security. Despite this fifty-year-plus obsession with national security and despite the overweening power and reach of the vast national security state, on September 11, 2001, the United States was powerless to detect, let alone prevent, a few fanatics from launching their murderous assault. In the confused days that followed, it became clear that much US strategic planning was

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obsolete. Politicians, military strategists, analysts, commentators, and ordinary citizens alike all seemed to repeat the same mantra: the shocking events of 9/11 were a turning point and “nothing would ever be the same again.” And yet . . . There had been something eerily familiar about the chilling live-time images of 9/11. The following day, People Magazine commented that the “life and death drama” of the attacks on the Twin Towers “resembled nothing so much as a big-budget Hollywood movie,” a sentiment echoed by the writer of the 1998 terrorism disaster film The Siege—“this looks like a movie . . . my movie”—and by some involved in other blockbusters.2 In effect, Hollywood had been preparing Americans for catastrophe for decades. Apocalyptic scenes of burning and collapsing skyscrapers; of terrorized citizens fleeing billowing chaos, imminent death, tragedy, and mass destruction; of acts of individual heroism and sacrifice had all been imprinted onto the collective unconscious by close to 200 disaster movies, many featuring New York City.3 And just weeks after 9/11, Pentagon officials spent three days with some two dozen Hollywood directors, screenwriters, and producers trying to brainstorm what al-Qaeda might do next: “If Hollywood had seen the future coming once, maybe it could do so again.”4 The White House painted its subsequent “global war” against “evil doers” as a white hats/black hats conflict in which the US strove to defend civilization on its global frontier with barbarism. John Wayne did not live to see the events of September 2001, but he surely would have known what to think about them, and how to react. Hollywood movies have always both mirrored and helped to shape the tenor of their times. No one who watched the American cinema of World War II, or lived through (or read about) the Hollywood blacklists of the 1940s and 1950s, or who saw even a few of the literally thousands of Cold War movies of the 1950s and 1960s, or who observed Ronald Reagan’s presidency could doubt that Hollywood films played a significant role in instilling a climate of fear across the United States, in fostering the favorable reception of state security policies and practices, and in marginalizing alternative perspectives. The events and aftermath of 9/11 simply underscored the power of “the movies” over the American imagination. In this book, we grapple with one vital dimension of that power. Our primary objective is to explore the ways in which Hollywood movies variously functioned to propagate, reproduce, or debate and occasionally contest, the evolving US national security state following World War II. As is explained in detail in Chapter 1, we do this by analyzing the depiction in Hollywood films of core institutions and the operational modalities of the national security state, and more particularly through an investigation of how these movies variously dealt with what we contend are the three vital elements of the mindset on which the national security state has been con-

Introduction

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structed since World War II. We label these elements, respectively, the Cold War consensus (see p. 21), the American security imaginary (see p. 19), and the ideology and mythology of Americanism (see p. 26). In doing so, we advance three principal arguments. The first insists that a “permanent national security state”5 emerged out of complex sets of domestic struggles over how the United States should respond to the radical transformation of its global role during and after World War II. The core issues of these ideological, cultural, social, political, and bureaucratic struggles turned around what it meant “to be a good American”; what the United States of America was said to stand for—or should stand for—in changing post–World War II global power politics; how vital national interests were said to be threatened, and by whom; and whether the federal government was appropriately organized and adequately equipped to enable it to defend “genuine” Americanism at home and abroad. This leads us to argue, secondly, that as an entirely new cult of national security gripped most of the United States by the end of the 1940s, the emergence, consolidation, and evolution of the national security state did much more than lead to a profound reorganization of the federal government. Perhaps even more importantly, it equally produced significant and ongoing transformations in national identity, in the prevailing view of the American community, and in foreign policy and national defense traditions dating back to the Revolution. In other words, the national security state emerged on the basis of, and then further consolidated, far-reaching changes in the dominant narrative of who “we Americans” were said to be and “what we stand for (and against whom)” in the very different international context following World War II.6 The central element of this post–World War II ideology of American identity hinged on the official insistence that the United States (we Americans) confronted an urgent, pervasive, permanent, and potentially fatal threat to its (our) vital interests, to its (our) fundamental values, and indeed to its (our) very existence. This proclaimed threat was invoked to legitimize a series of measures, institutions, and practices said to be necessary to ensure “national security”—in short, the national security state. Yet this narrative and these security practices have always been contested and the struggles over national security, national identity, and the nature of the American community and its place and role in global politics have gone through several distinct phases. For over a century, Hollywood movies have been “the most popular and influential medium of culture in the United States.”7 The third central argument that we advance in this book holds that, as such, these movies played a vital role in imagining the universe and in shaping the vocabulary; defining the images, metaphors, and tropes; and establishing the mental maps, archetypes, mindsets, and emotional framework through which most

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Americans came to think about themselves, their country, and national security following World War II. These too evolved over time, and we examine this evolution in largely chronological fashion from the beginning of the Cold War to the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Which Movies? The US cinema industry produced an estimated 51,311 feature films between 1894 and 2014.8 Clearly no study can begin to survey anything like all of these. Our filmography, at the end of this volume, includes only those films that we directly reference—some 500 movies. However, in preparing this book, we drew on a substantially greater number of films. These include 846 of the 2,141 top-grossing movies by decade since 1900,9 together with all but 13 of the 200 all-time top domestic box office earners adjusted for inflation10 and 245 of the 284 films nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award between 1946 and 2010 (and all of the winners). We also watched hundreds of other films not on any of these lists, including Bmovies, commercial flops, and outright disasters. Choosing which movies to highlight in this study was no easy task. We easily could have focused on the contribution of this or that genre or sets of genres to the national security state (the war movie, science fiction, the romantic comedy, etc.), or that of leading filmmakers, or of box office successes, or Oscar-nominated films. However, we deliberately chose a more eclectic approach. This focuses variously on genre, on film directors, on categories of films from this or that decade, on films about two US wars, on blockbusters, and even on commercial failures. We chose this route since it well illustrates our method of analysis which, we are firmly convinced, allows anyone to grasp the explicit and implicit political meaning and ideological content of virtually any film (see pp. 26–34). Our analysis of the evolving US cinema industry and its relationship to the national security state focuses in detail on forty-eight films released between 1948 and 2014, though we mention many more. Some of these forty-eight films deal explicitly with the national security state, others do so only obliquely or indirectly, still others apparently not at all. All were chosen because they seem to us to be especially emblematic both of a particular moment in US public life and of a way of posing vital issues around US security. However, it bears repeating that our choice of films is in some sense arbitrary. In almost every case, other films (or films by other directors—e.g., Elia Kazan or Howard Hawks instead of John Ford) could have been chosen, and genres not examined here (e.g., the musical) could equally have been analyzed to trace the link between movies and the national security state. We purposely chose not to focus on some obvious

Introduction

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national security films (e.g., Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe), mainly because a large literature on them already exists. Nonetheless, several other widely discussed films are included here since we believe that either these have not been mined for their national security content (e.g., The Graduate, Rocky) or they have been insufficiently located in a broader cultural context (e.g., M*A*S*H, The Deer Hunter, the Rambo series). This being said, all of these forty-eight movies do address—directly or obliquely—various key issues, dilemmas, situations, and problems confronting the United States and its sense of self and role in the world since 1945. All pose, explicitly or implicitly, questions about this or that aspect of the frame of reference through which we analyze the national security state (see pp. 33–34). The American Film Institute rates several of these films as among the 100 greatest movies;11 others are, to put it politely, cruder products. But they all resonate with something vital in the culture and debates of their time. Most films that we discuss here enjoyed strong commercial success. Widely seen, they have had an impact on public debate, or reinforced one or another partisan viewpoint. In some cases, their characters’ very names, or worldviews, or take on a particular situation, or elements of the movie’s dialogue, have entered into everyday speech. Conversely, the striking box office failure of all but one of the films about the Iraq War analyzed in Chapter 9 says a great deal about the contemporary United States and how Hollywood consolidates the national security state.

Structure of the Book We present a definition of the national security state and a sketch of its components, practices, and operational modalities in Chapter 1. That chapter equally spells out our understanding of the link between Hollywood movies and the national security state as well as our method of exploring how this link operates and has evolved. Those wishing to skip this more academic discussion can proceed directly to the analysis of the movies starting in Chapter 2, secure in the knowledge that each time we first deploy an analytical concept initially outlined in Chapter 1, readers are referred to the page on which this concept is discussed. In Chapter 2, we focus on the debate over the establishment of the national security state between 1947 and 1950 through an examination of how its ideological underpinnings are refracted and legitimized through director John Ford’s celebrated cavalry trilogy. In Chapter 3, we grapple with the McCarthyite period of the first half of the 1950s and the ways in which film noir came to present a coded challenge to the premises underly-

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ing the national security state. Chapter 4 covers the period 1954 to 1969, and we explore director Alfred Hitchcock’s ambiguous take on various facets and practices of the national security state. Chapters 5 and 6 look at the tumultuous period from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s. Our focus in Chapter 5 is on how key films of the “Hollywood revolution” directly challenged the assumptions on which the national security state rested, while in Chapter 6 we explore the ways in which Hollywood channeled a growing conservative backlash that relegitimized the national security state and prepared the ground for the “Reagan revolution.” In Chapter 7, we assess the contribution of revisionist films about the Vietnam War to recasting America’s narrative of this national trauma and so grafting Reagan’s geopolitical vision onto a renewed cult of national security and a strengthened national security state. We analyze Hollywood’s attempts to grapple with the post– Cold War global order and their significance for the national security state in Chapter 8. In Chapter 9, we take up the cinematic representation of the post9/11 period and, particularly, of the Iraq War. The various threads of our argument are drawn together in the concluding chapter.

Notes 1. Weber, Imagining America at War, p. 3. 2. “United in Courage,” People Magazine, 12 September 2001, http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/people.html (accessed 15 January 2011). Lawrence Wright, quoted in “September 11: A Warning from Hollywood,” Panorama, BBC News, 24 March 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/audio _video/programmes/panorama/transcripts/transcript_24_03_02.txt (accessed 5 January, 2010). See also comments by the screenwriter of Die Hard and Die Hard 2, quoted in “September 11: A Warning from Hollywood,” and those of the explosives expert who blew up the White House in Independence Day, in Shone, Blockbuster, p. 294. See also screenwriter Michael Tolkin, “The Movie I Didn’t Know How to Write,” New York Times, 23 September 2001, www.nytimes.com/2001/09/23/magazine/23TOLKIN.html (accessed 5 January 2010). 3. A classic 1965 article argues that the disaster movie fad allowed viewers “to participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself” (Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” p. 212). For more recent evaluations and lists of disaster movies, see Broderick, “Surviving Armageddon”; Hoberman, “Nashville Contra Jaws, or ‘The Imagination of Disaster’ Revisited”; Levine and Taylor, “The Upside of Down”; Dirks, “Disaster Films.” On New York City as the principal site of disaster movies, see Shone, Blockbuster, pp. 293–294. 4. “September 11: A Warning from Hollywood,” Panorama, BBC News, 24 March 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/audio_video/programmes/panorama /transcripts/transcript_24_03_02.txt (accessed 27 January 2011). 5. Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy, p. 3. 6. On the ways in which Hollywood’s post-9/11 narratives projected competing subjectivities, or what was meant by the expression “we Americans” and how “we”

Introduction

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(the United States) should act in global politics, see Weber, Imagining America at War, pp. 2–9, passim. 7. Sklar, Movie-Made America, p. 3. 8. This includes the American movies listed on the International Movie Database (IMDb), but excludes those marked as Adult, Documentary, News, Game, and TV. For the 44,704 films released between 1894 and 2012, see “Where Are Movies Made,” A Niche in the Library of Babel, 29 June 2013, https://babelniche.wordpress.com/2013 /06/29/where-are-movies-made/ (accessed 13 December 2014). For the additional 6,607 American films released in 2013 and 2014, see “Most Popular Feature Films Released in 2013 with Country of Origin United States,” IMDb, www.imdb.com /search/title?at=0&countries=us&sort=moviemeter,asc&title_type=feature&year=2013 ,2013, and “Most Popular Feature Films Released in 2013 with Country of Origin United States,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/search/title?at=0&countries=us&sort=movie meter,asc&title_type=feature&year=2014,2014 (both accessed 21 October 2015). 9. See “Top Grossing Films of . . . [specific decade],” Stats-a-Mania, www.teako170.com/ (accessed 21 October 2011). 10. See “All Time Box Office: Domestic Grosses. Adjusted for Ticket Price Inflation,” Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm (accessed 21 October 2011). 11. American Film Institute, “AFI’s 100 Greatest Movies of All Time,” www.afi.com /100years/movies.aspx (accessed 14 June 2012).

1 The National Security State and Hollywood Movies

Our present situation calls for . . . a complete realinement [sic] of our governmental organization to serve the national security in the light of our new world power and position, our new international commitments and risks and the epochal new scientific discoveries.1 If you want to know about the United States in the twentieth century, go to the movies!2 The birth of the US national security state coincides with, and was a significant element in the outbreak of, the Cold War. Numerous authors have written about the ways in which Hollywood movies depict the Cold War, or US foreign policy and its wars, or geopolitics, ideology, or American identity.3 Though we deal with all of these issues in this book, our original contribution lies, on the one hand, in our focus on the link between movies and the national security state itself and, on the other hand, in our method of analysis. This chapter spells out each in turn.

What Is the US National Security State? Much of the vast literature dealing with the United States since World War II echoes the notion that the adoption of the 1947 National Security Act led to the emergence of the national security state. Transforming the priorities and functioning of the federal government as well as the nature and thrust of US relations with the rest of the world, this produced what even analysts with close ties to the military acknowledge as a “virtual state of war in peace-

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time” and a “growing militarization of the American government.”4 As state and society were mobilized for permanent war preparedness, “the main business of the United States government had become the development, maintenance, positioning, exploitation, and regulation of military forces.”5 The literature on the national security state ranges from critiques from the right and the left to texts that more prosaically trace its emergence and evolution, its operational modalities and functioning, and its impact on this or that aspect of American life.6 Some see the national security state as “a covert coup,” or as a vast and monolithic “hidden government of the USA . . . controlled by vested ideological and financial interests,” or as the principal vehicle to ensure the “gradual triumph of corporate and military power over democratic institutions and practices.”7 In a very different vein, others despair of the bureaucratic bloat, sclerotic practices and routines, and interagency squabbles said to render much of the national security state dysfunctional and to have significantly hobbled the United States from Korea to 9/11 and beyond.8 Most of these writings implicitly paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s description of pornography—everybody recognizes the national security state when they see it, but almost nobody has been able to define it. Many take it as a given, as self-evident, making scant effort to delineate what they mean by this term. The few existing characterizations tend to be short, and variously depict the national security state as: “a comprehensive system of interdependent institutions”; or “a civil-military decision-making nexus”;9 or the institutionalization of “a new kind of civil-military relations” through which “the professional military” maintains its “lasting ascendancy within the national government.”10 Somewhat different approaches define the national security state as “a reorganization of power and authority that contradicts and undermines the very purpose of constitutional government”; or, more originally, as a “national ‘technology enterprise’”; or, more expansively, as “both an institutionalization of a new governmental architecture designed to prepare the United States politically and militarily to face any foreign threat and the ideology—the discourse—that gave rise to as well as symbolized it.”11 While the post–World War II US national security state was, and is, all of these things, it was and is also much more. We define it as an evolving and always contested matrix of power and modes of rule, one constructed on the proclaimed imperative to maintain state and society mobilized to counter what are said to be permanent existential threats to core US interests and values. All components and practices of this matrix of power and modes of rule operate to secure the primacy across public and private life of the institutions, strategies, policies, and practices as well as the interests, norms, attitudes, perceptions, discourse, and behaviors that the national security bureaucracy claims to be essential to preserve national security and to counter such supposed threats.

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It is important to clarify what is meant by “power” and by “modes of rule” in this definition. Conventional understandings of power focus on the resources and relations that enable political actors to influence policies, behavior, and events, both within the formal political system of a state (political power) and beyond its borders (state power). Our understanding widens the notion of power beyond the formal state system to include the resources, relations, and practices through which behavior is guided and shaped, social control is exercised, and consent or compliance are produced within the public and private spheres. Power can usefully be conceived as the capacity to define socially legitimate meaning (common sense or conventional wisdom) and to stipulate the nature and composition of “reality.” The vital site on which struggles to manufacture consent or compliance are played out is that of culture and, more particularly, popular culture. We take culture to consist of the webs of shared understandings, values, practices, routines, and rituals through which collectivities of people come to assign meaning to their world—to define their view of reality—and establish the parameters of how to act in it. Arising in social interaction, culture is never static, always in process; it is never monolithic, always contested. Through myriad daily social transactions between members of a collectivity, the meanings, values, and practices that make up its culture are forged, performed, reproduced, contested, adjusted, and sometimes transformed. By popular culture we understand the various forms of cultural representation, the productions and artifacts which, driven by commercial considerations, are explicitly conceived for and directed at a mass audience. Popular culture is intended to be consumed. Its productions and artifacts are commodities: items to be bought and sold in the marketplace. The production of popular culture—and of the vocabulary, images, metaphors and tropes, archetypes and stereotypes, values, mental maps, and mindsets it embodies—in turn becomes a central terrain on which contending social forces struggle over issues that dominate public discussion at any moment. It is in the realm of popular culture that these contending social forces either succeed or fail to project their sectional viewpoint and interests onto a broader popular consciousness. Popular culture’s productions, representations, artifacts, and trends are largely fashioned by those who manage to realize the highest profits for the commercial interests controlling its various means of production. Within every human society, various categories of people have been assigned, or have assumed for themselves, the role of attributing or of disputing meaning for the broader society. Such interpreters or culture brokers exercise the vital levers of power in that they greatly influence the ways in which a social group views itself and its internal and external relations, in a word how its members understand reality. Drawing the boundaries of the community, culture brokers specify who belongs and who is excluded. They delin-

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eate the power structure and which interests, values, and social roles, and rituals, routines, and artistic practices are legitimate and which are not. In similar vein, we use the term “modes of rule” rather than “government” to refer to more than just state institutions and policies and so as to incorporate two more recent notions: that of governmentality—the techniques, practices and strategies through which “a society is rendered governable”12—and that of governance—“the processes of interaction and decision-making amongst the actors involved in a collective problem that lead to the creation, reinforcement, or reproduction of social norms and institutions.”13 Defined in these terms, the national security state includes more than just a complex nexus of (often competing) military, intelligence, legislative, and decisionmaking institutions, and more than the reorganization of power and policy within the American state. Likewise, the politics of, over, and about the national security state extend beyond the formal structures and policies of the federal government to reach into multiple facets of public and private life across the planet. Moreover, this evolving matrix of power and modes of rule is rooted in several discreet but interrelated and mutually reinforcing components, practices, and operational modalities.

Components, Practices, and Operational Modalities World War II transformed the United States into the hegemonic global military and economic power. This had three crucial effects for the future development of the American state and society. Firstly, civil-military relations underwent a veritable revolution as the leadership of the armed forces now acquired a central strategic and decisionmaking role in day-to-day government.14 Secondly, the explosion of wartime industrial production to meet military needs erased the Depression and set the pattern in which a new military-technological-industrial complex became the engine driving both the US economy and emerging mass consumer society. And thirdly, Pearl Harbor and wartime developments shattered preexisting notions of national defense and of America’s national interests and global role. National Security Ideology and the Global Order

Between 1945 and 1950, US national interests and national defense came to be framed exclusively in terms of the entirely new ideology of national security.15 By ideology, we understand a systemized set of myths, beliefs, principles, and ideas that are held to be irrefutable. Ideology is constructed on a particular narrative of social reality, social community, and social identity (i.e., what is the supposedly natural order of social relations, and who

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“we” are and where “we” stand relative to others—“them”). It privileges certain values and norms in ways that legitimate and promote particular social interests and relations of power, and prescribes (and proscribes) specific forms of social action and behavior. All ideological narratives crystallize the various fears, anxieties, and insecurities that social instability, dislocation, and conflict elicit in different sets of social groups. Projecting these fused fears, anxieties, and insecurities onto an external object (them) said to be the principal source of all such instability, dislocation, and conflict, ideology mobilizes disparate groups (us) to oppose this identified external object. Successful ideology ceases to appear as something external to and imposed on the members of a population. Rather, it comes to mediate their spontaneous relationship with the external world and the ways in which they perceive its meaning.16 American post–World War II national security ideology has been rooted in several interlinked articles of faith, well summarized by one of the principal historians of the emergence of the national security state.17 The first held that World War II and particularly the advent of nuclear weapons signaled that “a new era of total war had dawned on the United States,” one which, secondly, required permanent vigilance and the mobilization of all national resources for permanent military preparedness and permanent war. Thirdly, in the highly unstable postwar global power balance, American survival was threatened by a fanatical and ruthless Other, an enemy driven by a messianic ideology and bent on destroying the West and its way of life. Fourthly, since “leadership of the free world was a sacred mission thrust upon the American people by divine Providence and the laws of both history and nature,” only a global preponderance of American power could ensure the survival of the United States and the free world. This remorseless struggle for survival implied, fifthly, a form of domino theory according to which gains made by this enemy anywhere in the world “increased the risk to freedom in the United States.” Finally, this all-embracing national security ideology “defined America’s national identity by reference to the un-American ‘other,’” thereby rhetorically equating any domestic critique of either the national security ideology or the policies it entailed with this all-threatening Other—an act of disloyalty to the United States itself; in a word, un-American. This new ideology of national security thus both extended the range of what were considered vital US interests (i.e., those for which it was prepared to go to war) to the farthest corners of the planet and depicted these interests as dependent on the United States forging and policing a reorganized capitalist global order (the Bretton Woods system). As a result, “problems in foreign relations are viewed as urgent and immediate threats. Thus, desirable foreign policy goals are translated into issues of national survival, and the range of threats becomes limitless.”18

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Movies, Myth, and the National Security State

Throughout the long decades of the Cold War, Soviet expansion and aggression was the external object onto which the ideology promoted by the national security state displaced Americans’ insecurities over the atomic age and over galloping post–World War II domestic class, racial, ethnic, regional, gender, and ideological conflict.19 From the mid-1990s onward, Islamic fundamentalist terrorism came to play the same role. National security ideology then depicted the raison d’être of the federal government as one of defending American identity and the “free world” through “continual engagement overseas through diplomacy, war and covert action.”20 Doctrine and Grand Strategy

National security doctrine is a declaration of principles that “creates binding strategic assertions, backed by the use of force”; it provides “the north star of guidance for American policymakers and a warning to potential enemies.”21 From the first strategy doctrine issued by the newly created National Security Council in 1948, US national security doctrine hinged around the assertion that “Communist ideology and Soviet behavior clearly demonstrate that the ultimate objective of the leaders of the USSR [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics] is the domination of the world.”22 As a result, “the gravest threat to the national security” and to the “relative world position of the United States” was said to lie in “the political, economic and psychological warfare which the USSR is now waging . . . the risk of war with the USSR is sufficient to warrant . . . timely and adequate prudence by the United States.”23 These conclusions were endorsed in the April 1950 National Security Council strategy document, NSC 68. This “bible of American National security policy,”24 characterized the Soviet Union as “animated by a new fanatic faith . . . [which] seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world,” a “slave state” that promoted “the idea of slavery” and whose “implacable purpose” was to eliminate the freedom embodied by the United States.25 Out of this doctrine of permanent threat emerged a new concept of US grand strategy, or the “foreign policy elite’s theory about how to produce national security.”26 Grand strategy seeks “to impose coherence and predictability on an inherently disorderly environment composed of thinking, reacting, competing and conflicting entities.”27 It “enumerates and prioritizes threats and adduces political and military remedies for them” while simultaneously explaining “why and how the remedies proposed would work.”28 Despite flirtations in the 1950s and the 1980s with the idea of rollback, between 1946 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, American grand strategy remained that of containment—a broad consensus that the most fundamental objective of all US foreign and domestic politics was “to contain the Soviet Union on the Eurasian landmass.”29 Taken together,

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national security doctrine and grand strategy produced what Marcus Raskin and Carl LeVan have aptly labeled a new “grammar of power,” one designed “to ensure that the U.S. can operate as the paramount power in the world, coming and going as it pleases, with whatever weapons it chooses.”30 Institutions and the Centralization of Power

The 1947 National Security Act laid down the basic institutional framework on which the national security state was erected. Its core institutions today include the National Security Council, the US armed forces, some twenty official intelligence agencies making up the US Intelligence Community,31 and various standing congressional committees. The more than 1,000 government organizations implicated in security issues are further served by and depend on an array of arms producers and private military contractors as well as numerous think tanks, foundations, and research institutes, together involving millions of people.32 This reorganization of the architecture of American government led to a far-reaching centralization of information flows and decisionmaking power in a tight circle around the president, one consisting largely of his appointees. The president aside, the dominant positions in the national security state today include the national security advisor, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director, the secretaries of defense and state, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (since the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act) and the director of national intelligence (since the post was created in 2004). Together with the vice president, these officials make up the Principals Committee of the National Security Council. Almost all other members of the cabinet have been reduced to a second-tier role in government.33 A spreading web of secrecy and increasing resort by all post–World War II administrations to government via presidential findings, executive orders, decision directives, and administrative regulations has reinforced the bureaucratic clout and role of these national security institutions. American democracy and the overall integrity of US public life have been the big losers. The elected members of Congress are able to claim a decisive national security and foreign policy role only in moments of presidential vulnerability (particularly in the period following Watergate) and in direct confrontation with the president.34 As a range of official security experts and pundits acquired the exclusive right to delimit the boundaries of legitimate political opinion and discussion and to discipline or punish those who strayed beyond these limits, public debate has been circumscribed and sometimes shut down, and institutions and citizens have frequently retreated into self-censorship. And as the Pentagon Papers, the Iran-contra affair, misrepresentations about the Iraq War, and the debate over torture have all revealed, the institutions and agents of the national security state

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frequently mislead and even deceive Congress and the American public in the name of the greater good of a national security that they have themselves defined. The term militarization is widely used to describe this reorganization of government. However, this notion actually obscures key aspects of the national security state. America’s armed forces were certainly its principal beneficiaries in terms of budgetary allocations and political and bureaucratic clout, and their top commanders indeed acquired a permanent and statutory role in the making and execution of national security policy. Yet as many have shown, a major source of the national security state’s longstanding dysfunctional aspects has been the sustained and bitter turf wars between some of its institutions (particularly between the various armed services and, to a lesser extent, between the intelligence agencies) over roles, mission, budgets, and strategy.35 Moreover, the term militarization inadequately describes the central role of the intelligence services and particularly the CIA. What Daniel Yergin long ago labeled as the “gospel of national security” placed a primacy on intelligence and on secrecy.36 Though the CIA has “never fulfilled its primary statutory mandate” of correlating, evaluating, and disseminating foreign intelligence,37 its covert activities have, for many, become the symbol of the national security state and frequently have little or nothing to do with the military. Security Practices

The day-to-day functioning of the national security state has always rested on a range of domestic and external, overt and covert, legal, semilegal, and sometimes outright illegal security practices. These were designed to ensure that the issues prioritized by the national security bureaucracy remained at the top of the national agenda: that they secured the lion’s share of national resources and political energies, and that competing visions and strategies were discredited or silenced. Such security practices include, inter alia: Surveillance. The doctrine of permanent threat implies an imperative to

identify and root out potential sources of threat, foreign and domestic, and to preserve the web of secrecy enveloping the national security state. As the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Security Agency (NSA), CIA, and other agencies acquired the ability to tap into virtually every means of communication and snoop into any private life, the hitherto relatively weak federal government morphed into a vast surveillance state probing the farthest reaches of the planet and plumbing the most private household secrets.38 Edward Snowden’s revelations simply underscore the exponential expansion of the surveillance state since 9/11.39

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Discipline and repression. Beginning with the March 1947 imposition

of a Loyalty Oath on federal employees and setting up of loyalty boards in federal departments and agencies, the national security state was fixed in place through a panoply of formal and informal disciplinary and repressive measures. These function to protect the web of secrecy that sustains the national security state, to silence or discipline dissent and modes of thought and behavior at variance with national security ideology, and to punish those designated to be in noncompliance. The best-known disciplinary measures include the Hollywood blacklists, the House (of Representatives) Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearings, and the overall climate of harassment and censure known as McCarthyism. Various media attack dogs and other nonstate bodies have also long played a central role in such patrolling of the boundaries of what are said to be legitimate modes of thought. The more repressive aspects of the national security state have ranged from legislation outlawing nonconformist political organizations (e.g., the 1950 Internal Security [McCarran] Act) to laws that expanded the powers and purview of existing security institutions (the Patriot Act of 2001) or created new ones (the 2002 Homeland Security Act). Covert action. Following CIA covert actions to topple elected govern-

ments in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), President Dwight D. Eisenhower commissioned the 1954 Doolittle Report. Insisting that national “survival” required abandoning fair play and “the rules of the game,” this report urged that “no-one should be permitted to stand in the way” of the United States developing “an aggressive covert, psychological political and paramilitary organization,” one “more unique, more effective and, if necessary, more ruthless than that employed by the enemy.”40 The “900 major covert operations, as well as many minor ones” carried out by the CIA between 1951 and 1975 quickly became “a major arm of US foreign policy,” and the CIA “established itself as the most effective instrument in the secret brinkmanship of the cold war.”41 Through its own Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) activities of 1956−1971, the FBI likewise launched a gamut of covert extralegal measures against a range of domestic dissidents.42 The CIA’s own 1973 accounting and the 1975 Report of the Senate’s (Church) Committee revealed an array of illegal covert agency activities including plots to assassinate foreign heads of government, support for military coups, the illegal imprisonment of a KGB defector, large-scale illegal surveillance of American journalists and activists, funding of thought control experiments on unsuspecting subjects, among others.43 The December 2014 publication of a summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report again underscores the extent of often illegal CIA covert activities.44

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Political economy. During World War II, “the United States started out

behind, and in many cases never caught up” with German military technology.45 Nevertheless, the awesome power of the atomic weapons produced by the Manhattan Project demonstrated that federally funded science and technological development stood at the forefront of expanding US military and economic capacity. Military planners and scientists “were agreed that the preservation of a ‘preeminent position’ in weapons technology must be a central goal of peacetime defense policy.”46 Following World War II, both the military and American industry acted to maintain their control over “the vast network of wartime laboratories and institutions in which they had an interest,” and sustained federal financing for science and technology ensured that much of this investment fell under military control.47 An emerging political economy of national security was organized around what Aaron Friedberg has labeled “mechanisms of power creation” designed to mobilize money and manpower, and direct resources toward “arms production, military research, and defense-supporting industries.”48 More recent research has led Linda Weiss to characterize the “vast state machinery” of the national security state as “a national ‘technology enterprise,’” one geared to the “permanent mobilization of the nation’s science and technology resources for military purposes.”49 The national security state has been “the crucible for breakthrough innovations, a catalyst for entrepreneurship and the formation of new firms, and a collaborative network coordinator for private sector initiatives.”50 Its vital economic role explains why the United States has pioneered all major advanced industries since World War II, all of which “emerged from patient federal investment in high-risk innovation, focused in the main on national security objectives.”51 Hegemonic Mindset

The national security state has been able to operate and evolve since 1947 only on the condition that it secures the active support, or at least the passive consent or compliance, of large groups of people, principally at home but also abroad. Consent and compliance have been manufactured, acquired, maintained, and reproduced through the inculcation of a hegemonic mindset that naturalizes official national security ideology and grand strategy as obvious or self-evident. The concept of hegemony implies “the enrollment of others in the exercise of your power by convincing, cajoling and coercing them that they should want what you want.”52 A hegemonic mindset is a vision of the world—and an accompanying set of prescriptions for acceptable behavior—that acquires the status of common sense and so paints the particular sectional interests embodied in that vision as if these represent the general

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interest. Such a hegemonic mindset never falls from the sky, it is always the product of ongoing social and political struggles, and its principles and prescriptions are always contested, challenged, and debated. The national security enterprise is predicated on the assertion that small groups of experts have privileged and exclusive knowledge about the nature of existential threat, and how best to counter it. The discourse of the emerging academic discipline of international relations, and particularly the assertions of realist international relations theory, played a key role in inculcating this hegemonic mindset. Realist theory claimed the status of science for notions of permanent threat and the primacy of national security. Together with activities of “foundations such as the SSRC [Social Science Research Council],” this helped “to acclimate the American people to the logic and rhetoric of national security and anti-Communism.”53 Yet relatively few Americans were familiar with abstruse academic theories and analyses. It is our central claim in this book that Hollywood movies played the key role rooting in the wider American popular consciousness the belief that the institutions, interests, ideology, doctrines, grand strategy, modes of rule, powers, practices, and even the excesses of the national security state not only were natural and necessary, but also marked an extension into a new epoch of national traditions and interests. They did so through their ability to root into long-standing American mythology explicit and implicit portrayals of what we take to be as two central aspects of the post–World War II American hegemonic mindset, the security imaginary and the Cold War consensus. The American security imaginary. The vision of the national security state explicitly or implicitly present in any Hollywood movie can be fruitfully grasped through a variant of the notion of a social imaginary. This refers to the ways in which “ordinary people” come to “imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.”54 The security component of the US social imaginary is well captured in the concept, adapted from Jutta Weldes, of the American security imaginary.55 Our version of this notion of a US security imaginary refers to the range of cultural practices that together define a uniquely American geopolitical space and identity—an American Self (who ‘we’ are)—in relation to a depiction of a threatening world beyond US borders (how and why ‘they’ threaten us). Specifying who is included in and who is excluded from the American community, and what are the appropriate social relations and power structure within that community, the security imaginary further stipulates which Others inhabit that dangerous external world and how they threaten the American Self. In so fostering a permanent sense of insecurity,

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the security imaginary equally draws the contours of the existing global order and the extent to which this global order is said to help, hinder, or harm what are declared to be vital American interests and core values. These cultural practices thus delineate the relationship of these various Others to the American Self; they lay out the conditions, contexts, and mechanisms through which this or that Other becomes represented as friend or foe and delimit the parameters of how to defend the United States and what are claimed to be its interests against the latter. In demarcating the boundaries of authentic American values, identity, interests, and behaviors, the security imaginary operates to discredit, marginalize, or silence those said to be beyond the pale of the mainstream. Such a definition of the relationship between an American Self and the threatening Other in a defined global order emerges in ongoing and contested processes extending beyond the formal political system. Analysis of the evolving American security imaginary needs grapples with the range of contested cultural representations and practices through which changing notions of difference became institutionalized as threat—to the extent that the mere evocation of a particular Other (Soviet, communist, or leftist, during the Cold War; Islamic fundamentalist, or even Muslim or Arab since 9/11) automatically conjures up a sense of insecurity and threat, producing common reactions and responses. The process of institutionalizing difference as threat is one central component of what the security studies literature labels securitization. This concept refers to a political move by socially authorized actors who attempt to frame a contentious or politicized issue as one of national survival—and, hence, as lying outside of, beyond, and above mere partisan politics and the established rules of the game. Securitization moves are a “more extreme form of politicization” in that they seek to give the status of unquestionable truth to the perception, vision, or policies of one set of political actors and, thus, render illegitimate or even illegal any dissidence or opposition.56 For a securitization move to succeed, it must be anchored outside of the formal political system and achieve wide resonance in popular culture. Hollywood films played a significant role in establishing in the popular imagination this definition of the relationship between an American Self and the threatening Other in a defined global order. They often did so through also projecting a particular take on the second element of the post– World War II hegemonic mindset. The Cold War consensus. The term Cold War consensus occurs in two distinct senses in the literature. The more limited meaning alludes to bipartisan principles—“partisan politics stop at the water’s edge”—said to have characterized congressional attitudes to national security.57 However, as Julian Zelizer has demonstrated, the politics of national security remained fero-

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ciously partisan throughout the Cold War, and bipartisanship was largely a fig leaf used by both the Republican and Democratic parties to cover up their own partisan positions and decry and castigate those of their opponents.58 We use the term Cold War consensus in a second and broader sense to designate a set of values and tenets widely shared by Americans throughout the Cold War (see Box 1.1). With occasional variation, these have carried over into the post-9/11 era and adherence to them has long been the litmus test of whether any individual was a good, patriotic American or not. The remainder of this chapter sets out our understanding of how even the most ostensibly nonpolitical films contribute to this securitization process and to the Cold War consensus.

Mere Entertainment? The commercial cinema was America’s principal cultural industry throughout the twentieth century. Weekly movie tickets sales peaked at 110 million by 1929.59 Though attendance fell sharply during the Depression, throughout the 1930s Americans bought over 50 million movie tickets each week. As audiences returned during World War II, ticket sales climbed to 90 million weekly in 1946, or four times attendance at church services. This fell again to 60 million in 1950, yet still far surpassed weekly church attendance.60 The movie palaces of the time were the temples in which were performed the rites of America’s civil religion; that is, where its core values and mythology were enacted, propagated, reproduced. Watching movies in the dark was a ritualized communal experience. The larger-than-life action on the screen engaged, channeled, and amplified visceral and shared emotions; established and reinforced desires, fantasies, and anxieties; and evoked collective identification with the principal characters, their dilemmas, choices, and ultimate fate. Together with the studio-fostered cult of celebrity and star system, this gave the movies unrivaled power over the collective imagination, emotions, and sense of identity. Recognition of cinema’s power to mold popular consciousness led to persistent official and private efforts to control its content. In 1930, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America (MPPDAA) adopted a voluntary code of standards (the Production Code, commonly known as the Hays Code), made it obligatory in 1934, and only abandoned it in 1968. During World War II, the government’s Office of War Information (OWI) controlled the content of Hollywood films. Most American cities maintained their own censorship board and an array of religious watchdogs rated every movie. The most powerful of these, the National Legion of Decency (later renamed the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures) exercised inordinate influence over the content and commercial

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fate of Hollywood productions. Congressional hearings into supposed communist influence in Hollywood in 1947 and 1951 produced the blacklists barring some 500 directors, screenwriters, and actors from the industry.

Box 1.1 Principal Tenets of the Cold War Consensus

• The primacy of national security as the supreme American value, the overriding objective of the federal government, and principal litmus test of individual loyalty to Americanism; • The imperative of preponderant US military power as the precondition for national security and as the guarantor of the global capitalist system, representative democracy, freedom and world peace; coupled with the need for the federal government to maintain vigorous domestic and external vigilance against and surveillance over communism and its perceived agents and fellow travelers, and the absolute right of the United States to deploy all its power resources to impede any effort to limit free enterprise anywhere on the planet; • The role of the corporation as the agent of economic progress. Docile (i.e., pro-capitalist) labor unions could play a role in helping maintain social order and improve living standards on condition that they eschew any hint of socialist commitment; • Macroeconomic policies of militarized Keynesianism in which steady economic growth would be guaranteed by massive military spending and active economic federal intervention to ensure full employment; • Ever increasing mass consumption, and the right of all Americans to an improving standard of living; • A Judeo-Christian worldview as the broad tent to accommodate American diversity. This includes an idealized view of the patriarchal, middle-class, god-fearing, law-abiding, and self-reliant nuclear family as America’s fundamental social unit and the embodiment and font of “authentic” American values; • The necessity and inevitability of evolutionary social progress and social justice to eliminate the rough edges of society and open the American Dream to all Americans; • A constitutional process and strong civic culture, with political participation as the means to ensure the just society.

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Hollywood has long been “a vital center of [American] political life” and prominent Hollywood personalities have played “a vital role in shaping the course of American politics.”61 Movie stars—mostly conservative Republicans—have been elected to political offices as diverse as city mayor, congressman, senator, governor of California, and the presidency itself. Moreover, Hollywood has produced hundreds of films that explicitly take a political stance in a highly politicized context. Yet for all the frequent complaints across the political spectrum about “Hollywood’s political agenda,” virtually without exception all Hollywood productions are financed, produced, and distributed with the primary aim of making money by entertaining as many people as possible. The overwhelming majority of movies are not made to grind a political ax. Hollywood’s long-standing aversion to overtly political movies is summed up in the old studio adage: “If you want to send a message, use Western Union!” How then can we claim that even the most anodyne and ostensibly apolitical of post–World War II Hollywood entertainments played a role in consolidating the national security state? If politics and ideology are usually neither intended, nor overtly present, where and how are a film’s politics and ideological orientation to be found? These questions frequently produce two sets of stock answers. The first is to slot films into neat political or ideological pigeonholes: either “corporate liberal” or “populist-conservative”; or again as “liberal,” “centrist,” or “conservative.”62 A second common set of answers is found in pejorative labels such as “the Hollywood leftist establishment,” “the Hollywood War Machine,” “the Hollywood-Pentagon axis,” “the Military-Industrial-MediaEntertainment-Network,” and “the Complex.”63 Both of these sets of answers are problematic. Slotting movies into predefined ideological or political categories presumes they all have a coherent sociopolitical vision and that none project a mixed or contradictory perspective, or can mean different things to different people. Such predetermined categories gloss over the myriad ways in which ideology, culture, and myth intersect to produce a view of the world that, while it may well correspond with the official view propagated by the state or by business or some other interest group, is seldom imposed by any of them. The pejorative labels equally reduce the widely varying ideological content of American films to a single and consciously controlled message. They presume Hollywood to be a channel either for official propaganda or for a single ideological viewpoint. Hollywood has indeed long enjoyed a “symbiotic relationship” with the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies, a relationship that has “helped shape the perceptions that the American people have had of war, of violence and of its armed services.”64 Between 1948 and 1962, “the Pentagon assisted 45 per cent of Hollywood’s War Films,”65 and each of America’s armed services and several of its intelligence agen-

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cies maintains its own entertainment industry liaison bureau to ensure that Hollywood positively depicts their undertakings. The FBI initiated this process in the 1930s by setting up an Office of Public Affairs to liaise with the news media, entertainment and publishing industries, researchers, and community-based organizations. Today, the bureau’s Investigative Publicity and Public Affairs Unit handles these activities.66 For its part, the Defense Department’s Entertainment Media Division is run from the Pentagon while the entertainment industry liaison bureau of each US armed service operates out of office space shared between them in a Wiltshire Boulevard building in Los Angeles.67 The CIA, on the other hand, long declined “to play a role in filmmaking ventures about the Agency which come to our attention.”68 However, prodded by the extremely negative image of the Agency presented in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), by 1995 the CIA “began to actively, formally, and more fully work with the Hollywood entertainment industry.”69 All of this has led some to suggest that Hollywood and the Pentagon have institutionalized forms of collaboration in which “Hollywood producers get . . . access to billions of dollars worth of military hardware and equipment . . . and the military get . . . films that portray the military in a positive light; films that help the services in their recruiting efforts.”70 However, while Hollywood certainly has made thinly disguised official propaganda movies since World War II, these represent a mere fraction of its output.71 Moreover, notions of Hollywood as a witting tool of the Pentagon or CIA fail to understand that even without such manipulation, the movie industry is central to establishing and reproducing the hegemonic mindset propping up the national security state. And it does so far more effectively than does official propaganda. Its power lies less in disseminating an official line than in propagating a standardized culture, together with idealized notions of national identity, the American community and authentic American values (who “we” are and what “we” stand for) across a country always deeply fragmented by race, region, ethnicity, class, gender, religion, and political outlook. Most American filmmakers conceive of their products as being apolitical or neutral and, as mentioned above, the overwhelmingly primary purpose of Hollywood productions is to turn a profit by entertaining as many people as possible. Yet entertainment is never devoid of social and ideological content. That which is “designed to make people feel good at the movies has a profound relation to how and what people think about the world around them.”72 Even the blandest entertainments depict the social order in a certain way, and embody a more or less coherent vision of society. All movies project a particular geography of social relations: they place individuals in that geopolitical space and social order, and privilege a specific view of appropriate relations between categories of social agents.

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Films reflect, perform, propagate, and reproduce social desires and anxieties. They model legitimate and illegitimate behavior and their idealized consequences, and depict what are said to be appropriate and inappropriate values, and for whom—what it means to be an American or an American man or a woman; boy or girl; black, white, or Hispanic; middle class, poor, or rich. Until the advent of mass television in the 1950s, commercial cinema was the principal medium socializing America’s consumers and citizens: “The movies have taught Americans how to kiss, make love, conceive of gender roles and understand their place in the world.”73 Hollywood movies diffuse larger-than-life representations of what are, or should be (and what are not, or should not be) the roles, values, and interests of an American consumer and citizen. In doing so, they furnish much of the vocabulary, images, myths, metaphors and tropes, representational practices, mental maps, archetypes, mindset, and attendant emotional attitudes (in a word, the social imaginary) through which most Americans have come to think and feel about themselves and their country and its role in the world since World War II. Movies are the “mythological determinant . . . in the creation of the idea of America.”74 While TV came to play a similar role, the narrative and emotional power of collectively viewed images on the big screen dwarfs that of TV, ensuring that “films will long continue to serve as the nation’s preeminent instrument of cultural expression—reflecting and shaping values and cultural ideas.”75 All of this means that, without any necessary intent to do so on the part of their makers, every movie projects a discernable (if often contradictory) ideological worldview and perspective. It bears repeating that the ideological or political content of any film can never be reduced to a simple question of conscious intent on the part of its makers, and may in fact even run counter to such expressed intent. Rather, this ideological or political content is to be found in the explicit and implicit ways in which the film in question reflects and shapes one or other version of “the idea of America” and of the US place and role in the world. And since the meaning of this idea of America has been hotly disputed since the Revolutionary War, Hollywood products have long been the primary vector and site of the struggle to establish the hegemonic American mindset. The details of the particular method we use in this book to grasp the (often contradictory) ideological and political content of a wide range of post–World War II Hollywood films, and more specifically the contribution of each to legitimizing, debating, or contesting the national security state, are outlined below (see pp. 33–34). However, it first is necessary to spell out what seems to us to be the crucial mechanism through which Hollywood movies project, perform, debate, and sometimes contest the American security imaginary and its Cold War consensus.

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Americanism and Un-Americanism Echoing liberal historian Richard Hofstadter’s oft-cited remark that the fate of the United States was “not to have ideologies but to be one,” neoconservative sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset claimed in the 1990s that being an American “is an ideological commitment. It is not a matter of birth. Those who reject American values are un-American.”76 The ideology of Americanism sprang from the fissiparous character of US society and its polity. Long before House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously proclaimed that “all politics is local,” dominant elites defined their interests and identities in local rather than national terms. Given this local basis of identities, and given the peculiar national style of American politics and ceaseless culture wars since 1783, “the identity of the United States as a nation remains unusually fluid and elusive.”77 To hold together this fragmented and fractious republic of colonizers and immigrants, Americanism emerged as a Manichean tale of good us and evil them; of progress, truth, justice, and the American way. Americanism can be understood as an ongoing discursive strategy to forge an always fragile national identity through a definition of who is included in and who is excluded from the American community.78 Americanism defines national space, national identity, and national interests: it warrants some forms of action and disqualifies others, promotes certain sets of social interests and renders others illegitimate. It incorporates so-called authentic values, interests, norms, standards, and representational practices, ones that proscribe the limits of what positions, attitudes, and policies can legitimately be adopted in public and political life. Americanism is by definition a binary notion. To play its role of separating the legitimate from the illegitimate in public life, it necessarily incorporates its sometimes silent and sometimes vociferous twin: un-Americanism. The disciplining power of Americanism—its silencing of all but an ideologically approved and narrow range of dissent—is a hallmark of “the national style” of US politics.79 Its corollary is that all political and social struggles necessarily turn around the definition of that which is claimed to be authentically and uniquely American. To be heard, all social actors must necessarily affirm that they rather than their opponents are the bearers of “real” American values. No dissenters can permit themselves to question the ideological foundations of the republic; they must rather assert that those from whom they dissent do not represent “true” American value or interests, that such persons are themselves somehow un-American. Thus, during the 1930s, the US Communist party claimed communism to be “twentieth-century Americanism” while the pro-Nazi German-American Bund (a fascist political organization during the 1930s and 1940s) described fascism as “true Americanism,” equating Adolph Hitler with George Washington.80

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The meaning of Americanism has always been contested. Yet while the boundaries of authentic American values have stretched or shrunk in recurrent culture wars, they are not infinitely elastic. A recent survey of contemporary culture wars concludes that both left and right “share the same American cultural values in propounding their different versions . . . [and] adhere to remarkably similar cultural positions.”81 A core set of remarkably stable “canonical ideals” has laid at the heart of the “quasi-religious ideal” of Americanism since the Declaration of Independence.82 These include at least the following qualities, ones so frequently invoked that they have hardened into cliché: the primacy of individual identity over communal ties, belief in almost unlimited social mobility, absence of an established state church and the consequent flourishing of both diverse denominations and grassroots piety, and a potent tradition of anti-authoritarian and anti-centralist politics. One should also add the remarkable self-confidence of most Americans, particularly white ones, that they live in a nation blessed by God that has a right, even duty, to help other nations become more like the United States.83

Thus, rather than seeking to root the ideology of Americanism in this or that set of core values, our approach focuses instead on this common mythology. While American values may evolve, the mythology of America has remained remarkably constant and powerful since the American Revolution. This implies that those who would codify and stipulate core authentic American values are obliged to anchor their claims within this shared mythology. Only by doing so can the proponents of this or that view assert legitimacy for their particular political project. And since mythology is always the object of widely varying interpretations, this approach enables us to take account of ambiguities and contradictions as well as of the ways in which the boundaries of American values have stretched or shrunk in ongoing culture wars.

The Mythology of America Every society rests on its own particular mythology—a set of persistent narratives, tropes, and beliefs that spell out that society’s origins, evolution, values and character, its image of the community of which that society is said to consist. In this sense, myths are commonly repeated stories about the past rather than pure fiction. Such repeated narratives are the central mechanism of what has been usefully labeled “cultural memory”—a construction of a shared view of the past, one which defines identity, values, and the boundaries of the imagined community in question (who is included

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and who is excluded). Cultural memory is always “freely built according to the demands of the respective present,”84 and serves “as a compelling idea for the future.”85 While these stories reflect a greater or lesser degree of historical accuracy, through persistent repetition and usage they acquire the force of truth. In this sense, “myths are frozen hypotheses. Serious questions are answered by declaration and will not be re-opened.”86 No matter how bizarre they might appear to outsiders, myths “evoke deeply held belief . . . [that] appears as essential truth to its believers.”87 While myths are “crucial to the world view and self-image of a people,”88 all myths are partial: in the sense of being incomplete and of privileging one among competing narratives of a complex past. Hence, Ronald Wright’s description of early nineteenth-century America: “seen from inside by free citizens, the young United States was indeed a thriving democracy in a land of plenty; seen from below by slaves, it was a cruel tyranny; and seen from outside by free Indians, it was a ruthlessly expanding empire. All of these stories are true, but if we know only one without the other, what we know is not history but myth. And such myths are dangerous.”89 The immense social power of myth depends as much on what it leaves out or distorts in the historical narrative as on that which it includes and affirms. Attempts to grasp how myths become such “frozen hypotheses,” how they work to fashion consensus, must thus necessarily grapple with what has been called the social organization of forgetting90—the ways in which all mythology silences, occludes, or writes out of the narrative, not just other stories or versions of the past but also the falsehoods, contradictions, and paradoxes built into the narratives and tropes sustaining the myth in question. Each society has its own unique social organization of forgetting. In the United States, this is colored by a peculiarly American view of the past. Almost forty years ago, Nora Sayre remarked that “our national memory is meager . . . the fifties and even Vietnam seem as remote as the Peloponnesian war . . . the past itself is suspect: arthritic as well as old.”91 This “American tendency to discount the weight of the past”—its “perpetually renewed historical virginity”92—is embodied in the common put-down, “You’re history, buddy!” Rather being seen as the force that shapes the present and delimits the future, history and the past are frequently reduced to the status of irrelevant (and, hence, unproblematic): that which counts is the blank slate of the future. Such a social organization of forgetting confers great power on mythology and the agents and industries that propagate it. All versions of Americanism are anchored in five mutually reinforcing foundation myths—exceptionalism, universalism, Manifest Destiny, the myth of the frontier, and the American war story. The ways in which Hollywood movies project, perform, or criticize each is thus a key element in struggles over the boundaries of Americanism.

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Exceptionalism

The myth of American exceptionalism is “a crystallization of a set of related ideas which explain the world and the U.S. role therein.”93 It consists of three core notions that “have remained relatively consistent throughout American history.”94 The United States is seen as an inherently peace-loving and democratic nation, a special country with a special destiny—one that is qualitatively different from, and morally and politically superior to, the despotic and belligerent European societies out of which it was born. This means the United States can escape the logic and the rise and decline of great powers. Exceptionalism rests on a social organization of forgetting that describes American history as “a rags to riches story that focuses on the luck and pluck and not on the stealing and killing entailed in becoming a continental and then a global empire.”95 As widely held on the left as on the right, exceptionalism is interpreted in widely varying fashion. Left or liberal American critics of US policy frequently express dismay that their government has failed to live up to the ideal of exceptionalism (and, hence, to the “Idea of America”). In berating the United States for behaving like any imperialist power, for not being different (exceptional), disappointed left critics in fact reinforce the myth of exceptionalism.96 On the other hand, much of the American right appears to believe that since exceptionalism holds the United States to be superior by definition to any other state, anything America does is necessarily good and moral and criticism of any US action is necessarily unpatriotic and unAmerican. Universalism and Manifest Destiny

The myth of universalism is the “belief that everyone in the world must have similar perceptions, values, priorities and goals as Americans.”97 Universalism asserts that American values and interests necessarily exemplify universal human aspirations. Since “the ideal of America is the hope of mankind . . . the light [that] shines in the darkness,” US actions embody human progress.98 Universalism complements a third foundation myth. Best expressed by President Woodrow Wilson, the myth of Manifest Destiny insists that “Providence and . . . divine destiny” have decreed “we are chosen and prominently chosen to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.”99 These myths imply that those who reject universal Americanist values necessarily stand opposed to humanity; those who challenge America’s manifest obligation to lead the world defy the logic of providence and history. It requires but a small leap to proclaim America’s adversaries to be

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uncivilized, or the enemies of freedom, even evil doers—thereby, in turn, rhetorically absolving the United States of the obligation to treat them according to its own standards. The Myth of the Frontier

From the outset, the narrative, values, and economic practices of Americanism constructed an American geography and geopolitics built around an infinitely elastic sense of internal space and opportunity. The frontier is the zone of confrontation between civilization and barbarism, backwardness and progress, order and disorder: it is pristine space to be pacified, settled, civilized, and pushed outward in the name of universal human values and progress. The myth of the frontier is famously summed up in Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 “frontier thesis,” which argues that the frontier was the source of the exceptional American national character, of vitality and individual freedom.100 Generating a mercantilist “bonanza economy,” it was the foundation of America’s growing wealth.101 Migration and the prospect of wealth in vast and virgin territory were central ingredients in Americanism’s ideological glue, its tropes of the land of opportunity and the self-made man. The frontier “made it possible for Americans to keep reenacting the core element of the American myth—the new beginning”102—or the ability to escape the dual prison of the past and of social structure, and to achieve the American Dream. In this sense, the myth of the frontier anchors the fundamental meaning of American individualism, as agency—the notion that any American can be, should be, a social actor capable of acting on their social context to improve their own lot and shape their own destiny. The American War Story

The myth of the elastic frontier sanctioned permanent US expansion through securitization—the demonization of the barbarous Other as existential threat to Self. Like each of the other myths underpinning Americanism, it embodies a particular narrative of why America goes to war and how it fights them. Adapting Tom Engelhardt’s analysis, we suggest that six tropes underpin this “American war story.”103 Only wars of liberation. Exceptionalism insists that Americans abhor war

as the principal threat to public liberty. Yet the United States is, in the title of a military history, “a country made by war.”104 This paradox is rhetorically resolved by the claim that “Americans do not fight, therefore, except to fulfill a solemn obligation to defend their own—or others’—liberty.”105 However, this has always been ambiguous. The American Revolution waged war

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on empire and tyranny—while the founding fathers agreed that they were writing “a constitution to form a great [American] empire.”106 Even America’s most overtly imperialist wars were all claimed to have freed the oppressed and expanded the realm of liberty.107 Official US post-9/11 discourse often seemed to say little else. Victory and vindication. Until the Korean War (1950–1953) and Vietnam War (1959–1973), the American war story told of seamless military success against aggressors. This narrative of victory not only vindicates exceptionalism, universalism, and Manifest Destiny, it equally reflects the justice of America’s cause; the superiority of its endeavor, know-how, and enterprise; and the courage and prowess of its citizen warriors. Said to confirm American progressiveness over backward adversaries, the trope of victory and vindication erases from popular memory those wars in which acknowledged US aggression or atrocities contradict proclaimed American values.108 The captivity narrative. This recounts the kidnapping and captivity of

white women and children by a savage Other. Over 500 such accounts were published in the nineteenth century, and the captivity narrative became a staple of the Hollywood western.109 Here, masculinity and state power comingle to protect the weak (white women and children), to defend (colonized) territory and property and (white) personal freedom, and to uphold male authority. The recurrent captivity narrative had three vital rhetorical effects. Firstly, it “instantly turned the invader into the invaded,” the aggressor into the victim. Secondly, this trope transformed the violence of the colonial dispossession of Native Americans and other peoples into the righteous defense of an American Self, thereby legitimizing “any act of retribution that might follow.” This had, thirdly, significant geopolitical implications in that an attack on Americans anywhere was rhetorically depicted as an assault on the America home and, by implication, on US territory, interests, and values. Ambush and the last stand. The trope of the ambush of white settlers by cruel and hidden savages constantly recurs in the American war story. From the explosion that sank the Maine (precipitating the 1898 war with Spain), through Pearl Harbor, Vietcong guerrillas who “refused to stand and fight like men,” to 9/11 and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), this trope exemplifies what the American war story depicts as the unmasculine cowardice of those who fight against the United States. The ambush trope provides “extraordinary evidence of the enemy’s treacherous behavior . . . In their hearts, they desired our total annihilation.” 110 Exhorting the United

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States to “fight back with military force lest we became the cowards,”111 the trope further confirms the righteous violence of its response. The ambush trope is frequently complemented by that of the last stand—the image of outnumbered and encircled Americans resisting to the last man—thereby equally authorizing vengeance in memory of those whose martyrdom performs such heroism. A spectacle of slaughter. Since the United States supposedly wages only defensive war, the tropes of ambush and the last stand demonstrate the inhumanity of a racialized Other: “the enemy’s incomprehensible infamy and deceit . . . ingrained them in the national memory as proof of the righteousness of subsequent acts of vengeance.”112 Only when those slaughtered were white, does the American war story depict their massacre “as a horror and an outrage to humanity.” A fetishism of weapons technology. Finally, the American war story exemplifies an obsession with weapons technology as the means of securing American survival and expansion. From the Bowie knife and Colt .45, to the revolution in military affairs, superior weapons technology is depicted as permitting ambushed and outnumbered Americans to focus overwhelming firepower on and obliterate their enemies. The Mythology of the Other

These foundation myths of Americanism equally embody their binary opposite—un-Americanism. This mythology of the bad guys rests on five-step rhetorical elision around difference. Firstly, difference is transformed not just into Otherness, but also into a form of unbeing (“these people are not civilized”). Secondly, such alienated Otherness is securitized as a threat to America and its universal values. Thirdly, since the United States is good, free, brave, and progressive, this menacing Otherness threatens not just American interests, but humanity, civilization, and progress—it morphs into evil. Evil can never be rendered good, but must be rooted out in “the Great Cosmic Battle between Good and Evil.”113 Fourthly, Otherness is profoundly racialized. This has a dual aspect. On the one hand, the threatening Other is represented in exaggerated racist stereotypes. On the other hand, those Others who ally themselves with the United States are depicted as good, loyal, and plucky. A familiar trope of the western (the good Indian vs. the bad), this opposition of the faithful and the evil Other is today that between peaceful Islamic moderates bravely resisting evil fundamentalist fanatics and “evil doers.” And finally, the racialized, evil Other can achieve redemption through embracing American leadership.

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The Mode of Analysis As indicated in the Introduction to this book, our analysis of the evolving link between Hollywood movies and the national security state since the late 1940s is organized chronologically. With the exception of the conclusion, each chapter covers a distinct slice of historical time and deploys an analytic method based on eight elements. The first evokes the interlocking contexts that frame the film’s production and its reception by the viewing public. Here, we include: the international politics of the times; the ways in which these international politics were, in turn, refracted through partisan domestic political and ideological struggles; and the impact of evolving Hollywood business practices, commercial logic, and conditions of production on the types of movies it tended to make in a particular moment in time. Secondly, we pay some attention to film genre as “an archetypal narrative that has always exerted a powerful grip on our collective imagination.”114 Though not relying on genre theory, some chapters explore the ways in which this or that genre’s particular dramatic and narrative conventions, codes, tropes, iconography, settings, elements, moods, stock characters, and modes of resolution work together to fashion comfortably familiar stories that “teach us new ideological messages . . . soften the blow of change . . . help us learn the new lesson.”115 Thirdly, and without falling into auteur theory,116 we equally pay attention where necessary to the role of important directors, scenarists, and actors, and any impact that their peculiar style, film image, or worldview might have on the meaning of a film in which they are involved. It bears repeating that our mode of analysis is not geared around the intentions of the filmmaker. However, where these do seem clear—or where his or her known personal politics obtrude into the meaning of the film—our analysis takes due notice. Fourthly, and most importantly, we focus on the situation, dilemma, or problem that a film presents, how this relates to the concerns of the national security state at the time, and what the fate of its characters and the modes of resolution of this situation, dilemma, or problem tell us about the national security state. Our analysis of a film’s presentation, treatment, and resolution of such a situation, dilemma, and problem hinges around how it portrays one or more of the final elements of our analytical model. These are: fifthly, the institutions, operational modalities, and practices of the national security state; sixthly, the American security imaginary; seventhly, the Cold War consensus; and eighthly, the ways in which the film in question anchors these three last elements within the mythology underlying the ideology of Americanism.

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The national security state emerged in an age of fear, angst, and loathing—fear of communism, angst over the possibility of nuclear war, loathing of everything said to be un- or anti-American (they are not the same thing). And though communism has long gone, we still live in an age of fear, angst, and loathing, and US and global politics remain dominated by the national security state. The remainder of this book deploys the elements discussed in this chapter to highlight the uneven role of Hollywood films in the various phases of the evolution and consolidation of that national security state.

Notes 1. Ferdinand Eberstadt, quoted in Stuart, Creating the National Security State, p. 112. 2. Mintz and Roberts, Hollywood’s America, p. ix. 3. See, inter alia (in chronological order of publication): Sayre, Running Time; O’Connor, “Teaching Film and American Culture”; Maland, “Dr. Strangelove (1964)”; Rollins, Hollywood as Historian; Biskind, Seeing Is Believing; Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema; Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America; Ryan and Kellner, Camera Politica; Prince, Visions of Empire; Traube, Dreaming Identities; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation; Mintz and Roberts, Hollywood’s America; Corber, In the Name of National Security; Jeffords and Rabinovitz, Seeing Through the Media; Jeffords, Hard Bodies; Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture; Rosenbaum, Movies as Politics; Gregg, International Relations on Film; Scott, American Politics in Hollywood Film; Der Derian, Virtuous War; Lipschutz, Cold War Fantasies; Basinger, The World War II Combat Film; Weldes, To Seek Out New Worlds; Valantin, Hollywood, the Pentagon and Washington; Weber, Imagining America at War; Jacobson and Gonzales, What Have They Built You to Do?; Boggs and Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine; Boggs and Pollard, “The Imperial Warrior in Hollywood”; Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War; Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics; Shaw and Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War; Donovan, Conspiracy Films. 4. Jablonsky, “The State of the National Security State,” pp. 6 and 9. A former US Army colonel, David Jablonsky is professor of National Security Affairs at the US Army War College. 5. Ernest May, quoted in Jablonsky, “The State of the National Security State,” p. 10, emphasis added. 6. The following references only scratch the surface of this literature. For critiques from the right and left see, respectively: Carden, “Bergdahl, Manning, and the Overextended National Security State”; Boggs, Imperial Delusions. The emergence and evolution of the national security state is covered by (in chronological order of publication): Yergin, Shattered Peace; Leffler, A Preponderance of Power; Sherry, In the Shadow of War; Hogan, Cross of Iron; Rothkopf, Running the World; Stuart, Creating the National Security State; Waddell, Toward the National Security State; Walker, National Security and Core Values in American History; Mabee, “Historical Institutionalism and Foreign Policy Analysis.” The implicit political theory underpinning the national security state is explored in Hanna, Democracy’s Achilles Heel? On the functioning/dysfunctioning of core national security state institutions, see Zegart, Flawed by Design; Jablonsky, “The State of the National Security State”; Lochler, Victory on the Potomac; Carroll, House of War; Zegart,

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Spying Blind; Wills, Bomb Power. Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy, examines the partisan politics over the national security state. On the political economy of the national security state, see Landau, “A Report on NAFTA and the State of the Maquilas”; Melman, “The Pentagon’s Welfare Budget”; Hossein-Zadeh, The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism; Boggs, Phantom Democracy; Weiss, America Inc.? The national security state’s impact on civil liberties is probed in Melanson, Secrecy Wars; and Friedman, Citizenship in Cold War America; while Sanders, Exceptional Security Practices, traces its impact on human rights; and Dwyer and Dwyer, “Courts and Universities as Institutions in the National Security State,” examine its influence on the judiciary and higher education. For the cultural dimensions of the national security state, see Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy; Robb, Operation Hollywood; Melley, The Covert Sphere. Post-9/11 aspects of the national security state are discussed in Grondin, “(Re)Writing the ‘National Security State’”; and Rorty “Post-Democracy.” See also Paul and Ripsman, Globalization and the National Security State; Grondin, “The New Frontiers of the National Security State.” 7. Respectively, Dwyer and Dwyer, “Courts and Universities as Institutions in the National Security State,” p. 2; “National Security State/Surveillance State: Review of the Literature,” Softpanorama, www.softpanorama.org/Skeptics/Political _skeptic/Corporatism/National_security_state/index.shtsh (accessed 17 August 2014); Boggs, Phantom Democracy, blurb. 8. Zegart, Flawed by Design; Zegart, Spying Blind; Carden, “Bergdahl, Manning, and the Overextended National Security State.” 9. Respectively, Stuart, Creating the National Security State, p. 1; Hanna, Democracy’s Achilles Heel? p.15. 10. Waddell, Toward the National Security State, pp. xii and ix. 11. Respectively, Raskin and LeVan, In Democracy’s Shadow, p. xi; Weiss, America Inc.? p. 4; Grondin, “The New Frontiers of the National Security State,” p. 83. 12. Jones, Jones, and Woods, An Introduction to Political Geography, p. 173, emphasis added. 13. Hufty, “Investigating Policy Processes,” p. 418. 14. See Waddell, Toward the National Security State, especially pp. 30–119. 15. The term national security was itself “a post–World War II coinage.” Allison and Treverton, Rethinking America’s Security, p. 19. See also May, “National Security in American History,” p. 95; Yergin, Shattered Peace, pp. 192–196. 16. Slavoj Žižek, quoted in the documentary film, Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. 17. Hogan, Cross of Iron, pp. 12–15. All quotes in this paragraph are from these pages. 18. Yergin, Shattered Peace, pp. 195–196, emphasis added. 19. On such postwar social conflicts, see, inter alia, Chafe, The Unfinished Journey, pp. 76–173; Wall, Inventing the “American Way,” passim. 20. Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy, p. 3. 21. Colucci, The National Security Doctrines of the American Presidency, p. 4. 22. National Security Council, NSC 20/04, U.S. Objectives with Respect to the USSR to Counter Soviet Threats to U.S. Security, pars. 1 and 2, https://www.mtholyoke .edu/acad/intrel/coldwar/nsc20-4.htm (accessed 23 March 2011). 23. Ibid., pars. 14 and 15. 24. Hogan, Cross of Iron, p. 12. 25. National Security Council, “Analysis: 1. Background of the Current Crisis,” and “4. A. Nature of Conflict,” NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, http://fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68.htm (accessed 23 March 2011).

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26. Posen, “The Case for Restraint,” p. 7. 27. Metz, Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy, p. xviii. 28. Posen, “The Case for Restraint.” See also Art, A Grand Strategy for America, p. 1; Jablonsky, “The State of the National Security State,” p. 6. 29. Jablonsky, “The State of the National Security State,” p. 6. See also Leffler, “The Emergence of an American Grand Strategy, 1945–1952.” For an overview, see Gaddis, Strategies of Containment. 30. Raskin and LeVan, In Democracy’s Shadow, p. 5, emphasis added. 31. These include: the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; Central Intelligence Agency; Federal Bureau of Investigation; National Intelligence Council; National Security Agency; National Reconnaissance Office; National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency; Defense Intelligence Agency; US Army’s Intelligence and Security Command; the Office of Naval Intelligence; US Air Force’s Air Intelligence Agency; Marine Corps Intelligence Activity; Coast Guard Intelligence; State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research; Office of Intelligence and Analysis of the Department of Homeland Security; Energy Department’s Office of Intelligence; Justice Intelligence Coordinating Council of the Justice Department; Treasury Department’s Secret Service; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Intelligence Program of the Drug Enforcement Agency. 32. A 2010 Washington Post investigation revealed that “some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. An estimated 854,000 people . . . hold top-secret security clearances.” Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, “Top Secret America: A Hidden World, Growing Beyond Control,” Washington Post, 19 July 2010, http://media.washingtonpost.com /wp-srv/special/nation/tsa/static/articles/hidden-world.html (accessed 2 October 2014). By 2014, over 5 million people “currently hold security clearances, out of which around a million are outside contractors, about half of whom hold a topsecret clearance” (Carden, “Bergdahl, Manning, and the Overextended National Security State”). 33. Jablonsky, “The State of the National Security State,” p. 10. 34. However, for arguments that Congress significantly restrains the power of presidential war-making activities, see, inter alia, Howell and Pevehouse, While Dangers Gather; Kriner, After the Rubicon. 35. See Zegart, Flawed by Design; Stuart, Creating the National Security State; Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy. 36. Yergin, The Shattered Peace, p. 193. 37. Stuart, Creating the National Security State, p. 258. 38. See Staples, The Culture of Surveillance. 39. See Greenwald, No Place to Hide. 40. James Doolittle, William Franke, Morris Hadley, and William Pawley, Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, pp. 2–3. 41. Andrew, “Intelligence in the Cold War,” p. 423; Ranelagh, The Agency, p. 259. 42. See Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Book II: Final Report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1976, www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94755_II.pdf (accessed 15 September 2013). 43. See Central Intelligence Agency, “The Family Jewels,” Doc. No. 0001451843, www.foia.cia.gov/collection/family-jewels (accessed 13 September 2013); Foreign

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and Military Intelligence, Book I: Final Report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1976, especially pp. 145–257, https://archive .org/stream/finalreportofsel01unit#page/n3/mode/2up (accessed 15 September 2013). 44. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, www.intelligence .senate.gov/study2014/sscistudy2.pdf (accessed 10 December 2014). On illegal detention, torture, and other human rights abuses, see Sanders, Exceptional Security Practices. 45. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State, p. 299. 46. Ibid., p. 297. 47. Stuart, Creating the National Security State, pp. 169 and 172. 48. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State, p. 5 and chaps. 4–8. See also Inman and Burton, “Technology and U.S. National Security.” 49. Weiss, America Inc.? pp. 2 and 4. 50. Ibid., blurb. 51. Ibid., p. 3 and “Box 1.1 What Does the NSS Do?” pp. 8–9. 52. Agnew, Hegemony, pp. 1–2. 53. Stuart, Creating the National Security State, p. 231. For similar arguments, see Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy, p. 15; Carroll, House of War, p. 430. As codified in six principles outlined in its founding text, realist international relations discourse insists that its understanding of international politics corresponds to “reality,” to supposed “objective laws” in which state survival, or national security, is the be-all and end-all of such politics. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, pp. 4–15. 54. C. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, p. 23. 55. Weldes, Constructing National Interests, p. 10. Weldes in turn adapted the concept from Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society. 56. Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde, Security, p. 23. 57. First formulated by the then Republican chairman of the senate foreign relations committee, Senator Arthur H. Vandenburg, in 1948, this principle was long claimed to guide congressional attitudes to foreign policy. See, for example, Richard Benedetto, “Remember When Partisan Politics Stopped at the Water’s Edge?” USA Today, 18 November 2005, usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opnion/columnist/Bene detto/2005-11-18-benedetto_x.htm (accessed 21 October 2015). 58. Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy, passim. 59. Mintz and Roberts, Hollywood’s America, pp. 14–15. 60. On weekly cinema attendance, see Lev, Transforming the Screen, p. 7. For weekly church attendance, see 1946 Legislative Research Service of the Library of Congress, quoted in Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, p. 9; 1950 Gallup surveys, quoted in Argyle, Religious Behavior, p. 21. 61. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right, p. 5. 62. Respectively, Biskind, Seeing Is Believing; Casper, Hollywood Film 1963– 1976. 63. See Medved, Hollywood vs. America, p. 3, passim; Boggs and Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine; Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War, p. 237, passim; Der Derian, Virtuous War, blurb; Turse, The Complex, pp. 3 and 103–112. 64. Suid, Guts and Glory, p. xiii. 65. Shain, “Hollywood’s Cold War,” p. 345. 66. See Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Working with the FBI: A Guide for Writers, Authors and Producers,” www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2008/october/a-guide -for-writers-authors-and-producers (accessed 23 March 2013).

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67. For Defense Department Entertainment Media liaison, see US Department of Defense, “U.S. Military Assistance in Producing Motion Pictures, Television Shows, and Music Videos,” www.defense.gov/faq/pis/pc12film.aspx. For the individual services, see US Air Force Entertainment Liaison Office, www.airforcehollywood.af.mil/; US Army’s Office of the Chief of Public Affairs, Western Region (OCPA-West), www.army.mil/info/institution/publicAffairs/ocpa-west/; US Coast Guard Film and Television Liaison Office, www.uscg.mil/hq/cg092/mopic/default.asp,/; Marine Corps’ Motion Picture and TV Liaison Office, www.hqmc.marines.mil/divpa/Units /LosAngelesPublicAffairs/FAQ.aspx; US Navy Film and Television Liaison Office, https://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navinfo/navinfowest.html (all accessed 23 March 2013). 68. CIA Public Affairs Officer Tricia Jenkins, quoted in Jenkins, “Get Smart,” p. 234. 69. Ibid. For the CIA Entertainment Industry Liaison Office since 2001, see https://www.cia.gov/offices-of-cia/public-affairs/entertainment-industry -liaison/index.html (accessed 23 March 2013). 70. Robb, Operation Hollywood, p. 26. 71. Examples of clear propaganda movies include Strategic Air Command, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, A Gathering of Eagles, The Green Berets, Top Gun, The Kingdom. A somewhat higher percentage of Hollywood films can be described as “propagandistic” in that they faithfully reproduce the Manichean (good us/bad them) worldview characteristic of all propaganda. 72. Rosenbaum, Movies as Politics, p. 3. 73. Mintz and Roberts, Hollywood’s America, p. 27. 74. Scott, American Politics in Hollywood Film, p. 6, emphasis added. 75. Mintz and Roberts, Hollywood’s America, p. 27. 76. Richard Hofstadter, quoted in Kazin and McCartin, Americanism, p. 1, emphasis added; Lipset, American Exceptionalism, p. 31. 77. G. S. Wood, The Idea of America, p. 3. 78. Campbell, Writing Security. 79. On the notion and content of the specifically American national style of politics, see Hoffmann, Gulliver’s Troubles. 80. The Communist party and the German-American organization Bund quoted, respectively, in Wall, Inventing the “American Way,” pp. 28 and 31. 81. Thomson, Culture Wars and Enduring American Dilemmas, p. 2. 82. Kazin and McCartin, Americanism, pp. 1, 13, and 3. See also Stephanson, Manifest Destiny. 83. Kazin and McCartin, Americanism, p. 10. 84. A. Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, p. 8. See also J. Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, pp. 1–11. 85. Hellman, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam, p. ix. 86. Mailer, “Myth Versus Hypothesis,” p. 286. 87. H. B. Franklin, M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America, p. 6, emphasis added. 88. Ibid. 89. Wright, What Is America? p. 13. 90. Burke, Varieties of Cultural History, pp. 108–109. 91. Sayre, Running Time, p. 5. 92. Hoffmann, Gulliver’s Troubles, p. 110. 93. McEvoy-Levy, American Exceptionalism and US Foreign Policy, p. 23. 94. McCrisken, American Exceptionalism and the Legacy of Vietnam, p. 8. 95. Costigliola and Paterson, “Doing and Defining the History of United States Foreign Relations,” p. 12.

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96. See Gitlin, The Sixties, p. 6, passim. For a longer historical perspective on a similar theme, see McPherson, “Americanism Against American Empire.” 97. Metz, Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy, p. xxiv. 98. The White House: President George W. Bush, “The President’s Remarks to the Nation, 11 September 2002,” http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news /releases/2002/09/20020911-3.html (accessed 13 February 2008). 99. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, “Famous Quotations from Woodrow Wilson,” About Woodrow Wilson, www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm ?fuseaction=about.woodrow (accessed 13 February 2008), emphasis added. See also Fousek, To Lead the Free World; Nugent, Habits of Empire; Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, passim; Wood, The Idea of America, pp. 319–335. 100. Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History. 101. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 30. 102. Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth, p. 23. 103. Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture, pp.16–65. 104. Perret, A Country Made by War. 105. F. Anderson and Cayton, The Dominion of War, p. xiii. 106. W. A. Williams, Contours of American History, p. 116. 107. See F. Anderson and Cayton, The Dominion of War, pp. 160–273, and 317– 360. 108. That few Americans are aware of their country’s brutal war of occupation in the Philippines (1898–1902) may be due in part to the fact that until John Sayles’s 2010 film Amigo, Hollywood had only ever made four B-movies about this war, all apologies for US actions. 109. Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture, pp. 23–28. All quotes in this and the following paragraph come from these pages. 110. Ibid., p. 39, emphasis in original. 111. Egan, “Cowardice,” p. 55. 112. The quotes in this paragraph are from Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture, pp. 37–39. 113. Rediehs, “Evil,” p. 71. 114. Schecter and Semeiks, “Leatherstocking in ’Nam,” p. 116. 115. Basinger, The World War II Combat Film, p. 249. On genre theory, see Grant, Film Genre. 116. On auteur theory, see Nelmes, An Introduction to Film Studies, pp. 137–150. For an overview of the evolution of film criticism and film theory, see Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, pp. 493–556.

2 John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy and the Didactics of National Security The Greeks had their Iliad; the Jews the Hebrew Bible; the Romans the Aeniad; the Germans the Nibelungenlied; the Scandinavians their Sagas; the Spanish their Cid; the British their Arthurian legends. The Americans have John Ford.1 The years between the end of World War II and the June 1950 outbreak of the Korean War saw deep division and self-questioning in the United States. The end of hostilities with Japan was immediately followed by the biggest strike wave in US history, by growing racial tensions, and by widespread fears of recession. As President Harry S. Truman moved rapidly to demobilize the armed forces, slash military spending, and unify the navy and army, bitter of political quarrels broke out over the size, respective missions, and budgets of the military. Growing official US disquiet over Soviet intentions, over left-wing governments in power in much of Europe, and over the rampant economic hardship and instability throughout the Old World, all fed a sense that the end of the war would not bring the longed-for peace. When the Republican party sought to take back Congress in the 1946 midterm elections through a powerful anticommunist ideological offensive, the Democratic party was forced onto the defensive and gradually substituted its own economic and social equity priorities for the rigid anticommunism of what liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger approvingly labeled a new “vital center” in US politics, one organized around the absolute primacy of national security.2 Cleaving to the new politics of the vital center killed off President Franklin Roosevelt’s vision of great-power cooperation and buried the mildly redistributive form of liberalism that had inspired the New Deal. In the late 1940s and 1950s, economic inequality in America was “taken off the table” as a political issue and replaced by the communist bogeyman.3 41

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As stressed in the previous chapter, this new priority accorded to national security and the emergence of the national security state broke radically with traditional US defense and foreign policies. Leading to a reorganization of the federal government with significant negative consequences for constitutionally guaranteed American freedoms, it also provoked widespread concerns that the United States was being “Prussianized.” Such concerns were not confined to the left of the political spectrum. The highly conservative Republican senator and three times runner-up in votes for the Republican presidential nomination, Robert A. Taft, warned that the United States risked becoming “a militaristic and totalitarian country.” Likewise, former five-star general turned Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, worried that “an exclusive focus on the military potential of the Soviet Union would turn the United States into a garrison state.”4 The emergence, powers, and consolidation of the national security state thus were not cast in stone. Rather, its “size and shape” were determined by a “fundamental contest over the nation’s political identity and postwar purpose” in the decade following World War II.5 Establishing and legitimizing the national security state required effecting significant shifts in Americans’ traditional understanding of the limits to the powers of the federal government, of the role (and cost) of the US armed forces, of defense policy and the kinds of threat the United States faced, and of America’s global role. None of these shifts simply occurred by themselves. Rather, all were the outcome of political, bureaucratic, ideological, and, above all, cultural struggles to establish what we call the Cold War consensus (see p. 22) and the American security imaginary (see p. 19), and to root both in the mythology of Americanism (see p. 27). In this chapter, we examine the contribution of director John Ford’s celebrated cavalry trilogy (Fort Apache, 1948; She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, 1949; and Rio Grande, 1950) to effecting these cultural shifts. We begin our analysis of the link between Hollywood movies and the national security state with these films for three reasons. Firstly, as argued below, Ford was the acknowledged master mythologist of Americanism, a key interpreter of US identity. Secondly, with the cavalry trilogy he elevated the western into the trademark Hollywood genre, one that embodies archetypical “America” for its inhabitants and for the rest of the world. The trilogy was shot in the years when the last US hopes for cooperation with the Soviet Union dribbled away, when the Cold War escalated into real war in Korea; when the national security state emerged to dominate political life; and when witch hunts, loyalty oaths, and blacklists transformed public life in general and Hollywood in particular. In this context, we argue, thirdly, that through Ford’s masterly evocation of Americanist mythology, the films of the cavalry trilogy directly mirror and intervene in the evolving late 1940s debate over the nature of external threat; over how the American community should respond; and over the purpose, mission, and role of armed force—

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overt and covert—in US expansionism. In this sense, the cavalry trilogy anticipates, reflects, and projects fundamental transitions in the narrative of the emerging US security imaginary.

Ford and the Mythology of Americanism John Ford (1894–1973) is widely regarded as the greatest American film director. Few matched his output of 144 films between 1916 and 1966; none has equaled his six Academy Awards.6 Exercising obsessive control over his films, Ford “successfully projected his values and ideals” into them.7 With the United States as his principal subject, Ford probed the forging of an American community, American identity, and American mythology. His films interrogate the moral dilemmas posed by nation building, the crises and tests in which Ford “saw a national character being formed, archetypal situations that provided the foundation for a romantic, heroic America.”8 During the quarter-century from his three 1939 films—The Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, and Stagecoach—Ford produced “a body of work that represents one of America’s great treasures,” a veritable “national mythology of the United States.”9 No other American filmmaker “has ranged so far across the landscape of the American past, the worlds of Lincoln, Lee, Twain, O’Neill, the three great wars, the Western and Trans-Atlantic migrations, the horseless Indians of the Mohawk valley and the Sioux and Comanche cavalries of the West, the Irish and Spanish incursions, and the delicately balanced politics of the polyglot cities and border states.”10 The western was Ford’s preferred canvas to explore and develop archetypes of American mythology, identity, and community. As the genre’s acknowledged “founding father,” “principal architect,” and “grand master,” Ford transformed the western from a B-movie filler into the national epic, one depicting “the encounter with the frontier as the process by which American character is formed . . . a pure expression of Ford’s—and America’s—traditional ideology.”11 Ford’s own politics defy conventional categories. A moving force in unionizing Hollywood in the 1930s and member of its Anti-Nazi League, Ford called himself a “socialistic democrat—always left.”12 Yet he served on the executive committee of the witch-hunting Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI) from 1949 to 1955. Nevertheless, Ford opposed President Truman’s Loyalty Oath, the House (of Representatives) Un-American Activities Committee Hollywood hearings, and the blacklists. Also a dedicated military man, Ford joined the US Naval Reserve in 1934, retiring as a rear admiral in 1951. During World War II he headed the Field and Photographic Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS),

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the precursor to the CIA. Wounded while filming the Japanese aerial attack on Midway Island, Ford’s subsequent film for the US Navy, The Battle of Midway—a film “more to be admired for the extraordinary conviction and virtuosity with which its vivid, scrappy material is used to dramatize the Ford heroic myth [of America] than as a documentary picture of war”13— won the 1942 Academy Award for Best Documentary. Ford walked off with a second Best Documentary Oscar the following year for December 7th. This largely simulated depiction of the attack on Pearl Harbor is a propaganda screed trading in racial stereotypes, manipulative religiosity, and a stridently self-righteous patriotism. Yet the images and message of Ford’s widely viewed documentaries clearly channeled the national rage, thirst for revenge, and renewed patriotism, and framed how Americans imagined both the infamy of Pearl Harbor and the first US victory in World War II. Although his unabashedly didactic style frequently expressed the disciplining force of Americanism—instructing the audience to follow the party line—as one of America’s most influential culture brokers from the 1930s to the 1960s, Ford questioned as much as he promoted a sometimes progressive, sometimes conservative populist patriotism. He won a 1940 Oscar for the strikingly anticapitalist and pro-socialist The Grapes of Wrath, arguably the most left-wing mainstream Hollywood film ever, and his later westerns undermine elements of the mythology Ford had himself largely shaped (see below). A seer who anticipated shifts in cultural values before they occurred and whose prophesies helped bring them about, Ford was equally a weathervane whose films detected and mirrored mainstream views of Americanism.

Shadows over Tinsel Town While the movies of the 1930s had explored conflicts and contradictions in American life, had shown multiple viewpoints, and had a clear social content, during World War II the Office of War Information effectively turned Hollywood into the US government’s principal propaganda arm. The 312 films produced between 1942 and 1945 “pitted unquestioned good against evil . . . [and] told viewers exactly how to think about the action, giving a monolithic direction to their thoughts.”14 Though government controls were abolished at the end of the war, the patriotic reflex and propagandistic techniques were not easily erased, and Ford deployed many of them in his cavalry trilogy. Three further postwar developments rocked the industry. Firstly, migration to the suburbs and the rise of television saw weekly movie attendance fall from 90 million in 1946 to 60 million in 1950. Second, the 1948 Supreme Court Paramount decision ordered the major studios to sell off the

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cinemas they owned, thereby ending the “guaranteed income that blockand blind-booking had provided” and dramatically increasing the costs of producing, distributing, and marketing movies.15 To win back their declining audience and offset rising costs, the studios turned to pure entertainment. American commercial movies “became principally what they had only been partially—an escape from reality into the familiar structures of genre formula. Their role in propagating alternative modes of social behavior seemed to have been completely abandoned, a casualty of the Cold War and of a vanishing audience.”16 Studio struggles to sustain profitability took place, thirdly, in the context of bitter labor disputes and ideological crises that shook America in the immediate postwar period. Beginning in March 1945, a thirteen-month strike by 10,000 members of the Conference of Screen Unions (CSU) highlighted Hollywood’s deep ideological rift. The Mafia-linked leadership of the rival International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) denounced the CSU as “communists” and worked with the studios to break the strike.17 This dispute forged a new Hollywood right-wing alliance. The recently formed and antiunion MPAPAI—itself explicitly dedicated to the principle that communists had “forfeited the right to exist in this country of ours”—rallied support for IATSE’s anticommunist line and Ronald Reagan was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild.18 Hollywood’s new right-wing alliance echoed warnings in a 1946 US Chamber of Commerce pamphlet that communists were taking control of the information and entertainment industries.19 Eric Johnson, the immediate past president of the Chamber of Commerce, Republican party stalwart, and leading ideologue of the politics of corporate consensus, was chosen to succeed Will Hays as head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America in 1946.20 Now the movie industry’s chief spokesman, lobbyist, and censor, Johnson changed the organization’s name to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and laid down a new ideological line, instructing screenwriters: “We’ll have no more Grapes of Wrath, we’ll have no more Tobacco Roads, we’ll have no more films that deal with the seamy side of American life. We’ll have no more films that treat the banker as the villain.”21 Johnson’s dictate was swiftly implemented. Movies featuring patriotic heroes or institutions “dedicated to protecting the nation from foreign and domestic enemies” increased from roughly 10 percent of Hollywood’s output to more than 40 percent between 1946 and 1950, while films featuring “a narrative of foreign or domestic subversion” rose from virtually zero to almost 20 percent.22 This shifting thematic content also gave rise to a new dominant genre. Westerns accounted for less than one in five Hollywood productions in 1948, the year in which the Cold War became fixed in American life. Four years later, they made up close to half of its output.23

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Ford stood at the epicenter of these transformations. He had directed both films that Johnson had now decreed beyond the pale—The Grapes of Wrath and Tobacco Road. The “seamy side of American life” was on prominent display in Ford’s first great western, Stagecoach, and the villain of this microcosm of white America was indeed a banker. The one-time socialistic democrat was clearly in Johnson’s sights. The year following Johnson’s broadside, the MPAPAI claimed that “Communists, radicals and crackpots” sought to turn Hollywood into “an instrument for the dissemination of un-American ideas and beliefs.”24 The MPAPAI and the IATSE urged the HUAC to launch hearings into the movie industry. MPAPAI members gave friendly evidence to these 1947 HUAC hearings that they had themselves instigated. The studios reacted quickly. In December 1947 Johnson read out their Waldorf Statement announcing Hollywood’s blacklist. Between 1947 and 1961, some 500 actors, directors, screenwriters, and others were barred from working on studio films. Having brought McCarthyism on itself, Hollywood became the key battleground in efforts to impose, propagate, and contest the officially sanctioned Americanism of the vital center.

Fabricating the Legend, Legitimizing the Cold War Ford did not set out to film a cavalry trilogy. Rather, he bowed to studio pressure to make first Fort Apache and then She Wore a Yellow Ribbon in a vain effort to save his own struggling production company, Argosy Productions, whose four principal investors were “former O.S.S. men, including [O.S.S. head, ‘Wild Bill’] Donovan.”25 Ford then agreed to make Rio Grande to secure studio financing for what became his Oscar-winning The Quiet Man. Nevertheless, the films of the trilogy are all based on stories by James Warner Bellah; they share a similar narrative, dramatic, and thematic structure; and were shot in Monument Valley. Ford patterned their visuals on Frederic Remington’s iconographic paintings.26 John Wayne plays essentially the same battle-tested, self-sacrificing protagonist in each film— Captain Kirby York in Fort Apache, Colonel Kirby Yorke (with an “e”) in Rio Grande, and Captain Nathan Brittles in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Several other actors and characters also appear in all three films—notably Sergeant (later Sergeant Major) Quincannon and the Southern trooper, Tyree (Ben Johnson).27 In Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande, the cavalry are based at Fort Starke. This continuity reinforces audience identification with the characters, their dilemmas, and the catharsis of the resolution of the threat they confront. Firmly anchored in the myth of the frontier (see p. 30), the cavalry trilogy depicts the divide between Self and Other, the encounter between civi-

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lization and barbarism. The frontier fort is the furthest outpost of America. Inside its walls are enacted the rituals of a civilized, ordered community— the formal dance, a well-laid table, courtesy in courtship, decorating a home, washing clothes, the troop’s singers serenading officers and their wives, deference by lower classes and ethnics to their “betters,” male respect for and dominion over women. Beyond the fort walls, all is anarchy where resistance by the Other to US authority turns the frontier into a bloody battleground to be patrolled and ultimately pacified by the cavalry. Each film begins with the arrival (or in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, the nonarrival due to a Cheyenne ambush) of visitors from beyond the fort’s hermetic world and, in particular, of sophisticated, independent, and spoiled women. Disrupting the fort’s settled routines and social relations, these new arrivals enable Ford to probe how heroic leadership copes with domestic cleavages so as to repel external threat and strengthen the community. These films also all show new recruits and inexperienced officers being socialized into the cavalry and manhood, and oblige young men to choose between the sacrifices of military service as the guarantor of US security and expansion and comfortable civilian individualism. This device stands for Ford’s querying whether the next generation has the discipline and stomach to cope with future threats by assuming the military burdens borne by their elders. An Indian rebellion brings these issues to a head. In Fort Apache and Rio Grande, it is the Apache who revolt; in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, several Indian tribes unite around “Cheyenne Dog Soldiers.” At stake is not just the fort community’s survival, but also American civilization and expansion. In Fort Apache and Yellow Ribbon, the threat from the Indian Other is made possible by whites whose actions lead to American deaths. Containing the threat requires closing divisions within the community through military discipline and vigorous heroics led by Wayne. The cavalry reforges the community through “regenerative violence,”28 teaching necessary lessons to the fort’s disruptive characters, its youth, and the audience. A series of other issues central to the emerging Cold War security imaginary underlie this treatment of the appropriate response to external and internal threat. The trilogy asks whether peace with the Other is possible and, if so, on what and whose terms? This leads to a disquisition on the nature of the American community, its identity, and its leadership. Probing the role of myth in sustaining national and institutional identity, the films examine how consent is manufactured across different categories of social cleavage. They explore civil-military relations, the balance between democratic values and military authority, and the meaning of masculinity and femininity. With Stagecoach in 1939, Ford invented the western set in Monument Valley. He eventually shot nine films in these daunting landscapes, forging

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archetypes “of a legendary frontier that embellished the substance of the historical West.”29 Ford’s Monument Valley embodies the frontier’s threatening grandeur. His reverential, wide-focus images render American exceptionalism (see p. 29) visual—only Americans can conquer and civilize this magnificent wilderness whose scale and lurking menace underscore the constant need for armed vigilance. This mythical Monument Valley frontier is the terrain on which American identity is forged, its youth socialized, and the Other rendered truly foreign—where threat is constructed and the geopolitics of expansion are legitimized and played out. Here are performed the issues arising out of America’s multiple cleavages in ways that ultimately reinforce the trilogy’s triple message: that of unbridgeable difference with the racialized and stereotyped Indian-Apache-red Other; that of the similarity in difference and the necessity for unity and discipline across gender, class, ethnic, and regional lines within the—always white—American community; and that of the necessity for ceaseless military vigilance and occasional illegal covert action to counter the permanent threat from the Other.

The Evolution of Threat Fort Apache opened just two days after the Soviet Union blockaded Berlin, kicking the Cold War into high gear. Yet this, the trilogy’s first film, projects Ford’s lingering New Deal populism. The threat to the cavalry comes less from the Apache than from the mindless elitism, racism, and vainglorious ignorance of the fort’s new commander, Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda). The Apache, on the other hand, are depicted with striking sympathy through the voice of Captain Kirby York who describes them as great warriors who have “out-generaled us, out-fought us and outrun us.” Apache grievances are presented as legitimate and their leader, Cochise, is an honorable warrior who, unlike Thursday, keeps his word. The ghost of Franklin Roosevelt hovers over Fort Apache’s dual message around Otherness and threat. Firstly, peace with the “reds” (the Apaches) remains desirable and possible. Achieving it means renouncing provocation, trickery, and glory seeking (à la Thursday) and relying instead on those who understand and respect red society, its achievements, pride, and grievances (York and his non-commissioned officers [NCOs]). This highlights, secondly, Ford’s view that American leadership should be based on merit and not privilege—leaders belong to the community, they do not stand above it. These themes merge in a surprising riff on American (and Hollywood) politics of 1948: the principal threat to American democracy and security comes from privileged, racist, ignorant, and militaristic reactionaries rather than from the honorable Other.

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However, the final scene delivers the sting. Thursday’s last stand (see p. 31) erases all social memory of his incompetence and transforms him into a heroic martyr. Only York knows otherwise. Now Fort Apache’s commanding officer, when questioned by a journalist in thrall to the Thursday myth, York deliberately endorses the legend to promote the army. Ford stated that Fort Apache was a retelling “inspired by [George Armstrong] Custer’s last battle.”30 The final scene summarizes his ambiguous take on the Custer myth and on Americanism in general. Idealizing the values and heroism embodied in Captain York and the NCOs, the film praises the common man and slams the ambitious, publicity-seeking, caste-bound militarists whom Custer personified. On the other hand, aware of his own role as weaver of myth, in this final scene Ford endorses the embrace of mythology, even knowing it to be false. National unity and the glory of the military take precedence over truth: myth embodies values more important than the truth. As Ford put it, “We’ve had a lot of people who were supposed to be great heroes, and you know damn well they weren’t. But it is good for the country to have heroes to look up to.”31 This poses two eminently political questions. The first is, which social forces and interests are held to be emblematic of the country that myth should to serve? In other words, who is included and who is excluded from the American community, and what is the nature of the proper social relations among its constituent groups? The second question is, who should be vested with the social power to define what “is good for the country”? Fort Apache’s reply to these questions embodies the shift from New Deal social liberalism to the vital center. National security is now the highest public good. Leading the cavalry out of the fort in the final scene, York “has not only inherited Thursday’s command but also adopted his Frenchified kepi headgear. There are no more liberals and conservatives, only bluecoats and redskins.”32 Any modulated awareness of the power and constructed nature of myth vanishes in the trilogy’s second film. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon opens where Fort Apache left off: with Custer. As a torn cavalry guidon flutters over a background of smoke, a somber-voiced narrator announces a national tragedy: “Custer is dead!” The massacre of Custer’s troops has united Indian tribes “from the Canadian Border to the Rio Bravo.” The danger is urgent and existential: “Hundreds of [white] communities, thousands of [white-owned] farms stand under the threat of an Indian uprising.” Unless this uprising is suppressed, American expansionism is doomed: “it would be one hundred years before another wagon train dared to cross the Plains.” Whereas Fort Apache is partially honest about the causes and legitimacy of an Indian uprising, a year later, in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, all such insight and sympathy have evaporated. The film is anchored in two

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central tropes of the American war story (see p. 30)—the ambush and the last stand. In 1949, these evoked the still raw national memory of Pearl Harbor and Bataan. The ambush trope transforms the aggressor, invader, and colonizer into the victim, the invaded, and the colonized. Through his heroic last stand, he stakes moral claim to the territory from which he has been temporarily expelled. This explicit framing of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon in terms of ambush and Custer’s last stand signals another departure from Fort Apache’s nuance. Little Big Horn was a direct consequence of Custer’s tactical incompetence and the conceited glory seeking that Ford had skewered in Fort Apache. Yet now, Custer is presented as a hero and martyr; Ford deliberately fosters the legend, as gospel truth shorn of all ironic selfregard. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is a paean to the military as the embodiment of America. The concluding narration draws the lesson: “So, here they are: the dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the fifty-cents-a-day professionals . . . they were all the same: men in dirty-shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing. But wherever they rode—and whatever they fought for—that place became the United States.”33 This epitaph implies that the blood of fallen American soldiers consecrates the seizure of Native American land, even if the cause was not just (“whatever they fought for”). The trope of blood sacrifice expunges the original sin of US aggression and genocidal dispossession of the Plains Indians. Ford’s absolution of the national security state is now total and unconditional. The years prior to the release of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon saw significant controversy over President Truman’s National Security Act and huge increase in military spending. These controversies give meaning to the film’s hook of Captain Brittles’s imminent retirement. Hours before “I become a civilian,” knowing he risks court-martial, Brittles orders his troopers into a covert mission to humiliate sleeping Cheyenne warriors by driving off their ponies. Here, Ford appears to urge war-weary Americans to accept ongoing service and sacrifice, reassuring them that the military will always choose the moderate (proportionate) response and avoid war if possible. Yellow Ribbon propagates the view that the military best knows how to protect America: well-intentioned efforts to save civilians lead to greater loss than following military imperatives would entail. The message that service gives meaning to life is underscored when the aimless retired Brittles is rescued from civilian status, promoted, and embraced back into the fold during a dance, Ford’s metaphor for an ordered idealized community. Indian treachery is placed front and center. Brittles undertakes a dangerous trek to appeal to Chief Pony That Walks (John Big Tree) to stop the war. Though agreeing that war would be calamitous, the barely articulate chief mutters “too late, too late”: he cannot control the young braves whom the narrator labels “new messiahs” threatening “holy war.” Reasonableness and

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honor among the reds have been rendered mute. The reference to holy war echoes George Kennan’s long telegram, which insisted that the irredeemably ideological and expansionist nature of the Soviet state made cooperation impossible.34 Underscoring that the threat from the “redskins” stood in for “the Reds,” the Indian warrior who mobilizes the tribes against the cavalry is named Redshirt—and is so clad onscreen. The tropes of ambush and last stand are reevoked when Brittles’s troops arrive at the stage post to find its white owners slaughtered, their children orphaned. Peace is no longer possible or desirable: “We must attack first!” an officer urges. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon equally reflects the climate of the years when federal employees were obliged to sign the Loyalty Oath, of witch hunts for those said to have betrayed atomic secrets, of the hounding of State Department specialists accused of losing China, and of Hollywood’s purges and blacklists. External threat is facilitated and rendered more deadly through the un-American behavior of those who, consciously or unconsciously, collaborate with the Other. The fort sutler, Rynders (Harry Woods), sells arms and ammunition to the Cheyenne. However, this racetraitor demands too much money and the Cheyenne kill him and his assistants. As one of the traitors is repeatedly cast into a fire, Ford underlines both the barbarism of the Other and the hellfire awaiting fellow travelers. The trilogy’s final film paints American vulnerability to threat even more explicitly. In June 1950, while Ford was shooting Rio Grande, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were charged with passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union and North Korea invaded South Korea. President Truman immediately dispatched troops to Korea. But the intervention quickly “turned into a military nightmare . . . one of the worst periods in American military history.”35 After Chinese forces crossed the Yalu River in October 1950, the US Eighth Army “fell apart as a fighting force in a fashion resembling the collapse of the French in 1940, the British in Singapore in 1942,” and “the word Dunkirk hung constantly in the air” in meetings at the Pentagon.36 Released in November 1950 into an America rocked by these reverses, Rio Grande mirrors the radical right-wing politics of its screenwriters, James Bellah and James McGuinness.37 The opening scene evokes the high price of policing civilization’s frontier (Korea) as the fort’s women and children rush to meet Colonel Yorke’s exhausted returning patrol, anxiously scanning the wounded for loved ones. The barbaric Other is immediately evoked as Yorke reports to General Philip Sheridan (J. Carrol Naish) that two troopers died tethered by the Apache face down over an ant heap. Native Americans have no voice in Rio Grande, uttering only incantations, chants, and war cries, all highlighting their irredeemable Otherness with which no dialogue is possible. The Apaches soon attack. The class cleavage in the fort community—a ravine separating the officers’ quarters from the troopers’ quarters—symbolically provides the entry point through which the Apaches breach the

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fort’s defenses. Yorke concludes that “three tribes” have united against the cavalry—a clear allusion to North Korea, China, and the USSR. Rio Grande effects three further transitions in the depiction of threat and how to respond. The first lies in recurring banter between Yorke and Sheridan that the army’s coffee “is not as strong as it used to be.” The movie makes clear that this refers to civilian lack of stomach for decisive action against the Other. Further scorn for civilian authority is shown as, from General Sheridan down, all troopers connive to thwart a deputy US marshal’s attempts to arrest the Southerner, Tyree, on a manslaughter charge. This representative of civilian law is a dupe while Tyree’s honor, valor, and loyalty save his comrades. Civilians, the law, the Constitution itself all impede security, and Rio Grande repeatedly endorses military efforts to bypass such constraints. Secondly, highlighting the weakness and unreliability of America’s allies, the film belabors the point that only the United States can ensure international security. Should an ally prove unable to defend itself, or decline US assistance, or be impotent to prevent its territory from being used to threaten America, that ally’s sovereignty should not impede unilateral US action. After the Apache burn a Mexican village, a Mexican lieutenant rides into the Rio Grande to confer with Colonel Yorke. The latter offers to place himself and his troops under the command of the lowerranking Mexican officer to destroy their common enemy. Insisting on his duty to protect his nation’s sovereignty, the lieutenant demurs. General Sheridan then orders Yorke to cross the border and destroy the Apaches. Both understand the order to be illegal—and essential. Yorke is assured that, should he be court-martialed, Sheridan will appoint only sympathetic officers to judge him. Again, the law and the Constitution are subordinated to the military’s priorities. To engage audience approval of this unlawful covert operation, Ford deploys, thirdly, Americanism’s oldest trope, the captivity narrative (see p. 31). The Apache ambush the caravan evacuating the fort’s women and children. Carrying off the children, they murder Mrs. Bell in “unspeakable rites” not shown on screen. We see only the shocked reaction of the oneeyed Captain St. Jacques (Peter Ortiz), who curses the “sauvages, barbares.” Yorke restrains Corporal Bell from viewing his wife’s remains: imagined horrors are more terrifying than real ones and we are again induced to trust the security experts who see and understand what mere citizens cannot. Preparing to kill the kidnapped white children, the Apaches underscore their barbarism by dancing and drinking themselves into a fury. Their planned slaughterhouse is a church, and the children view the approaching Apache through the slits of a cross carved into the church door. Such desecration further legitimizes the extermination of the Apache band when the

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cavalry rides to the rescue. Rio Grande’s inclusion of the General Sheridan character is pertinent to this spectacle of slaughter (see p. 32). The real General Philip Sheridan chided victorious Prussian generals for their overly genteel conduct during their 1870 war against France: “The proper strategy consists in . . . causing the inhabitants so much suffering, that they must long for peace and force the government to demand it. The people must be left with nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war.”38 In Sheridan’s frontier wars, the Plains Indians were not simply defeated and their lands seized; their very mode of life was eradicated. In Rio Grande, the cavalry maps American values onto the lands beyond the (Cold War) frontier through total war.

Forging the White Community America’s growing social conflicts and divisions following World War II alarmed a range of business interests into spending some $100 million annually on campaigns promoting themes such as “United America” and “I am an American.”39 The cavalry trilogy’s embattled frontier fort embodies these notions. Its community is a microcosm of white America, and Ford deploys slapstick and ethnic stereotypes to underscore and then resolve its gender, regional, ethnic, and class cleavages. The “correct” values of Americanism are performed through John Wayne’s wise leadership. The military is the idealized (and exclusively white) nation, the melting pot where divisions are subsumed in a common American community, the institution best equipped to decide what represents a threat to this community and how it should be countered. Redomesticating American Women

At the end of World War II, great effort was devoted to pushing back into the home the women who had been heavily recruited into America’s wartime industrial workforce.40 The advertising industry spread the message that a woman’s role was that of homemaker and mother, and the cavalry trilogy’s strong focus on gender propagates this morale. With two exceptions, its women are frivolous, lightweight creatures. Fort Apache juxtaposes young Philadelphia (Shirley Temple), daughter of Colonel Thursday, with the wise Mary O’Rourke (Irene Rich). Philadelphia is an immature upper-class brat: Mrs. O’Rourke is the wife of a mere sergeant major, but all the officers’ wives defer to her authority. Eventually redeemed by her father’s death, Philadelphia becomes the dutiful (and silent) wife to the son of Mary O’Rourke and her martyred husband. This marriage depicts both American class mobility and the imperative to tame

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female willfulness. Its price is that Mary O’Rourke loses her husband and becomes the dowager matriarch. The fort’s other women are passive creatures condemned to stand and wait, staring into the dimming west as their men ride off to war. The female protagonist in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is the equally precious Olivia Dandridge (Joanne Dru). Her flirtatious sense of entitlement provokes jealousy between two junior officers, distracting them from their duty and so endangering the community: “Because of her, men fight heroically. Because of her . . . men die!” thunders the film’s trailer.41 To protect her and the fort’s other women, the commanding officer is obliged to divert troops from their principal mission. Miss Dandridge literally forgets her place, repeatedly leaving the column to join the officers in tactical discussions: each time Captain Brittles orders her back into line. A massacre at Sudrow’s Well finally teaches Olivia Dandridge that her flightiness threatens the community. Opting for the less socially privileged of her suitors, she too effaces her independence, sexuality, and humor to become a dutiful and voiceless army wife. Rio Grande’s Kathleen Yorke (Maureen O’Hara) is the most formidable woman tamed in the trilogy. A Southern patrician and Colonel Yorke’s long-estranged wife, she arrives at Fort Starke to buy out their son from military service. Trooper Jefferson Yorke (Claude Jarman Jr.) has enlisted in the army having flunked out of West Point. Though Colonel Yorke has not seen his son in fifteen years, he sternly reminds the recruit that he is expected to do his duty and will receive no favors. Refusing the maternal option to quit the cavalry, Jeff embraces his father’s profession. His deflated mother retorts that what makes Jeff’s father a great soldier “is hateful to me.” Kathleen Yorke’s defeat in the battle over her son represents Ford’s critique of an antimilitarist civilian elite and underlines his message that only by casting off the emasculating shackles of protective mothers can young American men defend American security. Kathleen Yorke’s defeat goes beyond the symbolic loss of her son. Confronted with rampaging Apache braves, she is obliged to acknowledge her need for male protection and she accepts her domestic role and loss of independence. Once the Apache carry off the Fort’s children, Mrs. Yorke revises her view of her husband, the army, and Jeff’s military service. The proud aristocrat becomes a good soldier’s wife. As she cheerfully volunteers to wash the soldiers’ filthy underclothes, “The Irish Washerwoman” plays in the background. When Colonel Yorke is transported back to the fort victorious but wounded, Mrs. Yorke takes his hand, acknowledging his sacrifice, and shows maternal pride when informed that “our boy [Jeff] did well.” Kathleen Yorke has been redomesticated, her pacifism and antimilitarism transformed into recognition of the need for and support of military action and sacrifice to defend American security. The American family is

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reunited under its patriarch, female autonomy and voice beyond the realm of the home is suppressed, and women are subordinated to the army’s masculine authority. Settling the Civil War

America’s rising postwar social tensions included a powerful reaction in the segregationist South against President Truman. Disgruntled Southern Democrats formed their own States’ Rights Democratic Party (the Dixiecrats) to contest the 1948 presidential election. Two weeks later, and despite wide expectations that he would lose the upcoming election, Truman overrode strong opposition from the military brass to order America’s armed forces desegregated. The Dixiecrats carried four Southern states in 1948 and Southern discontent continued to simmer. The cavalry trilogy rhetorically heals this regional fracture through repeatedly invoking the Civil War and painting all Southerners as honorable and dependable warriors. Slavery is never mentioned and no Southerner in Rio Grande displays animosity toward General Sheridan for his ravaging of the Shenandoah Valley. In She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Captain Brittles presides over the burial under the Confederate flag of “trooper John Smith,” conferring on the dead soldier his real name Rome Clay and Confederate rank of brigadier general, “a gallant soldier and a Christian gentleman.” When the just-retired Brittles is recalled to service and promoted in a cable signed by the Civil War generals Sheridan, William Tecumseh Sherman, and (now president) Ulysses S. Grant, Captain Brittles agrees with Tyree’s wistful comment that it would have been perfect had the cable also included the signature of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Kathleen Yorke’s reconciliation with her plantation-burning husband symbolically closes the Civil War. The trilogy’s final scene doubly consecrates this healing in the white American family when General Sheridan orders the band to play “Dixie”—the unofficial Confederate anthem—and laughs as the Southerner, trooper Tyree, again evades civilian authority by escaping on Sheridan’s own horse. Ethnics United for American Expansion

With the exception of General Sheridan (see below), officers with AngloProtestant surnames command throughout, and each film validates the naturalness of WASP leadership. Other white ethnic groups are presented as stereotypes. Never losing his French accent and occasionally resorting to his mother tongue, Rio Grande’s immaculately tailored, one-eyed Captain St. Jacques oozes Gallic gallantry. His eye patch both underscores his debonair air and symbolically alludes to France’s dismal military performance in 1940.

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Ethnic rivalries among the troopers are resolved through low humor and ritualized male combat. When Rio Grande’s German trooper Heinze (Fred Kennedy) insults Jeff Yorke as the pet of “a Mick Sergeant Major,” Quincannon halts the ensuing fight, ordering a boxing match under Queensbury rules. All troopers rally to protect Quincannon when Colonel Yorke demands an explanation. Heinze and Jeff end their quarrel with a manly handshake and Quincannon engages our mirth by beating up the German for insulting the Irish. Victor McLaglen’s character is the trilogy’s principal ethnic protagonist, the bearer of the caricatured Irishness present in much of Ford’s oeuvre. Himself of Irish descent and a long-time financial supporter of Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army (IRA),42 Ford returned time and again to Ireland and Irish issues, particularly in The Informer and The Quiet Man, both of which won him a Best Director Academy Award. The McLaglen character is a riddled alcoholic, a childlike and loyal ignoramus who addresses children and generals alike as “darlin’.” Relishing violence, Quincannon is also a hell of a man in a fight, a good Catholic (he stops to genuflect while rescuing Rio Grande’s children) and faithful subordinate who never forgets his place. Ford has been accused of producing “some of the most disparaging images of the Irish to have appeared in American cinema.”43 Yet such souvenir store Irish stereotypes were common in 1940s and 1950s America. Bing Crosby made a fortune recording tacky faux Irish songs that invite listeners to weep over the Irish diaspora, chuckle indulgently at supposedly Irish foibles and folklore, and identify with Irish hatred of the English. However, behind this evocation of the soused and brawling simpleton, Ford’s fetish of Irishness performs a key ideological function. In Fort Apache, McLaglen’s lout is juxtaposed with the O’Rourke family. Despite his lowly birth, Sergeant Major O’Rourke (Ward Bond) is a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, a man of great natural dignity and authority, the fort’s real patriarch just as his wife is its true matriarch. O’Rourke’s heroism has allowed his son to attend West Point and so ascend into the officer class. However Colonel Thursday forbids his daughter to associate with Lieutenant O’Rourke (whom he repeatedly calls by various stereotypical Irish names). Even as Thursday and the sergeant major face imminent death, the senior O’Rourke horrifies Thursday by suggesting that they will live on in the offspring of the union of their children. Ford’s discourse on Irishness takes on further layers in Rio Grande. Though mainly concerned with her upper-class privilege, the formidable Kathleen Yorke is clearly of Irish descent. More significant is the portrait of General Sheridan. The son of Irish immigrants, the real Sheridan was a nationalist sympathizer, telling a committee of Irish nationalists that “if he lived in Ireland he would be the greatest Fenian there.”44 As the fort’s

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choral group serenades him with “Bold Fenian Men,” Sheridan is clearly moved by this evocation of Irish rebellion. Here lies the key to Ford’s juxtaposition of the hokey Irishness of the McLaglen characters with the worthy Irishness of the O’Rourkes, Mrs. Yorke, and General Sheridan. At end of the 1940s, Irishness evoked many things in America. But even Bing Crosby’s stereotypes were rooted in the image of the rebel resisting the British Empire. Unlike the then emerging third world (and often pro-Soviet) forms of nationalist anti-imperialism— embodied by China and North Korea—Irish anti-imperialism was culturally approved of and safe. It posed no threat to American values. At just the moment when the United States was assuming Britain’s mantle of defending global imperialism, Ford’s evocation of safe Irish anti-imperialism served to occlude two sets of truths. It masked the fact that the US cavalry had been the instrument of the genocidal dispossession of Native Americans presided over by the pro-Fenian General Sheridan, and it served to draw a veil over what many saw as an expanding US empire.45 Rio Grande includes other oblique allusions to empire. Sergeant Major Quincannon goads the “Johnny Reb” Southerners—Tyree, Jeff Yorke, and Daniel Boone (!)—into trying to ride “Roman-style,” galloping and jumping two horses simultaneously while standing upright, one leg on each unsaddled horse. The audience is invited to share Quincannon’s glee at the recruits’ success. This long scene elicits the role of the Roman cavalry as the shock troops of empire. That Roman riding is initiated by Quincannon—the stock, tame anti-imperialist turned faithful servant of the new empire—reinforces the message of the need to prepare America’s youth for the challenge of empire. Fort Apache contains a final “take up the white man’s burden” moment. As the wounded Thursday commandeers York’s saber to join in a sacrificial last stand, he instructs York: “When you command this regiment—and you probably will—command it!” Thursday’s snobbery and fixation with class hierarchy all suggest the rigidities of British imperialism. His passing of the torch echoes Britain’s 1946 appeal to the United States to take over its role of global policeman. Ending the Nightmare of Class Rhetoric

In the year of Rio Grande’s release, the Advertising Council brought together trade union leaders, business executives, prominent academics, and other opinion makers in discussions designed to “create a consensus [on the nation’s core values] that could become the possession of the average man.”46 The proceedings were published in a book entitled What Is AMERICA published by Simon & Schuster and distributed oversees by the United States Information Service.47 Blunting class cleavages became vital to national security strategy. Again, the cavalry trilogy delivers.

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Fort Apache’s Thursday is an almost caricatured class snob. Violating military protocol, he storms into the O’Rourke home to remove his daughter from contact with these social inferiors. His crass behavior contrasts with the O’Rourkes’ dignified defense of their home, and Thursday’s refusal to heed the advice of inferior officers leads to his own and O’Rourke’s death—and Philadelphia marries Lieutenant O’Rourke anyway. In Rio Grande, class privilege and elitism are embodied in Kathleen Yorke’s initial belief that different rules apply to the rich and that service to the nation is to be bought and sold. In both cases, Ford juxtaposes class privilege with Wayne’s sterling American Everyman raised to leadership through ability and courage. Not culturally all that distinct from his troopers—he has problems with his spelling in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon—Wayne’s character embodies a meritocratic military hierarchy. Similarly, early in Fort Apache, Philadelphia despairs of the bareness of her lodgings. Her class attitudes render her impotent before such a domestic challenge. Led by Mrs. O’Rourke, the fort wives rally round. Without violating the status differentiation of their respective husband’s rank, the women furnish the Thursday home and draw Philadelphia into their community—whose security depends on everyone knowing their allotted place and role.

The Limits of an Emerging Liberal Critique Master of the dominant cultural form of the 1940s, John Ford was a key interpreter of American identity. His cavalry trilogy both mirrored and helped shape the tenor of its times. Its didactic patriotism, depiction of external threat, advocacy of preemptive covert action against external and internal enemies, cavalier dismissal of the sovereignty of allies, elevation of security above the US Constitution, subordination of all difference into a unified and warlike American community bent on saving civilization, and defense of imperialism and insistence that truth be secondary to the needs of heroic myth all worked to forge the vocabulary, mental maps, and emotional attitudes of the Cold War security imaginary. And by firmly anchoring these in an unquestioning projection of all elements of the mythology of Americanism, Ford’s cavalry trilogy vividly legitimized the national security state’s profound recasting of traditional conceptions of US national defense and foreign policies. For all their visual grandeur and technical mastery, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande are truly propagandistic films. Their unproblematic promotion of a Cold War social organization of forgetting (see p. 28) conveniently excludes all information at variance with the ideology they perform. The movement across the trilogy in Ford’s treatment of the possibility

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and desirability of peace with the Other almost exactly captures, first, the shift from Roosevelt to Truman, and then the Truman administration’s increasing belligerency. Jettisoning Fort Apache’s nuanced representation of the Other and of the role of truth versus fiction in Americanism, Ford equally abandons that film’s evocation of the threat posed by elitist military commanders. As the trilogy evolves into a celebration of unrestrained militarism and concludes with open contempt for civilian authority and the rule of law, the former socialistic democrat turned into a recruiting sergeant for the national security state. Ford’s great ideological achievement in the cavalry trilogy was to transform traditional American suspicion of militarism, covert action, foreign entanglements, and great-power politics “into something like awed respect” for the “new grammar of power” embodied in the national security state—one designed “to ensure that the U.S. can operate as the paramount power in the world, coming and going as it pleases, with whatever weapons it choses.”48 His tropes, images, and values attained the status of archetypes—metaphors imprinted onto the collective consciousness through which a society represents itself to itself and defines its place in the world. The cavalry trilogy perfectly corresponds to Richard Slotkin’s definition of myth as “stories drawn from a society’s history that have acquired through persistent usage the power of symbolizing that society’s ideology and of dramatizing its moral consciousness—with all the complexities and contradictions that consciousness may contain.”49 Slotkin’s insistence on complexity and contradiction is pertinent here. What made Ford such a mercurial and enduring mythmaker was his ability to question his own creations and anticipate shifts in the zeitgeist. Six years after making the reactionary Rio Grande, Ford shot The Searchers, again starring Wayne. Arguably Ford’s finest film, it was the first of a series of movies in which this cultural broker for the security imaginary set out to question elements of the mythology that he had helped fashion and root into popular consciousness. Released two years after the fall of Senator Joseph McCarthy, The Searchers takes dead-eye aim at the “better dead than red” mantra of the witch hunts and suggests that militarism and obsessive pursuit of the Other had turned the American hero into the moral equivalent of his enemy. In his eight-year search for his kidnapped niece Debbie (Natalie Wood), Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) evolves from the archetypal heroic western vigilante into an obsessed racist barbarian. His racism, paranoia, and violence threaten himself, his family, and the community as a whole. This critique is expanded in Sergeant Rutledge (1960). Now subverting the cavalry trilogy’s vision of an exclusively white American community, Ford denounces the psychopathology of racism and the slave-based Southern culture that he had repeatedly praised in the trilogy. The main threat

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comes not from the Apache (though, like the Comanche in The Searchers, they remain demonized), but from America’s endemic racist culture, groupthink hypocrisy, ignorance, and sexual violence. Sergeant Rutledge argues that America’s true heroes are its long-suffering black soldiers. The US Army is ridiculed; its officers are mainly ignorant and alcoholic, blind to the truth before their eyes. Though Sergeant Rutledge is a poor film, it is a heartfelt one. By 1960, few mainstream American directors had dared to denounce white racism, the Cold War herd mentality, and a key institution of the national security state this sweepingly. Nonetheless, Ford’s critique remains ambiguous. On the one hand, The Searchers and Sergeant Rutledge clearly denounce attitudes that exclude some from the national community. The Searchers seems to advocate that Americans reembrace those who, like Debbie, had—willingly or not— “gone over” to the Other while Sergeant Rutledge argues that blacks also form part of the national family, that racism threatens American freedoms. These movies equally censure exclusionist institutions for undermining Americanism’s core values—obstinate heroism in The Searchers, racism and the army and the legal system in Sergeant Rutledge. However, Americanism’s underlying myths go unchallenged. So too does the depiction of the Other as a barbarian and threat to American survival. The black protagonist of Sergeant Rutledge (Woody Strode) is as a paragon of the desexualized and, hence, unthreatening black man whose innate respect for white women and his “betters” reproduce the status quo. Ford seems to be saying that America has not lived up to its ideals. What he is not saying is that those ideals are themselves flawed, or rest on fiction, or that the depiction of threat is based on a lie. This ambiguity is pushed even further in Ford’s last great western. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), the director returns to Fort Apache’s conclusion that national institutions rest on fiction transformed into myth. A newspaper editor Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young) badgers Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) into revealing the truth of the incident that launched Stoddard’s illustrious career. This career is shown to rest on a lie. Stoddard did not kill the brutal outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) in a heroic showdown between good and evil; rather, Valance was gunned down by Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), who had been hiding in the night shadows and out of Valance’s sight. Yet editor Scott tears up his notes, prompting Stoddard’s incredulous query: “You’re not going to use the story?” “No, sir,” Scott replies. “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend!” In Fort Apache, Ford had endorsed the view that sustaining national security institutions through myth takes precedence over the truth and embraces the necessity of mythical heroism. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, his attitude is more ambiguous and hardnosed. Stoddard unjustly

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attains hero status by betraying his principles and hiding the truth. Turning a lie into myth, he gives truth to the lie. While the killing of Liberty Valance was necessary to save the town of Shinbone, it was a dirty, opportunistic, and hidden (covert) execution—“cold-blooded murder” acknowledges Doniphon—the truth of which was suppressed to promote Stoddard’s political career. The man who does the socially necessary foul deed loses his girl to Stoddard and dies in obscurity. Though raised to fame, wealth, and power through this lie, Stoddard loses his soul. The idealistic young lawyer morphs into a pompous politician. The rule of law about which Stoddard constantly pontificates and, indeed, the entire aura of legitimate power he comes to radiate are shown to rest on shameful forms of covert violence, themselves the necessary precondition (the noble lie?) that props up American democracy. And as in Fort Apache, Ford takes a swipe at journalists unable to distinguish myth from reality, who propagate the former rather than uncovering the latter and, when they finally discover the truth, connive in hiding it. Jim Kitses argues that this celebrated scene suggests that “the nobility of America’s heritage is specious, that Manifest Destiny involved coldblooded murder.”50 As the arch mythologist of the West, Ford clearly has abandoned the my country, right or wrong, chauvinism of Rio Grande. Eliciting our approval of this suppression of the truth, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance shows how the social organization of forgetting actually works. But Ford’s critique remains ambiguous. The murder of Liberty Valance is necessary and transformative. And though based on a lie, myth too “is good for the country”;51 without it, civilization cannot take root. The McCarthyism of Rio Grande has given way to a clear-eyed realism embracing the virtue of necessity. Ford’s final word on Americanist mythology came in Cheyenne Autumn (1964). Placing the social organization of forgetting front and center, his penultimate film highlights the systemic brutality and horrendous cost of US imperialist expansion, inviting Americans to identify with one of its principal victims—the tragically noble Cheyenne and their heroic trek back to their homeland. As Ford told Peter Bogdanovich, “I’ve killed more Indians than Custer, Beecher, Chivington put together. I wanted to show their point of view for a change. Let’s face it, we’ve treated them very badly—it’s a blot on our shield; we’ve cheated and robbed, killed, murdered and massacred and everything else, but they kill one white man and God, out come the troops.”52 Cheyenne Autumn is savagely critical of the US Army. The liberalminded Captain Archer (Richard Widmark) excepted, its officers are incompetent boors. The army culture of mindless obedience leads to needless slaughter of Indians and whites. Ford gives a German name (Captain Wessels—Karl Malden) and accent to the army officer whose blind obedience

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to orders and procedure provokes this slaughter. In 1964, most Americans would have grasped the allusion to a German officer just following orders. The army is an imperialist institution intent on grabbing “every acre of land” on the continent. The main white protagonist, Captain Archer, displays world-weary disgust for his own complicity in its crimes. Other icons of western mythology are ridiculed—notably Wyatt Earp and Texas cowboys. As in Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the press blithely manufactures hysterical nonsense to sell newspapers while the American public—the populist common man who is the real hero of Ford’s oeuvre—is ignorant and paranoid, in complete thrall to an entirely manufactured pathology of fear. It is impossible to reconcile the passionate mea culpa in this, Ford’s farewell to the western, with the gung ho vindication of militarism and the national security state in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande. Though a commercial flop, Cheyenne Autumn is Ford’s retrospective commentary on his own career as mythmaker. Little in Americanism is here depicted positively: the militarized state leads to slaughter of both Indians and whites; the frontier myth of pristine space is a lie; the brave vigilantewarrior who is supposed to bring civilization is an incompetent drunkard and cynic out for only himself; his naked individualism sows death and destruction; “civilization” contains little of value; American expansionism is illegitimate and leads to genocide; and US officers are as blind to murderous orders as were their German counterparts.

Conclusion Two years after the Cuban missile crisis and a year following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Cheyenne Autumn demolishes almost all of the myths that the cavalry trilogy had woven into America’s security imaginary. The movie was released in 1964 when the fabricated Gulf of Tokin incident served as a pretext for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s massive escalation of US military engagement in Vietnam. It can be seen as a prescient perspective on how the national security state and Americanism’s combination of racism, a herd mentality, cultural ignorance, mythology, and imperialism would lead to catastrophe. Ford made only one film after Cheyenne Autumn.53 At the end of his career, this iconic director appeared to acknowledge both his own role in fabricating the ideological basis of the national security state and his impotence to rein in the killing machine he had promoted. His was the dilemma of millions of liberals who had abandoned New Deal populism for the expansionist militarism of the vital center. And in the decade following Cheyenne Autumn, the Vietnam War exposed the fallacy of the politics of

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this vital center, tore the Democratic party apart, and dealt American liberalism a blow from which it has yet to recover.

Notes 1. Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth, p. 18. 2. Schlesinger, The Vital Center. 3. Wall, Inventing the “American Way,” pp. 9 and 175. 4. Robert A. Taft and Dwight D. Eisenhower, quoted in “Fear and the Garrison State,” The Rand Blog, 26 April 2005, www.rand.org/blog/2005/04/fear-and-the -garrison-state.html. 5. Hogan, A Cross of Iron, blurb. 6. Best Director: The Informer (1935), Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952); Best Documentary: The Battle of Midway (1942); and Best Documentary, Short Subject: December 7th (1943). Ford’s other nominations include Best Director: Stagecoach (1939); and Best Picture (Producer): Arrowsmith (1932), The Informer (1935), The Long Voyage Home (1940), and The Quiet Man (1952). 7. Prater, John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy, p. 140; Stowell, John Ford, pp. xi–xii. 8. Kitses, Horizons West, p. 30. 9. Ibid., p. 32; Stowell, John Ford, p. xi. 10. Sarris, Interviews with Film Directors, p. 193. 11. Kitses, Horizons West, pp. 27 and 42; Stowell, John Ford, p. 45. 12. McBride, “The Convoluted Politics of John Ford.” 13. L. Anderson, About John Ford, p. 101. 14. L. May, The Big Tomorrow, p. 148. See also Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War. 15. Sklar, Movie-made America, pp. 282 and 283. 16. Ibid., p. 287. 17. Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, p. xi. 18. MPAPAI, “Statement of Principles,” Society of Independent Motion Pictures, SIMPP Research Database, www.cobbles.com/simpp_archive/huac_alliance .htm (accessed 7 April 2011). Funded by the Hearst group, the MPAPAI included such luminaries as Ward Bond, Gary Cooper, Cecil B. DeMille, Walt Disney, Clark Gable, Hedda Hopper, George Murphy (later a Republican senator), Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan, Ginger Rogers, Robert Taylor, Barbara Stanwyck, John Wayne, and King Vidor. 19. Chamber of Commerce of the United States, Communist Infiltration in the United States, pp. 2–3. 20. On Eric Johnson’s central role in several 1940s business initiatives to forge a new American consensus that “privileged individual freedom, national unity and a shared faith in God above all else,” see Wall, Inventing the “American Way,” pp. 3– 11, passim. 21. Eric Johnson, quoted in L. May, The Big Tomorrow, p. 177. 22. Ibid., figures 9 and 10, pp. 278–279. 23. Ibid., Figure 17, p. 283. 24. MPAPAI, “Statement of Principles.” 25. Prater, John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy, p. 10. Costing $2.8 million to make, Fort Apache grossed $4.9 million. The equivalent figures for She Wore a Yellow

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Ribbon were $1.3 million and $5.2 million, while Rio Grande cost $1.2 million and grossed $2.9 million. Republic Pictures Corporation statements of income and costs, quoted in Prater, John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy, pp. 147, 151, and 153. 26. Bogdanovich, John Ford, p. 85. 27. Quincannon is played by Dick Foran in Fort Apache and by Victor McLaglen in the later films. In Fort Apache, McLaglen plays Sergeant Mulcahy, who exhibits identical personality traits to his Quincannon of the latter films. 28. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, pp. 10–16. 29. Prater, John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy, p. 13. 30. John Ford, quoted in Gallagher, John Ford, p. 246. 31. John Ford, quoted in Prater, John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy, p. 38, emphasis added. 32. Hoberman, An Army of Phantoms, p. 81. 33. Concluding narration, quoted in “Memorable Quotes for She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, 1949,” IMDb, www.imdb.com/title/tt0041866/quotes (accessed 15 November 2010). 34. Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” 35. Halberstam, The Fifties, p. 75. 36. Ibid., p. 109. 37. James Bellah was described by his own son as “a fascist, a racist and a class bigot,” while James McGuinness was “one of the most vocal leaders of the right wing in Hollywood”; Roberts and Olson, John Wayne, p. 325. McGuinness launched the initiative that led to the formation of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals; Hoberman, An Army of Phantoms, p. 12. 38. General Philip Sheridan, quoted in Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat, p. 39. 39. See Wall, Inventing the “American Way,” pp. 160–200. 40. See Koussoudji and Dresser, “Working Class Rosies”; Goldin, “The Role of World War II in the Rise of Women’s Employment”; Michals, “Toward a New History of the Postwar Economy.” 41. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, IMDb, www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1 878328089/ (accessed 10 November 2010). 42. McBride, “The Convoluted Politics of John Ford.” 43. Morgan, “Irish in John Ford’s Seventh Cavalry Trilogy,” p. 34. 44. “Sheridan and the Fenians,” New York Times, 15 May 1871, reproduced at http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=940CE7DF1639 EF34BC4D52DFB366838A669FDE (accessed 11 November 2010). 45. W. A. Williams, Empire as a Way of Life; Nugent, Habits of Empire. 46. Wall, Inventing the “American Way,” p. 175, emphasis added. 47. Ibid. 48. Melley, The Covert Sphere, p. vii; Raskin and LeVan, In Democracy’s Shadow, p. 5. 49. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 5. 50. Kitses, Horizons West, p. 39. 51. John Ford, quoted in Prater, John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy, p. 38. 52. John Ford, quoted, Bogdanovich, John Ford, p. 104. 53. The 1966 interrogation of his own Catholicism, 7 Women.

3 McCarthyism, Film Noir, and the National Security State

Film noir, to a great extent, functions as a post–World War II counterpoint to a society that was suddenly one of the most powerful, influential and prosperous in the world, and thoroughly in love with itself.1 The tumultuous years between the adoption of the 1947 National Security Act and the December 1954 Senate vote to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy marked both the consolidation of the national security state and the height of US Cold War paranoia. As the US government and the CIA were caught off guard by the August 1949 test of the first Soviet nuclear weapon, fear of potential nuclear confrontation came to overshadow political and cultural life. Growing anxieties over Soviet spies gaining access to nuclear secrets were fed by events such as the 1950 arrest of the AngloGerman nuclear scientist Karl Fuchs and of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the flight to Moscow in 1951 of British diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, all accused of passing US nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Americans’ sense of security was further eroded by the military stalemate in Korea (1950–1953) and the first test of the Soviet hydrogen bomb in August 1953. The trial and 1953 execution of the Rosenbergs were the most dramatic moments in a seven-year domestic witch hunt for subversives and “unAmerican” Americans, real and imagined. This sustained and multifaceted campaign of intimidation was clearly designed to impose the Cold War security imaginary (see p. 19) as the sole legitimate and authentic version of national identity and the national interest, and to discipline, disgrace, and punish even suspected deviations from this national security norm. The climate of fear and conformity this generated succeeded in rooting a new

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grammar of power (see p. 15) in the United States. This period has come to be named after Joseph McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin, who described his crusade against alleged communists and their sympathizers in the State Department and other state agencies as one to root out “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.”2 Though McCarthy was disgraced in December 1954, and despite relatively rapid economic growth and the emergence by the end of the 1950s of mass consumer society, notions of omnipresent external and internal threat continued to dominate the Cold War consensus (see pp. 20– 22) that underpinned the hegemonic ideology from the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. The US cinema industry reflected the tenor of these anxious times. In 1947, years before McCarthy grabbed the spotlight, the man who would soon initiate the Hollywood blacklist, newly installed head of the Motion Picture Association of America, Eric Johnson, lectured filmmakers that “we’ll have no more films that deal with the seamy side of American life” (see p. 45). Within a year, Hollywood had become a principal focus of the right-wing effort to root out so-called un-American influences. Leading actors, directors, and screenwriters were hounded by the HUAC for suspected present or former communist affiliations. Moviemakers also faced censorship from the Production Code Administration (PCA) and organizations like the National Legion of Decency and the American Legion. Moreover, Hollywood’s economic situation was increasingly daunting. Television and the middle class flight to the suburbs continued to erode its weekly audience. Following the 1948 Supreme Court Paramount decision (see p. 44), the studios tried to lure Americans back to the movies with various new technical and wide-screen processes and epics that amplified the sensations of watching films, stressed moral certainty and the difference between good and evil, and sought to induce even more glamour into the decade of rising consumption.3 This unfavorable political and economic environment notwithstanding, filmmakers continued to explore “the seamy side” of the American way of life through film noir. This term refers to an eclectic category of films united by various common themes and visual styles that, taken together, offered an implicit and sometimes explicit critique of American society and its politics. Frequently made on low budgets, many film noirs were distributed as a B-movie (supporting film) in the widespread 1940s and early 1950s practice of trying to lure audiences by offering a double feature. In this chapter, we explore the relationship between film noir and the national security state. We begin by examining the phenomenon known as film noir and the ways in which it countered the dominant view of the national security state. We then look at how Hollywood’s attempts to stem its declining audiences helped to end the classic film noir era. In the final

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section, we focus on two films listed among the fifty essential movies constituting the film noir “canon”4—Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) and Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955). These examples of what Mark Osteen calls “nuclear noir”5 each illustrate how film noir could entertain its audience with stories that appeared to mirror widespread security anxieties and also offer critical reflection on how these anxieties were produced.

Exploring the Dark Side James Naremore has neatly summed up the core of the ongoing debate over exactly what constitutes a film noir by arguing that it “has always been easier to recognize a film noir than to define the term.”6 This debate centers around two main questions: (1) whether film noir refers to a particular period in the history of the American cinema or, rather, is a label that can apply to films made anytime and anywhere; and (2) whether there exist enough similarities between films that have been called noir to constitute a film category on their own, either as a separate genre or simply a type of film characterized by a similar style. Part of the problem lies in the fact that, despite the debates over the nature of American film noir that started in France just after World War II,7 the term only gained currency in the United States a decade after the making of the last film noir.8 No director set out deliberately to make a film noir in the way that he or she would make a western or a musical. Without entering into these controversies, we adopt the view that what can be called the “classical” period of Hollywood film noir ran from the early 1940s to the late 1950s, and that certain recurring themes and cinematic styles distinguish these movies from the Hollywood mainstream. Though observers still disagree about the exact dates of the film noir era, most situate its beginning in 1940–1941 with Boris Ingster’s Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) or John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941), and almost all agree it ended in 1958 with Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. This coincided with the period when the United States first began to assume and then assert its status as a superpower, when the notion of permanent threat and the absolute priority accorded to national security became overriding features of American public life. Of course, films with elements of noir were produced before this period, and certain films made after it have been called “neonoir.” Likewise, there are many French, British, and Italian films made in the style and with the content of film noir. However, neither these pre- and post-1958 American noir-style films, nor those produced outside the United States, carry the same meaning or have the same sociopolitical impact of those of the classic American film noir period.

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The typical film noir takes place in an urban setting and involves a lone white male protagonist in his late thirties to early forties, one living on the margins of social life such as a drifter, criminal or former criminal, private eye, disillusioned cop, or insurance agent. This protagonist typically finds himself caught up in a situation, often not of his own making, and usually involving some kind of criminality that overwhelms him or leads him in unintended directions. In some cases, the protagonist meets a femme fatale who will cause his downfall. Film noirs are distinguished by their atmosphere of moral ambiguity and alienation, with no clear demarcation between good and evil, no projection of the mythology of Americanism (see p. 27). More particularly all film noirs show the futility of the individual’s attempt to control his own destiny and retain his own autonomy and agency. The plot usually unfolds on a background of social and political corruption and violence, highlighted by the darkness of the photography and ample use of night-for-night scenes that emphasize the dark side of society and the failure and illusions of the American Dream. Instead of the happy ending typical of so many other Hollywood genres, and rather than the celebration of consumerism central to the Cold War consensus, film noirs usually end in tragedy or at best in ambiguity. In sum, in the words of the French authors of the first book on film noir, the “hallmarks” distinguishing noir from other types of Hollywood films are their moral ambivalence, criminal violence and contradictory complexity of situations and motives that conspire to give the public the same feeling of anguish or insecurity. . . . All the works of this series present an emotional form of unity: it is the state of tension felt by the viewer, and caused by the disappearance of his psychological points of reference. Film noir’s objective was to create a specific sense of unease.9

This state of tension and sense of unease, this pervasive violence, corruption, alienation, uncertainty, and general absence of moral clarity well captured the underlying angst that the Cold War and growing domestic social conflicts generated across much of the American population between 1947 and 1955. Ignoring Eric Johnson’s injunction, film noirs focused explicitly on the contradictions and conflicts of the seamy side of American life, and broke sharply with the 1950s Hollywood emphasis on glamour and American self-satisfaction.10 Politics and Ideology

As early as 1969, Jean-Luc Comolli and Paul Narboni provided one useful way of unraveling the politics and ideology of film noir.11 They divide films into seven ideological categories, two of which are particularly rele-

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vant to American popular movies. The first, and “largest category,” concerns “those films which are imbued through and through with the dominant ideology in pure unadulterated form and give no indication that their makers were even aware of the fact” and in which nothing “jars against [this] ideology or the audience’s mystification by it. They are very reassuring for audiences for there is no difference between the ideology they meet every day and the ideology on the screen.”12 Such films overtly reaffirm the hegemonic mindset (see p. 18). Clearly, film noir does not fall under this category, but rather under a second one: “films which seem at first sight to belong firmly within the ideology and to be completely under its sway, but which turn out to be so only in an ambiguous manner” because they “throw up obstacles in the way of ideology, causing it to swerve and get off course.”13 In such films, internal criticism is taking place which cracks the film apart at the seams. If one reads the film obliquely, looking for symptoms; if one looks beyond its apparent formal coherence, one can see that it is riddled with cracks: it is splitting under an internal tension which is simply not there in an ideologically innocuous film. The ideology thus becomes subordinate to the text. It no longer has an independent existence: it is presented in the text.14

Barbara Klinger dubs as “progressive” such films that question the depiction of reality presented in the classic Hollywood movie. Progressive films share certain characteristics that are relevant to our analysis of film noir. They have a pessimistic worldview, an overall atmosphere that is “bleak, cynical, apocalyptic and/or highly ironic . . . in such a way as to disturb or disable an unproblematic transmission of affirmative ideology.” Their themes “dramatise the demolition of values positively propounded in dominant cinema’s characterisation of the role and nature of social institutions,” and their narrative structure “departs from the perceived demands of the classical Hollywood form.”15 Film noir offers an implicit or explicit critical view of society, from either a left-wing or a right-wing perspective—although the former tended to dominate until the blacklist began to bite in the late 1940s.16 Those on the left suggested that the choices of corrupt individuals were essentially a product of a corrupt or imperfect society. They did not hesitate to establish a parallel between organized crime and corporate capitalism, often conflating the two. In other words, the moral ambivalence, alienation, violence, corruption, and absence of individual autonomy that these films project are systemic or structural problems in American society and its predominant ideology; on his or her own, the individual is powerless to overcome them. Right-wing film noirs, on the other hand, tend to reject structural or systemic explanations for the bleak lives they depict, usually locating the pervasive lack of internal unity and moral consciousness in human weakness

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or lack of strong leadership. People lead dismal lives because of their own choices rather than because of the predominant ideology or structure of the existing institutions and society. Such films advocated law-and-order solutions, usually leading to the physical elimination of those who threatened the prevailing sociopolitical consensus. Unlike film noirs of the left, which usually presented a bleak picture offering little hope of profound change, those of the right emphasized the possibility of individual redemption, often associated with the criminally oriented or misguided male protagonist finding his way back and his acceptance of the norms of “good” society, almost inevitably through an affirmation of family values. In this sense, such rightwing movies actually end up erasing the pervasive moral ambiguity characteristic of all film noirs, thereby restoring the Americanist myth of individual agency and control. In the final analysis, these films distinguished themselves from those of the left by their implicit support for maintaining or restoring a threatened prevailing order. Two examples illustrate these differences. In Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948) a New York gangster, Ben Tucker (Roy Roberts), takes over the local illegal numbers racket with the aim of legalizing this activity with the help of lawyer Joe Morse (John Garfield). Joe tries to help his brother Leo (Thomas Gomez), who runs one of the small numbers joints that Tucker wants to incorporate. Though Leo holds out, rejecting any aid from Joe, his business is taken over anyway and Leo is murdered when he decides to quit the newly formed syndicate. This finally leads Joe to denounce Tucker and his syndicate to the police, but too late. Not even the love of a good woman, Doris (Beatrice Pearson), will bring Joe redemption, despite his belated announcement that he wants to join the fight against corruption. Through its portrait of Tucker’s numbers syndicate, Force of Evil deconstructs the workings of monopoly capitalism and suggests that there is little difference between organized crime and organized capital. Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947) presents a very different picture of society and crime. Its protagonist, Nick (Victor Mature), is arrested as he robs a jewelry store. In return for a reduced sentence, he informs on other criminals. In the meantime, Nick learns that his wife has committed suicide—and was having an affair with another gangster—and that his children have been sent to an orphanage. On leaving prison, Nick meets and marries a “good woman,” Nettie (Coleen Gray), and agrees to testify against a vicious killer Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark). Udo is acquitted and out for revenge. Nick chases after him, but is ambushed, shot, and wounded. The film ends as he is carried off in an ambulance, but with every indication that he will survive and be reunited with Nettie and his kids. The message is clear. Getting in and out of crime is an individual choice, and redemption is possible for the sinner or prodigal son who sincerely repents and returns to the fold. On the other hand, the adulterous woman who

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betrays family values is punished and replaced by a good woman ready to assume and to maintain them.

Technological Innovations Be Damned Film noir was particularly affected by two developments in the film industry in the early 1950s. The first was the rise in the role of independent production companies as a direct result of the 1948 Supreme Court Paramount decision, which obliged the majors to separate film production from distribution (see p. 44). Following the Paramount decision, the studios transferred the making of B-films, the source of so many noirs, to the independents.17 Moreover, as Peter Lev points out, given the increasing difficulties in securing bank loans as box office receipts dropped off after 1947, the independents continued to maintain strong ties to the studios and to the main distributors, but they enjoyed greater artistic freedom from studio control than in the past.18 Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly is a typical example of this trend. Made by the independent Parkland Pictures—also responsible for such B-films as I, the Jury (1953), The Long Wait (1954), and My Gun Is Quick (1957), all based on novels written by Mickey Spillane—Kiss Me Deadly was produced on a relatively modest budget of $410,000.19 While Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street was made by a major studio, Twentieth Century Fox, its $780,000 production costs were still far less than the $4.1 million spent on the company’s major film of the same year, The Robe.20 The second development affecting film noir concerned the impact on Hollywood of the evolving political situation. From the 1947 Waldorf Statement (see p. 46) onward, pressure to eliminate any traces of apprehended leftism in the movie industry, as well as in society in general, increased to the point where “social issue films, concerns for minorities, or criticism of big business were suspect; even sympathy for the underdog was problematic.”21 This meant that the major studios avoided politically or socially controversial topics and tended to focus on making safe films with happy or morally uplifting endings.22 Paradoxically, this situation enlarged the space for independent filmmakers in general, and film noir in particular, to adopt a more critical perspective on political and social issues, though in ways that would not provoke the ire of the PCA or other defenders of the Cold War consensus. As the crisis of cinema attendance intensified during the 1950s, Hollywood attempted to woo back its audience with technological innovations. A dramatic increase in the number of drive-in cinemas sought to attract both a younger viewing public and suburban families.23 Other changes involved improving the product itself and going where television could not follow. These included increasing the number of films shot in color, employing

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wide-screen techniques such as CinemaScope, and using other more ephemeral gimmicks like 3-D or those with limited appeal to theater owners because of their huge cost, like Cinerama. Since the vast majority of film noirs were made on a relatively low budget, they were largely bypassed by such changes.24 Their very nature had little appeal to the average drive-in audience.25 Color would have completely destroyed the style of film noir, dependent as it was on black-and-white techniques. The other newer technologies all relied on the use of color and their cost tended to be prohibitive. By the end of the 1950s, film noir had reached the end of its technological tether. It was clearly already a film type belonging to a bygone era, not merely because it would not or could not adapt to change—an anachronistic idea in itself since nobody consciously set out to make movies of a yet to be declared category of film—but also because the political and social climate in which it had thrived was changing. Cinema censorship was loosening. With the release of Spartacus in 1960, based on a novel by unrepentant leftist and recipient of the 1954 Stalin Peace Prize, Howard Fast, and openly crediting the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, Hollywood acknowledged that the age of shunning political undesirables was over. US society and politics were on the cusp of profound changes that would soon lead to the collapse of the Cold War consensus. Openly critical films would become that much easier to make.

Deconstructing the National Security State Though made just two years apart, Pickup on South Street and Kiss Me Deadly reflect different moments in the McCarthyite era. In 1952, McCarthy was at the height of his influence. Therefore, it is not surprising that a contemporary film about spying like Pickup should emphasize unity in the fight against traitors “in our midst.” By the end of 1954, McCarthy was finished and, though the Red Scare continued for several years, Kiss Me Deadly could already critique both what McCarthyism meant in practice and the nature of US corporate capitalism. Nevertheless, the makers of Pickup on South Street and Kiss Me Deadly had to submit to the controls that the film industry imposed on itself (see p. 45–46) and to the realities of domestic Cold War politics. Both had to satisfy the PCA’s insistence that their scripts not involve drug trafficking. Samuel Fuller, the director of Pickup, apparently experienced no other difficulties with the PCA and enjoyed the full support of the film’s real producer, Darryl Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century Fox.26 And while J. Edgar Hoover criticized Pickup after a private showing, for its antihero’s lack of

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patriotism, this did not lead to changes to the final cut.27 On the other hand, the director and producer of Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich, had to negotiate the PCA’s objection to portraying the main protagonist as a “coldblooded murderer whose numerous killings are completely justified.”28 While the film finally received the PCA’s seal of approval, according to Richard Maltby the PCA “had a determining influence” on its narrative.29 Kiss Me Deadly, also faced harsh criticism from the National League of Decency, which awarded the film a “C” classification that was soon upgraded to a “B” rating, or suitable for adult audiences.30 The film also encountered advertising problems in the South and Midwest, and was banned in Britain.31 Despite sharing a similar theme—the theft of nuclear secrets—Pickup on South Street and Kiss Me Deadly seem to be very different films, both in the treatment of their material and in their political objectives. Yet each depicts people on the edge of society, and their respective narratives each question the reality of the American Dream and show the national security state to be ineffective in carrying out its designated mission. Unraveling the Web of Secrecy

Pickup on South Street’s protagonist, small-time pickpocket Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark), becomes unwittingly involved in a communist spy ring’s theft of a microfilm containing US nuclear secrets when he steals the wallet of a former prostitute, Candy (Jean Peters) on the New York subway. Unaware that she is under FBI surveillance, Candy was supposed to deliver the microfilm as a last favor to her ex-boyfriend Joey (Richard Kiley), who works for the spy ring. The FBI agents ask police captain Dan Tiger (Murvyn Vye) to find the pickpocket, who is identified as Skip McCoy through police informer Moe (Thelma Ritter in an Oscar-nominated role). Despite appeals to his patriotism, Skip is convinced that he can make money from the microfilm and refuses to hand it over to the FBI. Meanwhile, Candy, who thinks the microfilm contains trade secrets, is pressured by Joey to get it back. Thanks to Moe, she finds Skip who demands $25,000 for it. Now in love with Skip, Candy switches sides when she discovers the microfilm’s real contents, and is beaten and shot by a frustrated Joey. Skip then pursues Joey, beats him up, and in the process overcomes the spies’ ringleader. The microfilm is recovered and all charges against Skip are dropped. Though many would agree with Michael Rogin that Pickup on South Street “harks back to a nineteenth-century, predatory individualism” and presents an undeniably right-wing view of the world and the Cold War,32 a more nuanced evaluation is called for. The film’s director and screenwriter,

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Fuller, considered himself to be on the left,33 but claimed to have “no intention of making a political statement in Pickup, none whatsoever.”34 Simply wanting “to take a poke at the idiocy of the cold war elements of the fifties,”35 he sought to offer a third, centrist, way between blind adherence to official Cold War ideology and the self-centered individualism and indifference to patriotism expressed by Skip. For its part, Kiss Me Deadly takes the paranoia of the times a giant step further by suggesting where the theft of an actual nuclear device might lead. Returning to Los Angeles, private investigator Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) gives a lift to a mysterious woman, Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman), who apparently has escaped from a nearby sanitarium. A car blocks them on the highway. Hammer is knocked unconscious, Christina is tortured and then killed, and both are put back into his car which is pushed over a cliff. But Hammer survives. On awakening in hospital, he refuses to say anything when questioned by police captain Pat Murphy (Wesley Addy) and then by agents of the fictitious federal Interstate Crime Commission (obviously the FBI). Despite being warned not to pursue the matter, Hammer decides to do so anyway. He meets Christina’s roommate, Lily Carver (Gaby Rodgers), and takes her to his apartment to protect her. Meanwhile, Hammer’s secretary and lover Velda (Maxine Cooper) is kidnapped by a gang led by the mysterious Dr. Soberin (Albert Dekker), which is also looking for Christina’s secret—what Velda refers to as “the great whatsit.” Hammer and Lily Carver follow a lead that takes them to a locker in an athletic club. Finding a leather-covered iron box in the locker, Hammer is burned by its contents when he tries to open it. When he returns to his car, Lily has gone. Told by Captain Murphy that the real Lily Carver is dead and that the case involves nuclear secrets, Hammer takes Murphy to the locker, but the box has disappeared. Tracing Soberin to a beach house where he is holding Velda, Hammer also finds Gabrielle, the woman who had impersonated Lily, and Soberin admiring the stolen box. Convinced that it contains some treasure, Gabrielle tries to open it but Soberin stops her. When he refuses to share its contents with her, she shoots him dead. Hammer bursts in, and Gabrielle shoots and wounds him. She then opens the box and is immediately incinerated. Hammer manages to find Velda and to get both of them out of the house just before it disappears in a huge explosion. Aldrich never hid his intention “to make a political statement” in Kiss Me Deadly, one firmly on the left. 36 With the help of screenwriter, A. I. Bezzerides, a well-known left-wing Greek Armenian immigrant, Aldrich consciously set out to critique the ideology and the nuclear paranoia of the 1950s.37 As he later explained, his film “had to do with the McCarthy Era and the end justifying the means and the kind of materialistic society that paid off in choice rewards, sometimes money, sometimes girls, sometimes other things.”38

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Living Outside the Cold War Consensus

True to the noir archetype, the main characters of Pickup on South Street and Kiss Me Deadly live on the margins of society. McCoy and Hammer are ultraindividualists, motivated only by personal gain, resisting any external authority and with no interest in ideology, patriotism, or national security. In Pickup on South Street, when FBI agent Zara (Willis B. Bouchey) tells McCoy that should he refuse to cooperate over a stolen microfilm or he will be “as guilty as the traitors that gave Stalin the A bomb,” Skip shoots back, “Are you waving the flag at me?” When then asked, “Do you know what treason means?” McCoy responds with what, in McCarthyite America, would have been an incendiary, “Who cares?”39 In Kiss Me Deadly, police captain Murphy has no better success in persuading Hammer to leave the search for the box holding nuclear secrets to the authorities, at least not until he invokes three terms associated with the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project, Trinity (the code name of the project’s first nuclear test), and Los Alamos. Notwithstanding such similarities, these two protagonists have little in common. McCoy lives in a shack on New York’s East River, one devoid of home comforts, clearly not implicated in the consumerism of the Cold War consensus. McCoy is a true loner with few material needs who just wants to be left alone to carry on his business. He does not live through violence and makes a point of not carrying a gun. Hammer, on the other hand, drives fast and expensive sports cars, and his large apartment in a fairly prosperous part of Los Angeles is equipped with the latest technology. He clearly enjoys everything that the Cold War consensus held out as guaranteeing individual fulfillment. For Hammer, the ends justify the means and violence is the preferred way of doing business. Prepared to lie, beat people up, and even torture in his single-minded quest for information, Hammer is “McCarthyism carried to its logical and not-so-far-removed extreme.”40 To some extent, Pickup on South Street’s Candy and Gabrielle in Kiss Me Deadly are respectively McCoy’s and Hammer’s female counterparts. Both are also loners, fending for themselves. Like McCoy, Candy is out to make as much as she can for herself, but her greed has its limits. Horrified to discover she has unwittingly been involved in a communist spy ring, she readily agrees to work for the agents of the national security state, both for patriotic reasons and to protect the man she loves. Candy is a noir version of the well-known trope of the whore with the heart of gold. Gabrielle, on the other hand, like Hammer, is blinded by greed and will stop at nothing to achieve her ends, including deceit and murder. But whereas Hammer finally realizes the limits of his ruthless pursuit of the great whatsit, Gabrielle follows her quest to the very end, with dire consequences, and she is duly punished. Respectively set in opposition to the antiheroes, McCoy and Hammer, the villains in Pickup on South Street and Kiss Me Deadly demarcate the

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American from the un-American. Despite being predatory individualists, McCoy and Hammer are still Americans. However, Pickup’s communist agent Joey is a thoroughly un-American treacherous coward, propelled above all by fear. Betraying his country, he will do anything, from cajoling, bribing, and finally beating up and shooting his former girlfriend, to bullying and then killing a defenseless old lady (Moe), all to avoid punishment from his own side. The case of Dr. Soberin is more complex. Undoubtedly ruthless in his search for the great whatsit, and prepared to torture and kill to get information, he is both scientist and philosopher, constantly making biblical and classical references. Rather than seeking material wealth, Soberin pursues the absolute power that the great whatsit promises. It is less his treachery—whose nature is never clearly spelled out—than his quest for total control of the world that sets him outside of American society. An Imperfect American Dream

One of the basic tenets of the Cold War consensus on which the national security state was predicated proclaimed “the necessity and inevitability of evolutionary social progress and social justice to eliminate the rough edges of society and open the American Dream to all Americans” (see Box 1.1, p. 22). Like all film noirs, Pickup on South Street and Kiss Me Deadly contest this optimistic view of contemporary America and its cherished myth of a classless society, a melting pot open to all those with sufficient ambition and drive. Both films take place in pre–civil rights America, usually presented on the screen as male dominated, middle class, and white. Pickup on South Street deviates from this conventional Hollywood model. In his autobiography Fuller declared that “I wanted my film to be told through the eyes of the powerless,”41 a theme that recurs in many of his films. Pickup tells a story about a petty underworld where the line between the police and the criminals is thin, at least in terms of social class. Its only reference to other classes is to the very ordinary group of spies, which suggests that communism is not a phenomenon of the working class or the socially excluded, but of the privileged middle class—a viewpoint often associated with the populist right. Kiss Me Deadly portrays an America no more classless than that in Pickup, but that is more interested in deconstructing what it considers to be the myth of the melting pot. To the extent that black America exists, it is found only in those occupations to which blacks were still confined at the time such as boxers, boxing coaches, bartenders, and nightclub entertainers. White European immigrants may have escaped the fate of America’s invisible blacks, but they fare only marginally better. Aldrich offers an alternative to the traditional portrait, and Hollywood staple, of immigrant integra-

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tion and professional success. He shows an old Italian immigrant reduced to helping people move into a rooming house by carrying their heavy cases, and another unemployed Italian, in his fifties, living in a single room and dreaming of becoming an opera singer. Two other immigrants, both Greek, work in a small garage owned by one of them. For Nick (Nick Dennis), the garage owner, the American Dream is embodied in fast cars. When he finally gets the chance to drive Hammer’s sports car as part of a mission to gather information for the private eye, it gets him killed. The symbolism is obvious. Critiquing the Security Imaginary

Pickup on South Street and Kiss Me Deadly directly attack three key elements of the security imaginary sustaining the national security state: its fetish of secrecy; information and intelligence—how they are obtained, for what purpose, and who has the right to know; and the nature of the threat to the United States. Both films revolve around the national security state’s insistence on the threat to America’s nuclear secrets. A fetish of secrecy. Pickup on South Street invites its audience to focus on a stolen microfilm that contains important nuclear secrets, which would threaten national security if they fell into communist hands. Joey fobs off Candy by claiming that these are mere trade secrets. Skip is completely baffled when he looks at the microfilm through a public library microfilm reader, but realizes it can bring him financial reward. Only the FBI and the communist agents know what the film contains, until Skip and Candy are also let into the secret. In the final analysis, the microfilm’s contents do not matter in themselves. The fact that the dubbed version shown in France could make a credible story by changing the microfilm’s contents from nuclear secrets to a formula for a new drug confirms that the microfilm is an empty signifier.42 It simply serves to develop the plot and define the roles, and highlight the attitudes of the various characters toward the national security state. Only FBI agent Zara sees regaining the microfilm as a question of national security. For Skip, it is merely a potential source of revenue. In Candy, it reveals first a certain naiveté about her work for Joey, then her sense of patriotism. Finally, the microfilm brings out her nurturing desire to protect Skip from being arrested for treason. For Joey, obtaining and passing on the microfilm are part of his job as a communist agent and then, when it is stolen, it becomes a problem his bosses tell him to solve. Finally, it develops into an object of deep anxiety and fear, which leads Joey to brutality and murder. For police captain Dan Tiger, the microfilm is principally a means to put away his personal nemesis, Skip McCoy. Kiss Me Deadly, on the other hand, sustains the mystery surrounding the great whatsit through the first two-thirds of the movie. This serves to

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build up an atmosphere of tension and anxiety, one that is by no means dissipated when we learn what it is, and even less when the nuclear device explodes in the final scene.43 Like the microfilm in Pickup on South Street, the great whatsit quickly becomes an object of desire. For the representatives of the national security state, police captain Murphy and the members of the Interstate Crime Commission, it stands for all those national security secrets that must be concealed from the public. For Gabrielle, it is a source of material wealth. Likewise for Hammer, but he is unsure what it will bring him. Initially, he is intrigued and wants to understand the secret for which Christina gave her life. When he finds the box, he realizes that he has stumbled onto something highly dangerous whose true nature is revealed by Dr. Soberin for whom, as we have already seen, it represents the path to absolute power. However, Kiss Me Deadly’s great whatsit is no empty signifier. Beyond its value for each protagonist, all analysts agree that it stands for something more general. According to Osteen, it “encapsulates the concerns that have dominated nuclear noir: an increasingly suspicious attitude toward science; the lethal effects of secrecy; the fragmentation of identity; the substitution of violence and greed for human intimacy.”44 Auerbach’s more focused interpretation sees the box representing fear of the bomb, “which Kiss Me Deadly equates with the spreading of terror about it. In other words, radioactive contagion and social panic turn out to be one and the same in the movie’s representation.”45 A more overtly political interpretation also suggests itself, one both linked to this particular conjuncture in the Cold War and probably more immediately accessible to contemporary audiences. In a time when fear of nuclear war was at its height, Aldrich was reminding his audience not only that the nuclear weapons race could end in total annihilation but also, and perhaps more pertinently, that this could be triggered by ignorance or greed. After all, the nuclear explosion that ends the film, and symbolically the world, was not the result of a deliberate act of war or some master criminal. Rather, it was set off by a single-minded woman, avid for all the supposed riches that the box contained. In the final analysis, whether the bomb is a question of national security or an instrument to gain power is largely irrelevant since nobody can claim to exercise total control over it. “No-one should be permitted to stand in the way.”46 Both films

focus on the question of obtaining information or intelligence during the McCarthyite era. The making of Pickup on South Street coincided with the end of the HUAC investigations into the movie industry. Kiss Me Deadly finished production at almost the same time that the Senate was censuring McCarthy, and barely a year before the FBI launched its own extensive and largely illegal COINTELPRO surveillance activities.47 Each film depicts

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how such institutions worked. Pickup is above all concerned with the nature of informing and the informer, important considerations for an industry that had been subjected to several cycles of HUAC hearings since 1947 and two years of interrogations of so-called friendly and unfriendly witnesses. Kiss Me Deadly concentrates on the brutal McCarthy era methods of extracting information from reluctant witnesses. Pickup on South Street shows three forms of information gathering: payment, psychological and physical intimidation, and appeals to patriotism. The most common method is the use of hard cash. As Jack Shandoian puts it, “Everybody sells each other out.”48 The avowed professional information vendor, Moe, represents the most interesting case: “Some people peddle apples, lamb chops, lumber. I peddle information.” But Moe will not sell to just any buyer. When Candy asks if she would sell Skip to a “commie,” she indignantly replies, “What do you think I am, an informer?” She also objects to being called a “stoolie,” telling Candy that “I was brought up to report any injustice to the police authorities. I call that being a solid citizen.” When Candy points out that she gets paid for doing this, Moe simply replies: “You’re gonna knock it?” Fuller presents Moe’s informing in a sympathetic light, the result of her financial circumstances, and not as a form of veniality or opportunism. She does not do it to save her skin, or to keep her job of selling neckties, and even less for ideological reasons.49 Rather, for Moe, this is purely business, even when it involves informing on friends, none of whom seem to blame her. Noting all transactions in the little black book that serves as her ledger, she has a good idea of the going price of information and of inflation: “When the cost of living goes up, my prices go up. When the cost of living goes down, my prices go down.” When offering money fails, the communist agent Joey turns to intimidation and brutality to extract information from Candy and Moe. Fuller hints that these are the methods of the other side in the Cold War. As for the FBI, it seems to have few weapons at its disposal, except appeals to patriotism, which meet with mixed results. This works with Candy as soon as she learns she has really been working for communist spies and not just passing on trade secrets. But such appeals gets nowhere with Skip. This seems a clear case of Fuller’s expressed intention “to take a poke at the idiocy of the cold war elements of the fifties.”50 Kiss Me Deadly ignores the informer to concentrate on the information seekers. Without exception, they all rely on threats, intimidation, bullying, and torture. As suggested above, Hammer represents McCarthy. He will do almost anything except kill to get the information he wants. Hammer breaks a treasured record of an impoverished would-be opera singer, crushes the hand of a mortuary director, roughs up an athletic club attendant, and beats up the cowering, almost unconscious owner of an art gallery who has already taken a huge dose of sleeping tablets to avoid talking to him. He

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has no compunction about using his sports car to entice his garage owner friend Nick into an information-gathering errand, even knowing that it might well cost Nick his life. The even more ruthless Soberin is prepared to torture and kill for information. He injects Hammer with sodium pentothal in a failed attempt to discover what he knows about the great whatsit. And the state fares little better in the film’s denunciation of the unbridled quest for information (intelligence?). We learn at the outset that a female scientist, Christina, was being held in a mental institution to extract information she did not want to give. Once police captain Murphy finally gets the information he needs from Hammer, he disdainfully dismisses the private eye. What is the threat? These critiques of information and intelligence gath-

ering in the age of McCarthyism show that neither Fuller nor Aldrich have anything positive to say about the ideological battles of the Cold War, about the ideology of national security, or the institutions of the national security state, particularly the FBI. Yet these were years when the hegemonic ideology left scant room for a middle path between democratic capitalism and Soviet communism. In rejecting such fundamental tenets, these two directors were directly questioning the very nature of the supposed threat to America. As such, their films constitute a strong critique of the security imaginary of the national security state. Unlike Kiss Me Deadly, Pickup on South Street names the communist enemy and adopts the anticommunist rhetoric of the times. In all appearances it is as Rogin describes it, “a rightwing, anti-liberal B movie,” a statement he immediately qualifies by asserting that “by doubling the Communist and police bureaucracies, it makes explicit the unintended blurring of boundaries in orthodox cold war movies between the Communist party and the FBI.”51 Yet Fuller not only blurs the boundaries between petty criminals and the state, he also suggests that the private enterprise of the former is more effective at containing communism. He equally questions the nature of the ideological battle by framing it in different terms. His film’s two real patriots, Candy and Moe, harbor a visceral dislike of communism without having any real idea about its content. Skip has no opinion either way. For him there is no place for ideology or politics, it is all about money: “I’ll do business with a Red, but I don’t have to like him.” When he finally gets into a fight with communists, it is to avenge Candy and Moe, not for political reasons. Even Joey, the villainous communist agent, makes his living as a courier rather than as an ideologue, and his bosses all look like ordinary businessmen. FBI agent Zara’s passing reference to Stalin aside, Pickup contains none of the reflections on the evil of communism found in the anticommunist propaganda movies of the times. Fuller appears to prefer the Mercutio option of “a plague o’ both your houses,” represented by Moe. As an informer she is tolerated by the state, which she sees above all as a

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source of income, and is then killed by the communists because she refuses to do their bidding. To the extent that Moe has any politics, these are based on instinctive preferences, on personal code, and on a vague sense of patriotism. She is a pragmatist whose worldview is opposed not only to ideologies of the right and the left, but also to Skip’s nihilism. At least Pickup on South Street suggests there is an alternative to the dominant Cold War ideology, even if it is rather vague and very personal. This is done through Skip’s attempts to hold on to what he considers to be his own integrity and code. Here, Pickup actually deconstructs a central paradox of the national security state and, particularly, the hunt for communists said to be capable of suborning Americans away from their true national character. If, as Timothy Melley remarks with respect to Hoover’s obsession with communist subversion of American individualism, “Americans are defined by their extraordinary individual autonomy, then why do they need powerful government protections from communism? The answer can only be that autonomy is precisely what they lack, because they are easily turned into ‘brainwashed’ communist dupes. It turns out that for all their putative individuality, Hoover’s Americans are deeply susceptible to ideological controls.”52 Skip’s strong disdain for the FBI and lack of concern about the theft of America’s nuclear secrets actually reinforces his own autonomy and agency, things McCarthyism worked to undermine. Kiss Me Deadly offers no such option. It paints a thoroughly pessimistic portrait of the greed and violence of contemporary America and of humanity’s future. Its explosive ending announces closure, with none of the hints of possible redemption found in films about survivors of a nuclear holocaust such as On the Beach and Panic Year Zero. Aldrich’s film entirely negates the notion of threat lying at the core of the US security imaginary—the Cold War is neither a battle between competing ideologies, nor an undeclared war between the United States and USSR, and even less a struggle between good and evil. While Dr. Soberin does represent the enemy, for much of the film he is literally a faceless one whom we see from the waist down or hear his bodiless voice. His face is shown only toward the end of the film. Soberin refers to his imminent departure from the United States, but gives no hint of his destination (perhaps Mexico, as suggested by a poster on the wall of his beach house?). We never learn whether he is working for another country, for an international gang, or simply for himself because, in Kiss Me Deadly, this is irrelevant. The film’s cynical attitude toward the national security state’s core idea of the threatening Other, of a structuring enemy, is summed up by Velda: “‘They.’ A wonderful word. Who are ‘they’? They are the nameless ones who kill for the ‘great whatsit.’ Does it exist? Who cares? Everywhere, everyone is so involved in the fruitless search for what?” The existential threat comes not from the Soviet Union or communism, but is inherent

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within American society as embodied in three distinct elements in the film: a thuggish, self-centered private detective; a cynical, inefficient state; and a gang of desperate and powerful criminals. Their shared immorality, their common blind pursuit of naked self-interest regardless of the cost to others, and their fundamental inhumanity all combine to produce nuclear annihilation. Far from agreeing with the national security state and its agenda, Aldrich seems to be saying that it is part of the problem. Humanity faces desolation if things continue as they are. This was hardly the message intended by the ideology and agents of the national security state.

Conclusion Despite the constraints of the time, both Fuller and Aldrich succeeded in asking serious questions about the validity of the official Cold War story, in challenging the prevailing security imaginary. Though each offered an alternative reading of the Cold War and, hence, a form of resistance to the national security state, they achieved this effect in very different ways. Meeting the national security state on its own turf, at first glance Pickup on South Street seems to trot out a conventional narrative of the struggle between communism and capitalism, totalitarianism and democracy, one in which the nasty Reds get beaten thanks to cooperation between the American people and its security institutions. However, it soon becomes clear that Fuller has reversed or rather subverted this narrative, not by giving any quarter to the communist Other, but through several observations about this ideological battle. The first is that there is no reason to trust the institutions of the national security state. The FBI is mainly a bystander while Skip and Candy do all the necessary work to recover the microfilm. Secondly, the McCarthyite modes of information gathering are simply wrong. Pickup does not condemn the quest for information or even the practice of informing as such, but clearly shows that the strident claims of national security justify neither brutality nor betrayal of friends. Finally, Pickup rejects the Cold War ideological polarization on which the national security state was largely built and legitimized. Whereas Fuller criticizes and ridicules the national security state from the center, Aldrich attacks it from the left. In the guise of an apparently banal private detective story, Kiss Me Deadly proceeds to deconstruct both national security ideology and the national security state before our very eyes and, in doing so, questions the foundations of the society it is said to protect. Nothing is sacred. American society is built on a series of tenacious and fallacious myths. The cherished value of individualism becomes nothing more than the quest for personal gain: “What’s in it for me?” Hammer asks when he is told to leave the case to the police. The immigrant’s Amer-

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ican Dream is mere illusion, as Nick and others find out. And the so-called classless US society remains as racially segregated as ever. Similarly, Aldrich’s depiction of the national security state’s institutions shows a cynical, ineffective group of law enforcement agents, at the federal and at the city level, supplemented by a private effort to gather relevant information by an unsavory individual who believes in the principle that “the ends justify the means.” Finally, by refusing to assign the threat to national security to any particular country or foreign ideology, Aldrich appears to be suggesting that the official Cold War narrative is little more than a cover concealing the grim reality of American society. Such views hardly coincided with, or helped reproduce, the hegemonic mindset (see p. 18) on which the national security state rested. Despite their differences, Pickup on South Street and Kiss Me Deadly effectively challenge the ideological underpinnings of the national security state and the rosy view of the American consumerist paradise project by the Cold War consensus.

Notes 1. Donovan, Conspiracy Films, p. 16. 2. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense, p. 197. 3. Pomerance, “Introduction: Movies in the 1950s,” pp. 1–2. 4. See Ballinger and Gradon, The Rough Guide to Film Noir. 5. Osteen, “The Big Secret.” 6. Naremore, More than Night, p. 9. 7. Ibid., pp. 11–27. 8. It entered the US film vocabulary in 1968 with the publication of Higham and Greenberg, Hollywood in the Forties. 9. Borde and Chaumeton, Panorama du film noir américain, p. 24, authors’ translation, emphasis in original. 10. Pomerance, “Introduction: Movies in the 1950s,” pp. 1–2. 11. Comolli and Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism.” Originally an editorial in the October 1969 issue of Cahiers du cinema, this English translation was later published in Screen. 12. Comolli and Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” p. 31. 13. Ibid., pp. 32–33. 14. Ibid., p. 33, emphasis in original. 15. Klinger, “‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ Revisited,” pp. 34–39. 16. Naremore, More than Night, pp. 96–135. 17. Davis, Battle for the Bs, pp. 9–11. 18. Lev, Transforming the Screen, pp. 25–27. 19. Kiss Me Deadly, IMDb, www.imdb.com/title/tt0048261/ (accessed 30 July 2015). 20. Solomon, Twentieth Century Fox, p. 248. 21. Lev, Transforming the Screen, p. 11. 22. The top Hollywood films at the box office in 1953 and 1955 were Walt Disney productions, respectively, Peter Pan and The Lady and the Tramp.

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23. The number of drive-ins in the continental United States increased from 820 in 1948 to 4,063 in 1954. Segrave, Drive-In Theaters, p. 235. 24. Even Orson Welles’s 1958 Touch of Evil, one of the more expensive film noirs, cost an estimated $829,000, or less than a seventh of the $6 million budget of that year’s top-grossing film, South Pacific. See www.imdb.com/title/tt0052311 /?ref_=nv_sr_2 (accessed 31 July 2015), and www.imdb.com/title/tt0052225/?ref _=fn_al_tt_1 (accessed 31 July 2015). 25. According to an early 1950s poll of drive-in theater owners, the most popular genres among their patrons were westerns, action pictures, comedies, and musicals, in that order. According to one owner polled: “Anything with a theme or a message is murder at the B.O.” Segrave, Drive-In Theaters, p. 71. 26. Fuller, A Third Face, pp. 292 and 303. Unlike Darryl Zanuck, Pickup on South Street’s officially credited producer, Jules Schermer, receives no mention whatsoever in Fuller’s autobiography for any part that he played in making the film. Zanuck was considered to be one of Hollywood’s politically liberal studio heads. See J. Hirsch, “Film Gris Reconsidered,” pp. 89–90. 27. Fuller, A Third Face, p. 308. 28. Maltby, “The Problem of Interpretation.” 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Naremore, More than Night, p. 155. 32. Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, pp. 269 and 267. Another otherwise sympathetic analysis notes that Pickup on South Street “allows Fuller an excuse to embroider the thriller frame with some typically wacky rightwing Americanism” (F. Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen, p. 132), whereas Peter Lev calls it a “stylistically exciting film which deals—somewhat bizarrely—with domestic communism” (Lev, Transforming the Screen, p. 53). 33. Narboni and Simsolo, Il était une fois . . . Samuel Fuller, p. 155. 34. Fuller, A Third Face, p. 305. 35. Ibid., p. 295. 36. Arnold and Miller, The Films and Career of Robert Aldrich, p. 37. 37. According to an obituary, “Bezzerides transformed Spillane’s novel into an apocalyptic, ultra-paranoid film noir” (Vallance, “A. I. Bezzerides”). In Spiro N. Taraviras’s documentary, Buzz (2005), A. I. Bezzerides acknowledges that he had been graylisted and struggled to find work. Though several authors claim that Bezzerides was blacklisted by HUAC (Flinn, “Sound, Woman and the Bomb”; Shandoian, Dreams and Dead Ends, p. 234), we have found no evidence to support this assertion. On the contrary, between 1949 and 1955, Bezzerides was credited with being involved in writing scripts of at least eight films, including one for Jules Dassin, who was blacklisted a year later. This is a strong indication that he was in fact not on any blacklist. 38. Robert Aldrich, quoted in Silver, “Mr. Film Noir Stays at the Table,” p. 17. 39. This was a passage in the film to which J. Edgar Hoover objected. Fuller, A Third Face, p. 308. 40. Arnold and Miller, The Films and Career of Robert Aldrich, p. 37. 41. Fuller, A Third Face, p. 195. 42. Pickup on South Street’s French distributors changed the plot to forestall problems with the French Communist party. The French title, Le port de la drogue [Harbor of Drugs], would have mystified American cinemagoers. Shown in France eight years after the film’s US release, this fundamental story change led to creative translations of heavily loaded political terms. Thus, when Skip suggests Candy is a

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“Red,” she indignantly replies, “You think I’m a Red? Me?” This comes out in French as “Moi, une passeuse de came?” [“A dope courier, me?”]. Her complaint “He said I was a commie” becomes “Il a dit que je passe de la came” [“He said I deal in dope”]. 43. Kiss Me Deadly has two endings. The version released in 1955 ended with the explosion of the beach house, presumably killing all who were in it. The second and Robert Aldrich’s intended ending has Hammer and Velda escaping to witness the havoc wreaked by their greed and suggests that they have been contaminated by radiation. Glenn Erickson claims that the truncated ending was probably the result of a technical glitch rather than intentional censorship of the message of the dangers of nuclear weapons. See Erickson, “The Kiss Me Mangled Mystery.” 44. Osteen, “The Big Secret,” p. 88. 45. Auerbach, Dark Borders, p. 199. 46. James Doolittle, William Franke, Morris Hadley, and William Pawley, Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, pp. 2–3. 47. See Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Book II: Final Report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1976, www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94755_II.pdf (accessed 15 September 2013). 48. Shandoian, Dreams and Dead Ends, p. 189. 49. When Joey tries to buy information about Skip, he tells Moe that she would “sell anybody for a button.” She replies, “Yeah, but not to you, mister. I know you commies’re looking for a film that don’t belong to you,” and then adds, “What do I know about commies? Nothing. I know one thing. I just don’t like them.” 50. Fuller, A Third Face, p. 295. 51. Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, pp. 267 and 268. 52. Melley, Empire of Conspiracy, p. 4.

4 Hitchcock: From the Red Scare to Détente

Hitchcock not only intensified life, he intensified cinema.1 The US experience of the Cold War went through at least two distinct phases during the twenty years following Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953. Lasting until 1962, the first phase saw the United States’ relations with the USSR oscillate wildly. Moments of thaw alternated with bouts of crisis, culminating in the nail-biting showdown of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Domestically, this period saw the political demise of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the first steps in the civil rights movement. A second post-Stalin Cold War period lasted roughly from 1963 to 1975 and produced growing détente between the superpowers—the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the intensifying US involvement in the Vietnam War notwithstanding. While this general thaw in superpower relations did not reduce US hostility toward the Soviet Union and to the spread of communism at the international level, by the end of the 1960s public opinion was much more favorable to seeking accommodation with the USSR than to confronting it.2 These were also years of gathering domestic upheaval as the Cold War consensus (see p. 20) encountered growing resistance (see Chapter 5). In this chapter, we explore this shifting popular view of the Cold War and the national security state through an analysis of four Hollywood films of one of the era’s most influential and popular directors—Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), North by Northwest (1959), The Birds (1963), and Topaz (1969). Focusing on hallmark political ideas and themes of the Hitchcockian style, we take issue with Robert Corber’s claim that “Hitchcock’s films participated in a regime of pleasure that was specific to the

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postwar period and that helped to consolidate the emergence of the national security state.”3 We argue instead that this director’s characteristic skepticism and habit of stepping back from his subject worked to undermine the way that the national security state functioned and the values that it purported to defend. His films also reflected changes in popular perceptions of what was at stake in national security and questioned the way these issues were handled by the US state during the 1950s and the 1960s.

Politics in Hitchcockian Cinema Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) was one of the, if not the most prolific and analyzed film directors of his time; particularly, of the early decades of the Cold War.4 Thus it is hardly surprising that interpretations of his politics have evolved considerably. In Thomas Leitch’s pithy summary, “First he’s an apolitical entertainer, then a valued prize for ideological approaches like feminism to win or to lose, then grist for an all-devouring political mill.”5 Despite Hitchcock’s claim to have always avoided politics because the public “is not interested in politics in the cinema,”6 there is no longer any real disagreement that his films are highly political. What remains at issue is Hitchcock’s contribution to contemporary political debates and the extent to which his films supported the Cold War consensus and the national security state. Such questions can be asked of any director, but they are particularly relevant in Hitchcock’s case for two reasons: (1) he was the undisputed auteur of his films, not just as a director but as an obsessive overseer of all stages of their production; and (2) most of his films were box office hits reaching a wide audience. The release of a Hitchcock film was a highly anticipated cultural event. Though it is hyperbolic to claim that his films “suggest a Hitchcockian political philosophy,”7 observers agree that Hitchcock’s body of work presents recurring themes and ideas which, taken together, form a discernible worldview. Already present in the director’s pre−Cold War movies, these themes cohere into a clear political message: an identifiable external threat exists and can be countered only through vigilance and unified action. Emphasizing the role of the individual, the Hitchcockian political world, especially that of the Cold War, reflects deep suspicion of the state—or more precisely, puts society before the state, both of which are constantly threatened. Yet despite such an apparently conventional view of the Cold War and American society, this British director continually questioned some of their basic tenets.8 Hitchcock films, especially the political thrillers, invite the audience to see the world from their protagonist’s viewpoint. Early in the narrative, he (and, occasionally, she) is drawn into a situation not of his making but

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which, he soon realizes, only he can solve. So, unlike the film noirs discussed in the previous chapter, Hitchcock privileges individual agency. Frequently a victim of the “wrong man” syndrome, or mistaken identity, his protagonist is either pursued or manipulated by inefficient and cynical agents of the state security apparatus. With the state incapable of preventing injustice or defending the established order, Hitchcock portrays a society in which the political and the personal converge. The suspense characteristic of the Hitchcock thriller reminds the audience that it cannot just sit idly by and watch. It must become involved. Constantly recurring in all of Hitchcock’s Cold War thrillers, these themes work to present an ambiguous view of the national security state and key tenets of the Cold War consensus.

Filming the Security Imaginary The Rear Window script was written over the summer of 1953—that is, just after the death of Stalin on 5 March and during the July signing of the Panmunjom armistice that effectively ended the Korean War. Hitchcock began shooting in late November of that year and, except for a few additional scenes added later, ended in mid-January 1954.9 Though people were already beginning to talk of a thaw in the Cold War, the domestic Red Scare was about to reach its climax. HUAC, Senator McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee all continued to interrogate highly placed public figures about their political affiliations. Surveillance of suspected subversives was carried out by the FBI whose director, J. Edgar Hoover, was obsessed with rooting out all suspected traces of communism. The hunt for Reds and their suspected sympathizers at the federal level was supplemented by state- and city-level investigations affecting people in all walks of life, creating a general atmosphere of suspicion and distrust that David Caute has labeled the “Great Fear.”10 North by Northwest was shot between August and December 1958, a time of increased international tension over Berlin.11 However, this situation had little impact on films of this period. More significantly, the weakening public perception of the domestic communist threat—as witnessed by Senator McCarthy’s downfall and the decline in the activities of HUAC and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee—allowed Hitchcock to treat the communist threat in a more irreverent way, without any risk of a backlash from either the film-going public or the representatives of the national security state. For its part, The Birds was released on the heels of the climactic moment of the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis, though it was filmed before that confrontation took place.12 No salient issues or events in domestic or interna-

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tional politics found any resonance in the film itself. Nor did it meet any censorship problems from the PCA. Apart from the technical issues posed by filming bird attacks on the inhabitants of Bodega Bay, Hitchcock’s greatest problems concerned the screenplay. His choice of the well-known writer Evan Hunter (aka, Ed McBain) to write the script was part of his strategy to turn The Birds into the film that would establish his reputation as a serious director, not just a maker of thrillers.13 However, Hitchcock’s dissatisfaction with Hunter’s script led to tension, particularly as the director changed the script without consulting or informing the author. Confirming his role as the film’s auteur Hitchcock cut out at least ten pages of the original ending, reducing Hunter’s emphasis on the threat from the birds to a more ambiguous conclusion.14 Hunter only discovered these changes on seeing the final version of the film at an invitational screening. Clearly, the incident still rankled more than thirty years later when he scathingly remarked that “Hitch didn’t film the scene I wrote because then he would have made a movie with a thrilling, suspenseful ending.”15 Of all Hitchcock films discussed in this chapter, only Topaz was based on an actual Cold War event. The film fictionalized one controversial account of how the United States discovered that the Soviets were installing nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. Drawn from a 1967 Leon Uris novel, the plot turns around revelations by a KGB defector of the existence of a Soviet spy ring (code named Topaz) within the French government. A pro-American French intelligence official based in Washington, DC, helps the CIA uncover what is going on in Cuba. The allegedly true story behind Uris’s novel appeared in a spring 1968 Life magazine article by Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoli, the man formerly in charge of relations between the French intelligence agency, Service de Documentation Extérieure et de ContreEspionnage (SDECE), and the CIA in Washington. Thyraud de Vosjoli claimed that a Soviet spy ring known as Sapphire (hence, the thinly disguised name of Topaz) operated inside the French government.16 The Uris novel and Thyraud de Vosjoli’s allegations confirmed long-held US suspicions about the trustworthiness of its Gaullist France ally.17 Topaz was filmed in the wake of two important events: the May 1968 student revolts in France and elsewhere, and the August 1968 crushing by Soviet-led Warsaw Pact troops of the Prague Spring. The invasion of Czechoslovakia marked a hiatus in the period of détente that had followed the Cuban missile crisis, and this hiatus fashioned a climate conducive to anticommunist films. However, despite François Truffaut’s claim that Topaz was “deliberately anti-Communist,”18 there are solid reasons to believe that denouncing communism was not Hitchcock’s main objective. Having recently made a spy film, Torn Curtain (1966), which had been a box office disaster, Hitchcock agreed to make Topaz with some reluctance.19 The film was fraught with difficulties from the outset.20 Dissatis-

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fied with Uris’s script, Hitchcock replaced him with Samuel Taylor who had previously worked on the screenplay of Vertigo. He also ran into problems with French culture minister and arch-Gaullist André Malraux who withdrew permission to shoot on French soil because the film was considered critical of French foreign policy. An intervention from the US embassy solved this issue. Then, as with The Birds, Hitchcock struggled to find a satisfactory ending. His preferred final scene was a duel between the SDECE agent, André Devereaux (Frederick Stafford), and the head of the Topaz spy ring, Jacques Granville (Michel Piccoli), in which Granville is shot dead by a Soviet sniper. This ending was dropped after being badly received by US focus groups. Hitchcock then shot two other endings. The version shown in Britain has Devereaux and Granville crossing each other at Orly Airport, respectively boarding planes for the United States and for Moscow. French and American audiences were offered a final freeze-frame suggesting that Granville committed suicide in his Paris home.21

The Nature of the Threat On the surface, Hitchcock’s world is one of ordinary people living in wellordered white middle-class society. Blacks appear in only two of the four films analyzed here, usually in subordinate roles, though there is some evolution in their situation. In North by Northwest, the only African American with a speaking part is a train coach car attendant. Ten years later, in Topaz, blacks have more vocal roles, with the Martiniquais florist-cum-spy Philippe Dubois (Roscoe Lee Browne) and a group of pro-Castro sympathizers waiting for the Cuban delegation in front of the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. Here, Hitchcock clearly merely mirrors the changing place occupied by blacks in contemporary American society. All four films show a society under threat, though not necessarily from communism. Only Topaz specifically refers to the “communist threat.” British film historian, Raymond Durgnat, dismisses this film as an “apologia for the C.I.A.”22 However, an examination of the depiction of threat in Topaz and the three other films discussed in this chapter reveals a more complex vision of the dangers facing American society than that of a threat to democratic capitalism from totalitarian communism, and none faithfully echoes the US security imaginary (see p. 19). Made at the height of the McCarthy era, Rear Window was the top box office earner in 1954.23 It appears to be a film about surveillance of a society free from any obvious internal or external threat. Impatiently waiting for a broken leg to heal, news photographer L. B. “Jeff” Jeffries (James Stewart) whiles away the time snooping on the neighbors in his Greenwich Village tenement complex through binoculars and a telescopic lens. What

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he sees is a group of people living in a building facing in on itself, a distorted modern version of the circled wagons, a metaphor for threatened Americanism found in many westerns. But here alienation, loneliness, and individualism have replaced the community spirit and collective defense. Jeffries is soon convinced that one neighbor, Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), has murdered his nagging bed-ridden wife, cut up her body, and disposed of it in the East River. The murder in itself does not constitute a threat to the other occupants of the apartment block who are blissfully unaware that it has even taken place. Determined to prove the murderer’s guilt, Jeff involves his caregiver, Stella (Thelma Ritter), and above all his girlfriend, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), in tracking down the necessary proof. He almost gets himself killed in the process. The real threat to American values is Jeff’s amateur surveillance itself. Like the national security agencies that he symbolizes, Jeff is prepared to go to any length to justify his activities. He even urges his policeman friend, Tom Doyle (Wendell Corey), to search Thorwald’s apartment without a warrant until Tom reminds him of the constitutional limits to such action. This does not stop Jeff from encouraging Lisa to do just that, once Tom has left. Rear Window offers a reflection on the ethics of surveillance and on its questionable utility. Obsessed with his neighbors’ activities, Jeff is little more than a self-centered curmudgeon who loses no opportunity to denigrate the woman who obviously loves him. All those who enter his apartment overtly disapprove of his spying on his neighbors. Stella’s very first words sum up the movie’s plot: “We’ve grown to be a race of peeping toms.” Lisa is disgusted with Jeff’s snooping: “Sitting around, looking out of a window to kill time, is one thing—but doing it the way you are—with, with binoculars, and with wild opinions about every little movement you see . . . is, is diseased!” Yet she is drawn into Jeff’s spy game and horrified by her own guilty pleasure: “We’re two of the most frightening ghouls I’ve ever known.” Jeff’s policeman friend, Doyle, reminds him of the need to respect other people’s privacy: “That’s a secret, private world you’re looking at out there. People do a lot of things in private they couldn’t possibly explain in public.” And Jeff himself has serious doubts about the morality of the whole operation: “Do you suppose it’s ethical to watch a man with binoculars, and a long-focus lens—until you can see the freckles on the back of his neck, and almost read his mail? Do you suppose it’s ethical even if you prove he didn’t commit a crime?” Even the ultimate objective of Jeff’s surveillance, catching a suspected murderer, provides little justification for his intrusions. As Doyle reminds him, his constant spying offers at best only circumstantial evidence that a crime has been committed. In the end, it is Lisa’s decision to break into Thorwald’s apartment to look for his wife’s wedding ring that solves the case. Thorwald is even transformed into a somewhat sympathetic character

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when he finally confronts Jeff and asks him pleadingly: “What do you want from me?” Jeff has no answer. Having violated everbody’s right to privacy, Jeff is doubly punished. First, his struggle with Thorwald ends with him falling out of his apartment window and breaking his other leg. Second, Jeff reluctantly agrees to marry Lisa, something he has been trying to avoid throughout the film. Given this ambiguous and unconvincing outcome, Rear Window is hardly a ringing endorsement of the national security state’s paranoid surveillance of America in its search for enemies. Jeff’s obsessive snooping on his neighbors “collapses the distinction between the public and private sphere” and the film shows how this “threatens to ‘ideologize’ American society.”24 What matters here is that Hitchcock is suggesting a parallel between the excesses of the FBI (and, hence, of the national security state), eroding distinction between the private and public spheres, the very hallmark of the totalitarianism that national security doctrine claims to combat. Yet Jeff’s snooping exposes a more profound threat to this fragmented community, itself a microcosm of contemporary white American society. Hitchcock highlights its inherent social fragility and dysfunctionality in a scene where a middle-aged woman expresses her grief after her pet dog has been killed by Thorwald. In her grief, she denounces the whole neighborhood and, by implication, the increasingly atomized society produced by the cult of individualism: “You don’t know the meaning of the word ‘neighbor.’ Neighbors like each other—speak to each other—care if anybody lives or dies. But none of you do! You don’t talk, you don’t help, you—you don’t—even see. But I couldn’t imagine even any of you being so low that you’d kill a little helpless, friendly dog! The only thing in this whole neighborhood who liked anybody.” In the final scenes after the murderer has been brought to justice, this tenement community appears to have solved its problems: the lonely people have found companions, the couple has bought a new dog, and everybody is apparently communicating with someone. However, Hitchcock clearly conveys the impression that fragility and dysfunctionality remain just below the surface, that society remains ill prepared to face any external or internal threat. The sixth top box office earner of 1959, 25 North by Northwest also invites the audience to reflect on the nature and consequences of the national security state. Though ostensibly about Cold War espionage and counterespionage, the film does not simply represent a struggle between good (American democracy) and evil (Soviet communism). Even if the spies, led by the urbane Philip Vandamm (James Mason), are presumably working for the Soviets, this is never made explicit because in the end the source of the threat does not really matter.26 All we learn about these spies is that they want to take a hidden microfilm out of the country. Told nothing

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more about the microfilm, we are left to surmise its importance for national security. Early in the film, the audience is informed that the spies are being monitored by the fictitious United States Intelligence Agency (USIA) led by “the Professor” (Leo C. Carroll). The spies believe they are being tracked by a nonexistent agent called George Kaplan. Through a series of misunderstandings, they mistake advertising executive Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) for Kaplan and set out to eliminate him. But Kaplan is a fiction invented by the Professor to distract the spies from the agency’s real agent, Eve Kendal (Eva Marie Saint). This is a tale of intrigue rather than one of a threat to the American state from an international communism. As in most of Hitchcock’s films, physical threats to the main protagonists abound but, unlike his World War II films, their origin is never clearly identified, creating an atmosphere of anxiety and fear about an unknown enemy. The most celebrated example is the crop duster attack against Thornhill in an Indiana cornfield. Totally unexpectedly, the plane drops from the sky, and its perpetrator remains anonymous.27 Hitchcock never names the threat, but insists it is “out there.” As will become clearer in The Birds, what is really at stake is the stability of society itself. Unfortunately, as in Rear Window, the institutions that are supposed to protect us from this threat, the security agencies of the state, have themselves become part of the threat, both because they cannot control it and because of the way they behave. When we first meet the agents monitoring Vandamm and his group, we learn that they are prepared to sacrifice an innocent bystander (the wrong man), Thornhill, to protect their own agent. Thornhill and Eve are expendable pawns manipulated by both sides. When Thornhill realizes that the agency has ordered Eve to leave the country with Vandamm, even though this will place her in extreme danger, he expresses Hitchcock’s own skeptical view of the Cold War. The Professor justifies the decision by declaring, “War is hell, Mr. Thornhill, even when it’s a cold one.” Thornhill replies, “If you fellows can’t lick the Vandamms of this world without asking girls like her to bed down with them and fly away with them and probably never come back, perhaps you ought to start learning how to lose a few cold wars.” The Professor retorts, “I’m afraid we’re already doing that.” The threat embodied in Vandamm is finally countered only when Thornhill decides to ignore the state-imposed rules and take on the spies himself to save Eve (the personal converging once again with the political, the individual reclaiming his agency from the national security state). North by Northwest has been criticized for its negative references to homosexuality and the latter’s association with threats to the Cold War consensus. Corber charges Hitchcock with adopting the homophobic discourses of the period, in particular the construction of the homosexual as a national security risk, ensuring that gender and nationality became mutually rein-

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forcing categories of identity.28 The spectator thus “became a subject of historically specific fantasies that contributed to the establishment and consolidation of the postwar settlement.”29 Indeed, Hitchcock’s most well-known implicitly gay characters—Rebecca’s (1940) Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson); Rope’s (1948) Brandon Shaw (John Dall) and Philip Morgan (Farley Granger); or Strangers on a Train’s (1951) Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker)—all tend to be portrayed as villains. In this, Hitchcock clearly shared the widespread homophobic prejudices and stereotypes of his time. Yet little indicates that he considered homosexuality in any way an actual threat to national security.30 North by Northwest certainly seems to hint that Vandamm’s right-hand man, Leonard (Martin Landau), is romantically attached to his boss when the latter patronizingly dismisses his claim that Eve cannot be trusted: “You know what I think? I think you’re jealous. I mean it. I’m touched, dear boy. Really touched.” Even if contemporary audiences made the connection, which is doubtful, Leonard would have been seen as a threat to national security not because of his suspected homosexuality, but because he belonged to a gang of international spies.31 Hitchcock’s most detailed exploration of threat and anxiety came with The Birds, produced in the heightening Cold War tension of the first part of 1962, and the sixth top-grossing movie of 1963.32 The continuing crisis around Berlin had reached its climax with the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. Closer to home, in the aftermath of the ill-fated CIA-led Bay of Pigs invasion (April 1961), Cuba was strengthening its ties with the Soviet Union. Both superpowers were building up their nuclear arsenals. This was most definitely not a period of détente. In The Birds, “Hitchcock deals abstractly with fear itself, rather than with any particular manifestation of it.”33 The birds represent the threat of the irrational, a force that brings chaos to the world. Not only does this irrational threat destroy the peace of a small California seaport but, like the killing of the dog in Rear Window, it also exposes the real fragility of the community.34 The threat comes from an unexpected source, as the birds attack without warning or obvious cause or design. They intensify their assaults as people begin to react and, by the end of the film, appear to have taken control of the town and the threat seems to be spreading to other parts of the country. As the main characters flee by car, the film closes abruptly without even announcing “The End,” suggesting that there is no hope of defense against this growing assault.35 The link between The Birds and the national security state is most evident in the scene of the discussion at the Tides Restaurant on the nature of the threat. Presenting a cross-section of white US society in terms of gender, class, and age, this scene encapsulates much of the contemporary societal debate on security and defense. When the main characters, Melanie

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Daniels (Tippi Hedren) and Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), argue the seriousness of the situation, an elderly amateur ornithologist, Mrs. Bundy (Ethel Griffies), questions that such a concerted attack could come from such naturally inoffensive creatures. Clearly, Mrs. Bundy represents the skeptical rationalism of the scientist—“let’s be logical about this.” She needs more than anecdotal accounts of bird attacks before she is prepared to accept that such a threat exists. Though Hitchcock’s dismisses her as “a reactionary . . . too conservative to admit that the birds might be responsible for such a catastrophe,”36 she expresses what we would call today the environmentalist viewpoint: “Birds are not aggressive creatures, Miss. They bring beauty to the world. It is mankind, rather, who insist on making it difficult for life to survive on this planet.” Her ominous warning foretells the film’s ambiguous ending: “I have never known birds of different species to flock together. The very concept is unimaginable. Why, if that happened, we wouldn’t have a chance. How could we possible hope to fight them?” Others in the restaurant express varying degrees of anxiety and fear without necessarily agreeing that the birds constitute more than just a passing threat. A middle-aged traveling salesman offers a more radical approach. Declaring that seagulls are just scavengers, he suggests that the people take up arms “and wipe them off the face of the Earth.” The local sheriff sows further confusion when he attempts to play down the threat by announcing that the police from a nearby town consider that the death of one of the townspeople was a felony murder. A young mother of a terrified child insists that the threat is real, and calls on the others to do something. When, finally, everybody realizes they are in serious danger, this mother blames Melanie, the outsider from San Francisco, for the attacks: “They say when you came the whole thing started. Who are you? What are you? Where do you come from? I think you’re the cause of all this. I think you’re evil! Evil!” The general panic as the bird attacks intensify, the Tides Restaurant debate, and the incapacity of the authorities to mount any defense against this threat all show how unprepared society is to meet serious external danger. Here, Hitchcock is taking aim less at any specific threat, such as the Soviet Union or communism, than at the “terrifying menace” of society’s general complacency, which ignored the threat of chaos and disorder always lurking below the surface.37 Hitchcock finally appears to name an external threat in his two overtly anticommunist spy films Torn Curtain and Topaz. However, there seems to be no obvious reason why the communist threat during the age of détente should suddenly become an object of concern for a film director who had never referred to it before.38 Digging below the level of these spy stories, it becomes apparent that what is really under attack for Hitchcock is human relationships.39 Rather than painting spies and totalitarian regimes as a

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direct threat, Hitchcock used them to attract audiences at a time when espionage films were highly popular. The value of enduring relationships is a recurring Hitchcock theme, their subversion being the source of much evil. Although Topaz was the least successful of the films analyzed in this chapter (finishing a lowly thirty-fifth place in the 1970 earnings rankings),40 it takes this idea further than most previous Hitchcock films to highlight the Cold War’s devastating impact on the mutual trust on which human relationships depend. It is “about betrayal, about nobody, ever, being what they seem.”41 The film’s multiple betrayals are both political and personal. It opens with KGB colonel Boris Kusenov (Per-Axel Arosenius) and his family defecting to the United States. French intelligence officer André Devereaux agrees to work for the CIA, without informing his government. Yet the CIA keeps Devereaux in the dark about the Soviet defector who has provided them with the information about a spy ring within the French government. Cuban revolutionary leader Rico Parra’s (John Vernon) secretary, Luis Uribe (Donald Randolph), sells out his country by allowing a French agent to film a secret Cuban-Soviet treaty. Juanita de Cordoba (Karin Dor), Parra’s mistress and widow of a revered “hero of the revolution,” helps her former lover Devereaux obtain photos of the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Granville and his Topaz spy ring in the French government betray North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) secrets to the Soviet Union. Devereaux deceives his wife Nicole (Dany Robin) with Juanita, who cheats on her lover Parra, while Nicole carries on an affair with Granville, one of Devreaux’s best friends. Nobody is quite what they appear to be. Devereaux is more than just a French intelligence officer. Juanita, secret head of the Cuban antirevolutionary movement, is not simply the rich widow of a national hero. Granville and his fellow spies are much more than highranking French civil servants. Ironically, in all of this international and personal intrigue, the only character with any integrity is the Cuban revolutionary leader, Parra. Learning he has been doubly betrayed by Juanita, he shoots her dead, not to punish her for being a traitor or for deceiving him with another lover, but to spare her the torture that he knows she will suffer at the hands of his own security forces. The film equally portrays the difficulty of personal integrity in a situation that forces people to take sides. Betrayal begets betrayal. Nicole embarks on an affair with Granville in retaliation for André’s own infidelity. On discovering he is working with the CIA, she also challenges his patriotism: “André, you are French. You are not supposed to be mixed up in this Cold War between the Americans and the Russians. You are neutral.” He simply replies, “No one is neutral.” Yet when Nicole realizes that her lover Granville is a traitor, she does not hesitate to denounce him to

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André—perhaps yet another betrayal, but at least one made with a clear conception of the national interest on Nicole’s part.

Skepticism Toward the National Security State In most Hitchcock movies, the police tend to be depicted as bumbling, overcautious, or not very bright. It is usually up to a determined outsider to piece together the puzzle that the police are incapable or unwilling to solve. Through this negative portrait of its most visible agents, Hitchcock expresses his long-held distrust of the state and its inability to protect its citizens. Four of his five postwar spy thrillers (Notorious, The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, Torn Curtain, Topaz) give a prominent role to organs of the national security state, and Hitchcock is no less scathing about their incompetence and their cynicism. In North by Northwest, the fictional USIA stands for all the agencies of the national security state.42 It knowingly places advertising executive, Roger Thornhill, in extreme danger by allowing him to be mistaken for its own fictitious agent George Kaplan. Spymaster Vandamm’s mistaking Thornhill for Kaplan is seen as a stroke of luck by the USIA. When asked how long he thinks Thornhill will stay alive, USIA head, the Professor, replies: “Well, that’s his problem.” He will do nothing to help Thornhill since this would endanger Eve Kendall, his own agent in Vandamm’s group. The scene ends with the agent who questioned the morality of this enterprise wistfully saying: “Good-bye, Mr. Thornhill, wherever you are.” Americans working wittingly or unwittingly for the national security state are expendable. Both Roger and Eve are coldly manipulated throughout. On learning that the USIA has no intention of ending Eve’s dangerous mission and has lied to him about their reunion once the whole affair is over, Roger takes it upon himself to rescue her from Vandamm. Once again, the national security state fails in its most basic task of protecting Americans. It intervenes in extremis to save Eve and Roger since to do otherwise would have turned the jocular mood of the film into a tragedy. But no rescue would have taken place had it not been forced on the USIA by an ordinary citizen who cared nothing for the infamous “bigger picture,” which is always invoked to justify the state’s sacrifice of the individual. With Topaz, Hitchcock compares the national security agencies of four countries, the United States, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and France. All are depicted as inefficient, cynical, ruthless if need be, and generally not up to their assigned task. The Soviets fail to stop a highly placed KGB officer and his family from defecting to the United States, despite tight surveillance. The defector, Kusenov, accuses the CIA of handling the affair clum-

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sily, adding: “We wouldn’t have done it that way.” Kusenov resists his CIA interrogators and only heavy pressure on his family finally elicits his cooperation. Itself unable to acquire information on Cuba’s missile program, the CIA turns to a French intelligence agent to do so. The sympathetic portrait of Parra notwithstanding, the scenes of two tortured and murdered members of the antirevolutionary resistance attest to the ruthlessness of the Cuban security forces. French counterintelligence services are shown to mistrust their own members (with reason, in Devereaux’s case), yet incapable of tracking down the traitors in their midst. Given these not-so-subtle condemnations of the workings of national security organizations, it is difficult to understand how so many critics of the day could have seen Topaz as an anticommunist tract. As in Torn Curtain, communism and the Soviet threat serve as the ultimate “MacGuffin”—Hitchcock’s term for devices that drive a film’s plot and characters, but whose exact nature is largely irrelevant.43 Topaz could have equally been about police forces battling organized crime, and depicting a similar background of betrayal and deception.

Patriarchy, the Role of Women, and Family Values Cynthia Weber convincingly argues that the depiction of the “gendered and sexual codes required to produce the US imaginary of ‘the traditional family’” constitute the core of any film’s vision of American identity and, especially, in those that deal with “who we are” in a threatening world.44 Hitchcock’s portrayal of women has long been controversial; he tended to present an exclusively male point of view. Insofar as women are admitted into his world, they have been described as “pawns to be manipulated, used, exploited, and often destroyed.”45 His heroes are “exemplary of the symbolic law and order” and the “power to subject another person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned on to the woman as the object of both.”46 For some, this means that Hitchcock is a misogynist whose women “pick their way slimly through a range of awful experiences and deceitful pathologies so extreme you’d be howling with laughter, were the art of cinema not so very serious. There’s the vamp, the tramp, the snitch, the witch, the slink, the double-crosser and, best of all, the demon mommy. Don’t worry, they all get punished in the end.”47 This debate bears on Hitchcock’s presentation of the national security state. If the supporters of the misogynist thesis are correct, then this filmmaker must be seen as conforming to the prevailing masculinist opinions of the day and to their conservative conceptions of patriarchy and family values at the heart of the Cold War consensus defended by the institutions of the national security state. However, as we have argued in this chapter, Hitch-

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cock’s films not only distance themselves from the ideology and the practices of the national security state, but also question its effectiveness. Two recurrent themes in the films analyzed here are particularly relevant for this discussion: marriage, patriarchy, and family values; and male manipulation and exploitation of women in the name of the national security state. Though Hitchcock was hardly a champion of feminism, and recently denounced by Tippi Hedren and others as something of a sexual predator of his female stars,48 his films did challenge various prevailing conceptions of gender and gender relations that underpinned the Cold War consensus. Examining the question of marriage both from the viewpoint of a man who is afraid of it and a woman who has set her heart on marrying him, Rear Window is really about “the impossibility of successful relations within an ideological system that constructs men and women in hopelessly incompatible roles.”49 Jeff loses no opportunity to tell Lisa that he does not want to be tied down. He uses arguments that male and female viewers alike would see as specious: she is too perfect, his career as a magazine photographer would take her to places too rough for someone with her lifestyle, and so forth. The other inhabitants of the apartment complex project an equally unattractive image of marriage. There are the newlyweds whose lovemaking appears to have exhausted the husband. Just three days after their wedding, his wife tells him that she would never have married him had she known he was going to lose his job. The bickering, childless middle-aged couple seems to be kept together only by ties to their dog. And the future murderer Thorwald is continually nagged and mocked by his bed-ridden wife. Hitchcock equally flouts the Production Code, and the Cold War consensus, in making it clear that the unmarried Jeff and Lisa intend to sleep together. It is Lisa who takes the sexual initiative, exposing an element of the crisis of masculinity underpinning so many films of the Cold War era, including all four examined here. In addition to the obvious symbols of male sexual and moral impotence represented by Jeff’s cast, his wheelchair, and his snooping, in Rear Window this crisis of masculinity is manifested in its male protagonist’s lack of maturity in his dealings with women and in his fear of female assertiveness as exhibited by Jeff’s frequent cruel and sarcastic remarks to Lisa about their relationship. Nevertheless, it is the sexual Lisa, not the impotent Jeff, who exercises real agency. She takes the lead at all the stages in their relationship and assumes roles traditionally reserved for men. It is she who proposes marriage, invites herself to spend the night with Jeff, and obtains evidence of the murder, having taken it on herself to break into Thorwald’s apartment without informing Jeff. The final scene shows Lisa and Jeff at a new moment in their relationship. They are engaged to marry and, though immobilized in a new cast, Jeff looks contented. Dressed in designer jeans and shirt, wearing matching

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stylish loafers, Lisa is reading a book entitled Beyond the High Himalayas. This suggests that she is prepared to follow Jeff into the wilderness. Yet her clothes are hardly appropriate for such a purpose and, noticing that Jeff has fallen asleep, Lisa replaces the book with a copy of Harper’s Bazaar. Conveniently ignoring Lisa’s preference for her fashion magazine, Tania Modleski argues that this ending “reveals the way in which acceptable femininity is a construct of male narcissistic desire,” adding that Jeff becomes erotically attracted to Lisa only “when she begins to corroborate his interpretation of the world around him.”50 Corber proposes a more political interpretation, according to which Lisa’s clothes both express her willingness to make concessions and indicate the limits of her compromise: “Although she is willing to give up her modeling career for Jeff, she insists on maintaining her own separate identity.”51 These interpretations need to be pushed further. More than mere “masculine drag,”52 Lisa’s clothes express a statement. By wearing jeans, by no means popular among upper-class urban adults of the early 1950s, and exhibiting her preference for fashion magazines, she indicates that her compromise with Jeff will be made on her terms, not his: she will remain the agent in their relationship. After all, the film ends with her literally wearing the pants while Jeff is immobilized and symbolically impotent. Almost ten years after Rear Window, The Birds deals with women living on the cusp of the women’s movement. Like Rear Window’s Lisa Fremont, Melanie Daniels is from an upper-class background, but with no particular career ambitions. She too is used to taking the initiative and goes to great lengths to achieve her goals but, when it comes to getting her man, she relies on sheer determination rather than manipulation or any deliberate plan. As one feminist critic observes, “What could be more representative of modern female liberation than an elegantly dressed woman gunning a roadster through the open countryside?”53 The character of Mitch is the key to male-female relationships in The Birds. Hardly a traditional patriarchal figure, he is much more the man about the house, a role he has taken over from his late father. Mitch has to juggle his household relationships, rather than trying to impose his will. He is not simply the passive target of designing women, nor a Jeff Jeffries trying to resist the pressures to give up his independence for a marriage that he does not want. The film is neither a misogynist rant nor a defense of those family values so essential to the Cold War consensus. As with most Hitchcock postwar films The Birds is not interested in the family as an institution, but rather seeks to explore and explain the fragile foundations of personal relationships, within or outside of the family. The jaundiced view of marriage and families of Rear Window has been replaced by indifference. All of Hitchcock’s spy thrillers since the 1946 Notorious also deal directly with how women are treated by the national security state, especially

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those induced to work for it. When we first meet North by Northwest’s Eve Kendall on board the Twentieth Century Limited heading to Chicago, she appears to be the classic amoral femme fatale who will provoke the hero’s downfall and her own demise. Only in the latter part of the film do we learn she is the double agent that the national security state is trying to protect at the expense of private citizen Thornhill. Eve has become the lover of the enemy spy, Vandamm, on the orders of the USIA. Vandamm, in turn, sends her to seduce Thornhill/Kaplan so that he can be killed. Eve’s own desires, ambitions, and ultimate survival are totally irrelevant for both sides. Neither the twice-divorced Thornhill nor Kendall—who uses sex as her main weapon—respects the family values vaunted by the Cold War consensus. True, they appear to celebrate the traditional happy ending with marriage and a honeymoon. But by having sex less than an hour after their first encounter—this in the era where the eternally virginal and virtuous Doris Day was Hollywood’s most popular female star—they violate the spirit and the letter of the Production Code and the mores of the Cold War consensus. Topaz reaches similar conclusions about the value of women to state security agencies. Knowing full well the danger for a woman he claims to love, the film’s main male protagonist, Devereaux, does not hesitate to use his former mistress, Juanita, to gain information about Soviet missiles being installed in Cuba in secret. When Juanita is killed, yet another woman has been sacrificed on the altar of the national security of rival states. Family values receive short shrift in Topaz. We have already alluded to its themes of political and personal betrayal. Devereaux’s daughter Michèle (Claude Jade) appears to be happy in the early stages of her marriage but, again illustrating Hitchcock’s strong sense of irony, the film’s only truly successful family is that of the Soviet defectors, the Kusenovs. They hardly represent the model family of the Cold War consensus.

Conclusion Hitchcock was no social or political radical. His political outlook was very much that of the middle-of-the-road supporter of liberal democracy, harboring no desire to transform the capitalist system. His films of the 1950s and 1960s were made against the background of a Cold War that was as much about defending a set of shared values and conceptions of American identity as about a struggle against an external enemy, and they were produced under conditions of formal and informal censorship. The films were conceived and produced with the overriding objective of achieving commercial success in US cinemas. Accusations that Hitchcock made mainstream films that simply reinforced the political status quo—a charge that can be leveled

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against almost any commercial film of those years—ignore his skill in using and adapting that situation to raise questions about the ideology, aims, and actions of the national security state and the hegemonic mindset (see p. 18) on which it was built. None of his Hollywood films faithfully propagates Americanist mythology. Rather, Hitchcock invites his audience to witness the excesses of the national security state and the stifling constraints of the Cold War consensus, the fallacies of the security imaginary, and the myths of Americanism (see p. 27). He also questions the ideological Manichaeism on which this form of state functions. He did so not because he refused to take sides in the Cold War, but because he did not believe that the real threat to America lay with communism. His films are much more concerned with the shallowness of human relations and with the human capacity to simulate, to manipulate, and ultimately to betray. With the exception of North by Northwest, which appears to end happily with the marriage between two people who have been exploited, manipulated, and bruised by the national security state, the films analyzed here (like most Hitchcock films) end ambiguously or inconclusively, suggesting that the threat has not been countered. In the final analysis, whether Hitchcock deliberately chose to criticize the national security state and the Cold War consensus, or achieved this result inadvertently by following his own agenda and waging his own fight against the Production Code, is largely irrelevant. What matters is that he produced a form of subversive commercial cinema that attracted huge numbers of ordinary filmgoers who sought to be entertained rather than sermonized. Whether the audience was aware of it or not, Hitchcock’s films did not simply reinforce prevailing political and social norms, but rather suggested that these should never be accepted at face value. Given the political climate in Cold War America, especially during the 1950s, this was in itself a subversive act.

Notes 1. Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut, p. 348. 2. Wittkopf and McCormick, “The Cold War Consensus,” p. 653. 3. Corber, In the Name of National Security, p. 11. Despite insisting on the need to analyze these films in the context of the “concrete historical forces” that conditioned their production, Corber tends to treat the forces at play at the beginning and the end of the 1950s as if they remained more or less the same. He also underestimates two vital features of Hitchcock’s style that should temper any blanket assessment of the presumed conservative politics of his films: Hitchcock’s acute sense of irony and his penchant for moral ambiguity. 4. Between 1945 and 1972, Hitchcock directed twenty-two feature films and was involved in making a further twenty films for television. Naremore, North by Northwest, pp. 233–235. 5. Leitch, “It’s the Cold War, Stupid,” p. 12.

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6. Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut, p. 211. For a second, similar quote, see p. 248. 7. Dynia, “Alfred Hitchcock and the Ghost of Thomas Hobbes,” p. 36. Asked about his politics in an interview with the French political weekly L’Express, Hitchcock declared: “I think I am [a liberal] in every sense of the term. I was recently asked whether I was a Democrat. I answered that I was a Democrat, but in respect to my money, I am a Republican” (quoted in Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut, p. 331). 8. Hitchcock’s work manifests “to an extreme degree” resistance to the socialization process, “with the result that the dominant ideological structures—especially those governing gender construction and gender relations—are repeatedly exposed, called into question, or ruptured” (R. Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, p. 23). 9. Curtis, “The Making of Rear Window,” pp. 32–39. 10. See Caute, The Great Fear. See also Fried, Nightmare in Red. 11. The Berlin Crisis, which lasted three years, began on 10 November 1958, when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev issued an ultimatum to the Western allies to withdraw their troops from Berlin within six months or else the Soviets would turn control of East Berlin over to the German Democratic Republic, thus forcing the Western powers to deal directly with a state they did not recognize. 12. Production was over by July 1962. The Cuban missile crisis began on 14 October 1962. 13. See Kapsis, “Hollywood Filmmaking and Reputation Building”; Kapsis, Hitchcock. 14. For the details of Evan Hunter’s proposed conclusion, see Counts, “The Making of Hitchcock’s The Birds.” 15. E. Hunter, “Me and Hitch.” 16. Thyraud de Vosjoli, “So Much Has Been Swept Under the Rug.” 17. President Charles de Gaulle had just withdrawn France from NATO’s integrated military structure, had declared his search for a middle way between the United States and the USSR (especially in the third world), and had made an illfated attempt to replace the dollar as an international currency through a return to the gold standard. 18. Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut, p. 331. 19. Ibid., p. 329. For a similar point, see R. Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, pp. 222–223. 20. “From script to postproduction, Topaz was nothing but a ‘dreadful experience,’ in [screenwriter Samuel] Taylor’s words” (McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock, p. 691). Taylor also described Topaz as “a most unhappy picture to make” (Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius, p. 503). 21. See McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock, p. 693. 22. Durgnat, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, p. 386. 23. “Top Grossing Films of 1950–1959,” Stats-a-Mania, www.teako170.com /box50-59.html (accessed 12 January 2013). 24. Corber, In the Name of National Security, p. 105. 25. “Top Grossing Films of 1950–1959,” www.teako170.com/box50-59.html (accessed 12 January 2013). 26. In Hitchcock’s other 1950s spy thriller, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), the suggestion of a specific communist or Soviet threat is even more remote since the target of an assassination plot by internal political enemies is the prime minister of an unnamed Central or Eastern European country—an intrigue more reminiscent of the 1930s than the Cold War. 27. In his interviews with Hitchcock, Truffaut (Hitchcock/Truffaut, p. 256) pointed out that this scene is totally gratuitous, one “that’s been completely drained of all plausibility or even significance.” Hitchcock did not disagree.

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28. Corber, In the Name of National Security, p. 6. During the 1950s, homosexuals were picked out as a particular source of danger to national security, ostensibly because they were more susceptible to blackmail than other citizens, but more profoundly because they directly challenged traditional family values and the sexual mores of the times. Many civil servants lost their jobs on these grounds. David Johnson has dubbed this period the “Lavender Scare,” making a direct parallel with the anticommunist witch hunt of the Red Scare. See Johnson, The Lavender Scare; Charles, “Communist and Homosexual”; Shibusawa, “The Lavender Scare and Empire.” 29. Corber, In the Name of National Security, p. 6. John Hepworth labels Hitchcock a “supreme fag baiter,” claiming that “in a surprising number of films he crammed it [homophobia] down the public’s throat” (“Hitchcock’s Homophobia,” pp. 188–189). For a more nuanced and overall sympathetic view of Hitchcock’s perceived homophobia, also from a gay critic’s point of view, see R. Wood, “The Murderous Gays.” 30. Probably the film that has been most analyzed for its claimed homophobia is Strangers on a Train. For the most detailed accounts, see Corber, In the Name of National Security, pp. 56–82; Corber, “Hitchcock’s Washington.” For a rebuttal of Corber’s argument, see Nicholson, “Stranger and Stranger.” 31. Reference to Leonard’s homosexuality also appears to have completely escaped the censorship agencies of the time, even though the Production Code clearly forbade what it called “sex perversion or any inference to it.” Yet according to Hepworth, “Hitchcock’s Homophobia,” p. 189, the audience is led to believe that Leonard—“another entry in Hitchcock’s gallery of fiendish faggots”—is a monster “because he is gay” (emphasis in original). 32. “Top Grossing Films of 1960–1969,” Stats-a-Mania, www.teako170.com /box60-69.html (accessed 12 January 2013). 33. Weis, The Silent Scream, p. 24. 34. Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, p. 154, says much the same thing, suggesting that the birds “are a concrete embodiment of the arbitrary and the unpredictable, of whatever makes human life and human relationships precarious, a reminder of fragility and instability that cannot be ignored or evaded, and beyond that, of the possibility that life is meaningless and absurd.” 35. The ending of The Birds remains highly controversial. Screenwriter Evan Hunter was appalled by Hitchcock’s alteration of his original ending. Hitchcock himself seemed unsure of what he wanted to say. Early in the film’s production he told reporters, “Our main characters manage to escape, but nothing is said about what dangers they face,” and later claimed his intent was to depict the attacks as an isolated event. Counts, “The Making of Hitchcock’s The Birds.” Contemporary critics were particularly annoyed that the film never resolved the key issues that it raised. See Kapsis, “Hollywood Filmmaking and Reputation Building,” p. 9. 36. Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut, p. 286. 37. Counts, “The Making of Hitchcock’s The Birds.” 38. In fact, as Patrick McGilligan points out, during the 1950s Hitchcock slipped in several digs at the Red Scare in such diverse films as Strangers on a Train, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and North by Northwest (McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock, p. 559). For example, in North by Northwest, on seeing the statuette on Eve’s lap, Thornhill says “I see you’ve got the pumpkin,” an irreverent reference to Whittaker Chambers’s testimony in the iconic Alger Hiss affair some ten years earlier. 39. It is hard to disagree that Topaz “isn’t ‘about’ the Cuban missile crisis, any more than Notorious was about uranium ore in wine bottles. At a time when streets, campuses, and ‘youth movies’ were filled with rants against ‘the Establishment,’

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Hitchcock filmed a supremely lucid, supremely disenchanted critique of just what Establishments, Governments, Powers were up to, and how much it cost in individual human suffering” (Jameson, “Dinosaurs in the Age of the Cinemobile,” p. 158). Moreover, it was the human angle and not the denunciation of communism that underlay Hitchcock’s other apparently anticommunist film, Torn Curtain. Inspired by the defection to Moscow of British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, Hitchcock asked himself: “What did Mrs. MacLean think of the whole thing?” (quoted in Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut, p. 309). 40. “Alfred Hitchcock Movies,” Ultimate Movie Rankings, www.ultimatemovierankings.com/alfred-hitchcock-movies/ (accessed 4 August 2015). 41. Strick, “Topaz,” p. 49. 42. Though Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, and Corber, In the Name of National Security, both refer to this agency as the CIA, Hitchcock presents it as a generic security agency representing the entire national security state. As the Professor explains to Thornhill, “FBI, CIA, ONI [Office of Naval Intelligence], we’re all in the same alphabet soup.” 43. Hitchcock’s difficult relationship with author Leon Uris underscores this point. Their personal antipathy aside, they differed fundamentally over the direction of the plot. Hitchcock warned Uris “to write the intelligence agents and revolutionaries as human beings, without regard to politics”; Uris, on the other hand, “decided that Hitchcock didn’t have the slightest grasp of political complexities, and that all his ideas about espionage . . . were outdated and quaint” (McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock, pp, 685–686, emphasis in original). 44. Weber, Imagining America at War, p. 6. 45. Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, p. 360. See also Brill, The Hitchcock Romance. 46. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” p. 15. 47. Bidisha, “What’s Wrong with Hitchcock’s Women.” 48. See the interview with Tippi Hedren on YouTube, “Tippi Hedren, Hitchock Ruined My Carreer,” Huffpost Live, 7 December 2012, https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=M_JYRA2DZ5k (accessed 2 August 2013). See also, “Alfred Hitchcock Drama The Girl Sparks Angry Backlash,” The Telegraph, 22 October 2012, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/9621552/Alfred-Hitchcock-drama -The-Girl-sparks-angry-backlash.html (accessed 2 August 2013). 49. Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, p. 378. 50. Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, p. 84. 51. Corber, In the Name of National Security, p. 108. 52. Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, p. 84. 53. Paglia, The Birds, p. 29.

5 The Hollywood Revolution

A nation that commits itself to myth is traumatized when reality breaks through—in living color.1 Politics in the United States has always been a brutally partisan business. Since the American Revolution, the national style of politics and ongoing culture wars have generated enduring battles over a range of issues central to national identity and the purpose of the federal government. These include contentious questions such as: What does it mean to be American? Who is included and excluded from the “authentically” American community? What does the United States stand for in the world, and what are its core global interests? What should be the proper role of the federal government—particularly in its relationship to individual Americans and to business interests? What role should religion play in public life? Where lies the boundary between the public and the private? However, the decade preceding the Civil War excepted, no period in US history matched the range, intensity, and depths of conflict or the degree of confusion and doubt over fundamental values and myths that shook the country for almost twenty years following the June 1963 assassination of African American activist, Medgar Evers. Struggles over all aspects of American identity grew so intense that many agreed with the 1969 judgment of Lyndon Johnson’s deputy secretary of defense and later secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, that “the divisiveness . . . was threatening to tear the United States apart.”2

Things Fall Apart The hegemonic Cold War consensus of the vital center and the security imaginary (see pp. 20 and 19) that it encapsulated began to fragment in the 107

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early to mid-1960s. By the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency, both had largely disintegrated under the cumulative effects of the following: • The civil rights movement and radicalization of black resistance, together with a virulent white reaction, widened social and political cleavages and highlighted the systemic violence and hypocrisy underlying American democracy. • A series of unprosecuted political murders culminated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (November 1963), the two most important black leaders (Malcolm X, February 1965 and Martin Luther King Jr., April 1968), and the candidate who might well have won the 1968 presidential election (Robert F. Kennedy, June 1968). Confidence in the civic culture was further undermined by a veritable culture of conspiracy that these killings spawned.3 • The Vietnam War was the touchstone for all these divisions. Mass resistance to military service, the frequent violent and illegal suppression of domestic dissidence, revelations of US atrocities in Indochina and of successive administrations’ lies and subterfuge over the war, followed by exposures of illegal CIA programs to destabilize foreign governments and assassinate their leaders—let alone the stinging humiliation of defeat—all further eroded belief in the ideology and institutions of the national security state. For many Americans, “the notion of total obligation to a national security system became dubious.”4 • The 1960s counterculture challenge to virtually all of the patriarchal middle-class values of the Cold War consensus and security imaginary and to the national security state itself generated a backlash by what Vice President Spiro Agnew labeled the “silent majority.”5 • This backlash and reassertion of traditional and religious values was given further impetus by the emergence of a feminist movement contesting patriarchal authority, marriage, and the nuclear family, and by hesitant efforts to accommodate some of its demands. • The job security and living standards of the old white industrial working class were eroded by a shift of industrial production from the northeastern and north central heartland to the gun belt and the sun belt. This fueled perceptions that the white working class and its way of life was under attack and that the American Dream was slipping out of reach, thereby further intensifying the reaction against those seen to be questioning the American way. • The long psychodrama of the Watergate scandal almost destroyed belief in America’s political institutions and civic culture. Starting with Nixon’s vice president and his White House chief of staff, a raft of prominent politicians were indicted for corruption and other criminal activity between April 1973 and Nixon’s August 1974 resignation from the presi-

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dency. When Nixon was immediately pardoned by his unelected successor, Gerald Ford, it seemed that the establishment would permit its members to get away with any crime. By 1974, over 45 percent of Americans believed that “quite a few” government officials were “crooked,” compared to just 10 percent who insisted that “hardly any” were.6 • The spiraling cost of the Vietnam War and growing US trade deficits led President Nixon to end the fixed-price convertibility of the US dollar in August 1971. Undoing the US-imposed Bretton Woods regime that had managed global trade and finance since World War II, this provoked global economic uncertainty and a decade-long downturn. The 1973 oil crisis, stagflation, and recession further eroded belief in progress and individual social mobility, leading to widespread conviction that the United States was in historic decline. • Compounding America’s defeat in Vietnam and collapse of pro-US regimes in Cambodia and Laos, the 1970s produced what were seen as further Soviet gains through revolutions that overthrew solidly anticommunist governments in Ethiopia, Portugal (and its colonies of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique), Nicaragua, and Iran. Moreover, beginning in November 1979, the long Teheran hostage crisis outraged Americans. A growing belief that their country and its way of life were under attack was amplified by the consequent second oil crisis and December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. As brilliantly expressed in the “I am as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” rant of Peter Finch’s character in Sidney Lumet’s Network, alienation, confusion, fear, self-doubt, loathing, and rage spread across the political spectrum.7 A great deal of this focused around the national security state—both in terms of its overt and covert actions and as a symbol of the seemingly pristine (and disappearing) simplicities of the 1950s. During the 1960s America’s perception of its armed forces underwent a profound transformation. As World War II victories receded from memory and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis threatened the American people with nuclear holocaust, disenchantment with things military began to develop. . . . [T]he ultimate realization that the United States had lost the [Vietnam] war politically, if not militarily, completed the savaging of the positive military image which the services had cultivated for so many years.8

All fora of public discussion were seared by conflict over values that most Americans had long taken for granted. In this and the following chapter, we grapple with the ways in which Hollywood films dealt with the broiling social turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s—how “the movies” became a key battleground in what has been aptly labeled America’s “Civil

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War of the 1960s.”9 In this chapter, we explore the Hollywood revolution and its critique of the Cold War consensus, the ideology of national security (see pp. 13–14) and institutions of the national security state (see pp. 15– 16), and even, occasionally, the mythology of Americanism (see pp. 27– 32). In Chapter 6, we examine how the 1970s Hollywood counterrevolution prepared the ground for the reconsolidation of the national security state.

Getting Off Its Ass By the early 1960s, Hollywood was “more on its ass than any time in its history, literally almost wiped off the face of the earth.”10 Gimmicks like 3D, Cinerama, AromaRama, and Smell-O-Vision failed to lure back the audience lost to TV and the suburbs after World War II. By 1963, weekly cinema attendance had dropped to 44 million. It then plummeted to 17 million in 1968, bottoming out at 14 million in 1971.11 Despite the rare huge hit (Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music) and growing revenues from TV broadcasts of movies, the industry had bankrupted itself artistically and financially. Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) Pictures went under in 1959: a series of expensive box office bombs brought Twentieth Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), and Paramount to the brink.12 Hollywood seemed to have sunk to a creative low point: “It wasn’t just that we were sick of the system,” recalls director Arthur Penn. “At that point, the system was sick of itself.”13 Moreover, foreign movies marked by nudity, sexual openness, frank language, and thematic content were grabbing an increasing slice of the diminishing audience pie, especially among the urban young. Likewise, the cheapo youth-oriented schlock of Roger Corman’s American International Pictures enjoyed commercial success that eluded the major studios.14 A series of buyouts saw most studios turned into subsidiaries of this or that conglomerate, now run by accountants with little clue about how to make, or make money from, movies. The old artistic formulas no longer worked, and neither did the MPAA’s Production Code Administration. Its 1964 decision to deny a Certificate of Approval to Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker because of fleeting female nudity was overturned on appeal. Their wall of frumpy proprietary breached, the PCA and the National Legion of Decency could not stem the sexual and cultural revolution. When the PCA rejected the Bonnie and Clyde script in 1967, the new MPAA head, former aide to President Johnson, Jack Valenti, threw in the towel. The Production Code was replaced by a ratings system that, with modifications, remains in effect. This opened the floodgates. The huge profits eventually generated by Bonnie and Clyde were soon outstripped by those of The Graduate and Easy Rider, and contrasted with the financial hemorrhaging induced by for-

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mulaic late 1960s big-budget bombs such as Doctor Doolittle, Camelot, Hello Dolly, Sweet Charity, Paint Your Wagon, and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. The conglomerates running the studios became convinced that films geared to a youth audience and made by younger directors were the way back into profitability. The Hollywood revolution was under way. Though heavily influenced by the Italian and French New Wave, this innovative American cinema arrived neither out of the blue, nor as a mere aping of influential European and Asian directors. Even during the conformist 1950s, American film traditions (particularly film noir—see Chapter 3) had probed the underbelly of US life and challenged the Cold War consensus, the American security imaginary, and the national security state. This questioning was taken up from the late 1950s onward by established directors as different in style and ideological vision as Billy Wilder (Some Like it Hot; The Apartment; One, Two, Three), John Huston (The Misfits), and even the conservative icon, John Ford (see Chapter 2). Even before the Hollywood revolution, younger directors produced biting critiques of the Cold War or the national security state such as Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Spartacus, and (most spectacularly) Dr. Strangelove; John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May; George Englund’s The Ugly American; Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe; Arthur Hiller’s The Americanization of Emily; and Norman Jewison’s The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming. Nonetheless, the Hollywood revolution broke new artistic and thematic ground, carrying the critique of American society, politics, and culture way beyond that of its predecessors. While traditional entertainments occasionally enjoyed striking financial and critical success (True Grit, Love Story, Patton), Hollywood’s “creative resurgence” generated so many personal and critical movies that these now seemed to be the new mainstream.15 The films of the Hollywood revolution projected “a growing sense of alienation from the dominant myths and ideals of U.S. society”; they served “both as an instrument of social criticism and as a vehicle for presenting favorable representations of alternative values and institutions.”16 Seen from the highly conservative perspective that has overwhelmed American public life since the 1980s, many Hollywood films of the late 1960s and the 1970s are breathtakingly daring in scope, content, vision, and technique. Their take on the disappointments, follies, contradictions, and deceits of Americanist ideology, the Cold War consensus and security imaginary, and the crimes of the national security state today sometimes appears downright heretical.

A Less Perfect Union This new cinema of the period 1967 to 1979 was skewed to baby boomers growing into adulthood. By 1973, almost 75 percent of movie tickets were

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purchased by twelve- to nineteen-year-olds.17 As captured in the media cliché of the “generation gap,” the boomers’ sexual, chemical, cultural, fashion, and political experimentations and apparent rejection of middleclass mores seemed to herald real social change. Their widespread resistance to the Vietnam War directly challenged the Cold War security imaginary and national security state. A slew of films took up themes of alienation and rebellion, the hypocrisy and the shallowness of the American Dream, America’s endemic physical and psychological violence, youthful rebellion, sexual freedom, and the denunciation of US militarism and its institutions. The result was a profound questioning of the Cold War consensus and of Americanist mythology and the national security state’s purpose, ideology, and legitimacy. Hope I Die Before I Get Old!

Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) unleashed the Hollywood revolution with its seeming glamorization of the real and brief Depression era criminal rampage of two Texas working-class nobodies. For Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway), the American way is a life sentence to a dead-end existence. All they have going for them is youthful beauty and style, their craving for excitement and fierce contempt for authority. They rob banks not to accumulate wealth, but to give meaning to their grim lives of social entrapment. Starting out in comic vein, the movie turns increasingly bleak and violent, showing the hopelessness of individual defiance of the system. Yet the film is no left-wing screed. Though identifying with the downtrodden, Bonnie and Clyde are pure individualists, showing scant social conscience and no remorse at the unthinking violence they unleash. To underscore the point that their rebellion is no threat to the powerful, Clyde’s blustering and increasingly murderous confidence hides his own sexual impotence while—aware they cannot escape death at the hands of the system—all Bonnie can yearn for is the specious glamour of brief celebrity and notoriety. The movie’s most controversial scene—the couple’s extended death throes under a hail of bullets—is an explicit metaphor for the violence of American life and the extent to which the state will go to destroy those who defy the establishment.18 It further reinforces what now seems to be the film’s underlying message—that faced with the overwhelming might of corporations and the national security state, youthful rebellion presents no real alternative to the existing order: it can never win and is reduced to nihilistic violence and life lived as pure style (“be cool!”), a spectacle of thumb our noses at the adults and the state and get our kicks while we can. Released four months after Bonnie and Clyde, a Mike Nichols comingof-age movie revisited youthful ennui and alienation, but this time seen

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from the privileged side of the tracks. The Graduate probes the generational dialectic of contemporary upper-middle-class America to highlight the unraveling of the Cold War consensus and skewer the counterculture’s own failure to develop a viable alternative. Apparently on the fast track to conventional success, recent college graduate Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is “disturbed about things . . . in general.” Worried about his future, he wants it “to be different” from the vacuous lifestyle of his parents and their fatuous circle, but he has no inkling of how to live differently. Drifting aimlessly on his parents’ dime, Ben fails to take up his graduate school scholarship. When his frustrated father (William Daniels) asks what then was the point of all the hard work needed to graduate, Ben’s shrugged “you got me!” voices his generation’s sense of the futility of education for a corporate treadmill. With one exception, all adults are blind or indifferent to Ben’s confusion and distress. Their expressions of pride in his academic and track record are not about Ben at all: he is merely, as his father calls him, the “Feature Attraction” whose success allows America’s adults to bask in their own self-satisfaction. The Graduate mounts a frontal critique of a smug, conformist, and bigoted upper middle class and the consumerist Cold War consensus. American marriage is painted as a sexless, sick institution; the vaunted material success of the American Dream and American capitalism leads to emptiness and alcoholism. The system’s main enforcer is also its principal adult victim—the wife of Ben’s father’s law partner, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft in an Oscar-winning performance). Like her class and country, Mrs. Robinson (we never learn her first name) apparently has it all. Yet a self-described and self-loathing alcoholic, she knows her life to be a spiritual and moral desert. Mrs. Robinson’s fate and actions stand for the affluent society and Cold War consensus. Although the only adult to grasp that Ben is troubled, she uses his distress to turn him into her sexual prey. Their chillingly impersonal affair symbolizes both the mutually uncomprehending disgust between the generations and how the American way consumes its young to serve its empty purposes. Rejecting Ben’s plea that they have a conversation before their habitual silent copulation in the dark, Mrs. Robinson perfectly sums up the generation gap: “I don’t think we have much to say to each other.” All they can do is literally and figuratively screw each other in the dark. Ben’s own conflict between his need for sex, shame over the affair, and distaste at Mrs. Robinson’s contempt for him compound his disgust with himself, his class, and all adults. Yet Ben learns nothing. Living off his father’s money, he has no worries over where his next meal or rent check is coming from. Badgered by his parents into dating the Robinsons’ daughter Elaine (Katherine Ross), he humiliates her until her tears bring him short. An inarticulate and passive

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cipher until this moment, Ben suddenly speaks his mind. In a scarcely credible transition, he voices the counterculture’s understanding—gleaned from its favorite philosopher, Herbert Marcuse—of consumerism as a form of social control; of how the internalization of the rules of the Cold War consensus produces the soulless and alcoholic “successful” lives of his parents’ circle:19 “It’s like I’ve been playing some kind of game, but the rules don’t make any sense to me. They’re being made by all the wrong people. No! I mean, no one makes them up; they seem to have made themselves up.” Although appalled by the hollowness of the marriages around him, Ben convinces himself that he will marry Elaine (whom he barely knows). He essentially harasses her until—herself equally confused about what she wants from life—she agrees that she might marry him. Falling headlong into Hollywood’s myth of marriage as the happy ending of individual alienation, Ben and Elaine are oblivious to the fact that their obsessive parroting of empty lines about getting married simply endorses the value system each claims to loath. The movie’s climax focuses on Ben’s frantic quest to “rescue” Elaine from the loveless marriage arranged by her parents. Its key image has him spread-eagled against a giant cross carved into the church window, blaspheming and howling in despair as Elaine says her vows. When Mrs. Robinson rages at her daughter that “it’s too late” to escape her wedded state, Elaine’s heartfelt retort—“Not for me!”—speaks for her generation: it is never too late to choose to escape the compromises and moral and spiritual loss that Mrs. Robinson and consumerist America embody. This earns Elaine an enraged double slap from the woman who understands her own entrapment. This maternal violence on consecrated ground further underscores the lengths to which the system will go to control its youth. But Ben beats off the outraged wedding guests and bars the doors with a large cross, symbolically imprisoning adult America in the church of its conformity as he and Elaine escape. The Graduate ends with these confused juveniles jumping onto a passing bus under the uncomprehending stares of its passengers. Their flight from convention expresses their disgust with their parents’ values, class, and generation. However, as Elaine’s final unsettled gaze at Ben indicates, and Ben’s own collapsing smile reinforces, each is beginning to wonder what they have got themselves into. Despite their defying the system, their lives lack purpose and direction. Like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate fits squarely in Hollywood’s Cold War tradition of us against them movies. But the Other in opposition to whom their protagonists define themselves is neither the communists nor the Soviets, but the youths’ own parents, the American Dream, and the national security state—all of which combine to kill or stifle the youthful us. The nihilism of both films summed up something vital in the contradictory ethos of a disaffected generation. White middle-class baby boomers

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grew up in an affluent America where the right to consume had come to be taken for granted. Yet from the streets of Alabama to the rice paddies of Vietnam, daily TV newscasts broadcast the violence and hypocrisy of consumer society. Male boomers lived in dread of being conscripted to fight a losing war in Vietnam, one hopelessly at odds with Americanism’s myths and ideals. If they survived, all that awaited them were jobs as corporate automata. Female boomers were increasingly educated, yet still socialized to want what Mrs. Robinson had: purely domestic lives in service to a husband and children. Consumer society offered no hope, no way out. The Graduate makes no reference to the national security state. Yet its dissection of Ben and Elaine’s alienation was more threatening than Bonnie and Clyde’s armed violence. Bonnie and Clyde could defy the system, but not change it. However beautiful or stylish the film made them out to be, they remained low-rent hoodlums. Theirs was the rebellion of the powerless, one doomed from the outset. Nobody would spare a thought when the state duly wiped them out. Ben and Elaine, on the other hand, are neither freaks nor criminals. They drop out, but conspicuously do not “tune in and turn on”: their rebellion leads to neither the counterculture nor the New Left. They come from precisely the strata of educated, middle-class WASPs who built the national security state, and without whose support it could not function. Their rejection of the mores and lifestyle of corporate America— their refusal to be trapped like Mrs. Robinson—struck at the heart of the values of the Cold War consensus and cult of national security as the be-all of American society. Their apathy directly calls into question the national security state’s ability to reproduce itself. It was small wonder that such attitudes bewildered many in the generation that had suffered though the Depression, had fought in World War II and Korea, and for whom the prosperity and social mobility of the 1950s and early 1960s was a vindication of the promise of America. This bewilderment turned to genuine horror when confronted with the protagonists of the third and, in some ways most ambitious, of the films that launched the Hollywood revolution. Who “Lost” America?

Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) was conceived as a contemporary western and billed as “the story of a man who went looking for America . . . and couldn’t find it, anywhere.”20 Replete with allusions to John Ford’s images of the grandiose space of the American frontier, the film directly evokes all conventions of the western to deconstruct the myths and tropes of Americanism, American identity, and American freedom. Hippy bikers Billy (Dennis Hopper) and Wyatt, aka “Captain America” (Peter Fonda), are older and way scruffier than Bonnie and Clyde or Ben and Elaine.21 After scoring big by selling a stash of cocaine, they ride 1,700

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miles across America and are joined along the way by lawyer George Hanson (Jack Nicholson)—the dissident alcoholic son of a small-town big shot. Taking the form of a quest to find the real America, their journey to New Orleans depicts Billy and Wyatt as standing outside of civilization and consumer society, symbolic pioneers on the frontier of a wide-open and wild America who are exploring its promise and contradictions. The film deploys the classic western trope of the arrival of Billy and Wyatt as strange outsiders in several versions of a closed American community, and evaluates how their reception by each of these very different communities reflects American ideals, identity, and freedom. The travelers are welcomed and fed both by an extended multiethnic family living the Jeffersonian ideal and by a struggling hippy commune. This contrasts with their imprisonment by the forces of law and order in a conformist small town, with the extreme hostility of the redneck customers at a roadside restaurant, and with the scary and sad excess of the individualist indulgence of their own sex, drugs, alcohol, rock ‘n’ roll hedonism at the Mardi Gras. These encounters demonstrate the extent to which, at war with itself and its ideals, the United States is neither exceptional, universalist, nor free. Sitting stoned by a campfire, lawyer George voices the radical liberal critique that drove much of the New Left: “You know, this used to be a hell of a good country, I don’t understand what’s goin’ on with it.” America has lost its way. George tells Billy and Wyatt that they elicit so much violent rejection because people are afraid of the real individual freedom the two represent: “It’s real hard to be free when you’re bought and sold in the marketplace. [But] don’t tell anybody they’re not free because they’ll get busy killing and maiming to prove to you that they are. They’re going to talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual it scares them. . . . It makes them dangerous.” George’s words turn prophetic when he and later Billy and Wyatt are ambushed and murdered by rednecks representing American ignorance and aggression, an archaic system impervious to change, and one threatened by difference. Their killing underscores the extent to which, by the end of the 1960s, “many Americans came to regard groups of fellow countrymen as enemies with whom they were engaged in a struggle for the nation’s very soul.”22 However, going beyond such relatively facile judgments, Easy Rider also turns the critique against the counterculture that Billy and Wyatt personify. Their final campfire conversation probes the contradictions and limits of the counterculture as an alternative to the American way and violence of the national security state. The individualist Billy exalts, “We did it, man! We did it, we’re rich, man. . . . That’s what it’s all about. Like, you know, you go for the big money and then you’re free.” Seeing only the spiritual failure of their lives, the more community-oriented Wyatt replies: “You know, Billy, we blew it! . . . We blew it!”

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Wyatt’s conclusion that American freedom has been destroyed by the quest for wealth is prefigured in a shot of him shoving a plastic tube stuffed with the greenbacks from their cocaine sale into his bike’s US flag−decorated gas tank. Easy Rider cowriter, star, and producer, Peter Fonda, insists that this scene symbolizes “fucking the flag with money.”23 The “we” in Wyatt’s repeated “we blew it” epitaph refers on the one hand to the United States itself and the gulf between its ideals and the American reality, and on the other hand to the counterculture’s inability to present an alternative capable of rescuing those ideals. Whereas Bonnie and Clyde are slaughtered by the state for what they do, outraged fellow Americans club George to death and blow away Billy and Wyatt because of what they represent. The national security state has produced an America at war with itself.

Taking America’s Pulse The success of Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Easy Rider unleashed a flood of movies about alienation, rebellion, sexuality, American violence and hypocrisy, and the limits or failure of consumerism. Several featured often doomed protagonists taking on the system or the plodding agents of the national security state or consumerism while armed with only supercool superiority.24 This trend achieved its apotheosis in the movie that ultimately became one the biggest money-spinners of the period—Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970).25 The most innovative of the directors thrown up by the Hollywood revolution, Robert Altman (1925–2006) ranks with John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock as one Hollywood’s all-time most influential stylists.26 Like Ford, Altman too was a notoriously difficult iconoclast who exercised absolute control over his movies and whose principal theme was America. While Ford used westerns and historical dramas to probe America’s tensions, contradictions, and conflicts, Altman’s thirty-plus feature films take the US pulse through deconstructing almost every Hollywood genre (and sometimes several together) and other aspects of popular culture.27 M*A*S*H was Altman’s third and breakthrough movie and biggest hit. It forged the template of his unique style of an ensemble piece marked by overlapping dialogue, multiple viewpoints, and the unprecedented license to improvise given to his actors so as—in Altman’s words—to paint a portrait of a slice of American life rather than tell a story through a conventional narrative arc.28 Though ostensibly set in the Korean War, M*A*S*H dissects what the national security state and the Vietnam War had wrought in America.29 At the time, Hollywood had produced only one movie about this war, John Wayne’s unblinking apology, The Green Berets. Fearful of tackling this highly divisive subject, Twentieth Century Fox obliged Altman

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to tack onto the opening scene the words “And then there was Korea” and the 1952 “I shall go to Korea” statement by presidential candidate, Dwight Eisenhower. However, from his extensive use of helicopters to depicting “Koreans” wearing Vietnamese cone-shaped hats, Altman clearly signaled his film’s real location. M*A*S*H is a portrait of an American community caught in the jaws of the American way of war. It highlights the antics of three incorrigibly insubordinate army surgeons, Captains Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland), “Trapper” John McIntyre (Elliot Gould), and Duke Forrest (Tom Skerritt) in a mobile army surgical hospital close to the frontline (the mythical frontier). From the opening scene of Hawkeye stepping out of a latrine and stealing a jeep, the film seems to be (and was largely received as) a scathing parody of war, the national security state, and all institutions of Americanism. Nothing is sacred in this movie. Only bigoted fools believe in heroism, patriotism, duty, racism, and homophobia. Monogamy and marital fidelity are honored in the breach by every man and woman in the unit. The entertainment industry is lampooned in absurd loudspeaker announcements. Private property is an anachronism. Even the aura of the American presidency is mocked in a lewd parody of the official US presidential march. Christianity comes in for sustained ridicule. The unit’s priest, Father Mulcahy (Rene Auberjonois) is a pliant twit. The religious Major Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) is derided as a “sky pilot” whose piety is unacceptable to any normal person. To reinforce the point, Burns is a callous, bullying, hypocritical prig and an incompetent surgeon. Prayer is lambasted as a contagious “syndrome” to which every eight-year-old should be immune. When sexual impotence afflicts the well-endowed camp dentist, Captain “Painless Pole” Waldowski (John Schuck), Hawkeye and Trapper John organize a parody of The Last Supper, filmed in the style of the Leonardo da Vinci painting. Painless is “resurrected” through sexual intercourse with Lieutenant “Dish” (Jo Ann Pflug) who selflessly offers up her body so that the demented dentist might live. The movie’s principal target is American militarism and entire mindset sustaining the national security state. The football match near its end is a veritable parable of American warfare as a system rigged to enrich agents of the corrupt, incompetent, and risible national security state. The politics of fear of the Other are presented as insane forms of behavior. With the exception of the hypocritical and ceaselessly derided Frank Burns and Margaret “Hot Lips” O’Houlihan (Sally Kellerman), everyone in the unit goes out of their way to ridicule war, the army, and the notion of threat. The ludicrous loudspeaker announcements parody both army orders and Hollywood’s conventional depiction of military heroics. The US Army is shown to be commanded by corrupt and incompetent generals (General Hammond—G.

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Wood), tin pot dictators (Colonel Wallace C. Merrill—James B. Douglas) or distracted buffoons (Colonel Henry Blake—Roger Bowen). Hawkeye, Duke, and Trapper John suffer no consequences for their incessant insubordination. Their open contempt for war, the army, military hierarchy, and protocol is presented as the only viable human attitude. The film ends with a frustrated sergeant reiterating a comment he has already made several times: “Goddam army!” Altman abandons this smartass satirical tone only in the recurring and graphic portrayals of the operating theater, where the suddenly sober and adult surgeons grapple with the deadly consequences of war in a welter of spurting blood, punctured organs, severed limbs, and dying soldiers. Viewed at the surface, M*A*S*H is evidently saying that America and its national security state have gone completely off the rails. Its denunciation of the cult of national security and the American war story is more powerful and wider ranging than that of any of the three movies that launched the Hollywood revolution. While Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Easy Rider each recount an impotent adolescent revolt against the powerful, part of the symbolic force of the antimilitarist message of M*A*S*H comes from the godlike status that 1960s America granted to medical doctors. Hawkeye, Duke, and Trapper John are dedicated and highly competent professionals saving lives in the operating theater. Theirs is not the hopeless mutiny of those permanently excluded from the system, nor is it the rebellion of indulged and juvenile consumers. The surgeons rebel because they are rational adults trapped in the maw of the out-ofcontrol national security state, obliged to deal with the horrific cost in flesh, tissue, and blood of a meaningless war provoked by ingrained militarism and paranoia. In a United States mired in the killing fields of Vietnam, M*A*S*H had a resonance beyond the audience of alienated baby boomers. The movie’s anarchism proclaims that America’s natural and best condition is as a classless democratic melting pot. As a joyous celebration of rebellion, M*A*S*H perfectly reflects both the counterculture’s self-indulgent answer to the galloping crises wracking the United States at the end of the 1960s (“Do your own thing!”) and the smug and optimistic sense of superiority over the system that it despised and derided. However, Altman’s signature piece works at other levels to undermine the conventional interpretation that it is a left film. Thus, while many have commented that the surgeons’ antics represent a frantic effort to retain individual control when trapped in a chaotically depersonalized situation,30 they do so by asserting the primacy of the individual over society and organized authority—exactly the myth of Americanism. Moreover, in two brief scenes, Altman reveals that Hawkeye and Duke yearn for the certainty of traditional values. Called on by a passing TV reporter to say something to his family back home, the sly and cynical Hawkeye instantly morphs into a sheepish and grinning adolescent, mouthing a guileless and longing “Hi,

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Dad” into the camera. And when Duke hears that his discharge papers are ready, we see his mental flash-forward to the moment he steps off the plane and sprints into the arms of his wife and children. Perhaps these scenes are saying that the national security state has irretrievably altered the United States—that there is no going back to the innocence of Americanist mythology, that war and rampaging individualism are the future. Yet the film also seems to be saying something about the nature of American individualism, even on the left. The surgeons’ hilarious antics mask their profound narcissism. They are among the strongest examples of a new kind of Hollywood protagonist—the hip urbane male infinitely removed from the strong silent archetype embodied by John Wayne or Gary Cooper. Embodying 1960s cool, Hawkeye and Trapper John are—to take a phrase from Altman’s 1973 take on film noir, The Long Goodbye—“Smart Ass and Cutie Pie.” They are forever performing their own sense of superiority through wisecracks that brook no reply, showing scant regard for anything other than their own desires (although Altman would underscore the fragility of such a strategy in McCabe & Mrs. Miller). Duke’s flash-forward to his homecoming and Hawkeye’s bashful “Hi, Dad” also presage something about the 1960s New Left: that, once no longer facing the risk of death in Vietnam, most of its male protagonists would jettison their leftism for mainstream consumerist values—the 1960s youthful hippies and New Left would morph into Reaganite yuppies in the 1980s. Yet M*A*S*H says something even more fundamental about the counterculture. The surgeons’ professional humanism in the operating theater is juxtaposed with their persistent cruelty toward those who reject their particular groupthink. They organize an ugly mob hounding of the pious patriots Frank Burns and Margaret “Hot Lips” O’Houlihan. Their acolyte, “Radar” O’Reilly (Gary Burghoff), sneaks a microphone into the tent where Frank and Margaret are making love. For a film ostensibly set in the Korean War, this evocation of McCarthyite surveillance of intimate private space requires no interpretation. The following morning, in front of the entire mess, Hawkeye loudly and crudely suggests that Major O’Houlihan is menstruating. Ignoring her presence, Hawkeye torments Burns with vulgar, highly sexist comments about Margaret’s body and sexual performance. Burns is provoked into attacking Hawkeye who gloats as the major is bundled off in a straitjacket. The scene works in that Hawkeye nails Burns’s hypocrisy as an adulterous Christian, and the audience laughs at his comeuppance and at Hawkeye’s repartee. Yet those paying attention might have been unsettled by this allusion to the Soviet Union sending dissidents to psychiatric hospitals. Trapper John and Hawkeye’s unrelieved denigration of Hot Lips was perhaps even more disturbing. With Burns out of the way, the surgeons mobilize the entire camp (including its submissive women) to expose Mar-

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garet in the shower. Everyone laughs as the humiliated woman cowers naked on the floor. This symbolic gang rape finally tames Hot Lips to the surgeons’ patriarchal authority, and she becomes an idiotic bimbo cheerleader and Duke’s lover. The treatment of Margaret led one critic to dub M*A*S*H as misogynist.31 Or perhaps Altman is trying to make a subtle point. The director was forty-four years old when he made M*A*S*H, the age of the parents mocked in The Graduate. Clearly directed at the children of the counterculture, the movie also seems to want to show them that all societies, all collectivities—including the counterculture and New Left— have in-groups and out-groups, and that they all depend on the ruthless disciplining of those who do not share the dominant social values. Be this as it may, the women in M*A*S*H are little more than ciphers there to service male needs—as nurses and in bed. The movie’s depiction of the height of female satisfaction is the memory that the aptly named Lieutenant “Dish” has of herself servicing a huge male sexual organ so that Painless Pole Waldowski might recover his potency. In its rampant sexism, M*A*S*H mirrors a characteristic of many American movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, “an obsessive turn—or return—to the projection of worlds dominated by men.”32 The female characters in such iconic films as Easy Rider, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Midnight Cowboy, The Sting, The Last Detail, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest all “serve to mediate [white] fraternal relationships while insinuating the superiority of fraternity to any between men and women or between women and women.”33 In this, M*A*S*H echoed the skewed nature of the sexual revolution—“it was not a great time for women,” commented Oscar-winning actress, Julie Christie—and Hollywood’s “retrograde, female diminishment” and reluctance to incorporate feminism into its productions.34 M*A*S*H further reflects the limits of the Hollywood revolution’s version of America’s Civil War of the 1960s—the absence of any real black voice. Only three significant movies of the period featured a black character as the central, politicized, and sexualized protagonist—Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Gordon Parks’s Shaft, and Sidney Poitier’s Buck and the Preacher. These films are also exclusively about men, and the first two celebrate the black man as stud for whom “sisters” exist to service his sexual needs and bind his wounds.35 M*A*S*H’s only black character, brain surgeon Oliver “Spearchucker” Jones (Fred Williamson), is brought into the unit not for his professional skills but because he is a star football player who will help Hawkeye and his buddies win the bet over their football match against General Hammond’s team. Far more accomplished than Hawkeye, Duke, and Trapper John, Spearchucker nonetheless takes orders from and makes money for them. Like almost all subsequent Altman films, M*A*S*H portrays “a culture and its inhabitants, stuck like a top in mud and prevented from sinking only

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by the force of its self-perpetuated spinning.”36 Yet its take on the 1960s is far more ambiguous than the counterculture celebration it seemed on release. Altman’s breakout movie perfectly captures the turbulence of its time, the breakdown of the vital center, the confusion over masculinity, the hypocrisy of the New Left around feminist and racial issues, the anarchy of American society, the collapse of Americanism, and the critique of the national security state.

Something Rotten in the State of Denmark As America’s divisions deepened in the 1970s, an ever darker and more paranoid tone crept into Hollywood products. A number of high production value horror movies featuring a satanic assault on the United States made major league profits (see Chapter 6). American films began to feature themes such as: political assassination (e.g., Executive Action, The Day of the Jackal, The Parallax View, The Day of the Dolphin, Nashville, Taxi Driver, Winter Kills); random shootings and violence by psychotic youths (Targets, Badlands, Dirty Harry, Death Wish); serial murder (The Todd Killings, Klute, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Helter Skelter); and enraged working-class whites turning violently on hippies (Joe). Americans were shown as trapped in catastrophic disasters (e.g., The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, The Towering Inferno), or imprisoned by intelligent and totalitarian apes after a nuclear holocaust (Planet of the Apes and its four sequels); or threatened by viruses imported from outer space (The Andromeda Strain), by the psychotic abandoned woman (Play Misty for Me), by anonymous and inexplicable violence (Duel), or by out-of-control state surveillance (The Conversation). Other films featured plots to ransack public goods for private ends (Chinatown), terrorism (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The Enforcer, Black Sunday), the return of the Nazis (The Odessa File), or the Vietnam veteran adrift from society or in psychosis (Vanishing Point, Rolling Thunder, Taxi Driver). As argued in Chapter 6, many of these films projected a return to a security imaginary of the United States under constant threat. However, three successful truth-based conspiracy movies projected a strong liberal critique of the national security state through highlighting the rampant criminality of officials charged with assuring one or another aspect of Americans’ security. Sidney Lumet’s Serpico (1973) was released the year following the Watergate burglary, when the ensuing scandal came to overwhelm domestic politics. The film dramatizes the true story of the solitary battle by Detective Frank Serpico (Al Pacino) to expose the endemic corruption of New York City’s Police Department (NYPD) and its long-standing complicity

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with organized crime. The real Frank Serpico’s actions eventually led to the Knapp Commission, which confirmed systemic corruption in the NYPD. The movie portrays the lengths to which its command structure, individual officers, and city politicians go to suppress the truth. Its depiction of the 1971 shooting of Frank Serpico suggests that fellow officers declined to back him up in a drug bust and failed to summon help when he was shot. Serpico is a gritty tale of a courageous individual’s ultimate triumph over a corrupt system, though at great personal cost. As such, it could be read as an endorsement of Americanism’s individualist ideology. In both the movie and real life, Frank Serpico is ultimately vindicated because the New York Times publishes his exposure of police corruption. For moviegoers in 1973, this reminder of the role of the Times in disclosing the lies and sleaze of security professionals would resonate with the newspaper’s 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers that revealed systematic national security state deceptions and falsehoods about the Vietnam War. It also echoed the role of the press in unraveling the criminal Watergate conspiracy. The film highlights two central themes. The first is that American democracy, the values proclaimed by the republic, and the lives of individual Americans are threatened by an element of the state security apparatus that had become a law unto itself. The movie shows the system manipulating the notion of threat (in this case, crime) to sustain itself and enrich most of the individuals working within it. Secondly, Serpico insists that only the citizens and the free press can defend democracy against the national security state. The rogue element of the national security state featured in Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975) is the CIA. The movie seemed to be torn from the headlines. Released in the aftermath of the first oil crisis and two years after a CIA plot brought down Chile’s democratically elected government, Condor was filmed as the New York Times started to leak an internal CIA report on the Agency’s other illegal operations.37 These revelations led a “stunned” Pollack to change the script that had originally focused on CIA heroin smuggling in Laos.38 Condor opened days after congressional committees began to expose a range of illegal CIA domestic and international activities. Moreover, the real Operation Condor was a CIAsupervised strategy adopted in 1975 by five Latin American military juntas to “eliminate Marxist subversion,” which led to the murder of some 60,000 people.39 Three Days of the Condor’s protagonist, Joe Turner (Robert Redford), works for the CIA in New York. He turns in a report that inadvertently exposes its plot to take over Middle East oil fields. Returning to the office one day, he finds his coworkers have been shot to death. Fleeing, Turner comes to realize that the CIA has executed its own employees and is out to get him too. After several escapes and further Agency murders of its own,

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Turner confronts Deputy Director Higgins (Cliff Robertson). Justifying illegal CIA actions, Higgins skewers the imagined nature of national security: “We have games; we play games, that’s all! What if? How many men? What would it take? Is there a cheaper way to destabilize a regime?” Defending the oil fields plot, Higgins argues that national security trumps democracy. The “people” will soon demand that the CIA do whatever it takes to secure oil—“They won’t want us to ask them, they’ll just want us to get it for ’em.” Outraged, Turner informs Higgins that he has given the story to the New York Times. Retorting that Turner’s days are numbered, Higgins taunts him by asking, “How do you know they’ll print it?” As Turner walks away to begin a life on the run, his questioning backward gaze falls alternatively on Higgins and the New York Times building. The film ends with a freeze-frame of Turner still looking back, but now from behind a Salvation Army band singing “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” The Christmas carol’s juxtaposition of “Christ our Savior” come to “save us all from Satan’s power when we have gone astray” sums up the movie’s message: we cannot be sure which will triumph—democracy and the Constitution or the rogue national security state. To underline the point, the screen goes black and the sound cuts off just before the carol’s message of “good tidings of comfort and joy.” Three Days of the Condor’s director, Pollack, stated that his film dealt with “trust and suspicion, paranoia which I think is happening in this country, when every institution I grew up believing was sacrosanct is now beginning to crumble.”40 The New York Times concluded that “as a serious exposure of misdeeds within the C.I.A. the film is no match for stories that have appeared in your local newspaper . . . it’s never as horrifying as the real thing.”41 Yet while the truth may have indeed been more shocking than Condor’s fiction, such an American film could never have been made before the 1970s. Earlier Hollywood conspiratorial national security fictions (The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May—as opposed to spoofs such as Dr. Strangelove) depicted those behind such murderous plots as traitors, ultimately brought to book by the national security state itself: the system worked. In Condor on the other hand, a major studio financed a film by an A-list director featuring two of Hollywood’s then hottest stars (Redford and Faye Dunaway) in which the murderous villain is the core apparatus of the national security state—and its targets are Americans and American democracy. Condor shows the CIA consuming its own children, becoming the mirror image of the KGB. Turner’s flight suggests that ordinary Americans need to fear the national security state. In Vietnam-fractured, post-Watergate, post–oil crisis America, Condor’s depiction of CIA crimes well captured a country at war with itself and its values, unable to trust its institutions. However, as director Pollack acknowledged (and the truncated final Christmas carol underscores), Turner’s backward glance offers both hope

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and fear—hope that his exposure of the CIA oil plot and murder of its own employees would shut down such abuses, and fear that the New York Times might itself be controlled by the Agency.42 Pollack insisted that the climactic confrontation invites viewers to reflect on how far they would allow the CIA to go. A film about the price paid in American liberty for the national security state’s illegal and covert operations and cult of secrecy, Condor clearly asks which Americans valued more—their role as citizens guaranteed their constitutional rights, or that of consumers guaranteed access to cheap oil? The year following Three Days of the Condor’s release, Robert Redford brought to the screen a third major truth-based movie to shine a light on real rot at the heart of the national security state. The director of All the President’s Men (1976), Alan Pakula, had earlier made two key liberal paranoia films (Klute, The Parallax View), each of which fictionalized “the extraordinary power exercised by those hidden in the shadows of political life.”43 All the President’s Men reversed the parallax view to spotlight genuine conspiracies and real shadows in public life. Dramatizing the efforts of Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Bob Woodward (Redford) to unravel the 1972 break-in at the Watergate Democratic party headquarters, the movie relates the true story of a potentially fatal conspiracy against American democracy. As in Serpico and Three Days of the Condor, this real and present danger came neither from a Soviet plot nor from some domestic un-American rogue cabal, but from the entire national security state apparatus in thrall to what the real Carl Bernstein labels “a criminal presidency without regard for the Constitution of the United States.”44 Bob Woodward’s main source in breaking the Watergate conspiracy was famously labeled “Deep Throat” (Hal Holbrook), later revealed to have been the FBI associate director, Mark Felt. This key national security state official tells Woodward that his and Bernstein’s lives are in danger from a “conspiracy . . . [that] involves the entire U.S. intelligence community. . . . It leads everywhere.” All the President’s Men insists that the United States is at a crossroads. Its final exchange has Washington Post executive editor, Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards in an Oscar-winning performance), reacting to Deep Throat’s revelations: “Get your asses in gear. Nothing’s riding on this except the First Amendment of the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country.” The movie insists that only citizens and the free press can save the republic from the national security state. Yet if Bradlee is right, that “nobody gives a shit” about Watergate, the United States is in deep trouble. It is difficult to watch Serpico, Three Days of the Condor, and All the President’s Men without feeling that something had gone deeply awry in America. Each deploys Hollywood’s trope of the scared, but unbowed, little

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guy standing up to corrupt institutionalized power. Each makes extensive use of light and shadow to highlight the message that America’s real and urgent us versus them conflict is its citizens’ struggle to defend constitutional freedoms threatened by the national security state. At the core of each is the issue of trust. Frank Serpico fears that he can trust nobody. In the early scenes of Three Days of the Condor, Joe Turner tells his head of department, “I trust a lot of people”; by the end of the movie, he trusts not even his lover. And in All the President’s Men, Bradlee tells Bernstein and Woodward that he has to trust them and he hates trusting anybody. This highlights the collapse of trust in the federal government from 76 percent of Americans in 1964 to 36 percent a decade later, and 25 percent in 1980.45 While this erosion of trust in core institutions spanned the ideological spectrum, Serpico, Three Days of the Condor, and All the President’s Men explicitly promote the liberal view that a free press was the only remaining public institution capable of preserving the constitutional democracy threatened by the national security state. These liberal conspiracy films thus invert the message of early Cold War movies such as John Ford’s cavalry trilogy or Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets. Those paeans to the national security state had insisted that Americans should have faith in the security professionals who best knew where the threat to America lay and how best to contain it—even though they might act contrary to the Constitution. Two decades later, these security professionals and the national security state they serve are now depicted as the principal threat to the United States and, as such, are to be profoundly mistrusted by Americans. At the end of Three Days of the Condor when Higgins tells Turner that in revealing the Middle East plot to the New York Times he has done more damage to the CIA than he knows, the movie invites the audience to share Turner’s emphatic reply, “I hope so!”

The Road Not Taken In the 1978 Coming Home, the Hollywood revolution finally produced a film that transcended both the self-indulgent hedonistic critique of the national security state (à la M*A*S*H) and the pessimism of the liberal conspiracy movies. Launched by Jane Fonda in her “Hanoi Jane” mode, Coming Home was produced by her Indochina Peace Campaign production company. The director that Fonda chose to shoot her film, Hal Ashby, had already made several important critical 1970s films (Harold and Maude, Shampoo, The Last Detail) and would follow Coming Home with the acclaimed Being There. The film is set in the pivotal year of 1968—that of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, of the collapse of Lyndon

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Johnson’s presidency, the implosion of the political optimism of the counterculture and of the Democratic Party at the latter’s Chicago convention, of the Tet offensive in Vietnam, and of Richard Nixon’s wafer-thin victory in the presidential election. An early example of what would become a tide of movies about returning Vietnam vets, it explores the war’s impact on three main protagonists—gung ho straight-arrow marine captain Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern), his repressed wife Sally (Jane Fonda), and wounded vet Luke Martin (Jon Voight).46 Coming Home opens with Bob about to ship out to Vietnam, itching to prove himself a real hero. Sally moves in with Vi Munson (Penelope Milford), the working class lover of her husband’s sergeant. Vi remains in the area to look after her brother Billy (Robert Carradine) who has returned from the war a basket case. Volunteering at a hospital for wounded veterans, Sally literally runs into a former high school classmate (and football team captain), the now paraplegic and bitter Luke Martin. Through her contact with Vi, Billy, and Luke and her confrontation with the military’s indifference to its wounded veterans, Sally is slowly radicalized. When the traumatized Billy kills himself, Luke is galvanized into overt opposition to the war. Sally and Luke fall in love. Bob comes home from Vietnam where he has accidentally wounded himself, for which he is awarded a medal. Bob’s disgust with the war, and his own failure as a soldier and hero, is compounded when he is shown FBI surveillance of Luke and Sally. Armed with his loaded and bayoneted M-16, he confronts Sally, calling her a “slope cunt” and repeatedly screaming “I don’t belong here!” Luke arrives and talks Bob down. The film ends by cutting between its three principals. Bob strips off his dress uniform, removes his wedding ring, and plunges naked into the sea, presumably to kill himself. Unaware of Bob’s plan, Sally and Vi drive to the supermarket in the couple’s convertible sports car (a symbol of American freedom). Meanwhile, Luke debates the war with a marine sergeant in front of high school students, telling the students that war “ain’t like it’s in the movies. . . . There’s not enough reason, man, to feel a person die in your hands or see your best buddy blown away.” The film’s final shot has Sally reaching for the supermarket door on which appear the words “Lucky Out!” Coming Home enjoyed strong box office success and critical acclaim, winning three of the eight Oscars for which it was nominated.47 Yet several critics echoed Pauline Kael’s dismissal of the film as an abstraction “which started out about how the Vietnam War changed Americans” and then turned into “a movie about how a woman has her first orgasm when she goes to bed with a paraplegic.”48 Others complained that the radicalized Sally cops out of her nascent feminism by opting to remain with her militarist husband, and that the film is little more than an “Oedipal drama . . . and projection of male desire.”49

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Such carping misses the point. Coming Home’s thoroughgoing feminism and critique of Americanism have less to do with Sally’s radicalization than with its portrayal of the crisis of American masculinity and myth of heroism. Its core is the account of how three men broken by Vietnam deal with the effects of the war and, particularly, its juxtaposition of the choices made by Bob and Luke. Gung ho Bob and former jock Luke each explicitly state that they wanted to be “a hero.” Their embrace of the John Wayne stereotype of patriotic and militarist masculinity leaves Bob emotionally paralyzed (he literally shoots himself in the foot) and Luke physically so. Coming Home insists that the cult of heroism deeply damages American men and American ideals, leading inevitably to catastrophes like Vietnam—and that women too need to free themselves from enthrallment to the heroic model of masculinity. Bob cannot live with his shame over his own failure as a hero and husband. His plunge into the sea is either suicide or a search for ritual rebirth in water. Luke is ultimately more mature. Imploring high school students to resist the “bullshit” appeal of the Hollywood version of heroic patriotism, Luke struggles with his own shame at what he did in Vietnam. Though confined to a wheelchair, he insists that he is not sorry for himself but is rather “a lot fucking smarter than when I went in.” While Billy kills himself and Bob either follows suit or regresses, Luke has grown up. Accepting responsibility for his own actions, Luke’s growth into a new and less violent male potency is symbolized when he roars off in an adapted Shelby Mustang, the ultimate contemporary American muscle car. The film’s title refers to damaged returning vets and to the war itself as the metaphorical chickens coming home to roost. “There is a choice to be made here!” Luke tells the high school students. America is at a crossroads. It could respond, like Billy and Bob, with despair or self-hatred. Or it could respond like Luke—accept that it had authored its own problems and reject militarism and the national security state.

Conclusion The Hollywood revolution produced films “that defied traditional narrative conventions, that challenged the tyranny of technical correctness, that broke the taboo of language and behavior, that dared to end unhappily.”50 For a decade, American cinema seemed to abandon its long-standing glamorization of Americanist mythology, the American Dream, and the Cold War consensus to probe instead the contradictions, conflicts, corruption, tensions, hypocrisy, and violence endemic in American life. In its earlier moments, the Hollywood revolution tended to reflect something of the naively optimistic—“all you need is love” and Age of Aquarius—version of the counterculture. However, by the end of the 1960s,

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a consistently darker portrait of America was projected onto the nation’s movie screens. Moreover, while most such films were broadly and often stridently critical of the security imaginary and the attitudes and modes of living of the Cold War consensus, some of the more striking movies of the time articulated elements of a growing conservative reaction against the generalized social turmoil (e.g., The French Connection, Dirty Harry, Straw Dogs, The Exorcist, Network, The Deer Hunter). Other more pedestrian films either reasserted traditional values and American innocence, or raged against the alleged moral laxity, antipatriotic attitudes, and mollycoddling of criminals that were said to have issued from the social turmoil of the 1960s (Rocky, Death Wish, respectively). The eventual triumph by the end of the 1970s of what became known as the Hollywood counterrevolution was assured by the huge profit bonanza generated by bland blockbuster entertainments that again transformed the economics of Hollywood and killed off the brief Hollywood revolution. We explore this in the following chapter.

Notes 1. Gitlin, The Sixties, p. 289. 2. Cyrus Vance, quoted in Gitlin, The Sixties, p. 303. 3. See Donovan, Conspiracy Films, especially pp. 3–23. For a survey of the roots in American culture of the rash of post–World War II conspiracies, see Melley, Empire of Conspiracy. 4. Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy, p. 204. 5. See King and Anderson, “Nixon, Agnew, and the ‘Silent Majority.’” 6. “Are Government Officials Crooked, 1958–2008,” Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior, American National Election Studies (ANES), www.electionstudies.org/nesguide/toptable/tab5a_4.htm (accessed 12 January 2013). 7. See Sandbrook, Mad as Hell. 8. Suid, Guts and Glory, p. xi. 9. The subtitle of Isserman and Kazin, America Divided. 10. Paramount Pictures vice president Peter Bart, quoted in Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, p. 20. See also Sandbrook, Mad as Hell, p. 18; Sklar, MovieMade America, pp. 286–304; Casper, Hollywood Film 1963–1976, pp. 31–57. 11. Casper, Hollywood Film 1963–1976, p. 48. 12. Such as Cleopatra, the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, The Fall of the Roman Empire, and The Greatest Story Ever Told. For a useful overview, see Casper, Hollywood Film 1963–1976, pp. 32–57. 13. Arthur Penn, quoted in Harris, Pictures at a Revolution, p. 9. 14. With movies such as X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes; The Wild Angels; The Trip. 15. Harris, “The Day the Movies Died.” See also Harris, Pictures at a Revolution; Kehr, When Movies Mattered. 16. Ryan and Kellner, Camera Politica, p. 265. 17. Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, p. 571.

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18. Arthur Penn, quoted in Harris, Pictures at a Revolution, p. 337. 19. Marcuse, One Dimensional Man. 20. Director Dennis Hopper, interviewed in the documentary, Easy Rider: Shaking the Cage. 21. Billy is based on Billy the Kid, and Wyatt on Wyatt Earp. Ibid. 22. Isserman and Kazin, America Divided, p. 4, emphasis added. 23. Fonda interview in Easy Rider: Shaking the Cage. 24. For example, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Alice’s Restaurant, Shaft, The Long Goodbye, The Last Detail, Blazing Saddles, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. 25. M*A*S*H’s box office earnings were dwarfed by those of The Godfather, American Graffiti, The Exorcist, Jaws, Grease, Rocky, Star Wars: Episode IV, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. However, despite Robert Altman’s vociferous objections, M*A*S*H* was soon turned into a television series that ran for 251 episodes over eleven years (ten of them spent among the top ten most-popular TV series) and generated a number of spinoff series. The final M*A*S*H* episode remains America’s all-time most-watched TV drama, and the series continues to be replayed virtually every day on US television. 26. Gilbey, It Don’t Worry Me, pp. 121–122. 27. The most notable cinematic genres explored and deconstructed by Robert Altman include: science fiction (Countdown); the war movie (M*A*S*H, Streamers); fantasy (Brewster McCloud); the western (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Buffalo Bill and the Indians); horror (Images); film noir (The Long Goodbye); the caper movie (California Split); the musical (Nashville); family comedy (A Wedding); romantic comedy (A Perfect Couple); the biopic (Vincent and Theo); the thriller (Gingerbread Man); and the murder mystery (Gosford Park). Moreover, the defining role of popular culture and the entertainment industry in American life is an abiding theme of Altman films and the central focus in his take on country and western music (Nashville), comics (Popeye), Hollywood itself (The Player), the fashion industry (Prêt à Porter), and public radio (A Prairie Home Companion). 28. See the interviews in the following documentaries: American Film Institute, The Directors: Robert Altman; Kenneth Bowser, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. 29. Robert Altman always insisted that M*A*S*H was about Vietnam. See the documentary, The Directors: Robert Altman. 30. See Self, Robert Altman’s Subliminal Reality, pp. 22–44. 31. Mellen, Big Bad Wolves, p. 312. 32. Keyssar, Robert Altman’s America, p. 49. 33. Ibid. 34. Julie Christie, interviewed in the documentary, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls; Casper, Hollywood Film 1963–1976, p. 5. The Hollywood revolution produced but a handful of films clearly told from a woman’s perspective and reflecting something of the impact of the feminism of the times. All made by men, these include: Frank Perry’s Diary of a Mad Housewife, Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Fred Zinnemann’s Julia, Hal Ashby’s Coming Home, and Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman. 35. The politically active black actor and singer, Harry Belafonte, turned down the lead role in Shaft because he found it and all of the “blaxploitation” films to be “anti-black . . . anti-women . . . demeaning” (quoted in Ross, Hollywood Left and Right, p. 224). 36. Keyssar, Robert Altman’s America, p. 3.

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37. Seymour M. Hersh, “Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years,” New York Times, 22 December 1974, http://cryptome.org/2013/06/hersh-nyt-74-1222.pdf (accessed 27 November 2013). 38. Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War, pp. 254–255. 39. See Dinges, The Condor Years. John H. Coatsworth argues that, between 1960 and 1990, “the number of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceed those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites,” in “The Cold War in Central America, 1975–1991,” p. 221. 40. Sydney Pollack, interviewed in McGilligan, “Hollywood Discovers the CIA,” p. 12. 41. “Three Days of the Condor,” New York Times, 25 September 1975, http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=ee05e7df173ce577bc4d51dfbf66838e 669ede. 42. Pollack interview in McGilligan, “Hollywood Discovers the CIA,” p. 12. 43. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right, p. 333. 44. Carl Bernstein, interviewed in the documentary, Out of the Shadows. Senator Barry Goldwater, who succeeded and preceded Richard Nixon as Republican presidential candidate, denounced Nixon as “a two-fisted four-square liar . . . the most dishonest individual I ever met” (quoted in Halberstam, The Fifties, pp. 313–314). 45. “Trust in the Federal Government, 1958–2008,” Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior, American National Election Studies (ANES), www.electionstudies.org/nesguide/toptable/tab5a_1.htm (accessed 12 January 2013). 46. Earlier returning-vet films include Vanishing Point, Taxi Driver, and Rolling Thunder. 47. Winning for Best Actress (Jane Fonda), Best Actor (Jon Voight), and Best Screenplay; and nominated for Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Bruce Dern), Best Supporting Actress (Penelope Milford), and Best Editing. 48. Kael, “The Current Cinema: Mythologizing the Sixties,” p. 119. 49. Selig, “Boys Will Be Men,” pp. 191–200, especially p. 200. 50. Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, p. 17.

6 The Hollywood Counterrevolution

I am really sick of everybody’s being antichrist, anti-society, anti-government, anti-people, anti-life, anti-happiness. . . . I think that we have to bolster our way through hard times by fabricating good times.1 The 1960s are usually seen as marking the apogee of liberal power in the United States. From the civil rights movement to the sexual revolution, public discussion was notable for an unprecedented questioning of the Cold War consensus and the ideology and institutions of the national security state. However, this conventional narrative glosses over that which ultimately proved to be the most significant outcome of roiling doubt and social conflict outlined in the previous chapter—the rise of a new conservative alliance. Hollywood played a pivotal role in the development and eventual triumph of this new conservatism.2 In this chapter, we examine the ways in which the Hollywood counterrevolution prepared the ground for the Reagan counterrevolution and its consolidation of the national security state.

An Orgy of Self-Hatred? The notion of a Hollywood counterrevolution refers to a set of movies made in explicit reaction to three interrelated phenomena. The first was growing anger provoked by one or other facet of the turbulence of the 1960s and reinforced by the deepening crises of the 1970s. By the early 1970s, Americans lived in a world in which traditional narratives were undermined by feminism, multiculturalism and postmodernism, in which cherished notions of American virtue were challenged by Vietnam and Watergate, in which the boundless possi-

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bilities of the American Dream were denied by inflation, pollution and unemployment. . . . And just as Americans were not used to feeling pessimistic about the future, so they were not used to feeling uneasy about their place in the world.3

All of this amplified what Timothy Melley has usefully labeled agency panic; that is, “intense anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy or self control—the convictions that one’s actions are being controlled by someone else . . . by powerful external agents.”4 Well summarized in the existential notion of angst, or in the sociological one of anomie, such a sense of diminished human agency in mass society had been widespread in postwar Western societies. And though several classic American postwar studies and novels had underscored this theme,5 during the 1950s such panic had largely been deflected by the consumer bonanza that appeared to confirm the promise of the American Dream. By the 1960s, however, the counterculture, novels such as Catch-22, and many of the movies of the Hollywood revolution had extended such generalized agency panic into a critique of the American Dream. Still other cultural trends, conversely, attributed this loss of individual autonomy and declining American power to the liberal forces unleashed by the phenomenon of “the Sixties.” Well captured in a retrospective observation by one conservative commentator that the years of the counterculture and the New Left had been “a time when insanity crackled in the air and treason was met with equivocation,”6 this unease and gathering social rage eventually transformed the fortunes of the American right. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, conservatism had been widely regarded as passé, even derided as a form of social paranoia clung to by those unable to cope with change.7 There had been little to choose between the Republican and Democratic party platforms in the 1960 presidential election, and Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy took an even more hardline position on national security than did his opponent, then vice president Richard Nixon.8 Four years later, the informal slogan behind Lyndon Johnson’s trouncing of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater—“In your guts you know he [Goldwater] is nuts”— summed up the extent to which conservatism seemed beyond the pale of the vital center. Yet various grassroots right-wing strands had been growing since the late 1950s. By the end of the decade these had jelled into a conservative consensus stressing anti-communism, limited government, lower taxes, and social conservatism.9 Two faded movie actors, George Murphy and Ronald Reagan, played the vital role in packaging this new right-wing agenda and organizing its takeover of the Republican party.10 Murphy was elected to the US Senate in 1964 and Reagan became California governor in 1966.

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From his State House pulpit, Reagan soon made himself the leading conservative voice against liberalism and the counterculture. The Hollywood counter-revolution grew, secondly, out of the post–Bonnie and Clyde changes in the movies. Out had gone the happy ending as the obligatory ideological trope consecrating the promise of the American way. The conventional hero gave way to an ambiguous and frequently ambivalent protagonist who is destroyed by the system (Easy Rider, Vanishing Point, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Parallax View, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), or is defeated or disillusioned or condemned to life on the run (Chinatown, The Long Goodbye, Three Days of the Condor). Increasingly, the American male was shown to be physically or emotionally crippled, if not psychopathic (Coming Home; Night Moves; Welcome Home, Soldier Boys; Taxi Driver; and Rolling Thunder). As inherently violent as any bad guy, he either has no insight into his own motives and desires, or comes to understand that he is part of the system that he loathes (Deliverance and Straw Dogs; The Graduate and Shampoo; The Last Detail). Most shocking of all, he is gay (The Boys in the Band, Dog Day Afternoon). And even when the protagonist wins, his victory is ambiguous and ephemeral (Serpico, All the President’s Men). In the critical films of the Hollywood revolution, the American Dream and consumer society are shown to have forged a corrupt and callous wasteland (Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Medium Cool, The Wild Bunch, Midnight Cowboy, They Shoot Horses Don’t They?, The Last Picture Show, Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, Shampoo, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Night Moves), one replete with serial murder (Targets, Klute). The American family is highly dysfunctional (The Graduate, The Godfather, The Godfather: Part II), and the United States has declared war on its children (Joe). Many of these films depict Americans and US democracy as threatened not by communism or the Soviet Union, but by an imperialist and genocidal war machine of the national security state (Alice’s Restaurant, Soldier Blue, M*A*S*H, Little Big Man, Catch-22, Scorpio, The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, Apocalypse Now, Hair). So pervasive were these critiques that even such a Hollywood revolution enthusiast as New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael argued at the end of the 1970s that “educated people” were becoming “afraid” to go to the movies because self-hatred did become intolerable in American movies for a while. The culmination is Apocalypse Now, which is an orgy of self-hatred. It doesn’t look at the facts of the war, what we were doing there. Instead we are carriers of metaphysical evil, we are demons. And that was the attitude in a lot of American films during the [Vietnam] war years, even Westerns that deal with an earlier period of American life. The Americans are racists who shoot up Indians for the careless joy of it—in Little Big Man for instance.11

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This unease with a cinema focused on the seamy side of Americanism was reflected, thirdly, in the economics of the movie business. Notwithstanding its artistic achievements and occasional box office hit, the Hollywood revolution failed to stem the flight from movie houses. Average weekly cinema attendance shrank by almost 18 percent between 1968 and 1971, and the major studios together lost some $600 million between 1969 and 1974.12 Their gamble with younger would-be auteurs won critical acclaim but irregular box office success, and their corporate owners were desperate for a profitable business model. This began to emerge by the midto late 1970s from the cinematic culture fashioned by the Hollywood counterrevolution.

Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid! The first signpost to a cinematic right-wing turn was the emergence of the horror movie as a leading genre and money-spinner. Hollywood had always made horror films but, such Hitchcock contributions as Psycho and The Birds aside, these were usually B-features and more amusing than scary. The horror movies of the Hollywood counterrevolution took two distinct forms. The first were big-budget affairs shot by A-list directors and featuring major stars. Between 1968 and 1979, six such films enjoyed box office success ranging from among the most spectacular ever (Jaws, The Exorcist) to runaway smash hits (Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, Carrie, Alien). Secondly, a rash of down market horror movies were “more gruesome, more violent, more disgusting” than any previous examples (Night of the Living Dead, The Last House on the Left, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).13 Underscoring the horror film’s growing cultural significance, Mel Brooks’s 1974 spoof, Young Frankenstein, also hit box office gold. The new A-list horror films were rooted in the politics of terror, paranoia, and loathing. Jaws was a straightforward monster from the deep (the Freudian subconscious) flick parsed with a dash of fashionable political corruption and the ultimate triumph of the individual over both monster and expert. The five other A-list horror movies depicted deadly threat growing within and spreading from the body of individual Americans—an obvious metaphor for the body politic. Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen, and Carrie highlight the so-called generation gap underlying the counterculture and much of the Hollywood revolution. Each deploys religious tropes to project the message that the principal threat to America’s social fabric comes from its own terrifyingly incomprehensible and out-of-control offspring—the metaphorical young monsters of the counterculture.

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My Little Monster

Based on the novel by Ira Levin, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) opened this cycle. Among the twenty top-grossing films of the 1960s, it won an Academy Award (Ruth Gordon as Best Supporting Actress), was nominated for its screenplay, and walked off with two Golden Globes. Ostensibly a film about satanism, Rosemary’s Baby is principally a critique of the 1960s youth rebellion. The children of the counterculture are literally the devil’s spawn. The film’s protagonist, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow), initially symbolizes the archetypal white American wife— conventionally the bedrock of, and instrument to reproduce, civilization and social order. However, estranged from her Catholic family (America’s roots), Rosemary has polluted herself through her marriage to the half-Jewish actor, Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes). The film shows the American family doubly betrayed: first by the cultural hybridism and multiculturalism embodied in Rosemary and Guy’s marriage and Guy’s own culturally mixed identity, and then by the least reliable and least dependably masculine strata of the community—its effeminate cultural elite, again in the person of Guy. Playing on the oldest paranoid Christian stereotype, the film has Guy symbolically sacrificing Rosemary’s child (the American future) in a Faustian deal with devil worshippers led by his and Rosemary’s meddlesome elderly neighbors, Minnie and Roman Castevet (Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer). Ultimately realizing that her husband has drawn her into a satanic cult, Rosemary attempts to flee. However, Guy enlists the Jewish Dr. Sapirstein to subdue her. Reinforcing the point that evil stems from those who are not genuinely American, the creepy satanists all have foreign names (Gionnoffrio, Castevet, Marcato, Sapirstein) while those who help Rosemary are reliably AngloAmerican (Dunstan, Hill, Hutchins, Cardiff). When Rosemary finally sees the Antichrist she has spawned, her female nature undoes her. As she ultimately embraces her satanic baby, the American mother symbolically goes over to the enemy. Here, the film evokes the standard Cold War trope of “momism”—the idea that overprotective mothers had raised a generation of feminized men incapable of defending America.14 Marrying the Faustian archetype (Guy sells his soul and his wife’s womb for worldly success) with a perversion of Christianity’s founding myth (Rosemary and Guy as an inverted Mary and Joseph; Rosemary as the woman “chosen” to beget “His only living child”; conception through satanic rape rather than virgin birth), Rosemary’s Baby lays out a hierarchy of corruption of the American ideal. Ultimately, a woman is to blame for all that follows. Innate female nature and unreliability render Rosemary vul-

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nerable to infection from her culturally hybrid husband who spreads the rot through his association with demonic foreigners. The advanced age of the latter renders them incapable of reproducing their outdated ideas (communism?), or of taking care of Satan’s baby. To do so, they need to feed off America: first by corrupting the half-breed Guy, and then through America’s acceptance of this corruption in the indulgent maternal embrace of its devilish youth. Real satanic children of the counter-culture soon breathed horrific life into the repulsion and menace that Rosemary’s Baby portrayed. The studio had overruled Roman Polanski’s wish that his wife—Sharon Tate—play the role of Rosemary. Nine months after the film’s release, Hollywood was traumatized and America morbidly transfixed when the pregnant Sharon Tate was murdered in hideous ritual slayings carried out by the Charles Manson family of hippy psychopaths. Girls Are Even Worse

Four years following the Manson murders, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) reprised most of Polanski’s themes. Friedkin had previously shot a mildly risqué musical spoof (The Night They Raided Minsky’s), followed by one of the first Hollywood movies featuring gay characters (The Boys in The Band), and won the 1971 Best Director Oscar for The French Connection. Though critical reaction was mixed, The Exorcist was the third highest grossing movie of the 1970s and, when adjusted for ticket price inflation, is said to be Hollywood’s ninth all-time domestic top-grossing film.15 It received ten Oscar nominations, winning in two lesser categories, and was accorded the accolade of sequels in 1977 and 1990. Here, the adult whose lifestyle breeds a devil child is the successful unmarried actress Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn). Her twelve-year-old daughter Regan (Linda Blair) exhibits increasingly bizarre, sexualized, and paranormal symptoms, which lead to the death of a male friend of her mother. Since science and psychiatry can neither explain nor cure Regan, her distraught atheist mother turns to the church to exorcise her child. Stripped of its special effects and the metaphysical psychobabble they sustain, The Exorcist melds a misogynist reactionary Catholic moral tale with a right-wing Cold War narrative. At the root of devilish evil lies that dependable scapegoat—Eve, her body, and her sexuality. The film is “filled with disgust towards female bodily functions . . . drenched in a kind of menstrual panic.”16 As her androgynous first name signals, Chris MacNeil is a prototypical defeminized product of feminism—the antithesis of the archetypal chaste and god-fearing housewife. Overly independent, too successful, and too political, Chris lives a life too free of men and religion. Ergo, she fails to control her daughter at the moment when Regan’s adoles-

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cent hormones and confused sexuality require discipline and sober maternal guidance. Chris and her daughter are punished for abandoning the ‘natural’ role of their sex. Their corrupted status contrasts with that of the sainted dying mother of one of the film’s exorcists, Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller). As the film stresses the inability of modernity and science to grapple with the problem caused by Chris’s transgressions and Regan’s emerging sexuality, the cavalry arrives in the form of the church and its ancient rites and rituals. The Exorcist’s three priests allude to the doctrine of the threeperson God, and two are sacrificed so that Regan might live. At this level, The Exorcist expresses a “kind of born-again medievalism,”17 an overt statement of the obscurantist Catholic reaction to the Sixties. The counterculture, the sexual revolution, and particularly feminism and liberated politically active women are domestic enemies against whom the righteous must struggle, even at the cost of their own lives. In the light of seemingly unending revelations of the church’s systematic collusion in the sexual abuse of children, this portrait of priests collaborating to constrain and abuse a young woman so as to exorcize her sexuality today takes on an entirely more insidious meaning. Yet in 1973, The Exorcist echoed a groundswell demanding a reassertion of patriarchal social order and traditional authority, a crackdown on the excesses of the 1960s, and a return of liberated women to subservient roles. Just as Regan is saved from her sexuality, America needs somehow to be restored to its mythical pre-1960s innocence.18 He’s the Devil, Stupid!

Released barely a week before America’s bicentennial, Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976) married The Exorcist’s Catholicism to Rosemary’s Baby’s obsession with the Antichrist (the plot of The Omen begins in Rome on 6 June 1966—or 666, the “Mark of the Beast”—the day that Rosemary Woodhouse’s baby was born). The fourth-grossing film of 1976, The Omen won several minor awards and also garnered the Hollywood accolade of sequels. This time, the adult whose violation of traditional norms unleashes Satan’s power is a liberal US diplomat, Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck). Led astray by his human feelings, Thorn agrees to a proposal by Father Spilleto (Martin Benson) that he adopt a parentless boy born at the same time as Thorn’s own stillborn baby. The boy, Damien (Harvey Stephens), turns out to be the son of Satan. Equally undone by his humanity in wanting the orphan boy adopted, Father Spilleto brings evil into the world by ignoring church dogma that mankind is born in sin. His humanist Catholicism stands for the reformist papacy of John XXIII (1958–1963) and Vatican II, and The Omen articulates the reactionary Catholic backlash against such views.

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Spilleto’s indulgence is contrasted with the conservative Catholic realism of Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton) who insists that Damien should be ritually slain before evil can triumph. Despite his own growing disquiet over Damien’s behavior, Thorn dismisses Brennan’s warnings and those of journalist Keith Jennings (David Warner). His refusal to trust those who know evil (Satan) leads to the death of Damien’s nanny, Father Brennan, Father Spilleto, the Thorns’ unborn child, Thorn’s wife, Jennings, and, ultimately, Thorn himself. Too late, the diplomat finally realizes he must slay the evil he has adopted—but a policeman shoots him dead just as Thorn is about to kill the Antichrist before a church altar. The film ends at Arlington National Cemetery. Damien has now been adopted by Thorn’s brother, the US president. The last shot has Damien the Antichrist smiling diabolically into the camera. The Omen propagates the message that liberal lack of faith (Thorn) and humanist indulgence (Father Spilleto) allow evil to flourish. Damien’s triumph is further blamed on conservatism’s pet whipping boy, a bleeding heart liberal who, to boot, works for the weak State Department. Moved by humanism rather than cold reason, Thorn brings evil into his family, enables it to grow and then to infect America (his brother, the president). Like all bleeding hearts and professional diplomats, Thorn remains blind to the danger until it is too late. The Antichrist triumphs because the secularist Thorn failed to give credence to those who truly know and understand the deeply irrational and mysterious—that is, the church. The Omen’s road to hell is paved by Father Spilleto’s and Thorn’s good intentions and the journey is fast-tracked by the latter’s lack of resolve to deal with evil in the way John Wayne, or the Inquisition, would have. But Thorn is more than a typical liberal mugged by horrific reality. A US ambassador and the president’s brother, he symbolizes Washington’s power elite. In the bicentennial year, The Omen suggests that America is mortally threatened by weak-kneed liberals allegedly running the federal government, who refuse to stop the corruption engendered by the demonic children of the counterculture, and by the godless evil empire that it represents. A right-wing metaphor for the US defeat in Vietnam, the movie implies that the liberal establishment’s connivance with the resistance to the war by the children of counterculture allowed communism to triumph. Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen share a triple message. Firstly, out-of-control children (the New Left and the counterculture), independent women, and sexuality mortally threaten America. They do so, secondly, because corrupted by foreign ideas or weak-kneed liberalism, Americans have abandoned the traditional family and religion. Thirdly, only strong patriarchal and religious authority can repulse the assault of the evil empire and punish those responsible. These movies promote a vision of American identity that locates the frontier between civilization and bar-

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barism within America itself—between god-fearing traditionalists and the liberals (the godless) whose weakness (sins) facilitate the spread of the evil empire. These demonic children as threat movies perfectly captured the conservative critique of the child-rearing practices promoted through multiple editions of Benjamin Spock’s immensely popular 1946 book, Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. Dr. Spock was vilified by conservatives for allegedly fostering a culture of instant gratification that his critics claimed had generated the counterculture and permissive society. Spock’s left-wing activism and opposition to the Vietnam War simply added fuel to the fire. In 1970, an evangelical Christian psychologist James Dobson published a rejoinder, Dare to Discipline, advocating corporal punishment for children. Going on to found and lead the Focus on the Family Foundation, Dobson soon became “the country’s most powerful Christian activist,” one of “the quintet that launched the religious right” and its growing hold over the Republican party.19 Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen were key vehicles transporting this paleoconservative ideology out of an evangelical ghetto and into the broader cultural zeitgeist. They clearly implied that strong medicine delivered by strong men was needed to cure the United States and fight back against the evil empire. Hollywood had already begun to serve up the archetypes.

Shooting the Right People The success of these A-list horror movies demonstrated the extent to which a culture of paranoia and loathing resonated with many Americans in the 1970s. This was confirmed by a slew of vigilante movies, of which Dirty Harry starring Clint Eastwood and Death Wish featuring Charles Bronson were the most successful.20 Better written, directed, and acted than the Death Wish cycle, the Dirty Harry series enjoyed much greater commercial and cultural resonance.21 The term “a Dirty Harry” became a synonym for an overzealous cop, and various Harry Callahan lines entered the idiom.22 President Reagan used Callahan’s most celebrated quip—“Go ahead, make my Day!” (Sudden Impact) when he dared the Democratic party–controlled Congress to raise taxes. Several states enacted a Make My Day Law extending legal protection to homeowners using lethal force against intruders. Dirty Harry was director Don Siegel’s third collaboration with Clint Eastwood.23 A proudly old school filmmaker, Siegel had shot a key 1950s Cold War movie (The Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and would later direct John Wayne’s last film, The Shootist. Forging one of Eastwood’s signature roles, San Francisco police inspector, Harry Callahan, Dirty Harry

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consolidated his status as Wayne’s successor as the archetypal American hero taming an anarchic frontier through the gun. Yet Eastwood discarded the folksy charm of many of Wayne’s characters for an ostensibly emotionless cynicism barely masking white male rage. Each Harry Callahan movie is essentially a Hollywood western transposed to contemporary San Francisco. The modern-day sheriff, Callahan, is an equal opportunity misanthrope who “hates everybody: Limeys, Micks, Hebes, Fat Dagos, Niggers, Honkies, Chinks, you name it . . . [and e]specially Spics.” Yet he never blinks before putting himself in harm’s way to protect the weak or avenge victims of crime. Taking satisfaction from blowing away bad guys (sometimes while munching on a hot dog or hamburger), Callahan is the San Francisco Police Department’s top marksman and a gun buff to warm the collective heart of the National Rifle Association (NRA). No postfeminist namby-pamby he, women throw themselves at Callahan (“What does a girl have to do to go to bed with you?” asks a complete stranger in Magnum Force). He carries “the most powerful handgun in the world” and the phallic meaning of his weapon’s long barrel and explosive charge is repeatedly evoked (“My, that’s a big one” winks the Dirty Harry bad guy). Callahan projects the conservative image of the ideal man for the troubled 1970s as “a violent one. To be sexual he has to be not only tall and strong but frequently brutal.”24 A right-wing manifesto listing all ills that the Sixties had induced in America, Dirty Harry is equally a prescription for how to put things right. The film highlights the pet conservative peeve of out of control crime, taking aim at the supposed liberal mollycoddling of criminals. Its archetypal villain, Charles “Scorpio Killer” Davis (Andrew Robinson) sports the peace symbol on his belt and clearly embodies the conservative view of the threat posed by those who are labeled the “freaks” of the counterculture. A Manson-like long-haired and vaguely camp hippy, Scorpio gleefully shoots, kidnaps, rapes, tortures, buries women alive, and hijacks a school bus filled with children (America’s future). This enables the film to denounce the Supreme Court’s controversial Escobedo and Miranda decisions extending constitutional protection to criminal suspects. As Callahan tortures Scorpio to discover where the man has buried a kidnapped girl, the foul creature indignantly screams: “I have rights!” This leads to the following exchange between District Attorney Rothko (Joseph Sommer) and Callahan: Rothko: Where in the hell does it say that you’ve got a right to kick down doors, torture suspects, deny medical attention, and legal counsel? Where have you been? Does Escobedo ring a bell? Miranda? I mean, you must have heard of the Fourth Amendment? What I’m saying is that man had rights! Callahan: Well, I’m all broken up over that man’s rights.

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This scene echoes Callahan’s earlier riposte to instructions from San Francisco’s mayor that “I don’t want any more trouble like you had last year in the Fillmore District. Understand? That’s my policy.” Callahan: Yeah, well, when an adult male is chasing a female with intent to commit rape, I shoot the bastard. That’s my policy. Mayor: Intent? How did you establish that? Callahan: Well, when a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher knife and a hard on, I figure he isn’t out collecting for the Red Cross. Filmmaker, longtime NRA executive member, and self-described “zen fascist,” John Milius cowrote the screenplay for Dirty Harry and Magnum Force. He claimed that “Dirty Harry is saying we know what’s right and wrong, we don’t care what the law says. . . . Human beings know evil when they see it.”25 It is unclear whether Callahan most despises punks and criminals, or the Constitution and constitutional rights, or his superiors who claim to act within the law. He never hesitates to kill the first (even when they are disarmed) and ignore the latter two. The movie endorses flouting constitutional constraints and urges Americans to trust the security professionals who know who the bad guys are and how to deal with them. Dirty Harry’s commercial success and entry into the popular lexicon made it the ideological template for the cop action movie as a working-class morality play grappling with the frequency of divorce, delinquency among children, sexual deviance among men, sale of drugs to children and the poor, violent crime in general, control of that crime by police, preferential treatment of subjects by race, affirmative action in a meritocracy, segregation and harassment on the job site, deskilling of professional labor, devaluation of blue-collar work, corruption among ruling-class men, and conspiracy theories of economic crisis.26

The ideological power and mythical resonance that Dirty Harry brought to this cop action genre stems from its appropriation of conventions of the western and all six tropes of the American war story (see pp. 30–32). The birthplace of the counterculture, San Francisco becomes the mythical frontier, the zone of confrontation between civilization and barbarism, one where Callahan resorts to violence only to liberate kidnapped women and children and to prevent violent crime. The movie opens with an ambush— Scorpio’s sniper killings of Americans going about their business. Invading and threatening American space, Scorpio acts out the captivity narrative by kidnapping and confining women and children. This authorizes Callahan to carry out a spectacle of legitimized slaughter (he wipes out some forty-five evildoers in the series), relying on the fetishism of weapons technology (the

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films pay loving attention to Callahan’s eroticized weapons). Finally, Callahan’s victory over the bad guys vindicates his defiance of the system. Harry Callahan personifies the claim by 1964 Republican presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice . . . moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Presenting Callahan as a principled rebel always ready with a quip, the movie dulls the edge of his out-of-control persona and earns audience approval for his excesses. He is called “Dirty Harry” because he is given “every dirty job that comes along” and he always “gets the shit end of the stick.” The series is riddled with allusions to excrement. In Sudden Impact, Callahan says, “Listen, punk . . . to me you’re nothing but dog shit, you understand. And a lot of things can happen to dog shit. It can be scraped up with a shovel off the ground, it can dry up and blow away in the wind, or it can be stepped on and squashed. So take my advice and be careful where the dog shits ya!” This recurring scatological imagery underscores Callahan’s role as the man designated to clean out the Augean stables of America’s most permissive city—hence, the conservative fantasy embodiment of what is needed to purify the country (and, by extension, the world). His behavior and affect equally correspond to the right’s idealized view of American identity, of the national security state, and of the US global role. These include Callahan’s instinctive courage; his willingness to do whatever he knows to be right and good; his drive to protect the weak and avenge the wronged, regardless of cost to himself or his career; and the way he is despised by lesser men who seek to restrain him. An explicit disquisition on the interplay between rights and legitimate violence, Dirty Harry implies that, since Callahan is always right, anything done by the forces of law and order to ensure public security is by definition legitimate. Many agreed with New Yorker film critic Kael that the film projected a “fascist medievalism.”27 The accusation clearly rankled. Callahan would have Kael symbolically dealt with in The Dead Pool, when the bad guy murders a Kael-like elitist film critic for her dismissal of a horror movie. Kael’s accusation and the issue of the limits to legitimize violence are tackled head-on in Magnum Force, which coscreenwriter Milius termed “a deliberate answer” to the charge that Dirty Harry was fascist.28 Here, Callahan takes on a squad of neofascist cops who have constituted themselves into a death squad to eliminate the city’s scum. The vigilante chief, Briggs (Hal Holbrook) announces that “anyone threatening the security of the people will be executed. Evil for Evil, Harry. Retribution.” Affirming conservatism’s democratic and law abiding credentials, Callahan entirely unselfconsciously replies: “I’d have upheld the law! . . . I hate the goddam system, but until someone comes along with changes that make sense, I’ll stick with it.” He then wipes out these rogue cops with as little emotion as he blows away serial killers.

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Yet Kael was wrong. Dirty Harry is certainly a reactionary and misanthropic film, a statement of the Hobbesian view that a strong enforcer is needed to control man’s evil nature and maintain social (and global) order. But it is hardly a fascist or medieval one. Callahan remains the archetypical American individualist, the lone warrior who follows no star but his own. He will never goose-step, join a political party, raise an arm to Sieg Heil; he will follow no führer, bow to no medieval lord, respect no class privilege. In contrast to later overly earnest cinematic incarnations of the American vigilante or avenging warrior (Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey, Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo, and Chuck Norris’s Colonel James Braddock), Callahan displays affecting wit and self-deprecation. And unlike Bronson, Stallone, and Norris, Clint Eastwood can act—and act against his stereotype. He plays Harry Callahan as someone who takes his mission and his values deadly seriously, but seldom himself.

Dreaming America Dirty Harry offered a partial prescription for the conservative diagnosis of the source of America’s ailments. Yet it remained trapped in the politics of angry reaction rather than a proactive recasting of common sense. For conservatives to turn their ideological agenda into a viable hegemonic social project capable of capturing the middle ground, they would have to find ways to make most Americans (conservative and liberal) feel good about themselves and their country again, bringing them back to a belief in the promise of the American Dream and Americanist mythology. In a word, conservatives would have to make Americans recover faith in their own and their country’s agency—all of which the 1960s and 1970s (and the films of the Hollywood revolution) had left in tatters. Enter Sylvester Stallone. In 1976, Stallone conceived, wrote, and starred in the year’s runaway top-grossing movie, Rocky. Directed by John Avildsen, the film received ten Oscar nominations, winning for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Editing. Together with its equally successful sequels, Rocky significantly advanced the ideological impact of the Hollywood counterrevolution. Even more so than Harry Callahan, Stallone’s Rocky Balboa character was rooted in the right-wing version of Americanist mythology. Yet Rocky achieved what Dirty Harry’s misanthropy could not—the movie reinvested the conservative narrative of the idea of America and American identity with a renewed and engaging innocence whose appeal reached Americans of all ideological stripes. Rocky is an archetypal feel-good movie, a rags-to-riches fable of the triumph against overwhelming odds of a down-and-out little guy with a

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heart of gold. Explicitly set in the 1976 bicentennial celebrations, its theme is the struggle over American identity. Wearing its ultrapatriotic heart, Horatio Alger myth, and the American Dream on its sleeve, Rocky trumpets the message that in America—only in America—anything is possible, anyone can make it: all one needs is belief in oneself and America, some luck, and hard, hard work. The plot centers on an offer by the black World Heavyweight Champion, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), to give a title shot to a white no-hoper, Rocky Balboa. Laying aside all setbacks and self-doubt, Rocky turns himself into a genuine contender who fights the champ to a split decision. He brings hope and pride to his community, transforms the broken-down, seenit-all trainer Mickey Goldmill (Burgess Meredith) into a tower of boxing wisdom, and finds true love. In a key scene symbolizing American decline, Mickey visits Rocky’s dismal apartment to ask the boxer to take him on as manager and trainer. Ranting on about his own glory years and suffering, the trainer tells Rocky that he wants to “make sure that all the shit that happened to me doesn’t happen to you.” In the movie’s only concession to the generation gap, Rocky turns his back on the old man. Defeated, Mickey turns to go, muttering a hopeless and exhausted “I’m 76 years old,” exactly the age of the supposed American Century in 1976. As Mickey leaves, Rocky screams his anguish over his own wasted life—“my house stinks, that’s right, it stinks”—and vents his anger at Mickey’s generation, at America’s decline, and at the way the system is about to screw him again, his recognition that life is rigged against him. The old man wanders off, broken and lost into the dark rain-drenched street. But Rocky runs after him, puts an arm around him, and shakes his hand. America’s generations are symbolically reconciled; these men, who have been beaten down by life, will work their guts out to take their shot at the big time and recover their pride and self-belief. A paean to the American Dream and rallying call to America to believe in itself again, Rocky is also a barely disguised broadside against uppity, politicized, overly powerful black men. As was universally understood on its release, the Apollo Creed character stands for Muhammed Ali. Stallone was inspired to write the script after watching white no-hoper Chuck Wepner knock Ali down and almost go the distance with him. To belabor the point, before the fight at the movie’s climax, the white emcee introduces the first man to beat Ali in the ring, former Heavyweight Champion, “the beloved Mr. Joe Frazier.” Like Ali, Creed is a consummate showman and loudmouth. Naming this character for a pagan god is both an allusion to Ali’s classical birth name (Cassius Clay) and a put-down allusion to Ali’s idolization by blacks and the left for refusing induction into the US Army during the Vietnam War. Creed’s family name evokes Ali’s promotion of the religious and political creed of the Nation of Islam. Perverting Ameri-

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can mythology, Creed tries to seize the bicentennial for himself. He arrives in the ring dressed as George Washington, throwing money to the crowd, wearing an outfit adorned with the Stars and Stripes. “He looks like a big flag,” observes Rocky—some might hear this as “a big fag.” The title bout is a symbolic battle over who best represents America. Rocky’s attack on smart confident black men and women (the TV reporter who interviews Rocky in the cold storage meat plant) is echoed by its implicit denunciation of the effete intellectuals who Stallone (and conservatives) claimed were running and ruining America. No rocket scientist, but always quick with a joke, Rocky readily acknowledges that he is “half a bum.” He tells his love interest, Adrian Pennino (Talia Shire), of his father’s advice that since he had no brains, he had better concentrate on his body. He later confesses to her that he resented the way he was patronized and mocked by reporters and Apollo Creed’s promoters, and is wary of all who take “cheap shots” at himself and his community. Yet he easily distinguishes between freeloaders like his friend Paulie Pennino (Burt Young) and those who genuinely want to help him. As Rocky kneels and crosses himself before the fight, the movie broadcasts the message that God-fearing white ethnic ‘real’ Americans, who work with the muscles and sweat of their bodies, need to take back their country from smart-ass blacks and liberal intellectuals. In this, Rocky expresses white working-class anger over all the changes that Creed symbolizes. Rocky, Adrian, and Paulie are trapped in lives of quiet desperation in a desolate Italian American Philadelphia neighborhood. Billed as “the Italian Stallion,” Rocky’s hero and namesake is Rocky Marciano, the last white American World Heavyweight Champion. Even Rocky’s pets stand for his place in the class system and what he must do to free himself. His miniature turtles, Cuff and Link, allude to the “suits” running the system; his goldfish, Moby Dick, represents the fears that the movie suggests keep Rocky and his ilk downtrodden. Yet all three diminutive creatures are imprisoned in fishbowls; it is Rocky who has power over them. Moreover, Stallone’s real life bull mastiff, Butkus, begins the film in a cage in the pet shop where Rocky goes to buy fish food and woo Adrian. In the first scene in which Adrian appears looking chic rather than frumpy, Rocky is overjoyed when she makes him a gift of the dog. The freeing of Butkus symbolizes the unleashing of male power, the empowering of Rocky’s class. When Rocky asks what Butkus eats, Adrian replies, “He eats little turtles.” Rocky’s raw masculinity can conquer the suits of Cuff and Link because he is a better and stronger man. Rocky launched Stallone’s career and made him a fortune through the politics of the idealized male body dedicated to violence. The film’s most striking ideological trope is its insistence on American innocence. Rocky Balboa’s life is given over to violence. A bruiser in the ring, he earns his

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living as an enforcer—a self-proclaimed leg breaker—for a loan shark. Yet he remains the quintessential nice guy who gently pursues and protects the woman he wants, and loves his pets. Polite and friendly to all in his neighborhood, Rocky is always ready with a smile or encouraging word. He carries a drunk out of the cold and tries to save a twelve-year-old girl from a bad crowd—delivering her a sexist sermon about not being seen to be a whore. Even as a Mafia debt collector, Rocky goes out of his way not to hurt those behind on their payments. This studied and artificial innocence symbolizes a United States free of all sin. The movie is a clarion call for a return to an idealized past. Despite the poverty and hopelessness that it depicts, Rocky’s real message is that nothing is really wrong with America. The United States is the world’s caring neighborhood cop, not the global “leg breaker” that invades other peoples’ countries, carpet bombs and napalms their populations, destabilizes or overthrows their governments, and sets up death squads to hunt down their leftists. The movie shows no collapse of the American Dream, no racism, no riots in the streets, no shooting down of students, no My Lai, and no defeat in Vietnam. Stallone wrote and starred in a cinematic sermon straight out of Norman Vincent Peale’s power of positive thinking. A moving and talking Norman Rockwell vision of idealized America, Rocky distilled Reagan’s core political message—the United States is still the city on the hill: if Americans again believe in their country’s mythology, the fantasy will come true. But Stallone’s immense ideological achievement went even further. The Hollywood revolution had projected a sense of deep crisis in American masculinity. One of the films that Rocky beat out for the 1976 Best Picture Oscar, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, suggested that the Vietnam War and cult of the hero had turned the American male into a psychopath. Two years later, Coming Home would win multiple Oscars with its message that the Vietnam War, the national security state, and the urge to heroism had physically and emotionally crippled American men. Having no truck with such liberal mush, Rocky passionately asserts a traditional line of “men must be men and do whadda man’s godda do” while poking sly digs at the alternative viewpoint. Thus, before the title fight, Creed taunts Rocky with a parody of the celebrated Uncle Sam recruiting poster, pointing and shouting, “I want you.” Rocky’s reply—“Is he talking to me? Is he talking to me?”— mockingly echoes Travis Bickle’s (Robert De Niro) most well-known line in Taxi Driver, which had been released ten months earlier. Rocky is about what Stallone takes to be the true nature of masculinity. As he later told a conservative talk show host, “Men need that rite of passage, that is a moment in time when I say, ‘How do I prove that I am a man?’ And it’s not an intellectual endeavor, it’s a physical encounter with fear, and the more that’s being removed from society [sic], I think men always wondered, ‘What am I made of? Do I really have it?’”29

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Long before Reagan, Rocky insists that it could be morning in America again. However, before the sun could rise, the nightmare of Vietnam would have to be laid to rest (see Chapter 7).

The Politics of Popcorn Beginning with the Magnum Force sequel to Dirty Harry, the Hollywood counterrevolution started a trend of sequel after sequel. Each successive film in the series further reassured its returning audience and consolidated the conservative mythology by essentially repeating the same story and similar effects. Hollywood had finally found one element of a profitable business model—action and horror movies made on the principle that if you get ’em once, you could get ’em twice, three, four times. The strong commercial success of so many of these series reflected their ability to channel burgeoning white male blue-collar rage, and so tap into a mass audience that loathed many of the movies of the Hollywood revolution.30 Yet the class appeal and conservative ideology of most such films did not in and of themselves kill off the critical cinema of the Hollywood revolution. That task was accomplished by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, who stirred in the anodyne and ostensibly apolitical ingredients that brought ultimate decisive victory to the cinematic counterrevolution. Though originally charter members of the Hollywood revolution, Lucas and Spielberg soon realized that Americans were growing tired of having their country’s failings shoved in their face. As the 1970s produced one crisis after another, a hunger for distraction and assurance began to take hold. As Arnold Schwarzenegger put it, “Fantasy-adventure is what people want to see in these difficult times, people are starved of heroes.”31 Abandoning the art house pretention of his first film, THX 1138, Lucas had a smash hit with American Graffiti in 1973. Evoking the car culture, music, and promise of the summer of 1962—the last gasp of American innocence before the Cuban missile crisis, the March on Washington, the Kennedy assassination, and Vietnam—American Graffiti led to a wave of nostalgia movies (Paper Moon, The Great Gatsby, The Sting, Grease). Spielberg also took the premise of his spare 1971 debut movie (Duel), transposing its theme of looming threat on the open road to terrifying menace in the ocean and, with Jaws, produced one of the most successful entertainments of all time. Through aggressive TV marketing and a blend of special effects, heart-stopping suspense, terror, action, and bleak humor, Jaws cast the mold for the summer blockbuster that soon became standard Hollywood fare. Two years later, Lucas riffed on the nostalgia tide that he had unleashed with the inspired conceit of nostalgia transposed to the future— evoking a mythical American golden age through an equally mythical one

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in a galaxy far, far away. Deliberately setting out to make a Disneyesque heroic fantasy for preadolescent boys,32 in his confusingly titled Star Wars: Episode IV Lucas used hi-tech effects to fashion “subliminal history of movies,”33 one propagating all the myths of Americanism. This first film in the Star Wars cycle is a seamless blend of almost every Hollywood genre— an action flick and war movie, a morally black-and-white science fiction western, a teen comedy and buddy film, a kids’ movie replete with cuddly anthropomorphized animals and robots, a medieval moral fable of chivalrous knights resisting an evil emperor and his storm troopers, a coming of age movie, and a children’s crusade. A perfect template of Reaganite ideology, Star Wars: Episode IV brilliantly reinserts the US security imaginary into the popular culture. It depicts all of the galaxy’s outgunned and outnumbered free species as mortally threatened by the overwhelming technology of a grotesquely totalitarian evil empire. All that prevents universal enslavement or annihilation is the heroic determination and innate technical know-how of a bunch of cando teenagers who command the innate loyalty of voiceless other species (Chewbacca) and robots. But before these wisecracking adolescent individualists can save the universe, they are taught by sage adults to grow up and to respect their elders, traditional religion (“May the Force be with you!”), and patriarchal authority. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda symbolically undo the counterculture. Having made the then most profitable movie ever, as an encore Lucas turned Star Wars into the most successful series of all time—the Hollywood gift that still keeps on giving. He also understood from the outset that the sale of Star Wars toys would generate even more money than takings at the box office. By the early 1980s, “world-wide sales of Star Wars goods were estimated to be worth $1.5 billion a year.”34 Star Wars: Episode IV delivered the coup de grâce to the Hollywood revolution. With Lucas showing how to make immense profits through genre films that used prepubescent fantasy to relegitimize Americanist mythology and the security imaginary, teenagers and older children became Hollywood’s new “sacred demographic.”35 Henceforth, no studio would finance the risky, unsettling, ambiguous in-your-face movies of the Hollywood revolution. Now blandly reassuring entertainments and predictable special effects action movies “top-heavy with climax after climax” were in.36 Art, criticism, and reflective cinema were definitively out. Lucas spent years defending his film: “Star Wars didn’t kill the film industry or infantilize it. Popcorn pictures have always ruled. Why do people go see these popcorn pictures when they’re not good? Why is the public so stupid? That’s not my fault. I just understood what people liked to go and see, and Steven [Spielberg] has too, and we go for that.”37 In going for catering to this “stupid” public, by going for “what people

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liked to go and see,” Lucas and Spielberg became the most successful commercial filmmakers ever. Eight of the films they made separately and together are among the twenty top-grossing films of all time.38 All but one of these, Jurassic Park, were made during the 1970s and the 1980s. Lucas and Spielberg productions accounted for three of the ten top-grossing films of the 1970s, and the top three—and seven of the top ten—films of the 1980s.39 Their hugely successful popcorn pictures further addicted the public to movies geared to the lowest common denominator, an addiction reinforced by the advent of the video aftermarket that took off in the 1980s (see Chapter 7). Lucas and Spielberg movies also accounted for eight of the ten top 1980s video rental titles.40 The “brutal commercialism” and politics of distraction and reassurance promoted by popcorn cinema provided the business model for which Hollywood had been searching since the early 1960s.41 The four top-grossing films of the 1970s—and six of the top ten—were solidly conservative fantasies (Star Wars, Jaws, The Exorcist, Grease, Superman, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind). A seventh (The Godfather)—the only serious movie in the top ten—gave more comfort to conservatives than to liberals while the only liberal films among the top ten money-earners were a feel-good caper movie (The Sting) and a spoof western (Blazing Saddles).42 The Hollywood counterrevolution had thoroughly prepared the ground for the reinvigorated militarism and expanded and aggressive national security state that former B-movie actor Ronald Reagan would foster once installed in the presidency.

Notes 1. Sylvester Stallone, quoted in Knobler, “A One-Way Ticket from Palookaville (1977),” p. 352. 2. See Ross, Hollywood Left and Right, pp. 405, 131–183, 271–313, and 364–407. 3. Sandbrook, Mad as Hell, p. xii–xiii. 4. Melley, Empire of Conspiracy, p. 12. 5. For example, Riesman, Glazer, and Denney, The Lonely Crowd; Sloan, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. 6. Dwight D. Murphey, “Kent State, May 1–5, 1970,” 1995, reproduced at http://dwightmurphey-collectedwritings.info/B7-Ch3-Web.htm (accessed 25 April 2011). 7. See, for example, Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. 8. White, The Making of the President, 1960, pp. 180–209 and 279–295. 9. These included libertarians, Republican party auxiliary groups, the John Birch Society and Ku Klux Klan, Christian fundamentalists, and powerful lobbies such as the American Legion and National Association of Manufacturers. See, inter alia, Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties; Perlstein, Before the Storm; McGirr, Suburban Warriors. 10. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right, pp. 131–183.

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11. Brantley, Conversations with Pauline Kael, p. 45. 12. Casper, Hollywood Film 1963–1976, p. 48. 13. R. Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, p. 70. 14. See Plant, “The Veteran, His Wife, and Their Mothers,” p. 97. 15. Most highbrow critics were contemptuous—“Shallowness that asks to be taken seriously. . . an embarrassment,” Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema: Back to the Ouija Board,” The New Yorker, January 7, 1974, p. 59; “A chunk of elegant occultist claptrap,” Vincent Canby, New York Times; “a thoroughly evil film,” Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice; “Nothing more than a religious porn film,” John Landau, Rolling Stone. The latter three quotes are from Travers and Reiff, The Story Behind The Exorcist, respectively, pp. 150–152, 154–158, and 158–162. Yet others raved. Martin Scorsese labeled The Exorcist “a classic,” placing it eighth on his list of the “11 Scariest Horror Movies of All Time,” The Daily Beast, 28 October 2009, www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2009/10/28/martin-scorseses-top-11-horror-films -of-all-time.html (accessed 24 October 2011). On The Exorcist’s earnings, see “All Time Box Office: Domestic Grosses. Adjusted for Ticket Price Inflation,” Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm (accessed 21 October 2011). 16. Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, p. 223. 17. Ibid. 18. Many of these themes were reprised in Brian De Palma’s Carrie, whose conservatism lies in its Hobbesian pessimism about human nature, and especially that of teenage girls. With menstrual blood as its central motif, Carrie is a direct reaction to the era’s feminism, a warning against the power of female nature, sexuality, and jealousy. 19. Margaret Carlson, “Facing a Dobson’s Choice,” Time magazine, 25 May 1998, www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/05/18/time/carlson.html (accessed 11 October 2012); Amy Sullivan, “And Then There Was One,” Time magazine, 27 February 2009, http://swampland.time.com/2009/02/27/and-then-there-was-one/ (accessed 11 October 2012). On James Dobson’s role in the emerging evangelical movement, see Blumenthal, Republican Gomorrah. 20. Many others were B-movies featuring a returning Vietnam veteran (Slaughter, Vigilante Force) or a raped or otherwise victimized woman (Coffy, Lipstick). 21. The Dirty Harry sequels were Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), and The Dead Pool (1988). 22. “Nothing wrong with shooting as long as the right people get shot”; “The law is crazy”; “I know what you’re thinking punk. You’re thinking ‘Did he fire six shots or five’. Now to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all the excitement. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and will blow your head clean off, you’ve gotta ask yourself a question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya [feel lucky] punk?” 23. The others were Coogan’s Bluff (1968) and Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970). 24. Mellen, Big Bad Wolves, p. 2. 25. Interview in the documentary A Moral Right: The Politics of Dirty Harry. On John Milius’s labeling of himself as a “zen fascist,” see the autobiography of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Total Recall, pp. 232 and 231. 26. King, Heroes in Hard Times, pp. 2 and 3–4. 27. Kael, “The Current Cinema: Killing Time.” 28. See the Milius interview in the documentary, A Moral Right: The Politics of Dirty Harry.

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29. “Sean Hannity Interviews Sylvester Stallone,” Hannity’s America, Fox News, 27 January 2008, www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpoSL95qqsI (accessed 3 April 2011), emphasis in original. 30. Hall and Neale, Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters, p. 214. 31. Arnold Schwarzenegger, quoted in Ross, Hollywood Left and Right, p. 373. 32. Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, p. 312. 33. Time magazine review, quoted in Base and Haslam, The Movies of the Eighties, p. 55. 34. Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, p. 190. 35. Prince, American Cinema of the 1980s, p. 8. 36. Ibid. 37. George Lucas, quoted in Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, p. 344. 38. Star Wars, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Jaws, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park. See “All Time Box Office: Domestic Grosses. Adjusted for Ticket Price Inflation.” 39. Their 1970s top-ten hits were: Star Wars, Jaws, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And their 1980s top-ten hits were: E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Return of the Jedi, The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. See Tim Dirks, “All Time Box Office Hits (Domestic Gross) by Decade and Year,” AMC website, www.filmsite.org/boxoffice2.html (accessed 21 October 2011). 40. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Star Wars, Return of the Jedi, The Empire Strikes Back, Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The two other top video rental titles were the equally popcorn Batman and Top Gun. Prince, Visions of Empire, p. 19. 41. Kehr, When Movies Mattered, p. 7. 42. “Top Grossing Films of 1970–1979,” Stats-a-Mania, www.teako170.com /box70-79.html (accessed 21 October 2011).

7 Vietnam—The Sequel

Nations are as incapable of imagining their own defeat as individuals are of conceiving their own death.1 Eighteen men held the office of US president during the twentieth century. Though they did so for varying lengths of time and degrees of success, only the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt (1933–1945) and Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) thoroughly transformed the discourse and content of America’s domestic, foreign, and security policies. Like Roosevelt, Reagan entered the White House at a time of domestic crisis, division, and doubt—a moment when the American Dream and the United States’ power and role in the world were widely questioned. The recession and stagflation of the 1970s were partly a consequence of growing trade deficits and the spiraling costs of Vietnam and partly due to the global economic insecurity induced, firstly, by the US-provoked collapse of the Bretton Woods international financial regime (see p. 109) and, secondly, by the effects of the 1973 oil embargo by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Sustained social uncertainty was amplified by a cycle of Cold War geostrategic reverses. To the festering wound of defeat in Vietnam were added communist victories over US-backed forces in Laos and Cambodia, and revolutions that overthrew anticommunist regimes in Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and Iran. The seeming decline of America’s strategic power was further underscored by the September 1979 seizure of its embassy in Teheran and subsequent holding hostage of fifty-two US citizens; by the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; and, particularly, by the debacle of an April 1980 effort to rescue the Teheran hostages. Reagan’s decisive victory in the 1980 presidential election—like that of Roosevelt in 1932—expressed a generalized perception of the failure of 155

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prevailing modes of social, political, and economic governance. And though Reagan sought radically different solutions to America’s ills than those of his one-time New Deal hero,2 his presidency too was notable for its sharp break with the politics and policies of the preceding order and, particularly, for its ideological offensive to promote a new vision of American identity and to extend the capabilities and actions of the US military and intelligence agencies. In this chapter, we explore Hollywood’s role in projecting key tenets underlying Reagan’s expansion of the national security state. We focus particularly on revisionist Vietnam War movies that reinvigorated the security imaginary and legitimized the national security state.

The Reagan Revolution Reagan’s predecessor, Democrat Jimmy Carter (1977–1981), had divided and demoralized Americans with his insistence that a complex, morally ambiguous global order imposed limits on US power. Carter’s handling of various domestic and foreign policy crises convinced many that he displayed a “feminine spirit” incapable of defending national interests.3 Reagan routed Carter in 1980 by trumpeting the highly positive countermessage that the American Dream remained real and that the United States was still a “shining city on a hill.”4 Its only real problems were that—lulled by an effete liberal elite, dependent on big government, and assaulted by the communist evil empire—Americans had hobbled their entrepreneurial spirit, lost sight of the American way, and allowed the communists to gobble up much of the world. In opposition to the soft Carter, Reagan projected himself as a leader who would make the United States “Prouder, Stronger, Better.”5 His America would be “capable of confronting enemies rather than submitting to them, of battling ‘evil empires’ rather than allowing them to flourish, of using its hardened body—its renewed techno-military network—to impose its will on others rather than allow itself to be dictated to.”6 The Reagan administration set out to weaken organized labor, reduce regulation of the economy, and slash both a range of social programs and taxes paid by the wealthy. This was the age of junk bonds and Wall Street shenanigans, of yuppies, and of the rise of the fundamentalist Christian lobby as the loudest in public life, one determined “to take control of the culture” and reassert “traditional” American values centered on the patriarchal and idealized nuclear family.7 The Reagan revolution strengthened the national security state, renewed the Cold War, saw sustained US intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean, and rekindled its overt support for dictatorships worldwide. US politics, particularly those of the Republican party, moved dramatically to the right.8

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This radicalization of public life was equally notable for the manner and style through which it was achieved. The former actor’s principal political asset was his ability to project a firm, yet avuncular and reassuring, image and so persuade a majority of voters that he exemplified US values. Reagan’s communication strategy relied on four interlinked techniques, all drawn from Hollywood. The first was the extension of Reagan’s movie image to paint himself as an American everyman. “Mr. Norm is my alias,” wrote the actor in 1940; four decades later the presidential candidate argued that, when Americans looked at him, “they see themselves and that I am one of them.”9 His numerous gaffes actually reinforced his populist appeal: like George W. Bush, Reagan’s intellectual mediocrity made him seem closer to Middle America than the so-called elites who ridiculed and opposed him. He sold his right-wing populism, secondly, through a persistent simplification of complex issues and “a highly selective form of historical reconstruction” that nostalgically invoked an idealized national past.10 In the words of his Hollywood contemporary, actor Robert Ryan, “Reagan’s living in that Disneyland out there, that land of enchantment, as if it were a hundred years ago. Things are pretty complicated today, but Reagan makes them sound simple and people like that. ‘Thank God’ they say when they hear him speak about how simple things are.”11 The former actor had so imbibed the dream factory ethos that, according to his own White House communications director, Pat Buchanan: “For Ronald Reagan, the world of legend and myth is a real world. He visits it regularly and he’s a happy man there.”12 Reagan’s third communication technique relied on aggressively promoting image and myth over substance and truth. The core of the Reagan revolution lay in his “ability to [re]write the past to suit his upbeat vision of America’s present and future.”13 Ronald Reagan made himself the master of US politics, fourthly, by inverting the meanings of words and symbols, frequently appearing to advocate one thing while doing its opposite. Pillorying the evils of big government, he implemented the largest peacetime expansion of its biggest and most expensive component—the national security state. Advocating balanced budgets, his tax breaks for the rich produced a precipitous decline in government revenues, while exploding military spending saw the national debt triple from $712 billion to $2,012 billion, or from 26 percent to 41 percent of gross national product (GNP), during his presidency.14 Attacking liberal elites, Reagan’s policies redistributed wealth from the poor to the rich. As the incomes of the richest percentile rose by anywhere from 55 percent to 80 percent, those of the poorest fifth fell by almost 10 percent.15 Claiming that the United States was victimized by global politics, the “Great Communicator” preached the need to wield a big stick of military power. Opponents of his expansion of the national security state and con-

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frontational foreign policy were accused of wanting to “place the United States in a position of political and moral inferiority.”16 All of this found strong resonance in Hollywood: “Ronald Reagan was in the White House and fantasy, escapism and consumerist excess were the order of the day; and Hollywood was there to provide it on the big screen.”17

The Seminal Decade Three mutually reinforcing trends transformed Hollywood business practices during the 1980s. Firstly, the runaway success of Jaws in 1975 initiated a cycle of what were soon labeled blockbusters—“unusually expensive productions designed to earn unusually large amounts of money.”18 Almost always dealing with noncontroversial themes, and shamelessly mining Hollywood’s conventional tropes and cathartic endings, blockbusters featured major stars in heart-stopping action heightened by special effects made possible by Dolby sound and new computer technologies. The object of saturation advertising adding millions to soaring production costs, blockbusters were released simultaneously in hundreds of theaters. By the late 1970s, “the opening of any film on five hundred to six hundred screens was regarded as a wide release; by 1981 this figure had risen to eight or nine hundred (with 1,500 screens or more now marked out as a ‘hypersaturation’ release).”19 With the spread of the multiplex cinema complex, the number of US indoor screens rose from 14,029 to 22,029 during the 1980s.20 Major studios now owned some 3,500 of these since Reagan’s deregulation policies effectively overturned the Supreme Court Paramount decision (see p. 44), which had obliged the studios to sell off their theaters.21 Secondly, the explosion of video sales and rentals transformed both the economics of making films and the experience of watching them. Video revenues surpassed those from theatrical exhibition by mid-decade. By 1989, 70 percent of the revenue generated by Hollywood movies came from “ancillary markets,” of which video was by far the most important.22 Hollywood “soon found itself in . . . the business of producing film for expanding video markets.”23 The video aftermarket cash cow could dwarf box office earnings of a major hit—the 1989 Batman earned $250 million in theaters and an additional $400 million on video release.24 As even box office bombs could turn a profit in this aftermarket, a trend developed where some films were released solely in video. At the end of the 1980s, most Americans “were watching their movies at home on television sets in the form of rented videotapes.”25 This transformed the movie experience. Watching a film on a large screen in a darkened theater was both a communal and passive experience lasting for a fixed period of time. The individual viewer’s response was partly contin-

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gent upon, and heightened by, the collective response of the audience. Neither had any control over the action on the screen: they could only sit passively and watch—react, rather than act. Watching the same movie on video on a small television screen, on the other hand, became an individual experience or one confined to a small group of people. This had contradictory effects. The smaller screen, with its cropped and poorer image and sound quality, negatively affected a film’s sensory and emotional impact. However, the viewer now had significant control over how he or she experienced the movie. Favorite scenes could be replayed, even in slow motion; less pleasing ones could be passed over in fast-forward. And the process could be endlessly repeated. This significantly amplified the impact of any film’s ideological content, particularly those featuring threat, fear, violence, or explosive action. Though Top Gun was only twelfth among the topgrossing 1980s film at the box office, this glorification of US militarism was the decade’s best-selling video. These twin changes in Hollywood business practices were reinforced, thirdly, by its mutating ownership structure. Conglomerates had swallowed up all the major studios between 1966 and 1969. Yet the uncertain 1970s movie market and Hollywood’s ongoing precarious finances failed to deliver the expected revenue stream. As the globalizing decade of the 1980s obliged conglomerates to return to their core business, Hollywood underwent a significant “deconglomeration.”26 A new round of mergers and takeovers during the 1980s saw Hollywood fall under the control of global media and communications giants. This accelerated the industry’s transformation making movies to producing filmed entertainment with knock-on effects for much wider infotainment networks (see Chapter 8). All of these transformations favored the production of big-budget movies with a conservative message. The 1980s was the age of the Hollywood blockbuster, the superhero, the action movie, and the celebration of an American Field of Dreams (“If you build it, they’ll come”). Forty-four films grossed $100 million or more at the domestic box office between 1980 and 1989.27 The highest-grossing of them, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, was a children’s fantasy broadcasting the message that all beings yearn to hang out with their own kind, and that even cuddly aliens wanted to, and would, return home. The rest of the top ten all pandered to the Reaganite obsession with threat, be it interplanetary, external, or internal (Return of the Jedi, The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Batman, Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom), while seventeen others gave explicit voice to the tropes, anxieties, and fixations of American conservatism (Top Gun; “Crocodile” Dundee; Fatal Attraction; Beverly Hills Cop II; Gremlins; Rambo: First Blood Part II; Lethal Weapon 2; An Officer and a Gentleman; Rocky IV; Rocky III; Back to the Future Part II; The Karate

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Kid, Part II; Ghostbusters II; The Little Mermaid; Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home; “Crocodile” Dundee II; Superman II). Only eleven of these fortyfour high-grossing films projected elements of a liberal outlook (Tootsie; Rain Man; 3 Men and a Baby; Look Who’s Talking; Coming to America; Good Morning, Vietnam; On Golden Pond; Big; Driving Miss Daisy; Nine to Five; Parenthood). Moreover, even notable liberal films projected Reaganite class perspectives. Oscar-wining movies such as Ordinary People, On Golden Pond, and Terms of Endearment dramatized the “increasing self-concern of an ascendant white upper middle class that no longer wants to be bothered with questions of poverty or inequality.”28 Many echoed the values of 1950s domestic melodramas in their depiction of a family ravaged by a mother’s dereliction of her traditional duties.29 At least one, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, suggested that the conniving indigent controlled the naive and dysfunctional rich. While smaller, sometimes critical, films were occasionally made, the Hollywood revolution was truly dead and buried—along with the counterculture out of which it had emerged. This was perfectly reflected in the selfsatisfied nostalgia of Lawrence Kasdan’s 1983 hit, The Big Chill, which depicted former angry 1960s political activists as self-indulgent, well-off, anxious but largely unreflective, 1980s yuppies.30 Perhaps the most prominent and outspoken Hollywood political activist of the late 1960s and 1970s, Jane Fonda first promoted intergenerational reconciliation in On Golden Pond and then made a second career for herself with the best-selling “Jane Fonda’s Workout” series of videos and books. Hollywood’s rewriting of the past was truly under way. A rash of early 1980s movies gave voice to this Reaganite notion of the imperative to remold the past to fit the needs of the present (The Terminator, Starman, and Back to the Future), and several spawned sequels. Beyond such paranoia, escapism, consumerism, the conservative take on class and gender relations, and the will to rewrite an uncomfortable or threatening past, a significant proportion of Hollywood products promoted the Reagan agenda in a further dual sense. Firstly, they projected four core underlying tenets of what might be called a Reaganite geopolitical imagination:31 (1) that the United States faced permanent “clear and present” dangers—from what Reagan labeled the communist “evil empire,” and from other rogue states, terrorists, and drug lords; (2) that diplomacy, international cooperation, and collective security could never protect America: only eternal vigilance, backed by overwhelming and aggressively wielded military might could preserve national security; and (3) that this required erasing the Vietnam syndrome that had plagued Americans since the late 1960s so as (4) to enable the United States to win the Cold War and reclaim its status as uncontested global hegemon. Reagan’s January 1983 National

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Security Decision Directive No. 75 declared that America’s principal objective was “to contain and over time reverse Soviet expansionism” through sustained military competition in all geographical areas. This pushed the envelope of the long-standing US grand strategy of containment (see p. 14) close to one of rollback.32 Secondly, aping Reagan’s technique of ideological inversion, a range of movies stood reality on its head to promote the idea that the United States was the principal victim of global politics and, particularly, of Soviet aggression. The USSR was demonized in films such as Firefox, White Nights, Rocky IV, Rambo, Top Gun, No Way Out, Rambo III, Red Scorpion, and The Hunt for Red October. This reached its apotheosis in Red Dawn, which depicts the United States occupied by Soviet and Cuban troops—a theme reprised in Invasion U.S.A. And since Hollywood’s “willingness of to play fast and loose with the facts may well contribute to people’s apparent lack of concern with the truth,” such distortions were crucial to anchoring the Reagan doctrine in popular consciousness.33 Yet Hollywood’s most influential contribution to inculcating Reagan’s geopolitical worldview and support for expanding the national security state came through movies reframing US involvement in Vietnam.

A Culture of Defeat The Vietnam War was “a dramatic fall from grace” for the United States.34 Slashing a wound in America almost as deep and lingering as that of the Civil War a century earlier, it generated what President Lyndon Johnson’s biographer termed “the feeling Americans had deep down inside that we were doing something to be ashamed of.”35 Directly challenging the sense of superiority and entitlement innate to US identity, Vietnam “severely called into question American myth. . . . On the deepest level, the legacy of Vietnam is the disruption of our story, of our explanation of the past and vision of the future.”36 Beginning in the late 1970s, a growing number of conservative movies began to rewrite history to correct this “disruption” and to assimilate Vietnam into the myth of the American war story (see p. 30). They did so through harping on what Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues are five “losers’ myths” produced by all defeated societies.37 A first myth of scapegoating virtually celebrates defeat for having brought down the corrupt regime that had pushed that society into an unnecessary war. It leads, secondly, to a counterrevolutionary backlash through a myth of betrayal by elements in the society or government said to have “abandoned or deserted the nation in its hour of greatest need.”38 A third myth of unworthy victories embodies “the loser’s perennial claims that the victors cheated and that their victories

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were therefore illegitimate.” Undershot with “Christian concepts of victimhood and martyrdom,” this myth of the enemy’s “unsoldierly” victory in turn generates the idea that “defeat is not an outcome that must be acknowledged and accepted but an injustice to be rectified.”39 It is complemented, fourthly, by a myth of losers in battle, winners in spirit, which reassures the defeated nation that it is morally superior to the victors.40 And finally, cultures of defeat generate a spirit of revenge and revanche that insists on the need to “recapture what has been lost,” be it territory or national honor.41 To Schivelbusch’s list should be added the crisis of masculinity usually experienced in vanquished societies, fostering a further loser’s myth of renewed male potency and control through heroism and military prowess. The Vietnam War generated such a culture of defeat in America. John Wayne’s The Green Berets aside, a first wave of Vietnam movies confirmed the loser’s scapegoating myth by propagating the notion that a corrupt regime (or this or that element of a corrupted society) had pushed the United States into an unnecessary and/or unjust war. From M*A*S*H onward, Hollywood presented the war either as a mistake, an imperialist or militarist misadventure violating American values, or as criminal or genocidal or insane (see, respectively, Go Tell the Spartans; Two Mules for Sister Sara and the Oscar-winning documentary Hearts and Minds; and The Wild Bunch, Little Big Man, Alice’s Restaurant, Soldier Blue, The Boys in Company C, and Apocalypse Now). One growing focus in this early round of Vietnam movies was on damaged war veterans, and on the individual and social cost of America’s inability to grasp what the war had done to them (Vanishing Point, Taxi Driver, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Black Sunday, Coming Home, Who’ll Stop the Rain). A 1977 B-movie first nudged this trend in a new direction. Rolling Thunder tried to cash in on the Dirty Harry and Death Wish vigilante movie cycle and win audience approval for vets who strike back. Former prisoners of war (POWs), Major Charles Rane (William Devane) and Johnny Vohden (Tommy Lee Jones) wreak violent revenge on the longhaired robbers who killed Rane’s wife and son. However, it was Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) that unleashed a tide of movies that rewrote the Vietnam War through a “will to myth” that displaced “one question or problem . . . for another concept by the narrative patterns of the myths.”42 By inverting some of the war’s most notorious images, The Deer Hunter transformed the American narrative of the war from one of culpability to that of US victimhood.

Bloody Lies Prior to cowriting and directing The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino had written the second Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force, and written and

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directed another Clint Eastwood vehicle, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. The seventh top-grossing film of 1978,43 The Deer Hunter briefly made Cimino Hollywood’s wunderkind—until his 1980 western, Heaven’s Gate, ruined his career and bankrupted United Artists. With America in crisis as its subject, The Deer Hunter is told in three parts. Borrowing The Godfather’s trope of a wedding as a community snapshot, the first shows a working-class Russian American Pennsylvania steel town on the eve of the departure for Vietnam of three friends, Michael (Robert De Niro), Steven (John Savage), and Nick (Christopher Walken). This long wedding section underscores Steven’s reluctant domestication into the female domain and away from his preferred community of hunting buddies. The second part unfolds in Vietnam, where these friends undergo the primitive male trial of combat. Their bond is tested to the limit when they are captured and tortured in extended games of Russian roulette as Viet Cong guards gamble over the outcome. Michael organizes their escape. When Steven falls from the rescuing helicopter into a river, Michael jumps in after him, and only the psychologically damaged Nick is flown to safety. The third part of the movie recounts Michael’s efforts to reforge the broken male bond and so remake patriarchal authority in his hometown community. Finding Steven in a veterans hospital, he reunites this psychologically crushed amputee with his wife. Michael then travels to Saigon to rescue Nick who has gone missing. As Nick dies in a final game of Russian roulette, Michael returns home and he and his disconsolate circle hold a wake and sing a ragged “God Bless America.” The Deer Hunter aroused a firestorm of controversy. Its emotional force depends on the conceit of sadistic Viet Cong forcing American prisoners of war into games of Russian roulette. War reporter Peter Arnett wrote that “in 20 years of war there was not one recorded case of Russian roulette . . . the central metaphor of the movie is simply a bloody lie.”44 The film’s recurring scenes of Americans with a pistol held to their heads explicitly evoke and invert the meaning of one of the war’s more notorious images— the summary and public execution on a Saigon street of a manacled Viet Cong prisoner by the chief of South Vietnam’s secret police. The Deer Hunter propagates a further “bloody lie” by inverting yet another shocking image of the war. Faithfully recreating the photographs of the March 1969 massacre by US troops of hundreds of Vietnamese villagers at My Lai, Cimino shows North Vietnamese soldiers committing the atrocity and a brave American GI (Michael) stopping them. Three separate Russian roulette scenes depict Americans as the victims of barbarism. The first hinges around the captivity trope of the American war story (see p. 31). Painting Vietnamese jailers as viscerally evil and US prisoners as their patent moral betters, The Deer Hunter equally fosters the losers’ myths of unworthy victories and losers in battle, winners in spirit. The movie’s core message is that innocent American boys were the war’s

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principal victims and not the millions of Vietnamese who were bombed, napalmed, shot, maimed, wounded, sprayed with Agent Orange, or displaced. Recasting the US aggressor as the victim, The Deer Hunter legitimizes both this aggression—“to be a victim means never having to say you’re sorry”45—and the thirst for revenge and revanche following America’s defeat. A second scene depicts an amnesiac Nick in Saigon, now enticed into playing Russian roulette for money by a degenerate Frenchman, Julien Grinda (Pierre Segui). As another sadistic foreigner profits from gambling with the life of a broken American boy, Nick becomes a psychological prisoner of the war. Though also drawn to the gambling den, Michael has the mental strength to resist the induced addiction. This psychological version of the captivity narrative is extended into a final Russian roulette scene amidst the chaos of Saigon just before its fall. In thrall to decadent foreigners (who now include a Chinese gambling ring), Nick is destroyed by his inability to cleave to his American identity. Only Michael makes it home; only the true American male can withstand the foreign assault. And as the movie’s final scene shows, damaged and grieving Americans still love their country. The Deer Hunter makes a further ideological point. Its focus on young American victims of the war reaffirms traditional heroism, masculinity, male bonding, and male authority through the mastery of violence. Michael—the deer hunter of the title—is a working-class superhero. Conquering nature, torture, the Viet Cong, and Saigon chaos, he is the American warrior able to overcome everything his country’s enemies throw at him, and so save his community. The film’s women (even the splendid Meryl Streep) merely hold a mirror to their men. And as the marriage scene telegraphs, men and the male bond are weakened by women and by sex. Cimino’s movie thus anticipated three central ideological themes of the coming Reagan revolution and its narrative strategy to reframe the Vietnam War—that of America the victim, that of demonizing the Other as a sadistic and evil barbarian, and that of the need for the red-blooded working-class American male to reclaim his Übermensch warrior status. However, while it fundamentally shifts the narrative of the war, The Deer Hunter does not project a Reaganite geopolitical imagination. Neither does it paint US involvement in Vietnam as a noble quest. And in the last hunting scene where Michael decides not to shoot a regal stag and rages at the stay-athome Stanley (John Cazale) for waving a loaded revolver, The Deer Hunter clearly states that this new American hero wants nothing more to do with war and seeks no vengeance against his tormentors. This is a transitional rather than an outright conservative film in that it projects no real vision of how to transcend the Vietnam trauma. Doing so required two further shifts in the narrative of the war: firstly, turning the victimized vet into a right-

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eous avenger who would exorcize collective US guilt by destroying the enemies said to have caused the defeat; and, secondly, reconsolidating Americanist mythology by fostering as absolute and unquestionable truth an even more powerful bloody lie and ideological inversion than those of Russian roulette and the My Lai massacre. Reenter Sylvester Stallone, accompanied by Chuck Norris, at stage far right.

Political Entrepreneurs Fighting Back Among the actors portraying muscled 1980s American superheroes, Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris stand out for the explicit ideological content of their movies. Becoming “many people’s favorite commie bashers,” Stallone and Norris attained the status of political entrepreneurs seeking to ascribe particular meanings to identities, objects, and events in the “marketplace of ideas” over domestic and foreign policy issues.46 From his 1976 smash hit Rocky to the 1990s, Sylvester Stallone was one of Hollywood’s most popular and highest-earning stars. A registered Republican, he persistently insists that his films have no political agenda: “I am neither left, nor right, I just love my country.”47 Agreeing that his John Rambo character stands for his own vision of the United States, Stallone well summed up the Reagan security imaginary in a 2008 interview with conservative talk show host, Sean Hannity: Stallone: Rambo . . . believes that war is natural, peace is an accident. . . . [H]e realizes, like, he really is a warrior. He’s maybe been making excuses about it, but this is what he is meant to do, is protect people who cannot protect themselves. Hannity: One of the things that I love about America is that, literally, we have paid the price, you know: blood sweat tears; the financial burden of freedom [Stallone nods in agreement]; not just for us, but around the world. We haven’t always been perfect, we haven’t always been right, but we’ve been there for the cause of liberty . . . Stallone [interrupting and passionate]: How about the world without the United States? Hannity: Thank you, I say it all the time. Stallone: You know what it is? It’s a feral planet, it’s something right out of the Dark Ages. Hannity: Absolutely! Stallone: We’re only, the, that, might will survive and no, forget intellectuals they would slaughter everyone.48

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For his part, Chuck Norris has long enjoyed cult status, but never achieved anything like Stallone’s stardom. Norris is unabashed about his commitments as a conservative Republican and an NRA and Christian activist.49 Holder of the Professional Middleweight Karate champion title from 1968 to 1973, his brief onscreen debut was as a martial arts performer in John Wayne’s 1968 celebration of the Vietnam War, The Green Berets. Garnering attention in Bruce Lee’s cult 1972 martial arts film, Way of the Dragon, Norris’s underground status grew with the early to mid-1970s vogue of cheapo kung fu movies. A little-noticed 1978 Norris feature, Good Guys Wear Black (aka Black Tigers), laid the template for what would become the 1980s new genre—the POW/missing in action (MIA) avenger-vigilante movie. The POW/MIA question was a great wedge issue in US politics for over twenty years.50 It turned around claims that the federal government knowingly abandoned 2,255 of its own unaccounted for MIA Vietnam War combatants who allegedly were held in foul Indochinese prison camps decades after the end of the war—and that it conspired to conceal this “truth” from Americans. A powerful grassroots POW/MIA movement generates passionate political heat to this day. Good Guys Wear Black opens in 1973 toward the end of the Paris peace talks. Major John T. Booker’s special forces team is ambushed during a covert mission to rescue American POWs still held in Vietnam and all but Booker (Norris) and four others are killed. Five years later, Booker is a race car–driving, Los Angeles liberal arts professor who criticizes the war. As the surviving members of his team die one by one, Booker discovers that the original ambush and subsequent murders were ordered by the soon-tobe US secretary of state, Conrad Morgan (James Franciscus). Booker ultimately kills Morgan and saves America. The film projects four ideological assertions later taken up in a wave of movies. The first presents the claim of abandoned POW/MIAs as established fact while the second blames the US defeat in Vietnam on betrayal at the heart of the US government. These claims then fuse, thirdly, into an elaborate conspiracy theory about such traitors plotting with America’s enemies to hobble the United States. And finally, Good Guys Wear Black argues that such combined external and internal threat can be countered only by the American male reclaiming his agency as a warrior to take back the country from the traitors allegedly running it. Yet the movie’s credibility was strained by its amateurish direction and acting, its depiction of Norris as a likeable intellectual, and its pandering to the still dominant notion that the war was a mistake. It made little contribution to changing the narrative of Vietnam. That work gained traction with the 1982 release of First Blood, cowritten by and starring Sylvester Stallone as the Medal of Honor−winning Viet-

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nam vet, John Rambo. To date, Stallone has cowritten and starred in four Rambo films.51 First Blood was 1982’s thirteenth top-grossing movie (Stallone’s Rocky III was in fourth place).52 The series hit the stratosphere with the sequel. Rambo: First Blood Part II was the second top-grossing film of 1985 (with Stallone’s Rocky IV in third spot), and was spun off into a TV cartoon series and an aggressively marketed range of Rambo action toys.53 Beyond the ultramilitarist male fantasies that they embody, the first two Rambo films each project pristine versions of the culture of defeat and the Reaganite geopolitical imagination. Their resonance in the popular imagination stems from their success in deploying techniques of ideological inversion to reinsert Vietnam into Americanist mythology. Though not fascist in the sense of presenting the myth of an organically united nation organized into a totalitarian and militarized political party mobilized behind a charismatic leader, the Rambo films’ rewriting of the Vietnam War deploys narrative and symbolic strategies disturbingly evocative of another era. “In Mein Kampf Hitler established several cardinal rules for propaganda: (a) avoid abstract ideas and appeal instead to the emotions . . . ; (b) employ constant repetition of just a few ideas, using stereotyped phrases and avoiding objectivity; (c) put forth only one side of the argument; (d) constantly criticize enemies of the state; (e) identify one special enemy for special vilification.”54 First Blood continues the cycle of films about the rejected and angry returning Vietnam vet. The opening scene locates it among movies featuring “the white-male, blue-collar rage that imbued so many of the action films of the 1980s.”55 A cheaply dressed drifter, the recently discharged veteran, John Rambo, arrives in Oregon to visit the equally poor family of a war buddy. Told by Sheriff Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy) that “we don’t want guys like you,” Rambo is hustled out of the ironically named town of Hope. His defiance leads to his arrest and rapidly escalating persecution at the hands of Hope’s police, ultimately dragging Rambo into all-out war against the local and state police and the National Guard. Ordered by his former commanding officer, Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna), not to fight friendly civilians, Rambo retorts, “There are no friendly civilians.” Denied access to Hope (the American Dream), and abandoned and victimized by America, the heroic vet is on his own. In eliciting audience identification with Rambo’s increasingly sociopathic behavior, First Blood echoes The Deer Hunter’s depiction of the patriotic US soldier as the Vietnam War’s principal victim. Rambo’s victim status and righteous resistance are underscored by his recurring symbolic identification with Jesus Christ. His biblical-length hair underscores his Christlike humility in the early scenes. As Rambo is forced to strip in police captivity prior to being mocked, humiliated, and physically abused, an officer’s exclaimed “Holy shit” focuses attention on the stigmata left on the

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veteran’s body by Vietnamese torturers. Placed in a chokehold, Rambo has a flashback of being raised into a crucifixion position on a wooden beam in Vietnam. Escaping from the police, he garbs himself in a crude smock evocative of Hollywood’s version of the clothing of Jesus and then descends into the underground of an abandoned mine—only to rise into the light and wreak righteous hellfire on the town of Hope. The film presents Rambo’s actions as purely defensive. At first he merely seeks to escape the pursuing police. None of the escalating violence is his fault: “They drew first blood,” he tells Trautman. And though he almost destroys the town in an orgy of preemptive violence, no American dies at Rambo’s hand. In a rant at the end of the movie, he screams at Trautman: “It wasn’t my war. You asked me, I didn’t ask you.” First Blood is a far more right-wing film than The Deer Hunter. Whereas the working-class superhero of the latter seeks only to rebuild his shattered community, First Blood echoes Rolling Thunder and Good Guys Wear Black in depicting the enraged vet as a righteous vigilante avenging a conspiracy against the US fighting man (and, by extension, against America itself). Its theme of betrayal—“I did what I had to do to win, but somebody wouldn’t let us win”—equally echoes US incomprehension at its defeat by a small undeveloped country. First Blood both sanctions Rambo’s armed resistance against the state and hints at the theme of conspiracy, which moved front and center in the second film of the series.

New Myths for a New “Religion” The year following First Blood saw the release of Ted Kotcheff’s Uncommon Valor, starring Oscar-winner Gene Hackman. Uncommon Valor was produced by John Milius—who had cowritten the first two Harry Callahan movies and Apocalypse Now! and would direct what Bruce Franklin labels as two seminal “neofascist” 1980s films, Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn.56 These conservative credentials aside, Uncommon Valor is a highly sanitized reimagining of the real Operation Lazarus—a farcical 1982 effort organized by a bizarre and extreme right-wing former US Special Forces lieutenant colonel, James “Bo” Gritz, to find POWs in Laos.57 Repeatedly insisting that “God has chosen me” to find and free POW/MIAs, this selfstyled “Lawrence of Laos” spent four years searching for POWs across Southeast Asia.58 For Gritz, the issue was “sort of like a religion.”59 Asked directly by a congressional committee for evidence of the existence of POWs, Gritz replied: “I have the same proof that would be presented by a group of clergymen to prove the existence of God.”60 Aside from being chosen by the Almighty and guided by a psychic who claimed to have had visions of a POW camp, Gritz also drew inspiration

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from a Hollywood icon: “The POW/MIA dilemma needs to be resolved. If I and my people don’t do it, I know nobody in Washington who will. It takes action and both Teddy Roosevelt and John Wayne are dead. Hopefully, like the name of this operation [Lazarus], their spirit and resolve lives today in the heart of our President, resurrected as those declared dead by our system soon will be.”61 Two prominent Hollywood figures rallied to the cause. Clint Eastwood donated $30,000 and William Shatner $10,000.62 Informed by Eastwood of the Gritz raid, Reagan reportedly promised that, if Gritz brought out a single POW, he was prepared to “start World War III” to recover the rest.63 This support from Dirty Harry, Captain Kirk, and the Gipper notwithstanding, Gritz found no POWs and ended up convicted by a Thai court for illegal possession of high-powered radio equipment. In keeping with the Reagan era attitude toward inconvenient facts, Uncommon Valor transforms Gritz’s fantasies and shoddy amateurism into a heroically successful private mission. Channeling the legends of Jason and the Argonauts and the Arthurian quest, the movie shows seven losers pursuing the holy grail of MIA prisoners. Beyond its inversion of the reality of failure and disgrace into a myth of heroic success and redemption, Uncommon Valor projects the argument that feminism had emasculated American men. Removing seven wimps from their feminized civilian lives, the film remasculinizes them as they recover their own agency through relearning to master violence, first in a female-free male utopia and then in battle. Given mixed critical reception, Uncommon Valor was the twenty-second top-grossing film of 1983.64 Yet it lacked the vital ingredient needed to transform its revisionist narrative into veritable myth. The success of its rescuing warriors depends on teamwork: Uncommon Valor contains no comic book and solitary superhero remaking his own agency and his country’s destiny. Norris would kick-start the new myth with Missing in Action (1984) and Stallone would carry it into the stratosphere with his second Rambo film, Rambo: First Blood Part II (hereafter referred to as Rambo, and not to be confused with the much later fourth episode in the series, likewise entitled Rambo but without a subtitle and also known as Rambo IV). Given that Missing in Action essentially plagiarized Rambo’s plot, and that the Stallone vehicle had an infinitely greater influence, we start with the latter film.

Getting to Win Rambo begins where First Blood left off. Freed by Colonel Trautman from prison after shooting up the town of Hope, Rambo agrees to return to Vietnam to search for POWs. As he departs, Rambo asks, “Do we get to win this

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time?” Trautman’s reply—“This time it’s up to you”—allows Stallone to refight and win the Vietnam War. Symbolically proving that defeat was not the fault of the American warrior, this new narrative of Vietnam also authorizes a war on the conspirators who the movie insists were really to blame. Rambo is a straightforward conspiracy movie. Always “about an exercise in the manufacturing of perception,” such films depict a conspiracy whose goals “are the creation of a worldview, the manipulation of the impressions of reality, the recollection of strategically orchestrated memories.”65 The movie effects this manipulation of perception through the same narrative device deployed by the Nazis—the myth of the “stab in the back.” Its principal message is that the real reason that valiant American fighting men lost the war was because of betrayal by conniving politicians and bureaucrats (“somebody wouldn’t let us win”), whom Rambo embodies in the character of Murdock (Charles Napier). Described by Colonel Trautman as “a stinking bureaucrat that’s trying to cover his ass,” Murdock is a cardboard unmanly bad guy. He lies about serving in Vietnam. Like Rambo, Murdock perspires constantly: yet while Rambo’s sweat is that of a hard-working soldier, Murdock’s is that of a man who cannot take the heat but insists on running the kitchen. Drinking bottle after bottle of ice-cold Coke, Murdock is frequently shown eating—while Rambo subsists on next to nothing. The personification of the conspiracy said to have hobbled America and lost the war, Murdock dispatches Rambo to find evidence of US troops still held prisoner in Vietnam ten years after the war’s end. But the mission is a setup—“a goddam lie, like the [government’s handling of the] war,” says Colonel Trautman. Rambo is sent to an area that, Murdock is certain, contains no POWs. Nevertheless, Rambo finds POWs and frees one. On hearing this, and just as Rambo and the POW are about to climb into a rescuing helicopter, Murdock aborts the extraction, deliberately abandoning Rambo and the POW to the Vietnamese and Russians. Aggressively propagating the notion that America’s principal enemy is internal, the film authorizes resistance against the federal government. Rambo insists that “there are no more orders,” no more rule of law or obedience to constitutional authority. And when he tells the representative of the US government, “Murdock, I’m coming to get you” and “You know they’re there, you know where they are. Go and get them [the POWs] before I come and get you!” Rambo comes close to sanctioning armed insurrection. The film’s stab-in-the-back insurrectionism is complemented by the loser’s myth of the unworthy victories won by US enemies. This takes a doubly racist form. The first presents Vietnamese soldiers as “weak, sweating, repulsive in their gratuitous cruelty,”66 a carbon copy of the “evil Japs” of World War II propaganda. The second posits the equally demeaning fiction that these soldiers who defeated the United States were mere puppets

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of the “Russian bastards” who allegedly manipulated and controlled the war. The sadistic Russian lieutenant colonel Podovsky (Steven Berkoff) is a parody of the malevolent Other. This too echoes Nazi narrative strategy: for the Hitlerites, the evil all-controlling external Other was Jewish; for Rambo, it is the Soviet Union. The film’s demonized Vietnamese and Russian Others are juxtaposed with the loyal Other—the beautiful Vietnamese female guide, Co (Julia Nickson), who saves Rambo’s life. Compounding its theme of we are the stabbed-in-the-back victims, Rambo presents as gospel truth the claim that the US government first abandoned 2,255 POW/MIAs and then conspired to conceal this “truth” from Americans. Stallone remains an MIA true believer. In his 2008 interview with Sean Hannity, the actor emphatically agrees when Hannity insists that “we [the United States] left these boys [MIAs] behind.”67 In propagating the POW/MIA claim as unequivocal fact, Rambo serves two further ideological functions, each of which also relies on inverting reality. The first authorizes future US revenge and revanche through what the Reagan administration’s final report acknowledged to be the fiction of the POW/MIAs.68 Rambo refights the war by defeating the Vietnamese and Russians, and so legitimizes the Reagan geopolitical imagination and expansion of the national security state. The movie’s second ideological function demonizes those allegedly traitorous officials (read Democratic party administrations and their liberal constituencies) that questioned the existence of the POW/MIAs. Described by Colonel Trautman as “a pure fighting machine with only a desire to win a war that somebody else lost,” John Rambo is invincible. Able to escape any trap, turn any situation to his advantage, and fabricate deadly weapons from nature, Rambo always overcomes superior numbers and technology even when he starts out unarmed. Symbolizing lost US potency and agency, in his rampage through Southeast Asia (Rambo: First Blood Part II) and Afghanistan (Rambo III), Rambo “enacts his country’s symbolic transformation in the Reagan years from disengagement and false consciousness to the triumphal application of military force.” 69 When Rambo tells his Vietnamese contact, Co, that on returning home, he had “found another war going on . . . a kind of, like, quiet war against all the soldiers returning,” the movie is arguing that the United States must embrace its military, embrace its true nature as a warrior nation. And as the movie ends with Rambo insisting that all Vietnam vets want “is for our country to love us as much as we love it,” it implies that those who do not share this view of the war or of the POW/MIA issue are not real patriots. John Rambo’s universe is entirely male. No female characters utter more than a few words in First Blood; a briefly shown prostitute and Co are the only women in Rambo. The former is there to service the Vietnamese soldiers, the latter to service Rambo’s mission. Co expresses what Ameri-

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can conservatives want us to believe is the real desire of the Other— “maybe go America . . . you take me with you?” But she is conveniently killed before Rambo has to go to the bother of getting her a green card. Like The Deer Hunter and Uncommon Valor, the Rambo movies advocate resolving the crisis of American identity and masculinity by removing men from contact with women and freeing them from sexual lust. Yet whereas both The Deer Hunter’s alpha male, Michael, and Uncommon Valor’s motley crew of rescuers all remain recognizably normal, at least in terms of their physique, First Blood and Rambo make an eroticized fetish of John Rambo’s hypermasculine physicality. The camera lingers voyeuristically on Rambo’s glistening seminaked body and ripping muscles. With Stallone missing no opportunity to strip off his shirt and flash his pumped pecs, much of Rambo is a wet T-shirt celebration of the actor’s torso and loving fondling of powerfully phallic weapons that spew death and destruction. The film’s ideological message is reinforced by persistent usage of two additional inverted symbols. The first extends First Blood’s association of John Rambo with Jesus Christ. When the Judas Murdock meets Rambo, he comments, “So, you’re the Chosen One.” The shot following Murdock’s betrayal shows Rambo buried waist-deep in water, hanging by his arms, head bowed, from a cross-like structure, his body covered in leeches— which, like the Roman soldiers in the Gospels, his captors pick off with their rifles. Rambo is then spread-eagled on an iron bed prior to being subjected to electric shock torture. Over the course of First Blood and Rambo, the man is abandoned or denied three times—in not being allowed to win the war, by Sheriff Teasle in First Blood, and by Murdock’s betrayal in Rambo. Vietnam is frequently labeled as “hell,” and John Rambo twice rises from water, and once each from fire and primeval mud, to smite his foes and free enslaved POWs. Stallone’s Christlike superhero writes the mythical text of a new creed: “Belief in their [the POW/MIAs] existence, their suffering, and their betrayal often has all the intensity of a religion.”70 A second symbolic inversion presents John Rambo as being half American Indian and half German—“A hell of a [military] combination” comments Murdock. Rebelling against traitorous government representatives, Rambo assumes the headband, pendant, naked torso, and bow and arrow of the Indian noble savage and warrior. Playing “an imperialist guerrilla,”71 he appropriates the resistance and victim status of the Indian warrior to the US militarism that destroyed Native American independence and society. This also inverts the military dynamics of Vietnam. His American warrior is the master “of guerrilla tactics and jungle combat,” while “confined to a fixed position in a fortress” the Vietnamese can only “blunder through the brush and are hampered by its confines.”72 Rambo equally evokes all the tropes of the American war story (see p. 30). Refighting America’s first real defeat, its hero metaphorically transforms Vietnam into a site of victory and vindication. Always the victim of

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aggression (“they drew first blood”), Rambo’s wars are those of liberation: to free himself from the tyrannical Sheriff Teasle, to free POWs from barbarous jailers and from the American traitors who connive in their imprisonment, and to free his country from the burden of defeat. In the process, he is ambushed by Teasle’s tyranny and Murdock’s conspiracy, placed in captivity and tortured by Teasle’s cops and by the Russians and Vietnamese. This authorizes him to smite back in a righteous spectacle of slaughter. And the films make an absolute fetish of weapons technology. All of this purges the American warrior of the shame of defeat and reaffirms his masculinity through the gospel of “regeneration through violence.”73 These films project four further ideological messages central to the Reaganite geopolitical imagination. The first turns around belief. In losing faith in warriors and in its national security state, America has lost belief in itself. Secondly, the Rambo movies parrot Reagan’s line that government was the problem, not the solution, to America’s ills. It is Rambo’s private initiative that rescues the POWs despite the federal government’s obstructionism. Aggressively fostering the view that America’s only hope lies in unleashing its fighting men, these movies promote militarism as the means of transforming defeat into victory. Their wiping the slate of actual history provides, thirdly, the vital ideological prop for the injunction in Reagan’s 1983 National Security Decision Directive No. 75 that the United States throw out the received notion of the Cold War as an unwinnable standoff, abandon détente, and seek victory over the Soviet Union.74 In rehabilitating the Vietnam War, the Rambo series insists, fourthly, that US preponderance through the national security state is the only hope for humanity. To repeat Stallone’s own words: “How about the world without the United States?”75 Like John Wayne in World War II, Sylvester Stallone reinvented the archetype of the all-conquering, heroic American warrior despite himself having conspicuously stood on the sidelines during a war about which he so stridently pontificates onscreen. Respectively released near the beginning, in the middle, and in the final year of the Reagan presidency, Stallone’s first three Rambo films propagate an ideological fiction that millions of Americans took for gospel truth. Actual Vietnam veterans expressed their disgust at these fabrications by picketing theaters playing Rambo. In one such demonstration, these vets “were accosted and told to ‘go home’ by teenagers waiting to get Stallone’s autograph. Rambo, the teenagers screamed, was ‘a real veteran.’”76 Historical fact had given way to Hollywood fiction, reality to myth. This was pushed even further in Chuck Norris’s version of Vietnam.

Making War, Not Love Between 1984 and 1986, Chuck Norris starred in five movies “considered box office successes.”77 All but one were made by the Cannon Group, and

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the eight films Norris made with Cannon stand at the heart of his cult status as an action hero. Norris and Cannon perfectly complemented each other. A chart measuring the performance of Hollywood actors since 1985 ranks Norris as the very worst of them all.78 Taken over in 1979 by the Israeli producers and cousins, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the Cannon Group more than equaled this standard. The overwhelming majority of Cannon’s 130-plus 1980s films scraped the bottom of the barrel: “If bad movies were a religion, Golan and Globus would be its contemporary gods. . . . If there was a cheap buck to be made on an exploitation movie, Golan and Globus made it.”79 When the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Cannon in 1987 for “fraudulently misrepresenting earnings,” Golan and Globus were forced to begin liquidating Cannon’s assets.80 Chuck Norris Puts the Laughter in Manslaughter

Of all the 1980s claimants to the crown of American action superhero, only Norris had served in the US military. Moreover, Norris’s martial skills were genuine: “He was a professional karate champion. He invented his own martial arts style [Chun Kuk Do]. He trained with Bruce Lee.”81 Combined with his uncompromisingly wooden acting, this gave Norris an awful kitsch authenticity and integrity. His squared-jawed, straitlaced morality contrasted with the sociopath of Stallone’s Rambo, with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wisecracking self-irony, and with Bruce Willis’s love of Hollywood glitz. While these latter three all evidently were faking their assumed working-class and military personas, only Norris had genuinely walked the walk. He “was the humble option among the triumphalist quipping Reaganite action heroes—constitutionally positive, unwaveringly secure. His onscreen persona is entirely free of moral ambiguity or inner struggle.”82 Legions of those “losing ground”—whose world was “going to hell”83—could identify with Norris’s lack of skill and pretension. Reinforced by the unalleviated bad writing, implausible plots, and shoddy direction of all Norris’s movies, this eventually garnered cult status for the man and his ideas.84 The actor’s cult status was in large part due to the way in which the video aftermarket augmented the demand for juvenile action movies and pushed to extremes the Reaganite technique of symbolic inversion of, and disregard for, the facts. Missing in Action: Professional Ethics and the Continuity Girl

Missing in Action was the forty-fifth top-grossing film of 1984.85 Many saw it as a copy of Rambo. Later conceding that Missing in Action had been “inspired by” James Cameron’s treatment for Rambo, Cannon had rushed their movie into production before the Stallone vehicle.86 Such contempt

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for professional ethics finds echo in similar disdain for the audience evident in glaring continuity differences between the three Missing in Action films. The first begins with Colonel James Braddock (Norris) waking in a stateside apartment eight years after the Vietnam War ends. A TV news bulletin informs us that Braddock had escaped from a Vietnamese prison camp the previous year. However, the film’s prequel, Missing in Action 2, opens with Braddock still imprisoned in Vietnam ten years after the war’s end. Now Braddock is told by his sadistic chief captor, Colonel Yin (Soon-Tek Oh), that believing him dead, his wife has remarried. Yet in the third film, Braddock: Missing in Action III, the hero’s pregnant Vietnamese wife is captured by the communists in Saigon at its fall while Braddock remains free and returns to the United States (i.e., two years after the end of American combat involvement in the war, the return of American POWs by North Vietnam, and Braddock’s own supposed imprisonment depicted in the first two films). Echoing almost all of the narrative strategies of Rambo, the Missing in Action series is tied even more directly to a Reaganite agenda. The second film opens with Ronald Reagan himself on TV, sternly stating US determination to secure the return of all MIAs. This is B-movie nod to a former actor who had starred in a B-movie depicting brutal treatment of US POWs in North Korea (Prisoner of War, 1954). The Vietnamese of the series represent an even more diabolical Other than Rambo’s Colonel Podovsky. In Missing in Action 2, Colonel Yin revels in torturing US prisoners and actually cremates one before the dying man expires. Yin’s confrontations with Braddock end with the Vietnamese colonel rubbing in America’s defeat by proclaiming: “You lose!” When Braddock ultimately frees the POWs and destroys the prison camp, Yin challenges him to unarmed combat to settle the question of “who is the better man?” As Yin inevitably dies, Braddock proclaims the new “truth” of a US victory in Vietnam by telling him: “You lose!” Unlike John Rambo, Braddock is no ticking sociopath. Immensely patient, he is always in command of himself and his men. Nor does Braddock distance himself from the war à la Rambo’s whine (“It wasn’t my war”). Rather, Missing in Action asserts the nobility of US engagement. It juxtaposes Braddock’s successful quest to rescue POWs with his contempt for and the failure of the efforts of a government delegation led by Senator Porter (David Tress). This constructs a moral hierarchy between the individual and the government, suggesting that the individual best represents US values and that only private initiative can solve America’s problems. Here, the movie unwittingly underscores a double paradox in Reaganite ideology—the fact that America’s long Cold War was fought by the government, not by individuals; and that the ultimate message of Missing in Action (and the Reagan presidency) was the need to reinforce the largest component of demonized big government, the national security state.

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Missing in Action also projects a second tenet of Reagan’s geopolitical imagination: that military force is a sounder foreign policy instrument than diplomacy. National interests are harmed by “soft bodies” (Senator Porter) who negotiate with US enemies. Describing Braddock as the “most undiplomatic” of men, the film shows this uncompromising “hard body” doing whatever he thinks it takes—including the unblinking murder of a Vietnamese general in his bed while Braddock is ostensibly part of a US diplomatic mission to Vietnam. The movie’s message is that Braddock finds and then liberates the POW/MIAs only because he scorns diplomacy and international law, and unhesitatingly deploys deadly force to achieve his goals.

Conclusion Channeling and amplifying the anger and agency panic projected by the films of the Hollywood counterrevolution, these revisionist Vietnam movies effectively reversed the national narrative about the war. By blithely ignoring the constraints of inconvenient historical fact, these fantasies assimilated the US defeat into a renewed myth of the righteous American war story. The commercial success of Uncommon Valor and Missing in Action, and the mega box office triumph of Rambo: First Blood II, led to a rash of conspiracy films showing heroic Americans fighting back to rescue POWs in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the Middle East.87 Even the third Star Wars film—the 1983 Return of the Jedi—pays homage to the POW theme, opening with the rescue of Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt. Projecting a traditional narrative of the United States as the global good guy threatened by a menacing and demonized Other, these movies insisted that security was achievable only through enhanced military potency and assertiveness. Their metaphorical relegitimization of the security imaginary played a vital role in popularizing the Reaganite renewal of the grammar of power (see p. 15) on which the national security state had been constructed, one designed “to ensure that the U.S. can operate as the paramount power in the world, coming and going as it pleases, with whatever weapons it choses.”88 These films and Hollywood’s other 1980 fantasies and entertainments lulled Americans into a mixture of pleasurable nostalgia, intellectual numbness, and self-righteous anger. The Cold War consensus was reconstructed during by 1980s through the renewed magic of the movies now broadcasting the reassuring message that the good guys always triumph, even in galaxies far, far away; that E.T. would go home again (and, as an alien in the United States, should do so); that America’s ills were all caused by evil Soviets or conspiracies; that Rambos and Braddocks would turn all defeat into victory; that superheroes were on hand to wipe out the bad guys; and that all should follow Bobby McFerrin’s admonition to “Don’t Worry, Be

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Happy!” With box office receipts showing that the overwhelming majority of Americans went to the movies to fantasize, the country eagerly swallowed the Great Communicator’s fantasy version of the American Dream— the fiction that nothing was wrong with America; that voodoo economics, a massive increase in military spending, and kicking a lot of commie (and liberal) ass could transport the United States back to its lost paradise of innocence and national greatness. The national security state had triumphed at the box office. However, under the dual impact of Soviet glasnost and the Iran-contra scandal, in the latter half of the 1980s many Americans began to step back from such ideological simplifications. The cartoon worldview and crude ideological distortions of the Rambo and the Missing in Action series gave way to far more nuanced and complex films about Vietnam such as the trilogy by actual war veteran Oliver Stone (Platoon, 1986; Born on the Fourth of July, 1989; Heaven & Earth, 1993), Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War (1989). Entirely rejecting a Manichean heroic victory narrative, these films depict the Vietnam War as a brutal, pitiless, and dehumanizing experience. The latter part of Born on the Fourth of July also recounts how returning wounded veterans were received, and how many turned their anger into political mobilization against the war. In Heaven & Earth, Oliver Stone achieves what few Hollywood war films have ever done—he recounts the war and its aftermath from the perspective of one of its real victims, a Vietnamese woman. Yet by the time Heaven & Earth was released, President George H. W. Bush had already declared that the lightening US victory in the 1991 Gulf War meant that the country had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome for once and for all.”89 Hollywood’s long fascination with the Vietnam War faded away.

Notes 1. Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat, p. 6. 2. On Ronald Reagan’s transformation from fervent New Dealer to conservative poster boy see, Evans, The Education of Ronald Reagan, especially pp. 142– 151 and 156–159. 3. Jeffords, Hard Bodies, pp. 7–8, 10–11, 25, and 198. 4. Kiewe and Houck, A Shining City on a Hill, passim. 5. This was the formal title of Reagan’s 1984 campaign speech, better known as “Morning in America.” See www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU-IBF8nwSY (retrieved 12 June 2012). 6. Jeffords, Hard Bodies, p. 25. 7. Jack Nolan of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, quoted in Prince, A New Pot of Gold, p. 341. 8. For a summary of Reagan’s radicalization of the Republican party, see Nadel, “1983: Movies and Reaganism,” p. 82.

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9. Ronald Reagan, quoted in Rogin, Ronald Reagan, The Movie, p. 12. 10. Hall, “The Empire Strikes Back,” p. 75. 11. Robert Ryan, quoted in Ross, Hollywood Left and Right, pp. 179–180. 12. Pat Buchanan, quoted in Steve V. Roberts, “Washington Talk: The Presidency; Return to the Land of the Gipper,” New York Times, 9 March 1988, www.nytimes.com/1988/03/09/us/washington-talk-the-presidency-return-to-the -land-of-the-gipper.html (accessed 15 December 2013). For examples of the numerous occasions on which Reagan publicly recounted versions of Hollywood scripts as if they were actual fact, see Prince, Visions of Empire, p. 15; Roger Simon, “Ronald Reagan: Forever Young,” Politico, 1 May 2007, www.politico.com/news/stories /0507/3792.html (accessed 15 December 2013). 13. Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War, p. 268. 14. “Revenues, Outlays, Deficits, Surpluses, and Debt Held by the Public, 1971 to 2010, in Billions of Dollars,” Congressional Budget Office, Budget and Economic Outlook: Historical Budget Data, www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles /ftpdocs/120xx/doc12039/historicaltables[1].pdf (accessed 17 June 2012). 15. “Rachel Maddow Tangles with Wall Street Journal’s Steve Moore over Reagan Tax Cuts and Income Inequality,” Tampa Bay Times: Politifact.com, 3 February 2011, www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/feb/03/rachel-maddow /rachel-maddow-tanglles-wall-street-journals-steve-/ (accessed 12 June 2012); “Person by Poverty Status in 1969, 1979, 1989, by State,” Poverty, US Department of Commerce, US Census Bureau, www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/census /1960/cphl162.html (accessed 12 June 2012). 16. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the National Association of Evangelicals,” Orlando, Florida, 8 March 1983, Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library, www.nationalcenter.org/ReaganEvilEmpire1983.html (accessed 2 June 2012). 17. Base and Haslam, The Movies of the Eighties, p. 7. 18. Hall and Neale, Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters, p. 1. 19. Ibid., p. 228. 20. See Prince, A New Pot of Gold, p. 79, Table 2.7. 21. Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, p. 191. 22. Ibid., p. 192. 23. Prince, A New Pot of Gold, p. xii. 24. Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, p. 192. 25. Prince, A New Pot of Gold, p. xii. 26. Ibid., pp. 60–64. 27. Calculated from the data in “Top Grossing Films of 1980–1989,” Stats-aMania, www.teako170.com/box80-89.html (retrieved 12 January 2013). 28. Ryan and Kellner, Camera Politica, p. 160. 29. See R. Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, pp. 173–174. 30. A theme reinforced by the way in which The Big Chill echoed the underlying concept of John Sayles’s more edgy The Return of the Secausus 7 (1980). 31. Geopolitical imagination is defined as “a person’s (or society’s) constellation of taken-for-granted truths about the world and the way in which power should be utilized in that world” (Dittmer, Popular Culture, Geopolitics, and Identity, p. 19). 32. National Security Decision Directive No. 75, 17 January 1983, par. 1, www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdd/nsdd-75.pdf (accessed 12 December 2014), emphasis added. 33. Suid, Guts and Glory, p. xiii.

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34. Kern, “MIAs, Myth and Macho Magic,” p. 49. 35. “Robert Caro: A Life with LBJ and the Pursuit of Power,” The Observer, 10 June 2012, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/10/lyndon-b-johnson-robert-caro -biography (accessed 13 June 2012). 36. Hellman, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam, p. x, emphasis added. 37. Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat, pp. 10–27. 38. Ibid., pp. 14–15. 39. Ibid., pp. 16–18. 40. Ibid., pp. 19–22. 41. Ibid., pp. 22–27. 42. Studlar and Desser, “Never Having to Say You’re Sorry,” p. 103. 43. “Top Grossing Films of 1970–1979,” Stats-a-Mania, www.teako170.com /box70-79.html (accessed 29 October 2011). 44. Quoted in Biskind, “The Vietnam Oscars,” p. 7. See also the review in Just, “Vietnam: The Camera Lies.” 45. Studlar and Desser, “Never Having to Say You’re Sorry,” p. 104. 46. Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War, p. 199. On the notion of the United States as a “marketplace of ideas,” see Abelson, A Capitol Idea; Gagnon, “Invading Your Hearts and Minds.” 47. See Paul Bond, “Sylvester Stallone: U.S. Apologizes Too Much,” Hollywood Reporter, 20 August 2010, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sylvester-stallone-us -apologizes-too-26898 (accessed 3 April 2011); “Sean Hannity Interviews Sylvester Stallone,” Hannity’s America, Fox News, 27 January 2008, www.youtube.com /watch?v=kpoSL95qqsI (accessed 3 April 2011). 48. “Sean Hannity Interviews Sylvester Stallone.” 49. A regular commentator on the conservative Fox News program Hannity & Colmes, the actor promotes right-wing issues in his blog on the conservative website WorldNetDaily. See also Norris, Black Belt Patriotism. 50. See H. B. Franklin, M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America. 51. The confusingly numbered First Blood (1982); Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985); Rambo III (1988); and Rambo, aka Rambo IV (2008). 52. “Top Grossing Films of 1980–1989.” 53. Ibid. On Rambo toys, see Virtual Toy Chest, Rambo and the Force of Freedom Archive, www.virtualtoychest.com/rambo/rambo.html (accessed 29 October 2011). 54. Jowett and O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion, p. 230. 55. Hall and Neale, Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters, p. 214. 56. B. Franklin, MIA, or Mythmaking in America, p. 141. 57. See the account by his second in command, in Patterson and Tippin, The Heroes Who Fell from Grace. A vocal proponent of conspiracy theories, advocate for the reinstitution of racial segregation, and self-described “Christian patriot,” James “Bo” Gritz ran for US vice president with a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard in 1988 and for president on the white nationalist America First/Populist Party ticket in 1992. 58. Ibid., pp. 40–41 and 210. 59. Gritz, quoted in ibid., p. 233. 60. Gritz, quoted in ibid., p. 239. 61. Gritz, quoted in ibid., p. 132. On the role of the psychic in “Operation Lazarus,” see ibid., pp. 56–58. 62. Ibid., p. 80. 63. Ibid., p. 182.

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64. “Top Grossing Films of 1980–1989.” For the mixed critical response, see Franklin, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America, p. 233. 65. Donovan, Conspiracy Films, p. 21. 66. Studlar and Desser, “Never Having to Say You’re Sorry,” p. 108. 67. “Sean Hannity Interviews Sylvester Stallone.” 68. See Departments of Defense and State, Final Interagency Report of the Reagan Administration, quoted in H. B. Franklin, M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America, p. 16. 69. Prince, A New Pot of Gold, p. 317. 70. Franklin, M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America, p. 7. 71. Studlar and Desser, “Never Having to Say You’re Sorry,” p. 108. 72. Prince, A New Pot of Gold, p. 331. 73. Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence. 74. National Security Decision Directive No. 75, 17 January 1983, par. 1, www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdd/nsdd-75.pdf (accessed 12 December 2014). 75. “Sean Hannity Interviews Sylvester Stallone,” Hannity’s America, Fox News, 27 January 2008, www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpoSL95qqsI (accessed 3 April 2011). 76. Bowen, “Strange Hells,” p. 229. See also p. 230. 77. Mark Feldt, “The Most Successful Chuck Norris Movies,” Knoji, n.d., http://tv-movie-reviews.knoji.com/the-most-successful-chuck-norris-movies/ (accessed 27 January 2013). 78. “Slate’s Hollywood Career-O-Matic,” Slate, 6 June 2011, www.slate.com /articles/arts/culturebox/2011/06/slates_hollywood_careeromatic.html (accessed 27 January 2013). 79. Patrick Runkle, “Cannon Films: The Life, Death and Resurrection,” www.cannonfilms.com/cannon1.html and www.cannonfilms.com/cannon2.htm (accessed 27 November 2012). 80. Prince, A New Pot of Gold, p. 151. 81. “My neighbor,” quoted by Sean Macaulay, “The Cult of Chuck Norris,” Daily Beast, 6 December 2009, www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2402589/posts (accessed 27 January 2013). 82. Ibid. 83. See King, Heroes in Hard Times, pp. ix and 12–40. 84. See Spector, The Truth About Chuck Norris; Spector, Chuck Norris Cannot Be Stopped; Spector, The Last Stand of Chuck Norris. 85. “Top Grossing Films of 1980–1989.” 86. Douglass Barnett, “War Movie Mondays: Missing in Action,” The Flick Cast, 16 May 2011, http://theflickcast.com/2011/05/16/war-movie-mondays-missing -in-action/ (accessed 27 January 2013). 87. Iron Eagle, Cobra Mission, Ultimax Force, The Hanoi Hilton, Rambo III, Bat*21, and Nam Angels. A series of exploitation flicks also depicted female avengers rescuing women from brutal male captors: Caged Fury and Savage Island, the latter featuring The Exorcist’s Oscar-nominated actress Linda Blair. 88. Raskin and LeVan, Democracy’s Shadow, p. 5. 89. George H. W. Bush, quoted in George Herring, “America and Vietnam: The Unending War,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 2 (Winter 1991−1992), www.foreignaffairs .com/articles/47440/george-c-herring/america-and-vietnam-the-unending-war (accessed 7 January 2013).

8 National Security for the “New World Order”

In many ways, today’s threats are harder to observe and to understand than the one that was presented by the USSR. . . . Yes, we have slain a large dragon, but we now live in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes, and in many ways the dragon was easier to keep track of.1 War is show business, that’s why we are here.2 The end of the long Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union induced something akin to euphoria among some American analysts. For one neoconservative, this “triumph of the West, of the Western idea” marked nothing less than the “End of History”; for another, it signaled the onset of “the unipolar moment” in global power relations.3 Paradoxically, however, this victory induced a sharp identity crisis in the national security state. For over four decades, the Soviet Union had been both the raison d’être and “the allconsuming focus of US national security.” The emergence, expansion, doctrine, strategy, capabilities, tactics, practices, and policies of the national security state “made sense only with reference to the Soviet threat.”4 Having singularly failed to anticipate the disappearance of the very foundation on which it had been erected, the entire US national security enterprise found itself “at a moment of re-creation,” obliged to rethink national security and “American leadership on the international stage” in an entirely new and highly complex context.5 This was rendered more complex by a new “multi-centric world of transnational actors ranging from multinational corporations to terrorist groups” and by the onset of the information and communication revolution that “altered the place of time and distance in the consideration of fundamental US interests.”6

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At the core of these debates stood four interrelated questions: On what notion of threat was a post–Cold War national security doctrine to be based? How was this to be translated into grand strategy? What was to be the role and mission of preponderant US military power and its Cold War– era alliances? Were the existing institutions, operational modalities, capabilities, and practices of the national security state adequate for this new and nebulous security environment? In this chapter, we explore Hollywood’s portrayal of the new security context facing the United States and focus particularly on the role of the blockbuster movie in imagining new threats, foes, and crises and the role of the national security state in dealing with them.

The United States in the 1990s Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, America’s burgeoning economic anxieties appeared to overshadow the cult of threat sustaining the Cold War security imaginary. Yale historian Paul Kennedy enjoyed a surprise 1988 bestseller with a lengthy tome arguing that American “strategic overreach,” combined with the shift of pole of the global economy to the Pacific Rim, condemned the United States to decline.7 While scholars probed the likely trajectory of global politics “after [US] hegemony,” Jeremiahs howled that the United States was being stealthily overwhelmed by a calculating Japanese hi-tech behemoth.8 The 1992 presidential election appeared to confirm that economic fears trumped national security. Despite having presided over the final collapse of the Soviet enemy and America’s lightning victory in the 1991 Gulf War, President George H. W. Bush lost his job to a man who had avoided military service during the Vietnam War and whose own presidential campaign was rooted in the message, “It’s the economy, stupid!” However the 1990s soon turned into “a period that most Americans experienced as both peaceful and prosperous.”9 The US gross domestic product (GDP) grew from $5.8 trillion in 1990 to $9.4 trillion by the end of the decade.10 The communications revolution and dot-com boom were said to promise permanent US economic preponderance and ever increasing consumption. After decades of budget deficits, the Clinton administration produced four consecutive budget surpluses. Coupled with late 1990s Asian financial woes, this seemed to validate claims that “soft power” guaranteed long US global leadership.11 By the year 2000, the “received opinion” of the global elite gathered in Davos held that “no one else could ever catch up” with the United States.12 Yet all was not rosy in America. Fifty-three people died in the Rodney King race riots in Los Angeles, and racial sentiment was further polarized by the murder trial and acquittal of black celebrity O. J. Simpson. Security

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anxieties soon crept back into the national debate. Highlighting human savagery reminiscent of World War II, the bloody Bosnian War (1992–1995) and 1994 Rwanda genocide engendered much Beltway soul-searching over the purpose of overwhelming US military preponderance.13 As the botched 1993 Somalia peacekeeping mission ended with American corpses being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, even this preponderance seemed less certain.14 A wave of terrorist actions at home and abroad further underscored US vulnerabilities. The February 1993 bombing of New York City’s World Trade Center, that of US Air Force housing in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, in June 1996, and that of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 1998 were the most deadly strikes ascribed to Islamic fundamentalists. And the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was the most devastating of a series of domestic terrorist actions by right-wing insurgents. A December 1997 report of the National Defense Panel warned of a growing terrorist threat, and terrorism featured prominently in four of the six threats identified in the 1999 Clinton National Security Doctrine.15 All of these uncertainties amplified the culture wars over national identity and the national community. Americans remained profoundly divided over issues such as race, abortion, immigration, feminism, homosexuality, gun rights, education, religion and the separation of church and state, the role of the courts, and freedom of speech. The rise of a fundamentalist Christian coalition as the dominant force in the Republican party brought a darker tone to the culture wars. Vilifying Bill Clinton in a televised speech to the 1992 Republican National Convention, the failed candidate for the nomination and former Reagan White House communications director, Pat Buchanan, declared holy war against Americans who did not share his fundamentalist worldview: “Friends, this election is about . . . what we believe and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall one day be as was the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America.”16 Insisting that only “force, rooted in justice and backed by moral courage” could stop “the mob,” Buchanan lectured Republicans that “we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.” It was a small step from such rhetoric to action targeting fellow citizens as enemies to be killed in Buchanan’s jihad for “the nation we still call God’s country.”17

The View from Tinsel Town These multiple post–Cold War insecurities found expression in numerous A-list movies. Philip Kaufman’s Rising Sun warned of a creeping Japanese takeover of the US economy. Fear of the technological revolution featured in Ghost in the Machine, Virtuosity, The Truman Show, and The Matrix.

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Apocalyptic destruction loomed from outer space in Independence Day, Armageddon, and Deep Impact—and was parodied in Mars Attacks and Men in Black. Waterworld conjured up the triumph of humanist individualism in a Hobbesian world following environmental apocalypse, while the American heartland was devastated by monster tornados in Twister. A slew of movies painted the collapse of the USSR as a moment pregnant with a new holocaust stemming from terrorists packing weapons of mass destruction (True Lies, 12 Monkeys, Executive Decision, Escape from L.A., Air Force One, The Peacemaker, The World Is Not Enough). Permanent war against Islamic terrorism was predicted in The Siege. Films such as Passenger 57 and Die Hard: With a Vengeance featured international terrorists, while Irish Republican terrorism was denounced in Patriot Games, Blown Away, The Devil’s Own, and Ronin. The imagined threat was not always external. Homegrown terrorists provided the hook in Speed and Arlington Road. Concerns over an out-of-control national security state were reflected in movies depicting CIA plots against the president, and rogue military or intelligence officers either threatening mass destruction or overriding or conspiring against constitutional liberties (JFK; Die Hard 2, Crimson Tide, Broken Arrow, and The Rock; A Few Good Men, The Siege, and Enemy of the State). America’s overwhelming Gulf War victory generated just two ambiguous films. While Courage Under Fire endorses American heroism and Three Kings ultimately depicts the United States as an altruistic global protector, their take is light years away from the simplicities of John Wayne and Sylvester Stallone. It fell to Steven Spielberg to resurrect the heroic American combat movie with Saving Private Ryan. Partisan politics were parodied in liberal films such as Bob Roberts and Bulworth while Bill Clinton’s controversial presidency and sexual peccadilloes prompted several movies mixing White House sex, presidential ethics, and the ideological divide (Dave, The American President, Primary Colors, The Contender).18 The boundaries between reel politics and political reality were best blurred in Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog. Described by the New York Times as a “poison-tipped political satire that’s as scarily plausible as it is swift, hilarious and impossible to resist,” the film recounts the efforts of spin doctor (Robert De Niro) and Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman) to distract attention from a presidential sex scandal through fabricating a nonexistent war in Albania.19 American masculinity was a hot button issue. While the übermacho warrior hero featured in numerous box office hits (e.g., Die Hard 2, Rocky V, Cliffhanger, True Lies, Die Hard: With a Vengeance, Mission Impossible), Hollywood cautiously backed away from the Rambo-esque simplicities of the Reagan decade. The retreat was led by the actor whose signature 1970s and 1980s roles projected an image of the ideal American male as “violent . . . not only tall and strong but frequently brutal.”20 Clint East-

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wood won his first Oscar with a denunciation of the mythology of the western and America’s endemic violence in Unforgiven. He then directed and/or starred in a range of movies that skewered various male frailties (In the Line of Fire, A Perfect World, Absolute Power, The Bridges of Madison County). For his part, Michael Douglas specialized in characters grappling with white middle-class male vulnerabilities and agency panic (Basic Instinct, Falling Down, Disclosure, Wonder Boys). The 1980s had seen major releases warily probing race relations (A Soldier’s Story, The Color Purple, Glory, Mississippi Burning, Driving Miss Daisy). Written or directed by whites, all of these situated America’s racial problems in the past to present a largely optimistic view of improving race relations. Mississippi Burning actually inverted the national security state’s real efforts to delay desegregation with its absurd depiction of the FBI leading the 1960s civil rights struggle. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing shattered such smug notions. Lee’s subsequent take on interracial sex (Jungle Fever), his biopic of militant American black leader Malcolm X, and his take on the racialized war on drugs (Clockers) pushed the cinematic discussion over race into new territory. Moreover, the studios cautiously backed other black directors whose films explored unsettling aspects of black American life (Boyz n the Hood, New Jack City, Waiting to Exhale, How Stella Got Her Groove Back). Black actors like Denzel Washington, Will Smith, Morgan Freeman, Samuel Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, Angela Bassett, Eddie Murphy, Wesley Snipes, Halle Berry, Laurence Fishburne, and Danny Glover were either cast in roles that previously would have gone to white actors, or played fully realized (and sexual) black characters rather than the emasculated ones inflicted on pioneers like Sidney Poitier. Smith and Washington each carried several of the decade’s biggest blockbusters.

Globalization and the “End of Hollywood” The political economy of Hollywood evolved significantly during the 1990s. As domestic box office receipts rose by 45 percent, overall industry revenues grew “by an astonishingly high compound annual growth rate of around 9 per cent.”21 However, the triple impact of rocketing salaries, expensive marketing campaigns, and expanding use of digital technologies more than doubled the average costs of making and marketing a Hollywood movie. By the end of the 1990s, a movie budgeted at $100 million needed to earn $250 million simply to break even, and industry profitability “remained uncertain.”22 The studios adopted various strategies to offset soaring costs. Risks and costs were shared through international coproductions and, by 1999, almost 40 percent of Hollywood movies were being shot outside of Amer-

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ica.23 Mounting “a much more aggressive pursuit of international audiences,” Hollywood’s share of the global movie market doubled during the 1990s. Foreign box office earnings outstripped the domestic box office by 1994, and the following year ancillary earnings from abroad (video, etc.) surpassed those from the foreign box office.24 This globalizing trend was further driven by a round of mergers, acquisitions, and consolidations that were all focused on profiting from synergies between globalized entertainment and media enterprises. By the end of the decade, global media and entertainment giants controlled all the studios.25 This fundamentally changed the nature and role of the studios and of the industry itself. Most of these new media and entertainment empires brought together filmmaking, newspapers, magazines, broadcast and cable TV, the music industry, video and DVD rentals and sales, and theme parks. With consumers “making choices on everything from french fries to pajamas based on [filmed] entertainment properties,” each media and entertainment empire could now multiply the spillover effects of the synergies between their various areas of activity.26 With the actual process of filmmaking increasingly contracted out to independent production companies, creative control “passed from the studio to the market” and the studios became “more a financier, coordinator, and distributor of production than a genuine factory for films.” As decisions about film production shifted from Hollywood to corporate boardrooms in New York, Tokyo, and Paris, “in reality, there is no more ‘Hollywood.’”27 American movies produced for this globalized market generally fell into two broad categories. The first were aimed at one or another niche market. Such movies dominated the Academy Awards during the decade and several were major commercial hits (Pulp Fiction, The English Patient, Good Will Hunting, Shakespeare in Love). However, the bulk of 1990s Hollywood films were action movies, with the blockbuster as the preferred vehicle.

The Transportation Business Originally coined to describe monster British World War II bombs designed to raze an entire city block, the term blockbuster came to refer to any “play or film that was enormously successful, or failing that, just enormous.”28 In Hollywood parlance, a blockbuster is a technically polished, big-budget, hitech, high-action film featuring major stars usually playing cardboard characters. Designed to appeal to the widest possible global audience, blockbusters rely upon “a simple succession of ‘wow’ episodes, and . . . Manichean struggles between good and evil.”29 Their lowest common denominator narrative is carried along by the spectacular and mainly violent visual and sound effects, which amplify fears and anxieties deeply

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rooted in US culture. This visual and aural overkill seeks to overwhelm the audience through sensation and emotion. According to producer Jerry Bruckeimer, known as Hollywood’s “Mr. Blockbuster,” “We’re in the transportation business: we transport you from one place to another.”30 Blockbusters equally depend on expensive saturation advertising campaigns and simultaneous release on hundreds or even thousands of screens in the United States and abroad. Often conceived to be repeated in sequel after sequel, they are linked to a wide range of “mass marketed products . . . the hubs of huge wheels of tied-in products and affiliated sponsors.” As such, blockbuster movies “become the culture to the extent that they are giant engines of the consumer economy . . . insinuated in myriad ways into the lived texture of daily life.”31 Fifty-seven summer blockbusters were among the 104 movies whose domestic box office earnings surpassed $100 million in the 1990s.32 Yet several blockbusters equally failed to recoup their production costs (these include Waterworld, Batman and Robin, Speed 2, The 13th Warrior) and, by the end of the decade, the blockbuster was falling victim to Hollywood’s knee-jerk habit of searching for copycat success. Whereas the release of films like Jaws or the first Star Wars movie had been “a major event that took place a few times a year,” by the 1990s the blockbuster had morphed “into something that audiences have come to expect weekly.”33 Simply to retain audience interest in this now saturated market, filmmakers turned to ever more spectacular and expensive special effects. This annual “blockbuster demolition derby”34 began to undermine its own business model. The failure of the 1998 Godzilla to launch the expected franchise led to “cutbacks in the production of high-budget special effects movies.”35 Every blockbuster raised aspects of looming post–Cold War security anxieties in ways that rooted these in Americanist mythology while rendering them accessible to a global audience. Sometimes this was done by drawing on non-American cultural traditions. Thus, the top hit of 1996 and Hollywood’s fourth biggest money earner of the 1990s was Roland Emmerich’s, Independence Day. The movie essentially retells H. G. Wells’s novel War of the Worlds—which was itself a recasting in science fiction mode of The Battle of Dorking, the founding text of the late nineteenth century, and largely British, wave of “invasion literature” sparked by concern over growing German power.36 Independence Day combines fear of a technologically superior Other to project US manifest destiny and universalism as a young US president—channeling Luke Skywalker in the first Star Wars movie—leads a desperate Fourth of July air force mission to destroy the alien mothership that is about to exterminate the human race. In the remainder of this chapter, we focus on the differing ways in which both these security anxieties and this or that institution and practice of the national security state were portrayed in three 1990s blockbusters.

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Who, and Where, Is the Enemy? Although they enjoyed varying box office success, Michael Bay’s The Rock (1996), Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State (1998), and Edward Zwick’s The Siege (1998) share two elements that distinguish them from most shoot’em-up, hi-tech mayhem blockbusters. Each questions the appropriate balance between the imperatives of national security and the constitutionally guaranteed liberties of US citizens, and each identifies the national security state itself as a potential, or real, threat to American democracy. Never Hesitate

The Rock was Hollywood’s fourth top-grossing movie of 1996 and director Michael Bay’s second feature film and his second collaboration with producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer.37 As “the very embodiment of brash, boisterous [nineteen]eighties yahooism,”38 Bruckheimer and Simpson had previously produced such monster hits as Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, and Crimson Tide and the relative flop, Days of Thunder. After The Rock, Bay went on to direct a series of signature blockbusters, several in collaboration with Bruckheimer and all of which were marked by the director’s close relationship with the military (Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, and the Transformers trilogy). Answering his own question of “why does the military let me use their stuff?” Bay concluded that it was because “they look good at what they do in my movies . . . I really admire them for the service they do for their country.”39 The Rock hinges on a form of threat featured in several post–Cold War films—weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists or mad or bad people. Marine brigadier general Francis Hummel (Ed Harris) and his ultrasecret black ops US marine force recon unit take over San Francisco’s abandoned island prison, Alcatraz, after the federal government refuses to acknowledge or compensate their sacrifices. Holding eighty-one tourists hostage, Hummel and his marines threaten to annihilate San Francisco with deadly VX gas warheads unless they are paid $100 million. The unlikely heroes who foil these renegades are an illegally imprisoned former British Special Air Services (SAS) officer, John Patrick Mason (Sean Connery)— “the only man ever to have escaped from Alcatraz”—and an FBI chemical and biological weapons geek, Stanley Goodspeed (Nicholas Cage). Both are coerced into joining a US Navy Sea, Air and Land Forces (SEALs) team sent to rescue the hostages and disable the VX gas warheads. Though Hummel’s men kill all the SEALs, Goodspeed ultimately defuses the warheads and allows Mason to escape after FBI director James Womack (John Spencer) reneges on a promised pardon. The film ends with Goodspeed recovering the microfilm Mason had stolen from the FBI and asking his new wife if she wants to know who really killed JFK.

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The Rock makes ample use of the convention pioneered by George Lucas in the first Star Wars film of strip-mining multiple cinematic genres. This is at one and the same time a vigilante and vengeance movie, a combat film, an intergenerational buddy and mentorship flick where a wisecracking older hero coaches an immature nerd into adult masculinity, a conspiracy movie about the abuse of power, and a thriller based on the trope of the ticking time bomb. Plagiarizing the 1968 Bullitt trope of a car chase over San Francisco’s hills, the movie equally regurgitates Simpson’s and Bruckheimer’s own Beverly Hills Cop conceit of the car chase as an orgiastic destruction derby, which wipes out a Ferrari, a Humvee, numerous police vehicles and parked cars, a cable car, and “half the city.” The film’s scattershot, all-things-to-allmen approach reflects its ideological content. The Rock goes to great lengths to present domestic threat in such a way as to feed all possible ideological orientations (with the notable exception of feminism). Its appeal to flag-waving conservatives begins by depicting General Hummel as a heroic ultrapatriot, a man of honor: “a great soldier” says the US president; “the greatest battalion commander of the Vietnam War” declares the commander of the SEALs team. Echoing Rambo: First Blood II and Missing in Action, The Rock equally exploits the pet conservative claim that a pusillanimous federal government abandoned its military heroes in enemy territory and consistently lied to their families. “It stops here!” vows Hummel at the beginning of the movie. He and his marines launch their rogue action because, as the US president admits, they have been “ignored, abandoned or marginalized” by the “lies” of the federal government. Hummel insists that he is no traitor: what he does “is about justice”; he and his men will eventually be considered true patriots. Here, Hummel gives cinematic life to Pat Buchanan’s insistence that “force, rooted in justice and backed by moral courage” was needed for conservatives to “take back” their country.40 Yet when his bluff is called, and the ransom money is not paid, Hummel shows that he is no mass murderer by calling off the missile strike on San Francisco. However, he is thwarted by the greed of some of his men who kill him. The Rock echoes another peeve of America’s right-wing militias following the Waco and other standoffs of the 1990s—their hatred of the FBI and federal authority. Its real villain is creepy FBI director Womack, who is ultimately responsible for most of the bad things that happen. Womack has illegally kept Mason in prison for thirty years—“longer than Nelson Mandela”—because, in 1962, this British operative had stolen a microfilm containing sensitive information about American and European leaders held by then FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. Mason refused to give up the microfilm because, as he tells Goodspeed, he would have been “suicided” the instant he did so. Authorizing a pardon for Mason if the Briton shows the SEALs team how to get into Alcatraz, Womack tears up the signed federal document without Mason’s knowledge because “this man knows our most inti-

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mate secrets from the last half-century.” Here, too, the movie caters to wacky conspiracy theories since, according to Womack, these “intimate secrets” include the “alien landing at Roswell”—the recurring allegations that the federal government had long covered up a 1947 crash of an alien spacecraft at Roswell, New Mexico, and what believers argue is the consequent presence of extraterrestrials on Earth.41 Mason and Hummel are in fact each other’s mirror image. Patriotic warriors of a secret arm of a national security state, each—despite immense personal courage, character, and sacrifice—is abandoned by his own Judas-like government. Each seeks vengeance against the national security state that had created and then wronged him. Mason starts off trying to kill Womack and then escapes, only to be recaptured and forced to join the SEALs mission against Alcatraz in order to protect his daughter from FBI reprisals. The juxtaposition of these wronged übersoldiers also enables The Rock to cater to the ideological prejudices of a liberal or left audience. Hummel and his team embody fears that the main post–Cold War threat to the United States and its values came from an out-of-control military establishment and the weapons of mass destruction it monopolized. Stripped of their specious claims to honor and justice, the marines have become mere mercenaries, paid killers seeking only a big payday. The movie equally criticizes the web of secrecy sustaining the national security state. Present implicitly in the issue of the legitimacy of covert operations, this is most evident in the person of Womack. The FBI director’s illegal thirty-year detention of Mason to protect “our most intimate secrets” has gone way beyond violating the Constitution. Mason’s very identity has been erased; “he does not exist,” we are told. Here, The Rock implicitly poses the classic question, Who will guard the guardians? This highlighting of liberal fear of the unchecked power of the national security state is further seen in the standoff when Hummel’s men trap the SEALs team. Though endorsing Hummel’s outrage at his own treatment, the SEALs’ Commander Anderson (Michael Biehn) refuses to stand his men down, telling Hummel “I swore to protect this country against all of its enemies, foreign and domestic,” clearly implying that Hummel now falls in the latter category. Anderson appeals to Hummel’s men: “You are under oath as United States Marines! Have you forgotten that? We all have shipmates we remember. Some were shit on and pissed on by the Pentagon, but that doesn’t give you the right to mutiny!” The subsequent slaughter of all the SEALs shows that Hummel’s rogue marines have gone over to the dark side, leaving it to the amateur warrior Goodspeed and the aged political prisoner Mason to save the day. The Rock repeatedly evokes the fact that each member of this unlikely combo is “an educated man,” fully versant with the classics—the sort of people despised by the populist right as part of an effete elite that allegedly

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neglects US security. Their ultimate triumph over both Hummel’s trained killers and Womack’s Machiavellian national security state is yet another wink at liberal perspectives on 1990s American security anxieties—education and intelligence trump raw firepower. The film’s bows to liberalism (though not feminism) are equally evident in its depiction of masculinity. Its only female character, Goodspeed’s girlfriend, Clara Pestalozzi (Vanessa Marcil), is a clinging, hectoring vamp intent on forcing Goodspeed into marriage. Goodspeed wants to have nothing to do with what he calls “the marriage police” and tells the pregnant Clara that “anyone who is even considering thinking about bringing a child into this world is coldly considering an act of cruelty.” At first terrified of fatherhood, Goodspeed comes to welcome the idea. He further demonstrates this acceptance by saving Mason from an embarrassing arrest in front of the man’s own daughter. After the slaughter of the SEALs, Mason decides to help Goodspeed disable the deadly missiles because “I didn’t want your child growing up without a father.” So, accepting their role as nurturing fathers, real men can overcome killers. Since Hummel feels free to undertake this mission only after his wife dies, he and his marines embody the dangers of the warrior masculinity unchecked by feminine influence or the responsibilities of fatherhood. Such nods to the left notwithstanding, The Rock is by no means a liberal movie. At best, it poses questions about where to draw the line between national security and limits on state power. Its orgiastic display of fast cars, deadly military toys, hi-tech, and derring-do mixes drawn-out and deafeningly loud violence as mere overwhelming spectacle with the odd wisecrack from a world-wise Mason and the weirdo Goodspeed. Its lazy dependence on inverted forms of almost all of the tropes of the myth of the American war story (see pp. 30–32) is clearly aimed at male juveniles, gun fetishists, and those who get off on technology, bling, and general mayhem. The Rock’s evocation of the captivity narrative relies less on the eightyone hostages held by Hummel’s team—who are given little screen time— than on its Rambo-esque evocation of the missing in action of Hummel’s team, and then of the renegade general’s efforts to hold hostage the population of the San Francisco Bay Area. Though initially presented as victims, Hummel’s marines turn into murderous aggressors. The ambush and last stand of the SEALs team equally authorize the righteous slaughter of all of Hummel’s renegades, which itself turns into victory and vindication for the film’s real victim, Mason. And The Rock is about little if not the fetish of weapons technology—both as a means of defense and as a source of threat. The core ideological message echoes more of the libertarian individualism of what would become the Tea Party than the preoccupations of American liberals or the left. Its snide homophobic digs at a gay hair stylist aside, this is most evident in the life lessons that Mason teaches Goodspeed over the course of the film. To survive in a world “being Fedex-ed to Hell

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on a handcart,” the true American male—he who aspires to be among the “winners [who] go home and fuck the prom queen”—can rely neither on the duplicitous federal government nor the out-of-control and fallible national security state. Rather, he must depend on himself alone. And to do so, he must become a warrior—master the use of weapons, overcome his scruples about the use of violence, and, as Mason twice instructs Goodspeed, “never hesitate” to use deadly force. It’s Not Paranoia if They’re Really After You!

Two years after The Rock, Jerry Bruckheimer teamed up with another of his favorite directors to make a further national security state blockbuster. Enemy of the State was Tony Scott’s fifth film with Bruckheimer. Their four previous collaborations had together grossed “over $1 billion at the box office,” and Enemy of the State was the fourteenth top-earning movie of 1998.42 Featuring Oscar winners Jason Robards, Jon Voight, and Gene Hackman, it starred one of the two black actors who carried several 1990s blockbusters—Will Smith of the wildly profitable Independence Day and Men in Black and the less successful Wild Wild West.43 Enemy of the State opens with the special advisor to the deputy director of the National Security Agency, Thomas Brian Reynolds (Jon Voight), confronting Republican congressman and committee chairman Phil Hammersley (Jason Robards) in a park. When Hammersley angrily rejects Reynolds’s pleas to abandon his opposition to the invasive Telecommunications Security and Privacy Act, Reynolds has the congressman killed. However, Reynolds soon discovers that a hidden camera installed by bird researcher Daniel Zavitz (Jason Lee) has inadvertently filmed the murder. Reynolds sends his team to track down and kill both Zavitz and the left-wing journalist whom the researcher had contacted about his film of the murder. Minutes before his death, the fleeing Zavitz fortuitously bumps into a college acquaintance, labor lawyer, Robert Clayton Dean (Will Smith), who is himself involved in a conflict with a Mafia boss. Unbeknownst to Dean, Zavitz drops the film tape into one of the lawyer’s shopping packages. The rest of the movie relates Dean’s frantic efforts to evade the attempts of Reynolds’s men to kill him and ruin his reputation and marriage. He is ultimately aided by former National Security Agency operative “Brill” (Gene Hackman) who has been on the run from the agency since 1980. Made fifteen years before anyone had heard of Edward Snowden, the movie focuses on the threat to Americans and their democracy from the perfect society of control created by the national security state’s ever more invasive and automated hi-tech surveillance of everything that moves.44 Reynolds’s pursuit first of Zavitz and then of Dean makes clear that nobody can escape Big Brother: every step anyone takes can be tracked by surveil-

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lance devices installed all over everyday sites of urban and global life. Evoking the title of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel depicting totalitarian surveillance of daily life, Brill tells Dean: The government has been in bed with the entire telecommunications industry since the ’40s. They have infected everything. They can get into your bank statements, computer files, emails, listen to your telephone calls, every wire, every airwave. The more technology you use, the easier it is for them to keep tabs on you. It’s a Brave New World out there. . . . They’ve got over 100 satellites looking down on us.

These were highly current issues at the time of the making of Enemy of the State. Following the report of the Congressional Commission on Government Secrecy, bills challenging the national security state’s culture of secrecy were presented to the Senate and House of Representatives in 1997 (Government Secrecy Act of 1997) and to the Senate in 1999 (Government Secrecy Reform Act), though neither came to a vote.45 Philip Melanson reminds us that “the definition of legitimate secrecy is a subject of ideological debate and clashing priorities (national security versus the public’s right to know).”46 While critical of the surveillance society it depicts, Enemy of the State has Reynolds present a justification for such intrusive power in terms of the national security state’s claim to have privileged knowledge of the threat to the United States: “This is the most powerful nation on earth and therefore the most hated. And you and I know what the average citizen does not: that we are at war 24 hours of every day.” Though better made and more credible than The Rock, Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State wears its political message on its sleeve. The only arguments that the movie makes in favor of the surveillance society are put in the mouths its most despicable characters (Reynolds and Congressman Sam Albert). Their murderous stratagems are ultimately thwarted by a lovable, wisecracking good guy victim, lawyer Robert Dean, who stands for exactly that “average citizen” whom Reynolds so despises (though Dean is a highly privileged middle-class one). Before being caught in the National Security Agency maw, Dean spontaneously agrees with the claim made by Congressman Albert to (the real) Larry King that “when buildings start blowing up, peoples’ priorities change.” However, Dean quickly withdraws when corrected by his wife, Carla (Regina King), a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. And Dean soon learns just how arbitrary, invasive, and murderous is the power of the national security state, as it systematically sets out to get into and destroy his life. The message of what happens to Dean is thrice rubbed in by the film’s conclusion. Firstly, a government spokesman states on TV that “we always knew that we had to monitor our enemies. We’ve also come to realize that we need to monitor the monitors.” This elicits an exasperated riposte from

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Carla Dean: “Well who is going to monitor the monitors of the monitors?” Secondly, Enemy of the State appropriates the oracular authority of the Larry King TV show to depict King (playing himself) questioning the fictional Congressman Albert on “where do we draw the line between the protection of national security and the protection of civil liberties, particularly the sanctity of my home? . . . You have no right to come into my home!” And thirdly, the last image before the screen goes black shows a surveillance satellite spinning away to spy on other unwitting Americans. A final element in the underlying message closely parallels that of The Rock. To survive in this surveillance society, where the real threat is the national security state itself, the true American male must grow into a warrior. At the outset of Enemy of the State, though an accomplished lawyer able to outsmart the Mafia, Dean is dominated by and afraid of his hectoring wife. Even their young son knows who the real boss of their family is. However, angrily rejecting Brill’s insistence that he disappear to save his skin, Dean replies: “This is my life. I worked hard for it and I won’t give it up! I grew up without a father. I know what that is: I will not allow my family to go through that!” Like Goodspeed in The Rock, Dean rises to the role of protective family patriarch by mastering guerilla warfare against the National Security Agency and the Mafia. He does so by relying on himself, transcending even the expert mentorship of Brill. Enemy of the State appears to be a left or liberal critique of the overzealous and out-of-control national security state. However, as Dean takes back his life from the state and the Mafia and learns to dominate his pushy wife, his journey to warrior agency equally confirms Buchanan’s call to Americans to arm themselves to “take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.”47 The film makes full use of the action, violence, hi-tech special effects, explosions, chase sequences, and product placement common to the blockbuster model to impart this message. Producer Bruckheimer stated that the film is “a combination of The French Connection, Three Days of the Condor and The Fugitive.”48 He seemed to ignore the fact that Enemy of the State clearly draws most heavily on, and is in many ways simply a watered-down continuation of the reflection on surveillance, privacy, and the national security state presented in Francis Ford Coppola’s much starker 1974 surveillance thriller, The Conversation. And casting Gene Hackman as the paranoid surveillance expert is a clear wink to his role in The Conversation. Be that as it may, Enemy of the State is faithful to the blockbuster convention of blending several cinematic genres to attract the widest possible audience. This is at one and the same time a conspiracy film about political corruption; one about the lone hero battling a corrupt system; a buddy flick; a mentor movie; an espionage thriller; a legal drama (the subplot of Dean outwitting Mafia boss Pintero); and even, as Brill tells Dean, a primer in the

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tactics of guerilla warfare. Director Tony Scott includes several other Hollywood and political insider references. To reinforce the message that American liberties are threatened by the national security state’s all pervasive surveillance, Enemy of the State also makes several allusions to hidden surveillance in the Watergate scandal. Reynolds’s nemesis, lawyer Robert Dean, bears the same family name as the White House counsel (John Dean) whose testimony about Richard Nixon’s personal involvement in the Watergate cover-up eventually destroyed Nixon’s presidency. That the murder ordered by Reynolds is filmed by exactly the kind of hidden surveillance that he himself champions likewise echoes the irony of Nixon being brought down by the surveillance system he had secretly ordered installed in the White House. Moreover, three years before September 2001, Enemy of the State eerily foreshadows other national security fears in ways that none involved in its making could have known. When Brill finally discovers the identity of the National Security Agency executive out to kill Dean, he reads out Reynolds’s date of birth: “9/11, 1940.” Enemy of the State might be said to be the quintessential movie about the national security state’s reach and internal logic. In showing how the National Security Agency arbitrarily targets its own citizens, the film both fed on and helped propagate a growing pre-9/11 culture of paranoia in the United States: “The rise of surveillance sets the conditions for the development of conspiracy theories which, in turn, leads to paranoia about surveillance.” In the end, Enemy of the State shows how “a paranoia/conspiracy culture [can function] as a counterpoint to surveillance culture.”49 Choosing the Wrong That’s More Right

If Enemy of the State inadvertently anticipated 9/11 by naming Reynolds’s birth date, imagined threat would coalesce with future reality in Edward Zwick’s 1998 blockbuster, The Siege. Zwick is best known for his Civil War movie on the US Army’s first black regiment, Glory, featuring Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman. During the 1990s, Washington virtually cornered the market in starring roles in serious action or national security movies and those focused on this or that aspect of American identity (Malcolm X, The Pelican Brief, Philadelphia, Virtuosity, Crimson Tide, Devil in a Blue Dress). And before The Siege, Washington carried yet another Edward Zwick film about American heroism, Courage Under Fire. The Siege was the thirty-fourth top-grossing movie of 1998.50 It anticipates both the terrorist threat of the 2000s and the emergence of a post9/11 Hollywood genre in which the geopolitics of the US “global war on terror” (GWOT) would become “rearticulated as a form of entertainment for a mass audience.”51 The Siege also debates the balance between the imperatives of national security and the threat to US freedoms posed by the

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unchecked national security state. Though it deploys its fair share of hi-tech special effects and thrills, and clearly involved close collaboration with the US Army, The Siege stakes a claim to realism by eschewing the more obvious blockbuster pandering to an ideologically diverse audience. This is a straightforward counterterrorism thriller that makes little effort to mix cinematic genres. FBI special agent Anthony Hubbard (Denzel Washington) and his partner, Agent Frank Haddad (Tony Shaloub) are serious professionals who trade neither in the smooth wisecracking charm of John Mason and Robert Dean nor the boyish nervous tics of Stanley Goodspeed. Unlike Dean and Goodspeed, neither have to mature into full warrior manhood; they are already there. The Siege further distinguishes itself from the exclusively male perspective of The Rock and Enemy of the State by placing a strong, independent, and sexual woman—CIA undercover agent Elise Kraft, aka Sharon Bridger (Annette Benning)—at the heart of its narrative. The movie opens with the real images of the destruction of the Khobar Towers US military dormitory in Saudi Arabia by a suicide bomber in 1996. Cutting back and forth to President Clinton proclaiming on TV that the perpetrators will be punished, it shows US Special Forces kidnapping the (fictional) instigator of this attack, Sheikh Achmed Bin Talal (Ahmed Ben Larby) in a Middle East desert. This is done on the initiative and authority of Major General William Devereaux (Bruce Willis) and without the knowledge or assent of the president—whom Devereaux describes as “an expert in covering his own ass.” Islamic extremist terrorists respond with an escalating series of suicide bombings that bring New York City “to its knees,” spreading panic among the population and America’s political class. One senator wants to mobilize the National Guard and “bomb the shit out of them,” though no one knows who, or where, “they” are. As FBI special agent Hubbard’s counterterrorism unit tracks down the terrorists, their task is complicated by the intervention of CIA agent Kraft and General Devereaux, each of whom pursues her/his own agenda. This narrative framework allows The Siege to make several statements about post–Cold War security anxieties and the national security state. The first is that the United States faces a real and pervasive threat from Islamic extremism, one with no end: “It’s just the beginning,” says the last surviving terrorist, “there will never be a last [terrorist] cell.” Secondly, The Siege equally insists that this threat was first brought into being and then amplified by the actions of the American national security state itself. Sheikh Bin Talal and all of the terrorists had originally been recruited and trained by CIA agent Kraft when she ran an operation against Saddam Hussein. But “there was a policy shift” and the CIA abandoned its recruits to be slaughtered by Saddam. Moreover, General Devereaux’s illegal and unauthorized kidnapping and detention of the sheikh aggravates the problem. Now, says the last terrorist to his former CIA handler, the United States has “to learn the consequences of trying to tell the world how to live.” Here, The Siege

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reproduces the historical fact that groups that the United States had financed, trained, armed, and celebrated as freedom fighters in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, or against Saddam, and then abandoned, stood at the core of the al-Qaeda and other terror networks.52 Thirdly, juxtaposing the very different practices of three core national security institutions, The Siege highlights their sharp turf wars and mutual contempt. This enables it to debate how Americans should respond to the threat created by the national security state itself. A straight-arrow hero, FBI special agent Hubbard fervently believes in working within the Constitution. Even after New York is devastated by these attacks, and just as FBI headquarters is about to be turned into Ground Zero, Hubbard pleads before a Senate hearing for “patience and restraint,” that his team be allowed to do their constitutional job. This sharply contradicts CIA agent Kraft’s bleak view that dealing with terrorism is “lose-lose any way you play it”; all the national security state can do is choose “the wrong that is more right.” Her attitude that the end justifies the means is summed up in the following exchange: Hubbard: If I don’t take them [the suspected terrorists] down properly, they hit the streets in two hours. I don’t care if I find Semtex, plutonium, dynamite, self-lighting charcoal briquettes. Without the right warrant, they walk, you understand? Kraft: Listen, they’ve also got a warrant, OK! A warrant from God. They’re ready to die. Your quaint laws they don’t mean shit to these people. Hubbard: Last time I checked, you’re an American citizen. I saw your file, too. I’m sorry that the Cold War is over and all you little masters-of-the-universe CIA types got no work over in Afghanistan or Russia or Iran or whatever the hell it is, but this ain’t the Middle East. Seen through the person of General Devereaux, the US Army Special Forces are the third national security state institution examined in the movie. For Devereaux, the United States is in a “new kind of war” whose imperatives require an unapologetically brutal and repressive response. He despises and lies to the president and has only contempt for the CIA. His approach “anticipates the extreme positions of the Bush-Cheney administration.”53 Though Devereaux pleads with the powers that be to not use the army, what he clearly wants, and gets, is a declaration of martial law. Devereaux’s division then occupies Brooklyn and begins a systematic racially targeted round up of young Muslim men, imprisoning them in a stadium. This explicitly evokes both the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the CIA-inspired behavior of the Chilean army in the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government.

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“I am the law!” Devereaux insists, and he does not hesitate to torture and murder a detainee whom he wrongly believes to hold vital information. The latter third of The Siege contrasts Devereaux’s pitiless approach with the constitutionalism of FBI special agent Hubbard. It does so to examine the issue posed by Larry King at the end of Enemy of the State— where to draw the line between the requirements of national security and constitutionally guaranteed freedoms? As Devereaux and Kraft discuss the efficacy of increasingly brutal forms of torture to extract information from the prisoner Tariq Husseini (Amor Salaam), a scandalized Hubbard articulates the movie’s central message: Are you people insane? . . . What if they [the terrorists] don’t want the Sheik? Have you considered that, huh? What if what they really want is for us to herd children into stadiums like we’re doing? And put soldiers on the streets and have Americans looking over their shoulders. Bend the law; shred the Constitution just a little bit. Because if we torture him then everything that we have bled and fought and died for is over, and then they’ve won! They’ve already won!

Secretly meeting with the president’s chief of staff (Chip Zien), Hubbard insists that “the Army is the threat.” As a veritable melting pot of diverse ethnic groups unite to march across the Brooklyn Bridge to protest martial law, Hubbard and his men go to war against both Devereaux and the remaining terrorist cell. Having destroyed the latter, Hubbard arrests the general, adding to the reading of Devereaux’s Miranda rights: “You have the right not to be tortured, not to be murdered: rights you took away from Tariq Husseini!” Director Edward Zwick described The Siege as concerned with America’s “own latent possibilities of repression, stereotyping and prejudice.”54 His movie is a “cautionary warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism and overreaction on the part of the state,”55 one providing a prescient and overtly liberal perspective on a range of practices that would lie at the core of the national security state’s post-9/11 “global war on terror”—rendition, torture, militarization, and conflict between the security agencies and between the rule of law and the competing claims of national security. The film’s central message is that of Hubbard’s antitorture speech: the United States loses its very identity if it allows fear to bring it to abandon its democratic principles, constitutional liberties, and civilian control not just of the military, but of the entire national security state. In doing so, the movie equally accepts Pat Buchanan’s claim that “a war for the soul of America”56 obliged all Americans to ask, “what [do] we stand for as Americans?” However, rather than following Buchanan’s (and General Devereaux’s) declaration of war against their fellow citizens, The Siege insists that Americans unite to defend their democracy both against terrorists and the excesses of the national security state.

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Conclusion The sudden unanticipated collapse of the Cold War thrust the United States and its national security state into uncharted waters. As Americans sought to navigate their way through new and growing anxieties of the 1990s, Hollywood appeared to take its distance from the ultrapatriotic and militaristic model of America as the victim of the world, which had characterized so much of its product during the preceding decade (see the previous chapter). Even The Rock’s puerile shoot-’em-up antics are light years away from the rigid ideological certainties and rah-rah militarism of 1980s movies like Red Dawn, Uncommon Valor, and the Rambo and Missing in Action series. The three blockbusters that we analyze in this chapter each project something of the ambiguity, uncertainty, and even nuance that reentered American popular culture and debates over national security during the Clinton years. Though they ultimately give different answers to the questions they share—who, and where, is the real post–Cold War enemy? Where should the line be drawn between national security and constitutional liberties? To what extent can Americans trust the national security state to defend rather than undermine fundamental US values and identity?—each opens the possibility of varying replies. Here, we wish to underscore the different meaning each gives to a shared security trope, that of a Mexican standoff. Sometimes used as a metaphor for the nuclear balance of terror during the Cold War, this is a situation in which two or more armed parties of roughly equal firepower confront each other with weapons drawn. The result is a potentially deadly stalemate: the one who lowers his weapon loses, but no clear winner is guaranteed and mutual destruction is possible. The Rock’s Mexican standoff occurs when General Hummel’s men trap the SEALs team. However, the bad guys—the real aggressors—enjoy the tactical advantage of elevated position and kill all the SEALs. This implies two things: that even the special forces of the national security state are mentally and materially ill-equipped to confront the asymmetric threats of the 1990s, and it is thus up to individuals (Mason and Goodspeed) to deal with these threats themselves. The Mexican standoff between National Security Agency thugs and the Mafia in Enemy of the State is engineered by lawyer Robert Dean. Ending with the death of most members of both parties, it reinforces the message that both organized crime and the national security state threaten Americans, and that informed citizens (and the law?) are needed to protect the United States from each. Finally, the Mexican standoff between FBI special agent Hubbard’s team and General Devereaux’s soldiers at the end of The Siege is the sole situation that ends without violence. When Devereaux tells Hubbard that he would not hesitate to order the death of every FBI agent, Hubbard points to the soldiers whose

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weapons are trained on himself and the other federal agents and replies “But they might. Go on General, make murderers out of these young kids!” As Devereaux backs down, The Siege ends up consolidating American belief in the good elements of the national security state—those who, like Hubbard and ordinary soldiers, work within the Constitution and eschew special powers. Despite their differing messages, quality, and degree of commercial success, what makes these films important and revealing is not just their attempt to grapple with the ambiguities and uncertainties of the post–Cold War security environment, nor even their varying degrees of openness to a range of alternative responses. Made during a decade in which the national security state and the US security imaginary went through an identity crisis, The Rock, Enemy of the State, and The Siege show a turn inward that addresses homeland security even before the advent of Homeland Security following 9/11. Depicting a form of domestic terrorism as America’s next structuring enemy, each queries the relevance of a further expansion of the powers of the national security state as it prepares to confront an unidentified, volatile, and diffuse enemy. Each simultaneously asks to what degree is the national security state either now the main threat to American democracy, or at least part of a new existential threat that it had itself partly created? And finally, in raising the issue of how far American citizens can or should trust the national security state and its claim to permanent exceptional powers, each asks, What is it that the United States ultimately stands for? The response of George W. Bush’s administration to the events of 9/11 would stifle the debate that these films had tried to raise. To this extent, they represent a road not taken.

Notes 1. Nominee CIA Director R. James Woolsey at his 1993 Senate confirmation hearing, quoted in Zegart, Spying Blind, p. 212, note 8. 2. Conran “Connie” Brean (Robert De Niro), in Wag the Dog. 3. Fukuyama, “The End of History?” emphasis in original; Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment.” 4. Jablonsky, “The State of the National Security State,” p. 6. 5. Allison and Treverton, Rethinking America’s Security, p. 16. 6. Jablonsky, “The State of the National Security State,” p. 11. 7. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. For earlier works on US decline see, inter alia, Bell, “The End of American Exceptionalism”; Rosencrance, America as an Ordinary Country; Modelski, “The Long Cycle of Global Politics and the Nation-State”; Wallerstein, “Three Instances of Hegemony.” 8. Keohane, After Hegemony; Calleo, Beyond American Hegemony; Prestowitz, Trading Places; Kearns, Zaibatsu America; Tolchin and Tolchin, Selling Our Security.

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9. Holmlund, American Cinema of the 1990s, p. 1. 10. “US Gross Domestic Product GDP History: Fiscal Years 1950 to 2010,” US Government Spending, www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_gdp_history (accessed 22 March 2013). 11. Nye, Bound to Lead. 12. Buruma, “After America,” p. 127. 13. See Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace. 14. This incident was turned into Ridley Scott’s 2001 blockbuster, Black Hawk Down. 15. National Defense Panel, Transforming Defense: National Security in the 21st Century, www.dod.gov/pubs/foi/administration_and_Management/other/902.pdf (accessed 26 December 2014); White House, A National Security Strategy for a New Century, December 1999, https://www.fas.org/man/docs/nssr-1299.pdf (accessed 26 December 2014). These six threats were listed in the following order: regional or state-centered threats, transnational threats, spread of dangerous technologies, failed states, foreign intelligence collection, environmental and health threats. White House, A National Security Strategy for a New Century, pp. 2–3. 16. Patrick J. Buchanan, “Address to the Republican National Convention,” 17 July 1992, American Rhetoric: Online Speech Bank, www.americanrhetoric.com /mp3clips/politicalspeeches/partrickbuchananculturewars.mp3 (accessed 22 March 2013), emphasis added. 17. Ibid. 18. The success of The American President inspired its writer, Aaron Sorkin, to turn a similar set of characters into the award-winning TV series The West Wing, which ran for seven seasons. 19. Janet Maslin, “Wag the Dog: If the Going Gets Tough, Get a Pet, or Start a War,” New York Times, 26 December 1997, www.nytimes.com/library/film/122697 wag-film-review.html (accessed 23 March 2013). 20. Mellen, Big Bad Wolves, p. 2. 21. Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, p. 188. 22. Ibid. 23. D. Franklin, Politics and Film, p. 46. 24. Hall and Neale, Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters, pp. 252–253. 25. For the details, see Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, pp. 189–226. 26. Forbes Magazine, quoted in Prince, A New Pot of Gold, p. xiv. Thus, for example, Viacom could “take a property, such as a popular comic book or film character, and generate revenue streams by marketing it as a movie (Paramount), a cable [TV] presentation (Showtime, The Movie Channel), a book (Simon and Schuster), a video rental (Blockbuster), and a theme park ride (Paramount).” Prince, A New Pot of Gold, p. xiii. 27. Prince, A New Pot of Gold, pp. 46 and 59, emphasis added. 28. Robbie Collin, “Have Blockbuster Movies Lost the Plot?” The Telegraph, 27 April 2012, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/9229656/Have-blockbuster-movieslost-the-plot.html (accessed 26 March 2013). 29. Prince, Visions of Empire, p. 19. On the origins of the blockbuster, see also Sutton and Wogan, Hollywood Blockbusters, chap. 2; Shone, Blockbuster, pp. 1–81. 30. Jerry Bruckheimer, interviewed in “Production Featurette #1,” special features section of the DVD of Enemy of the State. 31. Prince, Visions of Empire, p. 27, emphasis added. 32. Hall and Neale, Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters, p. 307, note 65. 33. Shone, Blockbuster, blurb.

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34. Ibid. 35. Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, p. 576. However, the success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003) again reversed this trend. See Shone, Blockbuster, pp. 307–309. 36. The Battle of Dorking and other key texts of this wave of invasion literature are reprinted in Clarke, The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914; Moorcock, Before Armageddon; Moorcock, England Invaded. See also Reiss, “Imagining the Worst.” 37. “Top Grossing Films of 1995–1999,” Stats-a-Mania, www.teako170.com /box95-99.html (accessed 14 March 2013). 38. Shone, Blockbuster, p. 178. 39. Michael Bay, quoted in Alford, Reel Power. See also Robb, Operation Hollywood, pp. 178 and 184. 40. Buchanan, “Address to the Republican National Convention.” 41. See Nickell and McGaha, “The Roswellian Syndrome.” Rockwell aliens also feature importantly in the top-grossing film of 1996, Independence Day. 42. “Top Grossing Films of 1995–1999.” 43. The other was Denzel Washington. See the following section. 44. Lacy, “Designer Security,” p. 333. See also Lyon, Surveillance After September 11. 45. Grolier, Perspectives on Intelligence, pp. 24–25. 46. Melanson, Secrecy Wars, pp. 5–6. 47. Buchanan, “Address to the Republican National Convention.” 48. See, “Production Featurette #1,” special features section of the DVD of Enemy of the State. 49. Harper, “The Politics of Paranoia,” p. 2 (see also p. 1). 50. “Top Grossing Films of 1995–1999.” 51. In films such as Collateral Damage, The Kingdom, and Traitor, and TV series such as 24 and Homeland. Carter and Dodds, “Hollywood and the ‘War on Terror,’” p. 100. 52. See Coll, Ghost Wars. 53. Kellner, Cinema Wars, p. 18. 54. “Director Edward Zwick Defends ‘The Siege,’” Newstand: CNN & Entertainment Weekly, 10 November 1998, www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Movies/9811/10 /siege/ (accessed 25 March, 2013). 55. Kellner, Cinema Wars, p. 22. 56. Buchanan, “Address to the Republican National Convention.”

9 Hollywood and the War in Iraq

How the hell did a war on Iraq become part of the war on terrorism?1 Rather than create strategy anew for each security problem faced, the United States, like all nations, uses paradigms. . . . Since 1991, no paradigm has been more important for the evolution of American strategy than the conflict with Iraq.2 Some influential American international relations realists may well argue that September 11, 2001, was really a “day where nothing much changed,”3 but most observers agree that on that date the national security state suffered one of its most significant defeats. Nothing in the wave of terrorist attacks at home and abroad in the years leading up to the new millennium (see p. 183) affected the popular imagination like 9/11. President George W. Bush immediately declared a global war on terror (GWOT),4 and the world entered the age of global hypersecurity. The national security state was bolstered by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security—with its Home Security Advisory System— while the USA Patriot Act extended the powers of arrest and surveillance of law enforcement agencies. Once Afghanistan’s Taliban government refused the US demand that it hand over Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders who had planned the 9/11 attacks, supported by many of its NATO allies, the United States launched its first GWOT strike to overthrow the Taliban in October 2001. This objective apparently quickly achieved, over the following months it became clear that the administration was preparing public opinion for what it had decided would become the next stage of its war against terror: the invasion of Iraq.

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Since the end of the 1991 Gulf War, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had constantly taunted the United States and its allies, and defied all United Nations resolutions to restrict its military activities. Public opinion was thus already well primed to cast Iraq as a significant threat. The explicit strategic rationale that the Bush administration provided for linking an invasion of Iraq to its war on terror rested on three claims—all of which would prove to be false. First, administration spokespersons insisted that Iraq still possessed the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that it was supposed to have destroyed after the Gulf War. The threat that such alleged WMD were said to constitute to the region, and ultimately to the United States and its allies, was the principal justification offered for the invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003. The United States claimed, secondly, that Saddam Hussein’s government sponsored international terrorist groups, notably al-Qaeda, and had played a role in the 9/11 attacks. And thirdly, the president appeared to have accepted the argument of his neoconservative idealist advisers that replacing Saddam with a Western-style democracy would be a first step in building a zone of democratic peace in the Middle East.5 The US entertainment industry quickly adapted itself to the new national mood. Its products expressed the anger, fear, paranoia, and desire for revenge prevalent throughout the country. During the decade following 9/11, Hollywood blockbusters depicted catastrophes, horror, superheroes, wars in faraway places, conspiracies, and general violence, all linked to the pervasive climate of unease and insecurity. Since most of these themes had already been exploited in the 1990s, Americans were well primed for what they were about to see. Whether 9/11 initiated a new era of films or simply accentuated trends already established in the 1990s, the wave of movies touching on the Iraq War clearly brought something new to American cinema. During the three previous major wars involving US ground troops since 1945 (the Korean War, Vietnam War, and Gulf War), Hollywood released few feature films dealing overtly with the conflict while it was still being fought—six for Korea, just two feature films and a half a dozen or so B-movies for Vietnam, and none for the short Gulf War. However, between 2003 and December 2011, at least seventeen feature films about the Iraq War were released into movie theaters, while another was made exclusively for the DVD market, and three for TV. Two TV series and numerous documentaries were also produced.6 In this chapter, we focus on eight representative Iraq War films, four located at the war front (The Situation, 2006; Redacted, 2007; The Hurt Locker, 2009; Green Zone, 2010), and four predominantly situated on the home front (Home of the Brave, 2006; G.I. Jesús, 2006; In the Valley of Elah, 2007; Stop-Loss, 2008). Probing the extent to which these movies supported or opposed the war itself, and the strategic rationale underlying it, we go on to discuss what these films have to tell us about the way the national security state functioned before and during the war.

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Is This War Worth Fighting? Almost all Iraq War movies were made during a period of declining public belief in the strategic rationale given by the Bush administration for launching it and for the conduct and rising costs of US military operations.7 It therefore is hardly surprising that none of these films deliver the gung ho message found in the combat movies made during and after World War II. None sets out to rally support for the war effort. Rather, these films present themselves as part of the debate over the war and, in doing so, they implicitly take a position for or against it. Support Our Troops!

The makers of Home of the Brave, Stop-Loss, and The Hurt Locker all claim that they deliberately chose not to make a political movie.8 However, these declarations of political neutrality scarcely hide the tacit support that their films gave to the war, through their sympathetic presentation of the American troops who actually fought on the ground. Home of the Brave, Stop-Loss, and The Hurt Locker are what Martin Barker calls “statement films,” ones “primarily produced to make a point.”9 Their point, in this case, is that whatever Americans thought about the war, they should support US troops in Iraq. Each of these films is explicitly centered around the largely unrecognized contribution of the individual American soldier. Home of the Brave follows the lives of a group of soldiers in a National Guard unit from Spokane, Washington, on their return from Iraq. It clearly leans toward support for the war, not only in its empathetic presentation of their struggle to readapt to civilian life in a society largely indifferent to the war and to those who fought in it, but also in the way that it depicts the war itself. For example, the film immediately establishes the American good guys as the war’s victims by opening with a classic trope of the American war story (see p. 30)—these soldiers are ambushed as they undertake a final humanitarian mission to deliver medical supplies to an Iraqi town. Back home, military doctor Lieutenant Colonel Will Marsh (Samuel L. Jackson) finds himself in conflict with his antiwar son Billy (Sam Jones III). As a declared believer in freedom of speech when called to the school principal’s office, Will defends his son’s right to express his antiwar sentiments, but does not hesitate to chastise him in private: Marsh: So you’re against the war, huh? You don’t know a damn thing about it. Billy: It’s not a war, it’s an occupation. They hate us . . . Marsh: So you think we should just leave, huh? . . . It’s not an easy decision. . . . Some bad guys over there, Billy . . .

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Billy: Why don’t you just admit it, we went over there for oil and everything else is just bullshit. Marsh’s wife: Watch your mouth. Billy: That’s the problem with you people. You’re never wrong, are you? Marsh: We’re not wrong. . . . You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. . . . You should read a history book. Billy: I will, when you go read a newspaper! Marsh: I don’t have to. I was there! Since Billy later concedes that his stance is as much due to his father’s involvement as to the war itself, Home of the Brave simply equates opposition to the war with adolescent ignorance and anger at the adult world. The Hurt Locker equally makes no direct comment about the legitimacy of the war. But its portrait of the men of a bomb disposal unit leaves viewers in no doubt that these are the good guys, doing a vital job under atrociously difficult conditions and serving the interests of the Iraqi population. Yet according to Iraq War photojournalist Michael Kamber, the film “glamorizes war”10 and misrepresents the actual work carried out by such soldiers. The fact that conservative critics generally applauded The Hurt Locker for its “objectivity” suggests that it conformed to their own view of a good war film, one that presents US troops and their mission in a positive light. Commentary’s Stephen Hunter praised The Hurt Locker as “the first decent Iraq-War movie,” and claimed that its hero, Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), represents George W. Bush: “He believes, he’s willing to risk, his eye is on the bigger picture. He doesn’t think or care much about himself. Next to him, the others feel inadequate, and they conceive petty hatred, derision, ridicule.”11 Sidestepping the larger issues of the war, Stop-Loss shines a critical spotlight on one of its particular aspects, the practice of stop-lossing— compelling soldiers who had completed their tour of duty in Iraq to reenlist. Director Kimberly Pierce denied that her film was about the Iraq War. Rather, it told a story “about coming home, connecting with each other and trying to connect with their families.”12 Yet the film cannot avoid implicitly endorsing the war. Stop-Loss too tells the story of a group of soldiers returning to the same Texas town. Like Home of the Brave, it shows their struggle to cope with their new lives, compounded by the news that they must return to Iraq. It then concentrates on the tribulations of Brandon King (Ryan Philippe) as he decides to desert, a decision that leads him to the Mexican border. Faced with the realization that he could never return home, and never forget the war, he baulks and, in the last scene, we see him on the bus taking him and his buddies to the plane that will fly them back to Iraq.

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There’s More than One Way to Oppose a War

The directors of the five remaining Iraq War films that we analyze in this chapter make no bones about their opposition to the war. Three of these movies, G.I Jesús, In the Valley of Elah, and Redacted, offer a powerful critique of the military as an institution, and question the image of the American soldier as presented in the traditional Hollywood war film. The other two, The Situation and Green Zone, concentrate on the dynamics of the war of occupation and counterinsurgency and question the strategic rationale given for the US invasion of Iraq. In the Valley of Elah is loosely based on a real event.13 Director Paul Haggis acknowledges that he intentionally made a political film, but “as nonpartisan as can be” while telling the story “in a way that didn’t vilify the troops, that didn’t vilify those who thought the war was right.”14 The film is told from the perspective of former military police sergeant Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones). Deeply devoted to traditional military values, Deerfield seeks to understand the disappearance of his son Mike (Jonathan Tucker), recently returned from Iraq and declared to be absent without leave (AWOL). Stonewalled by the military, Deerfield receives little help from the local police, except for detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), who has been marginalized by her fellow officers. Learning that his son has been murdered by one of his buddies and that he had been involved with them in torture, Deerfield concludes that all is not well with America and its military. In the Valley of Elah offers a twist on the antiwar film. First, it shows how a former soldier and traditionalist like Deerfield, who neither undergoes a conversion to pacifism nor sheds his social conservatism, reluctantly changes his view of today’s military and the Iraq War. Deerfield had inculcated military values into his sons, and never questioned his country’s decision to go to war in Iraq or elsewhere. But the film ends with his charged gesture of hoisting the US flag that he reveres upside down—an international distress signal—and binding the ropes with duct tape to prevent it from being taken down. America is in deep trouble. Secondly, as a bedtime story to Emily’s young son, Deerfield recounts the biblical duel between David and Goliath in the Valley of Elah. Paul Haggis intended this as a direct metaphor for America’s wars in Iraq and elsewhere: So, these boys go off wanting to be heroes, thinking that they’re going there to support freedom. And then they find out they’re doing the opposite. They realize that they’re not the David, they’re the Goliath. They end up doing things, seeing things, that they can’t live with. They’re killing civilians; they have to face that on a daily basis. They have to walk through that village and see that mother dead with her child in her arms. . . . Maybe we can see through their eyes and empathize. Maybe we can see how it’s destroying them. Maybe we can see how it’s destroying our society. This isn’t just about Bush. It goes back a long time, if you look at

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the the history of our wars. That’s the way we solve disputes. By invading people. Somebody should stand up and say, “That’s not American. That’s not the America I love.”15

Brian De Palma’s Redacted harks back to the theme of the director’s Vietnam War film, Casualties of War. Redacted is based on the actual March 2006 rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl and the massacre of her family by a squad of US soldiers in the town of Mahmudiyah.16 Though a damning indictment of the horrors of war and what soldiers can do, Redacted says little about the context in which the Iraq War took place or why it occurred. De Palma foresaw that his film would elicit adverse reactions because it directly attacks the myth of the heroic GI: “It’s showing a different vision of [US] soldiers in Iraq. All we ever get told is that they’re valued and we support them, and as they’re represented on television, they’re true-blue and honorable. . . . But there’s another side.”17 Conservative critics were outraged. Boasting that he had neither seen the film nor needed to do so, Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly called it “vile” and “despicable” and declared that it “puts American soldiers in the worst light possible” and that “you don’t brand the U.S. military with this stigma.”18 Michael Medved equally denounced Redacted as a “slander on the United States of America . . . a slander on the Marine Corps [sic] . . . a slander on our troops.” He declared that it will “inspire future terrorists. . . . [B]ecause it portrays the United States troops in Iraq as sick, murderous, deviant losers.”19 G.I. Jesús chooses a different way to express opposition to the war. Its vehicle is a soldier returning from Iraq, a Mexican national, Jesús Feliciano (Joe Arquette), who enlisted to acquire US citizenship. Back in the United States, he shows signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the form of flashbacks to the war and his hallucinatory conversations with an Iraqi civilian called Mohammed (Maurizio Rasti) who reminds him of the family he killed in Iraq. When Jesús tells him that he is sorry, Mohammed replies, “What are you sorry for, Joe? . . . Sorry you killed an innocent girl? You’re a machine. You’re a rat. You’re not even human.” However, despite his growing reservations about the war—for example, he is clearly uncomfortable participating in a recruitment campaign aimed at Latino school kids— the actual task of denouncing the war is left to a grade school teacher who debates with Jesús’s daughter, Marina (Telana Lynum), after showing a short film about the war in class: Teacher: How can killing innocent people set an example for the rest of the world? Peace starts at home. I think from this footage that we can see that nothing good can come out of the fighting in Iraq.

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Marina: My father has just come back from Iraq and I believe he was sent there to liberate the citizens from a very repressive regime. We tend to forget we live in a country where we can get up in the morning and do what we want. Teacher: Killing women and children is not a legitimate way of liberating those people. War is not the answer. We’re murderers over there. Visibly upset, Jesús comes to the school the next day in search of an apology from the teacher for calling him a murderer in front of his daughter’s classmates, but he gets no satisfaction. The film’s director, Carl Colpaert, has staked his position, and it is Jesús who wavers about his own decision until he finally makes up his mind not to return to Iraq and to abandon his dream of becoming a US citizen.20 Both The Situation and Green Zone are located in the early years of the war and the occupation of Iraq and tell their story from several points of view. The Situation highlights the perspective of American journalist Anna Molyneux (Connie Nielsen). Initially, she supported the war but her experience in Iraq has changed her opinion and made her sympathetic to the plight of the Iraqi people. Secondly, intelligence officer Dan Murphy (Damian Lewis) represents the liberal pro-war position with a hearts and minds approach aimed at winning over the local population. Finally, the film introduces a more unusual point of view, that of a Christian Iraqi photographer, Zaid (Mido Hamada), who sensitizes Anna to the war’s impact on Iraqis. Bluntly asking, “What is the US doing here?” The Situation invites the audience to take a critical look at the way that the military and civilian representatives of the national security state handle the situation in Iraq. It asks awkward questions about the conduct of US soldiers and the negative effects of the occupation on the Iraqi population. The film begins with US soldiers on night duty in Samarra who throw two boys off a bridge and into the Tigris for no apparent reason. One boy drowns. The soldiers and their superiors then try to cover this up. The Iraqis feel neither liberated nor secure. Iraqi politics is as corrupt as ever, especially the police. The moderate Rafeeq (Nasser Mamarzia), who has given up on the Americans, is murdered by an Iraqi policeman, destroying Dan’s dream of a third way between repression and insurgency. Green Zone depicts the unsuccessful hunt for the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration’s main justification for the war. Made in the style of director Greengrass’s two Jason Bourne action movies, The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), and told from the point of view of Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon), the movie not only refutes claims about Iraqi WMD, but also accuses the

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Bush administration of knowingly and purposely misleading Americans to legitimize its invasion of Iraq. Once Miller begins to doubt the existence of WMD, the story switches to the civilian and military hierarchy’s attempts to cover up the truth and to kill Miller before he can make his findings public. Conservative commentators were again outraged. Denouncing Green Zone as “vicious anti-American lies disguised as cheap entertainment,” New York Post columnist Kyle Smith called it “one of the most egregiously antiAmerican movies ever released by a major studio.”21

Mission Accomplished? Like all the movies that we analyze in this book, Hollywood war films bear eloquent testimony to the state of American society and contemporary political and social debates. More particularly, every Hollywood war movie says a great deal about the national security state—its ideology, how it conceives of and deals with threat, and its view of American identity and the American national community. In short, war films are about the security imaginary (see p. 19) and how the national security state defines both Americanism and the supposedly threatening Other. The US armed forces lie at the core of such narratives in two distinct ways. Firstly, the military constitutes the central institution charged with defending the homeland and US national security and national interests abroad. How any movie depicts this role is the key to understanding how it represents the security imaginary. Secondly, however, the military has long been America’s primary melting pot, the institution that seeks to meld the country’s many divisions into one single national unit and purpose. Thus, war movies equally have much to say about the military’s understanding of Americanism and the American community, and how the armed forces deal with demands for integration on the part of racial and ethnic minorities who have largely felt themselves excluded from the American community. Revisiting National Identity

All war films, be they French, British, Russian, or American, are ultimately about national identity. This is particularly true of the United States, where the view that the military is “innately driven by noble ends” remains firmly embedded,22 as witnessed by the box office success of movies that return to the idyllic formula of the classic World War II combat film.23 Most Hollywood war movies fall back on two well-established tropes to paint their image of national identity: the (positive) values of the men (and, occasionally, women) on the warfront, as expressed through their attitudes and their behavior; and the (negative) values of the enemy (especially, their behav-

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ior). As we saw in Chapter 7, various Vietnam War films had already proposed a different perspective on these two tropes. Many Iraq War films likewise invite their audience to reassess the noble ends view of America’s military at war. Home of the Brave and The Hurt Locker do attempt to respect the tradition of the classic combat film. Neither raises serious questions about the strategic rationale for the war or its wider geopolitical implications, preferring to stick to the narrative of the good intentions said to lie behind the military’s mission in Iraq. Home of the Brave insists on America’s humanitarian motives through depicting soldiers bringing medical supplies to Iraqis. The Hurt Locker paints a picture of dedicated heroic US soldiers saving lives and risking their own to deactivate potentially deadly explosives. Most of the other films examined in this chapter show bored soldiers with little real idea of why they are in Iraq, and that most of those who make it home have little inclination to return to the war. None of the soldiers depicted in these eight films seem particularly motivated by patriotism. Their dominant sentiment is loyalty toward and attachment to their buddies. Several of these movies also raise another central theme of the traditional war film, that of leadership, but avoid most of the stock answers. In Redacted, the death of the squad’s leader, Master Sergeant Sweet (Ty Jones), leaves a vacuum that the army seems unable to fill, with the dire consequences already noted, and unlike the well-known trope of the classic World War II combat film, none of Sweet’s men show any inclination to take over his leadership role. Americans have lost their initiative. In Green Zone, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller leads his men in an operation during which he wantonly disobeys orders. In The Situation, officers spend their time trying to cover up a war crime until they are ultimately replaced. When it comes to defining national identity in counterpoint to the Other, Iraq War films present a more ambiguous view of the enemy than the one depicted in the classic World War II movie. Despite the Bush administration’s calls to Americans not to confuse Muslims in general and Arabs in particular with the perpetrators of 9/11, many newspapers, TV programs, and films did little to foster such a distinction. Hollywood has long inculcated stereotypes of Arabs as bloodthirsty, cruel, violent, untrustworthy, anti-American, inclined to terrorism, and bent on destroying Israel, all in the name of an allegedly backward power-seeking religion, Islam. These racist stereotypes are summed up in the term “Islamo-fascism.”24 The portrayal of Iraqis in these Iraq War films reflects the ambiguities of an operation presented simultaneously as a fight against a presumed threat to international security and as the liberation of an oppressed people. Most US soldiers in these movies clearly have difficulty distinguishing between the two. Time and time again, they portray the fear and distrust felt

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by ordinary US soldiers and many of their superiors toward the Iraqi population. In films that largely ignore the rights or wrongs of the war, such as Home of the Brave, The Hurt Locker, and Stop-Loss, Iraqis are at best unsympathetic bystanders and at worst active participants in attacks on Americans. Home of the Brave depicts palpable tension and suspicion between the invaders and Iraqi onlookers. For example, the scene of a convoy of soldiers crossing an Iraqi town focuses on a small boy who appears to be hiding a possible detonator, which turns out to be a lollipop. This moment is followed by an explosion, presumably triggered by a cell phone. In The Hurt Locker, a sympathetic US army psychiatrist is blown up after trying to befriend a group of old men. In the same film, Sergeant William James fruitlessly attempts to connect with a young boy selling DVDs at the market. Contrary to their attempts to show US soldiers as the good guys, these films suggest that Iraqis neither appreciate nor understand the US presence. This is hardly the war of liberation theme of both the Bush administration and the traditional American war story (see p. 30). Antiwar films such as The Situation, In the Valley of Elah, and Redacted suggest that widespread American racist attitudes contribute to the resentment felt by Iraqis and lead directly to the US war crimes that these films depict. This is most strongly expressed in Redacted. Calling Iraqis “sand-niggers” and “hadjis,” redneck Southerner private Reno Flake (Patrick Carrol) declares that “waxing hadjis is like stomping cockroaches.” Master Sergeant Sweet labels them as “motherfucking ragheads” and “shitbirds” and warns his men not to accept food from Iraqi children whom he calls “midget AliBabas.” Many of these films show how lack of sympathy for the population and the incapacity to communicate lead to mutual misunderstanding, fear, loathing, and much worse. Every Iraqi is soon seen by the occupying soldiers as a real or potential insurgent. In The Hurt Locker, a sullen taxi driver is dragged out of his car and his windshield is shot out when he refuses to give way to an army vehicle. Remarks William James, “If he wasn’t an insurgent, he sure is now.” Redacted makes this point even more forcefully, showing US soldiers treating Iraqis as the enemy and humiliating them at checkpoints and then carrying out the unprovoked massacre of an entire family, which in turn leads to retaliation with the abduction and murder of one of their own comrades by a terrorist group. The Situation and Green Zone also draw the contrast between the relative safety of Baghdad’s Green Zone where the Provisional Authority, the military hierarchy, and many journalists reproduce an American lifestyle, oblivious to the insecure conditions in the Red Zone where most Iraqis and American troops live. Yet the picture is not totally bleak. Several films portray Iraqis as ordinary people living in a complex society. In The Situation, various Iraqis are shown coping with the consequences of the US invasion. Zaid invites American journalist Anna Molyneux to his home to dine with his family

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and teaches her how a middle-class Iraqi family opposed to Saddam has experienced the occupation. Rafeeq, a local dignitary and a moderate, is caught between opposition to the invasion and refusal of violent resistance. Zaid and Rafeeq are juxtaposed to the opportunistic local tribal leader and mayor, Tahsin (Saïd Amadis), who also controls the corrupt and feared local police. Primarily concerned with maintaining his position, Tahin sums up his politics: “It’s better to side with the greater power.” According to Rafeeq, “There are no laws”—America has failed to deliver law or order. Duraid (Mahmoud El Lozy), a diplomat under Saddam Hussein, insists on the need for “democracy by force.” He sees no future for himself or his family now that the Kurds control the Foreign Ministry and asks the Americans to find him a diplomatic post abroad. Finally, the local insurgent leader Walid (Driss Roukhe) kidnaps Anna and Zaid, but treats them relatively well. Tashin excepted, all of these representatives of Iraqi society are portrayed sympathetically, but none of them appears to have been liberated by Operation Iraqi Freedom. These ambivalent images of the Iraqi Other, together with the ambiguous portrait of the US soldier, stand in sharp contrast to the simplistic narrative of American identity offered by the traditional combat movie and the typical antiterrorist fare of 1990s movies such as True Lies, Passenger 57, and Die Hard: With a Vengeance. They refute the Manichean understanding of the war—good Americans/bad Iraqis, democracy/dictatorship, freedom/tyranny— fundamental to traditional conceptions of national identity. As The Situation’s CIA agent Dan Murphy explains to enthusiastic newly arrived colleague Wesley (Shaun Evans), “There are no bad guys, there are no good guys. It’s not gray either.” The Politics of Race and Ethnicity

One of the central legal and practical issues associated with Americanism concerns inclusion in, or exclusion from, the national community. This question is of particular interest to the military because it directly affects both recruitment—especially since the end of the draft in 1973—and morale within the armed forces. Hollywood war movies reflect evolution of the expansion of formal and real membership of the American community since World War II. Films made about that war invariably depicted the military as a melting pot where soldiers of various European origins and an occasional Asian, displaying the characteristics of their ethnic group or their region, slowly blend into a valiant fighting force, thereby proving themselves to be true Americans. With President Harry Truman’s 1948 executive order desegregating the armed forces, African Americans began to appear in Hollywood war movies. Thus, the film Home of the Brave (1949) (in no sense the original of the 2006 Iraq War film of the same

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name) recounts antiblack racism and prejudice among a small group of US soldiers on a Japanese-held island in the Pacific during World War II.25 Sam Fuller’s Korean War movie The Steel Helmet (1951) deals with similar themes. Coming on the heels of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Vietnam War films reflected the changing place of African Americans in US society and in the military. Not yet officers, they were sometimes shown as noncommissioned officers and almost always as a vital, but not quite equal, part of the fighting force. Iraq War films suggest that, although the position of African Americans in the armed forces has improved, inequality persists. Both Home of the Brave and Stop-Loss feature poor blacks in untenable situations, which strongly contrast with those of their white counterparts. Clearly suffering from PTSD and upset about rejection by his former girlfriend, Home of the Brave’s black veteran, Jamal Aiken (Curtis Jackson), takes her hostage just so that he can finally talk to her. The police make little effort to negotiate with this deeply disturbed ex-soldier, and quickly resolve the situation by shooting him dead. By contrast, also struggling to readjust to civilian life, Jamal’s white buddy, Tommy Yates (Brian Presley), is offered several good job opportunities, which he turns down because he prefers to reenlist. In Stop-Loss Brandon King meets an African American, likewise on the run from stop-loss. Again we see the difference between the white soldier’s relatively privileged position as still able to count on help from various quarters, including his own family, and that of his black colleague who is crammed into a motel room with his wife and children, with flight to Canada as his only solution. Iraq War films also reflect the evolution toward racial integration within the military in other ways. In The Hurt Locker, (African American) Sergeant J. T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) plays second-in-command to (white) Sergeant First Class William James. Tensions between Sanborn and James stem mainly from Sanborn’s exasperation with what he considers to be the latter’s reckless behavior, but they learn to respect each other and bond to form a united team with its other white member, Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). There is no indication of any racial tension between the three. Despite his relatively short appearance, Redacted’s (black) Master Sergeant Sweet is the undisputed leader to all the members of his squad, including the racist Reno Flake who is particularly upset by Sweet’s death.26 All of his men take their master sergeant’s verbal abuse as normal and acceptable army behavior. His death from an improvised explosive device sets in motion the events that lead to rape and murder and occur only because Sweet is no longer there to exercise the leadership that this rudderless squad needs. The Iraq War gave members of another US ethnic minority—Latin American immigrants —an opportunity to improve their marginal position

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in the national community, a position often exacerbated by their status as illegal aliens. The marginalization of Hispanic immigrants has become all the more difficult to overcome, especially since 9/11, because of the growing fear of what Samuel Huntington euphemistically termed the “Hispanic challenge.”27 This refers to a perceived threat to American identity, one stoked by claims of undocumented immigrants sweeping across America’s southern border to join a Latino minority already accused of a whole host of ills—from rejecting the tradition of the melting pot to seeking to reconquer parts of the Southwest lost in the US-Mexican War of 1846–1848. Hollywood has long set negative Hispanic stereotypes (as “greasers”; oversexed Latin lovers; dimwitted clowns; dark, sinister ladies; or cunning, cruel savages) off against the positive characteristics associated with white Americans.28 Though a Hispanic soldier plays a significant, though negative, role in one film about the 1991 Gulf War, Courage Under Fire, Hispanics generally made little impact on war movies until those about the Iraq War. By the time such films began to appear, Hispanics had become the largest ethnic minority in the United States. Not surprisingly, they were a top target for military recruiters. By 2007, Hispanics accounted for just over 11 percent of total military personnel,29 concentrated mostly in the lower ranks. In an effort to increase Hispanic recruitment, President George W. Bush signed an executive order offering a faster path to citizenship for legally resident immigrants who joined the armed forces. However, educational possibilities, the desire to obtain work experience, and simple patriotism provided even greater incentives to enlist.30 Stop-Loss, Redacted, G.I Jesús, and In the Valley of Elah go beyond these stereotypes to explore the Hispanic situation in contemporary America. Since almost all of the military personnel portrayed in the Iraq War films come from the lower ranks, it is hardly surprising that the Hispanics shown in all these films are also ordinary working-class people. Only one, G.I. Jesús, has managed to raise himself above the rank of private. All have their own reasons for enlisting. For Jesús and Stop-Loss’s Rico Rodriguez (Victor Razuk), it is all about improving immigrant status. These films indicate that, desperate for recruits, the military waives the official requirement that only legal immigrants can enlist.31 Blinded, wounded in the neck, minus two limbs, and now recovering in a Veterans Administration hospital, Rodriguez backs his friend Brandon’s refusal to reenlist, telling him halfjokingly: “I might go back and get myself killed. Then my folks could get green cards.” Earlier in the film, we see his parents as honest hard-working people, already part of the community, even if they are still illegals. For his part, Jesús is somewhat confused about why he ever enlisted. When his wife tells him that he went to Iraq to make himself and his family legal, he retorts, “I killed a lot of people.” As we have already seen, G.I. Jesús

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recounts how its protagonist comes to realize that the price for US citizenship can be too high. In Redacted, Latino immigrant Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) spends most of his time filming his buddies and their boring life under canvas as he puts together the film that he hopes will get him into a film studies program. This also gives him an excuse not to join in the rape and murder. He is just there to film the scene, an attitude he justifies by declaring, “This is my pass into film school.” His indifference is punished when he is snatched by a group of insurgents on the streets of Samara, and then beheaded on camera in retaliation for the rape. In the Valley of Elah adopts a more critical stance toward the situation of Hispanic immigrants. At the beginning, Hank Deerfield suggests that they still have to learn American values. He corrects a Salvadorian school janitor who is hoisting the US flag upside down which, as Deerfield puts it, would be telling the world “we are in a whole lot of trouble, so come save our ass, cause we haven’t got a prayer in heaven of saving ourselves.” Deerfield’s paternalism turns much darker in his dealings with Bobby Ortiez (Victor Wolf), the son of Mexican immigrants, who has gone AWOL and is the prime suspect in Mike Deerfield’s murder. Chasing after Ortiez, Hank beats him up and has to be restrained. At the police station, he insults Ortiez as “chico” and “you wetback prick.” However, when the murderer turns out to be one of Mike’s white buddies, Hank apologizes to Ortiez who responds: “You got some serious issues, man.” Hank agrees. Though the film recounts how one conservative ex-military man is forced to rethink a series of preconceptions, the incident with Ortiez reminds us that racist attitudes are never far from the surface, and that Hispanics are far from being fully accepted members of the American community. Watching the National Security State at Work

Whether they deal with the war on the ground, or its impact on US soldiers, Iraq War films are all about the national security state’s capacity, or incapacity, to preserve American security. The portrait of the courageous men of bomb disposal units in The Hurt Locker reflects positively on the national security state. Though Stop-Loss and Home of the Brave criticize the arbitrary and uncaring treatment of those who have served the national security state, they do not question its foundations. In the Valley of Elah shows a major national security state institution, the US Army, as being more interested in saving face and defending its turf than in discovering the truth about the murder of one of its own or the atrocity committed by its soldiers. Such situations are not uncommon in films about the military. However, The Situation and Green Zone are among the few movies that deal with policy debates within the national security state during an ongoing war. Reflecting differences within the Bush administration, The Situation

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shows internal CIA debates between a liberal interventionist old hand, Dan Murphy, and the neoconservative neophyte, Wesley. For the latter, the only answer to growing Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq is “democracy by force. People are always reactionary. You have to drag them into the future somehow.” Calling for a “more subtle way” to extricate the United States from its untenable position, Murphy proposes construction projects, such as hospitals, and suggests recruiting moderates like Rafeeq before they join the opposition. Wesley replies, “I don’t know where you’re going with this, but I don’t like it. It’s not right thinking.” Murphy then discusses his ideas with an army officer and meets little sympathy. Finally complaining to the US ambassador that “we’re losing hearts and minds,” he is told that “there are no hearts and minds, Dan. This is a war zone.” Whereas The Situation observes the defeat of liberal interventionism, Green Zone proposes a more cynical reading of the neoconservatives’ triumph within the national security state during the crucial first year of the war. This film addresses two issues: (1) the proclaimed existence of WMD, and (2) the decision made soon after the invasion to disband the Iraqi military. Green Zone wastes little time questioning the reality of alleged Iraqi WMD. When the man leading the search for WMD sites, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, suggests that the intelligence is “no good,” a superior instructs him not to make waves: “They don’t want to hear that back in Washington. All they’re interested in is finding something they can hold up on CNN.” Miller’s doubts are confirmed, first by CIA operative Marty Brown (Brendan Gleason) and then by Wall Street Journal reporter Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan). Based on information that she received from Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), head of a Pentagon special intelligence unit, Dayne publishes an article supporting the existence of Iraqi WMD. According to Poundstone, this information came from a highly placed Iraqi source called Magellan, an Iraqi general, Al Rawi (Igal Naor). Yet Al Rawi informs Miller that he had in fact told Poundstone that there were no such weapons. The last third of the film covers the latter’s misuse of special forces to hunt for both Al Rawi and Miller, in an attempt to save the administration from embarrassment by suppressing information that would discredit its purported justification for the war. Apart from accusing the Bush administration of fabricating claims about Iraqi WMD, Green Zone also questions the crucial May 2003 decision made by the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer, to disband the Iraqi military, as part of his policy of de-Baathification. Bremer faced the classic dilemma of all conquering armies and victorious revolutionary forces: how far to go in co-opting elements of the administration of the defeated regime, especially that of a former authoritarian state. The film sums up the division between politicians and practitioners over this vital issue in a heated exchange between the administration’s Poundstone and the CIA’s Brown:

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Brown: We need to use the Iraqi army to help us. Poundstone: We’re not selling that to the American people. We beat the Iraqi army. Brown: Well, they’re still out there and they’re armed. And they’re looking for a place in the new Iraq. Poundstone: They’re going to be waiting a long time. Brown: They didn’t all follow Saddam. There are officers out there we can work with if we make it worth their while. Poundstone: Let me tell you something. We’ve spent too much American treasure and too many American lives for us to put a Baathist general into a position of power. Brown: Have you got any idea what’s going on outside the Green Zone? It’s chaos. No police, revenge killings every night. People are asking why we can’t stop this. We are losing this population. Poundstone: Democracy is messy. Brown: If you dismantle this country and cut out the army, you’ll have civil war in months. I guarantee it. The ensuing insurgency and the problems of creating a new Iraqi army proved Brown, whose position was supported by many senior US military officers,32 to be only too right.

Conclusion Arguing that “no event in American history sparked a greater shift in strategy than the attack of September 11, 2001,” a US strategic analyst concludes that as the Bush administration’s principal strategic effort after 9/11, the Iraq War “has also demonstrated one of the enduring problems in American strategy: the difficulty the United States has in developing sound assumptions when the opponent operates within a different psychological and cultural framework.”33 Indeed, both the war itself and the ongoing challenge to the United States and the West from such opponents well illustrate the failure of a grand strategy based on the belief that “everyone wants an American-style government and economy, and the only reason they don’t have them is because evil men control power and prevent it.”34 None of the eight Iraq War films thus far discussed in this chapter echo such a universalist mythology. Even those that offer some support for the war tend to reverse the traditional tropes of the combat film and the western: US soldiers are not all buddies motivated primarily by loyalty to each other; the army is not always the melting pot that produces a unified community; US armed forces are not welcomed by the local population as liberators; however wretched their situation, Iraqis neither express the desire

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to emigrate and start a new life in the United States, nor do they embrace supposedly universal American values; and superior American weapons technology does not guarantee victory. These movies also provide a critique of the workings of the national security state. Home of the Brave, G.I. Jesús, and Stop-Loss show the inadequate, even callous, treatment of those who have already served. The Hurt Locker, In the Valley of Elah, The Situation, Green Zone, and Redacted emphasize the total lack of rapport between the occupying army and the Iraqi population that it is supposedly liberating. In the Valley of Elah and Redacted also criticize the disastrous consequences of the army’s low recruitment standards and operational culture on the ground. Three films, The Situation, Green Zone, and In the Valley of Elah, also take us into the actual workings of the national security state. The first two show its representatives as divided on such vital matters as the conduct of war and how the national security state can make catastrophic decisions. All three films also illustrate how officials of the national security state often use their power to cover up inconvenient truths at all levels, from the platoon (In the Valley of Elah), through the mid-level military hierarchy (The Situation), to the upper echelons of the administration and the Pentagon (Green Zone). Despite being made during a period of ongoing decline in support for the Iraq War, this alternative critical view of the national security state has not proved particularly attractive to US audiences in the post-9/11 era of hypersecurity. All of these Iraq War films flopped in US cinemas. Four of them, Home of the Brave, Redacted, The Situation, and G.I. Jesús, took in less than $100,000 at the box office.35 Despite winning the 2010 Best Picture Oscar—usually a box office boost for any film—The Hurt Locker’s performance in US movie theaters barely covered its production costs.36 Even the highest earner among these films, Green Zone, recuperated little more than 35 percent of its original $100 million production costs in US cinemas. And one suspects that much of its relative success was due more to the presence of its star, Matt Damon, and a style reminiscent of the films of director Paul Greengrass’s two contributions to the Bourne trilogy than to the questions it raised about the war. John Markert explains these flops as follows: “People had enough problems in their daily lives: they did not want to go to the movies to be reminded of how bad the war was going, which was what these films did.”37 This may well be part of the answer. But more to the point, their lack of traction at the domestic box office reminds us that American audiences do not normally flock to see films that contest the view that US-initiated wars are always about achieving noble ends or that question treasured national myths. Hence, despite his popularity and impeccable patriotic credentials, Clint Eastwood met little success with his film Flags of Our Fathers, which dares to show how the military

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used one of most famous images of World War II in the Pacific, the (staged) hoisting of the flag at Iwo Jima, to sell war bonds and to rally flagging support for that war.38 Eastwood had his revenge with his 2014 Iraq War film. The abject commercial failure of the eight films discussed in this chapter contrasts with the runaway box office success of Eastwood’s American Sniper.39 Relying heavily on the western trope of the lone gunslinger out to civilize the anarchic frontier, the hit film clearly shows that rooting traditional notions of US identity, a conventional security imaginary, and a positive view of the national security state in Americanist mythology still hold a huge attraction over American moviegoers. As a virtual “Dirty Harry goes to Bagdad,” American Sniper does far more than endorse the George W. Bush administration’s strategic rationale for invading and occupying Iraq. Early in the movie its protagonist, navy SEALs sharpshooter Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), learns in childhood from his father that the world is made up of three kinds of people: sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. Americans see themselves as part of the latter category, “those blessed with the gift of aggression, an overpowering need to protect the flock. These men are the rare breed who live to confront the wolf.” In other words, the United States is the global protector, saving those unable to save themselves. Later replying to a colleague who expresses doubts about the American presence in Iraq, in just two sentences Kyle justifies the war and sums up the central tenet of national security ideology and its view of the role of the national security state: “Do you want these motherfuckers [Iraqi insurgents, identified with al-Qaeda] to come to San Diego or New York? I’m protecting more than just dirt.” Eastman shows America facing a permanent threat from a racialized Other, and it is the duty of the national security state to take the steps it deems necessary to defend the United States from these “motherfuckers.” Kyle’s personal success became a national one that made the film’s audiences forget that the Iraq War was far from an unqualified American success. American Sniper’s view of the war and of the heroism of the indomitable American warrior, its notion of American identity, and its reaffirmation of conventional American security imaginary all clearly have greater traction in contemporary America than the more bleak perspectives offered by the other Iraq War films. By winning at the box office, the national security state reinforces the hegemonic mindset on which it rests. While it is too soon to judge American Sniper’s longer-term cultural impact, it might well have begun a process similar to that stimulated by Rambo: First Blood Part II and the Missing in Action series discussed in Chapter 7—that is, reintegrating the US fiasco in Iraq into cultural memory in ways that render a divisive and traumatic war consistent with the mythology of Americanism.

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Notes 1. Officer on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, quoted in Ricks, Fiasco, p. 66. 2. Metz, Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy, pp. xx and xxi. 3. W. J. Dobson, “The Day Nothing Much Changed.” See also Layne, “The War on Terrorism and the Balance of Power,” p. 103. 4. Renamed the “Overseas Contingency Operation” by the Obama administration in 2009. See Wilson and Kamen, “‘Global War on Terror’ Is Given New Name.” 5. See the analysis of the strategic reasoning leading up to the invasion in Metz, Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy, pp. 73–144. In the words of one neoconservative, “The spread of democracy is fundamental not only to the spread of American values but also to the achievement of peace” (Krauthammer, “Peace Through Democracy”). The pre-9/11 neoconservative foreign policy manifesto insisted that one task of the US military was to “secure and expand the ‘zones of democratic peace’” (Project for the New American Century, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” p. 2). 6. Adapted from the list in Barker, A “Toxic Genre,” p. 4. This list includes only general release US-produced films that explicitly refer to the Iraq War and excludes films about the Gulf War and about military operations elsewhere in the Middle East or in Afghanistan. 7. The war started in March 2003, supported by over 70 percent of the US population. By 2005 this figure had dropped to less than 50 percent, and this decline has continued. See Pew Research Center, “Trends in Public Opinion About the War in Iraq, 2003–2007.” 8. For statements on this issue from the directors of these films, see, for Home of the Brave, One Guy’s Opinion, “Irwin Winkler and Brian Presley on ‘Home of the Brave,’” for Stop-Loss, Saito, “Kimberly Peirce on Stop-Loss,” and for The Hurt Locker, Tobias, “Interview: Katherine Bigelow.” 9. Barker, A “Toxic Genre,” p. 116. 10. Kamber, “Essay: How Not to Depict a War.” 11. S. Hunter, “The First Decent Iraq-War Movie.” 12. Saito, “Kimberly Peirce on Stop-Loss.” 13. See Boal, “Death and Dishonor.” 14. Beiser, “An Interview with Paul Haggis.” This interview illustrates the mysterious ways of Hollywood film politics. Haggis cocreated the TV showcase for Chuck Norris’s brand of far right-wing politics, Walker: Texas Ranger. Struggling to convince Warner Bros. to make In the Valley of Elah, Haggis was helped by Clint Eastwood, presumably in return for his having written the screenplay for the latter’s Million Dollar Baby (2004), Flags of Our Fathers (2006), and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006). 15. Ibid. 16. See Frederick, Black Hearts. 17. Murray, “Interview: Brian De Palma.” 18. O’Reilly, “Betraying the Troops.” 19. Pierre, “Medved on Redacted.” Medved was particularly incensed by its portraying “the members of our Marine Corps in the most disgusting way imaginable.” Since the soldiers in the film are clearly identified as members of the US Army (as were those accused of the actual crime) and not members of the US Marine Corps, Medved’s claim of having seen the film is hardly credible. But conservatives were

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not united in their assessment of the film. New York Post critic Kyle Smith described it as “a piece of anti-war propaganda whose aims I don’t agree with, but it jolted me nonetheless” and concluded that “De Palma isn’t trying to insult the troops but illustrating how any war puts men in impossible situations” (see Smith, “Battled-Scarred.”). 20. The film offers two versions of Jesús’s return home. In the first, he draws back from crossing the border at the very last exit. It ends as he seems about to shoot his wife and the man he (wrongly) thinks is her lover. In the second version, he takes his wife and daughter across the border with no intention of returning to the United States. In both cases, his war in Iraq is over. 21. Smith, “New Damon Flick Slanders America.” 22. Boggs and Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine, p. 13. See also the argument in Der Derian, Virtuous War. 23. For example, the movie Saving Private Ryan, made in the pure tradition of the classic World War II combat film, came in second at the box office in 1998, with a gross of $216,540,909; Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/movies /?id=savingprivateryan.htm (accessed 10 August 2015). 24. See Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs; Shaheen, Guilty. 25. This situation was, of course, totally fictional because there were no mixed race units in the US military at that time. 26. Flake’s immediate visceral response to Sweet’s death is simple: “Vaporize every last sand nigger.” 27. Huntington, “The Hispanic Challenge.” For an in-depth account of how the Hispanic threat has been constructed, see Chavez, The Latino Threat. 28. See the documentary The Bronze Screen (2002); Ramírez Berg, Latino Images in Film. 29. See Schmal, “Hispanics in the U.S. Military.” 30. See Pinkerton, “Military a Faster Path to Citizenship for Immigrants”; Alvarez, “Army Effort to Enlist Hispanics Draws Recruits, and Criticism.” 31. One of the first soldiers to die in the invasion of Iraq was José Gutierrez, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala. 32. See Ricks, Fiasco, pp. 158–166. 33. Metz, Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy, pp. 79 and xxiv. 34. Ibid. 35. All figures for US box office receipts cited here are drawn from Box Office Mojo, http://boxofficemojo.com (accessed 10 August 2015), with the exception of those for G.I. Jesús which, according to the IMDb website, made only $8,525, www.imdb.com/title/tt0479042/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 (accessed 10 August 2015). Production costs for all of these films, except In the Valley of Elah, can be found at the IMDb website, www.imdb.com. 36. The Hurt Locker cost an estimated $15 million to make and barely broke even at the US box office; see the IMDb website at www.imdb.com/title/tt0887912 /?ref_=nv_sr_1 (accessed 10 August 2015). The film that it beat out for the 2010 Best Picture Academy Award, Avatar, cost some $237 million to make, but brought in more than $760 million at the box office; see the IMDb website at www.imdb .com/title/tt0887912/?ref_=nv_sr_1 (accessed10 August 2015). 37. Markert, Post-9/11 Cinema, p. 221. Domestic box office failures often recoup most of their losses, and even make a profit, from foreign box office receipts, television rights, and sales and rentals of DVDs. 38. The film cost over $90 million to make and earned just over $33.5 million at the box office, Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=flagsofour fathers.htm (accessed 10 August 2015).

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39. With a budget estimated by IMDb at $58.5 million, American Sniper earned some $285 million at the box office within the first four weeks of its domestic release, see the IMDb website at www.imdb.com/title/tt2179136/?ref_=nv_sr_1 (accessed 11 February 2014). Compare this to the combined domestic box office earnings of $70 million from the eight other Iraq War films analyzed in this chapter. Figures are compiled from International Movie Data Base, www.imdb.com, and Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.

10 Movies, Myth, and the National Security State

Fear is a staple of popular culture and politics.1 For almost a century, commercial cinema has been a, if not the, leading force in the expression and diffusion of American culture. As such, it has profoundly influenced how “ordinary people” come to “imagine their social existence.”2 It therefore is hardly surprising that Hollywood has been deeply implicated in debates over who we Americans are in relation to a depiction of a threatening world beyond US borders (how and why they threaten us). These debates center on the national security state, the actions of its agencies, its objectives, and the ideology of national security itself; in a word, the entire grammar of power (see p. 15) on which the national security state both rests and projects. This being said, all Hollywood movies are made with the goal of turning a profit, and Americans watch them to be entertained rather than to receive an explicit political or ideological lesson. This is why earnestly didactic, and often dour, anticommunist films like The Woman on Pier 13 (aka I Married a Communist) (1949) and My Son John (1952) flopped at the box office while unabashedly ideological action movies like the Rambo or Dirty Harry series attract large audiences. The latter succeed because they tell a story that appeals to the imagination and emotions while reaffirming certain fundamental and comforting notions that Americans hold about themselves and their country. Though the makers of such films may be expressing their own worldview, few filmmakers consciously set out to indoctrinate their audiences either overtly or subliminally. Yet whatever the filmmakers’ intentions, no movie can escape the cultural, social, and political context in which it is made. In this sense, films are veritable time capsules embodying and bearing witness to the prevalent values, mores, ideas,

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and social relations of their times, and to the ongoing debates and struggles over them. Hollywood films thus provide valuable insights into the evolution of the dominant force in American political life since World War II, the national security state. Movies played a significant role in legitimizing in public opinion the hegemonic mindset (see p. 18) and associated set of values on which the national security state rested during the potentially deadly nuclear standoff of the bipolar Cold War period. Paradoxically, the post–Cold War era ushered in a much less settled, asymmetric world, one generating its own fears and anxieties. The national security state found itself obliged to justify its existence, budgets, and actions by defining new external and internal threats, a situation amply reflected in the ambiguities and the ambivalences of so many 1990s Hollywood movies. The traumatic events and aftermath of 9/11 further underscored the need to rethink the national security doctrine and grand strategy (see p. 14) of the United States, and generated intense debate over force posture and force design and the gamut of security practices appropriate to combat the new structuring enemy, global terrorism.

Screening the Cold War Between 1947 and 1990, the Cold War evolved from a standoff between implacable superpower enemies to a situation of mutual tolerance, periodically interrupted by moments of extreme tension. For most Western European states, with the possible exception of West Germany, debate over national security was focused almost exclusively on the perceived external Soviet military threat and did not raise sensitive questions about national identity. Domestic communists might present useful targets for their political opponents at election time, but they were more or less integrated into the national society and, in many cases, into the political system of these states. Thus, during some of the tensest moments of the Cold War before the death of Josef Stalin, and while the McCarthyite witch hunts in the United States were at their height, the popular Franco-Italian comedy Le petit monde de Don Camillo could fondly lampoon the frenetic struggle between a town’s communist mayor and its Catholic priest as an internal family quarrel masking mutual warmth and affection. Western European films about national security tended to present the Soviet Union in realist and traditional power politics terms rather than as a threat to national identity. If many of these films reflected the official view of national security, others—those based on the novels of John Le Carré and Len Deighton in Britain, and most French and Italian movies dealing with state security services—were critical of these services’ motives and mode of operation.

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A very different situation prevailed in the United States where the national security state colossus towered over public life. Despite its falling audience and the growing popularity of television, the cinema industry fulfilled a vital role in projecting the national security state’s all-encompassing definition of American identity and national security as well as the policies, practices, and actions said to be necessary to defend them. Yet even during the most repressive years of the Cold War, some Hollywood directors found ways to contest the official version of the link between national identity, national interests, and national security or, at least, to criticize the excesses committed in the name of national security. Legitimizing the National Security State

Hollywood often portrayed the institutions and practices associated with national security in a positive light. This was done either through sympathetic docudramas like The House on 92nd Street (1945) and T-Men (1947), or rewriting their history as in Mississippi Burning (1988) and its flattering distortion of the FBI’s role in the civil rights struggle. However, in the long run, the vital role of Hollywood movies in shaping public acceptance of the national security state and its actions during the Cold War lay less in promoting the official view of the conflict than in constantly harping on, and drawing the link between, two related themes. Firstly, through their obsession with the omnipresence of threat to ordinary Americans—be it from communists, Native Americans, criminals, viruses and bacteria, natural disasters, illegal immigrants, terrorists, or extraterrestrials—Hollywood films helped foster a culture of fear that reinforced the primacy of national security over all other social or political interests, thereby legitimizing the official security imaginary (see p. 19). And secondly, this issue of threat was almost always framed in terms of the founding myths of Americanism (see p. 27). Even movies critical of the national security state appealed to a shared narrative of American identity to argue that, far from protecting American values, the national security state was undermining so-called authentic Americanism. From the first days of the Cold War, Hollywood produced fairly transparent national security state allegories such as John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande and Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets. These films promoted a triple ideological claim: (1) that the United States faced a real and urgent threat; (2) that Americans should trust the security experts who had privileged knowledge of the nature and origin of the threat and how to respond, which meant; (3) that “loyal” Americans should support all actions of federal security institutions—including those violating domestic or international law and, indeed, the US Constitution itself—to contain the alleged threat. Time and time again throughout the Cold War, Hollywood

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movies projected these claims, either directly in films dealing with international affairs such as the second, third, and fourth episodes of the Rambo saga, or metaphorically in stories ostensibly about purely domestic issues such as the Dirty Harry movies, or through science fiction parables such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and the Star Wars trilogy. In all cases, the primacy that such films accorded to the national security state was predicated on the seriousness of the threats the United States was said to face. Little subtlety was involved in designating America’s enemies and the danger they represented if nothing was done to contain them. Such movies promoted a Manichean view of the world in which a good American Us took on and defeated an evil un-American or foreign Them. If Hollywood movies had little difficulty convincing audiences of the reality of external threat, they usually adopted a less direct approach to the question of internal security. As already mentioned, films that overtly warned of a domestic communist threat tended to fare poorly at the box office. This suggests that popular concern over domestic subversion was less acute than contemporary political discourse would have had Americans believe. To the extent that Hollywood concerned itself with the domestic activities of the national security state, films of the left tended to complain that there was too much national security and to hint at the existence of a state within the state or that the public was being misled about the verity of the claim of internal threat (The Manchurian Candidate), or they highlighted illegal activities by national security agencies (e.g., The Conversation or Three Days of the Condor). Those of the right reiterated their firm belief in the primacy of private and national security, but criticized the national security state’s failure to accomplish what should be its three most basic tasks: defending America’s interests abroad, protecting its citizens at home, and upholding traditional American values such as individual freedom (e.g., the Rambo series). Reflecting a hegemonic Cold War consensus (see p. 20), most Hollywood movies of the late 1940s and the 1950s implicitly endorsed the national security state by presenting values and a sense of national identity that most Americans took for granted. However, the films of the Hollywood revolution and the counterculture of the 1960s–1970s not only contested this Cold War consensus and the national security state, some of them went so far as to question the very mythology of Americanism (Chapter 5). In doing so they provoked an angry conservative backlash, unleashing renewed culture wars that have continued ever since (Chapters 6 and 7). This conservative Hollywood reaction can be broken down into three main strands, united only by their uncompromising critique of the shortcomings of the liberal state and its supposedly weak, vacillating, self-interested, cynical, incompetent, or untrustworthy civilian representatives. Films of the libertarian right (the Dirty Harry and the Death Wish series) pro-

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moted the primacy of the individual over the state and legal system through their argument that only vigilante violence on the part of the highly motivated citizen or unconventional cop could ensure that justice was served. Never confusing this objective with the defense of individual or human rights, such films accused the system of placing the rights of criminals over those of the victim of crime. A second group of conservatives, the militarists, insisted on the need to reaffirm seemingly abandoned military values such as patriotism, discipline, and solidarity with those who had devoted their lives to defending their country. In the numerous 1980s POW/MIA films, this took the form of maverick former soldier or hero or superman doing what the military hierarchy and his civilian masters seemed incapable of doing—defending American honor through refighting and winning the Vietnam War. In other cases pro-militarist films showed soldiers, or even civilians, ready to sacrifice themselves for their country (e.g., Heartbreak Ridge or Red Dawn). Finally, social-cultural conservative movies ranged from the simplistic Horatio Alger–type stories of the interminable Rocky series to the extolling of traditional values found in The Deer Hunter and the religious themes of films like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. Such films either invited the audience to appreciate what could be achieved by those who remained true to the proven values of the past, or they warned of the perils of neglecting or rejecting traditional Judeo-Christian morality. Contesting the National Security State

The ambivalence toward the national security state displayed by conservative films stemmed not from opposition to its avowed goals and basic principles, but rather from what they presented as its incapacity to achieve them. Centrist and left-leaning films on the other hand offered a much more direct critique. Some lampooned Cold War Manichaeism (One, Two, Three), nuclear deterrence (Dr. Strangelove), American militarism (The Americanization of Emily), the demonization of the Other (Romanoff and Juliet), the American way of war (M*A*S*H), and even the notion of a Soviet threat (The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming). Others denounced the way that the national security state acted (Three Days of the Condor), or raised doubts about the Cold War consensus on which it rested (The Graduate). Still others (Little Big Man, Soldier Blue, Apocalypse Now) recast the mythical past of the western and the frontier to argue that militarism and genocide were as American as apple pie and had led the United States into the heart of darkness in Vietnam. Films critical of the Cold War political and social status quo had to overcome two important obstacles. The first was the formal and informal censorship system in place during the first twenty years of the Cold War.

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Until 1968, all screenplays required the formal approval of the Production Code Administration before they could be turned into films. Directors like Alfred Hitchcock were adept in circumventing the spirit if not the letter of the Production Code; others, with films like The Moon Is Blue and The Pawnbroker, challenged the code directly and won. But in the end, it simply disappeared as an anachronism. A second form of censorship came from lobbies like the Catholic League of Decency and the American Legion, always ready to organize protests and boycotts of “immoral” films or those suspected of communist sympathies or having employed blacklisted persons. Local censorship boards could also ban films in their own area, and local advertisers could discourage theaters from showing films dealing with sensitive issues. Moreover, directors and producers sometimes came up against unofficial control from government agencies. These ranged from withdrawal of approval—as the Department of the Interior’s objections to the way that Hitchcock wanted to shoot the Mount Rushmore scenes in North by Northwest—to J. Edgar Hoover’s direct intervention to manage the FBI’s image in Pickup on South Street. However, the government agency most involved in controlling how movies were made was the Defense Department. The Pentagon could always decide to support a film involving any aspect of the military by providing access to costly material and equipment, often by suggesting “useful” changes that could make it happen. It could equally deny any help, even the use of stock images, if it disapproved a film’s script (e.g., Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe). Finally, films were subjected to more overt political censorship and self-censorship, at least during the early years of the Cold War, with the activities of congressional committees such as HUAC and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations under Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the publication of unofficial blacklists like the infamous 1950 Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television.3 These bodies created an atmosphere of suspicion in which many Hollywood figures vied to prove their anticommunist credentials while others were banned from the industry and still others, probably the majority, adopted a low political profile and swam with the tide. By the end of the 1960s, these controls either had been lifted or were simply ignored. The second obstacle to critical filmmaking lay in the nature of the movie industry itself, and persists to this day. Hollywood could succeed only by attracting an audience with a commodity that entertained, not lectured. This meant that audiences often either did not understand a film’s broader message, or ignored it in favor of its entertainment value. So critical filmmakers had to find ways to interest and set their audiences to thinking at the same time. Of course, they could confront the national security state and what it stood for head-on, by showing its uglier sinister side. The first to do so during the Red Scare period of the 1950s was

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Daniel Taradash’s Storm Center (1956), the story of anticommunist censorship in a small town. From the 1960s onward, films like The Manchurian Candidate, Fail Safe, and Three Days of the Condor and the anti-Vietnam War movies, especially those of the late 1980s (Casualties of War, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket), could directly criticize American militarism and the national security state, its agencies, and its policies without fear of major political repercussions. Their success depended on telling a good story and maintaining a strong degree of suspense. But most movies that criticized any aspect of the national security state adopted a more oblique approach, using satire, farce, allegory, or metaphor to carry its message (Dr. Strangelove, M*A*S*H, Little Big Man, Alice’s Restaurant). Throughout the first twenty years of the Cold War, the western was Hollywood’s principal allegorical vehicle to comment on contemporary reality. As John Ford showed, westerns could serve either to rally support for the national security state as in his cavalry trilogy or, as he did barely six years later in The Searchers, to critique key Cold War and Americanist myths (Chapter 2). In the politically charged climate of the 1950s, westerns like High Noon or Johnny Guitar equally demonstrated how it was possible to contest the prevailing repressive atmosphere and attack public acquiescence to the whims and dictates of McCarthyism. Metaphor was a tool well suited to film noir and neonoir, whether to question the capitalist system and values in films like Force of Evil or the politics and methods of the national security state as in Pickup on South Street and Kiss Me Deadly. The latter, for example, depicted the private detective hero of a popular right-wing pulp fiction author as a McCarthyite thug enveloped in a world obsessed by the fear of nuclear annihilation. Moreover, by attacking the process of extracting information, Kiss Me Deadly’s critique of McCarthyism takes a different route from other antiMcCarthy and anti-HUAC films of the period. Movies such as High Noon (1952), Silver Lode (1954), Johnny Guitar (1954), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), and Storm Center (1956) all emphasize the community’s cowardice and failure to resist the climate of fear, intimidation, and denunciation created by anticommunist witch hunts. These latter films also usually feature a hero who refuses to be intimidated. Their juxtaposition of collective cowardice with individual moral courage is totally absent from Kiss Me Deadly. Such film noirs were seen at the time essentially as a form of entertainment, often as B-movies produced specifically to prepare the audience for the main feature. It was only with developing academic interest in film noir in the late 1960s that its critique of the national security state began to be appreciated. Throughout history, satire has been a favorite instrument to avoid the constraints of formal and informal censorship so as to attack the political and social status quo, cherished national myths, and self-important individ-

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uals and groups. During the Cold War, and especially from the 1960s onward, satirical films criticized the obsessions and excesses of the national security state. The two most emblematic examples were Stanley Kubrick’s ridiculing of deterrence theory and nuclear paranoia in Dr. Strangelove and Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H—which turned the Korean War into a proxy for the taboo topic of Vietnam and mocked the entire American way of war while simultaneously exposing the limits of the countercultural critique. Hitchcock proved especially adept at exploiting all four of these approaches to contest the national security state. He directly attacked the world’s intelligence agencies in Topaz, proposed an allegory of a society under an undefined threat and the national security state’s incapacity to protect it in The Birds, presented a metaphor for the dubious ethics of McCarthyite surveillance in Rear Window, and satirized spying and counterintelligence in North by Northwest. Yet despite these persistent and obvious digs at American society and officialdom, many critics persisted in seeing Hitchcock as a mere supporter of the status quo or even as an apologist for the CIA. Projecting Key Cold War Concerns

In the twelve years following the first Soviet nuclear test in 1949, a series of film noirs and B-movies turned around the possibility and consequences of nuclear war (Five, Captive Women, Split Second, Kiss Me Deadly, The Day the World Ended, The Day the Earth Caught Fire). However, the major studios avoided such sensitive issues and, during the 1950s, only two A-list Hollywood films dealt with nuclear strategy or nuclear warfare (respectively, the 1955 celebration of American dissuasion, Strategic Air Command, and the 1959 On the Beach, which examined a group of nuclear war survivors while they await the radiation cloud that will kill them). The closest that the superpowers came to direct military conflict during the Cold War was in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. The realization that humanity had barely escaped a nuclear conflagration led to a spate of A-list films about the circumstances that might induce nuclear conflict (Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe, The Bedford Incident). Another major film questioned whether civilian control of the military remained possible given the cult of national security (Seven Days in May). Even before production of these films had begun, US Air Force chief, General Curtis Lemay, grew so concerned about the negative publicity for the nuclear deterrent generated by the novels on which Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe were based4 that he energetically supported the filming of an overt propaganda piece for the Strategic Air Command (A Gathering of Eagles). Though the balance of nuclear terror ultimately prevented any overt armed conflict between the superpowers, the entire Cold War period was one of indirect and bloody confrontation between them. After the Korean War ended, this mainly took the form of regional wars of insurrection and

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counterinsurgency. While US force posture remained predicated on allout warfare with the Soviet Union, the national security state equally had to adjust its practices and institutions to these new forms of conflict. Following the 1954 Doolittle Report (see p. 17), covert and frequently illegal CIA activities became what the principal drafter of the 1947 National Security Act later termed “a self-sustaining part of American foreign operations.”5 However, Hollywood remained allergic to films portraying US foreign policy in less than a moral light. The closest it came to questioning ambiguous American behavior abroad was through its traditional genre dealing with US expansion, the western. Several major westerns framed the intervention of an American warrior in an external conflict principally in terms of a noble quest to help those unable to defend themselves (Vera Cruz, The Magnificent Seven), which was the usual official explanation for interventions such as Vietnam. The first Hollywood movie to eschew analogy and openly depict Americans acting ruthlessly abroad in conformity with the recommendations of the Doolittle Report, the 1958 The Quiet American, prophetically recounted US counterinsurgency shenanigans in Vietnam during the Viet Minh war against the French. Five years later, The Ugly American (1963) was the only other Hollywood film that explicitly depicted and questioned US strategy in Indochina before President Lyndon Johnson’s massive escalation following the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. And even as the studios shied away from direct reference to the Vietnam War, from the mid-1960s onward a growing number of allegorical westerns painted US counterinsurgency wars in highly critical terms (Major Dundee, The Wild Bunch, Soldier Blue, Two Mules for Sister Sara, Little Big Man, Ulzana’s Raid). Between the end of the Vietnam War and 9/11, only the rare Hollywood movie either tackled US black ops abroad in a realistic way (Missing) or focused on Cold War conflicts in which CIA support kept brutal right-wing dictatorships in power (Under Fire, Salvador, Romero).

Imagining the Post–Cold War Threat Less than a year after the fall of the Berlin War and well before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, John Mearsheimer forecast that Americans might “wake up one day lamenting the loss of the order that the Cold War gave to the anarchy of international relations.”6 The first months of the post–Cold War era appeared to belie this dismal prediction. President George H. W. Bush lost no time in declaring the advent of a new world order, and talked of reaping a peace dividend. According to certain observers, the world was now entering the age of unipolarity in which the United States would use its preponderant power to maintain international peace and stability.7

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The initial post–Cold War euphoria soon gave way to growing anxiety and insecurity within America. The disappearance of the ideological threat from communism created uncertainty about who actually constituted America’s structuring enemy. In this novel situation, the national security state could no longer rely on the old Cold War rules. At the same time, public suspicion about the doings of state security agencies were on the rise. Adrift in a Sea of Asymmetry?

American national security doctrine in the decade following the end of the Cold War stressed that the United States now found itself in an era of asymmetric threats. These were said not only to oblige the United States to maintain an overwhelming predominance of nuclear and conventional capabilities, but equally to expand the capacity of the national security state to deal with a range of “low intensity conflicts” and “military operations other than war.”8 This was also the period of the so-called revolution in military affairs, which was posited on the notion that a combination of hi-tech weaponry, highly specialized forces, and network-centric warfare would enable the United States to project decisive power in all forms of armed conflict. However, it soon became clear that the national security state agencies had settled on terrorism as the principal threat to both the United States and international peace. Hollywood may even have beaten them to the punch. Expressing a general sense of fear and disarray, numerous films depicted terrorists with illdefined motives hovering in the wings ready to attack anywhere, at any time. In Speed the terrorist is an individual mad bomber, whereas in Passenger 57 the threat comes from a generic international terrorist and his group, intent on freeing their leader from US custody. Neither film invoked any apparent political motive. Other terrorist movies involve politics, but without favoring any particular source of threat. In Air Force One, a group of rogue elements from the US and Russian secret services hold the US president hostage (the film makes it clear that the Russian state is not involved). The terrorists in Patriot Games are a renegade IRA faction. The Arab terrorist threat took center stage in the almost comically over-the-top Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, True Lies, and the far more serious and seriously paranoid Rules of Engagement, directed by William Friedkin, who had terrified America with The Exorcist. Though both of these films exploited the explosive political situation in the Middle East, they contained little reference to religion. Islamic terrorists featured in The Siege, which (along with The Rock and Enemy of the State) also explored the theme of the enemy within, suggesting that Americans had reason to be wary of the national security state itself.

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The Age of Hypersecurity Beyond vastly amplifying the simmering anxieties of the 1990s, 9/11 had at least five major consequences for the American security imaginary and the national security state: (1) it led to a drastic increase in the scope of the powers of the agencies of the expanded national security state, thanks, in particular, to the USA Patriot Act and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security; (2) it targeted Islamist-inspired global terrorism as the country’s principal national security concern; (3) it subordinated all other aspects of defense and foreign policy to the global war on terror; (4) it fashioned a domestic consensus broadly supportive of any measure or practice claimed necessary to improve the national security state’s ability to detect, prevent, and even preempt possible terrorist attacks—virtually regardless of their impact on long-cherished constitutional liberties; (5) it led directly to the major and, ultimately, inconclusive and highly divisive US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Taken together, these five elements have generated an age of hypersecurity where, once again, national security can always be invoked to trump any other policy issue. For the first five years after 9/11, Hollywood steered away from making films directly featuring these traumatic events, preferring to evoke them through the allegory and metaphor with films like The War of the Worlds. In Good Night, and Good Luck, director George Clooney attacks the incipient McCarthyism of the Bush administration through a powerful docudrama recounting the 1954 confrontation between CBS journalist, Edward Murrow, and Senator Joseph McCarthy, leading to the latter’s downfall. The film also clearly suggests that elements of the US media were complicit in the excesses of the administration’s response to 9/11. However, the 2006 release of Paul Greengrass’s United 93 and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center unleashed a rash of movies dealing with the post-9/11 policies and actions of the national security state. Hollywood has released several movies critical of US counterinsurgency strategies and politics (the 2002 remake of The Quiet American, Syriana, The Good Shepherd, Lions for Lambs). On the other hand, films such as The Kingdom, Traitor, and Body of Lies clearly identify Islamist-inspired terrorism as the principal threat while drawing a distinction between the terrorists and good Muslims who cooperate with, or even work for, the US national security state. Body of Lies and Traitor also criticize the policies or actions of the national security state. This is taken much further in Rendition, which condemns the practice of outsourcing interrogations to other less law-bound states that use methods that would be illegal on US soil (but apparently not at Guantanamo Bay). The Iraq War inspired several such films. Some, particularly The Situation and Green Zone, focused on the

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negative impact of the war on Arab perceptions of the US occupying force, but most concentrated on the effects of the war on US soldiers. A few (Redacted and In the Valley of Elah) examined the collapse of moral behavior among the troops, but most (notably Home of the Brave, Stop-Loss, The Hurt Locker) restricted themselves to examining the psychological consequences of war on individual soldiers. With some rare exceptions, such as Green Zone or Fair Game, these films say nothing about the reasons invoked for starting the war in the first place. While registering the war’s heavy toll on the US troops, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper provides a clear justification of the Iraq War when the film’s main protagonist, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), declares this war to be essential to prevent “these [Islamic terrorist] motherfuckers” from striking on US soil. The most incisive critiques of the national security state came from films that questioned either the honesty or the efficiency of its agencies. A July 2006 national poll taken by the University of Ohio’s Scripps Survey Research Center revealed that 54 percent of the US population felt more anger toward the federal government than they had previously, with 36 percent agreeing that it was “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that federal officials either participated in the events of September 11 or did nothing to prevent them “because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.”9 This climate of suspicion toward the government, never far below the surface in America, created a receptive context for films that suggested conspiracies within the institutions charged with protecting national security—witnessed by the success of the Bourne series. If there was not always a proven conspiracy, satirical films such as Burn After Reading and Men Who Stare at Goats amused audiences with their depiction of a high degree of incompetence within the CIA and the armed forces. Arguing that 9/11 “ushered in a new era in cinema,” Tom Pollard sees in this “dark, dystopic, and violent filmic style” a veritable “post-9/11 style.”10 Such a claim strikes us as largely tautological. As we have argued throughout this book, movies rarely if ever escape the sociocultural and political context in which they are made. The films of the 1950s certainly reflected the concerns of that era. Fears of the Soviet Union and communist infiltration, or unease with McCarthyism and surveillance, were treated in films representative of several different genres. One can speak of Cold War westerns, Cold War science fiction films, and even Cold War romantic comedies and Cold War musicals to situate them historically and in terms of the themes and attitudes that they developed. But they hardly create a particular Cold War style as such. This is equally true of movies made after 9/11. Of course, many (but far from all) evoke the general feeling of paranoia that has persisted since September 2001. But should we be surprised? If any style characterizes post-9/11 Hollywood movies surely it should be sought in technology and the competition to create ever more overwhelm-

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ing special effects and computer-generated images typical of the contemporary blockbuster, which make them so different from the mostly black-andwhite movies of the 1950s. These technological developments, already present in most of the films produced in the 1990s, would have continued to dominate moviemaking in the twenty-first century whether the Twin Towers had been destroyed or not. If post-9/11 Hollywood has demonstrated anything, it is its capacity to adapt rapidly to new situations and changing public moods and to filter these through the prism of the mythology of Americanism.

Notes 1. Massumi, The Politics of Everyday Fear, p. vii. 2. C. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, p. 23. 3. A complete version of this document can be found on the Authentic History website, www.authentichistory.com/1946-1960/4-cwhomefront/1-mccarthyism/Red _Channels/index.html (accessed 25 October 2015). 4. Respectively, George, Red Alert; Burdick and Wheeler, Fail-Safe. 5. Clark Clifford, quoted in Raskin and LeVan, In Democracy’s Shadow, p. 21. 6. Mearsheimer, “Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War,” p. 35. 7. See Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment.” Many realists were also convinced that the unipolar moment was here to stay. See Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World.” 8. See Department of Defense, Joint Pub 3-0, Joint Doctrine for Military Operations Other than War, 16 June 1994, www.bits.de/NRANEU/others/jp-doctrine /jp3_07.pdf (accessed 14 June 2011). 9. See Hargrove, “Third of Americans Suspect 9-11 Government Conspiracy.” See also Stempel, Hargrove, and Stempel, “Media Use, Social Structure, and Belief in 9/11 Conspiracy Theories.” 10. Pollard, Hollywood 9/11, pp. 149 and 177.

Filmography

Feature Films Absolute Power, Clint Eastwood, 1997, Castel Rock Entertainment/Malpaso Productions, 121 mins. Air Force One, Wolfgang Petersen, 1997, Columbia Pictures/Beacon Communications/Radiant Productions, 124 mins. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, Martin Scorsese, 1974, Warner Bros., 112 mins. Alice’s Restaurant, Arthur Penn, 1969, Elkins Entertainment, 111 mins. Alien, Ridley Scott, 1979, Twentieth Century Fox, 117 mins. All the President’s Men, Alan J. Pakula, 1976, Warner Bros., 138 mins. American Graffiti, George Lucas, 1973, Universal Pictures, 110 mins. American President, The, Rob Reiner, 1995, Universal Pictures, 114 mins. American Sniper, Clint Eastwood, 2014, Warner Bros., 132 mins. Americanization of Emily, The, Arthur Hiller, 1964, Metro-GoldwynMayer, 115 mins. Amigo, John Sayles, 2010, Pinoy Pictures, 124 mins. Andromeda Strain, The, Robert Wise, 1971, Universal Pictures, 131 mins. Apartment, The, Billy Wilder, 1960, Mirisch Corporation, 125 mins. Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola, 1979, Zoetrope Studios, 153 mins. Apollo 13, Ron Howard, 1995, Universal Pictures/Imagine Entertainment, 140 mins. Arlington Road, Mark Pellington, 1999, Screen Gems, 117 mins. Armageddon, Michael Bay, 1998, Touchstone Pictures, 151 mins. Arrowsmith, John Ford, 1931, Howard Productions, 108 mins. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Jay Roach, 1999, New Line Cinema, 95 mins. Avatar, James Cameron, 2009, Twentieth Century Fox, 162 mins. 239

240

Filmography

Back to the Future, Robert Zemeckis, 1985, Universal Pictures, 116 mins. Back to the Future Part II, Robert Zemeckis, 1989, Universal Pictures, 108 mins. Bad Boys, Michael Bay, 1995, Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films, 118 mins. Bad Day at Black Rock, John Sturges, 1955, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 81 mins. Badlands, Terrence Malick, 1973, Warner Bros., 94 mins. Basic Instinct, Paul Verhoeven, 1992, Carolco Pictures/Canal +, 127 mins. Bat*21, Peter Markle, 1988, TriStar Pictures, 105 mins. Batman, Tim Burton, 1989, Warner Bros., 126 mins. Batman and Robin, Joel Schumacher, 1997, Warner Bros./PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, 125 mins. Battle for the Planet of the Apes, J. Lee Thompson, 1973, Twentieth Century Fox, 93 mins. Bedford Incident, The, James B. Harris, 1965, Columbia Pictures, 102 mins. Being There, Hal Ashby, 1979, Lorimar Film Entertainment, 130 mins. Best Years of Our Lives, The, William Wyler, 1946, Samuel Goldwyn Company, 172 mins. Beverly Hills Cop, Martin Brest, 1984, Paramount Pictures, 105 mins. Beverly Hills Cop II, Tony Scott, 1987, Paramount Pictures, 100 mins. Big, Penny Marshall, 1988, Twentieth Century Fox, 104 mins. Big Chill, The, Lawrence Kasdan, 1983, Columbia Pictures, 105 mins. Birds, The, Alfred Hitchcock, 1963, Universal Pictures, 119 mins. Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith, 1915, David W. Griffith Corp., 165 mins. Black Hawk Down, Ridley Scott, 2001, Revolution Studios/Jerry Bruckheimer Films/Scott Free Productions, 144 mins. Black Sunday, John Frankenheimer, 1977, Paramount Pictures, 143 mins. Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks, 1974, Warner Bros., 93 mins. Blown Away, Stephen Hopkins, 1994, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 121 mins. Bob Roberts, Tim Robbins, 1992, Miramax Films, 102 mins. Body of Lies, Ridley Scott, 2008, Warner Bros., 128 mins. Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn, 1967, Warner Bros., 112 mins. Born on the Fourth of July, Oliver Stone, 1989, Ixtlan Film, 145 mins. Bourne Identity, The, Doug Liman, 2002, Universal Pictures, 119 mins. Bourne Supremacy, The, Paul Greengrass, 2004, Universal Pictures, 108 mins. Bourne Ultimatum, The, Paul Greengrass, 2007, Universal Pictures, 115 mins. Boys in the Band, The, William Friedkin, 1970, Cinema Center Films, 118 mins. Boys in Company C, The, Sidney J. Furie, 1978, Golden Harvest Company, 125 mins. Boyz n the Hood, John Singleton, 1991, Columbia Pictures, 112 mins. Braddock: Missing in Action III, Aaron Norris, 1988, Golan-Globus Productions, 101 mins. Brewster McCloud, Robert Altman, 1970, Lion’s Gate Films, 105 mins.

Filmography

241

Bridges of Madison County, The, Clint Eastwood, 1995, Warner Bros., 135 mins. Bridges at Toko-Ri, The, Mark Robson, 1954, Paramount Pictures, 102 mins. Broken Arrow, John Woo, 1996, Twentieth Century Fox, 108 mins. Buck and the Preacher, Sidney Poitier, 1972, Columbia Pictures/Belafonte Enterprises, 102 mins. Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, Robert Altman, 1976, Lion’s Gate Films, 123 mins. Bullitt, Peter Yates, 1968, Warner Bros/Seven Arts, Solar Productions, 114 mins. Bulworth, Warren Beatty, 1998, Twentieth Century Fox, 108 mins. Burn After Reading, Ethan and Joel Cohen, 2008, Focus Features, 96 mins. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, George Roy Hill, 1969, Twentieth Century Fox, 110 mins. Caged Fury, Cirio H. Santiago, 1983, Lea Productions, 89 mins. California Split, Robert Altman, 1974, Columbia Pictures, 108 mins. Camelot, Joshua Logan, 1967, Warner Bros., 179 mins. Captive Women (aka 3000 A.D.), Stuart Gilmore, 1952, Albert Zugsmith Productions, 64 mins. Carrie, Brian De Palma, 1976, Redbank Films, 98 mins. Cast a Giant Shadow, Melville Shavelson, 1966, Batjac Productions/Byrna Productions, 146 mins. Casualties of War, Brian De Palma, 1989, Columbia Pictures, 113 mins. Catch-22, Mike Nichols, 1970, Paramount Pictures, 122 mins. Cheyenne Autumn, John Ford, 1964, Warner Bros., 154 mins. Chinatown, Roman Polanski, 1974, Paramount Pictures, 130 mins. Cleopatra, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963, Twentieth Century Fox, 192 mins. Cliffhanger, Renny Harlin, 1993, Carolco Pictures/Canal +/Pioneer, 112 mins. Clockers, Spike Lee, 1995, Universal Pictures/40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 128 mins. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg, 1977, Columbia Pictures, 137 mins. Cobra Mission, Fabrizio De Angelis, 1986, Fulvia Film, 85 mins. Coffy, Jack Hill, 1973, American International Pictures, 91 mins. Collateral Damage, Andrew Davis, 2002, Warner Bros./Bel Air Entertainment/David Foster Productions, 108 mins. Color Purple, The, Steven Spielberg, 1985, Amblin Entertainment/Warner Bros., 154 mins. Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Robert Altman, 1982, Sandcastle Productions, 109 mins. Coming Home, Hal Ashby, 1978, Jerome Hellman Productions, 127 mins. Coming to America, John Landis, 1988, Paramount Pictures/Eddy Murphy Production, 116 mins. Conan the Barbarian, John Milius, 1982, Universal Pictures, 129 mins.

242

Filmography

Contender, The, Rod Lurie, 2000, Cinerenta Medienbeteiligungs KG/Cinecontender/Battleground Productions, 126 mins. Conversation, The, Francis Ford Coppola, 1974, Paramount Pictures, 113 mins. Coogan’s Bluff, Don Siegel, 1968, Universal Pictures, 93 mins. Cool Hand Luke, Stuart Rosenberg, 1967, Jalem Productions, 126 mins. Countdown, Robert Altman, 1967, Warner Bros., 101 mins. Courage Under Fire, Edward Zwick, 1996, Fox 2000 Pictures, 117 mins. Crimson Tide, Tony Scott, 1995, Hollywood Pictures, 116 mins. “Crocodile” Dundee, Peter Faiman, 1986, Rimfire Films, 97 mins. “Crocodile” Dundee II, John Cornell, Paramount Pictures, 108 mins. Dave, Ivan Reitman, 1993, Warner Bros., 110 mins. Day of the Dolphin, The, Mike Nichols, 1973, AVCO Embassy Pictures, 104 mins. Day of the Jackal, The, Fred Zinnemann, 1973, Warwick Film Productions, 143 mins. Day the Earth Caught Fire, The, Val Guest, 1961, Pax Films, 98 mins. Day the World Ended, The, Roger Corman, 1955, Golden State Productions, 75 mins. Days of Thunder, Tony Scott, 1990, Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films/Paramount Pictures, 107 mins. Dead Pool, The, Buddy Van Horn, 1988, Warner Bros., 91 mins. Death Wish, Michael Winner, 1974, Paramount Pictures, 93 mins. Death Wish II, Michael Winner, 1982, Cannon Films, 88 mins. Deep Impact, Mimi Leder, 1998, Paramount Pictures/DreamWorks SKG/Zanuck/Brown Productions, 120 mins. Deer Hunter, The, Michael Cimino, 1978, Universal Pictures, 182 mins. Deliverance, John Boorman, 1972, Warner Bros., 110 mins. Devil in a Blue Dress, Carl Franklin, 1995, TriStar Pictures/Clinica Estetico/Mundy Lane Entertainment, 102 mins. Devil’s Own, The, Alan J. Pakula, 1997, Columbia Pictures, 107 mins. Diary of a Mad Housewife, Frank Perry, 1970, Frank Perry Films, 95 mins. Die Hard, John McTiernan, 1988, Twentieth Century Fox, 131 mins. Die Hard 2, Renny Harlin, 1990, Twentieth Century Fox, 124 mins. Die Hard: With a Vengeance, John McTiernan, 1995, Twentieth Century Fox, 131 mins. Dirty Harry, Don Siegel, 1971, Warner Bros., 102 mins. Disclosure, Barry Levinson, 1994, Warner Bros., 128 mins. Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee, 1989, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 120 mins. Doctor Dolittle, Richard Fleischer, 1967, Twentieth Century Fox, 152 mins. Dog Day Afternoon, Sidney Lumet, 1975, Artists Entertainment Complex, 125 mins. Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Paul Mazursky, 1986, Touchstone Pictures, 103 mins.

Filmography

243

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Stanley Kubrick, 1964, Columbia Pictures, 95 mins. Driving Miss Daisy, Bruce Beresford, 1989, Majestic Films International/The Zanuck Company, 99 mins. Drums Along the Mohawk, John Ford, 1939, Twentieth Century Fox, 104 mins. Duel, Steven Spielberg, 1971, Universal TV, 90 mins. Earthquake, Mark Robson, 1974, Universal Pictures, 123 mins. Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper, 1969, Columbia Pictures, 95 mins. Empire Strikes Back, The. See Star Wars: Episode V Enemy of the State, Tony Scott, 1998, Touchstone Pictures/Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films, 132 mins. Enforcer, The, James Fargo, 1976, Warner Bros., 96 mins. English Patient, The, Anthony Minghella, 1996, Miramax Films/Tiger Moth Productions, 162 mins. Escape from L.A., John Carpenter, 1996, Paramount Pictures, 101 mins. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Steven Spielberg, 1982, Universal Pictures, 115 mins. Executive Action, David Miller, 1973, Wakeford/Orloff, 91 mins. Executive Decision, Stuart Baird, 1996, Warner Bros., 133 mins. Exorcist, The, William Friedkin, 1973, Warner Bros., 122 mins. Fail Safe, Sidney Lumet, 1964, Columbia Pictures, 112 mins. Fair Game, Doug Liman, 2010, River Road Entertainment, 108 mins. Fall of the Roman Empire, The, Anthony Mann, 1964, Samuel Bronson Production, 188 mins. Falling Down, Joel Schumacher, 1993, Alcor Films/Canal +/Regency Enterprises, 113 mins. Fatal Attraction, Adrian Lyne, 1987, Paramount Pictures, 119 mins. Few Good Men, A, Rob Reiner, 1993, Columbia Pictures, 138 mins. Field of Dreams, Phil Alden Robinson, Gordon Company, 1989, 107 mins. Firefox, Clint Eastwood, 1982, Malpaso Company, 136 mins. First Blood (aka Rambo I), Ted Kotcheff, 1982, Anabasis N.V., 93 mins. Five, Arch Oboler, 1951, Arch Oboler Productions, 93 mins. Five Easy Pieces, Bob Rafelson, 1970, Columbia Pictures, 98 mins. Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood, 2006, Warner Bros., 132 mins. Flashdance, Adrian Lyne, 1983, Paramount Pictures/PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, 95 mins. Force of Evil, Abraham Polonsky, 1948, MGM, 88 mins. Forrest Gump, Robert Zemeckis, 1994, Paramount Pictures, 142 mins. Fort Apache, John Ford, 1948, Argosy Pictures, 125 mins. French Connection, The, William Friedkin, 1971, Schine-Moore Productions, 104 mins. Fugitive, The, Andrew Davis, 1993, Warner Bros., 130 mins. Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick, 1987, Warner Bros./Stanley Kubrick Productions, 116 mins.

244

Filmography

Gathering of Eagles, A, Delbert Mann, 1963, Universal International Pictures, 115 mins. Ghost in the Machine, Rachel Talalay, 1993, Twentieth Century Fox, 95 mins. Ghostbusters, Ivan Reitman, 1984, Columbia Pictures/Black Rhino Productions, 105 mins. Ghostbusters II, Ivan Reitman, 1989, Columbia Pictures, 108 mins. G.I. Jesús, Carl Colpaert, 2006, Cinefrontera, 100 mins. Gingerbread Man, Robert Altman, 1998, Enchanter Entertainment, 114 mins. Glory, Edward Zwick, 1989, TriStar Pictures/Freddie Fields Productions, 122 mins. Go Tell the Spartans, Ted Post, 1978, Mar Vista Productions, 114 mins. Godfather, The, Francis Ford Coppola, 1972, Paramount Pictures, 175 mins. Godfather, The: Part II, Francis Ford Coppola, 1974, Paramount Pictures, 200 mins. Godzilla, Roland Emmerich, 1998, Centropolis Film Productions/Fried Films/Independent Pictures (II), 139 mins. Good Guys Wear Black (aka Black Tigers), Ted Post, 1978, Mar Vista Productions, 95 mins. Good Morning, Vietnam, Barry Levinson, 1987, Touchstone Pictures, 121 mins. Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney, 2005, Warner Independent Pictures, 93 mins. Good Shepherd, The, Robert De Niro, 2006, Universal Pictures, 167 mins. Good Will Hunting, Gus van Sant, 1997, Be Gentlemen Limited Partnership/Lawrence Bender Productions/Miramax Films, 126 mins. Gosford Park, Robert Altman, 2001, USA Films, 137 mins. Graduate, The, Mike Nichols, 1967, Embassy Pictures, 106 mins. Grapes of Wrath, The, John Ford, 1940, Twentieth Century Fox, 129 mins. Grease, Randal Kleiser, 1978, Paramount Pictures, 110 mins. Great Gatsby, The, Jack Clayton, 1974, Paramount Pictures, 144 mins. Greatest Story Ever Told, The, George Stevens, 1965, George Stevens Productions, 225 mins. Green Berets, The, Ray Kellogg/John Wayne, 1968, Batjac Productions, 142 mins. Green Zone, Paul Greengrass, 2010, Universal Pictures, 115 mins. Gremlins, Joe Dante, 1984, Warner Bros./Amblin Entertainment, 106 mins. Hair, Milos Forman, 1979, CIP Filmproduktion, 121 mins. Hanoi Hilton, The, Lionel Chetwynd, 1987, Cannon Group/Golan-Globus Productions, 125 mins. Harold and Maude, Hal Ashby, 1971, Paramount Pictures, 91 mins. Heartbreak Ridge, Clint Eastwood, 1986, Malpaso Company, 130 mins. Heaven & Earth, Oliver Stone, 1993, Alcor Films/Canal +, 140 mins. Heaven’s Gate, Michael Cimino, 1980, Partisan Productions, 219 mins.

Filmography

245

Hello, Dolly! Gene Kelly, 1969, Twentieth Century Fox, 146 mins. Helter Skelter, Tom Gries, 1976, Lorimar Productions, 119 mins. High Noon, Fred Zinnemann, 1952, Stanley Kramer Productions, 85 mins. Home of the Brave, Mark Robson, 1949, Stanley Kramer Productions, 88 mins. Home of the Brave, Irwin Winkler, 2006, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 106 mins. House on 92nd Street, The, 1945, Henry Hathaway, Twentieth Century Fox, 88 mins. How Green Was My Valley, John Ford, 1941, Twentieth Century Fox, 118 mins. How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Kevin Rodney Sullivan, 1998, Twentieth Century Fox, 124 mins. Hunt for Red October, The, John McTiernan, 1990, Paramount Pictures, 134 mins. Hurt Locker, The, Kathryn Bigelow, 2008, Voltage Pictures, 131 mins. I, the Jury, Henry Essex, 1953, Parkland Pictures Inc., 87 mins. Images, Robert Altman, 1972, Columbia Pictures, 101 mins. In the Line of Fire, Wolfgang Peterson, 1993, Columbia Pictures, 128 mins. In the Valley of Elah, Paul Haggis, 2007, Warner Independent Pictures, 121 mins. Independence Day, Roland Emmerich, 1996, Twentieth Century Fox/Centropolis Entertainment, 145 mins. Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark. See Raiders of the Lost Ark Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Steven Spielberg, 1984, Paramount Pictures/Lucasfilm, 118 mins. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Steven Spielberg, 1989, Paramount Pictures/Lucasfilm, 127 mins. Informer, The, John Ford, 1935, RKO Radio Pictures, 91 mins. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The, Don Siegel, 1956, Walter Wanger Productions, 80 mins. Invasion U.S.A., Joseph Zito, 1985, Cannon Films, 107 mins. Iron Eagle, Sidney J. Furie, 1986, TriStar Pictures, 117 mins. Jaws, Steven Spielberg, 1975, Universal Pictures, 124 mins. JFK, Oliver Stone, 1991, Warner Bros., 189 mins. Joe, John G. Avildsen, 1970, Cannon Films, 107 mins. Johnny Guitar, Nicholas Ray, 1954, Republic Pictures, 110 mins. Julia, Fred Zinnemann, 1977, Twentieth Century Fox, 117 mins. Jungle Fever, Spike Lee, 1991, Universal Pictures/40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 132 mins. Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg, 1993, Universal Pictures/Amblin Entertainment, 127 mins. Karate Kid, Part II, The, John G. Avildsen, 1986, Columbia Pictures, 113 mins.

246

Filmography

King of Marvin Gardens, The, Bob Rafelson, 1972, BBS Productions, 103 mins. Kingdom, The, Peter Berg, 2007, Universal Pictures, 110 mins. Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich, 1955, Parklane Pictures Inc., 106 mins. Kiss of Death, Henry Hathaway, 1947, Twentieth Century Fox, 98 mins. Klute, Alan J. Pakula, 1971, Warner Bros., 114 mins. Kramer vs. Kramer, Robert Benton, 1979, Columbia Pictures, 105 mins. Lady and the Tramp, The, Clyde Geronomi and Wilfred Jackson, 1955, Walt Disney Productions, 76 mins. Last Detail, The, Hal Ashby, 1973, Columbia Pictures, 104 mins. Last House on the Left, The, Wes Craven, 1972, Lobster Enterprises, 84 mins. Last Picture Show, The, Peter Bogdanovich, 1971, Columbia Pictures, 118 mins. Lethal Weapon 2, Richard Donner, 1989, Warner Bros./Silver Pictures, 114 mins. Letters from Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood, 2006, Warner Bros., 141 mins. Lions for Lambs, Robert Redford, 2007, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 92 mins. Lipstick, Lamont Johnson, 1976, Paramount Pictures/Dino De Laurentiis, 89 mins. Little Big Man, Arthur Penn, 1970, Cinema Center Films, 139 mins. Little Mermaid, The, Ron Clements and John Musker, 1989, Walt Disney Pictures, 83 mins. Long Goodbye, The, Robert Altman, 1973, Lion’s Gate Films, 112 mins. Long Voyage Home, The, John Ford, 1940, Argosy Pictures, 105 mins. Long Wait, The, Victor Saville, 1954, Parklane Pictures Inc., 94 mins. Look Who’s Talking, Amy Heckerling, 1989, TriStar Pictures, 93 mins. Lord of the Rings, The: The Fellowship of the Ring, Peter Jackson, 2001, New Line Cinema/WingNut Films/The Saul Zaentz Company, 178 mins. Lord of the Rings, The: The Two Towers, Peter Jackson, 2002, New Line Cinema/WingNut Films/The Saul Zaentz Company, 179 mins. Lord of the Rings, The: The Return of the King, Peter Jackson, 2003, New Line Cinema/WingNut Films/The Saul Zaentz Company, 201 mins. Love Story, Arthur Hiller, 1970, Paramount Pictures, 99 mins. Magnificent Seven, The, John Sturges, 1960, The Mirisch Company, 128 mins. Magnum Force, Ted Post, 1973, Warner Bros., 124 mins. Major Dundee, Sam Peckinpah, 1965, Columbia Pictures Corporation, 123 mins. Malcolm X, Spike Lee, 1992, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 202 mins. Maltese Falcon, The, 1941, John Huston, Warner Bros., 100 mins. Man Who Knew Too Much, The, Alfred Hitchcock, 1956, Paramount Pictures, 120 mins. Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The, John Ford, 1962, Paramount Pictures, 123 mins.

Filmography

247

Manchurian Candidate, The, John Frankenheimer, 1962, M.C. Productions, 126 mins. Mars Attack, Tim Burton, 1996, Warner Bros./Tim Burton Productions, 106 mins. Mary Poppins, Robert Stevenson, 1964, Walt Disney Productions, 139 mins. M*A*S*H, Robert Altman, 1970, Twentieth Century Fox, 116 mins. Matrix, The, Andy Wachowski/Lana Wachowski, 1999, Warner Bros., 136 mins. McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman, 1971, Warner Bros, 120 mins. Medium Cool, Haskell Wexler, 1969, H &J/Paramount Pictures, 111 mins. Men in Black, Barry Sonnenfeld, 1997, Amblin Entertainment/Columbia Pictures/MacDonald-Parkes Productions, 98 mins. Men Who Stare at Goats, Grant Heslov, 2009, Smokehouse Pictures, 94 mins. Midnight Cowboy, John Schlesinger, 1969, Jerome Hellman Productions, 113 mins. Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood, 2004, Warner Bros., 132 mins. Misfits, The, John Huston, 1961, Seven Arts Productions, 124 mins. Missing, Costa-Gavras, 1982, Universal Pictures/Polygram Filmed Entertainment, 122 mins. Missing in Action, Joseph Zito, 1984, Cannon Group, 101 mins. Missing in Action 2: The Beginning, Lance Hool, 1985, Cannon Films, 100 mins. Mission Impossible, Brian De Palma, 1996, Paramount Pictures, 110 mins. Mississippi Burning, Alan Parker, 1988, Orion Pictures Corporation, 128 mins. Moon Is Blue, The, Otto Preminger, United Artists, 1953, 99 mins. Mutiny on the Bounty, Lewis Mileston, 1962, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 178 mins. My Gun Is Quick, Phil Vicker and George White, 1957, Parklane Pictures Inc., 90 mins. My Son John, Leo McCarey, 1952, Rainbow Productions, 122 mins. Nam Angels, Cirio H. Santiago, 1989, New Horizon Pictures Corp., 91 mins. Nashville, Robert Altman, 1975, Paramount Pictures, 159 mins. Network, Sidney Lumet, 1976, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 121 mins. New Jack City, Mario Van Peebles, 1991, Warner Bros., 97 mins. Night Moves, Arthur Penn, 1975, Warner Bros., 100 mins. Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero, 1968, Image Ten, 96 mins. Night They Raided Minsky’s, The, William Friedkin, 1968, Tandem Productions, 99 mins. Nine to Five, Collin Higgins, 1980, Twentieth Century Fox, 110 mins. No Way Out, Roger Donaldson, 1987, Orion Pictures, 114 mins. North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock, 1959, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 136 mins.

248

Filmography

Notorious, Alfred Hitchcock, 1946, Vanguard Films/RKO Radio Pictures, 101 mins. Odessa File, The, Ronald Neame, 1974, Columbia Pictures, 130 mins. Officer and a Gentleman, An, Taylor Hackford, 1982, Lorimar Film Entertainment, 124 mins. Omen, The, Richard Donner, 1976, Twentieth Century Fox, 111 mins. On the Beach, Stanley Kramer, 1959, Stanley Kramer Productions, 134 mins. On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Vincente Minnelli, 1970, Paramount Pictures, 129 mins. On Golden Pond, Mark Rydell, 1981, IPC Films, 109 mins. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Milos Forman, 1975, Fantasy Films, 133 mins. One, Two, Three, Billy Wilder, 1961, Mirisch Corporation, 115 mins. Ordinary People, Robert Redford, 1980, Paramount Pictures, 124 mins. Outlaw Josey Wales, The, Clint Eastwood, 1976, Warner Bros., 135 mins. Paint Your Wagon, Joshua Logan, 1969, Paramount Pictures, 158 mins. Panic in the Streets, Elia Kazan, 1950, Twentieth Century Fox, 96 mins. Panic Year Zero, Ray Milland, 1962, American International Pictures, 93 mins. Paper Moon, Peter Bogdanovich, 1973, Paramount Pictures/The Director’s Company, 102 mins. Parallax View, The, Alan J. Pakula, 1974, Doubleday Productions, 102 mins. Parenthood, Ron Howard, 1989, Universal Pictures, 124 mins. Passenger 57, Kevin Hooks, 1992, Warner Bros., 84 mins. Paths of Glory, Stanley Kubrick, 1957, Byrna Productions, 88 mins. Patriot Games, Philip Noyce, 1992, Paramount Pictures, 117 mins. Patton, Franklin J. Schaffner, 1970, Twentieth Century Fox, 172 mins. Pawnbroker, The, Sidney Lumet, 1964, Landau Company, 116 mins. Peacemaker, The, Mimi Leder, 1997, DreamWorks SKG, 124 mins. Pearl Harbor, Michael Bay, 2001, Touchstone Pictures/Jerry Bruckheimer Films, 183 mins. Pelican Brief, The, Alan J. Pakula, 1993, Warner Bros., 141 mins. Perfect Couple, A, Robert Altman, 1979, Lion’s Gate Films, 110 mins. Perfect World, A, Clint Eastwood, 1993, Warner Bros., 138 mins. Peter Pan, Clyde Geronomi and Wilfred Jackson, 1953, Walt Disney Productions, 77 mins. Petit Monde de Don Camillo, Le, Julien Duvivier, 1952, Produzione Film Giuseppe Amato, 197 mins. Philadelphia, Jonathan Demme, 1993, TriStar Pictures/Clinica Estetico, 125 mins. Pickup on South Street, Samuel Fuller, 1953, Twentieth Century Fox, 80 mins. Planet of the Apes, Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968, Twentieth Century Fox/APJAC Productions, 112 mins.

Filmography

249

Platoon, Oliver Stone, 1986, Hemdale Film, 120 mins. Play Misty for Me, Clint Eastwood, 1971, Universal Pictures, 102 mins. Player, The, Robert Altman, 1992, Avenue Pictures Productions, 124 mins. Popeye, Robert Altman, 1980, Paramount Pictures, 114 mins. Poseidon Adventure, The, Ronald Neame, 1972, Twentieth Century Fox, 117 mins. Prairie Home Companion, A, Robert Altman, 2006, Picturehouse Entertainment, 105 mins. Prêt-à-Porter, Robert Altman, 1994, Miramax Pictures, 133 mins. Primary Colors, Mike Nichols, 1998, Universal Pictures, 143 mins. Prisoner of War, Andrew Marton, 1954, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 81 mins. Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock, 1960, Shamley Productions, 109 mins. Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino, 1994, A Band Apart/Jersey Films/Miramax Films, 154 mins. Quiet American, The, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1958, Figaro, 120 mins. Quiet American, The, Phillip Noyce, 2002, Giai Phong Film Studio, 101 mins. Quiet Man, The, John Ford, 1952, Republic Pictures/Argosy Pictures, 129 mins. Raiders of the Lost Ark, Steven Spielberg, 1981, Paramount Pictures/ Lucasfilm, 115 mins. Rain Man, Barry Levinson, 1988, United Artists, 133 mins. Rambo: First Blood Part II (a.k.a., Rambo), George P. Cosmatos, 1985, Anabasis N.V., 96 mins. Rambo III, Peter MacDonald, 1988, Carolco Pictures, 102 mins. Rambo (aka Rambo IV), Sylvester Stallone, 2008, Lionsgate, 92 mins. Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock, 1954, Paramount Pictures, 112 mins. Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock, 1940, Selznick International Pictures, 130 mins. Red Dawn, John Milius, 1984, United Artists, 114 mins. Red Scorpion, Joseph Zito, 1988, Abramoff/Scorpion Film Production, 105 mins. Redacted, Brian De Palma, 2007, The Film Farm/HDNet Films, 90 mins. Rendition, Gavin Hood, 2007, Warner Bros., 122 mins. Return of the Jedi. See Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Secausus 7, The, John Sayles, 1979, Salsipuedes Productions/Anarchists’ Convention Films, 104 mins. Rio Grande, John Ford, 1950, Argosy Pictures, 105 mins. Rising Sun, Philip Kaufman, 1993, Twentieth Century Fox, 129 mins. Robe, The, Henry Koster, 1953, Twentieth Century Fox, 135 mins. Rock, The, Michael Bay, 1996, Hollywood Pictures/Don Simpson-Jerry Bruckheimer Films, 136 mins. Rocky, John G. Avildsen, 1976, United Artists, 119 mins. Rocky II, Sylvester Stallone, 1979, United Artists, 119 mins.

250

Filmography

Rocky III, Sylvester Stallone, 1982, United Artists, 99 mins. Rocky IV, Sylvester Stallone, 1985, United Artists/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 91 mins. Rocky V, John G. Avildsen, 1990, United Artists, 104 mins. Rolling Thunder, John Flynn, 1977, American International Pictures, 95 mins. Romanoff and Juliet, Peter Ustinov, 1961, Pavla, 103 mins. Romero, John Duigan, 1989, Paulist Pictures, 102 mins. Ronin, John Frankenheimer, 1998, United Artists, 122 mins. Rope, Alfred Hitchcock, 1948, Warner Bros./Transatlantic Pictures, 80 mins. Rosemary’s Baby, Roman Polanski, 1968, William Castle Productions, 136 mins. Rules of Engagement, William Friedkin, 2000, Paramount Pictures, 128 mins. Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, The, Norman Jewison, 1966, Mirisch Corporation, 126 mins. Salvador, Oliver Stone, 1986, Hemdale Films, 122 mins. Savage Island, Nicholas Beardsley, 1985, Empire Pictures/Roger Amante Productions, 74 mins. Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg, 1998, Paramount Pictures, 169 mins. Scorpio, Michael Winner, 1973, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 114 mins. Searchers, The, John Ford, 1956, Warner Bros., 119 mins. Sergeant Rutledge, John Ford, 1960, Warner Bros., 111 mins. Serpico, Sidney Lumet, 1973, Artists Entertainment Complex, 130 mins. Seven Days in May, John Frankenheimer, 1964, Seven Arts Productions, 118 mins. 7 Women, John Ford, 1966, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 87 mins. Shaft, Gordon Parks, 1971, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 100 mins. Shakespeare in Love, John Madden, 1998, Universal Pictures/Miramax, 123 mins. Shampoo, Hal Ashby, 1975, Columbia Pictures Corporation, 109 mins. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, John Ford, 1949, Argosy Pictures, 103 mins. Shootist, The, Don Siegel, 1976, Paramount Pictures/Dino de Laurentiis Company, 100 mins. Siege, The, Edward Zwick, 1998, Twentieth Century Fox, 116 mins. Silver Lode, Allan Dwan, 1954, Benedict Bogeaus Productions, 81 mins. Situation, The, Philip Haas, 2006, Red Wine Pictures, 111 mins. Slaughter, Jack Starrett, 1972, American International Pictures, 91 mins. Soldier Blue, Ralph Nelson, 1970, AVCO Embassy Pictures, 112 mins. Soldier’s Story, A, Norman Jewison, 1984, Columbia Pictures, 101 mins. Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder, 1959, Mirisch Corporation, 120 mins. Sound of Music, The, Robert Wise, 1965, Argyle Enterprises, 174 mins. Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick, 1960, Bryna Productions, 197 mins. Speed, Jan de Bont, 1994, Twentieth Century Fox, 116 mins.

Filmography

251

Speed 2: Cruise Control, Jan de Bont, 1997, Blue Tulip Productions/Twentieth Century Fox, 121 mins. Split Second, Dick Powell, 1953, RKO Pictures, 85 mins. Stagecoach, John Ford, 1939, Walter Wanger Productions, 96 mins. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Leonard Nimoy, 1986, Paramount Pictures, 119 mins. Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace, George Lucas, 1999, Lucasfilm, 136 mins. Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope, George Lucas, 1977, Twentieth Century Fox, 121 mins. Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back, Irvin Kershner, 1980, Lucasfilm, 124 mins. Star Wars: Episode VI—Return of the Jedi, Richard Marquand, 1983, Lucasfilm, 134 mins. Starman, John Carpenter, 1984, Columbia Pictures, 115 mins. Steel Helmet, The, Sam Fuller, 1951, Deputy Corporation, 85 mins. Sting, The, George Roy Hill, 1973, Universal Pictures, 129 mins. Stop-Loss, Kimberly Peirce, 2008, Paramount Pictures, 112 mins. Storm Center, Daniel Taradash, 1956, Julian Blaustein Productions, 85 mins. Stranger on the Third Floor, Boris Ingster, 1940, RKO Radio Pictures, 64 mins. Strangers on a Train, Alfred Hitchcock, 1951, Warner Bros., 101 mins. Strategic Air Command, Anthony Mann, 1955, Paramount Pictures, 112 mins. Straw Dogs, Sam Peckinpah, 1971, ABC Pictures, 118 mins. Streamers, Robert Altman, 1983, Streamers International, 118 mins. Sudden Impact, Clint Eastwood, 1983, Warner Bros., 117 mins. Superman, Richard Donner, 1978, Dovemead Films, 143 mins. Superman II, Richard Lester, 1980, Dovemead Films, 127 mins. Sweet Charity, Bob Fosse, 1969, Universal Pictures, 149 mins. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Melvin Van Peebles, 1971, Yeah Inc., 97 mins. Syriana, Stephen Gagan, 2005, Warner Bros., 128 mins. T-Men, Anthony Mann, 1947, Edward Small Productions, 92 mins. Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The, Joseph Sargent, 1974, Palomar Pictures, 104 mins. Targets, Peter Bogdanovich, 1968, Saticoy Productions, 90 mins. Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese, 1976, Columbia Pictures, 113 mins. Terminator, The, James Cameron, 1980, Hemdale Film/Pacific Western/Orion Pictures, 107 mins. Terms of Endearment, James L. Brooks, 1983, Paramount Pictures, 132 mins. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The, Tobe Hooper, 1974, Vortex, 83 mins. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Sydney Pollack, 1969, American Broadcasting Company, 129 mins. 13th Warrior, The, John McTiernan, 1999, Touchstone Pictures, 102 mins.

252

Filmography

Three Days of the Condor, Sydney Pollack, 1975, Paramount Pictures, 117 mins. Three Kings, David O. Russell, 1999, Warner Bros., 114 mins. 3 Men and a Baby, Leonard Nimoy, 1987, Touchstone Pictures, 102 mins. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Michael Cimino, 1974, Malpaso Company, 115 mins. THX 1138, George Lucas, 1971, Warner Bros./American Zoetrope, 86 mins. Titanic, James Cameron, 1997, Twentieth Century Fox/Paramount Pictures/Lightstorm Entertainment, 194 mins. Tobacco Road, John Ford, 1941, Twentieth Century Fox, 84 mins. Todd Killings, The, Barry Shear, 1971, National General Productions, 93 mins. Tomorrow Never Dies, Roger Spottiswoode, 1997, Danjaq/Eon Productions/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 119 mins. Tootsie, Sydney Pollack, 1982, Columbia Pictures, 116 mins. Top Gun, Tony Scott, 1986, Paramount Pictures, 110 mins. Topaz, Alfred Hitchcock, 1969, Universal Pictures, 143 mins. Torn Curtain, Alfred Hitchcock, 1966, Universal Pictures, 128 mins. Touch of Evil, Orson Welles, 1958, Universal International Pictures, 95 mins. Towering Inferno, The, John Guillermin, 1974, Twentieth Century Fox/Warner Bros., 165 mins. Traitor, Jeffrey Nachmanoff, 2008, Ouverture Films/Mandeville Films/Hyde Park Entertainment/Crescendo Productions, 114 mins. Transformers, Michael Bay, 2007, Paramount Pictures/Hasbro/DreamWorks SKG, 144 mins. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (aka Transformers 2), Michael Bay, 2009, Paramount Pictures/Hasbro/DreamWorks SKG, 150 mins. Transformers: Dark of the Moon (aka Transformers 3), Michael Bay, 2011, Paramount Pictures/Hasbro/Di Bonaventura Pictures, 154 mins. Trip, The, Roger Corman, 1967, American International Pictures, 85 mins. True Grit, Henry Hathaway, 1969, Paramount Pictures, 128 mins. True Lies, James Cameron, 1994, Twentieth Century Fox, 141 mins. Truman Show, The, Peter Weir, 1998, Paramount Pictures, 103 mins. 12 Monkeys, Terry Gilliam, 1995, Universal Pictures, 129 mins. Twister, Jan de Bont, 1996, Warner Bros./Universal Pictures/Amblin Entertainment, 113 mins. Two Mules for Sister Sara, Don Siegel, 1970, Universal Pictures, 116 mins. Ugly American, The, George Englund, 1963, Universal International Pictures, 120 mins. Ultimax Force, Willy Milan, 1987, Puzon, 90 mins. Ulzana’s Raid, Robert Aldrich, 1972, Universal Pictures, 103 mins. Uncommon Valor, Ted Kotcheff, Paramount Pictures, 1983, 105 mins. Under Fire, Roger Spottiswoode, 1983, Lion’s Gate Pictures, 128 mins. Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood, 1992, Warner Bros., 131 mins.

Filmography

253

United 93, Paul Greengrass, 2006, Universal Pictures, 109 mins. Unmarried Woman, An, Paul Mazursky, 1978, Twentieth Century Fox, 124 mins. Vanishing Point, Richard C. Sarafian, 1971, Twentieth Century Fox/Cupid Productions, 1971, 99 mins. Vera Cruz, Robert Aldrich, 1954, Hecht-Lancaster Productions, 94 mins. Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, 1958, Paramount Pictures, 128 mins. Vigilante Force, George Armitage, 1976, Chateau Productions, 89 mins. Vincent and Theo, Robert Altman, 1990, Arena Films, 138 mins. Virtuosity, Brett Leonard, 1995, Paramount Pictures, 106 mins. Wag the Dog, Barry Levinson, 1997, New Line Cinema, 97 mins. Waiting to Exhale, Forest Whitaker, 1995, Twentieth Century Fox, 124 mins. War of the Worlds, The, Steven Spielberg, 2005, Paramount Pictures, 116 mins. Waterworld, Kevin Reynolds, 1995, Universal Pictures, 135 mins. Way of the Dragon, The, Bruce Lee, 1972, Concord Productions, 90 mins. Wedding, A, Robert Altman, 1978, Lion’s Gate Films, 125 mins. Welcome Home, Soldier Boys, Richard Compton, 1971, Twentieth Century Fox, 91 mins. White Nights, Taylor Hackford, 1985, Columbia Pictures, 136 mins. Who’ll Stop the Rain, Karel Reisz, 1978, United Artists, 126 mins. Wild Angels, The, Roger Corman, 1966, American International Pictures, 93 mins. Wild Bunch, The, Sam Peckinpah, 1969, Warner Bros., 145 mins. Wild Wild West, Barry Sonnenfeld, 1999, Warner Bros., 106 mins. Winter Kills, William Richert, 1979, Winter Gold Productions, 97 mins. Woman on Pier 13, The (aka I Married a Communist), Robert Stevenson, 1949, RKO Radio Productions, 73 mins. Wonder Boys, Curtis Hanson, 2000, Paramount Pictures, 107 mins. World Is Not Enough, The, Michael Apted, 1999, Danjaq/Eon Productions/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 128 mins. World Trade Center, Oliver Stone, 2006, Paramount Pictures, 129 mins. X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, Roger Corman, 1963, Alta Vista Productions, 79 mins. Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks, 1974, Gruskoff/Venture Films, 106 mins. Young Mr. Lincoln, John Ford, 1939, Twentieth Century Fox, 100 mins.

Documentaries Battle of Midway, The, John Ford, 1942, United States Navy, 18 mins. Bronze Screen, The: 100 Years of the Latino Image in American Cinema, Nancy De Los Santos, Alberto Domínguez, and Susan Racho, 2002, Bronze Screen Productions, 90 mins.

254

Filmography

Buzz, Spiro N. Taraviras, 2005, Atalante Pictures Spiro N. Taraviras Film Production/CL Productions/Greek Film Center, 118 mins. Decade Under the Influence, A, Ted Demme and Richard LaGravenese, 2003, Constant Communication, 152 mins. December 7th, John Ford, 1943, The Navy Department/US War Department, 82 mins. Destination Hitchcock: The Making of North by Northwest, Presentation by Eva Marie Saint, Peter Fitzgerald, 2000, Fitzfilm, 40 mins. Directors: Robert Altman, The, American Film Institute, 1999, 60 mins. Easy Rider: Shaking the Cage, Charles Kiselyak, 1999, Columbia TriStar, 65 mins. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, Kenneth Bowser, 2003, British Broadcasting Corporation, 119 mins. Hearts and Minds, Peter Davis, 1974, BBS Productions, 112 mins. Moral Right, A: The Politics of Dirty Harry, Gary Leva, 2008, Disc 3 of the DVD, Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry: Ultimate Collector’s Edition, Leva FilmWorks, 24 mins. Out of the Shadows: The Man Who Was Deep Throat, Gary Leva, 2006, Disc 2 of the DVD of All the President’s Men, Warner Home Video, 16 mins. Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, Sofie Fiennes, 2013, Zeitgeist Films, 136 mins.

Acronyms

AWOL CIA COINTELPRO CSU FBI GDP GNP GWOT HUAC IATSE IED IMDb IRA KGB MGM MIA MPAA MPAPAI MPPDAA NATO NCOs NRA OPEC OSS

absent without leave Central Intelligence Agency Counter Intelligence Program (of the FBI, 1956–1971) Conference of Screen Unions Federal Bureau of Investigation gross domestic product gross national product global war on terror House (of Representatives) Un-American Activities Committee International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees improvised explosive device International Movie Database Irish Republican Army (Soviet) State Security Committee Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer missing in action Motion Picture Association of America Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America North Atlantic Treaty Organization Non-commissioned officers National Rifle Association Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries Office of Strategic Services

255

256

Acronyms

PCA POW PTSD RKO SAS SDECE SEALs SSRC USIA USSR WMD

Production Code Administration prisoner of war post-traumatic stress disorder Radio-Keith-Orpheum Pictures Special Air Services (Britain) Service de Documentation Extérieure et de ContreEspionnage (France) US Navy Sea, Air and Land Forces Social Science Research Council United States Intelligence Agency (fictional) Union of Soviet Socialist Republics weapons of mass destruction

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Index

Absolute Power, 184 Academy Award(s) (Oscars), 4, 43, 44, 46, 56, 74, 114, 122, 125, 127, 137, 138, 146, 148, 160, 162, 168, 180, 185, 187, 192, 221, 222 Addy, Wesley, 75 Advertising Council, 57 Afghanistan, 109, 155, 172, 176, 197, 203, 221, 235 agency/agent, of agency, 31, 68, 70, 80, 89, 95, 100, 134, 145, 166, 169, 171, 195; agency panic, 134, 176, 185. See also myth Agnew, Spiro, 108 Air Force One, 184, 234 al-Qaeda, 2, 197, 203, 204, 220 Albania, 185 Aldrich, Robert, 67, 71, 73, 74, 79, 81– 83 Ali, Muhammed, 147 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, 130 Alice’s Restaurant, 130, 135, 162, 231 Alien, 135 All The President’s Men, 125–126, 135 Altman, Robert, 117–12, 130, 232 Amadis, Saïd, 213 ambush. See trope, ambush American Century, the, 146 American Civil Liberties Union, 193 American community, 3, 11, 19, 24, 26, 27, 42, 43, 46–51, 53–58, 59–60, 92, 93, 107, 116, 118, 146, 147, 163, 164, 168, 18, 210, 213, 215, 216, 218, 231

American Dream, the, 22, 30, 68, 73, 76– 77, 108, 112–114, 128, 134, 135, 145–149, 155, 156, 167, 177 American Film Institute, 5 American Graffiti, 130, 149 American hero. See hero American innocence. See myth, American innocence American International Pictures, 110 Americanism 3, 22, 26–32, 33, 42, 43– 44, 46, 49, 52, 53, 58, 59, 60, 62, 68, 84, 92, 103, 110, 115, 119, 122, 123, 128, 136, 150, 210, 213, 220, 228, 237; definition, 26–27. See also unAmerican/unAmericanism Americanization of Emily, The, 111, 229 American Legion, 151, 230 American President, The, 184, 201 American Self, 19–20, 31 American Sniper, 220, 223, 236 American values, 1, 3, 10, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 53, 57, 59, 60, 93, 102, 108, 109, 115, 119, 124, 129, 156, 157, 162, 175, 190, 200, 210, 216, 219, 221, 226, 228, 229 American war story. See myth, American war story American warrior, 164, 172–173, 233 American way, the, 26, 65, 108, 112, 113, 116, 135, 156 American way of war, 118, 229, 231, 232 Anderson, Judith, 95

275

276

Index

anti-American(ism), 34, 135, 155, 210, 211 anticapitalist, 44 Antichrist, 137, 139, 140 anticommunism, 19, 41, 45, 80, 91, 96, 100, 105, 106, 109, 155, 226, 230, 231 antihero, 72, 75 anti-imperialism, 57 antiliberal, 80 anti-McCarthism, 231 antimilitarism, 54, 120 Anti-Nazi League, 43 antipatriotic, 129 antirevolutionary, 97 antiterrorist, 214 anti-union, 45 antiwar, 205, 207, 222 Apache(s), 47–48, 51–53, 60 Apartment, The, 111 Apocalypse Now, 135, 162, 169, 229 Arab, 20, 211, 234, 235 Arlington Road, 184 archetype(s), 3, 11, 25, 43, 48, 59, 75, 120, 138, 141, 173 Argosy Productions, 46 Armageddon, 184, 188 Arnett, Peter, 163 AromaRama, 110 Arosenius, Per-Axel, 97 Arquette, Joe, 208 Arrowsmith, 63 Ashby, Hal, 127, 130 Asia(n), 111, 169, 171, 182, 215 assassination, 62, 105, 107, 108, 123, 126, 149 Auberjonois, Rene, 118 Auerbach, Jonathan, 78 auteur theory, 33, 39 Avildsen, John, 145 Back to the Future, 153, 159, 160 Back to the Future Part II, 159 Bad Day at Black Rock, 232 Badlands, 122 Bancroft, Anne, 113 Barbarism, 2, 30, 47, 51, 52, 144, 163. See also civilization/barbarism Bart, Peter, 129 Basic Instinct, 185 Bassett, Angela, 185

Bataan, 50 Batman, 153, 158, 159 Batman and Robin, 187 Battle of Midway, The, 44, 63 Battle of Dorking, The, 188, 202 Bat*21, 180 Bay, Michael, 188, 202 Beatty, Warren, 112 Bedford Incident, The, 232 Beecher, Frederick H., 61 Being There, 126 Belafonte, Harry, 130 Bellah, James Warner, 46, 51, 247 Ben Larby, Ahmed, 196 Benning, Annette, 196 Benson, Martin, 139 Berkoff, Steven, 171 Berlin, 48, 89, 96, 104, 233 Bernstein, Carl, 125–126, 131 Berry, Halle, 186 Beverly Hills Cop, 159, 188, 189 Beverly Hills Cop II, 159 Bezzerides, A. I., 74, 84, 250 bicentennial, 139, 140, 146, 147 Biehn, Micheal, 190 Big, 160 Big Tree, John, 50 Billy the Kid, 130 Bin Laden, Osama, 203 Birds, The, 87, 89–90, 91, 94, 95–96, 101, 105, 136, 232 Black Hawk Down, 201 Black Sunday, 122, 162 blacklist. See Hollywood, blacklist Blackmer, Sidney, 137 Blair, Linda, 138, 180 Blazing Saddles, 130, 151 Blown Away, 184 B-movies, 4, 39, 152, 204, 231, 232 Bob Roberts, 185 Body of Lies, 235 Bogdanovich, Peter, 61 Bond, Ward, 56, 63 Bonnie and Clyde, 110, 112, 114, 117, 119, 135 Born on the Fourth of July, 178 Bouchey, Willis B., 75 Bowen, Roger, 119 Boys in Company C, The, 162 Boys in the Band, The, 136, 138 Boyz n the Hood, 185

Index

Bradlee, Ben, 126 Braddock: Missing in Action III, 175 Bremer, Paul, 218 Bretton Woods, 14, 109, 155 Brewster McCloud, 130 Bridges of Madison County, The, 185 Britain/British, 41, 51, 57, 65, 67, 89, 91, 106, 187, 188, 189, 210, 226 Broken Arrow, 185 Bronson, Charles, 141, 145 Brooks, Mel, 136 Bruckheimer, Jerry, 187–189, 192, 194, 201 Buchanan, Patrick J., 157, 178, 183, 190, 194, 198 Buck and the Preacher, 121 Buffalo Bill and the Indians, 130 Bullitt, 189 Bulworth, 184 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, 36 Burgess, Guy, 65, 106 Burghoff, Gary, 120 Burn After Reading, 236 Burr, Raymond, 92 Burstyn, Ellen, 138 Bush, George H. W., 178, 180, 182, 234 Bush, George W., 157, 198, 200, 203, 204, 206, 207, 209–212, 215– 218, 220, 234 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 121, 130 CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency CSU. See Conference of Screen Unions Cage, Nicholas, 188 Caged Fury, 180 California Split, 130 Cameron, James, 175 Cambodia, 109, 155 Camelot, 111 Cannon Films, 173–174 capitalism, 69, 70, 72, 80, 91, 113 Captive Women, 232 captivity narrative. See trope, captivity narrative Carradine, Robert, 127 Carrie, 136, 152 Carroll, Leo C., 94 Carter, Jimmy, 156 Cassavetes, John, 137

277

Casualties of War, 177, 208, 231 Catholicism, 22, 57, 64, 137–140, 226, 230 Catch-22, 134, 135 Caute, David, 89 Cazale, John, 164 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 15, 16, 17, 24, 36, 38, 44, 65, 90, 95, 97, 99, 106, 108, 123–125, 195, 184, 126, 196–197, 200, 213, 216–217, 232– 233, 236 centrist, 23, 74 Chambers, Whittaker, 105 Cheyenne, 47, 50, 51, 61 Cheyenne Autumn, 61–62 Chicago, 102, 127 Chile, 123, 197 China, 51, 52, 57 Chinatown, 122, 135 Chivington, John, 61 Christian(ity), 22, 55, 119, 120, 137, 141, 162, 166, 179, 209, 229; evangelical, 141; fundamentalism, 152, 156, 183 Christie, Julie, 121, 128 Cimino, Michael, 162–164 civil-military relations, 10, 12, 47 civil rights movement, 76, 87, 108, 132, 185, 214, 227 Civil War (American), 55, 107, 161, 195; civilization/barbarism, 2, 30, 32, 46– 47, 51, 58, 61, 62, 116, 137, 140–141, 143; class (conflict/rhetoric), 14, 22, 24, 25, 48, 51, 53, 56, 57–58, 63, 66, 77, 91, 95, 101, 108, 112, 113, 114, 115, 122, 127, 143, 145, 147, 149, 160, 163, 164, 168, 174, 185, 193, 213, 215; of the 1960s, 109–110, 121. See also myth, of classlessness Clifford, Clark, 237 Clinton, Bill, 182, 183, 184, 196, 199 Cleopatra, 129 Cliffhanger, 184 Clockers, 185 Clooney, George, 235 Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 130, 151, 153 Cobra Mission, 180 Cochise, 49 Coffy, 152 Collateral Damage, 202 Cold War, 2, 4, 9, 14, 18, 20, 21, 42, 45,

278

Index

47–48, 58, 60, 65, 68, 72, 73, 74, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 87, 88, 90, 89, 93, 94, 95, 97, 100, 102, 103, 111, 112, 114, 126, 138, 141, 155, 156, 160, 173, 175, 181, 182, 183, 187, 197, 199, 226–233, 234, 236 Cold War consensus, 3, 19, 25, 33, 42, 66, 68, 71, 72, 75–76, 83, 88, 89, 94, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 107, 108, 111–115, 128, 129, 134, 176, 228, 229; definition, 20–21; tenets, 22 colonialism/colonize, 26, 31, 60, 110 Color Purple, The, 185 Colpaert, Carl, 209 Comanche, 43, 60 Coming Home, 135, 126–128, 135, 148 Coming to America, 160 communism/Communist Party, 14, 19, 20, 22, 27, 34, 41, 45, 46, 66, 73–77, 79–82, 84, 87, 89–91, 93–94, 96, 99, 103–106, 114, 135, 138, 140, 155– 156, 160, 175, 226–228, 230, 234, 236 Comolli, Jean-Luc, 69 Conan the Barbarian, 168 Connery, Sean, 188 Conference of Screen Unions (CSU), 45 conservative/conservatism, 23, 42, 45, 50, 100, 104, 111, 152, 165, 166, 168, 172, 177, 179, 189, 207–208, 210, 217, 221, 228, 229; backlash, 6, 129, 133–151, 159–161, 228 conspiracy/conspiracy theory, 66, 108, 122, 123, 125–126, 143, 166, 169– 171, 173, 177, 179, 189–190, 195, 236. See also genre(s), conspiracy consumerism/consumption, 12, 25, 66, 69, 75, 83, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 125, 134, 136, 158, 161, 186, 187 containment, 14, 161 Contender, The, 185 Conversation, The, 122, 195, 228 Coogan’s Bluff, 153 Cool Hand Luke, 131 Cooper, Bradley, 220 Cooper, Gary, 64, 120 Cooper, Maxine, 75 Coppola, Francis Ford, 194 Corber, Robert, 87, 94, 101, 103, 106 Corey, Wendell, 93

Corman, Roger, 111 corruption, 68–70, 108, 118, 123, 126, 128, 135–140, 144, 162, 194, 209, 213 Countdown, 131 counterculture, the, 108, 113, 114–117, 119–122, 127–128, 134–137, 140– 143, 150, 160, 228 counterinsurgency, 207, 233, 235 Courage Under Fire, 185, 195, 216 Crenna, Richard, 168 Crimson Tide, 184, 188, 196 critical films, 61, 67, 69, 71, 82, 91, 103, 111, 126, 128, 135, 149, 150, 160, 190, 193, 206, 209, 216, 219, 226, 227, 228, 230, 231, 232, 233, 235 critics/criticism (of films), 39, 72, 73, 94, 99, 101, 105, 111, 121, 127, 135, 136, 138, 144, 152, 170, 180, 206, 208, 222, 232 crime/criminality, 62, 68–70, 76, 78, 80, 82, 92, 99, 108–109, 111–112, 115, 122, 123–125, 129, 142, 143, 162, 199, 227, 229; war crime, 211, 212, 221 Crosby, Bing, 56–57 Cuban missile crisis, 63, 87, 89–90, 104, 105, 109, 149, 232 culture, v, 3, 5, 11, 22, 23, 24, 59, 60, 61, 111, 121, 129, 136, 150, 156, 187, 193, 194, 195, 219, 225; brokers, 11– 12, 44; civic, 22, 108; of conspiracy/paranoia, 108, 141, 195; cultural memory, 27–28, 220; definition, 11; of defeat, 161–162, 167; of fear, 227; popular, 11, 20, 130, 150, 199, 225; wars, 26, 27, 107, 183, 228. See also counterculture Custer, George Armstrong, 49–50, 61 Czechoslovakia, 87, 90 Dall, John, 95 Damon, Matt, 209, 219 Daniels, William, 113 Dar es Salaam, 183 Dassin, Jules, 84 Dave, 184 Davos, 182 Day, Doris, 102 Day of the Dolphin, The, 122 Day of the Jackal, 122

Index

Days of Thunder, 189 Day the Earth Caught Fire, The, 233 Day the World Ended, The, 233 Dead Pool, The, 144, 152 Dean, John, 195 Death Wish, 122, 129, 141, 162, 229 December 7th, 44, 63 decline/declinism, US, 109, 146, 155, 182, 200 Deep Impact, 184 “Deep Throat,” 125, 125 Deer Hunter, The, 5, 129, 162–164, 167, 168, 172, 229 Defense Department 230; Entertainment Media Division, 24, 37. See also Pentagon Defense Intelligence Agency, 36 de Gaulle, Charles, 104 Dekker, Albert, 74 Deliverance, 135 DeMille, Cecil B., 63 democracy, 15, 22, 28, 48, 61, 82, 93, 102, 108, 123–126, 135, 188, 192, 198, 200, 204, 213– 214, 217–218 Democratic Party, 41, 63, 125, 127, 135, 141, 171 demonization, 30, 60, 161, 164, 171, 175, 176, 229 De Niro, Robert, 149, 163, 184, 200 Dennehy, Brian, 167 Dennis, Nick, 77 De Palma, Brian, 152, 177, 208, 222 Dern, Bruce, 127, 131 desegregation. See segregation détente, 87, 90, 95–96, 174 Devane, William, 162 Devil in a Blue Dress, 195 Devil’s Own, The, 184 Diary of a Mad Housewife, 130 Die Hard, 6, 184 Die Hard 2, 6, 184 Die Hard: With a Vengeance, 214 difference, 20, 32, 38, 59, 116. See also “Other,”/“otherness” Director of National Intelligence, 15, 36 Dirty Harry, 122, 129, 141–145, 149, 152, 162, 169, 220, 225, 228–229 Disclosure, 185 Disney, Walt/Disneyesque/Disneyland, 63, 84, 150, 157 Dixiecrats, 155

279

Do the Right Thing, 185 Dobson, James, 141, 152 Doctor Doolittle, 111 Dog Day Afternoon, 135 Donner, Richard, 139 Donovan, William J. (“Wild Bill”), 45 Doolittle Report, 17, 233 Dor, Karin, 97 Douglas, James B., 119 Douglas, Michael, 185 Down and Out in Beverly Hills, 160 Dr. Strangelove, 5, 111, 124, 229–232 Driving Miss Daisy, 160 Dru, Joanne, 54 Drug Enforcement Agency, Intelligence Program of, 36 Drums Along the Mohawk, 43 Duel, 122, 149 Dunaway, Fay, 113, 124 Durgnat, Raymond, 91 Duvall, Robert, 118 DVDs, 186, 204, 212, 222 E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, 153, 159, 176 Eagleton, Terry, v Earp, Wyatt, 62, 130 Earthquake, 122 Eastwood, Clint, 141–142, 145, 163, 169, 219, 220, 221, 236 Easy Rider, 111, 115–117, 119, 121, 135 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 17, 42, 63, 118 El Lozy, Mahmoud, 213 Emmerich, Roland, 187 empire, 28, 29, 31, 57, 186; “evil empire,” 140–141, 150, 156, 160. See also imperialism Empire Strikes Back, The, 153, 159 Energy Department Office of Intelligence, 36 Enemy of the State, 184, 188, 192–195, 196, 198–200, 234 Enforcer, The, 122, 152 Engelhardt, Tom, 30 English Patient, The, 186 Englund, George, 111 Escape from L.A, 184 Ethiopia, 109, 155 ethnic/ethnicity, 14, 24, 47, 48, 53, 55– 157, 116, 147, 198, 210, 213–216

280

Index

Europe, 29, 41, 76, 104, 111, 131, 189, 213, 226 Evans, Shaun, 213 Evers, Medgar, 107 exceptionalism. See myth, exceptionalism Executive Action, 122 Executive Decision, 184 Exorcist, The, 129, 130, 136, 138–141, 151, 152, 180, 229, 234 expansionism, 14, 16, 30, 33, 43, 47–49, 51, 55–56, 61–62, 156, 161, 233 extremism, 144, 198 Fair Game, 236 Fail-Safe, 5, 111, 230–232, 237 Fall of the Roman Empire, The, 129 Falling Down, 185 family values, 70–71, 99–102, 105 Farrow, Mia, 137 fascism, 26, 64, 143–145, 152, 167, 168, 211, 125, 127, 185 Fast, Howard, 72 Fatal Attraction, 159 FBI. See Federal Bureau of Investigation Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 16, 17, 24, 73–75, 77–82, 89, 93, 106, 188–190, 196–199, 227, 230; COINTELPRO, 17, 78; Investigative Publicity and Public Affairs Unit, 24; Office of Public Affairs, 24 Felt, Mark, 125. See also “Deep Throat” femininity, 47, 156, 191 feminism, 88, 100–101, 108, 121–122, 127–128, 130, 133, 138–139, 142, 152, 169, 183, 189, 191 Fenian(s), 56–57 Ferrin, Bobby, 176 fetishism of weapons technology. See trope, fetishism of weapons technology Few Good Men, A, 184 Field of Dreams, 159 Finch, Peter, 109 Firefox, 161 First Blood, 166–169, 171–172, 179 Fishburne, Laurence, 185 Five, 232 Five Easy Pieces, 135 Flags of Our Fathers, 220, 221 Flashdance, 188

Focus on the Family Foundation, 141 Fonda, Henry, 48 Fonda, Jane, 126–127, 131, 160 Fonda, Peter, 115, 117 Foran, Dick, 64 Ford, Gerald, 109 Ford, John, 4–5, 41–64, 111, 115, 117, 126, 227, 231 foreign policy, 3, 9, 14–15, 17, 37, 91, 156, 158, 165, 176, 221, 233, 235 Fort Apache, 42, 46–50, 53–54, 56–62, 63, 65 Fox News, 179, 208 France/French, 51, 53, 56, 67, 68, 77, 84–83 90–91, 97, 99, 104, 111, 164, 210, 226, 233 Franciscus, James, 166 Frankenheimer, John, 111 Frazier, Joe, 147 Freeman, Morgan, 185, 195 French Connection, The, 129, 138, 194 Friedberg, Aaron, 18 Friedkin, William, 138, 234 frontier. See myth, frontier Fuchs, Karl, 65 Fugitive, The, 195 Full Metal Jacket, 177, 231 Fuller, Samuel, 67, 71–72, 74, 76, 79–80, 82, 84, 214 Gable, Clark, 63 Garfield, John, 70 Gathering of Eagles, A, 38, 222 GDP. See gross domestic product gender, 14, 24–25, 48, 53–55, 94–95, 99–100, 104, 160. See also femininity; masculinity “generation gap,” 47, 112–113, 136, 146, 160, 189 genocide, 62, 183, 229 genre(s), film, 4, 33, 150, 189, 194–196, 233, 236; action, 143, 150, 159, 167, 174, 186, 209, 225; animal, 150; biopic, 130, 185; blaxploitation, 130; blockbuster, 2, 4, 129, 149, 158–159, 182, 185–200, 201, 204, 237, 222; buddy, 150, 189, 194; caper, 130, 15; combat, 184, 189, 205, 210–211, 213, 218; coming of age, 160; conspiracy, 24, 165, 133–151, 229; cop, 143; disaster, 2, 6; epic, 66;

Index

espionage/counterespionage/spy, 93, 96–98, 101, 104, 194; fantasy, 130, 150, 159; historical drama, 117; horror, 122, 130, 136–141, 144, 149, 152; murder mystery, 130; musical, 4, 67, 84, 130, 138, 236; neonoir, 67, 231; nostalgia, 150, 160, 176; paranoia films, 125; POW/MIA avenger movie, 166–176, 229; romantic comedy, 4, 130; science fiction, 4, 130, 150, 187, 228, 236; sequels/series, 122, 130, 138–139, 141, 143–145, 149–150, 152, 160, 167–173, 175, 177, 187, 187, 220, 225, 228, 229, 236; teen, 150; theory, 33, 39; thriller, 84, 88–90, 98, 101, 104, 130, 189, 194, 196; vigilante/avenger, 141–145, 162, 165, 166, 168, 180, 189, 229; war, 4, 23, 130, 150, 156, 177, 195, 204–220, 223; western, 31, 32, 42–62, 67, 68, 84, 92, 115–117, 130, 135, 142, 143, 150, 151, 163, 185, 218, 220, 229, 231, 233, 236 geopolitical, 6, 9, 19, 24, 30, 31, 48, 161, 195, 211; geopolitical imagination, 160, 164, 167, 171, 173, 176, 178 Geraghty, Brian, 215 German-American Bund, 26, 38 German/Germany, 18, 41, 56, 61–62, 65, 104, 172, 187, 226 Ghost in the Machine, 183 Ghostbusters, 159 Ghostbusters II, 160 Gingerbread Man, 132 globalization, 185–186 global war on terror (GWOT), 2, 196, 198, 203, 235 Globus, Yoram, 174 Glory, 185, 195 Glover, Danny, 185 GNP. See gross national product Go Tell the Spartans, 162 Godfather, The, 130, 135, 151, 163 Godfather, The: Part II, 135 Golan, Menahem, 174 Goldberg, Whoopi, 185 Goldwater, Senator Barry, 131, 134, 144 Goldwater-Nichols Act (1986), 15 Godzilla, 187 Gomez, Thomas, 70

281

Good Guys Wear Black, 166, 168 Good Morning, Vietnam, 160 Good Will Hunting, 186 Gordon, Ruth, 137 Gosford Park, 130 Gould, Elliot, 118 governance, 12, 156 governmentality, 12 Graduate, The, 5, 110, 112–115, 117, 119, 121, 135, 229 grammar of power, 15, 59, 176, 225 Granger, Farley, 95 Grant, Cary, 94 Grant, Ulysses S., 55 Grapes of Wrath, The, 44–46, 63 Grease, 130, 149, 151 Great Depression, 12, 21, 115 Greatest Story Ever Told, The, 129 Great Gatsby, 149 Green Berets, The, 38, 117, 162, 166 Gremlins, 159 Greenberg, Joel, 83 Greengrass, Paul, 209, 219, 235 Griffies, Ethel, 96 Gritz, James (“Bo”), 168–169, 170 gross domestic product (GDP), 182 gross national product (GNP), 157 Guantanamo Bay, 235 Guatemala, 17, 222 Guinea-Bissau, 109, 155 Gulf War, 177, 182, 184, 204, 215, 221 Gutierrez, José, 222 GWOT. See global war on terror HUAC. See House Committee on unAmerican Activities Hackman, Gene, 168, 192, 194 Haggis, Paul, 207, 221 Hair, 135 Hamada, Mido, 209 Hannity, Sean, 153, 165, 171 Hanoi Hilton, The, 180 happy ending, 68, 102, 114, 135 Harold and Maude, 126 Harris, Ed, 188 Hathaway, Henry, 70 Hays, William H, (Will), 45 Hays Code. See Production Code Administration Hawks, Howard, 4 Hedren, Tippi, 96, 100, 106

282

Index

Heartbreak Ridge, 229 Hearts and Minds, 162 Heaven & Earth, 177 Heaven’s Gate, 163 Hegemonic mindset/hegemony/hegemon, 12, 18–21, 24–25, 66, 69, 80, 83, 103, 107, 145, 161, 182, 220, 228, 226 Hello, Dolly! 111 Helter Skelter, 122 Hepworth, John, 252 hero/heroism, 2, 32, 43, 44–45, 47, 49, 50, 54, 56, 58–62, 99, 102, 118, 127– 128, 135, 142, 148–150, 162, 164, 167, 169, 172, 173–177, 184, 188– 189, 194–195, 197, 206–208, 211, 220, 229, 231. See also myth, hero High Noon, 231 Hiller, Arthur, 111 Hispanic, 25, 215–216, 222 Hitchcock, Alfred, 6, 87–106, 117, 136, 230, 232 Hitler, Adolph, 26, 167, 171 Hoffman, Dustin, 113, 125, 184 Hoffmann, Stanley, 38 Hofstadter, Richard, 26, 38 Holbrook, Hal, 125, 144 Hollywood/US cinema industry, 2–6, 9, 17, 19–25, 28, 31, 33–34, 38–39, 42– 43, 48, 51, 64, 66–69, 71–72, 76, 78–79, 83–84, 87, 102–103, 150, 156–158, 162–163, 165, 168–169, 173–174, 176–178, 182–184, 186– 188, 195, 199, 204, 227, 230, 207, 210–211, 213, 215, 221, 225–228, 230–237; blacklist, 2, 17, 22, 42, 43, 46, 51, 66, 69, 72, 84, 230; box office/earnings, 4–5, 63–64, 71, 83– 84, 88, 90–91, 93, 95, 110, 127, 130, 136–139, 145, 150–151, 158–160, 163, 167, 169, 173–174, 176–177, 184–188, 192, 195, 210, 219–220, 222–223, 225, 228; business practices/economics, 33, 44–46, 71, 110–111, 158–161, 185–186; cinema attendance/ticket sales, 21, 37, 44, 71, 100, 111–112, 136; “Complex,” 23; counterrevolution, 110, 129, 133–153, 176; “Hollywood-Pentagon axis,” 23– 24; “Hollywood War Machine,” 23; “leftist establishment,” 23; “MilitaryIndustrial-Media-Entertainment-

Network,” 23; “political agenda” of, 23; revolution, 6, 107–131, 134–136, 145, 148, 149–150, 160, 228; relationship with the Pentagon/intelligence agencies, 23– 24; studios, 44–46, 66, 71, 110–111, 136, 158–159, 185–186, 232–233 Home of the Brave (1949), 213 Home of the Brave (2006), 204–206, 211–12, 214, 216, 219, 221, 236 homeland security, 36, 200 Homeland Security Act (2002), 17 Homeland Security Department, 200, 203, 235; Office of Intelligence and Analysis, 36 homophobia, 105, 118, 191 homosexual(ality), 94–95, 105, 135, 138, 183, 192 Hoover, J. Edgar, 73, 81, 84, 89, 189, 230 Hopper, Dennis, 115, 130 Hopper, Hedda, 63 House Committee on un-American Activities (HUAC), 17, 46, 66, 78– 79, 84, 89, 231 House on 92nd Street, 227 How Green Was My Valley, 63 Hunt for the Red October, The, 161 Hunter, Evan, 90, 104 Huntington, Samuel P., 215 Hurt Locker, The, 204–206, 211–212, 214, 216, 219, 222, 236 Hussein, Saddam, 196–197, 204, 213, 218 Huston, John, 67, 111 Huxley, Aldous, 193 hypersecurity, 203, 219, 235–237 IATSE. See International Alliance of Theatrical Screen Employees identity. See national identity ideology, 3, 9–10, 14, 19, 23, 26–27, 33, 43, 59, 66, 68–70, 74–75, 80–83, 100, 103, 108, 111–112, 123, 141, 149– 150, 176, 210; definition, 12–13; Reaganite, 150, 175. See also national security, ideology Images, 130 IMDb. See International Movie Database Immigration, 43, 56, 75–77, 82, 183, 214–216, 222, 227 imperialism, 57–58, 62. See also empire

Index

Independence Day, 6, 184, 186–187, 193, 202 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 153 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, 153 individualism, 30, 47, 62, 73–6, 81–82, 92–93, 112, 116, 117, 120, 123, 145, 150, 184 Indochina, 108, 233 Indochina Peace Campaign Films, 126 inequality, 41, 160, 214 Informer, The, 56, 63 Internal Security Act (1950), 17 International Alliance of Theatrical Screen Employees (IATSE), 45–46 international law, 176, 227 International Movie Database (IMDb), 7, 222–223 In the Line of Fire, 185 In the Valley of Elah, 204, 207, 212, 215– 216, 219, 221, 236 invade/invasion, 31, 50–51, 87, 90, 95, 109, 148, 155, 204, 207, 210, 212– 213, 217, 221, 222 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 141, 228 Invasion U.S.A., 161 Iran, 15, 17, 109, 155, 177, 197 Iraq/Iraq War, 5–6, 15, 203–223 Ireland/Irish, 43, 56–57; Irish Republican Army (IRA), 184 Islam(ic)/Muslim, 14, 20, 147, 32, 183– 184, 196, 199, 211, 217, 233 235–236 Israel/Iraeli, 174, 211 Jackson, Curtis, 214 Jackson, Samuel L., 186, 205 Jade, Claude, 103 Jarman, Claude Jr., 54 Japan/Japanese, 41, 44, 182, 198, 214 Jaws, 130, 136, 149, 151, 153, 158, 187 Jew(ish), 41, 137, 171 Jewison, Norman, 111 Joe, 122, 135 John Birch Society, 151 Johnny Guitar, 231 Johnson, Ben, 46 Johnson, David, 105 Johnson, Eric, 45–46, 63, 66, 68 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 62, 107, 110, 127, 134, 161, 233 Jones, Tommy Lee, 143, 207

283

Jones, Sam, III, 205 Jones, Ty, 211 Julia, 131 Jungle Fever, 185 Jurassic Park, 151, 153 Justice Intelligence Coordinating Council, 36 Kael, Pauline, 127, 135, 144–145 Kamber, Micheal, 206 Karate Kid, Part II, 159–160 Kasdan, Lawrence, 160 Kaufman, Philip, 183 Kazan, Elia, 4, 126, 227 Kellerman, Sally, 119 Kelly, Grace, 92 Kennedy, Fred, 56 Kennedy, John F., 62, 108, 134, 149 Kennedy, Paul, 182 Kennedy, Robert F., 108, 126 Keynesianism, 22 Khrushchev, Nikita, 104 Khobar Towers, 183, 196 Kiley, Richard, 73 King, Larry, 193–194, 198 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 108, 126 King, Regina, 193 King, Rodney, 182 King of Marvin Gardens, The, 135 Kingdom, The, 38, 202, 235 Kiss Me Deadly, 67, 71–83, 85, 231–232 Klinger, Barbara, 69 Klute, 122 Knapp Commission, 51, 123 Korea, North, 51–52, 57, 175 Korea, South, 51 Korean War, 10, 31, 41–42, 51, 65, 89, 115, 118–120, 204, 214, 232–233 Kotcheff, Ted, 168 Ku Klux Klan, 151, 179 Kubrick, Stanley, 5, 111, 177, 232 Landau, Martin, 95 Laos, 109, 123, 155, 168 Last Detail, The, 122, 126, 130, 135 Last House on the Left, The, 136 Last Picture Show, The, 135 last stand, trope of, 31–32, 49–51, 57, 191 Latin America(n), 123, 131, 156, 214. See also Hispanic

284

Index

Lavender Scare, 105 Leachman, Cloris, 74 Lee, Bruce, 166, 174 Lee, Jason, 192 Lee, Robert E., 43, 55 Lee, Spike, 185 left/leftists/left-wing; 10, 27, 29, 35, 41– 44, 69–70, 74, 80–82, 112, 119–120, 141, 146, 165, 190–192, 194, 228, 230. See also New Left Leitch, Thomas, 88 LeMay, Curtis, 232 Lethal Weapon 2, 159 Letters from Iwo Jima, 221 Levin, Ira, 137 Levinson, Barry, 184 Lewis, Damian, 209 liberal(ism), 24, 26, 29, 41, 49, 59–62, 84, 102, 104, 116, 122, 125–126, 133–135, 139–142, 146–148, 151, 156–167, 160, 166, 171, 177, 184, 190–191, 194, 198, 209, 216, 217, 228 libertarian(ism), 151, 191, 229 Little Big Man, 135, 162, 230, 231, 233 Little Mermaid, The, 160 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 26 Long Goodbye, The, 120, 130, 135 Lord of the Rings, 202 Los Angeles, 24, 74–5, 166, 182 Loyalty boards/oath, 17, 43, 44, 51 Lucas, George, 149–151, 153, 189 Lumet, Sidney, 5, 109–111, 123 Lynum, Telana, 208 Mackie, Anthony, 214 Maclean, Donald, 65, 106 Magnum Force, 142–144, 149, 152, 162 Mailer, Norman, v Make-My-Day Law, 141 Malcolm X, 108 Malcolm X, 185, 195 Malden, Karl, 61 Malraux, André, 91 Maltby, Richard, 173 Mamarzia, Nasser, 209 Man Who Knew Too Much, The, 60–62 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The, 98, 104–105 Manchurian Candidate, The, 111, 124, 228, 231

Manhattan Project, 18, 74 Manifest Destiny. See myth, manifest destiny Manson, Charles, 138, 142 Marciano, Rocky, 147 Marcil, Vanessa, 191 Marcuse, Herbert, 114 Mars Attack, 184 Marvin, Lee, 60 Marxist, 123 masculinity/masculinsim, 31, 47, 55, 99– 100, 122, 128, 137, 148, 162, 164, 169, 172–173, 184, 189, 191. See also patriarchy M*A*S*H, 5, 117–122, 126, 130, 135, 162, 229, 231, 232 Mason, James, 93 Matrix, The, 184 Mature, Victor, 70 Mazursky, Paul, 130 McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 120, 130, 135 McCarthy, Joseph, 59, 65–66, 72, 79, 85, 87, 91 McCarthyism, 6, 17, 46, 61, 65–83, 89, 91, 120, 226, 231–232, 235–236 McGuinness, James, 51, 64 McLaglen, Victor, 56–57, 64 Mearsheimer, John J., 234 Medium Cool, 135 Medved, Michael, 208, 221 Meeker, Ralph, 74 Melanson, Philip, 193 melting pot. See myth, melting pot Meredith, Burgess, 146 Men in Black, 184, 192 Men Who Stare at Goats, 236 Mexico, 52, 81, 206, 208, 216; “Mexican standoff,” 199–200; US-Mexican War, 215 MIA. See missing in action Middle East, 124, 126, 176, 196–197, 204, 221, 234, 236 Midnight Cowboy, 121, 135 Milford, Penelope, 127, 131 militarism/militarist, 42, 48–49, 54, 59, 62, 112, 118–119, 127–128, 151, 159, 162, 167, 172–173, 199, 229, 231 militarization, 10, 16, 22, 62, 167, 198 military operations, other than war, 234 military spending, 16, 22, 41, 50, 157, 177

Index

Milius, John, 143–144, 152, 168 Misfits, The, 111 Missing, 233 missing in action (MIA), 166, 168–177, 191 Missing in Action, 169, 174–177, 189, 199, 220 Missing in Action 2, 175 Mission Impossible, 184 Mississippi Burning, 185, 227 momism. See trope, momism Moon is Blue, The, 230 Moscow, 65, 91, 106 Motion Picture Alliance for the Presevation of American Ideals (MPAPAI), 43, 45–46, 65 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) 45, 110; ratings system, 110. See also Production Code Administration Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America (MPPDAA), 21, 45 Movie Channel, The, 201 Mozambique, 109, 154 MPAA. See Motion Picture Association of America MPAPAI. See Motion Picture Alliance for the Presevation of American Ideals MPPDAA. See Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America multiculturalism, 134, 137 Murphy, Eddie, 185 Murphy, George, 63, 135 Murrow, Edward, 235 Mutiny on the Bounty, 129 Muslim. See Islam My Lai massacre, 163–164, 148 My Son John, 225 myth/mythology, v, 3, 12, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27–32, 60–62, 82, 107, 111–112, 114, 137, 143, 146, 148–149, 167, 168, 172–173, 219, 232; agency, 70; American innocence, 120, 129, 139, 145, 146, 148, 149, 177; Americanism, 27–33, 42, 43–48, 58, 60–61, 68, 103, 110, 227, 115, 119– 120, 128, 145–147, 150, 157, 161, 165, 167, 187, 220, 227–228, 231,

285

237; American war story, 28, 30–32, 50, 119, 143, 161, 165, 172, 176, 191, 205, 212; classlessness, 76, 83, 119; definition, 27–28, 49, 59; exceptionalism, 28–31, 48, 116; frontier, 2, 28, 30, 43, 46–48, 51, 53, 62, 115–116, 118, 140, 142–143, 220, 229; hero, 58, 60, 128, 169, 208; losers’ myths, 161–163; manifest destiny, 28–29, 31, 61, 187; melting pot, 53, 76, 119, 198, 210, 213, 215, 218; Other, 13, 19–20, 29, 31–32, 46– 48, 52, 59–60, 81–82, 114, 118, 164, 171–172, 175, 187, 210–211, 213, 220, 229; social organization of forgetting, 28–29, 58, 61; “stab in the back”/betrayal, 161, 166, 168, 170– 173; universalism, 28–29, 32, 116, 187, 218–219; of the West, 61–62, 185, 229; will to myth, 11, 60, 62 Nairobi, 183 Naish, J. Carrol, 52 Nam Angels, 180 Naor, Igal, 217 Napier, Charles, 170 Narboni, Paul, 69 Naremore, James, 67 Nashville, 122, 130 Nation of Islam, 146 National Association of Manufacturers, 151 National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, 21 National Conservative Political Action Committee, 177 National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency, 26 national identity, 3, 13, 24, 26, 65, 107, 183, 210–213, 226–228 National Intelligence Council, 36 national interest, 3, 12, 26, 65, 98, 156, 176, 210, 227 NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization National Legion of Decency, 21, 66, 110 NRA. See National Rifle Association National Reconnaissance Office, 36 National Rifle Association (NRA), 142– 143, 166 national security 1, 2–6, 9–10, 15, 19–20,

286

Index

22, 35, 41–42, 49, 65, 67, 75, 77–78, 82–83, 88, 94–95, 102, 115, 119, 124, 134, 160, 181–182, 191, 193–195, 198–199, 210, 226–228, 232, 235– 236; difference with defense, 3, 12, 13, 18; doctrine, 2, 14–16, 19–20, 93, 181–183, 226, 234; grand strategy, 14– 15, 18, 20, 57; ideology, 12–14, 17–19, 80, 82, 110, 133, 220, 225; practices, 1–3, 5, 10–12, 16–20, 33, 100, 181– 182, 197–198, 226–227, 233 National Security Act (1947), 15, 50, 65, 233 National Security Advisor, 15 National Security Agency, 16, 36, 192– 195, 199 National Security Council, 14–15 National Security Decision Directive No. 75, 173, 178, 180 National Security State: as threat, 92, 125–126, 136, 188, 190, 192, 195– 196, 200; components/modalities, 5, 10, 12–21; covert action, 10, 14, 16– 17, 43, 48, 50, 52, 59, 61, 109, 125, 166, 190, 233; definition, 1, 9–12; emergence, 3, 7, 10, 13, 18, 34, 42– 43, 47, 88, 181; institutions, 1–3, 10, 12, 15–16, 19, 33–34, 45, 60, 79–80, 82–83, 94, 99, 108, 110, 112, 118, 133, 182, 197, 216, 227, 233, 236; political economy, 18, 35; paradox of, 81, 175; practices, 1–3, 5–6, 10–20, 25, 33, 82, 100, 181–182, 187, 197– 198, 226–227, 233, 235. See also Central Intelligence Agency; Federal Bureau of Investigation; National Security Agency national style of poltics, 26, 38, 107 national values. See American values Native Americans, 31, 50–51, 57, 172, 227 nazi/nazism, 26, 43, 171 neoconservative, 26, 204, 217, 221, 177 Network, 109, 128 New Deal, 41, 48–49, 62, 156 New Left, 115–116, 121–122, 134, 140 New Jack City, 185 New World Order, 181, 233 New York City, 2, 7, 70, 74–75, 123, 183, 186, 196–197, 220; Police Department, 122–123

New York Post, 210, 222 New York Times, 123–126, 184 New Yorker, The, 135, 144 Nicaragua, 109, 155 Nichols, Mike, 112 Nicholson, Jack, 116 Nickson, Julia, 171 Nielsen, Connie, 209 Night Moves, 135 Night of the Living Dead, 136 Night They Raided Minsky’s, The, 138 Nine to Five, 160 1960s, 6, 87, 107–108, 109–111, 117, 120–122, 125, 128–129, 133–134, 137, 139, 142, 145, 160–161, 185, 229, 231–233 Nixon, Richard M., 108–109, 127, 131, 134, 195 No Way Out, 161 Nolan, Jack, 178 Norris, Chuck, 145, 165–166, 169, 173– 175, 221 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 97, 104, 203 North by Northwest, 87–89, 90, 93–95, 98, 102–104, 230, 232 Notorious, 98, 101, 105 nuclear weapons, 13, 74–75, 78, 85, 90, 95, 232, 234 nuclear strategy, 199, 226, 230, 232 Obama, Barack, 221 Odessa File, The, 123 Office of Naval Intelligence, 36, 106 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 44 Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 36 Office of War Information (OWI), 21, 44 O’Hara, Maureen, 54 Oh, Soon-Tek, 175 Oklahoma City, 183 Omen, The, 136, 139–141 On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, 111 On Golden Pond, 160 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 121, 130, 135 One, Two, Three, 111, 229 O’Neill, Eugene, 43 O’Neill, Tip, 26

Index

OPEC. See Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries Operation Condor, 123 Operation Iraqi Freedom, 213 Operation Lazarus, 168–169, 180 Ordinary People, 160 O’Reilly, Bill, 208 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 155 Ortiz, Peter, 52 Oscars. See Academy Award(s) (Oscars) OSS. See Office of Strategic Services Osteen, Mark, 67, 78 “Other,” the/“otherness,” 14, 19–20, 30– 32, 46–48, 51–52, 59–60, 81–82, 114, 118, 164, 171, 172, 176, 187, 210– 212, 220–229 Oversees Contingency Operation, 221 Outlaw Josey Wales, The, 162 OWI. See Office of War Information Pacino, Al, 122 pacifism, 54, 207 Paint Your Wagon, 111 Pakula, Alan, 125 Panic in the Streets, 126, 227 Paper Moon, 149 Parallax View, The, 122, 125, 135 Paramount Pictures, 129 Parenthood, 160 Paris, 91, 166, 186 Parks, Gordon, 121 Passenger 57, 184, 213, 234 patriarchy/patriarchal, 23, 55–56, 99– 101, 108, 120, 139, 140, 151, 156, 163, 194 Paths of Glory, 111 Patriot Act (2001), 17, 203, 234 Patriot Games, 184, 234 Patton, 111 Pawnbroker, The, 110, 230 PCA. See Production Code Administration Peacemaker, The, 184 Peale, Norman Vincent, 148 Pearl Harbor, 12, 33, 44, 50 Pearl Harbor, 188 Pearson, Beatrice, 70 Peck, Gregory, 139 Pelopennesian War, 28 Pentagon, 1, 2, 23–24, 51, 190, 217, 219, 230

287

Pentagon Papers, The, 15, 123 Penn, Arthur, 110, 112, 130 People Magazine, 2 Perfect Couple, A, 130 Perfect World, A, 185 Perry, Frank, 130 Peters, Jean, 73 petit monde de Don Camillo, Le, 226 Pflug, Jo Ann, 118 Philadelphia, 148 Philadelphia, 195 Philippines War, 39 Philippe, Ryan, 206 Piccoli, Michel, 91 Pickup on South Street, 67, 71–84, 230– 231 Planet of the Apes, 122 Platoon, 177, 231 Play Misty For Me, 122 Player, The, 130 Poitier, Sidney, 121, 185 Polanski, Roman, 137–138 Pollack, Sydney, 123–125, 131 Pollard, Tom, 236 Polonsky, Abraham, 70 populism, 48, 62, 157 Portugal, 109, 155 Poseidon Adventure, The, 122 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 208, 214 postmodernism, 134 Prairie Home Companion, A, 130 Presley, Brian, 214 Prêt-à-Porter, 130 Primary Colors, 184 prisoner(s) of war (POW), 162–164, 166–173, 175–176, 229. See also missing in action (MIA) Prisoner of War, 175 Popeye, 130 POW. See prisoner(s) of war Production Code Administration (PCA), 21, 66, 71–73, 90, 110 propaganda, 23–24, 38, 44, 80, 167, 170, 222 Prussia, 42, 53 Psycho, 136 PTSD. See post-traumatic stress disorder Pulp Fiction, 186 Quiet Man, The, 46, 56, 63

288

Index

RKO. See Radio-Keith-Orpheum Pictures race/racism/racist, 24, 32, 48, 51, 59–60, 62, 64, 118, 123, 124, 148, 170, 182– 183, 185, 211–214, 216, 222 Radio-Keith-Orpheum Pictures (RKO), 110 Rand, Ayn, 247 Raiders of the Lost Ark, 153, 159 Rain Man, 160 Rambo: First Blood Part II, 160, 167, 169–173, 174–177, 179, 189, 220 Rambo III, 161, 171, 179–180 Rambo IV, 169, 179 Randolph, Donald, 97 Rasti, Maurizio, 208 Razuk, Victor, 216 Reagan, Ronald, 2, 46, 63, 134–135, 141, 148–151, 155–166, 169, 173, 177– 178; communication strategy, 157–158, 175; geopolitical imagination, 6, 160–161, 164–165, 167, 171, 173, 176; Reagan revolution, 6, 133, 156–158, 164 Rear Window, 87, 89, 91–95, 100–101, 232 Rebecca, 95 Redacted, 205, 207–208, 211–216, 219, 221 Red Channels, 230 Red Dawn, 161, 168, 199, 229 Red Scare, 72, 87, 89, 105, 231 Red Scorpion, 161 Redford, Robert, 123, 124–125 religion, 21, 24, 107, 138, 140, 150, 168– 169, 172, 183, 211, 234 Remington, Frederick, 46 Rendition, 235 Renner, Jeremy, 206 Republic Pictures, 64 Republican party, 21, 37, 41–41, 45, 65, 103, 131, 134, 141, 144, 151, 156, 165–166, 177, 183, 192 Return of the Jedi, 153, 160, 176 revolution in military affairs, 32, 234 Rich, Irene, 54 right/right-wing, 10, 27, 29, 34, 44, 51, 54, 66, 69–70, 73, 76, 80–81, 84, 134, 136, 138, 140–142, 144–145, 156, 157, 164–165, 168, 189–190, 221, 228–229, 231, 233. See also conservatism

Rio Grande, 43, 46–47, 51–59, 61–62, 64, 227 Rising Sun, 183 Ritter, Thelma, 73, 92 Robards, Jason, 125, 192 Roberts, Roy, 70 Robertson, Cliff, 124 Robin, Dany, 97 Robinson, Andrew, 142 Rock, The, 184, 188–194, 196, 199, 200, 234 Rocky, 5, 129–130, 145–149, 165, 229 Rocky III, 159, 167 Rocky IV, 159, 161, 167 Rocky V, 184 Rockwell, Norman, 148 Rodgers, Gaby, 74 Rogers, Ginger, 63 role of women, 53–55, 99–102, 120–121, 128, 139–140, 164, 171–172, 181. See also gender rollback. See national security, doctrine Rolling Thunder, 123, 131, 135, 162, 168 Rome, 139 Ronin, 184 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 41, 48, 59, 155 Roosevelt, Theodore, 169 Rope, 95 Rosemary’s Baby, 136–141, 229 Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius, 51, 65 Ross, Katherine, 113 Roswell, 189 Roukhe, Driss, 213 Russia/Russians, 97, 163–165, 170–171, 173, 197, 210, 234. See also Soviet Union Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, The, 111, 229 Rwanda, 183 Ryan, Amy, 217 Ryan, Robert, 157, 178 Saint, Eva Marie, 94 Saigon, 163–145, 175 Salaam, Amor, 198 San Diego, 220 San Francisco, 96, 141–143, 188–189, 191 SAS. See Special Air Services Satanism, 122, 124, 137–141 Saudi Arabia, 183, 196

Index

Savage, John, 163 Saving Private Ryan, 184, 222 Sayles, John, 39, 178 Sayre, Nora, 28 Schermer, Jules, 84 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 161–162 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., 41 Schuck, John, 118 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 149, 152–153, 174, 234 Scorpio, 135 Scorsese, Martin, 130, 148, 152 Scott, Ridley, 201 Scott, Tony, 188, 192–193, 195 Screen Actors’ Guild, 45 Scripps Survey Research Center, 236 SDECE. See Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (France) SEALs. See US Navy Sea, Air, and Land Forces Searchers, The, 59–60, 231 secrecy: cult of/web of, 16–17, 73–74, 77–78, 125, 190, 193 Secret Service, 36 securitization, 21 security imaginary, 3, 19–20, 25, 33, 42– 43, 47, 58–59, 62, 66, 77–82, 89–98, 103, 107–108, 111–112, 122, 129, 150–151, 156, 165, 176, 182, 200, 210, 220, 227, 235; definition, 19–20 segregation, 55, 83, 143, 179, 185, 213 Segui, Pierre, 164 September 11 (9/11), 2, 6, 10, 17, 20, 21, 31, 35, 195, 198, 200, 203, 204, 211, 215, 218, 219, 221, 226, 233, 234, 235, 236 Sergeant Rutledge, 59–60 Serpico, 122–123, 125–126, 135 Serpico, Frank, 122–123, 126 Seven Days in May, 111, 124, 233 7 Women, 248 sex/sexuality, 54, 60, 94–95, 99–100, 102, 105, 110, 112–113, 116–118, 120–121, 133, 138–140, 142–143, 152, 165, 172, 183–185, 196, 215 sexism, 120–121, 148 Shaft, 121, 130 Shakespeare in Love, 186 Shaloub, Tony, 196 Shampoo, 127, 135 Shandoian, Jack, 79

289

Shatner, William, 169 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, 43, 46–51, 54–55, 58, 62–63, 227 Sheridan, Philip Henry, 53, 55, 56–57, 64 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 56 Shire, Talia, 147 Shootist, The, 141 Showtime, 201 Siege, The, 2, 184, 188, 195–200, 234 Siegel, Don, 141 Silver Lode, 231 Simon & Schuster, 57, 201 Simpson, Don, 188–189 Simpson, O. J., 182 Sinn Fein, 56 Sioux, 43 Situation, The, 205, 207, 209, 211–13, 217, 219, 235 Skerritt, Tom, 118 Slaughter, 152 slavery, 28, 55, 59 Slotkin, Richard, 59 Smell-O-Vision, 110 Smith, Kyle, 210, 222 Smith, Will, 185, 192 Snipes, Wesley, 185 Snowden, Edward, 16, 192 social organization of forgetting. See trope, social organization of forgetting social imaginary, 19, 25 socialism, 43–44, 46, 59 soft power, 183 Soldier Blue, 135, 162, 229, 234 Some Like it Hot, 111 Sommer, Joseph, 142 Sound of Music, The, 119 sovereignty, 52, 58 Soviet Union, 14, 20, 41–42, 48, 51, 57, 65, 80–81, 87, 90–91, 93, 95–99, 102, 104, 109, 114, 120, 125, 131, 135, 155, 151, 171, 174, 177, 181–182, 197, 226, 229, 222–223, 236 Spain, 32 Spartacus, 72, 111 Special Air Services (SAS), 188 spectacle of slaughter. See trope, spectacle of slaughter Speed, 184, 234 Speed 2, 187 Spencer, John, 188 Spielberg, Steven, 149–151, 184

290

Index

Spock, Dr. Benjamin McLane, 141 Stafford, Frederick, 91 Stagecoach, 43, 46–47, 65 Stalin, Joseph, 75, 80, 87, 89, 226 Stalin Peace Prize, 72 Stanwyck, Barbara, 63 Stallone, Sylvester, 145, 148, 150, 167, 169–174, 184 Star Trek IV, 160 Star Wars: Episode IV, 130, 150–151, 153, 187, 189 Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace, 153 Star Wars cycle of films, 150, 228 Starman, 160 States’ Rights Democratic Party. See Dixiecrats Stephens, Harvey, 129 Stewart, Jimmy, 60, 91 Stewart, Justice Potter, 10 Sting, The, 121, 149, 156 Stone, Oliver, 24, 177, 235 Streep, Meryl, 165 Strode, Woody, 60 Stop-Loss, 204–206, 212, 214–216, 219, 236 Storm Center, 231 Stranger on the Third Floor, 68 Strangers on a Train, 95, 105 Strategic Air Command, 38, 232 Straw Dogs, 129, 135 Streamers, 130 Sudden Impact, 141, 144, 152 Superman, 151 Superman II, 160 surveillance, 16–17, 22, 73, 78, 90–93, 98, 120, 122, 127, 193–195, 203, 232, 236 Sutherland, Donald, 118 Sweet Charity, 111 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, 122 T-Men, 227 Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The, 122 Taraviras, Spiro N., 84 Targets, 122, 135 Taft, Robert A., 42. 63 Tate, Sharon, 138 taxes/taxation, 134–135, 141, 156 Taxi Driver, 122, 131, 135, 148, 162

Taylor, Robert, 63 Taylor, Rod, 96 Taylor, Samuel, 91, 104 Tea party, 191 Teheran, 109, 155 Television, 7, 25, 38, 44, 66, 71, 103, 110, 115, 119, 130, 147, 149, 158– 159, 167, 175, 186, 193–194, 196, 201–202, 204, 208, 211, 222, 227, 230 Terminator, The, 160 Temple, Shirley, 54 Terms of Endearment, 160 Terrorism/terrorist, 2, 14, 122, 160, 181, 183–184, 188, 195–198, 200, 203– 204, 208, 211–212, 226–227, 234–236 Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The, 112, 136 Thailand, 169 Theron, Charlize, 207 They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? 135 13th Warrior, The, 187 threat, 1, 3, 10, 13–14, 16, 19–20, 30, 32, 42, 46–54, 57–60, 66–67, 70, 77, 79, 80, 82–83, 88–97, 99, 103–104, 107, 109, 112, 115–116, 118, 122–123, 126, 136, 140–141, 143, 150, 159– 160, 166, 176, 181–184, 188–190, 192–201, 204, 210–211, 215, 220, 223, 225–229, 232, 234 3-D, 72, 100 Three Days of the Condor, 123–126, 135, 194, 228–229, 231 Three Kings, 184 Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, 163 THX 1138, 149 Thyraud de Vosjoli, Philippe, 90 Tobacco Road, 45–46 Todd Killings, The, 122 Tokyo, 186 Tootsie, 160 Top Gun, 153, 159, 161, 188 Topaz, 88, 90–91, 96–99, 102, 104–105, 232 Torn Curtain, 90, 96, 98–99, 106 torture, 15, 16, 37, 74–76, 79–80, 97, 99, 131, 143, 153–154, 168, 172–173, 198, 207 totalitarian, 42, 83, 91, 93, 96, 122, 150, 166, 192 Touch of Evil, 67, 84

Index

Towering Inferno, The, 122 Traitor, 202, 235 Transformers, 188 Tress, David, 176 Trip, The 130 trope(s), 3, 11, 25, 27–28, 30, 32–33, 50, 52, 59, 75, 115–116, 125, 135–136, 143, 147, 158–159, 163, 189, 191, 199, 205, 210–211, 218, 220; ambush, 31–32, 50, 52, 70, 116, 143, 166, 173, 191, 205; captivity narrative, 32, 52, 143, 163, 164, 167, 172, 191; fetishism of weapons technology 32, 142–143, 173, 191; last stand, 31–32, 49–51, 57, 191; momism, 137; only wars of liberation, 30–31, 173, 211–212; spectacle of slaughter, 32, 53, 143, 173, 192; victory and vindication, 31, 62, 144, 173, 177, 191 Troughton, Patrick, 150 True Grit, 111 True Lies, 184, 213, 234 Truffaut, François, 90, 104 Truman, Harry S., 41, 43, 50–51, 55–59, 213 Truman Show, The, 183 Trumbo, Dalton, 72 Tucker, Jonathan, 207 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 30 Twain, Mark, 43 12 Monkeys, 184 Twentieth Century Fox, 71–72, 110, 117 Twister, 184 Two Mules for Sister Sara, 152, 162, 233 Ugly American, The, 111, 234 Ultimax Force, 181 Uncommon Valor, 168–169, 172, 176, 199 Unforgiven, 185 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). See Soviet Union United Artists, 163 United Nations Organization, 204 United 93, 232 universalism (myth of), 28–32, 116, 187, 218–219 Unmarried Woman, An, 130 Uris, Leon, 90–91, 106

291

US armed forces, 1, 12, 15, 16, 41, 42, 65, 109, 210–211, 213–215, 218, 237 US Army, 49, 52, 54–55, 60–62, 118– 119, 197, 211, 213–214, 217–219; Intelligence and Security Command, 36 US Air Force, 187; Air Intelligence Agency, 36 US Chamber of Commerce, 46 US Coast Guard Intelligence, 36 US Congress, 5–16, 20, 22–23, 36, 41, 123, 141, 168, 192–194, 230 US Constitution, 10, 22, 31, 42, 52, 58, 92, 124–126, 142–143, 170, 184, 188, 190, 197–200, 227, 234 US economy, 12, 18, 30, 34, 156, 182– 183, 186, 218 US House of Representatives, 193 US Information Service, 57 US Intelligence community, 15, 126 US Marine Corps, 127, 188–191, 208, 221; Intelligence Activity, 36 US Navy, 38, 41, 44, 220; Office of Naval Intelligence, 36, 106 US Senate, 17, 37, 65, 78, 143, 193, 197, 200, 231; Internal Security Subcommittee, 89; Subcommittee on Intelligence, 17 USSR. See Soviet Union US Supreme Court, 10; Escobedo Decision, 142; Miranda Decision, 142, 198; Paramount Decision, 44, 66, 71, 158 Valenti, Jack, 110 van Peebles, Melvin, 121 Vance, Cyrus, 107, 131 Vanishing Point, 122, 131, 135, 162 Vatican II, 139 Vernon, John, 97 Vertigo, 91 veteran, 122, 127, 131, 152, 162–164, 167–168, 173, 177, 214–215 victim/victimization, 31, 50, 89, 113, 161, 164, 167, 172, 199 victory culture/narrative, 177 video, 151, 153, 158–160, 175, 186, 201 Vidor, King, 63 Viet Cong, 163–164 Vietnam War, 6, 28, 31, 62, 87, 108–109, 112, 115, 117–120, 122–124, 127–

292

Index

128, 130, 134–135, 140–141, 146, 148–150, 155–180, 182, 189, 204, 208 211, 214, 229, 231–232 vigilante(s), 59, 62, 141, 144–145, 162, 166, 168, 189, 229 Vigilante Force, 152 Vincent and Theo, 130 Virtuosity, 184, 195 vital center, the, 23, 41, 46, 49, 62–63, 107, 122, 134 Voight, Jon, 127, 131, 192–193 Vye, Murvyn, 74 Wag the Dog, 184, 200 Waldorf Statement, 46, 71 Walken, Christopher, 163 War of 1812, 1 War of the Worlds, 188, 235 Warner Bros., 221 Warner, David, 140 Washington, D.C., 90, 121, 159, 169, 217 Washington, Denzel, 185, 195–196, 202 Washington, George, 26, 146 Washington Post, The, 26, 125 Watergate, 15, 108–109, 122–126, 133, 195 Waterworld, 184, 187 Way of the Dragon, The, 166 Wayne, John, 47, 53, 58–60, 63, 117, 120, 128, 141–142, 162, 166, 169, 173, 184 weapons of mass destruction (WMD), 184, 188, 190, 204, 209–210, 217 Weathers, Carl, 146 Wedding, A, 130 Weiss, Elizabeth, 18 Welcome Home, Soldier Boys, 135 Welles, Orson, 67, 84 Wells, H. G., 187 Wepner, Chuck, 146 West Wing, The, 202 What Is AMERICA, 57

White Nights, 161 Who’ll Stop the Rain, 162 Widmark, Richard, 61, 70, 73 Wild Angels, The, 130 Wild Bunch, The, 135, 162, 232 Wild Wild West, 192 Wilder, Billy, 111 Williamson, Fred, 121 Willis, Bruce, 174, 196 Wilson, Thomas Woodrow, 29 Winter Kills, 122 witch hunt(s), 42–43, 51, 59, 65, 105, 226, 232 WMD. See weapons of mass destruction Woman on Pier 13, The, 225 Wonder Boys, 185 Wood, G., 118–119 Wood, Natalie, 59 Woods, Harry, 51 Woodward, Bob, 125–126 Woolsey, R. James, 200 World Trade Center, 1, 183 World Trade Center, 235 World War II, 2–4, 9–10, 12–15, 18–21, 23, 25, 35, 41–44, 53, 65, 67, 94, 109–110, 115, 129, 169, 173, 183, 187, 197, 205, 210–211, 213–214, 220, 222, 226 World Is Not Enough, The, 184 Wright, Lawrence, 6 Wright, Ronald, 28 X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes, 130 Young, Burt, 147 Young, Carleton, 60 Young Frankenstein, 136 Young Mr. Lincoln, 43 Zanuck, Darryl, 72, 84 Zien, Chip, 198 Zinnemann, Fred, 130 Zwick, Edward, 188, 195, 198

About the Book

While analysts may agree that Hollywood movies have always both mirrored and helped to shape the tenor of their times, the question remains: Just how do they do it? And beyond that, how do we identify the political/ ideological content of any film? The authors of Movies, Myth, and the National Security State offer answers to these questions, exploring how Hollywood movies have functioned to propagate, or to debate, or sometimes to contest the evolving US national security state since 1945. Drawing on more than a thousand films released since 1948, and focusing in detail on 48 films that address key issues and dilemmas confronting the US and its sense of self and role in the world, they provide insights into US political life as it has developed across some seven decades. Dan O’Meara is professor of international relations in the Political Science

Department of the University of Québec at Montreal (UQAM). His teaching and research deal variously with international relations theory, US foreign policy, popular culture, and political conflict in southern Africa. Alex Macleod is professor of international relations in the UQAM Political Science Department. His teaching and research focus on international relations theory, security studies, and in particular how these two subfields are reflected in popular culture. Frédérick Gagnon is an associate professor in the UQAM Political Science Department and director of the Observatory on the United States of the Raoul Dandurand Chair. His research focuses on US politics and foreign policy and their representation in popular culture. David Grondin is an associate professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. His research centers on the US national security state and its ways of war, on technologies of security, and on security and popular culture.

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