Projecting Politics Book

Downloaded by [University of Oregon] at 20:52 12 October 2017
The new edition of this influential work revises, updates, and expands the scope of the origi-
nal and includes more sustained analyses of individual films, from The Birth of a Nation to
The Wolf of Wall Street. An interdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between Ameri-
can politics and popular film, Projecting Politics offers original approaches to determining
the political contours of films and to connecting cinematic language to political messaging.
A new chapter covering 2000 to 2013 updates the decade-by-decade look at the Washington–
Hollywood nexus, with special areas of focus including the post-9/11 increase in overtly
political films and the tension between the rise of political war films like Green Zone and
films tightly constructed around the experience of U.S. troops like The Hurt Locker. The
new edition also considers recent developments such as the Citizens United Supreme Court
decision, the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, the political dispute over Zero Dark Thirty,
newer generation actor-activists, and the effects of shifting industrial financing structures on
political content. A new chapter addresses the resurgence of the disaster-apocalyptic film,
while updated chapters on nonfiction film, the politics of race, and gender in political films
round out this expansive, timely new work.
A recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in the Humanities, Elizabeth Haas has pub-
lished in numerous journals and teaches film studies at the University of Bridgeport in
Connecticut.
The author of many books including Local Politics: Governing at the Grassroots, Terry
Christensen is professor emeritus in the political science department at San Jose State Uni-
versity in California.
Peter J. Haas, recipient of a Fulbright Foundation Senior Specialist grant, is education

director for the Mineta Transportation Institute and teaches political science at San Jose
State University.
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First edition published 2005 by M. E. Sharpe
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Christensen, Terry.
Projecting politics : political messages in American films / Elizabeth
Haas, Peter J. Haas, and Terry Christensen.—Second edition
p. cm.
Revised edition of: Projecting politics: political messages in American film /
Terry Christensen and Peter J. Haas.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Motion pictures—Political aspects—United States. 2. Politics in
motion pictures. 3. United States—Politics and government—20th
century. 4. United States—Politics and government—21st century. I. Haas,
Elizabeth, 1964– II. Haas, Peter J. III. Title.
PN1995.9.P6C47 2014
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2014025319
ISBN: 978-0-7656-3596-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-7656-3597-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-72079-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman

by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
I. Studying Political Films
1. Setting the Scene: A Theory of Film and Politics 3

2. The Making of a Message: Film Production and
Techniques, and Political Messages 25
3. Causes and Special Effects: The Political Environment of Film 61
II. Political Films by Decade
4. Politics in the Silent Movies 95

5. The 1930s: Political Movies and the Great Depression 105
6. The 1940s: Hollywood Goes to War 121
7. The 1950s: Anti-Communism and Conformity 137
8. The 1960s: From Mainstream to Counterculture 153
9. The 1970s: Cynicism, Paranoia, War, and Anticapitalism 169
10. The 1980s: New Patriotism, Old Reds, and a Return to Vietnam in
the Age of Reagan 193
11. The 1990s: FX Politics 217
12. The Twenty-First Century: 9/11 and Beyond 237
III. Political Films by Topic
13. True Lies? The Rise of Political Documentaries 269

14. Film and the Politics of Race: The Minority Report 291
15. Women, Politics, and Film: All About Eve? 313
16. White House Down? Politics in Disaster 343
CONTENTS
Appendix
Closing Credits: A Political Filmography 371
Index 393
About the Authors 409
vi
Preface
Interest in the relationship between American politics and film appears to be on the rise.
Explicitly political films from the biting documentary about the George W. Bush adminis-
tration’s “war on terror” Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) to the historical White House drama The
Butler (2013) are filling theaters and collecting awards—2012 was even dubbed the year
of the political film. Within that trend films with expressly activist discourses also appear
ascendant. The rightwing documentary America: Imagine the World Without Her (2014)
urges viewers to “stop” the Obama White House, while the DVD release date of the eco-
logically themed sci-fi fantasy Avatar (2009) was timed with Earth Day 2010 to support an
international reforestation campaign. Yet a review of the academic literature on political film
as well as the content of the many books dedicated to the subject reveals disagreement, if not
confusion, about what exactly constitutes a political film and why.
All film genres are historical in nature and derive from the repetition of certain film ele-
ments, including character types, plot patterns, setting, and iconography. These repeated
elements establish a framework recognizable to and shaped by filmmakers and audiences
alike. Yet political scientists and film scholars seem to agree only on the complexity and
difficulty of assigning to political films any single set of identifying features or genre con-
ventions. Researchers into this area will instead encounter a bewildering array of critical and
analytic approaches. This book aims to provide a coherent overview of the subject and intro-
duces a methodology useful to any researcher of the topic for considering any film’s political
value. The second edition revises, expands, and updates the first edition while maintaining
its organization and offering sustained analysis of a greater number of films.
We believe that the most important and overarching aspect of the study of politics and
film is the political messages that movies may transmit. We therefore believe that such
messages have potentially tremendous political significance that transcends basic critical
analysis. However, a major obstacle to the task of analyzing film from this perspective is
the general lack of reliable data and research that demonstrate (1) that movies indeed send
messages beyond general and readily identifiable ideological impressions, and (2) that
these messages have verifiable and measurable effects on the political behavior of individu-
als and institutions. Although we present research to support these assumptions, it is not
within the scope of our intentions for this text to prove that they are wholly valid. Rather we
stress the importance of recognizing the varying degrees of political messaging intrinsic to
most popular films.
vii
PREFACE
Our interest here is exclusively with (more or less) American films. Certainly foreign
films present an intriguing canon of politically interesting releases, but in addition to limit-
ing our study to a manageable scope, we believe that American movies are the most likely
both to be seen by readers and to influence American politics. Thus anyone with an interest
in comparative studies will want to supplement this text with other materials. On a related
note, we devote most of our attention to popular movies. Certainly other volumes could be
devoted to films that fewer people are likely to see, but we think that popular movies are the
ones that are most likely to be politically salient—they are also the most accessible, both in
terms of audience comprehension and ready availability.
Projecting Politics is divided into three parts. Part I provides a conceptual overview of the
relationship between politics and film. Chapter 1 explores the meaning of the term “politi-
cal film” in a systematic way, so as to assist those who study politics and film. The goal
is to identify a practical yet focused approach for thinking about and classifying all films
with respect to their political significance. Chapter 2 explores how the various techniques
involved in the production of movies help to create political messages. We examine the
elements of film production to reveal how cinematic language can be and has been used
to shape political messages in various ways. Chapter 3 examines how the “real world” of
politics, ideological institutions, and society affects the “reel world” of Hollywood and film-
making. While not meant to be an exhaustive examination, this chapter approaches that real-
to-reel connection from a range of perspectives and finds that, historically, political forces
have had a profound impact on the making of films. We also argue that the worlds of film
and politics are increasingly intertwined. When films like Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), 2016:
Obama’s America (2012), and Zero Dark Thirty (2012) draw audiences and incite political
debate, and a film like The Invisible War (2012) leads to landmark legislation, and an aging
Hollywood action hero from films like Total Recall (1990) wins a recall election to become
governor of California, these worlds appear even to collide.
In Part II, we provide a historical overview of American films of political significance.
Each chapter covers the films of a decade; new to this edition is the chapter covering the
period from 2000 through 2014. We recognize that categorizing films in this way is some-
what arbitrary. Both historical trends and trends in filmmaking overlap decades—and we
take this overlap into account. But at the same time, referring to decades provides a ready
historical context for the movies we discuss and helps readers comprehend change and
development in political filmmaking by providing a rough chronological order. Although we
look at the tenor of a range of films in each decade, we generally focus most intently on films
with overt political themes and content.
Our discussion of each decade of movies is not intended to be entirely systematic from a
critical-analytic perspective. In some instances, we seek to explore the political messages of
films; in others, we examine the impact or potential impact a film had. We also look at why
some films of political significance are more popular with critics and the public than others,
as we believe that the reasons films are successful have implications for the relationship
between film and politics. But we do not mean to imply that financially unsuccessful movies
are categorically without merit or political significance. Additionally, we frequently cite box
office numbers and the comments of popular press movie critics as reception studies or indi-
cations of how films were received by audiences and made meaningful in popular culture.
Part III of this volume compiles four topical approaches to film and politics: documenta-
ries, race, gender, and, new to the second edition, the recently revived disaster and apocalyptic
viii
PREFACE
film genre. Our discussion of minority films in Chapter 13 uses as a case study movies by
and about African-Americans and concerns racial politics specific to that socially designated
group alone. This selective approach is not meant to suggest that the nexus of racial identity,
race relations, film, and politics is limited to the black experience or that conclusions drawn
from this chapter should or even can be extrapolated to other groups. Rather the representa-
tion of African-American culture in American popular film offers an especially compelling
and instructive case of how racial politics and Hollywood filmmaking intersect.
Finally, we include as an appendix a political filmography that compiles most of the more
blatantly political films in this book, plus others that space and time did not permit us to
address, with their box office performance.
ix

Acknowledgments
—Dedicated to Ruth Miller Haas and the memory of Harold Haas—
Contributor to the first edition and sole author of the second edition, Elizabeth Haas, would
like to acknowledge the principle authors of the first edition, Terry Christensen and Peter
Haas. It was a privilege to revise and expand their original work. Many thanks go to editor
Suzanne Phelps Chambers and to research assistants James Griffith and Julie Nagasaki. For
helpful comments at the 2012 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference
and the 2014 Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference much appreciation
to Lisa Purse, Matthias Stork, and Natalie Taylor. Thanks also to colleagues Susan Crutch-
field, Frank Tomasulo, Roxana Walker-Canton, Montre Aza-Missouri, and Philip Bahr, and
to students Angelika Zbikowski, Audra Martin, Eve Seiter, Michael Girandola, and Erik
Fong, film authorities all. Bridget Dalen supplied camaraderie and invaluable media exper-
tise. Beth Carter, Janice Portentoso, Cheryl Eustace, Deede Demato, and Michelle Chapman
provided friendship and the village it indeed takes. For inspiration and abiding kindness,
gratitude unfeigned to Tobin Siebers. For making the world new every day, Dash and Jolie
each: “Impossible without Me! That sort of Bear.”
Above all: Manyul.
xi

Studying Political Films


Argo (2012)
1
Setting the Scene

A Theory of Film and Politics
STUDYING POLITICAL FILMS
The study of movies does not fit neatly into the discipline of political science or the other
social sciences. Although film is a mass medium, political scientists have devoted decidedly
less attention to it than to mass news media such as television, newspapers, the Internet, and,
increasingly, to social media.1 For one thing, data about movies are difficult to quantify in
meaningful ways. From one perspective, movies are independent variables, cultural stimuli
that potentially address and modify the political attitudes and behaviors of audiences and
society. However, many films—particularly the most financially successful ones—seem
themselves to be “caused” by external social and political conditions. Furthermore, certain
films seem to assume a life of their own and interact with the political environment. Well-
publicized and sometimes controversial and politically charged movies such as All The Pres-
ident’s Men (1976), Wag the Dog (1997), and Zero Dark Thirty (2012) can even become part
of the political landscape and discourse.
However, thinking of movies as independent variables does not seem likely to shed light
upon the more nuanced aspects of the relationship between film and politics, especially for
films that are—on the surface, at least—not very political. And the relationship may be far
more complex and finely calibrated than the typical social science model of clearly identified
independent and dependent variables. As Phillip Gianos notes, “politics and movies inform
each other. . . . Both tell about the society from which they come.”2 (Or as Wag the Dog’s
Hollywood movie producer hired to create a fictional war to distract the public’s attention
from a presidential sex scandal cynically describes his efforts, “This is politics at its finest.”)
Douglas Kellner argues that Hollywood film actually “intervenes in the political struggles
of the day” and like American society constitutes contested territory. As such, “Films can be
interpreted as a struggle of representation over how to construct a social world and everyday
life.”3 Rejecting a more passive model of thinking about film and politics, these assessments
point to politics and film as actively engaged with each other.
Political analysis of film has commonly taken a qualitative or even literary approach,
although some intriguing research has explored the direct behavioral impact of specific
films.4 A small-scale audience study in the mid-1990s found that viewers of Oliver Stone’s
controversial biopic JFK (1991) reported a significant decrease in their intentions to vote.
The authors determined that the film’s assassination conspiracy premise left viewers with
a “hopelessness” that extended to a sense of political futility.5 A more recent investiga-
tion working from a larger sample concluded that popular films retain the power to shape
political attitudes in part because the possibility for persuasion is greatest precisely when
one is least aware that political messages are being communicated. The authors found that
sentimental movies about personal struggles involving aspects of the healthcare system
like the romantic comedy As Good As It Gets (1997), in which a waitress has difficulty
affording the healthcare of her ailing son, affected the way viewers appraised policies like
the politically contentious Affordable Care Act, leading to the conclusion that “popular
films possess the capability to change attitudes on political issues” and that “the potential
for popular films to generate lasting attitudinal change presents an important area for
future research.”6 Within narrow fields of investigation, both studies found that a few spe-
cific films had certain measurable effects on generalized audience political outlooks and
intentions.
One major obstacle to a more systematic and wider-reaching study of film and politics
is the lack of a clear definition of what constitutes a political film. In this chapter, we first
4
SETTING THE SCENE: A THEORY OF FILM AND POLITICS
outline the contours of political film categorization and then offer a plausible framework for
classifying films that may be used as a tool for in-depth analyses.
Political Content
Perhaps the most commonly used approach for distinguishing political films is political con-
tent. In this approach, political films are presumed to be those that depict various aspects of
the political system, especially (but not necessarily) political institutions, political actors,
and/or the political system. Whereas nearly every movie that focuses on political content of
this type would probably qualify as sufficiently political, many other films, some entirely
devoid of explicit political references, are excluded using this approach. But in a sense,
every film has political significance and meaning. All films transmit ideas of political impor-
tance if only by telling some stories instead of others or by favoring one character’s point of
view over another’s.
Films on the whole mirror the way political processes manage the conflicting needs and
demands of different groups of people. Filmmakers struggle to get projects made or to attract
audiences to their work by striking some level of balance between appealing to current atti-
tudes and tastes and challenging the same. Political constituencies compete with each other
for influence and control while political representatives negotiate among them, often picking
winners and losers along the way. Even by featuring a popular actor in a controversial part,
films indicate bias. Philadelphia (1993) provides a case in point. With all-American funny
guy Tom Hanks in the role of an ailing, gay AIDS patient suing his employer for wrongful
termination and handsome, winning Denzel Washington as his lawyer, the film preemptively
mitigates the chance of wholesale rejection at the box office and builds in sympathy for a
politically marginalized and, especially at the time of the film’s release, socially reviled
group. Anyone with an interest in the impact of movies must be prepared to sift through any
movie as a potential vessel of political meaning.
Until recently, few book-length studies of a genre called “political films” existed. Com-
mercial categorizations and genre-based analyses alike have been apt to assign what are
arguably political films to other albeit fitting categories like biography (e.g., Malcolm X,
1992; Erin Brockovich, 2000; W., 2008; J. Edgar, 2011; Lincoln, 2012) or thriller (e.g.,
Argo, 2012; Broken City, 2013) as if these more readily agreed-upon and commercially
proven genres were also definitive and exclusive.7 Other approaches understandably blur the
line between political and ideological meaning. These analyses tend not to establish clear
separation between a film’s depiction of a particular political realm and its ideologically
more wide-reaching implications. After all, ideology has been called “the most elusive con-
cept in the whole of social science” while at the same time proliferating as a critical category
both in those sciences as well as in studies of film—especially interdisciplinary approaches.8
While ideology can refer to explicit political beliefs or belief systems like those endorsed
by a particular political party or associated with liberal and conservative perspectives, the
more philosophical and social-theoretical conception of ideology is more complex. Ideology
in this usage refers to implicit views and assumptions that seem to be common-sense truths
or natural beliefs, neutral in their apparent universality, but that really serve the interests of a
ruling class or dominant force in society. By definition, this kind of ideology or “false ideas”
can be difficult to discern. Yet Douglas Kellner suggests ideology “functions within popular
5
culture and everyday life” and that “images and figures constitute part of the ideological rep-
resentations of sex, race, and class in film and popular culture.”9 In this view most movies can
be useful sites for uncovering ideological meaning not restricted to obvious political content.
For better or worse there has been and continues to be little critical unanimity about pre-
cisely which form and content would unarguably indicate a political film. American political
films have not widely or uniformly received recognition as a specific genre. For example, in
the latest edition of the influential Film Genre Reader, not one of thirty-six chapters specifi-
cally addresses political films.10 This omission contrasts with the decision of the Library of
Congress’s Moving Image Genre Form Guide to include under “political” a succinct defini-
tion: “Fictional work centering on the political milieu, often of candidates, elections, and
elective or appointive office. Some of the protagonists may be corrupt or dictatorial.”11 The
genre’s exclusion from the Film Genre Reader and inclusion in the Moving Image Genre
Form Guide’s comparatively exhaustive list, featuring more than 125 genres and including
one dubbed “city symphony,” points less to a dearth of politically topical films than to the
widespread lack of consensus over what exact qualities constitute the genre. As implied by
the Moving Image Genre Form Guide, there are perhaps enough films that are overtly politi-
cal to most viewers to constitute a genre, yet until the last few years they have not commonly
been acknowledged, much less promoted, as such.
In film criticism a genre is primarily defined as a category or group of films about the
same subject or marked by the same style—musicals, for example, or western, gangster, war,
science fiction, or horror movies. Yet most of these genres are “un-contentious,” declares
Steve Neale, and their critical categorizations have “generally coincided with those used by
the industry itself.”12 Films in the same genre tend to look alike and observe certain conven-
tions, although there are exceptions to both rules even among less controversial genres. Any
given film may obey many established generic conventions but vary enough in one crucial
aspect that it defies easy inclusion in that genre. Set in the past in the American west, and
featuring horses, dramatic vistas, and physically tough cowboys of few words, Brokeback
Mountain shares many conventions with the western. The queer sexuality of its main charac-
ter, Heath Ledger’s tortured ranch-hand Ennis Del Mar, however, breaks with the western’s
characterization of masculinity as a function of heterosexuality. On the other end of the issue
of genre and inclusiveness, Thelma and Louise (1991) is considered a road movie or buddy
flick, but it also includes many conventions of the western genre. Played by Geena Davis and
Susan Sarandon, the title characters are outlaws on the run through Monument Valley, the
location of many John Ford westerns from the 1930s and 1940s, and their fate is straight out
of the incontestable western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Their plight chal-
lenges the patriarchal foundation to civilization’s ideas of justice and revenge, a gendered
take on a familiar western theme.
Critics often group movies into genres for the purpose of comparison and discussion;
audiences, sometimes unknowingly, do the same thing. But political films do not seem to fit
into a unique, recognizable genre marketed to stimulate and fulfill audience expectations.
They seem more to illustrate what critics call “hybrid” and “multi-generic” classifications
and the tendency of some Hollywood genres to “overlap.”13 In practical terms, the quandary
looks like this: Is The Green Zone (2010), a film about the failure to locate weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq and thereby validate the political justification for the United States’
invasion, a war film or a political film? Are Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995) and Ron Howard’s
Frost/Nixon (2008) both political films by virtue of their eponymous portrayals, despite
6
marked differences in tone, plot, and time period dramatized? If the answer is a self-evident
“yes,” then does the satirical “sly little comic treasure” Dick (1999) by definition belong in
the same camp?14 Finally, is an obviously political movie like The Candidate (1972) political
in the same sense as a satire like Election (1999) or a comedy like The Campaign (2012)? All
three movies deal with the political process in the largest sense, but they share little in terms
of content, structure, or message to the viewing audience.
We can suggest at least four reasons for the lack of a clearly defined genre of political
films:
1. Supposedly political films lack the internal consistency of other film genres—the
forms that political movies take vary widely (e.g., The Candidate and Election and
The Campaign; Nixon, Frost/Nixon, and Dick).
2. Political films do not share as many conventions of plot, character, and iconography
as do other genres.
3. Overtly political films often allow for variation within the genre by combining
descriptions, as in “political comedy” (e.g., The Dark Horse, 1932; Man of the Year,
2006; The Campaign, 2012) or “political thriller” (e.g., The Bourne Identity fran-
chise, 2002, 2004, 2007, 2012), thus vitiating their status.
4. Filmmakers and perhaps popular critics fear the label of political film as box office
anathema, meaning that filmmakers may consciously avoid making political films,
may depict political topics through allegory to shroud political intent (e.g., Invasion
of the Body Snatchers, 1958, 1976; The Godfather trilogy, 1972, 1974, 1990), or
may attempt to depoliticize the ones they do make (Argo; Zero Dark Thirty).
Even if there were a widely recognized and readily recognizable genre of political films, it
would probably not help to identify the kinds of political messages that can appear in many
less explicitly political films. It would thus divert attention from the frequently interesting
political aspects of otherwise seemingly apolitical films. This murky relationship between
explicitly and obliquely political films persists even when headlines like “Politics Reigns at
Golden Globes” trumpeted the surprising critical and box office successes Argo, Zero Dark
Thirty, and Lincoln in 2012.15 Set decades apart in time among divergent kinds of political
players and laying out contrasting moral dilemmas, these films showcase the vibrancy of the
political film spectrum. Their popularity does not, however, put the genre on a stable foot-
ing, as their considerable differences make plain. Recent studies that more or less take the
genre’s parameters for granted and/or lean heavily on this book’s typology of political films
to make their case have not extinguished the need for an updated and expanded analytic
framework befitting the ambiguous nature of politically imbued films that this second edi-
tion provides.16 The diversity among these recent analyses, both their analytic styles and the
films they include, further underscores the difficulty in staking the genre’s claim to politi-
cally relevant movies.
Sending Political Messages
A second common approach to identifying political films places emphasis on the politi-
cal or ideological messages they impart. Samuel Goldwyn’s famous bromide (“Messages
are for Western Union!”) notwithstanding, movies frequently do bear political messages.17
7
Rather explicit ideological messages may be present in films entirely devoid of explicit
political referents; however, many of the political messages conveyed by movies are not the
result of conscious planning by filmmakers.18 The depiction of gender roles in movies of
the 1930s and 1940s has been interpreted as speaking volumes about the gender politics of
that era, although in many cases this effect was not necessarily the intent of the filmmakers.
Indeed, it is probably safe to say that most, if not all, contemporary American movies are not
intended to send any particular political or ideological message; most are probably meant
only to entertain and, more importantly, to make money. Those that do impart a lesson by
the film’s end tend to be dramas that stress personal, emotional, or sentimental messages
that, in fact, occlude or undermine a film’s politics. For example, the critically acclaimed hit
Silver Linings Playbook (2012) draws audiences into the painful, bewildering, and at times
absurd world of psychological illness by bringing Pat, a man trying for a second chance in
life after a bipolar diagnosis, to three-dimensional life. The film does not really concern the
shortcomings of a healthcare system that fails him. In contrast, Stephen Soderbergh’s thriller
Side Effects (2013) also addresses issues of mental well-being but does so by taking on the
psychopharmacological business, questioning the cozy relationship between doctors and the
drug industry and, more broadly, people’s dependency on medications like its fictional anti-
depressant Ablixa. At the same time, for all its skepticism toward the entwining relationship
between high finance and the omnipotent pharmaceutical industry, the film aims to thrill as
a whodunit and does not sacrifice suspense to make a political statement.
The overriding importance of economics to the film industry makes all the more remark-
able the twenty-first-century increase in the production of films depicting political processes,
exploring the politics of war, and showcasing characters inscribed by their proximity to
institutional power (e.g., Charlie Wilson’s War [2007] is all of these). Their very numbers
and unprecedented dominance at the 2013 awards season prove a new interest by film-
makers in creating, and by the public in watching, ideologically charged films. This trend
is no less important for being downplayed by those most responsible for creating it. Char-
lie Wilson’s War is about the U.S. intervention in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and
Argo dramatizes a little known rescue of American diplomats by the CIA and the Canadian
ambassador during the overthrow of the shah in Iran. Both address international politics of
the 1970s and 1980s and build from the heroism of real people, highlighting how much it
helps to have a good yarn to tell. Tom Hanks, the lead actor and producer of Charlie Wilson’s
War, explains, “It’s almost like an anecdotal story of look how curious things can happen
in the political world when no one is paying attention to what you are doing, which is prob-
ably the best way politics works. . . . What’s great about non-fiction films even though we
make a fake movie about it is that it gives the audience the knowledge of the fourth and the
fifth act that goes on afterwards.”19 On the other hand, director and lead actor Ben Affleck
feared partisanship would poison Argo at the box office. In an article titled “Affleck Says No
Politics in ‘Argo,’” he shrugs off the political aspect of his award-winning hit: “I didn’t want
the movie politicized. I have Republican friends and Democratic friends and wanted them
all to see the movie and enjoy it in equal measure. I certainly didn’t want it to be politicized
internationally, either.”20
Regarding the perhaps unintentional political statements offered by many movies, James
Combs offers a useful analogy of the movie as a political participant: “A film participates in
a political time not in how it was intended, but how it was utilized by those who saw it.”21
This outlook raises the question of whether the intentions of filmmakers are a legitimate and
8
In Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), Julia Roberts plays a wealthy socialite, Joanne Herring, who urges
louche Texas congressman Charlie Wilson, played by Tom Hanks, to intervene on behalf of Afghan
rebels against Soviet forces in the early 1980s.
significant focus for the political analysis of films. For among many film scholars and crit-
ics, discussing the filmmakers’ intent implies a problematic methodological and conceptual
conundrum. First, many if not most Hollywood films are the result of a group filmmaking
process, so to talk about the political intentions of the filmmaker may be truly inaccurate.
Second, many scholars and critics of the literary tradition and the declared “death of the
author” point of view regard cinematic output as a text that must speak for itself.22 According
to this approach, the political motives of the creators of films are ultimately irrelevant to the
meaning a film has for, and the effects it has upon, its audience.
However, when the task at hand is political analysis, the intentions of filmmakers are
arguably much more germane. As Beverly Kelley notes, “movies reflect political choices.”23
In this respect, to create film is to participate politically. And like all political participation,
some filmmaking is more rational, effective, and ultimately more politically noteworthy than
the rest. Therefore, the political motivations and intentions of films and filmmakers should
be of great interest to students of political films, which is one reason why this book tends to
focus on films that seem to have been made to impart a political message.
Political Film as Political Theories
Another way of looking at the relationship between film and politics is to regard films as
potential vehicles of political theory. After all, the almost magical capacity of films to cre-
ate or alter reality can be seen as analogous to the machinations of political theorists. Most
movies seek either to mimic and/or re-create reality or to bend and twist reality in creative
ways. Some movies may even do both, or attempt to. The two predominant dimensions
of political films—content and intent—seem to parallel the two major strands of political
theory—empirical and normative.
Political content, which frequently entails depicting, more or less accurately, if not
realistically, some aspect of political reality, resembles empirical (or descriptive) polit-
ical theory. Thus, films that emphasize describing political institutions, processes, and
9
actors—rare as they may be—may help audiences to understand political phenomena.

Conversely, if such films do a poor job of representing political reality or if they contradict
the assumptions and perceptions of their audience, they may incite objections or even ridi-
cule. Regardless of its accuracy, this kind of political content almost always makes mov-
ies seem more political. Like empirical political theory, political content usually helps to
describe and explain how politics works. Of course, many movies only marginally invoke
this kind of political content. For example, legal thrillers such as A Civil Action (1998)
and Michael Clayton (2007), or even the slavery-era Amistad (1997), almost invariably
provide some insight into the judicial system and legal theory, but such content is usually
not the film’s central focus.
Political intent generally resembles normative (or judgmental) political theory in that it
seeks to judge, prescribe, and/or persuade. Films that are loaded with intentional political
messages explicitly challenge the values of the audience and may even incite it to political
action. On the other hand, the political messages of many movies may be lost on the audi-
ence amid a sea of competing cinematic themes—usually more personal than political. As
the authors of the seminal Film and Society Since 1945 explain, “Most American social
and political films . . . define political events in terms of an individual’s fate and conscious-
ness.”24 Like normative political theory, however, movies rife with ideological messages
may fail to affect unreceptive audiences who reject their exhortations. Or, as often seems the
case, political messages may be squarely aimed at the choir of true believers who are likely
to agree with a film’s message without having seen it. A serial adaptation of Ayn Rand’s
novel Atlas Shrugged (2011, 2012, 2014) bears out this claim. Supporters of Rand’s politi-
cal ideology championed the low-budget productions with an “it’s about time!” attitude and
wore their enthusiasm for the poorly received films as a badge of honor.25 Even the complete
cast change in the second installment did not dampen Rand-believers’ support even as the
franchise’s “preaching to the choir” effect likely hurt its ability to draw many nonbelievers.
In his disparaging review of part one, Roger Ebert anticipates the predisposition of Rand-
fans and tacitly warns off anyone else: “Let’s say . . . you’re an objectivist or a libertarian,
and you’ve been waiting eagerly for this movie. Man, are you going to get a letdown. It’s
not enough that a movie agree with you, in however an incoherent and murky fashion. It
would help if it were like, you know, entertaining?”26 Reviewing the third installment, Alan
Scherstuhl cannot resist taking ironic note of the contradiction between the film’s ideological
cant and its artistic value: “Rand’s parable is meant to showcase just how much our world
needs the best of us, but this adaptation only does so accidentally—by revealing what mov-
ies would be like if none of the best of us worked on them.”27
A Basic Typology of Political Films
The two dimensions of political content and intent identified earlier may be combined to
create a basic means of classifying films according to their political significance. Figure 1.1
illustrates the matrix created by the two dimensions. Most films probably fall well within the
extremes described by this matrix, but these extremes suggest pure types that may be useful
as tools for analyzing movies. At the positive extremes of both political content and intent,
in the upper right corner of the diagram, arguably lie the most obviously political of all films,
consistent with the label of pure political films and the bare-bones description by the Library
of Congress. Such films are set in a recognizably political environment and depict political
10
Figure 1.1 Types of Political Films Suggested by Dimensions of Content and Intent
Political
Politically reflective content Pure political movies
movies (high)
Political Political
intent intent
(low) (high)
Socially reflective
Political Auteur political movies
movies content
(low)
actors and institutions, thus providing cues to their audiences and presumably describing the
filmmaker’s view of political reality.
Note that the “pure” designation does not necessarily mean that such films are more or
less political than others, nor does it mean that “pure” political genre films exist in a defini-
tive sense. In the words of Janet Staiger, “Hollywood films have never been ‘pure’—that is,
easily arranged into categories. All that has been pure has been sincere attempts to find order
among variety.”28 In this quest for “order among variety,” the “pure political movies” desig-
nation means that the political nature of such films will be fairly evident to most audiences.
In fact, pure political films may suffer in a sense from their very transparency. Audiences
may understandably recoil from movies that combine heavy doses of both political context
and ideological cant. Combs and Combs find that such efforts are prone to evoking the “poli-
tics of the obvious.”29
Most movies, we will argue, send political or protopolitical messages that audiences
may not even notice, but these overtly political films are political in a way that all of us
readily perceive: they focus on politicians, elections, government, and the political process
(Table 1.1). These are the explicitly political films that fulfill the Library of Congress’s
genre requirements, the message movies that Goldwyn warned against. The tradition of the
political film began before The Birth of a Nation (1915) and includes The Jungle (1914), a
movie adapted from the radical immigrant novel/meatpacking industry exposé of the same
title by journalist-socialist Upton Sinclair. In an essay titled “The Visual Politics of Class,”
Steven J. Ross notes, “By 1910, movies about class struggle grew so numerous that review-
ers began speaking of a new genre of ‘labor-capital’ films.”30 Even the first campaign ad
preceded D.W. Griffith’s offensive epic; pro-Woodrow Wilson, “The Old Way and the New”
hit screens in 1912.31
11
Table 1.1
Examples of Film Types
Politically reflective films Pure (overt) political films

Independence Day Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Invasion of the Body Snatchers The Candidate
Many legal, western, and gangster films Most social problem and documentary films
Propaganda films
Socially reflective films Auteur political films

Pretty Woman The Godfather

Gone With the Wind Natural Born Killers
Many other genre films
Some political movies are comedies (Man of the Year, 2006; The Campaign, 2012), oth-
ers are thrillers (Three Days of the Condor, 1975; State of Play, 2009; The Ides of March,
2011), many are melodramas (The Gorgeous Hussey, 1936; Meet John Doe, 1944; A Face
in the Crowd, 1957), and more than a few are biographies (The Young Mr. Lincoln; W., 2008;
Iron Lady, 2012; Lincoln, 2012). Many (e.g., All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930; Pla-
toon, 1986; Stop-Loss, 2008; The Hurt Locker, 2008) deal with the issues of war and peace,
while others (e.g., Gentleman’s Agreement, 1947; Brubaker, 1980; Silkwood, 1983; Boys
Don’t Cry, 1999; Bamboozled, 2000; and Good Night and Good Luck, 2005) confront social
problems such as discrimination, the need for prison reform and work safety regulations,
gender-based crime, and the moral responsibilities of the entertainment industry and the
press in a free society. More contentious issue movies such as Norma Rae (1979), The China
Syndrome (1979), and Erin Brockovich (2000) are even more obviously political. Most of
these films criticize specific aspects of the political process, but a few, like Network (1976),
go even further by offering a broad critique of the entire political and socioeconomic system.
All of these movies have as their core a political message that any viewer can perceive; their
themes are not competing with mythic characterization and special effects as in Christopher
Nolan’s dystopian Batman trilogy (2005, 2008, 2012). Their critiques are not couched in
the lifestyle of a hooker with a heart of gold (à la Pretty Woman, 1990) or obscured by the
cartoon styling of WALL-E (2008) or Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (2009), two chil-
dren’s movies rife with comic yet ominous warnings about the fate of the environment and
out-of-control American consumerism.
In the lower right corner of Figure 1.1, where extremely high political intent meets
diminished political content, are films that may be described as “auteur” political movies.
The “auteur” designation does not necessarily confer the traditional meaning of a director
with firm artistic control (discussed in Chapter 2); rather, it suggests films in which politi-
cal meaning is imparted—perhaps artistically—without overt reference to obvious political
imagery. Instead, such films may typically invoke symbolism and other artistic devices to
transmit their politically charged messages. Their richest interpretations may rely more
heavily than other films do on the political and social climate of the time of their production.
Films as diverse as The Wizard of Oz (1939), versions of The Invasion of the Body Snatch-
ers (1956, 1978, 1993) and The Crucible (1957, 1996), the Alien movies (1979, 1986, 1992,
1997), and the phenomenally popular, cottage industry Star Wars franchise invite symbolic
12
reading beyond their embrace of conventions associated with historical, science fiction, and
fantasy genres. For example, viewers commonly consider 1957’s The Crucible, based on
Arthur Miller’s play, a morality tale about the destructive Communist “witch hunts” of the
1950s. In the post-Soviet era of the 1990s, the allegory’s new historical context opened the
film to an interpretation of the upright Proctors and their predicament as a backlash against
the politics of feminism. Or as Roger Ebert only half-jokingly supposed, “Perhaps every age
gets the Crucible it deserves. Anyone who has seen the recent documentary Paradise Lost:
The Child Murders of Robin Hood Hills will recognize in its portrait of a small Arkansas
town many parallels with this fable about Salem, including those who mask their own doubts
in preemptive charges of Satanic conspiracies.”32 Even the classic, bittersweet love triangle
Casablanca (1942) is often interpreted as a call to arms to the United States during World
War II. Rick’s mantra, “I stick my neck out for nobody,” is widely read as Americans’ initial
reluctance to join the fight.
The upper left corner of Figure 1.1 depicts films with obvious political content that are
more or less devoid of intentional political messages. Films in this area are designated
“politically reflective” because they often mirror popular ideas about political phenomena.
This label covers films from other genres (romantic comedies, thrillers, etc.) that use politi-
cal institutions as convenient backdrops to other sorts of themes. For example, the 1990s
witnessed the release of a spate of films featuring the American presidency. These films
do, of course, address political issues, but they generally use the institution as a convenient
ploy to evoke other themes; the intentional political agendas of films such as Independence
Day (1996), which features a president as a kind of action hero, seem marginal at best. With
Annette Bening playing Sydney, an environmental lobbyist and love interest to Michael
Douglas’s widowed President Shepherd, the romantic comedy The American President
(1995) also fits as an example. The film humanizes the president in the service of romance.
With a script by celebrated political drama writer Aaron Sorkin, issues like gun control share
the screen with more personal concerns like the one voiced by Sydney’s boss: “The time it
will take you to go from presidential girlfriend to cocktail party joke can be measured on
an egg timer.” Even this observation—all the more cruel for being true and symptomatic of
larger concerns about the highest office in the land never having been held by a woman—
delivers comedy and little else on behalf of the film’s putative politics.
Such films may be of particular significance with respect to providing symbolic referents
to political phenomena. Dan Nimmo and James Combs provide a compelling description of
how such films can unintentionally create political meanings for audiences.33 Nimmo and
Combs work from Murray Edelman’s postulate that the mass public does not experience
politics through direct involvement; instead, its perceptions are founded upon and filtered
by symbolic representations, such as those provided by the film medium.34 So movies set in
political or quasi-political contexts are likely sources of the symbolic content that informs
mass understanding of the political system.
Films that avoid both overt political messages and reference to explicitly political events
are located in the lower left corner of Figure 1.1 and are labeled “socially reflective” films.
Most Hollywood movies probably fall near this designation, if not squarely in it. Most mov-
ies neither feature blatantly political contexts nor evoke intentional political messages to
audiences; however, that is not to say that most movies are not at all political. For example,
most of the films examined in Chapter 15, “Women, Politics, and Film: All About Eve?,”
fall in the category of “socially reflective.” With neither intentional political messaging nor
13
political events anchoring their plots, most of these films instead reflect, and reflect on, the
public’s attitudes toward women and gender norms.
Despite the benign intentions of their creators, both the socially reflective and politically
reflective types of film are frequently pregnant with political meaning. Nimmo and Combs
further contend that all social reality is “mediated” by means of communication—much of it
the mass communication exemplified by film. Film, moreover, is a “democratic art,” whose
success as an enterprise is dependent upon the favor of mass audiences.35 Successful movies,
therefore, tend to be the ones that show the public what it wants to see—just as successful
political candidates typically tell the public what it wants to hear. Thus, a very popular movie
can tell us something politically significant and socially revealing about the audience.
Analyzing the Unpolitical Political Film
Most viewers can recognize overtly political films; however, many find it difficult to rec-
ognize films that fall roughly into the lower left quadrant of Figure 1.1—socially reflective
movies—as examples of political filmmaking. A casual observer can interpret and under-
stand the obvious political films, and some can navigate the subtle ideological nuances of
auteur political efforts. Archetypical political classics such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
(1939) and The Candidate are generally well received by contemporary audiences despite
their dated qualities. More difficult for many is the leap toward understanding how otherwise
ostensibly benign films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) or even politi-
cal thrillers such as Blow Out (1981) or Syriana (2005) can imply messages—both from
the filmmaker and about the audience as well as society itself. With this text, we hope to
provide readers with the examples and analytic tools they need to make these interpretations
more readily.
How do otherwise mostly apolitical movies evoke political themes? First and foremost,
movies intended for mass audiences are invariably moneymaking propositions. Gianos notes
that “biases follow from films’ most basic role as vehicles for profit making . . . these biases,
of course, are the point.”36 Nimmo and Combs state that “those movies that sell and those
few that endure do so because they have treated selected cultural themes that were on the
minds, or in the back of the minds, of large numbers of people.”37 Popular movies, in other
words, invoke popular ideas about politics. Such films may individually be more or less
innocuous, yet collectively influential: “The power of any single movie to influence one’s
viewpoint is limited, but obviously repetition has its effect.”38
A potential problem for scientific observers of political films is recognizing within
themselves the proclivity to respond to such themes. A useful analytic question to pose
when viewing such films is this: To which mass, politically relevant beliefs, hopes, or
fears does this film appeal? This is not a straightforward question to answer, because as
Nimmo and Combs observe, “people sort themselves on the basis of the cultural [film]
fantasies that they want to believe.”39 As moviegoers, we must examine not only our own
values and beliefs but also those of others and of society at large. The following section
explores various avenues of analysis by which students of film and politics may arrive at
insights into the political aspects of inexplicitly political films. Whereas these patterns
may be found in all types of film, they are perhaps most likely to appear in socially or
politically reflective films.
14
Sublimated Politics in the Movies
Fantastic Displacement
Nimmo and Combs draw particular attention to movies that involve what they call “fantastic
displacement . . . the process of placing fantasies of an age in a melodramatic setting and
story that covertly mediates the political fantasy for a mass audience to make their fantasies
palatable and entertaining.”40 As an example of this process, Nimmo and Combs cite the
science fiction films of the 1950s, which seemed to substitute fears of alien invasions and
discoveries of earthly mutant creatures for anxiety about the spread of the ostensible Com-
munist threat and the dawning of the nuclear age following the unleashing of the atomic
bomb. Likewise, the spate of eco-catastrophe and epidemic films of the late 1990s and the
beginning of the new century might be viewed as substituting fantastic threats like asteroids
and volcanoes for anxiety about the fragile ecosystem of earth and the susceptibility of the
world’s population to global outbreaks of disease.
Although many viewers are readily able to identify these patterns in older films, such as
Them! and Creature from the Black Lagoon (both 1954) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers
and Forbidden Planet (both 1956), they tend to miss—or even emotionally reject—similar
patterns in movies of their own era. They prefer instead to view cautionary tales as entertain-
ing but safely far-fetched. For example, The Terminator (1984, 1991, 2003, 2009) and Trans-
former (2007, 2009, 2011, 2014) franchises translate rather straightforwardly into anxieties
about increasing interdependence between humans and technology. Less obviously, these
films’ cyborg imagery resonates with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—the longest in U.S.
history—and their aftermaths. Due to medical advances on the battlefield, injured soldiers
from these wars survive wounds that would have proved fatal in previous wars, even one
as recent as the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Wounded veterans return with machinery appended
in previously impossible ways to their bodies. Some even have prosthetic limbs capable of
responding to thought patterns. Their renewed bodies visibly signify human vulnerability,
the stuff of technology-obsessed movie nightmares.
In the critical and box office disappointment Battleship (2012), a real-life double-amputee
U.S. Army officer who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan plays a soldier pitted against a
fully armored alien in a scene edited to highlight the similarity between the soldier’s pros-
thetic legs and the gleaming metallic limbs of the alien. That these foreign occupations did
not merit mention during the 2012 Republican presidential nominee’s convention speech
suggests that both the wars and the plight of returning veterans remain meager subtext to
the national conversation in which the economy repeatedly crowds out all other issues. Even
unintentionally, movies can redirect attention to subjects the national psyche would repress.
Portrayals of Race and Gender
Perhaps one of the most common means by which political messages seep through Holly-
wood films is through portrayal of sex, race, and gender roles. Audiences are typically able
to identify and analyze the significance of dated portrayals of race and gender in older films
(e.g., the black porters and the deferential female roles in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington),
but are often at a loss to identify equally dubious portrayals—or revealing absences—in
15
In Battleship (2012), real-life Iraq war veteran and double-amputee Col. Gregory D. Gadson plays
Lt. Col. Mick Canales, facing off against an alien whose metallic exterior compares to Gadson’s
prosthetic legs. Despite Gadson’s actual state-of-the-art knees, this scene used computer-generated
imaging to create his legs.
more contemporary films. One problem with identifying politically significant portrayals of
race and gender is the wide variety of ways they may reflect political concerns. Among the
many possibilities: some films invoke offensive or dated stereotypes; others use plot devices
to punish certain types of characters, such as independent women or minority figures; while
other films signal ideas about politically sidelined groups through their token presence or
complete absence.41
Examples of problematic African-American stereotyping include the highly sexualized
Leticia played by Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball (2001), the “gentle giant” football player in
The Blind Side (2009), and the obese, poor, illiterate, young black woman who is sexually
and emotionally abused as the title character in Precious (2009). (Tellingly, all three of these
films garnered Academy Awards in acting categories, including the first-ever win for Best
Actress by an African-American, Halle Berry.) Characters punished for their independence
include a range of women portraying law officers, including Jamie Lee Curtis’s New York
policewoman Meghan in Blue Steel (1990), Jodie Foster’s FBI agent Starling in Silence of
the Lambs (1991), Jennifer Lopez’s Chicago cop Sharon in Angel Eyes (2001), and Angelina
Jolie’s CIA agent and title character in Salt (2010). These women all go through extended
trials-by-fire to prove themselves worthy of their institutional authority and the trust of their
predominantly male colleagues. The relationship they bear to their badges and all that those
badges symbolize more than informs these films; it shapes their plots.
Finally, Adilifu Nama describes the lack of African-American characters in science fiction
films as a structured or symbolic absence. Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968), for example, appears devoid of any references to race and therefore neutral on the
subject. Closer analysis, however, uncovers a symbolic blackness in the film that, according
to Nama, “suggests that nonwhites are primitive simian predecessors of modern humanity.”
He describes this meaningful absence as a consistent feature of the science fiction genre to be
diagnosed with a certain amount of self-described hyperbole: “For decades it appeared as if
science fiction cinema was the symbolic wish fulfillment of America’s staunchest advocates
16
of white supremacy.”42 The films of Clint Eastwood often present women characters in a
related presence-through-absence manner. Referred to by other characters but neither seen
nor heard on screen, dead wives haunt an array of Eastwood leads. These include city detec-
tive Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry (1971), Old West gunfighter Bill Munny in Unforgiven
(1995), cat burglar Luther Whitney in Absolute Power (1997), and disgruntled Korean War
vet Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino (2008). The wives’ merely implied presence affects how
these men understand themselves but, more importantly, frees them to take action in male-
dominated worlds where patriarchy remains a seemingly uncontested fact.
Genre
Genres develop through the dialectic of convention repetition and selective convention vari-
ation. The content of this repetition is replete with clues about the political and social val-
ues of filmmakers and audiences alike. The variations from established conventions can
be equally telling and instructive. Audiences expect certain outcomes (e.g., the good guys
should win). Once again, contemporary viewers tend to be more comfortable identifying
such patterns in older genre efforts (e.g., westerns) than they are with contemporary releases.
For example, some audiences may be reluctant to identify the gender dichotomy inherent in
classic “slasher” films as well as in newer models of the genre, such as the ironic, self-aware
franchise Scream (1996, 1997, 2000, 2011). Male viewers in particular may resist the idea
that these horror films frequently punish sexually active girls with a vengeance fiercer than
any meted out to their male peers. On the other hand, viewers may also struggle with the
interpretation Carol Clover provides of the Final Girl—her term for the teen who survives
the typical slasher massacre. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Mod-
ern Horror Film claims that male and female viewers alike identify with, rather than root
against, the survivor of the genre even though that person is typically female and, by defini-
tion, chaste.43
Types of Political Messages
Americans in general do not trust politicians. In fact, politics as a respected profession ranks
well below medicine, law, engineering, teaching, dentistry, and the ministry. A 2013 Gal-
lup poll found that only 8 percent of those surveyed would rate the honesty and ethical
standards of members of Congress as high or very high—only lobbyists ranked lower with
6 percent. Nurses, pharmacists, and grade school teachers rated at the top.44 At the start of
2013, moreover, Congress’s approval rating was a dismal 14 percent, the lowest in history
according to Gallup.45 In the words of one headline, “Congress Approval Rating Lower Than
Cockroaches, Genghis Khan.”46
People get their ideas about politicians from experience, the news media, and the process
of political socialization. Movies play a part in this process by creating or reflecting attitudes
about politicians, and as we will see, the cinematic portrait of politics and politicians is
almost invariably negative. Politicians are often the villains in movies. They are frequently
corrupt, greedy, self-serving, and ruthlessly ambitious. Conversely, real politicians of the
past, such as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt—Spielberg’s Lincoln and the
Bill Murray FDR vehicle, Hyde Park on Hudson (2012) notwithstanding—are treated with
such reverence in movies that they become boring and unbelievable. Neither depiction is
17
accurate, of course, but both reinforce the popular view of politicians as either murderous
crooks or heroic saviors.
Condemning the cardboard clichés of corrupt politics and conniving politicians, former
senators William S. Cohen and Gary Hart have charged that film and television producers
are naive about how Washington really works and are dangerously misleading their view-
ers.47 Television commentator Andy Rooney responded that the public “understands that the
crooked politician is a standard dramatic cliché that is no more typical of the average politi-
cian than the winding marble staircase in a home shown on television is typical of a staircase
in an American home.”48 Cohen and Hart suggest that movies and TV shape our view of
politicians, whereas Rooney insists that we know the difference between fact and fiction.
Like others who feel maligned by the media, the senators may be laying too much blame
on the movies, but Rooney is probably letting filmmakers off the hook too easily. Movies
really do shape, reflect, and reinforce our opinions, even though we often dismiss them as
silly—“It’s only a movie.”
Movies, as we noted earlier, also tell us about the political system and how it works, or
whether it works—that is, whether it can solve our problems. Usually, they tell us that bad
people can mess up the system and good ones can set it right. On the whole, these movies
reinforce the status quo, telling us that all is well in America and that any little problems can
be worked out, usually with the help of a heroic leader. They seldom point out fundamental
defects in the system, and they rarely suggest that social problems can be solved by collec-
tive or communal action. They simplify the complex problems of a complex society, solving
them quickly and easily so we can have a happy ending. Some critics see a conspiracy in
this pattern, but most agree that it is unconscious and, to some extent, executed in collusion
with audiences more willing to have their opinions reinforced than challenged. Selective
perception enables us to ignore even movies that question our biases. Hollywood’s ubiqui-
tous happy endings further mute such challenges by suggesting that problems can be easily
solved. The results are what film scholars call “dramas of reassurance,” movies that support
commonly held ideas and tell us that everything is fine.
Political movies send messages about other important aspects of public life, too. Their
images of politics, politicians, and the political system influence participation in politics, for
example. If politics is corrupt or if heroes and heroines always come to the rescue, perhaps
there is no need to fight city hall. If the movie version of politics makes those of us who
are not stars irrelevant, perhaps we need not participate. Power is another frequent subject
of movies, almost always treated negatively, usually by falling back on the old maxim that
power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. For an example, we need look no
further than the film that takes its name from the saying: Absolute Power contains a president
so craven and villainous he kills his best friend’s wife during a violent tryst, then to protect
himself orders his Secret Service men to kill a very indirectly involved second woman sim-
ply because she is a prosecutor. Only a handful of totally selfless, godlike leaders such as
Hollywood’s favorite president, Abraham Lincoln, manage to exercise power and still come
across as virtuous.
Most American movies avoid, ignore, oversimplify, or denigrate political ideology, yet
ideology is essential if we are to understand politics. Ideologies help us make sense of the
world around us. They help us decide whether we are satisfied with the status quo or willing
to change it. All of us have some sort of ideology, but many Americans pretend they have
none, and so do most of our movies. No wonder the political motives of most film characters
18
are personal ambition and greed. The rare ideologues in American political movies are one-
dimensional and often silly, thus caricaturing ideology itself. As a consequence, American
movies, lacking a rich variety of perspectives on society, tend to see conflict as a struggle
between good and evil or right and wrong. Political scientists have noted that Americans, as
a people, are pragmatic rather than ideological. They adapt to conditions rather than react-
ing to them from a fixed point of view. Such ideology is vague and largely unarticulated.
Alternatives are seldom expressed, and we have been taught, partly by political movies,
that ideology is foolish, impractical, or evil. Indeed, American ideology as exhibited both in
political film and in the larger society might be said to be essentially anti-ideological because
of its emphasis on pragmatism and consensus. We like to make things work, and we do not
like conflict. Both of these orientations lead us to mute ideology. But also we place a high
value on individualism, competition, and social equality, all of which are traditional com-
ponents of an ideology—and all of which are themes that recur in American political films.
Political movies thus send many different messages. They describe us, shape us, and
sometimes move us. Although some themes recur, the messages and our reactions to them
tend to vary over time, reflecting the historical and political context. This survey therefore
treats American political movies chronologically, although we will return to their common
themes and focus on some specific issues. Subsequent chapters of this text will explore how
the films of various eras and genres evoke the various kinds of political significance we have
discussed.
The Impact of Political Films
The study of political films interests us as political scientists and film critics primarily because
we theorize that such films might have some kind of impact on the political system; how-
ever, the specific forms of such an impact remain largely unexplored by both disciplines. A
priori, we can hypothesize several non-mutually-exclusive ways that movies affect politics:
Movies Contribute to General Social and Political Learning,

Including Affective Patterns
Movies are part of a larger political socialization process. Just as we learn about our political
system in school and other social institutions, we learn by going to movies. This socializa-
tion process may include learning affective patterns, such as support for or opposition to the
role of government. For example, if one attends enough movies like Independence Day or
Air Force One (1997) as an impressionable youth, one might be disposed to expect extraor-
dinary achievements by U.S. presidents. A lack of examples of important female politicians
on screen may undergird public reluctance to support such candidates.
Movies Provide Information About and/or Orientation to

Specific Issues or Events
Not all learning at the movies needs to occur by means of slow, subtle processes of socializa-
tion. Attending a specific movie can provide viewers with information and possibly change
their attitudes concerning specific issues. For example, viewing The Insider (1999) might
both inform a viewer and instill a negative perception about the tobacco industry. At the
19
same time, films about the 2007 financial collapse may inform audiences about chicanery in
the financial industry yet leave them unconvinced that avoiding Wall Street for some nobler
pursuit is the way to go. Despite their antiheroes’ bad behavior, the movie star glamor and
conspicuous consumption on display in films like Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010),
Margin Call (2011), Cosmopolis (2012), and Arbitrage (2012) may prove hard for a viewer
to resist.
Movies Affect Specific Political Behavior, Such as Voting in Elections
A movie whose message contains a specific political target might affect the vote in an elec-
tion. For example, Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) or 2016: Obama’s America (2012) might have
convinced voters to vote against President George W. Bush or President Barack Obama,
respectively. The documentary film The Thin Blue Line (1988) resulted in the exoneration
of a man who had been imprisoned for murdering a police officer. The documentary West of
Memphis (2012) helped release from prison the men known as “the West Memphis three,”
who had been convicted of killing three boys in Texas as part of a supposed satanic ritual;
their story is also the basis of Atom Egoyan’s feature Devil’s Knot (2013).
Movies Affect the Knowledge and Behavior of Specific Groups,

Especially Political Elites
Some elected officials, for example, cite John Wayne movies as influencing their political
careers; in Chapter 3, for example, we discuss a theory that President Ronald Reagan in
effect reenacted some of the movie parts he played, including sheriff in a western, while in
office. His presidential image then informed the public posturing of George W. Bush and his
adoption of cowboy hat, cowboy boots, and ranch backdrops to stake his political identity to
the ideological underpinnings of the western much as Reagan had. (Even Hawaii native and
Chicago politician Barack Obama has made public appearances in a cowboy hat.)
Movies Spark Public Debate and/or Media Interest in Specific Issues
Even a film that is not seen in great numbers by the general public, such as Wag the Dog
(1997), may have a tertiary impact on the political system because the mass media or other
elites discuss and use its imagery in public discourse, which may eventually filter down to
other groups, including the general public. Meanwhile, films based on current events, like
Zero Dark Thirty’s portrayal of the hunt for and assassination of Osama bin Laden, percolate
into public consciousness when politicians refer to them in political contexts. Senators John
McCain, Dianne Feinstein, and Carl Levin all protested the film as “grossly inaccurate and
misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the capture.”49
This is only a partial list of possible means of impact by movies, but it suggests that the col-
lective effect of movies may be profound indeed. Several mediating influences on the power
of movies to affect politics ought to be borne in mind, however.
First, decades of political research teach us that, as a rule, individuals possess consid-
erable capacity to screen their own beliefs from outside stimuli such as those presented
20
by political messages in movies.50 A person with a firmly established partisan identity, for
example, is unlikely to be swayed by the heavy-handed ideological message of Bulworth
(1998) or the environmentally concerned look at the energy extraction process known as
“fracking” dramatized in Promised Land (2012). It also bears mentioning that many movies
(particularly small, independent ones) are not even accessible to many would-be viewers.
Film studios put many movies in limited release, meaning that they are seen only in major
urban centers or perhaps only in New York and/or Los Angeles.
Moreover, a person with a strongly conservative worldview is probably unlikely to go and
see a movie like Bulworth or Promised Land. (After she met with North Vietnamese officials
and imprisoned American pilots behind enemy lines, an entire generation of Vietnam-era
political conservatives swore off Jane Fonda movies.) Thus, attending movies is a self-
selected political stimulus. Except perhaps as children, we generally choose the movies we
want to see and exclude ourselves from many others. Therefore, many movies with strident
political messages may wind up only preaching to the choir of its predetermined supporters.
As we have noted, preliminary research suggests people are least susceptible to persua-
sion by movies that they expect to be political; they are most open to influence when they
are least aware of political messaging. Films overtly aligned with a partisan cause or party
affiliation would be even less likely to influence viewers already resistant to such issues and
groups outside the movie theater.
A recent analysis by the New York Times found that the audiences for the liberal docu-
mentary Fahrenheit 9/11 and those of the traditional or conservative The Passion of the
Christ (2004) were markedly different geographically and demographically. The theaters
where Passion audiences were the largest tended to be in suburban settings and dispersed
across the country, whereas the biggest 9/11 audiences were located in New York, Los
Angeles, San Francisco, and a few other urban centers.51 The studios and their distribu-
tion networks contribute to this pattern by exhibiting and heavily promoting movies in
areas where they think the audience will be the largest. Such a pattern followed the
release of the anti-Obama documentary, 2016: Obama’s America, with runs extended in
areas where prospective voters favored Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney
and curtailed in “blue” locations where voters were expected to vote Democratic. Similar
geographic splits defined the presidential elections of 2012. Obama’s firmest support
occurred in urban and coastal areas, whereas Romney votes tended to come from the
suburbs and heartland.52
Finally, audiences are not monolithic. What little empirical data we have suggest that
people experience movies politically in fundamentally different ways. Recent research by
Young suggests that moviegoers have different motivations for seeing movies; for example,
some just want to kill time while others are trying to keep up with current trends.53 Stephen-
son’s groundbreaking research identified remarkably variable reactions to a short film from
the American Cancer Society, reactions that seemed to depend on the viewers’ own experi-
ence with cancer.54 We can therefore expect that different kinds of political movies will have
varying effects on different kinds of audiences. Whereas that may seem like a self-evident
conclusion, remarkably little is known about which sorts of films are most efficacious (and
why), which types of audiences are most susceptible to which types of film, and so on. For
now, we must take it mostly as an article of faith that movies are an important “participant”
in our political system in a variety of ways.
21
Summary and Implications for the Systematic Study of Film and Politics
With the goal of helping readers to approach the study of film and politics systematically,
this chapter has suggested a typology of political films. The typology is based largely on two
important dimensions of such films: (1) political content—the extent to which a film reflects
a political context or setting, and (2) political intention—the extent to which filmmakers
actively seek to impart political or ideological messages. Whereas movies that exhibit a
great deal of either dimension tend to be readily identifiable as political films, those with
understated—or even totally sublimated—political content or expression pose relatively
greater challenges to contemporary students. Several critical approaches to identifying
political meaning in less obvious political films were briefly discussed. The means by which
political films may theoretically affect the political system were briefly explored, along with
a series of potentially mediating factors. Finally, much of the study of political film rests on
largely untested assumptions about the effects of cultural symbols on the political attitudes
and actions of mass audiences. The rather nascent research linking exposure to movies and
other media to mass behavior needs to be linked to these often tenuous assumptions.
Notes
1. For an example of social science research into the effects of television on voting, see Danny
Hayes, “Has Television Personalized Voting Behavior?” Political Behavior, 31.2, June 2009,
pp. 231–260. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11109-008-9070-0. For an example of research into
social media and political habits, see Joseph DiGrazia et al., “More Tweets, More Votes: Social
Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior,” PlosOne, November 27, 2013; http://
www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0079449.
2. Phillip L. Gianos, Politics and Politicians in American Film (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995), p. 3.
3. Douglas Kellner, “Film Politics and Ideology: Reflections on Hollywood Film in the Age of Rea-
gan,” www.pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/filmpoliticsideology.pdf, p. 1.
4. See, for example, Bruce Austin, Immediate Seating: A Look at Movie Audiences (Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth, 1989).
5. L.D. Butler et al., “The Psychological Impact of Viewing the Film JFK: Emotions, Beliefs, and
Political Behavioral Intentions,” Political Psychology, 1995, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 237–257.
6. Todd Adkins, J.J. Castle, “Moving Pictures? Experimental Evidence of Cinematic Influence on
Political Attitudes,” Social Science Quarterly. doi: 10.1111/ssqu.12070.
7. For an example of films about political figures classified as biographical films, see Dennis Bing-
ham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010). For examples of political films categorized as biography
and thriller films but not as political films, see these film lists: IMDb.com, www.imdb.com/genre/
biography, and www.imdb.com/genre/thriller. The popular film reference website IMDb.com
does not officially feature political films as a genre but provides only links to such lists maintained
by users.
8. David McLellan, Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 1.
9. Kellner, p. 3.
10. Barry Keith Grant, Film Genre Reader IV (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012).
11. Library of Congress, Motion Picture & Television Reading Room, www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/
miggen.html#Political.
12. Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 45–46.
13. Ibid., p. 46.
14. Roger Ebert, “Dick”, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/dick-1999.
15. “Politics Reigns at Golden Globes,” Politico Magazine, www.politico.com/story/2013/01/golden-
globes-politics-86119.html.
22
16. See, for example, Ian Scott, American Politics in Hollywood Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni-
versity Press, 2011), pp. 12–13. See also Ernest Giglio, Here’s Looking At You: Hollywood, Film
and Politics (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 26–27.
17. Goldwyn himself sent a few messages. His first film company was publicly committed to “a
foundation of intelligence and refinement,” and it was Goldwyn, after all, who produced Lillian
Hellman’s The Little Foxes (1941), a bone-chilling tale of capitalist greed, and The Best Years of
Our Lives (1946), a poignant story of the aftermath of war. He also was responsible for The North
Star (1943), one of Hollywood’s most blatantly pro-Russian films. Apparently Goldwyn was not
so much opposed to messages as ambivalent about them. See Ephraim Katz, The Film Encyclo-
pedia (New York: Perigee, 1979), p. 491.
18. See, for example, Louis Gianetti, Understanding Movies (New York: Prentice Hall, 1996).
19. “Charlie Wilson’s War—Interview with Tom Hanks,” IndieLondon, www.indielondon.co.uk/
Film-Review/charlie-wilsons-war-tom-hanks-interview.
20. Kevin Robillard, “Affleck Says No Politics in ‘Argo,’” Politico Magazine, www.politico.com/
blogs/click/2012/10/affleck-says-no-politics-in-argo-138010.html.
21. James E. Combs, American Political Movies: An Annotated Filmography of Feature Films (New
York: Garland, 1995), p. x.
22. Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), p. 142.
23. Beverly M. Kelley, Reel Politik: Political Ideologies in ’30s and ’40s Films (Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1998).
24. Leonard Quart and Albert Auster, Film and Society Since 1945 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2011), p. 5.
25. See, for example, the message boards at IMDb.com, “Atlas Shrugged, Part 1,” www.imdb.com/
title/tt0480239/?ref_=sr_2.
26. Roger Ebert, “Atlas Shrugged, Part 1,” www.rogerebert.com/reviews/atlas-shrugged-2011.
27. Alan Scherstuhl, “Atlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt?” Has the Year’s Funniest Sex Scene,”
http://www.villagevoice.com/2014-09-10/film/atlas-shrugged-part-3/.
28. Janet Staiger, “Hybrid or Inbred: The Purity Hypothesis and Hollywood Genre History,” Film
Criticism (1997), p. 5.
29. James Combs and Sarah Combs, Film Propaganda and American Politics: An Analysis and Fil-
mography (New York: Garland, 1994), p. 8.
30. Steven J. Ross, “The Visual Politics of Class: Silent Film and the Public Sphere,” Film Interna-
tional, http://filmint.nu/?p=1735.
31. See the spot at PBS Newshour, “Origins of the Political Ad: Woodrow Wilson’s 1912 Campaign
Film,” www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/08/origins-of-the-political-ad-woodrow-wilsons-
1912-campaign-film.html.
32. Roger Ebert, “Crucible,” www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-crucible-1996.
33. Dan Nimmo and James E. Combs, Mediated Political Realities (New York: Longman, 1983),
p. 105.
34. Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1964).
35. Nimmo and Combs, p. 105.
36. Gianos, p. xii.
38. Dan Leab, “Blacks in American Cinema,” in The Political Companion to American Film, ed.
Gary Crowdus (Chicago: Lakeview Press, 1994), p. 46.
40. Ibid., p. 108.
41. See, for example, Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New
York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1992).
42. Adilifu Nama, Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2008), pp. 12, 10.
43. Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press), pp. 21–65.
44. Gallup, “Honesty/Ethics in Professions,” www.gallup.com/poll/1654/honesty-ethics-professions.
aspx#1.
23
45. Gallup Politics, “Congress Begins 2013 with 14 percent Approval,” www.gallup.com/poll/159812/
congress-begins-2013-approval.aspx.
46. HuffingtonPost.com, “Congress Approval Rating Lower Than Cockroaches,” www.
huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/08/congress-approval-rating-nickelback-cockroaches_n_2435601.
html.
47. William S. Cohen and Gary Hart, “TV’s Treatment of Washington—It’s Capital Punishment,” TV
Guide, August 24, 1985.
48. Andy Rooney, “Anything You Say, Senator Ewing,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 29,
1985.
49. Xan Brooks, “John McCain Criticizes Zero Dark Thirty’s Depiction of Torture,” The Guardian,
www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/dec/20/john-mccain-zero-dark-thirty.
50. For a succinct summary of the research on the effects of mass media on political behavior, see,
for example, Doris A. Graber, Mass Media and American Politics, 6th ed. (Washington, DC: CQ
Press, 2001), pp. 195–225, or David A. Paletz, The Media in American Politics: Contents and
Consequences (New York: Longman, 1999), pp. 103–113.
51. Sharon Waxman, “Two Americas of ‘Fahrenheit’ and ‘Passion,’” New York Times, July 13, 2004.
52. For a geographic breakdown of the 2012 presidential election, see New York Times, “Special Cov-
erage: The 2012 Election,” http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/live-blog-the-
2012-presidential-election/. See also Geography Education, “Geographic Analysis of 2012
Presidential Election,” http://geographyeducation.org/2012/10/09/geographic-analysis-of-2012-
presidential-election/.
53. Namkung Young, “A Motivational Study of Moviegoers: A Q-Methodological Approach,”
Q-Methodology and Theory 4 (1999): 182–207.
54. William Stephenson, “Applications of Communication Theory: Immediate Experience of Mov-
ies,” Operant Subjectivity 1 (1978): 96–116.
24
2
The Making of a Message

Film Production and Techniques,

and Political Messages
The Hurt Locker (2008)

Movies can send political messages in many ways, from the most explicit political preach-
ing on view in a satire like Bulworth to far more subtle means involving techniques of
filmmaking that most viewers take for granted. For example, the setting, point-of-view
cinematography, and costuming in the beginning of the war film The Hurt Locker (2009)
visually compare the rubble-strewn street in Iraq (actually Jordan) to the pocked surface of
the moon, U.S. soldiers to astronauts, and Iraqis to aliens as an automated bomb detonator
crawls the rough and dusty street like a mechanical rover exploring the moon. Politically,
the emphasis on the foreignness of the terrain suggests a war detached from the Ameri-
can public that may as well be taking place on another planet. This chapter analyzes how
each step in the filmmaking process—from conception of the idea for a film to its release
(and even thereafter)—can achieve the effect of political messaging to an audience. Politi-
cal messages may be present in films as the result of either intention by the film’s creator
or largely unintended reflections of political and social realities, or perhaps both. In this
discussion, we focus primarily on intentional messages.
The Filmmaking Process
Creating a popular motion picture in the current era is an expensive, time-consuming pro-
cess that can involve (literally) a cast of thousands. In this section, we analyze the film
production process into a series of steps and isolate the possible contribution each step can
make to the political impact of a film. The steps we identify are “ideal” ones that in fact
may occur in combination with one another and/or in different sequences. For example,
the conception of a movie—the very idea of creating it—may likely coincide with (or even
precede if the film is an adaptation) the creation of the basic story that the movie will tell.
And although promotion is relegated to one of the final steps in the process, it is frequently
created and implemented long before a film is completed, as is evident when a movie trailer
(a promotional short that precedes a movie) is shown months or even more than a year
before a film is seen in the theater. But breaking the process into its constituent parts ena-
bles us to see how individual production decisions can create or affect political messages
in films. It also provides an opportunity to explore the technical aspects of filmmaking (and
the accompanying terminology) that are of the greatest relevance to the study of politics
and film.
Conception
“Conception” refers to the idea of making a film. In current American cinema, the ideas for
movies can originate in a number of ways. Some films are the creation of individuals whose
vision (and access to the necessary resources) enables them to fashion a very personal or
individualized statement. Many other films are created by means of a complicated process
involving large studios and teams of writers and other production personnel. All things
being equal, smaller (i.e., less expensive) films that originate in an individual artistic vision
are more likely to contain overt and/or intentional political messages than are big-budget,
major-studio projects. With the caveat that the filmmaking process and movie industry have
changed in significant ways since the advent of the so-called digital revolution, it is still
often the case that most popular films fall into the latter category, and we will focus on these
films in analyzing the filmmaking process.
26
THE MAKING OF A MESSAGE
Production
Movie production is an extremely important, yet often unclear aspect of moviemaking. There
is no specific list of tasks, responsibilities, or roles that is necessarily undertaken by a movie
producer. However, a film producer is generally the first person (beyond a screenwriter or
other story source) professionally involved with a film project. Among the activities gener-
ally associated with film producers are the following:
• Identifying and hiring the major creative talents who will work on the film (the director,
screenwriter, cinematographer, costumer, art director, casting director, editor, major
stars, and so forth).

• Maintaining a presence during the shooting of a movie to help with the practical chal-
lenges involved in completion of a film project. (This role may or may not create
conflicts with the movie director.)
• Serving as the individual regarded by the studio or production company as the ultimate
authority on the project who has ultimate responsibility for its successful completion.
(Again, such a role may lead to confusion or conflict with that of the film’s director.)
However, the major and overarching role of a movie’s producer is to ensure its finan-
cial viability. This person supervises a production’s logistics, including scheduling, raising
funds, overseeing the budgeting process, hiring key personnel, and answering to the studio
or production company when there are problems.1 The focus of film production can thus be
said to be the commercial aspects of a project rather than the artistic—which tend to be the
province of film direction. Movies are produced in order to make money, and their content
is strongly influenced by economics. Although state and local lawmakers from Oklahoma
to New York do use tax incentives to lure filmmakers to make movies on their home turf,
and unlike the national cinemas of Australia and Canada, U.S. filmmakers receive no federal
government subsidies.
Movies are business ventures and expensive ones at that. The production costs alone of
a feature film averaged just $400,000 in 1941; by 1985, the figure was more than $12 mil-
lion.2 The average overall cost of major studio movies rose from about $42 million in 1995
to $78 million in 2011.3 Since 2005, the biggest budgeted Hollywood studio films averaged
between $200 and $300 million.4 Production costs are only part of the picture. In 2007,
the average advertising and promotion costs for a studio picture reached $36 million, and
studio executives estimate that, despite pressure to scale back, marketing costs have only
risen since then.5 Reuters explains the cost ratio between production and marketing costs
this way: for every dollar spent on producing a major film, the studios spend between 51
and 58 cents to release and market it in the United States and Canada. This means the aver-
age 2009 release had to gross $186 million to recoup production and domestic release costs
alone—a tall order.6
All this means high finance. The big studios used to provide this money and often still
do, but banks, insurance companies, corporate sponsorships, and individual investors are
now more prominently involved than ever before. These institutions and people tend to be
conservative—politically and economically—and they invest accordingly.
Nevertheless, depending upon the context of their involvement, movie producers can
help to shape political content. Paramount to understanding how that influence can occur
27
is realizing, as Gianos reminds us, that films are a commodity produced to make money.7
This profit-making motive—in an endeavor whose production costs may reach hundreds of
millions of dollars—tends to push producers in certain ways. Perhaps most important, the
profit motive tends to cause producers to err on the side of caution when making movies.
Political controversy and emphatic political sentiment, although not inevitably anathema
for a movie’s bottom line, risk alienating ticket-buyers aligned on the other side of an issue,
a chance many producers seek to avoid. Hiring a director with a known political agenda,
for example, might be typically eschewed in favor of a safer choice. Scripts may be toned
down or flat-out rejected for their potential political sensitivity. The release of movies may
be timed according to their relevance to current political events. For example, the Arnold
Schwarzenegger action vehicle Collateral Damage (2001), about terrorist attacks, saw its
release date delayed after the actual attacks on 9/11 in 2001. Steven Spielberg deliberately
scheduled the release of Lincoln after the 2012 presidential election lest it be perceived and
possibly rejected as an endorsement of the incumbent. In an unprecedented, far more contro-
versial and potentially damaging collision between politics and Hollywood, Sony Pictures
pulled from release the satiric The Interview (2014) in response to threats from hackers
linked to North Korea, the object of the film’s humor. Actors with safe images (e.g., Tom
Hanks) may be favored over those with outspoken political beliefs or images (e.g., Jane
Fonda, dubbed “Hanoi Jane,” in the 1970s).
The conservative orientation of investors is widely believed to have increased since the
1960s as the corporate moneymen took over and the power of the studios declined, but, in
fact, the collapse of the studio system, as well as the increased access to high-quality digital
technology, has made it easier for independent filmmakers to develop political projects.
They still need lots of money, which means finding investors. Some artists solve this prob-
lem by starting their own production companies and investing themselves. Actor-director
Clint Eastwood has Malpaso, his long-time stock production company that allows him to
work with the same crew from film to film. Movie stars from Sandra Bullock to Zac Efron
to Queen Latifah have their own production companies and produce their own headlin-
ing projects as well as films in which they do not appear. For example, Brad Pitt’s Plan B
Entertainment produced the Julia Roberts vehicle Eat, Pray, Love (2010), co-starring Javier
Bardem, not Pitt. Small investors also have become more important, and cable television and
digital technology, including DVDs and streaming films on computer, have provided new
outlets and new investors.
Recent well-received political film projects appeared not as traditional theatrical releases
but on cable and via the DVD-by-mail and on-demand Internet streaming media company
Netflix. Recount (2010), based on the retabulation in Florida after the 2000 U.S. presidential
election, and the Golden Globe–winning Game Change (2012), based on the 2008 election
campaign, were both produced and distributed by premium cable channel HBO. Described
by The New Yorker as “dark, expertly directed and acted, and about five times better than
the average Hollywood film,” House of Cards (2013), a political thriller starring Kevin
Spacey, was the first show not simply distributed but also made by Netflix.8 The company
made history by releasing all thirteen episodes for streaming on the same day to capital-
ize on the recent phenomenon of the movie-like, “binge” viewing made possible by the
release of television episodes online and on DVD. That a political story would both form the
spine of such innovative programming and receive vaunted critical praise says something
unprecedented about the current appetite for and interest in producing politically themed
28
entertainment in the twenty-first century. (This trend toward the political will not go unno-
ticed by Hollywood.)
Despite the decreased cost of high-quality cameras and the increase in kinds of viewing
platforms, independent filmmakers still need the studios at least to some extent for both
investment and distribution—a relationship observers have dubbed “Indiewood”—but even
the studios have changed since their heyday from the 1930s to the 1950s. Would any of the
old studios, except perhaps Warner Brothers, have laid out $52 million for Reds (1981)?
Paramount did—under the corporate ownership of Gulf and Western. The conglomerate
thought the film would make money so it was willing to invest, even if it did not endorse
the film’s politics, just as other studios invested in Missing (1982) and The Killing Fields
(1984). “Hollywood has nothing against message films as long as they make money,” said
director John Frankenheimer in 1984. “You could get The Manchurian Candidate made
today—provided you had Jack Nicholson in the Sinatra role and Rob Lowe playing Ray-
mond Shaw.”9 Frankenheimer proved remarkably prescient: in 2004 Paramount produced a
remake of the noted political thriller—vastly inferior to the original—with bankable stars
Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep. More recently, film mogul Harvey Weinstein, who
famously picked up Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) for distribution when Disney decided it was too
controversial, declared that movies and politics had “converged,” while in the fall of 2011
the New York Times predicted that “social media, an increasingly robust circuit of festivals
and private screening events, and digitally driven distribution systems . . . are creating an
environment in which the right movie, at the right time, could play a notable role in a cam-
paign.”10 It would be hard to point out any film that actually did alter the 2012 presidential
campaign’s trajectory—unless we count a waiter’s covert recording of Mitt Romney at a
fund-raiser complaining about the 47 percent of Americans he claimed were dependent on
government and therefore in the bag for Obama. A heightened relationship between films
and the election process, however, did distinguish the movies from 2010 on from those of
previous decades.
Whereas this discussion might lead us to assume that movie production is somehow
biased toward films espousing a conservative, patriotic, and even nationalistic viewpoint,
there is by no means agreement on that point among film industry observers. Conservative
critics, like Michael Medved, in fact claim the opposite: that Hollywood producers favor
films that denigrate so-called traditional American values. Medved wrote in Hollywood vs.
America: “Americans are passionately patriotic, and consider themselves enormously lucky
to live here; but Hollywood conveys a view of the nation’s history, future, and major insti-
tutions that is dark, cynical, and often nightmarish.” Medved’s book goes on to assert that
movies frequently attack mainstream religion, promote promiscuity, malign the institution
of marriage, encourage foul language and violence, and generally “bash America.”11
Conservatives have also argued that Hollywood children’s movies contain “left-wing
propaganda” and cite Cars 2 (2011), Monsters vs. Aliens (2009), and The Muppets (2011)
for their vilification of traditional politically conservative leaders like military officers and
oil executives. “Children should be off-base for the industry’s thought police,” laments one
critic, but “. . . no such luck.”12 Children’s movies, however, are like most Hollywood fare,
even those with popular liberal targets like greedy CEOs or ruthless financiers. American
films of various genres tend to celebrate the power of the individual to overcome any obsta-
cle and emphasize the worth of the one over the struggle of the many. By movie’s end they
neatly restore or erase any disruption in the sociopolitical order so that moviegoers leave
29
satisfied with life more or less as it is. And satisfaction with the status quo and valorized
individualism are inherently more conservative values than liberal.
This kind of celebration of the status quo inspires the romantic comedy Maid in Man-
hattan (2002), starring Jennifer Lopez as Marisa, a single mother and Puerto Rican hotel
maid in a star-crossed romance with Ralph Fiennes’s Christopher Marshall, a blue-blooded
Republican senatorial candidate who mistakes her for a wealthy socialite. Following a Cin-
derella storyline right down to Marisa fleeing the ball in heels and borrowed diamonds with
Christopher in earnest pursuit, the film rewards Marisa’s hard work as a hotel maid with a
promotion that takes her away from her service worker friends and puts her into a manage-
ment position. Meanwhile Marshall is humanized by learning a few politically palatable
lessons about immigrant communities and the working class. He thus wins the election and
Marisa, pulling her to his level to live happily ever after. Initially, the film supports the soli-
darity of the working-class immigrant community, but by its fairy-tale conclusion the unity
of the many gives way to celebration for the socioeconomic success of the one, Marisa.
Trained in these kinds of ideologically conservative narrative patterns, moviegoers would
not expect the film to end any other way.
Most critics and scholars would agree that most movies are indeed produced on the basis
of their ability to make money for their investors. Whether that motive drives them toward a
particular ideological message in their films—other than the very general demand that indi-
vidualism trump all competing political ideologies—is debatable. Clearly, however, films
can be vehicles for all kinds of political messages, and in many cases the content of that
message will be in the eyes of the beholder.
The film industry appears as a whole to be at best ambivalent about investing in political
films. Directors from D.W. Griffith (The Birth of a Nation, 1915; Intolerance, 1916) and
King Vidor (The Big Parade, 1925; The Crowd, 1928; Our Daily Bread, 1934) in the early
days to Costa-Gavras (Missing, 1982; Betrayed, 1988; Music Box, 1989; Capital, 2013),
Oliver Stone (Salvador, 1986; Wall Street, 1987; Natural Born Killers, 1994; World Trade
Center, 2006) and George Clooney (Good Night and Good Luck, 2005; The Ides of March,
2011; Monuments Men, 2014) today, along with some studios, producers, writers, and stars,
have defied the Goldwyn rule frequently and flagrantly. At least a few movies with political
messages are made every year, and some periods, such as the 1930s and the late 1970s, and
again since 2000, have seen higher rates of production. Such movies generally get more than
their fair share of recognition: witness the success of Platoon in 1986 or Argo and Lincoln
in 2012. Hollywood likes to congratulate itself by giving an occasional Academy Award
nomination, and sometimes even the Oscar itself, to a film that at least pretends to have a
message. Milk (2008) presents such a case. Awarded Oscars for best lead actor and original
screenplay, Milk is based on the real-life and assassination of activist Harvey Milk, who cru-
saded for gay rights and became California’s first openly gay elected official in the 1970s.
A year later, the soldier’s-eye view of the politically divisive Iraq war, The Hurt Locker, won
multiple Academy Awards, including Best Picture, in a head-to-head contest with box office
smash Avatar, a film widely interpreted and debated as both an environmentalist warning
cry and a colonialist fable. Critics may give political films a rough ride, but they pay atten-
tion to them and regard them as “important works.” And contrary to conventional wisdom,
audiences do not ignore political films. Although message movies hardly ever rank as block-
busters, many have actually turned a handsome profit. So producers clearly do not reject
political films out of hand.
30
Indeed, it is not only political films that filmmakers are leery of handling. Film critic
Stephen Holden recently observed that Hollywood is reluctant to make films with any kind
of serious, adult-oriented content.13 The number of vacuous big-budget movies aimed at
what is often seen as a key demographic group—teenagers—seems to far outnumber serious
movies of any kind. Or as one critic recently put it, “Hollywood has become an institution
that is more interested in launching the next rubberized action figure than in making the
next interesting movie.”14 Recent cartoon-based franchises with fast food tie-ins (Iron Man,
Spiderman, and The Transformers) make the point.
Screenplay and Story

Probably the most obvious way films send political messages is via the screenplay, which
prescribes the basic content of a movie: its subject matter, characters, and plotting. As we
have noted, American movies are noteworthy for their general tendency to avoid overtly
political subject matter. As Gianos notes succinctly, “the conventional wisdom of the indus-
try is that political subjects are to be avoided.” According to Gianos, therefore, a primary
message transmitted by the film industry as a whole is that “politics is neither interesting nor
important.”15 At least, political themes are interesting and important, the movies seem to say,
only when supplying the backdrop to other, more appealing themes like romance. Of course,
some movies with overt political content and themes are made, but on the whole, more mov-
ies with other kinds of political messages are seen by the general public.
The words or dialogue may be even more important in political films than in other mov-
ies. Politics itself is a medium of words, so more is spoken in these films and what is said is
given greater weight. In the case of All the President’s Men, the phrase “non-denial denial”
memorably refers to politicians’ penchant to answer direct questions with disavowals that
crumble under logical scrutiny. Meanwhile Deep Throat’s admonition to Bob Woodward to
“follow the money” has buried itself so permanently into American political consciousness
that it gets exhumed with almost every new scandal. Syriana (2005) provides this delectably
quotable rant from a sleazy Texas lawmaker: “Corruption? Corruption is government intru-
sion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations. That’s Milton Friedman. He got a
goddamn Nobel Prize. . . . Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead
of fighting over scraps of meat out in the streets. Corruption is why we win.” If too much
is said, however, the movies become static and boring or, worse, obvious, broadcasting the
message heavy-handedly and thereby subverting it. On the other hand, if a movie is too sub-
tle, the message might be missed altogether. Courtroom scenes provide the template for this
tightrope walk. Since their setup demands direct addresses to judges and juries spelling out
in no uncertain terms a cause or case, the chance for incisive language and genuine drama
is high—but so is the risk for overkill. This balance is demonstrated in Al Pacino’s role as a
defense lawyer in his climactic confrontation defending a guilty judge to a corrupt judge in
the crime drama . . . And Justice For All (1979). “You’re out of order! You’re out of order!
The whole trial is out of order! You’re supposed to stand for somethin’! You’re supposed to
protect people! But instead you rape and murder them!” These lines and a young Pacino’s
passionate delivery provide fertile ground for parody. At the same time they light a fire in
the audience by “speaking truth to power,” showing one man avenging American faith in
the political ideal that justice is blind. Nonetheless, research suggests that movies are most
effective when they let us reach our own conclusions or at least let us think we have.
31
Subject Matter/Genre
“Genre” refers to a class of films with conventional settings, characters, and plots. Among
the most commonly recognized film genres are horror movies, romantic comedies, and sci-
ence fiction. We have observed earlier that political films do not seem to constitute a genre
or “type” of movie unto themselves. But other genres do tend to be associated with certain
kinds of political messages.
Perhaps the oldest and most commonly invoked genre is the American western. The cen-
tral plot of the classic western film is the struggle to maintain law and order on the frontier
in a fast-paced action story. Good and evil are generally represented in stark contrast, and
as a rule, the good guys wearing the white hats emerge victorious. Many early westerns
affirm the basic goodness of early America while depicting Native Americans as savages
whose defeat was just and appropriate. Countless variations on the basic western have been
produced, making it a quintessential American genre that tends to reflect “American values”
widely construed.
However, genres are subject to mutation over time. In the case of the western, for exam-
ple, recent efforts tend to downplay the essential goodness of American settlers and cowboys
and instead explore the tragic plight of Native Americans. Dances with Wolves (1990) was a
hugely popular movie that won director and star Kevin Costner an Academy Award and fea-
tured a sympathetic perspective on Native Americans. Yet the more things in movies change,
the more they stay the same: Dances with Wolves also featured a white protagonist who was
able to master the nobly portrayed native culture. One could argue that the movie co-opts
Native Americans into the white world. Thus the film does not really undermine the tra-
ditional values of the western genre. A variation on the same theme is present in The Last
Samurai (2003), wherein an American soldier from the frontier era is sent to Japan, masters
the art and culture of the samurai, and succeeds in preserving it on behalf of the Japanese.
Once again, the message is not so much that the foreign culture is venerable but that an
American can master it against the forces of evil. James Cameron’s 3-D, sci-fi blockbuster
Avatar (2009) prompted similar charges of exploitation in the guise of cultural sensitivity.
One writer diagnosed it as a classic story of colonialism in which “the natives must rely on
the white anthropologist to become fully human.”16 Another critic claimed that Avatar “is a
fantasy specifically for white people living with a heavy dose of liberal guilt. And it is one
that, ultimately, marginalizes indigenous peoples and affirms white supremacy.”17 Thus, even
in the science fiction genre, Hollywood’s attempts to reposition native culture to the moral
center give way, however unintentionally, to generic assumptions about the inherent superior-
ity of those characters most identified with the forces endangering that same culture.18
Directed by Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained (2012) revises the western genre in a
completely different fashion, taking its setting, iconography—horses, cowboy hats, boots,
rifles, saloons—and theme of justice versus revenge and relocating all of it to the slavery-
era South. Jamie Foxx plays Django, the freed or “unchained” slave of the title. Physically
indomitable and keenly trained by the German man who buys his freedom—a facet of the
story some critics point to as yet another example of white paternalism—Django metes out
justice at the end of a gun. The opposite of an Uncle Tom, he avenges dehumanized, tor-
tured slaves and with his black cowboy hat and silent demeanor overturns the western genre
convention that puts white hats on white cowboys and lets them get the best of marauding
Indians and snarling bank robbers.
32
Jamie Foxx plays the title character and Christoph Walz his partner in the slavery revenge fantasy and
revisionist western Django Unchained (2012).
Django Unchained followed on the thematic heels of Tarantino’s popular World War II
historical revenge fantasy, Inglorious Basterds (2009), about a group of Jewish U.S. sol-
diers planning to assassinate Nazis. Tarantino counts on audience familiarity with generic
elements of the western and the combat war film, respectively, only to subvert those expec-
tations, occasionally to comic and certainly ironic effect. Reinvigorating typical cues by
scrambling them, each film rebrands its genre’s victims as vanquishing heroes.
Nicholas Ray’s cult classic Johnny Guitar (1954) and the lesser-known The Ballad of
Little Jo (1993) are examples of westerns that disrupt the genre’s typical gender roles.
Johnny Guitar slings a holster on Joan Crawford’s female saloon owner, Vienna, and makes
her the face of pioneer independence and rebellion against injustice and small-town hypoc-
risy. Her struggle has been read as a metaphor for the era’s Hollywood ban on working with
supposed Communist sympathizers, replete with a character tortured to name Vienna for a
crime she did not commit. Based on a true story, The Ballad of Little Jo goes even further in
overturning gender stereotypes, turning Josephine into “Jo,” a woman passing as a man in a
grim, nineteenth-century mining town. Historical and generic revisionism breathes new life
into narrative patterns as old as fiction film itself and, to greater or lesser success, upends the
ideological scaffolding on which the western stands.
Movie Conventions
Movies of any genre tend to follow time-proven conventions to which audiences have grown
accustomed. With respect to movies with overtly political content, Gianos identifies four
such conventions, each of which serves to minimize the political conflict of storylines that
might otherwise arouse controversy.19
Personalization
Movies with political subject matter frequently focus on the individual drama of politically
active roles, which tends to make them more palatable to mass audiences. The Vietnam
33
War classic The Deer Hunter (1978) involves the viewer in the drama of a group of friends
enmeshed in the war, thus tending to avoid overt commentary about the war itself. Rendition
(2007) dramatizes the questionable morality of the “war on terror” by showing the illicit
seizure of a wrongly accused, handsome Egyptian living in the United States and happily
married to a blonde American woman, pregnant with their second child.
Sugarcoating
Another frequent approach is to cover potentially strong political content with other genres.
Gianos notes that Reds (1981), which concerns an American journalist who is a Communist
sympathizer, is presented largely as a love story. Conspiracy Theory (1997) and Enemy of
the State (1998) redirect content dealing with concerns about Orwellian government into
more conventional thrillers, while Side Effects (2013) begins as a damning look at the cozy
relationship between psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry and ends as a more typi-
cal whodunit.
“The Unlabeled Bottle”
By this phrase, Gianos is referring to the tendency for political movies to use extremely
generic terms to defuse possible political controversy. He notes that in Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington (1939) no party (or ideological) labels are provided, allowing the audience
to read its own interpretation into the story. Indeed, very few movies with politicians in
key roles—particularly fictional movies about presidents, such as The American President
(1995), Independence Day (1996), and Dave (1993)—provide party labels. Likewise, darker
films like Syriana (2005) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012) do little to distinguish between Dem-
ocratic and Republican administrations.
Ambivalence
Many films present both sides of a political conflict with an even hand, thus deflating criti-
cism of favoritism toward a particular side or cause and possible bad publicity. Gianos notes
that director Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) presents a case for both violence and
nonviolence in racial conflict; Citizen Ruth (1996) lampoons both extremities of the abortion
debate in a way that favors neither side, while The Hurt Locker (2009) attempts to stake out
neutral territory by attaching itself to the point of view of soldiers ambivalent about but not
politically motivated by the Iraq war.
Additionally, the requirement to entertain, the focus on individuals, and the need to solve
problems by the end of the movie can result in oversimplification, which is why American
political films almost invariably deal with only one problem at a time. Even a single issue
may be simplified so much that the outcome is obvious. In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
(1967), for example, the solution is so readily apparent that white viewers’ racist attitudes are
not really challenged: of course their daughters could marry nice black doctors like Sidney
Poitier. Red Dawn (1984, 2012) and Rambo (1985) leave us no options either. The villains of
such movies—whether they are racists, Communists, bureaucrats, or businessmen—are so
broadly caricatured that we have no choice but to reject them, and we certainly cannot identify
34
with them. More recently, The Kingdom (2007) tackled the ideological complexity of the
twenty-first century “war on terror” and turned it into what critic A.O. Scott dubs a “whodunit/
blow-’em-up.” In Scott’s view, “The result is a slick, brutishly effective genre movie: ‘Syriana’
for dummies. Which is not entirely a put-down. Intricate, earnest puzzles have their place in
the movie cosmos, but so do lean, linear stories with clearly defined villains and heroes and lots
of explosions.”20 In other words, no topic is so sacred or multifaceted that Hollywood cannot
make it entertaining—usually in ways we have come both to expect and reward.
Direction
A movie’s director is generally considered the single most important contributor to a movie’s
final artistic impact and the one with the most control over the final product. The actual
duties of the director vary from film to film (and perhaps overlap with those of the pro-
ducer, as discussed earlier). Film directors are usually responsible for not only “directing”
the actors (à la a stage director) but also determining the many visual and aural aspects of a
movie, including the choice of shots, camera angles, lighting, light filters, composition, and
editing. Directors also usually make major costume and set-design decisions.21
In Hollywood’s classic era, moviemaking was purportedly a group or studio endeavor
with each piece of the machinery—screenwriter, producer, director, contracted stars—
clicking into place to create the product. Since the breakup of the studio system, film has
increasingly become the artistic province of the director. This is especially true of indepen-
dently produced films like those directed by Woody Allen or Spike Lee. One reason for this
evolving view of the director as playing a commanding role was the influence of French film
theorists of the 1950s, whose “auteur” theory prescribed the director as the true “author” of
a film. The French theorists proposed that
the greatest movies are dominated by the personal vision of the director. A filmmaker’s
signature can be perceived through an examination of his or her total output, which is char-
acterized by a unity of theme and style. The [screen] writer’s contribution is less important
than the director’s, because subject matter is artistically neutral. The director dominates the
treatment, provided he or she is a strong director or auteur.22
Certainly the best-known explicitly political American films are almost always the handi-
work of a specific director. Directors such as John Sayles, Oliver Stone, Spike Lee, and
Robert Redford espouse a well-known political agenda that is frequently evident in their
films. While less prolific at this point, the growing bodies of work by the Hughes Brothers
(Allen and Albert), Ben Affleck, Lee Daniels, Kathryn Bigelow, and George Clooney sug-
gest they may belong in the coterie of political directors as well. Even directors with a less
obvious interest in political themes, such as Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, have
created films with interesting political implications. Critics of auteur theory point out that
moviemaking is undoubtedly a group effort no matter how great the clout of the director
and that at the same time many movies with “no-name” directors are nevertheless excellent
films. Michael Curtiz, who directed the World War II classic Casablanca (1942), had no
distinctive style or personal vision, yet he created many excellent movies.23 However, aver-
age big-studio directors, even though they may create films with a distinctive style, seem
more likely to reflect political reality than to comment on it intentionally. This adherence
35
to a legible yet broadly palatable or even innocuous politics is no less true for the current
era of deep political cynicism than for the relatively more optimistic era of Frank Capra or
John Ford. For example, The Campaign (2012), a mostly silly satire released in the midst of
the 2012 presidential campaign, paints both candidates as avaricious, their greed for power
evenly matched. The satire’s real aim is the seemingly limitless amount of anonymous
money allowed, even invited, by campaign finance laws.
Peter Biskind notes that the same director can send different kinds of messages over the
course of a career, and liberal directors can work with conservative writers and producers,
and vice versa: “Particular directors are often able to put their stamp on their work, intention-
ally insert messages into their movies. But these are exceptions, and it often happens that
the films of an individual director, even one with a strong directorial personality, convey
different ideologies.”24
Regardless of political messages, films tend to fall between the extremes represented by
two major approaches to direction: realism and formalism. Realism is a filmmaking style
that seeks to imitate or duplicate reality. This is typically achieved by means of an empha-
sis on authentic locations and a minimal amount of film editing. Formalism, by contrast,
emphasizes aesthetic forms and symbols rather than objective reality. Formalist films tend
to distort their representation of reality in a variety of ways—often by means of unusual set
designs, lighting techniques, and aggressive film editing. It is important to emphasize that
realism, like formalism, is still just a style, an effect of formal filmmaking decisions. Another
way to put it is that realism and formalism exist on the same spectrum of filmmaking design.
Despite how inclined audiences may be to praise a film for seeming so “real,” realism, too,
constitutes an aesthetic vision rather than an absolute value or “the truth.”
Neither realism nor formalism necessarily connotes a political emphasis in filmmaking, and
either approach could conceivably be used to create a film with a particular sort of political
message. Moreover, many Hollywood films combine the two approaches to create a smooth,
almost transparent style of direction that may be difficult to discern at all. But when directors
emphasize a realistic or formalistic approach or technique, it provides viewers with clues as to
the kind of political message, if any, that the film seeks to convey. For example, in Apocalypse
Now (1979), director Francis Ford Coppola used a variety of formalistic techniques, includ-
ing light filters and music, to dramatize the horror of war in Vietnam. Other directors, such as
Oliver Stone in Platoon (1986), Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Kathryn
Bigelow in The Hurt Locker used realistic techniques to achieve a similar message.
The nature of movies as an art form also may moderate their politics as much as the
directors. Writers and other collaborators in filmmaking vigorously dispute the auteur notion
of the all-powerful director. “It sure as shit isn’t true in Hollywood,” declares screenwriter
William Goldman. “Movies,” he insists, “are a group endeavor.”25 More recently, in a New
York Times article titled “Now Playing: Auteur vs. Auteur,” novelist-screenwriter Guillermo
Arriaga says, “When they say it’s an auteur film, I say auteurs film. I have always been
against the ‘film by’ credit on a movie. It’s a collaborative process and it deserves several
authors.”26 Directors may be central figures and the notion of their role as a film’s author may
help to brand a film to sell more tickets, but many creative people, including writers, produc-
ers, cinematographers, editors, designers, and actors, contribute to the final shape of a film.
The politics of these individuals may differ, and their perceptions of what audiences want to
see, need to be told, or will accept also may vary. Out of the conflict of these differing biases
and perceptions comes the movie.
36
The following elements and sub-elements of film direction also play a role in sending
political messages; each also may be used in a way that is realistic or formalistic.
Titles
Movie titles can be used to prepare the audience for a political message. A frequent device
is the use of “typewriter” fonts that suggest a newspaper exposé of a given topic, such as
those used in All the President’s Men (1976) to highlight the role of journalists in bringing
the Watergate scandal to light or in Missing (1982), an exposé of CIA involvement in foreign
affairs. More fanciful titles may cue the audience to suspend any political critique of the
proceedings, although some directors choose credits that provide an ironic contrast to the
serious political nature of their film. Far From Heaven (2002) is about racism and homo-
phobia in 1950s Connecticut, but opens with a drifting title sequence suggesting a standard
melodrama about lost romance.
Sound and Dialogue
Like direction generally, sound in films can emphasize a realistic or formalistic approach,
or both. In the opening title sequence to All the President’s Men, the stark sound of the
typewriter keys slamming into the white page ring out like gunshots. In isolation from any
other sound and amplified, the realistic sound of a typewriter takes on a formalist quality.
Not only is the pen mightier than the sword in politics, the sequence says, but the journalist’s
typewriter is the political equivalent of a gangster’s gun. Several directors have emphasized
realistic sound to help define their filmmaking style and political emphases. Robert Altman,
known for films such as Nashville (1975) and a dark satire about Hollywood called The
Player (1992), is also known for a signature sound design with characters speaking in over-
lapping dialogue. In Nashville the clutter of voices is used to express the political anarchy
that the film dramatizes, while in The Player competing voices represent a cynical industry
where no one really listens to anyone but himself. In Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversa-
tion (1974), a multilayered soundtrack of voices helps convey an atmosphere of paranoia
and suspicion in the work of an eavesdropping spy. (The bugging and tape recording eerily
anticipated the Watergate scandal that exploded soon after the film’s release.)
Spike Lee’s overlooked but provocative take on identity politics and black fatherhood,
She Hate Me (2004), uses a lack of sound, including dialogue, to mark key moments when
a lesser filmmaker would have forced lines or used music to cue laughter. Instead, silence
and a missing musical score underline the atypical and inventive directional cues that
characterize much of this film about a whistleblower on corporate malfeasance who gets
fired and turns to impregnating lesbians for profit. Preposterous on the face of it, She Hate
Me is a mash-up of clichéd characters in melodramatic situations tipping toward absurdity,
a romantic comedy that is mostly neither. As Roger Ebert puts it, Lee’s film defies “pious
liberal horror about such concepts as the inexhaustible black stud, and lesbians who respond
on cue to sex with a man—and instead of skewering them, which would be the easy thing
to do, flaunts them.” Lee’s strategic deployment of silence and ambient (i.e., natural) sound
complements what Ebert finds “audacious and recklessly risky” about this unusual film.27
Kathryn Bigelow’s thriller Blue Steel (1989) is about a female rookie cop pursued roman-
tically by an obsessed killer. The sound design layers droning, synthesized music with
37
alternately emphasized and downplayed ambient sounds—bullets loaded into a gun’s cham-
ber, traffic whizzing by, the din of a restaurant. The formal effect creates tension, yet also
adds a mythic element to the film’s consuming gender politics. A fairy-tale quality emerges
amid the gruesome violence that the film says is the result of a woman in uniform carrying a
gun strapped to her body, both symbolizing and enforcing the law.28 Bigelow’s politically
controversial Zero Dark Thirty (2012) opens from an obscured point of audition—the audi-
tory corollary to point-of-view camerawork. While Blue Steel opens from an obscured point
of view—we know we are in someone’s shoes as we follow screams down a darkly lit
hallway, we just do not know whose—Zero Dark Thirty opens on a black screen and the
sound of overlapping voices. Only gradually do we decipher that we are hearing the fright-
ened calls for help from people trapped inside the targets of attack on 9/11. The tangle of
voices falls away, leaving only a desperate conversation between a woman inside a doomed
tower and an emergency dispatcher, helpless to reassure her. Separating out sound from the
familiar images of the attack makes the terror of that decade-old day fresh and terrifying
all over again. That unsettling effect of sound newly anguishes viewers and prepares them
for the relentless search for Osama bin Laden to follow. Critics charged it also appeared to
justify using torture to find him. Wrote Naomi Wolf, “Zero Dark Thirty is a gorgeously shot,
two-hour ad for keeping intelligence agents who committed crimes against Guantánamo
prisoners out of jail.”29
Music
Two kinds of music are usually used in movies: original music scored and played expressly
for a particular film, and soundtrack music, which is drawn from existing music. Either form
of music can be played in the foreground or the background of a particular scene, and either
can transmit political messages. Beginning with the opening credits, serious (frequently
classical) music can cue the audience to prepare for a serious political message, whereas
breezy or jazzy music connotes lighter fare.
The soundtrack tells us who the good guys and bad guys are. Patriotic tunes arouse our
emotions, and martial music sets the adrenaline flowing, building excitement. When the
campaign catches on in The Candidate (1972), so does the music. We know something is
happening and we are caught up in it. Music can communicate dread, too. Along with light-
ing effects, camera angles, and editing, chilling, strategically timed minimalistic music gives
thriller qualities to All the President’s Men (1976) and to a film that in many ways stands as
homage to it, State of Play (2009).
Often directors of popular movies use soundtracks composed of popular music to enhance
the mood they seek to create in a particular scene. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979)
brilliantly juxtaposes a scene of American soldiers waterskiing with the Rolling Stones’
“(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” to dramatize the decadence and pointlessness of the Vietnam
War. Altman’s Nashville, which climaxes with a political assassination, ends with a crowd
singing along to “It Don’t Worry Me,” a hymn to apathy and alienation that reinforces the
film’s theme.30 Quentin Tarantino designs his soundtracks with a meticulousness that reflects
his status as an unparalleled connoisseur of popular culture. By turns comic and moving,
Tarantino’s use of the sentimental 1970s song “I’ve Got a Name” to accompany the triumph
of the slave Django’s transformation from property to a self-determined, freed man elicits
both knowing laughter and reconsidered appreciation. As Rolling Stone comments, “It’s a
38
signature Tarantino trick: He excavates a pop artifact widely maligned as trash, champions
its coolness and reveals its beauty.”31 Tarantino’s films point to the crucial relationship music
bears to film. The filmmaker himself describes the importance of the original Django (1966)
title track to his artistic intentions: “I knew it was imperative that I open it with this song as a
big opening credit sequence . . . because any spaghetti western worth its salt has a big open-
ing credit sequence. In fact, if it doesn’t, I don’t really want to see it.”32 Opening his slave-era
film in the musical manner of a spaghetti western signals the film’s historical revisionism.
Editing/Montage
Editing (also known as “montage”) is the joining of one uninterrupted sequence of film (or
“shot”) to another. For many film theorists, editing is the foundation of film art. Conven-
tional film style relies on a method that filmmakers call “continuity editing,” which ensures
that viewers can follow one shot to the next without losing track of time and place. The scene
“continues” through various visual changes, including shot types or the implied proximity
of the camera to the subject being filmed. David Bordwell describes continuity editing as
“the practice of breaking a scene into matched shots in order to highlight character action
and reaction” and claims that by 1920, “this editing strategy became the dominant approach
to mass-market filmmaking across the world . . . the essence of cinema itself.”33 Using mul-
tiple cameras to film the same event allows the edited version to unfold for the viewer from
different perspectives and provides for changes in emphasis through, for example, cuts to
close-ups or to a view associated with a different character and then back to a longer, more
omniscient or neutral point of view.
As mentioned in the earlier discussion of approaches to directing, extensive use of
editing is usually associated with formalism. That is because editing is a means of manip-
ulating time and space in a movie that, although inherently unrealistic, can effectively
convey complicated narratives—as well as political messages. Editing can be relatively
simple and seamless, such as cutting from a distant perspective (or long shot) on the exte-
rior of a location like a house—known as an establishing shot because it establishes where
and when the scene to follow will take place—to a shot from inside the house focused on
two characters seen in conversation either in full shot, including all of the actors’ bod-
ies, or from the knees up—known as an “American shot” (or medium-long shot).34 Such
an editing pattern is so common the typical viewer may not even notice the transition.
Continuity editing conventions mask the process and effect of editing. On the other hand,
editing may also involve an extremely complicated series of rapid shots strung together
(jump cutting) or any mixture of shots of varying lengths and takes (i.e., the time elapsing
from one cut to the next), depicting locations and events not necessarily closely related to
each other or the primary story being told. In these cases, montage editing draws attention
to its effects, intentionally working against the perception of effortless continuity. Film
pioneer and Russian Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein championed montage precisely
for its power to jolt audiences from the ideological passivity and political complacency
that smoothly joined images and Hollywood technique encouraged. To him, editing style
alone presented a political choice.
Editing techniques can be used to transmit political messages in any number of ways. A
famous sequence at the end of The Godfather (1972) splices scenes from a Catholic wed-
ding with a series of vicious mob hits, suggesting the new godfather’s corruption of even the
39
church as he consolidates his power in the world of organized crime. Generally speaking,
extensive use of film editing tends to draw attention to the director and, presumably, to the
film’s message. Longer-lasting, unedited takes tend to focus greater attention on the subject
matter. Despite the fact that the average take (also referred to as “average shot length”) in
most films has shortened noticeably over time and sequences of varying takes have been
shown to hold viewers’ attention most effectively, either editing technique can enhance the
transmission of a particular message.35
Composition/Mise-en-scène
Composition (also known as mise-en-scène, a term derived from the French meaning to “put
on stage”) is the construction of movie scenes—the placement of people and objects in the
frame of the camera lens. Different kinds of composition help directors propel their narra-
tives and also transmit political messages. Among the elements of a typical composition in an
individual movie scene are (1) the dominant object or objects, (2) the camera angles, (3) the
apparent distance of the camera from the scene, or “proxemics,” (4) the colors and lighting,
(5) possible distortion by use of lenses, (6) the density or complexity of the image, (7) charac-
ter placement, and (8) the framing of the images.36 Manipulating these and other elements in
a given scene allows the director to say different things even before any action is filmed. As a
general principle, the larger an object appears in the frame, the more significance it carries as
a symbol or plot foreshadowing. A famous example of this rule can be found in Alfred Hitch-
cock’s postwar romantic thriller Notorious (1946). Ingrid Bergman plays Alicia, the daughter
of a German man convicted by the United States of treason. To prove her patriotism, she ingra-
tiates herself with a group of exiled Nazis in order to spy on them for the Americans, going
so far as to marry one. Unbeknownst to her, her husband figures out her secret and begins to
In Notorious (1946), a close-up on a specially made large teacup in the foreground draws unspoken
attention to its use in poisoning double agent Alicia, played by Ingrid Bergman, middle-ground left.
40
poison her. To imply the presence of poison in her tea, Hitchcock ordered an extra-large teacup
to be made and then placed it in the foreground of the frame as a woozy Alicia, seated directly
behind the cup, begins to feel faint. She does not know what is ailing her but we do, thanks
to the unmistakable plot message transmitted by Hitchcock’s close-up on a gigantic cup. In
Thelma and Louise (1991), disorganized housewife Thelma, preparing for a weekend away
from her overbearing husband, impulsively tosses a gun into her suitcase, holding it by her
fingertips as if afraid to touch it. A close-up on its glinting barrel amid the muddle of clothes,
curlers, and makeup tells us that, despite its incongruence with the rest of the mise-en-scène,
sooner or later that gun will be fired. Metaphorically, the unexpected appearance of the gun
in close-up hints that the fraught emotional issues smoldering beneath the messy surface of
Thelma’s careless housekeeping will eventually blow up in her face.

Normally, audiences do not consciously think about composition, but as these examples
prove, its use is a powerful tool for manipulating audience reaction to characters and events
within a film. Shots at the end of Bulworth (1998) show a splayed Bulworth (Warren Beatty)
on the pavement after the gunman hits his mark; they remind viewers of famous images of
Robert Kennedy’s assassination at the Embassy Hotel in Los Angeles and, more indirectly,
of his brother President John Kennedy’s murder by a remote gunman. The composition also
features witnesses pointing in the direction of the shots fired, directly imitative of photo-
graphs from the immediate aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination.
The last medium-close-up of Maya, the main character responsible for apprehending
Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty, features her alone in the vast hold of a military trans-
port plane, a red canvas cargo lattice standing out behind her as a kind of cage. That the bars
remain to her back, not strapped over her chest, suggests she is free, while at the same time
the color of the netting alludes to the American flag prominently featured in proximity to her
CIA operative Maya (Jessica Chastain) sheds a tear after Navy SEALs kill Osama bin Laden in Zero
Dark Thirty (2012).
41
throughout the film, with red historically symbolizing bloodshed in the name of freedom.
This final frame suggests that Maya, better than most, knows the price of American freedom
or, given the ambiguous lighting of her face, the cost of vengeance. Whatever its precise
contours, the knowledge Maya has gained by the film’s conclusion, no less traumatic for
being clear from the beginning, will haunt her for a long time to come, threatening as it does
visually to ensnare her in its complicated web.
Photography/Cinematography
Photography in movies (frequently referred to as cinematography) entails a number of

techniques, including the use of lighting and color, camera angles and placement, and the
selection and/or creation of movie sets, props, and special effects. A brief discussion of each
aspect of photography follows.
Lighting and Color
Directors and their cinematographers use a variety of devices that affect the lighting and per-
ception of color in a film. They may choose to rely on natural lighting and use lamps to create
additional light or shadows. Filters may be used in conjunction with various sorts of lenses
that distort the natural colors in a scene. All these effects can enhance the potential political
impact of a scene. In All the President’s Men (1976), for example, the lighting juxtaposes the
well-lit pressroom of the Washington Post with a dark, seedy parking garage where the truth
is divulged by a secret source nicknamed Deep Throat. The contrast highlights the journalis-
tic truth (and pure motives of the journalists) compared to the dirty political reality. 37 Traffic
(2000) contrasts different settings through dominant color tones. The scenes in Mexico are
saturated with a yellow ochre color, whereas the U.S. scenes involving Michael Douglas as
a judge who discovers that his own daughter is a junkie are filmed in a dominant blue tone.
The deep coloring of both worlds suggests a parallel between them: the open corruption of
the Mexican police is not so far removed from the politicization of the antidrug movement
in the United States. Traffic’s director, Steven Soderbergh, takes a similar approach in his
science fiction thriller, Contagion (2011). When a contagious pandemic breaks out, health
officials race against time for a cure before global social order breaks down. Once the dis-
ease has spread and martial law is declared, the film’s mise-en-scène looks washed out and
antiseptic as one touch from another person may mean death. This effect is underscored by
flashbacks to the deeply saturated colors of the scenes before the outbreak when life still had
its pleasures, like gambling and drinking in foreign casinos, and when illicit physical contact
was the old-fashioned, adulterous kind.
Camera Angles and Placement
The position of the camera and the angle of the scene being photographed are tools that
directors can use to insert messages about the subject matter of their films. Here, too, film-
makers make crucial choices. Generally speaking, extreme camera angles emphasize the
meaning of the projected image. A high-angled shot suggests a different interpretation from
that of a low-angled shot. Much of Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941) is shot
from a low angle, giving the characters a larger-than-life quality and thus emphasizing the
42
politician Kane’s mythical quality and towering personality as he looms over the camera.38 In
All the President’s Men, high-angle shots and bird’s-eye views suggest that the corruption the
journalists investigate is more widely spread than they imagine. A close-up of Jane Fonda’s
face in The China Syndrome (1979) instead of a long shot of the nuclear reactor room subtly
influences the moviegoer’s perception of the situation. Some actors’ faces accrue mean-
ing from appearing in thematically linked films over time so that their very appearance in
a close-up suggests not only the importance of a discrete expression, but a collection of
meanings layered into the very folds of their skin. By virtue of his many appearances in
and direction of overtly and subtly political films alike, Robert Redford’s craggy face reg-
isters the chisel-jawed handsomeness of his movie heartthrob past, but, more pertinently,
his cerulean eyes and lined skin have attained symbolic value, suggesting intelligence and
political skepticism as well as a liberal activist’s concern for the environment. His close-up
toward the beginning of the conspiracy thriller The Company You Keep (2012) guarantees
his involvement with the 1960s underground protest movement in question, but also assures
us that he will not be guilty of the worst crimes of his compatriots.
The use of close-ups serves a number of purposes, political and otherwise, in a film.
Among them is the crucial function of drawing the audience deeply into the action. “We
are held to films by the human face,” Leo Braudy writes. “Faces hold us more than plot,
direction, photography.”39 Close-ups are artistically and emotionally satisfying, but by
focusing our attention on one person at a time, they may cause us to lose sight of the
shared experiences of the characters or the historical and political context of events. All
is reduced to the one person we see; everything is individualized. Movies do not have to
do this, however, and directors from Griffith to Frank Capra, Robert Altman, Martin Ritt,
Sidney Lumet, and Alan Pakula have found ways to let us see their central characters in
larger contexts. For example, Frank Capra’s films often highlight the wisdom and shared
humanity of the public, pitting populist values against the corruption of high-powered
bosses or self-serving politicians—unless the politician comes from the humble ranks of
an everyday Joe, like Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) or Longfel-
low Deeds in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974)
frequently features crowd shots at public events and frames them in relation to Warren
Beatty’s crusading journalist Joe Frady to suggest the presence of assassination conspira-
tors nowhere and everywhere at once.
Sets, Props, and Special Effects
In many movies, settings are an important contributor to the theme and storytelling. Unlike
stage sets, which are limited to a small physical area, movie sets can evoke anything from
a small room to the vastness of outer space, thanks to the ever-evolving artistry of spe-
cial effects. “In the best movies . . . settings are not merely backdrops for the action, but
symbolic extensions of the theme,” observes Giannetti.40 The approaches of realism and
formalism suggest greater use of location and studio sets, respectively, but realism can be
forged on a Hollywood set as readily as formalism can be expressed using location shoot-
ing. Oliver Stone uses both approaches in his extremely formalistic Natural Born Killers
(1994). This frenetic film moves from cartoonlike set action to gritty outdoor scenes, allow-
ing Stone to achieve a “combination of technical virtuosity and dark commentary on the
modern American landscape.”41
43
All the filmmaking techniques discussed earlier can help shape the audience’s perceptions
of a film’s setting. Consider, for example, the variety of messages extended by scenes osten-
sibly shot in the White House in movies ranging from romantic comedies (The American
President, 1995), political thrillers (Absolute Power, 1997), comedies (Dick, 1999), politi-
cal action dramas (Air Force One, 1997; Olympus Has Fallen, 2013), and action comedies
(Mars Attacks!, 1995), to powerful historical-political biographies (Nixon, 1995; J. Edgar,
2011; Lincoln, 2012; The Butler, 2013). The same basic location can be manipulated to
inform an endless variety of moods and messages.
Product Placement
A controversial aspect of film sets is the increasing intentional use of recognizable brand
names in movies. Such placements are increasingly the results of negotiated contracts
between product sponsors and film producers to offset what we have seen are the formi-
dable costs to produce a movie. In addition to the commercial information they extend to
audiences, product placements tend to reinforce corporatism in American political culture.
In E.T. (1982), a blockbuster directed by Steven Spielberg, an endearing alien is enticed to
come out of hiding with Reese’s Pieces candy. In the wake of the movie, sales of Reese’s
Pieces soared, and the result was the birth of modern product placement, a trend solidified
when a year later Tom Cruise famously donned Ray-Ban sunglasses to similar effect in his
breakout hit, Risky Business (1983).
Some directors, however, use products as an additional nod toward realism and do not
by law have to negotiate with companies to include brand labels in their work. In The Last
Detail (1973), for example, stars Jack Nicholson, Otis Young, and Randy Quaid down end-
less cans of Schlitz beer in a variety of seedy bars and flophouses. In this case, the product’s
lowly status seems to reinforce the film’s message of working-class antiauthoritarianism.
Mark Miller, noting that many famous American auteurs, including Robert Altman, Martin
Scorsese, and Ang Lee, have directed commercials, argues that movies and commercials
are becoming increasingly similar in both form and content.42 Additionally, digital video
recorder (DVR) technology gives home viewers the chance to skip television commercials
and thus increases the need for eye-catching, fast-forward-stopping commercials on par with
the production values of the best television and movies. The facts that the most important
advertising outlet for movies is television and that today’s actors enjoy careers in both mov-
ies and television (e.g., Jason Segel of television’s How I Met Your Mother, 2005–2014, and
movies I Love You Man, 2009, and The Muppets, 2011; or Tina Fey of television’s 30 Rock,
2006–2013, and movies, Baby Mama, 2008; Date Night, 2010; Admission, 2013; and The
Muppets . . . Again, 2014) show how entwined the two industries are.
While television has historically relied more heavily on product advertising for financing
than Hollywood, both participate in product placement. The political implications of prod-
uct placement, however, remain unclear. Extensive use of placements at a minimum tells
audiences that corporate America generally has the endorsement of the actors, the director,
and the filmmaking industry. In fact, given how important brand names are to corporate
marketing and how influential films can be in regard to consumer behavior, it is likelier that
product placement will meet greater opposition from the corporate side than from the film-
maker side. For example, despite the critical and popular success of Flight (2012), the story
of a pilot, played by Denzel Washington, battling alcoholism, Anheuser-Busch InBev asked
44
Paramount to remove its labels from the film. In its debut on movie screens, Washington was
seen knocking back Budweisers while in his car and then showing up in the cockpit impaired
by this alcohol consumption. If InBev gets its way, its logo will be removed or disguised in
digital copies and other forms of future distribution.
The trouble is that under the laws of “fair use,” artistic license extends to filmmakers
using trademark products on set. Says one legal expert, trademark laws “don’t exist to give
companies the right to control and censor movies . . . that might happen to include real-
world items.”43 But while Budweiser’s owners do not want the movie audience to associate
their product with irresponsible drinking and dangerous behavior, it was widely reported
that Heineken paid $45 million to have its beer replace the famous “shaken, not stirred”
vodka martini as James Bond’s drink of choice in Skyfall (2012), a movie franchise well
known for product placements (e.g., BMW, Omega, Coke). So while some companies pay
big money for implicit product endorsement by a figure with the cultural capital James Bond
enjoys, others want to protect their brand image from association with unsavory characters
or controversial plots that might put off consumers or damage the brand’s value as a cultural
symbol. In this way, artistic motivation can be difficult to distinguish from financial incen-
tive to showcase brand-name products. The political message may simply be a reminder that
moviemaking remains at its core a capitalist venture.
Actors and Acting
Casting
The decision of which actors and actresses to cast in a movie can create and send political
messages. Looking at the history of film, James Monaco argues that the fact that movie celeb-
rities even exist is “evidence that film has radically altered traditional values”: “Previously,
heroic models for society were either purely fictional creations or real people of accomplish-
ment (whom we knew at only one remove). Film fused the two types: real people became
fictional characters. The concept of the ‘star’ developed—and stars are quite different from
‘actors.’”44 According to Monaco, early film producers—apparently wary of the potential
phenomenon of movie stardom and demands for higher salaries—insisted that actors work
anonymously. However, fan magazines soon appeared that identified stars such as Mary
Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, and these early stars were soon vying for the first million-
dollar movie contracts.45
More specifically, Florence Lawrence was the first actor publicly identified by name—in
a publicity stunt, no less—and is considered the first movie star. Known to fans only as “the
Biograph Girl,” Lawrence was working with director D.W. Griffith at his Biograph film
company when Carl Laemmle of the Independent Motion Picture company lured her to
become the “IMP Girl” instead. To drum up interest in her, Laemmle planted a story with
the press that she had been killed in a streetcar accident, only to turn around and famously
announce in Moving Picture World magazine, “We nail a lie!” accusing IMP’s “enemies”
of lying about the good health of his new leading lady. To prove she was indeed alive and
well, he promised she would appear at the premier of her latest film. The stunt worked: fans
mobbed her at the theater and thus the star system was born. A different instance of early
stardom also highlights the planned manufacturing of stars suggested by Laemmle’s street-
car stunt. Theda Bara was born a middle-class Jewish girl named Theodosia Goodman, but
45
was transformed into an on-screen vamp in movies like A Fool There Was (1915). She car-
ried the act into an off-screen persona as well, claiming she was born under the Sphinx in
Egypt and that her name was an anagram for Arab Death. She wore furs to publicity events
in the heat of the Los Angeles sun to keep up her Egyptian mystique and posed with skel-
etons and kohl-lined eyes to further her man-killer image.
Movie stars soon, if not immediately, begin to project messages based on the images their
films created for them and accompanied by all the publicity that defines the industry. “Stars
[are] the creation of the public: political and psychological models who demonstrate some
quality that we admire.”46 Thus, the casting of an actor known for patriotic roles—Harrison
Ford or Tom Hanks, for example—reassures an audience that the movie they are seeing
supports national (American) values. Tom Hanks has been cast in the glow of an eternal
American hero thanks to his association with NASA in Apollo 13 (1995) and the miniseries
he produced, From the Earth to the Moon (1998); his role in the World War II movie Sav-
ing Private Ryan and his narration of the television documentary Killing Lincoln (2013); the
television miniseries he produced, Band of Brothers (2001); and even his role as the voice of
the beloved, timeworn toy cowboy, Woody, in the animated franchise Toy Story (1995, 1999,
2010). Hanks is in many ways a modern-day Jimmy Stewart, a star whose presence in a film
almost always signified the goodness of America. John Wayne, of course, was the ultimate
cinematic symbol of American political (and military) will. As Hollywood films increasingly
address the international market and rely on computer-generated imagery and comic book
heroes, the less likely a star will emerge to embody the American heroism of a Wayne or Ford.
The images that stars build can resonate in any number of political ways, including racial
and sexual stereotypes. Denzel Washington won a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of
a corrupt, drug-dealing cop in Training Day (2001), an African-American stereotype that
his previous film roles had eschewed but that Hollywood audiences themselves were quick
to recognize. Washington reprised the type by playing a heroin kingpin in the title role of
American Gangster (2007). Those stereotypical facets of his star image are complicated and
arguably outweighed, however, by his roles in the political biographies Cry Freedom (1987),
in which he played the martyred South African activist Stephen Biko, and his title role
in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992). Heroic roles as crusading lawyer (Philadelphia, 1993;
The Pelican Brief, 1993), bold soldier (Glory, 1990, for which he won the Best Supporting
Actor Oscar as a black volunteer Union soldier in the Civil War; Crimson Tide, 1995; Cour-
age Under Fire, 1996), officer of the law (The Siege, 1998; Fallen, 1998; Bone Collector,
1999; Inside Man, 2006), and inspirational sports figure (The Hurricane, 1999; Remem-
ber the Titans, 2000) also counter his affiliation with stereotype. Despite or as a result of
his Oscar-honored appearances, which tend to validate American notions about acceptable,
popular representations of African-Americans, Washington’s enduring persona approaches
Tom Hanks territory. This is true despite the fact that Glory unfolds from the perspective
not of Washington but of his white commanding officer, and Training Day transforms him
from influential cop to urban drug-lord bullying his naive white recruit. Flipping stereotypes
further, in the film The Equalizer (2014) Washington takes over the vigilante role originally
reserved for an Anglo avenger during the Reagan-era television series (1985–1989) and
played by British actor Edward Woodward. Due to American attitudes on race, Washington,
more so than Hanks, is an American hero with layers.47
Sometimes decisions are made to cast actors “against type,” meaning in a role or situation
that notably contrasts with their normal character type. This may be done in an attempt to
46
highlight a particular message, as audiences will usually sense the contrast between a star’s
image and a particular role that diverges from it. When Hanks played a hit man in Road to
Perdition (2002), it cut against the grain of his good-guy status. The film invited potential
viewers to ask, “What could have caused Tom Hanks to take the road to damnation?”—a
question answered only by going to the movie. If an actor’s image is too densely meshed with
a particular type, however, audiences may reject any deviation from that profile. For example,
when Adam Sandler plays anything other than a man-child in a goofy comedy—a Peter Pan
syndrome suggested by the titles of his films alone: The Waterboy (1998); Big Daddy (1999);
That’s My Boy (2012); Grown Ups (2010); Grown Ups 2 (2013)—his audience deserts him
(e.g., Punch Drunk Love, 2002; Funny People, 2009). One of Julia Roberts’s few box office
flops was the horror-thriller Mary Reilly (1996), in which she played against her spirited,
thousand-watt-smile type as an unadorned, quietly dreary chambermaid in love with John
Malkovich’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Sometimes movies build their entire premise around
casting against type, a tack followed by two films playing off Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
image as an action star with a muscular body. Kindergarten Cop (1990) puts him in the role
of kindergarten teacher, children crawling over him like a jungle gym. Junior (1994) takes
his iconic identification with stereotypical masculinity and body-builder-level intelligence
and goes for laughs by casting him as a male scientist who agrees to carry a pregnancy in
his own body. Schwarzenegger as a highly intelligent scientist sporting a baby bump: what
could be funnier?
Giannetti explains that stars generally can be divided into two categories: personality
stars, who tend to play roles that “fit a preconceived public image,” and actor stars, “who
can play roles of greater range and variety.” According to Giannetti, the so-called star sys-
tem frequently cues the audience to the political values transmitted by a movie.48 In the
days of the studio system (1930s–1960s), when studio companies controlled in monopolistic
fashion the production, marketing, and distribution of movies, stars signed contracts that
determined their every role and included morality clauses dictating their behavior on and
off screen. Studios worked to generate positive or at least socially acceptable publicity and
to contain any contrasting or negative gossip associated with their financial investment, the
star. Thanks to the studio star system, Rock Hudson became known as a hunky, heterosexual
romantic lead in films like the genre-defining melodrama Magnificent Obsession (1954) and
the equally influential romantic comedy Pillow Talk (1959). At the will of the studios in the
1950s, he was also briefly married. Only when he came out as gay and dying of AIDS in the
1980s did the public come to know someone different from the star persona the system had
created.
Today’s star system is no longer the product of the studios, and most studios no longer
function as monopolies. Stars contract through agents to work from film to film and col-
laborate with a variety of directors and studios. Gossip about stars supports an entire cottage
industry of magazines, television shows, and websites. Nonetheless, it would be disingenu-
ous to suggest that the Svengali effect in Hollywood vanished with studio control. Morality
clauses have arguably been replaced by the constant surveillance of stars by paparazzi and
the celebrity industry that pays them. As important, audiences dictate a kind of morality
clause by accepting or rejecting at the box office certain actors in certain parts. The out Brit-
ish actor Rupert Everett advises gay actors to remain closeted for the sake of their careers:
“Straight men get every opportunity to play gay parts that they want and then win tons
of awards for doing so. But the other way doesn’t really work out. The mainstream actor
47
has had to become straighter and straighter and straighter.”49 The former child star Lindsay
Lohan watched her career falter as much for her off-screen troubles, including arrests and
rehab stints, as for her lackluster performances.
What the public “knows” about stars’ lives outside the parts they choose in films helps
to shape their acting persona. “Personality stars” such as Will Smith or Cameron Diaz pro-
ject a more or less predictable image in their film roles. On top of that, their acting persona
meshes well with the ideas generated about their “private” or off-screen lives through reports
on gossip websites like Perezhilton.com and television shows like the syndicated news and
entertainment show Inside Edition. Film scholars refer to this information as “extra-textual
discourse” and it, too, contributes to how the public interprets a star’s performance in a film.
The predictability of “personality stars” makes them more likely to convey ideological mes-
sages than “actor stars” such as Meryl Streep, Daniel Day Lewis, or Christian Bale who are
known for “disappearing” into a role.
The politics–film nexus is further manifested when politicians try (or at least seem to
try) to emulate movie-star icons. Ronald Reagan’s presidency was marked by frequent
invocations of the American western movie hero—an actual film role in Reagan’s past as
a movie actor. Images of his election campaigns and presidency frequently framed Reagan
in a cowboy hat on a horse or chopping wood on his ranch. In California, meanwhile, actor
Arnold Schwarzenegger used lines made famous by his own movies to promote his success-
ful campaign for the office of governor, leading to his nickname the “Governator,” a play
on his famous role in The Terminator franchise. (We will further explore this reversal of the
film–politics relationship in the next chapter.)
Characters
Certain types of characters—some frequently associated with certain film genres—tend

to transmit political messages. Gianos notes that characters representing political figures
frequently tend to be “male, white, at least middle-aged, overweight, self-important, not
terribly bright, not terribly well-informed, and with a cigar.”50 Such stereotyping reinforces
already negative views about politics and politicians that many filmgoers hold.
On the other hand, stereotypical underdog characters, frequently female or from minor-
ity groups, are often used to emphasize the struggle against “the system” or “the political
establishment.” Two successful films about political underdogs featured women: Sally Field
(Norma Rae, 1979) and Julia Roberts (Erin Brockovich, 2000). Both played feisty, attractive,
working-class women who prevail against the (predominantly male) establishment. The fact
that these protagonists were female may have made the movies seem less threatening than
similar films with male leads.
More generally, of course, stereotyped characters merely reflect dominant social conven-
tions, values, and attitudes. Prostitutes, for example, are frequently portrayed as “hookers
with hearts of gold,” reflecting the tolerance (or familiarity, at least) that most audiences
have for the commercialization of sex—as long as it conforms to heterosexual norms and ideas
about women as both sexually available and eager to be “good,” both forgiving and forgiv-
able. Belle Watling in Gone With the Wind (1939), Dallas in Stagecoach (1939), Bree Daniels
in Klute (1971), Lana in Risky Business (1983), and Shug in Hustle & Flow (2005) number
among the many examples of the type. While slowly changing, minority roles tend to be ste-
reotyped in the sense that unless a script specifically calls for, say, a black policeman, most
48
characters in a film are likely to be white. When a member of a racial or ethnic minority (par-
ticularly a non-star) appears in a film, audiences are cued to expect something that reinforces
stereotypes from that character. This often amounts to an early death or exit from the film.
With color-blind casting rare, films with predominantly white casts take race for granted as if
it were relevant only to other groups. This pattern makes all the more remarkable the surprise
success of the low-budget thriller No Good Deed (2014), starring black English actor Idris
Elba (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, 2013) and African-American actress Taraji Henson
(Think Like a Man, 2012; Think Like a Man Too, 2014). No Good Deed offers a familiar
seeming home invasion, woman-in-peril plot exceptional only for its two black stars. Yet
it almost doubled its production costs in its first weekend at the box office, showing that,
increasingly, black-cast films effectively marketed can succeed financially without invoking
stereotype.
Names
According to Gianos, even the names of movie characters are sometimes used to project
a political message. The practice of using names to signify political and other themes car-
ried over from literature into film. “Jefferson Smith” of the film classic Mr. Smith Goes
to Washington suggests both a common man and a representative of America’s patriotic
past.51 The title role of Bulworth suggests that a politician is worth (or full of) bull. Films
may also use nicknames to suggest a character’s multiple facets. At the start of Dirty
Harry (1971), the first in a series of three, a fellow cop calls Detective Harry Callahan
“Dirty Harry,” accusing him of “hating everybody,” and then proceeds to list every racial
epithet he can think of to show what an equal opportunity “hater” Harry really is. This
strategy allows the film to indulge in racist jokes without actually seeming to support the
“dirt” in Harry’s character. Later a new partner gets to know Harry and wonders aloud if
his nickname refers not to his racism or his willingness to play dirty to get the bad guy
but to his commitment to do the dirty jobs Harry’s captain assigns to him. This sentiment
earns Harry our begrudging sympathy despite his firm affinity with racial epithets, a char-
acteristic he shares with his nemesis, the psycho-killer Scorpio (a name that suggests the
real-life California “Zodiac” serial killer). Frequently the significance of character names
is lost on the audience and only noticed by film critics and fans in hindsight. Each letter of
the evil computer’s name “HAL” in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is one letter removed
from “IBM.”
Distribution and Promotion
As we noted in Chapter 1, a movie is unlikely to have great political impact if nobody sees it.
The extent to which a movie is distributed and promoted is critical. In the latest incarnation
of the film industry, a handful of conglomerate global media companies like Viacom, Sony,
and Disney dominate. Their business model relies on “tent-pole” productions meant to miti-
gate the risk of financial loss and guarantee domestic and international sales, with DVD sales
and international markets accounting for more and more of a film’s anticipated profit margin.
In industry-speak, “tent-pole” refers to big-budget movies expected to earn enough to carry
a studio’s inevitable flops as well as its smaller movie projects not designed or required
to earn a huge profit. Films like Iron Man (2008, 2010, 2013) and G.I. Joe (2009, 2013)
49
form the “poles” that prop up the entire “tent” of the studio. They entail saturation levels of
both distribution and promotion, which means release on more than 3,000 U.S. screens and
multiple venue promotions, including television commercials, tie-in products, press junkets
promoting the film, and the like. At the same time, the studio itself is a subsidiary of a larger
capital-intensive, global media conglomerate that typically also owns television, cable, and
online entertainment networks among other media ventures. The tent-pole model ideally
balances mass-marketed, big-budget films engineered to generate huge revenue on one side
and the endeavors their profitability makes possible on the other side—smaller, more per-
sonal, or ideologically challenging films often marketed to niche audiences. On that side of
the scale fall most overtly political films with promotion campaigns far more modest than
those tipping the other way.

Not everyone sees the balancing act working quite so neatly. No less a Hollywood fixture
than veteran actress and multiple Academy Award-winner Meryl Streep has linked the tent-
pole model to the continued lack of opportunity for women in Hollywood:
We are very familiar with the dreadful statistics that detail the shocking under-representation
of women in our business. Seven to ten percent of directors, producers, writers, and cin-
ematographers [are women] in any given year. This in spite of the fact that in the last five
years, five little movies aimed at women have earned over $1.6 billion: The Help, The Iron
Lady believe it or not, Bridesmaids, Mamma Mia! and The Devil Wears Prada. . . . They
cost a fraction of what the big tent pole failures cost. . . . Let’s talk about The Iron Lady. It
cost $14 million to make it and brought in $114 million. Pure profit! So why? Why? Don’t
they want the money?52
A political biopic about Margaret Thatcher, England’s prime minister in the 1980s,
The Iron Lady (2012) was not predicted—or designed—to make so much money and was
screened in only 1,200 theaters, compared to Pacific Rim’s total of over 3,000. Despite
Thatcher’s domineering role on the world stage, her politically polarizing tenure, and Streep
in the lead, the film was assumed by all concerned to have built-in limited appeal. Though
The Iron Lady surpassed financial expectations and 2012 was not only the year of the politi-
cal film but also one of Hollywood’s most prosperous, those facts are not likely to change the
erstwhile prognostication that says political films are not moneymakers.
Tent-pole movies are expected to recoup costs if not in the domestic market then through
foreign and DVD sales. They tend not to rely on dialogue or the intimate subtleties of act-
ing associated with a Meryl Streep or Forrest Whitaker performance and are less about the
messiness of being human than the spectacle of computer-generated images (CGI) fantasy-
scapes, massive explosions, car chases, and science fictive displays of military might. Such
films dominated the multiplexes in summer 2013: Pacific Rim, Elysium, After Earth, Man
of Steel, The Lone Ranger, White House Down, World War Z among them. As popular press
movie critic Manohla Dargis notes, it has been a very long time since “the major movie
companies were still in the business of American life rather than just international proper-
ties.”53 Movies that do not address the “business of American life” are even less likely to
express overtly political themes or dramatize matters of governance and the complexity of
how groups and individuals experience politics and exert political agency.
Diagnosing Hollywood in the 1990s, cultural critic Neal Gabler blamed the conglomerate
financing structure for enabling even terrible movies to make money and crowding out more
50
individualized efforts: “By combining movies, broadcast television, video, foreign video, for-
eign television, merchandizing, theme parks, soundtrack albums, books and heaven knows
what else, [Disney] has devised a new form of vertical integration that takes virtually all of the
risk out of movie software.”54 Other industry experts contribute recent developments in Holly-
wood patterns of marketing and distribution to the effects of globalization, digitization, and
media deregulation.55 Yet another factor contributing to the 2010-decade’s tent-pole output was
the steep decline in DVD sales beginning in 2008. Removing that profit cushion meant even
greater pressure on the contribution of international sales to achieve profitability.56
Yet the business model of tent-pole filmmaking favored by the conglomerates may be
collapsing under its own weight. Hardly Gabler’s risk-free hits, the blockbusters of 2013
included more than a few duds: Pacific Rim, R.I.P.D., After Earth, and Disney’s own lemon,
The Lone Ranger, all underperformed in the United States. In response, heavy hitters George
Lucas and Steven Spielberg lamented Hollywood’s artistic climate and business logic. Pre-
dicting an industry “implosion,” Spielberg said, “You’re at the point right now where a
studio would rather invest $250 million in one film for a real shot at the brass ring than make
a whole bunch of really interesting, deeply personal—and even maybe historical—projects
that may get lost in the shuffle.” Lucas foresaw the day when most idiosyncratic and crea-
tive filmmakers would move to television. He noted how the steep rise in marketing costs,
competition from new players like Netflix, Amazon, and Yahoo, and financial reliance on
the tent-pole model were squeezing out edgy and uniquely personal voices.57 The success of
House of Cards on Netflix and HBO’s Recount and Game Change hints that such changes
may have already come to political films.
The major studios do house smaller artistic or specialty divisions that produce mov-
ies with an “indie” feel, and these are likelier to be political films. There also exist what
the industry refers to as mini-major studios like Lionsgate that compete with the major,
conglomerate-owned studios like Warner Bros. and Columbia. Hundreds of cheaper, smaller,
truly independently produced films are distributed each year as well, but while produced by
a smaller company, they frequently look for (and get) distribution by mini-major or major
studios. (That matchmaking dance between independent filmmakers and studio distributors
can become frenzied at festivals like Sundance.) Yet truly independently made films are less
likely to be exhibited outside of art house theaters, film festivals, and large American cit-
ies or will merit larger distribution and exhibition only if they first break through at a smaller
level. Lacking the funding required for tent-pole-sized promotion, their success may depend
on word of mouth—ironically, the very “promotion” that can kill a tent pole’s prospects of
attaining the “brass ring.”
It can be an intense food chain of ownership and controlling interests among various
distribution companies and exhibitors, but most mainstream tributaries lead to the mighty
waters of corporate control, conglomerates run by a hierarchy of business people untrained
in the art of film and interested in studios primarily as financial assets capable of generating
multiple revenue streams. The interests of artists and commerce can clash. For example,
political film champion George Clooney feuded publicly with hedge funder-investor Daniel
Loeb over two of summer 2013’s tent-pole flops. Loeb, whose company owns a 7 percent
stake in Sony, announced the conglomerate should sell off its entertainment assets after the
back-to-back disappointments of After Earth and White House Down. Clooney’s production
company Smokehouse Pictures plants its flag with Sony, and Clooney did not mince words
in his cri-de-coeur answering Loeb’s threat:
51
A guy from a hedge fund entity is the single least qualified person to be making these kinds
of judgments, and he is dangerous to our industry . . . I would call him a carpetbagger, and
one who is trying to spread a climate of fear that pushes studios to want to make only tent
poles. Films like Michael Clayton, Out of Sight, Good Night, and Good Luck, The Descen-
dants and O, Brother Where Art Thou?—none of these are movies studios are inclined
to make. What he’s doing is scaring studios and pushing them to make decisions from a
place of fear. Why is he buying stock like crazy if he’s so down on things? He’s trying to
manipulate the market. I am no apologist for the studios, but these people know what they
are doing. If you look at the industry track record, this business has made a lot of money.
It creates a lot of jobs and is still one of the largest exporters in the world. To have this guy
portraying it that Sony management is the bad stepchild and doesn’t know what it is doing
and he’s going to fix it? That is like Walmart saying, let me fix your town, putting in their
store, strangling all the small shops and getting everyone who worked in them to work for
minimum wage with no health insurance.58
Douglas Gomery links the general centralization of the film industry to the political content
of movies: “To those who champion film as an art form, the coming of media conglomerates
has meant that corporate chieftains prefer safe, formulaic films to even the most elementary
experimentation. To those who look to film to help with ideological struggle, media conglom-
erates have effectively strangled the marketplace and kept alternative means of expression
marginalized.”59 If not from the big studios’ view, then from the perspective of those interested
in political films, the increased number of platforms available for exhibition has arguably not
only loosened the grip of corporate control but in some ways helped to counteract it. Youtube.
com, Netflix, cable television networks like IFC and Sundance, and premium cable networks
like Cinemax, Showtime, and HBO are all producing films for various types of distribution,
exhibition, and marketing. Never before has it been so inexpensive and so relatively simple to
make a film and, if nothing else, post it to the Internet for an audience potentially larger than
previous generations of independent filmmakers could have ever dreamed.
Viewing
The culmination of the filmmaking process is, of course, an audience watching a completed
film in the theater. To this point, we have explained how various aspects of the movie pro-
duction process can foster the transmission of political messages. This perspective, however,
assumes that audiences can receive messages and that the received messages are somehow
effective in altering the perceptions, attitudes, and ultimately the actions of movie audiences.
What is there about the moviegoing experience that might lead us to believe in the power of
movies as “independent variables” that may affect the minds and ultimately the behavior of
audiences?
In contrast to a vast literature that dissects the political meaning of hundreds of movies,
very little empirical research has been devoted to testing their actual impact on their audi-
ences. Few would debate that movies (and other vehicles of popular culture) have no impact,
but the extent to which films—individually and collectively—change political behavior is
largely unknown; however, using reason and observation (and based on studies cited in Chap-
ter 1), it is possible to buttress the case for the efficaciousness of films on American politics.
As Gianos notes, going to the movies is both a special and a social event. Compared
to, for example, watching television, going to a movie requires initiative on the part of the
52
audience. Although the audience usually consists of strangers, there is nevertheless a com-
munal aspect of experiencing a film. At a movie theater, the screen and sound command our
attention as television generally cannot, so we are perhaps more susceptible to, or at least
more accessible to, whatever messages a movie may transmit.60
A significant development in recent years has been the advent of home theater systems
that enable at least a portion of the moviegoing experience to be re-created in the homes of
many Americans. The DVD movie format enhances the at-home experience with higher
sound and picture quality and with greater accessibility afforded by mail-order services like
Netflix. Additionally, an increasing number of streaming sites are available on the Internet
(e.g., Hulu.com, Amazon.com, and also Netflix.com) and displayed on televisions or com-
puters using technology like gaming systems (e.g., Wii or PlayStation), Internet-equipped
DVD players, or streaming “boxes” specialized for such services as Roku or Vudu. Although
large high definition screens and acoustically sophisticated speakers cannot exactly match
the grandeur and sheer scale of a large movie theater, a home theater system’s impressive
visual and sound quality as well as the greater availability of a larger number of movies from
various access points does make it even more likely that more films will have the opportu-
nity to affect the minds of the American public.
Movies are always more than mere entertainment. They can illuminate our society and
political system. They can increase our understanding of government and politics. Some also
can shape the way we think and feel about politics and political participation. Some films try
very hard to persuade, advocating policy positions on current issues. A few political films,
such as The Birth of a Nation (1915), The China Syndrome (1979), and the documentaries
Gasland (2010) and The Invisible War (2012), appear to have had a direct impact on politics.
Did The Day After Tomorrow (2004) impact the debate over global warming, or did Million
Dollar Baby (2004) influence euthanasia laws? Did Contagion (2011) have an effect on the
Center for Disease Control protocols?
Every film that deals even peripherally with politics contributes to our political
socialization—that is, our familiarity with the political system and our understanding of the
part we play in it. Through this process, we are taught our society’s political ideas and values
as well as its accepted political behavior, such as voting and deference to elected officials.
The most important agents of political socialization are the family, peer groups, friends, and
schools, but in a mobile, atomized, fragmented society like the United States, where families
break down and friends and peer groups change, political scientists believe that the media
gain power as socializing agents.
All mass media contribute to this political socialization, but movies are the least studied,
except perhaps in terms of sexism and racism. The other political messages of films may
have received less attention because their impact is difficult to measure or because political
films are seldom blockbusters. But political socialization is a cumulative process, to which
many forces contribute, and movies are part of that process—teaching, reinforcing, and
sometimes even challenging. Film heroes and heroines become our role models. They teach
us that we cannot fight city hall—or that we can, and under what conditions.
Movies may be a particularly powerful medium of political socialization because of the
way we see them. We go voluntarily, often for social reasons, with a positive, receptive
attitude. We expect to be entertained, so our guard is down. We do not go to learn, yet any
teacher will tell you that the first problem in teaching is getting the student’s attention, and
that is what movies are designed to do. The social aspects of moviegoing also enhance their
53
influence. Most of us go to the movies with someone else, and afterward we talk about the
film. Perhaps this talk is mostly about acting and action, but sometimes we discuss content.
“Well, maybe nuclear power isn’t such a hot idea after all,” we say, or “I don’t think all
politicians are really that bad.” Any talk at all extends the socializing power of movies,
strengthening their message or hardening people’s rejection of it.
The communal nature of moviegoing also intensifies the experience. When a film holds
an audience in rapt attention, when they laugh or cry or boo or applaud, we know something
is happening, and the movie’s effect is more powerful. The process begins even before we
go to the movie because the larger audience helps us choose which film to see. Ads, critics,
conversations, friends, the particular people whose opinions about movies we respect—all
encourage us to see a film and alert us to its significance. Gandhi (1982), for example, was
an improbable success. Americans got the idea that this biography of a foreign pacifist was
a “significant” film, a must-see. And they did see it, often applauding at the end. Even the
densely historical, dialogue-heavy Lincoln (2012) succeeded in part by word of mouth that
said any thoughtful American had to see it.
Movies also are one of the few things to which we give our exclusive attention. We
attend with others but mostly ignore them the second the lights dim and the screen bright-
ens. Turn around and look at the rest of the audience sometime. They sit in the dark, eyes
riveted to the screen and totally attentive to the unfolding story, letting waves of sound and
image pour over them. To experience a movie is to enter almost a state of disembodiment,
so focused are we on the screen. Some theaters even eject talkative audience members.
The power of movies is further enhanced by their appeal to emotion rather than intellect
through nonverbal elements such as close-ups and music. This emotional manipulation
makes movies more effective socializers, giving them a power that seems to defy articu-
lation. More than half of today’s filmgoers are under age twenty-one, and the power of
movies may be even greater for them because they are probably more impressionable than
older filmgoers. That should make us at the least apprehensive about the crude political
messages of some popular films of the 1980s, like Red Dawn (1984, remade in 2012 with
the invading force switched from Soviets to North Koreans), Rambo (1985), and Invasion
U.S.A. (1985).
Other media, especially television, may be more pervasive—and invasive—but movies
are a formidable force for the gentle inculcation of ideas and for persuasion. They remain
the most talked about and most reviewed medium. Their power is even greater because we
regard them as mere entertainment and are sometimes unconscious of their influence on us.
Only when political films cross the line from entertainment into direct persuasion and propa-
ganda do we begin to resist, and even then we may be unconsciously influenced.
Political films also can help us understand the forces we fear, putting them in perspective
and thereby affecting how we cope with them. Movies that deal with war, corruption, racism,
assassination, or the danger of a nuclear accident provide catharsis, reassurance, or a more
complicated reaction, including acceptance of a recommended path of action to ameliorate
the situation or simply greater consideration of a particular issue. “Entertainment is not a
full-scale flight from our problems,” Michael Wood writes, “not a means of forgetting them,
but rather a rearrangement of our problems into shapes which tame them.”61 Movies also are
historical artifacts that help us understand the past and how people then thought about poli-
tics. And films may even give voice to a society’s subconscious fears and desires. German
film theorist Siegfried Kracauer asserts that “the films of a nation reflect its mentality in a
54
more direct way than other artistic media [because they] address themselves and appeal to
the anonymous multitude [and] satisfy . . . mass desires.”62
Some theorists, known as structuralists because they search for the underlying struc-
tures of societies in their myths and stories, see movies as our modern myths, symbolically
expressing our deep subconscious. Structuralists tend to focus on horror movies and the like,
but explicitly political films also express the wishes, needs, and fears of a nation, reflect-
ing the longing for a strong leader or concern about a war or a new group of immigrants.
In so doing, they may arouse us to action, stimulate our thinking, mollify us, and convince
us political action is useless or get us talking about the problem in an attempt to find new
solutions.
Movies influence our taste in fashions, hairstyles, music, dance, and cars. In 1932 Letty
Lynton featured Joan Crawford in a white, ruffled-shoulder organdy dress that ignited a
fashion craze, reportedly selling over 1 million copies. More than fifty years later, Jennifer
Beals in Flashdance (1983) wore off-the-shoulder sweatshirts that set a trend that neatly
dovetailed two years later with Madonna’s leather-and-lace look in Desperately Seeking
Susan (1985). The Gladiator (2000) popularized toga-like cocktail dresses and leather-laced
sandals, while hipster men imitated the wild-colored shirts and contrasting textured jacket
sported by Brad Pitt in the cult hit Fight Club (1999). Les Misérables (2012) found favor
with both genders in clothing, hairstyles, and jewelry. In the same way, political movies can
shape the way we think and talk about politics, helping to define, clarify, and entrench issues
or attitudes. A generation of moviegoers coming of age in the 1970s aspired to careers as cru-
sading journalists breaking the next big government scandal like Bernstein and Woodward
in All the President’s Men. President Reagan often relied on catchphrases from movies in
order to make his point. He quoted Knute Rockne (“Win one for the Gipper”), Dirty Harry
(“Go ahead—make my day”), Obe Wan Kanobe (“The force is with us”), and Rambo (“We
get to win this time”) along with other movie characters. Reagan’s popularity and the con-
tinued importance of his legacy to contemporary politicians like Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan
and to conservative news media personalities like Rush Limbaugh suggest that his movie
dialogue rhetoric resonated with voters and that segment of the American public that recalls
him with fondness and even reverence. Reagan’s vice president got into trouble when he did
his best Dirty Harry “Read my lips. No new taxes” imitation in his 1988 campaign and won
election. When he then turned around and raised taxes as president it hurt him politically
since the voting public had supported his initial tough guy talk. If movies can affect our
behavior in these matters, is it difficult to believe that they can alter our political behavior,
both individually and collectively?
Besides contributing to the way we think and talk about politics, political moviemak-
ers sometimes make a conscious attempt to influence political issues and even to provoke
action. Country (1984), The River (1984), and Places in the Heart (1984), for example,
tried to build sympathy for the plight of farmers. Similarly, The China Syndrome (1979)
and Silkwood (1983) were explicit warnings about the dangers of nuclear energy. Through-
out the 1980s, political filmmakers debated American involvement in Central America and
Vietnam, while many of the films from the early twenty-first century depicted the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars with anything but a flag-waving approach. Rendition (2007) raised the
question of whether the secret detention and torture of suspected terrorists in countries with
less restrictive interrogation rules (also known as “extraordinary rendition”) was an accept-
able American policy—and answered a resounding “no.” Films like these consciously seek
55
to persuade. Others do so unintentionally. Twenty-eight people are alleged to have died play-
ing Russian roulette after seeing The Deer Hunter (1978), and John Hinckley Jr. is supposed
to have gotten the idea of shooting President Reagan from Taxi Driver (1976). Oliver Stone’s
JFK (1991) left some susceptible viewers convinced that Lyndon Johnson was responsible
for the assassination of President Kennedy.
Filmmakers, however, argue that the influence works both ways. “Mass entertainment,”
one analyst insists, “cannot depart too far from the tastes and beliefs of the masses.”63
Moviemakers bear their audiences in mind as they create their products. They are constantly
aware that audiences seek entertainment, not offense, so it is safer to make movies that
reinforce people’s biases rather than try to change them. The content of a film may thus be,
at least to some extent, a reflection of what its audience already believes. “Our condition,”
observes the fictitious movie producer in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Last Tycoon, “is that
we have to take people’s own favorite folklore and dress it up and give it back to them.”64
Political films, then, may reflect rather than shape the nation’s politics because that is the
safest way to draw an audience. When political movies attempt to convert us, they risk being
rejected as propaganda if they come on too strong or not making their point at all if they are
subtle.
Even the most tendentious American political movies usually opt to persuade gently,
however, perhaps by introducing us to issues about which the filmmakers think we are unin-
formed, like nuclear energy in 1979 or the costs of dependence on foreign oil (Syriana, 2005;
Promised Land, 2012). Or they try to communicate to us how it feels to be discriminated
against, or they evoke our sympathy by using stars in sensitive roles. Sidney Poitier prob-
ably did more than we know to increase whites’ tolerance of blacks in the 1960s, while Jack
Lemmon gave credibility to middle America’s doubts about nuclear power and about U.S.
involvement in the Chilean counterrevolution (in The China Syndrome, 1979, and Missing,
1982, respectively). Costa-Gavras, one of the most consistently ambitious and successful
makers of overtly political films, says that films do not make big changes, “but they can
make people feel a little, discuss a little.”65
The effect of movies on audiences is not a one-way street, for audiences—or filmmakers’
perceptions of audiences—also influence politics in the movies, not only because decades
of boycotts and protests have made filmmakers cautious about political subjects but also
because the box office has become the ultimate measure of a movie’s success. To sell tickets,
filmmakers try to please us. We in turn expect to be entertained, perhaps because movies
have trained us to. Collectively, we seem to prefer to be terrified by apocalyptic or slasher
movies rather than forced to think by social or political commentary. Many filmmakers
therefore refrain from making us think by muting their films’ political content or rejecting
politics altogether. The political message of a movie may be played down to avoid offend-
ing any major segment of the diverse American audience, or it may be moderated so that as
many people as possible will agree with it and buy tickets.
Unfortunately, audiences have been changing in ways that can only increase the dif-
ficulties political filmmakers face in reaching them. “The audience today is dumber than it
was,” said Sidney Lumet. “They’re morons. They don’t know how to behave in theaters—
they can’t even be quiet. . . . They’re totally corrupted by the television experience. And
they expect the same television emotional results: sentimentality instead of emotion,
tactile sensation and shock instead of thrill.”66 Accustomed to TV, we grow impatient with
wordy movies or slow, subtle films that take time to build characters and approach their
56
points. Our impatience impels filmmakers to oversimplify, goose up their movies with
action, or avoid talk. Films today must grab us and take us for a fast ride not only because
of our TV orientation but also and significantly because movie audiences are young; the
majority of moviegoers are under twenty-four years of age, raised on hand-held gaming
devices and joystick video games, with their entire consciousness shaped by virtual reality
experiences. And this is the only segment of the audience that is growing. The bigger this
part of the audience gets, the more moviemakers go after it and the less articulate their
movies become.
Some scholars of politics and popular culture, however, argue that the impact of film upon
political life is far more potent than that implied by the experience itself. According to James
Combs, movies have a direct and profound impact on our entire political system:
In the twentieth century, the movies have been a central aspect of the American popular
experience. They have expanded and enriched the popular imagination while deriving
much of what they depicted from that imagination. The relationship between the mov-
ies and us is truly transactional, an interplay of the influence between moviemakers and
movie audiences (as well as the larger population and power structure) that takes subtle
twists and turns in the relationship as time goes by. The imagination of moviemakers
extends popular experience, and the experience of movie-watching extends the popular
imagination. Although we shall never know for sure, it seems reasonable to conclude that
the movie experiences have made a difference in the shaping of our national imagina-
tion, in other words, that we would not be whom we are, nor do what we do, without the
movies.67
Perhaps identifying and verifying the true impact of movies on American politics is
indeed impossible. Intuitively, however, Combs’s argument is a strong one, and students
of politics ignore the world of movies and their political messages at their peril. Politicians
themselves do not think they have that luxury. During the 2013 awards season, Vice Presi-
dent Joe Biden invited David O. Russell and Bradley Cooper, the director and the star of
Silver Linings Playbook, to the White House to discuss mental health issues, a bedrock issue
in the popular film. Of the influence of movies on public perception, Biden said, “Sometimes
movies do what governments can’t.”68
Notes
1. Dan Gurskis, The Short Screenplay: Your Short Film from Concept to Production (Boston: Cen-
gage Learning, 2006), p. 179.
2. Walid Habboub, “Movieball,” 2004, www.boxofficeprophets.com/column/index.cfm?columnID=
8353.
3. Ryan Nakashima, “Hollywood and Big Budget Movies: Is the Love Affair Over?” 2011, www.
huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/17/hollywood-big-budget-movies_n_967559.html.
4. The Numbers, www.the-numbers.com/movies/records/budgets.php.
5. Claudia Eller, “Studios Struggle to Reign In Movie Marketing Costs,” 2009, http://articles.
latimes.com/2009/apr/20/business/fi-ct-movies20.
6. Larry Gerbrandt, “How Much Does Movie Marketing Matter?” www.reuters.com/article/2010/
06/11/us-industry-idUSTRE65A13Q20100611.
7. Phillip L. Gianos, Politics and Politicians in American Film (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995), p. 1.
8. “House of Cards and the Decline of Cable,” The New Yorker, www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/
culture/2013/02/house-of-cards-and-the-death-of-cable.html#ixzz2K4yinmJU.
57
9. Quoted in Glenn Lovell, “Frankenheimer Back in High Gear,” San Jose Mercury News, Novem-
ber 16, 1986.
10. Michael Cieply, “The Sniping of Partisans, This Time on the Screen,” New York Times, www.
nytimes.com/2011/10/20/movies/hollywood-revs-up-partisan-films-a-year-ahead-of-election.
html?_r=0.
11. Michael Medved, Hollywood vs. America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), pp. 10, 216.
12. “Hollywood Studios Accused of Pushing Liberal Agenda Through Children’s Films,” Hollywood
Reporter, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/happy-feet-two-politics-childrens-movie-267827.
13. Stephen Holden, New York Times Speakers Series, June 10, 2004.
14. Mark Harris, “The Day the Movies Died,” Gentleman’s Quarterly, http://www.gq.com/
entertainment/movies-and-tv/201102/the-day-the-movies-died-mark-harris.
15. Gianos, p. 3.
16. Hana Shams Riazuddin, “Why Avatar Is a Truly Dangerous Film,” Ceasefire, http://ceasefire
magazine.co.uk/why-avatar-is-a-truly-dangerous-film/.
17. Lisa Wade, “On Avatar the Movie,” Sociological Images, http://thesocietypages.org/
socimages/2009/12/28/on-avatar-the-movie-spoiler-alert/.
18. This tendency may owe to the fact that, despite decades of change, Hollywood remains a pre-
dominantly white, male institution. Those most responsible for making movies, unconsciously or
not, reflect their own cultural positioning in the movies they make.
19. Gianos, p. 8.
20. A.O. Scott, “The Kingdom,” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/movies/28king.
html?_r=1&.
21. Louis Giannetti, Understanding Movies, 7th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996),
p. 293.
22. Ibid., p. 445.
23. Ibid., p. 449.
24. Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the
Fifties (New York: Pantheon, 1995), p. 5.
25. William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade (New York: Warner, 1983), pp. 100, 102.
26. Terrence Rafferty, “Now Playing: Auteur vs. Auteur,” New York Times, www.nytimes.
com/2006/10/22/movies/22raff.html?pagewanted=all.
27. Roger Ebert, “She Hate Me,” www.rogerebert.com/reviews/she-hate-me-2004.
28. Robynn J. Stilwell, “Breaking Sound Barriers: Bigelow’s Soundscapes from The Loveless to Blue
Steel,” in The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor, ed. Deborah Jermyn and
Sean Redmond (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), pp. 49–50.
29. Naomi Wolf, “A Letter to Kathryn Bigelow,” The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/
commentisfree/2013/jan/04/letter-kathryn-bigelow-zero-dark-thirty.
30. Steven Abrahams, “Buying Nashville,” Jump Cut 9 (1975): 7.
31. Jody Rosen, “Django Unchained: Original Soundtrack,” Rolling Stone, Reviews, www.rolling-
stone.com/music/albumreviews/django-unchained-original-soundtrack-20130114.
32. Randy Lewis, “Quentin Tarantino Discusses the Music of Django Unchained,” Los Angeles
Times, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/dec/25/entertainment/la-et-ms-quentin-tarantino-django-
unchained-music-soundtrack-streaming-20121224.
33. David Bordwell, “Observations on Film Art,” blog, www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2007/05/27/
intensified-continuity-revisited/.
34. French film critics dubbed the medium-long shot the “American shot” due to its prevalent use in
Hollywood movies of the classical era (1930s–1950s). The framing is wide enough to show set-
ting or background or to include a number of actors yet close enough for viewers to discern facial
expression.
35. Using a software program called CineMetrics, developed by Gunars Civjans, psychologist James
Cutting determined that “the average shot length of English language films has declined from
about 12 seconds in 1930 to about 2.5 seconds today.” He calculated the average shot length in the
James Bond film, Quantum of Solace (2008), at 1.7 seconds. Here he also explains how a fluctua-
tion of varying takes (or shot lengths) holds viewer attention. Quoted in Greg Miller, “Data From
58
a Century of Cinema Reveals How Movies Have Evolved,” www.wired.com/2014/09/cinema-

is-evolving/. For more on how shot length (or duration of takes) affects film meaning, see the
CineMetrics website, http://www.cinemetrics.lv/index.php.
36. Giannetti, pp. 83–84.
37. Charles Derry, The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchock (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland) 1995.
38. Gianos, p. 38.
39. Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame: What We See in Films (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2002), pp. 186–187.
40. Giannetti, p. 297.
41. Judd Blaise, “Natural Born Killers,” All Movie, www.allmovie.com/movie/natural-born-killers-
v132230.
42. Mark Crispin Miller, “Advertising,” in Seeing Through Movies, ed. Mark Crispin Miller (New
York: Pantheon, 1990).
43. “Alcohol in ‘Flight’ puts trademark laws in focus,” CBS News, www.cbsnews.com/8301-207_
162-57545611/alcohol-in-flight-puts-trademark-laws-in-focus/.
44. James Monaco, How to Read a Film: The Art, Technology, Language, History and Theory of Film
and Media, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 220.
45. Early film actors themselves did not want to be credited for film work because they also were
theater stars, or struggling to be so, and did not want film work to discredit them in the legitimate
acting arena. When fans themselves started inquiring after actors who reappeared in several films,
production companies started promoting their recurring stars and then fan magazines proliferated,
exploiting the stars’ images.
46. Monaco, p. 222.
47. By way of compensation for the lack of black actors in central roles, a different stereotypical role
for blacks emerged in the late 1970s: the black judge whose on-screen time is minimal but who
nonetheless seems important by virtue of wearing judicial robes.
48. Giannetti, p. 516.
49. “Rupert Everett: Movie Business Is Anti-gay,” BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/
programmes/hardtalk/9784435.stm.
50. Gianos, p. 29.
51. Ibid., p. 28.
52. “Meryl Streep Slams Hollywood’s ‘Big Tentpole Failures,’” Hollywood Reporter, www.
hollywoodreporter.com/news/meryl-streep-women-in-film-speech-337788.
53. Manohla Dargis, “Gran Torino,” New York Times, http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/movies/
12tori.html?_r=1&.
54. Quoted in Tom Schatz, “The Studio System and Conglomerate Hollywood,” www.
blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/Sample_chapter/9781405133876/
9781405133876_C01.pdf, p. 13.
55. Ibid., p. 22.
56. David Edelstein, “Hollywood’s Blockbuster Problem,” Vulture, www.vulture.com/2013/06/
george-lucas-steven-spielberg-on-hollywood-blockbusters.html.
57. Gary Susman, “Is Hollywood Model Doomed?” Rolling Stone, www.rollingstone.com/movies/
news/is-hollywood-model-doomed-steven-spielberg-and-george-lucas-think-so-20130815.
58. “George Clooney to Hedge Fund Honcho Daniel Loeb: Stop Spreading Fear at Sony,” Deadline
Hollywood, www.deadline.com/2013/08/george-clooney-slams-sony-investor-daniel-loeb/.
59. Douglas Gomery, “Conglomerates in the Film Industry,” in The Political Companion to American
Film, ed. Gary Crowdus (Chicago: Lake View Press, 1994), pp. 71–74.
60. Gianos, p. 25.
61. Michael Wood, America in the Movies (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 22.
62. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974),
p. 5.
63. Randall M. Miller, The Kaleidoscope Lens (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Ozer, 1980), p. 13.
64. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), p. 125.
59
65. Costa-Gavras, Guardian Lecture, National Film Theatre, London, March 16, 1984.
66. San Jose Mercury News, August 17, 1986.
67. James E. Combs, American Political Movies: An Annotated Filmography of Feature Films (New
York: Garland, 1990), p. ix.
68. Steven Zeitchik, “For David O. Russell, an entry in his own ‘Silver Linings Playbook,’” Los
AngelesTimes,www.latimes.com/2013/feb/08/entertainment/la-et-mn-for-david-o-russell-a-real-life-
silver-linings-playbook-20130208.
60
3
Causes and Special Effects

The Political Environment of Film
Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

This book focuses mostly on the content of movies themselves and how it may create politi-
cal messages and therefore potentially affect the political system. However, as we noted in
Chapter 1, the relationship between politics and film is scarcely a one-way street: the politi-
cal system interacts directly with the world of film in a variety of ways. In fact, in many
instances it is difficult to ascertain which is affecting which. For example, a study of Ameri-
can movie plots from 1920 to 1960 found a sharp rise in the number that portrayed “foreign
elements as a danger to the hero/heroine” from 1940 to 1944.1 Presumably, filmmakers were
responding to the threat of World War II as they created movies with foreign villains. At the
same time, however, these movies portraying “foreign” danger were intended to shore up
popular support for American war efforts and might be viewed as propaganda. So these films
reflected the political reality of the times, but also were intended to affect it.
On a much more individual scale, some observers noted that when President George W.
Bush celebrated the putative end of hostilities in the Iraqi war in 2003 by landing on an air-
craft carrier in a jet fighter, the resulting image strongly resembled the movie Independence
Day (1996), in which a president flies a fighter plane to battle alien invaders. Did this movie
inspire President Bush or his staff to re-create the scene and somehow profit politically from
the resemblance? Or did the movie merely seek to reinforce the common stereotype of the
president as superhero-savior?
In 1973, iconic actor Marlon Brando famously declined his Academy Award and sent in
his stead the Native American actress Sacheen Littlefeather to shame Hollywood for its his-
tory of degrading portrayals of Indians and to announce Brando’s support for the political
protests of the American Indian Movement. When filmmaker Michael Moore accepted an
Oscar in March 2003, his brief speech included the following broadside: “We live in a time
where fictitious election results give us a fictitious president. We are now fighting a war for
fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fiction of duct tape or the fictitious ‘Orange Alerts,’ we are
against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you.”2 Moore’s comments
brought film-based political controversy about the war into American living rooms and made
him a bête noire among conservative commentators.
In 2008, Laura Linney inserted herself into the nation’s politics when, accepting her Best
Actress Emmy award for her role in the biopic John Adams, she rebuked Republican vice
presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s sarcasm about Barack Obama’s history as a community
organizer, saying that the founding fathers’ miniseries made her “grateful and thankful for
the community organizers that helped form our country.” During that same campaign sea-
son, The Bourne Identity’s Matt Damon drew Republican ire when he said he feared the
prospect of Sarah Palin ever having the nuclear codes. In 2011, Damon further burnished his
liberal credentials by appearing in Washington for a march in support of teachers and calling
Washington’s debt ceiling debate “disgusting.” He said wealthy people like himself should
pay more taxes, virtual heresy to the rising Tea Party movement and hardcore Republicans.
And in fall 2014, movie star environmentalists Leonardo DiCaprio (Titanic, 1997; J. Edgar,
2011; Wolf of Wall Street, 2013) and Mark Ruffalo (In The Cut, 2003; The Avengers, 2012;
Now You See Me, 2013) joined New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, former Vice President Al
Gore, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and 300,000 other activists in “The People’s Cli-
mate March,” a globally organized protest timed with a United Nations summit on carbon
emissions. (The previous week DiCaprio was named U.N. Messenger of Peace for his com-
mitment to environmental causes.) DiCaprio and Ruffalo’s participation headlined many
mainstream news accounts, raising the protest’s profile at the same time as the demonstration
62
CAUSES AND SPECIAL EFFECTS: THE POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT OF FILM
To make a political statement about the plight of American Indians on behalf of actor Marlon Brando
during the 1973 Academy Awards television broadcast, Sacheen Littlefeather declines Brando’s Best
Actor Oscar from presenters Roger Moore and Liv Ullman.
emphasized a bottom-up approach to climate change. Drawing prominent stars and leading
political figures, the march was still an event of the “people” meant to push world leaders to
act (“think globally, act locally”). The planning and corporate media reporting of the event
also point to the worldwide demonstration as a notable example of the deep imbrication of
celebrity culture and political activism. Here the star is both “just like us”—as a regular
feature in the tabloid US Magazine puts it—and significantly different, able to wield politi-
cal influence rarely available to ordinary citizens—unless they are joined by hundreds of
thousands of others.
Why do such collisions between Hollywood and politics occur? How do entertainment-
industry figures like Damon and DiCaprio participate in the political process, and with what
impact? The complicated relationships between the world of movies and the real world of
politics are frequently difficult to distinguish, not the least because the political world itself
is so heavily mediated. By this we mean that what the public knows of politics it learns
primarily through the media, especially television news but also Hollywood films. In this
chapter, we focus on aspects of movies and moviemaking that are generally external to the
movies themselves. We explore the various ways in which the world of politics (and eco-
nomics) seems to affect the movies and the movie industry, generally recognizing that the
relationship is usually bilateral.
The Red Scare and McCarthyism: HUAC and Hollywood
The most obvious and perhaps most noteworthy impingement of politics into the world of
film was the Red Scare of the late 1940s. The House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC) of the U.S. Congress presided over a ruthless interrogation of film and television
63
industry figures. Claiming that Hollywood had been subverted by foreign Communists,
HUAC used hearings to publicly expose alleged agents of the Soviet Union. The greater
impact of the HUAC hearings was the response by Hollywood, which was essentially to
blacklist individuals who refused to cooperate with the committee by providing it with
names of their associates who might have been involved with the Communist Party. By
refusing to hire suspected Communists or party sympathizers Hollywood moved to protect
its image with the ticket-buying public much the way it had during the 1920s and 1930s
when scandals over the exploits of stars on and off the screen and backlash against film
content by civic and religious groups threatened both its bottom line and freedom from
government rule. In both instances the movie industry tried to circumvent outside control of
its product and profits by preemptively censoring movies and policing actors, directors, and
writers. With HUAC, Hollywood moved to expunge the appearance of Communist influ-
ence before Congress could either pass restrictive, wide-reaching regulations or tarnish the
cinema’s reputation with audiences, or both.
The House Un-American Activities Committee discovered Hollywood in 1939 when it
held its first hearing on subversion in the film industry. The committee returned in 1947 to
begin investigations that resulted in a cause célèbre, the Hollywood Ten—a group of movie-
makers who were jailed on a charge of contempt of Congress for refusing to talk about their
political activities. The Hollywood Ten included Edward Dmytryk, Dalton Trumbo, and
John Howard Lawson—all of whom had directed or written political films. Hollywood at
first rallied to their defense, then cravenly backed off and introduced the infamous blacklist,
systematically refusing to employ more than 300 men and women who had allegedly sup-
ported leftist causes or held Communist political sympathies. The investigation continued
until well into the 1950s, destroying many careers and helping others, and influencing the
kinds of movies that were or were not made.
The film industry was not the only major American institution that was investigated by
the anti-Communist crusaders, but it was a special attraction because of the massive press
coverage it produced and because of the presumed power of the movies. Besides, Holly-
wood really was a center of liberal and even Communist political activity. The Communist
Party had made the industry a special organizing target in 1936, a move that reflected the
Leninist belief in the power of cinema as political propaganda.3 (“Of all the arts, cinema for
us is the most important,” declared Lenin in 1922, organizing Soviet filmmaking so that it
would stir the working class to revolutionary consciousness.4) Proclaiming that movies are
“the weapon of mass culture,” the party organizers urged their recruits at a minimum to
“keep anti-Soviet agitprop” out of the movies they worked on.5 The Communist Party had
some recruiting success during the Great Depression, the New Deal years, and the Spanish
Civil War, but news of Stalin’s purges and the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact stopped its
advances. In the 1950s, HUAC finished it off.
Communist infiltration of Hollywood was never very successful, however, and the inves-
tigators probably knew it. They found a lot of film people who leaned to the left, but HUAC
never came up with evidence of undue party influence on the movies. The investigators
kept looking, however, because they were less interested in reality than in publicity, and
glamorous Hollywood provided plenty of that. Besides, the investigations gave ambitious,
conservative congressmen like Richard Nixon a chance to attack people they did not like
much anyway—for many of Hollywood’s elite were rich, Jewish, liberal, Democratic, and
perceived as intellectually arrogant.
64
The HUAC investigations provided an opportunity for politicians to bring mighty Hol-
lywood to its knees, and they did. Dozens of film workers were jailed, usually for contempt
of Congress as defined by their refusal to testify against their friends. Others were forced to
inform on friends and coworkers to save their own careers.
Even the unions joined the purge, after initially resisting. “Do they [HUAC] expect us
to constitute ourselves as a little FBI of our own and determine just who is a commie and
who isn’t?” a young Ronald Reagan reasonably demanded as president of the Screen Actors
Guild (SAG), but soon he, too, was testifying that there were cliques in SAG that “follow
the Communist party line.”6 Liberals also joined the purge, and some Hollywood Jews
became particularly vigorous anti-Communists because they were afraid the attacks would
turn anti-Semitic.7 Once the united front was broken, the members of the film industry were
on their own. Some, like director Elia Kazan and Ronald Reagan, cooperated fully with
the committee. Others, like writer Dalton Trumbo, resisted and went to jail. Still others, like
playwright Lillian Hellman, talked about their own activities but refused to name anyone
else, famously declaring, “I will not tailor my conscience to fit this day’s style.”
Ironically, the investigators found little evidence of subversion in the testimony of
those who were willing to talk. Walt Disney alleged that the Cartoonists Guild had tried to
“subvert” Mickey Mouse. Ginger Rogers’s mother testified that her daughter had been given
the line “Share and share alike—that’s democracy” in Tender Comrade (see Chapter 4),
a film written by Dalton Trumbo and directed by Edward Dmytryk, both members of the
Hollywood Ten. Conservative novelist Ayn Rand cited “a suspicious number of smiling
children” in Song of Russia and also pointed out certain suspicious elements in Mission to
Moscow and The North Star.8 All three movies were transparently pro-Russian, however,
because they had been made with government encouragement to strengthen the U.S.–Soviet
alliance during World War II. They were not hits, and they were poor evidence of a Com-
munist conspiracy.
For all its efforts, HUAC never came up with much evidence of Communist propaganda
in American movies, much less a massive conspiracy. Most of those accused had worked on
patriotic war movies as well as projects that reflected a liberal ideology. In fact, Hollywood’s
radicals never got much beyond defending President Theodore Roosevelt and attacking fas-
cism. Dorothy Jones’s detailed analysis of 300 films on which Hollywood “Reds” had worked
reveals that some were “vaguely liberal,” but none contained actual Communist propaganda.
Furthermore, “none of the 159 films credited over a period of years to the Hollywood Ten con-
tained communist propaganda” or were cited by the conservative Motion Picture Association
of America (MPAA) for such content. Jones argues that the collegial method of making films
fragmented responsibility and muted any propaganda, while “the habitual caution of movie-
makers with respect to film content” and the “self-regulating practices of the motion picture
industry as carried on by the Motion Picture Association” were further preventives.9
HUAC, however, did not require evidence to act. The impact of the hearings and the
blacklisting on Hollywood was immense. As the HUAC hearings proceeded, it became vir-
tually impossible to bankroll a film with a leftist message. Instead, between 1947 and 1954
almost forty “explicitly propagandistic anti-Communist films” were made in Hollywood,10
including such formidable viewing fare as The Red Menace (1949), I Married a Communist
(1950), and I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) (see Chapter 7). Although nearly all of
these movies lost money, the studios continued to put the products out, hoping to avoid fur-
ther controversy. (We discuss the creation of propaganda per se later in this chapter.)
65
Many progressive film workers were driven out of the industry after the 1947 hearings,
and many more followed after another round of hearings that began in 1951. A few committed
suicide, some were imprisoned, others went into exile, and many merely went underground.
Those who continued working avoided political subjects or social issues. Jones discovered
that while fully 28 percent of Hollywood productions in 1947 dealt with “social and psy-
chological themes,” only 9.2 percent fit into this category by 1954. She concludes that the
HUAC attack was based less on real concern with the Communist threat than on a “fear . . .
of movies getting serious about social and political problems.”11 Besides digging through
Hollywood’s past, the investigations intended to influence its future, and they did. At the
time, movies dared not address the investigations or blacklisting except as allegory. Hol-
lywood turned to genres like the western and the horror film to mask the real subject of its
commentary. Paced to unfold in actual time, High Noon (1953) makes a hero out of a retiring
marshal when he stays to defend a town defined by cowardice and treachery. Like coopera-
tive HUAC witnesses the townspeople abandon their marshal, but like the Hollywood Ten
he stands by his word and by them.
The blacklist was eventually broken, and eventually many of those the Red Scare had
demonized the Hollywood community later recognized as heroes. Several movies (The
Front, 1976; Guilty by Suspicion, 1991; Good Night, and Good Luck, 2005) have dealt
with the period in a way that depicts the blacklisted individuals and their defenders as vic-
tims and/or heroes, and their accusers as evil incarnate. The dramatic divide between those
opposed to HUAC and those who cooperated features in the sentimental love story The Way
We Were (1973), one of Hollywood’s earliest open depictions of its sordid blacklisting past.
In fact, beyond the films themselves, a sort of backlash has occurred, as some individuals
who were known to have cooperated with HUAC became themselves the object of scorn and
isolation from the Hollywood mainstream. In 1999, when the Academy Awards decided to
honor cooperative witness Elia Kazan with an honorary Oscar almost half a century later,
many in Hollywood objected. Protesters picketed the event with signs that read, “Don’t
Whitewash the Blacklist.” The controversy threatened to overwhelm the ceremony. In the
end, however, some of the audience remained silently seated while even Guilty by Suspicion
star Robert DeNiro and famously left-leaning Warren Beatty stood to applaud the eighty-
nine-year-old Kazan.
The chief impact of this period in film history is to clearly illustrate the potentially awe-
some influence of the government on free and creative expression. “When the question
was raised, the moguls of Hollywood and Madison Avenue came to heel at the behest of a
congressional committee without formal authority over them as meekly as the most obedi-
ent member of the Soviet cultural committees under Stalin and Khrushchev,” writes one
scholar.12 Contemporary advocates of free expression frequently invoke the misdeeds of
the era when defending the industry against its critics. Some contend that the entire episode
marked a turning point for American films, transforming them from frequently progressive
and artistically challenging vehicles to vacuous and politically toothless entertainment .13
Censorship and Regulation
Another important way that politics affects movies is by means of the government’s author-
ity (or potential authority) to regulate and censor the film industry. While many early movie
studios practiced a form of self-censorship simply by creating movies aimed at the widest
66
audience possible, others saw profit in exploiting the medium’s salacious potential, while
still others viewed the new medium as a soapbox for political and social commentary. Even
in their earliest days, movies courted controversy both intentionally in stories about abortion
(Where Are My Children?, 1916) and unintentionally in displays of racial harmony (Broken
Blossoms, 1919). Almost immediately the country’s moral guardians sensed danger in the
power of movies to influence viewers’ behaviors and beliefs.
Legislative and civic crusades against the feared effects of cinematic entertainment began
as early as 1906 by which time early movie houses called nickelodeons had proliferated
throughout urban America and beyond. While traditional theater had frequently excluded
lower class and immigrant populations, the cheaper priced, more culturally accessible
nickelodeons catered to them. Politicians and newspaper editorialists worried, however,

that both the movies and the exhibition conditions or general atmosphere of the nickelo-
deons subjected these groups to a “carnival of vulgarity, suggestiveness, and violence” and
to a “moral leprosy” that posed a serious “menace to the morals of the community and the
healthy development of the social organism.”14 As one-reelers were succeeded by longer
form, more narratively involved films, anxiety over their social, cultural, and political influ-
ence intensified. A patchwork of local and state censorship laws and review bodies resulted,
including in 1909 the creation of the National Board of Censorship. Made up of members
from groups like the Women’s Municipal League and the Federation of Churches, the board
enjoyed industry cooperation. (The studios cooperated as a way of exerting influence and
staving off more coercive forms of outside control.) Aimed primarily at exhibitors, the cen-
soring body’s recommendations had greatest impact in New York where the mayor had tried
to close down those “carnivals of vulgarity,” the nickelodeons.15
The watershed moment in the conflict over state and municipal censorship efforts and the
studios’ push–pull resistance to them occurred when the state of Ohio banned D.W. Griffith’s
controversial The Birth of a Nation in 1915. The subsequent lawsuit led the Supreme Court
to rule that movies did not enjoy First Amendment protection, and more censorship laws
followed. In Mutual Film Corporation vs. Ohio Industrial Commission the court reasoned
that movies were a profit-driven business and, unlike the informative print media, served no
larger purpose than to make money; therefore, they did not merit freedom of the press or
free speech rights. At the same time the justices warned that movies possessed “a capacity
for evil.” That meant that legally movies were matters of interstate commerce, not forms of
protected artistic expression, and therefore were subject to state regulation like other goods
and services.
The court’s decision captured the dilemma that the burgeoning movie industry more or
less recognized on its own. On the one hand, movies featuring scandalous storylines and
suggestive performances sold tickets. On the other hand, stretching the country’s moral fab-
ric too far risked rupture and backlash. When movie boycotts advocated by church officials
led to declining profits, the studios took notice. Accordingly, the most notable era of aggres-
sive, organized film censorship in the United States did not occur at the hands of legislators
but when the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) attempted
more vigorously than ever before to court public favor and preempt national censorship law
by adopting the Motion Picture Production Code in 1930. Also called the Hays Code after its
author, former Postmaster General Will Hays, the Production Code went far beyond simply
prohibiting nudity and swearing in films. It banned movies from depicting certain events or
character types and encouraged stories that stressed respect for religious and civic authority.
67
The change was palpable. In Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915), a socialite steals from a
charity to bet on the stock market to fund her lavish taste. The stock tanks and Edith resorts
to trading her favors for money with an “Oriental” (Japanese) ivory dealer, Tori. When her
husband strikes it rich and she tries to pay back the money, Tori brands her skin to stake his
claim. Edith shoots him, and her husband takes the blame but is exonerated when she reveals
her brand in court. Almost twenty years later, the Production Code explicitly prohibited
depiction of the “repellant subject” of branding people.
By the end of World War I and the dawn of the Jazz Age, pioneer moviemakers like
D.W. Griffith, Lois Weber, and Cecile B. DeMille had made the movies a widely accepted
art form with an expanding middle- and upper-class audience. Each of these directors rep-
resented a particular slant on politically relevant filmmaking: Griffith tackled sweeping

controversial historical sagas (Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, 1916), Weber addressed
social issues like birth control and poverty (The Blot, 1921), and DeMille couched sex and
sensuality in Biblical epics to reinforce traditional patriarchal Christian views (The Ten
Commandments, 1923; King of Kings, 1927). About the time silent films gave way to “talk-
ies” featuring characters who could verbalize their heretofore only implied motivations and
desires, the nation’s economic, intellectual, and religious elite grew concerned that the influ-
ence of films might be immoral and subversive. The greater expressive power that sound
provided the movies worried civic leaders, but the fact that immigrants and Jews dominated
the industry made elite Yankees and outspoken Midwestern Catholics even more nervous,
and they soon advocated government inspection of movies. Robert Sklar argues that “the
struggle over movies was an aspect of the struggle between classes,” with the proponents of
censorship demanding the suppression of “any idea or image harmful to the moral, social or
political health of the state.”16
By the early 1920s, eight states and ninety cities had established censors, and in 1922
the public outcry over a widely reported Hollywood sex scandal involving Roscoe “Fatty”
Arbuckle, a comedian with an on-screen image vastly at odds with the criminal charges
against him, produced demands for national censorship. Filmmakers reacted defensively by
forming the MPPDA with Will H. Hays, former chair of the Republican National Committee
and a political crony of President Warren G. Harding, as its executive. The Hays Office was
hyped as a self-policing effort by a concerned industry, but it was really a symbolic action
intended to ward off government censorship and a separate, potentially looming threat as
unwelcome to the studios as censorship laws: binding antitrust arbitration. For 1930 marked
not only the establishment of the Motion Picture Production Code but also the year that
major film studios were found guilty of violating antitrust laws. After striking a deal with the
government under the auspices of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the studios returned
to business as usual but now they were on notice. The widely publicized misbehavior of
actors, including drug use, and the expansion by the big studios into every layer of their trade
(i.e., the production, distribution, and exhibition of movies) occurred more or less simultane-
ously. A monopolistic ambition, expansion like that required capital. To secure capital the
studios could not risk looking to Wall Street like a shaky investment subject to greater fed-
eral inspection and regulation and open to other lawsuits. The MPPDA’s Hays Office needed
to contain one threat—boycotts and calls for censorship—to stave off the other, government
interference in their business model.
Hays recognized that his chief duty was to protect the studios’ financial interests. On the
heels of Arbuckle’s trial for rape and murder in a 1923 address to the MPPDA Committee on
68
Public Relations, Hays staked out his allegiances: “You must get the angle of the men who
have five hundred million dollars invested, who started this business. They started some-
thing and they have five hundred million dollars invested. It is a thing to be recognized and
reckoned with.” At the same time he declared his job “no gentleman’s agreement,” but a
“Cause.” Repeatedly promising that he would not “judge the morals of the people in the
industry,” he also pledged to “cut out the filth immediately.” To “cut out the filth” in an act he
describes as “heroic,” Hays banned the release of any more Arbuckle films and effectively
banned Arbuckle from “any employment in the industry on the coast.”17 After three differ-
ent trials, Arbuckle was ultimately found not guilty but by then his career was mostly over
and the legacy of the public reaction to his case lived on in the increasingly ambitious and
forceful Hays Office.

In 1927, the Hays Office issued a list of “don’ts” and “be carefuls,” warning the industry to
keep away from certain subjects, including drug addiction, sexual deviance, miscegenation,
and nudity. Any violations of the Ten Commandments, or the Hays amendments to them,
were permissible only if the perpetrators ended unhappily. Individual clergy and politicians
could appear comical or corrupt but religious and governmental institutions could not be
undermined. Crime could never pay nor could behavior like adultery be depicted in a posi-
tive light. Hollywood could titillate its audience, but the final message had to be that sinners
were punished. By 1930 the “dos” and “don’ts” had been codified into the expansive Produc-
tion Code. Restrictions included “The use of the Flag shall be consistently respectful” while
moral reasoning included “Correct entertainment raises the whole standard of a nation.”
Gender-specific rules included “dances with movement of the breasts violate decency and
are wrong.”18
The uneasy bargain studios struck with government officials and the public took time to
yield the desired effect. At the Code’s beginning, studios enjoyed a period now called the
“pre-Code” or “Forbidden Hollywood” era. Despite Hays’ “heroic” actions like blacklisting
Arbuckle, from 1930 to 1934 neither the letter nor the spirit of the Code was effectively
enforced, and filmmakers flouted censorship rules with impunity. Stars like Mae West and
Joan Crawford built entire careers playing to the shifting moral standards of the day, espe-
cially those regarding gender and sexuality, and directors like William Wellman created
some of the most radical images ever to haunt the silver screen. Wellman’s pre-Code work
illustrated adultery in Other Men’s Women (1931), starvation of children for profit in Night
Nurse (1931), and prostitution in Frisco Jenny (1932) and Midnight Mary (1933).
The symbolism of the Code—issued but not enforced—represented not simply the
growing pains of an influential, economically powerful industry working out its role in
a time of technological and social flux but an entire culture, including the body politic, at
war with itself over issues as fundamental as how to respond to the economic Depression,
whether and where women belonged in the public spheres of work and government, and
the relationship between ethnicity, race, citizenship, and the right to vote. Pre-Code movies
illustrated resistance to marriage but not to sex and romance in Illicit (1931), prostitution
and marriage for profit in The Purchase Price (1932) and Baby Face (1933), love across
racial lines in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), metaphoric cross-species sexuality in
Frankenstein (1931) and King Kong (1933), and economic injustice and political corrup-
tion in Wild Boys of the Road (1933), Heroes for Sale (1933), This Day and Age (1933),
and Gabriel Over the White House (1933). Faced with increasing boycotts from groups like
the National Legion of Decency and pressure from the failing economy, the MPPDA soon
69
determined it had to get serious about content and did so by forming the Production Code
Administration (PCA) to put teeth to the virtually hollow Code. In 1934, staunch Catholic
lay-leader Joseph Breen took over as head of the PCA. Soon every script had to meet his
approval before beginning production. All movies had to receive his office’s literal seal of
approval, played at each film’s start, or face steep fines and be blocked from mainstream
distribution and exhibition—a financial fate far worse than losing scenes to the censor’s
cutting-room floor.
Though rarely specifically directed at political films, this censorship must have discour-
aged those who considered producing such movies. Some observers argue that the limits
on expression created by the Hays Code were a primary reason for the near disappearance
of social and political criticism from a once-progressive mainstream film industry. Others
postulate that by forbidding subversive expression, censorship forced movies to cultivate
a more sophisticated visual language to signify criminal attitudes, sexual innuendo, and
political critique. Alfred Hitchcock’s suspenseful scenes of characters chasing each other
atop sacred national monuments like the Statue of Liberty (Saboteur, 1942) and across the
presidential faces memorialized in the “Shrine of Democracy” at Mount Rushmore (North
by Northwest, 1959) mock nationalistic pride and patriotic myths. In fact, the Department
of Interior disapproved of the struggle-to-the-death between Communist and CIA spies at
the end of North by Northwest as a desecration of the famous monument and requested—
futilely—that the MPAA alter the Code to prevent such scenes in the future.19 Likewise,
Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) undercuts the image of postwar U.S. foreign involvement by
portraying the American spy agency as cavalier, its chief agent lounging on a bed, eating,
drinking, and otherwise taking a casual attitude as he orders others to put their lives on the
line. While all these scenes made it past the censor, an attentive audience discerned subver-
sive meaning.
Perhaps the politically cautious motion pictures of the 1920s reflected a decade of pros-
perity, isolationism, and dull, conservative presidents. The emergence of the big studios also
The climax of North by Northwest (1959) pits a man mistaken for an American spy against foreign
agents in a deadly fight on the Mount Rushmore national monument.
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must have contributed to the caution and conservatism among political filmmakers. Like
factories, these studios churned out movies feverishly for an ever-expanding audience as
filmmaking enterprises left New York and elsewhere to concentrate in Hollywood. There the
business solidified into a vertically integrated system in which the largest studios controlled
all aspects of the filmmaking process, including the production, distribution, and exhibition
of most American films. The near-monopolistic control of the industry by the big studios
discouraged independent-minded filmmakers and led to reliance on traditional plots and
genres, with only slight variations. Chain of command also meant that directors did not have
the last word on a film’s final version. Thus studio executives tacked on awkwardly happy
endings even to pre-Code films as diverse as Frankenstein, Baby Face, and Wild Boys of the
Road, tying a pretty bow around the socially and politically controversial scenes that came
before. The sheer volume of films being produced—as many as 800 a year in the 1920s and
’30s—let some political and even less-than-conservative movies slip through.
The enactment of the Hays Code was the result of pressure by religious and political lead-
ers after release of objectionable films and, more urgently, a series of Hollywood scandals in
the 1920s that involved sex and drugs. Although it did not constitute government censorship
per se—because members of the motion picture association complied voluntarily—the Code
represented de facto censorship, making it difficult if not impossible for films to deal with
sensitive social issues or radical political topics. This remained the case despite revisions to
the Code over the years, including language in the 1940s that justified studio self-censorship
to preclude “political dictatorship.” If the studios occasionally skirted and toyed with its
provisions, the Code was still, on the whole, a highly effective means of limiting creative
expression, one that did not require political debate. In the 1960s, however, broad soci-
etal change (along with the collapse of the rigid Hollywood studio system after a series of
antitrust court rulings) made the code obsolete. A reconfigured industry group, the Motion
Picture Association of America (MPAA), moved to create a new means of regulating film
content. Jack Valenti, a former fighter pilot with ties to the Kennedy and Johnson adminis-
trations, was appointed president of the MPAA and charged with the challenge of creating a
new, more workable system of regulating cinematic content.
Of this task, Valenti said,
From the very first day of my own succession to the MPAA President’s office, I had sniffed
the Production Code constructed by the Hays Office. There was about this stern, forbidding
catalogue of “Dos and Don’ts” the odious smell of censorship. I determined to junk it at the
first opportune moment. I knew that the mix of new social currents, the irresistible force of
creators determined to make “their” films and the possible intrusion of government into the
movie arena demanded my immediate action.20
Working as quickly as his words would imply, Valenti created the ratings system still in
effect today (with a few changes over the years). With that, he turned the MPAA president’s
job from content watchdog to government lobbyist and business leader for the industry that
paid his salary.
As was the case with the Hays Code, the MPAA ratings system does not represent overt
censorship, since compliance is voluntary and the government is not formally involved in
its machinations. Instead, a panel of from eight to thirteen individuals, whose views are
supposed to reflect those of the average American parent, constitutes the Classification and
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Ratings Administration (CARA) or film-rating board. CARA panelists—all of whom must

be parents or former parents—view films months before they are released and pronounce
their ratings, using the now familiar G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17 rating scale. The PG-13
rating was developed in the early 1980s as a harsher alternative to the “parental guidance
suggested” PG rating and a milder warning than the “restricted” R rating. The PG-13 rat-
ing means “parents strongly cautioned” and warns “some material may be inappropriate for
children under 13.” This system yields results especially when it comes to the age of the
audience a film hopes to draw. A recent case proves how vital achieving the appropriate rat-
ing can be to a film’s fortunes. To lure families into seats, Warner Bros. executives changed
the title of their modern fairy tale Jack the Giant Killer to Jack the Giant Slayer (2013) and
marketed the film as both a familiar fable and a computer-generated-imagery (CGI) action-
adventure fantasy worthy of a PG-13 rating for violence. The muddled marketing and PG-13
rating sent mixed messages to audiences, and the film’s opening weekend earned back only a
little more than 10 percent of its nearly $200 million production budget. Meanwhile, the PG-
rated Oz The Great and Powerful (2013), also a lavish updating of a familiar children’s tale
with roughly the same production budget, earned an opening close to half its budget despite
receiving poor reviews. The difference? A clearer marketing strategy based on a solidly kid-
friendly MPAA rating.
Whereas the film rating system has undoubtedly freed movie creators to delve into
more controversial (and politically charged) subject matter than during the days of the
Hays Code, it is not without potential for censorship-like impacts on movies. The rating
system places enormous pressure on filmmakers to change their work to suit the tastes of
the CARA panel since, as Jack vs. Oz demonstrates, box office receipts are highly sensi-
tive to the film ratings. Relatively few cinemas will show NC-17 movies, and even fewer
will show unrated movies.
What frequently occurs, therefore, is proactive editing by moviemakers in an effort to
remove the NC-17 stigma. This reportedly occurred in the case of 662 films in 1998 alone.
(Similar machinations also occur with respect to R rated movies seeking different ratings,
although sometimes producers actually prefer an R-rating to a PG-13 or PG rating.) Further-
more, an unknown number of films are either never made or are significantly modified to
satisfy the ratings system. Says Chris Roth, “this scenario is unsettling because legal, adult-
to-adult communication was eliminated.”21 Roth quotes a representative of the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as saying, “The ‘look and feel’ of the film can be changed
when a sequence is cut or shortened. It is very difficult to put limits and bounds on things
and pretend that the film is not being significantly altered.”22 Additionally, the ratings system
is frequently criticized for consistently allowing much more violence than sexual or other
controversial content.
From time to time, the content of movies inspires political debate. In the election of 2000,
Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman made a series of high-profile attacks
on Hollywood and other entertainment outlets. Lieberman accused the film industry specifi-
cally of corrupting America’s culture and its children. Oddly, one of his attacks occurred
shortly before the Democratic Party convention in Los Angeles as President Clinton was
being feted by Hollywood stars at a fund-raising party. Lieberman warned that Washing-
ton might impose legal restrictions if Hollywood filmmakers refused to “draw some lines
themselves.”23
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After the 2012 elementary school massacre of almost thirty people—most of them first-
graders—by a lone gunman in Newtown, Connecticut, the national debate turned from gun
control to violent video games to Hollywood movies. In one poll, 70 percent of interviewees
agreed that advertising for movies and television included too much violence; 34 percent
believed that advertising for violent films and television shows should have greater restric-
tions. While 46 percent said Hollywood should make fewer movies that show violence and
killing, three-quarters of respondents said, “it isn’t Congress’ or the president’s role to pres-
sure Hollywood to make less-violent movies” (emphasis added).24 Trying to deflect attention
from itself, the National Rifle Association promoted the view that guns were less at fault for
national gun violence like the Newtown killings than media glorification of violence, par-
ticularly video games and Hollywood films. Politicians in the hot seat on gun control were
fearful of the political pull of the NRA yet eager to appeal to constituents sickened by the
massacre. So they, too, found video games, Hollywood, and the nexus formed between them
in films like the Lara Croft Tomb Raider and Resident Evil franchises easy to blame. Mean-
while, the killing spree the summer before in a Colorado theater showing the premier of the
last in the Batman movie trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises (2012), by a lone gunman with fiery
orange, apparently Joker-inspired hair, lingered in the nation’s consciousness.
A horrific crime and the killer’s mimicry of Batman’s nemesis from the trilogy’s sec-
ond installment, The Dark Knight (2008), seemed to prove a cause-and-effect relationship
between screen violence and real violence despite the anti-gun reputation of Batman himself.
The massacre of moviegoers occurred at the opening of a frightening, apocalyptic film but
one also featuring a superhero openly scornful of guns and distinguished from his enemies
by an adamant refusal to murder, a complicated irony lost on politicians eager to denounce
Hollywood for political gain. Warner Bros. studio acknowledged if not complicity at least
the centrality of its place in the debate by suspending publicity for the movie and pulling
from theaters a trailer for a future release, Gangster Squad (2013), which depicts four men
shooting up a movie theater. The trilogy’s director also felt compelled to issue a statement:
“The movie theater is my home, and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and
hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me.”25 In the wake of the
9/11 terrorist attacks and after the Newtown shootings, the industry responded also by alter-
ing or delaying release of certain content. During the 2012 presidential campaign and just
after the election when the film was released, the topics of leaked classified information,
national security, torture, and the events depicted or implied in Zero Dark Thirty (2012),
including the question of who deserved the most credit for bringing down Osama bin Laden,
also prompted heated political debate.
Although the content of American movies is a continuing source of public debate, in the
case of Senator Lieberman’s campaign the issue was scarcely begging for comment. Instead,
it appeared that the attacks were part of a conscious effort by Lieberman and presidential
candidate Al Gore to give themselves a “hard moral edge” and distance themselves from the
publicly perceived moral lapses of President Clinton. In fact, such attacks are rarely part of
a serious policy agenda, and both parties use the film industry as a whipping boy to impress
that part of the electorate that responds to this sort of moral indignation. Although currently
most in Hollywood appear to lean Democratic, it was not always so, and both parties accept
millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the entertainment industry. Serious gov-
ernment intervention into filmmaking seems unlikely in the near term, if ever.
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Political Involvement by Hollywood Celebrities and the Film Industry
An obvious and apparently growing phenomenon that further blurs the line between film
and politics is the enlistment of various members of the moviemaking industry into politi-
cal campaigns and causes. Such involvement can run the gamut of what political scientists
consider “political participation,” ranging from making donations to campaigns and politi-
cal organizations to actually running for (and holding) political office. (We discuss the latter
case in a separate subsection.)
For many years, the actor who perhaps most exemplified a political image to many Amer-
icans was John Wayne. Most of his preeminence as a political icon stems from his films,
many of which he chose and altered to promulgate his political views. But Wayne was also
an activist. In 1948 (amid the hoopla of the HUAC hearings on Hollywood), Wayne became
president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a group
that had helped create the Red Scare by inviting HUAC to investigate Hollywood. In the
1960s, Wayne joined the infamous right-wing John Birch Society, a group that claimed that
the U.S. government was secretly run by Communists. He publicly endorsed a number of
conservative Republican candidates and over time became a symbol of that aspect of Ameri-
can political life.26 Wayne’s status as a political symbol is inextricable from his activities as
a political participant.
Flashing forward several decades, we see that Hollywood celebrities have gradually
become de rigueur fixtures on the American political scene, visible and vocal participants
in all types of political causes and campaigns. Bill Clinton’s campaigns fueled the practice
and gained notoriety for including the financial and in-kind support of Steven Spielberg,
Barbra Streisand, Alec Baldwin, and a host of other Hollywood figures. Democrats have
continued to enjoy the support of top actors with fund-raisers and public endorsements. Both
of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns attracted an array of celebrities, including Oprah
Winfrey, George Clooney, Chris Rock, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Tyler Perry, Tom Hanks,
Anne Hathaway, and Spike Lee. Eva Longoria was national co-chair for President Obama’s
reelection campaign.
In 2008, comedian Sarah Silverman (Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic, 2005) filmed “The
Great Schlep” ad to encourage young people to “schlep” their grandparents to the polls, rec-
ognizing that older generations were skeptical about the first black presidential contender:
“Yes, Barack Hussein Obama is a super-fucking-shitty name, but you’d think that somebody
named Manischewitz Gooberman might understand that.” In 2012, directly addressing young
women voters, writer-director-actress Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture, 2010) made “Your
First Time,” using her trademark sexual honesty in a pun to sell Obama’s record on women’s
rights to first-time voters: “Your first time shouldn’t be with just anybody, you wanna do it
with a great guy . . . someone who really cares about and understands women.” In his 2012
ad, “Wake the Fuck Up,” Samuel L. Jackson traded on his association with vulgar language
to reenergize young voters whose previous support for Obama seemed to wane the second
time around. While the effect of these ads on moving votes remains unknown, that Obama
won both elections suggests these commercials effectively targeted voters receptive to their
Hollywood-infused messages and at a minimum did not go unrewarded.
Republican presidential nominee John McCain responded by trying to turn Obama’s pop-
ularity into a liability and make celebrity a dirty word. Calling Obama the world’s “biggest
celebrity” while juxtaposing images of him with pictures of scandal-plagued celebrities like
74
Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, the longtime senator questioned the relative newcomer’s
preparation and seriousness to lead the country. Stalwart Hollywood Republicans backing
Mitt Romney in 2012 included Jon Voigt, Robert Duval, Chuck Norris, Kelsey Grammer,
Scott Baio, and adult film star Jenna Jameson.
In the 2000 contest, both parties received contributions in the millions of dollars from the
film and entertainment industries. The Democratic Party has consistently received signifi-
cantly more donations from the film industry specifically. In eight national elections between
1990 and 2004, Democratic candidates received 87 percent of the more than $46 million in
total contributions from the “movie production” industry.27 According to another account,
before the 2004 election cycle had begun, “Hollywood had given the Democratic Party
contributions roughly equivalent to what Republicans received from their friends in the oil
and gas industries.”28 In 2012, the president outraised Romney in Hollywood by 16-to-1
with close to 200 famous donors writing checks to Obama compared to fourteen giving
to Romney. The number of Hollywood elite campaign contributions increased so much in
the 2012 cycle that the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) now includes separate lists of
celebrities. In that spirit, the CRP reported that forty-one Hollywood “bundlers,” or people
who gather contributions from others and bundle them into one lump sum, swelled Obama’s
campaign coffers by $11.4 million, “with nothing in this category reported for the Romney
campaign.”29
Despite this imbalance, Republicans in 2012 did have on their side a secret celebrity
weapon. Following in John Wayne’s footsteps as western movie icon turned prominent
political supporter of conservative views, Clint Eastwood caused a stir with a provocative
appearance at the 2012 Republican National Convention on presidential candidate Mitt
Romney’s behalf. Thinking Eastwood’s appearance a publicity coup, convention organiz-
ers tried to keep his role a secret to build viewer anticipation for a mystery guest. Giddy
media reports leaked the news that “Dirty Harry” would appear, playing up Eastwood’s
1970s–1980s incarnation as a detective fed up with a justice system he thinks has tied his
hands in order to protect the civil rights of accused criminals at the expense of their victims.
Eastwood’s speech earned mixed reviews at best for its premise that the aging actor was
speaking, at times quite crudely, to an invisible President Obama represented by an empty
chair. While Republicans hoped for a shot in the arm by an American film legend with a
reputation as an “enforcer” (The Enforcer, 1976) of direct justice and old-school standards
of masculinity, what they got was an unintentional parody of their most prominent standard-
bearers: old, white, out-of-touch men.
Of course, other political causes boasted their stars and benefactors, such as the National
Rifle Association (actor Charlton Heston served as its president from 1998 to 2003) and the
National Abortion Rights Action League (actress Cybil Shepherd is a frequent spokesper-
son). The 2004 campaign reprised, and the 2008 and 2012 campaigns outdid, the star-studded
2000 campaign, although election-law changes lowered the amount of money individuals
could contribute.
Campaign financing dynamics changed after the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election
Commission Supreme Court ruling that campaign finance laws intended to limit influence-
peddling by capping the independent expenditures of unions and corporations to political
action committees (PACs) violated First Amendment rights to freedom of speech. In other
words, corporations and unions could no longer be prohibited from paying for political
ads made by groups separate from candidate campaigns. Direct contributions to particular
75
candidate campaigns, however, remained regulated. The court wrote, “If the First Amend-
ment has any force it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of
citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.” This ruling resolved earlier conflicting
court precedents by siding with a decision that had forbidden “speech restrictions based
on the speaker’s corporate identity.” To reach this conclusion, the Supreme Court, having
previously equated money with speech, decided that corporations and unions were nothing
more than “associations of citizens” and therefore could not have their speech “disfavored”
or singled out by restrictions on expenditures to PACs. The court also decided that this type
of corporate or union political speech was no likelier to corrupt elected officials than that
already guaranteed to individuals. The dissenting opinion said the majority had rejected “the
common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations
from undermining self-government since the founding.”30
The free speech at issue in Citizens United was a political film, a documentary extremely crit-
ical of Hillary Clinton’s work as senator and first lady. Anticipating that Clinton would win the
2008 Democratic nomination for president, the conservative nonprofit organization Citizens
United produced the film. Because of its political bent and because the organization planned
to purchase airtime on cable television, the Federal Election Commission determined that
Hillary: The Movie (2008) was an “electioneering communication” and so subject to the rules
governing political ads, including restrictions on their sources of funding. The case landed in
the nation’s highest court, and the divisive ruling that decided it opened the floodgates on the
amount of cash poured into elections. Unless Congress passes different legislation that a differ-
ent Supreme Court accepts as constitutional, Citizens United is tantamount to law.
The 2012 election involved the largest amount of campaign money spent in history. The
Center for Public Integrity determined that as a direct result of Citizens United, super PACs
and nonprofit groups dumped $1 billion more into the election process than they would
have without the ruling. Most of the money went to negative attack ads.31 It is not certain,
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appears in the documentary Hillary: The Movie (2008),
the political expression at issue in the Supreme Court campaign finance case known as Citizens
United.
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Co-stars Zach Galifianakis and Will Ferrell attend The Campaign press conference on July 17, 2012,
at The Grove in Los Angeles. (Photo by JB Lacroix/Wire-Image)
however, how Citizens United affected Hollywood’s involvement in the 2012 election or
even the election outcome overall. For one thing, Citizens United allowed groups and indi-
viduals to donate to nonprofit organizations anonymously. For another, more money ended
up in the tills of conservative nonprofits like Crossroads GPS and Americans for Prosperity
than in liberal or Democratic hands, yet Republicans lost the presidential election and sev-
eral other key races. One likely effect will be continued cynicism toward electoral politics
by the voting, and viewing, public, as expressed in Hollywood films as disparate as Ides of
March (2011) and The Campaign (2012).
The overall impact of Hollywood money and celebrity endorsements in election cam-
paigns and whether it is of lasting political import are difficult to ascertain. It certainly
further frays the line between Hollywood imagination and political reality. The motives of
Hollywood celebrities are probably the same as those of other elites—they can use their sta-
tus to pursue their political goals much more easily than average citizens. They also may be
attracted to particular candidates and perhaps aspire to be regarded as serious public figures,
as the personal magnetism of Barack Obama and the political activism of various celebrities
respectively suggest. Politicians and political organizations presumably value celebrities for
the fund-raising cachet they bring to campaigns and, perhaps, the glamour. (As the cliché
goes, “Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.”) Michael Nelson sees an additional rea-
son to suspect that the affinity will continue:
Entertainers and politicians face similar challenges. Whether on screen or on the hustings,
they must woo the public and adjust to changes in style and taste. Since the 1980s, the
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distinction [between the public and private lives of politicians] no longer has prevailed in
media coverage of politics. In almost all aspects of their careers, therefore, celebrities and
politicians can not only help each other, but can also empathize with each other in a way
that few outsiders can.32
Actors as Politicians, Politicians as Actors
Although much of interest in the subject of film and politics concerns how actors portray
politicians, the logical conclusion of the trend of celebrity involvement in politics is actors
actually becoming politicians. Before Ronald Reagan’s improbable rise from actor to gov-
ernor of California to president, this scenario seemed unlikely. But the electability of actors
(and other celebrities, such as professional wrestler and Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura)
is no longer at question nor even novel. Nevertheless, the 2004 election of action-film actor
Arnold Schwarzenegger to the governorship of California seemed to transfix the nation
anew.
As we have seen, the distinction between the roles of actors and politicians has dimin-
ished in recent decades. Hastened by the overwhelming importance of the mass media—and
particularly television—politicians increasingly seem to need to be able to demonstrate their
acting ability in order to succeed. That professional actors would thrive at this challenge is
hardly surprising.
When George H.W. Bush said to Congress, “Read my lips,” he was consciously invok-
ing the tough-guy image of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. His son, George W. Bush, made
similar use of cinematic tough-guy talk when he declared that the sponsors of terrorism
against the United States were “wanted dead or alive,” and we have referred to his cinematic
landing on an aircraft carrier. “Bring ’em on,” Bush declared, when asked about guerrilla
attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq in 2003. But these incidents seem, on the whole, to be isolated
and staged. Neither Bush is particularly convincing as an actor, it would seem, although the
extent to which politicians’ worldviews are derived from the world of movies is open to
question. Such free appeal to movie lines and imagery may reflect the increasing dominance
of pop culture in the United States, according to Allen Metcalf: “We’re all so used to pop
culture” that when Bush talks like a movie hero, “we get the message that he’s serious, he’s
being tough.”33
One movie reference mistake suggested how seriously Americans take movies and presi-
dents’ relationship to them, practically in that order. In 2013, when the press asked President
Obama what he was doing to prevent the impending automatic budget cuts called “seques-
tration,” he replied, “I’m not a dictator; I can’t use a ‘Jedi mind meld’ to force Republicans’
hands.” The media pounced on his unintentional mash-up of Star Wars with Star Trek and
the result was not pretty for the president nor, it could be said, for the nation. His pop culture
gaffe briefly overtook the topic of what effects the automatic cuts in government spending
would have on the economy. The media’s eagerness to make hay out of Obama’s mistake
signaled their apparent weariness at covering the complexity of the original issue at hand.
Addressing the Values Voters Summit in Washington, DC, during the fall 2013 federal gov-
ernment shutdown, Texas senator Ted Cruz invoked a more obscure film fact when he used
criminal mastermind Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects (1995) to vaguely associate the
left with the anti-Christ while suggesting that the Republicans responsible for the shutdown
were the real victims of the moment: “You know the movie The Usual Suspects? When they
78
say, ‘The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.’
The greatest trick the left ever played is to convince conservatives we cannot win.”34 And
so it seems likely that political use of cinematic words and imagery—intentional quotes and
slip-ups both—will only increase in the coming decades.
What is perhaps even more significant is the prospect of politicians behaving like actors,
in the sense of emulating movie roles and concepts drawn from cinematic fiction. Former
House Speaker Newt Gingrich refers often to the influence of John Wayne generally and
his role as Sgt. Stryker in the quintessential World War II combat film, Sands of Iwo Jima
(1949), specifically on Gingrich’s political persona. In adolescence he emulated Stryker’s
stride and as Speaker of the House claimed, “That was the formative movie in my life.”35
Garry Wills writes of the profound impact movies, more so than scholarship, have had on the
former history professor Gingrich:
If you can get a novel in its movie form, all the better. Gingrich draws lessons from The
Last of the Mohicans with Daniel Day Lewis as Natty Bumppo (and is under the miscon-
ception that it is faithful to the novel). He urges students to learn their history from Sunrise
at Campobello (1960) or Young Lincoln in Illinois “with Raymond Massey as Lincoln” (he
means Abe Lincoln in Illinois, 1940—Young Mr. Lincoln, 1939, has Henry Fonda). Gin-
grich’s belief in the power of movies to solve life’s problems came out when he suggested
the baseball strike could be settled by getting both sides together to watch Field of Dreams,
just as he promoted orphanages by telling people to see Spencer Tracy in Boys Town.36
This type of cinematic “learning,” though largely unexplored by political scientists and film
scholars, clearly represents an important aspect of the politics–film nexus.
Michael Rogin argues that Ronald Reagan’s entire presidency was a kind of reenactment
of his movie roles.37 Analyzing Reagan’s ascent from actor to the presidency, Rogin identi-
fies a number of instances when Reagan drew from Hollywood movies for key phrases as
well as conceptual foundations for his policies:
• During a 1980 Republican presidential debate, Reagan uttered, “I am paying for this
microphone, Mr. Green.” The line was spoken by Spencer Tracy as a fictional presiden-
tial candidate in the film State of the Union (1948).
• During a 1983 Congressional Medal of Honor ceremony, Reagan recounted a story of
a World War II bomber pilot who was posthumously honored with the Congressional
Medal for choosing to die aboard his crippled plane rather than abandon a wounded
crew member. It was soon discovered that the hero in question was drawn from the
1944 war movie A Wing and a Prayer. (When questioned on the matter, Reagan’s press
secretary Larry Speakes responded, “If you tell the same story five times, it’s true.”)38
• Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative system (commonly known as “Star Wars,” but
not inspired by that film) closely resembled the “inertia projector,” a defense system
that “stops and destroys anything that moves” in Murder in the Air (1940), which fea-
tures a secret agent played by Reagan.
In Rogin’s view, Reagan’s entire worldview was etched by simplistic Hollywood movies
that—among other things—presented an evil foe and an always virtuous America. The valid-
ity of his specific connections between movies and Reagan’s words and actions as president
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is sometimes questionable, but Rogin’s central argument about the power of film to transfix
political elites must be taken seriously. It is consistent with the view of political scientists
James Combs and Sara Combs that “the motion picture must be accorded a central role in
the expansion of popular learning.”39 If even only marginally valid, Rogin’s thesis casts the
significance of understanding the political content of film to an even higher level.
Reagan is not the only president to be linked to Hollywood. Ian Scott’s analysis of the
Clinton presidency suggests a similar blur between the silver screen and the White House. In
Scott’s view, Clinton’s reputed obsession with spin control stemmed directly from his “dan-
gerous obsession with movie culture.”40 Scott interprets Clinton’s facility and fascination
with Hollywood personalities as a direct contributor to his actions as president. Scott also
traces the chicken-and-egg relationship between the early presidential aspirations of Barack
Obama and the fictional television show about the White House created by political screen-
writer Aaron Sorkin, West Wing (1999–2006). He quotes e-mail from Obama’s right-hand
man, David Axelrod, to West Wing staff writer Elie Attie: “We’re living your scripts.” On the
other end, witnessing Obama rock the house in his national debut at the 2004 Democratic
National Convention convinced Attie to use Obama’s tone, style, and rhetoric as template
for the show’s Latino presidential aspirant. As he puts it, “After that convention speech,
Obama’s life changed. . . . He was more than a candidate seeking votes; people were seeking
him. Some of Santos’s celebrity aura came from that.” Scott sums up the art–reality nesting
egg this way: “The fact that one drew inspiration from the other shows the reality of the
Hollywood/entertainment/Washington nexus in the early twenty-first century.”41
Action hero Schwarzenegger was not loath to borrow from his movie roles on the cam-
paign trail. He shouted “Hasta la vista, car tax!” (paraphrasing a line from Terminator 2:
Judgment Day, 1991) as a crane dropped a weight onto a car to illustrate his promise to cut
the unpopular tax. After his election in 2003, his campaign to pass a pair of citizen initiatives
was to resemble “a Hollywood production, a neat blending of show business and politics.”
Schwarzenegger believes that acting and political leadership overlap significantly: “In act-
ing what is important is that it’s organic . . . and that you connect to the people so they can
look at the scene and buy in. But it’s the same here [in government]. You have to connect
with the people, and the more organic you are . . . that’s what then makes people buy in.”42
Out of office, Schwarzenegger came full circle in 2011 with plans for a 3-D movie fran-
chise built around his cartoon alter ego, the “Governator,” a campaign-era nickname fusing
the fiction of his Terminator franchise with his ambition to be elected governor. The online
open source dictionary of slang “Urban Dictionary” lists several definitions for the name,
including two that invoke another Schwarzenegger film also uncannily apt to his politi-
cal moment, Total Recall (1990) (remade with Colin Ferrell in 2012): “Half governor, half
cyborg, a hyper-alloy combat chassis surrounded by living tissue, sent back by Skynet to
become the governor of California,” and “the bodybuilder/actor-turned-38th Governor of
California, who in a recall election terminated the governorship of Gray Davis.” At a 2011
press conference convened to announce the marketing strategy for the film and related mer-
chandise, Schwarzenegger claimed a number of celebrities were interested in participating in
The Governator, from actors “to politicians, tycoons and business men.”43 His postpolitical
career enjoys the opportunism presented by the same blending of entertainment, political,
and corporate elites that fueled his political ascension to an office that then came to embody
the same.
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While earning their game-changing political clout in different times with contrast-
ing character traits, and although it could be argued that Governor Schwarzenegger is a
postmodern parody of President Reagan’s earnest belief in movie ethics and their power
to convince, both actors translated film genre iconography into an expressed ideology that
resonated with a dominant voting bloc. Reagan parlayed the shorthand of western settings,
horseback rides, axe-swings, and sunsets into a legible set of old-fashioned values applied
to a range of issues, including social justice and gender norms, appreciated by most 1980s
voters beleaguered by the dispiriting, paranoid decade just ended. Schwarzenegger turned
his sci-fi-gleaming yet muscle-bound cinematic body into a symbol for government effi-
ciency and macho can-do spunk, presenting himself not as the original, mindless death
machine of The Terminator (1984) but as the sequels’ good-guy man of action to replace
or “recall” the perceived ineffectualness of the elected governor, Grey Davis, whose very
name and slim physical build suggested weak tea indeed. As if lifted from any one of several
Schwarzenegger movies, California, in essence, went back in time to do over the election
and rejigger the outcome to hand the action hero his happy ending along with their hopes for
renewed, effective government.
Propaganda and the Military Uses of Film
Another way that politics and film interact is through the creation of propaganda: “material
disseminated by the advocates or opponents of a doctrine or cause.” As media of all kinds are
routinely used to persuade the public, propaganda is a “dominant form of communication,”
according to Combs and Combs.44 We routinely sift through all kinds of propaganda every
day, much of it in the form of advertising. Movies are particularly valuable as vehicles for
propaganda because “much of the movie experience is play . . . more fun than work,” thereby
making movie audiences vulnerable to subtle forms of persuasion embedded in films.45
However, as Combs and Combs observe, “In some broad sense, all films have propa-
ganda value, the potential to be used, or taken, as a message that should be propagated.”46
This statement is similar to our earlier contention that all movies must be considered in some
way political, so we need to have a means of differentiating films that represent propaganda
in its purest form from everyday, run-of-the-mill entertainment. For the purposes of this
discussion, we will confine our focus to government-created, -sponsored, or -enabled films
that seek to persuade the public in favor of governmental causes, specifically support for
war-making efforts.
Combs and Combs trace the earliest propaganda to the Spanish-American War of 1898,
when the War Department helped filmmakers film battle action at Fort Meade, Maryland, that
glorified the American cause. Before America’s entry into World War I, J. Stuart Blackton
produced a film paradoxically titled The Battle Cry of Peace (1915), which advocated military
preparedness and featured the “nefarious traits” that would characterize Germans through-
out the century. Theodore Roosevelt promoted the movie, and 2,500 actual marines were
allocated to the set. A competing, pro-pacificist film, Civilization (1916), which was openly
promoted by President Woodrow Wilson, quickly followed.
Once America entered the war, the Committee on Public Information (CPI) was formed
with the mission of selling the war to the American public. The CPI and its director, George
Creel, found that the movie industry was a willing ally in this effort; it produced trailers to
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sell war bonds, created “documentary” newsreels, and let its major stars tour the country in
support of the war. Combs and Combs note that “the movies had proven to be powerful stuff,
and now that power was available to anyone who wanted to propagate a social or political
message.”47
World War II required another movie to sell the American public on the need for war. The
Office of War Information, the Film Liaison Office, and various other government entities
forged an alliance with the film industry’s War Activities Committee. Combs and Combs
write that “Washington did not merely want Hollywood to confirm, it also wanted the crea-
tive genius of the producers, writers, technicians, and directors.”48 Most prominently, director
Frank Capra produced a series of motivational films for soldiers titled Why We Fight, spon-
sored by the War Department. The films, directed by Capra and other Hollywood stalwarts
such as John Huston and John Ford, were so successful that President Franklin D. Roosevelt
ordered them to be shown to civilian groups, and millions of Americans viewed them.
The Cold War opened up new avenues of government-sponsored propagandistic film-
making. Combs and Combs note that “studios making war films could count on the
assistance and cooperation of the military if they had a measure of script approval that
would propagate a positive image.”49 Filmmakers who met this assurance were allowed
access to military bases and other forms of what amounted to subsidization of propaganda
films by the U.S. military. Many of these films, such as Strategic Air Command (1955)
and Take the High Ground (1953), emphasized the need for “preparedness” in the face of
the Communist threat.
The cozy relationship between filmmakers and the military fizzled somewhat with the
onset of the Vietnam War (and later the Gulf War), with popular films critical of the war
like Apocalypse Now (1979) and Platoon (1986) receiving no military assistance at all. This
disruption set the stage for the generally more confrontational tone of the war films of the
era—with the notable exception of John Wayne’s throwback film, the Pentagon-subsidized
The Green Berets (1968)—discussed in later chapters. But the propaganda role served by
movies, bolstered by military assistance to filmmakers, continued, as films like Top Gun
(1986) and Annapolis (2006) served as virtual recruitment films. Released in the midst of
the Reagan era’s rekindled emphasis on Cold War politics, Top Gun in particular marked a
renewed interest in the mutual benefits a close relationship between the Film Liaison Office
and Hollywood could yield. The film’s producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, relied heavily on Pen-
tagon assistance and the military set up recruitment tables outside theaters playing the Tom
Cruise jet pilot hit. At the same time, some films faced a form of censorship when the mili-
tary refused to provide them with such assistance. Said director Oliver Stone, who was
refused military assistance for his Vietnam War-era films, “They make prostitutes of us all
because they want us to sell out to their point of view.”50
An internal military memo concerning production of the popular spy film Clear and Pre-
sent Danger (1994) expresses the situation even more explicitly:
Perhaps the biggest hurdle the public service affairs officers had to overcome was the film-
makers’ sense of our meddling in their product and our sense that they weren’t taking us
seriously. There was a tension, almost until the day filming began, which manifested itself
in our comments which went unanswered in subsequent drafts of the script. When the film-
makers realized that unless the services were satisfied with the script, approval [from the
military] would not be granted, the changes were finally made.51
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In 2002, the Marine Corps “convinced” the producer of the Nicholas Cage film Windtalk-
ers to delete a historically accurate scene in which a Marine pries gold teeth from the mouth
of a dead Japanese soldier.52 Not all filmmakers have been willing to airbrush facts to suit the
Pentagon’s propaganda demands. The producers of Thirteen Days (2000), a dramatization of
the Cuban missile crisis with Kevin Costner as President Kennedy, forfeited support when
the military judged that key generals were “depicted in a negative and inauthentic way as
unintelligent and bellicose.” The same military office also demanded removal of a scene of a
U2 reconnaissance pilot shot down and killed over Cuba, saying it never happened. Backed
by secret recordings Kennedy made of meetings with the generals in question as well as a
letter of condolence Kennedy sent the pilot’s widow, the film’s producers stuck by the his-
torical accuracy of their version.53

The Air Force Entertainment Liaison Office green-lights films for assistance and describes
their clients as those who “rely upon our services for accurate and plausible Air Force depic-
tions.”54 Among those services are script research, wardrobe and dialogue consultation,
on-location filming at various U.S. bases, and on-set technical advice. The liaison office
has provided a variety of these services to films ranging from the first post-9/11 story about
that devastating day’s events and the only plane not to reach its target, United 93 (2006), to
different installments in the science fiction action franchises Terminator (2003, 2009), Iron
Man (2008, 2010), and Transformers (2007, 2009). Prospective studio clients must submit
material to the liaison office early in the “development or concept phase,” and the office’s
services are contingent upon “accurate depictions of the Air Force” and “productions in the
overall interest of the Department of Defense or the nation.”55 The Air Force thus defines
what is in the overall interest of the nation as what is acceptable to the Defense Department
and uses words like “plausible” and “accurate” as catchall terms for reasons to deny a stu-
dio access and assistance as if these were transparent or common-sense standards to apply
across the board. What criteria the liaison office actually uses to determine whether a movie
is in the nation’s interests are unspecified, yet its website reassures: “If your project will
increase the public’s awareness of the capabilities, history or mission of the Air Force, we
are ready to help.”56 Thus, the distinction between censorship and propaganda is sometimes
blurred. It is difficult to imagine cooperation between government and filmmakers without
some compromise of the purposes and products of the latter. Such a pattern seems most
likely to occur in the context of war, military, and espionage films, but can certainly spill
over into films about crime, terrorism, and other politically sensitive issues.
Recent changes to the law governing official propaganda distribution enhance the pos-
sibility for collusion between Hollywood and the government. At the end of World War II
and the start of the Cold War, the State Department decided the time had come to coun-
ter rampant anti-American propaganda abroad. At the same time, lawmakers recalled the
virulent effects of the massive Nazi propaganda machine and did not want any U.S. gov-
ernment agency to be used to propagandize American citizens as Hitler had the Germans.
Thus the U.S. Information and Education Act of 1948, more frequently referred to as the
Smith-Mundt Act, allowed the U.S. State Department to engage in the production and dis-
semination of American propaganda abroad to influence foreign populations but strictly
forbade any distribution “within the United States, its territories or possessions.”57 The act
also stressed the value of the government using private business in these efforts. The law
has meant that before any film produced by the United States Information Agency can be
screened domestically, Congress must pass a waiver. (The first such film Congress allowed
83
a domestic screening was the 1965 documentary about John F. Kennedy, Years of Light-
ning, Day of Drums.)58
Moving to change the law in the 1970s, Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas declared
that propaganda outlets like the radio broadcaster Voice of America “should be given the
opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics.”59 The law did
not undergo significant reform, however, until 2013, when the Smith-Mundt Moderniza-
tion Act removed the prohibition against the release of State Department and Broadcasting
Board of Governors programming within the United States.60 While it is not yet clear what
effect this repeal will have, already some critics are bracing for an unwelcome effect on
filmmaking.
In an open letter to director Kathryn Bigelow, author Naomi Wolf accuses the Zero Dark
Thirty director of justifying the use of torture to capture Osama bin Laden and speculates
that this “amoral compromising” resulted from an unspecified unseemly financial relation-
ship. Calling Bigelow a “Leni Riefenstahl-like propagandist of torture,” Wolf writes:
It is very hard to get a film without a pro-military message, such as The Hurt Locker,
funded and financed. But according to sources in the film industry, the more pro-military
your message is, the more kinds of help you currently can get. . . . It seems implausible
that [Zero Dark Thirty] scenes such as those involving two top-secret, futuristic helicopters
could be made without Pentagon help, for example. If the film received that kind of undis-
closed, in-kind support from the defense department, then that would free up millions of
dollars for the gigantic ad campaign that a film like this needs to compete to win audience.61
Without proving that Bigelow did indeed carry water for the military in Zero Dark Thirty,
Wolf predicts that the effect of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act will be “even more overt
corruption of Hollywood.”62 Wolf’s attack on the amendment from the political left echoes
criticisms from the right. A Conservative News Central headline blasts, “Obama Launches
Massive Domestic Propaganda Push With Government Run News,” and conspiracy theorist
Alex Jones on InfoWars.Com warns, “The CIA will now propagandize Americans.”63 The
actual effect on Hollywood filmmaking remains for filmmakers to decide and critics and
audiences to discern.
Centralization of the Film Industry
A final way that the external world may affect movies is the organization of how they are
produced, distributed, and shown. The salient pattern in this respect is the centralization
and corporatization of the film industry. In the studio system days of Hollywood’s classical
era, the “big eight” studio companies controlled every aspect of film production, distribu-
tion, and exhibition, with three of them (Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and United
Artists) owning smaller theater chains than the five comprehensively vertically integrated
companies (20th Century Fox, Lowe’s Incorporated/MGM, Paramount Pictures, RKO
Radio Pictures, and Warner Bros.). In 1948, antitrust court rulings deemed the studio system
a monopoly and broke it up, leading to a reconfigured business model horizontally organized
around production, distribution, and exhibition. Today the “big six” major studios are owned
by global media conglomerates. Sony owns Columbia Pictures, TimeWarner owns Warner
Bros. Pictures, the Walt Disney Company owns Walt Disney Pictures, Comcast/General
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Electric owns Universal Pictures, News Corporation owns 20th Century Fox, and Viacom
owns Paramount Pictures. Media conglomerate control extends beyond control of one of the
“big six.” For example, Sony owns the major studio Columbia Pictures, but it also courts
art house filmmakers with its subdivision, Sony Pictures Classics, and owns the distribution
subsidiary called Screen Gems, which invests in genre and other B-picture projects. It also
controls other movie companies and interests, including Tri Star Pictures, Sony Pictures
Animation, Destination Films, Triumph Films, Stage 6 Films, and Affirm Films.64
The same media conglomerates also own significant interests in film distribution, DVD
sales and rentals, theater ownership, ticket sales, and related merchandise. Industry watchers
suggest global conglomerate control has reprised the vertical integration organization of the
old studio system, controlling each stage in the life of a film. TimeWarner offers a case in
point with the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part 1 (2010). Its major studio,
Warner Bros. Pictures, in association with HeyDay Films, produced the film. Warner Bros.
Distribution distributed it. Several TimeWarner companies marketed it: premium cable com-
pany HBO aired a “behind the scenes” special about the making of the film; its worldwide
cable network CNN ran a Larry King Special interviewing the film’s stars at the film’s pre-
mier; Time magazine featured print articles on the film even after its release to promote DVD
sales. Finally TimeWarner exhibited the film to international audiences through its Warner
Bros. International Cinemas chain.65 Vertical integration means monopolistic control by the
big studios can squeeze out independent, smaller-scaled filmmaking, the kind more inclined
to the types of stories associated with political films.
The trend toward fewer firms controlling an increasingly greater proportion of the film
industry is mirrored in the American mass media generally, as these same conglomerates
also have vast holdings in other media, such as cable television, television stations, and
the Internet. The conglomerate Walt Disney Company owns the major studio Walt Disney
Pictures and the ABC television network as well as cable networks like ESPN, the Disney
Channel, and SOAPnet. Its radio interests include Radio Disney and ESPN Radio Network.
Disney’s print media include Juvenile Publishing and Marvel Publishing, and its entertain-
ment holdings include Marvel Entertainment, Pixar, and Mammoth Records; it also owns
Disney theme parks and water parks.66 By one estimate, whereas approximately fifty firms
dominated the mass media in 1983, by 2001 that number had decreased to nine companies,
including those that own the Hollywood studios.67 By 2010 that number had dropped to six.68
The impact of corporate ownership of film production and distribution companies (along
with other mass media) is debatable; however, potential politically sensitive outcomes are
readily identifiable. Perhaps the most frequently stated consequence is the belief that cor-
porate owners, ever mindful of the bottom line, may further skew film production toward
politically safe themes and content. This would effectively constitute corporate censorship
of the entertainment industry.
For many observers, this effect is a fait accompli. Variety editor in chief Peter Bart believes
that corporate ownership of the film industry has changed it “only about 150 percent”:
it’s only in relatively recent years that Hollywood became the playground of multi-national
corporations, which regard movies and TV shows as a minor irritant to their overall activ-
ity. So, it’s become a corporate town. It was not a corporate town 10, 15 years ago. [I]t
affects the decision-making process on movies, because, for example, what big corpora-
tions want most is risk-averse pictures.68
85
Control of the last element, exhibition, through ownership of theaters and theater chains,
also is becoming increasingly centralized. One firm, the Anschutz Corporation, now owns
close to 20 percent of the screens in the United States.70 According to industry observer Jon
Alon Walz, Anschutz and others who are acquiring theaters intend to cash in on digital pro-
jection technology to increase the profitability of owning large numbers of theaters.71
“Digital cinema” includes the production, delivery, and projection of full-length motion
pictures in theaters using digital technology in place of actual celluloid films and reel-to-reel
projection. While one copy of a 35mm film costs upward of $1,500, copies on digital hard
drive cost one-tenth of that with prices falling fast, radically lowering the financial and logis-
tical costs of the second element, distribution.72
As one industry reporter observed, “With digital delivery to theatres, economies of scale
at the 6,000-screen level and above might finally be possible. Freight and projector main-
tenance costs are eliminated, as is the job of film splicer and, for all practical purposes,
projectionist.”73At the end of 2012, 84 percent of American cinema screens had been con-
verted to digital.74 Winston Wheeler Dixon announced, “By the end of 2013, it seems, film
will be gone; like it or not, it’s a digital world.”75 This means that small rural theaters unable
to afford the roughly $100,000 conversion cost will close or have to settle for showing
older or independently distributed films, since all new Hollywood films will require digital
projection. As many as 10 to 20 percent of U.S. theaters may go out of business; other com-
mentators put the number even higher.76 At the same time, big multiplex chains like AMC,
Regal, and other major players have raced to make the switch.77
Such centralized ownership of cinemas could result in limitations on the viewing of polit-
ically controversial films. Anschutz Corporation owner Philip Anschutz, for example, is a
financial patron of conservative causes such as Colorado’s highly publicized Amendment 2,
which would have overturned laws protecting gay rights. Politically motivated theater own-
ers of the magnitude of Anschutz could conceivably limit the exposure of a film whose
political messages they disliked.
Of course, not all movies are produced and distributed by the major studios and their
conglomerate owners. Independent films (i.e., those not produced by the major Holly-
wood studios) are ostensibly the product of a more artistically liberated creative process.
Every year hundreds of these small films are produced and released, many in hopes of re-
creating the success of independent breakout hits like Pulp Fiction (1994) and My Big Fat
Greek Wedding (2002). Yet that business model—truly independent production finds mass
distribution and strong marketing through financial affiliation with major studio—has col-
lapsed into chaos like much else about the indie film scene in the current digital age and
tent-pole era.
If today’s independent film scene is in a state of flux, it was not always thus. In the
1990s, independent productions became increasingly important to the film industry. The
unprecedented success of the independent production and distribution company Miramax
and the Sundance film festival led to a Hollywood spending spree, with studios absorbing
independent companies or launching their own in-house indie or niche-oriented divisions.
(For example, Disney purchased Miramax.) Always on the lookout for a surefire hit, the
industry both bought out the independent studios and sought to compete with them with
their in-house indie divisions. Gary Susman explains how indie transformed from a business
description applying to film companies unaffiliated financially, legally, and artistically with
86
big Hollywood studios to a brand and a filmmaking style largely co-opted and subsequently
abandoned by the industry:
With few truly independent studios left, indie cinema became less about who was raising
the budget and more about a set of artistic criteria. Indie was the kind of movies that won
Oscars—dramas built around characters instead of plots, around ideas instead of feelings,
voices instead of actions, faces instead of special effects. . . . In the past few years, how-
ever, Hollywood decided there was no money in the business of making small arty films,
and the studios shuttered their indie divisions in order to place all their chips on expensive,
formulaic action spectacles.78
Without national distribution of their films, independent filmmakers cannot achieve much
success at the box office. Lack of box office success diminishes the prospect for truly inde-
pendent films to provide a significant counterbalance of political messages.
Nevertheless, independent cinema represents the potential for a true “cinema of outsid-
ers,” not tightly constrained by massive profit seeking or other corporate agendas. That
freedom alone still compels filmmakers, even Hollywood A-listers. George Clooney, for
one, makes foreign television commercials and mainstream films like the Ocean’s Eleven
franchise (2001, 2001, 2004, 2007) so that he can work for scale on smaller films, several of
which, like Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), The Ides of March (2011), and The Monu-
ments Men (2013), were overtly political.
Business challenges persist, but truly small-scale and independent productions continue
to rise to them. Assisted by the low cost of digital distribution to theaters and the multi-
ple platforms available for exhibition, political films have the chance to thrive in the latest
technological environment. Netflix and other Internet digital streaming services, as well
as video-on-demand distribution, all suggest the potential for greater democratization of
filmmaking and film viewing. The future for movies predicted by the head of Vogel Capi-
tal Management—“longterm technology is all digital distribution on the web; streaming or
downloading or whatever”—will yield more viewers for political film projects, too.79
Conclusion
In this chapter, we have sketched the contours of forces external to the movies that have
affected the creation of movies in the United States. It is an incomplete and somewhat arbi-
trary list, but it demonstrates that movies are not created in a political vacuum—they can
be directly and profoundly impacted by the social, political, and economic environment of
their times. Although several of the factors discussed in this chapter would seem to inveigh
against the creation of overtly political if not controversial films, the fact is that such films
continue to be made and viewed.
The stunning commercial success of independent filmmaker Michael Moore’s documentary
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004, discussed in greater detail in Chapter 12) and the widely released 2016:
Obama’s America (2012) demonstrates that overt political content is not necessarily box office
anathema. Even more astonishing were the award-winning box office successes of politically
driven films based on real-life stories in 2012: Lincoln, Argo, and Zero-Dark-Thirty. Part of
their success may have to do with their blending of the documentary qualities of Moore’s film
87
with the creative license allowed fiction narratives even when based on real-life history; these
films exploited the best of both worlds, and audiences rewarded them for it.
Many of these films exemplify the concepts explored here, such as the use of film as
propaganda (anti-government propaganda in the case of Moore, pro-government in the case
of Zero Dark Thirty), the role of corporate distribution, the state of independent filmmaking,
and actors as politicians as well as film as the object of political campaign debate. Whether
over the longer term Fahrenheit 9/11 and the decade of politically motivated films following
it prove to be merely an exception that proves the rule remains to be seen.
Notes
1. Larry May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 279.
2. The Moore quote can be found (among many other sources) at www.countercurrents.org/iraq-
moore10403.htm.
3. The term “Leninist” refers to Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Russian Communist Party, leader
of the Bolshevik Revolution, architect of the Soviet Union, as well as its first head of state.
“Leninism” is the doctrine codified and merged with Karl Marx’s works by Lenin’s successors
to form Marxism-Leninism, the theory foundational to Communist political ideology and party
organization.
4. Richard Taylor, The Politics of the Soviet Cinema 1917–1929 (London: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), p. 26.
5. Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Penguin, 1983), p. 78.
6. Sidney Lumet quoted in Glenn Lovell, “Not a Pretty Picture. . . . Neither Their Makers nor Their
Audiences Are Finding Films Fun,” San Jose Mercury News, August 17, 1985.
7. Navasky, p. 146.
8. Ibid., pp. 79–80.
9. Dorothy Jones, “Communism in the Movies,” in Report on Blacklisting 1: The Movies, ed. John
Cogley (New York: Fund for the Republic, 1956).
10. M. Keith Booker, Film and the American Left: A Research Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1999).
11. Jones, p. 216.
12. Navasky, pp. 300–301.
13. See, for example, Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind
America’s Favorite Movies (New York: Free Press, 2002).
14. Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth Century America
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 4.
15. For more on the National Censorship Board see Nancy J. Rosenbloom, “Before Reform and Reg-
ulation: The Struggle Over Film Censorship in Progressive America 1909–1922,” Film History,
Vol. 1, 1984. For a more succinct account, see http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/pages/2054/
The-National-Board-of-Censorship.html.
16. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America (New York: Random House, 1975), pp. 123–124.
17. A transcript of Hays’ address can be found in the MPPDA Digital Archive, http://mppda.flinders.
edu.au/records/77.
18. To read the Production Code in its entirety, go to ArtsReformation.com, http://www.artsreformation.
com/a001/hays-code.html.
19. Todd David Epps, “Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Expedient Exaggerations’ and the Filming of North by
Northwest in South Dakota,” American Experience, PBS, www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rushmore/
filmmore/ps_nnw.html.
20. Jack Valenti, “How It All Began,” www.mpaa.org/movieratings/about/content.htm.
21. Chris Roth, “Three Decades of Film Censorship . . . Right Before Your Eyes,” The Humanist,
January 2000, http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1374/is_1_60/ai_59021329.
88
22. Ibid.
23. “Lieberman Attacks Hollywood,” BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/879681.stm.
24. “Post Newtown: 70 Percent Say Hollywood Shows Too Much Violence (Poll),” Hollywood
Reporter, 2012, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/post-newtown-school-shooting-70–407372.
25. Christopher Nolan quoted in Michael Cieply, B. Barnes, “Hollywood Struggles for Proper Response
to Shooting,” New York Times, 2012, http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/warner-
brothers-assesses-potential-responses-on-dark-knight/.
26. Gary Wills, John Wayne’s America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).
27. Movie Production: Long-Term Contribution Trends, www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.
asp?Ind=C2400.
28. Eric Alterman, “The Hollywood Campaign,” The Atlantic, August 2004, p. 76. However, every
other major industry favors the Republican Party; see, for example, www.alternet.org/story/
9862/.
29. James Hirsen, “Hollywood Cash: Obama Leads Mitt 16:1,” Newsmax, 2012, www.newsmax.
com/Hirsen/Hollywood-Obama-Romney-donations/2012/10/29/id/461866.
30. Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm’n (No. 08–205), Legal Information Institute, Cornell
University Law School, www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08–205.ZS.html.
31. Reity O’Brien, “Court Opened Door to $933 Million in New Election Spending,” Center for
Public Integrity, 2013, www.publicintegrity.org/2013/01/16/12027/court-opened-door-933-million-
new-election-spending.
32. Nelson, p. 1.
33. Allen Metcalf quoted in Liz Marlantes, “More John Wayne Rhetoric Infuses Politics: Bush’s
‘bring‘em on’ line is indicative of a growing machismo in public discourse,” Christian Science
Monitor, 2003, www.csmonitor.com/2003/0718/p02s02-usfp.html.
34. Ted Cruz quoted in Charlie Spiering, “Beltway Confidential: Ted Cruz Tells Values Voters They ‘Scare
the Living Daylights Out of the Left,” Washington Examiner, 2013, http://washingtonexaminer.
com/ted-cruz-tells-values-voters-they-scare-the-living-daylights-out-of-the-left/article/2537149.
35. Newt Gingrich, quoted by Owen McNally in his review of Garry Wills’s book-length study,
John Wayne’s America, “John Wayne’s Biggest Role: American Cultural Icon,” Hartford
Courant, 1997, http://articles.courant.com/1997-03-30/entertainment/9703250092_1_john-wayne-
s-america-newt-gingrich-garry-wills.
36. Garry Wills, “The Visionary,” New York Review of Books, 1995, http://www.nybooks.com/
articles/archives/1995/mar/23/the-visionary/.
37. Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan: The Movie (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987),
pp. 1–8.
38. Larry Speakes quoted in Susan J. Douglas, “The Enduring Lies of Ronald Reagan,” In These
Times, 2007, http://inthesetimes.com/article/3242/the_enduring_lies_of_ronald_reagan.
39. James Combs and Sara Combs, Film Propaganda and American Politics: An Analysis and Fil-
mography (New York: Garland, 1994), p. 4.
40. Ian Scott, American Politics in Hollywood Film (Chicago: Fitzroy-Dearborn Press, 2000), p. 156.
41. Ian Scott, American Politics in Hollywood Film, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2011), p. 1–2.
42. Connie Bruck, “Supermoderate,” The New Yorker, June 28, 2004, p. 87.
43. Scott Roxborough, “Arnold Schwarzenegger Announces 3D ‘Governator’ Film,” Hollywood
Reporter, April 2011, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/arnold-schwarzenegger-announces-3d-
governator-174327.
44. Combs and Combs, p. 6.
45. Ibid., p. 8.
46. Ibid., p. 34 (emphasis added).
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., p. 69.
49. Ibid., p. 90.
50. Oliver Stone, quoted by David Robb at www.amctv.com/article?CID=1284=1=0=15-EST.
51. Major David Georgi, quoted ibid.
89
52. David L. Robb, Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004) p. 60.
53. Ibid., p. 54.
54. Air Force Entertainment Liaison Office, http://www.airforcehollywood.af.mil/clients/index.asp.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. “USIA: Can the News Abroad Come Home?” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/1987/11/25/
us/washington-talk-the-usia-can-the-news-abroad-come-home.html.
58. Ibid.
59. Elspeth Reeve, “Americans Finally Have Access to American Propaganda,” The Wire, 2013,
http://www.thewire.com/politics/2013/07/americans-finally-have-access-american-propaganda/
67167/.
60. John Hudson, “U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government Made News to Americans,”
Foreign Policy, http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/07/12/us_backs_off_propaganda_
ban_spreads_government_made_news_to_americans.
61. Naomi Wolf, “A Letter to Kathryn Bigelow on Zero Dark Thirty’s Apology for Torture,” The Guard-
ian, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/04/letter-kathryn-bigelow-zero-dark-thirty.
62. Ibid.
63. Rosa Brooks, “The Case for American Propaganda,” Foreign Policy, www.foreignpolicy.com/
articles/2013/07/17/the_case_for_american_propaganda.
64. “The 10 Biggest Hollywood Studios,” The Richest, www.therichest.com/rich-list/the-biggest/
the-10-biggest-hollywood-studios/.
65. “Vertical Integration in Warner Bros.,”AS Media, http://ablmedia.blogspot.com/2012/11/vertical-
integration-in-warner-bros.html.
66. “Who Owns the Media?” FreePress, www.freepress.net/ownership/chart.
67. Peter Bart, “The Monster That Ate Hollywood,” Frontline, PBS, 2001, www.pbs.org/wgbh/
pages/frontline/shows/hollywood/picture/corptown.html.
68. “Facts on Media in America: Did You Know?” Common Cause, www.commoncause.org/site/
pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=4923173. See also, “Media Reform Information Center,” www.
corporations.org/media/. See also, “These 6 Corporations Control 90 Percent of the Media in
America,” Business Insider, www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-
media-in-america-2012–6.
69. Bart.
70. Ray Green, Hollywood Migraine: The Inside Story of a Decade in Film (Dublin, Ireland: Merlin
Publishing, 2000), p. 280.
71. Jon Alon Walz, “The Dealmaker of Denver,” located somewhat obscurely at http://investorshub.
advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=1856253. Originally appearing on BoxOffice
Online, Walz’s article is also referenced in Dion Dennis, “Priming the Pump of War: Toward
a Post-Ethnic, Post-Racial Fascism,” CTHEORY, 2002, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.
aspx?id=353#_edn17. Dennis’s article both exposes and critiques the political ideology implicitly
endorsed by a foundation called For a Better Life and its financial backer and chairman, Phil-
lip Anschutz, also of the Anschutz Corporation and described by Dennis as “one of the world’s
richest men, with far-flung interests in industrial, transportation, agribusiness, entertainment and
telecommunications.” Dennis argues that the billboard messages, television spots, website, and
other media produced by this benign-seeming organization that promotes multi cultural, unob-
jectionable virtues like “hard work” and “loyalty” fit all too neatly into definitions of propaganda
and at base are the function of a postmodern, pro-war fascism implicit to Anschutz’s business
behaviors.
72. Stephanie Garlock, “Why the Switch to Digital Projectors Means the End of the Small Town
Movie Theater,” The Atlantic Cities, www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2013/08/
why-switch-digital-projectors-means-end-small-town-movie-theater/6625/.
73. Walz.
74. Garlock.
90
75. Winston Wheeler-Dixon, “The End of Film Is Really Here,” Frame by Frame, University of
Nebraska Lincoln, http://blog.unl.edu/dixon/tag/film/.
76. “A Bleak Picture for Non-Digital Independent Theaters: Convert or Die,” The Wrap, www.
thewrap.com/movies/article/bleak- picture- non- digital- independent- theaters- convert- or-
die-52346.
77. Garlock.
78. Gary Susman, “The State of Independent Film: 2013,” Moviefone, http://news.moviefone.com/
2013/07/03/state-of-indie-movies-2013/.
79. “What Ails Hollywood,” The Wrap, 2012, www.thewrap.com/movies/article/what-ails-hollywood-
six-experts-weigh-34020.
91

II
Political Films by Decade


The Birth of a Nation (1915)

4
Politics in the Silent Movies

POLITICAL FILMS BY DECADE
Although many movies reflected the social reality of the times, the overtly political films of
the first period of American films—the silent age—were dominated by the work of one film-
maker, D.W. Griffith. In this chapter, we explore the political significance of silent motion
pictures, paying special attention to the epic masterworks of this most influential director.
As we shall see, Griffith exemplifies much of what critics admire and detest in mainstream
films even in the contemporary era.
Because the medium was so new, the moving images of the first films powerfully
affected viewers, their impact heightened by the excitement of live music, usually a piano
banging away or, in classy establishments, an organ or sometimes even an orchestra. The
power of these silent films is hard for us to imagine now, but thanks to the efforts of film
historians, more of these movies can be seen today as they were originally experienced—
with music, appropriate technical equipment, and good prints. Although many silent films
are lost or housed in museums or in private collections with limited access by the pub-
lic, even a cursory study reveals a tradition enlivened by a variety of subjects, styles,
and perspectives perhaps richer than that of later eras. With language no barrier, foreign
films increased this diverse array of films available to early, often immigrant American
audiences.
One- and Two-Reelers
Movies were telling stories, albeit short ones, right from the beginning. In 1896, Alice Guy
Blaché, a French filmmaker who later moved to New Jersey to found her own film company,
directed The Cabbage Fairy, considered by many historians to be the first narrative film.
Limited to the amount of film that would fit on one reel of a projector, most early films, like
Blaché’s or the better known The Great Train Robbery (1903) by American film pioneer
Edwin S. Porter, were less than fifteen minutes long. Predominantly comedies and melodra-
mas, enough of the films of this era survive to give us an idea of what the founders of the
American film industry thought about politics.
The development of the medium at the turn of the century coincided with the Progressive
movement, which dominated American politics into the 1920s. It was a time when crusading
reformers and muckraking journalists attacked political machines and big economic inter-
ests. And filmmakers joined the attack. According to British film historian I.C. Jarvie, these
early days of filmmaking rank with 1930–1934 and 1966–1976 as periods when films were
most critical of American society.1
Films like The Ex-Convict (1905), for example, treated crime as a social problem, showing
how poverty could drive a decent family man outside the law. The Eviction (1907) condemned
avaricious landlords. Bankers and factory owners were also targets of criticism. Workers,
however, enjoyed a rare moment of favor in the film industry. This sympathy—perhaps a
predictable bias in an era of reform—was evident in the treatment of labor–management
conflict in films like D.W. Griffith’s The Iconoclast (1910). Yet sympathy for laborers in
Griffith’s work extends only so far. As Scott Simmons observes, “Only a few of Griffith’s
films are overtly political arguments such as The Iconoclast which traces the route from
‘laziness’ to ‘irrational socialism.’ More often his films are subtle parables against economic
revolt.”2
In the 1920s, sympathetic movie portraits of workers and unions became rare. The
Russian Revolution made Americans paranoid about Communism, but as filmmaking in
96
POLITICS IN THE SILENT MOVIES
Hollywood became an industry, producers were running into labor union problems of their
own. Although a few filmmakers, such as Charlie Chaplin, remained sympathetic to work-
ers, immigrants, and the downtrodden in general, heroic workers became rare at the movies,
and union organizers were more often portrayed as thugs than as saviors.
Attitudes about race and ethnicity were more consistent in the silent era, a time when
America’s white Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority felt threatened by mass immigration.
Movies reflected this fear with ethnic and racial minority characters who were lazy, evil,
and lustful. This was especially true of African-American and Asian characters. Northern
European immigrants were treated more sympathetically, but white ethnic immigrants from
elsewhere often were not, and the depiction of Jews in early films was almost always nega-
tive. The treatment of immigrants and Jews was ironic given that most early film producers
and investors were immigrants and many were Jewish. But instead of showing sympathy for
those of their own background, the early filmmakers seem to have been pandering to their
audiences and denying their roots.
One aspect of their experience as immigrants did shine through, however. For the early
filmmakers, the American dream had come true. Hard work and good fortune had made
them rich and famous. Naturally, they believed in the dream, and their faith showed up in
their movies. But their flag-waving served a political purpose, too. By proving how Ameri-
can they had become, they diverted the kind of criticism that might have led to government
control of the film industry, a threat they were nervous about while the anti-immigrant atti-
tudes were a political force.
Films that portrayed racial minorities and immigrants—and probably most films of the
silent era—were socially reflective movies according to our typology, low in both political
content and intent. A few movies of the silent era were more explicitly political. For exam-
ple, The Politicians (1915) is a relatively pure political movie high on political content and
surely intentionally so. A clear reflection of Progressive attitudes about politics, The Politi-
cians condemned corrupt machines and bosses. This film and others of its time nourished the
popular stereotype of the corrupt politician that would be reiterated throughout the history of
American political film. But the explicitly political film of the silent era that had the great-
est impact was undoubtedly D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), which contained
clear political messages and persuaded America’s intellectual elite that films were more than
entertainment for the masses.
History in Lightning
The Birth of a Nation was almost certainly the most important film of the silent era, both
artistically and politically. Griffith made many movies before his epic, but like most others
at the time, his earlier films were short, and only a few of them—including The Politician’s
Love Story (1909), The Iconoclast (1910), and The Reformers, or the Lost Art of Mind-
ing One’s Own Business (1913)—touched on politics. At over three hours, The Birth of a
Nation was the longest film ever made in America up to that time and the most technically
dazzling, with its creative camera movement and angles, close-ups, long shots, panning and
tracking, crosscutting to simultaneously occurring events, montage editing, iris shots, split
screen, fade-ins and fade-outs, and thoughtful framing and composition. These techniques
came to be considered “cinematic grammar.” They had been used before but never to such
great effect and never in such a way as to involve the audience so deeply. Film historian
97
Kevin Brownlow observes that The Birth of a Nation was the “first feature to be made in the
same fluid way as pictures are made today. It was the most widely seen production of the
time and it had the strongest influence.”3 The Birth of a Nation was ambitious in more than
length and technique. Its content also gave it impact but because it was so substantial and so
controversial. Among the first to make people take movies seriously, Griffith’s epic helped
to give birth to film criticism. So many people saw The Birth of a Nation that the film is
credited with widening the film audience beyond the working class to include the middle
class and intellectuals. Even President Woodrow Wilson saw it—at the first screening of a
movie at the White House—and was said to have declared that it was “like history written
in lightning.”4
Griffith developed his script from The Clansman by his friend and fellow southerner,
Thomas Dixon Jr. (also an acquaintance of President Wilson). From this popular play and
novel of the Civil War and Reconstruction and with Wilson’s own History of the American
People quoted directly in the film’s intertitles—shots on screen with written information
or lines of dialogue between scenes of action in silent films—Griffith shaped a film with a
distinct point of view on the events, politics, and politicians of its period despite depicting
events nearly fifty years in the past.
The story centers on two families: the Southern Camerons and the Northern Stonemans.
Their friendship as the film begins symbolizes a united country, but Griffith’s politics soon
become apparent: the “first seeds of disunion,” one of the intertitles explains, were planted
by the “bringing of the African to this country.” Griffith blames the Civil War and its after-
math on blacks and politicians—with the exception of Abraham Lincoln, who is treated
reverentially. In a carefully composed scene replicating the signing of the proclamation call-
ing up the first troops, Lincoln is seated apart from the other politicians to make the point
that he is different, that his only motive is to do good. When the signing is completed, the
camera lingers on Lincoln, alone and looking haunted by what he has just done. Later, as the
war comes to an end, he argues against those in his cabinet who would be vindictive toward
the South. And when he is assassinated in another meticulously reconstructed sequence, the
intertitle announces, “Our best friend is gone.” Exonerating Lincoln for the South’s troubles,
Griffith only underscores where blame lies in his view—not with either side at battle, nor
with the institution of slavery, but with the Africans.
Griffith’s once-happy families illustrate the consequences of these events when they are
divided by a war that the movie labels “futile and abhorrent.” In the large and lavish battle
sequences, masses of men move through the smoke of firing cannons, falling and dying.
The younger sons of the Northern and Southern families die in each other’s arms, reiterat-
ing Griffith’s point that a hateful war sown by the presence of “the African” has divided a
loving people.
As the fighting ends and Reconstruction begins, The Birth of a Nation follows Dixon’s
story more closely, and its view of history grows more and more distorted and perverse.
The elder Cameron brother returns to his impoverished, grieving family, which becomes the
focus of the film. Senator Stoneman, a representative of the evil, vindictive forces of Recon-
struction, soon follows him. He hopes to build a presidential career by reorganizing the
South with carpetbaggers, black voters, and black politicians. His only motive is personal
ambition, encouraged by his evil, racially embittered mulatto house servant and mistress,
Lydia. In a state legislature, we see Stoneman’s black puppets in power—slovenly, barefoot
98
In lower left, white actor Walter Long in blackface plays renegade freed slave Gus, watching as Flora
(Mae Marsh) jumps to her death rather than let him touch her in The Birth of a Nation (1915).
politicians slouching in their chambers and lustfully eyeing the white women in the galleries.
Senator Stoneman’s immediate goal is to put his protégé, the mulatto Silas Lynch, in charge
of the state, making him “the peer of any white man living.” Stoneman walks with a cane
and a limp, while Lydia and Lynch are physically marked by the indication of their race: with
such physical markers does Griffith telegraph his characters’ intentions and infirm nature.
Stoneman’s ambition for Lynch sours in the end, when Lynch, daring to act as the white
man’s peer, pursues Stoneman’s daughter Elsie, played by Griffith’s longtime collaborator
Lillian Gish. Stoneman applauds Lynch’s desire until the minute Lynch reveals the name of
the object of his affection.
Meanwhile, another daughter precipitates a crisis. Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh), young-
est member of the Southern family, skips into the woods to fetch water—an indication of
how low the family has fallen since the war and an example of Griffith’s frequent depic-
tions of women as children. Diverted by the antics of a squirrel, she wanders too far and
is spotted by Gus, an evil black man and former Union soldier. His eyes bulge with lust
as he follows her through the woods; hers bulge with fear when she spots him. She runs,
he follows, and she throws herself off a precipice rather than submit to the advances she
assumes he is about to make. Meanwhile, her elder brother Ben, unaware of her plight,
takes a solitary walk and wonders what can be done: the carpetbaggers are running the
town, the black legislature has ruled interracial marriage lawful, and the Old South is
falling apart. Then he sees some white children garbed in white sheets frightening black
kids, and an idea is born. He forms a fraternity of white men who wreak vengeance as
they ride through the night in white costumes “made by women,” according to the titles,
and the Ku Klux Klan is born. They raise a fiery cross “of Old Scotland” and consecrate it
with the blood of Flora, who earlier died in Ben’s arms when he stumbled upon her during
99
his walk. Their first victim is Gus. In one version of the film, the Klan castrates him. In
the more commonly screened version, they lynch him and dump his dead body on Silas
Lynch’s front porch.
The climax comes when angry blacks besiege the remaining Camerons in an isolated
cabin and the Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue, just as Silas Lynch is about to have his
way with Elsie Stoneman. In one of the greatest chase sequences in American movies,
Griffith cuts from the galloping Klansmen to Silas and Elsie and then to the cabin. Parallel
editing creates an exciting and emotional sequence as Cameron contemplates killing his
remaining daughter before the marauding blacks can get their hands on her. Two former
Union soldiers assist the Camerons to fend off the mob, the intertitle reiterating just where
the fault for “disunion” lies: “The former enemies of North and South are united again in
common defense of their Aryan birthright.” The scene ends happily: the Klan arrives in
time, everybody is rescued, and Senator Stoneman is chastised for having betrayed not
only his people but also his own daughter through his alliance with blacks. In the film’s
view, North and South, acting in “common defense,” give birth to a white nation unified
by the pain of war.
The Birth of a Nation was a vivid, dramatic rewriting of history that suited a lot of people
at a time when blacks were migrating to the North in great numbers and racism was increas-
ing there. Intentionally or not, Griffith’s film promoted the revival of the Ku Klux Klan
outside the South; the Klan reportedly screened it for recruitment. The son of a Confederate
officer, Griffith was telling the story as Southerners saw it but also in a way viewed sympa-
thetically by Northern elites. It was, of course, a distorted version of even basic facts. For
example, blacks held majorities briefly in only two state legislatures and never had much
genuine power; the real problem for the South was the white carpetbaggers. But Griffith’s
message was regarded so seriously at the time that schoolchildren throughout the country
were taken to his movie to learn history.
Revolting as its message seems now, The Birth of a Nation was the blockbuster of its day.
Grossing a preinflationary $18 million, it was the second-biggest box office success of the
silent era. Immediately perceived as a classic, it was rereleased in 1921, 1922, and 1930.
Some 200 million people saw it before 1946.
This movie was politically significant not only because of its content and popularity but
also because of the contemporary reaction to it. Latter-day viewers recognize its deeply
offensive racism, often dismissing it too readily for that reason and perhaps assuming that
audiences at the time of its original release were oblivious to its bias or approved of it. But
objections to The Birth of a Nation in 1915 were intense. Many reviewers condemned its
racism, including a New York Times critic who called it “inflammatory” and “controversial”
even as he praised it as an “impressive new illustration of the scope of the motion pic-
ture camera.”4 The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
organized a precedent-setting national boycott of the film, probably the first such effort and
one of the most successful. There was a mass demonstration when the film was shown in
Boston, and it was banned in three states and several cities.
Griffith, claiming to be shocked by these objections, denied that he was racist, although
he warned that the NAACP favored interracial marriage. Nevertheless, the widespread criti-
cism of Griffith’s black characters—all of whom are either evil or stupid and, perhaps even
more offensively, most of whom were played by white actors in blackface—forced him to
100
delete some scenes of blacks molesting white women as well as the final scene in which
blacks are deported to Africa. He had already softened the racism of the novel by adding the
“good souls,” the Camerons’ happy and loyal house servants. But these concessions did not
silence the protesters, and their continued objections made other filmmakers skittish about
including blacks in their movies. Except for a few happy servants like the “good souls,”
blacks disappeared from mainstream movies until the 1940s.
The Birth of a Nation also portrayed women in a manner that now seems objectionable.
Griffith’s female characters are doll-like possessions of men; they are treated with reverence,
but they are objects, sexual property that thus stands for national identity. Purity is all-
important; death is preferable to defilement, because if a white woman is defiled, the entire
white South has been tarnished. Their value reduced to a potential birthing vessel, Elsie and
Flora serve as metaphors for political ideology—better a racially “pure” new nation than
a compromised, “mongrel” one. The constructive task for Griffith’s women is making the
Klan robes. The one exception is the lascivious Lydia, Stoneman’s mulatto housekeeper and
mistress, who uses sex to manipulate her man.
Griffith’s portrait of politics and politicians makes use of stereotypes and conventions that
later became entrenched in the movies. He uses, for example, the contrasting stereotypes of
the saintly leader (Lincoln) and the evil politician (Stoneman and Lynch). He also provides
the kind of populist, collective solution that is seen in later political films: instead of seeking
a leader to help them or working through the regular political process, Griffith’s oppressed
white Southerners band together, forming a vigilante group, and take the law into their own
hands.
Griffith’s main concern, however, was rewriting the history of the South and the Civil
War, and he was well aware of the power of his medium. He saw film as an educational tool,
and he set out to use it as such—an intention that was in itself political. The Birth of a Nation
was the first important American political film not only because it reshaped the image of the
South but also because it influenced the way Americans thought about politics—in addition
to its encouragement of racism and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan.
In response to the protests against and “intolerance” of Birth of a Nation by various crit-
ics and audiences, Griffith’s next major project was Intolerance (1916). It consists of four
interwoven stories, set in different historical periods, each about the theme of intolerance. In
the modern story, an evil industrialist pursues a typical Griffith heroine whose sweetheart is
involved with a sleazy political machine. When the lustful capitalist falsely accuses the boy
to get him out of the way, the girl saves him by appealing to the governor. A good politician
and laws that protect the innocent bring to this story a happy ending that stands in contrast to
the suffering of persecuted innocents, including Christ on the cross, in the three other tales.
Made partly to refute the charges of racism provoked by The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance
condemns persecution and criticizes the excesses of capitalism—only to be labeled “Com-
munist” itself.6 But in Orphans of the Storm (1921), a movie about the French Revolution,
Griffith makes it clear that the rule of the masses is not acceptable either. “The tyranny of
kings and nobles is hard to bear,” reads one of the titles, “but the tyranny of the mob under
blood-lusting rulers is intolerable.” All of Griffith’s movies with political themes—from the
one-reelers to The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and beyond—portrayed politics and politi-
cians in much the same way, however. Most politicians were evil and corrupt, motivated by
base self-interest.
101
Beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, African-American schoolteacher Sylvia (Evelyn Preer) defends
herself against white, wealthy Gridlestone (Grant Gorman) in black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux’s
Within Our Gates (1920), a reaction against The Birth of a Nation.
The Twenties: Corruption and Redemption
Most of the 10,000 or so films that were produced during the 1920s were domestic mel-
odramas, westerns, comedies, love stories, costume dramas, or crime movies, but a few
straightforward films about politics were made despite the ominous presence of the Hays
Office (discussed in Chapter 3). The American Film Institute (AFI) index for this period
lists fewer than 200 feature films with political themes, although this may be a conservative
estimate because the index’s definition of politics is narrow.7
One safe political topic showed up early in the decade in a group of films reflecting para-
noia about the revolution in Russia and unionization at home. Put those two fears together
and you have the Bolshevik labor organizers who are the villains in more than a dozen
movies of the time. In Dangerous Hours (1920), for example, Russian agitators infiltrate
American industry, but their efforts to foment a strike are foiled by a good American hero.
Another favorite villain is the political boss. Scheming politicians who indulge in seduc-
tion, graft, and blackmail show up in Manslaughter (1922), By Divine Right (1924), The
Blind Goddess (1926), A Boy in the Streets (1927), Broken Barriers (1928), and Apache
Raiders (1928). In Wild Honey (1922), a political boss scorned by the heroine schemes to
flood a river valley but is foiled when she saves her true love as well as the settlers and the
valley. In Contraband (1925), the town’s leading politician is exposed as a gangster leader,
and in The Vanishing American (1926), corrupt government agents cheat decent Indians.
Unique for the time and even today, Her Honor the Governor (1926) features a female
politician as its central character. Although this film’s heroine is the governor, a political
boss holds the real power in her state. After she blocks a water project that is dear to his
heart, he frames her son for murder. The governor’s son is convicted, but she cannot pardon
him because she herself is impeached. Finally, the truth comes out and all is well, but the
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governor caves in, retires from politics, and remarries, sending the ultimate message that
politics is evil and best avoided by honest people.
Other films of the 1920s, however, see politics as redemptive. What Every Woman Knows
(1921) and The Battling Mason (1924) feature formerly sinful men who run for office to
prove to the women they love that they have reformed. In other movies, heroes and heroines
redeem themselves by exposing crooked political bosses and civic corruption. In One Glori-
ous Day (1924), for instance, a meek professor defeats a gang of political scoundrels after
he is nominated for mayor. In That Old Gang of Mine (1925), a nasty political situation is
cleaned up when the opponents reminisce about their common roots, unite, and overcome a
still nastier enemy. In Law and Order (1928), a boss is transformed into a reformer as a result
of the love of a good woman. All of these movies focus more on politics than those in which
the politician is clearly the villain, and all are relatively positive about the potential value of
political activity. Some even suggest that we can fight city hall and win.
Social Criticism
A few movies of the 1920s clearly offered social criticism without focusing specifically on
politicians and government. Perhaps the most renowned of these is Erich von Stroheim’s
Greed (1923), based on the novel McTeague by Frank Norris. Von Stroheim’s original ver-
sion took over nine hours to tell the grim story of California immigrants and their destruction
by the capitalist system and their own avarice. Filmed in part in Death Valley’s unremitting
heat, Greed’s naturalistic, stripped-down look suggested its grim political critique. Louis B.
Mayer literally knocked von Stroheim to the ground over the film and producer Irving Thal-
berg cut it to three hours. With only fragments of it still in existence, Greed is considered a
lost masterpiece of uncompromising realism. Perhaps tellingly, however, Greed was rejected
by audiences at the time. “Spectators laughed and laughed heartily at the audacity of the
director,” reported the New York Times.8
King Vidor, one of Hollywood’s most prolific directors and one whose perspective was
solidly from the left, made more successful social commentaries. His antiwar film, The Big
Parade (1925), was the biggest box office hit of the silent era. It tells the story of a trio of
young men who succumb to social pressure and enlist in the army during World War I. They
soon learn that war is horrible, and their romantic illusions dissipate. When the survivor of
the trio goes home, he discovers that he has lost his girl to his brother, who stayed behind
to manage the family business. Disillusionment with the war is compounded by disillusion-
ment with the attitudes of the people at home.
The Big Parade was a resolute, but not heavy-handed, antiwar film. Audiences loved
it, partly because it dealt with a war that was still vivid in their memories. The critics also
approved. Calling it “a romance with war as the villain,” the New York Times rated it one of
the ten best films of 1925 (the newspaper’s annual ratings were just starting).9 Disillusion-
ment with World War I was common, and isolationism was the key concept of America’s
foreign policy. Vidor followed The Big Parade with The Crowd in 1928, the story of a young
couple struggling for success to differentiate themselves from “the crowd.” A softer version
of Greed, this film is a tough commentary on urban alienation—at least until the couple
strike it rich in a happy ending that was added over Vidor’s objections. This imposed ending,
like the drastic cutting of Greed, illustrates the conservatism and the power of the studios in
the 1920s.
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Sound and the Depression Mark the End of an Era
Films’ lack of political boldness in the 1920s no doubt reflected the filmmakers’ fear of
censorship, and the Hays Office soon institutionalized that caution. Change came swiftly
at the end of the decade, however, as sound came to the movies and the Great Depression
descended on the nation. In 1929, nine “audible” films ranked among the New York Times’s
top ten movies, yet even in 1930 sound was still enough of a novelty for critics to marvel at
the battle noise in All Quiet on the Western Front.
Sound had a special impact on political movies because it gave words greater power in
relation to images and thus facilitated the expression of more complex stories and ideas,
allowing political films to escape from the realm of pure melodrama and coded gestur-
ing. Directors who were grounded in the silents and whose work was highly visual often
stuck with images to communicate political concepts, but for others, words were liberating.
Words made it easier to express political ideas, but in a way sound was a mixed blessing for
political films. The Big Speech, pounding in the message with a sledgehammer, often spoils
political movies.
While filmmakers were learning to put words and images together, the prosperous 1920s
came to a precipitous end with the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.
Political change was in the wind, and Hollywood soon reflected that change. What followed
was one of the most political periods in the history of American movies.
Notes
1. I.C. Jarvie, Movies as Social Criticism (London: Scarecrow, 1978).

2. Scott Simmon, The Films of D.W. Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 62.
3. Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 26.
4. Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art (New York: Signet, 1979), p. 23, and many others. Phil Hall,
however, asserts that the quote is only an “urban legend” and that “Wilson was never quoted by
any journalist on the subject of the film.” Phil Hall, “The 10 Best Urban Legends in Film History,”
www.filmthreat.com/features/932/.
5. New York Times, March 4, 1915.
6. Larry May, Screening Out the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 86.
7. Kenneth W. Munden, American Film Institute Subject Index to Films of the 1920s (New York:
Bowker, 1971).
8. New York Times, December 5, 1924.
9. New York Times, January 10, 1926.
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5
The 1930s
Political Movies and the Great Depression
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

The Great Depression and the advent of sound marked the beginning of an extraordinary
period for American movies. By 1930, 23,000 movie theaters—the most ever in the United
States—were screening films for 90 million people a week. Attendance slipped during
the Depression and did not fully recover until the late 1940s. In the early 1930s, however,
Hollywood was churning out more than 500 films a year, an output made possible by the
factory-like production methods of the ever-growing studios, which also owned most of the
theaters they were servicing. The huge volume of films produced during the 1930s resulted in
a diversity of subject matter rarely matched in the history of American movies. The demand
for a large number of movies accounts in part for the abundance of political films made in
those years.
This was also an intensely political era, with the Great Depression driving the nation to
desperation and Franklin Delano Roosevelt riding to the rescue with his New Deal. This
turmoil affected the movies. The Depression caused a widespread questioning of traditional
values, faith in the rewards for hard work, and the fairness of the American system. This
questioning was most apparent in the social issue films of the early 1930s. At first, the
movies were cynical and despairing, offering no hope of salvation, but soon they grew opti-
mistic, offering simple solutions that usually involved reliance on a strong leader. Some
flirted with fascism, but others promoted Roosevelt’s New Deal. Once the New Deal was
well established, however, the output of social criticism and political films almost ceased.
A coherent political left emerged in Hollywood in the 1930s as a result of the Depression,
the popularity of Roosevelt, and the organization of unions. Although its presence influ-
enced some movies, conservative forces within the film industry were more powerful. Film
production had become more rigidly organized and more dependent on bankers and other
investors, often from conservative eastern institutions. These investors were more conserva-
tive both aesthetically and politically than the Hollywood producers.
Social Cynicism
One of the first big hits of the era was a political movie intended by its producer to be “a
great work for peace,” bringing “home the wastefulness of war.”1 More than 100 million
people have seen All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) by now. The movie was, and still is,
a success with audiences and critics alike. The film industry must have liked it, too, because
it won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Direction, marking the beginning of a
long tradition of Oscars for message movies.
Taken from Erich Maria Remarque’s antiwar novel, the film tells the story of a German
soldier in World War I. In a way, it resembles the great box office successes of the silent era,
The Big Parade and The Birth of a Nation. All Quiet on the Western Front, however, focuses
not on an American victim of the war, but on a highly sympathetic German soldier (Lew
Ayres), whose ghastly experiences are quite similar to those of the central character in The
Big Parade. All Quiet pushes the antiwar message a little further than the earlier film with
the soldiers’ speculation about the causes of war, a passage more easily achieved with the
dialogue of a sound film than with the images and titles of a silent. One young soldier blames
national leaders for the war; another says its causes are rooted in pride; a third blames those
who profit from war; a fourth says that things just got out of hand.
Crime and violence dominated the action in movies like Little Caesar (1930) and Pub-
lic Enemy (1931), but these films also deal with class and ethnic conflict, reflecting the
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THE 1930S: POLITICAL MOVIES AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION
emerging doubts and questions about how well the American system was working. “Could
this system save itself from the Depression?” the movies ask. Could ethnic minorities and
the working class count on the system to save them? The answers provided by the gangster
movies were not very optimistic. About the best you can do, they seem to say, is to stand up
and die honorably, with guns blazing. Although the gangsters are punished in the end, they
are usually treated with some sympathy and even admiration, and the movies frequently sug-
gest that society has made them what they are.
While the gangster films criticized society somewhat indirectly, comics like W.C. Fields,
Mae West, and the Marx Brothers made fun of it. All were in their prime in the 1930s, and
all of them challenged traditional values, from morality to authority. The Marx Brothers’
Duck Soup (1933) is their most direct assault on politics, with Groucho as the tin-pot dic-
tator of Fredonia leading his nation into a farcical war. At the other end of the spectrum,
horror movies such as Frankenstein (1931) and Dracula (1931) subliminally addressed the
Depression-era audience’s deepest fears.
Like the staccato gunfire of the gangster movies and the fast talk of the comedies, the up-
tempo songs and tap dances of the musicals of the early 1930s celebrated sound. Musicals
presented an upbeat outlook on life and on the future, but they did not always skirt the prob-
lems of the times. Gold Diggers of 1933, for example, opens with Ginger Rogers singing
“We’re in the Money,” but her ironic song is interrupted by workers arriving to repossess
the sets and costumes for the show she is rehearsing. Despite their eviction, however, the
kids of the cast get a show together. Their big number is “Remember My Forgotten Man,”
a Depression dirge about veterans who fought in World War I and farmed the land but are
forgotten in their hour of need.
The Gold Diggers movies (1933 and 1935), Footlight Parade (1933), 42nd Street (1933),
and other musicals portrayed groups pulling together to overcome adversity, although at
least one critic has suggested that directors like the one played by James Cagney in Footlight
Parade signified dependence on a strong leader like Roosevelt.2 While the gangster films
reflect the despair of the Depression, the musicals incorporate the optimism of the New Deal.
Instead of giving up and going out with a blast, like Little Caesar, chorus boys and girls
could work hard and become stars.
No star better epitomized this up-by-your-bootstraps self-determination than the top box
office draw of the decade, and one of American cinema’s most enduring figures, the child
star Shirley Temple. In the grinding despair and economic scarcity of the Great Depression,
Shirley Temple literally radiated from the screen with hope and cheerfulness even when
playing impoverished child parts in films like Baby Takes a Bow (1934). Of that film Presi-
dent Roosevelt said, “When the spirit of the people is lower than at any time during this
Depression, it is a splendid thing that for just fifteen cents, an American can go to a movie
and look at the smiling face of a baby and forget his troubles.”3
Her stardom accompanied Roosevelt’s rise as her films offered a template for Depression-
era propaganda: no matter how dire her circumstances, she never lost her image of
free-spirited dignity and joyful determination. She was fortitude and hope personified, just
the message Americans needed to forge ahead in their own lives and to accept the limited
nature of government assistance even in the New Deal era. Charles Eckert argues even
further that the ideological function of Shirley Temple’s image in her films and in the print
media that saturated the country with information about “Little Miss Sunshine” was to pro-
mote a particular class-based view of what she was always seen to do: give of herself. The
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Shirley Temple’s star image championed up-by-your-bootstraps initiative over government assistance
in Depression-era films like Baby Takes a Bow (1934).
meaning of Temple’s image was to promote charitable giving and private assistance in place
of government action and entitlement programs. Of her mid-1930s plucky yet charitable
persona, Eckert writes,
The ideology of charity was the creation of a class intent upon motivating others to absorb
the economic burdens imposed by the depression. This privileged class regarded itself as
possessed of initiative, as self-made through hard work. And it saw in all governmental
plans for aid a potential subversion of the doctrine of initiative. Money as a charitable gift
was benevolent, whereas money in the form of a (government) dole was destructive.4
This view of government’s responsibility—or lack thereof—toward the poor and underser-
viced, in Eckert’s view, found its most persuasive expression in the image of the dimpled,
smiling “face of a baby,” as she sang and danced and magically healed the rift between
classes through the sheer force of her off-screen personality and repeated characterization
in films.
Many of the gangster films and musicals came from Warner Bros., which has been called
“the workingman’s studio,” not only because of the audience it aimed for but also because its
films contained more social comment than most other examples of the two popular genres.
But Warner Bros. went beyond genre to produce some of the most powerful message movies
of the 1930s. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), directed by Mervyn LeRoy (who
also directed Little Caesar), is a pessimistic study of the victimization of an innocent man by
the American legal system. Paul Muni plays the fugitive, driven further and further outside
society and unable, despite his efforts, to overcome the forces against him. Unlike most films
of the era, Chain Gang makes no attempt at a happy ending. A modest success with audi-
ences and critics, the movie won Academy Award nominations for Best Film and Best Actor
(Muni), demonstrating again the willingness of the film industry to honor serious movies.
108
More upbeat endings reflecting the nation’s longing for what film scholar Andrew Bergman
labels “benevolent authorities”5 were provided by other Warner productions, however. In
Wild Boys of the Road (1933), a judge saves the juvenile victims of the Depression, while
in Massacre (1934), the federal government, a symbol of the New Deal, steps in to save the
good Indians from their exploiters, just as it would save the nation.
Shysters and Saviors
Explicitly political films about government and elected officials nearly became a genre in
and of themselves during the early 1930s, as a nation dissatisfied with the way it had been
governed by President Herbert Hoover’s complacent Republicans searched for new solu-
tions and a new leader. Nevertheless, the political films of the early 1930s were cynical about
the possibility of improvement. They projected the nation’s disillusionment and held out
little hope of change for the better. Most presented politicians as crooks and shysters; only
later did a few saviors appear.
Several of these movies were comedies, among them Politics (1931), in which the for-
midable Marie Dressler, then Hollywood’s top box office draw, plays a housekeeper who
becomes mayor when the women of the town go on strike in her support. The film’s mildly
feminist politics and upbeat ending were unusual for the early 1930s—more like films of the
musical genre than other political films of the time.
The Phantom President (1932) combined the musical and comedy genres in a tale about
mistaken identity involving a presidential candidate and an entertainer, both played by
George M. Cohan. In the film’s prologue, portraits of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and
Theodore Roosevelt come to life to sing “The Country Needs a Man” to lead it out of the
Depression. A gang of political bosses is running Theodore K. Blair, a banker, for president,
but Blair has “no flair” and, as a woman senator keeps mentioning, “no sex appeal.” By
chance the bosses come across Varney, a look-alike medicine man and minstrel. “Every time
the Congress goes in session,” Varney sings, “they achieve a gain in the Depression. Maybe
someone ought to wave the flag!” The politicians know that the country needs “a sober man,”
but the public wants someone with “ginger and pizzazz” who can deliver “a musical comedy
presidential campaign,” so the bosses persuade the minstrel to substitute for the candidate
temporarily. “I do the act and he takes the bows,” Varney says. Blair grows envious and tries
to get rid of Varney, but the plot is revealed and Varney is elected president in his own name.
A lightweight comedy, The Phantom President reiterates popular clichés about politicians. A
close-up of a horse’s rump fades to a close-up of an orating politician’s face. The country is
run by bosses and buffoons, and the people are fools, easily seduced by “a musical comedy
presidential campaign.” But lest the message seem too cynical, The Phantom President opts
for what was becoming the movie-cliché solution to all problems: a good man.
The Dark Horse (1932), yet another comedy, was a greater popular and critical success
with more to say about politics. A naive nobody is nominated for governor and ruthlessly
packaged by his managers. The candidate is coached always to give the same answer to the
press: “Yes—and again, no.” The film still rings true to some extent, possibly because today
we are even more aware of the packaging of candidates. But while the message was funny, it
was also cynical: politics was all pretense and manipulation, an unlikely means of salvation.
Like these comedies, melodramas of the 1930s also conveyed a cynical view of politics.
In Washington Masquerade (1932), a young senator fights “the Interests” behind a corrupt
109
water project. Although seduced and diverted by an evil woman they set on him, he redeems
himself by testifying against “the Interests” before he dies. Washington Merry-Go-Round
(1932) tells a similar story. A young man is elected to Congress with the help of bosses, but
when he attempts to rally reformers in Washington he is shocked to discover that the politi-
cians are all there to get something for themselves. The political machine unseats him, but
he has already discovered “an invisible government” led by a sinister boss. “I have plans,”
says the boss. “Italy has her Mussolini, Russia her Stalin. Such a man will come along
in America!” After a message-laden moment of meditation in the Lincoln Memorial, our
reformer rallies the unemployed to take the law into their own hands and force the evil boss
to commit suicide. Like the comedies, these Washington melodramas saw politics as cor-
rupt, but they had a solution: a good man. Despite corruption, these films said, one good man
could make the system work.
Gabriel over the White House (1933) had a different vision, however, moving from
whimsical fantasy to the implication that a fascist leader could solve the nation’s problems.
Publisher William Randolph Hearst was a major influence on the film, even contributing to
the script, although the major auteur of Gabriel was producer Walter Wanger. A member of
President Wilson’s staff at the Paris Peace Conference, Wanger was a friend of President
Roosevelt and one of Hollywood’s most political producers (Washington Merry-Go-Round,
1932; The President Vanishes, 1934; Blockade, 1938).
Gabriel is the story of Jud Hammond (Walter Huston), a political hack who becomes
president by making the right deals, who plans to stay in office by paying off the right peo-
ple with jobs and contracts, and who shows little interest in dealing with the Depression and
crime—mere “local problems,” he scoffs. Hammond has an accident while taking a joyride
in the country (symbolic of an economy out of control, say some film scholars),6 and at this
point the angel Gabriel intervenes. The hack is transformed into a benevolent leader, com-
mitted to solving the nation’s problems by the most efficient means possible. Using radio as
his communication medium (a technique Franklin Roosevelt was just beginning to exploit),
he inspires the nation, gets the powers he wants from Congress, which he then suspends, and
proceeds to feed the hungry, eradicate unemployment, and end crime by declaring martial
law and sending out the army to destroy the gangsters (the only cause of crime) by putting
them before firing squads without benefit of trial. He then eliminates war, too, by bullying
the rest of the world into joining the United States in a disarmament agreement. With the
problems of the nation and the world solved, the angel Gabriel disposes of the president,
presumably to protect us from dictatorship.
When MGM boss Louis B. Mayer and Will Hays of the Motion Picture Producers and
Distributors Association (MPPDA) saw an early screening of Gabriel, they were appalled,
not because of the film’s fascist implications, but because it seemed pro-Roosevelt and they
were staunch Republicans. Mayer took the film in hand, reshooting some scenes and toning
others down.
The film premiered just before President Roosevelt took office. An instant hit, it was one of
the big box office draws of 1933 and also won critical approval. “For its uncannily prophetic
foreshadowing of the spirit of President Roosevelt’s first month in office . . . for putting into
film what scores of millions think our government should do,” gushed Photoplay, “this will
unquestionably be one of this year’s most talked-of pictures.”7 Some members of Congress
complained, but President Roosevelt enjoyed the film and saw it several times.
110
Film scholars view Gabriel as an expression of longing for strong leadership bordering
on fascism. Their case is strengthened by the fact that Hearst, widely considered a fascist
sympathizer, was a principal backer of the film. Certainly the movie proposes a dictatorship,
albeit a benevolent one, and the police in the movie behave in a fascist manner. But this
view probably exaggerates the intentions of the filmmakers, who more likely merely wanted
to encourage strong leadership and amuse the audience. In most ways, Gabriel is like other
American political films: it sees politics as dirty, dominated by shysters, and redeemable
only by a miracle, in this case the intervention of an angel. Gabriel is different from other
films, however, in that it willingly, if fantastically, accepts the overthrow of democracy.
Producer Wanger followed Gabriel with The President Vanishes (1934), a more benign
and less successful film with a more distinct leftist bias. The threat in The President Vanishes
comes from a right-wing coalition of big businessmen, corrupt politicians, and fascist Gray
Shirts plotting to drag the United States into a war in Europe in order to make profits for
the arms industry. They are foiled when the president fakes his own kidnapping and disap-
pears on the very day Congress is set to declare war. Public sympathy turns to the president,
and when he returns, the country is mobilized for peace. While The President Vanishes is
an overtly antifascist film, it, too, reflects pessimism about democracy. In it, the public is
manipulated first one way, then the other. As in so many American political films, one man
saves the day.
Other Visions
While some films put their faith in a strong leader, Viva Villa (1934) offered a revolutionary
alternative. Its location shots, filmed in Mexico, are still impressive, but Wallace Beery’s
folksy Pancho Villa comes off as a horny buffoon. The evil rich drive young Pancho to
banditry until Francisco Madero, reverentially portrayed as a Mexican Abe Lincoln, asks
him to join the Revolution of 1910. When Madero is killed by a cabal of evil army officers,
Villa reluctantly takes his place as leader. But he is a fighter, not a politician, and he is soon
bewildered by the responsibilities of government. Once he gets the land reform that Madero
had promised, Villa retires to the country. Unfortunately, his boisterous ways land him in
exile, and in the end a man whose sister he’s dishonored assassinates him. The messages
of this film are mixed, to say the least. Viva Villa seems to say that revolution is sometimes
justifiable, but it is fraught with difficulties.
The best alternative vision and the most radical film of the 1930s, Our Daily Bread (1934),
came from King Vidor, the maker of The Big Parade and The Crowd. Improbably inspired
by a Reader’s Digest article on collective farms, this film is the story of the itinerant unem-
ployed of the Depression. Tom and Mary, an all-American couple, flee the hopeless life of
unemployment in the city to take over a bankrupt farm. They are joined by other itinerants,
each of whom has a useful skill to offer. A thriving cooperative community is soon estab-
lished. This utopia is nearly subverted by a blonde temptress from the city who lures Tom
away from the collective endeavor. His conscience soon brings him back, however, and the
farm is saved when its irrigation problems are solved by a cooperative ditch-building effort.
The opening of the ditch—presented in a dramatic montage sequence—is the film’s climax.
The collective politics of Our Daily Bread puts it well out of the American mainstream, yet
in other ways it is consistent with the other films of the era. It is anti-urban in its suggestion
111
In King Vidor’s radical Our Daily Bread (1934), itinerants form a farming cooperative and in communal
spirit share their “daily bread,” even with tough-talking Sally (Barbara Pepper), a blonde temptress
from the city.
of a return to the land and to rural values, although this is an unrealistic solution in the dust
bowl days of the Depression. Furthermore, threats to Tom and Mary’s rural enterprise come
from city forces: a banker and the blonde seductress. More significantly, despite its collec-
tive rhetoric, Our Daily Bread insists on the need for a strong leader. The members of the
co-op decide they need “a strong boss,” settling by acclamation (not election) on Tom, the
film’s Roosevelt-figure, according to Andrew Bergman.8
Our Daily Bread is an impressive and unusual film. Remarkably, it was a modest suc-
cess at the box office and even won some critical approval. Although the Hearst papers
denounced it as “pinko” and the Los Angeles Times refused to accept advertising for it, the
New York Times declared it “a brilliant declaration of faith in the importance of cinema as
a social instrument . . . a social document of amazing vitality and emotional impact,” con-
cluding that “it is impossible to overestimate [its] significance.”9 Other critics agreed on its
worthiness, although some correctly pointed out that the acting and writing were turgid at
best. Banks and the studios had refused to finance the film, and its budget limitations are
apparent in its production qualities. Today it is the spirit of the film that holds up, especially
in the dazzling ditch-building sequence. Although some judged it radical at the time, in ret-
rospect the political message of Our Daily Bread—pulling together in hard times—does not
seem much more radical than the message of some Depression musicals.
While Our Daily Bread expressed faith in collective action, other films of the decade
portrayed “the people” as a dangerous mob. In Fury (1936) and They Won’t Forget (1937),
angry mobs resort to lynching. These films were part of a national campaign against lynch-
ing, which had reached a sickeningly high rate in the early 1930s. It seems odd in retrospect
that the victims in the films were both white while most real-life lynching victims were black,
but Hollywood in the 1930s avoided racial issues and aimed its movies at a white audience.
112
Two other films of the era, Black Fury (1935) and Black Legion (1936), centered on Ameri-
can workingmen who were led into misadventure by crooks. In Black Fury, a miner (Paul
Muni) is duped into leading a strike by agents of a company that stands to make a profit by
breaking up the strike. And in Black Legion, Humphrey Bogart joins a Ku Klux Klan-like,
anti-foreigner group that turns out to be a profit-making venture for its organizer. Both films
played on the foolishness of the people and the ease with which they could be misled.
These movies and others of the era expressed a theme that runs through American films: a
mistrust of the people and collective action. Despite America’s revolutionary and democratic
heritage and all the “we the people” rhetoric, American filmmakers have not manifested
great faith in the people who make up their audiences. Except for occasional nonmain-
stream movies like Our Daily Bread, group endeavor is rarely depicted in a positive manner.
More often, the group turns into a lynch mob or passively follows venal leaders. These
movie themes may have reflected the American establishment’s genuine fear of revolution
in the 1930s. The Depression had put the masses on the move. Union activism and left-wing
political movements reached a high point. Roosevelt’s New Deal was, in some ways, a con-
cession to these forces and, in others, a way of buying them off, thus preventing revolution.
And the movies played their part in this process by discouraging collective movements that
challenged the nation’s basic political and economic structures.
Politics in Movieland
As the messages of these films suggest, filmmakers were becoming more interested and
active in politics. In national politics, some movie moguls such as the Warners, and Hearst,
owner of Cosmopolitan Pictures, were enthusiastically pro-Roosevelt; others, like Louis
B. Mayer at MGM, remained militantly Republican. They were unified, however, in 1934,
when they intervened in politics more blatantly than ever before or perhaps since.
Upton Sinclair, the socialist novelist, had won the Democratic Party nomination for gov-
ernor of California and might have been elected had it not been for a combined film and print
media smear, the biggest up to that time. Apparently terrified by the popularity of social-
ist Sinclair, the state’s leading newspapers, with the Hearst press in the forefront, accused
Sinclair of being a Communist, a homosexual, and an atheist. Meanwhile, the film studios
produced anti-Sinclair trailers that looked like newsreels and screened them in their theaters
all over the state.
Other political divisions followed. Film workers wanted to form unions, but the pro-
ducers resisted; no wonder their films showed a mistrust of mobs and rarely dealt with
labor relations. The Communist Party reached the peak of its popularity in the 1930s, too.
In Hollywood, Communist organizers pushed hard for the formation of unions, and many
Depression-radicalized liberals joined the party. When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936,
the anti-fascist cause became a rallying point for the Hollywood left.
These leftist leanings, however, rarely showed up on the screen, possibly because Holly-
wood’s self-censors would have quashed them anyway. Over the years, Will Hays’s MPPDA
had become more than a mere symbol of self-regulation. As discussed in Chapter 3, the
establishment worried about sexual mores in the movies and about gangster movies, which
allegedly encouraged the lower classes to rebel.10
Even as the advisory code was toughened up, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, and the
makers of gangster films challenged it. Mae West’s She Done Him Wrong (1933) and Walter
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Wanger’s Gabriel over the White House especially alarmed Will Hays, who warned movie-
makers away from films about sex, violence, and any political stance that might give offense.
Hollywood found a way to get around Hays’s Production Code and keep violent action
in movies by shifting its focus from gangsters to lawmen, but few political films were made
in the mid-1930s. Perhaps filmmakers and audiences lost interest in politics because they
now had a president they trusted to lead them out of the Depression. But the Code was also
a factor in discouraging political films, as was establishment concern about political unrest.
Besides the anti-lynching movies (Fury, They Won’t Forget) and the movies about duped
workingmen (Black Legion, Black Fury), the mid-1930s produced only Cecil B. DeMille’s
nation-building epics (The Plainsman and Union Pacific) and a few comedies such as First
Lady (1937), which played on the Hillary-esque idea of a president’s wife as the power
behind the scenes. There was nothing to match Gabriel, Our Daily Bread, or the other seri-
ous political films of the beginning of the decade. At the very end of the decade, however,
political films made a comeback.
The Politics of Dorothy and Scarlett
Two of America’s classic films, The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind, were released in
1939. Both were directed by Victor Fleming and both became Variety “Box Office Cham-
pions.” Both were also filmed in color, which may have helped them hold favor with later
audiences.
The Wizard of Oz had no overt politics or political intentions, but some latter-day critics
managed to discern political messages. The Scarecrow and the Tin Man, for example, were
supposed to represent a longing for a populist alliance between farmers and factory workers,
a dream that may have occurred to the author of the Oz books, but one that had faded by the
time the film was made. The fake leadership of the wizard, all promise without delivery, was
a more apparent political theme, reflecting a common view of politicians. The Wizard of Oz
concluded with the message of most Hollywood musicals: have faith in your own ability to
solve your problems. Like earlier Depression musicals, however, it also suggested that group
support helped.
Most people do not think of Gone With the Wind as being any more political than The
Wizard of Oz, but the film that swept the Oscars and led in box office receipts for 1939 has
its political themes. After all, it is about the Civil War and is even more resolutely pro-
Southern than The Birth of a Nation. The sacrifice and suffering of the South are made much
of, while the depiction of Reconstruction features crude, greedy carpetbaggers swarming
over the vanquished South. Like the Southern gentlemen in the earlier movie, Ashley (Leslie
Howard) and Frank (Scarlett’s second husband) go off to a “political meeting,” apparently a
KKK raid, during which Frank is killed. Unlike The Birth of a Nation, however, the Klan is
not presented as the savior of the South. Instead, Scarlett (Vivian Leigh) eschews collective
action and offers her determined individualism and faith in the land as the answer. Her indi-
vidualism is mitigated somewhat by the film’s condemnation of her selfishness and by her
willingness to save her plantation not only for herself but also for her family and its faithful
retainers. Nevertheless, Gone With the Wind, like The Birth of a Nation, romanticized the
Old South and helped entrench American racism, a bias that probably had more political
impact than its other messages. Critics pointed out the racism of Gone With the Wind, just
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as they had done with the earlier film, but there was less general outrage, perhaps because
none of the black characters in Gone With the Wind were evil and because Scarlett’s mammy
(Hattie McDaniel, who won an Oscar for the role) served as the sympathetic moral arbiter
of the film.
Mr. Smith
Although Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz were not primarily about politics, the
other great hit of 1939 was. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was one of the most popular
political films ever made, coming in second only to Gone With the Wind in 1939 box office
receipts and Academy Award nominations.

Frank Capra, one of Hollywood’s most prolific, popular, and political directors, made
Mr. Smith when he was at the height of his career. He had already directed a string of hits
that included It Happened One Night (1934) and Lost Horizon (1937). He had shown an
interest in politics with two of his earlier efforts: Forbidden (1932), a melodrama about a
corrupt politician and a crusading reporter, and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), a movie
about a small-town poet (Gary Cooper) who inherits a fortune and tries to spread it around
during the Depression. Capra’s films were characterized by an all-American hokeyness that
the director himself called “Capracorn.” Others have called it populism, by which they seem
to mean faith in the people. Although written by Sidney Buchman, who later admitted mem-
bership in the Communist Party and was blacklisted, no such ideological proclivities were
visible in Mr. Smith, which was distinctively Capra’s movie.
The story is set in motion by the death of a U.S. senator from a western state. Political
boss Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold in one of his many boss roles) meets with his flunky, the
governor (Guy Kibbee in one of his many flunky roles). Standing in shadow, the boss gives
orders to his resistant, dejected flunky, who sits in the light. Later, during a chaotic family
dinner, the governor complains that he is unwilling because of “howling citizens” to appoint
Boss Taylor’s man to the vacant Senate seat, and his children suggest that he appoint Jef-
ferson Smith (James Stewart), the leader of the Boy Rangers. The governor likes the idea
because the appointment would be popular and the inexperienced Smith could be managed
by the state’s senior senator, Joseph Paine (Claude Rains), who happens to be Smith’s hero
and, unbeknownst to Smith, a secret ally of Boss Jim Taylor.
Flattered, Smith accepts the appointment, and his arrival in Washington is a classic of
American political cinema. A bunch of political hacks, all familiar faces from other movies,
wait to hustle him into seclusion, but he slips away for a tour of the capital, seen in a stirring
montage featuring the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument, the White House,
and the Capitol, accompanied by a medley of American patriotic songs. The tour concludes
in the Lincoln Memorial as Smith listens to a child reading the Gettysburg Address to an
old man.
The cynical Washington press corps soon shatters his idealism, however, making a fool of
him at his first press conference. When he complains, the reporters explain that it was their
duty to expose him: “You’re not a senator, you’re a stooge!” Depressed, Smith determines
to try to accomplish just one worthwhile goal during the short time he has in office—a boys’
ranch for his home state. Clarissa Saunders (Jean Arthur), the aide of the dead senator, agrees
to help him. The land Smith wants for his boys turns out to be part of a corrupt water project
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included in a bill being carried by Senator Paine for Boss Taylor. When Taylor finds out,
he threatens and then slanders Smith, who retreats, devastated, to the Lincoln Memorial.
Saunders, who by now is in love with him, finds him there and inspires him to fight back.
Later, as she coaches from the gallery, he embarks on a filibuster, blocking Senate action for
as long as he can speak in the hope that public opinion back home can be rallied to his cause
before the bill comes up for a vote. As the filibuster gets under way, H.V. Kaltenborn, a real-
life contemporary radio newscaster, explains the process to the audience and notes that “the
diplomatic gallery includes envoys of two dictator powers, here to see what they can’t see at
home: democracy in action!”
The camera stares down at the filibustering hero, dwarfed in the immaculately repro-
duced Senate chamber. Capra’s message—that this is a little guy struggling against large
forces—cannot be missed. Smith’s call for support from the folks back home is suppressed
by the boss, who controls the press and uses it to smear Smith. But the reporters and young
Senate aides cheer Smith on in Washington while back home his Boy Rangers print a leaflet
in an attempt to get the truth out. All this is done in a fast-paced montage that culminates
with an anti-Smith rally at home and the dumping of sacks of mail opposing him in the
Senate chamber. Dejected, Smith is prepared to admit defeat when Senator Paine, who is
ashamed of what he has done to further his presidential ambitions, rushes out of the Senate
chamber to attempt suicide. When his effort is foiled, he blurts out the truth, and the film
ends as the Senate erupts into chaos and we assume, according to cinema convention, that
Smith has triumphed.
Capra’s message in Mr. Smith, as in his other movies, is simplistic: a problem caused by
bad men—not the fault of the system or its institutions—can be fixed by good men with
the support of the people. Even some of the apparently bad guys, like Rains’s senator, do
the right thing when they get a chance. Although the country was still in the Depression,
Capra’s faith in the system was unshaken, perhaps because of his own Horatio Alger-like
rise from poor Sicilian immigrant to Oscar-winning Hollywood filmmaker. Mr. Smith has
been labeled “populist” because it seems to show faith in “the people,” but its message
is more complicated, perhaps darker, than that. It shows faith in one man—Smith, as
Everyman—but it is hard to see how the film shows faith in a public that is so easily
manipulated. Even the faith in one good man does not stand up to scrutiny. Smith is saved
from losing only by Senator Paine, who gives up everything when he tries to shoot him-
self, the action that brings out the truth. Smith and the people are saved by Paine’s crisis
of conscience and bad aim.
Capra’s movie presents a prototypical American view of politics, with messages and a
style that recur in other movies about politics, but also it accurately observes some aspects
of the workings of politics, including the process of appointing a senator, the Senate’s insti-
tutional clubbiness, the filibuster as a parliamentary device, and the job of presiding over
the Senate. The film recognizes the power of the press as well as the importance of public
opinion in both Smith’s appointment and his legislative battle.
If Mr. Smith seems somewhat conservative now, moviegoers in 1939 did not see it that
way. Written by a confirmed leftist (Buchman), Mr. Smith won the applause of the left, pre-
sumably because it showed the enemy as an evil boss with economic interests and placed
its faith in the common man. Washington, however, hated Mr. Smith. When it premiered in
the capital, journalists complained that the movie portrayed them as cynical hacks, a movie
stereotype of the time—although in Mr. Smith they were allowed to redeem themselves by
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rallying around the hero in the end. The politicians were even more upset. One senator called
it “grotesque distortion,” while another denounced it as “exactly the kind of picture the dic-
tators of totalitarian governments would like their subjects to see.” Joseph Kennedy, father
of the future president and then ambassador to Britain, tried to prevent the film from being
shown in Europe because he thought it reinforced Nazi propaganda about the corruption of
democracy and would demoralize the Allies. Efforts were made to buy up the film and sup-
press it, but they failed.11
Such strong reactions to so moderate a movie show just how narrow the limits on political
films were. Only the fact that Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was a box office success can
have encouraged Hollywood to make other political films.
Ford and Fonda
While Frank Capra was establishing James Stewart as one of America’s most enduring
images of the good man, John Ford was doing the same for Henry Fonda. These two direc-
tors repeatedly took up political themes, with Ford generally perceived as conservative and
Capra as liberal. The two reassuring actors were also frequently cast in political roles, and
eventually Stewart became associated with conservatism and Fonda with liberalism. All four
names crop up repeatedly in the history of American political films.
Ford first worked with Fonda in 1939 on Drums Along the Mohawk and Young Mr. Lincoln.
In the latter, Fonda plays the future president as a lawyer defending some nice young men
who have killed a bully in self-defense and are now in danger from a lynch mob. Lincoln
wins their freedom and we are instructed in respect for the law. The film illustrates two of
Hollywood’s favorite political themes, condemning lynch mobs and providing a hero to
show the people the way. Young Mr. Lincoln is reverential toward its subject, relying on our
knowledge of what he would become to give the movie its portentous tone. By contrast,
John Cromwell’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) presented a complex and sometimes stormy
portrait of the great man’s personal life that was almost embarrassing, given the respectful
treatment Hollywood’s favorite president got in other films.
Ford and Fonda had a greater success in 1940, however, with The Grapes of Wrath, an
adaptation of John Steinbeck’s moving novel about dust bowl migrants in the Depression
and a good example of filmmaking as a collaborative art. The project was initiated by its
producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, who acquired the rights to the book and assigned Ford to direct
it. Zanuck was also deeply involved in shaping the script, which muted Steinbeck’s radical
and pessimistic social criticism. Part of a new generation of producers who pursued profit in
a more calculated way than their hit-or-miss predecessors, Zanuck hoped to avoid offending
the Production Code Administration or HUAC while pandering to the traditional values of
audiences; Ford was the perfect director.
John Ford began working in films in 1914. He played a Klansman in The Birth of a
Nation and started directing by 1917. Eventually he became one of Hollywood’s most pro-
lific craftsmen, with 200 films to his credit at the time of his death in 1973. His style was
distinctive enough to earn him the title of auteur, one who leaves a personal imprint on a film
even while working within the confines of the studio system. Visual style is the most obvious
signature of the auteur, but philosophical themes also emerge, like Capra’s corny populism.
In Ford’s films, a conservative faith in the common man and nostalgia for a simpler, agrarian
past are apparent.
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In their work on The Grapes of Wrath, three other superb film artists aided Zanuck and
Ford. Nunnally Johnson wrote the tight script, and Alfred Newman composed a score based
on a folksy version of “Red River Valley,” which suited Ford’s sentimental style perfectly.
Cinematographer Gregg Toland, best known for his work on Citizen Kane (1941), made an
even greater contribution, using his photography to communicate what could not be made
clear through dialogue. Long shots of the horizon give a sense of space and the dreariness
of the dust bowl. At times Toland’s mobile camera pans to make visual connections and at
other times it puts the viewer right in the action. The film as a whole retains a documentary
quality that is radically different from the style of other films but perfectly suited to The
Grapes of Wrath.
The movie starts with a long shot of the plains, followed by a shot of a lone man, Tom
Joad (Henry Fonda). He is coming home from prison just as his family prepares to give up
their farm and migrate to California. Tenant farmers, they are being driven off their land,
a process described by a neighbor in a touching flashback in which the landowner’s agent
denies responsibility for the eviction by blaming “orders from the East.” “Then who do we
shoot?” the neighbor’s son demands. The film avoids fixing the blame, an example of its
muted politics, but also a realistic point, since a whole system rather than any individual
produces the eviction.
The family’s despair is turned to hope by a flyer announcing “plenty of work in Califor-
nia: 800 pickers wanted.” The Joads pack up and take off in their old jalopy. They face hard
times on the road. Elders die, the family runs out of food and money, and they are harassed
by state border patrols. Ma Joad (Jane Darwell in an Oscar-winning performance) struggles
to keep the family “whole and clear,” but she is working against the odds. The Joads are
aided, however, by waitresses, truckers, and other migrants, working folk who have learned
to stick together.
Two key moments come as the family arrives in transient camps. Both scenes unfold
through a subjective camera, so we see the camps as the Joads see them from their rickety
old car. Starving children stare at them from grim huts as they enter the first camp, a hellish
place run by growers. They soon learn that California is not the paradise they had hoped for.
There are too few jobs for the thousands of people who have been lured there by growers’
propaganda intended to ensure a surplus of cheap labor. Despondent, the Joads move on,
eventually arriving at a second camp that turns out to be an oasis. As they enter, the camera
zooms in on the sign above the gate: “Department of Agriculture.” A benign attendant clad
in white welcomes them in a mellow voice, explaining that the camp is a cooperative run by
the federal government. The Joads are shocked by their good treatment, the absence of cops,
and the idea of residents running the camp. The camp is an obvious symbol of the New Deal,
complete with a Roosevelt-like manager.
But the pull of “the people” is too strong for Tom Joad to rest content with this oasis.
He has been thinking, and he suspects that unions could help. At the first camp, Tom saw
his friend Casey killed by the growers’ thugs for doing union work. Drawn into the scuffle,
Tom inadvertently killed one of the thugs, another reason for his restlessness. Earlier, he had
wondered, “What is these reds, anyway?” Now he thinks that “these reds” might not be so
bad if they help people. He finally leaves the family, apparently to become a union organizer.
He reassures Ma Joad that he will always be around, though, because “we’re all part of the
one big soul that belongs to everybody.” She gets the film’s closing monologue: “Rich fellas
come up and they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good, and they die out, but we keep acomin.’
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We’re the people that live. Can’t wipe us out. Can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, ’cause
we’re the people.”
The message in The Grapes of Wrath was faith in the family, the land, and the working
people, a message of longing for the past and despair for the present. The Joads slowly figure
out that they are victims of the system, but they do not know what to do about it. Only the
federal government, as represented by the clean, happy co-op camp, offers salvation.
Ford’s movie considerably toned down John Steinbeck’s sensational novel. The film
replaces Steinbeck’s emphasis on class with the family and “the people.” To conform
with the cinematic tradition of happy endings, the film reversed the order of arrival in the
camps: the happy camp comes first in the book, second in the film. The ordering of these
events in the movie also suggested greater faith in the federal government as the people’s
savior and stressed Tom’s situation as a fugitive. Steinbeck made it clear that Tom goes off to
become a union organizer, but running from the law seems to be his main motive in the film.
The novel’s assertion that unions might be the answer to the migrants’ problems was also
weakened in the film. As the book ends, the strike has been broken, Casey has been killed,
Tom has been beaten, and in the final scene, one of the young Joad women breast-feeds a
starving man. It is a desperate, despairing ending, one Hollywood could not accept, so the
film ends in the government camp with Ma Joad’s “we’re the people” speech implying that
all will be well. Survival, not change, is the theme.
The issue of migrant workers was hot when the film was made. California growers were
shifting over to native white workers like the Joads for cheap labor. Japanese immigra-
tion had been halted, and Mexicans were being repatriated. Union activity was growing.
The Hearst press denounced The Grapes of Wrath as Communist propaganda, and even
before it was completed, the filmmakers were under pressure from growers and banks.
They were so nervous that they kept their shooting locations a secret and, as we have seen,
considerably muted the book’s message. The movie was a box office hit, and it won two
Academy Awards.
Notes
1. Ray McDonald, SUFG Bulletin, Second Term, 1957.

2. Mark Roth, “Some Warners Musicals and the Spirit of the New Deal,” Velvet Light Trap 17
(Winter 1977): 3.
3. Quoted in David Eldridge, American Culture in the 1930s (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh
Press, 2008), p. 62.
4. Charles Eckert, “Shirley Temple and the House of Rockefeller,” Jump Cut 2 (1974): 1, 17–20,
www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC02folder/shirleytemple.html.
5. Andrew Bergman, We’re in the Money (New York: New York University Press, 1971), p. 102. See
also Nick Roddick, A New Deal in Entertainment (London: British Film Institute, 1983).
6. Robert L. McConnell, “The Genesis and Ideology of Gabriel over the White House,” in Cinema
Examined, ed. Richard Dyer MacCann and Jack C. Ellis (New York: Dutton, 1982), p. 209.
7. Photoplay, June 1933.
8. Bergman, pp. 78–79.
9. New York Times, March 25, 1934.
10. Bergman, p. 4.
11. Frank Capra, The Name Above the Title (New York: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 287, 292.
119

All the King’s Men (1949)

6
The 1940s
Hollywood Goes to War
The 1940s was a turbulent decade for the world, the United States, and Hollywood. When
isolationist America was dragged into World War II, Hollywood enthusiastically signed up.
Many movies manifested high political intent—rallying the nation to war—but few articulated
complex political ideas or confronted social issues. After the war, however, Hollywood made
some of its strongest social issue films as well as some powerful movies about the political
process, but the regulators of the Production Code Administration (PCA), the breakup of the
big studios, and paranoia about Communism soon discouraged the making of such films.
Hollywood and the nation concentrated on domestic politics through the 1930s, but
toward the end of the decade, international troubles intruded. The Spanish Civil War caught
the imagination of some moviemakers, dividing and politicizing Hollywood from its begin-
ning in 1936. The Spanish conflict was romantic for some, but others saw it as part of the
wider rise of fascism. Hollywood debated whether or not to oppose fascism in the movies,
but some antifascist films were made and many more movies alluded to the need for national
involvement, a position that ran counter to the isolationism that had dominated U.S. public
opinion since World War I.
When the United States finally entered World War II, Hollywood was enthusiastic. Before
Pearl Harbor, Warner Bros. had been the most political and most pro-Roosevelt studio, and
the political left had been the chief advocates of intervention. Once war was declared, all the
studios and filmmakers across the political spectrum rallied around the flag, turning out enter-
tainment films that supported the cause, making training films, and joining the campaign to sell
war bonds. At this point, domestic politics and social issues all but disappeared from American
films except as background in such movies as The Glass Key (1942), a murder mystery compli-
cated by machine politics. Throughout the war years, filmmakers stuck with optimistic stories
of heroism, patriotism, and antifascism. Thanks to the rapid production methods of the studio
system, these movies were hitting the screens within months of America’s declaration of war.
After the war, Hollywood’s audience reached a high point and then started a long decline.
From 1946 to 1948, an average of 90 million people went to the movies every week, but by
1950 weekly attendance had plummeted to 50 million. As it moved from fat times to lean
times, from security to insecurity, the film industry experienced great changes. Hollywood and
America started the postwar years cheerfully. The United States had won the war and was the
most powerful nation in the world. The economy was booming. A baby boom started and the
suburbs burgeoned. But the good times were not perfect. Inflation, labor unrest, and a reces-
sion resulting from reduced military spending caused economic jitters for a nation that had not
forgotten the Depression. Veterans had problems coming home; women had problems staying
home after being pushed out of the workforce when the men returned from the war. Racial ten-
sion increased as blacks, more assertive after their wartime experience, moved out of the South
and grew impatient for equality. The Soviet Union expanded into Eastern Europe and China
went Communist. Then, in 1949, Russia exploded an atom bomb and America began to worry
about Soviet spies. Postwar political films reflected these changes, starting with optimistic
crusading, then growing cynical and avoiding political topics.
Internationalism and Antifascism
Hollywood launched the theme of internationalism in the 1930s with a number of pictures
focused on Latin America. The studios perceived a vast audience there, but other factors
were at work as well. The Rockefeller family had acquired RKO studios and immediately set
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THE 1940S: HOLLYWOOD GOES TO WAR
out to promote Latin America, where it had major economic interests. Nelson Rockefeller
formed a committee to improve relations with Latin America, persuaded Twentieth Century-
Fox to alter scenes that were less than flattering to Latin America in Carmen Miranda’s debut
film, Down Argentine Way (1940), and encouraged Walt Disney to make the pro-Latino
Saludos Amigos (1943) and Three Caballeros (1945).
Juarez (1939) was more distinctly political as well as internationalist. Directed by Wil-
liam Dieterle, who had cautiously raised the issue of anti-Semitism in The Life of Emile Zola
(1937), Juarez centers on the attempt of Napoleon III (Claude Rains) to impose monarchy
on Mexico by installing Maximilian (Brian Aherne) and Carlotta (Bette Davis) as its rulers.
Juarez (Paul Muni) and Porfirio Diaz (improbably played by John Garfield) lead the resis-
tance, countering the hubris and decadence of the Europeans with native democracy. They
win, but the film gives them the Lincoln treatment, presenting them with such deference they
seem stiff and boring. Audience sympathy and interest shift to Maximilian and Carlotta, who
agonize as the people they wish to help reject their good intentions. Napoleon III, with his
imperial ambitions, is the villain, while the savior is the United States. French intervention
is bad, but ours is good because we support Juarez and “the people”—and because Abraham
Lincoln is invoked, even though he was dead by the time the United States took action in
Mexico. Despite its transparent politics, Juarez was a critical and box office success. The
New York Times declared it “a stirring restatement of faith in the democratic process . . .
ideologically flawless . . . socially valuable.”1 HUAC congressman Martin Dies, however,
denounced Juarez as propaganda.
Another group of films, from The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) to The Sea Hawk
(1940), That Hamilton Woman (1941), and ultimately Mrs. Miniver (1942), were directly or
indirectly internationalist and unabashedly pro-British, reflecting Hollywood’s substantial
British contingent.
While these films emphasized internationalism, others were explicitly antifascist. One of
the first antifascist movies was Blockade (1938), a tale of espionage in Civil War Spain, pro-
duced by Walter Wanger, directed by William Dieterle (Juarez), and written by John Howard
Lawson, a Communist, union activist, and later one of the Hollywood Ten (see Chapter 3).
Set in Spain in 1936, Blockade follows the adventures of Marco (Henry Fonda), a peasant
who rallies his neighbors to resist an invading force referred to only as “the enemy.” He is
soon assigned to root out saboteurs who are preventing food from getting past the enemy
blockade to the starving people. Blockade never specifies which side is which, although
its populist orientation and the military might and brutality of “the enemy” are obvious
clues. The movie’s main point is a warning to America: “As I sit here,” a journalist writes,
“I see nightmare visions of air raids sweeping over great cities.” But despite its apparent
good intentions, the movie’s sympathy for Republican Spain drew criticism and the public
ignored it.
Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), also from Warner Bros., features Edward G. Robinson
as an FBI agent who infiltrates the Nazi underground. Unabashedly antifascist, the film is
said to have been inspired by the studio’s fury when its representative in Germany, a Jew,
was beaten to death. Confessions was a popular and critical failure, although some reviewers
praised the filmmakers for their daring. They had faced hostility while they were making this
movie, and they came in for even greater hostility, especially among German-Americans,
when it was released. Nazi sympathizers burned down the theater where it was shown in
Milwaukee.
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The most overtly anti-Nazi film of this era was Charlie Chaplin’s still-popular The Great
Dictator (1940). His earlier films consistently championed the struggle of the little guy
against repression by bullies or institutions, but this movie is more specifically political. It
is a gentle comedy in which Chaplin plays a Jewish barber and his look-alike, the dictator
of Tomania, Adenoid Hynkel, known as “the Phooey.” Hynkel is a burlesque character, but
his political motives—including lust for power, hatred of Jews, and competition with his
neighbors—are clear. The film ends with the little barber taking the Phooey’s place at a big
rally and addressing a resoundingly anti-isolationist, antifascist speech directly to the movie
audience. The war in Europe was well under way when The Great Dictator was released, but
the movie was controversial nonetheless. Efforts had been made to stop its production, and
there was hostility to its message. Audiences loved it, however, and made it a box office hit
in both 1940 and 1941. Franklin Roosevelt liked The Great Dictator so much that Chaplin
was asked to reprise the little barber’s big speech at the president’s birthday celebration.
As unexceptionable as this and other antifascist films now appear, they were controver-
sial in a prewar America still committed to isolationism. Of course, German-Americans
and Nazi sympathizers objected to them. HUAC congressman Dies charged that all these
films were propaganda, attacked Chaplin for his left-wing sympathies, and even alleged that
Shirley Temple was a Communist dupe. The Senate set up a subcommittee in 1941 to inves-
tigate “any propaganda disseminated by motion pictures . . . to influence public sentiment in
the direction of participation by the United States in the European war.”2
There is even some question whether Hollywood studios, far from sounding the alarm
against fascism and the rise of Nazism, were reluctant to take on any subject or story that
might alienate foreign audiences, including and especially anti-Semitism. In his controver-
sial study The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (2013), Harvard fellow Ben
Urwand argues Hollywood did just that—“collaborated” with Hitler in hopes of maintaining
a German audience for its product. Beginning with Nazi-led protests against All Quiet on
the Western Front and subsequent censoring of scenes particularly offensive to Germans,
Urwand charts a shocking history of studios caving to Nazi requests, suggestions, and
threats. In archival records of correspondence, studio executives and Nazis both use the
term “collaborate” to refer to the industry responses to Nazi vetting of Hollywood projects.3
Other film scholars and descendants of studio bosses tarred by Urwand’s book accuse The
Collaboration of sensationalism, overstatement, and an ahistorical perspective. The author
of a competing study called Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–39, Thomas Doherty summarized
in an essay in The Hollywood Reporter his objections to Urwand’s research and conclusions.
Calling Urwand’s work “slanderous” and “ahistorical,” Doherty points out that Hollywood
films at the time enjoyed no First Amendment rights and that it should come as no surprise
that studios negotiated with Germany to leverage their films into a lucrative marketplace. He
also reminds readers,
No Popular Front group in the 1930s did more to alert Americans to the looming threat
from Nazism than the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League for the Defense of Democracy
(HANL). Founded in 1936 and numbering some 5,000 artists-activists from all ranks of
the motion picture industry, HANL worked tirelessly to raise awareness about the menace
of Nazism . . . doing its best to inject anti-Nazi sentiments into Hollywood cinema (no easy
task given the obstacles set up by the internal and external censors who always sought to
denude American cinema of overt political content).4
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Many German Jewish émigrés in Hollywood also contributed to refugee funds like
the European Film Fund founded by the agent Paul Kohner and the émigré director Ernst
Lubitsch. Universal founder and producer Carl Laemmle donated heavily to such charities
and personally signed hundreds of affidavits to help secure the immigration of Jewish refu-
gees, in Doherty’s estimation, thereby “saving more Jews from certain death than the U.S.
State Department.” In Doherty’s view, the story of Hollywood and Hitler is one not of col-
laboration but of “resistance.”5
Citizen Welles
Often proclaimed the best film of all time, Citizen Kane (1941) was not primarily antifascist
or, some would say, even political. But while the political content of Citizen Kane may have
been low, its political intent was surely high. Orson Welles, the twenty-five-year-old auteur
of Citizen Kane, was its star, director, and coauthor. Basing his film on the life of newspaper
magnate William Randolph Hearst, Welles tells us that power corrupts and money cannot
buy happiness. This is an old Hollywood message, but it was not so much the message that
made Citizen Kane great as the way that message was conveyed.
Kane’s life is told in a series of flashbacks by a variety of witnesses, all filmed using
dramatic composition and extreme camera angles to emphasize power and impotence, an
expressionistic style brilliantly executed by cinematographer Gregg Toland (The Grapes of
Wrath). The witnesses tell their tales to an unseen newspaper reporter who seeks to unravel
the character of the late Charles Foster Kane by learning the meaning of his dying word,
“Rosebud.” But even though Citizen Kane is primarily a study of the private life of a pub-
lic figure, it is political in its obsession with power and in its depiction of Kane’s election
campaign.
Although the young Charles Foster Kane begins his media career frivolously, because
he thinks “it would be fun to run a newspaper,” he is idealistic when he writes the “declara-
tion of principles” for his first issue: “(1) I will provide the people of this city with a daily
newspaper that will tell them all the news honestly, and (2) I will also provide them with a
fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and human beings.” He stands in the
dark, however, as he reads his declaration, a portent of things to come.
“If I don’t look after the interests of the underprivileged,” the young crusader declares,
“maybe somebody else will, maybe somebody without money or property.” His politics
are liberal but elitist, a sort of noblesse oblige. In fact, he holds the people in contempt and
manipulates public opinion with increasing cynicism. He stirs up a crisis in Cuba to boost
newspaper sales. When his correspondent wires that there is no war, Kane responds, “You
provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war!” Before long, he is openly announcing that
“the people will think . . . what I tell them to think!” Kane’s friend, Jed Leland (Joseph Cot-
ten), sums up the publisher’s shallow, elitist liberalism when he observes that the American
worker is “turning to something called organized labor, and you’re not going to like that one
bit when you find out that it means he thinks he’s entitled to something as his right and not
your gift.”
Kane runs for governor on a sort of populist-progressive platform, attacking “the machine,”
which is represented by Boss Jim Geddes (Ray Collins). The campaign culminates in a big
rally. A massive portrait of Kane hangs over a crowded auditorium—a scene modeled after
the fascist rallies of the time. The crowd is a painted backdrop, dots rather than faces. The
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looming visage of Kane and the blurred crowd are an apt comment on Kane’s politics and
the politics of personality as well. But the dark figure of Boss Jim Geddes gazes down on
the rally from the back of the auditorium. Just as Kane is within reach of victory, Geddes
demands that he drop out of the race. If he refuses, Geddes will tell the press that Kane has
been keeping a mistress, a revelation that would cost him both the election and his family.
Kane stubbornly refuses to quit. The story of his “love nest” is published and Kane loses
both his wife and the election. Welles concludes this segment of Kane with his most succinct
and cynical comment on politics and the media as Kane’s newspaper prepares alternative
headlines for the day after the election: “Kane Elected” and “Fraud at Polls.” Kane retreats
to exercise his formidable power in private life, much as Hearst did, pushing the career of his
mistress and building his palace, Xanadu, which closely resembles Hearst’s famous estate,
San Simeon. His politics, referred to only indirectly in the latter part of the film, move to the
right and are ultimately discredited when he poses with Hitler in Germany and returns to the
United States to announce that there will be no war.
These scenes hint at antifascism, but Citizen Kane is more clearly an antielitist, antiau-
thoritarian reiteration of the axiom that power corrupts. Kane is more cynical than earlier films
because it offers no salvation. The good characters in the movie cannot stand up to Kane, the
reporters cannot figure him out, and the people continue to buy his newspapers without protest,
rejecting him politically for the wrong reasons—because of his mistress, not his egotistical elit-
ism. Other American movies had dealt with political corruption, from the nearly contemporary
Mr. Smith back to The Birth of a Nation and beyond. But Kane was different because Welles
refused to offer simple solutions. Another distinction is Kane’s focus on the corrupt man him-
self. Instead of a Jefferson Smith or Tom Joad, we get Charles Foster Kane, a nasty man whom
we do not like but for whom we feel some sympathy because of his lost childhood and his
youthful exuberance and good intentions. Although “Rosebud” provides a simplistic expla-
nation of Kane’s character, the film’s closing shot focuses on a No Trespassing sign outside
Kane’s lavish estate, suggesting that we cannot really know what makes people tick anyway.
Citizen Kane was not a great box office success, despite positive, if qualified, reviews.
Writing for McCall’s, Pare Lorentz praised the technique, but felt that Welles’s acting was
not strong enough to carry a film about so unsympathetic a character.6 Other critics called
Kane “a magnificent sleigh-ride” and “a curious adventure in narration.”7 The New York
Times acclaimed the film, saying it was “as realistic as a slap in the face” but expressing
reservations about the “undefined character” of the “eminent publisher.”8
Despite its criticism of the press, Citizen Kane was applauded at its New York City press
showing, but the Hearst newspapers assaulted the film vigorously. They had begun doing so
while it was being made, with Hearst gossip columnist Louella Parsons campaigning to get
RKO to “junk the project.”9 Once it was released, the attacks escalated, focusing especially on
the film’s cowriter, Herman Mankiewicz, who had been friendly with Hearst and his movie-
star mistress, Marion Davies. Even before the film was released, the PCA objected to scenes
in a brothel, resulting in the deletion of a character called Madam Georgie and the toning
down of a scene with dancing girls so they are not so obviously whores. Louis B. Mayer and
others tried unsuccessfully to buy up all the negatives of the film, and theater chains, includ-
ing Warner Bros., refused to screen it until RKO, Welles’s studio, threatened legal action.
Citizen Kane had made a stylistic and political splash. Besides its gleeful attack on one of
America’s most powerful men, Kane almost offhandedly condemned Hitler and ridiculed the
foolishness of people like Kane who thought that war could be avoided. This was perhaps
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a cheap shot by 1941, but still made for controversy. Beyond that, Citizen Kane marked an
advance for political films because of the complexity of Kane’s character and because of its
broad, if pessimistic, attack on power and capitalism.
From Casablanca to the Rhine
Among the first American films to address the growing concern with the international situa-
tion was Casablanca (1942), a Warner Bros. movie directed by Michael Curtiz and written
by Howard Koch, a team that had already expressed itself on isolationism and preparedness
in The Sea Hawk (1940). Casablanca made a more urgent case for involvement, though,
with the cynical American expatriate Rick (Humphrey Bogart) reluctantly joining the Free
French and giving up Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), his true love, to another freedom fighter (Paul
Henreid). “If it’s December 1941 in Casablanca, what time is it in New York?” Rick asks.
“I bet they’re asleep in New York. I bet they’re asleep all over America.” Waking up was
clearly the right thing to do, in case anybody still doubted it in 1942. Gracefully presented in
a seductively romantic story laced with humor and adventure, Casablanca’s political mes-
sage went down well, and the movie was a box office and critical hit, winning Oscars for
best picture, director, and script.
Encouraged by the success of Casablanca and the active urging of President Roosevelt,
Warner Bros. churned out war movies for the next couple of years. James Cagney took
the lead in the patriotic but otherwise relatively apolitical Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942),
also directed by Michael Curtiz. Bogart was back in All Through the Night (1942), fight-
ing saboteurs and spies on the home front. Errol Flynn joined the war effort in a string of
straightforward adventure stories: Desperate Journey (1942), Northern Pursuit (1943), Edge
of Darkness (1943), and Objective Burma (1944). In 1943, Action in the North Atlantic, Air
Force, and Destination Tokyo came from Warner Bros. at the request of President Roosevelt.
These films were straightforward, inspirational calls for support of the war effort. Some of
them condoned collective action and egalitarianism, but these normally left-wing themes
had suddenly become widely acceptable because of the war. In the early 1940s, oppression
and military necessity justified both collectivism (we had to stick together) and egalitarian-
ism (we needed everybody, regardless of class or race). Anyway, there was usually a WASP
leader to guide the cross section of society that made up the little bands of warriors.
Although Warner Bros. took the lead, other studios joined the cause. At United Artists,
Ernst Lubitsch directed and produced To Be or Not to Be (1942), a black comedy about a
troupe of actors caught up in anti-Nazi espionage. Paramount produced For Whom the Bell
Tolls (1943), based on Hemingway’s novel about the Spanish Civil War, although even in
1943 the studio shied away from politics and emphasized the love story. Less shy were
three propagandistic anti-Nazi movies: RKO’s Hitler’s Children (1943), Paramount’s The
Hitler Gang (1944), and MGM’s Hitler’s Madman (1943). MGM also produced Mrs. Mini-
ver (1942) and Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944). Only a few of these films, including these
two MGM productions and Casablanca, were hits with audiences and critics.
One of the most memorable was Watch on the Rhine (1943), a Warner Bros. production
adapted by Dashiell Hammett from the play by Lillian Hellman. Kurt Muller, a German
freedom fighter superbly played by Paul Lukas, takes his wife, Sarah (Bette Davis), and
their children home to her family in prewar America. “I am an antifascist,” he explains to his
in-laws when they ask about his profession and his failure to settle down in one place. But
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even in America, the Mullers are not safe. A Romanian houseguest learns that Kurt plans to
return to Germany with money for the resistance. The Romanian threatens to betray Kurt
to his Nazi friends at the German embassy. When Sarah’s family learns of the Romanian’s
plot, they try to buy him off. “The new world has left the room,” the Romanian says when
he finds himself alone with Kurt and Sarah. “[They] are Americans,” Kurt responds. “They
do not understand our world, and if they are fortunate, they never will.” But the Americans
aid the freedom fighter. “We’ve been shaken out of the magnolias,” the matriarch declares.
Meanwhile, Ginger Rogers and her housemates, a cross section of American woman-
hood, await the return of their men in Tender Comrade (1943). Edward Dmytryk and Dalton
Trumbo, both later members of the Hollywood Ten, directed and wrote this story of a group
of war wives who work in an aircraft factory and live together in a co-op. The film focuses
on their home life, complete with refugee German housekeeper, and teaches lessons about
the need for sacrifice, the dangers of hoarding, the reasons for rationing, the importance of
keeping mum about troop movements, and the tragedy of the “murder” of German democ-
racy. Ginger Rogers says, “Share and share alike, that’s the meaning of democracy”—a
line that would later be offered as testimony of “Communist content”—as the women solve
individual problems while working together toward a common goal.
And On to Moscow
As the war went on, a few movies crossed the line into more overt propaganda. President
Roosevelt urged them on, pressing first for films about the Asian front, then for movies about
the European Allies, especially Russia. Mission to Moscow (1943) was made, Jack Warner
said, at the specific request of Roosevelt, who wanted to “flatter” Stalin and “keep [him]
fighting” as well as to educate the American public.10 Directed by Michael Curtiz and written
by Howard Koch, the team that had made Casablanca, the pro-Russian movie was as bad as
their earlier film was good.
Mission to Moscow starred Walter Huston as Joseph E. Davies, the real-life American
ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1941. Davies himself introduces the movie
with praise for the Warner brothers, “those great American patriots.” Then we see Huston as
Davies, happily fishing before President Roosevelt calls him out of retirement to take on an
urgent assignment. On his way to Moscow, Davies passes through Germany and is appalled
at the regimentation and authoritarianism holding sway there. He watches grimly as Jews
wearing identification tags are marched by. The cruel totalitarianism of the enemy is thrown
into sharp relief when the ambassador reaches the Russian border, where cheerful soldiers
and happy women engineers welcome their American friends with food and laughter. The
film goes on to present a portrait of Russia that is strictly party-line propaganda. The purges
of the 1930s are presented as unimportant exercises carried out only for purposes of internal
security. The Hitler–Stalin nonaggression pact of 1939 is blamed on American isolationism
and European appeasement. Russia’s occupation of Finland is explained away as a strategic
necessity for which the Soviets had asked—and received—Finland’s permission.
Bogged down with narration and stagy explanations of American policy and Soviet poli-
tics, Mission to Moscow is high in political content and intent but it is a pretty bad movie. The
film industry press nevertheless gave it grovelingly good reviews and pointed out the signifi-
cance of movies “flexing their muscles in human crisis.”11 The New York Times proclaimed
it “the most important picture on a political subject any American studio has ever made,” but
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criticized its glowing portrait of the USSR and its sloppy history.12 Others were less kind,
calling it a “mishmash” and “a lot of rot” and denouncing its “cuddly, reverential treatment”
of Franklin Roosevelt.13 The Hearst press and Republican presidential candidate Thomas
E. Dewey condemned its pro-Communism while liberals objected to its Stalinist portrait
of Trotsky.14 Audiences avoided the movie. Hollywood’s most serious attempt at sending a
message—approved and encouraged by the president of the United States—bombed.
Other World War II message movies did not do much better. The North Star (1943),
directed by Lewis Milestone and written by Lillian Hellman, is set in a happy and charming
Russian village (populated by Dana Andrews, Walter Huston, and Walter Brennan) that is
overwhelmed by Nazis (led by Erich von Stroheim). Producer Samuel Goldwyn said it was
about “people who think and act as do Americans,”15 and the clear intent was to make the
American people more enthusiastic about their Soviet allies. MGM and RKO responded to
Roosevelt’s urgings with Song of Russia (1943) and Days of Glory (1944), both hyping our
Russian allies. Like Mission to Moscow and The North Star, both movies flopped, probably
not so much because of what they said as because they were bad movies. When American
filmmakers tried hardest to make political points, they failed most dismally, perhaps because
they were trying too hard to please Washington and not hard enough to please their audiences.
Winding Down the War
As the fighting on the European front drew to a close, Hollywood shifted its attention to the
war in the Pacific. In The Fighting Seabees (1944) and Edward Dmytryk’s Back to Bataan
(1945), both starring John Wayne, the racist portrayal of the enemy was even more extreme
than the depiction of the villainous Nazis of the antifascist films.
The seminal World War II combat film Bataan (1943) features a group of American and Philippine
soldiers ordered to blow up a bridge to delay the advancing Japanese army as the United States
retreats from Manila to Bataan. None of the soldiers survive the mission, stoking the film’s propaganda
fire.
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But by 1944 Hollywood was also looking forward to peacetime with films like Hail the
Conquering Hero. Preston Sturges wrote and directed this comedy about a hero’s son (Eddie
Bracken) who is discharged from the marines because he has hay fever. Unable to face the
folks back home, he sets out to drown his sorrows, but he is saved by a group of sympathetic
marines who decorate him with borrowed medals and send him home. Welcomed as a hero,
he is drafted as a candidate for mayor. He confesses, but the townspeople are so unaccus-
tomed to hearing the truth from politicians that they continue to believe he is a hero and elect
him anyway.
Like Sturges’s earlier films, this one was cynical (albeit funny) about politics. Sturges’s
The Great McGinty (1940) had been about a bum who gained favor with a political boss but
ruined his career when true love turned him honest. In Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Sturges
made fun of Hollywood’s social concerns. In Hail the Conquering Hero, the innocent tri-
umphs for no apparent reason except that he is good, in contrast to the incumbent mayor, who
is inept, pretentious, and hypocritical. The well-meaning man who usually runs against the
mayor denounces his own dullness and steps aside in favor of the young hero. Room must
be made for the returning warriors, the movie tells us. More disturbingly, it also informs us
that politics is like love: “You don’t need reason.” The sophisticated Sturges may have been
working with his tongue in his cheek, but audiences loved his film nonetheless.
Wilson (1944) was a loftier, if more ponderous, contemplation of the aftermath of world
war. The big biopic of the year was produced for Twentieth Century-Fox by Darryl Zanuck,
written by Lamar Trotti, and directed by Henry King. Zanuck, who was determined to make
an epic, spent $5 million (a great deal of money in 1944) and employed a cast of 13,000,
headed by Alexander Knox as President Woodrow Wilson. “Sometimes the life of a man
mirrors the life of a nation,” the film’s prologue announces, but Wilson was not so much
about the man as about the peace ending World War I and the need for international coop-
eration. Zanuck’s epic argued that the League of Nations and collective security could have
prevented World War II.
Wilson deserves credit for taking politics seriously, but while the movie’s intentions
were good, it was long and dull. Personalities, issues, and political processes were radically
oversimplified, and Wilson himself got the Lincoln treatment: he is wise and good while
Europeans are greedy and vindictive and the Americans who oppose the League of Nations
are fools. The movie was successful despite its lecturing, winning both audience and critical
favor. The New York Times called the film’s politics “authentic,” singling out the exciting
scenes at the party convention where Wilson first wins the presidential nomination, although
the reviewer conceded that the movie was chauvinistic in its exclusively American view-
point and gave no credit to European leaders or perspectives.16
Not everyone agreed with this assessment, however. Wilson caused almost as much of
a furor in 1944 as Mission to Moscow had the year before. Republicans and isolationists
denounced it as propaganda for Roosevelt’s 1944 reelection campaign. Darryl Zanuck, its
producer, denied the charge, pointing out that he was himself a Republican. The film, he said,
was his “personal crusade for world peace.”17 Although a million people went to see Wilson
within five weeks of its release and it earned more than $3 million in two years, the film did
not recoup its $5 million cost. The loss, combined with the controversy, may have discour-
aged Twentieth Century-Fox from making other movies with similar themes.
With few exceptions, the propagandistic wartime movies were flops, and even the excep-
tions were controversial. As a consequence, Hollywood grew increasingly cautious about
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sending political messages, for even when quality and profits were highest, the movies came
under attack from politicians who did not share the filmmakers’ point of view. Both the
House of Representatives and the Senate accused Hollywood of encouraging war, promoting
Roosevelt, or leaning to the left (never the right). The Production Code Administration also
kept the pressure on, although a few filmmakers challenged its rules. As early as 1943, How-
ard Hughes let immoral people have a happy ending in The Outlaw, starring Jane Russell.
The close scrutiny of the censors and the intense attacks of the politicians indicated how
influential they thought the movies were. And if the tremendous size of the audience was a
measure of the influence of films, they were right. But even as their audience was at its larg-
est, filmmakers retreated from political topics. This retreat may have reflected the mood of
the country after long years of depression and war. The sheer size of audiences may have led
filmmakers to seek maximum profits by avoiding controversial topics. Most likely, produc-
ers and studios refused to support political projects because of their wartime disasters and
their nervousness about interference from Washington.
Socially Reflective Movies versus Social Problem Movies in the Postwar Era
The increasing cautiousness of filmmakers reflected the mood of the nation, as the optimism
that immediately followed the war mixed with fear of the future precipitated by the Cold
War abroad and difficulties in adjusting to peacetime at home. The musicals of the late 1940s
expressed the optimistic viewpoint while the style that came to be known as film noir (black
film) expressed the fear.
From Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) through Easter Parade (1948) and On the Town (1949),
Hollywood sang and danced its way through the postwar era, led by Judy Garland, Gene
Kelly, and Fred Astaire. MGM virtually specialized in the genre. Less political than the
musicals of the early 1930s, these movies presented an almost perfect world in which prob-
lems could be solved simply by making an effort.
Film noir was just the reverse, as dark in its mood as in its lighting. In movies like The
Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and The Lady
from Shanghai (1948), dangerous women (Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth)
lured weak men (Van Heflin, John Garfield, Orson Welles) to their fate, often aided and abet-
ted by charming villains. Although not overtly political, these movies reflected the postwar
sense of social breakdown and dislocation and commented on class structure through their
use of rich villains and poor victims. There was nothing reformist about these films, how-
ever. They portrayed a big, bad world where sinners—especially grasping women—were
punished. Among these motion pictures, only Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948)
stands out as a forthright condemnation of the corrupting qualities of capitalism.
Another little group of postwar movies combined the optimism and pessimism of the
times in their treatment of social issues. Their look and point of view often resembled film
noir, but their resolution was almost always optimistic as good people overcame adversity
through love, understanding, or individual effort. One of the first and most important of
these social problem films was The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), a melodrama about
three soldiers adjusting to civilian life in varying states of distress: one returns an alcoholic
(Al Stephenson played by Frederic March), one has two metallic prosthetic arms (Homer
Parrish played by real-life war amputee Harold Russell), and the other suffers post-traumatic
stress and night terrors from flying bombing raids over Germany (Fred Derry played by
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In the classic film noir The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Rita Hayworth plays wealthy femme fatale
Mrs. Bannister luring weak, working-class Michael O’Hara (Orson Welles) into her deadly web.
Dana Andrews). This moving film criticized the treatment of returning veterans by callous
civilians bent on business as usual, but it offered no solution other than the assurance that the
love of a good woman and the passage of time would heal all wounds.
In fact, The Best Years of Our Lives posits that women are essential to overcoming the
trauma of war as each tormented veteran experiences in an extended scene his wife or love
interest soothing him and putting him to bed like a child. The film’s happy ending depends
on all three men finding the fulfillment of romantic promise in marriage, the single social
institution upheld by film’s end. Myrna Loy’s Milly stands by Al through his drunken dis-
plays; Cathy O’Donnell’s Wilma convinces childhood sweetheart Homer that she still wants
to marry him, prosthetics and all; Teresa Wright’s Peggy, daughter of Milly and Al, falls for
Fred while his own wife deserts him and his troubles. The flipside to this happy ending is
the lack of reassurance that the veterans will find support and acceptance by any other social
or government institution. At the same time, their entwined stories resonate with prewar
nostalgia. The film’s message is that America’s “best years” occur when women tend to their
men in the domestic space and private realm of the family home, not when they occupy the
workforce or other dimensions of the public sphere they inhabited during the war years.
Pride of the Marines (1945) and Till the End of Time (1946) tackled the same subject, but
The Best Years of Our Lives, produced by Samuel Goldwyn, was the most successful of these
films, becoming the top box office attraction of 1947, winning the approbation of the critics,
and sweeping the Academy Awards.
Director Edward Dmytryk combined the problems of veterans with racial bigotry in
Crossfire (1947), the story of a demented ex-soldier who murders a Jew. Anti-Semitism
was also the theme of Elia Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), in which Gregory Peck
plays a writer who pretends to be Jewish for eight weeks. He confronts crass prejudice in
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hotels and eventually condemns even those who claim to disapprove of anti-Semitism but
who say nothing and thereby condone it. In Pinky (1949), Kazan dealt with the problems of
a young black woman trying to pass as white. Prejudice against blacks was also the subject
of Home of the Brave (1949), which dealt with the discrimination suffered by a black GI, and
Intruder in the Dust (1949), which reiterated the antilynching theme of the 1930s but faced
up to the fact that most of the victims were black.
Most of these movies seem transparently naive and didactic today. They rarely got
beneath the surface of the problems they tackled, and their solutions were invariably based
on the assumption that we are all alike anyway. Veterans, Jews, African-Americans, Native
Americans, Latinos, and juvenile delinquents were all portrayed as human beings in need
of understanding. Prejudice was bad, according to these films, but the solution was simple
because the problem went no deeper than ignorance. Racism was not institutional but per-
sonal; delinquency was not social but individual. These movies seem mild now, but they
were testing the limits then, and at least one study found that films like Crossfire, Gen-
tleman’s Agreement, and Pinky had a slightly positive effect on viewers’ tolerance of the
minority groups that were their subjects. The oversimplification of these problem films is
put into historical context by Leonard Quart and Albert Auster, who argue that they are “yet
another sign of the overwhelming optimism of the era; an optimism which refused to see any
problem as insoluble.”18
These films were taken seriously in their time, however, and some of them were big hits.
The Best Years of Our Lives, Crossfire, Gentleman’s Agreement, and Pinky all did well with
the public and the critics and won Academy Award nominations. Both Best Years and Gen-
tleman’s Agreement won the Oscar as Best Picture. But these movies were also controversial.
Gentleman’s Agreement, Force of Evil, Home of the Brave, and Pinky were condemned as
Communist propaganda because they presented a negative picture of the United States. A
Texas theater owner was jailed for screening Pinky. Clearly, the “overwhelming optimism
of the era” had its limits.
Political Films Reject Politics
In 1947 President Truman announced “trust-busting” as part of his upcoming re-election

campaign, and the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission launched antitrust
suits against multiple major industries, Hollywood included. The following year the Supreme
Court agreed essentially to combine a number of antitrust cases against the studios under
U.S. v. Paramount Pictures et al. The result was the momentous 1948 Paramount decree,
the court’s ruling in favor of the Justice Department and independent studios and against
the vertically integrated big studios, forcing them to divest of their exhibition subsidiaries
and banning them from dictating to independent exhibitors what films they could run under
arrangements called “block booking.”19
Before the ruling as these cases were winding their way through the courts, Hollywood
tended to steer clear of politics and limit its messages to tolerance and understanding. Film-
makers rarely exercised their power to fight back. It must have seemed easier just to keep
quiet for a while and wait for the politicians to go away. Hollywood therefore avoided politi-
cal films, except for a few comedies and stories about bosses or martyrs, all fairly safe
bets. Some, like The Senator Was Indiscreet (1947), were throwbacks to the 1930s. William
Powell plays a senator who seeks his party’s presidential nomination but loses out when
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he misplaces his little black book, which is full of dark secrets about the party—a standard
portrait of dirty politics.
Billy Wilder directed and cowrote a timelier and sophisticated political film in A Foreign
Affair (1948). In this acute satire, Jean Arthur is a member of a congressional delegation
investigating the morale of American troops in postwar Berlin. She gets involved with an
army captain (John Lund) whose German mistress (Marlene Dietrich) provides a sharp con-
trast between American naiveté and European world-weariness.
Meanwhile, Frank Capra was pushing the movie view of domestic politics into the post-
war era with his prescient State of the Union (1948). Like his earlier film, It’s a Wonderful
Life (1946), this movie lacked the frothy Capracorn that had marked his work during the
1930s. The postwar world seemed more dangerous to Capra, and his solutions were neither
simple nor happy.
In State of the Union, Grant Matthews (Spencer Tracy) is a rich airplane manufacturer
and all-round good guy who is drawn into politics by his mistress, Kay Thorndyke (Angela
Lansbury), a powerful Republican publishing heiress with a lust for power. Matthews, a
populist and an idealist, is eager to bring his good works to government. When he becomes
a candidate for president, Matthews needs his estranged wife (Katharine Hepburn) by his
side, and she voluntarily complies. Not a normal politician, Matthews says just what he
thinks, but this only increases his popularity. He advocates world government and condemns
interest groups for caring only about themselves and not the greater good. Thorndyke, his
publisher-mentor, puts him under the guidance of a cynical, corrupt political hack (Adolphe
Menjou), who introduces Matthews to some harsh political realities: “The only difference
between Democrats and Republicans is that they’re in and we’re out.” When the candidate
is impressed by public admiration, the hack is incredulous. “Those letters are just from
people,” he sneers, “not state chairmen!” He soon has his candidate stumping for support
from labor, farmers, business, ethnics, southerners, and professional politicians. Pushed by
the publisher and the hack, Matthews begins to want the nomination enough to make any
deal to get it.
He is kept loyal to his own principles by his wife and her ally, a wisecracking, good-
hearted journalist (Van Johnson). These two, but especially Hepburn as the wife, function
as Capra’s voice in State of the Union, encouraging the candidate to say what he thinks and
put his faith in “the common man.” Capra also makes his points through the voices of waiters
and maids who express faith in Matthews. But the candidate is seduced and ready to sell out
until he sees his wife sell out herself by making a televised speech about him that she does
not believe. In the end, he recoils with disgust and announces that he will dog the politicians
to make them tell the truth, but he will not be a candidate himself. Husband and wife are
reunited; publisher and hack move on to their next victim.
State of the Union stirred up almost as much controversy as Capra’s Mr. Smith, partly
because, unlike other fictional political films up to that time, it named real people and real
parties. Some saw it as favoring then-President Truman because it seemed to attack the old,
Harding-style Republican machine. Capra may have felt sympathy for Truman as the closest
the nation has come to putting one of his idealized common men in the White House, but
Truman was hardly free of the taint of machine politics. Neither the controversy nor good
reviews earned much of an audience for State of the Union.
This movie deserved better, however, because its treatment of politics was much more
sophisticated than that in earlier political films. Capra’s portrait of interest group politics and
134
his hint at the future importance of television put the film ahead of its time, but he had also
moved away from his earlier faith in the common man and his depictions of good-hearted
citizens triumphing over corrupt politicians. Here he presented a political world ruled by a
power elite represented by the publisher, the party boss, and a gaggle of character actors who
spoke for various vested interests. In the 1930s, Mr. Smith had stood, fought, and won; in the
late 1940s, Grant Matthews saves his integrity by walking away. The people support him,
but they are not strong enough to defeat the organizational elite. This cynical view of politics
was all the more powerful coming from Frank Capra.
The populism familiar from Capra’s earlier films had a darker tone in this one and grew
even darker in All the King’s Men (1949), which warned against the public tolerance for
corruption and propensity to fascism. Broderick Crawford plays Willie Stark in this fictional-
ized version of the career of Huey Long, the populist demagogue who dominated Louisiana
politics for a generation. Robert Rossen, one of Hollywood’s most progressive filmmakers,
wrote and directed the movie based on Robert Penn Warren’s novel.
Willie Stark begins as an idealistic man of the people. He runs for office but loses to the
corrupt local organization, so he adapts and comes to terms with the machine: “I’d make a
deal with the devil if it’ll help me carry out my program.” When he becomes governor, he
fulfills his promises, building roads and hospitals for the rural folk who elected him. The
ends seem to justify the means, and we are on his side, but Willie soon becomes cynical
and corrupt, a demagogue who misleads and manipulates his people, misusing and wasting
their tax money on useless projects. He crudely compromises the old elite, represented by
an affluent, educated, liberal family, when he takes their daughter (Joanne Dru) as his mis-
tress and their son (John Ireland) as his aide. The adoring masses are symbolized by another
of Stark’s aides (Mercedes McCambridge), who is blindly in love with him and resolutely
loyal. These three are sympathetic characters, but it is apparent that their own weakness has
betrayed them. Willie Stark is assassinated in the end, punished for his transgressions, as
was Huey Long.
Aside from the Academy Award-winning performances of Broderick Crawford and Mer-
cedes McCambridge, Rossen’s preachy film has not held up well over time. Some critics
noted its preachiness in 1949, but others admired the film. The New York Times thought it
was “raw, racy . . . pictorial journalism,” a “rip-roaring film.”20 Power corrupts, this movie
tells us—not a new theme in American political films, but one that was frequently reiterated
after the war. All the King’s Men also warned against putting too much faith in leaders. The
film was careful, however, to make it clear that the fault was not only in the leaders but also
in the corrupt and decadent society that accepted them. Fascism could arise in America, in
other words, if the masses put their faith in the wrong leaders.
In State of the Union, Grant Matthews must walk away from power to retain his integrity,
a conclusion that condemned not only power but politics as well—good men could not get
involved. In All the King’s Men, Willie Stark takes the other path and is destroyed when he
goes too far. Perhaps it is reassuring that such an evil leader is doomed, but the alternatives
presented by these two films of the late 1940s represent an alarmingly discouraging view of
politics and a shift in the messages of political films. Although earlier movies had criticized
the corruption of politics and politicians, they always provided a solution, usually in the
form of a heroic leader or “the people.” The movies of the late 1940s and early 1950s were
more profoundly cynical. Great leaders like Roosevelt, good programs like the New Deal,
even faith in the people, were no longer enough. Postwar optimism had already turned to
135
pessimism, even cynicism, especially about politics. This bleak view would dominate politi-
cal films for three decades.
Notes
1. New York Times, April 26, 1939.

2. Colin Shindler, Hollywood Goes to War (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 31.
3. Ben Urwand, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2013). Excerpted in The Hollywood Reporter, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/
how-hollywood-helped-hitler-595684.
4. Thomas Doherty, “Does ‘The Collaboration’ Overstate Hollywood’s Cooperation with Hitler?” The
Hollywood Reporter, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/does-collaboration-overstate-hollywoods-

cooperation-595678.
5. Ibid.
6. McCall’s, June 1941.
7. Monthly Film Herald, April 12, 1941.
8. New York Times, May 2, 1941.
9. Charles J. Maland, American Visions (New York: Arno Press, 1977), p. 307.
10. Rudy Behlmer, ed., Inside Warner Bros., 1935–195I (New York: Viking, 1985), p. 290.
11. Cited in Shindler, pp. 58–59.
13. Cited in Monthly Film Bulletin, May 5, 1944.
14. David Culbert, ed., Mission to Moscow (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), p. 16.
15. Ron Harris, The Thousand Eyes Magazine 2, no. 3 (1976): 16.
16. New York Times, August 2, 1944.
17. Thomas J. Knock, “History in Lightning: The Forgotten Film, Wilson,” in Hollywood as Histo-
rian, ed. Peter C. Rollins (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1983), p. 95.
18. Leonard Quart and Albert Auster, American Film and Society Since 1945 (New York: Praeger,
1984).
19. Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1999), pp. 326–329.
20. New York Times, November 9, 1949.
136
7
The 1950s
Anti-Communism and Conformity
The Last Hurrah (1958)

The antipolitical films of the late 1940s and early 1950s played to an apolitical nation,
a nation that chose a nonpolitician, the moderately conservative former five-star Army
general and Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II,
Dwight Eisenhower, to serve as its president from 1952 to 1960. This was a prosperous time
for America, a time for big cars, television sets, suburban houses, and large families. Joan
Mellen, author of Big Bad Wolves, suggests that the films of the 1950s reflected this prosper-
ity in their “glorification and reinforcement of individual success and crass material gain.”1
But Americans in the early 1950s also had to come to terms with an increasingly urban and
corporate nation. The old emphasis on individualism had to be tempered to suit the new
organizational context, which demanded conformity and consensus, and this change, too,
showed up in the movies. America in the 1950s was also adjusting to being a world power.
The Cold War grew hot in Korea in 1950 and cold again when that “limited war” ended
in stalemate in 1953. At home, the threat of Communism produced fear that bordered on
paranoia, reinforcing consensus and conformity and giving birth to a fervid anti-Communism
that culminated in the career of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
The forces of conformity and consensus were so strong in the 1950s that they domi-
nate our memories and images of the decade. Postwar optimism and faith in the future had
been strengthened by prosperity and widespread support for the moderate conservatism of
President Eisenhower. But the nation was not as placid as it seemed. International poli-
tics was dominated by the Cold War, and the sense of American hegemony was fading. In
1956, America stood by as the Soviet Union invaded Hungary. The following year Russia
launched its Sputnik satellite, and America felt technologically inferior for the first time in
decades. When Fidel Castro signed a trade agreement with the Soviet Union in 1959, Com-
munism seemed to have arrived at America’s doorstep. And the threat of nuclear war loomed
over all the events of the decade.
Even as the world became a more dangerous place, the paranoia of the House Un-
American Activities Committee (HUAC) and Senator Joseph McCarthy fell into discredit,
and domestic politics became more complex as liberals grew braver and new social move-
ments emerged. The civil rights movement gained momentum and by 1957 was in the
forefront of American politics, where it would stay for two decades. Rock and roll and
the Beat movement drove a significant wedge between generations, and journalists pounded
the wedge in deeper by mocking the bland conformity of suburbia and the organization men
in their gray flannel suits.
All these changes were mirrored and sometimes predicted by the movies. Political films
were still made, though they were fewer and different. Social issue films peaked in the late
1940s, but kept appearing right through the 1950s. Among them was an increasing number
of movies about rebellious teenagers, like The Wild One (1953) and Rebel Without a Cause
(1955). But this was also a time when new genres emerged and old ones changed as the
power of the studios and the Production Code Administration (PCA) broke down.
As the nation and world changed, the film industry itself was restructured by the studios’
divestiture of their theater chains. In 1949, the Justice Department had given the big stu-
dios five years to implement divestiture, which, when completed, denied them their captive
exhibitors and thus their captive audiences. By the 1950s, theater owners could compete for
films by bidding and could refuse to show studio productions that they perceived as inferior
or controversial. This development may have discouraged the studios from taking risks on
138
THE 1950S: ANTI-COMMUNISM AND CONFORMITY
political subjects, for few political films were produced after divestiture was implemented in
1954, but also it gave independent producers access to audiences. As a result, independents
were the major source of political films by the late 1950s.
Even more than divestiture, the studios worried about television. Weekly movie attend-
ance dropped from 90 million a week in 1948 to 40 million in 1958. TV broke the habit of
regular moviegoing. A worried Hollywood tried to lure audiences back with extravagant
historical epics and technical innovations that TV could not match, like VistaVision and 3-D.
“Movies are better than ever,” a desperate advertising campaign declared.
The result of these elaborate efforts and declining box office receipts was fewer, more
costly films designed to draw huge audiences. Annual production fell from 383 films in
1950 to 154 in 1960. And the more spectacular Hollywood films became, the less politi-
cal they were, at least in terms of overt, contemporary politics. Independent filmmakers
like Stanley Kramer made a few political films during the 1950s, and the lack of studio
controls may have let the independents express their ideas more freely, but their political
output remained modest, because the caution of investors and distributors made it hard to
raise the necessary money. However, some of the studio-produced epics, westerns, and
science fiction movies of the era had political content. Michael Wood points out that per-
secution of minorities is the theme of several epics, including Quo Vadis (1951), The Robe
(1953), and Ben Hur (1959), while Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960) delivers a lesson
about revolution.2 Other film historians have noted the allegorical politics of westerns
like High Noon (1952) and sci-fi movies like The Thing (1951) and Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (1956).
As it turned out, however, Hollywood had another reason to avoid political films in the
form of HUAC and the Red Scare (see Chapter 3).
Gary Cooper plays a sheriff taking off his badge in disgust after the town deserts him in High Noon
(1952).
139
Hollywood Joins the Anti-Communist Crusade
Hollywood made at least thirty-three anti-Communist films between 1947 and 1954,3
although many more scored anti-Red points allegorically or featured Communist villains.
These productions, peaking in number just after the 1947 and 1951 hearings, suggest that the
film industry got the hint when HUAC asked director Leo McCarey, a cooperative witness,
if he thought Hollywood made enough anti-Communist films.
The first such venture was The Iron Curtain (1948), a box office failure produced by
Darryl Zanuck and directed by William Wellman. This was a traditional espionage story
in which the Communist characters were so villainous that outraged leftists picketed the
movie when it opened. The following year saw the release of three box office flops: The
Red Menace, The Red Danube, and I Married a Communist, a Howard Hughes produc-
tion starring Robert Ryan, which Time magazine referred to as “a celluloid bullet aimed at
the USSR.”4 This movie also attacked the West Coast dockworkers’ union, which then had
Communist leaders, and it was allegedly used to test the politics of various directors, thirteen
of whom refused to work on it.5 When the film failed, Hughes withdrew it, edited it so as to
deemphasize its politics, and then released it as The Woman on Pier 13, but it was no more
successful. Despite their failure, these movies entrenched the “dirty Commie” stereotype.
Sleazy, immoral, often fat and effeminate, these characters left no doubt that they were bad
guys, and audiences saw them over and over in the 1950s, just as they had seen the same
stereotypes as Nazis a decade earlier.
A somewhat less overtly anti-Communist film, The Fountainhead, was also released in
1949. Surprisingly, King Vidor, the progressive maker of The Big Parade and Our Daily
Bread, directed this one. The principal source of the conservatism in The Fountainhead,
however, was not Vidor but the reactionary author of the story, Ayn Rand. She was a leader
of the archconservative, anti-Communist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of
American Ideals and the formulator of the “Screen Guide for Americans.” Published to
coincide with the 1947 HUAC hearings as a supplement to the Motion Picture Produc-
ers and Distributors of America’s production code, Rand’s guide advised filmmakers not to
“smear the free-enterprise system” or “success” or “industrialists,” not to “deify the ‘com-
mon man,’” and not to “glorify the collective.”6
The Fountainhead reflects these directives in its story of Howard Roark (Gary Cooper),
an avant-garde architect who is nearly hounded out of his profession by traditionalists and
conformists. He gets a few jobs and becomes a modest success, but when his design for a
public housing project is altered, he blows up the building. At the trial that follows, he makes
an impassioned plea for artistic integrity and individual rights. The jurors swallow the dyna-
miter’s line and let him off.
The Fountainhead clearly expresses Rand’s right-wing libertarianism. The enemy is the
public, whipped up by cynical media manipulators. The declared intent of one of them,
improbably an architecture critic, is to raise the collective and destroy the individual. But
despite the movie’s condemnation of the masses and public opinion, in the end Roark
demands public approval for his act of destruction and gets it from the jury and a courtroom
audience. Thanks to its often ludicrous sexuality, The Fountainhead has become a camp
classic, but contemporary critics did not think it was funny. “The most asinine and inept
movie that has come from Hollywood for years,” sneered The New Yorker; “long-winded,
140
complicated preachment . . . pretentious . . . turgid . . . twaddle,” agreed the New York Times.7
Apparently critics did not feel compelled to please HUAC by praising a right-wing film.
The Fountainhead was unusually indirect, however, in its attack on Communism. Far
more typical was Big Jim McLain (1952), which starred John Wayne as a HUAC agent
purging Communists from Hawaii. Production of these anti-Communist films peaked with
thirteen in 1952 alone, just a year after HUAC renewed its investigation. Among these was
My Son John, Leo McCarey’s response to HUAC.
McCarey’s movie is about the all-American Jefferson family, played by familiar actors in
familiar parts. Dean Jagger is the American Legionnaire father, Helen Hayes the devoutly
Catholic mother, and Robert Walker their misled son John. When the intellectual, college-
educated John comes home for a visit and makes sarcastic remarks about the American
Legion, his father questions John’s Americanism. Then a visit from the FBI worries Mom,
who is reassured when John swears his loyalty on her Bible. “John stands for everything
I stand for,” she explains. “He’s just a liberal. Saint Paul was a liberal.” Dad is not so sure,
though. “How’s your supper coming?” he asks his wife, sending her scurrying away so he
can have a man-to-man talk with his son. They argue, John makes some anti-American
remarks, and Dad hits him with a Bible. When John returns to Washington, his mother fol-
lows him to return a key he has left behind. Learning from the FBI that the key is for the
apartment of a female spy, Mom uses the key and confronts her son. He confesses to having
an affair but denies that he is a spy. The unbelieving mother turns him in to the FBI, then
with rosary in hand, tearfully begs him to confess. “Take him away,” she says when he
refuses. “You have to be punished, John.” The FBI agent urges him to “use whatever free
will you have. Give up. Name names.” John escapes, then remorsefully phones the FBI and
agrees to turn himself in and become an informer. On his way, the Communists shoot up his
taxi, which crashes ostentatiously on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial killing him. Fortu-
nately, John has left a tape-recorded confession, which is melodramatically played for the
graduating class at his alma mater.
Like other films of this cycle, My Son John casts suspicion on intellectuals and liberals,
who are perceived as easy dupes for Communists. The film disapproves of John for rushing
off to see his egghead professor when he first comes home instead of staying with his par-
ents, who represent the traditional American values of patriotism, religion, and family. John
is advised to emulate the simple-minded patriotism of his father and “think with your heart,
not your head,” as his mother puts it. Nobody in this film does much thinking, however. For-
tunately, the FBI is there to take care of things, although one agent admits that “those with
something to hide” often criticize its methods.
My Son John was better than most of the anti-Communist movies, although its thinking
was muddled and its plot was jumbled, possibly because lead actor Robert Walker died
before the film was completed. The critics noted both flaws. The New York Times called it
“cultural vigilantism,” endorsing a “stool pigeon” mother and a father’s “stubborn bigotry”
as well as taking “a snide attitude toward intellectuals.”8 Although the critics did not like My
Son John, Hollywood signaled its approval by nominating McCarey’s original story for an
Academy Award, perhaps for HUAC’s benefit. McCarey himself argued that the film had a
happy ending, saying, “I’ve never yet ended a film on a note of futility.”9 John is dead and
his family is broken, but McCarey saw John’s tape-recorded speech as a kind of redemption.
Better dead than red!
141
My Son John was one of the last of the crusading anti-Communist films. By 1954, Sena-
tor McCarthy had brought about his own downfall through his investigation of the army and
his attacks on the president. HUAC also faded away. The Cold War went on and so did the
blacklist, but few anti-Communist movies were made after 1953, partly because the pressure
was off and also because audiences had not flocked to the earlier films.
The Quiet American (1957), a film that was both behind and ahead of its time, was perhaps
a vestige of this cycle. Writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz puts a distinctively American
twist in his adaptation of a novel by British author Graham Greene. The scene is Vietnam
in the early 1950s, with the French fighting a Communist-nationalist revolution. Thomas
Fowler (Michael Redgrave) is a British journalist cynically observing the decline of Euro-
pean imperialism and the rise of American power and the Third World. He tells the story of
a man known only as “the American,” played by Audie Murphy. Without a personal name to
define his character individually, the American stands all that more bluntly for his country’s
postwar political and economic order. Caught between the two men and the worlds they
represent is Phuong (Giorgia Moll), a Vietnamese girl who spurns her European lover when
she falls for the American.
The film follows Greene’s novel closely at first. The American arrives in Saigon spout-
ing his professor’s theory about the need for “a third force” that is neither imperialist nor
Communist. Fowler, the journalist, presumes that the American is an undercover agent for
his government. In the book, this is true and the American is destroyed when his plot goes
awry, but Mankiewicz balked at this anti-American message. “I have no politics,” says the
journalist, but a nasty Communist agent persuades him that the American is aiding terrorist
murderers and insists, “Sooner or later, one has to take sides.” Fowler gives in, losing his
professional objectivity and aiding the Communists, not only to prevent terrorism but also
to destroy his rival. The American turns out to be innocent, merely a do-gooder who imports
food, not bombs. A French policeman explains that “the idea had to be murdered,” appar-
ently meaning that aid was as threatening to Communists as military intervention.
Although better than earlier anti-Communist movies, The Quiet American also flopped
with critics and audiences. These films may have failed less because of their message than
because of their sledgehammer delivery—their political intent was too obvious for their
own good. In the end, they may have hurt the anti-Communist cause more than they helped
it. A 2002 version of The Quiet American starring Michael Caine as the anguished Brit and
Brendan Fraser as the American stuck closer to Graham Greene’s novel and made its politi-
cal points with more subtlety.
In Other Words
However, Hollywood did not enlist en masse in HUAC’s holy war. Dissenters survived and
even dared to speak out against the Cold War and HUAC’s witch hunt, although they often
did so indirectly or allegorically.
High Noon (1952) was a western, but according to Carl Foreman, who wrote it, “What
High Noon was about at the time, was Hollywood and no other place but Hollywood.”10
Producer Stanley Kramer, a leading Hollywood liberal, and Foreman, who was soon to be
blacklisted, were commenting on the filmmakers’ abandonment of their colleagues who
were under attack by HUAC. This film is about a sheriff (Gary Cooper) who gets no help
from the townspeople when a vengeful gang of killers comes after him. No cavalry arrives
142
representing the federal government, nor do the people rally around their sheriff, as in the
populist movies of the 1930s. High Noon is a bleak story of one man’s courage to stand up to
a hostile enemy in defense of his town despite being deserted by its citizens. In the context of
the HUAC hearings, Cooper’s sheriff represents those appearing before the committee who
refused to give in to the paranoia and bullying and name names. The townspeople represent
the craven witnesses who cooperated, turning on their colleagues to spare their own careers.
Its left-leaning politics were smoothly folded into a movie that became a hit with audiences
and critics and picked up Oscars for Cooper’s performance and Dmitri Tiompkin’s music.
Meanwhile, those who had cooperated with HUAC defended themselves in works like
On the Waterfront (1954), written by Budd Schulberg, featuring Lee J. Cobb and Leif Erick-
son, and directed by Elia Kazan, all of whom had named names for HUAC. Kazan had
joined the crusade against Communism with Viva Zapata! (1952) and Man on a Tightrope
(1953), in which a Czechoslovakian circus owner tries to escape from Communism, but
On the Waterfront is not so much an anti-Communist movie as a vindication of informers.
Making an informer into a hero, however, was no mean feat. Stool pigeons had always been
disdained in American folklore and movies.
Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) is the informer in On the Waterfront. His girlfriend (Eva
Marie Saint) and a priest (Karl Malden) urge him to tell a government investigator (Leif
Erickson) the truth about the corrupt activities of a union boss (Lee J. Cobb). Terry must
choose between his loyalty to friends and coworkers and a higher order represented by the
girl, the priest, and the investigator. His choice is simplified when the mob rubs out not only
Terry’s brother (Rod Steiger), but his pet pigeons as well.
“The message is clear,” Victor Navasky writes. “The injunction against informing is all
right as a guideline for an adolescent gang, but it won’t do for adults who are obliged to
look at each situation in its own moral context. (What’s ratting for them is telling the truth
for you.) Squealing is relative.”11 Besides, Terry really has no choice, and the audience has
no option but to sympathize with him. Not only must he avenge the murder of his brother
and loss of his pigeons, but also he must fight the corrupt union, win the girl, and please the
priest and the investigator.
Beyond its justification of informing, On the Waterfront is politically orthodox. Like
other movies about politics, it praises individual action and a benign government. It never
occurs to Terry, for example, to rally the troops and reform the union from within; collective
action simply is not an option. Instead, like a good corporate liberal, he puts himself in the
hands of the federal agents. Still, Kazan managed to make On the Waterfront and his other
socially conscious films complex enough for their messages to be palatable. The public and
the critics liked On the Waterfront, and it swept the Oscars.
An even grittier movie about the working class was made the same year, however. Funded
by a mine workers union, Salt of the Earth was a collaborative effort by blacklisted film-
makers, including its director, Herbert Biberman. Except for Rosaura Revueltas, a Mexican
movie star, and a few American character actors like Will Geer (who later played Grandpa
Walton on television), the cast was made up of real-life miners and their families.
In Salt of the Earth, the Mexican-American zinc miners go on strike because Anglo work-
ers in their company’s other mines have better pay and working conditions. The company
says it “can’t afford equality,” however, and it uses cheap Mexican labor to keep the Anglos
in line. While the men strike over salaries and working conditions, the women meet and
independently decide to strike over housing and sanitation in the company town. The men
143
shrug these demands off, saying they are not as important as working conditions, but when
a court order prohibits them from picketing and the women replace them, the men take over
the housework and soon agree to include the women’s demands in the bargaining. The vote
to put the women on the picket line is the turning point that solidifies the community. The
miners are aided by their international union and others, but the film makes it clear that they
are essentially on their own and treats them with great reverence. Only the company men
and the sheriff (Will Geer) come off badly; they are caricatured in a turnabout of Hollywood
tradition.
Salt of the Earth is remarkable for being feminist when no movies, liberal or conserva-
tive, recognized women’s issues, but what is truly remarkable is that a leftist film was made
at all at the height of McCarthyism. Not surprisingly, the production process was often
disrupted. The filmmakers were harassed by gun-carrying townspeople on location, and the
Mexican actress who played the lead was deported three times during the shooting of the
film. After it was completed, distributors boycotted it and the projectionists’ union refused
to screen it. In the end, Salt of the Earth was screened in only eleven theaters, most of them
in New York and Los Angeles, and then it was not seen again for a decade. Even now, the
film is shown mainly in union halls and at leftist conferences, and it is not listed in most film
reference books.
Salt of the Earth was attacked out of all proportion to the size of its audiences. The
American Legion condemned it, and the cinemas showing it were picketed. Film historian
Andrew Dowdy remembers being “warned to park [his car] blocks away . . . because FBI
men were taking down license plate numbers at the theater.”12 Variety screamed that the Rus-
sians had to be prevented from getting prints or they would use the movie as anti-American
propaganda,13 but other reviews were more balanced. Time conceded that “within the propa-
gandistic limits it sets,” it was “a vigorous work of art” from which “social anger hisses.”14
Whatever its flaws, Salt of the Earth provided an alternative vision of workers and unions
and was particularly notable for its feminism. Many Americans shared its political perspec-
tive, a perspective that they rarely saw on film. Nor did most of them see Salt of the Earth.
And Hollywood, of course, took note of its fate.
A more direct rebuttal of HUAC came in Daniel Taradash’s Storm Center (1956), “a
sure loser as the only attack on HUAC ever made in a Hollywood studio,” according to
Andrew Dowdy.15 In this movie, Bette Davis plays a librarian who refuses to remove from
her library a book called The Communist Dream. She is accused of belonging to Communist
front groups and fired, but a boy gets carried away and burns the library down. Storm Center
attacked the inquisitorial, guilt-by-association techniques of HUAC, but the message of free
speech was so oversimplified that even the Daughters of the American Revolution endorsed
it, and the movie was an unqualified flop. Storm Center was not Hollywood’s last word on
the deep trauma of the investigations, the pain of which is still not forgotten. But even in the
early 1950s and certainly later in that decade, other issues were arising in the nation and in
the movies.
Other Takes on Politics in the Early 1950s
While the Red Scare dominated Hollywood and shaped the themes of most of the political
films of the early 1950s, more traditional films about politics and social issues were also
produced, though they were fewer and more cautious.
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Hollywood expressed its liberalism in a number of films that featured minorities. The
image of Indians, for example, was rehabilitated in Broken Arrow (1950), with Jeff Chan-
dler playing Cochise and James Stewart as the government agent who understands him. In
Apache (1954), Indians, portrayed as pretty much like the rest of us, settle down on farms.
Latinos received less attention, but Joseph Losey, later a target of the HUAC witch-hunters,
directed The Lawless (1950), an update of The Grapes of Wrath centering on Mexican-
American migrants, and Elia Kazan cast Marlon Brando as the lead in Viva Zapata! (1952).
Later, Giant (1956), a precursor of TV’s Dallas and Dynasty, starring Rock Hudson, Eliza-
beth Taylor, and James Dean, preached a mild sermon about equality for women and Latinos.
Sidney Poitier made his debut in No Way Out (1950), while conservatives Ginger Rogers
and Ronald Reagan did their bit in the anti-KKK Storm Warning (1950). Poitier was back
in The Defiant Ones (1958), and racism was also a theme in Imitation of Life (1959). A
different social problem, juvenile delinquency, hit the screens in 1955 in The Blackboard
Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause. Both were controversial, but The Blackboard Jungle
was condemned as Communist propaganda because it presented a negative picture of the
United States.
Meanwhile, three films of the early 1950s took on politics in a more direct and traditional
way. One was a comedy, one a biopic, and one a drama, but all three were high on both
political content and intent.
The most successful of the three was Born Yesterday (1950), a comedy directed by George
Cukor. After a shot of the Capitol that tells us where we are, we meet Harry (Broderick
Crawford), a junk man who has become a big-time “dealer in scrap metals” in Washington
and who has attempted to further his own interests by bribing some congressmen. With
him is Billie (Judy Holliday), his crass mistress. Harry persuades Paul (William Holden),
a reporter, to coach Billie and make her more presentable; Paul agrees in order to spy on
Imitation of Life (1959) presents a deeply affecting illustration of “passing” in the character of light-
skinned Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner), the daughter of long-suffering African-American domestic worker
Annie (Juanita Moore), lower right. “I’m white, I’m white,” screams Sarah Jane into the mirror.
145
Harry. “Harry’s a menace,” Paul instructs Billie. “The whole history of the world is the story
of the struggle between the selfish and the unselfish. . . . All that’s bad around us is bred by
selfishness. Sometimes selfishness is a cause, an organized force, even a government, and
then it’s called fascism.” Paul, on the other hand, represents intellect, enlightenment, altru-
ism, even democracy—plus he is cute. He wins Billie’s affection, and she helps him expose
Harry. Good triumphs over evil, and Born Yesterday makes it clear that Harry is out of date
when even his cynical attorney tells him that despite “a few bad apples,” congressmen are
basically honest. Cukor’s film was well received by both the public and the critics and is
still a favorite, thanks largely to Judy Holliday’s performance, for which she won an Oscar.
Melanie Griffith played the part in a less successful remake in 1993.
Viva Zapata! (1952), a biopic about the Mexican peasant revolutionary Emiliano Zapata,
was written by John Steinbeck and directed, perhaps surprisingly, by Elia Kazan, who had
named names as a witness before HUAC. Zapata, played by Marlon Brando, is motivated to
lead a revolution not out of any profound political beliefs, but to win land for his people. The
revolution succeeds, but its leaders bicker and more fighting ensues until Zapata reluctantly
accepts the presidency. He is encouraged by Fernando (Joseph Wiseman), a bizarre-looking
political manipulator who is dressed in black and apparently intended as a stereotypical
Marxist revolutionary. Zapata soon feels he is being corrupted by power, like other leaders
before him, so he resigns and returns to his people, whom, eventually, he must again lead in
a guerrilla revolution. The new rulers know how to end this one, however. “Cut off the head
of the snake, and the body will die,” Fernando advises. “Kill Zapata, and your problem’s
solved.” Zapata, however, has trained his people not to need him. “You’ve always looked for
leaders,” he instructs them, “strong men without faults. There aren’t any. They’re only men
like yourselves. They change. They desert. They die. There are no leaders but yourselves.
A strong people is the only lasting strength.” Zapata goes Christlike to his death, apparently
knowing that he has been betrayed but that his spirit will be an inspiration to his people.
“Sometimes,” an army officer observes, “a dead man can be a terrible enemy.”
Viva Zapata! was a modest box office success, perhaps surprising for a movie about a
Mexican revolutionary released at the height of McCarthyism in the conservative 1950s, but
its message is more romantic than revolutionary. The movie never addresses the root causes
of the Mexican Revolution in class conflict, focusing instead on straightforward corruption.
Evil men subvert the revolution, presumably in their own interests, and Kazan later claimed
that these characters made the movie anti-Communist.
A Lion Is in the Streets (1953) was a more traditional political drama that reiterated the
condemnation of demagoguery sounded in All the King’s Men. Lion stars James Cagney
as an ambitious man of the people who betrays his own supporters to win the favor of the
machine. When even this fails, he leads an armed mob on the state capitol to demand that
the legislature resolve a tie vote for the governorship in his favor. Like Willie Stark in All the
King’s Men, he is ultimately assassinated by someone he has wronged. Although the movie’s
warning about the dangers of strong leaders and mobs was timely in the era of McCarthyism,
the movie was mostly ignored.
With reactions like this plus divestiture, HUAC, and other worries about censorship, no
wonder Hollywood backed away from political and social issue films. For all their worries,
however, filmmakers continued to challenge the Production Code, and some even became
more daring in the conservative, conformist 1950s. Otto Preminger managed to get his sex
comedy The Moon Is Blue (1953) screened without Code approval despite dialogue that
146
seemed scandalous in those days. He then took on the forbidden subject of drug abuse in The
Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and got away with that, too. In 1956, the PCA, bowing to
pressure from the film industry, amended the Code to permit the subjects of drugs, abortion,
prostitution, kidnapping, and miscegenation. The remaining rules quickly crumbled. Films
about homosexuals began to appear, for example, including Tea and Sympathy (1958) and
Suddenly Last Summer (1960). Gradually, fewer and fewer “sinners” were punished.
Changing Genres
While some filmmakers of the 1950s challenged the Production Code, others remolded old
movie genres to suit the changing times. War movies, for example, underwent a transforma-
tion after World War II. Peter Biskind points out that World War II films were written mostly
by liberals like Lillian Hellman, Dalton Trumbo, and John Howard Lawson. These writers
“were preoccupied with articulating war aims—democracy, freedom, brotherhood—and
went out of their way to explain why we fought.” Films about the Korean War, how-
ever, were apolitical adventures because the moviemakers “didn’t know why we fought,
and what’s more, they didn’t care.”16 Biskind goes on to describe three different political
perspectives in the war movies of the 1950s. Attack (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957) were
leftist films criticizing war and the military, while The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955)
was a conservative condemnation of bureaucracy. The mainstream political ideology of the
decade, however, was expressed in the centrist Strategic Air Command (1955).
In this film, Dutch (James Stewart) is a baseball player and U.S. Air Force reservist who
is recalled to temporary duty. Over the objections of his wife (June Allyson), he signs up
permanently. She would not object, he tells her, if there was a war on, and he explains
that “there is a kind of war. We’ve got to stay ready to fight without fighting. That’s even
tougher.” A bad arm excuses Dutch from service, but not before the film demands public
support for the men of the flying force and their dependents. Dutch, his wife, and the U.S.
Air Force all win, providing a centrist solution, but only after the husband and wife express
their willingness to sacrifice their selfish preferences to the greater cause. The film educated
audiences on the military policy of the day and, as in the other war films of the decade,
shifted the focus from the groups of enlisted men featured in movies about World War II to
the officer elite, in whom the nation was to place its trust.
While war movies changed, another genre grew in prominence in the 1950s. The popu-
larity of science fiction movies fed on the new interest in outer space and the anxiety about
atomic power. Mostly low in both political content and intent, these films are best under-
stood as socially reflective movies featuring fantastic displacement in which the nation’s
fears were played out in the fantasy of the movies. Some, however, were more clearly politi-
cal. In an era when direct political commentary was dangerous, science fiction offered a rich
source of allegory. Whether the aliens in these movies were mutants affected by radiation or
invaders from another planet, they could represent any threat, from technology gone mad to
Communist infiltration.
As with war movies, Peter Biskind sees the political right, left, and center in sci-fi. While
the centrist movies reassured us that we were in good hands, the left and right used sci-fi to
deliver utopian and antiutopian messages and to warn us not only about invaders but also
about the ineptitude of our rulers. Proponents of all three perspectives seemed to agree on
the need for vigilance. Right-wing sci-fi was paranoid about infiltration (The Thing, 1951;
147
Them!, 1954) and about people hopelessly searching for utopias (Forbidden Planet, 1956)
and getting into things they should have kept out of. Science and government often saved
the day, as in Them! and Forbidden Planet, but sometimes they were inept and average
guys became heroes, as in The Thing. Left-wing sci-fi, on the other hand, had benign aliens
offering utopia only to be rejected by dumb humans (The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951).
Biskind quotes Jack Arnold, the director of It Came from Outer Space (1953), who declared
he “wanted to have some meaning to it all. I think science fiction films are a marvelous
medium for telling a story, creating a mood, and delivering whatever kind of social message
should be delivered. . . . If ten per cent of the audience grasped it, then I was very success-
ful.”17 In centrist sci-fi, danger usually came when nature went berserk (The Black Scorpion,
1957; The Creature from the Black Lagoon, 1954). Radiation, a new worry in the 1950s,
was often at fault, but these movies trusted good scientists or the government to come to the
rescue. Alien pods turn normal people into unfeeling automatons in Don Siegel’s Invasion
of the Body Snatchers (1956). Now seen by some film scholars as a leftist condemnation of
the conformity of the 1950s, few doubted, when the movie was first released, that it was a
rightist denunciation of Communist mind control. The ending, to which Siegel purportedly
objected, was centrist, however, with the federal government stepping in to save the day.
The invasions and disasters of sci-fi were a perfect medium for centrist messages because
they “dramatized the necessity of consensus, of pulling together,” according to Biskind.18
Happy endings, provided by government, science, or the military, reassured us that we were
in good hands.
Political Films in the Late 1950s: Angry Men, Bosses, and Demagogues
According to Biskind, however, the ultimate centrist political movie of the 1950s was
the drama Twelve Angry Men (1957), directed by Sidney Lumet. The men of the title are
members of a jury, a convenient cross section of American males. They vote 11 to 1 to
convict the defendant, but the lone dissenter, a liberal architect played by Henry Fonda,
gradually turns them around. The court system works in this film, but only because of the
presence of one good man. Although the lone liberal dissenter prevails, it is also important
that all the others agree with him in the end, providing a centrist solution typical of the
conformist 1950s.
The Last Hurrah (1958) was less distinctly contemporary than Twelve Angry Men, but
although it reminisced about the good old days of machine politics, it also had something to
say about politics in the coming decade. Based on Edwin O’Connor’s novel about an aging
boss, The Last Hurrah was directed by John Ford, whose treatment oozes with nostalgia for
a simpler past. Although the movie’s portrayal of the machine was sympathetic, Boston’s
mayor, James Michael Curley, thought its fictional city was sufficiently like his own to
attempt to have the film suppressed.
Ford’s casting of the always-benign Spencer Tracy as an aging Irish-American political
boss running for mayoral re-election named Frank Skeffington immediately suggests that
the machine cannot be all bad. Several touching scenes in which Skeffington helps his peo-
ple solve their problems reinforce this impression. The machine is shown to be corrupt only
on a small scale, and the point is repeatedly made that politics is a means of social mobility
for Irish immigrants like Skeffington. When the town’s leading banker, a Yankee aristocrat
148
(Basil Rathbone), refuses to lend the city money for a project Skeffington needs to ensure
his reelection, saying “the banks don’t consider the city a good risk under the current admin-
istration,” Skeffington responds, “The city is no longer yours, it’s ours. That’s what really
bothers you.”
But he is wrong. The power of the machine is crumbling, partly from sheer age, a point
made both visually and verbally. The old Yankee aristocracy plots to run a slick but vacu-
ous media candidate against Skeffington to attract the emerging urban middle class, the
children of Skeffington’s supporters. “Politics is the best spectator sport in the country,”
Skeffington says as he tries to make the most of his rallies and speeches. But he knows that
his old-fashioned campaign style is “on the way out. It’ll all be TV,” he explains. His bland
opponent puts his family on TV in a scene reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s famous Checkers
speech, complete with dog, and wins the election as Skeffington dies.
The critics found The Last Hurrah sentimental, old-fashioned, and oversimplified,
although a few thought it gave a good sense of how politics worked. Slow and one-sided
as it is, Ford’s film is a rich portrait of machine politics that could have been improved by a
less saintly Skeffington and a less callow opponent. The younger candidate is so ludicrous
that his victory looks like a condemnation of the voters’ gullibility—and of TV, which may
have reflected the filmmakers’ attitude toward the competing medium and its audience. Still,
The Last Hurrah shows how the machine helped immigrants assimilate and how it cared for
people, humanizing and personalizing their government. Sociologists were writing about
these functions of the political machines in the 1950s; The Last Hurrah illustrated them.
Despite its sentimentality, the movie respects politics, treating politicians as caring and
distinctly human people. The younger generation of politicians comes off less well, how-
ever, as do the old aristocracy. The portrait of this Anglo elite plotting against the upstart
Irish gives The Last Hurrah added depth by making the class basis of political conflict clear,
something few other American political films have accomplished. Condemnation of the elite
is not balanced by faith in the masses, however. No respect is shown for the voters in The
Last Hurrah, no Capra-like trust in the people. Rather, they seem to get what they deserve
when the media candidate wins the election.
Such pessimism about the power of television and the gullibility of the people became
the theme of several American movies in the 1950s. Elia Kazan took it up in A Face in the
Crowd (1957), written by his On the Waterfront collaborator Budd Schulberg. In this movie,
Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Griffith) is a bum who is discovered by a local radio station and
catapulted into stardom as a singer and populist philosopher. He ends up grooming a dull
conservative candidate for president in return for the promise of becoming secretary for
national morale if the candidate wins. Rhodes is cynical, using his talent and the television
medium only to gain sex, wealth, and power. The politicians are equally cynical, using Rho-
des and his methods to sell themselves rather than their programs to the voters. Rhodes is
done in when a spurned lover leaves a microphone on after he thinks he is off the air. The
demagogue’s insulting remarks turn his audience against him, and his fame and power dis-
sipate overnight.
Kazan was commenting more on the superficial power of television than on politics, but
A Face in the Crowd made it clear that politicians would use that power and that the public
would be duped unless good people told the truth—and there were not many of them around.
Like Ford, Kazan seemed pessimistic about the people.
149
A Face in the Crowd (1957) features Andy Griffith as “Lonesome” Rhodes, a charismatic, itinerant
guitar player who cultivates a devoted following on radio and television until, drunk with political power
and fame—“I’m gonna be the power behind the president!”—he self-destructs.
On Toward Camelot
Political movies had changed during the 1950s. They had begun to deal with discrimination,
they had confronted the Cold War, and they had learned to look at the Communist threat
and the anti-Communist crusade from a new perspective. The result was a substantial body
of political films from an era that is commonly perceived as dull and apolitical. Films like
State of the Union, The Last Hurrah, and A Face in the Crowd had new and different things
to say. Generally more cynical, they were also more complex, sophisticated, and realistic.
Unlike the redemptive politics of some 1920s movies or the longing for strong leaders of the
1930s or even the uplifting triumphs of the people and their innocent leaders best captured
by Frank Capra, the political films of this era saw good men destroyed. The message of the
1950s was more a warning than a rallying cry, however, urging conformity over either indi-
vidualism or collective action.
And while the film rolled, America went from Truman to Eisenhower to Kennedy, from
postwar optimism to 1950s paranoia and conformity and, finally, to Camelot. Political films
had grown more sophisticated by the Kennedy years, but the liberalism that Kennedy inspired
did not catch up with either the nation or its filmmakers until after his assassination in 1963.
Notes
1. Joan Mellen, Big Bad Wolves (New York: Pantheon, 1977), p. 189.
2. Michael Wood, America in the Movies (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 184.
3. Dorothy Jones, “Communism in the Movies,” in Report on Blacklisting I: The Movies, ed. John
Cogley (New York: Fund for the Republic, 1956), pp. 300–301.
150
4. Time, October 17, 1949.

5. Colin Shindler, Hollywood at War (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 121.
6. Cited in John Cogley, ed., Report on Blacklisting I: The Movies (New York: Fund for the Repub-
lic, 1956), p. 11.
7. The New Yorker, July 16, 1949; New York Times, July 9, 1949.
9. Quoted in Variety, March 26, 1952.
10. Quoted in Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing (London: Pluto Press, 1984), p. 49.
11. Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Penguin, 1983), p. 210.
12. Andrew Dowdy, The Films of the 1950s (New York: Morrow, 1973), p. 35.
13. Variety, March 17, 1954.
14. Time, March 29, 1954.
15. Dowdy, p. 184.

16. Biskind, p. 59.
17. Ibid., p. 159.
18. Ibid., p. 102.
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8
The 1960s
From Mainstream to Counterculture
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
America’s youngest president took office in January 1961, ushering in a new political era.
John F. Kennedy’s tragic death less than three years later has perhaps caused us to exagger-
ate his stature as a leader, but even so, his presidency signaled a change. The roots of that
change were not so much in his politics as in his image.
Kennedy, a moderate Democrat more interested in foreign than domestic policy, identified
a “missile gap” between the United States and the Soviet Union and promised to get America
moving again. He did, increasing military spending and launching the space program. He
also introduced a boldly active Cold War interventionism that included the disastrous inva-
sion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union over missiles
based in Cuba, and the beginnings of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Kennedy was not so active or interested, however, in such issues as civil rights, urban
decay, and poverty. These were issues for which the 1960s would be remembered, but they
emerged during and after Kennedy’s term in office. He awoke to them as the nation did, but
his close election and an uncooperative Congress made domestic politics treacherous for
him, causing him to move slowly on these issues. It was left to his successor, Lyndon B.
Johnson, to develop and implement the programs that distinguished the era, assisted by the
political momentum of the spirit Kennedy had awakened and by his martyrdom.
While the Kennedy spirit helped liberalize the nation, the civil rights movement provided
political momentum, driving both Kennedy and Johnson to the left. Martin Luther King Jr.
led the great march on Washington in 1963. The following year saw riots in several urban
ghettos to which Johnson responded with his Great Society program. Meanwhile, a wave of
student activism started in 1964 and evolved into the radical New Left, then into the antiwar
movement, and eventually into a youthful counterculture.
Where were the movies? In 1962, Advise and Consent caught some of Kennedy’s joy in
politics, although its conclusion was as consensus-oriented as that of any 1950s movie and
as confident that the system worked as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. That same year, The
Manchurian Candidate expressed some of the wit of the era by putting down McCarthy-
ism, but it managed to do so safely by portraying the Red-baiters as the real Reds. In 1963,
P.T. 109, an action movie about the World War II exploits of John Kennedy (played by Cliff
Robertson), simultaneously contributed to and cashed in on the young president’s popular-
ity. For the most part, however, Hollywood lagged behind the nation, perhaps because it was
a bad time for the film industry.
By 1960, average weekly attendance at the movies had dropped to 40 million, half
what it had been in the 1940s, and by 1970 it had fallen to only 20 million. The number
of movie theaters declined, and so did the number of films made, bottoming out with 154
in 1960. Some major studios, like MGM, quit making movies. Multinational corporations
absorbed others, including United Artists and Paramount. Moviemakers grew more cautious
and profit-conscious, producing fewer films as they concentrated, without great success, on
blockbusters.
The movies launched a surprising revival later in the 1960s, however, even as television
replaced the motion picture as America’s primary entertainment medium. Television took
over the middle of the road, freeing movies to search for more selective audiences and thus
to take more chances, even on politics. This risk-taking was limited, though, by the studios’
corporate conservatism and profit orientation, which now forced them to take lucrative TV
sales into consideration when making movies. The continued dominance of a few major dis-
tributors was also a constraint, although independent producers like Stanley Kramer could
154
THE 1960S: FROM MAINSTREAM TO COUNTERCULTURE
Angela Lansbury plays duplicitous, overbearing Mrs. Eleanor Shaw Iselin in The Manchurian
Candidate (1962), a seminal film about brainwashing during the Red Scare era.
win wide distribution by first proving their films during art house runs in New York and Los
Angeles. The number of independent producers grew as distribution opportunities appeared,
and liberal filmmakers began to take advantage of the nation’s new political mood. Kramer,
Sidney Lumet, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Ritt became more active, and others, like Dalton
Trumbo and Abraham Polonsky, returned to work after having been blacklisted. They were
joined by a new generation of politically oriented filmmakers, including Robert Altman,
John Frankenheimer, Alan Pakula, Mike Nichols, and Arthur Penn.
There were new audiences, too. Some filmmakers began to exploit the large numbers
of young ticket buyers, a move that resulted not only in beach-blanket movies but also in
classics such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Graduate (1967). Others aimed at the
growing and increasingly sophisticated art film audience in big cities and university towns,
an audience capable of making “small” movies profitable. The beach-blanket and art house
audiences even merged to make big hits of a few independent productions with countercul-
ture themes, like Easy Rider (1969).
In the liberal 1960s, the Production Code finally succumbed to defiant filmmakers, civil
libertarians, court decisions, changing politics, and the need for movies to attract audiences
by giving them what they could not get on TV. By 1966, the Code was advisory rather than
mandatory, but it still recommended rewarding virtue, condemning vice, and dealing cau-
tiously with sex. For the first time, it also suggested limits on violence. In 1968, the Code
was replaced by the more liberal rating system, which limited film audiences to specified age
groups, mainly to protect the young from sex, violence, and obscene language. Filmmakers
were undoubtedly happy to be free of the Production Code’s restrictions, but investors and
the public still served as censors, rejecting subjects that offended or angered large groups
of people.
155
Although Hollywood was slow to pick up the politics of the decade, a number of political
films of the 1960s mark the beginning of a period during which American filmmakers more
willingly criticized the dominant values of their society. Ironically, the decade that is often
perceived as America’s most political produced fewer political films than the consensus-
oriented 1950s or even the 1920s. The American Film Institute subject index of films of the
1960s lists seventy such movies that touch on political themes—only half as many as are
listed for the 1920s.1
On the Beach and the Political Films of the Early 1960s

On the Beach, one of the first movies to catch the spirit of the 1960s, was actually made in
1959. Its director, Stanley Kramer, was one of Hollywood’s most consistent liberals, gen-
erally seeing the people as victims rather than the dupes portrayed in The Last Hurrah or
A Face in the Crowd. Kramer started as producer of Home of the Brave (1949), a film about
the racism experienced by a black war veteran. He went on to produce High Noon (1952),
The Wild One (1954), and The Defiant Ones (1958), which he also directed. All these films
as well as Kramer’s films in the 1960s were unabashedly political in intent and content,
although none dealt explicitly with the political process.
Based on Nevil Shute’s best-selling novel, On the Beach was an early disaster movie
in which the last survivors of a nuclear holocaust, a cross section of humanity played by
an all-star cast, await the radioactive clouds of death, mostly with dignity. On the Beach
opened portentously with “a global premiere” in seventeen cities, including Moscow. It
was treated as a profound statement on the need to face the possibility of an atomic future,
a theme that had been touched on by sci-fi films but never by a big-budget movie with stars
like Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire. It became the film people talked about
and felt they had to see. Critics liked it, too, although a few pointed out that it left audi-
ences feeling helpless because it gave no clue as to what could be done to prevent the
atomic holocaust. They also observed that the end of the world was more bland than hor-
rifying in On the Beach. Time noted “what really is horrible about the end of the world:
boy does not get girl.”2
Kramer followed On the Beach with Inherit the Wind (1960), the story of the Scopes
trial, which involved the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in Tennessee schools. An
impassioned plea for free speech, praising the good citizens who stand up for the persecuted
teacher at the risk of angering the mob, the film said as much about the 1950s as it did about
the trial. Kramer next turned to persecution and prosecution on a grander scale with Judg-
ment at Nuremberg (1961), which tells the story of the Holocaust through the trial of German
war criminals. He dealt with anti-Semitism again in Ship of Fools (1965), and he took on
race relations with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967).
Some reviewers considered Kramer’s films overly sentimental and simplistic, and they
certainly seem so now, but they were popular hits, often garnering Academy Awards and
nominations, and they were almost always treated respectfully as must-see movies. Remark-
ably, Kramer managed to elicit this response despite his consistently liberal perspective.
His use of all-star casts helped, and the softness of his liberalism made his messages easy to
swallow. He never demanded much more than tolerance, and he rarely called on people to
do much more than stand up for the rights of others, although this may have seemed like a
lot in the post-McCarthy 1950s and early 1960s. Kramer’s movies surely contributed to the
156
Spencer Tracy plays a lawyer defending the right of a science teacher to teach evolution in Inherit the
Wind (1960).
development of the social consciousness of the decade’s activists, a generation of Americans

who were teenagers when Kramer was most prolific.
As the 1960s began, other filmmakers were also showing an interest in politics. Sunrise
at Campobello (1960) told the story of the beginning of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s career
and his battle with polio. One of the last of the big biopics, Sunrise was also one of the
increasingly rare movies that presented politics as a worthwhile pursuit with a politician
as hero. Other political films of the early 1960s took up more contemporary topics. Exodus
(1960), directed by Otto Preminger and written by Dalton Trumbo, was a popular epic of
the founding of modern Israel. Elia Kazan’s less successful Wild River (1960) dealt with the
eradication of traditional rural life by progress in the form of federal dam-builders. The Ugly
American (1962), a movie about Communism and nationalism, also flopped, despite the star
power of Marlon Brando and its prescient focus on southeast Asia. Director Billy Wilder,
on the other hand, had a hit with One, Two, Three (1961), a daring satire of the Cold War
starring James Cagney.
Mainstream Politics in the 1960s: The Best Men?
While all these films were clearly political, a few movies of the 1960s dealt more explicitly
with the political process, high in both political content and intent. Two of these pure politi-
cal films are classics whose messages about politics hold up today.
Melodrama combined with realism in Advise and Consent (1962), a political movie in
the Hollywood tradition but with a skillful evocation of the Washington scene and a more
probable plot than most such films. Based on the novel by Washington journalist Allen
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Drury, Advise and Consent was directed by Otto Preminger, who toned down the novel’s
conservatism.
In this film, Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda) is the presidential nominee for secretary
of state, awaiting approval by the Senate, which, according to the Constitution, must advise
the president and consent to his political appointments. Right-wingers label Leffingwell
soft on Communism and denounce his “egg-headed arrogance.” We are on Leffingwell’s
side from the outset, not only because he is played by Henry Fonda, but also because his
chief opponent is the reactionary old southerner, Seab Cooley, portrayed with great relish by
Charles Laughton. Pushing from the left is the ruthless, dogmatic senator Fred Van Acker-
man (George Grizzard), who is willing to violate all the rules to make Leffingwell secretary
of state. Leader of a national prodisarmament group, Van Ackerman is always surrounded by

zombielike aides (Communist automatons?). Caught between them all is the Senate majority
leader (Walter Pidgeon), an honorable man who only wishes to get his president the ratifica-
tion he wants, even though he knows it will not be easy.
Van Ackerman wants to chair the subcommittee that will hold the hearing on Leffingwell’s
nomination, but although he is the logical choice, he is rejected because his ambition has led
him to violate the Senate’s unwritten rules of conduct. (“He doesn’t belong here,” the Senate
leaders say. “No tact.”) They choose young Brig Anderson (Don Murray) to chair the hearings
because “he knows how to be a senator.” Anderson seems perfect—he is clean-cut and polite,
a mature and sophisticated version of Mr. Smith; he has a nice family, plays by the rules, and
honors his elders, but he turns out to be a bit rigid. Senator Cooley dredges up evidence that
Leffingwell was once a member of a Communist cell. When Leffingwell denies the associa-
tion, Anderson, learning he has lied, turns against him despite pressure from the president and
the majority leader, who understand that “we all make mistakes” in youth and that “everything
isn’t black and white.” Anderson, the pure young idealist, plans to denounce Leffingwell until
a mysterious caller threatens to expose Brig’s past homosexual affair unless he supports the
confirmation. Unable to cope with the truth about himself and unwilling to compromise his
position on Leffingwell, Brig commits suicide. The Senate deliberations proceed, but as the
vice president (Lew Ayres) prepares to cast the tie-breaking vote, the president dies and the
issue becomes moot. It turns out that the evil Van Ackerman was behind the blackmail, and
he is scorned by his fellow senators. “Fortunately this country is able to survive patriots like
you,” the majority leader tells him. “We can tolerate about anything, but you’ve dishonored
us.” Senator Cooley, however, is still in the club because he played by the rules.
Although it was made in 1962, Advise and Consent carries a 1950s message of consensus—
characters that do not fit in or will not play by the rules are destroyed. Like earlier movies,
this one says that politics is a dirty business, but Advise and Consent is more interesting,
sophisticated, and morally complex than its predecessors. The human side of politics is clear;
the majority leader and the Senate regulars are good men who live by a code of honor, even
if that code is morally ambiguous. Nobody is pure, not the president or the secretary of state
or the clean-cut young senator, not the left or the right, yet some are well-intentioned and
play the game with honor. Pidgeon’s majority leader and Ayres’s vice president give the film
moral weight because we like them and trust them. Advise and Consent also provides painless
instruction on the way the political process works. The repartee between the majority leader
and his mistress provides a distinctly grown-up perspective on politics, and the filmmakers
also use a group of diplomats’ wives in the gallery to explain how the Senate operates.
The New York Times dismissed Advise and Consent as a cynical movie about dishonor-
able men, including the president.3 Critic Pauline Kael wrote it off as a “mindless ‘inside’
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story of Washington shenanigans” and an “overwrought melodrama,”4 but other critics liked
it, noting the accurate depiction of the workings of the Senate. As in many political films,
the melodrama was there for entertainment, but it turned out to be the weak point of the film,
while the political machinations and procedures were stronger. Still, they would not have
been as interesting without the moral conflict introduced by the melodrama.
Real-life politicians took a great interest in Advise and Consent. Although Martin Luther
King refused an offer to play a senator, three real-life senators did appear in it, and President
Kennedy entertained the filmmakers at the White House while the movie was being made.
Some senators did not like the final product, however. “I don’t think it will be wholesome
for either our people or those abroad,” declared Strom Thurmond.5 As usual, the real-life
politicians overreacted. Advise and Consent not only gave a strong sense of how politics
worked, but also insisted that most politicians were decent people. Mr. Anderson’s Washing-
ton of 1962, however, was different from the city that Mr. Smith visited in 1939. Politics had
become more complicated, and innocence was no longer allowed to triumph.
Advise and Consent also anticipated the vicious personality-focused politics of the 1990s,
as did another political film of the 1960s. Less melodramatic, The Best Man (1964) is sharper
and more contemporary—and holds up better—thanks to Franklin Schaffner’s direction and
Gore Vidal’s adaptation of his own play. The scene is a convention to select a presidential
nominee, implicitly to succeed Lyndon Johnson, since the film’s titles play over portraits
of all the presidents through Johnson. Bill Russell (Henry Fonda again) is the intellectual
former secretary of state, an Adlai Stevenson-style liberal and presumably the best man.
His wife (Margaret Leighton), an independent and intellectual woman, rallies to his side,
like Hepburn in State of the Union, setting aside marital problems for the greater cause.
“Politics make strange bedfellows,” she wryly comments. Russell’s opponent, Joe Kantwell
(Cliff Robertson), is a ruthless ideologue and true believer who combines the image of John
Kennedy with the politics of Richard Nixon. Kantwell is scornfully dismissed for having
built his career on the pursuit of “an imaginary Communist mafia,” an indication of how
much American and Hollywood politics had changed in just ten years.
The unscrupulous Kantwell threatens to reveal that Russell once had a nervous breakdown
unless he withdraws from the race. Russell’s supporters urge him to retaliate by accusing
Kantwell of being a homosexual. Russell is incredulous (“That ugly wife, those ugly chil-
dren!”) and refuses to smear his opponent, insisting that he wants to win the nomination
because of his stand on political issues. Small corruptions, he insists, destroy character. Rus-
sell himself, however, has misled the public about his “happy” marriage, given speeches he
has not read (“I’ll surprise myself”), and manipulated the press.
If Kantwell embodies the ruthless ideologue and Russell the conscientious liberal,
ex-president Art Hockstadter represents political pragmatism. Lee Tracy was nominated for
an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of this Truman-like politician
who declares that he does not personally care whether Kantwell “has carnal knowledge of
a McCormick reaper,” but demands that Russell use whatever he has got against his oppo-
nent. “Power is not a toy we give to children,” the ex-president explains. “It’s a weapon and
a strong man uses it.” Disdaining Russell’s squeamishness, he asserts that “to want power
is corruption already” and that “there are no ends” to justify means. It is normal to fool the
people, Hockstadter warns Kantwell, but it is “serious when you start fooling yourself.”
Hockstadter fails to persuade Kantwell to back down, however, and when Russell still will
not fight back, Hockstadter refuses to support him. To stop Kantwell, Russell ultimately
martyrs himself by withdrawing from competition and releasing his delegates with a request
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that they vote for a third candidate. “Men without faces tend to get elected president, and
power or personal responsibility tends to fill in the features,” he assures us. These may be
the best men, but the conclusion is subverted by the film’s clear prejudice in favor of Russell/
Fonda, the man who is too good for politics.
In an era of increasing interest in politics, The Best Man caught enough of the excitement
of the game to engage mild public interest and win mixed reviews, although most critics
pointed out that Russell/Fonda was altogether too scrupulous and that the film’s ends/means
morality was less than profound.6 The State Department worried about the reaction of Soviet
audiences to such a cynical portrait of American politics, but director Schaffner dismissed
this concern, saying that the Soviets “don’t understand politics,” by which he presumably
meant electoral politics, as in The Best Man.7

Like Advise and Consent, The Best Man is an inside view of politics. Both films play on
its seaminess, featuring blackmail based, disturbingly, on homosexuality, but in both films
the political institutions finally work, and the process and the system triumph. Both films
also disparage ideologues and laud team players. And in both, Henry Fonda plays the good
man with a tainted past who has to give up politics, although his character in The Best Man
does so more decisively.
Like State of the Union (1948), The Best Man sets out the choice between personal integ-
rity and political ambition and opts for integrity. Such martyrdom to idealism “is a central
liberal dramatic tradition,” according to Richard Maltby,8 but the choice would have been
stronger if Russell’s stand on political issues had been clearer rather than simply “good”
by implication and in comparison to the abhorrent politics of his opponents. The Best Man
cynically rejects politics as dirty and hypocritical, thus reinforcing the Hollywood cliché.
The Fonda character does not even trust the public enough to appeal to it, as a Capra hero
would have done, and his aloofness gives the film an overall tone of elitism and condescen-
sion toward politics, perhaps reflecting the attitude of its privileged author, Gore Vidal, who
himself dropped out of politics after an unsuccessful congressional candidacy. This elitism is
mitigated by the suspicion that perhaps Russell/Fonda is not the best man after all; he seems
rather too good, too self-consciously superior. In the end, we are instructed that the probable
nominee will live up to his position and all will be well, a reassuring conclusion that has
been confirmed by any number of real-life presidents.
Finally, it should be noted that these films—and most others of the 1960s—carried on
the male focus of political movies. Women continued to play supporting roles as wives, not
even attaining the political stature of Jean Arthur’s aide in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
The decade’s movies did produce one woman president, although Kisses for My President
(1964), a 1930s-style sex comedy, focused on “first husband” Fred MacMurray. Homosexu-
als fared even worse. The weakening of the Production Code made it possible for movies to
feature homosexuality, but only as a seamy secret.
From Dr. No to Dr. Strangelove
These traditional Hollywood political films contrast with a new genre of political films that
emerged in the 1960s, the political thriller. The political content of these films was often
high, although their intention was usually more to entertain than to educate. They neverthe-
less reflected the concerns of the times and shaped the public understanding of then-current
issues.
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John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962) was one of the first and most
successful of these political thrillers. A brainwashed veteran of the Korean War (Laurence
Harvey) is programmed to assassinate on command—but who is his intended victim? Mean-
while, a gravel-voiced McCarthy type (James Gregory) rabble-rouses, declaring he has
“lists” of Communists in government agencies, declaring that they number fifty-seven when
he glimpses the “57 Varieties” label on a bottle of Heinz ketchup. Linking the two men is the
veteran’s mother, who is also the demagogue’s wife and mastermind (Angela Lansbury in
the role of a very untraditional woman). A shocking conclusion reveals that the Communist
agent who controls the programmed assassin is his mother. The right-wing demagogue turns
out to be a front for subversion, a nice twist and one that was courageous in 1962. Frank-
enheimer’s brilliant film brought the cycle of anti-Communist movies to an end by adding
complexity and confusion to everybody’s motives, simultaneously establishing the thriller
as a major form for political movies.
Although the politics of the 1960s is remembered as liberal or even radical, one of the
most durable movie symbols of the era is neither, but does reflect the general fear of nuclear
war and the Kennedy administration’s reliance on CIA intervention. James Bond is a Brit-
ish secret agent created by novelist Ian Fleming, whose books President Kennedy enjoyed.
The first Bond movie, Dr. No (1962), was such a hit that a dozen more followed, with Sean
Connery and later other actors playing the suave spy. The political content of these films is
simplistic at best, but it suited the political mood of the nation. Film scholar Joan Mellen
declares the Bond movies “the key image of the decade,” reflecting the “macho politics” of
the Kennedy era,9 as superspy Bond foils villainous plots for world domination or destruc-
tion. To some extent, the Bond movies were a vestige of the Cold War, but their view is
somewhat more complex in that the Soviet Union is not always the enemy. More often, the
menace is an evil genius like Dr. No who plays the superpowers off against each other, thus
expressing the public’s fear that something might go wrong in the delicate balance of power
and bring apocalypse. The solution in these films is always provided by the superhero. All
we had to do, they suggested, was let the CIA or the British secret service take care of busi-
ness, a notion that was shared by the Kennedy administration with its penchant for brisk
and brutal intervention by the CIA or Special Forces and international brinkmanship. Some
real-life CIA plots, like the attempted assassination of Cuban premier Fidel Castro, went
even further than the Bond movies, in which action is mostly defensive rather than offensive.
The Bond films and many copycat movies were spoofs that toyed with international disas-
ter, but other motion pictures of the era took the subject seriously, suggesting that worldwide
disaster might come not from evil enemies but from within. Some even suggested that
the final holocaust could result from an accident. These were the movies that most clearly
brought Hollywood into the politics of the 1960s.
The first, Seven Days in May (1964), was a thriller written by Rod Serling, best known
today for his Twilight Zone TV series, and directed by John Frankenheimer. In this movie,
a wise, liberal president (Fredric March) signs a nuclear nonproliferation treaty with the
Soviet Union, but a group of right-wing generals, led by Burt Lancaster, plots a coup. A jun-
ior officer (Kirk Douglas) loyal to the president reveals the conspiracy. At first incredulous,
the president eventually acts to entrap the treacherous generals and denounce them to the
nation in a televised press conference. With the help of the loyal officer, his cynical White
House staff, and, presumably, the television-viewing public, the president foils the coup.
The twist in Serling and Frankenheimer’s thriller is the way they turn American paranoia
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inside out, suggesting that the threat could come from within and from the right. They also
suggest a political role for the public through the president’s televised appeal, an unusual
message in American political films other than those of Frank Capra. Seven Days in May
did well at the box office and was praised by most critics. Arthur Knight was excited to see
Hollywood, “the sleeping giant . . . waking up again” and dealing with contemporary issues
after the escapism of the 1950s.10 But despite its reassuring message that the system worked,
politicians worried about the impression Seven Days in May would give abroad, demanding
that the export version be clearly labeled “fictional,” lest “ignorant foreigners” think such
right-wing coups were possible in the United States.11
In Fail Safe (1964), directed by Sidney Lumet and written by the formerly blacklisted
Walter Bernstein, the threat results from a technological accident: an American bomber heads
for Moscow because of a mechanical glitch. As in Seven Days in May, however, levelheaded
men solve the problem. The president, reassuringly played by Henry Fonda, negotiates his
way out of the mess, finally ordering U.S. planes to bomb New York City to assure the
Russians of fair play and to avoid wider destruction. Rational men capable of thinking the
unthinkable—as strategists of nuclear war were doing at the time—somehow made even
the sacrifice of New York seem necessary. Some critics praised Fail Safe for showing how
“intelligent men trying to use their wits and their techniques correct an error,”12 but others
thought the movie was platitudinous, and it stirred little enthusiasm at the box office. Fail
Safe also suffered from comparison to another, more devastating film about nuclear war that
made all other movies on the subject seem naive.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), directed
and coauthored by Stanley Kubrick, was a critical and box office hit even though it pro-
claimed that the world had gone mad and was bound for destruction. Strangelove opens
with an ironically lyrical scene of a bomber being refueled in midair, perhaps an allusion to
a similar scene in Strategic Air Command (1955), but this time “Try a Little Tenderness”
is the musical accompaniment and the tone is satirical, providing a suitable prologue to
Kubrick’s scathing movie. During a simple military exercise, a fleet of American bombers
is sent toward the Soviet Union, but some of the bombers do not respond to a command to
return to base. It turns out that an insane Air Force general (Sterling Hayden) has initiated
a real attack on the Soviet Union. He hopes to force the president (Peter Sellers) to pro-
ceed with the assault rather than suffer Soviet retaliation. The president orders the general to
send the coded call-back orders to the planes, but he refuses. The president sends the army to
seize the general’s base, but the general tells his men they are under attack by subversives in
American uniforms. While the battle at the base goes on, the bombers get closer and closer
to their target and the president summons his cabinet to the war room. As the tension builds,
Kubrick cuts between the base, the president in the war room, and a bomber commanded by
Major Kong (Slim Pickens).
One of the generals in the war room (George C. Scott) advises an all-out preemptive
attack, but the president calls the Soviet ambassador to the war room instead and uses the
hotline to warn the Russian premier, who says that a secret doomsday device will destroy
the entire world if the Soviet Union is attacked. Confronted with apocalypse, the two lead-
ers cooperate in shooting down the American bombers—all except the one piloted by Major
Kong. Damaged in the attack, Kong’s plane flies too low for radar detection and proceeds
to its target to the tune of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Meanwhile, Dr. Stran-
gelove (Peter Sellers in another role) arrives in the war room. Speaking in a heavy German
162
accent and giving Nazi salutes with a gloved hand he cannot control, Strangelove advises
the president and cabinet on survival after the holocaust, raving about life in caves and
mines, drooling over his planned male–female ratio, and referring to the president as “Mein
Fuehrer” in a caricature of German expatriates who had become American defense experts.
Major Kong’s B-52 gets through, however, and the film ends in lyrical shots of mushroom
clouds accompanied by “We’ll Meet Again,” the sentimental World War II song.
Dr. Strangelove is relentlessly cynical and satirical with no completely sympathetic char-
acters. Scientists and the military take the toughest beating. Science is represented by the
mad Nazi, Dr. Strangelove, and the military is embodied by the generals played by Scott
(“war is too important to be left to politicians”) and Hayden, a lunatic who is convinced that
everybody is after his “precious bodily fluids.” Major Kong, the ingenious cowboy pilot,
would have been the hero in any conventional movie, but cheering for him in this movie
would mean rooting for apocalypse. Strangelove does not even offer a reasonable liberal as
hero. The president is well meaning but ineffectual. So is his military counterpart, a visiting
British officer (Peter Sellers again) attempting to stop the insane general. Liberal faith in
good men—even a rational president willing to communicate with the Soviets—is dismissed
as derisively as is conservative faith in the military. And Strangelove attacks technology as
well as human folly and fallibility. Slick machines, without hearts or minds, go out of control
in the hands of insane, careless, or incompetent humans. The U.S. Air Force denied that such
accidents could happen, but Terry Southern, one of the film’s authors, declared that its intent
was “to blast smugness . . . over a foolproof system which may not be.”13
Most disturbingly, Strangelove issues a warning without offering any hope of salvation.
Seven Days in May and Fail Safe also condemned the military and expressed concern about
the safety of technology, but they offered human heroes and a political system that worked.
Strangelove’s condemnation is more sweeping and offers no hope at all. “It is not war that
has been laughed to scorn,” critic Pauline Kael wrote, “but the possibility of sane action.”14
The Washington Post reviewer worried that “no communist could dream of a more effec-
tive anti-American film to spread abroad than this one.”15 However, critics conceded the
brilliance of the film, and its skillful combination of comedy and politics made it a popular
hit. Strangelove won Academy Award nominations (but no Oscars) for best picture, direc-
tor, writers, and actor (Sellers), the first political film to gain such approval since the 1940s.
Not since the sci-fi films of the 1950s had the consequences of nuclear technology been
so directly addressed. Strangelove, Fail Safe, Seven Days in May, and, earlier, On the Beach
played to and expressed public concern about nuclear war and kept the subject on the
nation’s agenda. They helped shape a generation’s attitudes, and they may have contributed
to Lyndon B. Johnson’s electoral victory in 1964. Johnson presented himself as the “peace
candidate,” whereas his right-wing Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, an officer in the
U.S. Air Force Reserve, was portrayed as a warmonger and virtual Strangelove.
Even as America worried about nuclear war, it moved toward détente, and so did Holly-
wood. Fail Safe suggested we could negotiate with the Russians, while Strangelove sent up
the hotline and satirized the Soviets as viciously as it did our own leaders, but both movies
helped to modify the old 1950s image of evil Communists, as did other films of the 1960s.
Doctor Zhivago (1965), for example, was a romantic tale of the Russian Revolution in which
all Communists were Stalinist villains, but the eponymous hero (Omar Sharif) remained
resolutely sympathetic with the revolution. Meanwhile, a contemporary comedy, The Rus-
sians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966), delivered a message of reconciliation.
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A Soviet submarine runs aground in New England and its crew members are perceived as
invaders by wacky villagers. “I do not wish to hate anybody,” says the handsome Russian
(John Phillip Law) to the pretty American (Eva Marie Saint). “It doesn’t make sense to hate
people,” she agrees.
John Wayne’s War
Although the war in Vietnam loomed large in the consciousness and politics of the nation
by the late 1960s, Hollywood avoided the subject. The Quiet American (1958) and The
Ugly American (1963) anticipated the Vietnam quagmire and Brian De Palma’s Greetings
(1968) was an antiestablishment comedy about draft dodging. But most filmmakers avoided
Vietnam, because war films had rarely been commercially successful and because public
opinion on the war was deeply divided. Taking a position on a phenomenon still in progress
is particularly risky because events may alter both the outcome and public attitudes about it.
Besides, television news of the war satisfied the curiosity of most people and made fictional
treatments look silly. As a consequence, Vietnam did not get to Hollywood until the war was
over—except in one movie, The Green Berets (1968).
John Wayne got to the Vietnamese battlefield a decade ahead of other filmmakers when
he codirected an old-fashioned, patriotic pro-war film that could just as well have been about
World War II. The Green Berets begins with an army officer’s didactic lecture to trainees who
are about to don the famous berets of the Special Forces. Another officer (Aldo Ray) explains
that the Chinese and Russians are already involved in the conflict, but a visiting liberal jour-
nalist (David Janssen) asks skeptical questions. Their instructive exchanges occupy most of
the first third of the movie. When the scene shifts to Vietnam, every trite convention of the
old war movies is dragged out, including orphans, mascots, painful efforts at comedy, and a
scavenger (Jim Hutton). But this middle third of the movie is even more like one of Wayne’s
westerns, with the Vietcong attacking the Green Beret base like Indians laying siege to a fron-
tier fort. Portrayed as yellow savages, they strip white bodies and brutalize villagers, although
a sympathetic South Vietnamese (George Takei) functions as the “good Indian.” The liberal
reporter, converted by all this, denounces his biased publisher and proposes to quit his job to
join the army’s public relations team, but the Green Beret commander (John Wayne) insists
that the reporter has a higher duty: he must keep his job and take the truth to the American
people. The final third of the movie is a Mission Impossible-style caper, with a team of Green
Beret guerrillas infiltrating enemy territory to beat the Vietcong at their own game. “You’re
what this is all about,” Wayne tells the Vietnamese orphan-mascot as the movie ends with the
sun setting over the ocean—in the east (from their perspective in Vietnam).
The Green Berets is a long, cliché-ridden lecture in defense of the war. It is the sort of
movie in which you know, as soon as you are introduced to them, which supporting actors
will die and in which even the violence is reassuringly old-fashioned. The box office pull
of John Wayne and his film’s cozy invocation of tradition were enough to generate a profit
for the film despite bad reviews and the protests of antiwar activists. Wayne was sufficiently
politically committed that he may not have cared as much about profits as about the mes-
sage, however, which could account for the most transparently propagandistic American
movie since the pro-Russian films of the 1940s. At any rate, the message was too late to
matter, coming just as the Tet offensive showed the strength of the North Vietnamese. Public
opinion turned against the war, and Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for reelection.
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The Coming of the Counterculture
Social change was in the wind in America in the 1960s—and in the movies of the era.
Besides concerns about nuclear holocaust and wars in foreign lands, racism and an emerging
counterculture became popular subjects for filmmakers.
With a few honorable exceptions, filmmakers had avoided the subjects of race and
racism since The Birth of a Nation, but the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s
and the black pride movement that followed helped get these subjects back in the mov-
ies. Liberal filmmakers like Stanley Kramer made movies like Guess Who’s Coming to
Dinner (1967), calling for tolerance. The star-power of Sidney Poitier helped to make
movies with racial themes profitable, from The Defiant Ones (1958) to In the Heat of the
Night (1967). Star Harry Belafonte, later known for his political activism, also succeeded
in race-themed films like Island in the Sun (1957), The World, The Flesh and the Devil
(1959), and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). (The two men even starred together with
African-American actress Ruby Dee in Buck and The Preacher (1970), about the exploi-
tation of freed slaves who have migrated out west.) By the 1970s, black filmmakers were
making movies like Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) with all-black casts—a huge advance
in the treatment of race on film from The Birth of a Nation or even Guess Who’s Coming
to Dinner. These films and the evolving portrait of race in American movies are discussed
in detail in Chapter 13.
Native Americans were also treated better in the films of the 1960s, although 1950s films
such as Broken Arrow had started the trend. Director John Ford made up for his past portraits
of bloodthirsty savages with Cheyenne Autumn (1964). Far more radically, blacklist victim
Abraham Polonsky suggested in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969) that Indians and other
minorities should go their own separatist way, trusting no one, least of all white liberals.
The film centers on a manhunt with a sheriff (Robert Redford) chasing an American Indian
who is wanted for a killing. An impending presidential visit turns a posse and the press into
a frenzied mob. The white liberal schoolmarm, who would have brought reconciliation in
earlier films, is shown here to be silly, ineffectual, and condescending in her wish to care for
the Indians. Little Big Man and Soldier Blue (both 1970) continued the revision of American
history by interpreting the fate of the Indians as genocide; both films also alluded to the
American involvement in Vietnam.
These films about race reflected and contributed to the emergence of a youthful counter-
culture in America and elsewhere. With roots in the beatniks of the 1950s and the student
protests of the 1960s, as well as the civil rights and antiwar movements, the counterculture
was an antimaterialist, youth-oriented phenomenon that expressed itself politically as the
New Left and socially as the flower children, or hippies.
The first movie to catch the spirit of this counterculture may have been Bonnie and Clyde
(1967), a box office success that was denounced by some critics for romanticizing violence.
Based on the exploits of two real-life Depression criminals, the film follows two young peo-
ple (Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty) as they drift into crime, partly as an act of rebellion
against their elders. At one point, Bonnie and Clyde are welcomed as heroes in a migrant
camp reminiscent of the one in The Grapes of Wrath, but overall, this movie is socially
reflective rather than explicitly political. Many saw it as an allegory of youthful disaffection
and rebellion against authority in the 1960s. The Graduate (1967), a big box office and criti-
cal hit directed by Mike Nichols, played on the same theme.
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Wild in the Streets (1968) took the generational conflict one step further in the tale of a
rock star who uses his popularity to gain political power as young people take over the coun-
try. The voting age and then the age for office-holding are reduced to fourteen. Adults are
sent to “retirement” camps. In the end, yet another youth coup is plotted as seven-year-olds
prepare to rebel against their teenage elders. Wild in the Streets managed to simultaneously
exploit and send up the youth culture, which was already turning sour.
In Easy Rider (1969), the counterculture’s biggest box office hit, two hippies (Dennis
Hopper and Peter Fonda) judge the state of the nation during a motorcycle odyssey enhanced
by drugs. Fonda’s character, portrayed in saintly fashion, bestows approval on people who
live freely and independently, but admits in the end that he and his friend, if not his genera-
tion and the country, have failed: “We blew it.” Although Easy Rider criticizes conformity,
materialism, and authority, it is less political than it seemed at the time. Its most revolution-
ary effect in 1969 was to demonstrate to the big studios that an independent production and
a film about the counterculture could make money.
By 1968 the counterculture was falling apart. It was becoming clear that drugs led to
addiction instead of liberation. The Manson family made communes a nightmare. Martin
Luther King Jr. was murdered, and the civil rights movement was fragmented by calls for
black power and cultural separatism. The hopefulness of the antiwar movement was shat-
tered by the assassination of Robert Kennedy and riots at the 1968 Democratic convention
in Chicago. Richard Nixon was elected president.
Perhaps the film that best summed up counterculture politics and its demise was Medium
Cool (1969), a low-budget, independent production directed by left-leaning cinematogra-
pher Haskell Wexler. A TV news crew films an auto accident as the movie begins. Only
after they have shot their footage do they call for help for the victims, establishing one
of Wexler’s themes, the exploitative nature of the media. John (Robert Forster), the cam-
eraman, senses the coldness of his work and feels alienated both from it and his playboy
lifestyle. After filming a passionate group of black militants, he quits his job when he learns
that his station is turning over his footage to law-enforcement officers. Meanwhile, appar-
ently longing for a traditional family relationship, he gets involved with an Appalachian
woman and her son. The boy disappears, and the couple searches for him on the violent
streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention.
Wexler set his film in Chicago so the story could be played out with the convention as a
backdrop: the street conflict in the film is real-life footage. Wexler, a known radical, and his
crew were hassled by police during the making of the movie, but the footage they got makes
a remarkable blend of fact and fiction, successfully heightening the tension of the film as we
hear one of his crew shouting, “Watch out, Haskell. This is for real!” It was real enough that
the Department of Justice requisitioned Wexler’s footage during its investigation of the riots.
Medium Cool ends somewhat gratuitously in an auto crash, with the camera pulling back to
reveal Wexler and his crew filming the wreck, a self-conscious application of his point about
the disengagement of the media. This disengagement, or failure to connect, is the central
point of Medium Cool, not black militancy, street riots, or convention politics, all of which
operate in the film only as background details. Wexler was saying that traditional politics had
failed and there was no salvation for his protagonists.
The critics were divided about Medium Cool. Some gave it raves (“technically brilliant,”
“a kind of cinematic Guernica”) but others dismissed it (“awkward and even pretentious . . .
166
a slashing indictment of car driving”).16 Audiences made Medium Cool a box office success,
however. Its immediacy pulled them in, compensating for its virtually nonexistent plot with
the sheer intensity of the moment, and its sense of outrage and alienation was perfectly in
tune with the mood of 1969. Many people considered Medium Cool the only truly contem-
porary film of the era.
The success of Easy Rider and Medium Cool sparked the interest of the studios, which
tried to cash in on the counterculture in 1970 with movies about student protest, including
The Strawberry Statement (1970) and Getting Straight (1970). Other films addressed the
antiwar sympathies of the era. Franklin Schaffner’s highly entertaining Planet of the Apes
(1968) and its sequels depicted life on earth after a nuclear holocaust, with apes ruling and
human beings reduced to slaves. Patton (1969), written by Francis Ford Coppola and also
directed by Schaffner, presented the World War II general as a sort of mad genius, useful in
war but in need of containment by calmer superiors. M*A*S*H (1970), directed by Robert
Altman, and Catch-22 (1970), directed by Mike Nichols from Joseph Heller’s novel, both
made vicious fun of the military, while Johnny Got His Gun (1971), written and directed by
blacklist victim Dalton Trumbo, delivered a more serious antiwar message about a paraple-
gic veteran of World War I. Trumbo’s film was the least popular of these. Audiences were
prepared to laugh cynically at war but not to examine its consequences too closely.
Besides these films, Joe (1970), about a bigoted blue-collar worker who is both attracted
and repelled by the counterculture, and WUSA (1970), about a right-wing radio station, dealt
with fascism in contemporary America. Jane Fonda, Peter Boyle, and Donald Sutherland
made Steelyard Blues (1972), an antiauthoritarian comedy about a group of 1960s rebels.
And a French film about political assassination in Greece, Z (1968), directed by Constantin
Costa-Gavras, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and ranked fifth in box office
receipts for 1970.
Notes
1. Kenneth W. Munden, Subject Index to Films of the 1960s (New York: Bowker, 1971).
2. Time, December 28, 1959.
3. New York Times, June 7, 1962.
4. Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), p. 6.
5. Time, March 30, 1962.
6. Time, April 10, 1964; Saturday Review, April 4, 1964.
7. Quoted in Variety, September 15, 1964.
8. Richard Maltby, Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus (London:
Scarecrow, 1983), p. 306.
9. Joan Mellen, Big Bad Wolves (New York: Pantheon, 1977), pp. 249, 251.
10. Saturday Review, February 14, 1964.
11. Quoted in Variety, May 13, 1964.
12. New York Times, September 16, 1964.
13. Lawrence Suid, “The Pentagon and Hollywood,” in American History/American Film, ed. John
E. O’Connor and Martin A. Jackson (New York: Frederick Unger, 1979), p. 368.
14. Pauline Kael, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (New York: Bantam, 1969), p. 79.
15. Quoted in Mason Wiley and Damien Bona, Inside Oscar (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986),
p. 368.
16. New York Times, August 31, 1968; The New Yorker, September 13, 1969.
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9
The 1970s
Cynicism, Paranoia, War, and Anticapitalism
All the President’s Men (1976)

The 1970s started with President Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the most widespread
antiwar demonstrations of the era. Despite the unpopularity of the war, Nixon enjoyed a
landslide reelection victory in 1972—only to face the protracted agony of the Watergate
scandal. His 1973 resignation put the uninspired Gerald Ford into the White House and
began an era of almost total disillusionment with politics. The political activism of the 1960s
gave way to what Tom Wolfe labeled the “Me Decade.”1 Self-interest and political apathy
replaced involvement.
As a disillusioned nation celebrated its bicentennial, voters rejected Washington insider
Ford and elected Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer and moderate Democrat. President Carter’s
modesty appealed to the voters, but not enough to prevent his defeat by conservative Repub-
lican Ronald Reagan in 1980. In short, the 1970s took America from Nixon and Cambodia
to Ford, Carter, and a prolonged hostage crisis in Iran, concluding with a genuine Hollywood
actor in the White House. Few decades have seen so much change, and the films of the era
reflect its turbulence.
The film industry also experienced huge changes in the 1970s, as the big studios declined
and independent filmmakers gained clout. The studios suffered record losses between 1969
and 1972. A substantial number of political films were released during this time, but they
were not sufficiently linked with financial losses to discourage further productions. Some,
like Che! (1969), an awful film about the Cuban revolutionary, lost money. Others—including
Easy Rider (1969), Medium Cool (1969), and Z (1969)—were sufficiently profitable to make
the studios take notice, while big productions like Hello, Dolly! (1969) lost more money than
most of the political films cost, so the studios were not totally discouraged and independent
filmmakers were positively encouraged.
Most other movies of the 1970s, however, expressed no worries at all about politics.
This was the time of the new blockbusters and a new generation of filmmakers like Francis
Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas. They learned filmmaking in universi-
ties rather than in studios, they were committed to entertaining, and they seemed content
to express themselves within traditional genres. These young men and others thrived in a
Hollywood where producing a movie depended less on studios than on packaging a deal and
putting together investors. They had spectacular early successes that gave them enormous
freedom on later projects. Some say they saved the industry.
Coppola’s Godfather (1972 and 1974) successes were the beginning, but Spielberg’s
Jaws (1975) was the first real blockbuster, shooting to the top of Variety’s chart of “Box
Office Champions.” Although it was primarily a horror film, Jaws commented briefly on
politics when the mayor of the shark-threatened resort forces the police chief to keep the
beaches open so business will not suffer. Spielberg went on to make Close Encounters of the
Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and E.T. (1982), all of which contained
only minimal explicit political comment. Lucas started with American Graffiti (1973) and
then went on to make Star Wars (1977) and its equally successful sequels.
The lack of political content in all these films was seen by some critics as a sort of con-
servatism, as was their reliance on individual heroes. One radical film journal even went so
far as to condemn Star Wars as a fascist, militaristic movie because of its hierarchies of sex,
race, class, and species, complaining that only the humans, not the Wookies or the robots,
got medals for their heroism.2 Still, Lucas’s humans did at least take action to overthrow the
“evil empire” (a phrase later used by President Reagan).
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THE 1970S: CYNICISM, PARANOIA, WAR, AND ANTICAPITALISM
These movies were only mildly and probably unintentionally conservative, however, in
comparison with other films of the time. Clint Eastwood played a cop in Dirty Harry (1971)
and its sequels, all of which violently condemn permissiveness and liberalism. Charles
Bronson got a vigilante’s revenge on urban criminals in Death Wish (1974). In movies of
this sort, danger and injustice were all around, often in the form of menacing minorities or
poor people, but government was tied up by bleeding-heart regulations, so the only solution
was to go beyond the law. Meanwhile, horror movies made a comeback, often as slashers,
playing on fear and isolation. Disaster movies also fed paranoia, although sometimes in
these films people worked together to rise above a crisis and save themselves. On a slightly
more positive note, Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky (1976) updated the American dream of the
average guy winning out, a theme Stallone would reiterate with astounding success in seem-
ingly endless sequels.
Meanwhile, audiences were also changing. By 1976, 76 percent of filmgoers were under
the age of thirty, a figure that has declined only slightly since then. The number of theat-
ers shrank to 13,500, although multiscreen complexes would soon bring the number up
again. The good news for Hollywood was that weekly attendance was creeping up, reaching
18.4 million in 1976 after having bottomed out at 17.7 million in 1970. Film production also
increased in 1976, with 353 films released, the most since 1950. The most lasting impact,
however, was to be the persistent preponderance of young people in audiences, people who
were far more interested in entertainment than in serious analytical or political films.
Mr. Redford Goes to Washington
While the output of political films at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s
was high, Hollywood’s approach to politics remained cautious except in the hands of inde-
pendents like Haskell Wexler and Europeans like Costa-Gavras. Many of the films of this
highly political era dealt delicately or indirectly with contemporary issues. Antiwar movies,
for example, were set during wars other than the one in which the country was then engaged.
Virtually no movies dealt directly with the political process except The Man (1972), fea-
turing James Earl Jones as America’s first black president. The Man was a 1960s-style
political melodrama, but 1972 also brought another film with a more contemporary political
perspective.
Robert Redford was the star, producer, and prime mover in The Candidate (1972), the
first and best film of the 1970s to deal with political campaigns and a classic example of a
high content/high intent political film. Although The Candidate uncannily anticipated the
career of California governor Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown, writer Jeremy Larner and direc-
tor Michael Ritchie based it on their experiences in the 1970 campaign of John Tunney, a
Kennedyesque senator from California. Several incidents in the film were drawn from the
Tunney campaign, and the senator was allowed to okay the script “so it wouldn’t be a knife
job on him,” according to Ritchie.3
The Candidate begins on election night in an unnamed state as a losing candidate
addresses his supporters. His manager, Marvin Lucas (Peter Boyle), is already on his way to
another campaign, showing a colleague a photo of young Bill McKay (Robert Redford) in
Time magazine. Lucas is warned that McKay could not possibly beat Crocker Jarmon (Don
Porter), the powerful incumbent senator from California, but he nevertheless visits McKay
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In The Candidate (1972), political novice Bill McKay (Robert Redford) takes on an establishment
politician, Senator Crocker Jarmon (Don Porter). As McKay trades in his outsider, “tell it like it is”
persona for a more predictable, anodyne candidacy, this shot captures his blurring into the persona of
the vapid Jarmon.
in his ramshackle poverty law office. From McKay’s talk to his staff, we learn of the good
causes the handsome son of a former governor works on, but he tells Lucas that he is happy
with what he is doing and not interested in politics.
“You’re happy?” Lucas asks. “Okay. Clams are happy. You saved some trees, you got a
clinic opened. Does that make you feel good? Meanwhile, Jarmon sits on his committees and
carves up the land, the oil, the taxes.” Tempted, McKay asks “What’s in it” for Lucas, the
professional manager, who murmurs something about “an air card, a phone card, a thousand
dollars a week.” It is only a job to him, he says, but he appeals to McKay, the crusader, by
offering him a forum for his causes and by promising him that he will lose the election.
In the beginning, the campaign is forthright and issue-oriented as McKay bluntly answers
questions on controversial issues like abortion and busing at his first press conference.
“Jesus!” a reporter exclaims. “That’s a first,” another declares as McKay admits he does not
know enough to answer a question. But when he says he would fire the Board of Regents
of the University of California only to be told that senators do not have that power, McKay
begins to recognize his need to be briefed on issues, and he grows more dependent on his
manager and staff.
Lucas takes the candidate to a media consultant who is enthusiastic about McKay’s youth
and virility as contrasted with the age and weariness of his opponent. The voters, he says,
will look at Jarmon and think “the Crock . . . can’t get it up anymore.” So the media pack-
aging begins, first with a haircut, then with new suits and ties, and finally with carefully
filmed and edited television ads. In the first ads, McKay talks about issues, but when he sees
the results, he realizes that issues do not work in commercials, and so do we. The edited,
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music-backed ads are much better. “You’re showing your face,” the media man explains.
“That’s what we have to sell first.” McKay keeps trying to talk about the issues as he is
filmed meeting people, but the results are incoherent. “Maybe we can use a line or two out
of context,” sighs the consultant.
Nobody else wants to run against Jarmon, and McKay wins his party primary easily, but
then, manipulated by the professional manager and his opinion polls, he begins to want to
win the election. “You’re only reaching the people who agree with you already,” Lucas says;
“you’re gonna lose.” “But I’m supposed to lose,” the candidate replies. “Yeah,” says the
manager, “but if you keep going this way, you won’t only lose, you’ll be humiliated, and so
will your ideas.” We can see that McKay is being manipulated, but we are seduced along
with him.
The Candidate deftly introduces the power of the media with footage of McKay at a big
banquet with real-life political leaders. As our candidate rises to give his maiden speech,
however, the TV lights are switched off and a voice in the background says, “Okay, we got
all we need.” Later, McKay tries to get some free coverage, changing his schedule to rush
to a forest fire in Malibu. “It’s perfect,” his breathless staff says, showing no concern about
the disaster. When he gets there, McKay begins talking about environmental policy, but he is
interrupted when his powerful opponent arrives by helicopter and the press dashes away to
question him. Jarmon makes the power of incumbency clear with the reminder that he chairs
a Senate committee and has a direct line to the president. He promises to act immediately as
McKay smiles ruefully.
As the campaign grows more desperate, McKay is persuaded to swallow his pride and
solicit the support of his father, the ex-governor, whose politics disgust him. “Did you really
run your own [campaign]?” the son asks the father (Melvyn Douglas) as they walk in the
woods, groping for reconciliation. “Shit, yes,” the old man says. “What’s it like to campaign
in this state these days?” “I wouldn’t know,” his son answers. Chastised by his staff and
demoralized after losing a debate with Jarmon, he is encouraged when his father arrives to
endorse him. “Son,” the old man says, “you’re a politician”—the ultimate insult to young
McKay. Still thinking about the debate, the candidate wonders “if anyone understood what I
was trying to do.” “Don’t worry, son,” his father says, not very reassuringly. “It won’t make
any difference.”
Eventually, the campaign completely swallows the candidate. He follows directions, not
knowing where he is or what he is doing, and he has little real contact with people. His
campaign staff has grown so large that he does not know them all. Groupies in search of
autographs and sex treat him like a star, while strangers slug him or harangue him, even
in toilets. He seldom argues with his aides, and when he does, he loses. He becomes an
automaton, doing whatever they tell him. “I don’t know what her name is, but she’s sending
a check,” he reports after carrying out an order to phone a contributor.
McKay’s campaign finally gains momentum and gels, however. At a meeting with the
leader of the teamsters’ union, McKay the former activist reemerges as he condemns the
union for what it has done to the farmworkers, but the leader endorses him anyway, and
at a rally of the union members McKay gives the speech that ignites the campaign. “There
has to be a better way,” he cries. In rhythmic references to the division between black and
white, old and young, rich and poor, he demands change without being specific. It is a media
speech, but it works. The upturn is accompanied by a stirring musical crescendo—the same
music that underscores Crocker Jarmon’s moving, patriotic speeches. The two candidates
173
have become alike. The campaign rushes on, full of incidents that illustrate the humor,
cynicism, intensity, and excitement of politics as well as its techniques, from advertising to
getting out the vote. McKay is stunned, however, when he wins. “What do we do now?” he
asks his manager, but before he gets the answer, he is swept away by cheering supporters.
The door closes, and the camera lingers on an empty room.
The Candidate did not set box offices afire, but it turned a profit and advanced the careers
of Robert Redford, Michael Ritchie, and Jeremy Larner, who won an Oscar for his script.
Most reviewers liked the film, although Andrew Sarris denounced its “winning is losing
puerilities.”4 Vincent Canby agreed, commenting on its “perverse and puritanical” view
of politics while conceding that The Candidate was “one of the few truly funny American
political comedies ever made” and praising its style for being “as nervous and frenetic as
the campaign itself.”5 Even politicians were impressed with The Candidate. California’s
Jerry Brown allegedly wanted to buy advertising time for his campaign during its television
broadcast, but was dissuaded by his staff, who thought the public would misunderstand.
Brown and others liked the movie’s humor and appreciated its depiction of campaign tech-
niques and the seductive power of politics.
From advertising to winning endorsements and cajoling key groups, The Candidate is a
veritable campaign primer, deficient only in its treatment of fund-raising. This movie catches
the spirit of a campaign and the way it sweeps away the candidate and everybody around
him. We watch McKay sell out, but we cheer him on because we want him to win. We laugh
at the cynicism of the campaigners and of the “now what?” ending, but the cynicism is
softened by the casting of Robert Redford as the candidate. He may be naive, but he means
well, and in the end, we still like him, which makes it easier for us to understand how decent
people get drawn into the political process and forget their good intentions.
“What do we do now?” asked McKay when he won the election. In 1979, The Seduction
of Joe Tynan answered his question. Alan Alda, who wrote the script, is Senator Joe Tynan,
a good New York liberal. The film lets us know this with an opening montage featuring a
busload of black kids and an array of Washington monuments right out of Mr. Smith Goes
to Washington. We next see Tynan alone in the Senate speaking about hunger, a scene that
tells us he cares while others do not. At home that night, he romps in bed with his wife,
Ellie (Barbara Harris), gleefully celebrating his success: “I got the works bill passed! I’ve
got clout!”
The realities of politics are introduced in the next scene, when Senator Birney (Melvyn
Douglas), a conservative from Louisiana, asks a favor of Tynan. The president has nomi-
nated a racist from Birney’s state to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court, and the Senate must
now approve the nominee. Birney wants the nomination approved so as to eliminate the man
as a potential opponent. “Vote against him if you like,” he says; “just don’t start a crusade.”
Tynan agrees as a personal favor to his elder, and we support this mild compromise because,
thanks to the fine acting of Melvyn Douglas, we share Tynan’s sympathy for the old man.
Joe next meets Karen Traynor (Meryl Streep), a southern labor lawyer, counsel for a black
group, and daughter of a powerful politician. Wanting Joe to lead the opposition to the judi-
cial nomination, Karen seduces him into it with an enticing description of what this move
could mean to his career. All he has to do is use some film footage of the nominee making a
racist speech. “When I think of the splash you could make with this piece of film, I get weak
in the knees,” she gushes, quickly adding “of course it’s the right thing to do.” The seduction
is soon sexual as well as political.
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They succeed in blocking the nomination and the media report a victory for Joe Tynan.
His staff prepares to press his advantage, hiring a speech and video coach to polish up his
act, planning visits to newspaper editorial boards, and preparing a direct mail campaign. By
this time Joe and Karen have gone their separate ways, but Joe’s wife is increasingly repelled
by her husband’s unrelenting absorption in politics, or perhaps she just feels left out. “When
were you going to tell me you were running for president?” she asks. “At the inaugural
ball?” But for the moment, Joe is only positioning himself for a candidacy, angling to give
a crucial speech at a party convention. He attains this modest goal, but Ellie seems about to
leave him even as the convention crowd chants, “We want Joe!” He gazes at Ellie from the
convention podium. Her mouth quivers. Is it a smile? Will she stay? The ending is ambigu-
ous, but most viewers think she will.

Karen seduces Joe sexually, but also she plays on his ego and ambition, thus seducing
him with the prospect of success as well. Joe is not a victim, however. He is an active and
enthusiastic participant in both seductions, and he has few qualms about breaking his word
to Senator Birney and destroying a nice old man. The treachery of the hero is mitigated, of
course, by the racism of the judicial nominee and by the senility of the old man. Besides, we
like Tynan/Alda.
The Seduction of Joe Tynan raises the issues of compromise and ambition and makes
audiences understand Tynan’s position and even feel sympathy for him. Joe’s future remains
unclear, however. “After a while,” warns a colleague who has decided not to run for another
term, “you forget why you’re here. You just try to hang on to clout.” Joe will not walk away
from politics like his honorable colleague or like the candidates in State of the Union and
The Best Man, but can he stay and still retain his integrity? That question is left unanswered.
The Seduction of Joe Tynan won mixed reviews, but did fairly well at the box office,
thanks at least in part to Alda’s popularity. The New Yorker derided the movie’s “have a nice
day” politics and called the film “overwrought, airless and pious.”6 Feminists approved of
the presence of strong women with careers, but expressed disappointment that their ultimate
function was to support the male. For all its shortcomings, however, Joe Tynan reflects polit-
ical reality. More than most films about politics, it rings true on the personal costs of political
life, its small compromises, and its corruptions. The process is convincingly portrayed with-
out resorting to dirty little secrets as in Advise and Consent and The Best Man, thus keeping
the melodrama within the realm of credibility. Joe Tynan’s great strength, like that of The
Candidate, is its feel for politics and politicians. Bill McKay and Joe Tynan face the horrors
and carry on. They may sell out, but we understand why because the movies make sure we
continue to like them. However cynical these movies are, they are more realistic than other
movies about politics because they keep their politicians human. Their view may be less
than reassuring, but their truthfulness is an advance for political movies.
Paranoia
These films marked a change in the way movies portrayed politics. Before World War II,
filmmakers insisted that individuals could make a difference: heroes and heroines could fight
the system and win, often by calling on the support of “the people.” But after the war, movies
emphasized the corrupting nature of power: good men became evil (All the King’s Men, A
Lion Is in the Streets) or had to walk away from politics to preserve their honor (State of the
Union, Viva Zapata!). Still later, individuals had to adapt to the system and play as members
175
of the team (Advise and Consent, The Best Man). But in The Candidate and Joe Tynan, the
system was bigger than the individuals. The process itself dominated, sweeping individu-
als along with it. As entertaining and seductive as these movies were, their message about
politics was less than empowering.
Their portrayal of politicians being overwhelmed by the system was mild, however,
compared to the political messages of other films of the mid-1970s. Francis Ford Coppola
followed The Godfather (1972) with The Godfather, Part II (1974), an even bleaker view
of American society in which his Mafia family goes corporate and falls apart. Meanwhile,
Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) took up corrupt politics in Los Angeles. In all three
movies, economic interests dominated and politicians were mere puppets.
Executive Action (1973), based on the works of conspiracy theorist Mark Lane and writ-
ten by Dalton Trumbo, was even more paranoid with its theory that a right-wing conspiracy
had President John F. Kennedy assassinated to prevent his family from perpetuating itself in
power and moving the country to the left. Newsreel footage and factual details made Execu-
tive Action seem realistic, but too much didactic dialogue defeated it with critics and at the
box office.
Executive Action ends with an ominous report of the deaths of eighteen material witnesses
within three years of Kennedy’s assassination, a phenomenon that also inspired The Paral-
lax View (1974). In this film, a crusading reporter (Warren Beatty) stumbles onto a corporate
assassination bureau when he notices that all the witnesses to a political killing are being
eliminated. He infiltrates the Parallax Corporation, which at first seems to be training him
as an assassin but later sets him up as the fall guy for another agent. The film begins and
ends with investigative commissions dismissing charges of conspiracy in assassinations and
concluding that the alleged killer (in both cases the wrong man) acted alone, exactly as the
Warren Commission did after the Kennedy assassination. With its ominous music, dark
lighting, and obscure villain, The Parallax View was basically updating the political thriller,
but its hero was not merely co-opted, like Bill McKay in The Candidate; he was destroyed
by the system. Critics liked the movie, but despite its production values and star, The Paral-
lax View failed at the box office.
Political paranoia continued in Three Days of the Condor (1975), directed by Sydney
Pollack and coauthored by Lorenzo Semple Jr., one of the scenarists of The Parallax View.
Robert Redford plays a scruffy CIA researcher who chances on some dangerous information
that results in his entire office being wiped out, a massacre he escapes only by a fluke. When
he phones his superiors, they promise him safety if he comes in, but when the friend sent to
reassure him is murdered, he grows wary. Isolated and able to trust no one, he decides to take
his story to the New York Times. This promises a happy ending until a CIA operative (Cliff
Robertson) says to Redford, “How do you know they’ll print it?” The doubt in Redford’s
face leaves us uncertain about the film’s ending. Is even the New York Times controlled?
Condor became one of the all-time political box office hits, undoubtedly assisted by the star
power of Robert Redford.
All the President’s Men (1976), another well-made Redford film, was even more success-
ful. Although it was presented as a thriller, audiences consciously saw it as a political movie,
high in both political content and intent. Fascinated by the story of President Nixon’s fall
from power, Redford acquired the rights to the book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
He then recruited director Alan Pakula (The Parallax View), who gave his films an ominous
quality through the clever use of lighting, editing, and music.
176
The filmmakers faced a problem, however, when they set out to make a movie of
events that were so recent. Audiences had followed the story in newspapers, watched the
Senate hearings on television, and heard Nixon deny his involvement, and they had made a
best seller of the book by the young Washington Post reporters who started the Watergate
investigation. The filmmakers were gambling that the nation was sufficiently obsessed with
the story to make their movie a success, too. But as Pakula said, the story consisted of
“one phone call after another. How do you make that interesting?”7 With megastars Robert
Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the lead roles, the filmmakers decided to play the story as a
thriller. All the President’s Men could not be a whodunit, of course, since the public already
knew the answer. It was more of a how-they-done-it, focusing on the reporters and how they
gradually and painstakingly got their story.

The action begins with the Watergate burglary, a story assigned to junior Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward (Redford). Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) muscles in as coau-
thor, and when their story looks bigger than burglary, editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards Jr.)
resists demands to put a national reporter on it. The big-time editors and reporters, we are
told, would be less likely to dig into the story because they have been co-opted by their
subjects, lunching at the same posh restaurants as the president’s men. This battle between
the little guys and the elite puts us firmly on the side of the young reporters and their tough
editor. They experience self-doubt when other papers ignore the story, missing the security
of pack journalism, but they persist.
Pakula’s filming techniques constantly isolate and dwarf the two reporters. As they drive
away from the newspaper building, for example, their car seems to be swallowed up by the
city. As they plow through reams of research material at the Library of Congress, the camera
looks down on them, making them appear to the audience as tiny figures encircled by an
endless maze, an image that suggests the impossibility of their huge task. The sound track,
too, constantly underlines their isolation with ominous music.
The two reporters gradually get their story not from the president’s men but from low-
and middle-level workers in the Campaign to Re-Elect the President (CREEP)—except for
“Deep Throat,” the mysterious high-level informant whose face is only dimly shown and
who insists on secret meetings. Like the Parallax Corporation or the CIA in Three Days of
the Condor, CREEP is powerful, unapproachable, and somehow dangerous. The low-level
informants are terrified, and even Deep Throat is obviously fearful. Film technique makes
this fear palpable when Deep Throat meets Woodward deep inside a murky parking garage
in a scene complete with creepy footsteps and thriller lighting. But while the investigation
takes place in half-light and long shots with high camera angles, the revelations take place
in the bright newsroom, with the camera closer and lower. Pakula said the “hard light of
truth is in that newsroom; no shadows there.”8 At the end of the movie, we hear the guns
saluting Nixon’s inauguration on a television set in the newsroom, but the shots are gradu-
ally drowned out by the clacking of a lone Teletype pounding out reports of the conviction of
the president’s men. Viewers know that by telling the truth to the people, two little guys will
bring down the president and his men—a more upbeat ending than even Capra provided, and
this time the story was true.
The critics were almost unanimously ecstatic about All the President’s Men, praising its
accurate treatment of journalism although mainly admiring it as a thriller. Vincent Canby
called it “the thinking man’s Jaws.”9 Woodward and Bernstein became role models for
American youth as journalism schools turned away applicants. Only Sylvester Stallone’s
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Rocky, another movie about a little guy making good, beat All the President’s Men at the box
office in 1976. No other purely political film has done better at the box office than this one,
which ranked as one of Variety’s “Box Office Champions” through the 1980s. Audiences
responded to a well-made film with big stars, but they must also have wanted to relive the
recent trauma of Watergate and learn more about it. The film was nominated for Academy
Awards for best film and direction. Goldman won an Oscar for his script, and Jason Robards
took the award for supporting actor.
All the President’s Men told us that politics is corrupt and that bad men can gain great
power, but it also said that brave individuals, a free press, and public opinion can bring the
evil men down, a traditional Hollywood view. Whereas The Parallax View suggested that
evil was all pervasive, President’s Men reassured us that wickedness could be exposed and
defeated. Condor’s faith in the integrity of the press was vindicated. Yet the message of All
the President’s Men was not entirely comforting. Our heroes are transparently ambitious and
careerist. They publish their findings knowing innocent people will be hurt, and the movie
does not justify their action. They manipulate people and use their colleagues, ultimately
making a big mistake about the confirmation of some information. Yet if two junior reporters
have to save the country all by themselves, surely democratic institutions and the press are
working imperfectly. If the young reporters or their stubbornly courageous editor had been
diverted, the defense of democracy would have failed. Finally, playing the story as a thriller
implied an ominous, evil power although it remained undefined. What were the CREEP
workers so frightened of and what actually happened to them? Who were the president’s
men and what exactly did they do? Their actions may have been an accumulation of small
corruptions not entirely unlike those practiced by the reporters, but Pakula made them seem
purely malign, perhaps even worse than they were. The president’s men became a faceless
conspiracy like the Parallax Corporation. This treatment, however, probably had more to do
with making an entertaining and profitable movie than with sending a message.
Nevertheless, this film sent a powerful message. According to scriptwriter William Gold-
man, Ronald Reagan thought that All the President’s Men “cost Gerald Ford the presidency
against Jimmy Carter, because the film’s release in April of ’76 and its long run flushed
to the surface again all the realities of Watergate that the Republicans had tried so hard to
bury. We are talking,” Goldman boasted, “about a movie that . . . just might have changed
the entire course of American history.”10 Appropriately, it was the first film screened in the
Carter White House.
Reagan and Goldman notwithstanding, Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, also released in 1976,
may have had as much to do with Carter’s election as All the President’s Men. Both movies
were about little guys who became heroes, just as Carter rose from the obscurity of Georgia
politics to the presidency. Like movie politicians from Mr. Smith onward, Carter presented
himself as a nonpolitician, carrying his own luggage, sleeping in the homes of voters, and
swearing never to tell a lie; and the nation longed for a nonpolitician like Jimmy Carter
in 1976.
Later in the decade, The China Syndrome (1979) continued the theme of paranoia and
interest in the media. As All the President’s Men helped lead to changes in campaign finance
law and amendments to the Freedom of Information Act, this movie also had a direct impact
on policy and bolstered the growing public opposition to nuclear power. The China Syn-
drome was independently made by IPC, the Bruce Gilbert–Jane Fonda production company
responsible for other Fonda films of the era. Like those movies, it suffered from what might
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be called the Fonda syndrome, raising an important issue but delivering a timid message.
Although inspired by the death of nuclear power worker Karen Silkwood, director and
coauthor James Bridges changed the storyline so as to emphasize TV news as much as
nuclear energy. Instead of a blue-collar worker like Silkwood, Fonda played a glamorous
TV reporter.
Kimberly Wells (Fonda) covers light stories but longs to do hard news. She is given a
chance to do a series on nuclear energy, although initially it looks more like promotion than
news. By chance, she and her crew are present at a power plant during an “incident,” and
her aggressive freelance cameraman (Michael Douglas) films the event surreptitiously. They
rush back to the station with their scoop, but when the power company denies that anything
unusual happened, the station manager refuses to let Kimberly air the story. Confident that
the TV station will not air anything detrimental to its capitalist partner, the hot-tempered
cameraman steals the film.
Kimberly goes looking for the photographer and the film so she can give it back to the
station manager and save her job. In a bar near the power plant, she meets Godell (Jack
Lemmon), the engineer who was in charge at the time of the accident. He is nervous about
talking to her, but he is also attracted to her, and she uses her good looks to get him to open
up. Gradually, his worries about a company cover-up come out.
Godell starts out as a true believer in nuclear power and his company. When his coworker,
an uneducated twenty-five-year company man (Wilfred Brimley), says he is afraid the inves-
tigators will attribute the accident to human error and make him the scapegoat, Godell is
incredulous. “What makes you think they’re looking for a scapegoat?” he asks. “Tradition,”
answers the company man. When the shallow investigation concludes with a cover-up, the
appalled Godell begins poking around and discovers falsified safety checks that prove the
accident was more serious than the company has admitted. The power company rejects
Godell’s charges and has Kimberly’s report suppressed with the collusion of her television
station. New safety checks would cost too much, the company says, and might delay the
licensing of a new plant at even greater cost. Kimberly and her activist cameraman arrange
for Godell to give evidence at hearings on the licensing of the new plant and arrange for
their soundman to deliver their videotaped evidence to support him, but the soundman, like
Karen Silkwood, is killed in an auto accident. Desperate, Godell seizes the control room of
his plant and sends for Kimberly and her cameraman to broadcast his statement. Above them
in a glass booth, a company executive oozes evil as he watches their preparations. By the
time they go on the air, Godell is so nervous that he comes off as a nut. The police antiterror-
ist squad breaks in and kills him, and at that very moment another nuclear accident begins.
Even as the power plant shakes and rattles, the company mounts a new cover-up, blam-
ing it all on the dead Godell. Kimberly asks Godell’s coworker, the company man, whether
management’s allegations about his friend are true. He pauses and then says the company
is wrong, that Godell was a good man. As the film ends, we assume the truth has come out,
although a note of ambiguity is introduced when the movie takes us back to the television
studio and the news broadcast is interrupted by an advertisement for microwave ovens.
Predictably, the nuclear power industry tried to discredit The China Syndrome even
before it was released, but two weeks after it opened, an accident at Pennsylvania’s Three
Mile Island (T.M.I.) nuclear plant spectacularly gave the movie both credibility and public-
ity. Years later when the fear of nuclear energy had subsided or at least been overwhelmed by
climate change anxiety, The China Syndrome co-star Michael Douglas recalled the profound
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effect of the film’s message and its timing with the T.M.I. disaster. Watching the accident
play out on television news reports which interspersed live shots from Pennsylvania with
eerily similar scenes from the film converted Douglas. While Fonda was firmly anti-nuke
before making the film, Douglas was not as dogmatic. Recalled Douglas, “It was a religious
awakening. I felt it was God’s hand.”11
The film was advertised as a thriller, but the coincidence of Three Mile Island gave
emphasis to what would otherwise have seemed a timid message. Thanks to the free public-
ity, heavy advertising, generally good reviews, three Oscar nominations, and many public
appearances by Fonda, Douglas, and Lemmon, all of whom agreed with the movie’s mes-
sage, The China Syndrome did well at the box office.
In addition to foreseeable criticism from the nuclear power industry, the harshest reviews
of this film came from the left, which flayed The China Syndrome for choosing entertain-
ment over political substance, trivializing the opposition to nuclear energy, ignoring the
problems of blue-collar workers, showing too much faith in the media, and substituting indi-
vidual for collective action.12 In the end, the film’s heroes are not against nuclear power; they
just want to tell the public the truth. Good people stand up and speak out, another reassuring
conclusion along the lines of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and All the President’s Men. The
China Syndrome implies that telling the truth about the accidents will be enough to mobilize
the public and precipitate government action, and in a way it was. This popular and enter-
taining movie, considerably aided by the coincidence of Three Mile Island, added impetus
to the long years of organizing, demonstrating, and lobbying that ended the construction of
nuclear power plants in America.
Revenge of the Blacklist
In addition to political thrillers and movies like The Candidate, the mid-1970s brought a
modest revival of the Old Left. As the civil rights and antiwar movements reached their
culmination, the Old Left found itself rehabilitated. Activists who had been blacklisted and
spurned in the 1950s became the new heroes and heroines, and the old witch hunt virtually
reversed itself as the collaborators and friendly witnesses of the House Un-American Activi-
ties Committee (HUAC) fell into disrepute. Lillian Hellman, Dalton Trumbo, Arthur Miller,
and others who had been harassed became cultural icons, and the Old Left got its revenge
in the movies, too.
In the grand Hollywood tradition, however, the first of these films, The Way We Were
(1973), was more romantic than political. Star casting and an eye toward prospective prof-
its may have led to the toning down of the political content originally intended by director
Sydney Pollack and writer Arthur Laurents, who adapted his own novel.
Katie (Barbra Streisand) is a student activist in the 1930s. As president of the Young
Communists League, she is serious and committed, even fanatical, and she works her way
through college, too. The rich, handsome Hubbell (Robert Redford), however, is just out for
a good time. Katie, who is Jewish, dismisses Hubbell as a rich WASP twit until one of his
short stories is read aloud in class. “In a way he was like the country he lived in,” the story
begins. “Everything came too easily.” Later, during World War II, the two meet again and
fall in love. After the war, they end up in Hollywood, where he is a scriptwriter and she is
an activist housewife just as anti-Communist fever is taking hold in Congress. When Katie
joins the protests against HUAC, they separate, and the movie ends when they accidentally
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meet later in New York City after the Red Scare has ended. She is handing out ban-the-bomb
literature, and he is taking his new WASP wife into the Plaza Hotel. Katie reports that she,
too, has remarried, and they part nostalgically.
The romantic stars made The Way We Were a box office hit, but most reviewers criti-
cized its soft politics, which reduced the movie to a melodrama of doomed love. In scenes
that were cut from the movie at the last minute, Katie is called to testify before HUAC and
must choose between naming names or refusing to do so and hurting Hubbell’s career. She
refuses and loses him for the sake of her politics. Had audiences seen this version, we might
have wished the wimpy Hubbell good riddance, but instead we see Katie giving up Robert
Redford just to stand on a street corner and hand out leaflets.
Not surprisingly, the political theme of The Way We Were was lost on most audiences,
but if its backers and makers played safe with their investment, those of The Front (1976)
were more forthright. The writer, director, and several actors in The Front were black-
listed themselves, a fact that was noted in the film’s end credits and that surely added to
its credibility.
In this film, a blacklisted TV scriptwriter (Michael Murphy) asks his friend Howard
(Woody Allen) to “front” for him. This means that Howard will put his name on the writer’s
scripts and deal with producers in the writer’s stead in return for a fee. Howard agrees because
he needs the money, and soon he is serving as a front for other blacklisted writers as well and
enjoying wealth and fame. The workings of the blacklist are seen not only through Howard’s
dealings with the writers he fronts for, but also through pressures on Hecky Brown (Zero
Mostel), a comic. Claiming innocence of left-wing activities, Hecky is pressured to spy on
Howard and others, loses his job, and ultimately kills himself.
The investigators then subpoena Howard. He has no politics and is outraged at being
wrongly accused, but he cannot inform because he would lose his stable of writers. The inves-
tigators demand names—any names, even the dead, even Hecky Brown. One of the writers
Howard fronts for explains that all the persecutors really want is to prove they can make
Howard submit—a belief widely shared by HUAC’s critics. During the hearing, Howard
balks at naming his dead friend Hecky, declaring that he does not recognize the committee’s
right to “ask those kind of questions and furthermore you can all go fuck yourselves.” He
walks out, and the film ends with him being taken to prison for contempt. A crowd cheers,
his left-wing writers pat him on the back, and he wins back his liberal girlfriend. The front
has become a hero and “Young at Heart” plays on the sound track (“Fairy tales can come
true, it can happen to you . . .”).
The Front got mixed notices from critics, many of whom found it unsatisfactory as either
political analysis or comedy. The harshest criticisms were from the left for taking blacklist-
ing too lightly, particularly through the comic “intrusion . . . of the classic Woody Allen
character, the Jewish schlemiel.”13 Pauline Kael thought it was a “slightly archaic” movie
about a common man standing up for what was right, “like the heroes of the forties war-
time movies written by those who were later blacklisted.”14 Audiences, however, liked The
Front, and it was more successful at the box office than a film with tougher politics might
have been.
The Front described the workings of the blacklist and left no doubt that it was bad. If
anything, the movie oversimplified this evil by caricaturing the investigators. To the film’s
credit, however, not all of its blacklist victims were as innocent as Hecky and Howard. Still,
The Front offered little real understanding of why the blacklist existed, and even its terrible
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impact on individuals was obscured by what most audiences took as a happy ending, despite
the film’s implication that it was fantasy. Casting Woody Allen in the lead also weakened
The Front, instantly making it “a Woody Allen movie.” Howard learned, grew, and finally
took action, yet because of Allen’s presence the audience perceived the movie as a comedy,
straining for laughs even when they were not there.
The Way We Were and The Front illustrate how political messages can be subverted or
obscured by Hollywood’s imperative to find an audience and make money. Both films took
on political subjects and then backed away, the former toward romance and the latter toward
comedy. Both films would have been stronger if the motives of their main characters had
been more clearly political, but their actions were either unfathomable or explained by love
and loyalty. On the other hand, the romance and comedy found audiences, which tougher
politics might not have done.
Although Julia (1977) was not explicitly about the blacklist, it must have been sweet
revenge for HUAC critic Lillian Hellman, who wrote the book, Pentimento, that included
the story on which this film was based. Directed by Fred Zinnemann, Julia starred Jane
Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, both of whom, like Hellman, had suffered career setbacks
because of their politics. Julia (Redgrave) is an antifascist student activist and a committed
revolutionary in Nazi Germany. She asks her friend Lillian (Fonda) to help her by smuggling
money for the resistance, an act of danger and bravery, especially for someone like Lillian
who is not directly involved. Lillian, undertaking the mission out of personal loyalty rather
than political commitment, matures in the process. The politically conscious Julia is the
moral center of the film and her commitment is strongly justified by her antifascism. Lillian,
on the other hand, exhibits the naiveté of some people who associated with left-wing causes
in the 1930s, suggesting that HUAC exaggerated their subversiveness. Perhaps more nota-
ble, however, was the fact that women were heroines rather than marginal characters in this
film. By giving both women a firm basis for their actions and by letting us see Lillian mature,
Julia provided a politically stronger condemnation of HUAC and the blacklist than either
The Way We Were or The Front. Significantly, this film about friendship, bravery, and politi-
cal commitment—neither a romance nor a comedy—was a popular and critical success and
won three Oscars.
Disillusionment
Whatever their shortcomings, The Way We Were, The Front, Julia, and All the President’s
Men acknowledged the potential for honorable individual action. The Candidate and the
political thrillers of the 1970s had argued that such action was futile against the overpower-
ing corruption of the system, but their heroes were willing to join the struggle, and at least
there was a central power that could be opposed, even if defeat was inevitable.
Other movies of the decade revealed a deeper disillusionment, perhaps more accurately
reflecting the spirit of the times. Beloved political leaders had been killed. The civil rights,
antiwar, and women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s had fallen apart. Political action
seemed useless to many liberals after the defeat of George McGovern and the reelection of
Richard Nixon in 1972. Watergate, Nixon’s resignation, and Gerald Ford’s presidency only
exacerbated the disillusionment, as did the fall of Saigon in 1975. Crime, violence, urban
decay, and racial polarization were on the rise, and the environmental and sexual liberation
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movements seemed more personal than political. The country diffidently celebrated its
bicentennial in 1976 as the little-known antipolitician Jimmy Carter was elected president.
Not surprisingly, movies reflected the nation’s disillusionment.
During this period, Warren Beatty, one of Hollywood’s most politically active stars, pro-
duced, coauthored (with Robert Towne), and starred in Shampoo (1975), directed by Hal
Ashby. Although this is not primarily a political movie, its climactic scene takes place at a
political banquet and it uses constant television commentary on the 1968 election of Richard
Nixon as a backdrop. Beatty said his movie was “about the intermingling of political and
sexual hypocrisy,”14 comparing Nixon’s public behavior with our own private behavior.
Director Robert Altman showed similar disillusionment in Nashville (1975), using the
country-and-western music capital as a microcosm of American society. Altman had taken

on the military in the anti-Vietnam War film M*A*S*H (1970), set during the Korean War,
and made corporate businessmen the villains in his “western,” McCabe and Mrs. Miller
(1971). Nashville was more overtly political, although most viewers were unsure just what
the message was. Like Altman’s other films of the 1970s, it destroyed all expectations with
its multicharacter structure and chaotic plot, yet it managed to remain profoundly humanist.
No less than twenty-four characters crisscross through Nashville. Their lives are a
country-and-western version of Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade” as they dash around trying to
attain or keep hold of stardom. “The whole piece,” scriptwriter Joan Tewkesbury said, “was
about people who were trying to do the best job they could with the equipment they had
in this dumb kind of social structure.”16 As in Shampoo, politics provides a backdrop for
the hustling in Nashville. Hal Philip Walker is the unseen “Replacement Party” candidate
for president. A roving sound truck constantly announces his vaguely populist proposals,
including a new national anthem “that people can sing.” An advance man (Michael Mur-
phy), reminiscent of the campaign manager in The Candidate, is in Nashville lining up stars
to support Walker at a big concert. All twenty-four characters come together at the rally, and
the movie climaxes when an assassin who apparently panics while waiting to kill Walker
murders one of them, a country megastar. The film ends as an aspiring country singer picks
up the microphone and sings “It Don’t Worry Me,” an antipolitical song that says we will all
survive no matter what.
Audiences were mystified by Nashville, probably because of its chaotic structure, and its
box office was mediocre, but the film was nominated for five Academy Awards, and critics
raved about it. Some complained about its ending, however, and Tewkesbury admitted that
the assassination was added at Altman’s request.17 Such occurrences were on Americans’
minds at the time, and this one pointed up the randomness of violence in our society, but as
an ending, it may have been more convenient than political. The basic mood of Nashville
was pessimistic, the film had no political answers, and only a few honorable characters
offered hope for the future.
Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) was even bleaker. This film’s protagonist, Travis
Bickle (Robert De Niro), is an unstable Vietnam vet who is drawn to politics by his infat-
uation with a campaign worker (Cybill Shepherd), who ignores him. To get attention or
revenge, he plans to assassinate her candidate, but he is diverted by his obsession with a
child prostitute (Jodie Foster) and ends up wreaking bloody havoc on her pimp (Harvey
Keitel). Politics is a separate world in this movie, irrelevant to the hell Travis lives in. Like
the beautiful campaign worker, politics is hypocritical and uncaring, incapable of providing
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salvation. Travis wreaks his crazy vengeance not on the politician, however, but on the pimp,
a more deserving target. This grim, antipolitical movie was allegedly an inspiration to John
Hinckley, who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan to gain the attention of
Jodie Foster.
Network (1976) featured yet another crazy man and yet another assassination. Directed
by Sidney Lumet and written by Paddy Chayefsky, Network was a hugely popular and criti-
cal hit, with four Oscars and five more nominations, for although it was as cynical as
Nashville and Taxi Driver, audiences found it more entertaining. “I’m mad as hell and I’m
not going to take this anymore!” cries a TV anchorman (Peter Finch) when he is fired. He
threatens to commit suicide on live television and becomes a cult hero. The network sees
it has a good thing going and unscrupulously takes advantage of the newsman’s insanity
by giving him his own show. The programming executive (Faye Dunaway) will broad-
cast anything that will get good ratings, including a sort of terrorist-of-the-week show.
She is encouraged and rewarded by the vicious, unscrupulous network president (Robert
Duvall), but even he is subordinate to the chairman of the board (Ned Beatty). Preaching
like a revivalist converting sinners, the chair warns the obsessed anchorman to contain
his rabble-rousing because corporations like the one that owns the network have replaced
nations and now rule the world.
Network’s “I’m mad as hell” slogan gave the film a populist tone, but its contempt for
television audiences did not manifest faith in the public. In fact, Network offered no hope
at all. Like other movies of the 1970s, including both Godfather films, Chinatown, The
Parallax View, and Shampoo, Network saw politics and politicians as less powerful than cor-
porations, a more radical and distressing political analysis than that offered by earlier films.
Even more distressing, these movies refused to offer even a glimmer of hope.
Network (1976) concerns the growing influence of television and the cynical, greedy forces behind its
production. Here former newscaster Howard Beale (Peter Finch) transforms into a cult celebrity, as
indicated by the stained glass backdrop to his television show.
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Hollywood Discovers Vietnam
Among the most painful topics for Americans in the 1960s and 1970s was the war in
Vietnam. Hollywood largely avoided this subject except for John Wayne’s The Green Berets
(1968) and some films of the early 1970s for which the war functioned as background. In
American Graffiti, for example, the war was seen as a part of growing up. In Nashville, an
edgy Vietnam vet who could have been an assassin turns out to be a hero. And in Taxi Driver,
it is a crazed veteran who explodes into horrific violence. But it was not until after the fall
of Saigon in 1975 and the election of President Carter in 1976 that Hollywood contemplated
Vietnam seriously.
The first such effort, Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977), was a thriller along the lines
of Fail Safe, offering a left-wing explanation of the war. Director Robert Aldrich, one of
Hollywood’s most consistent liberals, had previously made the pro-Indian Apache (1954)
and the antiwar, anticlass Attack (1956).17 Lawrence Dell (Burt Lancaster), the protago-
nist in Twilight’s Last Gleaming, is a renegade general but, contrary to convention, he is
a liberal rather than a fascist, and he wants the American people to know the truth about
U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Drummed out of the air force and railroaded into prison for
his fanaticism, he escapes with two other inmates, seizes a Strategic Air Command missile
silo, and threatens to launch the missiles unless the president makes public the minutes of a
National Security Council meeting that will tell all. A sympathetic president (Charles Durn-
ing) prepares to do so, but his advisers oppose him, and when he goes to the silo to bring
the renegade general out, both men are gunned down. In the words of Dell’s associate, the
men who control the system would sacrifice even the president rather than “blow their gig.”
The general and the president act as they do for clear, unambiguous reasons: they are
good men who want the people to know the truth. In earlier movies, the good guys usually
won when the people learned the truth. Here, as in other 1970s movies, the truth never comes
out and the good guys lose, but at least the movie tells us such heroes do exist. The film’s
chilling conclusion gains nuance and a certain ambiguity from good casting and fine acting,
but audiences and critics were unenthusiastic.
Other movies about the war followed. Rolling Thunder (1977) featured a Vietnam vet
using skills acquired in the war to wreak vengeance at home. Big Wednesday (1978) was
about three surfers, one of whom was drafted and sent to Vietnam. The effects of the war
were taken up in Who’ll Stop the Rain (1978), which suggested that America had corrupted
itself through its involvement in Vietnam, as a disillusioned journalist, criminals, crooked
federal agents, and relatively innocent bystanders fight over the spoils—drugs, in this case.
Go Tell the Spartans (1978) and The Boys in Company C (1978) were the first combat
films about Vietnam since The Green Berets, although neither was as old-fashioned as that
film. Go Tell the Spartans takes place in the early days when Americans are just advisers in
Vietnam, but one of them (Burt Lancaster again) begins to doubt the worthiness of the cause.
Sidney J. Furie’s The Boys in Company C, however, was a combat film with a difference.
Like a World War II movie, The Boys in Company C follows a cross section of American
men—including a black, a big-city Italian, a hippie, and a good ol’ country boy—through
training and their first month in Vietnam, but we soon learn that this is like no other movie war.
Within a day of arriving in Vietnam, one takes heroin, another deals drugs, and a third blows
up a general’s trailer. Their officers are tyrants interested only in body counts, the enemy is
an unseen terror, and the South Vietnamese officers are corrupt. The movie, however, makes
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a point of including some good Vietnamese civilians who are befriended by the streetwise
black soldier, who, albeit reluctantly, becomes the informal leader of Company C.
The men are ordered to lose a soccer match to a Vietnamese team in order to boost the
morale of their allies. In return, Company C will be taken off combat duty and sent on a
soccer tour. The catch is that they have to keep losing. They refuse and return to the front,
preferring to take their chances rather than become part of the all-pervasive corruption. The
Boys in Company C does not, however, say that fighting to win is the best alternative. Rather,
it honors those who refuse to sell out, whether they fight or desert, and especially if they are
loyal to their peers.
Unfortunately, this fine little movie was overshadowed by Hollywood’s first big, star-
studded productions on Vietnam. The Deer Hunter and Coming Home swept the 1978 Oscars
and cleaned up at the box office. These two films were also widely, if somewhat unfairly,
perceived as representing the right- and left-wing perspectives on the war.
The Deer Hunter, written by Deric Washburn and directed by Michael Cimino, is about
a group of working-class men who leave their industrial hometown to go to war. They do
so out of a sense of duty, without questioning why and with no particular prejudices either
for or against the war. The camaraderie of their life at home gives way to the brutality, chaos,
confusion, and pervasive evil of the war. When they are taken prisoner, everything centers
on their struggle for survival. Before they escape, their evil Vietcong captors force the men
to play a brutal game of Russian roulette. Having lived through incredible degradation, some
of the young men return to their community, but they are ineradicably altered by what they
have gone through, and they have difficulty adjusting.
Michael (Robert De Niro), the leader of the group and an avid deer hunter, no longer takes
pleasure in hunting. He returns to Saigon just before its fall to try to save Nick (Christopher
Walken), who has become obsessed with the game of Russian roulette he learned from the
Vietcong and now plays before an audience for money. The game becomes a symbol of
American involvement in Vietnam, and it also reveals that its South Vietnamese audience
and gamblers are just as vile and bloodthirsty as the Vietcong. Nick finally loses and Michael
returns to their hometown, where the film ends with the surviving buddies sadly singing
“God Bless America.”
Although The Deer Hunter was a popular and critical hit, many people perceived it as a
right-wing film because of its failure to question the war and its uniformly racist portrait of
Asians. The film is oblivious to the impact of the war on the Vietnamese, in effect blaming
them and absolving Americans of any responsibility. The game of Russian roulette is an
effective dramatic device, but it also symbolizes the Asians’ contempt for human life. Direc-
tor Cimino, who declared The Deer Hunter an antiwar film because “any good picture about
war is an antiwar picture,” saw the Russian roulette as a symbol of the pointlessness of war.19
For him, the theme of the film was how war destroys individuals and communities. Having
seen the ravages of war, Michael no longer enjoys hunting deer. Even the singing of “God
Bless America” can be seen as ironic, as the singers try to convince themselves that they
still believe the lyrics. But while the pro- or antiwar sentiments of The Deer Hunter can be
debated, it is clear in the film that the Vietnamese are the bad guys and Cimino’s working-
class Americans are innocent of responsibility. Cimino deserves credit for making a movie
about the men who really fought the war, yet he seemed condescending to his working-class
heroes, who are incapable of articulating their thoughts and oblivious to the politics of the
186
war. The Deer Hunter might have been a more right-wing film if Cimino had shown authen-
tic working-class men with authentic attitudes about the war.
In contrast to Cimino’s epic of working-class men, Coming Home (1978) focuses on the
middle-class wife of an officer. Initiated by Jane Fonda and Bruce Gilbert, Coming Home
was directed by Hal Ashby, photographed by Haskell Wexler, and written by Waldo Salt,
Robert C. Jones, and Nancy Dowd. The message these liberals put together was very differ-
ent from Cimino’s but almost as muddled.
Jane Fonda plays Sally, whose officer husband (Bruce Dern) is sent to Vietnam. Sally at
first dreads being left alone, but after a while she feels liberated. She gets a sports car and
a house on the beach and starts working with paraplegics. Soon she meets and falls in love
with Luke (Jon Voight), a veteran who is opposed to the war. Like many Fonda characters,
Sally is naive in the beginning, but she grows and learns and, as Gilbert Adair has written,
“turns into Jane Fonda.”19 Despite his disabilities, Luke furthers the cause by helping her
achieve her first orgasm. They have happy times and play at the beach. Sally’s husband, Bob,
is mentally unbalanced when he comes home from Vietnam. She tries to reconcile with him,
but in his stressed-out state, she cannot reach him. When the meddlesome FBI tells Bob that
Sally has been involved with an antiwar activist in his absence, he loses control, menacingly
confronting the lovers, but ultimately turns away, defeated and in despair, to end it all by
swimming out to sea to die.
Like The Best Years of Our Lives, Coming Home is about adapting. Luke is the model,
coming to terms with a bad war by opposing it. In so doing, he becomes a complete, caring
human being, able to help Sally to adjust. Bob, on the other hand, is unable to adapt his tra-
ditional military values to new circumstances. Too rigid to change, he chooses death. It could
have been worse for Bob; an earlier draft of the script had him sniping at freeway traffic.
As an antiwar movie, Coming Home could have convinced few. Apparently the filmmakers
thought they could make their point best by fudging the politics and playing up the romance.
Perhaps they were right, for although some critics disdained this film as superficial, it did
well at the box office and won Academy Awards for best actress, actor, and screenplay.
Meanwhile, Hollywood eagerly awaited the definitive film on the war in Vietnam from
Francis Ford Coppola, America’s hottest contemporary director after his Godfather suc-
cesses. The anticipation was heightened when Coppola was nearly bankrupted by prodigious
production problems in the Philippines, for unlike The Deer Hunter and Coming Home, all
of Apocalypse Now (1979) was to be set in Vietnam.
Based on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, Coppola’s movie follows Willard
(Martin Sheen) on his mission to find and kill Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a rogue American
officer who is fighting the enemy on its own terms. During his journey, Willard runs into
a cavalry officer addicted to surfing who leads a helicopter raid on an innocent village in
search of the perfect wave. Later, Willard’s crew panics and slaughters a boatload of Viet-
namese who also turn out to be innocent. As their adventures continue, Willard and his men
witness American troops going berserk over a Playboy show imported for their entertain-
ment, reiterating the uniqueness of this war and sending up Bob Hope’s renowned troop
shows. After all this, when Willard finally arrives at Kurtz’s bizarre encampment, the argu-
ments of the renegade leader and his admirers in favor of their mad methods seem relatively
persuasive. In the end, Willard has to decide whether to eliminate Kurtz, join him, or replace
him. The film makes all these alternatives seem credible.
187
Critics and audiences were stunned by Apocalypse Now, for Coppola’s nightmare of
Vietnam was more surrealistic than realistic. Reviews of the movie were mixed, as both
left and right criticized the confusing (or confused) politics of the film, and despite eight
Academy Award nominations, Apocalypse Now won only for sound and cinematography.
Coppola’s film nevertheless did well at the box office, surpassing the other war movies to
join Variety’s top 100 “Box Office Champions.” Despite their reservations, the critics gener-
ally agreed that Apocalypse Now successfully communicated the horror of the war. Better
than other films, it suggested the war’s otherworldliness, its confusion of good and evil, and
its contagious, destructive madness. Yet Apocalypse Now could also be read as a defense of
that destructiveness because of Kurtz’s claim that he was driven to extreme action by the
atrocities of the Vietcong. In fact, Kurtz’s justification of his behavior seemed to be the point
of Apocalypse Now, not only because the role of Kurtz was played by a superstar but also
because the character was the subject of the quest that took up two hours of the film.21 This
interpretation was undercut, however, by Kurtz’s apparent madness, Brando’s low-key per-
formance, and the apparent innocence of the Vietnamese civilians in the earlier scenes. The
meeting with Kurtz is an anticlimactic and unsatisfying conclusion to Willard’s journey, but
the events leading up to the meeting help explain Kurtz’s actions and the view of Vietnam
as a quagmire, making clear the reasons for deeper and deeper U.S. involvement and excess.
All of these films about Vietnam made money and some were big hits, but Hollywood
soon turned away from the war. Bad reviews and box office worries played a part in this
disenchantment, but the nature of the war seemed the primary reason. The complexity of
the situation in Vietnam was difficult to catch in fiction films, especially when people had
seen so much news footage on TV. The Vietnam War also remained a very painful subject,
not only because America lost, but also because the reasons for involvement had never been
clear. Hollywood liked simpler wars, like World War II, in which our reasons for fighting
were clear, but in the brief cycle of movies about Vietnam, few offered an explanation.
Apocalypse Now contemplated the deepening American involvement and its increasing irra-
tionality, but on the whole these films focused on the impact of the war on the individuals
who fought it and on its effect on American society. Except for a handful of characters in The
Boys in Company C and Coming Home who survived with their honor and their sanity intact,
these movies unanimously concluded that the war screwed everybody up, a message that
was basically antiwar. In this at least, the Vietnam movies were well within the Hollywood
tradition—most war films made during peacetime are antiwar. But even the antiwar message
was obscured by the films’ focus on individuals, a sure way to defuse political content, since
every issue is personalized and therefore not necessarily applicable to American society as a
whole. Meanwhile, other issues caught the film industry’s limited political attention.
Labor Unions and Corporate Power
America sank deeper into disillusionment and apathy through the 1970s, but even as the
nation as a whole turned away from politics, Hollywood continued in one of its most politi-
cal periods, taking on not only Vietnam, but also a variety of other issues. This was partly
due to the coming of age of filmmakers whose political consciousness had been shaped by
the 1960s, but changes in the corporate structure of the film industry were also a factor.
Larger corporations absorbed most of the big studios in the 1970s. The last to retain its inde-
pendence was Columbia, which fell to Coca-Cola in 1982. Initially, the corporate studios
188
made fewer films, but as the size of audiences and the number of cinemas increased, so did
the number of movies.
The nature of production had changed, however. Making a movie increasingly depended
on packaging writers, directors, actors, and others into a “deal.” Such deals were still
initiated by studios, but independent producers, agents, directors, actors, and writers also
put together deals and took them to studios, which then acted as investors or distributors.
Independent funding eventually became easier with the evolution of cable television and
videocassettes as sources of revenue. In short, the role of the studios had changed: movies
could now be made without them. Both Coming Home and Apocalypse Now, for example,
were independent productions, as were many other films of the era. Perhaps the increased
independence of filmmakers accounts for a little flurry of prolabor and anticorporate films
as the decade ended.
Hollywood has never shown sustained interest in the working class. Movies have always
been more likely to center on lawyers, architects, teachers, doctors, or the idle rich. Working-
class characters were more common in the early silent movies, and Warner Bros. featured
them often enough to earn the label “the workingman’s studio” in the 1930s. But by the
1950s and 1960s, working-class people had become an endangered species in the movies,
despite an occasional Marty (1955) or Joe (1970).
Union members fared even worse21 because the studios fought a long battle against the
unionization of their own workers. Even after that battle ended, unions were rarely favorably
treated in American movies. The Grapes of Wrath sided with the workers, but stopped short
of the enthusiastic unionism of Steinbeck’s novel. Outright pro-union films like the sup-
pressed Salt of the Earth were rare, and union corruption as in Big Jim McLain and On the
Waterfront was more common. Given Hollywood history, the number of films about workers
and unions that appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s was remarkable. Interestingly,
Hollywood took up this topic as union membership was in decline and labor conflict was
becoming a thing of the past. Like Vietnam, it was a safe subject by the time the movies got
around to it.
Director Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory (1976) was about real-life folk singer Woody
Guthrie’s travels with migrant farmworkers in 1936, but the treatment and the casting of
David Carradine in the lead reduced the movie’s hero to a moody agitator who did not seem
to care much about the people he stirred up. Factory workers took center stage in Blue Collar
(1978) and F.I.S.T. (1978), although neither film had anything good to say about unions. Paul
Schrader’s Blue Collar powerfully conveyed the alienation and frustration of assembly-line
workers, but it soon turned into a grim caper movie as three autoworkers rob their corrupt
union and then turn against one another. Norman Jewison directed F.I.S.T., but the movie
seemed to have been more heavily influenced by Sylvester Stallone, its coauthor and star,
who plays the Hoffa-style leader of the union whose initials give the film its title. F.I.S.T.
begins with a righteous strike that effectively makes the case for unions. The idealistic young
hero joins up, grows more involved, and rises to leadership, but he ultimately betrays both
his workers and his union as the film reiterates one of Hollywood’s favorite political themes:
power corrupts.
Despite movies like these and public antagonism to unions, one of the big hits of 1979
was the pro-union Norma Rae, independently produced and directed by one of Hollywood’s
most consistent liberals, Martin Ritt. Norma Rae did well at the box office, picked up two
Academy Awards, and was praised by most critics. Based on the true story of a woman
189
Norma Rae (1979) features Sally Field in the title role trying to unionize a southern textile mill.
textile worker and union organizer, Norma Rae was released just as the effort to unionize
the southern textile mills came to a head, helping to publicize the workers’ call for a national
boycott against J.P. Stevens, one of the biggest companies. Both the boycott and the movie
had happy endings.
Norma Rae (Sally Field), a naive and apathetic single parent who works in the mills, is
recruited by Reuben, a northern union organizer (Ron Liebman) whom the other workers
shun. Under his guidance, she develops into an effective grassroots organizer and leader.
Their relationship is at the center of the film, but although movie tradition leads us to expect
them to have an affair, they do not. Their cultural and class differences are driven home by
the difficulties she faces as she becomes more involved in the fight for unionization. He is
on his own, free to leave when he likes, but her roots are in the community and the personal
pressures on her are enormous. Her family turns on her, and the factory managers try to
isolate her as a troublemaker. In the end, however, the workers vote to join the union and
Norma Rae is triumphant. Reuben packs up his files and moves on to his next project, leav-
ing her in charge.
The upbeat ending ignored the tough battles to negotiate a contract and control the union
that lay ahead, but the strengths of Norma Rae outweighed this weakness. Better than most
films, Norma Rae communicated the need for unions and the personal and political difficul-
ties of organizing them. Norma Rae gave too much credit to two individuals, a shortcoming
it had in common with most American political films, but unlike most, it stressed that by
working together and taking action, average people could take care of themselves.
Being There (1979), written by Jerzy Kosinski from his novel and directed by Hal Ashby,
takes us from the shop floor to corporate boardrooms. Chance Gardener, played with bril-
liant reserve by Peter Sellers, is a retarded illiterate who has lived all his life on the estate
of a wealthy benefactor, watching television and tending the garden. When his protector
dies, Chance is turned out on the streets, but he is unable to discern the difference between
190
television and reality. When street toughs harass him, he tries to make them go away by
changing the channel on the TV remove control he carries. He walks into the street and is hit
by a limousine. Its passenger, Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine), takes him to her mansion for
treatment, apparently worried about a lawsuit.
Eve’s husband, Benjamin (Melvyn Douglas yet again and even better), is a dying mega-
industrialist, one of the men who run the country. He is impressed by Chance, whose rare
comments either are noncommittal, and so taken as agreement, or refer to gardening, in
which case they are taken metaphorically. The Rands introduce Chance to their circle, and
he comes to be seen as some kind of authority. His cool reserve and his gardening com-
ments, which everyone takes as metaphors, make him an instant celebrity when he appears
on a television talk show. Rand introduces Chance to his protégé, the president of the United
States, who is delighted with what he takes as Chance’s optimistic advice about the econ-
omy: “As long as the roots are not severed, all will be well in the garden. . . . There will be
growth in the spring.” Rand’s corporate colleagues choose the imbecilic Chance as their next
presidential candidate. Meanwhile, Chance wanders into the wintry garden. The film ends as
he crosses a pond, walking on water.
Sellers was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of Chance, and Melvyn
Douglas won a well-deserved Oscar for his supporting role, but although the movie was a
box office success, some critics were put off by the absurdity of Being There. Intended as
devastating satire, the film came across as ominous rather than funny. People were unsure
about its message and some even took Chance’s final walk on water literally rather than iron-
ically. Like Network, Being There was a condemnation of television, which numbs people’s
minds and creates instant celebrities who do not deserve respect. Both films also insisted that
businessmen, not politicians, ran America.
Being There was only one of many movies of the late 1970s and early 1980s featuring
the pervasive influence of business, perhaps reflecting Hollywood’s greater independence
as well as its anxiety about its own corporate status. Jane Fonda starred in a whole string
of antibusiness movies during this period: Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), Comes a Horse-
man (1978), The Electric Horseman (1979), The China Syndrome (1979), and Nine to Five
(1980). But a film that was itself a debacle for the businesses of Hollywood capped off the
antibusiness films of the 1970s.
Michael Cimino’s anticapitalist Heaven’s Gate (1980) is about the nineteenth-century
range wars in Wyoming, during which land barons, aided by hired thugs and the army,
brutally crush immigrant settlers. Cimino’s dazzling technique directs our sympathy to the
heroic immigrants, whose community is movingly portrayed, but a dearth of dialogue and
an obscurely motivated hero (Kris Kristofferson) make Heaven’s Gate too dependent on
images. The critics panned it as boring, pretentious, and overlong, and distributors with-
drew the film before many people could see it. Heaven’s Gate deserved better because of
its visual beauty as well as its revisionist view of the history of the West. Its anticapitalism
also suggested that the interpretation of Cimino’s earlier work, The Deer Hunter, as right-
wing was unfair. Heaven’s Gate cost $44 million and brought in less than $2 million, ruining
Cimino’s career and leading film financiers to assert greater control over filmmakers—an
ironic achievement for an anticapitalist film.
The few defenders of Heaven’s Gate argued that the film bombed because the American
people were not prepared to see the truth about their history. But truth or not, a whole string
of films through the 1970s—from The Candidate to All the President’s Men, Network, Being
191
There, and most of Jane Fonda’s films—had already proved that audiences were perfectly
willing to accept cynicism, paranoia, and corporate skulduggery.
Notes
1. Tom Wolfe, “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” Mauve Gloves & Madmen,
Clutter & Vine (New York: Bantam [reprint], 1999).
2. Dan Ruby, “Star Wars,” Jump Cut, August 1978.
3. James Monaco, American Film Now (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 356.
4. Andrew Sarris, Politics and Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 20.
5. New York Times, June 30, 1972.
6. The New Yorker, August 20, 1979.

7. Alan Pakula, Guardian Lecture, National Film Theatre, London, February 25, 1986.
8. Ibid.
10. William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade (London: Futura, 1985), p. 147.
11. Stephen J. Dubner, S.D. Levitt, “The Jane Fonda Effect,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.
com/2007/09/16/magazine/16wwln-freakonomics-t.html?_r=0. Doug Zwick, “The Genre Syndrome,”
and Michael Gallantz, “Meltdown in Hollywood,” both in Jump Cut, May 1980.
12. Norman Markowitz, “The Front: Comic Revenge,” Jump Cut, July 1977.
13. Pauline Kael, Reeling (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 170.
14. Film Review, November 1975, p. 8.
15. American Film, March 1979.
16. Ibid.
17. See Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing (London: Pluto Press, 1983).
18. Michael Cimino, Guardian Lecture, National Film Theatre, London, August 11, 1983.
19. Gilbert Adair, Hollywood’s Vietnam (London: Proteus, 1981), p. 106.
20. Ibid., p. 165.
21. See Peter Stead, Film and the Working Class (London: Routledge, 1989).
192
10
The 1980s
New Patriotism, Old Reds, and a Return to

Vietnam in the Age of Reagan
Top Gun (1986)

Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush presided over the United
States through the 1980s as the country appeared to turn to the right. Observers in other
countries found it hard to understand how America could prefer a second-rate actor like
Ronald Reagan to Jimmy Carter, but for many Americans Reagan represented optimism
and hope over Carter’s pessimism and malaise. International politics played a part, too,
when Carter proved unable to resolve a lengthy stalemate over hostages in Iran. In electing
Reagan, Americans protested the hostage crisis, rejected the Carter style, endorsed a reduc-
tion in government, and moved to the right, but also they expressed nostalgia for their own
past. Reagan was part of that past, having appeared on movie and television screens since
1937. His familiarity, his likable personality, and his very presence were reassuring. So
was his rhetoric of traditional values and patriotism. Reagan offered simple, old-fashioned
answers and an unflinching faith in America that people longed for.
More than any other president, Reagan saw America and the world through a movie lens,
making frequent references to films and even citing scenes from movies as if they were
real-life events. His language was often drawn from film. For him, the Soviet Union was
the “evil empire”—as in Star Wars—and his concept of an umbrella-like missile defense
for the United States took the name of that film. Like many Americans, he understood his
country and the world through the movies, seeing fewer shades of gray than his predecessor
and communicating in simple, straightforward, and reassuring words.
Worries about his lack of experience in foreign affairs were soon swept away by a wave of
patriotism. The joyous return of the Iranian hostages on the day of his inauguration launched
the revival of American pride and patriotism. Reagan called for a renewal of American
power and boosted the nation’s military might with massive increases in military spending.
Carter’s foreign policy emphasis on human rights was replaced by interventionism. Reagan
bombed Beirut, sent troops into Lebanon, and loosed the U.S. Marines on the tiny island
of Grenada. He intervened in El Salvador and Nicaragua, supporting the Contra counter-
revolutionaries. He sent U.S. jets to raid Libya, which he claimed was the headquarters of
world terrorism. Many Americans approved these actions—and some of the movies of the
era reflected that approval.
Meanwhile, Reagan reduced taxes, cut social programs, and ran up huge deficits to fund
military spending. Vice President George H.W. Bush, succeeding Reagan as president in
1988, continued his domestic and international policies, enjoying significant early victo-
ries. The Cold War ended when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then,
when Iraq occupied Kuwait in 1991, Bush showed decisive world leadership by building
a coalition to free Kuwait and contain Iraq. But Bush was no Ronald Reagan. Lacking his
predecessor’s charisma and good luck and with the nation blaming him for a recession, Bush
was defeated in 1992 by Democrat Bill Clinton.
Despite the nation’s apparent move to the right in presidential elections in the 1980s, the
films of the decade were as politically diverse as in preceding decades, perhaps even more
so. As independent film production increased, films with liberal messages seemed to pro-
liferate, perhaps in reaction to Reagan and the move to the right. Other movies, however,
reflected the conservatism of the decade, emphasizing traditional values and patriotism. Syl-
vester Stallone’s Rocky movies, for example, were old-fashioned stories based on traditional
values; other films of the 1980s exemplified the resurgence of patriotism along with these
values.
194
THE 1980S
A Warmed-Up Cold War and New Patriotism
Reaganite movies did not come into their own until after his 1984 reelection, but the trend
started in 1982 with Sylvester Stallone’s First Blood, for which the Rocky movies and F.I.S.T.
had paved the way. John Rambo (Stallone), a former Green Beret and winner of the Con-
gressional Medal of Honor, is an alienated, itinerant Vietnam vet searching for a buddy who
survived the war. After learning that his friend has died of Agent Orange-induced cancer, the
distraught Rambo wanders around, looking like a cross between a hippie and a Hell’s Angel.
Not surprisingly, a small-town sheriff (Brian Dennehy) orders him to move on and drives him
to the outskirts of town. Rambo, who does not like being told what to do, starts back into town.
The two men fight, and Rambo is arrested. In jail, he becomes a victim of police brutality. With
visions of Vietnam in his head, Rambo goes berserk and breaks out, fleeing to the woods.
A posse pursues Rambo along with the National Guard and state police. Rambo kills the
bad cops but only wounds others, declaring, “Out here I’m the law!” His old Green Beret
commander (Richard Crenna) tries to talk the surrounded Rambo into surrendering. “Do you
want a war you can’t win?” he asks. Explaining the film’s title, Rambo replies, “They drew
first blood—not me”:
It wasn’t my war. You asked me, I didn’t ask you. And I did what I had to do to win, but
somebody wouldn’t let us win. And I come back to the world, and I see all those maggots at
the airport, protesting me, calling me a baby-killer and all kinds of vile crap. Who are they
to protest me, huh? Back there I could fly a gunship, I could drive a tank. I was in charge
of million-dollar equipment. Back here I can’t even hold a job.
Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) continues the Rambo franchise with Sylvester Stallone as veteran
John Rambo in a revisionist view of the Vietnam War and its aftermath.
195
First Blood condemned the maltreatment of Vietnam vets, a message with which few
would disagree, but the real point of this film was action. Although critics laughed at the
movie, Stallone laughed last: First Blood was a box office smash, and Stallone followed it
with two Rambo sequels.
The next Reaganite movie was Red Dawn (1984), directed by John Milius, who wrote
Apocalypse Now. When Russian, Cuban, and Nicaraguan Communists invade a small
Colorado town, the Wolverines, a group of teenagers who resemble the partisans in World
War II movies, resist the attackers. The mayor of the town, who collaborates with the Com-
munists, represents politicians. The teenagers run rings around the occupying army for a
while, but they finally sacrifice themselves in a kamikaze-style mission. The movie closes
with a shot of Partisan Rock, a monument to the heroes of the resistance.

“Movies like Red Dawn are rapidly preparing America for World War III,” said the chair
of the National Coalition on Television Violence, denouncing its 134 acts of violence per
hour and labeling it “the most violent film ever seen.”1 Dismissed by critics as a mediocre
action movie, Red Dawn was nevertheless a box office hit. “The ferocity of the American
people,” director John Milius smugly observed, “has always been underestimated.”2 But
action rather than politics probably accounts for the popularity of his film. Red Dawn was
anti-Communist, but only because Communists were convenient enemies; the bad guys had
no perceivable political ideology and could just as easily have been from outer space. The
inclusion of Latinos among the invaders distinguished Red Dawn from the anti-Communist
movies of the 1950s, but otherwise it was no more politically sophisticated. Ultimately, it
was more individualistic than anti-Communist.
Although it is hard to take the politics of Red Dawn seriously, the movie set precedents
that other films would soon follow. It revived Communists as convenient enemies, and it
proved the marketability of posturing patriots as heroes. Few movies had fallen back on
these old stereotypes since the 1950s. After the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, America and
the Soviet Union had moved toward détente, and so did the movies. Superpatriot heroes and
Communist villains were out of style during the cynical 1960s and 1970s, but in the 1980s,
Ronald Reagan made patriotism and anti-Communism okay again, and Red Dawn proved
they were good box office.
Once unleashed, Reaganite cinema became even cruder. First Blood and Red Dawn seem
sophisticated compared to what followed. Missing in Action (1984) and Invasion U.S.A.
(1985) were raw action flicks starring Chuck Norris, a wooden actor but a supple stuntman.
In Missing in Action, Norris plays an escaped prisoner of war who returns to Vietnam with
an American senator who is investigating allegations about American soldiers missing in
action (MIAs). Discredited by the evil Vietnamese and disowned by the American politician,
the hero wreaks havoc on various enemy encampments, prisons, and convoys, saves the
MIAs, and brings them back to Ho Chi Minh City to repudiate the Vietnamese liars. Not sur-
prisingly, critics did not take Missing in Action seriously. Like other Chuck Norris movies,
however, it did well at the box office despite its lack of tension, credibility, and excitement.
In Norris’s other hit, Invasion U.S.A., he plays an ex-CIA agent who comes out of retire-
ment to stop a Russian “invasion” of Florida. Diabolical Communists in various disguises
slaughter Cuban refugees, ghetto dwellers, Christmas shoppers, and families in suburban
homes, stirring up distrust and unrest and turning people against one another. “America has
not been invaded by a foreign enemy in nearly two hundred years,” the Communist villain
sneers. “Look at them . . . soft, spineless, decadent. They don’t even understand the nature of
196
THE 1980S
their own freedom or how we will use it against them. They are their own worst enemies.”
The movie confirms this analysis when cowardly FBI agents phone in sick and spoiled
citizens whine about rationing. The “tide of terror” turns into a “threat to democracy,” with
demands for martial law and the suspension of the Constitution, but happily, the hero stops
the invaders single-handedly. Thanks in part to a larger budget, Invasion U.S.A. was bet-
ter than Missing in Action, although neither of Norris’s popular movies really had much to
say about politics. International tensions were merely an excuse for violent action, feeding
Reaganite anti-Communism.
Rambo’s return was almost as crude, but Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), written
by Sylvester Stallone, was even more popular than the Reaganite movies that preceded it.
John Rambo (Stallone again) wins a pardon for his earlier rampage in the woods when he
accepts an assignment to find American MIAs in Vietnam. “Do we get to win this time?”
Rambo asks his former Green Beret commander (Richard Crenna). He is only supposed to
photograph the MIAs for evidence, but he tries to bring one back. The helicopter sent to pick
him up abandons them, and the Vietnamese and their Russian advisers capture and torture
Rambo. He escapes, slaughters the enemy, frees the MIAs, and leads—or drags—them to
safety. He trashes the headquarters of the U.S. mission when he gets back and warns its
bureaucratic chief to find the rest of the MIAs or risk the wrath of Rambo. This movie places
the blame for the continued captivity of the MIAs squarely on the U.S. government, which
first declined to win the war and then refused to pay war reparations to Vietnam in exchange
for the MIAs.
In a promotional video for Rambo, Stallone, unlike most filmmakers, was forthright in
declaring his movie political. “I hope to establish a character that can represent a certain
section of the American consciousness,” he said, “and through the entertainment [I also
hope to] be educational. . . . More than being just a fighting man, [Rambo] represents the
entire fighting force.” Stallone also claimed that his movie was part of the “pre-stages of
a true historical event” in which the existence of the MIAs would be verified. “It’s no big
secret,” he declared. “Vietnam wants reparations from us. We don’t want to pay all those bil-
lions,” possibly because “our officials are being paid off.” Movies like Rambo were popular,
Stallone asserted, “because the people are on to something. There’s a thirst for verification.”3
Despite derisive reviews and Stallone’s pretensions, Rambo was a big hit even though the
action was perfunctory. David Morell, author of the novel on which First Blood was based,
dismissed Rambo as “a cartoon. On military bases,” Morell said, “they show it as a com-
edy.”4 Others took it more seriously, though few critics liked it. David Halberstam labeled
Stallone “a cinematic Joseph McCarthy” for his assertions about the existence of the MIAs
and for conveying the “exact reverse of the real message of the Vietnam War.”5 President
Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, admired Stallone’s message. “After seeing Rambo last
night,” he joked during a terrorist crisis, “I know what to do next time this happens.” He
failed to comment on Rambo’s contention of U.S. government complacency in freeing the
MIAs, however. Stallone concluded his Rambo films with Rambo III in 1988, in which our
hero invades Afghanistan. By this time, however, audiences were losing interest.
Anti-Communism also was a theme of Rocky IV and White Nights (both 1985). Stallone
wrapped himself in the flag for his fourth Rocky film, in which the boxing hero comes out
of retirement to defeat a Soviet fighter produced by biochemical engineering rather than old-
fashioned hard work. The fight takes place in Moscow, where a hostile crowd of Communists
ends up cheering Rocky as he calls for international understanding in a concluding speech
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that attempts to mitigate the anti-Communism of the rest of the film. This was the only one
of the new Cold War films to fail at the box office. White Nights was more successful thanks
to the presence of Mikhail Baryshnikov and the direction of Taylor Hackford. An airliner
makes an emergency landing in Soviet territory, and a Russian ballet dancer (Baryshnikov)
who has defected to the United States is taken captive. He escapes with a black American
tap dancer (Gregory Hines) who has defected to the Soviets. Director Hackford played down
his movie’s politics, claiming it was “only realistic about artistic freedom,” but Baryshnikov
was more accurate when he said, “this film is politically right wing and patriotic.”6
Iron Eagle, Heartbreak Ridge, and Top Gun (all 1986) soon added to what the Soviet
press labeled “war-nography.” In Iron Eagle, an American teenager flies to the rescue of
his father, whose plane has been shot down over North Africa. The movie praises President
Reagan as “this guy who don’t take no shit from no gimpy country,” but Reagan’s govern-
ment fails to save the captive pilot, forcing the teenager to do the job himself. Heartbreak
Ridge featured a tough career soldier (Clint Eastwood) making men of his trainees, who are
ultimately tested in the triumphant invasion of Grenada, a tiny island in the Caribbean.
Top Gun topped them both, though, at least at the box office, becoming the biggest ticket
seller of 1986. Maverick (Tom Cruise), the young pilot who must become “top gun,” is
obsessed by the memory of his father, who was shot down under mysterious circumstances
over Southeast Asia. It turns out that Dad was a hero, but details of his death have been
kept secret for political reasons. Maverick ultimately proves himself in a skirmish with an
unnamed enemy whose pilots fly Russian-made MIGs. Top Gun takes such confrontations
for granted, beginning with U.S. and enemy jets playing tag and ending in real combat. Lest
the audience worry that this incident might trigger World War III, we are told “the other side
denied the incident.” The implication that this sort of thing is a daily occurrence may have
worried some viewers—all the more so because the U.S. Navy wholeheartedly endorsed
and cooperated in the making of this picture. Top Gun is a throwback to old-fashioned war
movies, no longer calling for calm vigilance, as did Strategic Air Command in 1955, but
advocating confrontational machismo instead. Slick and shallow, it was the essence of Rea-
ganite cinema.
This same strutting self-confidence ran through all the patriotic movies of the Reagan
years, but as in other Hollywood eras, this was not the only vision. Although these films
seem to exemplify the decade, they were in the minority. Hollywood also produced films
about working people and mainstream politics. In fact, films with a conservative perspective
were a minority.
Workers, Farmers, Fishermen—and Stockbrokers
In contrast to these patriotic films, another group of movies of the 1980s addressed the
economic and political situation of working people, from coal miners and nuclear power
workers to farmers, fishermen—and stockbrokers.
Silkwood (1983), directed by Mike Nichols and written by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen,
was about women, workers, unions, corporate capitalism, and the dangers of nuclear power.
Silkwood was stronger than The China Syndrome or Norma Rae on these issues, but also it
was edgier. Karen Silkwood (Meryl Streep) is a blue-collar worker and single parent like
Norma Rae, but her awakening is slower and far less ecstatic. Karen and her coworkers at a
nuclear processing plant are ignorant and confused about their personal lives as well as the
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dangers they are exposed to at work. Even when they become concerned about their safety
in the plant, they value their jobs too much to make their concerns public—except for Karen.
She becomes an activist on their safety issues, complaining to coworkers, the company, and
outsiders. Unlike the inspired, self-sacrificing Norma Rae, however, Karen is a cranky sort
of activist. She never makes it clear whether her commitment is genuine or she just enjoys
challenging authority and stirring things up. Her union encourages her activism, but the local
union officials are as clueless as she is about how to proceed, and the national union organ-
izers are so culturally and geographically distant that we cannot tell whether they really care
about her or are just using her as a tool to organize other workers. Karen agitates about the
safety issue until it is discovered that she and her house are contaminated with radioactive
material, apparently planted by the company to suggest that she has manufactured the crisis.
Then, while on her way to give evidence of falsified safety records to the New York Times,
she is killed in an auto wreck. Here the movie hedges: ominous headlights behind her sug-
gest murder, but a postscript to the film notes that there was evidence of drugs in her blood,
implying that she might have died accidentally.
Silkwood was nominated for four Academy Awards, but did less well at the box office
than Norma Rae and The China Syndrome. Historical accuracy became a key issue in oth-
erwise mostly good reviews, with the New York Times criticizing the movie in an editorial
and the Village Voice persuasively denouncing the film as a slur on Karen Silkwood.7 The
filmmakers invited such criticism by using a true story about a woman who had become a
folk hero of the left, although as the Voice pointed out, they also had the advantage of five
years of free publicity, including stories of the massive damage suit against Silkwood’s
employers.
Silkwood also made itself vulnerable to criticism by its refusal to take sides. It was ambig-
uous about Karen’s character and motivations, the good faith of the union, the culpability of
the company, and even her death. The movie kept its focus on working-class characters who
did not blossom like Norma Rae but remained minimally articulate and self-aware and there-
fore less sympathetic than the white-collar professionals of The China Syndrome. Silkwood
bravely let the audience decide about the characters, allowing Karen Silkwood to be more
human than the usual heroine. For some, particularly the partisans of the real-life Silkwood,
that made for an unsatisfying film with no point of view. Without knowing whether Karen’s
death was murder or a drug-induced accident, audiences could not be angry with the culprits
or sad at the tragedy.
In 1984, the focus shifted from blue-collar laborers to rural workers in what came to
be known as “the farm trilogy.” Places in the Heart, The River, and Country all featured
beleaguered small farmers fighting the elements and the banks, and they all featured strong
women. Places in the Heart starred Sally Field as another plucky heroine who overcomes
adversity, this time with the help of a child, a blind lodger, and an itinerant black. Places in
the Heart was less political than the other two farm movies, however, because it was safely
set in the past and because it was mainly about brave human beings triumphing over adver-
sity by determination and hard work. The most popular of the farm movies, it won Oscars
for Sally Field and scriptwriter Robert Benton.
The River was also about a determined individual, but although Tom Garvey (Mel Gibson)
is determined, he is unable to save his farm by himself. His wife Mae (Sissy Spacek) is the
real backbone of the family, working the farm on her own when Tom goes to the city to scab
in a steel mill, a moving sequence that manages to communicate both why scabbing is bad
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and why people do it. But determination and hard work are not enough to save the farm. A
greedy agribusinessman pressures the state to build a dam to irrigate his massive holdings
and hires down-and-out farmers to break up the levee Tom has built to protect his land, but
in the end the farmers turn on the agribusinessman and help the small farmer in a scene
reminiscent of the ditch sequence in Our Daily Bread. The loser is unperturbed, however.
“We’ll win in the end,” he says, “because we can outlast you.” Nominated for four Academy
Awards, The River was a modest success despite criticism of its sentimentality.
Country was the least sentimental of the farm movies; its small farmers are even more
reserved and inarticulate than Karen Silkwood and her friends. Director Richard Pearce
distanced them from us with few close-ups and little sentimentality. Just as we suspect that
Karen Silkwood might be a troublemaker rather than a true believer, here we wonder if the
farmers’ difficulties are their own fault. Again, a strong woman (Jessica Lange) holds her
farm family together as her husband (Sam Shepard) crumbles when their government loan is
called in. They win at least a stay of execution, however, when she organizes the neighboring
farmers to resist the government. As in The River, collective action saves the day, although
we are not sure for how long. Like Field and Spacek, Jessica Lange was nominated for an
Academy Award for her performance, but Country’s unsentimental restraint appealed less to
audiences than did the other farm movies.
Although far from radical, all three of these movies were critical of American farm policy.
Inspired by foreclosures on small farms that were much in the news in the early 1980s, these
movies may have taken on the subject after it was too late to affect the policy, just as the
movies about Vietnam had come too late to affect the war. Of the three films, only Country
seemed to address government policy directly, but its makers were nervous enough about
its politics in the year of Reagan’s reelection that they refused benefit showings for politi-
cal causes to avoid “politicizing the film” and insisted that its “villain [was] not the Reagan
administration,” but monolithic bureaucracy and “government apathy.”8
A little later in the decade, small farmers battled big developers in another part of the
country in The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), directed by Robert Redford, one of America’s
most political filmmakers. His entertaining film, which mixed Capra and magical realism,
may have been a little too whimsical for most audiences, but it was one of the first to feature
a southwestern setting and a range of positive Latino characters as well as a different sort of
political battle.
Fishermen rather than farmers fight government in Alamo Bay (1985), directed by Louis
Malle and written by Alice Arlen, coauthor of Silkwood. “We defend everybody all over the
world, but there ain’t no protection for any American, and that ain’t right,” declares one fish-
erman, Pierce (Ed Harris), when hardworking Vietnamese immigrants drive him and other
white shrimp fishermen out of business in the recession-struck Gulf of Mexico. Another
(Amy Madigan) tries to save her small business by trading with the Vietnamese, but the Ku
Klux Klan takes advantage of the white fishermen’s frustration to foment violence. Thanks
to the resolve of Malle and Arlen, we sympathize with the immigrants but also understand
the frustration of the white fishermen.
John Sayles, perhaps America’s preeminent independent filmmaker, took audiences to the
coal mines of West Virginia in the 1920s in Matewan (1987). Chris Cooper plays a union
organizer encouraging white and black miners to join together to fight the repressive coal
companies and their strikebreaking thugs. Beautifully filmed by Haskell Wexler, Matewan is
a powerful and moving evocation of the plight of the miners and the divisive, brutal tactics
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of the mine owners, although its sympathy for the miners is so complete that at times it
seems simplistic and one-sided.
Alamo Bay and Matewan are perceptive studies of the situation confronted by the people
at the bottom of America’s economic heap. Like the equally reserved Silkwood and Country,
they resolutely reject easy solutions. Together, these films constitute an indictment of Ameri-
can capitalism—a message audiences may not have wanted to hear in the age of Reagan.
Norma Rae, The China Syndrome, and The River shared the liberalism of these movies,
although these films, along with Places in the Heart, were far more affirmative about the
possibility of taking action. All of these movies focused on workers, whether on farms and
shrimp boats or in mines, mills, and power plants, at a time when yuppies were capturing the
nation’s attention. These films also featured strong women, making them feminist in varying
degrees, even as the equal rights amendment failed to win ratification.
The appearance of these movies in such times was largely due to the new independence
of filmmakers. Only The River was produced by one of the old studios (Columbia), although
big studios were involved to some degree in most of the others. But the reception of these
films suggested that the country was not as deeply conservative as its enthusiasm for Ron-
ald Reagan seemed to indicate. Most of these movies were favorably reviewed, and all but
Alamo Bay were honored with Academy Awards or nominations. Some were box office hits
as well.
But the biggest hit in this minigenre of films about capitalism was Wall Street (1987). Like
the other movies, Wall Street was critical of capitalism—more powerfully and explicitly than
the others—but its primary capitalist character was such a potent creation that he is prob-
ably better remembered than the movie’s overall anticapitalist message. Directed by Oliver
Stone, Wall Street features Michael Douglas in the Oscar-winning role of Gordon Gekko, a
ruthless Wall Street broker. The sleek Gekko revels in his work, wheeling and dealing, buy-
ing and selling, insider trading and corporate raiding, because “it’s all about bucks.” In the
most famous scene in the movie, Gekko declares “Greed is good!” as he lectures enraptured
shareholders. Charlie Sheen plays Bud, Gekko’s protégé, and it is through his eyes that we
see the battle between good, represented by Bud’s working-class father (Martin Sheen),
and evil, represented by the greedy Gekko. But as Roger Ebert observed, “The movie’s real
target isn’t Wall Street criminals who break the law. Stone’s target is the value system that
places profits and wealth and the Deal above any other consideration. His film is an attack on
an atmosphere of financial competitiveness so ferocious that ethics are simply irrelevant.”9
Electoral Politics, Courts, and Bureaucracy
As political—or politicized—as the films of the 1980s were, few focused on electoral poli-
tics or government like the films of Robert Redford in the 1970s or Frank Capra in the 1940s,
and none found the audiences of those films.
The courts and the legal system, on the other hand, received more cinematic scrutiny in
this decade than in most others, perhaps because they were safer subjects or just because
crime always pays at the movies. Robert Redford played a reforming prison warden in
Brubaker (1980), but the movie’s central political theme had to do with compromise. Urged
to make concessions to the conservative powers-that-be, Brubaker refuses and ultimately
loses. Since Robert Redford plays Brubaker, we take his side and accept the movie’s con-
demnation of compromises. Sidney Lumet examined pervasive police corruption in Prince
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of the City (1981), featuring informers as heroes. The Verdict (1982) reiterated Lumet’s faith
in the jury system as a desperate attorney (Paul Newman) defeats corrupt judges, lawyers,
doctors, and hospital administrators.
The U.S. Supreme Court took center stage in Ronald Neame’s considerably lighter First
Monday in October (1981), which also raised the issue of compromise. Here Jill Clayburgh
plays a conservative antipornography campaigner from California’s Republican stronghold
Orange County who becomes the first woman member of the court. Walter Matthau is her
liberal antagonist, a justice committed to free speech even if it is smutty. The workings of the
court are instructively presented, and the antagonists debate the meaning of the First Amend-
ment credibly if simplistically. A crisis arises when the integrity of the conservative justice is
impugned by the revelation that her late husband helped cover up the secrets of an ominous
corporation. She prepares to resign, but her liberal colleague talks her out of it, despite their
ideological disagreements.
First Monday is reminiscent of a Tracy–Hepburn movie, but it barely touches on romance.
The ideological rivalry of the Clayburgh and Matthau characters develops instead into a
solid working relationship, as the movie lauds rational debate among honorable people. First
Monday reiterates the big-bad-business theme, but its main message is that decent people
can have differing views and that these views need not be based on self-interest or corrup-
tion. Above all, the movie respects court politics and tells us that the system works. Given
the public antagonism to liberal judges dating back to the civil and criminal rights decisions
of the 1950s and 1960s, the movie seems a virtual defense of the courts. First Monday in
October is innocuous, but unlike many American political films, it respects politics and the
people who participate in it. The critics were unenthusiastic, but the movie had respectable
box office results thanks to its optimism, its cast, and its good timing: First Monday was
released just as President Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor, an Arizona conservative,
as the first woman justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Less optimistic but more in keeping with popular prejudice was Peter Hyams’s The Star
Chamber (1983), with Michael Douglas as a young, liberal judge frustrated by the legal
loopholes used by attorneys to get their guilty clients off. Another judge (Hal Holbrook)
introduces him to the Star Chamber, a group of renegade judges who take the law into their
own hands by hiring hit men to murder criminals who have avoided punishment through
legal niceties. After unleashing the Star Chamber on an innocent man, the young liberal has
second thoughts, however, and betrays the vigilante judges. Torn between action sequences
to hold audience interest and its political themes, the message of The Star Chamber is
ambivalent at best. First it says that protecting defendants subverts justice, giving approval
to the Star Chamber’s punishment of wrongdoers, all of whom happen to be members of
minority groups or of the lower class and who also happen to be so repulsive that they seem
to deserve what they get. Perhaps to minimize offense, the filmmakers include a woman and
a black in the avenging Star Chamber. In the end, however, this judicial elite gets its come-
uppance, too. Only the young judge and the black cop who break up the Star Chamber come
off well. All things considered, this is a law-and-order movie, covering its exploitation of
social prejudice and lust for vengeance with a liberal gloss, condemning and then upholding
the system, but never resolving the question of whether the law gives too much or too little
protection to those accused of crime.
Another film of the 1980s touched on politics more obliquely itself, but was expected to
make a big splash in real-life politics. The Right Stuff (1983), adapted from Tom Wolfe’s best
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seller and directed by Philip Kaufman, was about America’s first astronauts, one of whom,
John Glenn, was a senator and a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomina-
tion in 1984.
The Right Stuff contrasts the men who became astronauts with test pilot Chuck Yeager
(Sam Shepard), who did not, making it clear that he is too much of an individual to jump
through hoops and conform, as the others willingly do. In the movie, John Glenn (Ed Harris)
and the other astronauts attain success by compromise and conformity, but we know they
have kept their integrity. They have the right stuff, especially in contrast with the crude
reporters, foolish politicians, and offensive hangers-on with whom the movie surrounds
its heroes.
President Reagan and Glenn’s Democratic opponents feared that The Right Stuff would
provide the astronaut’s candidacy with a powerful send-off, but both the movie and the
campaign flopped. Although Glenn ultimately comes off well in The Right Stuff, the movie
was not enough to save his presidential campaign. Some film industry people thought asso-
ciation with the politician jinxed the film, because “no one would pay to see a movie they
thought was a political polemic.”10 Unenthusiastic reviews and the movie’s reluctance to
play the astronauts as either buffoons or heroes did not help either, and the movie failed
financially.
Another group of films of the 1980s addressed concerns about technology and nuclear
war. John Badham’s WarGames (1983) and Short Circuit (1986) and Marshall Brickman’s
The Manhattan Project (1986) played to youthful audiences by featuring teenage heroes, but
unlike the confrontational, patriotic Top Gun and Iron Eagle, these films expressed liberal
concern about nuclear apocalypse. The threat in all three films comes from uncontrollable
technology, and, in all three, teenage nerds—considerably more credible heroes than the
beefcakes of the other movies—avert disaster. These films also raised the issue of accidental
nuclear war, a subject that had been ignored since the 1960s, although they did so mainly as
a premise for action and entertainment. Critics were unimpressed, but WarGames, at least,
was a box office hit.
Protocol (1984), directed by Herbert Ross and written by Buck Henry, was also a popu-
lar success. Almost a “Ms. Smith Goes to Washington,” it centers on Sunny Ann Davis
(Goldie Hawn), a Washington cocktail waitress who accidentally foils an assassin. The Arab
potentate she saves takes a fancy to her, and the State Department cynically offers her as a
pawn in negotiations for a military base. Sunny, who has never voted, becomes a protocol
officer and does a fast study of American government, which is presented in a montage of
Washington reminiscent of Mr. Smith’s arrival or our introduction to Joe Tynan. But when
Sunny travels to the Middle East, her visit precipitates a coup d’état and a scandal. Testifying
before a congressional committee investigating “Sunnygate,” the heroine refuses to blame
the bureaucrats who set her up. “I’m responsible,” she declares. When Congress acts, “it
has a direct effect on we the people’s lives, so if we don’t—I mean if I don’t—know what
you’re up to, and if I don’t holler and scream when I think you’re doing it wrong, and if I just
mind my own business and don’t vote or care, then I just get what I deserve, so now that
I’m Sunny Davis, a private citizen, again, you’re going to have to watch out for me, ’cause
I’m gonna be watching all you . . . like a hawk.” Sunny gets the guy and is elected to Con-
gress, too. The critics derided Protocol, but audiences liked the comedy, and they also may
have liked the movie’s trite, but positive, message of individual responsibility. As familiar
from old movies as the president himself, the message fits almost as well with Reaganite
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philosophy as did Rambo or Top Gun. It was even antigovernment in the same way Reagan
was, mistrusting bureaucrats and Congress in particular.
Another movie of the era focused more explicitly and seriously on politics, but was less
successful than Protocol. In Sidney Lumet’s Power (1986), Richard Gere is a political media
wizard who tells clients, “My job is to get you in. Then you do whatever your conscience
tells you to do.” Using opinion polls and clever TV ads, he cynically packages candidates
to fit what the public wants. He is finally disillusioned, however, when he discovers he is
being used by Arab oil sheiks seeking to block solar energy legislation. Confronting an
idealistic young candidate being managed by a rival media man, the campaign consultant
denounces his own profession and tells the budding politician to say what he really believes.
He does, and he gets more votes than expected, although he still does not win. The film ends
with “The Stars and Stripes Forever” playing as the camera pans over video equipment and
computers—the new tools of politics.
Like Lumet’s Network, Power was over the top, but while Network succeeded as black
comedy, Power was just melodrama. The villains of Power are neither funny nor credible,
and the good guys are incredibly naive. Director Lumet and writer David Himmelstein ignore
the fact that politicians have always manipulated voters, blaming the sad state of the nation
almost entirely on new technology and the gullibility of the public. All politicians in the film
are willing dupes, except for one female governor (Michael Learned). Power’s insights into
the techniques used by media consultants were instructive, but the movie grossly exagger-
ated their influence. Critics panned it and audiences ignored it, despite the popular successes
of Lumet’s other films.
Old and New Left Nostalgia in the Age of Reagan
While patriotic films from Rambo to Top Gun seemed to catch the conservative spirit of the
1980s, the decade also produced a surprising number of films with liberal themes and char-
acters, heroes, and stories of the political left.
Most prominent of these was Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981). Long one of Hollywood’s
most politically active stars, Beatty used his box office clout and success as a producer to
make one of America’s most important political films. He was the film’s star, director, pro-
ducer, and coauthor. The subject of Reds is John Reed, the left-wing journalist whose books
about his experiences in the Mexican and Russian revolutions were classics and who was the
only American ever to be honored by burial in the Kremlin Wall. Beatty had been interested
in Reed since a visit to Russia in the 1960s, when aging revolutionaries told him he looked
like the writer.
We meet Reed as he offends a social gathering in Portland, Oregon, with his left-wing
views and meets Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), a local woman who feels stifled by provin-
cial society. She wants to write and shows Reed her work. He invites her to return to New
York with him. “What as?” she asks, fearing she will still be trapped in a subordinate role
when independence is what she most desires. She goes with him, however, and joins an
exciting society of left-wing artists and intellectuals in Greenwich Village.
Reed is driven by his political commitment, constantly dashing off somewhere to write
about and sometimes participate in political events. Bryant complains, impatiently con-
demning his need for “another shot of limelight.” When she has an affair, they get married
and settle down in a cozy cottage with a puppy. But he is still peripatetic, and she is still
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Directed by Hollywood leftist Warren Beatty, Reds (1981) also stars Beatty as real-life radical
American journalist John Reed during the Communist revolution in Russia.
discontented. Finally, she leaves him to go to France, where she writes unsuccessfully about
World War I. Reed follows and persuades her to join him in Russia, where the revolution is
under way. Caught up in the spirit of events, they share the excitement of the revolution, of
which they eventually become a part. Reds evokes the chaos of that conflict as well as the
intoxicating meetings of workers, so we are with Reed when he rises to speak at a turbulent
rally. “We’ll join you in revolution!” he proclaims on behalf of American workers. At the
end of his speech, the crowd separates Reed and Bryant. They struggle toward each other,
and at the film’s midpoint they make love while outside a marching crowd sings the rousing
“Internationale.” Political, professional, and personal commitments come together in one
glorious—or ludicrous—moment.
Reed and Bryant return to America. She lectures; he writes his classic Ten Days That
Shook the World. Reed joins one of the contending Communist factions and prepares to
return to Russia to have it recognized as the official party in America. “You’re not a politi-
cian,” Louise protests. “You’re a writer. . . . You’re an artist.” He goes anyway, and the party
orders him to stay and work on propaganda. He finds that his old friend Emma Goldman
(Maureen Stapleton) has grown disillusioned with the revolution. “The dream is dying,” she
sighs. “The centralized state has all the power. They’re putting anarchists like me in jail,
exterminating all dissenters.” “What did you think, anyway?” Reed responds. “It was going
to work right away?” The party sends him on a tour to speak on behalf of American work-
ers in support of the revolution. When a party official edits his speech, he is offended. “You
don’t rewrite what I write,” he insists, repeating one of his catch phrases and reminding us
he is an artist.
Reed seems to be growing disillusioned, but before further political developments
occur, we return to Louise, now determined to join him. Getting into revolutionary Russia
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is difficult, however, and she makes a Zhivago-like journey through the snowy wastes of
Finland. The lovers rush toward each other through yet another crowd and are tearfully
reunited. Reed promptly falls ill. He promises Louise they will go on together and again she
asks, “What as?” “Comrades,” he says, and dies.
Beatty’s emphasis on the personal life of his protagonists was a concession to Hollywood
tradition that made his lavish epic more romantic than political. John and Louise could
almost be Rhett and Scarlett. Unlike Gone With the Wind, however, Reds is true except for
a few incidents. Reed and Bryant were real American radicals, members of a group whose
history, unlike that of the landed aristocracy of the antebellum South, had been ignored by
Hollywood. Reds also was distinguished by Beatty’s innovative use of “witnesses”—real
people, some of them famous, whose reminiscences about Reed are interspersed throughout
the film, giving Beatty’s epic resonance and credibility and making it more than a romance.
Their disagreements and confusion warn that memory, and therefore history, are fallible. “I’d
forgotten all about them,” one witness says of Reed and Bryant. “Were they socialists?” The
witnesses validate some parts of Reds and challenge others, but even their disagreements
strengthen the movie by reminding us that the film itself is just one interpretation of history.
Beatty claimed his film was “reclaiming history” by telling a story about the left when
it was still a viable force in American politics or, as he put it, at the last historical moment
before America’s ideology “hardened.”11 One critic dismissed his efforts as “nostalgia of the
left,”12 but nostalgia or not, Reds dealt with a history that had been lost for most Americans.
The antiwar movement of World War I, the American Socialist and Communist parties and
their factions, the Wobblies, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, and Big Bill Haywood are a
part of our past, and we should know about them, whether or not we share their values.
Reds was far from purely left-wing in its point of view, however. The movie had it both
ways, leaning Red in its choice of heroes and heroines and its initial romantic view of the
Russian Revolution, but anti-Red in its ultimate portrait of Soviet totalitarianism. The film
withheld final judgment by implying rather than explicitly stating Reed’s disillusionment.
On another level, Reds had it both ways by emphasizing the individualism of people who
advocated collective politics, not only by focusing on their personal lives but by insisting on
artistic integrity (“You don’t rewrite what I write”).
Reds never made the political values of its characters clear, nor did it define the class
conflict on which real-life politics in both the United States and Russia then centered. It
was a more personal than political film, although it was at its most trite when it dwelled
on the purely personal with its quaint cottage, cute puppy, and clumsy man in the kitchen.
This was presumably a commercial choice made by Beatty; screenwriter Trevor Griffiths’s
original script was more political than romantic. But at least Reds respected politics as
an important part of its characters’ lives, and unlike most American films, it also showed
the importance of work in people’s lives. Indeed, the greatest strength of Reds may be its
presentation of the way personal lives blend with work, careers, and politics. And Reds
was more complex and willing to question than most movies about politics. The witnesses
and the positive picture of the Russian Revolution and America’s radical past also were
worthwhile contributions.
The reviews of Reds were generally good, although many pointed out that Beatty’s poli-
tics were more cautious than radical. The New York Times called it old-fashioned American
optimism, about “as ideological as the puppy.”13 Andrew Sarris was more enthusiastic,
praising Reds as an “open-minded historical inquiry” with the “clang of paradox and
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contradiction.”14 With twelve Academy Award nominations, Reds looked set to dominate
the 1981 Oscars, but it won awards only for Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best
Supporting Actress (Stapleton). On accepting his own award, Beatty thanked Paramount
and Gulf and Western, which then owned Paramount, as capitalists willing “to finance a
three-and-a-half-hour romance which attempts to reveal for the first time just something of
the beginnings of American socialism and American communism” and gave credit to the
“freedom of expression that we have in American society and the lack of censorship we
have from the government or the people who put up the money.”15 But despite three Oscars
and good reviews, Beatty’s very expensive picture was a financial failure. Audiences did
not like the witness technique as much as critics did, and many found the film long, boring,
and even silly.

Despite the financial disappointment of Reds, American filmmakers continued to make
political movies, but not on such a grand scale—and even less ambitious political movies
had difficulty finding investors. Sidney Lumet’s Daniel (1983), a thorny examination of
left-wing history, was produced by the artists themselves with no studio assistance at all.
Lumet had been directing political movies since making Twelve Angry Men in 1957. He
dealt with informers in A View from the Bridge (1961), nuclear war in Fail Safe (1964),
feminism in The Group (1966), police corruption in Serpico (1973) and Prince of the City
(1981), homosexuality in Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and corporate control of television in
Network (1976). All these movies treated controversial issues in complex and interesting
ways, rarely oversimplifying, resorting to clichés, or making their messages unnecessar-
ily obvious. Lumet shunned the “political” label, however. Even Daniel, he claimed, was
simply “about parents and children and the damage people do without meaning to.”16
Daniel (Timothy Hutton) is the son of the Isaacsons, Jewish Communists who, like the
real-life Rosenbergs, are executed as Soviet agents. The story of their death is told from
their son’s point of view, connecting the two generations and showing how one affects the
other. Daniel is disillusioned, alienated, and apolitical, cruel to his young wife, harsh to his
adoptive family, and impatient with his neurotic sister. While he retreats deeper and deeper
into himself, his sister tries drugs and then political activism. He hates the memory of their
parents while she venerates it, but in the end she goes insane and commits suicide whereas
Daniel finally makes peace with himself and his memories and takes a step toward political
commitment by joining an antiwar demonstration.
Like Reds, Daniel restores a part of the history of the left by showing its rallies and con-
certs as well as its paranoia and persecution. The Isaacsons’s guilt or innocence is never clear
in the film, although their apparent poverty and innocent activism make them seem unlikely
spies. Whether innocent or merely complicit, however, their children were damaged, and
Lumet claimed that this was the subject of his movie. His point was that the parents’ com-
mitment beyond the family destroyed the children. This gloomy view of family psychology
contradicted the affirmative ending of his movie, however. Daniel’s wife and child are with
him as he joins the antiwar demonstration. Commitment had separated Daniel from his par-
ents, yet for him it is salvation, perhaps because he embraces it with his family.
Like Lumet’s other films, Daniel was dark and depressing, with complex characters, few
of whom were likable. That did not keep audiences away from Lumet’s earlier movies, but
Daniel was more political, despite the director’s denials. Critics picked at its family neuroses
and exploitation of the Rosenbergs. Some thought the family melodrama muddled its poli-
tics. “Political movies are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t,” observed Andrew
207
Sarris.17 If they make their political point clear, people may dislike the message or its obvi-
ousness, but if the point is not clear, people find the film muddled and confusing.
Lumet followed Daniel with Running on Empty in 1988. Judd Hirsh and Christine Lahti
portray radicals who, in the 1960s, blew up a lab that made napalm, unintentionally killing a
janitor. They have been on the run from the FBI ever since, repeatedly uprooting their chil-
dren out of sheer paranoia or when the FBI closes in. The film’s crisis occurs when their son
(River Phoenix) approaches high-school graduation and must choose between joining his
family in their next move or going on with his life and a career as a musician. But although
past political actions set up the situation, Running on Empty is not really about politics. Even
more than Daniel, it is about families and the repercussions of past acts. The message of
both films could be read as a warning against radical action, despite Lumet’s liberal reputa-
tion. Despite its fine cast and good acting, reviews of Running on Empty were mixed (some
critics loved the movie whereas others found it melodramatic and simplistic), and audiences
ignored it. Although nostalgia was a theme of the Reagan years, Reds, Daniel, and Running
on Empty suggest that audiences were not nostalgic about America’s left-wing history—even
though all three movies emphasized powerful personal stories as well as political themes.
Another little group of movies dealt with the activists of the 1960s and 1970s more gently,
though not much more successfully as far as critics and audiences were concerned. Milos
Forman’s Hair, a counterculture musical about the 1960s, was belatedly filmed in 1979, and
several filmmakers took up the stories of 1960s activists and idealists as they matured. The
fates of three Harvard students of the 1960s are assessed in A Small Circle of Friends (1980),
but this movie attributes the past activism of the trio to personal relations rather than to poli-
tics, thus trivializing the political involvement of a whole generation.
The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980) focused on the reunion of a group of 1960s activ-
ists who were once arrested in Secaucus, New Jersey, en route to an antiwar demonstration
in Washington, DC. Followers rather than leaders, the seven were marginal to the antiwar
movement and yet were affected by it. Writer and director John Sayles made the limits of his
characters’ political involvement clear, but without belittling 1960s activism. The Big Chill
(1983), directed by Lawrence Kasdan, was a strikingly similar film—some said a rip-off—
about a weekend reunion of 1960s pals, but it reached a much larger audience. The group
reunites because of the suicide of its dominant member. These idealists of that decade have
sold out, however, to become career-oriented professionals. Their friend’s death symbolizes
the death of the values of the 1960s. 1969 (1988), written and directed by Ernest Thompson,
may have unintentionally contributed to the death of those values. Robert Downey Jr. and
Kiefer Sutherland play 1960s college students caught up in the counterculture and antiwar
movement. They return to their small hometown and clash melodramatically with their fami-
lies. Critics derided 1969’s phony sense of place and time as well as its shallow politics.
Hair, A Small Circle of Friends, The Return of the Secaucus Seven, The Big Chill, and
1969 all looked back nostalgically on the 1960s, but the popular and entertaining Big Chill
most clearly defined the 1980s attitude toward that generation. These movies were about
shattered dreams and aging, not politics. Their characters represented the attitudes of many
of their generation, and their stories should be told, but among these films only Secaucus
Seven managed to treat the politics of the 1960s with respect and accuracy. Other films
derided, trivialized, and finally scorned the activism and social concern of the period.
Some of the movies that looked to previous political eras, however, showed respect for
political commitment. Reds made commitment seem exciting and rewarding while admitting
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THE 1980S
its costs. The psychological price of involvement was higher in Daniel, but in the end it was
seen as a means of salvation. Even the films that look back to the 1960s mourn the loss of
commitment. It seemed that in the 1980s, people missed commitment even though they
were too fearful, cynical, or self-absorbed to believe in it anymore. They did not flock to
these films, however. Reds was a critical success, but only The Big Chill was a box office
hit. Perhaps its portrait of sold-out idealists made it more in tune with its times than the
other movies.
America and the Third World

Except for films about wars, few American movies in the twentieth century dealt with
international politics. After Vietnam, America grew cautious about its international role,
grappling with the limits of power and struggling toward a foreign policy that emphasized
détente, human rights, and a new respect for the third world. Under President Jimmy Carter,
the nation turned almost isolationist. Because of Vietnam jitters, neoisolationism, and
Carter’s support of human rights and nonintervention, the United States stood by as two of
its authoritarian allies, the shah of Iran and President Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, were
overthrown. A guerrilla war started in El Salvador. Another war was under way in Angola,
and unrest was increasing in South Africa. (Two films with international directors and writ-
ers, Cry Freedom [1987] and A Dry White Season [1989], dealt with that subject.) In 1980,
the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, but the United States took no action. When Ronald
Reagan became president, however, American foreign policy changed. Human rights were
of little concern; interventionism was back. This change soon showed up in the movies, with
most filmmakers firmly opposed to Reagan’s foreign policy, especially as applied to Latin
America. Their movies were among the most critical ever made about America and its for-
eign policy, yet some were popular and critical successes.
Hollywood, like the nation, ignored Latin America for a long time, venturing south of
the border only occasionally for a big movie like Juarez or Viva Zapata! or for settings
for costume epics and musicals. The movies also ignored Hispanic-Americans, except for
occasional appearances as stereotypical bandits, whores, maids, or venal generals. Then the
revolutions in Nicaragua and El Salvador and the growing assertiveness of America’s huge
Hispanic population pushed Latin America back into the national consciousness.
In the 1980s, more Hispanics showed up in the movies. Zoot Suit (1981) told the story of
the Sleepy Lagoon murders and the anti-Mexican riots in Los Angeles during World War II.
The Border (1981), coauthored by Deric Washburn (The Deer Hunter) and director Tony
Richardson, shifted the focus to an Anglo immigration officer (Jack Nicholson) on the Mexi-
can border. The exploitation and corruption of the border are seen through his tired, cynical
eyes, but he at least tries to help a Mexican girl (Elpidia Carrillo).
By contrast, El Norte (1983) was a low-budget production filmed in Spanish and featur-
ing unknown actors. Told from the point of view of two young Guatemalan immigrants to
the United States, according to director and coauthor Gregory Nava, the film focused on
their personal story because “an overtly political film . . . would have put off too many peo-
ple. As it is, left, right, and center seem to like it and political people can easily make the
connections.”18 El Norte left little doubt that the immigrants were refugees from an oppres-
sive system or that they were exploited once they arrived in this country, but by understating
their case, Nava and coauthor Anna Thomas made viewers sympathetic to the immigrants
209
without giving offense. They rejected suggestions to cast stars like Robbie Benson and
Brooke Shields in the leads and to make the protagonists lovers rather than brother and sister
because such compromises, although they would have made it easier to raise money for the
independent production, would have blurred the film’s focus. The writers’ judgment proved
valid. El Norte won good reviews and was a small-scale hit.
Movies set in Latin America itself were more popular than border stories, however,
especially when they featured big stars and plenty of action. Missing (1982) was the first
of these and also Costa-Gavras’s first American production in English. A Greek-born citi-
zen of France and one of the world’s finest and most political directors, Costa-Gavras first
examined American involvement in Latin America in State of Siege (1973), the story of the
kidnapping of a CIA agent (Yves Montand) by Uruguay’s Tupamaro guerrillas, but Missing
was a more accessible, traditional film that reached a much bigger audience.
In Missing, Charlie Horman (John Shea), a nice young American living in Chile with his
wife Beth (Sissy Spacek), disappears in the aftermath of the coup that brought down the
popularly elected Marxist government of Salvador Allende. When Beth and the American
embassy cannot find him, Charlie’s father Ed (Jack Lemmon), an all-American conservative,
arrives, suspecting that his son got himself into trouble with his political dabbling. Gradually
he comes to share Beth’s belief that the American bureaucrats are duplicitous and that Char-
lie has disappeared not because of anything he did, but because he was with a tourist friend
in the town that was the base for American involvement in the coup and he saw too much.
After visiting a stadium full of political prisoners and a morgue full of bodies, Ed con-
fronts the American officials. They confirm that Charlie has been killed by the Chilean
military. Ed is outraged. “I do not think that they would dare do a thing like that unless an
American official co-signed the kill order,” he says. “Why would we want him dead?” the
ambassador asks. “Probably because he knew of our involvement in the coup,” Ed answers,
calling the ambassador’s denial “a bald-faced lie.” A CIA man effectively admits complic-
ity in Charlie’s death, telling Ed that his “kid . . . was a snoop” who deserved what he got.
“If you hadn’t been personally involved,” the ambassador explains to Ed, “you’d have been
sitting at home, complacent and more or less oblivious to all this. This mission is pledged
to protect American interests. . . . There are over three thousand U.S. firms doing business
down here. Those are American interests. In other words, your interests. I’m concerned with
the preservation of a way of life.”
Until this scene, Costa-Gavras exercised uncharacteristic restraint in making his political
points. Charlie is clearly a harmless do-gooder caught up in the violence of Latin Ameri-
can politics. Ed is a skeptical father who gradually learns about the brutality of the coup and
becomes aware of American complicity. As we follow Ed through the learning process, we
come to share his rage. U.S. officials, the film tells us, have helped overthrow a foreign govern-
ment, lied to their own citizens, and possibly approved of the death of an innocent American.
Missing was a box office hit and nominated for several Academy Awards, winning for
Best Script. Mixed reviews praised the film’s pacing and performances, but some thought
its politics were too blatant whereas others objected to its conclusions. Like Silkwood, Miss-
ing was based on a true story, and also like that movie, it was attacked for distorting the
record. The State Department denied the movie’s allegations, whereas a left-leaning critic
condemned Costa-Gavras for focusing on individuals, saying it was odd “to see a European
filmmaker falling into . . . one of the ways Americans hide from the concrete realities of the
rest of the world.”19
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THE 1980S
Missing would have been strengthened by the presence of one or two strong Chilean
characters to point out the devastating impact of the coup on them, but Costa-Gavras chose
characters with whom Americans would identify. Focusing on Chileans would have diverted
attention from his primary concern, American involvement. It also could have reduced the
conflict to Chilean good guys and American bad guys, which would not have been as per-
suasive to American audiences as the all-American confrontation he chose instead. Through
these characters and dramatic devices, Costa-Gavras conveyed the extent of American
involvement in the coup. Missing did what a political movie should do: it entertained people
and it made a point. The controversy over the film’s interpretation of historical fact only
confirmed its power.
Critics raised similar objections to Under Fire (1983), another film about U.S. involve-
ment in Latin America seen through the eyes of Americans. Photographer Russell Price
(Nick Nolte) joins his friends Alex (Gene Hackman) and Claire (Joanne Cassidy) in Nica-
ragua, where the Sandinista revolutionaries are about to overthrow Somoza, a right-wing
dictator. Alex leaves for a job as a network anchorman; Russell and Claire become lovers
and grow sympathetic to the revolution, which the film tells us is totally justifiable. When
the rebels need to persuade the media and the people that their recently deceased leader is
alive, they ask Russell to fake a photo of the leader. Considering it a violation of his jour-
nalistic integrity, he first resists, then gives in, sure that the revolution is a worthy cause.
Then he discovers that some photos he shot at the rebel camp are being used by the CIA to
identify rebel activists so they can be captured and killed. As Somoza’s regime collapses,
Alex returns to Nicaragua and demands that Russell arrange an interview with the (dead)
rebel leader. Before the request can be dealt with, Somoza’s national guard shoots Alex. Rus-
sell photographs the killing, and the film suggests that the anchorman’s death outrages the
American public, resulting in the withdrawal of U.S. support for Somoza and affecting the
revolution, as the photographer had hoped his fake picture would.
Under Fire clearly sides with the rebels, but an antirevolutionary perspective is forcefully
stated by a CIA agent (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and a mercenary (Ed Harris). All revolutions
turn to dictatorships, they tell the idealistic journalists, so what difference does the revolu-
tion make? More insultingly, the mercenary says that the journalists are paid to do their jobs,
just like him. “See you in Thailand,” he says as the film ends.
Under Fire, like Missing, was about Americans, not Latinos. None of its central charac-
ters was Nicaraguan, just as none of Missing’s was Chilean. Another Hollywood element in
Under Fire was the implication that the revolution was dependent on a single heroic leader.
In fact, the Sandinistas won with collective leadership, but that is harder to film. Under Fire
was more successful as a treatise on journalists under pressure, trying to come to terms with
their own power and to use it for good rather than have it used by malefactors (like the CIA
agent). Russell must make a moral choice between professional ethics and good politics
(helping the revolutionaries). He chooses politics, but the film refused to make his choice so
obvious as to obscure its difficulty or to stifle argument about it.
Under Fire was a success in Europe, but flopped in the United States. Some critics thought
its subject was too much in the news at the moment. Others thought the movie failed because
it was anti-American. “The film may be the only American movie in recent decades to side
with a foreign government against which the United States has aligned itself,” declared
the New York Times. Roger Spottiswoode, the British director of Under Fire, insisted that
the film was not anti-American, however. “It is a film against American policy in Central
211
America. . . . In that sense it’s got political content,” but “it’s an exciting story and it has
lots of different levels other than the political one.”20 Supporters of American foreign policy
nevertheless condemned Under Fire’s bias, whereas critics on the left denounced its portrait
of a “one-dimensional Third World where the natives pull liberal heartstrings—until they
get reckless.”21
If being about a contemporary issue and opposing U.S. policy were the first two strikes
against Under Fire, its treatment of journalists may have been the third. The press was
highly critical of the film for justifying the fakery of the photograph. Labeling Russell’s ruse
“Rambo-think in reverse,” Enrique Fernandez condemned the movie for saying “it’s okay
to lie for the left.”22 Vincent Canby called Under Fire “absolutely absurd” for oversimplify-
ing the success of a revolution and for adding to public mistrust of the press.23 Pauline Kael,
however, said other journalists unconsciously do the same sort of thing Russell did.24
Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), a joint U.S./Brazilian production, presented a Latin
American perspective on revolutionary politics. Brazilian Hector Babenco directed this
adaptation of Manuel Puig’s novel in English with an American cast. The story is set in
a South American prison, where a homosexual, Luis Molina (William Hurt), befriends a
revolutionary, Valentin Arregui (Raul Julia). Molina is an apolitical romantic who survives
prison by reenacting movies, including a fascist melodrama that appalls his cellmate. When
Molina is freed, he carries out a political act on the instructions of his revolutionary friend.
His motive is romantic, rather than political, and he is used by both the police and the
revolutionaries, but he achieves fulfillment by his commitment. Meanwhile, Valentin, still
in prison, has learned to dream in order to survive. The roles have been reversed. In a way,
Spider Woman is cynical about politics, yet the love and pride of the self-sacrificing Molina
make a superficially meaningless act heroic.
Spider Woman had nothing to say about U.S. involvement in Latin American politics, but
other films did. In Latino (1985), directed by Haskell Wexler (Medium Cool), Green Beret
Eddie Guerrero (Robert Beltran) is sent to train Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries, a job he
comes to dislike. His Nicaraguan lover adds to his doubts about the U.S. role in Nicaragua,
and the sweet but determined farmers of a Sandinista co-op provide a sharp contrast to the
crude, antirevolutionary Contras. Eddie becomes so disillusioned that he allows himself
to be taken captive on a raid. The army has sent Chicanos like Eddie to Central America
because they can pass as natives if captured, but he violates orders, keeping the dog tag
that will identify him as an American and reveal U.S. involvement in the conflict. Although
well meaning, Latino was too obvious. Even critics who were sympathetic with its politics
panned it. “I guess I’m damning it,” David Edelstein wrote, “for not stirring people up the
way a hack right-wing action flick does—for forgetting that, in American movies, it’s not
enough to tell the truth.”25
Salvador (1986) did what Edelstein seemed to want from Latino: communicating the
chaos and horror of revolution and stirring things up. In fact, Salvador looked more like a
right-wing movie than the left-wing movie it was. Oliver Stone (Wall Street) directed and
coauthored this low-budget production with Richard Boyle, the gonzo journalist whose story
it tells. Boyle (James Wood) seems to have been present at every highly publicized atrocity
of the long war in El Salvador, including the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and
the murder of three nuns. Through it all, he drinks, takes drugs, mistreats women, abuses his
responsibility, and disappoints those who trust him. He is such an offensive character that his
conversion to the revolutionary cause lessens its credibility, but he also prevents the politics
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THE 1980S
of Salvador from seeming pious. The film’s reverential treatment of the rebels in their quiet
camps strains belief, however, as does Boyle’s one speech explicitly denouncing U.S. policy.
Boyle’s disgust when the rebels kill some prisoners is an attempt to provide balance, but
Salvador is still less balanced than even Missing or Under Fire. It ends with Boyle and his
Salvadoran lover being led off in handcuffs—by U.S. immigration officers. “The man who
made this movie is no gentle persuader hoping to cast a wide net out in the mainstream,”
wrote one offended critic.26 Salvador is sometimes crude and simple-minded, but Stone’s
no-holds-barred filmmaking leaves a powerful impression.
Romero (1989) dealt with some of the same subjects, but less forcefully and entertain-
ingly. John Duigan’s film is a biopic about Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero (Raul
Julia), telling of his disillusionment with the Salvadoran government, his radicalization, and
finally his assassination. Produced by Paulist Pictures, which is associated with a Catholic
order of teachers, the film was a little too reverent for its own good, but it did record a piece
of history. So did The Old Gringo (1989), featuring Gregory Peck, Jane Fonda, and Jimmy
Smits caught up in Pancho Villa’s Mexican revolution. Washington Post critic Hal Hinson
dismissed it as “grandly scaled folly . . . with overblown revolutionary nonsense.”27 Other
critics agreed.
The failures of these movies might have discouraged the making of others on the subject,
but at least they offered an alternative to the conservative, superpatriot films of the Reagan
era, although they were considerably less popular.
Return to Vietnam
Another set of films provided a more popular and powerful counterpoint to Rambo and Top
Gun, as filmmakers—most notably Oliver Stone—returned to the subject of Vietnam.
Stone’s Platoon (1986) was less overtly political than Salvador, his earlier film. Platoon
is a tough, gritty movie about American soldiers in Vietnam. Based on the director’s own
experiences, the film is filled with powerful images of the horror of that war. Compared to
The first in Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War trilogy, Platoon (1986) depicts the experience of fighting
in a platoon, including a civilian massacre.
213
Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, Platoon is unpretentious and down-to-earth. It deals
with the ways the war affected a small group of men, rather than attempting to communicate
a bigger message.
“You volunteered for this shit, man?” declares a black soldier on discovering that Chris
Taylor (Charlie Sheen) is in Vietnam because he felt the fighting should not be left to “poor
kids.” “You got to be rich in the first place to think like that!” the soldier scoffs. In a series of
terrifying patrols and battles, two sergeants struggle for “possession” of young Taylor’s soul.
Barnes (Tom Berenger) is a scarred, gung-ho soldier driven to win at any cost and furious at the
constraints imposed on the fighters by the politicians. “Our captain Ahab,” Taylor calls him.
Elias (Willem Dafoe) is a mellow, dope-smoking progressive. When Taylor asks if he believes
in what he is doing, Elias says he did in 1965, but “Now . . . no. . . . We’re gonna lose this
war. . . . We been kickin’ other people’s asses for so long I figure it’s time we got ours kicked.”
Throughout his harrowing film, Stone focuses relentlessly and respectfully on the men
who actually fought the war, the grunts. “They’re poor, they’re the unwanted, yet they’re
fighting for our society and our freedom,” Chris observes at the beginning, but by the end,
he is saying, “we did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves and the enemy was in us.”
Like earlier movies about Vietnam, Platoon pays little attention to what we did to the Viet-
namese and makes no effort to analyze the reasons for the war. Such restraint is surprising
from the maker of Salvador, but by focusing on the real horrors of fighting the war rather
than its politics, Stone broadened his audience and made his point more strongly. More than
in most political films, music underscored the message of Platoon, with Samuel Barber’s sad
“Adagio for Strings” setting its mournful tone.
Dedicating his film to “the men who fought and died in Vietnam,” Stone said, “I’d like
[Vietnam vets] to see it and feel it and walk out and say never again.”28 Many vets and other
viewers seem to have done so. “We didn’t set out to make an anti-war film,” producer Arnold
Kopelson said, but “if, through Platoon, the public perceives Vietnam as a war America
shouldn’t have got involved in, then it may raise their consciousness about what’s going on
in Nicaragua.”29
Praised by the critics, Platoon was a big box office hit and won four Academy Awards,
including Best Picture and Best Direction. The success of the movie came as a surprise to
many, who found its politics dramatically out of sync with the patriotic conservatism of
the Reagan era. Among the most surprised were the Hollywood studios that had refused to
finance Platoon, a mistake they might have avoided if they had noted the success of The
Killing Fields (1984), an earlier, equally powerful film about the conflict in Southeast Asia
that was produced by a British company.
Three more Vietnam films by great directors followed, though none was entirely successful
as a film or at the box office. Barry Levinson directed Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Stanley
Kubrick directed Full Metal Jacket (1987), another British production, and Brian De Palma
directed Casualties of War (1989). All told stories of Vietnam from the perspective of troops
similar to those in Platoon, and all emphasized the moral ambiguities and horrors of that war.
A Decade of Diverse Messages
In retrospect and even at the time, movies like Rambo and Top Gun seemed to dominate the
1980s and the era of Reagan. Certainly they were popular with audiences, if not popular
press critics. But other films with very different messages also were offered. Some, like
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THE 1980S
Missing and Platoon, were very successful and stand the test of time better than the superpa-
triotic films. Most remarkably, these films succeeded partly because they seemed to beat the
Stallone–Norris–Eastwood movies at their own game, with tough and realistic action. They
also suggested that the American public was willing to contemplate the harsh realities of
international involvement rather than simply to fantasize about some sort of revenge victory.
Reaganite films were box office hits, but movies from Reds to Silkwood, Salvador, and
Daniel examined politics from another perspective. Many addressed tough issues, presented
complex characters, and refused to offer facile solutions. Political commitment, these mov-
ies asserted, was difficult but worthwhile. Some films, of course, continued to manifest naive
faith in the system, the people, or the press, but these movies were fewer in number than
in previous eras. Several advocated activism even as the country grew apathetic and self-
centered. Even the increasingly youthful audience and rising production costs—averaging
$16 million in 1986 with half again as much for promotion—did not discourage the mak-
ing of serious films about politics. With cable television, videocassettes, and an increasing
number of movie theaters providing new outlets, revenues, and investors for filmmakers,
independent production increased, and the 1980s ranks with the 1930s as one of the most
fertile eras for political films.
Notes
1. Stills, October 13, 1984, p. 15.

2. Ibid.
3. The Guardian, July 20, 1985.
4. Time Out, April 23–29, 1986.
5. California, July 1986.
6. Quoted in People, December 16, 1985.
7. “The Chicanery of Silkwood,” New York Times, December 25, 1983; Village Voice, February 21,
1984.
9. Chicago Sun-Times, December 11, 1987.
11. Film Quarterly, 35 (Spring 1982): 43–47.
12. Morris Dickstein, “Time Bandits,” American Film, October 1982, p. 42.
14. Village Voice, December 14, 1981.
15. Warren Beatty accepting the Academy Award for Best Director, March 31, 1981.
16. Lecture, London Film Festival, December 3, 1983.
17. Village Voice, September 6, 1983.
18. The Guardian, July 19, 1984.
19. American Film, March 1982, p. 79.
20. New York Times, cited in Sunday Times London Magazine, January 22, 1984.
21. John Powers, “Saints and Savages,” American Film, January–February 1984, p. 38.
22. Village Voice, December 2, 1986.
24. The New Yorker, October 31, 1983.
25. Village Voice, March 11, 1986.
26. California, June 1986.
27. Washington Post, October 6, 1989.
28. Nightline, ABC-TV, December 19, 1986.
29. Guardian, February 14, 1987.
215

Air Force One (1997)

11
FX Politics
The 1990s
As the 1990s began, Republican George H.W. Bush had succeeded Ronald Reagan in the
White House. His administration reached its apogee in the successful Gulf War of 1991, for
which Bush masterfully built an international coalition, although he ended the war without
bringing down Saddam Hussein. His popularity soared but soon collapsed as a recession hit
the economy and Bush seemed unable to cope. Quoting Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, Bush
had declared “Read my lips, no new taxes” when he first ran for president, then raised taxes
in the face of recession. His movie quote came back to haunt him in the 1992 election, when
he was decisively beaten by Bill Clinton. Besides being the first baby boomer to become
president, Clinton was the darling of Hollywood, and the Clinton White House virtually
became Hollywood East for a succession of filmmakers and movie stars. He would also
become the implicit subject of several films of the 1990s.

The final decade of the millennium also brought a paradox with respect to film and poli-
tics. After the vapidity of many of the films of the 1980s and growing corporatism in the film
industry, healthy skepticism about the prospects was probably in order. Would Hollywood
studios deign to create challenging, more explicitly political films, or would the growing
chains of ever-larger multiplexes be consigned to sequels of “high-concept” remakes of
television sitcoms? Or could the two perhaps coexist?
Writing in The Nation at the decade’s end, Jon Clark noted, “Everyone in Hollywood
agrees on one thing: The studios are reluctant to make political or even serious pictures.
For moviemakers, being called ‘political’ is often the kiss of death.”1 Although reasonably
compelling and politically charged movies such as Wag the Dog (1997), Bulworth (1998),
and Primary Colors (1998) did manage to emerge, they were financial flops despite boasting
big stars, big directors, and big studio marketing machinery.
Clark had a point; of the top twenty films of the decade, only the maudlin Forrest Gump
(1994) and the neowestern Dances with Wolves (1990) might charitably be categorized as
overtly political films. Far more popular were romantic blockbusters like Titanic (1997)
and special-effects-laden fantasy epics like Jurassic Park (1993) and the Star Wars sequel
Phantom Menace (1999). Indeed, special effects were perhaps the signature feature of the
decade’s films, and critics frequently bemoaned the preeminence of “FX” razzle-dazzle over
storytelling substance. Partly as a result of big studios taking over their turf with aggressive
buying sprees and in-house specialty divisions, independent movies became more notice-
able but also more conventional (see Chapter 3). Even if movies like The Player (1992),
directed by Robert Altman, and The Usual Suspects (1995) did not evoke overtly political
themes and messages, they did veer significantly from the mind-numbing status quo of the
standard Hollywood product of the decade.
Key Political Films of the 1990s
The decade did produce a significant canon of explicitly political films that, if lacking in
measurable impact upon the political system, certainly added to its lexicon. Thematically,
the most interesting overtly political films—those with obvious political content and what
seemed to be intentional messages—reflected a deep cynicism about the political system
and its institutions. To the extent they were partisan vehicles, the tenor of the decade was
definitely askew toward the liberal side of the aisle, as political movies with coherently con-
servative themes were few, if any. Such films shared screen space with vapid, yet sometimes
more entertaining (and generally more financially successful) movies that used political
218
THE 1990S: FX POLITICS
institutions for their human interest value, much as media coverage of political events (i.e.,
the Clinton impeachment saga) seemed to.
The leading contender for the decade’s touchstone political film must be Wag the Dog (1997),
a movie whose tagline was “truth, justice, and special effects.” Featuring two of the generation’s
biggest stars in Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro, director Barry Levinson’s creation was a
brilliant mixture of Hollywood and Washington, DC. Shot in just twenty-nine days with a small
budget, the scattershot story begins with a president who is accused of molesting a Girl Scout
(“Firefly Girl”) in the Oval Office just eleven days before the next election. In order to divert the
public’s attention from the scandal, the president’s spin doctor (De Niro) enlists a Hollywood
producer (Hoffman) to create a fake war. The resulting pseudowar with Albania (!) is waged via
press release, music video, and war memorabilia in a movie that was always both absurd and
frighteningly plausible. In its mixture of political insight and comedy, the film echoed some of
the best political satires, from Dr. Strangelove (1964) to The Mouse That Roared (1959).
When Wag the Dog was released, it was viewed as uncannily prescient because of the
proximity of the Lewinsky scandal. President Clinton, in fact, was accused of “wagging
the dog”—diverting the media and public attention with a foreign policy initiative—when
he ordered missile attacks on a chemical weapons plant in Sudan and a terrorist training
camp in Afghanistan. (Of course, such charges were vigorously denied by the Clinton
administration.) In retrospect, however, the film was perhaps even more precisely predictive
of the second Iraqi war. In the movie, war with Albania is said to be necessary because of
“links to extremist Muslim groups” and weapons of mass destruction (a “suitcase bomb”)
that did not exist. The ostensible motive of the terrorists: “They want to destroy our way of
life!” (In fact, Wag the Dog was based on a book whose premise was that the first Iraqi war
was staged by President George H.W. Bush and Saddam Hussein.)
Wag the Dog (1997) shows Hollywood producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman) using blue-screen
technology to create a fake war, complete with innocent victim (Kirsten Dunst), in order to divert public
attention from a presidential scandal.
219
As eerily plausible and prescient as Wag the Dog seemed to be—particularly when in the
midst of personal troubles, Clinton launched attacks in Sudan against Osama bin Laden—its
deeper meaning was perhaps even more salient. Mid-film, the Hollywood professionals’
actions become more important than those of the politicos. Perhaps no other movie had
effectively investigated the similarities between the two worlds and the indispensability of
images and sound bites in American politics.
Another election satire, Bulworth (1998), finds Warren Beatty playing the title charac-
ter, a U.S. senator who is deeply depressed. He takes out a large insurance policy on himself
and arranges his own assassination. Going for days without food or sleep and increasingly
despondent, Bulworth arrives drunk to give a scheduled speech to an African-American
group in Los Angeles. Instead of delivering his prepared speech, Bulworth starts speaking
what he honestly believes, most of it shocking his audience (not to mention his campaign
manager). The senator gains attention for telling it like it is, even as he begins immers-
ing himself in hip-hop culture and falling in love with a black woman. He becomes
a political phenomenon and regains his will to live, yet the assassination plot is still
in motion.
Bulworth, while certainly satirical and cynical, is a different type of film than Wag the
Dog. Much of the film’s humor lies in the juxtaposition of the formerly stodgy Bulworth
and the hip-hop culture—he even starts rapping his political speeches. But the political
premise is much more conventional: Bulworth comes from a long line of films that implied
that if only liberal or populist politicians would speak the truth, they would somehow be
more popular. Still, it is novel to see a movie character explaining why Americans do not
have national health insurance (because of payoffs by insurance companies) and how the
Medicare program is more efficient than private health insurance companies. Bulworth is
essentially a novel, albeit entertaining, vehicle for liberal ideology.
Although neither movie was a resounding hit, of the two, Wag the Dog was much more
successful financially (it ran five weeks, with a $43 million domestic gross) than Bulworth
(three weeks, $26 million). By contrast, the twentieth most popular film of the decade,
Toy Story (1995), grossed $192 million. Both Wag the Dog and Bulworth gained notoriety
In Bulworth (1998), Warren Beatty plays disillusioned Senator Bulworth, who begins to channel hip-
hop language and rhythms to speak unvarnished truth to his constituents and fund-raisers, much to
the dismay of his staff.
220
among critics and the media, Wag the Dog for its presumed connection to President Clinton
and Bulworth primarily for controversy over its racial imagery. Perhaps movies that suggest
that the voters (and therefore, moviegoers) are idiots for believing the bald-faced lies of their
elected representatives are poor commercial propositions.
Bob Roberts (1992) also presented a fictional senatorial candidate and election. Tim Rob-
bins (who also wrote and directed) starred in the title role as a candidate from Pennsylvania.
Candidate Roberts is a slick and ingratiating pol, who touts ill-defined support for symbolic
issues such as national pride and family values. Espousing “rebel conservativism,” he plays
guitar and sings counterprotest songs like “Times Are Changin’ Back” and “This Land Was
Made for Me.” Behind the scenes, though, we are allowed to see that Roberts is really a cyni-
cal, mudslinging manipulator. His campaign exploits many of the techniques of (successful)
modern campaigns. Presented as a pseudodocumentary, Bob Roberts garnered nearly unani-
mous critical praise, but flopped miserably at the box office, grossing less than $5 million,
as did Robbins’s next project, Cradle Will Rock (1999), an adamantly liberal look at the
relationship between art and politics during the Great Depression.
If Wag the Dog was the boldest overtly political movie of the decade, the brashest had
to be Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994). In what someday might be regarded as
Stone’s masterwork, the relationship between the news media and politics was explored in a
way as twisted yet as spot-on as Wag the Dog’s look at Hollywood. The film depicts the story
of two young lovers, Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis), who go on
an ultraviolent killing spree. A television reporter (Robert Downey Jr.) from a show called
American Maniacs follows them and the pair becomes a cause célèbre.
Released about the time of the societal fascination with the O.J. Simpson trial, Killers
explores the discomforting symbiosis between the media and violence in American culture.
The movie is much more about how the media (and everyday Americans) reacted to the idea
of Mickey and Mallory than it is about their bloodthirstiness. In that respect, it shares the
harrowing near-plausibility of Wag the Dog. With popular television shows like Cops and
America’s Most Wanted on the air, not to mention the Simpson trial spectacle, how unlikely
is a pair of celebrated mass murderers?
Unlike Wag the Dog, though, Killers was directed in an utterly surreal way. Included were
uses of animated sequences, black-and-white photography, a multitude of color lenses, and
even a mock sitcom sequence that “explained” Mickey and Mallory. Stone threw a passel of
cinematographic tricks at this movie to highlight its garish message of the extent to which
violence is idolized in American mass culture. Said film critic Roger Ebert, “Once we were
shocked that the Romans threw Christians to the lions. Now we figure out a way to recycle
the format into a TV show. That’s what Natural Born Killers is all about.”2 Some critics
found the movie gratuitous in its shocking approach, and audiences tended to shy away: the
film barely managed to break even.
After Stone, John Sayles is perhaps America’s most consistently political director, with
strong messages about politics in almost all his films. In the 1990s, Sayles delivered City
of Hope (1991), Lone Star (1996), Men with Guns (1997), and Limbo (1999). All his films
deal at least tangentially with class and gender politics; many address issues of race as well.
Other themes include political protest and apathy, the labor movement, the politics of prop-
erty development, international exploitation, and local politics. Sayles writes, directs, and
edits all his films, none of which cost much to make and none of which, unfortunately, has
ever reached a large audience. The films, however, do well as independent cinema playing
221
in art houses, and, partly because of their low budgets, they make money—at least enough
for Sayles to go on to his next film.
His films of the 1990s tended to emphasize his personal vision of politics; Sunshine State
(2002), for example, focused on the effects of Florida real estate development on the lives
of several interconnected characters. Said Sayles, “Our movies are political in that they
deal with how people affect each other, and how governments affect people and how peo-
ple affect governments, but they are not ideological. I would say they just recognize that
there are politics involved in a lot of things.”3 However, in 2004 Sayles came back to more
overtly political fare with Silver State, his fifteenth feature film. Featuring Chris Cooper as a
gubernatorial candidate (with the politically loaded name of Richard Pilager) who looks and
sounds an awful lot like George W. Bush, Silver State is a tongue-in-cheek, satirical look at
contemporary elections.
Candidate Pilager stands for “honesty, integrity, and articulacy” but in reality fronts for
moneyed interests. However, Silver State was primarily hung around a much less captivating
character, a down-at-his-heels journalist named Danny O’Brien (Danny Huston), who stum-
bles onto a complicated conspiracy that fails to surprise or enlighten the audience. Richard
Dreyfuss contributed a convincing portrayal of Pilager’s slick campaign manager, but on the
whole Silver State feels too hollow to convince us of any underlying truths.
The Cold War Reheated
The 1990s were a decade that witnessed rapid political change. Foremost, the Soviet Union
and its East European empire crumbled. Many observers credited this surprising develop-
ment to the firm defense policies of Ronald Reagan, although others attributed it to the long
history of American commitment to the Cold War. Still others believe that the Soviet Union
toppled from the sheer weight of its own corruption. Oddly, perhaps, the dissolution of the
“evil empire” was not popular subject matter for the decade’s film. As one critic expressed
it, “the end of the cold war . . . created a grievous villain vacuum in Armageddon-mongering
fiction.”4
In fact, even as the Soviet Union fell apart, several box office successes reverted to the
Cold War for the familiar enemy, including the box office smash The Hunt for Red October
(1990), Crimson Tide (1995), and the far less commercially successful Russia House (1990).
Compared to the images of cold, efficient, malignant power delivered by the Reaganesque
films of the previous decade, the Soviet enemy portrayed in these films is technologically
inferior, self-doubting, and in fact seeking to aid American efforts to counter its military and
political might. Collectively, the films seem to devalue the dismantling of the Soviet empire,
as the villains they portray seem less than a worthy adversary of a superpower.
Red October, based on a novel by the generally conservative Tom Clancy, features Alec
Baldwin as Clancy’s CIA action hero, Jack Ryan (a role that Harrison Ford would less suc-
cessfully reprise in Patriot Games, 1992, and Clear and Present Danger, 1994). Ryan is
brought aboard an American submarine when U.S. intelligence learns that a Soviet sub
commander, Marko Ramius (Sean Connery), has steered his sub (called Red October) off
course toward American shores. The film is primarily a highly effective suspense movie, but
while certainly evincing the competence and effectiveness of American military and intel-
ligence prowess, it also manages to cast the Soviet system as somewhat bumbling even as
222
the Soviet commander—who seeks to defect to the United States—is provided a noble sheen
by Connery.
Another submarine tale, Crimson Tide, suffers from the lack of a coherent, compelling
villain. Instead of the evil empire, submarine officers portrayed by Gene Hackman and
Denzel Washington must contend with a breakaway group of Russian forces that have seized
missile silos from the former USSR. Much of the plot revolves around the tensions between
Hackman’s and Washington’s characters, but the film also portrays the former übervillain
of Soviet military might as less imposing than earlier films might have. Similarly, Russia
House (based on a novel by more liberal-leaning—and British—author John Le Carré),
although it operates on a much more human and dramatic level than the submarine stories,
provides us with a Soviet system that is militarily deficient and crying for assistance in its
own defeat. Sean Connery plays a British author who is given secret data about the Soviet
missile system: Russian rockets “suck instead of blow . . . and can’t hit Nevada on a clear
day,” as a CIA agent comments. A critical success on the strength of the dramatic perfor-
mances by Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer (the Soviet “leak”), the film was not a big success
at the box office, perhaps because it failed to portray the kind of villainy to which American
audiences could relate. From where would the next generation of supervillains come?
A decade before the events of September 11, 2001, with the credibility of the Soviet
Union as an ominous threat in rapid decline, Hollywood began to look toward terrorism and
terrorists as stand-ins for the role of villainous international threats to American security.
Although Russians—specifically, nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union—as well
as generic Latin Americans (Toy Soldiers, 1991), Kazakhstanis (Air Force One, 1997), and
even Irishmen (Patriot Games, 1992) were occasionally demonized as terrorist threats, the
evildoer of choice tended to be Arabic. In popular movies like Navy Seals (1990), True Lies
(1994), and Executive Decision (1996), “Middle Eastern,” “Islamic,” or “Arab” terrorists
posed the threats that American action heroes had to defuse. In Under Siege (1992), white
terrorists threaten to sell nuclear arms to Arab nations, while a frenzied Arab mob creates the
backdrop for Rules of Engagement (2000).
In all likelihood, the makers of these films did not intend to single out Arabs as innately
evil, and the generic Middle Eastern villains were merely a convenient choice to replace the
hastily exited Soviet heavies. However, research conducted by media critic Jack Sheehan
indicates that, far from being a recent development, the vilification of Arabs is a long-
standing Hollywood tradition. Reviewing more than 900 movies produced since 1900,
Sheehan found that nearly all presented a negative stereotype of Arabs (typically as bru-
tal, heartless, uncivilized “others” bent on terrorizing civilized Westerners), whereas only
twelve movies transmitted what could be construed to be a positive image.5 (One of the few
exceptions was Three Kings (1999), which we discuss later in this chapter.)
The crude stereotyping might be less potentially injurious if film portrayals of Arabs as
ordinary people were more commonplace. “Stereotyping and demonizing of the Arab or
Muslim by American film has been so complete and so successful that film critics, most
Americans and social commentators have barely noticed,” notes one Arab studies scholar.6
Furthermore, the heritage of Arab-bashing creates difficulties when the use of Arab antago-
nists is truly appropriate. The Siege (1998) envisioned a realistic terrorist scenario in which
an extremist Islamic group threatens to bomb New York City—eerily prescient, of course,
of the September 11 attacks. What differentiated The Siege from the vast majority of films
223
using Arabs as villainous elements was that it sought to provide insight into the attitudes,
backgrounds, and history of Islamic extremists. It also presented other Arabs in a positive
light, including an Arab-American agent who participates in the investigation of the threat.
Actually, The Siege was not so much a movie about terrorism as a meditation on the
effects on civil liberties that terrorism poses. According to director Ed Zwick, The Siege is
“very much about what civil liberties are we prepared to sacrifice for the sake of prosecuting
a war [against] an unseen enemy? Are we willing to abnegate certain privileges and rights?
privacy? speech? whatever? assembly? for the sake of actually dealing with something that’s
very pernicious and has been the plague of every other country but America for the last thirty
years?”7
However, the film was largely lost on American audiences, who perhaps confused it with
yet another Arab terrorist action flick. Ironically, it also suffered from criticism that it was
anti-Arab, an accusation that might have been less tenable had it not been released amid so
many movies that actually do seek to mindlessly vilify Arabs.
The War That Keeps On Giving . . .
Although the Cold War seemingly vanished in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet system,
filmmakers continued to mine the Vietnam War. Oliver Stone, already noted for Platoon
(1986), opened the decade with Born on the Fourth of July (December 1989, but viewed
primarily in 1990). Whereas Platoon sought to explore the nature of the war itself, Fourth
of July examined the war’s domestic impacts. Up-and-coming megastar Tom Cruise por-
trayed Ron Kovic, a paraplegic Vietnam veteran who wrote a memoir about his experiences.
The use of Cruise, who to some represented an American ideal, was effective in selling the
film’s message of the horror of war. Kovic is transformed from an all-American boy (hence
the film’s title), to a pathetically crippled soldier (his paraplegic’s therapy is depicted in
detail), to an angry opponent of the war. Some critics, however, began to sense that the war’s
cinematic novelty had been depleted: “Because there have now been so many films about
Vietnam, because we’ve seen so many innocent villagers gunned down, so many accidental
deaths, so much tragedy and pain, unless a radically different perspective is presented . . . a
numbing sense of familiarity sets in,” wrote Hal Hinson of the Washington Post.8 Neverthe-
less, perhaps due to Cruise’s participation and performance, the film was a smash financial
success.
Arguably the biggest Vietnam War movie of the decade, however, did not actually take
the war as its theme. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, a relatively obscure protégé of Steven
Spielberg, Forrest Gump (1994) followed the fictional life of a mentally handicapped man.
The film literally inserts Gump’s life into a panoply of late twentieth-century American his-
tory, using digital effects to enable him, among other things, to teach the “real” Elvis Presley
how to dance and to meet the “real” Lyndon Johnson at the White House on screen. How-
ever, it is the Vietnam War that serves as the pivotal event in the film’s narrative, as most of
the film seems to constitute a string of disjointed vignettes.
Gump, played by American icon-in-the-making Tom Hanks, fights heroically in the
Vietnam War. Befriending a black soldier who will die in combat, he valiantly saves another
soldier by carrying him through miles of jungle brush. He is awarded a Medal of Honor
by President Johnson, yet also manages to energize a massive antiwar protest. Essentially,
Gump, whose everyman status is elevated by Hanks’s own, comes to signify everything that
224
is good about America, even under the worst of circumstances. Viewers are allowed to feel
good about every recent aspect of American history, including race relations, the war, and
war protests . . . even George Wallace and paraplegics become easier to take. This quality of
the movie, along with the eerily impressive special effects, helps explain Gump’s stunning
success at the box office (it grossed $679 million), as well as a few critical accusations of
pandering to “maudlin sentiment.”9 The film is not pro-war so much as it is uncritically and
relentlessly pro-American.
After ignoring the subject of World War II for years, Hollywood turned once again to that
war during the 1990s. The best of the lot, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998),
was one of the most-seen films of the decade. Mixing detailed realism in battle scenes with
time-tested combat film stereotypes, and opening and closing on images of the American flag,
Spielberg’s film is a patriotic ode to the fighters of the “last good war.” The film’s enormous
popularity helped to inspire a new wave of recognition for veterans of the war. Tom Hanks
starred as the regular guy—a Midwestern schoolteacher—who leads a platoon of young sol-
diers in search of Private Ryan. Although the soldiers are occasionally frightened, they never
question their participation in the war, as soldiers in a typical Vietnam War movie would.
Spielberg also tapped into the horrors of World War II with Schindler’s List (1993), which
documented the heroic actions of an otherwise ordinary Polish businessman in rescuing Jews
from extermination at the hands of the Nazis. Without disparaging Schindler’s List, which
received high critical praise and an Academy Award for Best Picture, it bears noting that
American audiences seem to take to movies about foreign political heroes more readily than
those about heroes of their own country. They have demonstrated their interest in films that
document the shaking-up of the political systems of other countries, such as Gandhi, Evita,
Michael Collins, In the Name of the Father, and Cry Freedom, yet an American movie about
slavery has yet to achieve much popularity.
The most original if not also the very best war movie of the decade, Three Kings (1999)
was one of the few major motion pictures to address the first Gulf War. Near the war’s end,
three American soldiers (bankable star George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, and Ice Cube)
learn that a cache of confiscated gold bullion is hidden in an obscure Iraqi encampment.
What might have been a simple reworking of a similarly plotted World War II movie, Kelly’s
Heroes (1970), becomes much more interesting when the trio discovers that Iraqis are being
slaughtered as the American military retreats. The film was thus, on one level, an explicit
critique of the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war.
Of greater interest, however, was how director David O. Russell drew the central char-
acters of this first post-Vietnam American war. Clooney, Wahlberg, and Ice Cube portray
soldiers, not conscripts, who are at once “bored, opportunistic, confused about a war they
never got a chance to fight properly, and dangerously impulsive.”10 Their enemies, moreover,
are not inscrutable demons (as the Vietnamese were frequently portrayed, even in antiwar
films), but instead depicted as human beings with their own problems and agendas.
Three Kings also set itself apart with its energetic style. The ante of active camerawork
offered by Vietnam War movies like Platoon was raised considerably by Russell’s visu-
ally striking, rapidly cutting eye that helped the audience buy the sense of random chaos
in which these characters must make life-and-death decisions. Lens filters kept the Middle
Eastern desert looking menacing, yet banal. Surprisingly, audiences responded well to a
movie that seemed to undercut an American military victory, and Three Kings grossed more
than $60 million domestically (as well as another $40 million internationally).
225
Presidential Characters
As no decade of film before it, the 1990s were focused on the United States. Fictional
presidents were featured or figured prominently in at least a dozen popular movies, while bio-
graphical (and quasi-biographical) films of Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and John Kennedy
were also released. What many of these films shared was emphasis on the personal lives of
presidents (real or imagined). To a certain extent, this tendency mirrored reality, as the Clin-
ton presidency was characterized by unprecedented interest in chief executive “affairs.” But
many of these films preceded the Lewinsky and related scandals, as did both Dave (1993)
and The American President (1995).
Americans generally tend to be more aware of and interested in presidential politics than
those at any other level, perhaps due to the myth of the all-powerful president. Popular
movies about fictional presidents can speak volumes about American perceptions of them-
selves and their country. Both Dave and The American President in broad strokes resemble
Capra-like fantasies about the presidency. At the surface, both are romantic comedies or
light dramas that explore the idea of a president’s social life. In Dave, Kevin Kline plays a
small-town businessman whose uncanny resemblance to the incumbent president results in
his summons to Washington to cover for the president, who has suffered a heart attack while
engaging in an extramarital affair. À la Capra, Dave turns out to be a ceaselessly honest,
everyday guy who, when thrust into a corrupt system, becomes a force for good—that is,
when he’s not getting emotionally involved with the president’s wife, who has become
estranged from her husband due to his lack of character in all matters.
On a political level, Dave betrays a hopelessly simplistic and perhaps even purposely
naive view of the presidency that might make Capra blush. When a budget shortfall threatens
homeless shelters, Dave summons his entire cabinet, snaps his fingers, and, voilà, increases
social spending and balances the budget (with a little help from his small-town buddy, an
accountant). In case the left-of-center bent is not obvious (the screenwriter was a Democratic
delegate at the 1980 national convention), Dave successfully rebuffs the evil machinations
of the real president’s right-wing aide. To the extent—and here is the big question—that the
audience took Dave seriously, the movie reinforced the idea of the all-powerful president as
well as the Capra ideal of the efficacy of one man versus the corrupt system. The painless
politics it espoused was, as the Washington Post noted, “an attempt to reheat the American
pie and hand around the slices, a form of gentle jingoism equivalent to playing the national
anthem at ball games.”11
The American President, although it is not without a host of lighthearted moments, has a
somewhat more serious tone. Michael Douglas portrays Andrew Shepherd, a liberal presi-
dent who is up for reelection. He also happens to be a widower who meets an attractive,
capable environmental lobbyist named Sydney Wade (Annette Bening). Sparks fly. The plot
thickens when Shepherd’s right-wing opponent uses the affair (which has become public
knowledge) as an election issue. As we would expect any fictional president to do, Shepherd
successfully rebuffs the attack, protects gun control and the environment, and manages to
keep the girl and live happily ever after.
Like Dave, this fictional president is obviously liberal, but this time with big-city style
and attitude. (Neither is identified as a Democrat, however, apparently so as not to alienate
Republican audiences.) When accused of being an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
member, Shepherd barks to his opponent, “Yes, I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU.
226
But the more important question is: Why aren’t you, Bob?” in a way that might provide com-
fort to liberal audiences. The system is again portrayed as corrupt, but this president knows
how to make the deals that preserve his integrity and his political goals. In fact, arriving as
it did when the Clinton administration was embattled and feeble, the film’s message seemed
to be aimed at Clinton. As president, Michael Douglas does not care what the polls say—he
does the right (liberal) thing! Go left, young man!!
The American President comes across as a little more sophisticated about political realities
than Dave—President Shepherd has to make deals—but equally naive about the presidency.
Both place Capraesque faith in the efficacy of personal character to trump political reality.
But the broad comic and romantic appeal of both films is probably more responsible for their
sizable financial success. Neither Dave nor The American President was of itself likely to
have any measurable impact on moviegoers; conjointly with many other movies that also
embodied a simplistic view of the presidency, however, they may have helped mold our
expectations of the office.
Another fictional presidency or, rather, pair of presidencies was the subject of the gentle
screwball comedy My Fellow Americans (1994). Jack Lemmon and James Garner play two
former U.S. presidents: Russell P. Kramer (Lemmon) is a stuffy, conservative Republican
and Matt Douglas (Garner) is an amorous, liberal Democrat. (There is also a vice president
who resembles Dan Quayle.) When the incumbent president (Dan Ackroyd) is hit with a
bribery scandal, he tries to frame Kramer and Douglas. The two wind up on the lam and
(you would never guess it) eventually learn to appreciate each other’s company and values.
Although essentially a harmless romp, My Fellow Americans, like many films that address
political icons, deftly reconciles the differences between ideologies with personal warmth
and humor.
The myth of the all-powerful president was revisited at absurd new extremes in two
other fictional presidencies in Independence Day (1996) and Air Force One (1997). In Inde-
pendence Day, an alien force invades planet Earth. Likable actor Bill Pullman portrays the
president, who, along with a ramshackle group of other survivors of the alien attack, person-
ally joins the battle by flying a fighter jet. Independence Day, suffice it to say, is not overly
concerned with any sort of realism. It is a zesty, self-consciously silly pastiche of B-movie
clichés dating from War of the Worlds (1953) up to approximately Star Wars (1977). Beyond
the flying heroics of the president, the movie also manages to mix in a little jingoism: with
the entire world under attack, it is the Americans who have the brains and the moxie to
defeat the evil aliens. These aliens are so evil that they forgo the usual posturing as friendly
explorers and start nuking American cities from the get-go. (It may have been comforting to
some viewers to see the rest of the world actually applauding an American military action.)
However, although it reinforces implausible expectations about the presidency, Indepen-
dence Day is such a cartoon that only the most naive viewer would confuse its lazy plotting
for a political message.
Mars Attacks (1996), released at roughly the same time, was essentially the same movie
taken to its logical cartoonish conclusion and was therefore something of an antidote for
those taken aback by the gleeful simplemindedness of Independence Day. Directed by visual
maestro Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice), it was said to be based on a series
of bubblegum cards that were issued in the 1950s. The aliens microwave Congress and just
about everything else in sight, with little point other than sheer cinematic fun . . . which,
unfortunately, the movie oddly lacks.
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Air Force One featured yet another president with vast military experience and expertise.
Harrison Ford was cast as President James Marshall, a Vietnam combat hero whose plane
is hijacked by a Kazakhstani terrorist (Gary Oldham, an old hand at playing crazies of all
races). Needless to say, the president’s combat savvy pays off and Marshall dispatches the
villain in due course. Apart from the reprise of the president-as-action-hero concept first
seen in Independence Day, this film includes Glenn Close as the vice president who must
grapple with the terrorist’s demands. To its credit, the film lets Close act with dignity and the
audience-preferred level of toughness, perhaps helping to sell the idea of a female candidate
to upcoming electorates. The movie itself is predictable, forgettable fun that does not really
trample on any provocative political airspace. Yet the decade’s message of the all-powerful
president was once again affirmed in one of the most popular films of the decade.
Less fictive, yet not necessarily true-to-life films about the presidency addressed the life
of Richard Nixon and the death of John F. Kennedy. Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) was the
premier overtly political film event of the decade, grossing over $70 million domestically.
The title notwithstanding, the film is actually about a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy
and its cover-up; the president himself is presented as an icon of liberalism. (JFK implies
that Kennedy had plans to withdraw American troops from Vietnam). Directed with Stone’s
trademark, extremely active camera (and liberal use of color filters), the movie is an intense
experience fraught with compelling performances by an outstanding cast (Kevin Costner,
Sissy Spacek, Joe Pesci, Donald Sutherland, Gary Oldman).
But JFK raised a fascinating and disturbing paradox as a political film. In portraying the
conspiracy to murder a president, Stone took extreme liberties with the factual evidence
of such a conspiracy. In the words of film critic Roger Ebert, the narrator of the film (upon
whose book the film is loosely based), former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garri-
son, “was a loose cannon who attracted crackpot conspiracy theories the way a dog draws
fleas.”12 Yet Garrison’s theories, as well as others, were depicted as factual amid a backdrop
of legitimately disturbing aspects of the Kennedy assassination. Was JFK therefore fiction?
Docudrama? Propaganda?
Whatever else it was, JFK was indubitably controversial. Stone was and is frequently vili-
fied for distorting the truth, if not lying outright about the subject matter of JFK. One problem
is that any film based on historical subject matter contains historical inaccuracy, particularly
those like JFK that address inherently mysterious or ambiguous subjects. According to film
historian Roger Rosenstone, “Film will always include images that are at once invented and
true. True in that they symbolize, condense or summarize larger amounts of data, true in that
they impart an overall meaning of the past that can be verified, documented or reasonably
argued.” From this standpoint, a film like JFK can be interpreted as a hypothesis about his-
torical events, what Rosenstone calls “historical intervention in that it’s provoking you to at
least consider what might have happened, not to give you a definitive history.”13
Such interpretations are perhaps sufficient for film critics and scholars, but what about the
audience? Does a film like JFK, for example, lead to unwarranted mistrust of government
and/or the judicial system? Perhaps not . . . most viewers attending a movie like JFK are
already armed with perceptual screens, and many may have read the reviews of the movie,
which in the case of JFK tended to emphasize its lack of historical accuracy. Those enam-
ored of conspiracy theories, of course, were already converted to the film’s point of view.
But what Stone’s film did do, unequivocally, was to focus public interest and debate on a
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politically charged subject. It even spurred the release of previously sealed files by means
of a congressional resolution signed by President George H.W. Bush. This was no mean
feat in a mass cultural environment replete with other distractions. Film scholar William
Romanowski states that the controversy about JFK “demonstrated how effective a motion
picture can be as a transmitter of knowledge, history, and culture.”14
Stone continued in a similar, although somewhat less controversial vein with his biopic of
Richard M. Nixon, Nixon (1995). Although an outspoken liberal like Stone might have been
expected to deliver a brutal caricature of the scandal-ridden Republican president, Nixon is
actually a fairly evenhanded and conventional Hollywood-style biography. Unfortunately,
some of the same aggressive filmmaking techniques that made the shocking substance of
JFK all the more compelling tended not to coalesce as effectively with the more staid nar-
rative of Nixon’s life. Nixon, after all, had an undistinguished upbringing, and winning and
losing elections does not make for compelling cinema; Anthony Hopkins, familiar to many
filmgoers in his role as psycho killer Hannibal Lecter, gave a heroic effort in the title role,
but did not really look or sound like the man.
Stone provoked by creating some fictionalized scenes that developed a theory of Richard
Nixon’s personality: essentially a lonely man who felt unloved from childhood onward. Like
JFK, Nixon received criticism from those who felt it was too far afield from the historical
record. Unlike its predecessor, however, Nixon failed to stir much public response, grossing
much less than the $50 million cost of making the three-hours-plus movie.
An interesting footnote to Nixon that fell largely by the wayside, Dick (1999) was a farci-
cal romp that answered the cinematic question: what if the famous eighteen-minute gap in the
Watergate tapes had involved two teenage girls? A curious combination of teen comedy and
broad political satire, Dick featured Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst as two teens who
stray from their tour group while visiting the White House; the pair stumbles into the Oval
Office and hilarity ensues. Unfortunately, for all of its relentlessly cute put-ons of Nixon’s
presidency, Dick was not particularly funny and failed to recoup even half of its minuscule
$13 million budget. Some critics, however, liked its ability to “make particular aspects of the
recent American past comprehensible to those too young to have lived them.”15
Another quasi-historical presidential film was one of the more interesting overtly politi-
cal movies of the decade, Primary Colors (1998). Based on the best-selling roman à clef by
Joe Klein (who originally published it anonymously), Primary Colors concerns the 1992
presidential campaign of one southern candidate who is notorious for his appetites. In other
words, it is a thinly veiled interpretation of Bill Clinton’s run for the presidency. The film,
while notably even less accurate than either JFK or Nixon (it may even have given Dick
competition in that regard), provides a stunningly insightful look at what made Clinton both
such an effective candidate and a troubled president. Directed by Hollywood veteran Mike
Nichols (perhaps best known for The Graduate, 1967), Primary Colors is most captivat-
ing when star John Travolta, in his role as Governor Jack Stanton, is, in effect, imitating
Bill Clinton. In a series of campaign vignettes, Travolta/Clinton mingles irascible personal
charm with keen political and policy instinct in a way we would imagine the real Clinton
doing.
Unfortunately, the film’s insights seem to end with the remarkable take on Clinton, the
human being. As a chronicle of the political process that enabled him to gain power, the film
has little to offer.
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High Crimes and Misdemeanors
The 1990s also saw a high tide of fictional suspense movies centered on the presidency,
frequently involving miscreant presidents. In the Line of Fire (1993) was a generally effec-
tive thriller, starring Clint Eastwood as a Secret Service agent whose career has been marred
by his failure to protect President Kennedy in Dallas. John Malkovich portrayed the current
president’s would-be assassin. Although by no means a film with a particular political point
to make—the focus is on the action and Eastwood’s struggle to redeem himself—the movie
adequately reflects the reality of a presidential election. Eastwood’s character, of course, is
in the tradition of his Dirty Harry antihero; he snubs the bureaucracy and throws the pro-
cedure book away at a footfall. The film also includes some murky talk that the country is
no longer what it used to be and that its flag has fallen, but this was not a resonant message.
In the Line of Fire was one of the top-grossing movies of 1993 and received critical praise
as well.
In Clear and Present Danger (1994), Harrison Ford reprised his role as author Tom
Clancy’s superspy, Jack Ryan. The film had nothing to do with Schenk v. United States, the
Supreme Court ruling that free speech could be limited if its exercise presented a “clear
and present danger.” Ryan is called in to clean up a murder spree on a yacht that has pos-
sible connections to the president (a vaguely Reagan-looking Donald Moffat). The action
proceeds down to South America, where a stereotypical Colombian drug warlord is holding
Americans—who were fighting a secret war—captive. What ensues is a fairly gripping if
by-the-numbers suspense movie. Interestingly, however, the script betrays little of author
Clancy’s right-wing worldview because Ford demanded it be moderated, which was achieved
by bringing in a more liberal coauthor.16 In the original script, the Reagan-like president is
not vilified, whereas in the film he is exposed by Ryan in testimony before Congress. The
film seemed to be the cinematic answer to the Iran-Contra affair: this time, the president does
not skate away quite so easily.
Murder at 1600 (1997) and Absolute Power (1997) are two movies that seemed to be
inspired by the Clinton administration. In each, the president is implicated in murder. In
Murder at 1600, Wesley Snipes portrayed detective Harlan Regis of the Washington, DC,
police force, called in to investigate the murder of a striking blonde woman in the White
House. A formulaic thriller that happens to be set in the president’s residence, Murder does
not say much except to underscore that the president could be a very bad man.
Absolute Power is an equally mediocre exploration of presidential evildoing. Based on a
William Goldman script loosely based on a novel by David Baldacci, directed by Clint East-
wood, and starring Gene Hackman, it centers on a career burglar (Eastwood) who happens
upon a sleazy sex-and-murder scene that involves . . . the president! The cowardly, beastly
nature of the president’s crimes overshadows the sin of burglary and goes over the top to
portray that political thriller fixture, a corrupt politician. The “cancer” on this presidency is
personal, not political, and so reminiscent of right-wing attacks on Clinton’s philandering
and moral credibility.
Absolute Power did seem to pander to a hard right-wing sensibility. As critic Charles
Taylor wrote, “Even the queasy, unpleasant tone . . . is perfect for conservatives, since they
get to be titillated by the sex and violence . . . and take a shocked attitude toward it.”17 East-
wood’s libertarian-leaning politics assisted in this impression, while his skillful filmmaking
and iconic appearance lift Absolute Power above yet another 1997 White House thriller,
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Shadow Conspiracy, about an assistant to the president, played by Charlie Sheen, catching
on to a shadow government, a conspiracy “in the highest levels.” Presciently Ebert summed
up the film as “a simple-minded thriller that seems destined for mercy killing in the video
stores after a short run before appalled audiences.”18
Taken collectively, however, these movies intrigued in that they were released around the
time that the Clinton administration was being accused of murdering aide Vince Foster (yet
just before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke). To the extent that they make such a sce-
nario more plausible, such films exacerbated an extraordinary (and ultimately groundless)
attack on the White House.
Congressional Acts
A few films of the 1990s had congressional settings. From the first, Hollywood has viewed
Congress as a corrupt institution, ripe for saving by a principled individual—much as Ameri-
cans tend to view Congress dimly, but usually admire their own representative. No exception
to the rule, The Distinguished Gentleman (1992) featured star Eddie Murphy as Thomas
Jefferson Johnson, a con man who dupes his way into Congress when an incumbent dies. For
a farce, the film actually conveyed some of the actual trappings of the legislative process,
including the importance of sitting on certain committees, the role of political action com-
mittees (PACs), and the struggle over freshman office space. The film’s plot also turned on a
real policy issue, the link between high-voltage transmission lines and cancer.
Produced by Marty Kaplan, a former speechwriter for Democratic presidential candidate
Walter Mondale, The Distinguished Gentleman was loosely based on actual events—
particularly scandals in the U.S. Congress. But despite its veneer of factualness, the movie
provides only a dumb parody of legislative wrongdoing. When Johnson gets to Washington,
he looks to exploit the system for his own betterment. Immediately, he is able to sell his
votes (to the highest bidder, of course). “With all this money coming from both sides,” asks
Congressman Johnson, “how could anything ever get done?” The answer, from a hooked-up
lobbyist: “It doesn’t.”
Thus The Distinguished Gentleman makes Mr. Smith Goes to Washington seem positively
nuanced in its depiction of Congress and its faults. (In fact, the film’s press release actually
referred to Eddie Murphy as “the Jimmy Stewart of the Nineties.”) When Johnson meets and
becomes enamored of a pretty young lobbyist whose child may have gotten cancer by means
of close proximity to power lines, he just cannot help but straighten up, fly right, and in so
doing expose the corrupt institution for what it is. The movie was only a modest financial
success and was generally pounded by critics for its insipid storytelling.
Just over ten years later, Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde (2003) covered the
same tired ground as The Distinguished Gentleman. The sequel to a funnier comedy fea-
turing Reese Witherspoon as Elle Woods, a deceptively dim-looking blonde law student,
Legally Blonde 2 inserts the same character into Congress as an aide to a congresswoman
(Sally Field). The aide’s mission is to convince Congress to stop testing cosmetics on ani-
mals. In the ensuing hilarity, Elle learns the truth about democracy and how self-serving
Congress is. Critically panned in large part for its hackneyed plotting, the movie grossed
a more than respectable $90 million. Together, Legally Blonde 2 and The Distinguished
Gentleman helped to compound public misapprehension of Congress and did so in a way
that was only marginally entertaining.
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Legal Matters
Some of the best overtly political films of the decade focused on the American legal system
and related policy issues. Director Milos Forman’s The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) is a
biography of Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt. Although the film covers Flynt’s entire
life, at its heart is Flynt’s obscenity trial in 1987. Flynt’s magazine had published a cartoon
that depicted conservative televangelist Jerry Falwell as an incestuous drunk, and Falwell
sued for $40 million in damages. After the film first familiarizes us with Flynt’s crudeness,
it next traces the progress of the suit all the way to the Supreme Court. Edward Norton, in
the role of Flynt’s attorney, provides a compelling oral argument and gamely banters with
the court (itself rarely a cinematic setting). The film is as effective as any at relating the logic
and importance of the First Amendment guarantee of free speech in a democratic society.
Civil Action (1998) depicted the experiences of real-life trial lawyer Jan Schlictmann
(John Travolta), who evolves from a self-interested ambulance chaser into a public inter-
est attorney. The film focuses on a lawsuit brought against multinational corporations for
polluting a Massachusetts town. Instead of milking this story for a predictable Hollywood
storyline, Civil Action luxuriates in the ambiguities and complexities of high-stakes civil liti-
gation. It also avoids the tendency of movies—particularly those set in the legal system—to
separate the courtroom into good guys and bad guys, searching instead for how and why the
winners win and the losers lose. As Roger Ebert wrote, Civil Action is “like John Grisham
for grownups.”19 Due to its high-profile cast, Civil Action was expensive to make and failed
to recoup its $60 million budget at the domestic box office.
Perhaps the most compelling film of the decade with a legal system setting was The
Insider (1999). Directed by Michael Mann (a director better known for action films like
Heat), the movie makes the true story of a scientist for a tobacco company, Jeffrey Wigand,
feel like a gripping suspense yarn—without compromising the politically charged material.
Instead of the conventional Hollywood claptrap about a little guy who takes on the system
and wins, The Insider gives serious consideration to the notion that everyone in a legal
conflict has an agenda, the media included. A star-studded cast (including Russell Crowe as
Wigand and Al Pacino as CBS news producer Lowell Bergman) is given ample room to fill
in the shadows between black and white. Director Mann makes characteristically good use
of lighting (and frequently, the lack thereof) to give the proceedings a healthy tinge of sus-
pense. Despite seven Oscar nominations (including Best Picture and Crowe for Best Actor),
The Insider actually lost money, which probably did not improve the prospects for future
intelligent, politically charged film projects.
Citizen Ruth (1996) was an independently produced look at both sides of the abortion
debate from a heavily satiric perspective. It starred Laura Dern as Ruth, an indigent drug
abuser (she “huffs” toxic fumes from various kinds of spray cans) who gets pregnant and
may or may not want an abortion. But the film is really about lampooning the extremists on
both sides of the abortion issue, who are soundly and equally ridiculed throughout Citizen
Ruth. Antiabortionists are depicted as hymn-singing “baby savers” while abortion rights
activists are lesbians who sing New Age hymns to the moon.
A more successful film by the same director as Ruth (Alexander Payne) defied easy cat-
egorization. Election (1999) would seem to be an intentionally political film because its
subject matter is a high school student council election. Matthew Broderick stars as civics
teacher Jim McAllister, who very much wants one student, Tracy Flick, to lose the election,
232
since her affair with one of his colleagues resulted in scandal. Meanwhile, unhappy at home,
McAllister is embarking on an affair of his own with a family friend. His efforts to make
Tracy lose the election ultimately result in personal and professional humiliation. Although
Election is hilarious for its send-ups of high school personalities (and perhaps the banality
of teaching high school civics), it does not try to present a pointed satire of the American
political system. Most of the dark humor revolves around the foibles of its characters’ per-
sonalities, although the election itself is broadly presented as a farce.
Political Science Fiction

Several science fiction films of the 1990s seemed to resonate politically. If there was a single
unifying theme of the decade’s sci-fi, it was a sense of alienation fueled by the perception
that the outside world and all its institutions are a facade for a darker, mind-numbing force
that commands conformity from all humanity. This seemed to be the idea behind such popu-
lar fantasies as The Truman Show (1998), The Matrix (1999), and the lesser-known Dark
City (1991). A far more comedic entry, Men in Black (1996), also touched on a similar vein.
In The Truman Show, Jim Carey plays the title role of a man, Truman Burbank, who is
blissfully unaware that his entire life is a TV show watched by millions every day. When
Truman discovers the truth, he becomes outraged and seeks to flee the giant set in which he
has been living, which does not sit well with the corporate giant behind the TV show of his
life. The show’s director and Truman’s personal manipulator, Christof (Ed Harris), seeks to
keep Truman imprisoned.
The Truman Show is interesting for the way it presaged and critiqued the American obses-
sion with reality television—people keep watching Truman’s life with voyeuristic gusto,
even though nothing interesting happens. Its premise, that one’s life is lived in a glass jar
for the amusement of others, was captivating at the outset. Unfortunately, the movie never
got too far beyond its premise, devolving into an action piece. Its life-affirming, Hollywood
stock ending (yes, Truman escapes!) is far less original than its start. The outcome implies
that no matter how artificial our world may seem, individualism can emerge triumphant.
Beyond the endless Star Wars sequels, perhaps the science fiction smash of the decade
was The Matrix (1999). Keanu Reeves plays Neo, a computer hacker who is led to believe
that reality as he and everyone on earth knows it is a collective dream fed by a massive com-
puter system known as the Matrix. The Matrix imprisons humanity in a dream state as it
sucks the life force out of its bodies. A group of rebels contacts Neo and informs him that he
must play a role in defeating the Matrix.
The Matrix was a surprise megahit produced, written, and directed by two relative
unknowns, Andy and Larry Wachowski. Much of its appeal was doubtlessly found in the
groundbreaking digitalized special effects used for its action sequences—the movie was
a natural for the then newly popular, home theater audio-video systems. But the theme of
alienation and ennui spawned by a consumer society also seemed to strike a collective nerve.
One British critic reasoned that The Matrix and its two sequels might reflect the “widespread
feeling of helplessness in the United States.”20
Unfortunately, the potential for exploring that theme was largely squandered in favor of
mind-numbing action sequences in the sequels, The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix
Revolutions (2003), which tended in stretches to resemble long video games rather than
movies. Although both movies were financial successes (due in large part to international
233
box office receipts), perhaps the unabashed use of Cadillac product placements ran against
the grain of selling alienation from mass society.
Dark City (1998), a much smaller picture than The Matrix trilogy (its budget was a mere
$27 million), featured a nearly identical premise. John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) is an amne-
siac who awakens to learn that he may be a serial killer. Murdoch learns that a mysterious
group called the Strangers controls the entire city. Through a process called the Tuning, the
Strangers can manipulate time and physical space. Dark City follows Murdoch’s efforts to
thwart the Strangers and discover his own identity.
Although it resembles The Matrix in its theme of alienation amid a world of facades,
Dark City has an entirely different look and feel. Thanks to the remarkable visual world
created by George Liddle and Patrick Tatopoulos, the film luxuriates in a timeless sense of
foreboding that invokes Fritz Lang’s silent classic, Metropolis. Dark City also operates on
a more personal level than the Matrix series, which may have muted its effect as a political
vehicle. It never caught on with mass audiences, either, barely recouping its original budget
in domestic and international box office.
A much bigger financial success was the comic book adaptation Men in Black (1997).
Yet again, life on earth is but a veneer for another “real” world. In this one, aliens of all
sorts reside on and frequently visit earth. It is the duty of government agents, played by Will
Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, to keep this alien influx a secret from earthlings. Men in Black
is a harmless if amusing high-tech farce, and the aliens are generally lovable CGI (computer-
generated imagery) creations. The film’s satire is directed at other movies more than at real
political institutions. Sequels Men in Black II (2002) and Men in Black 3 (2012) were less
successful both critically and financially.
In retrospect, as a decade, the 1990s provided little basis for hope that Hollywood would
commit itself to making thoughtful, overtly political movies. The best efforts in that regard
were generally independent films or box office flops, and frequently both. Although much is
sometimes made of a liberal Hollywood agenda, relatively few movies pursued leftist causes
very openly. On the other hand, even fewer projected a traditional or conservative point of
view.
Notes
1. Jon Clark, “Primary Color: Green: Why the Studios Won’t Make Political Movies (Bottom Line
Continues to Be Financial, Not Political),” The Nation, April 5, 1999.
2. Roger Ebert, “Natural Born Killers,” www.rogerebert.com/reviews/natural-born-killers-1994.
3. “Interview: The Return of John Sayles,” Indiewire, www.indiewire.com/article/interview_the_
return_of_john_sayles_from_secaucus_to_the_sunshine_state2.
4. Janet Maslin, “Deciding the World’s Fate From the Ocean’s Bottom,” New York Times, www.
nytimes.com/1995/05/12/movies/film-review-crimson-tide-deciding-the-world-s-fate-from-the-
ocean-s-bottom.html.
5. Jack Sheehan, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Northampton, MA: Interlink
Publishing Group, 2001).
6. Susan M. Akram, “The Aftermath of September 11, 2001: The Targeting of Arabs and Muslims in
America,” Arab Studies Quarterly 24 (Spring–Summer 2002): 66–86.
7. “Interview with ‘The Siege’ director: Ed Zwick,” Life and Times Tonight, KCET in Los Angeles,
transcript, www.thescreamonline.com/commentary/comment2-1/index.html.
8. Hal Hinson, Washington Post, January 5, 1990.
9. Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle, April 28, 1995.
234
10. Andrew Gumbel, “Back to the Future: In 1999, Three Kings—a Film on the Gulf War—Made
Little Impact. Today, It Seems Chillingly Prescient,” Independent (London, England), May 28,
2004.
11. Rita Kempley, Washington Post, May 7, 1993.
13. Roger Rosenstone, “Film Historian Says Nixon Follows a Tradition of Mixing Truth and Fiction,”
Orange County Register, December 29, 1995.
14. William D. Romanowski, “Oliver Stone’s JFK: Commercial Filmmaking, Cultural History, and
Conflict,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 21, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 63–71.
15. J. Hoberman, Village Voice, August 4, 1999.
16. Bruce Fretts, “After Surviving One Clash with Tom Clancy, Harrison Ford and the Patriot Games
Team Head Back into the Danger Zone,” Entertainment Weekly, August 19, 1994.
17. Charles Taylor, review of Absolute Power, Salon, www.salon.com/1997/03/14/absolute/.

18. Roger Ebert, “Shadow Conspiracy,” www.rogerebert.com/reviews/shadow-conspiracy-1997.
19. Chicago Sun-Times, January 8, 1999.
20. Philip Hensher, “The Matrix Reloaded Should Worry America’s Leaders,” Independent, www.
questia.com/library/1P2–1759173/the-matrix-reloaded-should-worry-america-s-leaders.
235

12
The Twenty-First Century

9/11 and Beyond
Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

The specter of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon dealt the new millennium a unique opportunity for popular film to reemerge as a
political force. The question hovering over the early part of the decade was how Hollywood
would approach these events. Would it repeat the pro-America propaganda of World War II
films, remain tight-lipped as with Vietnam-era films, or move faster to criticize both the
failure of the George W. Bush administration to prevent the attacks and also its ensuing wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq? A few prominent voices even wondered if Hollywood would look
into the mirror and consider its own culpability. In projecting on-screen fantasies of spec-
tacular mass destruction, had Hollywood contributed to this unprecedented disaster? Robert
Altman, the director of the antiwar classic M*A*S*H (1970) and the biting industry satire
The Player (1992), thought so. For their intrinsically violent fantasies he laid the blame of
9/11 squarely at Hollywood’s feet: “The movies set the pattern, and these people have copied
the movies. Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that unless they’d seen
it in a movie.”1 Jean Baudrillard also accused the industry of complicity, arguing that with
its stock-in-trade of spectacularly destructive images, Hollywood films expressed a barely
sublimated wish that the terrorists simply acted out: “Countless disaster movies bear witness
to this fantasy which they clearly attempt to exorcise with images, drowning out the whole
thing with special effects.”2 In some respects, the industry ratified this view with its initial
circumspect response, followed by a return to business as usual with scenes of mass destruc-
tion again dominating the multiplex.
To begin, Hollywood was not particularly quick to exploit the 9/11 attacks, although the
selection of Arab terrorists had become common long before 2001. The predictable Arnold
Schwarzenegger thriller Collateral Damage (2001) was delayed for several months because
its subject matter involved a terrorist plot, while the release of The Quiet American (2002)
was also put on hold for fear its critical look at foreign involvement in Vietnam might incite
backlash. At the same time, Hollywood rushed ahead the release of the combat drama Black
Hawk Down (2001). Directed by Ridley Scott in a gritty verité style, the film was a remark-
ably downbeat war movie that depicted the ill-fated 1992 American military mission in
Mogadishu, Somalia, a country devastated by famine and civil war. As in Three Kings, the
soldiers in Black Hawk Down learn that they are fighting only for themselves and their bud-
dies; the script implies that the political decision makers in the Clinton administration are to
blame for their predicament.
Black Hawk Down generated criticism over the way Somalis were depicted—largely as
targets in a shooting gallery. In fact, more than a thousand Somalis were killed during the
battle depicted in the film. A telling footnote: when Black Hawk Down was screened in
Mogadishu (a bootleg version, shown outdoors) in 2002, the Somali audience cheered as
American helicopters crashed and soldiers died. Their reaction testified to how elastic mov-
ies’ political effects can be and showed that no matter what political messages a film might
bear, audiences will decode its narrative imagery in the context of their own experiences and
existing political sentiment.
Perhaps the earliest explicit fictional link to the September 11 attacks was The Sum of All
Fears (2002). Another film version of a Tom Clancy/Jack Ryan novel, The Sum of All Fears
featured young star Ben Affleck in the role previously played by Harrison Ford and Alec
Baldwin. A group of terrorists in Russia are able to obtain nuclear weapons from the former
USSR; the novelty of this film is that they detonate such a device in Baltimore. Beyond that
chilling link to the contemporary fear associated with terrorism, however, The Sum of All
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THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: 9/11 AND BEYOND
Fears had little to do with the subject matter of terrorism or even weapons of mass destruc-
tion (WMD). Despite a cool response from most critics, The Sum of All Fears did reasonably
brisk business at the box office.
In 2002, eleven directors of different nationalities each made an eleven-minute film
responding to 9/11 and released them together as the feature film September 11. With pieces
by Youssef Chahine (Egypt), Mira Nair (India), Ken Loach (UK), and others, the film was
hailed by critics as “a monumental achievement,” “fascinating,” and “artful,” while Variety
decried it as “stridently un-American.” According to Nair, it had trouble getting an Ameri-
can release because “it is an overtly political film.”4 Her own contribution was based on the
true story of a young Islamic man who went missing that day in New York. When the FBI
got involved in the case, not to help find him but because his name and religion made him a
suspect, neighbors turned on his family. Eventually it is discovered he was one of the day’s
heroes: a trained paramedic, he raced to the Twin Towers and lost his life helping survivors.
Politically active Hollywood star Sean Penn made September 11’s American contribu-
tion, about an elderly widower, played by Ernest Borgnine, who, in a confused state of
mourning and befuddlement, lays out his dead wife’s dress for her while oblivious to the
events played and replayed on the television screen in his small apartment. (Not long after
the film’s international debut, Penn took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post protest-
ing impending military action in Iraq.) At the other end of the spectrum, Mexican director
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s short film shows in harrowing detail what much of the media
coverage downplayed: images of people with arms and legs flailing tumbling from the tow-
ers to their deaths.
Wanting to avoid what he called “political gibberish and rhetoric,” Inarritu stressed, “This
event is beyond politics. It has more to do with the dark side of our nature.”5 Yet restoring
to sight the edited vision of falling bodies constituted an act of political remediation by
creating film images that contested or corrected the corporate media’s standard presentation
of events. Ostensible focus on the “dark side” of a universal humanity yields in this short
film a trenchant critique, bringing into relief the way images deemed watchable by major
television networks, like those of the planes hitting the towers, mirror the kinds of large-
scale destruction already screening in movie theaters. Inarritu’s vision thus accords with
Altman’s view that the original attacks “copied the movies.” Unlike Michael Moore’s films
that were also criticized for perceived anti-American sentiment and also sought to show
sides to the Bush administration’s march to war not prominently featured in corporate media
news, September 11 never found a prominent American distributor and remains little known
in the United States.
In 2004, the commercial film most literally dedicated to the events of 9/11 with the wid-
est release opened. United 93 imagined in real time the hijacking of United Flight 93 and
the passengers’ success in banding together with the remaining crew to thwart the terrorists’
plans. The plane went down in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, rather than crashing in
Washington, DC, at a site like the White House or the Capitol, as was feared would happen.
While no one survived the crash, no damage befell any other federal landmark, nor were any
other lives lost. On a day of unprecedented loss and destruction caused by the three other
hijacked flights hitting their targets, many Americans took pride in the presumed heroism
of the rebelling passengers. A movie about United Flight 93 was therefore taking on a near-
sacred national story and risked backlash, the sense that even after five years it was still
“too soon.”
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To avoid the perception of blatant exploitation, director Paul Greengrass (Green Zone,
2010; Captain Phillips, 2013) cast little-known actors to play people presented with no per-
sonal histories. Viewers come to know the passengers and terrorists as they came to know
each other—solely in the context of events unfolding on the plane. While advertising for the
film made it seem like a more conventional action-thriller and therefore politically manipu-
lative or jingoistic, the film as a whole does its best to establish an objective point of view
detached from specific political scenarios. As Ebert noted, “The movie contains no politics.
No theory. No patriotic speeches.”6 United 93 depicts the military struggling to get permis-
sion to attack commercial flights but does not cast blame why such confusion of command
occurred. The famous last words “Let’s roll” can be heard as passengers prepare to storm
the cockpit, but they are not used to build any one character into a hero. Its circumscribed
approach to complex material succeeded with the public, and the film earned double its
production costs.
A decade later, Non-Stop (2014) fulfilled what the ad campaign and trailer for United 93
misleadingly promised, an action thriller aboard a plane, with hijackers—not snakes (Snakes
on a Plane, 2006)—playing the enemy. Non-Stop’s tagline, “The hijacking was just the
beginning,” refers to the predicament that global action star Liam Neeson faces as a fed-
eral air marshal challenged both to save passengers and to unravel the mystery of who is
framing him. Playing the film’s suspect and hero at once, Neeson’s character stands in for a
conflicted view of the United States as the world’s lone superpower, its savior and villain.
Neeson’s action-thriller persona—honed to the point of parody in films like Taken (2008),
Taken 2 (2012), and The Grey (2011)—placed amid chaotic violence aboard a plane, how-
ever, promises to revise 9/11’s traumatic imagery by giving viewers an Anglo hero certain
to turn the tables on the mysterious, faceless force of evil aligned against him. The revision-
ist irony is compounded by the fact that the terrorists turn out to be disillusioned American
soldiers, one the son of a man killed in the 9/11 attacks. As 1980s films revised the trauma
of Vietnam, this film revisits imagined scenes inside 9/11’s planes-turned-to-weapons and
rewrites the ending so that, to paraphrase Rambo, “we get to win this time.”7 Winning aboard
the planes would mean preempting the actions leading to war in Iraq and Afghanistan and
the subsequent disillusionment and cynicism of typical combat soldiers like those terror-
izing the plane. At the same time, the film celebrates Anglo heroics at the expense of its
disgruntled soldiers-turned-terrorists. This revised view of Western militarism implies that
the recent foreign wars have recycled and, at the same time, inverted the enemy, obliquely
delegitimating the ongoing crisis in postwar veteran rehabilitation and treatment. In other
words, this film would prefer to rid itself of any reminder of the post-9/11 American wars,
veterans included.
Twenty-First Century War Films
Less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush ordered retaliatory strikes against
the Taliban government and al-Qaeda terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. That initial act
of aggression escalated into a war that continued through Bush’s two terms in office and into
the second term of President Barack Obama. Not long after launching its offensive against
Afghanistan, the Bush administration indicated that under dictator Saddam Hussein, Iraq,
too, was involved in the 9/11 attacks. The administration also claimed Iraq possessed WMD,
including chemical weapons, and warned Americans and the United Nations that Iraq would
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unleash these weapons unless stopped by a preemptive show of force. In March 2003, the
United States invaded Iraq. As in every military campaign since World War II, the United
States never formally declared war against either Afghanistan or Iraq, yet the U.S. military
presence in Iraq lasted long past initial projections. By the end of 2003, American troops had
captured Saddam Hussein, and President Bush had declared an end to major combat opera-
tions, yet the occupation continued. A few years later, most Americans had turned against
the Iraq war, but not until 2011 did the United States complete the withdrawal of its military
forces. While trying to negotiate some kind of postwar troop presence, currently the United
States plans to pull all American brigades from Afghanistan at the end of 2014, making the
war there the longest in U.S. history. Meanwhile in fall of 2014, the United States launched
air attacks in Iraq and Syria against the terror group Islamic State in what appeared to be the
start of a new chapter of a war never formally declared and seemingly never-ending.
How did Hollywood react to this prolonged period of military campaigns abroad? Early
on, Winston Wheeler Dixon made this diagnosis:
While some contemporary films offer escapism, the bulk of mainstream American cinema
since 9/11, whether the films were in production before or not, seems centered on a desire
to replicate the idea of the “just war,” in which military reprisals, and the concomitant
escalation of warfare, are simultaneously inevitable and justified.8
Dixon here identifies a pattern that resembles the 1940s Hollywood war-film-as-propaganda.
Briefly put, this period of films helped enshrine the “greatest generation,” who fought and
endured World War II and, most importantly, prevailed. Films like Bataan (1943), Back to
Bataan (1945), The Wings of Eagles (1957), and even the Vietnam-set The Green Berets
(1968) burned with propagandistic passion, endorsing war as necessary and honorable, an
ideological trend that lasted well into the 1970s and then briefly subsided as the loss in
Vietnam and a new generation of filmmakers produced popular antiwar films like The Deer
Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979).
The next decade, the propagandist tendencies of the war genre resurfaced in historically
revisionist films. The Rambo series salvaged the “bad” war in Vietnam and rehabilitated
the image of American soldiers as brave men victimized not by the enemy but by gut-
less, hypocritical government bureaucrats. In Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), Vietnam
veteran John Rambo utters the franchise’s signature line. To the military’s request that
he return to “’Nam” to aid American POWs, Rambo says, “Do we get to win this time?”
The commander’s reply, “This time it’s up to you,” completes the film’s political agenda
to wrest the business of war from presidential and congressional control and hand it to
the military—an agenda that might have been realized had Vietnam veteran and former
POW John McCain ever been successful in his bids for the presidency. This subset of war
films recovered the vanquished American soldier’s valor while simultaneously restoring
integrity to the cause and purpose of war. A reclaimed vision of war as honorable was
then amplified by the post-Vietnam, post-Gulf War, pre-9/11 films Saving Private Ryan
(1998), Pearl Harbor (2001), and Windtalkers (2002). Films like these looked back to the
“good war” of World War II to redefine not simply “the troops” as noble but war itself as
a worthy endeavor. And Steven Spielberg’s critical and popular smash hit Saving Private
Ryan revised even the “good war” by sending the message that the United States defeated
the Nazis practically by itself.
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The early twenty-first century “just war” model followed a similar path. A remake from
the 1970s updated to the early years in the Afghan and Iraq wars, Walking Tall (2004) stars
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Army Special Forces Sgt. Chris Vaughn. After combat
service, Vaughn returns to his hometown only to find it degraded by drugs, violence, and a
dying economy. Trading his fatigues for a sheriff’s badge, Vaughn “liberates” the town from
corruption with a vigilante spirit and a trained expertise inherited from his army experience.
(In the run-up to a war he vigorously endorsed, Vice President Richard Cheney famously
said of the Iraq invasion, “We will be greeted as liberators.”) In a film popular enough
to break even, The Rock, a Republican supporter, handily wins Walking Tall’s “just war”
though it has been displaced from abroad to a remote town in the Northwest.
As suggested by its title, Home of the Brave (2004) was the first major release to dramatize
battles inside Iraq as well as the social and psychological complexity surrounding veterans’
return home. It drew comparisons with one of the seminal post-World War II films represent-
ing the traumatized vets’ reentry into society, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Unlike that
film, however, Home of the Brave was considered “an honorable dud,” failing critically and
financially.9 The movie portrays a National Guard unit about to be sent home when it sud-
denly gets one last assignment: a humanitarian mission. The film follows three members of
the predictably ambushed unit in their journey back home, where life has proceeded without
them. Vanessa, played by Jessica Biel, lost a hand in the ambush and returns with a pros-
thetic, while Will, played by a volatile Samuel Jackson, comes home to a son disenchanted
with him and his war. When asked by his wife what it was like “over there,” Will responds,
“I don’t really remember. It’s like a dream . . . a hazy dream.” That combined haziness of
geography and recall of purpose bleeds into the film and its resemblance to formulaic war
films about the good that soldiers do despite the homefolks who do not understand them.
War is simply war, no matter where it is fought or under what circumstances it is launched.
Even with the uniquely wrenching situation of volunteer National Guards called to active
duty abroad, Home of the Brave failed to distinguish the Iraq war from any other.
Eventually the tide of films sympathetic to framing war as retributive justice gave rise to
those more resembling the popular late-1970s films of Coppola and Cimino. These films of
the Iraq–Afghanistan era made it difficult to view warfare as both “inevitable and justified.”
Atrocious War
A scandal involving New York Times journalist Judith Miller revealed that the Bush admin-
istration and specifically the office of Vice President Cheney had planted news reports about
Iraq’s alleged hoarding of WMD and then pointed to those reports as proof of the weapons’
existence. The case for the invasion presented by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the
United Nations fell apart. At the same time as justification for the Iraq invasion began to
shrivel under scrutiny, the predicted “cakewalk” against Hussein’s military turned into a pro-
longed boots-on-the-ground battle against an unanticipated armed insurgency.10 Even after
the defeat of the Taliban, the conflict in Afghanistan wore on in a similarly ugly and confus-
ing fashion: who was the enemy now? What would victory look like? Against this backdrop,
some films began to question—implicitly in their vilification of governmental agencies and
openly in the dialogue of complex storylines—the politically freighted decision to wage
war. They bore down on what undeclared war against a non-state enemy like the terrorist
group al-Qaeda really entailed. At the same time, scandals around the outsourcing of war to
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private contractors, the behavior of U.S. troops toward civilians abroad, the use of torture
on political prisoners, and other human rights abuses came to define the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
In 2007, a plunge in American support for the Iraq war coincided with the debut of a spate
of films about it. These divided into two broad categories. One strand focused on controver-
sial U.S. policies condoning torture and on atrocities committed by American troops. The
other concerned the anguished plight of the American soldier caught up in a conflict once
considered just and good, if only for having been billed as retribution for the 9/11 attacks,
now suddenly tipping into “bad war,” morally and tactically contested, Vietnam territory.
Brian DePalma’s Redacted is a fictionalized account of the real-life rape and murder of
14-year-old Iraqi Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi and the killing of her family by American
soldiers. This storyline compares to DePalma’s Vietnam-set Casualties of War (1989). If
Vietnam was the war fought on televisions in America’s living rooms, DePalma presents
Iraq as the war fought on video via a variety of media, including handheld camcorders,
mobile phones, surveillance cameras, and Internet streams. Pieced together in an episodic
narrative, Redacted’s choppy, verité style imitates both contemporary media and the moral
aimlessness and brutality of the troops as they struggle to survive the confused purpose of
the Iraqi occupation. Promotions for the film spoke to the “edited” of its title: “See what
they don’t want you to see; what’s been redacted.” The film’s use of supposedly found
footage for a French documentary played on the supposition that, like the justification for
the invasion, the war itself was being produced and packaged for public consumption.
“I mean what are we doing here?” one soldier asks about the raid on Abeer’s home. His
line reflects the film’s questioning of the purpose behind continued American involvement
in Iraq.
Like Redacted, Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha dramatizes in graphic imagery the
real-life massacre by American troops of twenty-four Iraqis, almost half of them women
and children, including toddlers. All were shot at close range. Using nonprofessional and
little-known actors, including Iraqi war refugees and former Marines, the film opens with
soldiers addressing the camera in tormented confusion and bitter cynicism to answer the
question, “Why are we here?” The film short-circuits the political propaganda surrounding
the real-life event and returns the incident to its historical circumstance. Doing so creates
a modicum of sympathy for the battle-weary, psychologically scarred Marines without let-
ting them off the hook. The public’s rejection of Redacted and Battle for Haditha suggested
that these films’ unblinking approach to horrific events so vastly counter to popular images
of “our troops” was too politically threatening to Americans already disillusioned by the
Iraq war.
Directed by Oscar-winner Paul Haggis (Crash, 2004), In The Valley of Elah nonetheless
continued this exploration of atrocities committed by American soldiers, only this time the
crime occurs stateside against one of their own. Army Specialist Mike Deerfield returns
home only to be reported AWOL and then to turn up murdered, his charred and dismembered
body buried in the New Mexico desert. His father Hank (Tommy Lee Jones) is a retired mili-
tary police officer. He prods police detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron) until finally
he moves to his son’s base in New Mexico to find his own answers. Erratic clues in the form
of texts and images sent by Mike from Iraq lead Hank to suspect his son’s own comrades.
Hank’s search to find the truth about what the Iraq war has been like for Mike’s generation
gradually intensifies the film’s sense of dread and foreboding as the look of the film grows
243
increasingly washed-out and stark. Part police procedural, part father–son story, In the Val-
ley of Elah registers its political perspective in clear terms: The war in Iraq has produced
more casualties than body counts suggest, and it has harmed this country in ways certain to
be long-lasting and elusive to healing.
Grace Is Gone shares In the Valley of Elah’s concern for the widening gulf between the
thin slice of Americans who fight the nation’s wars and the much wider swath who get no
closer to battle than sporting a yellow “Support Our Troops” magnet on their SUVs. John
Cusack plays Stan, a Midwestern father looking after his two young girls while their mother,
his wife Grace, is stationed in Iraq. Poor eyesight got Stan rejected by the army when 9/11
prompted him to enlist. The film says he serves now by staying home and letting his wife
fight the war they both have supported. (He is the only man in a support group for army
spouses.) When he receives news of Grace’s death, he puts off telling his daughters and
instead takes them on a road trip to Florida for a last perfect day. Along the way they visit his
childhood home and his antiwar brother. Although less politically vociferous than Redacted,
The Battle for Haditha, or even the biblically titled war-murder-mystery In the Valley of
Elah, the quieter Grace Is Gone fared little better at the box office.
Rendition returned to the Bush administration’s controversial alteration of long-standing
American policies against torture, dramatizing the rendition to a North African country of an
Egyptian-born engineer named Anwar (Omar Metwally) on his way home to Chicago and his
blonde, pregnant wife, Isabella (Reese Witherspoon). Suspected of terrorist activity, Anwar
is handed over to a police commissioner by an increasingly disenchanted and dissolute CIA
agent, Douglas Freeman, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. This tactic is referred to as “rendi-
tion.” (The UK released the very similar Extraordinary Rendition also in 2007.) Rendition’s
storyline cuts back and forth between scenes of Anwar’s horrific torture in Africa and the
corridors of power in Washington, DC, where rendition policy is an open secret. Debates
about ends justifying means and Isabella’s desperate attempts to get anyone in Washington
even to acknowledge Anwar’s existence layer complexity into the film’s political point of
view. The New York Times noted, “While hardly neutral—it may not shock you to learn that
the filmmakers come out against torture, kidnapping, and other abuses—Rendition nonethe-
less tries to be evenhanded and thoughtful.”11 Like Redacted, Battle for Haditha, and In the
Valley of Elah, and for all its attempts to treat contentious issues seriously, Rendition met
with cries of anti-Americanism and financial loss.
Lions for Lambs eschewed war atrocities to focus on the immorality of an apathetic public
and business-as-usual political establishment during a time of war. Featuring an all-star cast
including Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise, its triptych storyline plays out on a college campus,
in a U.S. senator’s office, and across the nearly forgotten battlefields of Afghanistan. Robert
Redford, a politically active celebrity densely associated with the environmental movement
and the political cynicism of 1970s films as various as All the President’s Men, The Candidate,
and Three Days of the Condor, directed and starred. He plays Vietnam veteran and history
professor Dr. Stephen Malley, trying to shake a student out of his self-absorbed frat life and
political apathy. In the second storyline, Cruise plays Republican senator and presidential
hopeful Jasper Irving, offering coveted face time to high-profile journalist Janine Roth. The
two have been mutually beneficial to each other’s careers and Irving has summoned her for
his pitch to escalate the war in Afghanistan by way of Iran. She is appropriately skeptical,
even appalled, yet also seduced by his naked ambition unchecked by the disaster of Iraq and
the stalemate of Afghanistan.
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The third story belongs to Ernest Rodriguez and Arian Finch, two of Malley’s former
students who heeded his call for engagement by enlisting. Neither Latino Rodriquez nor
African-American Finch supports the wars, but both think that by serving they can work for
change from within “the system.” The New York Times complained about the film’s didacti-
cism: “Career Politicians, the Fourth Estate and Disaffected Youth all earn a stern knuckle
rapping” in this “big-screen lecture about civic responsibility and its absence in the Age of
Iraq.”12 The ending underscores the political point when the earnest, ill-prepared soldiers
die tragic deaths in a botched mission, lambs sacrificed all too easily by lions like politi-
cal opportunist Irving and a self-interested press corps too willing to play along. Lions for
Lambs, too, flopped financially.
Pro-Soldier
The lackluster box office showing of 2007’s war films did not halt the production of war
movies, a development that defies financially conservative Hollywood history. In another
break with the industry’s past, the following year two women directors released war mov-
ies: Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss. Consciously
attempting to occupy politically neutral territory and still tell the story of war, both films
foreground the experiences of American soldiers in Iraq and back home. In these films’ Iraq
scenes, unlike in Home of the Brave, unstable point-of-view cinematography dominates,
with queasy realism the primary effect. In Peirce’s film, this technique occurs in the opening
montage of still images and video shot, edited, and put to music by soldiers just like real
footage her own brother sent her. (The events of 9/11 compelled him to enlist.)
Inspired by her brother’s wartime experiences and videos, Pierce wrote Stop-Loss about
a group of soldiers returning to Texas from Iraq profoundly damaged in ways psychological
and physical, only to be called up for another tour of duty thanks to a merciless policy that
gives the film its ironic name. Observing their crackups—bar fights, night terrors, drunk-
craziness—the girlfriend of one soldier suffering an especially volatile case of PTSD asks,
“What happened to these guys?” The film implies an answer lifted from a 1970s anti-Vietnam
film: a “bad war” happened to them. But it also spends a lot of time with veteran Brandon
King, played by Ryan Phillippe, as he tries to fight the politics of redeployment. The senator
from whom he seeks reprieve is no help: “Our country needs you to go back. You know it’s
the right thing to do.” King yells, “Fuck the president!” before giving up plans to flee, obeys
the stop-loss order, and reveals the film’s ideological hand: Like it or not, soldiers do the
right thing by obeying unjust rules to fight even illegitimate wars.
Peirce explained Stop-Loss’s political balance between taking a soldier’s point of view
and objecting to U.S. war policy: “This movie is definitely pro-soldier. It may not be pro the
Stop-Loss policy. But we have tried to honor and show with great compassion and under-
standing the unique experience of these brave men.”13 The promotional campaign for the
film tiptoed so gingerly around the topic (for fear audiences would reject it out of hand
based on genre alone) and the film’s focus falls so narrowly on the soldiers that the Dallas
Observer titled its review, “Iraq War Movie Stop-Loss Does Its Best Not to Mention the
War.”14 By sidestepping the war, the political controversies around the reasons for going
to war, the changes to torture policies and practices, and the shift from a preemptive inva-
sion to embroilment in a regional war, Stop-Loss tried to distinguish itself from its failed
contemporaries and elicit audiences’ emotional investment through identification with its
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Stop-Loss (2008) stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Tommy Burgess, an ill-fated Iraq war veteran. Ryan
Phillippe plays Brandon King, a returning veteran arbitrarily ordered back to field duty.
characters’ youthful pain. Said Peirce, “This is really the first one, I think, from the soldier’s
point of view. It really has a rock ‘n’ roll, young, authentic feel, and it’s totally a young cast.
No one else is giving these guys a voice.”15 Stop-Loss received a Prism award for its por-
trayal of mental health issues, but financially it fell victim to what became known as “Iraq
war fatigue.”
Kathryn Bigelow echoed Peirce in promoting the politics-neutral agenda of The Hurt
Locker: “The story is from a soldier’s point of view.”16 Taking place predominantly in Iraq,
The Hurt Locker opens with the inscription “War is a drug” and then follows a series of
incidents involving an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) squad and its leader, adrenaline
addict William James, played by Jeremy Renner. Though his friendship with a local boy
begins to play tricks on his mind and he has a toddler son back in the States, when given the
chance James chooses his job in-country over safety and boredom at home—in Iraq, defus-
ing bombs, he is in his element. Slavoj Žižek points out the ideological import of the script’s
choice of the EOD profession:
This choice is deeply symptomatic: Although soldiers, they do not kill, but daily risk their
lives dismantling terrorist bombs that are destined to kill civilians. Can there be anything
more sympathetic to our liberal sensibilities? Are our armies in the ongoing War on Terror
(aka The Long War), even when they bomb and destroy, ultimately not just like EOD
squads, patiently dismantling terrorist networks in order to make the lives of civilians
safer?17
James’s job makes him a “good” soldier doing “good” work. It obscures the fact of Iraq as
a war of choice and the truth that the invasion turned out anything but a cakewalk. James’s
job is to protect, not destroy or kill, and that aspect to his character occludes the disturbing
246
truths of the occupation. At the same time, real soldiers who saw the film objected to James’s
daredevil behavior. Said one, “Films, almost more than anything, will be the way Americans
understand our war. For Hollywood to glorify this crap is a huge slap in the face to every
soldier who’s been on the front line.”18
Bigelow cited her efforts to create a non-Hollywood “look” as an act of respect toward the
military. She meant visual style to distinguish The Hurt Locker from other war films and to
force the audience’s sympathies. “You want to make it as real and as authentic as possible, to
put the audience into the Humvee, into a boots-on-the-ground experience . . . let the rawness
and integrity of the subject be as pronounced as possible.”19 Most film critics praised her
work for that “rawness” and Bigelow broke the “gold ceiling” by becoming the first woman
to win the Oscar for Best Director.

Critics like Žižek, however, ripped back the veil of Bigelow’s “authentic” aesthetic to
demystify what the film tried to gloss: “In its very invisibility, ideology is here, more than
ever: We are there, with our boys, identifying with their fears and anguishes instead of
questioning what they are doing at war in the first place.”20 Guy Westwell also criticized
Bigelow’s trademark, bewildering point-of-view camerawork that often leaves the viewer
unanchored from any particular character or organizing intelligence. When the camera then
reattaches to the perspective of a main character like James, the viewer is even more deeply
connected to his bomb squad’s point of view. It is one marked by paranoia and a constant
sense of being under unseen, threatening surveillance. To Westwell, this tactic effectively
reverses the power relations in Iraq to create the impression that it is the Americans who are
“imperiled, powerless, and victimized, in contrast to the realities of the balance of power
between an insurgency and the world’s most powerful army.”21 In these respects, the “pro-
soldier” strand of twenty-first-century war films minimizes the trauma and damage inflicted
on the Iraqis by the invading force.
Not only are Iraqis peripheral to these narratives, they are viewed on screen only from the
perspective of the American soldier. From this view, all Iraqis are like human improvised
explosive devices, their meaning limited to the danger they pose to the soldiers. The films
seldom see them on their own terms as innocent victims of the occupying force. In The Hurt
Locker, when James puts on the EOD bomb suit, his muted perception of Baghdad’s streets
and the fishbowl effect of his bubbled helmet underscore the film’s narrow, nearly claus-
trophobic scope. In a heart-pounding chase through a labyrinthine set of buildings early in
Stop-Loss, the Iraqis matter only as they endanger “our troops” and jeopardize King’s com-
mand. With the damage done, the setting switches to Texas. Iraq, its people, and its violent
suffering are left far behind, to surface again only implicitly in the wounded bodies and
fractured psyches of Stop-Loss’s “these guys.”
By showcasing “the integrity of the subject” with “great compassion,” the “pro-soldier”
films intentionally champion the home team and obscure the international toll the war has
taken. Helpless Iraqi victims and their scarred geographic and social landscapes remain
remote backdrops to the soldiers’ dramas. In this way these would-be politically neutral
films let American viewers off the hook for anything but sympathy for their own—and even
that at arm’s length, given the narrow band of the population (white, male, working-class)
most often featured as soldiers.
A more overtly political war film opened in 2010. Directed by United 93’s Paul Green-
grass and starring Matt Damon, Green Zone took on the issue of Iraq’s WMD, the most
compelling justification for the U.S.-led invasion. Damon plays Chief Warrant Officer Roy
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Miller, in charge of locating Hussein’s WMD, their existence certified by the Pentagon and
U.S. intelligence officer Clark Poundstone. Once Miller begins to suspect he has been sent
on a wild goose chase, he goes rogue in order to piece together the fabricated evidence for
war. A fearless Iraqi translator, an intrepid female journalist, and a CIA officer harboring
suspicions of his own assist him. The emerging truth resembles what actually happened: like
the American people, Miller’s been had. The film’s political message is that Iraq’s WMD
stockpile was not only elusive but a wholesale fiction dreamed up by the Bush administra-
tion, led by its neoconservative members. What is more, the United States fatally erred when
it fired the Iraqi army and left its soldiers at loose ends, armed and alienated. Early blunders
like these ensured that the promised cakewalk would turn into an unending, gruesome slog
to no clear benefit and devastating loss.

Obvious political content intentionally delivered within the thrills of an action movie
earned Green Zone $35 million. That amount was twice the profit of The Hurt Locker and
many times more than that of any of the 2007 war movies. Still, it accounted for only a frac-
tion of another Greengrass–Damon film: the action-thriller The Bourne Supremacy (2007)
grossed over $227 million.
The overtly political film Fair Game (2010) also dramatized the actual circumstances
surrounding the Bush administration’s casus belli. A key piece of Secretary Powell’s case
before the United Nations involved a report that Niger had sold uranium to Iraq for use in
developing nuclear weapons. CIA operative Valerie Plame volunteered her husband Joseph
Wilson, the former ambassador to Niger, to travel there to check out the facts. When he
reported that no evidence of the uranium sale existed, his findings were ignored. Worse, the
United States cited the nonexistent sale in its case for war. Wilson published an account of
his fact-finding mission. To discredit him, the office of the head cheerleader for war, Vice
President Cheney, leaked the fact that Wilson’s wife, Plame, was a CIA agent. Using the real
names of these real political players, Fair Game makes this political argument: fully aware
that Saddam Hussein had no WMD, the White House continued to claim the contrary so
that war with Iraq would seem both “inevitable and justified.” Featuring the outspoken Sean
Penn as an outraged Wilson and Naomi Watts as smooth professional Plame, the film also
claims that by outing Plame’s covert status, the vice president’s smear campaign was respon-
sible for the deaths of some seventy people working in her complex Middle Eastern web of
contacts and informants. The film’s “just the facts” style strengthens its message that the
very people the government should be able to rely upon to provide trustworthy intelligence
were grievously betrayed for political, and the film argues treasonous, reasons. Retreading
a story well aired in the news and splashed across the pages of Vanity Fair, Fair Game did
not sell a lot of tickets.
In 2012, a presidential election year and not coincidentally “the year of the political film,”
Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s follow-up to The Hurt Locker, opened.22 Weaving
together the “atrocious war” and “pro-soldier” war movie strands, Zero Dark Thirty drew on
factual accounts of the hunt for and killing of the man called “the most infamous terrorist in
our lifetime” and “the number one celebrity of evil,” Osama bin Laden.23 Topping the box
office on its opening weekend, Zero Dark Thirty inspired both vigorous political debate over
its depiction of torture as an integral part of the mission’s success and partisan bickering
over filmmakers’ access to officials in the Obama White House, the CIA, and the Pentagon.
Initially set for an October release, the film incited Republican complaints that it was no
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more than a reelection ad for President Obama. In addition to arranging a meeting between
the film’s screenwriter, Mark Boal, and the real-life operatives most responsible for the mis-
sion’s success, the CIA also provided Boal a tour of the vault where the raid was planned.
The agency even shared with him a mockup of the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden
was killed. The release date moved to Christmas.
In a rare case of the effects of Hollywood movies reaching the level of open political dis-
pute, three longtime U.S. senators issued a letter to the film’s studio, Sony Pictures:
Zero Dark Thirty is factually inaccurate, and we believe that you have an obligation to state
that the role of torture in the hunt for Usama Bin Laden is not based on the facts, but rather
part of the film’s fictional narrative. Regardless of what message the filmmakers intended
to convey, the movie clearly implies that the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques were
effective in eliciting important information related to a courier for Usama Bin Laden. We
have reviewed CIA records and know that this is incorrect. We are fans of many of your
movies, and we understand the special role that movies play in our lives, but the funda-
mental problem is that people who see Zero Dark Thirty will believe that the events it
portrays are facts. The film therefore has the potential to shape American public opinion in
a disturbing and misleading manner.24
Like the soldier protesting The Hurt Locker’s power to influence Americans’ view of how
the military does its job, the senators feared a susceptible public would believe the movie’s
propagandizing on behalf of the efficaciousness of torture. They make no mention, how-
ever, of the political context priming Americans to take the film for truth. For years prior to
the film’s release, the Bush administration endorsed “enhanced interrogation techniques,”
even as President Bush publicly stated, “This government does not torture people.” Ignoring
actual policy and political discourse, the senators instead fingered the film for blame. Their
letter also did not take issue with the film’s depiction of CIA agents engaged in torture, only
that it implies such methods produce actionable results.
A U.S. Senate intelligence committee also investigated whether the degree of access the
filmmakers enjoyed was appropriate. Once the film got shut out on Oscar night, however,
the investigation quietly ended. At the same time as Bigelow and Boal fended off accusa-
tions of a too-cozy relationship with the CIA, they denied that their film supported torture.
Declaimed Bigelow, “Depiction is not endorsement, and if it was, no artist could ever por-
tray inhumane practices. The point was to immerse the audience in this landscape, not to
pretend to debate policy.”25 Žižek would have none of it: “Without a shadow of a doubt,
she is on the side of the normalization of torture.”26 In this sentiment, the Lacanian-Marxist
philosopher found an unlikely ally in Senator John McCain, one of the letter’s authors, a
staunchly Republican former Vietnam POW and torture victim, and a leading political voice
against torture.
The soldier’s point of view anchoring Zero Dark Thirty belongs to Maya, a CIA operative
obsessed with the calling to find Osama bin Laden. Before focusing on Maya’s perspective,
the film opens on a sustained shot of a darkened screen; only the jarring audio of desperate
phone calls from people facing their doom on 9/11 can be heard. A harrowing waterboard-
ing scene follows. (Maya was scripted to participate in the waterboarding, but after CIA
objections, the film shows her only observing.) Thus the film begins on a cause-and-effect,
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retributive or “just war” note—the 9/11 attacks justify, even call for, the use of torture. It
then displaces that sentiment onto the figure of Maya, the very embodiment of vengeance as
holy justice. Witness to another CIA operative getting blown to bits in a brazen attack, Maya
says with Messianic certainty, “I believe I was spared so I could finish the job.” After bin
Laden is killed, she weeps.
Propaganda Redux
Made fully a decade after the launching of the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, Lone Survi-
vor (2013) brought the Hollywood war movie back to its propaganda roots. A vocal proponent
of the military, director Peter Berg achieved surprise blockbuster success—$124 million and
counting—with this true story of a 2005 Taliban assassination mission in Afghanistan gone
grievously wrong. The film stars Mark Wahlberg as Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, author of
the memoir with the same name. Lone Survivor belongs firmly to the World War II com-
bat film tradition of sweethearts left behind, manly teasing, unquestioned brothers-in-arms
solidarity, and a nostalgically defined “us versus them” mentality. Discovered mid-mission
by goat herders, four SEALs must decide whether to abide by the rules of engagement that
forbid killing unarmed civilians or do what the film suggests is the sensible thing and kill
them. Their decision is forecast in the film’s title, a foregone conclusion that has not deterred
audiences.
The most financially successful twenty-first century war movie by far, Lone Survivor got
love at the box office but hate from some critics. Its critical reception links Lone Survivor’s
cartoonish depiction of the Taliban enemy and its attempt to scrub itself clean of politics to
pro-war propaganda: “It’s about a politically charged situation but has almost no political
point of view” (Los Angeles Times); “A pro-war propaganda surprise hit—Mark Wahlberg
kills Taliban by the dozens in Hollywood’s first 2014 smash, a shameless war-porn spectacle”
(Salon.com); “Crude propaganda” (Vulture); “Lone Survivor’s Takeaway: Every War Movie
Is a Pro-War Movie” (The Atlantic). One critic locates the film’s propaganda in the Navy
SEALs’ boot camp scene at the film’s start: “It plays out like an advertisement for the Marine
Corps—an affectionate endorsement from Hollywood of the SEALs’ peerless brawn . . .
military indoctrination geared toward the young and the impressionable.”27 Another critic
noted that it was the first war movie of the “war on terror” era to hook a mainstream audi-
ence and that the filmmakers, “because they’re not total idiots,” intentionally avoided any
ideological message about the Bush administration or the Afghan war. Berg wanted to give
audiences a chance, in his words, to “express their patriotism in a way that doesn’t feel
political,” leaving the reviewer to remind readers, “to pretend that a movie has no politics is
in itself an ideological position, and never more so than in this jingoistic, pornographic work
of war propaganda.”28 As propaganda, it never questions war or assassination missions or
even whether personnel and resources diverted to Iraq might have made the difference for
the SEALs.
Like “pro-soldier” movies, Lone Survivor never takes its eyes off the home team, never
broadens its allegiances or its context. Audiences responded to the rah-rah message exactly
as propaganda intends. Though U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan, the cultural zeitgeist has
long since decided the war is over. All that remains is the recuperation of it in the popular
imagination as a “good war.” In pure political content and intent, Lone Survivor contributes
mightily to that effort.
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Acting Political: The Case of Ben Affleck
To build support for House Speaker John Boehner on the 2011 debt ceiling debate, House
majority whip Kevin McCarthy played a film clip to rally his troops. What made this inci-
dent newsworthy was the head-scratching choice of film. No Ronald Reagan “win just one
for the Gipper” speech from Knute Rockne (1940). No St. Crispin’s Day oratory from Ken-
neth Branagh’s Henry V (1989). Instead, the whip played a scene from The Town (2010)
in which director and star Ben Affleck plays a bank robber named Doug, who implores his
childhood friend Jim (Jeremy Renner), “I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is. You can
never ask me about it later. And we’re going to hurt some people.” Without missing a beat,
bank-robbing thug Jim replies, “Whose car are we gonna take?” Cut to the brothers-in-crime
donning hockey masks to beat a man senseless, then shoot him when he professes not to
know what he did to get Doug, in Jim’s words, “so cranked up.”
The pep rally worked. When the clip ended, Florida representative, vociferous Tea Par-
tier, and former army officer Allen West jumped to his feet to declare, “I’m ready to drive
the car.”29 Jon Stewart on The Daily Show quipped, “Quick, Robin, to the Bat-shit mobile!”
before asserting that the Republicans answering the call to “drive the car” must not have
seen the whole movie since in the end Doug abandons a dying Jim. The Town is not an
overtly political film and, as Stewart’s commentary suggests, was not meant to inspire politi-
cal action or to propagandize on behalf of a partisan cause. That McCarthy used it with
evident success speaks to the influence of Hollywood films to affect human behavior and
political beliefs through their melodramatic mode of address. This definitive style is evi-
dent here in the low-angle, single shot of Doug as he addresses an off-screen Jim, his face
slightly askance to the camera. Actor blocking and film framing create the momentary sense
that Doug speaks to “us,” the audience, requesting our complicity through violence and our
loyalty to a secret we promise both to keep and not to know.
This theory of the viewer as a willing, fervent, but uninformed or willfully clueless
conspirator bears comparison to the uneasy compact Americans made with the federal gov-
ernment in the wake of 9/11 and the passage of the Patriot Act, a policy that both deprives
Americans of long-held basic rights and keeps them in the dark about what government
This shot of Ben Affleck as bank robber Doug in The Town (2010) exemplifies a melodramatic mode of
address.
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does by virtue of their abdication of those rights. Looking back at the 1980s, Michael Rogin
defined this kind of political phenomenon with the paradoxical phrase, “covert spectacle.”
The concept of the covert spectacle reveals how citizens’ participation in political life and
access to political knowledge resemble a moviegoer’s relation to characters and action on
screen, a combination of pleasurable voyeurism and privileged complicity. In the covert
spectacle orchestrated by government secrecy, and contrary to an informed active citizenry,
“Spectators gain vicarious participation in a narrative that, in the name of national security,
justifies their exclusion from information and decision-making.”30 Limited, spectator-
like participation in the political sphere precipitates ingenuous, emotional attachment to
government-scripted narratives—and to their featured players.
The stories and imagery generated by the government around soldiers Jessica Lynch in
Iraq and Pat Tillman in Afghanistan exemplified covert spectacle. In an elaborate campaign
of lies based on exaggeration and myth, Lynch’s harrowing captivity by the enemy and Till-
man’s death by friendly fire were transformed into vignettes lifted from an action-packed
superhero franchise film. Looking at the deplorable facts of each case, the military called for
“rewrite!” In place of the actual miscommunication, poorly equipped vehicles, and tactical
disaster that befell each soldier, we got heroics of big-screen proportions. Thus a mislead-
ing script for war, replete with fictional blockbuster characters, replicated the clip from The
Town to demand of a susceptible American public its acceptance of violence and pledge
of loyalty to a secret it must promise both to keep and not to know: why the United States
invaded Iraq. In fact, much about the politics of launching the Iraq invasion fits Rogin’s
paradigm, where orchestrated displays of both diplomatic effort—Colin Powell’s speech to
the UN where he brandished a model vial of anthrax—and militaristic might—the tearing
down of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Iraq—obscured in plain sight the full exercise of power
belying the administration’s paradox of open intent and secret motivation. As Rogin has it,
“Covert spectacle . . . aims to control not simply political power but knowledge.”31
The Town’s power of persuasion over the likes of Congressman West suggested in an
ironic way the inherently political import films bear culturally even when they do not address
overtly political themes, disrupt political culture, or feature political stories and players. The
use of The Town to inspire fundamentally political action on behalf of the Republican Party
is ironic also for Affleck’s own political sympathies. Describing the situation as bizarre,
Affleck said, “I don’t know if this is a compliment or the ultimate repudiation. But if they’re
going to be watching movies, I think The Company Men is more appropriate.”32
The Company Men (2010) concerns the plight of three middle-aged men laid off during
the “Great Recession” that began with the collapse of financial markets in 2008. Depressed
about his unemployment and subsequent loss of self-worth, one character commits suicide.
His death underscores the sacrifice of the American job market to corporate profits unevenly
distributed among shareholders, CEOs, and workers. The suicide’s grim weight upon the
film also contrasts with the sensationalized criminality, violence, and murder that underpin
The Town. The Company Men invokes the widespread suffering inflicted on the very Ameri-
can public that Speaker Boehner’s hyped debt debate ignored most. Says one “company
man,” “My life ended and nobody noticed.” This Affleck flick critiques the invisibility of the
recession’s victims and their absence from the American citizenry’s spectatorial relationship
to government economic discourse. As the Bush administration transitioned to the Obama
administration, Washington political theater yanked the big top’s tent-stakes from foreign
policy and pitched it over the economic arena. When an ordinary life ends as a sideshow
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off screen from the spectacle that the political class has staged about the horrors of national
debt and the apocalyptic need for big bank bailouts, what chance has any citizen to “notice”?
The Company Men criticizes status quo politics that ignores high unemployment figures and
lets workers slip through the holes of a badly fractured economy and frayed social safety
net. Depressing yet timely, The Company Men predictably failed at the box office, grossing
a small fraction of The Town’s profits.
Two other Affleck films, State of Play and Argo, represent typologically purer political
films. State of Play (2008) features Russell Crowe as Cal, a rumpled but tireless political
reporter, and Affleck is Cal’s college pal, Stephen Collins, a suave but apparently sincere
politician with a secret. Collins is investigating the dark dealings of a mysterious private
security contractor reaping big profits from the wars. When his lead researcher, with whom
he’s had an affair, is killed, news reports say Collins is a suspect, but Cal is torn by profes-
sional and personal imperatives. Directed by Kevin MacDonald, State of Play resembles All
the President’s Men. Once again brightly lit newspaper offices stand for the search for truth,
and once more suspenseful action unfolds in dark underground structures where political
intrigue meets criminal activity. (In place of Jason Robards’s portrayal of Post editor Ben
Bradlee, Helen Mirren does a Tina Brown turn in bobbed blonde hair as editor Cameron
Lynne.) Dinosaur Cal works the news beat on an ancient computer and bickers with young
Della, an ambitious gossip blogger eager for a more substantial beat. The only old-fashioned
thing about her is her name—she does not own a pen! Together old and new news solve the
mystery, but by that point the film has ditched the vexed topic of military privatization for
the melodrama of triangulated sexual desire. An absorbing look at the hidden costs of out-
sourcing war to contractors splinters into clichés and confusion, illustrating the difficulty of
even political thrillers to sustain political critique when the object of that analysis is part of
the covert spectacle of national defense policy.
Nostalgia of a different kind animates Argo (2012), directed by and starring Affleck and
winner of the Best Picture Oscar. During the 1979 overthrow of the shah of Iran, armed revo-
lutionaries stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took hostages. This film tracks the
six Americans lucky enough to escape and take refuge in the home of the Canadian ambas-
sador. They know it is only a matter of time before they are discovered. Argo takes its name
from a phony movie concocted as a cover to get CIA operative Tony Mendez (Affleck) inside
Iran. An expert at “exfiltration,” Mendez poses as a Canadian movie producer and outfits the
six as his crew. To establish their cover, they scout locations for the fake movie “Argo” in
Tehran, and eventually this ruse allows them to take their seats on an airplane home.
In a twist on typical Hollywood coding, 1970s and early 1980s fashions are not played for
jokes and Argo’s CIA agent is the good, if also ethnically vague, guy. In a twist on a histori-
cally dark time, America unexpectedly finds a ray of light in the rescue of the six, a view
both nostalgic and revisionist at the same time. In other ways, however, the ideology remains
the same: Mendez achieves hero status only by bucking the incompetent, uncaring gov-
ernment institution that would shut down his rescue operation. This exchange captures the
dynamic: when Mendez says, “We’re responsible for these people,” his supervisor replies,
“What we are is required to follow orders.”
If State of Play was a nod to All the President’s Men, in the rule-bending figure of Mendez
Argo tips its hat to a different Redford anti-institutional vehicle of the 1970s, Three Days
of the Condor. As one cultural observer sees it, in the post-bin-Laden era the pop culture
fixture of the rogue CIA agent is less likely to incriminate the agency than to humanize it.
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In part, this shift reflects the agency’s decision at the start of the twenty-first century to start
consulting on films because it was fed up with being depicted as a “nefarious organization”
lacking a moral compass and consisting of rogue operatives.33 Of course Hollywood, too,
looks “good” in Argo—movie pros played by John Goodman and Alan Arkin dream up
“Argo,” the movie-within-the-movie, all the way down to a mock production history and
fake advertising campaign, the better to provide convincing cover and establish Mendez’s
movie producer credibility.
At the same time, Iranians play their familiar screen villain’s part, with virtually none
of them emerging as anything but inherently violent, irrational, and hysterically Other. Yet
one scholar noticed that it is the fake movie’s storyline and its resemblance to the actual
Iranian Revolution that sets the six free. When one of the refugee embassy staff members
tells the story of “Argo” in Farsi to one of the questioning Iranian Revolutionary Guards
holding them up at the airport, it is the utopian story of the Revolution not as Argo the movie
presents it—“confusing crypto-fascistic ethnic-theological revolt”—but as “Argo” the fake
script does. After listening to the fable of “nobodies who rise up in a galaxy far, far away to
throw down an oppressive order,” the guard lets them on the plane.34 Despite itself, then, the
film ultimately takes the side of revolution at a time when the United States itself was con-
vulsing with demonstrations—the Occupy Wall Street movement, various college protest
movements, and the symbolic rupture of erstwhile racial order by the presidency of Barack
Hussein Obama.
Political Biopics
Political biographies surged in the twenty-first century, including Bobby (2006), about the
political life and assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Written and directed by Emilio Este-
vez, Bobby departs from biopic convention with a large ensemble cast of well-known actors,
including Estevez, and a compressed plot containing multiple storylines that unfold over a
single day and in one place: June 6, 1968, in the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel, the time
and location of Kennedy’s murder. In postmodern remediating fashion, the film incorporates
the historical Kennedy through archival footage. The effect makes him present in his own
biopic. This aesthetic technique bends time to the contemporary longing for the political
vision and ethical certitude of RFK compared to the morally murky politics of the day—that
is, the wartime “enhanced interrogation techniques” and increased tax cuts for the wealthy
offered by the Bush administration. Bobby’s speeches lament the nation’s involvement in
Vietnam as proxy for Iraq and cite growing threats to the environment as proxy for global
climate change. Bobby-the-movie and Bobby-the-virtual-cast-member together resurrect the
political message that Kennedy embodied: help for the poor, healing between racial groups,
and “love,” a rhetorical fixture in his political lexicon. Including stories of the hotel staff
and guests builds viewer investment in the common people whose cause RFK championed.
Steven Soderbergh directed the two-part biopic of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevera,
titled Che (2008). The film covers the time from his 1955 meeting with Fidel Castro to the
1959 overthrow of Cuba’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista. It is interspersed with black-and-
white scenes of Che’s 1964 visit to New York when he was interviewed by a journalist and
addressed the United Nations. While Bobby used archival footage to retrieve a vision of
Kennedy warehoused in news shows and documentaries of the 1960s, Soderbergh creates
a constant sense of verisimilitude with Benicio Del Toro in the title role. That visual style
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persists through Che: Part Two, picking up seven years after the end of Che: Part One.
Part Two focuses on the year a doomed Che spent in Bolivia, where he was captured and
executed with an assist from the CIA. Even with Che’s historical cult status—his likeness
graces T-shirts, dorm rooms, building walls in Cuba, even vodka bottles—the film had no
wide release or breakthrough at the box office.
A more traditional biopic, Milk (2008) follows the first openly gay elected official in San
Francisco, Harvey Milk. His personal journey from New York to the West Coast, from the
closet to running for city office as an openly gay man, takes on the weight of a social move-
ment. Drawing on archival footage and a personal statement Milk recorded late in his life,
Gus Van Zant’s moving tribute to the man and his times culminates in Milk’s assassination
by Dan White, a political conservative. The two clash as the film charts Milk’s growing
political effectiveness and White’s increasingly unhinged response to personal pressures and
Milk’s ascendance. The film’s final arc traces the 1978 fight against a statewide initiative
to bar gays from public school jobs. Sean Penn won a Best Actor Oscar in the lead role, a
Hollywood tradition of honoring straight, normative actors for playing the Other. The film
did brisk business at the box office, a sign of the times of broader support for the gay rights
movement and the legalization of gay marriage in bellwether states like Iowa.
Frost/Nixon (2008) took another fork in the biopic road by focusing solely on the produc-
tion in 1977 of David Frost’s famous, wide-ranging yet combative interviews with Richard
Nixon after he had resigned from office and was looking to rehabilitate his image, save his
political legacy, and make over half a million dollars for agreeing to do the show. Directed
by Ron Howard and starring Frank Langella as Nixon and Martin Sheen as Frost, the film
succeeded in generating dramatic tension around what might have been inert material.
Sheen’s jet-setting, womanizing Frost looks like easy prey for the cunning Nixon, intent on
running the show. The story unwinds to a classic reversal as Frost gives Nixon more than
he bargained for in both wit and psychological stamina. It is Frost who gets Nixon to utter
the famous, damning line, “I’m saying that when the president does it, it’s not illegal!” In a
moment drenched in self-pity yet laced with self-knowledge, Nixon confesses:
I let them down. I let down my friends, I let down my country, and worst of all I let down
our system of government, and the dreams of all those young people that ought to get into
government but now they think, “Oh it’s all too corrupt and the rest.” Yeah . . . I let the
American people down. And I’m going to have to carry that burden with me for the rest of
my life. My political life is over.
These lines explain not only the attitude of “all those young people” toward government but
also an entire generation of political movies defined by cynicism and paranoia.
Steven Spielberg’s long-awaited portrait of a different religiously minded president,
Lincoln (2012) drew record crowds and restored belief in the idea that Hollywood could
make “serious” political films and audiences would respond. Although Spielberg has spoken
of how difficult it was to get funding for the project and admitted that he even contemplated
making it for television, the film was a critical triumph and box office hit. What makes the
film its own brand of political biopic, however, is not so much its commercial appeal as its
dramatic re-creation of the legislative process. While it covers the growing hostility toward
the president in the waning days of war and ends with his assassination, most of the drama
unfolds around Lincoln’s efforts to pass landmark legislation—the constitutional amendment
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Lincoln (2012) dramatizes the president’s push to finish the Civil War and to end slavery through
constitutional amendment before the Southern states rejoin the Union and block its passage. Director
Steven Spielberg casts Lincoln in the golden glow of an eternal flame delivering his second inaugural
address: “With malice toward none and charity for all . . . let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to
bind up the nation’s wounds.”
to forever ban slavery in the United States. Daniel Day Lewis won the Best Actor Oscar for
his vulnerably bodied, storytelling Lincoln. The film was nominated for Best Picture though
it lost to the overtly political Argo.
Starring George W. Bush
Within the subset of twenty-first-century political biopics fall three films variously based on
the persona of George W. Bush, the dominant American political figure of the new century’s
first decade. They illustrate the different ways popular film has responded to the chaos of the
new millennium and the role Bush played in defining a decade of tumult.
Weeks after Bush’s departure from the White House, Oliver Stone released W. (2008),
his third presidential biographic film following JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995). Featuring a
lauded performance by Josh Brolin as George W. Bush, the film addresses key events and
sociopolitical conflicts of its time period. In its perceived sympathy for a very unpopular
president, however, the film does not as closely reflect the mood of its times. Stone pointedly
depicts Vice President Cheney attempting to direct Bush’s presidency on profound matters
like torture—legislation and memos that Bush resists signing without even reading. Eventu-
ally and regrettably, however, Bush joins with the Cheney faction in the push to invade Iraq.
It is downhill from there. Stone portrays Bush’s need to prove himself to his father, George
H.W. Bush, as a personal and family tragedy. He closes the film with a fantasy image of the
former baseball team owner, W., alone in a stadium racing to make a game-saving catch, a
look of perplexity shadowing his familiar squinted expression.
W. was less controversial than Stone’s earlier biopic, JFK, and much less controversial
than the second of the movie-cluster to suggest the filmic transcoding and the decade’s anxi-
ety and pessimism during Bush’s tenure. The British television film Death of a President
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(2006) used cunning CGI effects to imagine the assassination of George W. Bush in an eerily
realistic fashion. A sniper takes out the president in Chicago as he heads to his motorcade
after making a speech and working a rope-line. The secret service rushes him to the hospital
much as in the actual 1981 attempted assassination of President Reagan. The investigation
immediately centers on a Syrian-born gunman as a shocked nation confronts the war on ter-
ror in the post-Bush era. The head of the British television channel to air the film defended its
premise, saying that the shooting occurs only ten minutes into the ninety-minute film and is
only glimpsed rather than taking place in a “gratuitously lengthy gazing kind of scene”—it
is a very small drop in the bucket of exploitative violence compared to the blood and death
recorded daily in the news from Iraq.35 The Bush White House refused to comment on the
film, saying it did not merit a response, and London critics scoffed at arguments that the
movie was serious filmmaking. They labeled it hype and not a serious study of the darkly
uncertain times. Promotional photos of the film filled British papers showing a mortally
wounded Bush dying in a Secret Service agent’s arms, courting further controversy espe-
cially among those who thought the photos were real.
The third film in the George W. Bush-relevant trio is the most loosely linked to the
historical figure and the most obvious example of how genre films often invite political
interpretation. An independently produced, low-budget horror film, Frailty (2002) trans-
lates in broad strokes an aspect vital to the Bush presidency that later studies would come
to examine closely: his born-again Christianity and sense of himself as called by God to
steer the ship of state through the riotous waters of the post 9/11 world, to direct a “war on
terror” against what he dubbed “evildoers.” For example, Bush has explained, “I feel like
God wants me to run for President. I can’t explain it, but I sense my country is going to need
me.”36 This is a very personal sense of a heavenly mandate that, although in service to the
country, is directed, according to Bush, at him alone. While Stone’s W. is very much a prod-
uct of his family dynamics, Bob Woodward’s book Plan of Attack recounts the way Bush
perceived 9/11 to have strengthened that divine calling. Asked whether he has consulted his
father about his plans for war in Iraq, Bush responds, “You know he is the wrong father to
appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher power I appeal to.”37
Frailty operates in a similar Manichean realm of good and evil, father and son intensity,
and murderous acts inspired by religious conviction. It even deploys the same rhetoric of
good and evil, divine and mortal. Director and star Bill Paxton plays Dad Melks, a Texan
widower and father of two boys, who in his divine calling is visited by an angel instructing
him to destroy demons disguised as humans. He enlists his sons as collaborators in a series
of gruesome ax murders carried out as a holy crusade. Although the older boy knows his
father has gone mad, the younger one believes him; his naive desire to stay at one with his
murderous parent lends him a modicum of humanity. Told in flashback years later by one
of the sons to a federal agent, the film stays true to its genre and provides a plot twist to
upend all that viewers have come to believe about the story. While clearly not a straight-
forward portrayal of George W. Bush and his religious beliefs, the film can be interpreted
as transcoding the president’s Manichean moral certainty and avowed religious guidance
regarding the decisions to launch two foreign wars and a more vaguely defined war on terror
as part of a crusade against evildoers.
From the beginning of Bush’s candidacy for president, he strongly identified as a reli-
gious person, the perfect candidate for conservative Christians. That voting bloc stuck by
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Bush even by the disastrous end of his term in office as he continuously reaffirmed his
status as a Christian. His pre-9/11 stand on abortion and initiation of an office to provide
federal funds to religious programs were prelude to the rhetoric he would adopt once the
Twin Towers fell. Beginning with his evocation of a “crusade” against an “axis of evil,”
Bush spoke easily in biblical and apocalyptic language, saying, “This is a new kind of,
a new kind of evil. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade,
this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.”38 His Texas cowboy persona invoked the
language of a western—a genre that also traffics in a rigid ideology of good guys and bad
guys. Having declared Osama bin Laden wanted dead or alive, Bush also famously said of
the terrorists, “We’re smokin’ them out, we’ve got ’em on the run.” These aspects of Bush’s
presidential persona link him to Frailty’s Dad Melks and the film’s tightly constructed story
with a confined, at times fantastical, mise-en-scène that binds sons to father, father to sons,
sons to each other in a confusion of patriarchal-filial duty and a conception of masculinity
gone to psychotic extremes in the absence of both a maternal counterweight and a secular
epistemology.
Sociopolitical Biopics
Not a typologically authentic political biopic but high in political intent, Dallas Buyers
Club (2013) offers a scathing critique of the Federal Drug Administration. It dramatizes
the real-life personal, medical, and legal battles fought by Ron Woodroof, a hard-partying,
bull-riding electrician diagnosed with AIDS in the mid-1980s. Its politics addresses homo-
phobia and medical research in the age of “big pharma” in the context of Woodroof’s fight
to get the FDA to approve alternative drug protocols and treatment to ease the disease’s
symptoms. Woodroof is played with fierce energy by a diseased-skinny Matthew McCo-
naughey in a part that won him a Best Actor Oscar. Woodroof snorts coke, slugs back
whiskey like water, and is “addicted to pussy,” as a fellow redneck-homophobe says. When
he receives his diagnosis, his world overturns in ways that force him to confront more than
just the medical establishment’s slow-footed approach to the “gay” disease. When told the
In Dallas Buyers Club (2013), Matthew McConaughey plays real-life Ron Woodroof, battling “big
pharma” and the FDA to seek alternative treatments for AIDS. His cowboy hat signifies his “buck the
system” independence as he meets with scientists overseas.
258
FDA has not approved a drug yet, Woodroof responds, “Screw the FDA, I’m going to be
DOA. Are you telling me I got to sue the hospital to get my medicine?” Told of a support
group he can attend instead, Woodroof says, “I’m dying and you’re telling me to go get
a hug from a bunch of faggots?” That the profane, largely unlikable Woodroof is such an
unlikely candidate to crusade against the expense and actual danger of early AIDS drugs
like AZT drives the film. Woodroof researches medicines used in other countries but unap-
proved by the FDA, an organization depicted as overly cozy with large pharmaceutical
companies with their financial stake in the success of dangerous drugs like AZT, a drug
abandoned for cancer treatment when it proved more lethal than healing. He becomes a
medical pioneer and patients’ rights hero by illegally bringing supplements and drugs like
interferon to the United States to self-administer and sell to other sufferers, most of them
gay men he learns to embrace.
The film’s title refers to the way around the crime of selling treatments lacking FDA
approval pioneered in the AIDS crisis: patients purchase subscriptions to the club and only
as club members receive the drugs. The film’s social climax occurs when Woodroof forces
a gay-bashing former friend to shake hands with Rayon, Woodroof’s business partner, a
transgender person with AIDS played with a supple spirit by Jared Leto. Its political climax
occurs when a judge announces from the bench that people like Woodroof have the right to
choose their body’s own remedy, but that is
interpreted as medical care that is approved by the FDA. Regarding the FDA, the court is
highly disturbed by its bullying tactics. The FDA was formed to protect people, not prevent
them from getting help. . . . What is lacking here is legal authority to intervene.
Though the court rules against him, Woodroof returns to his renegade company, the
Dallas Buyers Club, and a hero’s welcome for his bravery simply in mounting the case.
Though the convenience of setting up a straight white man as the crusading face of a health
crisis that devastated gay and minority communities is hard to overlook, the film’s success
at the box office and during awards season testifies to the country’s growing acceptance of
Dallas Buyers Club (2013) earned McConaughey a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of a hard-
partying Texan, straight white man as a pioneer for the right of patients to determine their own care.
259
gay rights, a societal trend perhaps most powerfully evidenced by the number of states that
have legalized gay marriage.
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) centers on another real-life, hard-partying renegade with
legal troubles: Jordan Balfort. Played with charm, smarm, and carpe diem gusto by Leo-
nardo DeCaprio, Balfort is a financially successful but morally bankrupt and highly corrupt
stock trader. His life is synonymous with excess—sex, drugs, and conspicuous consump-
tion of cars, houses, and clothes. One representative and symbolic image includes Jordan
contemplating a naked woman taped with stacks of cash to smuggle overseas on his behalf.
Every American materialist impulse gets full consideration in the case of Balfort’s self-made
success mastering “Wall Street,” code for “casino” in this film’s view. From scenes of a half-
naked marching band parading through his company’s penthouse offices to Balfort struggling
to speak and drive in a drug-induced paralysis to his penchant for snorting coke during sex,
acts of debauchery and hedonistic self-absorption fill nearly every frame. One of the year’s
most successful films, the Martin Scorsese-directed The Wolf of Wall Street courted con-
troversy by appearing to romanticize the very kinds of risky financial transactions, lack of
effective legal oversight, and personal lifestyles that crashed the world’s economy in 2008.
As one reviewer asked, “Does it offer a sustained and compelling diagnosis of the terminal
pathology that afflicts us, or is it an especially florid symptom of the disease?”39 Its success
suggests the answer is both. As with films like Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010),
Margin Call (2011), and Arbitrage (2012), the portrayal of greed rewarded by financial suc-
cess walks a fine line with greed condemned by poorly enforced laws and social scorn. As
evidenced by Wall Street’s roaring comeback in 2010 after the postcrash big bank bailouts,
political will matters for little when the rewards of risk and corruption are so high.40
In 2010, President Barack Obama declared March 31 Cesar Chavez Day in honor of the
Mexican-American labor rights leader whose slogan, “¡Sí se puede!” or “Yes, we can!” can-
didate Obama borrowed in 2008. In spring 2014, the political biopic Cesar Chavez screened
at Obama’s White House. Directed by Diego Luna, the film won that year’s audience award
at the increasingly influential South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. Chavez founded
the United Farm Workers of America and was instrumental in winning better pay and
working conditions for migrant grape pickers, a labor victory that led to other pro-worker
legislation. In a jobless economic recovery, when the power of unions and the rights of
laborers have reached a nadir, Luna intended the film to achieve contemporary political
effect, saying, “The struggle and fight of these people is still so much alive, and they deserve
attention. Hopefully this film can draw attention, not just to farm workers but to all of those
workers that today are feeding this country, that are building this country.”41 Recent renewed
labor rights demonstrations have included strikes and boycotts against fast food restaurant
chains. Movement to raise the federal minimum wage is also under way, with several states
raising their minimum rate ahead of federal action.
With Michael Peña as Chavez and America Ferrera as his wife, Helen, Cesar Chavez also
features John Malkovich as a grower in conflict with Chavez and his expanding union power.
The film’s production company, Participant Media, has a history of involvement in politi-
cally ambitious films. These include Lincoln (2012); Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), about
pre-9/11 U.S. involvement in Afghanistan; The Help (2011), about relationships between
black domestic workers and their white employers in the 1960s; the anti-fracking Promised
Land (2012); and Snitch (2013), about drug trafficking and unjust mandatory sentencing
laws. With Cesar Chavez, the company’s portfolio expanded to tell a classic David versus
260
Goliath, immigrant worker versus capitalist American story that appealed to Latinos, an
increasingly powerful voting bloc and movie market. Hagiographic, the film sparked debate
about where Chavez would have sided on today’s knotty issue of immigration, a topic the
film itself avoids.
Political Climate Change
Apocalyptic threats were the hook for another post-9/11 thriller, The Day After Tomorrow
(2004). In this update of the 1970s disaster film genre, global warming takes an unexpected
and extreme turn for the worse. New York City is flooded and flash-frozen while tornadoes
destroy Los Angeles. One scientist, Adrian Hall (Dennis Quaid), is aware of the coming
debacle but unable to prevent it. Filmmaker Roland Emmerick, who also directed Indepen-
dence Day (1996) and White House Down (2013), intended to critique the environmental
policies of the Bush administration by including a president and vice president suspiciously
reminiscent of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney. (Even after the tornadoes wipe out Los
Angeles, the president refuses to change his mind about global warming!)
Although scientists largely discounted the way the film portrays the threat of climate
change, including the speed at which catastrophe strikes, Emmerick intended it as a caution-
ary tale and claimed he was simply warning that these events could happen if behaviors do
not change. While also criticized for its one-dimensional characters, the movie did spark
political discussion. Critics of the science of climate change feared that the enormously pop-
ular film would add an irrational element to the environmental policy debate. Indeed, in its
wake, other films exploited fears surrounding continued disregard for the effects of carbon
emissions and other pollutants. Emmerick returned to the genre with the financial and criti-
cal flop 2012 (2009), about a geoscientist who discovers that the earth’s core is heating up
and the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. In the dystopian fantasy Pacific Rim (2013),
polluted oceans unleash attacking aliens called Kaiju, gigantic robotic creatures similar in
appearance to the car-robots in the Transformers franchise. The expensive flop After Earth
The Day After Tomorrow (2004) puts climate change on fast-forward as rising seas and a new ice age
envelop the Statue of Liberty.
261
(2013) takes place after humans have ruined their habitat and fled to a different planet; a
military general and his son (played by real-life father and son Will and Jaden Smith) crash
back to earth to face the frightening, at times beautiful life that has grown back. Paying lit-
tle heed to the politics surrounding carbon emission and energy policies, these films assume
climate change as fact yet also serve as what Blair Miller calls “case studies for hegemony”
by taking the potentially subversive topic of human contribution to climate change and trivi-
alizing it, draining it of urgency, and convincing audiences nothing need be done.42
A more earnest look at the environmental costs of continued dependence on fossil fuels,
Promised Land (2012) features the left-leaning, politically engaged Matt Damon cast against
type as a corporate salesman trying to convince an economically strapped town to sell his
company drilling rights to its land. Directed by Gus Van Zant (Milk, 2008) and written by co-
stars Damon and John Krasinski, Promised Land succeeded critically by nuancing the face
of corporate profit in Damon’s character, Steve Butler. “I’m not a bad guy,” he says, and the
film agrees. He is part corporate predator and part proselytizer for “fracking,” a controver-
sial process for extracting natural gas from shale that he claims will save rural America. The
film paints the debate in shades of gray through its characters but the double-twist ending
clearly puts the film on the side of the antifracking movement. Even with a proven director
and popular stars, the film flopped.
Hollywood Gets Religion
Although few movies of the period explored traditional religious beliefs, Mel Gibson’s The
Passion of the Christ (2004) attracted more viewers than almost any of the political movies and
more than three times as many as Fahrenheit 9/11. The Passion focuses on the torture of Christ
in the final two hours of his life. Although it reflects a distinctively traditional theological view
of its subject matter, it does not pursue explicit political themes. It was intended to be a literal
reenactment of the death of Jesus Christ, as told by the Bible. However, its immense popularity
(along with the conservative ideology of its maker) seemed to signal a sociocultural statement.
The biggest specific controversy that arose with the film’s release, however, was sparked
by allegations that it blamed Jews for the death of Jesus. Although critics predicted a new out-
break of anti-Semitism, little if any ethnic conflict actually ensued. A different impact of the
film was the possibility that its box office popularity might lead Hollywood to make other reli-
giously themed movies in the hope of cashing in on The Passion’s unexpected profitability. Its
success also provided fodder for conservative social and political critics, who saw affirmation
of their belief in the public’s desire for religious themes and traditional values in the movies.
HBO talk-show host, writer, and stand-up comic Bill Maher took up the challenge with
Religulous (2008), his satiric investigation of world religions conducted, as he put it, in the
name of bringing people to their senses. In this film, released at the close of a presidency
defined by religious sentiment and a biblical brand of self-righteousness, Maher’s skepti-
cism played the role of cultural antidote.43 Not until years later, however, did Hollywood
finally bet again on the promise of audience appeal with two openly religiously themed
fiction films, like Gibson’s. Son of God (2014) presented a traditional illustration of the life
of Christ, from his storied humble birth, through his teachings and miracles, to his death by
crucifixion. In wide release, Son of God represented a breakthrough in Christian-themed
movies, with so many church groups mobilizing turnout to support it that a conservative
news headline read, “Churches Buying Tickets to ‘Son of God,’ Interest Level Akin to
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Summer Blockbuster.”44 Directed by Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan, 2010), Noah (2014)
combined biblical storytelling with the current trend in apocalyptic films. Although the film
enjoyed a strong opening at the box office, trying to have it both ways may pose a problem;
Michael Cieply identifies
a sense among religious viewers that the movie, at its core, was appropriating the biblical
account of the flood to preach about current concerns like overpopulation and environmen-
tal abuse. That churchgoers should be leery of a progressive agenda wrapped in Scripture is
perhaps understandable, given Hollywood’s recent treatment of religious characters, who
are often hypocrites and villains, driving plot lines that make, at best, a token bow toward
the virtues of a faith-based life.45
The industry will be watching very closely how well Noah fares by combining apocalyptic
spectacle with a treasured biblical story, particularly in these politically divisive times when
civil rights and the right to practice religion are leading to legislation that seems to say the
two are mutually exclusive in a democratic society.46
Notes
1. Robert Altman, quoted in “Hollywood ‘Inspired U.S. Attacks,’” BBC News, October 17, 2001,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/1604151.stm.
2. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (Radical Thinkers) (New York: Verso, 2013), pp. 23–24.
3. Stephen Holden, “After Iraq, Struggling on the Homefront,” New York Times, http://www.
nytimes.com/2006/12/15/movies/15brav.html.
4. Duncan Campbell, “Eleven Short Films About 9/11,” The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/
film/2002/dec/13/1artsfeatures.
5. Ibid.
6. Roger Ebert, United 93, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/united-93–2006.
7. See below for the use of this phrase in First Blood II: Rambo (1985).
8. Winston Wheeler Dixon, “Teaching Film After 9/11,” Cinema Journal 43, no. 2 (Winter 2004):
115–118.
9. Stephen Holden, “After Iraq, Struggling on the Home Front,” New York Times, http://www.
nytimes.com/2006/12/15/movies/15brav.html.
10. Hendrik Hertzberg, “Cakewalk,” Comments, The New Yorker, www.newyorker.com/archive/
2003/04/14/030414ta_talk_hertzberg.
11. A.O. Scott, “When a Single Story Has a Thousand Sides,” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/
2007/10/19/movies/19rend.html?_r=0.
12. Manohla Dargis, “Hearts and Minds: Senator Meets Reporter, Selling a New, Improved War,”
New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2007/11/09/movies/09lion.html.
13. Kimberly Peirce, quoted in Marie Fisher, Stop-Loss movie review, Journal of Feminist Family
Therapy 21, no. 2 (2009): 147.
14. Dallas Observer, www.dallasobserver.com/2008–03–27/film/iraq-war-movie-stop-loss-does-it-s-
best-not-to-mention-the-war/full/.
15. “Director Reaches Out to Young on Iraq Issue,” News Service, Chicago Tribune News, http://
articles.chicagotribune.com/2008–03–27/news/0803270442_1_abbie-cornish-kimberly-peirce-
channing-tatum.
16. Nick Dawson, “Time’s Up: Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker,” Filmmaker Magazine, http://
filmmakermagazine.com/4686-times-up-kathryn-bigelows-the-hurt-locker-by-nick-dawson/#.
UxDpkV53e8U.
17. Slavoj Žižek, “How Hollywood Hides the Horrors of War,” In These Times, www.countercurrents.
org/zizek260410.htm.
263
18. Christian Davenport, “Some Iraq, Afghanistan War Veterans Criticize Movie ‘Hurt Locker’ as
Inaccurate,” Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/25/
AR2010022506161.html.
19. Dawson, “Time’s Up.”
20. Žižek, “How Hollywood Hides the Horrors of War.”
21. Guy Westwell, “In Country: Mapping the Iraq War in Recent Hollywood Combat Movies,” in
Screens of Terror: Representations of War and Terrorism in Film and Television Since 9/11, ed.
Philip Hammond (Suffolk, UK: Abramis, 2011), p. 27.
22. Alex Martin, “12 Most Political Movies of 2012,” Mic.com, http://mic.com/articles/21052/
12-most-political-movies-of-2012.
23. Phil Bronstein, “The Man Who Killed Osama bin Laden Is Screwed,” Esquire, www.esquire.
com/features/man-who-shot-osama-bin-laden-0313.
24. Steven Zeitchik, “Senate Leaders Feinstein and McCain Condemn ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’”
Los Angeles Times, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/dec/19/entertainment/la-et-mn-feinstein-
mccain-condemn-zero-dark-thirty-20121219.
25. Jordan Zakarin, “Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal Fire Back at Zero Dark Thirty Investigation
and Torture Debate,” Hollywood Reporter, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/zero-dark-thirty-
torture-debate-409646.
26. Slavoj Žižek, “Zero Dark Thirty: Hollywood’s Gift to American Power,” The Guardian, www.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/zero-dark-thirty-normalises-torture-unjustifiable.
27. Calum Marsh, “Every War Movie Is a Pro-War Movie,” The Atlantic, www.theatlantic.com/
entertainment/archive/2014/01/-em-lone-survivor-em-s-takeaway-every-war-movie-is-a-pro-
war-movie/282812/.
28. Andrew O’Hehir, “Lone Survivor: A Pro-War Propaganda Surprise Hit,” Salon.com, www.salon.
com/2014/01/15/lone_survivor_a_pro_war_propaganda_surprise_hit/.
29. CNN Politics, Political Ticker, http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/07/27/gop-use-of-ben-
affleck-movie-clip-riles-dems/.
30. Michael Rogin, “Make My Day! Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial Politics,” Representations 29
(Winter 1990): 116.
31. Ibid.
32. CNN Politics, Political Ticker.
33. Laura Bennett, “‘Homeland,’Argo, and the Changing Role of the Rogue C.I.A. Agent,” New Repub-
lic, www.newrepublic.com/article/109204/homeland-argo-and-changing-role-rogue-cia-agent.
34. Robert St. Clair, “The Bomb in (and the Right to) the City: Batman, Argo and Hollywood’s Revo-
lutionary Crowds,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 7, no. 3 (2013): 19.
35. Kevin Sullivan, “Bush Assassination Film Makes Waves Across the Pond,” Washington Post,
www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2006/09/01/AR2006090100858.html.
36. Paul Harris, “Bush Says God Chose Him to Lead His Nation,” The Guardian, www.theguardian.
com/world/2003/nov/02/usa.religion.
37. William Hamilton, “Bush Began to Plan War 3 Months After Attack,” Washington Post, www.
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17347–2004Apr16.html.
38. George W. Bush White House Archives, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/
releases/2001/09/20010916–2.html.
39. A.O. Scott, “When Greed Was Good (and Fun),” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2013/12/25/
movies/dicaprio-stars-in-scorseses-the-wolf-of-wall-street.html.
40. Michael J. Moore, “Wall Street Sees Record Revenue,” Bloomberg News, www.bloomberg.
com/news/2010–12–13/wall-street-sees-record-revenue-in-09–10-recovery-from-government-
bailout.html.
41. Diego Luna, quoted in Jordan Zakarin, “Diego Luna’s ‘Cesar Chavez’ Biopic to Screen at White
House,” The Wrap, www.thewrap.com/diego-lunas-cesar-chavez-film-screen-white-house-
exclusive/.
42. Blair Miller, “‘What You See Is Happening Right Now’: Thermageddon and a Search For Tomor-
row,” Cineaction 70 (Summer 2006): 66.
43. Maher’s career is instructive in understanding the political-cultural climate immediately after the
events of 9/11. On his talk show of the time, Politically Incorrect, airing on ABC, Maher said,
264
“We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly.
Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.”
Not long after, ABC canceled the show. www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNMhNJDRnhU. That same
year, 2002, Maher published the nonfiction book When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden,
a critical survey of the political response to 9/11, the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” and
American oil consumption.
44. Breitbart News, “Churches Buying Tickets for ‘Son of God,’ Interest Level Akin to Summer
Blockbuster,” www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2014/02/14/churches-buying-son-god-tickets-
theaters.
45. Michael Cieply, “Can God Make It in Hollywood?” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/
2014/02/23/sunday-review/can-god-make-it-in-hollywood.html?ref=opinion&_r=1.
46. An example is legislation the Arizona state legislature passed, but the governor vetoed, that would
have allowed businesses in the state to deny service to LGBT customers on religious grounds.
Jaime Fuller, “The Arizona ‘Religious Rights’ Bill,” Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.
com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/02/24/the-states-fighting-the-fight-between-religious-rights-vs-gay-
rights/. Another example is the case before the Supreme Court brought by the crafts goods store
Hobby Lobby against the Affordable Care Act, arguing that for religious reasons the store should
be exempt from providing healthcare to its workers that includes contraception coverage. Nina
Totenberg, “Hobby Lobby Contraceptive Case Goes Before Supreme Court,” NPR, www.npr.
org/2014/03/25/293956170/hobby-lobby-contraceptive-case-goes-before-supreme-court. In June
2014 the court found in favor of Hobby Lobby.
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III
Political Films by Topic


13
True Lies?
The Rise of Political Documentaries
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)

POLITICAL FILMS BY TOPIC
Perhaps the most startling development in popular film of the twenty-first century was the
improbable ascent of the documentary film. Although documentaries have been an important
art form since the dawn of motion pictures, until the contemporary era they have not been a
significant commercial force. In fact, none of the top ten most popular (nonmusical) docu-
mentaries of all time was produced before 2002, when filmmaker and political raconteur
Michael Moore’s pivotal Bowling for Columbine was released.
But what exactly is a documentary? There is no set, universally agreed-upon definition
of the term. We might say that a documentary is intended to be nonfictional and therefore
factual. Documentaries are also inherently propagandistic, in that they seek to convince the
audience of some “truth.” They can even support activism by educating viewers on a par-
ticular, often politically charged topic and urging a specific form of action to take. The recent
history and success of documentary filmmaking challenge even these basic descriptions.
Documentaries can be as entertaining and cinematic as narrative films and formally more
daring. Film critic Eric Hynes says, “The truth is that docs can and should be as varied and
unruly as the world they capture.”1 A.O. Scott asserts, “Documentary is, at present, hetero-
geneous almost to the point of anarchy.”2
Many of the earliest movies were in essence documentaries, as filmmakers simply turned
their cameras on anything that was happening—before the conventions of filming fictional
pieces had been developed. Called “actualities,” these early cinematic images, like “Fred
Ott’s Sneeze” and “Workers Leaving a Factory,” captured daily life in quotidian moments.
Soon, however, documentary filmmakers began making documentaries films that, while not
untrue, certainly manipulated reality to make their subjects more interesting and compel-
ling. An early landmark documentary, Nanook of the North (1922), contained scenes of
Eskimo life that appeared to be real, but were in fact staged by director Robert Flaherty,
including sets designed to enable the use of filmmaking equipment. Although these kinds of
techniques made documentaries more entertaining, they were not commercial successes and
were rarely intended to be.
Documentaries became a little more commercial—and more controversial—in the 1960s
and 1970s when several addressed audiences, in art house venues and later on television or
videotape. Emile D’Antonio’s Point of Order (1964) taught a new generation about McCa-
rthyism, using television film footage of the Army-McCarthy hearings. D’Antonio followed
Point of Order with In the Year of the Pig (1968), a movie about the Vietnam War, and
Milhouse (1971), about President Richard Nixon. Both were more polemical, more contro-
versial, and less successful than Point of Order. Frederick Wiseman, arguably the dean of
American political documentarists, launched his series of documentaries about American
institutions with Titicut Follies (1967), about a mental institution, followed by High School
(1968), Law and Order (1969), Hospital (1970), and many others right up to Public Housing
(1997) and beyond. Wiseman’s films lack narration, pioneering for television the observa-
tional style of documentary in which the cameras insinuate the viewer as a “fly on the wall”
and the denizens of the institutions speak for themselves.
In the 1970s, Barbet Schroeder’s General Idi Amin Dada (1974), about an African dictator,
David Halpern’s Hollywood on Trial (1976), about Hollywood and the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC), and Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County USA (1977), about
unions in the coal mines, all found small audiences. Hearts and Minds (1974), directed by
Peter Davis, found a somewhat wider audience—and won an Oscar for Best Documentary.
The title reflected the unsuccessful U.S. strategy of trying to win “the hearts and minds”
of the Vietnamese people in order to win the Vietnam War. Davis featured interviews with
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TRUE LIES? THE RISE OF POLITICAL DOCUMENTARIES
participants in the war, filmed comments of political and military leaders, and news footage
of the war to make his points. According to Hal Erickson,
the film was briefly withdrawn from distribution when . . . [an] advisor to President John-
son insisted that the advisor’s reputation had been damaged and demanded that the two
minutes featuring [him] on-camera be deleted. More controversy arose when Hearts and
Minds won the Best Documentary Oscar, whereupon the Academy issued a statement—
read during the awards ceremony by Frank Sinatra—that it did not condone or advocate the
volatile statements made by the producers during their acceptance speech.3
The audiences for all these documentaries were small, mostly young, and liberal to radical.
In their own small way, the documentaries contributed to the movements of the 1960s and
1970s, confirming what some already believed and adding believers among the previously
uninitiated (mostly college students). As the 1960s and 1970s turned into the 1980s and the
“me generation,” interest in documentaries like these waned, but precedents had been set for
today’s documentary filmmakers even as the concept of “hearts and minds” endured in the
nation’s political consciousness.
While the documentaries of the 1960s and 1970s attempted to tell their stories and make
their points in a reasonably entertaining way, more recent documentaries have further blurred
the distinction between the imperatives of entertaining the audience with a story (as con-
ventional movies do) and the factual quality traditionally associated with documentaries.
A rerelease in the early 1970s of a 1930s pseudo-documentary about the evils of mari-
juana, Reefer Madness (1938), had demonstrated the entertainment value of old propaganda
films. The Atomic Café (1982) successfully strung together old “documentary” footage in
the form of government-issued films about nuclear radiation. The old scenes in Atomic Café,
including such absurdities as schoolchildren being asked to “duck and cover” under their
desks (to music) in order to survive a nuclear attack, were at once comedic and helped the
filmmakers ridicule the idea of nuclear war. The film turned a profit, won an Oscar, and
nurtured the notion among filmmakers that a documentary could both entertain and make a
political point. As Combs and Combs note, “by appealing to our higher emotions through
humor . . . they gave political propaganda a whole new impetus toward light-hearted satire
and parody.”4
The Thin Blue Line (1988) was a riveting film that further whittled down the distinction
between documentary and other movies. The movie explores the 1976 murder of a Dallas
policeman for which drifter Randall Adams was convicted and sentenced to death. Direc-
tor Errol Morris used a mix of traditional documentary interviews and staged scenes that,
cleverly strung together in an almost surreal way, turned the story into a highly engrossing
mystery. The music of avant-garde composer Philip Glass underscored the mood of the film,
which led the viewer to question the official story of the murder. The repetition of a staged
reenactment of the crime, the incongruous official story, and the hypnotic score combined
to create an effective challenge to Adams’s guilt. In fact, the movie was so successful that
it resulted in Adams’s release from prison the same year it was released—a rare example of
a political film achieving an observable and specific political result. Beyond that, The Thin
Blue Line left the viewer with the clear implication that the “official story” was not always
to be trusted—even in capital murder cases.
Roger and Me (1989) introduced the world to Michael Moore, a folksy-looking
and -talking, unabashedly liberal political provocateur. Moore’s movie traced his efforts
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to contact General Motors CEO Roger Smith about the fate of the filmmaker’s hometown
of Flint, Michigan. But that search was only a ruse with which to tie together the movie’s
exploration of economic despair in Flint. With Roger and Me, Moore discovered a way to
improve upon The Atomic Café; rather than just using old footage that was entertaining and
politically provocative in its absurdity, Moore plumbed the city of Flint for contemporary
scenes that achieved the same purpose even more effectively. As captured by Moore on film,
Flint’s economic woes yielded a panoply of emotions, including pathos (a family is evicted
just before Christmas), humor (a woman tries to make a living skinning rabbits and sell-
ing their hides), and disgust (various political and economic leaders appear to be indifferent
to the fate of those affected by the city’s poor economy). Moore himself appeared throughout
the film, interviewing luckless citizens and (especially) trying to find Roger Smith. Taken
as a whole, the film was an effective piece of political polemic; Moore made no pretense of
objectivity and therefore did not try to present any balance in his indictment of Flint’s (and
by extension, perhaps, America’s) political and economic elite.
Moore’s film was, by documentary standards at least, a smash success, grossing nearly
$7 million on a budget of less than $200,000. But perhaps more so than any documentary
that preceded it, Roger and Me also created a hailstorm of politically pointed criticism that
set the pattern for his subsequent films. Critics charged that the movie was propaganda (true)
and that it manipulated the facts and the people in the film to achieve its political ends (also
true). Moore’s defenders pointed out that all movies rearrange and manipulate “facts” to
make their stories coherent and their messages clear. By combining entertaining vignettes
and his own brash but personable character, Moore had created a new form of documentary
with the potential to both entertain and, possibly, shape the public’s political imagination.
Moore again struck both gold and a political nerve with his release of Bowling for Col-
umbine (2003). An exploration of the violence wrought by guns in America, Columbine
represented a refinement and expansion of the documentary techniques that had made Roger
and Me such a success—and also fomented increased political controversy. Critics credit
Bowling for Columbine for inaugurating what has been widely acknowledged as a “golden
age” of documentary.5
The title was taken from the fact that the two high school students who were responsible
for the massacre of students at Columbine High School had been bowling the morning of
the shootings. The incident at Columbine was only a starting point, as the film took a wide-
ranging look at guns and violence in American society. Compared to Roger and Me, though,
Bowling for Columbine took some pains to be more thoughtful if not necessarily more
objective. The film probed the American plague of gun violence from a variety of angles;
filmmaker Moore seemed genuinely unable to come up with a clear explanation for the
problem of gun violence, although he did not hesitate to identify some likely villains along
the way: gun fanatics, militia members, guns and ammunition manufacturers and sellers,
and (particularly) the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its leadership were allowed to
indict themselves with their own simplemindedness. For example, James Nichols—brother
of one of the men convicted for the Oklahoma City bombing—argues passionately, if not
semi-psychotically, that one must be armed to fight for a political cause, but admits that he
has never even heard of Gandhi and the idea of nonviolent political action. Yet the film never
explicitly advocated gun control as the answer to the problems it explored.
Like Roger and Me, Columbine was both thought-provoking and extremely entertaining.
It also used Moore’s folksy presence and exploited the weaker moments of the individuals
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he chose to vilify. Moore threw in old documentary footage (à la Atomic Café) of a 1950s TV
commercial for a toy gun that sounds real, an animation sequence that resembled the popular
cartoon show South Park, and even some acts of what might be called performance art (e.g.,
he took survivors of the Columbine incident to meet with K-Mart executives in an effort to
persuade the store to stop selling ammunition). Moore also managed to provide a critique of
welfare reform policy as he explored a tragic shooting by a first-grader whose single mother
was at work most of the day to earn a meager wage.
Although very popular at the box office by documentary standards and praised by most
film critics, Bowling for Columbine predicated the same kind of critical and political melee
that Roger and Me had sparked, but with much more volume. It certainly fomented debate in
media circles. Critics pointed out that Moore had manipulated images and events to make his
point and that he unfairly accosted celebrities like Charlton Heston (president of the NRA)
and Dick Clark (who owned the restaurant where the first-grader’s mother worked). More
generally, such critics were alleging that Moore’s film was not a documentary. If documen-
taries are defined by a neutral point of view, then there is definitely some validity to this
assertion, as Bowling for Columbine was unabashedly critical of American society, particu-
larly with respect to the ownership and use of guns. In essence, like Roger and Me, it was a
polemic that sought to lead viewers to conclude that something about Americans and guns
was fundamentally askew. Taking a point of view, however, does not by itself distinguish
Moore’s documentaries from others nor does it disqualify it from being a documentary.
The question that follows is to what extent “documentary” is a truly meaningful category
of film. Steve James, the director of Hoop Dreams (1994), Box Office Mojo’s nineteenth
highest grossing documentary, about two inner-city Chicago basketball players, doubts that
it is. Reflecting on the diversity of 2012 documentary films, James declares, “It’s not a genre
anymore.”6 As we have seen, the trajectory for contemporary documentaries is the increas-
ing emphasis on entertainment and narrative over the supposedly more traditional, neutral
approach of “just the facts.”7
But from the beginning, documentary filmmakers have selected aspects of reality in order
to tell their stories, the version of the truth that they sought to tell. Is any other approach even
possible? Consider how the unedited, unplanned eighty-one-second videotaping of the 1991
Rodney King beating resulted in a hung jury for the policemen who were accused of beating
him, in part because the two sides in the courtroom were able to create widely convincing
yet totally disparate interpretations of the same factual footage. The lens of the camera itself
edits “reality,” excluding from sight whatever falls outside its frame. Filmmakers, in any
event, are not about to start releasing unedited videotape . . . and Bowling for Columbine
proved to be a relatively tame affair compared to Moore’s next production.
Although Bowling for Columbine smashed all previous box office records for documen-
taries by earning $21.5 million in gross receipts, nobody anticipated the juggernaut that
Moore’s next “documentary,” Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), would prove to be. Columbine, for all
its success and media attention, was actually viewed in just a paltry 248 cinemas nationwide.
Fahrenheit was shown in more than 2,000 theaters and became the first documentary to actu-
ally take the top position in weekly box office ticket sales. The political debate it sparked
was also perhaps the most vociferous and voluminous ever created by an overtly political
film and, given its proximity to the 2004 elections, potentially the most efficacious. 9/11
became a political football even before its release when the subsidiary of the Disney Cor-
poration with which Moore had contracted to produce the film declined to release it. It was
273
ultimately released independently (by executives from Disney), but the controversy played
right into Moore’s hands as free publicity for his film.
A searing indictment of the war in Iraq and the Bush administration’s role in its initia-
tion, 9/11 represented the culmination of the elements of the quasi-documentary approach
Moore had honed with his previous films. Rather than relying as much on amusing stunts
and the insertion of his camera-friendly provocateur persona, in 9/11 Moore took his docu-
mentary approach back almost full circle to the observational style and remediation or use
of previously filmed scenes. Abandoning the potpourri of techniques and scenarios thrown at
viewers in Bowling for Columbine, he let his subjects’ own images both amuse and alienate
his audience. President Bush is seen reading a book to a group of schoolchildren during the
minutes immediately after being informed of the September 11 attacks. He is seen playing
golf after making tough-guy comments about terrorism. He and his staff are seen preening
before making on-camera appearances, including the unpleasant sight of Paul Wolfowitz
licking his comb before raking it through licorice-slick hair.
One can agree or disagree with its politics, but Fahrenheit 9/11 made political reality
seem . . . like a movie! The behind-the-scenes shots of politicians looking all too human
were exactly what we have come to expect in a regular movie. The insertion of old Drag-
net television scenes harked back to the “goofing” on the law in Reefer Madness, and other
scenes that scoff at the danger posed by Iraq were reminiscent of The Atomic Café. Moore’s
deft editing of September 11 footage, never actually showing the buildings under attack,
only the on-looking crowd and the sounds of the attack (with a blank screen), was truly
captivating. Although the film lost momentum near its end, interviews with the mother of
a dead American soldier comprised both a mini-mystery (when we meet the woman, we
sense that something is troubling her deeply) and tragedy (when we learn that her son has
died in Iraq).
This approach, therefore, was anything but artless. Moore (and his crew), for example,
obviously combed through hours of film footage to find the most unfavorable images of
Bush and his administration, the sort of scenes that mainstream media would traditionally
shy from if only in the name of decorum. He linked these images to his thesis about the war
and its illegitimacy, in part by lacing the film with disturbing footage of the prosecution of
the war itself. Amazingly, this linkage was achieved in a way that—although clearly upset-
ting to his opponents—did not necessarily make an audience feel manipulated, particularly
those sympathetic to its viewpoint. In short, Fahrenheit 9/11 was both a modern masterpiece
of political propaganda and a movie with an unprecedented, very specific political objective.
Moore timed the release of the film (and its subsequent early release on DVD) to coincide
with the presidential election of 2004. Extremely pointed interviews in the film suggested
that viewers might want to consider voting against the president.
At the box office, 9/11 was a staggering success. It shattered the old mark set by Colum-
bine by grossing over $100 million in its first month of release, based on estimated ticket
sales of more than $12 million, and remained among the top five releases for more than a
month. Public opinion polls revealed that 24 percent of American adults had seen the film as
of July 11, 2004, and that an additional 18 percent planned to see it at a theater and another
30 percent planned to see it on video. Even 38 percent of Republicans polled had seen or
planned to see the film despite its critical view of President Bush.8 Clearly, 9/11 had the
potential to affect both support for the war in Iraq and the outcome of the 2004 election.
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The political fallout from 9/11 was and is on a level unmatched by modern films. In antici-
pation of criticism from defenders of the president and the war itself, Moore created a “war
room” that would deal with accusations of inaccuracy. However, this time Moore’s critics
were not only from the political opposition. Even some liberals who generally agreed with
Moore’s view of the Iraq war faulted him for manipulating his audience and taking liberties
with the images of Bush and others in the film. Others took a more sympathetic view, assert-
ing that although Moore may have used crass and even unfair methods to make his case,
these are the precise methods by which his political opposition (in other media) has thrived.
Wrote one commentator, “Moore is such a fitting adversary to the current administration—
and its mainstream media chorus of approval—because he knows how to speak in precisely
the same vocabulary of sensation, sound bites and sheer emotionalism that the [Bush admin-
istration] uses to promote its policies.”9
Fahrenheit 9/11 in many ways embodied a “natural experiment” for exploring the rela-
tionship between film and politics. It was as overtly a political film as was imaginable, to
which record numbers of voters and politically active individuals were exposed. Its context
seemed to embody a perfect storm of a controversial war, an upcoming election, and the
growing conflation of reality and cinematic imagery (also seen in so-called reality televi-
sion). Would it have any measurable or verifiable effect on political events, or did it merely
serve mainly to preach to the choir, exerting little sway on those not already predisposed to
its point of view?
Public interest in political documentary film seemed on the increase. Even before the
success of Fahrenheit 9/11 seemed to spill over onto other politically charged documenta-
ries, Errol Morris’s documentary The Fog of War (2004) was a modest sensation, winning
an Oscar and generating a fair amount of political discussion. The film was essentially a
straight interview with former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, focusing on his role
in the Vietnam War. Errol Morris invented a special device called the “Interrotron” that
allowed the interviewee to look directly into the camera and see the interviewer (Morris)
rather than the camera. The device was said to relax the interview subject and also make the
audience feel closer to the interview. Although it was not nearly as innovative and seductive
as Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War did implicitly raise eerie parallels between
what McNamara believes were the mistakes of the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq. Without
the latter conflict as a backdrop, it seems doubtful that The Fog of War would have created
much of a stir, nor would it have become the tenth most financially successful documentary
in American film history.
Another war-related documentary that attracted some viewers, Control Room (2004)
explored the Arab-language television network Al-Jazeera. Directed by an Egyptian-
American, the film went behind the scenes at the network to provide American audiences
with a view of the Arab media. Although it was relatively low-key about making a message,
like The Fog of War the film had obvious implications for the Iraq war, questioning the role
of journalists as “objective” participants and showing how audience expectations actively
shape news production. “It benefits Al-Jazeera to play to Arab nationalism, because that’s
their audience,” says an American Marine press representative in the film, “just like Fox
plays to American patriotism. . . . That’s their demographic audience and that’s what [their
viewers] want to see.” However, the audience for this challenging work was limited by a
narrow release.
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Another documentary-like film, Super Size Me (2004), was a much bigger box office
draw. Director Morgan Spurlock expanded on Michael Moore’s participant-observer tac-
tics by basing the entire film on his own single stunt. In Super Size Me, he eats nothing but
McDonald’s food for an entire month as the film chronicles his subsequent health problems.
The message was pretty clear—junk food is bad for one’s health—but the stunt made the
message a lot more entertaining. Audiences ate up this act to the tune of more than $10 mil-
lion in box office gross, making Super Size Me the fourth most popular documentary.
The film’s release appeared to have had the immediate political impact of causing the
McDonald’s Corporation to announce the end of its “super size” option, although that con-
nection was denied by McDonald’s. Critics have since questioned Spurlock’s reporting.
They dispute that he consumed 5,000 calories eating only McDonald’s meals three times
a day and that his diet caused the kidney ailments and related health problems he asserted.
Ironically, Spurlock has not responded to his critics, just as in the film McDonald’s does not
return his calls. Nonetheless, Super Size Me influenced other movies critical of the industrial
food movement. These include the ensemble-cast dramatization of the popular nonfiction
book Fast Food Nation (2006). Its poster features a baby, viewed from behind, wearing
stars-and-stripes diapers with arms stretched high as he stares up at two burgers positioned
like breasts above him. The documentary Food, Inc. grossed $4.5 million by retreading some
of the same ground as Super Size Me and then casting a wider net to explore the trade-off
between economic value and convenience on the one hand and nutrition and environmental
concerns on the other. Unlike Super Size Me, Food, Inc. finds a few bright spots to highlight.
Wal-Mart now sells organic produce.
Several more intensely political documentaries were released in 2004, including Out-
foxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, a film that sought to expose the right-wing bias
of the publishing mogul’s Fox Network news, and The Hunting of the President, a filmed
version of the book by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons (subtitled The Ten-Year Campaign
to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton). Both films emerged from openly liberal Democratic
sources that did little to efface their partisan origins. Neither was greeted with a great deal of
commercial interest; both were screened in only a few cities (although Outfoxed was quickly
made available on DVD). The lack of public interest for these straightforwardly deadpan
partisan statements suggested limits to the phenomenal expansion of the documentary in the
modern cinema.
However, as the first decade of the new century passed into the second, documen-
tary’s “golden age” maintained momentum. In 2011 alone, out of some 800 feature-length
films with theatrical releases in the United States, more than 300 were documentaries.10
Reasons for the increase include the cheaper cost of quality recording equipment, the
multiple viewing platforms available for distribution, and also the economic success of
a generation of entrepreneurs. The so-called dot.com bubble (1995–2000) and the job-
less economic recovery beginning in 2009, among other factors, allowed great wealth to
concentrate in the hands of a few. Many of these entrepreneurs were young and attuned
to the possibilities of using social media to create sociopolitical change, and they spent
their money to produce politically provocative documentaries. The term “filmanthropy”
names this trend.
Venture capitalist and owner of the Washington Capitals hockey team, Ted Leonsis made
the film Nanking (2007), a straightforward recounting of the rapes and murders of 300,000
Chinese civilians and soldiers in the city of Nanking in the late 1930s. The film cost roughly
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$2 million to produce. According to Leonsis, filmanthropy and political awareness go hand

in hand. People like him use their money to “make something that can drive people to under-
stand an issue. It brings together philanthropy and understanding how media works.”11 Thus
the filmanthropy movement provides wealthy individuals the opportunity to make films and
raises funds for filmmakers concerned with issues philanthropists want to promote. The
movement also highlights the broadly political and Hollywood-outsider side of the docu-
mentary’s “golden age.”
Advocacy Documentaries: The Invisible War

Recent documentaries frequently build narratives around investigations. They seek to expose
a political truth that has been obscured, often by people with vested interests in keeping the
public in the dark, or they shed light on a topic more ignored than actively suppressed. As
A.O. Scott says, “The dominant approach to documentary filmmaking nowadays is more
argumentative, even prosecutorial.”12 Documentaries like 2010’s Inside Job, Waiting for
“Superman,” and Gasland (and its sequel, Gasland Part II, 2013) address “complex, highly
politicized and enormously consequential issues in a way that combines explanation with
advocacy.”13 As much as any other recent documentary The Invisible War (2012) takes a
“prosecutorial” approach to the topic of sexual assaults against American military personnel
by perpetrators that the victims count on being able to trust most—other military personnel.
According to the film, in 2012 an estimated 26,000 sexual assaults occurred, up from 19,000
in 2011.
The Invisible War puts on trial the U.S. military’s inept response to the crimes committed
within its house. It also targets the command structure for fostering an environment that has
allowed these crimes to continue undiminished. As director Kirby Dick explains, “There are
hundreds of thousands of survivors in this country. They were completely voiceless. I’ve
never come to a story where fewer people knew the story than this story.”14 Dick’s film gives
speech to those deprived of a voice by pulling back the curtain on the military justice sys-
tem and allowing rape victims to declare truth to democratic power—actual Congressional
The Invisible War (2012) looks at the epidemic of sexual assault in the military.
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The Invisible War (2012) became mandatory viewing for military personnel as bills before Congress
sought to change the adjudication of military assault cases.
representatives. In scenes all the more harrowing for their simple shot-countershot con-
struction and medium close-up framing, a cast of primarily female victims details their
experiences of being battered first by assailants (many of them in authority positions over
their victims) and then by a system biased in favor of offenders. (The cases represented most
prominently include one male assault victim.)
The film reports that since 1991 over 500,000 military men and women have been sexu-
ally attacked. Out of more than 3,000 reported cases in one year, fewer than 200 ended with
punitive action against the perpetrator. Left to their own devices by a military that trained
them to think of fellow soldiers as brothers and officers as trusted mentors, the victims
describe lives left in pieces, with rapists allowed to go free or even enjoying successful
military careers. “They gave him the military professional of the year award during the
rape investigation,” explains one victim about her rapist. Accounts of psychological pain—
“I have never seen trauma like I’ve seen from veterans who have suffered military sexual
trauma,” says one doctor—and obvious discrimination—“You’d see a guy get five years for
drugs and two weeks for rape,” says one researcher—organize the film.
The featured victims include Kori Cioca, a Coast Guard service member left with a frac-
tured face after being raped by another Guard member. He continued to harass her after the
assault and, as is typical of many cases, he remained in the service while she left. Never
eligible to collect disability benefits despite persistent emotional difficulties and physical
problems, including an inability to eat anything other than soft foods and liquids, Cioca, also
like other victims, attempted suicide. In one of the film’s most devastating moments, she
reads the letter she wrote her mother when she planned to die.
The Invisible War’s advocacy on behalf of the epidemic’s victims includes the Artemis
Rising Recovery Fund, founded by the filmmakers. The film’s website also provides a num-
ber of ways for viewers to take action, such as signing a petition to push for change.
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A 2012 Best Documentary Academy Award nominee, The Invisible War led to direct
political action. Advocating for the removal of military rape prosecutions from the chain of
command, the film was viewed by U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who announced
two days later that prosecutorial decisions would no longer be left to the immediate supervi-
sors of the accusers and accused. Republican senator Susan Collins and Democratic senator
Claire McCaskill then put forward a bill to limit a military commander’s ability to dis-
miss a court-martial conviction for sexual assault and to mandate dismissals or dishonorable
discharges for anyone convicted of rape or sexual assault in the military. Senator Kirsten
Gillibrand followed with legislation that would take the prosecution of rape cases out of the
victim’s chain of command in an effort to remove the fear of reprisal from victims weighing
whether to report a crime. Referring to legislative and military action on the issue spurred by
The Invisible War, promotion on the film’s website puts it this way: “That’s the documentary
equivalent of a box office blockbuster.”15
Documenting the Great Recession
Pre-Recession Economic Documentaries
Before the collapse of the world economy in 2008, a few documentaries presaged the com-
ing calamity not in so many words but by drawing attention to dark clouds looming on the
economic horizon. Notable among these were The Corporation (2003); Enron: The Smart-
est Guys in the Room (2005); and Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices (2005). Together
they brushed early strokes in a developing portrait of an unsustainable economy jeopardized
by global corporations detached from local communities, investment trading run amok, and
corrupt business practices. All these scenarios fit into an anti-regulation political climate
fostered by President Clinton and taken to new extremes during George Bush’s presidency,
with his tax cuts that favored the wealthy. One result was a laissez-faire attitude that encour-
aged, or at least allowed, regulators to look the other way from collusion and monopolistic
practices in various markets and an increase in the number of the working poor—employed
people laboring at multiple jobs but still unable to afford a decent lifestyle off government
assistance.
The Corporation observes that like the Catholic church of yesteryear, today’s corpo-
ration is the all-pervasive dominant institution. After a series of nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Supreme Court decisions—upheld in the recent Citizens United and
Hobby Lobby decisions—established that a corporation resembles more a person than any
other kind of entity, corporations also enjoy certain rights accorded individuals, includ-
ing property rights, freedom of expression, and religious liberty.16 The film follows these
rulings to their logical conclusion by asking, if corporations are people, what kind of
people are they? Through studies of examples of harm that “the corporation” has inflicted
on others—from Agent Orange to bovine growth hormone to manipulative children’s
commercials—the film diagnoses the patient as psychopathic, not evil but lacking moral
conscience. The narrator explains, “They are required, by law, to place the financial inter-
ests of their owners above competing interests. In fact, the corporation is legally bound
to put its bottom line ahead of everything else, even the public good.” Shareholder activ-
ist Robert Monks describes how corporations can legally “make other people pay the
bills for its impact on society,” a concept known as “externalities.” Monks concludes, “A
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corporation is an externalizing machine in the same way that a shark is a killing machine.”
An unwary or uncaring public will foot the bill for whatever the corporation can get away
with externalizing to it—for example, health insurance and, increasingly in the fast food
business, a living wage. Earning almost $3.5 million at the box office, The Corporation is
among the top fifty highest-grossing American documentaries.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room provides a maddening look at the profit-driven
pathology of corporations by laying out the story of how Enron, once America’s seventh-
largest corporation, lauded for its cutting-edge business model, turned out to be little more
than an elaborate Ponzi scheme. The film was a success, earning just over $4 million at the
box office to make it the thirty-seventh highest-grossing documentary. Among other fraudu-
lences, Enron perfected the art of “mark to market” accounting, tagging mere estimates of
future profits as actual on-the-books assets. As bankruptcy neared, top executives dumped
their own Enron stock while encouraging employees to keep investing their 401(k) funds
into buying more. An energy-trading company, Enron manipulated the California power
market by creating a phony crisis and repeatedly overcharging the state to put it back online.
In his review, Roger Ebert remarks on the disaster, “The cost was incalculable, not only
in lives lost during the power crisis, but in treasure. . . . If the crisis had been created by
Al Qaeda, if terrorists had shut down half of California’s power plants, consider how we
would regard these same events.”17 This calculus exposes the political advantage American
corporations enjoy—we would not let foreign “others” treat us this way, but home-grown
corporations do so with impunity.
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices looks at another behemoth corporation, analyz-
ing its “psychopathic” business practices and their effects on local communities. Though
different from Enron’s brand of malpractice, the news about the impact on the American
economy of the world’s largest retailer and the United States’ largest private employer is
not much better. The price paid for Wal-Mart’s low prices? Underpaid domestic employees
made to work overtime for free; an increasingly unbridgeable income gap; virtual slaves in
sweatshops abroad; sub-minimum wages paid to illegal immigrants to clean stores at night;
anti-union activities to prevent worker organization; women and African-Americans with
years of experience repeatedly denied management positions; the instant death of locally
owned businesses when Wal-Mart comes to town; and workers directed to apply for Medic-
aid, food stamps, and other forms of government assistance, the very definition of corporate
“externalities.”
Facing a slew of employee lawsuits, Wal-Mart has become a whipping boy for liberal
activists like the film’s director, Robert Greenwald. Some critics faulted the film for bias. Yet
critic Andrew O’Hehir suggests that Wal-Mart’s plea of ignorance about its global quest to
drive costs, wages, and prices ever downward
dwarfs the already galactic scale of what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney presumably
didn’t know about Iraq. It’s a crude analogy, but the same philosophical approach to the
world is at work here, and it’s no accident that Greenwald’s earlier films—which pioneered
his distinctive guerrilla-marketing approach—have tackled Fox News, the Iraq war, and
the 2000 presidential election.18
However slanted the film’s political approach, the relentless downgrading of the Ameri-
can economy and the replacement of middle-class careers with low-paying service jobs that
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do not provide basic benefits like health insurance are dismaying facts. The observation that
companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s play a role in this scenario remains undisputed.
Capitalism: A Love Story; Inside Job
In 2008, the bottom fell out of the world’s economy: the overheated housing market self-
immolated, and longtime Wall Street stars like Lehman Brothers went belly-up and Bear
Stearns went on life support. Presidential contender John McCain sealed his fate with voters
by first declaring that the underlying fundamentals of the American economy were sound
and then suspending his campaign to return to Washington to help fix a problem so large
even he had to admit the status quo, in the hands of his own party under President Bush,
was failing. On a campaign slogan of “The time for change has come,” Barack Obama won
the presidency only to discover that what the necessary economic “change” should be was
far from clear. Job losses accelerated, average families saw their life savings vanish, and
the poor slid even further down the economic ladder’s splintered rungs. Documentary films
addressing the perfect storm of factors that crashed the economy include Capitalism: A Love
Story (2009) and Inside Job (2010).
Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story looks at a wide range of corporate
externalities—that is, the social costs of corporations doing what they do, which is pursuing
profits to the detriment of the common good even at a time when the economy was shedding
some 14,000 jobs a day. Moore takes aim at both political parties and expresses dismay at
Obama’s unwillingness or inability to bring about substantive reforms, especially of Wall
Street. Expertly wielding the tools of the documentarian’s trade, Moore uses rare archi-
val footage, personal interviews, and news excerpts to question whether capitalism actually
serves well the country that venerates it. Moore also puts his own spin on the material with
satire: he addresses the sticky issue of derivatives, an “exotic” financial product so compli-
cated that the three experts he asks to explain it all fail. Capitalism: A Love Story is at its
best in scenes featuring homeowners foreclosed on by banks; a widower informed that his
wife’s employer collected “dead peasant insurance” on her (when a company takes out a life
insurance policy on employees and then collects a payout when they die); a family losing
their fourth-generation farm. Humorous, grandstanding stunts round out the film and mark it
as Moore’s: a citizen’s arrest on the board of AIG; Wall Street marked off in yellow crime-
scene tape as Moore uses a bullhorn to demand taxpayers’ money back.
The film also probes the parasitic relationship between Washington’s political elite
and the financial interests of Wall Street, starting with former Federal Reserve chair Alan
Greenspan, a housing bubble champion caught off guard by the crash, and including the
federal bailout of Wall Street firms and big banks that was engineered by former Goldman
Sachs CEO and Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, a man who rescued his own. Along the
way Moore reveals how members of Congress and other politicians were granted special
interest rates and financial favors, never falling victim to the circumstances that put so many
Americans out of work, home, and health. A deep-bellied cry for fairness, Capitalism: A
Love Story loses focus in spots, but when its buckshot spray hits, as much as we might want
to, it is hard to look away. Earning more than $14 million at the box office, Capitalism is the
fourteenth highest-grossing documentary.
In a more soberly analytic style, former software entrepreneur and millionaire Charles Fer-
guson’s Inside Job, Academy Award winner for Best Documentary, creates a comprehensive
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Inside Job (2010) fully investigates the global financial crisis of 2008.
and devastating portrait of a financial industry in over its head yet profiting wildly from its
recklessness and the neoliberal fiscal policy and free market ideology that politically enabled
it. With a title defined as “a crime committed by or with the assistance of a person living or
working on the premises where it occurred,” Inside Job exposes the scheming that churned
this disaster into high gear: a solipsistic, greed-fueled Wall Street with no minders, no regu-
lation, no moral compass, and no shame. Inside Job’s fluency in the language of finance adds
to its persuasiveness as interviewees and a pitiless narrator (liberal-minded film star Matt
Damon) rattle off terms like “subprime mortgages,” “predatory lending,” “toxic mortgage
assets,” “RMBS” (residential mortgage-backed securities), and “CDOs” (collateralized debt
obligations) as bloodlessly as a croupier at a roulette table—a sadly fitting analogy, the film
makes clear.
As Roger Ebert succinctly explains,
Here is the argument of the film, in four sentences. From Roosevelt until Reagan, the
American economy enjoyed 40 years of stability, prosperity and growth. Beginning with
Reagan’s moves against financial regulation, that sound base has been progressively
eroded. The crucial federal error (in administrations of both parties) was to allow financial
institutions to trade on their own behalf. Today many large trading banks are betting against
their own customers.19
That timeline emerges through archival footage and interviews with key Wall Street and
political players—as well as keen journalists, academics, and a Manhattan madam who
attests to the heady levels of prostitution and cocaine permeating Wall Street just before the
crash.
The film excels at explaining the complicated arrangements that allowed Wall Street firms
to take positions on all sides of a financial transaction so that no matter what happened to
clients or others, Goldman, Sachs and similar investment firms walked off with millions,
including the likes of Lehman Brothers’ CEO Richard Fuld: he raked in half a billion dol-
lars from a historic company even as he ran it into the ground. Then, when all of it came
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crashing down like the house of cards it was, these same high-flying players’ firms and banks
required huge infusions of cash so that everyday transactions fundamental to the economy
did not stall out completely. This phenomenon became known as “too big to fail.” Like
Moore’s film, Inside Job spares no one, least of all the shameless financiers who reaped
obscene amounts of money—while average people suffered enormous calamity—and the
Obama officials who continued the Wall Street–White House revolving door of previous
administrations. Exhibit A: Tim Geithner, who replaced Paulson as Treasury secretary, was,
like Paulson, formerly of Goldman, Sachs—the investment firm Rolling Stone memorably
called “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its
blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”20 Second to Capitalism: A Love Story in
the category of popular economic documentaries, Inside Job earned more than $4 million.
In the ascendance of figures like Elizabeth Warren, a tough talker on behalf of consumer
protection in the financial industry, Inside Job offers glimmers of hope that the system can be
changed for the good. (Since the film she was elected as a senator from Massachusetts.) As
with Corporation and Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices and their scenes of optimism
based on community action, however, it is hard not to think that ship has sailed. In 2013, the
Associated Press reported, “Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty
or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic secu-
rity and an elusive American dream.”21 Around the same time, a report commissioned by
Congress revealed,
The average family’s income is lower today than at any point in the last 10 years. Income
inequality is more extreme today than at any point since before the Great Depression, with
the top 1 percent of income earners receiving 93 percent of income gains in the recovery.
In the third quarter of 2012, corporate profits reached $1.75 trillion, their greatest share of
GDP [gross domestic product] in history. During that same quarter, workers’ wages fell to
their lowest share of GDP on record.22
These documentaries trace that shocking decline to the cozy relationship between the
political and financial elite. Avaricious Wall Street firms and big banks substitute casino
gambling with abstract, nearly incomprehensible trading practices and, rather than regulat-
ing them, a compliant, ideologically sympathetic political class in need of campaign money
turns a blind eye. In the documentary’s prosecutorial spirit, these films hold such people
criminally accountable, as the legal system mostly has not.
Documentary and Disaster
The prosecutorial spirit and advocacy mission of recent documentaries find a perfect fit with
disaster documentaries addressing everything from global climate change to oil spills, from
tsunamis and nuclear accidents to war atrocities. One prominent example: Hurricane Kat-
rina’s devastation of New Orleans in 2005 occasioned its own subgenre—so-called “Katrina
films,” both documentary and fictional. Costing $2 million in production costs, the most
widely viewed of the documentaries was Spike Lee’s HBO four-part series, When the Lev-
ees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006). As the title indicates, Lee’s blistering study of
the hurricane’s destruction focuses on the inadequate government response to the initial
disaster. For though the hurricane itself wrought its share of damage, the disaster spread
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uncontrollably when the city’s safeguards against flooding, primarily the levees of Lee’s
title, failed. The levees’ inability to hold back the waters was no surprise to some experts,
while the failure of the National Guard to sandbag and restore the barriers caused the deaths
of nearly 2,000 people, leaving the low-lying city underwater.
Lee first explores the measures taken before Katrina’s nightmarish assault, tracing in
detail the George W. Bush administration’s almost willfully poor understanding of the full
nature of the coming catastrophe. The “requiem” case against the government thus indicts
first its failure to predict the disaster and then its inability to meaningfully and successfully,
or even earnestly, respond to it. Images of blatant apathy toward what New Orleans mayor
Ray Nagin dubbed the “chocolate city” predominate as scenes of destroyed infrastructure
and unbearable human suffering give the film a definitive air. Officials like Nagin share the
screen with celebrity activists like actors Sean Penn and Harry Belafonte. After a compre-
hensive exploration of the measures that need to be taken to restore the city and prevent
future calamity, the forceful political message of the film is that this unique city and its citi-
zens, sacrificed by government incompetence and indifference in 2005, will likely fare no
better the next time disaster comes to call.
While documentaries defending the government’s insufficient and possibly criminally
negligent response to Hurricane Katrina are unlikely, the potential disaster posed by the
increase in hydraulic fracturing to produce oil on American soil has led to two different
takes. Best Documentary Oscar-nominated Gasland (2010) and the sequel Gasland II
(2013) emphasize the dangers of “fracking,” while FrackNation (2013) argues that shale gas
may well be a miracle answer to America’s twenty-first-century energy needs. Fracking is a
process energy companies use to extract oil and natural gas from deep underground, often in
areas with no history of oil or gas drilling. The injection of fluid at high pressure into under-
lying rock formations pries apart narrow fissures to release trapped gas or crude oil, which
then flows through a pipe to the surface. The method is most often used to retrieve gas from
shale fields located hundreds and thousands of feet underground.
Theater director turned documentarian Josh Fox prosecutes the case against fracking in
the form of a first-person narrative. Asked to lease his Pennsylvania land for $100,000 so a
natural gas company can explore it for gas deposits, Fox researches the history and effects of
fracking. What he discovers is alarming. In 2005, Congress passed legislation that exempted
fracking from environmental regulations like the Clean Water Act. Deregulation led to a
drilling boom in more than thirty states. As energy companies like Halliburton fail to return
his calls, Fox travels through states pocked by drilling sites and uncovers nightmare sce-
narios. Most famously, he records residents near fracking sites who can light a flame near
their water faucets and set the polluted tap water on fire. Powerful graphics and animation
help make the case that the lethal brew of chemicals injected underground to release the
gas endangers the safety of drinking water by inevitably polluting nearby river basins and
watersheds. The film’s politics are clear: we must regulate fracking or lose a natural resource
more vital than fossil fuel.
Described by Variety as “rough-hewn” and “poetic,” veering between “nightmarish
moods and lyrical reveries, even while the camera peers into the faces of government and
corporate officials,” Gasland won the Special Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival
and achieved its goal of drawing attention, if not viewers, to its cause.23 Screened in only
a handful of theaters to earn under $31,000, Gasland is more known about than actually
watched. It inspired numerous posts on Youtube.com of people lighting their tap water on
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fire, attracted to its cause celebrities like singer-artist Yoko Ono and actor Mark Ruffalo,
and doubtlessly helped push Congress to instruct the Environmental Protection Agency to
investigate the link between hydraulic fracturing and poisonous drinking water. In 2012, the
feature fiction film Promised Land debuted. Set in a worn-out Pennsylvania town, it pits gas
company salespeople, who are encouraging citizens to lease their land for drilling, against a
teacher and local activist opposed to the plan.
Following the release of Gasland, gas companies launched campaign efforts like the
Independent Petroleum Association of America website, “Energy in Depth,” to sway public
opinion about the safety and desirability of fracking. Fox returned with Gasland II (2013), an
even more anguished, information-laden cry to end fracking. Fox even got arrested in 2012
for filming congressional hearings on the issue, and his work led directly to the counter-
documentary FrackNation.24
Produced independently on a shoestring budget, FrackNation is journalist Phelim
McAleer’s attempt to balance the scales. Directly addressing perceived shortcomings and
misrepresentations in Gasland, McAleer interviews pro-fracking residents from the same
town featured by Fox and forces anti-fracking Fox supporters to admit to a lack of evidence
for their claims. While the film never manages to transcend its dependence on Fox’s origi-
nal film, it does a respectable if not entirely convincing job of cracking open the debate.
The New York Times defended the film’s purpose: it “underscores the sheer complexity of a
process that offers a financial lifeline to struggling farmers. Whether it also brings death to
their water supply is something we won’t find out by listening to only half of the debate.”25
Wartime Documentaries: Why We Fight and No End in Sight
Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 topped box office records for documentaries and did so
taking on the treacherous relationship between the attacks of 9/11, the presidency of George
W. Bush, the “neoconservative” policies of his inner circle, and the misleading justification
for war in Iraq. Following that unprecedented success, a spate of documentaries debuted,
addressing the escalating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fed by journalists imbedded with
military units in the field, soldiers equipped with inexpensive but quality recording devices,
and the controversial nature of the launching of the Iraq war, these documentaries embody a
variety of political and human perspectives on the wars.
This mini-genre includes the following 2000-era releases. In Gunner Palace (2004), field
artillery soldiers known as the “gunners” hunker down in one of Saddam Hussein’s luxury
palaces while enduring continued hostilities despite George Bush having declared the end to
major combat operations. In a more overtly political vein, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers
(2006) investigates corporations like Halliburton and Kellog, Brown and Root that enjoyed
sweetheart contract deals with the government to deliver materiel and services that in previ-
ous wars were provided entirely by the military itself. Though few corporate officials agreed
to participate in the film, former employees, survivors of employees killed in the field, and
soldiers serviced by the corporations all testify to profiteering—the companies’ dismaying
drive for profits over safety, quality, and love of country.
Iraq in Fragments (2006) views the personal cost of war and occupation through the eyes
and voices of regular Iraqis, while another cinema verité-styled documentary, The War Tapes
(2006), is comprised solely of footage shot by a group of National Guard members when
they were called for duty in Iraq and given digital video cameras to record their experiences.
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Produced by HBO, The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007) focuses on the torture of prisoners at
the hands of American soldiers in a now notorious prison in Iraq in the fall of 2003. It makes
the case that these heinous acts were not, as was suggested at the time, the result of a few
bad actors low on the chain of command. By putting their atrocities in the context of memos
on “enhanced interrogation” from the likes of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the
film indicts the chain of command all the way to the White House. Finally, Restrepo (2010)
concerns the year journalist Sebastian Junger and photographer Tim Hetherington spent
teamed up with the Second Platoon fighting the Taliban in a strategically valuable valley in
Afghanistan.
None of these films scored big audiences, and even fiction war films like Lions for Lambs
(2007), Stop-Loss (2008), and The Green Zone (2010) proved box office duds. By the end
of the decade, the number of war documentaries and fictional films alike slowed to a trickle.
Critics blamed their failure to attract audiences on “war fatigue,” yet two war documentaries
from this period did break the top 100 box office documentaries, although just barely. Why
We Fight (2006) and No End in Sight (2007) each grossed just under $1.5 million.
Borrowing the title of a series of pro-World War II propaganda films made by Frank
Capra, Why We Fight takes the long view, tracing twenty-first-century wars to 1950s
President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famous warning about the development of a “vast
military-industrial complex”—a convergence of political and corporate interests that created
an America permanently poised to wage war. In the film’s view, conflict of interest is an out-
moded concern when it comes to the relationship between American foreign policy and the
industries that supply the necessities of war, especially since the United States has turned to
outsourcing or “privatizing” the way it fights. According to the Christian Science Monitor,
by 2008 the Department of Defense employed 155,826 private contractors in Iraq and only
152,275 troops. In Afghanistan in 2010, the government hired 94,413 contractors compared
with 91,600 troops. Between 2001 and 2010, the United States spent nearly $5 billion a year
employing contractors, an unprecedented shift from military or public personnel to civilian
or private personnel.26 Winner of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for
documentary, Why We Fight argues that contracting out services and supplies the military
once provided itself ratchets up the civilian government’s predisposition to engage in mili-
tary action.
Directed by Eugene Jarecki, director also of the political documentaries The Trials of
Henry Kissinger (2002) and Reagan (2011), Why We Fight cuts back and forth between
archival footage of wartime politicians—President George W. Bush, his vice president
Richard Cheney, and President Richard Nixon among them—and interviews made for the
film—including with some of Eisenhower’s descendants, Senator John McCain, disillu-
sioned military officer Karen Kwiatkowski, and William Sekzer. Sekzer’s son died in the
9/11 attacks, and in his grief and desire for revenge, Sekzer got his son’s name etched on a
bomb dropped in Iraq. Once it became clear that Iraq had nothing to do with the events of
9/11, Sekzer felt manipulated and deceived. His story provides fodder for fresh indignation
in a movie that treads familiar intellectual and historical territory. A convincing case against
the unholy alliance between business and government, Why We Fight takes for granted why
we care. Yet, as Roger Ebert reasons, the film did not have much impact at the box office or
on the politics of war because “What it says should concern us, but apparently it does not.”27
Directed by Inside Job’s Charles Ferguson, a former political scientist and one-time sup-
porter of the Iraq war, No End in Sight focuses squarely on the arrogance and incompetence
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of the engineers of the post-invasion war. Laying out key decisions made by men like
Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, American diplomat and leader of the
Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq L. Paul Bremer III, and U.S. Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz during 2003, after major combat operations had been declared
over, the film sets out to answer why by 2007 Iraq, despite all the salesmanship pitching
the opposite view, had turned into a quagmire. Twice in the film we see Rumsfeld say he
doesn’t “do” quagmires, yet all else in the film points to his culpability. To today’s audi-
ence, the historical analysis is compelling yet depressingly familiar: the disastrous and
apparently hasty decision to purge all remaining Baathists (members of Saddam Hussein’s
political party) from Iraqi civil services and to undo Iraq’s military; the lack of a coordi-
nated strategic response to looters and other warning signs that the United States was not
being “greeted as liberators,” as Cheney predicted, but was in fact facing an incipient insur-
gency; ideologically correct opinions repeatedly trumping pragmatic and expert advice;
young, inexperienced administration loyalists leapfrogging seasoned professionals to jobs
beyond their skill set. Thus, No End in Sight takes an overt political stand on the bungled
prosecution of the war, one even the most dyed-in-the-wool war proponents would have
difficulty refuting.
Political Documentary Redux: 2016: Obama’s America
Though earning only less than half earned by the one ranked just above it (the 2011 concert
movie Justin Bieber: Never Say Never), the fourth highest-grossing documentary at this time
is a political film in the spirit of Fahrenheit 9/11. Like that film, 2016: Obama’s America
was released in time to impact a presidential election, purported to reveal hidden truths about
the man in office, and played to audiences predisposed to agree with its message—in this
case, an audience hostile to and suspicious of the nation’s forty-fourth president. Despite
a weak debut in only one theater, the film went on to earn more than $33 million in over
2,000 theaters, the most successful conservative-leaning political documentary ever. Its tag
line, “Love him or hate him, you don’t know him,” suggests the film’s mission—to explain
the inexplicably “different” president, Barack Obama. 2016: Obama’s America is based on
a Forbes Magazine essay by one of the filmmakers titled “How Obama Thinks.” With that
piece of political psychoanalysis as its starting point, it projects into the future what the
country will be like should the president win a second term—it isn’t pretty. Money burns and
the Statue of Liberty’s visual prominence suggests the erosion of American liberties. Dinesh
D’Souza approaches his subject like an astronaut encountering an alien life form, mysterious
and unknowable. The Forbes piece repeatedly invokes words like “odd,” “anomaly,” and
“strange” to describe the president and his policies, stressing, “The President’s actions are
so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike.”28
D’Souza’s Obama is an adult in thrall to the absent African father he met only once, deter-
mined to fulfill the elder’s anticolonial convictions espoused in academic articles. The film’s
premise is that his father’s anticolonialism has transformed into today’s anti-Americanism
and thus Obama’s desire to please his dead father means the diminishment of the very coun-
try he leads. D’Souza’s proof? According to 2016, Obama intends to work against Britain to
help return control of the Falkland Islands to Argentina and to have the Middle East become
the “United States of Islam.” When he is not racking up government debt to fund social-
ist policies, he is busy undermining Israel and giving Iran a pass. To complete this suspect
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A poster promotes 2016: Obama’s America (2012), an anti-Obama documentary released in time to
try to influence the 2012 presidential election. (Courtesy of Getty Images)
profile, D’Souza quotes from Obama’s own writings and returns to 2008 election ghosts like
former radical activist Bill Ayers and the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright. A competently
made documentary, 2016: Obama’s America lacks Fahrenheit 9/11’s theatricality and heft,
relying more on conjecture than factual events. It does, however, share that film’s political
legacy: neither film turned the election its way.
Documentary style and political practice intersect in important yet unpredictable ways.
With the financial, if not electoral, success of films like Moore’s and D’Souza’s, we are
certain to see other such efforts. In the summer of 2013, a full three years before the next
presidential election, Politico reported that CNN had selected Charles Ferguson to direct a
feature documentary about former secretary of state and rumored 2016 presidential contender
Hillary Clinton for release “in theaters and air on CNN.”29 The announcement provoked con-
troversy on both sides of the aisle. Clinton supporters feared a hatchet job. Conservatives
complained that so much exposure would bias people in her favor, and Republicans banned
CNN from their party’s schedule for the 2016 candidate debates. Fewer than three months
288
later, Ferguson declared the project dead in the water: “When I approached people for inter-
views, I discovered that nobody, and I mean nobody, was interested in helping me make this
film. Not Democrats, not Republicans.”30 Thus, lack of cooperation from people pegged to
participate in the film, and perhaps fear of political repercussions for doing so, and not lack
of support from his financial backers, killed the film.
Even without strong box office performances, recent political documentaries about envi-
ronmental and social injustices have achieved measurable political impact by kick-starting
legislation and inspiring congressional hearings. Audiences may never flock to political doc-
umentaries as they do to blockbuster fictional films, but that fact matters less to filmmakers
than do such films’ potential for making a cultural splash and achieving measurable political
effect.
Notes
1. Eric Hynes, “We’re Living in a Golden Age of Documentary,” Slate, www.slate.com/articles/arts/

culturebox/2012/02/tabloid_senna_the_interrupters_and_other_documentaries_overlooked_by_
the_academy.html.
2. A.O. Scott, “Documentaries (In Name Only) of Every Stripe,” New York Times, www.nytimes.
com/2010/10/17/movies/17scott.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
3. Hal Erickson, “Hearts and Minds,” All Film, www.allmovie.com/movie/v21924.
4. James Combs and Sara Combs, Film Propaganda and American Politics: An Analysis and
Filmography (New York: Garland, 1994).
5. Thomas White, “The Dusking of the Golden Age? A Look Back and Forward,” Documentary.
org, www.documentary.org/content/dusking-golden-age-look-back-and-forward. See also, “The
New Golden Age of Documentaries,” NBC News, www.today.com/id/5279181/ns/today-today_
entertainment/t/new-golden-age-documentaries/#.UkBjDryKs9M. See also, “Steve James Hails
a Golden Age of Documentary Filmmaking,” The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/film/2011/
jun/06/steve-james-golden-age-documentary.
6. Quoted in Hynes.
7. At least since the post-World War II neorealist movement, fictional films from Arthur Penn’s
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008), among others, have
included long takes of documentary-like footage featuring actual settings and unprofessional
actors.
8. “Majority of Adults Expect to See Fahrenheit 9/11,” Gallup, www.gallup.com/poll/12379/
Majority-Adults-Expect-See-Fahrenheit-911.aspx.
9. Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star, June 25, 2004, available online at http://jpfitness.com/showthread.
php?58911-F911-the-critics-speak.
10. Hynes.
11. Thomas Heath, “Leonsis’s ‘Filmanthropy’ Plants a Seed With Buddies,” Washington Post, www.
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/24/AR2007012401887.html.
12. Scott, p. 2.
13. Ibid.
14. “How Oscar’s Military Rape Documentary Might Change Everything,” Daily Beast,
www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/07/the- invisible- war- how- oscar- s- military- rape-
documentary-might-change-everything.html.
15. The Invisible War, http://invisiblewarmovie.com/.
16. Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human
Rights (New York: Rodale Books, 2004). See also, Jeffrey D. Clements, Corporations Are Not
People: Reclaiming Democracy from Big Money and Global Corporations (Oakland: Berrett-
Koehler Publishers, 2014). For a more succinct explanation of the court decisions related to
corporate citizenship and property rights, free speech, and religious liberties see, PBS.org, http://
www.pbs.org/now/politics/corprights.html.
289
17. Roger Ebert, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” www.rogerebert.com/reviews/enron-the-
smartest-guys-in-the-room-2005.
18. Andrew O’Hehir, “Beyond the Multiplex,” Salon.com, www.salon.com/2005/11/03/btm_35/.
19. Roger Ebert, “Wall Street’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” Inside Job, www.rogerebert.com/
rogers-journal/wall-streets-dirty-rotten-scoundrels.
20. “The Great American Bubble Machine,” Rolling Stone, www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/
the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405.
21. “Exclusive: 4 in 5 in US Face Near-Poverty, No Work,” Yahoo News, http://finance.yahoo.com/
news/exclusive-4-5-us-face-175906005.html.
22. “Are Wal-Mart’s Low Wages a Drag on the Economy? A New Report Says Yes,” Forbes, www.
forbes.com/sites/lauraheller/2013/05/31/are-wal%E2%80%90marts-low-wages-a-drag-on-the-
economy-new-report-says-yes/.
23. “Gasland,” Variety, http://variety.com/2010/film/reviews/gasland-1117941971/.

24. “Documentarian Is Arrested at House Hearing,” The Carpetbagger, New York Times, http://carpet-
bagger.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/documentarian-is-arrested-at-house-hearing/.
25. “Fracknation,” New York Times, http://movies.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/movies/fracknation-a-
documentary.html.
26. “A Lesson From Iraq,” Commentary, www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2013/0319/
A-lesson-from-Iraq-war-How-to-outsource-war-to-private-contractors.
27. Roger Ebert, “Why We Fight,” www.rogerebert.com/reviews/why-we-fight-2006.
28. “How Obama Thinks,” Forbes, www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0927/politics-socialism-capitalism-
private-enterprises-obama-business-problem.html.
29. “CNN to Produce Hillary Clinton Film,” Politico, www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/07/cnn-
to-produce-hillary-clinton-film-169427.html.
30. “CNN Hillary Clinton Movie Canceled,” Huffington Post, www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/30/
cnn-hillary-clinton-movie-canceled_n_4016080.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003.
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14
Film and the Politics of Race

The Minority Report
Bamboozled (2000)
As in every other aspect of American life, the mix of racial politics and film has been vola-
tile, resulting in a rich and complex history. The depiction of minorities in popular movies
has generally been both reflective of social and political reality and occasionally intended
to send political messages. But the study of minorities in the movies is fraught with com-
plexities. What constitutes a “minority film”? Must such films (1) be directed by minorities,
(2) feature many minority actors, (3) emphasize race-related social and political issues, and/
or (4) be created primarily for minority audiences? With respect to the political impact of
movies, do movies create or reflect racial conflict and other outcomes?
In this chapter, we focus selectively on the evolution of films by and about African-
Americans. One rationale for this approach is that race relations between whites and blacks
have proved to be the most enduring conflict in American society—as well as the one most
often depicted in popular movies. We focus on films and events from the latter part of the
twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, as this era represents the most interesting
and most complex and widely viewed part of the cinematic landscape. These films include
both reflections of race relations and efforts that create more pointed political messages
about race relations. Certainly volumes could be devoted to the study of other racial minor-
ity groups, although the way popular movies have treated other minorities often parallels the
way they have treated African-Americans.
From the onset, the depiction of African-Americans in film has been problematic. The
Birth of a Nation, as discussed in Chapter 4, provoked such outrage, including boycotts and
censorship laws, that Hollywood was loath to address race relations directly for decades.
Additionally, the Production Code strictly forbade representations of miscegenation. Subse-
quent studio films thus avoided Birth’s depiction of blacks as threatening savages and found
it easier to avoid Code violations by sidelining African-American characters altogether.
Instead, when early films did feature black characters, they were almost universally depicted
in subservient roles as demeaning caricatures, including happy, shiftless Uncle Toms, kind
but witless Mammy servants (as in 1939’s Gone With the Wind), dancing fools, and “coons,”
who appeared lazy and stupid and spoke a nearly unintelligibly thick dialect. At the same
time and specifically in response to the traumatizing depictions of blacks, white supremacy,
and race relations in Birth of a Nation, independent black directors and producers were cre-
ating an alternative cinema, called “race movies.” Although developed for limited audiences
in segregated theaters, race movies, as a writer from the time period explained, “all have the
same motive, namely, to present Negro films about and for Negroes, showing them not as
fools and servants, but as human beings with the same emotions, desires and weaknesses as
other people’s; and to share in the profits of this great industry.”1
The most important and widely known of these artists, Oscar Micheaux, created more
than forty movies between 1919 and 1948.2 Produced with extremely limited resources,
these films counteracted the racism of D.W. Griffith’s work. Within Our Gates (1920) was
meant specifically to repudiate The Birth of a Nation and addressed the very audience
Griffith’s film both degraded and ignored by casting black actors in black-identified roles.
Promotion for Within Our Gates hailed its audience, claiming the film “takes up a problem
in which every member of the Colored Race is vitally interested,” and boasted that “every
actor is of the Colored Race.” The movie was described as “the greatest preachment against
race prejudices” and “full of details that will make you grit your teeth in silent indignation.”
Micheaux’s political intent defies the racist depiction of blacks-in-burnt-cork in Birth of a
Nation. He also rebutted Griffith’s racist ideology by using parallel editing, or what Griffith
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FILM AND THE POLITICS OF RACE: THE MINORITY REPORT
called “switchbacks,” to build suspense at the film’s conclusion just as Griffith does. While
the climax to The Birth of a Nation cuts back and forth between white people hiding out from
marauding freed slaves in a remote country cabin and the Clan riding to their rescue, Within
Our Gates ends by alternating between scenes of a lynching of an African-American couple
and, in a house not far away, the sexual assault of a young black woman by an older white
man. Micheaux’s ending corrects the view of racial violence and moral turpitude promoted
in Griffith’s work, effectively switching the roles of victim and criminal from black against
white to white against black. When the would-be rapist realizes the woman he is attacking
is his own “mixed race” relation, he stops. Thus Within Our Gates stops short of exploiting
sexual assault but only after depicting a representation of group violence more historically
accurate than Griffith’s. White lynch mobs attacking black victims were far more common
occurrences than former slaves victimizing white landowners.
However, race films were ultimately no match for Hollywood, which would not distribute
films by budding black independent filmmakers and trumped them with richly produced
all-black musicals with characters almost always conforming to stereotype. Hearts in Dixie
(1929), advertised as “200 Negro Entertainers From the Levees and the Cotton Fields,”
starred Stepin Fetchit as Gummy, a lazy shiftless husband who lets his wife do all the work
and calls a voodoo woman to aid his sick daughters. Advertised as “Realistic!” and “Earthy!,”
King Vidor’s Hallelujah (1929) attempted to showcase African-American dance and music
from an authentic, less stereotypical perspective yet featured characters with names like
Chick, Hotshot, Mammy, and Zeke. Entered into the Library of Congress’s National Film
Registry, Hallelujah includes the traditional Negro spirituals “Goin’ Home” and “Swing
Low Sweet Chariot” yet they are presented alongside songs by Irving Berlin and Stephen
Foster. Although Vidor received an Oscar nomination for the film, he was forced to put up
part of the funding himself. Almost twenty years later Vincente Minnelli’s Cabin in the Sky
(1943) cast the groundbreaking Lena Horne in her first substantial part.
The 1960s and 1970s: Hollywood Discovers Minorities
Race relations and the war in Vietnam dominated the politics of the 1960s, yet Hollywood
avoided both issues until late in the decade, apparently assuming that an issue that polarized
the nation would offend too many people to turn a profit. The same rationale had applied to
films about race since the tumultuous response to The Birth of a Nation, although there had
been honorable exceptions in the late 1940s (Pinky, Home of the Brave, Intruder in the Dust)
and 1950s (The Defiant Ones, Imitation of Life, The World, The Flesh and The Devil ). The
powerlessness of blacks in popular film mirrored their status in the political system itself.
In the 1960s, however, Hollywood discovered that race could sell tickets. Minority issues
were hot, and a vaguely liberal national consensus on civil rights had developed; as long
as films played safely within that consensus, they could appear controversial yet please the
majority. This trend accelerated when the film industry belatedly noticed that minorities
themselves constituted a substantial potential audience. A decade of civil rights activism had
prepared audiences to accept a greater and more realistic presence of blacks in Hollywood
films.
One of the first successful films dealing with race was Alan Pakula’s To Kill a Mocking-
bird (1962), with Gregory Peck as a brave lawyer defending a black man accused of rape in
a small southern town. In the Heat of the Night (1967), directed by Norman Jewison, was
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an even bigger hit. The story of a racist southern sheriff (Rod Steiger) and a northern black
lawman (Sidney Poitier) who are forced to work together, In the Heat of the Night ridiculed
the southerner’s racist attitude toward the clearly superior black cop. The film was an all-
round hit, winning Academy Awards for best motion picture, script, and actor (Steiger) and
later spawning a TV series.
Another contender in the 1967 Oscar race was also antiracist: Stanley Kramer’s Guess
Who’s Coming to Dinner, which starred Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy as parents
whose daughter is about to marry a black doctor (Sidney Poitier) so handsome, selfless, and
intelligent it is less clear why he wants to marry the daughter than why she wants to marry
him. Audiences loved this comedy, and both Hepburn and the script won Oscars, but critics
were hard on the movie, pointing out that the problems of its affluent families were irrel-
evant in an era of ghetto riots. To their credit, such movies condemned white racism, but
most did so in a sanitized way calculated not to offend white audiences. The racist charac-
ters were such crude caricatures that whites could join in the condemnation without feeling
guilty about their own racial sensibilities. The liberalism of these films was thus well within
the national consensus of the time. Yet such films may have paved the way to even greater
racial tolerance.
Although Poitier, who went on to forge an important civil rights and social activist record,
was ridiculed for playing cuddly, acceptable blacks in his 1960s films, his screen presence
surely helped prepare white audiences for integration, even if some whites were shocked
when they found out that not all blacks were like Sidney Poitier. This fact became abun-
dantly apparent in a spate of 1970s films that featured nearly all-black casts and plenty of
action. Loosely labeled “blaxploitation” movies, these films featured a new “Superspade”
stereotype: a suave but tough black hero “who lived a violent life in pursuits of black women,
white sex, quick money, easy success, and a cheap joint, among other pleasures.”3 This ste-
reotype was politically empowering, but also socially demeaning and ultimately a dead end
for blacks in the movies.
The mold was set by independently produced Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1970s).
Shot on a shoestring budget in South Central Los Angeles, it is the story of a sex-show per-
former (Sweetback, played by director Marvin van Peebles) who witnesses the beating of
black revolutionaries by white cops. In turn, Sweetback roughs up the cops and must then
live on the run—indulging in sex and violence and outsmarting the dimwitted white police
manhunt. The movie was a minor sensation, grossing more than $10 million and providing
the impetus for a score of Hollywood copycat efforts. (The story of the film’s creation was
the subject of a quasi-documentary, Baadasssss!, in 2004.) Sweetback and movies of its ilk
projected an empowered, if flawed black male amid a corrupt, mostly white political system.
Subsequent movies like Shaft (1971) and its sequels, Shaft’s Big Score (1972) and Shaft
in Africa (1973), as well as Superfly (1972) and Coffy (1973), demonstrated that blaxploita-
tion flicks—and therefore, movies that featured black characters and themes—could attract
a crossover (white) audience, even if their political messages were muddled in the emphasis
on sex, drugs, and violence. Critics denounced their “reverse racism,” since the (white) man
was often portrayed as weak, corrupt, and stupid, but black and white audiences were drawn
by the action as well as the mystique of the Superspade stereotype. Suddenly, black was very
cool at the box office. Coffy and its follow-up Foxy Brown (1974) even demonstrated that
black women could join in on the action. However, the blaxploitation craze was short-lived,
and the spate of copycat and sequel black action films died out.
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The Politics of Black and White in the 1980s
Racial politics was still a hot topic in America in the 1980s, but filmmakers pretty much
steered clear of it. John Sayles touched on it in Matewan (1987), however, and a few other
filmmakers also addressed America’s most persistent political challenge.
Ragtime (1981), for example, based on E.L. Doctorow’s panoramic historical novel of
turn-of-the-century America, features a variety of characters and political themes in elabo-
rately interwoven stories. Director Milos Forman chose to focus on a mild-mannered young
black man, Coalhouse (Howard E. Rollins Jr.), who is driven to radical revenge after white
racists destroy his car. With no recourse in the law, he resorts to violence. A black attorney
refuses to help Coalhouse on the persuasive grounds that other clients have greater needs,
and Booker T. Washington (Moses Gunn) makes a strong case for his own pacifist tactics,
but Ragtime stays resolutely on the side of Coalhouse as well as its other nonconformist,
antiauthoritarian characters.
Ragtime’s treatment of the subject of race is very different from that of Sidney Poitier’s
movies of the 1960s. Despite the film’s historical setting, Coalhouse is an up-to-date char-
acter, proud and stubborn, with a chip on his shoulder, insistent on his rights, unwilling to
placate whites on any terms. Unfortunately, whatever message Ragtime meant to send was
lost in obscure motivations and a confusion of subplots. From Coalhouse’s extreme actions
(he leads a break-in of magnate J.P. Morgan’s home) to his shooting death on the order of
a seemingly decent police commissioner (James Cagney), Ragtime provides few clues to
the characters’ motivations. Despite fine performances, this distancing kept audiences from
identifying with the characters, and Ragtime’s rich and beautiful evocation of the American
past was not enough to sustain it. Critics and audiences were unenthusiastic, and although
the movie was nominated for five Academy Awards, it won none.
Mississippi Burning (1988), directed by Alan Parker and written by Chris Gerolmo,
was a tougher and more forthright film about the politics of race, set in Mississippi in
1964. Based on the true story of the FBI investigation of the disappearance of three
young civil rights workers (one black and two white), the movie conveys a strong sense
of the tension in a small southern town caught up in the civil rights battles of the 1960s.
Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe portray two very different FBI men, with Hackman
as the cautious, good-ol’-boy southerner and the younger Dafoe as a more aggressive
outsider. Their challenge as investigators is to get anybody—black or white—in the tight
little town to talk about what happened. Whites, many of whom may have been complicit
in the murders, keep to themselves. Blacks keep silent out of fear. One who refuses to
talk to the agents is nevertheless beaten by local Klansmen. But as Roger Ebert pointed
out, one of the strengths of this film was that “there are no great villains and sadistic tor-
turers in this film, only banal little racists with a vicious streak.”4 Although some critics
condemned the film for focusing on white FBI agents when blacks were the real heroes
of the era, Mississippi Burning got mostly rave reviews and won several Academy Award
nominations.
Costa-Gavras’s film Betrayed (1988), scripted by Joe Eszterhas, touched on a similar
but more contemporary subject less successfully. Debra Winger plays an undercover FBI
agent assigned to investigate white supremacists—but she falls in love with the prime sus-
pect (Tom Berenger). Reviewers condemned the movie, as they did Mississippi Burning,
for dealing with racism by focusing on white characters, but while some critics thought
295
Mississippi Burning was redeemed by its script, acting, and sense of place, others dismissed
Betrayed for the heavy-handedness of its message.
Spike Lee, the preeminent African-American director of his or perhaps any era, brought
racial politics in America completely up to date in Do the Right Thing (1989), which he
wrote, directed, and starred in. An array of black and white characters interacts at a pizzeria
in New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood on a single, oppressively hot summer day.
An Italian family runs the pizzeria, survivors of an era when the neighborhood was pre-
dominantly Italian. Now it is black and poor, and a minor disagreement between the pizzeria
owner and one of the black residents results in racial insults, slurs, and eventually violence,
provoked by heat, poverty, and the insecurities of the neighborhood’s varied residents. Lee’s
high-energy film is funny, moving, and provocative at the same time, with some sympathy
and understanding for all its characters. Hal Hinson of the Washington Post called Do the
Right Thing “a moral workout. At once a plea for tolerance and a rationale for violent oppo-
sition, the film embraces both its patron saints, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and then
invites us to hassle out the contradictions.”5 Some audiences were elated by the ambiguity
of this film’s message, whereas others were frustrated. Spike Lee accepted both reactions,
declaring, “All we can do is present the problems.”6 Although only modestly successful at
the box office ($26 million gross), Do the Right Thing captured some awards, two Oscar
nominations, and a considerable amount of media attention. Despite its evocation of a par-
ticular time and place, this 1980s-era film remains relevant and important thirty years later
and a fixture on many must-see lists.
Lee himself became a significant film artist and political figure with the success of Do
the Right Thing. He had burst on the scene three years earlier with an independently pro-
duced hit, She’s Gotta Have It (1986), which demonstrated both his directing skills and his
ability to make financially successful movies about blacks and black themes. Lee skillfully
parlayed this success in a way that enabled and inspired other black artists—actors, direc-
tors, and others—to succeed also. He also was and is extremely visible and outspoken,
becoming a prominent, if often controversial, spokesperson for black concerns about film.
Unlike many other directors (black and white), Lee is able to make movies with racial
subjects and themes that, instead of reflecting social and political reality, create an alterna-
tive vision that frequently constitutes an alternative to Hollywood stereotypes, although
not always a coherent race-related message. Even as the popular and critical attraction of
his films has been inconsistent, Lee has been adamantly reluctant to pigeonhole his politi-
cal message.
Directed by Edward Zwick, Glory (1989), on the other hand, had a more straightforward
message. Kevin Jarre’s script told the story of a regiment of black soldiers led by white offic-
ers in the Civil War. Seen through the eyes of a white officer (Matthew Broderick), Glory
was criticized as yet another film about race told from a white perspective. But powerful per-
formances from Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman as black soldiers provide balance.
During the war, blacks were not fully trusted by either side, and black soldiers were thought
to be too undisciplined and unreliable to be effective. The 54th Regiment of Massachusetts
Volunteer Infantry, made up of free northern blacks as well as escaped slaves, fought bravely
in some of the bloodiest battles of the war, disproving the prejudice against them. As a result,
the North recruited more black troops, and the added manpower was crucial to winning the
war. Another issue in the film is that the black troops received lower pay than the white
296
troops. When the black soldiers refuse to accept their unequal paychecks, their white offic-
ers join them, producing a bond between them that contributes to their success. The distance
between the races, however, is never glossed over. Glory opened to good reviews, and won
Academy Awards for soundtrack and supporting actor Denzel Washington, only the second
of three African-American actors ever to win that award.
The 1990s: The Emergence of Black Directors and Blaxploitation Revisited
The 1990s inaugurated some significant new trends in black cinema, although black films
never attained truly consistent and widespread commercial success. Inspired and enabled by
the success of Spike Lee, African-American directors attained modest success with a series
of chronicles of life in South Central Los Angeles—the impoverished black community of
Southern California. Most prominently, African-American director John Singleton created
Boyz N the Hood (1991), a gritty narrative about young blacks coming to grips with the
realities of the prospects they face. White characters are generally portrayed as bigoted and
as hindrances to black advancement. The film received several Oscar nominations and estab-
lished Singleton as a candidate to join Spike Lee as a prominent black filmmaker.
Working a similar vein, twin African-American directors Albert and Allen Hughes cre-
ated Menace II Society (1992). Another effective exploration of life in the Los Angeles
ghetto, Menace was even less hopeful about the prospects for young urban blacks than was
Boyz N the Hood. But neither Singleton nor the Hughes brothers were successful in carv-
ing out subsequent releases that would expand upon their visions of black America. Both
wound up as part of the recent blaxploitation revival, with Singleton remaking Shaft (2000)
and the Hughes brothers creating their Dead Presidents (1995) heist flick. Although both
Singleton and the Hughes brothers demonstrated great potential in their subsequent releases,
they did not match the critical and commercial success that their initial filmmaking forays
had represented.
Instead of heralding the advent of a vital new African-American cinema, racially dis-
tinctive mainstream cinema in the 1990s for the most part was treading water. A host of
heist movies, reminiscent of the politically neutered blaxploitation era, emerged. New Jack
City (1991) helped cut the mold. Mario Van Peebles, son of the director of Sweet Sweet-
back’s Baadasssss Song, directed this entertaining crime-genre film with a mostly black cast.
Whereas in the old blaxploitation movies the villains were generally white, in New Jack City
the bad guys are black—and so are many of the cops who are after them. Although this and
similar films introduced a new generation of filmgoers to the blaxploitation concept, they did
little to advance a political agenda for black films.
Spike Lee remained the standard-bearer for widely distributed and politically provoca-
tive African-American film. His Malcolm X (1992) was a hard-nosed, three-dimensional
biography of the political activist. It also propelled Denzel Washington (in the title role) to
fame as a crossover star. Far from a Hollywood glamorization of the fiery orator, Malcolm X
explored the complexities and ambiguities of his life in a way that was compelling to main-
stream audiences; however, the film is, to date, Lee’s last undisputed critical and commercial
triumph. In the blockbuster, CGI-dominated film scene of the early twenty-first century,
Lee tellingly resorted to the capital-raising website Kickstarter to finance his latest project,
exceeding his goal in thirty days.7
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Everything Is Buddy-Buddy
Race relations, as depicted in American cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, were frequently rep-
resented in what came to be known as an interracial variation of “buddy movies.” Typically,
such films entailed an “odd couple”—a white and a black, frequently policemen—whose
exploits were entertaining and also innocuous. The comedy revolved around the juxtaposi-
tion of stereotypical white and black social behaviors. The smash hit 48 Hrs (1982) was a
typical example and perhaps a progenitor of this mini-genre. Circumstances oblige a white
police officer (Nick Nolte) and a black convict (upcoming star Eddie Murphy) to work
together to solve a crime. 48 Hrs was a generally mindless crime romp; the real appeal of
the movie (and its sequel) was the contrasting of a stereotypically white character with a
black counterpart.
The success of 48 Hrs meant that the same formula would be repeated numerous times in
the 1990s in such popular releases as Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Lethal Weapon (1988)
and their various sequels. Although these very popular series and a host of derivative knock-
offs did not seek to say anything beyond their superficial (yet frequently entertaining) action
sequences, they did seem to imply an ultimately cozy relationship between the races that
exceeded any social reality of the era. Hollywood seemed intent on smoothing over the
social reality of race relations in the United States. The fact that the black and white charac-
ters were typecast as initially incompatible itself pointed to the idealization of race relations
that such movies projected. Yet audiences clearly enjoyed many of these buddy movies, so
perhaps a charitable interpretation is that they may have helped to engender a more tolerant,
if not necessarily enlightened, relationship between the races.
The black and white buddy concept was pushed to extremes by white director Quentin
Tarantino’s hugely popular Pulp Fiction (1994). Pulp Fiction is a loosely strung-together
series of vignettes featuring phenomenally cool criminals. One of the central stories involves
two supercool criminals portrayed by white actor John Travolta and black actor Samuel L.
Jackson. The script calls for Jackson, particularly, to make frequent use of the offensive term
“nigger,” albeit in a self-consciously hip way. Spike Lee criticized Tarantino for exploiting
the term (which Tarantino also used frequently in his 1997 blaxploitation update, Jackie
Brown), setting off a public feud between the two directors. The incident pointed to the
greater issue of the political sensitivity of contemporary white directors’ portrayal of black
issues. The two clashed again when Lee refused to see Tarantino’s Django Unchained
(2012), a revisionist western set in the slavery-era South. Lee stated publicly that attending
the movie would be disrespectful to his ancestors. On Twitter, Lee wrote, “American Slavery
Was Not a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves.
Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them.”8 As in Pulp Fiction, Samuel L. Jackson plays a
tricky part in Django Unchained, a wily “house slave” who deceives the sadistic plantation
owner played by Leonardo DeCaprio while also siding with him against Django, a freed
slave with a self-determination that Jackson’s character resents.
In Driving Miss Daisy (1989), a grumpy old southern white woman is paired with a black
chauffeur. Although they begin at odds with each other, by the end of the drama they realize
what good friends they have become and how much they have in common. Immensely popu-
lar at the box office (and awarded the Best Picture Oscar award), the film seemed to project a
liberal message of racial tolerance while still accommodating the existing racial order. How-
ever, one critic, writing about The Human Stain (2003), in which Anthony Hopkins portrays
298
an African-American passing as white, observed that such movies (like the buddy flicks)
constitute “intellectual and moral comfort food. . . . They do not challenge the oddly sooth-
ing traditional template of racial thinking—the premise, which is increasingly a myth, that
there are two and only two brightly delineated racial identities.”9 Responding to criticism
for casting a Welsh actor in the lead role, director Robert Benton said, “Who could I have
cast? Someone ‘blacker’ than Hopkins would have subverted the movie’s challenge, which
is to consider the corner into which people are painted by the politics of racial identity.”10
The Human Stain died at the box office, but offered a much more nuanced portrayal of race
relations than many films that touch upon the subject.
White directors offered a few films that challenged status quo racial politics in the 1990s.
Steven Spielberg, who had explored racial issues before with The Color Purple (1986),
directed Amistad (1997), a dramatization of the aftermath of a revolt by slaves on a ship
bound for America in 1839. Amistad generated significant controversy on several fronts:
Spielberg was accused of plagiarizing the script from a black author (the charge was settled
out of court), and historians complained that he had taken too many liberties with the his-
torical record. Although Amistad is somewhat compelling as entertainment, one critic wrote
that it “quickly turns into another courtroom drama where the noble white people must save
helpless black people.”11 By Spielberg’s lofty standards of profitability, Amistad was a flop,
barely earning its $40 million budget in domestic receipts.
Another history-based effort, Jonathan Demme’s Beloved (1998), was an adaptation
of a fact-based novel by black author Toni Morrison. The film received critical praise as
a gripping depiction of the lives of ex-slaves after the Civil War, in part due to standout
performances by stars Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. Yet it failed to recoup even half
of its $53 million budget at the box office. Nonetheless, within the economic history of
race in Hollywood, Beloved was significant for bringing to screen a famous literary novel
by an African-American female Nobel Prize-winning author and for being produced by an
African-American woman (Winfrey).
Hoodwinked and Bamboozled
The 1990s ended with what was perhaps Spike Lee’s most racially provocative film yet,
Bamboozled (2000). The title was plucked from a speech in Lee’s Malcolm X in which
Malcolm exhorted blacks to recognize all the ways they had been deceived. In Bamboozled,
Lee explores racial stereotyping and exploitation in television and film in an over-the-top tale
of a black, Harvard-educated television-networking programmer, Pierre Delacroix (Damon
Wayans), who tries to create a television show so offensive that he will be fired. Instead, The
ManTan Minstrel Show—in which black performers perform racially demeaning slapstick in
blackface—becomes a hugely popular hit, leaving Delacroix to defend himself as its creator.
(Reminiscent of the actual vaudeville actor turned 1930s–1940s movie star Stepin Fetchit,
The ManTan Minstrel Show features Sleep’n Eat.) To call Bamboozled a satire is a gross
understatement, and it is not an easy film to watch; aside from its cringe-inducing evocations
of minstrel humor, Lee chose to shoot the film in digital video—consistent with the medium
of television he is skewering, but also wearying. And as the plot progresses, it veers deeply
into melodrama and away from the caustic satire it began with.
Nonetheless, watching the film provides even the most knowledgeable viewer a remark-
able look at the representational history of blacks in American entertainment. Into the central
299
plot, Lee braids scenes and images from a diverse array of film, television, and cartoons,
including Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind, and the 1970s television shows The Jeffer-
sons and Good Times, as well as Hollywood blackface comedians like Bert Williams playing
pop-eyed, buffoonish sidekicks to white leads. Despite the increasingly tangential storyline,
that history still stings even in the decade-plus since the film’s debut.
Nonetheless, Bamboozled contains many insightfully hilarious scenes as well as a serious
political conversation and trenchant cultural analysis, including a comparison of blackface
minstrel shows to 1990s gangsta-rap music videos. Critical reaction varied widely. Stephen
Holden of the New York Times praised it: “In going where few have dared to tread, Bamboo-
zled is an almost oxymoronic entity, an important Hollywood movie. Its shelf life may not
be long, nor will it probably be a big hit, since the laughter it provokes is the kind that makes
you squirm. But that’s what good satire is supposed to do. Out of discomfort can come
insight.”12 But many other critics considered Bamboozled an undisciplined and incoherent
mess, and audiences avoided it.
All-Black Casts
A few of the decade’s films succeeded on the basis of telling stories with largely black casts
that explored less stereotyped portrayals of black Americans. Soul Food (1997) tells the
story of an extended black family in Chicago as seen through the eyes of its young narrator.
Much of the drama revolves around the lives of the boy’s mother and her two sisters, who
are competing with each other on various levels. The movie was a modest crossover hit, and
although it did not project an explicit political agenda, it did familiarize audiences with more
realistic images of black families than are typically found in Hollywood films.
Based on the best-selling novel of the same title, Waiting to Exhale (1995) featured an all-
black female cast, including Whitney Houston and Angela Bassett, and fit into the decade’s
gender politics. At the start of the decade, the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme
Court nominee Clarence Thomas brought the issue of sexual harassment to the national con-
versation. The sight of the all-male Senate committee grilling Anita Hill on her allegations
against Thomas spurred a record number of women to run for office. At the time, Hill was
labeled “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” even as her case helped other women find a
vocabulary to talk about sexual-power dynamics. Acknowledging the sociopolitical moment,
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences declared the “Year of the Woman” as its
1992 Oscars theme. A few years later, Waiting to Exhale focused on four successful women
in various states of romantic dissatisfaction searching for men worthy of them. With gentle
humor and mild melodrama, their tribulations support the clichés “a good man is hard to
find” but “it is hard to keep a good woman down.” Shot in a striking palette of oranges and
reds set in an arid Arizona landscape, the film drew female-dominated audiences, as Thelma
and Louise had, by addressing women, regardless of but not blind to race. Academy Award-
winning actor Forest Whitaker made his directorial debut with the film, and it grossed nearly
triple its production costs in the United States alone.
Another film that avoided black stereotypes was Barbershop (2002), which takes place
at a barbershop with a primarily black clientele. The owner, Calvin (Ice Cube), sells the
shop to a seedy character who intends to turn it into a strip club, and the action occurs on
its last day of business. Most of the film centers on the conversations of the barbers and
their clientele. Although not a film intended to make a political statement, Barbershop did
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arouse political controversy because of a comedic monologue by one of the barbers (played
by Cedric the Entertainer) that invokes negative opinions about Rosa Parks, Rodney King,
and O.J. Simpson. Some black leaders (notably the Reverend Jesse Jackson) argued that
the film denigrated Rosa Parks by suggesting that her fame was somewhat undeserved and
that the movie thus demonstrated the lack of appreciation for civil rights pioneers among
young black Americans. The film’s producers defended the scene, arguing that the lines
were spoken by a character who is clearly the clown of the barbershop. If nothing else, the
controversy demonstrated how political fissures in the black community at the time made it
difficult for even low-key films with black casts to succeed without race becoming an issue.
It also suggested just how high the sociopolitical stakes are when Hollywood produces so
few films about black experiences.

A 2003 movie with obvious political content, Head of State, spoofed race relations during
the Bush administration. A weakly received political satire imagining comedian Chris Rock
as president, the film’s punch, such as it was, derived from how unlike the actual office-
holder Rock’s president was. It included scenes instructing fuddy-duddy white Washington
how to dance, or “be black,” as did that year’s more lucrative Bringing Down the House.
Both films relied on a seemingly outdated notion of race relations, with blacks teaching
whites how to loosen up, and whites bestowing political or economic power on blacks for
self-serving purposes masked as charitable.
On the whole, films with black political themes have been rare, and those that have fared
well in the Hollywood environment are even rarer. Far more commonly, mainstream movies
have featured blacks in stereotypical roles such as jokers, minstrels, sidekicks, and villains.
A few black actors (such as Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, and Forest Whitaker)
and even fewer black actresses (Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard, 1992; Halle Berry in
The X-Men franchise and The Call, 2013) have transcended the constraints imposed by Hol-
lywood to appear in films that more or less ignore race. Hollywood’s reluctance to take risks
with black-themed films remains a major obstacle, and for a long time contemporary black
political film has seemed to reflect the shifting sands of racial reality rather than to offer a
visionary beacon.
1970s Paranoia Returns
With this history in mind it is interesting to note that a spate of early twenty-first-century
films reprised paranoid political conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s like The Parallax View and
Three Days of the Condor, films with white male leads and few black characters. Among
these new films were Enemy of the State (1998), Bait (2000), and The Manchurian Candi-
date (2004). There were two key differences between the two eras’ versions of this subgenre:
this time around, African-American actors played the lead roles, and the conspiracies were
driven by personal rather than institutional forces. As Roger Ebert said of Enemy of the State,
“It’s not the government that is the enemy, this movie argues, so much as bureaucrats and
demagogues who use the power of the government to gain their own ends and cover their
own tracks.”13 All three movies created paranoia around excessive governmental surveil-
lance technology. By casting black male leads, the films suggested that a black voice crying
conspiracy or speaking out against government intrusion may carry greater legitimacy than
a white actor trying to convey the same message. Presumably, white stars are so thoroughly
identified with the corruption of power and the confusion between political and Hollywood
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celebrity that it takes a black “truth teller” to achieve any credibility in the film’s suspense.
These films also suggested that in a terror-filled world, Hollywood suspects that audiences
would rather see a black male panic—a more familiar movie theme than white male uncer-
tainty, given who for the most part holds the actual reins of national security.
The L.A. Rebellion
In the 1990s, a small cadre of black directors emerged who more or less successfully created
films primarily geared to black audiences and/or art house theaters. Although the audience
for these films is quite small, these directors may become more influential in the coming
years; a few of them have earned a circle of attention wider than their box office appeal. Julie
Dash attracted a loyal and enthusiastic following for her 1991 landmark work, Daughters
of the Dust, which the Library of Congress entered into the National Film Registry in 2004.
The first female African-American director with a film in general theatrical release, Dash
first drew acclaim for a short film about race in Hollywood during World War II, called Illu-
sions (1983). About a black woman passing as white to work in a film studio and another
black woman brought in to dub the singing of a white star, Illusions was filmed in black-and-
white and addresses the illusions Hollywood films create around race and gender.
Daughters of the Dust is set on the Sea Islands off the South Carolina–Georgia coast in
1902. Isolated from the continent, the Gullah people speak their own English–West African
dialect called Geechee and maintain ancient African rituals, customs, and beliefs. When the
film opens, the extended Peazant family has made the difficult decision to migrate to the
mainland. Over the course of a celebratory yet ritualistic picnic the day before departure,
generational conflicts arise. Family matriarch Nana Peazant, the one most in touch with the
Included in the National Film Registry and the first feature in general theatrical release directed by a
black woman, Daughters of the Dust (1991) takes place on an island off the shore of South Carolina in
the early 1900s.
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clan’s Yoruba roots, still practices spiritually imbued magic. She fears the loss of those tra-
ditions. Close viewing reveals that Nana is actually a ghost, having died before the family
decided to move.
Daughter Viola brings Nana’s passion for African spiritualism to her Baptist faith, while
Hagaar looks down her nose at Nana’s sacred African heritage, calling it so much “hoo-doo.”
Yellow Mary is the family’s black sheep, and Nana’s granddaughter, Eula, is expecting a
child her husband fears is not his but a white rapist’s. Narrated by the in utero child, their
stories unfold in an elliptical fashion along the shoreline and in the woods among Yoruba
icons and art. Pale, elaborately laced dresses reflect the sun and sand, as rhythmic editing
creates a mesmerizing effect. Eschewing clear plot, linear progression, and other melodrama
genre conventions, Daughters of the Dust is difficult for some viewers to follow, but even a
casual viewing is rewarded by Dash’s vivid evocation of place and time and of how a people
endured slavery to preserve memory and heritage.
Ethiopian-born Haile Gerima directed Sankofa (1993), which explores the violent past of
the African slave trade as a means of making a political point about the present. (Sankofa is
an African word meaning “We must go back and reclaim our past so we can move forward, so
we understand why and how we came to be who we are today.”)14 In the film, Mona, a black
model (played by Oyafunmike Ogunlano), finds herself reliving the past as a slave named
Shala and participating in a slave revolt on an American plantation. Ultimately, Mona/Shala
returns to the present profoundly changed by her experience. The New York Times noted that
“Sankofa asks its audience to enter a different moral universe, one that slavery created.”15
Although shown almost exclusively in cinemas in black neighborhoods, Sankofa turned a
handsome profit and demonstrated that a market exists for political black-themed films.
Dash and Gerima hail from a 1960s–1980s filmmaking movement called the “L.A.
Rebellion.” Following political upheaval like the Los Angeles Watts uprising and Vietnam
War protests, these UCLA students rejected Hollywood stereotyping, formulaic plots, and
the kind of reductionist visions of African-American life found in the era’s blaxploitation
movies. Influenced by “Rebellion” films like Charles Burnett’s celebrated art house Killer of
Sheep (1979), about an alienated man working in a slaughterhouse, other black filmmakers
tried a more commercial style to tell their stories. Kasi Lemmons made her screenwriting
and directorial debut with the independently financed Eve’s Bayou, called the best film of
1997 by Roger Ebert.
Set in 1962 in a Louisiana bayou named after a slave, the film features no white char-
acters, and its black characters never appear working the fields, wiping sweaty brows, or
marching in political protests. In her pitches for studio support, executives asked Lemmons
to include at least one white character, even a racist, but Lemmons stood firm. Her story was
a family romance between a charismatic country doctor, Louis Batiste (Samuel Jackson), his
elegant wife, Roz—“men fought to say her name,” says Louis—his spiritual medium sister,
Mozelle, and his two daughters, Cicely and Eve (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), and Lemmons was
determined to keep it as she wrote it. Louis’s female patients love him, and he loves play-
ing their hero. One night, ten-year-old daughter Eve witnesses him with a woman not her
mother, and the shocking sight triggers the events that unfold over what she calls “the sum-
mer I killed my father.”
Eve’s Bayou is an evocative film about memory and images “printed indelibly on the
brain,” as Eve says in voice-over. The political value of the film is its refusal to bow to
stereotype or to put its characters in any framework larger than the melodrama of their own
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lives. In fact, Eve and Mozelle, in a stand-out performance by Debbi Morgan, are so far
from being used as props that key story details unspool not only from their perspective of
events but from the interior of their minds. In other words, they are so fully realized that we
see with them many images and events they only imagine or access in dreams and visions.
With its spreading jewel-green lawns, raw silk dresses, glass bead necklaces, and gleaming
champagne flutes, Eve’s Bayou’s mise-en-scène reflects the influence of the unique beauty
of Daughters of the Dust. Like that film, a surprising and subtle glamour upends any precon-
ceptions based on time period and setting. Culturally rich and politically subtle, both films
make the salient point that in their respective time periods, there was much more to African-
American life than routinely represented in mainstream films.
In 2007, Lemmons directed the more politically responsive Talk to Me, starring Don
Cheadle as real-life ex-con, community activist, and radio talk-show host Ralph “Petey”
Greene. Unlike the private world of the Batistes, Greene’s life is almost entirely framed by
the social upheaval and political turbulence of the 1960s. Having bluffed his way into an
on-air job with a personal code of “Keep it real,” Greene rises to the horrific occasion of
Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Over the Washington, DC, airwaves, Greene speaks
in a heartfelt way about the senselessness of violence to those bent on revenge. He does not
preach, and he is not at peace with the tragedy, but his voice helps calm the street. King’s
death becomes the transformative moment of Greene’s life. While hardly blockbusters, both
Eve’s Bayou and Talk to Me enjoyed respectably wide releases and earned high praise for
Lemmons’s uncompromising yet accessible direction. Lemmons’s next film, Black Nativ-
ity (2013), was a musical starring Forest Whitaker, Angela Bassett, and Jennifer Hudson,
based on the libretto “Wasn’t It a Mighty Fine Day?” by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston
Hughes. An evangelical tale about birth and rebirth, as the title suggests, Black Nativity
openly laments the gap between haves and have-nots, yet failed to gross $10 million at the
box office.
Box Office Breakthroughs
The most widely viewed American black directors of the day are probably Lee Daniels and
Tyler Perry. Daniels’s work is the more overtly political. A compelling mash-up of genres
and visual styles, his independent film Precious (2009) was a box office hit, earning back
five times the cost of its production and becoming the first black-helmed film nominated for
the Best Picture Academy Award. While it did not score that trophy, it did scoop up numer-
ous other high-profile awards, including the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Mo’Nique,
a comedian known for routines that celebrate, contrary to their “Mammy” stereotyping,
the sexual independence and personal intensity of large-bodied black women. Precious’s
screening at the Cannes Film Festival in France received a fifteen-minute standing ovation.
Based on the novel Push by a young writer named Sapphire, Precious tells the story of an
obese, illiterate, black teenager who is sexually abused by her father and twice made preg-
nant by him, emotionally and physically abused by her mother, Mary, and thought worthless
by almost everyone else. Precious’s life is a horror show escaped only in daydreams. When
she encounters a caring teacher named Miss Blu Rain and a social worker played with sober
tenderness by singer Mariah Carey, she learns to read and write. Little by little, her life
begins to change despite her mother’s unremitting need to kill her spirit and suck her into
Mary’s own dead-end lifestyle of nonstop television and fraudulent welfare-dependence.
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Gabourey Sidibe plays the title character in Precious (2009), a film that sparked debate over its
portrayal of a 1980s urban black community and Precious, seen here eating fried chicken, a familiar
racist caricature.
The women Precious encounters solely because government programs and institutions con-
nect her to them offset Mary’s cruelty. Taking place in the late 1980s, Precious stands as a
rebuke to that era’s antigovernment ideology personified by President Reagan. Politically,
Precious reminds viewers that public programs can make the difference between a life of
abject misery and one of productive hopefulness. As critic A.O. Scott notes, “Government
can provide not only a safety net, but also, in small and consequential ways, a lifeline.”16
The film sparked controversy, especially among African-American audiences. Accus-
tomed to reverential depictions of black mothers even in misogynistic rap videos, some
viewers took offense at Mary. One reviewer compared the film to The Birth of a Nation
for its denigrating depiction of black American life and criticized it for peddling a debased
view of black fatherhood to a larger culture already all too eager to buy it. “Black pathology
sells,” charged film critic Armond White. “It’s an over-the-top political fantasy that works
only because it demeans blacks, women and poor people.”17 In an article titled “The Audac-
ity of ‘Precious’” after Barack Obama’s political book The Audacity of Hope, even Daniels
hesitated over the dirty laundry aired:
“Obama’s the president, and we want to aspire to that. But part of aspiring is disassociating
from the face of Precious. To be honest, I was embarrassed to show this movie at Cannes.
I didn’t want to exploit black people. And I wasn’t sure I wanted white French people to
see our world. But because of Obama, it’s now O.K. to be black. I can share that voice. I
don’t have to lie. I’m proud of where I come from. And I wear it like a shield. ‘Precious’
is part of that.”18
Thus, in addition to its message about the necessity of government “lifelines,” Precious
invokes a complex array of racial prejudices. It asks viewers to identify with someone
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considered a pariah even by those most expected to cherish her, and it displays a family
rejected by its presumed community. As Daniels admits and the polarized reaction to Pre-
cious proves, even in the twenty-first century the line between representing and exploiting
black characters in popular film remains difficult to navigate.
Daniels also directed the Obama-era box office hit, Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013), with
a script by Game Change (2012) writer Danny Strong. Like Lemmons’s thematic shift from
private drama to factual history, The Butler is a more obviously political film than Precious.
Its poster announces its agenda by centering on a white background a man’s silhouette filled
in with the stars and stripes of the American flag. The prominently featured tagline reads,
“One quiet voice can ignite a revolution.” That voice belongs to Cecil Gaines, a character
based on the real-life Eugene Allen, who rose from the brutal cotton fields of 1920s Georgia
to the White House, where he personally served seven presidents, from Eisenhower to Rea-
gan, bearing stoic witness to the political and social turmoil that defined the second half of
the twentieth century.
Forest Whitaker leads a cast that reads like a who’s who of Hollywood. Highlights include
Oprah Winfrey as wife Gloria, John Cusack as Richard Nixon, Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan,
Terrence Howard as the neighborhood lothario, and Oscar-winner Cuba Gooding Jr. as a
fellow butler so close to Cecil’s family that Cecil’s two sons call him “Uncle.” Released on
a summer bill of apocalyptic would-be blockbusters and comic-book superhero tales, Lee
Daniels’ The Butler topped the charts with an intimate portrayal of American history from
the unexpectedly privileged vantage point of the least powerful of political players. Its debut
coincided with the commemoration of the fifty-year anniversary of the civil rights move-
ment’s “March on Washington” when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream”
speech, and the film’s masterful interlacing of presidential policies with public protest and
private experience brought President Obama to tears.
While it may be that Americans flocked to see a black man back in the accommodat-
ing, long-suffering role of servant, The Butler, says A.O. Scott, “unlike almost every other
movie about race in America, is not primarily about the moral awakening of white people.”19
Rather, the film belongs to Cecil, his slow awakening to what it really means to bear two
faces through life, one for the people he serves with barely a whisper and one for family and
coworkers.
Generational conflict between Cecil, who learns early that “the room should feel empty
when you’re in it,” and his activist son Louis drives the story. When Cecil advances to the
position of White House butler, President Eisenhower announces federal enforcement of
desegregation laws. The dovetailing of Cecil’s good fortune with improved public policy
justifies to Cecil his faith in progress without activism. Cecil brings out the better natures of
the men he serves. President Kennedy tells Cecil he personally has changed the president’s
heart on civil rights, and in a confession to the butler, anti-affirmative action president Ron-
ald Reagan wonders if on that issue he is simply wrong. Louis, however, disparages Cecil’s
wait-and-see attitude and insists on pushing for full recognition of his rights. Cecil serves
decanted aperitifs and dinners on gold-rimmed porcelain to dignitaries while Louis takes
part in lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides. The rift between them appears irrevocable.
In grainy stock footage and parallel editing, the film’s structure honors both points of
view until finally each man finds his way back to the other, emotionally and politically. On
the way to this reconciliation, Cecil finally lives up to his promise to Gloria to take her to the
White House when the Reagans invite them to a state dinner. Gloria shines while Cecil feels
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unaccountably deflated. In voice-over he admits he would rather be there “for real” and not
just “for show.” An ironic version of Cecil’s two faces, The Butler’s Reagan is personally
kind and fair but politically harsh. He has the power to bring his personal generosity to pub-
lic effect and refuses. Cecil lacks such luxury of choice. Realizing that imbalance, he begins
to reconsider his son’s perspective even as Louis abandons the Black Panthers’ militancy to
run for Congress. The end arrives in Cecil’s excitement over Obama’s election-day triumph,
a moment Louis also savors. In this resolution of personal and public grievances, the film
suggests protest is crucial but real political power accrues through the ballot box. This mes-
sage was overshadowed by the divisive 2013 Supreme Court’s invalidation of parts of the
Voting Rights Act a few months before the film’s debut, a coincidence that may also have
played a part in the film’s popularity.
2013: Year of Black-Themed Movies
A smaller yet more pointedly political film based on real events also opened in the summer
of 2013. The first feature from writer and director Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale Station concerns
the 2008 police shooting of an unarmed young black man in a commuter train station of the
same name in Oakland, California. It begins with news footage of the crime before segueing
to a bare-bones dramatization of Oscar Grant’s fateful day. Played with masterful ease by
Michael B. Jordan, Oscar is a well-meaning and likable man with a daughter in preschool
and a Latina girlfriend named Sophina, the mother of his daughter, whom he means to marry.
Haunted by a stint in prison, Oscar also must contend with his hair-trigger temper and the
loss of his job at a grocery store. New Year’s Eve finds Oscar celebrating his mother’s birth-
day with a crab feast and the holiday with a trip via public transportation into San Francisco
to see the fireworks.
The small family party preceding the public outing shows the indirect way this film
addresses Oscar’s racial identity. Watching football on the television, one of Oscar’s rela-
tives declares he likes the Pittsburgh Steelers because they wear black uniforms and have
a black coach who even has a black wife. Everyone laughs. Instructed by his sister not to
get their mother a corny birthday card with a white family on it, as a joke, Oscar does just
that. As with his cross-racial relationship with Sophina and his casual encounters with white
people—the grocery store customer he tutors in cooking fish, a man whose pregnant wife
he assists in finding a restroom while the two men talk about romantic commitment—these
subtle references suggest that in Oscar’s daily life, racial identity is both profoundly funda-
mental and occasionally incidental.
Hours before his death, Oscar runs into the street to comfort a dog hit by a car. Later
Sophina presents him with a fresh black T-shirt to replace the white one bloodied by the
dying hound, a foreshadowing of his own fate. Usually a harbinger of a character’s death or
guilt, a black shirt in this instance also registers racially in the context of the comment equat-
ing Steelers’ uniforms with blackness. Oscar’s black skin, his black shirt, and the tattoo on
his back all subtly signal the always, already guilty condition that renders him vulnerable to
sudden death through no fault of his own. To the law, he is his appearance or racial profile.
Appearing as a young black man in a state where African-American men are dramatically
more likely to be imprisoned than are other groups proves deadly.
The film plays on the audience’s prejudices about race when, for example, a man carrying
a concealed object and wearing a dark hoodie boards the train just behind Oscar, Sophina,
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and their friends. This figure unnerves viewers until he pulls back his hood to reveal blond
hair and then unveils music speakers to get an impromptu party started. On the ride home,
a white bully from Oscar’s prison time, and the only man besides the police called “nig-
ger,” starts a fight. Otherwise, every male in this film is called “bruh” suggesting that Oscar
reserves one of the most offensive and problematic epithets in American vernacular for men
defined not by their skin color but by their propensity to violence. The police single out
Oscar and his friends and shove them against the station wall. The rougher the police, the
more incensed are the watching passengers until they pull out phones to record what they
witness. Oscar loudly protests the brutal police treatment, but he is unarmed and on his stom-
ach when an officer shoots and kills him.
With the exception of a single flashback, Fruitvale Station takes place over one day and
rarely strays from medium or close-up shots on one or two characters, with Oscar never far
from view. The intimate, nearly claustrophobic relationship between the camera and Oscar’s
body underscores his physical and racial vulnerability. Made real to viewers in unadorned
cinematic language, Oscar is no techno-bodied hero from one of the apocalyptic blockbust-
ers that dominated the box office in summer 2013, no Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man or Matt
Damon in Elysium. Nor does the compelling Michael B. Jordan yet emit the high-wattage
star power of a Ben Affleck or Will Smith. Simply constructed to reach its devastating con-
clusion, an ending we have already seen in the film’s opening but nonetheless hope will
somehow be avoided, Fruitvale Station deeply humanizes Oscar as few of today’s films do
for any character, much less black characters. Our familiarity with Oscar breeds sympathy
for him, and his very ordinariness packs a subversive punch—particularly in the context of
the 2013 trial of George Zimmerman for killing black, unarmed, hoodie-wearing teenager
Trayvon Martin in Florida as well as a judge’s ruling that same spring that New York Police
Department stop-and-frisk policies violated minorities’ civil rights. Fruitvale Station reveals
how a cultural norm of suspicion based on race costs the lives of men guilty of nothing more
than being seen as black.
Passengers sharing public transport use cellphones to turn a collective, resistant eye on the murder of
Oscar Grant by fascistic transit cops in Fruitvale Station (2013).
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The film’s political message goes further by largely exonerating the white people Oscar
encounters throughout his day. Their openness to his easygoing warmth puts them on his
side and against the alien invading force of the police. Before the fight breaks out, the train
is a scene first of public comity and then of utopia as people from different backgrounds all
dance, sing, and kiss in honor of the holiday. Hollywood usually celebrates the individual-
ism of car ownership, with chauffeured limousines seen as the height of glamour. Idealizing
public transit instead is therefore a politically important choice. When passengers begin
using their cell phones to record the excessive police response, Fruitvale Station inverts and
co-opts police surveillance by transforming the train’s utopian common space into an all-
seeing public eye, seizing and turning back the gaze of accountability and power normally
reserved for sanctioned legal authorities, the police themselves. The passengers’ monitoring
of the event distinguishes their occupation of public space from the officers’ enforcement of
the law in that space. Only their nonviolent gaze openly directed at this unexpected enemy
can counter the brute force that the police exert. Thus the film politically codes the police as
fascist and the public as socially responsible and politically active in the face of such unwar-
ranted violence. Taxpayer-funded transportation benefits a public that police officers acting
outside the law unreasonably try to control and unjustly kill.
If 2012 was the year of the political film, 2013 was the year of black-themed films. (In
2012 major Hollywood studios put into wide release only one film by a black director with
a black cast, the profitable music-drama remake Sparkle, about three sisters in a 1960s girl
group and the strain of fame on family ties.) 42 and 12 Years a Slave continued 2013’s run of
politically resonant movies based on the lives of African-American men. A biopic of Jackie
Robinson, the legendary baseball player and breaker of racial barriers, 42 (2013) earned
back more than double its production costs. Part hero worship, part political history, 42
emphasizes Robinson’s unique skills on and off the field that made him the perfect first black
athlete to play for a professional national team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, in 1947 and to face
head-on the violent racist reaction his popular profile spurred. Illustrating the racial hatred
deeply imbedded in both Jim Crow laws and widely held cultural norms, 42 unsurprisingly
condemns racism while emphasizing just how extraordinary Robinson had to be to pioneer
desegregation of the nation’s pastime, a key stepping-stone to wider political change. Team-
mate Pee Wee Reese’s public embrace of Robinson forms the film’s emotional peak, yet 42
does not follow in the sports film tradition of The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), in which a
superior black athlete sacrifices his ambition to further the goals of a white hero. And unlike
The Blind Side’s (2009) true-life story about a white family taking in a destitute young black
man and nurturing his talent all the way to the NFL, no one matters more to his success than
Robinson himself.
In a year rife with stellar performances in black, character-driven films, 2013 Oscar talk
zeroed in on English actor Idris Elba’s performance in the English–South African film,
Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, about South African political prisoner turned president,
Nelson Mandela. Buzz also favored Forest Whitaker in Lee Daniels’ The Butler, charismatic
talent Michael B. Jordan in the smaller-scaled Fruitvale Station, and the eventual winner
Chiwetel Ejiofor (the actor who played Petey Greene’s manager, Dewey Hughes, in Talk to
Me) for his performance in the profoundly affecting box office hit 12 Years a Slave (2013).
12 Years a Slave recounts the true story of Solomon Northup, a free black man living in
upstate New York in 1841, who on a trip to Washington, DC, is captured and enslaved in the
Deep South. Besides using Northup’s own memoir, American screenwriter John Ridley and
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12 Years a Slave (2013) stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northrup, a freed black man living in
upstate New York, captured and sold into slavery in the antebellum South.
English director Steve McQueen also consulted the influential African-American historian
Henry Louis Gates Jr. for help portraying the facts of slavery with unflinching exactitude.
One day a contented family man and violinist and the next brutally beaten and controlled,
Northup’s fresh hell provides a sustained view of slavery rarely witnessed in Hollywood
movies. Long takes reinforce the film’s unswerving focus on Northup, forcing audiences
to feel every flicker of Ejiofor’s suppressed emotion and making it impossible not to loathe
vicious slave owner Edwin Epps (played by Michael Fassbender) and his despicable wife,
Mary Epps (Sarah Paulson). 12 Years a Slave won the prestigious Toronto International Film
Festival audience award and the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Drama.
Even superstar Brad Pitt as a compassionate Canadian abolitionist cannot steal scenes
from Ejiofor. Also one of the film’s producers, Pitt testified to the film’s cultural significance
Lupita Nyong’o won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar playing the strong, vivacious, yet brutalized
Patsy in 12 Years a Slave (2013).
310
and the artistic reward of making it: “If I never get to participate in a film after it, this is it
for me.”20 Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o also delivered a standout Oscar-winning perfor-
mance as Patsy, a plantation slave who demonstrates strength despite the crushing suffering
she endures. Nyong’o and Ejiofor joined the growing number of international actors nabbing
top billing in some of Hollywood’s most prominent films—Christopher Waltz in Django
Unchained (2012), Jean Dujardin in Monuments Men (2013), Charlie Hunnam in Pacific
Rim (2013), Sharlto Copley in Elysium (2013)—a trend that reflects the growing revenue
Hollywood draws from abroad.
That this casting trend extends to the recent mini-Renaissance of films by and about
African-Americans points to a telling shift in Hollywood’s calculations. As one Hollywood
observer noted, “Movies that feature a predominantly black cast in a specifically African-
American story have been caught in a squeeze between foreign markets, where those films
often come up short, and demographic pressures at home.”21 With the post-2008 drop-off in
DVD sales, the international market has become more important than ever to the industry.
This changing business model has the potential to leave the specificity of African-American-
based stories (and American politics) in the cold. As we have seen, the industry historically
has cast a skeptical eye at both black films and overtly political films, making the com-
bination of the two even less probable. Yet rather than collapsing in that “squeeze,” the
increasing number of films made in both genres and the embrace of foreign actors in films
like 12 Years a Slave point to something other than business as usual. Today’s Hollywood
appears to be willing to stake a claim to the potential profitability of casting black films for
foreign distribution. Domestic markets, too, are rewarding the gamble and embracing these
films with a growing multicultural appetite not obvious even a decade ago.
Today’s mainstream black films include a range of settings and themes that heartens Kasi
Lemmons: “It’s what I always wished for. I always thought it would be an indicator of success,
when we had a full spectrum of films.”22 David E. Talbert, writer and director of the romantic
comedy Baggage Claim (2013), even compares black filmmaking in the early twenty-first
century to the Harlem Renaissance in the early twentieth, when African-American writers and
musicians thrived in a culture of mutual support and opportunity.23 Almost as remarkable are
the votes that audiences are casting at the box office in favor of this trend.
Notes
1. Jane Gaines, Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001), p. 3.
2. James Earl Young, The Life and Work of Oscar Micheaux (San Francisco: KMT Publications,
2003).
3. Dan Leab, “Blacks in American Cinema,” in The Political Companion to American Film, ed.
Gary Crowdus (Chicago: Lakeview Press, 1994), p. 46.
5. Washington Post, June 30, 1989.
6. New York Times, May 19, 1989.
7. “The Truth About Spike Lee and Kickstarter,” Kickstarter blog, www.kickstarter.com/blog/
the-truth-about-spike-lee-and-kickstarter-0.
8. “Spike Lee Goes After ‘Django Unchained,’” New York Times, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.
com/2012/12/25/spike-lee-goes-after-django-unchained/.
9. George Will, “A Nuanced Look at Race,” Boston Globe, www.boston.com/news/globe/
editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2003/11/10/a_nuanced_look_at_race/.
311
10. Ibid.
11. Peter M. Bracke, review of Amistad, www.dvdfile.com/reviews/dvdreviews/37139-amistad.
12. Stephen Holden, “Trying on Blackface in a Flirtation with Fire,” New York Times, www.nytimes.
com/movie/review?res=9C01E2D9163CF935A35753C1A9669C8B63.
13. Roger Ebert, “Enemy of the State,” www.rogerebert.com/reviews/enemy-of-the-state-1998.
14. “Sankofa,” www.sankofa.com/haile-gerima.php. See also, “Sankofa,” http://spot.pcc.edu/
~mdembrow/sankofa.htm.
15. “Sankofa,” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9500EFDA173EF93BA3575
7C0A962958260.
16. A.O. Scott, “Lee Daniels Gives Us Howls of a Life, Buried Deep Within,” New York Times, http://
movies.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/movies/06precious.html.
17. Ibid.
18. “The Audacity of ‘Precious,’ New York Times Magazine, www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/magazine/

25precious-t.html?pagewanted=all.
19. “Black Man, White House, and History,” New York Times, http://movies.nytimes.com/2013/08/16/
movies/lee-daniels-the-butler-stars-forest-whitaker.html?pagewanted=all.
20. “A Portrait of Evil,” New York Times, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/07/a-portrait-
of-evil-in-12-years-a-slave/?_r=0.
21. “Coming Soon—A Breakout Year for Black Films,” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/
2013/06/02/movies/coming-soon-a-breakout-for-black-filmmakers.html?pagewanted=all.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
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15
Women, Politics, and Film

All About Eve?
The Contender (2000)

To consider the role of women and politics in American film requires an expanded definition
of what we mean by “political” because, historically, films expressly about the political pro-
cess or government institutions rarely feature significant women characters. In most overtly
(“pure”) political films, women tend to melt into the background of a supporting role. They
perform the cliché “behind every great man stands a woman.” In general, their minimal
importance in overtly political films speaks to women’s political and economic subordina-
tion in a patriarchal society. In particular, it speaks to men’s dominance in an industry as
financially profitable as filmmaking.
Yet it would be a mistake to assume that the dearth of important female roles in pure
political films means that women are irrelevant to these movies. Despite their subordinate
role and in some ways because of it, women are inseparable from any history of film, includ-
ing any account of the intersection between politics and movies.
To begin with, it is worth noting generally that women have played more substantial,
wide-ranging roles throughout the film industry than is commonly recognized. As recent
revisionist accounts document, many female directors, writers, and producers enjoyed
vibrant careers before the 1930s and the advent of the rigidly controlled studio system of
film production. The Turner Classic Movies series A Salute to Women Film Pioneers, the
biography Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hol-
lywood, and the online Women Film Pioneers Project have begun to resurrect figures like
Marion, once Hollywood’s highest-paid screenwriter, and directors like Alice Guy Blaché,
Nell Shipman, Helen Gardner, Dorothy Davenport Reid, and Lois Weber. Attention to their
careers and salvaged “lost” films reveals that from the beginning of feature filmmaking,
women were forging an American cinematic legacy behind as well as in front of the camera.
Before the film industry became big business, when the atmosphere was still “relatively
egalitarian,” women were involved in nearly every dimension of its operation. They worked
as costume designers, readers, script girls, film cutters, editors, producers, set designers, and
casting directors. They founded and managed their own production companies and directed
films they wrote. In fact, from 1910 through the 1930s nearly 25 percent of the screenwrit-
ers in Hollywood were women, and women wrote half of all the films copyrighted between
1911 and 1925.1
For the topic of women and politics in American film, the significance of this unearthed
record affects our understanding of trends like the following: between 1910 and 1923 five
separate versions of Salome were produced, and between 1917 and 1934 three versions of
Cleopatra found their way to the screen. As early politically relevant films go, these stories
stand out for dramatizing the myths and facts of two notorious yet mighty women at a time
when the acceptability of women in American public places, from city streets to city hall,
was undergoing epic change. Both stories show women exerting political power: Cleopatra
is queen of Egypt, entangled in alliances partly romantic and partly political, while biblical
Salome dances for King Herod in order that he do her bidding and behead John the Baptist,
the wish of Salome’s mother, the new queen. That these films equate female power unde-
niably political in its effect with sexual allure and also proved popular enough to support
several remakes reflects widespread interest in and fear of women’s shifting social, eco-
nomic, and ultimately political place in American life during the first part of the twentieth
century. They also point to a pattern consistent in Hollywood history: women on screen
almost always represent sex, especially as viewed from a heterosexual perspective in the
context of what Stephen Heath calls “the production of a commodity ‘sexuality.’”2 Whether
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WOMEN, POLITICS, AND FILM: ALL ABOUT EVE?
Theda Bara appeared as Cleopatra (1917), a film that exists only in fragments.
they are queen or empowered to behead a man simply by dancing, their significance almost
always depends on expressions of sexuality produced for masculine consumption. Given the
prominence of women in the industry during these years and their imminent eclipse from the
scene, the recurrence of these stories may also hint at male attitudes toward women working
in the industry itself.
At the same time, from about 1915 through the mid-1920s, director Lois Weber made
films on political subjects like capital punishment and governmental corruption as well as on
gender-related topics such as birth control, prostitution, promiscuity, and abortion. Her mor-
alizing films, unique in both form and content, tackled in more contemporary and transparent
terms the sorts of issues that lay beneath the surface of the popularity of the historical dramas
Salome and Cleopatra. Her work also sparked more controversy. In the pre-Production Code
days of her career, her movies prompted censorship hearings with the police shutting several
of them down, events that only furthered her commercial success.
The more lucrative the movie business proved to be, however, the less able were women
like Weber to maintain their stake in it. After all, women did not even have the right to
vote until 1920, by which time Hollywood was on its way to becoming a virtual monopoly
controlled by the executives of the top eight studios, none of them women. As a result,
women’s choices of film topics, like those important to Weber, ceased to have an advocate.
The groundbreaking influence of these pioneers was subsequently erased from the archives
when their films were lost or credited to other, usually male, directors. Such was the fate
of Guy Blaché, who spent years of her life trying to set the record straight on her early film
accomplishments. Only now, some fifty years after her unmarked death in Mahwah, New
Jersey, is she recognized as an innovative director and probably the first ever to make a fic-
tional narrative film.3
Additionally, it is easy to see that despite the neglect of official film histories, women
are everywhere in films, even when they have not exerted any direct control over their
315
production. Given women’s relative lack of political and economic status and their minimal
impact on the actual production of films, we must look to the politics of the image and our
typology’s “socially reflective” films to understand the significance of women within the
topic of film and politics. That is, until the contemporary period, the political significance
of women and film lies primarily in the images of women that films have generated as those
images reinforce or challenge the prevailing social order, and fulfill stereotypes or transcend
them.
The following survey of the changing image of woman in American film looks at how
mainstream movies reflect and shape values and attitudes about women. The list of films
and defining images is highly selective, some might say idiosyncratically so, and of course
incomplete. Moreover, the broad phrase “image of woman” usually refers to white, middle-
and upper-class women—the fictional ideal Hollywood most often projects on screen.
Early Cinema
Precinematic inventions like Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope offered Americans their first
glimpse of independently moving images. What did customers see when they stuck their
noses into the soundless wooden cabinets? A man comically sneezing, a strongman flexing
his muscles, boxers duking it out in a ring. Other favorite subjects befitting the peep-show
quality of the single-viewer machines were women performing exotic dances, women scant-
ily clad, women doing a partial striptease.
As this list suggests, many of the early films showed quotidian events: in What Hap-
pened on Twenty-Third Street (1902), a young woman on a busy street walks over a subway
grate and must straighten out her billowing skirt. As that seemingly mundane example also
implies, these early moving images expressed a theme of gender difference: women per-
forming in sexually charged situations for an audience perceived as predominantly male.
Though women themselves patronized the Kinetoscope arcades and later the Nickelodeon
theaters, many notable early films featuring women obviously anticipated men as their cus-
tomers and screened voyeuristic images of women accordingly. Films like Pull Down the
Curtains, Suzie (1904) openly invoked the gender divide implicit in the anonymous viewer
(voyeuristic) setting of this new entertainment: as Suzie leaves her companion to go into her
room to change, he watches her disrobe from the street below her window.
By 1920, the silent movies had expanded in length to dramatize stories with characters
and plot. At the same time, women were agitating for the right to vote and urban Amer-
ica was expanding as a site of industry, consumerism, and immigration both foreign and
domestic, as people from the country moved to the cities for work. The movies reflected
and influenced this time of potential political chaos when staid nineteenth-century Victorian
values and agrarian lifestyles gave way to modernity and what writer F. Scott Fitzgerald so
famously dubbed the “Jazz Age.”
The New Woman
This era’s movies represent the shift away from an ideal of femininity as maternal, reli-
giously pious, and submissive—the type of woman promoted in D.W. Griffith movies like
The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Way Down East (1920). In those movies, women protected
their chastity at all cost, wore long heavy skirts, swept floors, prepared meals, prayed, and
316
did not do much else. The Birth of a Nation even equates America’s national identity with the
virginity and racial purity of a white female character by requiring she kill herself rather than
risk being raped by a renegade black soldier, then pinning her self-sacrifice to the “birthed”
nation’s new order of racial segregation.
By 1920, the New Woman had arrived on screen. Popularized at the end of the previous
century, the term “New Woman” referred to educated, ambitious women weary of their
circumscribed place in society, namely the home. The New Woman advocated political and
social emancipation for women, smoked in public, and wore less cumbersome clothing—
baring her arms and knees!—as she forayed into the city to shop and, increasingly, to work
and live. Her Honor The Governor (1926) is a rare overtly political film that addresses, if
only half-heartedly, the New Woman’s sociopolitical advances in the character of Adele
Fenway, loosely based on an actual woman governor of Texas, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson.
Variety called it a “melodrama of love and politics with a woman Governor placed in the
spot where the old man usually was.”4 When Governor Fenway crosses a man sworn to dis-
lodge her, he retaliates with a rumor campaign that brands Adele’s son a bastard and Adele
an unwed mother. Upon her impeachment, her son fights for her honor, leading Photoplay
to declare it a film about “mother love.”5 In the more commonly found socially reflective
category of film, the New Woman ushered three female types to the screen, as evidenced by
the following popular films.
The Vamp
A Fool There Was (1915) brings to life a woman so completely lacking in the Victorian vir-
tues of sexual restraint and obedience to men that her very presence is poisonous. The title
refers to the lead male character, a fool of a man seduced by the New Woman presented in
the guise of the female archetype, the vamp—short for vampire. The heartless vamp wants
money and social status and will do anything to get them. Not yet thoroughly modern in
appearance, she wears tightly wrapped long dresses and has kohl-lined eyes. The vamp look
is nonetheless exotic as played by Theda Bara—considered by some the first true movie
star—who made her career in this role. She would go on to star as both Cleopatra (1917)
and Salome (1918). Bara’s entire filmography—including The Devil’s Daughter (1915), Sin
(1915), Siren of Hell (1915), The Vixen (1916), When a Woman Sins (1918), The She Devil
(1918)—telegraphs the era’s obsession with female morality.
A Fool There Was, a huge hit for the fledgling Fox studio, dramatizes the rise and fall of
the socially and politically prominent John Schuyler, newly tapped presidential envoy to
England. Voyaging there without his wife and daughter, he falls prey to the unscrupulous
vamp, billed in the film as “The Vampire,” and so called because her surreal power to mes-
merize men literally drains them of will. Her hypnotic power, carnal appetite, and unbowed
attitude toward men appear as supernaturally evil. Still, what makes her emblematic of the
New Woman is her explicitly sexual characterization and an unsentimental attitude suc-
cinctly expressed when she receives a gift of roses: after a brief whiff, she giddily shreds
them to bits. Even more New Womanish is Schuyler’s sister-in-law, who advises his wife to
divorce him—a rare bit of advice for a woman to offer in those days of low divorce rates.
Scenes depicting the vamp’s decadence juxtaposed with Schuyler’s rapid physical decay, a
sign of his helpless addiction to her sexual favors, remain notable in a plot otherwise confus-
ing for contemporary audiences to follow.
317
The Femme Fatale
More than a decade later, in 1927, F.W. Murnau directed Sunrise with a similar New-Woman-as-
vamp theme, this time with a twist: the vamp hails from the city and the object of her seduction
is an unassuming country boy. As a representative of the new cityscape’s electric lights, tall
buildings, and open-all-night atmosphere, this New Woman is more grounded in a recogniz-
able reality. More hard-boiled femme fatale than demonic vampire, she completely embodies
the Jazz Age style with her androgynous bobbed hair, short dresses, and aggressive sexuality.
The femme fatale seduces the rube and urges him to murder his wife, sell his property, and live
the high life with her in the big city. The vivid contrast between city and country scenes and
Murnau’s evocative use of light and shadow make Sunrise an engaging film to watch even now.
The Flapper
A more benign version of the New Woman than either the vamp or the femme fatale,
the flapper also earned plenty of screen time during this period. Fun-loving but not at all
manipulative, enjoying clothes and unconventional behavior like dancing and drinking in
speakeasies, the 1920s flapper inherited her spirit from the women who came before her
flexing their political muscle. Suffragists won passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, earn-
ing women the right to vote; women leaders of the temperance movement helped to ratify
the Volstead Act, the prohibition on alcohol. The flapper exploited women’s greater freedom
to have a good time.
Clara Bow famously became the first “It” girl, playing a flapper in It (1927). The term “it”
was code for sex appeal. The girls who had “it” were less venal than either the femme fatale
or the venomous vamp yet every bit the New Woman icon. In one telling scene, the flapper,
preparing for a date, takes a modest dress, snips it here and there, adds a few decorative
flourishes, and suddenly she’s the very picture of “it”: fashionable, free-spirited, flirtatious,
and confident. The film was so popular that even today film and style magazines use the
term “it” to refer to the ineffable cachet of newly popular stars. While men and women can
both have “it,” women especially wanted “it” because despite the liberties newly afforded
women, from voting to drinking in mixed company, they were still primarily defined in rela-
tion to men. They were good girls if they had fun without leading men on; they were bad
girls if they had fun with more than one man at a time. The films of this era (and beyond in
many instances) rewarded good girls with marriage and punished bad girls by exiling them
from marriage and the social circle.
From Flapper to Shop Girl to Hussy
With the stock market crash and onset of the Great Depression, the movies looked to a more
somber image of women in the “social problem” film, a genre that ranks high in political
intent. The New Woman’s loose sexual mores and style-conscious worldliness hardened
into the dreary shopgirl or mill worker down on her luck. The movies dared not offer only
escapist fantasies about self-indulgent characters without risk of alienating audiences who
were experiencing wrenching economic distress. The modern woman therefore could not be
viewed as simply enjoying the high life as either conniving seductress or lighthearted flapper
anymore; she suffered and scraped to get by.
318
With the advent of the talkies in the 1930s, the movies as we now know them came to
the fore of popular mass entertainment. Many evolving genres required certain parts for
women: the gangster picture’s gun moll, the musical’s chorine, the women’s picture’s self-
sacrificing mother, the screwball comedy’s fast-talking romantic partner, the horror film’s
innocent victim. Not all but many of these parts were clearly incidental to the film’s biggest
themes. From getting her face smashed with a grapefruit by a hoodlum in the gangster clas-
sic The Public Enemy (1931) to playing the love interest of both man and ape in King Kong
(1933), the woman in popular Depression-era genres frequently had very little of substance
to do. She reacted but she did not instigate. Films about social problems like unwed mothers,
crime, and financially ruined families, however, often put women at center stage, a symbol
of endurance. These characters arguably stood as a rebuke to the New Woman, who thought
she could carouse all she wanted, paying little heed to the consequences of her behavior.
Five notable films starring Joan Crawford demonstrate this particular ideological shift
regarding women’s behavior. In 1928, Crawford gave a star-making performance in the
silent film Our Dancing Daughters, a film so popular it spawned two more featuring vir-
tually the same cast: Our Modern Maidens (1929) and Our Blushing Brides (1930). The
quintessential high-society flapper role of Diana put Crawford’s chorus girl’s legs to work
dancing the Charleston in breathless party scenes. After watching Diana whip off her party
dress to continue dancing in her slip, one male admirer asks, “You want to take all of life,
don’t you?” She responds, “Yes—all! I want to hold out my hands and catch at it.” Her big-
gest dilemmas are choosing what dazzling dress to don and whether to wed her boyfriend.
Marriage, she fears, would spoil her fun.
Only two years later, Crawford filmed the grim melodrama Paid (1930). Stripped of
Diana’s glamorous wardrobe, no-expenses-spared parties, and frivolous friendships, Craw-
ford plays modest shop girl Mary Turner, framed for a crime she did not commit. Freed after
three years in prison, she has turned into a hard-hearted criminal bent on revenge against
the men who set her up, promising, “You’re going to pay for everything I’m losing in life.”
Within two years the typical Crawford part had gone from carefree clotheshorse to bitter
working-class girl, who spends at least part of each film in dreary smock-dresses, scrubbing
floors and swearing to change her lot in life, not simply endure it. In Possessed (1931), she
escapes dismal factory life on the arm of a rising but married political star. He keeps her in
diamonds and furs but finds he must choose between her and his career, knowing that either a
divorce or word of an affair would sink his campaign. The movie rewards her adultery when
he chooses to forsake his pursuit of public office to keep her. (When the Hays Production
Code went into effect a few years later to regulate movie morality, this rewarded sin would
not make it past the censors.)
The reversal in fortune Crawford’s characters undergo from Our Dancing Daughters to
Paid and the opening of Possessed is the actual plot of the ironically titled Dance, Fools,
Dance (1931). In this film, Crawford plays Bonnie Jordan, a typical flapper, wealthy and
fun-loving. When her father loses his fortune in the stock market crash, Bonnie must trade
her dancing togs for a reporter’s notebook to earn her own living. Life is no longer hers to
simply reach out her hands and “catch at”; now the dispossessed flapper must put those
hands to work. Throughout the film, Bonnie’s previous upper-class lifestyle proves use-
ful to her investigative work and allows the film to have it both ways: it can revel in her
former high-class sensibility and display conspicuous consumption while also showing the
Depression’s brutal, equalizing effect on her and people of her class. Also cast adrift by her
319
father’s bankruptcy, her brother, not as lucky as Bonnie, falls hard into a world of gangland
theft and murder. While investigating a crime, Bonnie discovers her brother’s plight but too
late to save him. The film ends when Bonnie marries a man from her old life. He appreci-
ates her anew for the lessons she has learned in self-reliance. After toppling her from her
socioeconomic pinnacle and dramatizing her fall, the film at last rewards her for hard work
and honest intent.
In 1936 Crawford starred as historical figure Peggy Eaton in an overtly political film with
the less than obviously political title The Gorgeous Hussy, inspired by but not truthful to
actual events of the 1830s. In her sole appearance in a historical film, Crawford received the
full Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) star treatment to transform her from Paid’s hard-luck
shop girl and Possessed’s kept woman to an antebellum beauty with surprising political
influence in President Andrew Jackson’s inner circle. The film opens with Congress debating
issues fundamental to the eventual secession of Southern states from the Union. The debate
is framed as a question of states’ rights versus the preeminence of the U.S. Constitution. No
legislator mentions slavery, and although slaves appear in the film, they are presented on
a par with white servants to camouflage their actual status. After the session, a few sena-
tors retire to a popular tavern owned by Peggy’s father and she joins their debate, firmly on
the side of the constitutionalists even though the object of her affection disagrees. Senator
John Randolph (Melvyn Douglas) insists he is Virginian first and American second. Only
John’s insistence that Peggy is too young and mercurial trumps their dispute over the Union
in impeding a union of their own. He discounts her romantic overtures as quickly as he
dismisses her political convictions. Spurned, she falls for the easy charms of a sailor. They
quickly marry and almost as quickly he departs for sea aboard the aptly named USS Consti-
tution and dies abroad.
Meanwhile Peg’s “Uncle Andy,” presidential aspirant Andrew Jackson (Lionel Barry-
more), arrives in Washington with his wife, Rachel, dubbed “Andy’s Rachel.” In the minds
of Washington’s elite, Rachel (Beulah Bondi) has two strikes against her. Her first marriage
was not officially ended when she married Jackson, leaving her vulnerable to charges of big-
amy and adultery in the campaign against Jackson. Second, she is a “hick” from the woods
of Tennessee who speaks in country dialect and enjoys smoking a clay pipe. Rachel shuns
the spotlight to protect Andy from slander directed at her, but Peg is second only to Jackson
in defending his beloved Rachel’s honor. Eventually he wins the disputed election through a
congressional vote. Broken when Rachel dies soon after, Jackson blames the pious wives of
the political class that rejected her. He turns to Peg as confidante and social hostess—roles
that Rachel should have played had she lived.
The same women snub Peg, eying with suspicion her influence on the president, her
widowed status, and her popularity with men. Meanwhile, Peg and John Randolph find each
other again. This time John returns her affection and they plan to marry. When Peg shares
the good news with Jackson, he declares this is the end of their friendship since Randolph
is still a committed states’ rights man and she would owe her allegiance to her husband. Peg
confronts John with Andy’s fears, and they separate, realizing that they cannot resolve their
conflicting politics in marriage.
Despite her continued romantic feelings for Randolph, Peg marries Senator John Eaton
(Franchot Tone, Crawford’s husband at the time) in order to attain respectability, but to no
avail. Jackson takes the opportunity to punish the gossips he blames for Rachel’s death by
firing most of his cabinet for ill treatment of Peg. Peg finally convinces both Uncle Andy and
320
husband John, however, that the couple would be better off on ambassadorial assignment to
Spain. In this way, the film dispatches with a woman who dares to assert herself politically
in the only ways available to her. In a theme running throughout overtly political Holly-
wood films, women viewed as sexually compromised forfeit political viability. While a rare
example of a prominent woman character in the genre, The Gorgeous Hussy remains notable
almost solely for that fact. Crawford is miscast as a historical figure, her star image better
suited to contemporary films. Worse, Production Code strictures made it nearly impossible
even for a 1930s audience to decipher anything objectionable in Peg’s behavior. The impli-
cation was that Peg was sexually active with various romantic partners but the film is so
reticent on this point that the veiled accusations against her register as comical. The New
York Times wrote, “Miss Crawford is gorgeous, but never a hussy,” and dismisses her Peggy
as a “persecuted Polyanna.”6
The theme of social legitimacy determining a woman’s political worth appeared in a far
more successful “pure” political film a decade later. The Farmer’s Daughter (1947) stars
Loretta Young as Katie, a young Swedish-American farm girl who winds up working in
the house of political power broker and matriarch Agatha Morley and her son Glenn. They
come to value Katie’s down-to-earth goodness and regard her as more than a servant. When
the Morleys nominate a replacement candidate to fill a vacant congressional seat, Katie,
knowing of the man’s unprincipled ambition, objects to their choice. At his political debut,
she asks pointed questions and gets embarrassing answers, much to the Morleys’ vexation.
Drawing the attention of the competing party, Katie ends up their nominee for the seat and
leaves the Morley household. Her political positions are progressive but not strident. When
her opponent tries to smear Katie’s reputation with the lie that she spent the night with the
man who gave her a ride to town just before she joined the Morley staff, Katie does not
know how to respond and runs back home. Glenn figures out that far from enjoying a tryst
with Katie, the driver stole her money, forcing her to look for domestic work with his family.
He finds Katie, proposes, exposes her opponent’s dirty tricks, and, with his mother, backs
Katie’s candidacy. The film closes on an image of Glenn sweeping Katie in his arms over the
threshold of the House of Representatives.
While Crawford’s Peggy Eaton married two different men and enjoyed the romantic atten-
tions of more, Katie’s behavior is scrupulously proper. Her common sense even trumps her
naiveté, if not that of the plot. Through a combination of virtue and charming intelligence,
Katie wins officially sanctioned political power in contrast with “hussy” Peg, deprived by
hypocritical tongue-wagging of even tangential political influence. The Farmer’s Daughter
was a hit, earning Young a Best Actress Academy Award and becoming a television series in
the mid-1960s. As Bosley Crowther admits, however, given the “nature of American poli-
tics and the American male as shown here, it doesn’t take too much ingenuity on her part to
conquer both.”7
The Working Woman
The theme of working women recurred in many of the films produced in this period and
extended into the era of World War II, when women took over work on railroads and in
shipyards, steel plants, and other war industries as men went to fight with the armed forces
overseas. The government campaigned for women to work these jobs with posters display-
ing “Rosie the Riveter” images of women wearing men’s uniforms and working at men’s
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jobs. One such poster featured a soldier, a sailor, and a pilot pointing to a poster of a woman
worker with the caption, “Their real pin-up girl.” Another addressed openly the potential
tension caused by women filling jobs formerly reserved for men with a picture of a woman
in overalls and headscarf and a man standing protectively beside her: “I’m proud . . . my
husband wants me to do my part.”8 With this kind of propaganda, the U.S. government pro-
moted women in blue-collar jobs as patriotic. Meanwhile, women moving into professional
careers interested director Frank Capra. One of his overtly politically populist films, the
comic-melodramatic Meet John Doe (1941), prominently features a woman in the rise and
fall of political innocent “John Doe.”
To win back her job from the new owner of her newspaper, columnist Ann Mitchell
invents in her farewell column a politically and socioeconomically alienated man called
John Doe. A stand-in for all those ruined by the Depression, John Doe pledges to kill
himself by jumping from a tower on Christmas Eve in protest against “man’s inhumanity
to man.” People respond to his message, and Ann, played by Capra favorite Barbara Stan-
wyck, keeps her column. Soon John Doe fan clubs spring up everywhere, necessitating the
hunt for a real John Doe. Ann discovers Long John Willoughby, a former baseball player
turned vagabond, played by Gary Cooper, and turns him into her John Doe. All this pleases
her new boss, big businessman strong-arm D.B. Norton, a fascist figure with his own pri-
vate police squad. He is pleased, that is, until the clubs start to wield potential political
influence beyond his control. Norton unmasks Willoughby. When Willoughby’s supporters
discover his ruse, he climbs the tower to kill himself anyway, feeling powerless to stop
the widespread political disillusionment his fakery caused. Meeting him there at midnight,
Ann tries to stop him from jumping but faints in his arms. Willoughby confronts Norton on
the tower, too, and the film ends ambiguously, with Ann still unconscious and Norton still
powerful, still lurking.
Important to the theme of working women, Ann Mitchell dominates the film’s storyline
and determines the moral development of Willoughby. From casting Willoughby as her John
Doe, to writing his speeches and motivating him to believe sincerely in a cause begun only
as a publicity gimmick, to crossing Norton despite all the money he has thrown her way, Ann
Mitchell is the film’s engine. She is the good sport, the go-to gal. Her brains and her pluck
set the plot in motion. While suspenseful, the film never turns into a forum on her sexual
nature or questions where her political loyalties lie, and thus Ann plays more than prop to
the film’s male lead. That sign of female proactivity distinguishes the movie from Capra’s
other political films. A smart movie addressed to smart women as well as men discovering
women’s competence in the world of work, Meet John Doe suggests that the absence of men
from their traditional political and social roles was not all bad.
Woman in a World Gone Wrong
Barbara Stanwyck shows a different face of woman popularly on display just before, during,
and immediately after World War II in the cycle of movies dubbed “film noir.” A phenome-
nal hit then and a staple of film noir revival festivals today, Double Indemnity (1944) features
Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson, the quintessential femme fatale of 1940s film noir. A vamp
in the tradition of A Fool There Was and Sunrise, Dietrichson meets life insurance salesman
Walter Neff, played by Fred MacMurray. Clad in nothing but a towel and an ankle bracelet,
she seduces him. Like all femmes fatale, Phyllis resents her marriage and convinces Walter
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that she is her husband’s victim, saying, “He keeps me on a leash so tight I can’t breathe.”
Under the spell of her close-fitting sweaters and gardenia perfume, Neff agrees to murder her
husband and help her reap the insurance money.
As if they were romantic partners in a 1930s screwball comedy, Phyllis and Walter match
wits verbally, but the subtext to their banter is not just sex but the genre’s theme of social
alienation. The film’s screenwriter and noir novelist, Raymond Chandler, describes the noir
attitude as acknowledgment of a world gone wrong, “a world in which long before the atom
bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction and was learning to use
it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. The law was
something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something
more than night.”9

Through lies and double crosses, the doomed lovers meet in director Billy Wilder’s
famous climax. Filmed in the noir style of extreme light and dark, the film’s penultimate
scene positions Phyllis as the center of a web cast by the room’s shadows and the lines of her
blouse. Still unique in film up to that time, Phyllis, acting the man’s part, pulls a gun from her
dress and shoots Walter. In a romantic clutch with him, she admits she never loved him or
anybody else. He kills her before hobbling back to the insurance office to confess his crimes,
a futile but ennobling act when compared with Phyllis’s cold admission.
Duplicitous and castrating, Phyllis epitomizes the self-serving noir woman. Neff laments,
“I killed him for money and for a woman. I didn’t get the money . . . and I didn’t get the
woman.” But in noir the spider woman derives no pleasure from her wicked ways either.
Phyllis is not only antiromantic and greedy in this world gone wrong; she is something even
worse in Hollywood’s eyes: she is antifamily. Avaricious to the core, she puts no one’s needs
above her own. Her selfishness extends to her stepdaughter, Lola. While seducing Neff,
Phyllis is also seeing Lola’s boyfriend behind her back, the ultimate in maternal treachery.
The cautionary tale of the noir femme fatale warns against women assuming greater
agency through work on the assembly line or in the office by equating their empowerment
in real life with the destruction of the prewar family in movies. Film noir anxiety caused
by working women is most pronounced in Laura (1944) and Mildred Pierce (1945). Both
title characters conquer commercially—Laura in advertising, Mildred in the restaurant
business—but falter emotionally, with Laura falling for a cad and Mildred Pierce failing as
a mother. Like Phyllis, these characters upend traditional expectations that women know
their own heart, instinctively care for their children, and put their husbands first. The entire
genre’s cynicism expresses tacit nostalgia for a time when everyone knew where a woman
could be found: in the home, with the children, out of sexual and economic circulation.
Woman on the Verge
By the 1950s, the masculinity-challenging, home-wrecking, noir femme fatale lost momen-
tum on screen. With men back at home and on the job in postwar America, certain strands of
Hollywood ideology suggested that women should resume their part as nurturing and faith-
ful. Femininity no longer implied ambition, much less promiscuity, some of that decade’s
most popular films said. After three decades of women on screen seducing, deceiving, and
in rare instances killing men, however, it was too late to close Pandora’s box. These mixed
messages created a view of women as slightly mad. Neither marriage nor failing to marry
enabled this postwar woman to cope. Films like Possessed (1947), Harriet Craig (1950),
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Executive Suite (1954), A Woman’s World (1954), and Queen Bee (1955) stuff women back
into the domestic, frequently suburban realm of submission to their husbands and watch as
they panic. The eponymous Harriet Craig works at her housekeeping like a profit-driven cor-
porate executive. Putting so much effort into producing a spotless, perfectly appointed home,
however, reaps no profit, only an oppressive hysteria. Executive Suite’s Julia Treadway owns
a controlling share of stocks in a company whose chief executive has just died. Suicidal over
his death and her own spinsterhood, she has the power to decide the man to replace him. A
1940s woman would have boldly set up a man for the job, seduced or murdered him, and
acquired the company herself. Treadway, on the other hand, is so distraught over her wasted,
unmarried life she breaks down sobbing—on the ledge of the company’s top-story office. In
There’s Always Tomorrow (1956), the murderous lovers of Double Indemnity, Stanwyck and
MacMurray, meet again. This time, he plays a happily married man feeling unappreciated by
wife and kids. She plays a single woman from his past who forgoes her own desire for him
to steer him back toward the family that needs him, a self-sacrifice unthinkable for a noir
woman. In these 1950s dramas, the world of crime and scheming women has been replaced
by the corporate boardroom and stay-at-home moms.
The same period witnessed a renewed idealization of the blonde bombshell with the hour-
glass figure. That image of woman replaced the androgynous, masculinized look of the long,
lean, shoulder-padded women of the 1940s. The 1950s female stars share more in common
with curvaceous, prewar sex symbols like the bawdy Mae West in I’m No Angel (1933), who
quips, “It’s not the men in your life that count, it’s the life in your men.” The 1950s said
good-bye to the likes of Crawford and Stanwyck as “It” girls and hello to Betty Grable, Lana
Turner, and Marilyn Monroe. The “new look,” as magazines dubbed the fashion trend these
stars promoted, took advantage of postwar prosperity to use yards of extra material in large
poofed skirts, cinched at the waist. These dresses emphasized the so-called wasp figure of
exaggerated chest, slim waist, and exaggerated behind. As embodied by Monroe in movies like
Monkey Business (1952), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), and The Seven Year Itch (1955),
the sexy woman of the 1950s was also part child, her sexuality endlessly open and available.
Her characters regularly delivered lines like this from The Seven Year Itch: “There I was with
a perfectly strange plumber—and no polish on my toenails.” Her ditzy qualities mitigated her
sexiness so she posed no threat to the suburbanized, corporate man or even his wife.
The wasp figure promoted by the “new look” took on ironic meaning in another Holly-
wood female trope of the era: the monstrous woman. Movies like Attack of the Fifty-Foot
Woman (1958) and The Wasp Woman (1959) turned the frustration and hysteria of domesti-
cally trapped women inside out. Rather than experiencing the fear and paranoia herself, she
projects it onto her own exterior, the better to terrorize others. These films translate her panic
into her weapon. While they also clearly point to fears of nature gone berserk in the nuclear
age, these films tellingly use women to project that fear.
A comparison was also made between the shape of the nuclear missile, so present in
public consciousness after the nuclear bombing of Japan in 1945, and the 1950s screen fash-
ion of the cone-shaped bra. The missile-breasts feature prominently in scenes as diverse as
the showgirl musical routines performed by Jane Russell and Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes (1953), Julie Adams’s swim scene in Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and
Janet Leigh disrobing in Touch of Evil (1958) and Psycho (1960). The missile-bra comparison
equates fear of women with fear of the nuclear bomb and suggests that women’s sexuality in
the wake of the family-destroying 1940s femme fatale remains potentially deadly.
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Femme Fatale Redux
The 1980s and 1990s occasioned a comeback for the noir femme fatale in some of the
era’s most popular films: Body Heat (1981), Against All Odds (1984), No Way Out (1987),
Fatal Attraction (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), and The Last Seduction (1994). The revival
of noir themes that define women as dangerous enigmas invites review of these films’ wider
political and social context: the “second wave” of feminism. Influenced by the civil rights
movement, women in the 1960s and 1970s organized to protest sex discrimination in educa-
tion, housing, employment, and public spaces. They fought for equal pay and legalization
of contraception and abortion, and they marched to support the equal rights amendment
(ERA) just as first-wave feminists had marched for the vote more than a half century before.
Though the ERA failed, other laws and court rulings did prohibit discrimination on the basis
of sex, and women were elected to national office not as widows of congressmen but in their
own right for the first time.
Culturally and politically, the United States changed in the wake of this second-wave
agitation. Many women did not feel obliged to define themselves socially and sexually
through marriage, and they moved into previously off-limits vocations. Men resisted but
were expected as never before to shoulder child-rearing and housekeeping duties if for no
other reason than to compensate for working women’s absence from the home. In this way,
second-wave feminism affected both political and personal realms, with women forcing
subjects like rape and domestic violence to the fore as part of their movement for greater
emancipation and legal rights.
A range of popular movies made just before the noir revival reflected these shifts and
celebrated women’s independence. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) begins by mak-
ing a widow of Alice, compelling her slow, often comic ascent toward self-sufficiency and
self-awareness as a single mother. Set during World War II, the Academy Award-winning
drama Julia (1977) showed off women practicing political subversion and espionage while
cultivating a meaningful relationship with each other, independent of men. The Turning Point
(1977) compared a lonely but successful ballet star with her friend who sacrificed her own
artistic aspirations to become a wife and a mother. Norma Rae (1979) showcased a single
woman’s political awakening without adding romantic entanglement to her evolution, while
Coming Home (1978) charted a military wife’s evolving political consciousness through a
sexual awakening outside her marriage in the era of Vietnam. At the end of the 1970s, Kramer
vs. Kramer (1979) portrayed divorce and ensuing custody battles as the bitter harvest of the
women’s movement, yet An Unmarried Woman (1978), made only the year before, posed
divorce as liberation and the means to women’s self-confidence and career fulfillment.
By the 1980s, conservative Republican politicians like Ronald Reagan and anti-ERA
leaders like Phyllis Schlafly succeeded in their opposition to the women’s movement and
the politics of sexual liberation. Strengthened by a rise in Christian fundamentalism, the
New Right argued that feminist agitation weakened the moral fiber and anti-Communist
strength of the United States. Conservatives claimed that feminism’s goals, especially abor-
tion rights, doomed “traditional family values” and that with the family in decline the entire
country was sure to follow. This sky-is-falling rhetoric resonated with the American public
even though the U.S. economy depended on women in the workforce.
At the same time, independent of gender ideology, baby boomer families discovered that
they required two incomes simply to maintain the lifestyle their parents had known and they
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expected to enjoy themselves. This combination of disparate pressures on women to embark

on careers previously denied them or to carry their weight financially while also playing
“mom” showed up in the movies in patterns reminiscent of classical Hollywood’s response
to shifting gender roles and economic upheaval during the Jazz Age and World War II. In
general, films of this period punish women for the very pursuits that films of the previous
decade honored. Many of these films figure into the backlash against feminism, a cultural
phenomenon most prominently documented in Susan Faludi’s seminal 1991 book Backlash:
The Undeclared War Against American Women.
Fatal Attraction
Despite mostly poor reviews, Fatal Attraction was the second highest-grossing film of 1987,
earned several Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and became one of the
most controversial films in late twentieth-century movie history. Talk shows talked about it,
comedy sketch shows parodied it, and newspapers covered it as news. So popular was the
film that its title entered the cultural lexicon as a way to indicate obsession turned patho-
logical, particularly a frustrated single woman’s obsession with a man or simply her lack
of husband and kids. Independent, professionally successful Alex, played by Glenn Close,
embodied the film’s controversy and became a litmus test for viewers’ opinions of feminism.
Whether a viewer hated Alex and cheered her demise or rooted for her against the movie’s
own obvious allegiances said something about that person’s attitude toward feminism. Fatal
Attraction spawned numerous imitations, from Single White Female (1992) and Hand That
Rocks the Cradle (1992) to The Crush (1993) and Swimfan (2002). These knockoffs sug-
gested that all females, from teens to hired nannies, contain the seeds of paranoid obsession
about men and psychotic envy of other women who enjoy lives validated by the very men
that the psychos attract but cannot keep. (As perhaps the ultimate sign of cultural signifi-
cance, Fatal Attraction also inspired 1993’s movie spoof, Fatal Instinct.)
Fatal Attraction presents Dan, played by Michael Douglas, a happily married, successful
lawyer living in New York City but contemplating a house in the country. His wife, Beth,
played by Anne Archer, is beautiful and kind, so devoted to their young daughter that she
allows her to take Dan’s place in bed with her while Dan is out walking the family dog.
When wife and daughter leave for the weekend, Dan has a sexually heated fling with Alex, a
publisher he meets through work. Dan describes their arrangement as “two adults who saw
an opportunity and took advantage of it.” The masculine-named Alex agrees to play by boys’
rules, but when Dan ditches her to resume his role as husband and father, she reneges. “I will
not be ignored,” she threatens. Desperate for his attention, she attempts suicide, swaying him
with her despair, then turning on him violently when his sympathy proves temporary. Preg-
nant and wanting to have the child against Dan’s expectations or wishes, Alex tightens the
psychological noose as he tries to escape with his family to the country. In the film’s climax,
Dan saves Beth from Alex’s butcher knife by drowning Alex in the bathtub, only to watch
her rise from the tub again ready to kill. Finally Beth shoots Alex in the heart, and the film
ends with intimations of a tested but restored family peace.
The film sparked intense public debate. Feminists vehemently criticized its over-the-top
vilification of the career-minded, independent woman. They saw conservative backlash in
the way the film first pitted the black-leather-clad Alex against the softly lit, doe-eyed, stay-
at-home Beth, then made it clear that, compared to Beth’s assets of a successful husband and
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adorable child, Alex’s professional accomplishments amount to nothing. While the women’s
movement depended upon women joining forces for the benefit of all, this film marked
women as the natural enemy of other women. As feminist critics also pointed out, the film
both punishes Alex for expressing her sexual desire and exploits that openness to titillate
viewers, while allowing Dan to atone for his sexual indiscretion with choices unavailable to
Alex. Dan’s abdication of Alex’s pregnancy, justified by her psychotic behavior, also seemed
to mock women’s struggle for reproductive freedom.
Other viewers saw Dan and Beth as smug yuppies, a category coined in the 1980s to
refer to young urban professionals. From this perspective, Beth and Dan’s self-contained,
self-satisfied world deserved destruction by Alex’s wrath.10 Alex’s fierce, homicidal char-
acterization thus energizes the film in subversive contrast to the rule-obeying, dependent
Beth.
Still other critics saw Alex as the source of irrevocable depravity that the film needed
to vanquish in order to end satisfactorily. Director Adrian Lyne’s original ending, included
on the DVD release, involves planted evidence and Alex turned suicidal again. It hits a
much more morally ambiguous note than the Beth-versus-Alex/good-versus-bad shoot-out
resolution. Test audiences, however, rejected any fate for Alex other than death at the hands
of Beth. They seemed to echo the politics of the New Right and its opposition to changing
mores and gender dynamics by advocating revenge against Alex and death to the threat she
posed to “family.”
Alex’s horror movie resurrection at film’s end compares her to the mesmerizing vamp of
A Fool There Was and attributes to her desires and motives a supernatural force defiant of
any plausible, much less sympathetic, psychology. She is not so much woman wronged or
even woman blinded by desire as symbol of evil. As more than one critic has pointed out,
her transformation from attractive, confident professional to hysterical shrew, monstrous in
her desire, undermines the feminist stands she takes to defend herself within the film.11 As
with the 1940s noir femme fatale, Alex’s designs oppose the traditional family, but unlike
her “husband and home bore me” predecessors, winning for Alex means stealing domestic
bliss for herself. While the old femme fatale wanted no part of such monotony, this one
would kill for it.
The film’s reactionary politics, while still resonant in such issues as the political viability
of former first lady, senator, and secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, nonetheless now
has a dated quality. Many contemporary fans value the film for its camp appeal or its visual
sumptuousness and sharp direction.
Basic Instinct and Disclosure: The Michael Douglas Factor
Notorious neo-noir films from the early 1990s, Basic Instinct and Disclosure (both 1994)
also demonized productive, independent women. The blockbuster hit Basic Instinct ignited
controversy with its explicit depiction of sex and violence and its bisexual femme fatale.
Accused of homophobia and misogyny, the storyline provoked protests from gay and lesbian
groups before filming had even finished. Disclosure, a less commercially successful film,
courted feminist outrage by portraying sexual harassment as a matter of women exploit-
ing men. The film posed this peculiar gender reversal despite the famous Supreme Court
nomination hearings three years earlier in which former employee Anita Hill alleged sexual
harassment against Clarence Thomas in a Senate hearing almost entirely composed of men.
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Disclosure made the woman the villain and the man her victim, counter to the overwhelm-
ing number of actual harassment cases filed in the wake of the landmark Thomas hearings.
Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, and Disclosure coalesce around male lead Michael
Douglas to solidify his acting persona as an everyday guy made to suffer the manipula-
tions of unstable, predatory, but somehow also professionally successful women. As he says
in Disclosure when asked how he will cope, “Grin and bear it like I usually do and hope
it doesn’t get any worse.” The repeated casting of Douglas underscores the ideology that
the movies promote, rendering explicit what might have remained implicit with a different
male lead. Each film associates female encroachment on Douglas’s character’s work domain
with persecution of him. In Fatal Attraction, Alex’s publishing company hires his law firm,
providing her the chance to seduce and then terrorize him. In Basic Instinct, cynical, trigger-
happy cop Nick Curran must interview famous thriller author Catherine Tramell, played by
Sharon Stone. Catherine’s novels imply she knows more about actual crimes than he does,
putting her in charge of their initial encounters. Disclosure begins with the symbolic emascu-
lation of computer expert Tom Sanders by setting him up for a promotion that goes instead to
the ruthlessly ambitious and sexually rapacious Meredith Johnson, played by Demi Moore.
In their overlapping themes and use of Michael Douglas, this trio of films equates female
ambition with virulence to send the message that the goal of harmonious family life and the
goal of successful men and women sharing the workplace are mutually exclusive. Women
are thus the enemy of men except when women are where that era’s conservative politicians
would keep them: in the home, tending the kids.
On the whole, the paranoid gender dynamic of these films depends on a disjunction that
robs them of coherent political expression. Struggling under the weight of their own absurd-
ity and detachment from recognizable societal patterns, films like Disclosure resist logical
scrutiny. The plot confounds even Roger Ebert: “It is an exercise in pure cynicism, with little
respect for its subject—or for its thriller plot, which I defy anyone to explain.”12
Working Girls
Other films from the 1980s and 1990s took the theme of working women and made comedy
of it. The hugely popular 9 to 5 (1980) is a revenge fantasy in which women working anony-
mous jobs in giant corporations finally get even. Three assistants, played by Jane Fonda,
Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton, slave for a male boss played by Dabney Coleman, a “sexist,
egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.” Fed up with his abuse and his habit of taking credit for
their ideas, they tie him up at his house and take over the office. Under their management,
productivity goes up as they instigate employee-friendly programs like child care, flextime,
and job sharing. The film was such a success that it led to the creation of two television situa-
tion comedies of the same title, and the theme song provided an Academy Award-nominated
hit for Parton. A seemingly frothy exercise in wish fulfillment, this film at heart offers a
sharp satire on the topic of chauvinism and the routine use of women in ways inappropriate
to the work environment.
Baby Boom (1987) comically addressed the culture’s burning question of whether women
could “have it all,” both demanding career and full-time family, and was popular enough
to spur a television series, too. Unlike the female support staff of 9 to 5, lead character
J.C. Wiatt, played by the unlikely Diane Keaton, is the boss of her office. Known as “the
tiger lady,” J.C. epitomizes the fearsome professional woman forsaking family life for a
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high-powered career as an advertising executive. Known for her competitive drive, J.C.
thrives in a world dominated by men until the day she inherits a long-lost cousin’s baby and
her compulsively ordered life turns chaotic. Comedy derives from the incompatibility of
mothering and career success, with J.C. tossing off lines like “I can’t have a baby—I have
a 12:30 lunch meeting” and “I went to Yale and Harvard, I don’t have children.” Despite
J.C.’s efforts to put up the baby for adoption, her live-in lover dumps both her and their posh
DINK lifestyle, the term coined in the 1980s meaning “double income, no kids.” The baby
thus quashes her love life and jeopardizes her career.
Forced to quit her high-powered position when predictably she decides against adoption,
J.C. retreats with the baby to Vermont, where she at last masters the art of mothering and, as
a direct consequence, the film implies, falls in love with the local veterinarian. Meanwhile,
her type-A personality resurfaces when she invents a recipe for baby applesauce so tasty
that she successfully markets it nationwide and gets to reject her old advertising firm’s bid
to direct her new product’s ad campaign. While audiences enjoyed the fantasy, critics were
not as enthusiastic, noting the film’s heavy-handed message about saving the endangered
nuclear family. As one critic acidly put it, “From time to time, Hollywood likes to make
movies that assuage some of the guilt that it feels for being such a superficial, unthinking,
materialistic behemoth. Baby Boom is one of these films—a typically 1980s movie whose
essential message is ‘making money and living in flash apartments is all well and good, but
what we all really want is to have kids and live in an old house making jam.’”13
J.C. Wiatt’s look in this film is also “typically 1980s”: she sports shoulder-padded, exqui-
sitely fitted business suits the better to “pass” as a man in a man’s world, the New York
advertising scene. When Diane Keaton famously wore men’s ties and jackets as part of her
Annie Hall (1977) clothing ensemble, that look playfully connoted women’s struggle for
gender parity but within the film’s storyline it amounted to a choice, a fashion whimsy. In the
more romantic of the two comedies, Annie Hall’s male-inspired attire is a flirtation aid, while
the tiger lady’s version renders fashion a mandatory uniform. In Baby Boom, Keaton’s cos-
tuming raises the stakes to male impersonation, similar to the shoulder-padded look of 1940s
film heroines like Mildred Pierce. Clothing and location cues both say that J.C. becomes a
real woman only when she discovers her maternal instincts, flees the city, and ditches the
suits. When she gets it all at film’s end—baby, man, and business—she forfeits neither fam-
ily nor wealth, just the office masquerade.
In this respect, Baby Boom presents a subtle riff on the earlier Tootsie (1982) and Mr. Mom
(1983), two significant comedies about gender politics featuring men in various degrees of
female impersonation. A critical and box office hit, Tootsie stars Dustin Hoffman as Michael,
an actor unable to get work until he auditions in drag for a female lead in a soap opera. (The
fallacy here is that women can gain employment more easily than men can in this post-ERA
era, one of the fears promulgated by the anti-ERA lobby.) Throughout the film, Michael-
as-Dorothy endures the come-ons and belittlement of reliable chauvinist Dabney Coleman
while playing mother, confidante, and friend to numerous characters. His trials as Dorothy
lead Michael to reveal his identity at the end by declaring that being a woman has made him
a better man. Mr. Mom follows a similar trajectory when Michael Keaton’s character, Jack,
loses his job, dons an apron, and takes over the household while his wife goes to work full-
time. Like J.C. Wiatt’s transformation in Baby Boom, Jack’s drag performance is not literal
but supposes that men and women, work and home, are so at odds with each other that leav-
ing one realm to succeed in the other requires an identity change nearly that drastic. Though
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not as well-known as Tootsie, Mr. Mom sends a similar message about learning new respect
for women. It stresses more emphatically, however, the financial imperatives that dictate the
divide between running a household and holding down a job when Jack’s overworked wife
becomes as absent from the home as he was before turning into Mr. Mom. When neither
spouse gets it all, the ending implicitly gives a thumbs-down to an economy that demands
such an unhappy trade-off of its workers, regardless of gender.
Drag of a different sort plays a key part in Working Girl (1988) when a secretary masquer-
ades as her upper-class boss. The not-so-subtle reference of the title to prostitution remains
a subtext in this romantic comedy that is more interested in issues of class than the divide
between family life and career women.
At the film’s center is Tess McGill, played by the girlish-voiced Melanie Griffith, a secretary
with a working-class pedigree and white-collar ambition. When she discovers that her new boss
is a woman, Tess thinks her climb up the corporate ladder will be infinitely easier. Katharine
Parker, played with devious glee by Sigourney Weaver, mouths all the right platitudes but
proves to be every bit the manipulative user that Tess’s male boss was. Tess’s illusions about
Katharine as a mentor are shattered when Tess discovers Katharine’s plans to use an idea Tess
pitched to her and claim credit for herself. When Katharine breaks her leg skiing, Tess sees
her opportunity and grabs it by passing herself off as the boss, wearing Katharine’s couture
clothing and imitating her hairstyle. The transition Tess undergoes from secretary to manage-
ment by the end of the film is thus as much about knowing how to look successful as it is about
having the brains and guts to take charge. To complete the impersonation of business acumen,
she must renounce her “working girl” big hair and seductive clothing to adopt the upper-crust
style of the low-voiced, porcelain-skinned Katharine with the sculpted face. What is more, she
must leave behind her blue-collar neighborhood and friendships.
The film pits Tess against Katharine in the boardroom and the bedroom, as Tess slowly
falls for Katharine’s boyfriend, not realizing who he is. Played by Harrison Ford, Jack
Trainer, who is not as enamored of Katharine as she is of him, is attracted by Tess’s genuine
sweetness and authenticity, qualities that manipulative “tiger lady” Katharine lacks. Unlike
the group spirit animating 9 to 5, this film divides women against each other along the lines
of Fatal Attraction, suggesting that only one woman is woman enough for both Jack and
the job. For one woman to win, the other must lose, according to this backlash logic. The
film thus lauds Tess’s pluck while vilifying Weaver’s forceful presence and her aggressive
sexuality on humiliating display when she tries to seduce Jack.
Despite or perhaps owing to this rift between Katharine and Tess, the film’s closing
images of Tess and Jack making a home together suggest an equal partnership between
the sexes. Neither character sacrifices for the other as they help each other get coffee and
breakfast before heading out to work. The final image seals Tess’s triumphant replacement
of Katharine: she is now “boss,” with her own secretary and a high-rise office with a view.
Though Tess makes a point of telling her secretary how fairly she will treat her, Working
Girl’s comedy relies on ginned-up rivalry between women for its entertainment fuel.
Avenging Angels
If many movies in the 1980s and 1990s counted on audiences to enjoy the sight of women
competing with each other for men and jobs, a few unleashed feminine rage squarely at
men. Ms. 45 (1981), Extremities (1986), The Accused (1988), and Thelma and Louise (1991)
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all concern the problem of justice in the crime of rape. Unlike Straw Dogs (1972), which
dramatized rape as an insult to the victim’s husband and his perceived emasculation through
her suffering, or Deliverance (1972), which featured a male rape, these films take their
female victim’s point of view entirely. More importantly, they allot their female protagonists
the chance, even obligation, to mete out vengeance. The four movies differ in how far each
assault victim is willing to go for reprisal and the means by which she exacts her revenge.
The harshest and most excessively violent revenge occurs in the exploitation thriller Ms. 45,
directed by the controversial Abel Ferrera, and the most attenuated occurs in Thelma and
Louise, a combination of buddy flick and road movie, directed by Ridley Scott from an
Academy Award-winning script by Callie Khouri.
All four of these movies follow in the wake of Susan Brownmiller’s watershed book
Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, published in 1975. This comprehensive study
defines rape as a crime of coercion and domination of women, reflective of the society in
which it occurs, rather than as a strictly violent, sexual act isolated from the public sphere.
To rebel against the culture of rape is to struggle against the male dominance that allows men
to rape with impunity and encourages a view of women as submissive to men personally
and subordinate to men publicly. Such a perspective on rape derives from the second-wave
feminist notion that “the personal is the political.” The women’s movement thus brought
rape out of its shroud of secrecy as activists argued against the prevailing idea that rape was
a private event that shamed its victims as much as if not more than its perpetrators. Among
other effects, these feminist protests resulted in “rape shield” laws that restricted defense
attempts to humiliate victims and weaken their cases by airing their sexual histories in court.
The aim was to prevent trials from turning into referenda on the issue of whether a victim
was “asking for it.” These movies all turn on some version of that same question.
Ms. 45 presents two rapes in its first fifteen minutes. A mute woman working at a lowly
job in the fashion industry gets raped on her way home from work and then again when she
arrives home and catches a burglar mid-robbery. These violations transform her from a meek,
subservient creature into a dressed-to-the-nines, gun-toting, one-woman vigilante force, the
Avenging Angel of the film’s alternate title. A cult favorite, Ms. 45 is a bloody contribution to
the rape–revenge cycle as Thana, played unforgettably by Zoe Tamerlis, starts blowing away
almost any man who looks her way. Called “intensely disturbing yet sexy, clever, intelligent,
and even funny,” Ms. 45 was not a mainstream hit, and its perspective, presented within the
exploitative revenge fantasy genre, did not address a mainstream audience by any means.14
Yet the film also comments indirectly on class issues by suggesting that Thana’s seam-
stress job oppresses her almost as much as the violence to her body and the violation of
her home. She is a constant victim, poorly dressed, but when she straps on the gun to take
charge of her own destiny, Thana also dons sexy clothes, as if she is indeed “asking for it,”
the faster to attract and kill her offenders. With this transformation of character registered
through her come-hither costuming, the film ironically comments on rape court cases in
which a woman’s clothing can be presented as evidence that no crime actually occurred
since a woman dressed in this manner is clearly inviting the attention of men who cannot be
held accountable for what they do in view of such alluring attire. Thana’s muteness, which
drives the power of Tamerlis’s performance, implies the inherent defenselessness of women
and their relatively voiceless political position in patriarchal culture. This film suggests that
as instruments of male-sanctioned power, the police and courts are useless so, to foment
change, women must take justice and self-defense into their own hands.
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Extremities, based on a successful stage play, also distrusts police willingness and capabil-
ity to assist women rape victims. The movie dramatizes the plight of a woman survivor of an
assault whom the police refuse to help, even though the attacker stole her wallet in his aborted
rape attempt. Even as the police deny her further assistance—“If he calls, let us know and we’ll
send a man round”—the rapist plots his attack on her at home. Played convincingly by former
pinup star Farrah Fawcett, Marjorie fights for her life against her attacker and then turns the
tables on him when she captures him and locks him away in her house. Once he is at her mercy,
she finds herself paralyzed to turn him in and unable to refrain from torturing him. Despite the
film’s attempt to let Marjorie’s roommates complicate the ethical question of how to treat this
criminal, once she cages him, the film runs out of steam. Fawcett won the somewhat aston-
ished praise of critics for her performance, but the film flopped at the box office.
The much more commercially and critically successful film The Accused presents a twist
on these vigilante scenarios by portraying a legal system that first fails its rape victim with
a plea bargain for her attackers, then redeems itself by successfully prosecuting a second
trial. This film also addresses issues of socioeconomic class by presenting the rape victim,
Sarah, as working-class and the setting of her rape a seedy, working-class bar. (Jodie Foster
won a Best Actress Academy Award for her role as Sarah.) Sarah, with her rough talk and
cheap, provocative style of dress, contrasts with the sophisticated attorney prosecuting her
case, Kathryn, played by real-life rape victim Kelly McGillis. (This fact was publicized at
the time of the film’s release.) When the original trial results in a plea bargain for the rapists,
Sarah interrupts a quiet, sophisticated dinner party at Kathryn’s tastefully appointed home to
accuse Kathryn of selling her out. With license plates reading “Sexy Sadie” and low-slung
shirts, Sarah represents the “accused” of the title who must both defend her drunken, flirta-
tious behavior at the bar and fight for her own case to go forward. Kathryn finally redeems
herself by becoming a true advocate for Sarah, validating the system by successfully pros-
ecuting the men who egged on and cheered the rape.
In the presentation of the prosecution’s case at the end, the film depicts the rape for the
first time, leading some critics to cry exploitation since the graphic scene serves as the film’s
visual climax, a tacit endorsement of the crime’s sexual titillation for viewers. By suppress-
ing the sight of the rape for most of the film, the narrative payoff at the end presents the rape
as a visual reward. The film also suggests that sanctioned legal channels can address rape
with satisfactory results for the victim, a message contrasting with that of lower-budgeted
or independently made films like Ms. 45 and I Spit on Your Grave (1977), which advocate
revenge by any means available, the bloodier the better.
The most popular of these films, Thelma and Louise, features two rapes, one on-screen,
the other off. The on-screen rape occurs when two best friends, a submissive housewife and
a waitress at a diner, abandon husband and boyfriend to hit the road for a weekend fishing
vacation. They stop at a honky-tonk bar where the married Thelma, played movingly by
Geena Davis, flirts with and then gets hit on by a man who knows she is drunk. He takes
her out back to the parking lot, but just as the assault begins, Louise, played by flinty-eyed
Susan Sarandon, arrives with a gun. (For both actresses, this was a name-making film.) She
shoots the man and the two women take off, with the police eventually in pursuit. Thelma
and Louise implies that a rape in her past motivates Louise’s act of extreme violence and her
fugitive reaction to the crime. Her past tells her to distrust the police’s ability or willingness
to believe the women’s self-defense version of events. From experience, she believes that
Thelma faced serious trouble in that parking lot.
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On the lam, the two shed their hausfrau apparel for roadworthy duds, an outward trans-
formation symbolic of inner evolutions from weak to strong, from subdued to daring, from
carefree friends to committed partners. A paternal cop, played by Harvey Keitel, takes their
case and comes to care so much about them that by film’s end he berates a man for stealing
their getaway money. He claims to know the secret truth about Louise’s past, the event that
haunts her and compels her to run. That he never spells out directly what he “knows” sug-
gests the elusive grip patriarchy still has on these characters even as they blaze a new path
for themselves and for the legion of female fans the film attracted.
The film’s attitude toward rape is complicated in some respects by Thelma’s sexual awak-
ening in a tryst with a hitchhiker the two allow on board with them. An indictment of her
unfaithful and abusive husband, Thelma’s thrill at the young man’s attentions cuts against
the story’s subplot of Thelma and Louise rejecting the men in their lives and coming to trust
only each other. This growing devotion to each other and rebellion against their past social
roles, especially as they had been treated and defined by men, invited condemnation from
critics. Many deplored the film as feminist propaganda and antimale. That kind of reaction
led other critics to qualify their take on the film’s politics. For example, critic Rita Kempley
felt compelled to announce: “That’s not to say that Thelma and Louise are male-bashers or
that the movie is a load of spiteful feminism. . . . This liberating adventure has a woman’s
perspective, yes, but one that aims to give moviegoers of both sexes an ungirdled good
time.”15
In the end, cornered by the police and clutching each other in the sort of embrace Hol-
lywood reserves for heterosexual couples, the two sail out over a canyon in their convertible
and the film freeze-frames them in mid-flight. While manifest destiny remains a driving spirit
in traditional westerns, this movie suggests that the only truly liberated space for women is
as yet uncharted or, more pessimistically, open to them only in death.
Women in Contemporary Pure Political Films
In the contemporary era, movies featuring both political content and intentional political
messages involve major female players usually when gender is one of the ideological issues
driving the story. Even with the women’s movement, the election of women to national office
in numbers that defy tokenism, and the overall headway made by women in professions once
deemed men-only, movies still entertain the question of what female empowerment means
in society and in politics.
Viewed as usurpers of traditional patriarchy and, worse, as having shirked their domestic
duties, some women in public life still undergo this sort of scrutiny. Films about campaign
politics can dramatize their plight of having to prove themselves both competent and still
somehow “all woman” by framing the political process as a testing ground for the fitness of
a candidate to command power.
The Contender
In the wake of the sex scandal involving President Bill Clinton, a pure political film debuted
to ask whether Americans had gone too far in demanding to know every detail of elected
officials’ personal lives. In The Contender (2000), the vice president has died and President
Jackson Evans, in a sly performance by Jeff Bridges, decides to secure his place in history
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by appointing a woman as the new vice president. He chooses Senator Laine Hanson, a
perfect contender until it is leaked to the media that in college she participated in a sexual
orgy. Despite the real-life context of Clinton’s extramarital affair, in the film’s terms Han-
son’s gender alone seems to prompt The Contender’s guiding question: “Can a promiscuous
woman be president?”
As played by perennial Oscar nominee Joan Allen, Hanson is no-nonsense without being
humorless, hardworking and smart without seeming cerebral. (Her build and hairstyle also
resemble those of Geraldine Ferraro, running mate to Democratic presidential nominee Wal-
ter Mondale in 1984.) Hanson is devoted to her family in a way that forgoes sentimentality.
Indeed, the film introduces her having sex with her husband atop an office desk, making it
clear that when it comes to a professional life and a sex life she has not compromised in
either direction. Yet her levelheaded qualities also suggest earthiness, a woman who may
very well harbor secrets. Besides that, as we have seen, any woman having sex in main-
stream American film is automatically suspect.
Once allegations of her past behavior surface, it is open season on Hanson. The press,
in all its twenty-four-hour news cycle glory, cannot get enough of the story. Leading the
charge against her is Senator Shelly Runyon, a particularly juicy part played by Gary Old-
man replete with Nixonian widow’s peak and H.R. Haldeman-style thick-rimmed glasses. A
member of the opposition party and head of the Senate committee that must clear her nomi-
nation, he declares, “I’m not going to confirm a woman just because she’s a woman.” Then
he sets out to destroy her candidacy for pretty much that reason.
Runyon expressly represents the GOP, specifically the branch supporting Richard Nixon’s
1960s–1970s silent majority and vice president Dan Quayle’s 1980s “family values”—that
is, the anti-ERA, antiabortion rights faction. Runyon stands as a renouncement of the 1960s
counterculture, symbolized by both Hanson’s alleged kinky, “free love” sex and Evans’s
constant appetite for food, an allusion to the first baby boomer president and man of many
appetites, Bill Clinton. If Runyon can prove Hanson’s dalliance, he will have shown the
American public all it needs to know about a woman: her sexual impurity. If she is guilty of
having had unconventional sex, she cannot be counted on to support any other conventional
value women still must embody: motherhood, stand-by-your-man rectitude, and sex within
marriage only. Distilling a woman’s character into a question of her sexual experience is
the key code to understanding Republican shorthand. Hollywood, too, relies on that code,
only in this film the shorthand is actually deployed in a pure political context, fairly unique
in American popular film.
The plot mirrors the case unfolding against Hanson. News shows air blurry photographs
to track the apparent verification of her secret. Hanson neither confirms nor denies the rumor,
stating quite succinctly the film’s main point: “I simply can’t respond to the accusations
because it’s not okay for them to be made.” A bust of Thomas Jefferson in the foreground
of several shots and Allen’s costuming in white high-collared shirts against dark jackets
suggest colonial-era integrity, while her white sweat-suited jog through Arlington National
Cemetery implies her status as sacrificial victim. The film suggests that her right to privacy
is not unpatriotic but backed by the nation’s own history.
Just as events seem about to bear out Runyon’s prediction, “What I say the American
people will believe. You know why? I’ll have a very big microphone,” a Hollywood-style
twist occurs to take the heat off Hanson, and it turns out she was not the person caught in
those grainy pictures. In this way, the film tries to have it both ways. It wants to point out
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that questions of sexual conduct are irrelevant to government office while also vouchsafing
the purity of its heroine. That her virtue was never really in question undercuts the fact that
she withstood the brutal smear campaign so stoically. It rehabilitates her completely as loyal
wife and model mother and seems to answer the question “Can a hussy hold office?” with a
sighing “no.”
While the film was a box office disappointment, grossing only $17.8 million, critics
approved it. Roger Ebert pointed out the film’s political context: “When I asked its star, Jeff
Bridges, if the plot was a veiled reference to Monica-gate, he smiled. ‘Veiled?’ he said. ‘I
don’t think it’s so veiled.’ . . . The Contender takes sides and is bold about it. Most movies
are like puppies that want everyone to pet them.”16
To a post-impeachment, post-9/11 audience, the film’s depiction of the political process as

soap opera remains presciently relevant. As the 2004 presidential campaign revived debate
over 1960s attitudes and actions in the Vietnam War—even as actual war raged in Iraq and
Afghanistan—the political process eerily resembled the fight over Hanson’s did-she-or-
didn’t-she sexual past in The Contender. The Contender wants audiences to agree that the
focus on a politics of personal behavior, orchestrated by politicians and abetted by a hungry
media market, takes up too much airtime. By attaching these issues to a female vice presi-
dential nominee, a fiction in American political history, the film suggests that privacy is a
particularly feminist concern, hinting at but not fully exploring the related issue of abor-
tion rights. Ultimately, however, the film fails to critique in any meaningful way the feeding
frenzy of politics by relying so deeply on a realistic depiction of that frenzy to fuel its plot and
titillate viewers. Perhaps that is why the film disappointed audiences in 2000. It mirrored too
closely the mediated version of the political process already so omnipresent in American life.
Films with political content and messaging occasionally feature women prominently but
not necessarily to make an explicit point about gender. Only indirectly do they question how
women should fit into the political arena.
Primary Colors and The Manchurian Candidate
Primary Colors (1998) and The Manchurian Candidate (2004) are two other pure politi-
cal films that question the efficacy and integrity of the American political electoral system
but more pointedly question the role of women in that system. On the topic of gender, both
invoke the image of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former first lady who went on to become
the junior senator from New York. Primary Colors treats her with respect in the figure of
Susan Stanton, played by Emma Thompson as a personally cautious but politically true
believer in her husband, presidential hopeful Jack Stanton, played with oozy charm by John
Travolta. Never venturing beyond the closed door of their bedroom, Primary Colors paints
the Stantons as well-meaning but ultimately flawed, politically driven people. Whether polit-
ically motivated people are necessarily flawed or politics inevitably causes those flaws the
film never decides.
Featuring cameos by notable Hollywood Democratic supporters like Rob Reiner, the
film recaptures moments from Bill Clinton’s actual 1992 primary race, including rumors
of Jack’s philandering. It also mimics reality with a talk-show spot by Jack and Susan.
She holds Jack’s hand firmly as she defends their marriage and then tosses it aside when
the interview ends. More than infidelity, Jack’s lies torment Susan. In this she seems more
believable than depressing or disingenuous.
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The Hillary Clinton references in the 2004 remake of the 1962 paranoid political thriller
The Manchurian Candidate are more diabolical. Played by Meryl Streep, Eleanor Shaw is
mother to Raymond Shaw, the man tapped to be the next vice president after heroic service
in the Gulf War; a strategically timed assassination will leave him president. Whereas the
political conspiracy in the original film featured Communists in a labyrinthine plan to sabo-
tage the United States not from the political left but from the right, in this film right-wingers
pose as liberals to corrode the left from within its own ranks and essentially overrun the
government. Substituting corporate America for Cold War Communists, this contemporary
Manchurian Candidate sets up Raymond to be “the first privately owned and operated vice
president of the United States.” “Manchurian” now stands for Manchurian Global Corp., not
Communist China, and Raymond’s greedy, self-serving mother provides the key to “own-
ing” him.
Rumors in the entertainment press suggested that Streep channeled Hillary Clinton to
portray this overbearing, manipulative monster, and the styling of Streep’s appearance in
the film alludes to her. Whether true or not, the widespread nature of the rumor means that
the mere idea of Hillary Clinton, a lightning rod for political controversy, still terrifies and
enthralls Americans. That Streep’s character only mouths the convictions that Clinton pur-
ports to believe suggests the ultimate right-wing nightmare: if Clinton is a phony, then she is
secretly not a liberal but, more horrifying, a conservative.
Tepidly received at the box office and by reviewers, director Jonathan Demme’s Manchu-
rian Candidate possibly suffers from the same problem afflicting The Contender: its dark
worldview is too familiar to be disturbing. With the specter of inflated Halliburton profits
hovering over the Iraq war and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction undermining
the original justification for the invasion, the Manchurian Global Corp. plot suggests busi-
ness as usual. A woman masterminding the conspiracy would not shock anyone familiar
with Condoleezza Rice’s prominence in George W. Bush’s administration.
The Iron Lady and Game Change
Streep returned to political film in her Academy Award-winning turn as the first British
woman prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, in The Iron Lady (2011). From humble “grocer’s
daughter from Grantham” to iron-willed woman of unprecedented political power, her life
is presented in flashbacks cued by a conversation between elderly, semi-senile Thatcher
and her recently dead husband, Denis (Jim Broadbent). With faintly protruding teeth and a
hard-swept hairdo to match her character’s nickname, Streep inhabits every inch of the role,
providing subtle depth to a formidable political player. Given how polarizing Thatcher’s ten-
ure was, however, the biopic itself is restrained. In trying to humanize the three-term Tory,
the film pays meager attention to what she did and how she did it: crushing unions, capital-
izing on Labor Party infighting, winning the Falkland Islands war with Argentina, selling
off or “privatizing” many state-owned industries (airlines, utilities, etc.), and driving the
conservative agenda at home and abroad, shoulder-to-shoulder with men like her personal
favorite, American president Ronald Reagan.
The Iron Lady highlights both Thatcher’s belief that ideas are superior to feelings and
her impatience with feminism—“It used to be about trying to do something,” she scoffs at
a woman thanking her for her example. Yet the film tends to dwell on those very issues by
focusing on the drama of her private life at the expense of exploring her political skill and
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Meryl Streep won an Oscar playing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011), a very
commercially successful political biopic. (Courtesy of AP Images)
convictions. Disappointed reviews complained that The Iron Lady concerned a widow and a
neglected mother who also just happened to have been one of the most powerful and conse-
quential women of the twentieth century. The New York Times reviewer asked the obvious,
“Would the life of a male politician be rendered this way?”17
Illustrating her fitness for office by tracing her father’s lasting influence on her and
emphasizing her proudly British stiff-upper-lip attitude toward foreign and domestic policy,
the film then casts her politics aside to get at the what-might-have-beens had she lived a
more conventional late-twentieth-century woman’s life more devoted to children and hus-
band and other traditional standards of feminine accomplishment, motivated less by ideas
and more by, yes, feelings. Turning the feminist adage “the personal is the political” on its
head, The Iron Lady makes the political personal and pays only obligatory attention to those
most adversely affected by her free market priorities. At an event honoring women in the
film industry, Streep herself announced that Iron Lady cost $14 million to make and reaped
more than $114 million at the box office, proving that unlike recent tent-pole flops, small
budgets can turn a big profit.18
The multiple Golden Globe Awards-winning HBO film Game Change (2012) dramatizes
the American 2008 presidential election from the point of view of the Republican candidates
and their campaign staff. Ed Harris plays the presidential candidate, former Vietnam war
POW and longtime Arizona senator John McCain, and Julianne Moore plays his running
mate, first-time Alaska governor and national political neophyte Sarah Palin. Game Change
focuses on Palin’s rise, fall, and resurrection: from Republican Hail Mary pass to television
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joke to hustings favorite and rogue candidate with her own loyal following. Based on two
prominent political journalists’ account of the race, Game Change reveals the behind-the-
scenes calculus that led the McCain camp to choose Palin as a “game changer” who could
steal the spotlight from Barack Obama, the nation’s first African-American presidential can-
didate. McCain’s campaign managers do not perform due diligence to determine Palin’s
background and preparedness for the job. Instead, they recognize in her only what they want
to see and blind themselves to potential pitfalls. The campaign “game” then “changes” in
ways that McCain’s team fails to predict and is helpless to control. When Palin breaks free
of their stage management, her political persona takes on a life of its own.
Game Change creates a documentary effect by seamlessly editing news footage into reen-
actments of events like the Republican National Committee nominating convention, Palin’s
interview with newscaster Katie Couric, and the vice presidential candidates’ debate. The
Democratic candidates, for example, appear only in archival footage. This tack significantly
differs from the contrived framing of The Iron Lady’s story and presents such remediated or
meta-layered moments as Julianne Moore playing Sarah Palin watching Tina Fey imperson-
ate Sarah Palin. (Even more so than Moore, Fey bears an uncanny likeness to Palin, adding
to the ironic humor of her word-for-word renditions of Palin’s awkward comments.) For
Obama supporters and conservatives dismayed by Palin’s thin résumé, Game Change vali-
dates their criticisms with ample screen time devoted to her many shocking shortfalls as a
candidate. McCain, on the other hand, emerges as a sympathetic and honorable man dealt a
bad hand by the historic candidacy of his opponent.
Game Change flips the script on how overtly political films present dominant female
characters. A son deploying to Iraq, three daughters, a special needs baby, and a devoted
high school sweetheart husband she calls “First Dude” all qualify Palin as patriotic mother
Julianne Moore plays Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on the verge of a breakdown
in Game Change (2012).
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and traditional wife who also just happens to hold government office. She is conventionally
attractive. Her retro-styled hairdo, wireless glasses, and impeccably tailored jackets play
off her “sexy librarian” look. Knowing that her youngest child had Down syndrome, she
carried him full-term as her antiabortion position and the RNC platform dictated. (In fact,
after she has come into her own, Palin refuses to share a stage with a pro-choice Republican,
much to the McCain camp’s chagrin.) With antitax bona fides earned as governor, Game
Change’s Palin is the dream candidate for every social and fiscal conservative voter. Yet
meeting “traditional values” voters’ expectations with her personal life and talking the talk
of the conservative economic, environmental, and foreign policy agenda are not enough. Her
political behavior must also comport with expectations and here the film’s Palin fails, putting
her own reputation ahead of McCain’s and demanding the kind of decision-making power
her appeal on the stump tells her she deserves.
A crowd-pleaser, Palin lacks basic knowledge about government policy and world his-
tory. Photogenic, she flubs basic interview questions before a national audience, unable to
name even one Supreme Court decision she disagrees with or daily newspaper she reads.
McCain’s advisers, including Woody Harrelson as Steve Schmidt (“Stevie-boy” to McCain)
and Sarah Paulson as Nicole Wallace, had urged McCain to choose Palin. Now they must
tirelessly coach Palin to help their cherished boss recover from this unforced error. Midway
through the film, Schmidt admits he has not even told McCain “she doesn’t know anything.”
What Palin doesn’t know includes the facts that, contrary to George W. Bush’s insinuations,
Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks and that the queen of England is
not the head of state. Palin pens stacks of notecards trying in days to cram an entire curricu-
lum of history and civics lessons.
Her dawning awareness of her complete inadequacy for the job turns to unfounded fears
about her appearance. As numerous people try to prep her for an upcoming interview, she is
catatonic and refuses to answer questions, muttering that she misses sleeping with her baby.
In a mirror shot, others fix her hair and makeup as she stares unhappily at her reflection. Irra-
tionally she says she is tired of looking fat. She smears off the makeup and tugs at her shirt
to make it less revealing. She screams she will not be the staff’s puppet. The camera empha-
sizes her isolation even in group shots, as she alone seems to understand, if only in inchoate
terms, the brutality of the media’s gaze on a woman’s body. In full-scale meltdown, her
behavior causes aides to doubt her mental stability. Fearing the debate spells the Republi-
cans’ doom, Schmidt has an epiphany: Palin does not have to actually “know anything”; she
simply has to act as if she does. He rehearses her to be the greatest political actor, literally.
If The Contender said that a sexually promiscuous woman could not hold office and The
Iron Lady suggested that a woman in high office by definition must be more “iron” than
“lady,” Game Change announces that a virtuous woman with a lady’s home-life cannot hold
office unless she demonstrates both her ability and her willingness to read the script others
write—to play “puppet.” Ebert’s review focuses on the tug of war: “Schmidt is a man driven
by frustration as he tries to manage a campaign that Palin is trying to manage herself.”19
Pairing campaign ability with political effectiveness marks the difficulty many a would-
be John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan faces in the age of 24/7 media coverage, regardless
of gender. Game Change, however, pivots on the political feasibility of women in two ways.
First, the film’s documentary style underlines how vital visual appeal is to political power.
The McCain team wanted a star to match Obama’s charisma and they found one. A woman’s
physical appeal demands the kind of good looks Palin already enjoys. Once her intelligence
339
is called into question, however, her confidence in her attractiveness crumbles. She takes out
her frustration on her body’s appearance as if to make it compensate for what her intellect
lacks, losing pounds she cannot spare and buying expensive clothes she does not need and
the campaign cannot afford. Second, rope-line scenes and rallies make clear how important
it is to her candidacy that her constituency consider Palin one of them, a “hockey mom”
with a pit bull’s tenacity for protecting her children. Yet the demands of campaigning sever
her from those children and force her pregnant daughter into an ill-advised engagement to a
young man Palin clearly dislikes. These contradictions deal a mental health blow Palin can-
not withstand—until she wins the debate, sees how the conservative movement embraces
her, and takes back the reins from McCain staffers like Wallace. (At the end, a teary Wallace
admits that, knowing what she knew about Palin, she could not bring herself to vote.)
For his part, Harris’s McCain bears in his stunted body movements the scars of war, a
once-upon-a-time requirement for office abandoned in the 1992 victory of Bill Clinton over
George H.W. Bush, a World War II hero. Unlike the physical and psychological difficulties
Palin experiences in maintaining the physical appearance that causes conservative pundits to
swoon, McCain’s disfigured body aids him in his quest. His POW past gives rise to Palin’s
best debate line, “Only one man has fought for you and that is John McCain.” McCain also
mentions the attacks on his adopted child lobbed by the George W. Bush primary campaign
in 2000. Neither war injury nor campaign wound, however, topples McCain. He loses the
election, yes, but his strength of character remains, if anything gaining added distinction in
Game Change.
Palin, on the other hand, prefers jogging to debate rehearsal and will not be managed,
down to the formal staging of the concession speech on election night. She wants to deliver
remarks, enraging Schmidt. He considers her demand a slap in the face of the sacred tradi-
tion of the transfer of power from one president to the next. Her newfound confidence in
her political prowess appears Frankenstein-like, leaving in agonized disgust the very people
who handpicked her for the national stage. Game Change’s Palin is an empty but still beauti-
fully tailored suit with an unmatched ability to inflame the very passions McCain calls the
ugly side of American populism.
Palin’s opportunistic and callow politics linger to the end. She knows “she doesn’t know
anything,” but that self-awareness hardly bothers her. McCain resists launching personal
attacks, but Palin relishes them. At the same time, she feels unfairly demonized when the
media questions personal facts in conflict with the narrative she is trying to craft. Her popu-
larity in certain circles leads her to believe she can spin those facts however she likes. After
all, experience has shown her that in politics, perception trumps reality every time. McCain
urges her to take responsibility for the moral direction of the party, but, dazzled by the bright
lights of her own political and financial future, Palin barely hears him.
Women in the movies have most often been consigned to subservient roles, but these roles
have evolved with the place of women in the home, the workplace, and beyond. Occasion-
ally those roles have been evocative of equality with and even mastery over men, but more
typically the lesson of Hollywood films is that, for women, with great power comes great
humiliation or punishment. The number of overtly political movies with prominently fea-
tured women in positions of sanctioned political authority is woefully small, their plots often
predictable. Recent examples tend to explore that possibility more regularly than those of the
distant past. Yet in any era, popular films equate political viability for women with sexual
virtue and circumscribed behavior. Should characters meet those tests, as Meryl Streep’s
340
Margaret Thatcher does, they earn that power at the price of a personal life marred by
regret—in Thatcher’s case, at what might have been had she been a more traditional mother
to particularly her son who never appears as an adult in the film. Some, like Julianne Moore’s
Sarah Palin, clear the sexual virtue and traditional woman hurdles only to trip over man-
agement of their image by the political establishment. They exhibit behavior that reminds
everyone they are only human after all, with complicated lives and minds of their own, not
the living embodiments of abstract, patriotic femininity that some viewers-as-voters pre-
sumably think—or Hollywood imagines they think—they want.
Notes
1. “American Women,” Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/awmi10/

silent_camera.html. See also, Women Film Pioneers Project, Columbia University, https://wfpp.
cdrs.columbia.edu/.
2. Stephen Heath, The Sexual Fix (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 85.
3. Women Film Pioneers Project.
4. Originally published in Variety on July 21, 1926, this review of Her Honor The Governor is avail-
able at the website devoted to the film’s star, Pauline Frederick, by Stanford University, http://
web.stanford.edu/~gdegroat/PF/reviews/hhtg.htm.
5. Ibid.
6. “Democratic Unconvention in ‘The Gorgeous Hussy,’” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/
movie/review?res=9A0CE3D7143CE53ABC4D53DFBF66838D629EDE.
7. “‘Farmer’s Daughter,’ Mixture of Romance and Politics,” New York Times, http://movies.nytimes.
com/movie/review?res=9E00E0DA113EEE3BBC4E51DFB566838C659EDE.
8. “Rosie Pictures: Select Images Relating to American Women Workers During World War II,”
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Reading Room, www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/126_rosi.
html#posters.
9. Raymond Chandler, quoted in The Literature Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation, ed. James M.
Welsh and Peter Lev (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007), p. 205.
10. Jeanine Basinger, American Cinema: One Hundred Years of Filmmaking (New York: Rizzoli,
1994), p. 150.
11. Peter Lehman and William Luhr, Thinking About Movies, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2003),
p. 13.
12. Roger Ebert, “Fatal Attraction,” www.rogerebert.com/reviews/disclosure-1994. Emphasis added.
13. “Baby Boom,” BBC, www.bbc.co.uk/films/2001/04/12/baby_boom_1987_review.shtml.
14. “Ms. 45,” Rotten Tomatoes, www.rottentomatoes.com/m/ms_45/.
15. “Thelma and Louise,” Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/
movies/videos/thelmalouiserkempley_a0a10c.htm.
16. Roger Ebert, “The Contender,” www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-contender-2000.
17. “Polarizing Leader Fades into the Twilight,” New York Times, http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/12/
30/movies/the-iron-lady-about-margaret-thatcher-review.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
18. “Meryl Streep Celebrates Women in Film,” Vanity Fair, www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/
2012/06/meryl-streep-women-in-film-crystal-lucy-awards-2012
19. Roger Ebert, “Game Change,” www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/the-greatest-actress-in-
american-political-history.
341

16
White House Down?

Politics in Disaster
White House Down (2013)

In 2012–2013 alone, Hollywood released two films featuring the annihilation of the U.S.
capital in Olympus Has Fallen (2012) and White House Down (2013), as well as a string
of disaster, apocalyptic, and postapocalyptic movies, including Dredd (2012), The Dark
Knight Rises (2012), Elysium (2013), The Hunger Games (2012) and its sequel, Catching
Fire (2013), Oblivion (2013), After Earth (2013), Pacific Rim (2013), and World War Z
(2013). Romances and comedies cashed in on the doomsday craze in Seeking a Friend for
the End of the World (2012), This Is the End (2013), The World’s End (2013), and the teen
romance How I Live Now (2013). Dubbing the trend “Cinema Apocalyptica,” the New York
Times noted, “We have placed our modern anxieties inside the particle accelerator of block-
buster Hollywood with contemporary computer effects to contemplate the obliteration of the
universe on the big screen” in films that “have the scope and prestige of a maturing genre.”1
Despite this trend and the renewed popularity of the study of genre films, the disaster film
genre, including the “maturing” apocalyptic films under its wide umbrella, has received
relatively little critical attention. The political implications of the genre have been even less
thoroughly considered. Yet the coincidence of recent American federal government dys-
function, shifting American military deployments abroad, the disaster-apocalyptic movie
resurgence, and the topical intersections these phenomena share together point to a film
genre hardly indifferent to matters of politics and government. Recognizing that confluence,
this chapter looks at popular disaster genre films in the political context of their times to
consider how they translate political discourse into cinematic language.2
To begin: what is a disaster movie and what political assumptions tend to fuel this genre?
The Library of Congress genre guide defines the disaster film as a
fictional work depicting a large-scale natural or man-made calamity, such as an airplane

crash or a wreck at sea, which isolates a group of people in imminent danger. They must
devise at least part of their method of escape (sometimes outside assistance awaits) with
only minimal materials at hand. Principle source of tension is in the question of how the
extraordinary measures necessary for a rescue will be implemented and which of the varied
and often self-destructive characters will have the inner resources to endure the ordeal.3
This basic definition accounts for the Darwinian impulse in the history of the disaster genre
as a survival of the most socially, psychologically, and physically adaptable. It also high-
lights how the genre contrasts established civilization as a place of comfort and predictability
with the wild, harrowing new world faced by disaster survivors. In this gap between old and
new worlds, ideology most reliably reveals itself, as these genre films valorize some char-
acter behaviors and inner resources over others by choosing who lives and who dies, how,
and why.
One of the most successful disaster films of any era, The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
pits young, liberal-minded Reverend Scott, played by Gene Hackman, against a traditional
church elder, the chaplain, first in an argument over church doctrine and then in Scott’s
risky decision to lead a flock of survivors to the bottom, now the top, of the capsized ship.
The chaplain waits passively with the injured and fear-filled passengers for help that never
comes while Scott bucks even the remaining crew’s command to stay put. The film rewards
Scott’s rebellion against ship hierarchy and church doctrine when his instincts prove correct,
and he exhorts his followers “to let God know that you have the guts and the will to do it
alone.” In the end, however, Scott must sacrifice himself, Christ-like, so his followers live.
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WHITE HOUSE DOWN? POLITICS IN DISASTER
His leadership role and death temper the film’s support for rebellion, reinserting his story
into a familiar patriarchal Christian outline.
At a more elemental level, Maurice Yacowar describes the essence of the disaster genre this
way: “a situation of normalcy erupts into a persuasive image of death.”4 Elaborating this core
component, he lists eight “basic types” of disaster film—natural attack, ship of fools, city fails,
the monster, survival, war, the comic, the historical—while acknowledging that the types can
overlap both with each other and with other genres. Yacowar also enumerates a set of genre
conventions. Chronological time is the present or foreseeable future so the “threatened soci-
ety is ourselves. The disaster film aims for the impact of immediacy.”5 Scenes of spectacular
destruction stand in for the iconography more readily located in the western, gangster, or even
the politically overt film with its White House settings or campaign props or elements of legis-
lative mise-en-scène—a state house rotunda backdrop or a chamber of representatives gaveled
into order in films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) or The Contender (2000). In the
disaster film, Yacowar says, a cross section of society is used to stand in for civilization at
large. As a result, the disaster film often dramatizes class conflict. In The Poseidon Adventure,
Scott locks horns with retired cop Rogo in a clash pitting educated, white-collar confidence
against working-class, blue-collar brawn. When the U.S. president and a former soldier-
turned-bodyguard join together in White House Down to fight an enemy from the president’s
own security team, socioeconomic class disparities between the two increase tensions, provide
comic relief, and nuance their racial difference—white soldier, black president. Like 1975’s
Rollerball, the entire conceit of The Hunger Games franchise supposes that in a dystopian
future a totalitarian regime rules over twelve impoverished districts and each year sponsors
“The Hunger Games,” a dark take on Olympian spirit since each district’s “hungry” entrant
fights to the death. Punishment for a past uprising, the sport entertains the privileged. When the
franchise’s hero, Katniss Everdeen, threatens to inspire the subsistence-living districts with an
against-the-odds victory, the elite plot to finish her.
In other instances, a family acts as the microcosm of society. In this scenario, gender
roles and psychosexual dynamics come to the fore. Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963)
exemplifies this version with its look at the psychological underbelly of the otherwise “nor-
mal” postwar American family. A Gothic visual idiom manifests 1960s-era concerns about
the independence of women, patriarchal control, and family traditions when even a ritual as
innocuous as a child’s birthday party turns into a maelstrom of dive-bombing birds appar-
ently brought on by the intrusion of an unmarried San Francisco socialite, Melanie Daniels,
into the conventionally rural lives of Bodega Bay’s Brenner family.6 The family’s widowed
mother, Lydia, wants her son, Mitch, to remain at home as patriarch, and he obliges, calling
her “dear” and doing her chores. Mitch’s romantic attraction to the scandalous, motherless,
desiring Melanie threatens Lydia and makes visible her mix of Oedipal desire and traditional
expectations. Mitch rescues Melanie from gory bird attacks in the attic of Lydia’s home after
elided scenes imply the two have had sex. Soon after, the devastated but recomposed family
quietly flees as countless birds line an apocalyptic horizon. Mitch takes the driver’s seat as
a bandaged, traumatized Melanie falls limp in Lydia’s arms. The film persecutes its 1960s
unmarried, sexually active heroine with dark “madwoman in the attic” imagery and, in the
war over Mitch, declares repressed, socially conservative Lydia the winner, further punish-
ing Melanie by positing Lydia as her new mother.
Memorably evoked in the shrill squawks of the milling birds massed beneath an explosive
sky in The Birds’ final frames, the disaster film is, in Yacowar’s words, “predicated on the idea
345
At the end of The Birds (1963), menacing birds crowd the frame; squawks, cries, and the sound of
their fluttering wings replace the film’s score as the sky cleaves, underscoring the fleeing survivors’
isolation.
of isolation,” regardless of the group featured.7 No one is coming to save the imperiled, espe-
cially not any official state body like the army, the police, or the National Guard. The survivors
must rely on themselves alone. More pertinently, Yacowar says “all systems fail in the disaster.
Politicians are corrupt . . . The church is usually absent . . . The police are either absent or skep-
tical about anything beyond the familiar.”8 Frequently, the political message of the disaster film
is systemic failure. After all, disaster films are about what is going or has gone terribly wrong.
By definition, they frequently imply or even strongly mount an inevitably negative critique of
a political or economic or defense system that has created the disaster—or in its ineptitude or
corruption has allowed it to occur and cannot or will not anticipate or solve it.
A half century ago in the era of the civil rights, women’s liberation, and anti-Vietnam War
movements, American satisfaction with government policy and institutions like the courts
was a typically conservative position. Agitation against government and existing law was a
typically liberal stance. Today, deep dissatisfaction with the status quo may often align with
both political extremes, liberal or conservative. While ideologically conservative, strong
messages supporting individualism nonetheless frequently appeal to many segments of the
political spectrum. Those messages that stress the idea of government failure tend to play
especially well to political conservatives and libertarians like former U.S. Congressman
Ron Paul and his son, Senator Rand Paul. How individual disaster movies depict causes of
and societal response to the “persuasive image of death” becomes an integral part of their
importance and message of political critique.
Camp and Allegory
The disaster genre fiction film also raises questions of taste. So closely identified with their
1950s B-movie forebears and the predictability and camp appeal of their 1970s heyday, even
today when disaster headlines the news every other day and fear of the end-times makes it
346
into mainstream news reports, many twenty-first-century disaster movies acknowledge their
lineage in flashes of self-reference and parody. In The Core (2003), when earth’s interior
“stops spinning,” Hitchcockian swarms of crazed birds attack London (with a fish or two
thrown in for those paying close attention). To demonstrate that if action is not taken “the
earth will be cooked,” Aaron Eckhart’s Dr. Keyes uses an aerosol can to light a peach ablaze
before an auspicious audience of military brass and Dr. Zimsky, played by Stanley Tucci
looking very much like Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and
Learned to Love the Bomb (1964). Yet the comparison serves up laughs without inching the
film closer to Dr. Strangelove’s political satire, and popular press film critic Roger Ebert
recalls the scene with fondness: “To watch Keyes and the generals contemplate that burnt
peach is to witness a scene that cries out from its very vitals to be cut from the movie and
made into ukulele picks. Such goofiness amuses me.”9 When one officer puffs himself up to
say, “Can’t isn’t in my vocabulary,” Dr. Keyes earnestly tells him he had better get “a new
word-a-day calendar,” a retort typical of his self-serious one-liners. Later, a miracle material
needed to fix the core’s deadly problem is dubbed “unobtanium.” As Ebert concludes, “The
Core is not exactly good, but it knows what a movie is. It has energy and daring and isn’t
afraid to make fun of itself.”10
Recent disaster films also ward off audience skepticism and distance themselves from cheap
genre identification by diving headlong into boldly configured, bleak allegory. Adapted from
Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same title, The Road (2009) takes place after an unspecified
apocalypse wipes out most of the civilized world, leaving behind a damaged ecosystem with
no plant or animal life, a permanently blocked sun, and rampant fires and earthquakes. Like
Aeneas and his father Anchises in Virgil’s classical epic The Aeneid, who, after the devastating
fall of Troy, travel far and rough to fulfill their destiny and found a new civilization, The Road’s
nameless, emblematic father and son head south on foot through a dead, ash-colored land-
scape, hunted by roaming bands of desperate survivors turned thieving cannibals. As soot falls
like snow from the sky and charred bodies strew the way, Father and Son slog toward warm
The Road (2009) filmed its postapocalyptic nightmare in the dregs of a postindustrial, strip-mined
present-day Midwest with Father and Son (Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee) doing whatever they
can to survive.
347
coastal waters and, they hope, a new life. Aeneas evocatively, memorably carries his father on
his back, but only one of them survives the journey. So, too, in The Road the older generation
must be sacrificed or even purged at sea’s edge to secure a truly fresh start for the survivors.
Father’s death suggests the sliver of hope that whatever mistakes led to the apocalypse will not
be the errors Son’s new society makes.
For all its father–son focus, however, The Road’s sharpest political point is not a warn-
ing that western civilization might fail in the ugliest of ways after an apocalypse but that
dehumanizing ecological decay is occurring now.11 Shot explicitly “for realism” in the aban-
doned coalfields, deserted freeways, and postindustrial wastelands of the Pittsburgh area,
The Road suggests that the apocalypse has happened. Fitting what Yacowar’s foundational
study described as the aim of “immediacy,” The Road says the present world is already in
decline.12
In Children of Men (2006), the year is 2027 and the world’s population has become infer-
tile. Homelessness, hunger, lack of utilities, rampant violence, and martial law impoverish
life worldwide, but none more so than the lack of children, the last one having been born
eighteen years earlier. The scene that reveals the one woman miraculously with child takes
place in a barn with animals and straw all around, underlining the mythic significance of her
conception. Reminiscent of her biblical counterpart Mary, Kee is a poor refugee at a time
when immigrants are feared and despised, yet she holds the “key” to the future, and the man
who helps her is named Theo, another hint to the religious allegory at work.
Importantly, however, in most contemporary disaster-apocalyptic films, religion remains
a figurative backdrop and not a literal cause of, or intervention in, apocalyptic events. As
one critic notes, the role of Theo as the reminder of the divine reflects the secularization of
modern apocalyptic films. Adding further irony to his role, Theo is fully human, yet he joins
in efforts to save and restore humanity and greets Kee’s pregnancy with a hushed “Jesus
The apocalyptic Children of Men (2006) reveals in a barn that immigrant refugee Kee (Clare-Hope
Ashitey) is pregnant after eighteen years of worldwide infertility.
348
Children of Men (2006) features a detention center with prisoners posed like the abused and tortured
detainees at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison run by American soldiers in Iraq.
Christ.” He becomes one of the film’s many “children of men” to sacrifice themselves for
humanity’s literal and metaphoric rebirth.13 Like The Road, this film invokes the-apocalypse-
is-here message with images lifted directly from the torture practiced by U.S. soldiers at the
infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. It also concludes uncertainly with a promising image:
Kee crossing the sea in a rough-hewn boat to a larger vessel named The Tomorrow.
These contemporary tendencies—humorous self-references in The Core, secular allegory
in The Road, and biblical imagery accompanied by contemporary inter-textual references in
Children of Men—suggest a self-defensive genre in danger of tipping into unintentional par-
ody and dismissed as camp and exaggerated self-consciousness. In this context, the political
value of intentional camp is joyful indifference rife with comic pessimism. As suggested by
2013’s television summer movie Sharknado’s tagline, “Enough said,” the object of these
films’ attention is the genre itself, not the political philosophy issues at stake in sober exam-
ples like Stephen Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), about a pandemic deadly virus, or the
class politics behind Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium, about a future unbridgeable gap between a
ruined earth where the ordinary struggle and the space station where the very wealthy thrive.
The Core makes fun of itself, not governments stumped by the core’s failure to “spin.”
Unlike political satire, self-parody in these films takes for granted a failed, even flailing
political system, diminishing their political effect.
Blueprint Disaster Films
Five Came Back
It was not always so. With releases like The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, Mr. Smith
Goes to Washington, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1939 is widely regarded as a
349
pinnacle year for classical Hollywood movies. Among them: a template for disaster films
to come, the often overlooked Five Came Back. Debuting along with the seminal western
Stagecoach, Five Came Back shares with that John Ford classic a basic “ship of fools” and
“road of life” premise, with character actor John Carradine appearing in both. Set in a nos-
talgic version of the mid-nineteenth century, Stagecoach throws together a drunken doctor,
a prostitute, the notorious Ringo Kid, a pregnant woman, and a gambler and sends them
through the Wild West just as Geronimo is on the warpath. Filmed in Monument Valley with
cowboys and Indians and wide-skirted women, the film features definitive western iconog-
raphy with setting and themes to match. Yet in the name of manifest destiny its cross section
of society negotiates not so much means to survival as the boundaries of law and civilization
in the unsettled territory.

As Five Came Back’s title advertises, the classic disaster-driven dilemma at its broadly
political climax occurs when a plane carrying twelve crashes in a hostile jungle and the
repaired engine can carry only five back. Developed as a B picture, Five Came Back suc-
ceeded beyond studio expectations thanks to sharp writing by acclaimed novelist-screenwriter
Nathanael West and Academy Award-winning, former blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo. Its
popularity also speaks to how original this politically incisive, prewar, blueprint disaster
film was.
In the 1930s, when flight travel was still exotic, nine passengers (socially diverse by Hol-
lywood standards of the time) board an airliner bound for South America. With suave Bill
and blue-collar Joe as pilots and a young steward named Larry, the plane only just accom-
modates everyone. The flight manifest includes a secretive young couple who turn out to
be eloping; a racketeering gangster’s little boy, Tommy, sent away for safekeeping with his
father’s top man; Peggy, a woman with a past; an elderly professorial couple; a political pris-
oner, Vazquez, being deported back to the country that will hang him; and his armed escort,
the mercenary Crimp.
The plane hits a storm, rocking and jolting until little Tommy hits the floor. When Larry
rushes to assist, he is sucked out the plane’s cabin door—a very sudden eruption of “persua-
sive death.” In the mayhem, Vazquez surreptitiously steals Crimp’s gun, the pilots crash-land,
and the film really begins: how will they fare cut off from civilization with limited supplies?
Will the rumored headhunters get them or will infighting and/or a modern inability to adapt
to the jungle cause their demise?
Fairly quickly, Five Came Back makes clear that jungle law, Thomas Hobbes’s “war of all
against all,” dictates that for this group to survive their cohesion must supersede the exercise
of personal liberty. The film enacts the political philosopher’s social contract: an agreement
forged among individuals that necessitates they relinquish certain liberties for the sake of
benefits that can only be obtained through cooperation. The group effort also demands hier-
archy. As Bill puts it, there has to be a “boss.” If anyone refuses to consent to hierarchy or
his or her place within it, the emblem of the gun makes clear that person has no other real
choice. To signal the importance of enforcing the compact, Vazquez turns over Crimp’s gun
to Bill. The gun boasts more than symbolic value; as Bill warns Crimp, “Don’t make us
waste any bullets on you. We might need ’em for food.” At the same time, only those trusted
to act on behalf of the group and not only for themselves are allowed the authoritarian role
and the means of enforcing it, the gun.
With drumbeats creeping subtly closer and dead bodies the sign of things to come, Joe
and Bill get the engine repaired. Though eight adults remain, the single repaired engine will
350
carry only five. Bill volunteers to stay and Peggy, sweet on Bill, follows suit, saying, “I’m
pretty fed up with things outside. I don’t care much what happens.” By labeling civilization
“outside,” Peggy’s words imply that “inside” the actual jungle, the group’s organization
offers better means for her success than the social economy she exited at the demand of a
lover. Surprising everyone, Vazquez pulls his gun and announces, “I will stay. Now some
of you want to live; others deserve to. But the question cannot be decided emotionally. It’s
got to be decided by cold hard logic. I am the only one you can depend on to decide things
logically. I am the law now.” Again, the film places political prisoner Vazquez at its political
center as he wields the gun in the name of logical righteousness, not self-preservation.
With the plane safely aloft, the political prisoner assures the professor that three bul-
lets remain. A close-up on the chamber reveals only two. The professor says to Vazquez
simply, “When she’s not looking,” and shortly after, Vazquez fires two shots as the elderly
couple embraces. The camera then pans, tilts, and dollies through the surrounding trees to
close on suggestive medium shots of bare feet drawing closer. By omitting full shots of the
headhunters, the film implies that the jungle, populated not by Rousseau’s “noble savages”
but animated by Hobbesian forces that make life “nasty, brutish and short,” will finish off
Vazquez. He sacrifices everything to preserve in rescue not anyone in particular but the only
decent organization of people—or government—he has ever known. Dispatching by gun
one rogue character who tried to board the plane without the group’s approval and mercy
killing Martha without her knowledge or consent also equates Vazquez to the fascists he
opposed in his home country. He embodies law as defined by his personal judgment and
enforced at the end of a gun. Even so, the arc of Vazquez’s character in the film’s pre-World
War II context, like Peggy’s transposition of “outside” with life back home, also expresses
political idealism.
Pitch Black (2000) and the resulting “Riddick” film (Chronicles of Riddick, 2004; Rid-
dick, 2013; another scheduled for 2015), animation (Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury,
2004), and video game (Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay; Chronicles of
Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena) franchise follow this blueprint. Political prisoner Vazquez
is now dangerous escaped convict Richard Riddick, and the South American jungle has been
replaced by an inhospitable planet scorched by the light of three suns and inhabited by flesh-
eating creatures that emerge once every twenty-two years when the suns dim and the planet
is plunged into darkness. Played by the Fast and Furious franchise action star Vin Diesel,
Riddick has surgically enhanced eyes that can see in the dark. While the other survivors of
the space-wreck first feared Riddick (as Five Came Back’s survivors were suspicious of
Vazquez), now they need him and depend upon a thin alliance with him.
The sequels continue Riddick’s sci-fi trials in space, his outlaw status repeatedly chal-
lenged by his he-man, do-the-right-thing instincts. Riddick’s combination of criminality
and heroism parallels the racial ambiguity of Vin Diesel’s star image, what he calls “my
mystery” and “chameleon-like ethnicity.”14 While Five Came Back and its postwar remake
Back From Eternity (1956) tested democratic and social contract ideals within a crucible
of fascism, the Riddick franchise turns on the popularity of Vin Diesel and his surprising
feasibility as a replacement for aging white action stars like Harrison Ford and Bruce Willis.
In place of their alignment of nationalism and patriotism with whiteness in films like Air
Force One (1996) featuring Ford as an action-hero-president and Die Hard (1988) star-
ring Willis in iconic white undershirt as an action-hero-cowboy-detective, Diesel’s avowed
multiculturalism has led critics to hail him as “the first truly All-American action hero.” As
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one Hollywood director put it, “It has taken America a long time to acknowledge the new
face of America . . . Vinny is that new face.”15 Diesel’s savvy positioning on a blurred racial
continuum represents America’s cultural assimilation and capitalist tendencies, where the
necessity of ethnic identity becomes both self-determined and a commodity. Of greatest
political significance, Diesel’s “face of America” heralded Barack Obama’s political appeal
and eventual ascension to the presidency.
Contagion (2011) replaces the Hobbesian jungle of Five Came Back and Pitch Black’s
flesh-eating aliens with a world pandemic. Its killer virus strikes people in urban and rural
areas—Hong Kong, Chicago, Guangdong Province, Tokyo, and so on. Despite its global
setting, the terms of the social contract and the question of knowing whom to trust when
disaster has both erased social rules and weakened decided law define this film, too. Played
by Laurence Fishburne, Dr. Ellis Cheever of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) provides
special treatment to a loved one. When a character of lesser means and no CDC-level connec-
tions finds out, he reminds Cheever, “We all got people, Doc.” As death and civic breakdown
spread, cities eventually declare martial law, a tactic that suburbanites emulate as survivors
arm themselves with shotguns against looters and friends alike. Such federal, state, and pri-
vate military-style crackdowns resonate with the enforcement of the social contract by gun in
Five Came Back and “society’s” reluctant reliance on outlaw Riddick in Pitch Black.
With the taglines “Nothing spreads like fear” and “Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t touch
anyone,” Contagion treats rumor like an infection and disease like a weapon. When a home-
land security officer asks, “Can bird flu be weaponized?” another gruffly replies, “Birds are
already doing that.” The contagion is also a social and moral leveler: a woman cheating on
her husband and a selfless doctor both die the same horrific death. Yet the film also suggests,
if not outright collusion, a powerful interdependence between military and government
command, medical and corporate science, high finance, and media technology. The rogue
blogger of “Truth Serum” draws that alliance into relief as he accuses all sides of conspiracy
and deceit only to be revealed as a charlatan. Despite Contagion’s depiction of the virus’s
global reach and global “viral” information sharing, certain racial ideologies abide: in a
remote area of China, a village ransoms a CDC doctor for vaccines. In this exchange, one
western doctor is worth the lives of many rural peasants. Armed and barricaded in his home
with a stark white interior, the character naturally immune to the disease is Mitch Emhoff,
a white man from the snowy Nordic state of Minnesota. With such details the film suggests
that western whiteness will prevail even against a “weaponized” virus that knows no geo-
graphic, racial, or national boundaries.
King Kong
The 1930s produced a classic disaster film combining Yacowar’s “natural attack” and “the
monster” types in the pre-Code hit and source of several remakes, King Kong (1933). It
was directed by Merian C. Cooper and Earnest B. Shoedsack, two veteran filmmakers of
ethnographic travel documentaries, who were influenced by popular jungle adventure films
like Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932) and by horror movies like Dracula (1931) and Franken-
stein (1931). They took their experience exploring the customs and cultures of remote and
therefore “exotic” people and, together with special effects pioneer William O’Brien (The
Lost World, 1925), concocted one of the most famous and influential myths ever to light up
the screen.
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Set during the Depression, King Kong features movie director Carl Denham setting sail
with a film crew and a newly recruited starving blonde actress, Ann Darrow (Faye Wray),
to a secret, mist-shrouded spot in the Pacific called Skull Island—a hint at the prehistoric.
Denham hopes to capture on film a rumored giant ape called Kong. In place of a gun he
points his camera, but like a gun the camera proves a potent symbol of power and aggres-
sion. The island intruders encounter a ceremonial sacrifice to the beast. The natives capture
Ann to sacrifice and allow Kong to abscond with her into his primeval jungle, deep into an
island that evolution has bypassed. (Ann’s last name alludes to Clarence Darrow, the 1925
Scopes trial lawyer who defended the teaching of evolution in public schools.) Seaman Jack
Driscoll and Denham rescue Darrow but lose a few men to unfathomably steep canyons and
prehistoric creatures—“Something from the dinosaur family,” says Denham. Once they res-
cue her, Denham does not hesitate to capture Kong using Ann as bait and take him back to
New York to display for profit. Disaster ensues when modern civilization and “chains made
of chrome steel!” cannot contain an agitated Kong, who is obsessed with Darrow, and he
escapes to run riot through the streets of New York in search of her. Death and destruction
follow until his final famous last stand atop the Empire State Building, gripping Darrow in
one hand as with the other he fights airplanes and gunfire to his death. Denham announces,
“It was beauty killed the beast.”
Historically, King Kong has been politically critiqued through the prism of race.16 From
this perspective the giant ape presents a racist fantasy about black male heterosexuality
shoved into overdrive at the mere sight of a potent Hollywood icon, the white blonde dam-
sel in distress. Since D.W. Griffith, popular film depictions of black men have frequently
used animal imagery to portray inferiority to whites and an attraction to white women both
instinctive and dangerous. The film’s horror derives from giant Kong but also from fears of
miscegenation represented by his obsession with Ann.
The plot suggests slavery when King Kong is forcibly abducted from Skull Island,
brought in chains to America, and then displayed in chains like a slave at auction on the
theatrical stage, where Denham plans to exploit him for pure profit. As he explains, “We’ll
give him more than chains. He’s always been king of his world, but we’ll teach him fear.”
Taming Kong to acculturate him to Western civilization means instilling in him the fear that
all audiences—in and of the movie—have of him as Other. Denham’s slaveholder logic
means Kong must internalize the fear everyone has of him and transpose it into his fear of
everyone else. Then Kong will see that in the new hierarchy he is not the king with inferiors
to appease him with sacrificial virgins but the captive with no ability to act on his own will,
only the need to subordinate himself. Finally, as Denham makes plain, what kills Kong is not
an army defending the city or enforcing laws against his crimes. Harboring lust in his heart
for a white woman kills Kong.
Besides its oft-remarked racism, King Kong registers public anxiety over the growing
sexual emancipation of women and the meaning of the blonde “beauty” to national myths
about race and virtue. In this scenario, women are helpless, white victims while Kong rep-
resents a palpably racial and genetic Other. Given its starkest, most memorable expression
in King Kong, this politically loaded racial dynamic threads its way throughout American
history and popular culture. Most closely, 1933’s King Kong echoes the earlier actual case
of Jack Johnson. The first black heavyweight champion and African-American pop culture
icon, Johnson was imprisoned ostensibly for transporting a prostitute from Pittsburgh to
Chicago. In fact, he fell victim to a witch hunt spurred by public outrage over his marriages
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to white women. Legally, the case against him was based on the Mann Act’s prohibition on
transporting women across state lines for “immoral purposes.” As recently as spring 2013,
the Senate voted to urge a presidential pardon for Johnson. In 2006, basketball star LeBron
James was the first black man to appear on the cover of Vogue. He was posed in a crouch,
his mouth open in a growl; one hand clutched a ball and the other, smiling blonde Gisele
Bundchen. Cries of racism greeted the image. As USA Today reported, “James strikes what
some see as a gorilla-like pose, baring his teeth. . . . It is an image some have likened to King
Kong and Fay Wray.”17 King Kong’s barely concealed myth of animal-like, dangerous black
men hard-wired to desire white women as trophies endures.
The 1970s remake uses the King Kong disaster tale and its racial dynamics to promote a
direct political message fitting the pressing issues of its time—fossil fuel. The updated King
Kong (1976) still capitalizes on the chemistry Kong feels for the Ann Darrow character, now
named Dwan and played by then-unknown starlet Jessica Lange. But the more pertinent
political dynamic informing the film is the energy crisis that eventually helped bring down
the presidency of Jimmy Carter in 1980. Denham’s role now belongs to Fred Wilson, an
executive of the oil company Petrox Corporation, and the movie begins when he sets sail to
explore for oil on an uncharted Indian Ocean isle. Sailor Jack Driscoll is now paleontolo-
gist Jack Prescott. Convinced that a mysterious beast inhabits the island, he sneaks aboard
to check it out for himself. Along the way the boat picks up aspiring actress Dwan, uncon-
scious and adrift in a lifeboat. Once they reach the island, the crew happens upon a primitive
people with rituals that revolve around their god, Kong. Coincidentally, Wilson realizes that
the island’s oil is too low-grade to be profitable. The natives capture Dwan, bedeck her with
ceremonial ornament, and stake her to the altar for Kong. On cue, Kong arrives and takes
Dwan back to the jungle with him; Prescott leads a crew to rescue her.
Once Wilson realizes his oil venture is a bust, he devises a new plan to capture Kong and
exploit him as a Petrox promotional gimmick. The film plays out much like the original with
the evocative difference that Kong fights his final battle atop the twin towers of the World
Trade Center in Manhattan, the monument to capitalism destroyed in the terror attacks of
9/11. In an eerie moment of prescient film fantasy, Kong gets hit with flamethrowers from
the other tower and retaliates by hurling a tank that explodes into flames. Reminiscent of the
violence of 9/11, one of the film’s posters features Kong astride the towers, a flaming tanker
in one hand and a much harder to spot and therefore sexually downplayed Dwan in the other.
The showmanship gimmickry of the original King Kong gives way here to a politics of cyni-
cism toward corporatism and a rapacious oil industry seeking to suck every drop of fossil
fuel out of the earth. Disapproval of Wilson is most pronounced at the climax when Kong
tramples Wilson underfoot. His demise is gruesome camp.
The original Earth Day took place in 1970, when more than 20 million protesters across
the country demanded regulation of industrial pollution. So began the contemporary envi-
ronmental movement that led to the creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency
and legislation like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. In this political context,
Prescott represents the 1970s “earth movement,” attentive to the fragile natural world and
its limited resources. Wilson represents anti-regulation, pro-business interests that demand
unrestrained access to those resources. Next to Prescott and even Denham, Wilson is the
worst sort of capitalist. He is willing to exploit national crisis and the earth’s well-being for
corporate gain that will redound to him personally.
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Lifeboat
In the 1940s, the outbreak of World War II dominated the nation’s political, economic, civic,
and cultural life. Hollywood responded by abandoning the disaster genre—with a few excep-
tions. Hitchcock’s wartime adaptation of the “ship of fools” setup, Lifeboat (1944), debuted
to a mix of strong reactions about its politics. Variety hailed its “devastating indictment of
the nature of Nazi bestiality,”18 while the New York Times fretted, “Nazis, with some cutting
here and there, could turn ‘Lifeboat’ into a whiplash against the ‘decadent democracies.’”19
Lifeboat uses the “microcosm of society” conceit to propagandize against fascism and
on behalf of democracy. When a German U-boat torpedoes a freighter, a cross section of
English and American working-class and elite survivors huddle in a drifting lifeboat, coming
to terms with each other’s socioeconomic class and political viewpoint in an effort to stay
alive. Their plight stands for democracy in all its messiness and struggle. Eventually they
rescue a German seaman. Pretending not to speak English, he exhibits superhuman strength,
uncommon nautical and medical abilities, and a commanding personality. Gradually he takes
control of the boat as the rest offer little resistance to his strength and purposefulness. Sym-
bolically, democracy yields to fascism, and appeasement reigns. Reviewer Bosley Crowther
wrote at its release, “It is this German, personification of the Nazi creed, who proves to be
the only competent leader in a boat full of ineffectuals.”20 When they discover he is really the
sunken U-boat’s captain, that he has ruthlessly culled their pathetic lot in superman fashion,
and that he is secretly steering the vessel to rendezvous with a German supply ship, the once
complacent mob turns on him.
Disputes between author John Steinbeck and director Hitchcock reveal more than clash-
ing styles, Steinbeck’s detailed realism vs. Hitchcock’s high-gloss thrillers. They expose
rival political visions of both the war and the nature of the society and government alle-
gorized. Accounts of Lifeboat’s genesis differ, but Steinbeck’s personal investment in the
project seems to have derived primarily from his lifelong interest in the sea and a request by
the Merchant Marines for a film to showcase the importance of their wartime role, a propa-
ganda task Steinbeck embraced. Hitchcock’s final project, however, appalled Steinbeck so
much he appealed to 20th Century Fox to remove his name from it:
While it is certainly true that I wrote a script for Lifeboat, it is not true that in that script
as in the film there were any slurs against organized labor nor was there a stock comedy
Negro. On the contrary there was an intelligent and thoughtful seaman who knew realisti-
cally what he was about. And instead of the usual colored travesty of the half comic and
half pathetic Negro there was a Negro of dignity, purpose and personality.21
Steinbeck wanted criticism for the film’s offensive stereotyping and antilabor sentiment
to go to Hitchcock, the last to revise the script. Sensitive to earlier criticism that his work was
sympathetic to Nazis, Steinbeck also worried that the film undermined the American cause:
“Because the picture seems to me to be dangerous to the American war effort I request my
name be removed from any connection with any showing of this film.”22 Others concurred.
Again the New York Times review: “There remains the alarming implication, throughout
all the action of this film, that the most efficient and resourceful man in this Lifeboat is the
Nazi, the man with ‘a plan’ . . . . Obviously Mr. Hitchcock and Mr. Steinbeck failed to grasp
just what they had wrought. They certainly had no intention of elevating the “superman”
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ideal . . . it is questionable whether such a picture, with such a theme, is judicious at this
time.”23
Hitchcock justified his symbolic Allies putting their destiny in the Nazi’s hands as a
wake-up call to the actual Allies to stop infighting and join forces to win the war. He also dis-
missed the idea that the obvious physical and psychological superiority of his Nazi character
validated the German “übermensch” theory of the political necessity of a strongman leader:
“I always respect my villain, build him into a redoubtable character that will make my hero
or thesis more admirable in defeating him or it.”24 Demonstrating just how slippery politi-
cal messaging in film can be, Steinbeck and Hitchcock and the film’s warring critics could
not agree on just how and what the film portrayed as propaganda. In this study of how the
film was received by popular critics, clearly the single issue conceded by all sides regarding
the Lifeboat quarrel is that, good or bad, the portrayal of Nazis and the allegoric depiction
of democracy versus fascism was of great consequence. That films conveyed political mes-
sages was beyond dispute.
Science Fiction B Pictures: Red Scare, Atomic Threats
On November 1, 1952, the United States exploded the world’s first hydrogen bomb. Two
weeks later, the Atomic Energy Commission begrudgingly confirmed that “‘satisfactory’
experiments in hydrogen weapon research” had been completed in the Marshall Islands. The
New York Times decoded the announcement, explaining that it came amid “informed specu-
lation that this meant a super-atomic bomb had been exploded in recent United States tests”
under a 1950 directive from President Truman pushing thermonuclear weapons research.
The commission emphasized the need for armament: “In the presence of threats to the peace
of the world and in the absence of effective and enforcement arrangements for the control
of armaments, the United States Government must continue its studies looking toward the
development of these vast energies for the defense of the free world.” Yet it also stressed
nondestructive benefits: “At the same time, this Government is pushing with wide and grow-
ing success its studies directed toward utilizing these energies for the productive purposes
of mankind.”25
Announced seven years after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan and
three years after the Soviets exploded their own atom bomb, this groundbreaking news cre-
ated a dreadful yet tantalizing ambiguity as to what these “satisfactory” experiments might
actually portend and a clear paradox. The United States was developing nuclear energy for
“defensive” weaponry as well as for “the productive purposes of mankind.” Practical and
moral uncertainty and science at cross-purposes with itself came to characterize the emerg-
ing “nuclear age.”
Cue Hollywood.
Between 1948 and 1962, the U.S. film industry produced more than 500 science fiction
features to wide release and box office success.26 While many of these featured comic-book
plots and cartoonish effects, nameless stars, and cringe-inducing dialogue, their political
significance and influence on the disaster genre cannot be overstated. Their plots provided
oblique depictions of Cold War and Red Scare political dynamics even as they flung the door
open to apocalyptic scenarios unmoored from the political issues of the state of nature, or
war of all against all.
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Even a director of the stature of Howard Hawks, with such genre classics to his name as
the gangster hit Scarface (1932) and screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938), tried his
hand at disaster sci-fi with The Thing From Another World (1951). Scientists and U.S. Air
Force researchers at a remote scientific military station in the Arctic discover a space capsule
frozen within the ice. When they find the pilot aboard, they take him back to their base only
to realize when he accidentally thaws that he is an alien organism out for blood, and he will
get it any way he can. In Invaders from Mars (1953, remade in 1986), a boy figures out that
space aliens are colonizing peoples’ minds, turning even his parents into killers in an attempt
to sabotage an atomic rocket under construction by the U.S. military. In Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (1956, multiple remakes), a small-town doctor realizes people have been replaced
by alien duplicates, and in I Married A Monster From Outerspace (1958), aliens begin their
takeover of the lives of unsuspecting humans by one alien switching places with a young
bridegroom.
During President Reagan’s reenergized Cold War politics, several 1980s remakes of these
films doubled down on this kind of paranoia and the deceptive nature of interior threats. In
John Carpenter’s update The Thing (1982), now set in the Antarctic, researchers confront a
shape-shifting alien that manifests into the people that it kills, making it even more difficult
to know friend from enemy, predator from prey, parent from psycho-killer, husband from
monster. Whereas the original Invaders from Mars ends ambiguously—was it all a child’s
dream?—the 1986 version, helmed by cult director Tobe Hooper, suggests more certainly in
an off-screen scream the invasion’s inevitability.
In the 1950s and 1960s, film catastrophes upped the stakes in the propaganda war by
frequently featuring invasions and explosions of both geographical territory and interior
landscapes of mind. Some literalized the conflict with animated, autonomous brains taking
possession of men. As the brains grow in size and power, the men turn into wild-eyed mass
killers. Films as various as Donovan’s Brain (1953), The Brain from Planet Arous (1957),
and The Brain (1963) follow this pattern. While these films suggest the continued seeping
of psychoanalysis into the popular imagination, the 1950s political context points more
directly to the fear of propaganda as mind control and to anxiety about science trumping
conscience. Yet as obvious as the message is about the need to counter Communist propa-
ganda and to balance snowballing scientific discovery with ethical considerations, however,
these films could also be interpreted as latent critiques of their own agenda. “Just who is
doing the brainwashing here and to what end?” they implicitly and appropriately ask. At the
time these films were screening, the American military was conducting secret experiments
on healthy U.S. soldiers of “psychochemicals” to temporarily incapacitate the mind, induce
delirium, or, as one army officer described it, cause “selective malfunctioning of the human
machine.”27 Disaster mind control films, a conceit ramped even further in such examples
as The Brain Eaters (1958) and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962), staged a return of
this institutionally repressed, publicly suppressed fact that “un-American activities” were
indeed taking place closer to home than even Hollywood in publicly funded institutions
like the U.S. Army. That the American military experimented with devastating effects on its
own soldiers suggests the thorough ideological entrenchment of anti-Communism brewed
with belief in the supremacy of science to override all competing moralities. In the face of
such self-feeding fears, a snowballing “if it can be done, it should be done” rationale won
the day.
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The Brain From Planet Arous (1957) literalizes anti-Communist paranoia and fear of mind control as
this giant floating brain invades the body of a nuclear scientist and threatens to take over the world.
Women’s monstrosity in King Kong-like disaster movies like The Wasp Woman (1959),
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), and Mothra (1961) signaled a sexualized, gendered
degeneracy and overall regression from a higher democratic yet firmly patriarchal order.
Understood more broadly, the oversexed femininity layering this substratum of the sci-
fi disaster genre stands for catastrophic threats to civilization and political construction.
Women-as-nature-run-amok endanger men-as-political-order. The imagery and plot prem-
ises of these films suggest that the liberal state’s balance between security and liberty depends
on the confinement of women.
In Them! (1954), atomic testing in New Mexico in the 1940s turns out to have caused the
mutation of common ants into a gigantic killer colony promoted as “a horror horde of crawl-
and-crush giants.” The repeated stressed syllable “hor” implicitly insists that the sex and
dangerousness of the monsters is a gendered social designation: woman. Scientists destroy
them only to discover that, sure enough, two queens, signifying a malignant and regressive
matriarchy, have escaped to the underground of Los Angeles and begun mass replication.
How horrible are these matriarchal monsters? Children may already be their first victims.
These terrors justify the announcement: “This city is under martial law until we annihilate
THEM!” Certainly not “us,” these creatures are not simply the “second sex” unleashed from
traditional societal control but a “them” so unimaginably Other that their very existence
defies articulation, as title and tagline make clear: “A horde so horrifying no word could
describe . . . Them!”
This dichotomy recalls the Other of Red Scare disaster films, but by setting the original
nuclear testing in 1940s New Mexico and accounting for the actual lag time between radiation
exposure and damaging effect, the film’s opening facts underscore the gyroscopic perversion
of the atomic disaster subgenre at large. Documented images of both the incinerated and the
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survivors of the actual atomic bombing of Japan and its radiated aftermath align with com-
mon notions of mutation and deformity, nature turned against itself in bodies that, having
absorbed radiation but not been destroyed by it, have changed dramatically in response to its
cancerous effects. These victims’ bodies are the “them” that this film simultaneously repre-
sents and represses in the figure of the giant “killer ant,” a contradiction in terms that both
mirrors and points to the film’s inversion of historical fact into fiction film fantasy. Them!
makes over the Japanese bomb victims into the object of an American audience’s terror as
their altered bodies and damaged lives frighten and unnerve “us” to the point that the only
way “we” can culturally contemplate the United States’ singularly disastrous act of war is to
deny them their victim role, take it for “us,” and recast “them” as aggressor.
1970s Disaster Films and Charlton Heston
Smash hits at the box office, 1970s disaster movies swapped radiated monsters, funny-scary
aliens, and apocalyptic eruptions for natural catastrophes like earthquakes, man-eating sharks
and deadly fish, killer bees (Earthquake, 1974; Jaws, 1975, and Piranha, 1978; The Swarm,
1978), and large-scale accidents caused by hubris and technical error (The Poseidon Adven-
ture, 1972; The Towering Inferno, 1974; Airport 1975, 1974). Following political scandals
like Watergate and the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, the tumultuous withdrawal of troops
from the lost war in Vietnam, and revelations of controversial CIA activities abroad, as well
as widespread domestic economic decline, deindustrialization, and aging infrastructure, the
1970s disaster cycle appeared during a widely recognized American crisis of confidence.
These films shared marquees with political thrillers like The Parallax View (1974), Three
Days of the Condor (1975), and All the President’s Men (1976), movies defined by perilous
political atmospheres and paranoid plots that said covert acts and corruption (Parallax’s
secret assassination corporation, Three Days’ extra governmental-agency foreign opera-
tions, and All the President’s Men’s tampered campaigns) would always outpace even a
wary voting public’s ability to control its government. That cynicism found a corollary in
the disaster genre’s premise that catastrophe lurks around every corner and eats at the edges
of even monumental achievements like gravity-defying airliners, gigantic dams, and impos-
sible weight-bearing ocean liners and skyscrapers.
The political thrillers were committed to downer endings that undermined faith in govern-
ment (Parallax’s political assassinations and death of an undercover journalist, Three Days’
uncertain fate of a CIA whistleblower, and All the President’s Men’s proof of a presidency
defined by bad acts and corruption). By contrast, no matter what displays of incompetency,
cowardice, and desperation went before, the disaster genre’s conclusions reinforced belief
in the capability and trustworthiness of patriarchal authority. As Michael Ryan and Douglas
Kellner see it, this cycle depicts crises solved by “the ritualized legitimation of strong male
leadership.”28 The 1970s disaster cycle’s true heroes, however, were cops, firemen, structural
engineers, and pilots but mostly not women, and never politicians. The most spineless and
unprincipled character in Jaws is also its only elected official, the mayor.
Occasionally the “trust authority” formula rested on the shoulders of a man with a strained
connection to public institutions. In these instances (Charlton Heston as rogue detective
in Soylent Green and as army man without troops in Omega Man), the leader possesses
skill and reliability in proportion to his distance from institutional power. His loose alliance
with politically sanctioned authority provides him his patriarchal bona fides yet frees him to
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follow his own instincts, independent of official but ineffective indoctrination, and to seek
ingenious solutions to each new dilemma rather than follow inevitably doomed institutional
protocol.
Throughout the 1970s, Heston embodied on screen the embattled man on whom nothing
less than the fate of civilization rests, an apocalyptic, archetypal hero status begun with roles
like astronaut Taylor in the postapocalyptic Planet of the Apes (1968). Like 1950s sci-fi
nuclear disaster flicks that entertained the notion that the modern world might actually be in
a reverse Darwinian free-fall, Planet of the Apes took that premise and ran with it. At some
time in the future, Taylor and crew crash into a planet that at first looks much like earth until
they discover prelinguistic humans have been enslaved by technologically advanced, speak-
ing apes. They emphasize their superiority with sayings like, “Man see, man do.” Shirtless,
Taylor’s bronzed, muscle-rippled skin ironically contrasts with ape hair as his ordeal fulfills
the film’s tagline: “No human can remain human on the Planet of the Apes.” Threatened by
a human with their skills and aptitude, the apes put Taylor on trial to prove his origins. With
the help of rebellious apes, he finds a cave in the Ape City’s “Forbidden Zone” that proves
evolved humans existed prior to the ascendance of the apes. Ever the standard bearer for
alpha-male heterosexuality, Heston’s character escapes with a woman, vowing to uncover
what happened to his kind. Following the shore’s edge, they discover the ruins of the Statue
of Liberty, an ideological use of American iconography to suggest irrevocable loss and pre-
sent nostalgia for a past not yet past. This kind of invocation of the monument is repeated in
disaster and apocalyptic films from Deluge (1933) to Deep Impact (1988), Day After Tomor-
row (2004), Cloverfield (2008), and Oblivion, among others.
Set in the American bicentennial year of 1976, The Omega Man (1971) stars Heston as Rob-
ert Neville, a military doctor and the last person alive. It is a lonely life. To ward off madness,
he plays chess against a bust of Caesar. As Ebert drily observed, “If anybody has to be the last
man in the world, I suppose it might as well be Charlton Heston.”29 Having injected himself
with an experimental serum, he has survived an apocalyptic biological war between China and
the USSR. Now immune to the war’s plague, he has to fight for survival against “the Family,”
a band of ghoulish, zombie-meets-vampire people deformed by the war—wearing monks’
robes and sunglasses, they are nearly blind, facially marred, and mentally unbalanced. Their
grungy, nocturnal existence and distrust of science liken them to hippies, the 1970s “back to
the earth” movement, religious cults, and a mix of all of the above, the Manson family respon-
sible for gruesome murders in the late 1960s. A scene of Neville watching Woodstock (1970)
in an empty movie theater clarifies his difference from the film’s free-love hippies dancing in
the mud and further aligns the Family with the 1960s antiestablishment counterculture, includ-
ing the anti-Vietnam War movement. That Neville enjoys unimpaired health while the Family
suffers mutation suggests in political terms that his values represent the film’s individualist,
patriarchal authoritarian norm and theirs, the communal, anti-intellectual aberrant.
With his own armory of weapons and a lifetime supply of Scotch, Neville has barricaded
himself in an upper-floor apartment while the Family tries to kill him. He stands for all they
fear and hate, a symbol of the old order, of technology, science, art, and the “progress” that
caused the war and subsequent plague. In their words, “he has the stink of oil” and is “the
refuse of the past.” They shun the light—of reason and of the sun. To the sounds of a Fam-
ily book burning, Neville mutters, “What will it be tonight? Museum of Science? Some
library?” In the divide between Neville and the Family, art and science ally with the fossil
fuel economy. To reject one means spurning the others, too.
360
Eventually the Family captures him and prepares to burn him at the stake. This sequence
is reminiscent of torture scenes in Planet of the Apes, except the Family are overtly religious
and their killing of Neville involves ceremony. Their leader intones to them why they must
kill Neville and they chorus their agreement: “Do we use the tools of the wheel as he does?”
“No!” “Then what is he?” “Evil!” Other survivors, including children, rescue him from his
heretical death sentence. They represent a surrogate family unsullied by what Neville calls
the Family’s “barbaric” values. Among them is Lisa, a representative of the 1960s–1970s
black power movement, played by Rosalind Cash with an Afro-styled haircut. She intro-
duces Neville to one of the children: “This is the man . . . and I mean ‘The Man,’ but he’s
cool.” Neville protects her and plays father to her younger brother, until she suddenly turns
mutant and betrays him to the Family. Neville dies, but not before battling the zombies at the
politically significant city hall, extracting Lisa from the Family’s clutches, striking another
crucifixion pose, and handing off to the nonzombie family a serum he made from his own
blood—“genuine 160-proof, old Anglo-Saxon, baby!” says Neville. In heavy-handed Chris-
tian symbolism, “the Man” sacrifices himself for “man’s” survival and ensures through his
blood the hope for a return to the “genuine Anglo-Saxon” way of life. Despite the potentially
subversive relationship that military doctor Neville shares with Lisa, the film ends on a
strained, visually contradictory note regarding her political symbolism. She escapes with the
“good” family but as an albino-mutant. Politically and culturally coded for resistance and
rebellion, her Afro is hidden in a hooded robe, and her skin shines an eerie white.
In Soylent Green (1973), Heston plays a police detective in New York City in 2022,
an overpopulated, starving, resource-depleted dystopia, where women serve as concubines
referred to as “furniture” and most people are homeless and eat compressed foodstuff wafers
issued by the Soylent Corporation. Called “Soylent Green,” the latest variety is said to
derive from plankton. Heston’s Detective Thorn (as in a thorn in the side of the government-
corporate cabal) discovers the truth, and secret state agents target him for murder when he
disobeys the governor’s order to stop investigating the death of a Soylent executive and then
Charlton Heston as Dr. Robert Neville dies after handing off his “160-proof Anglo-Saxon” blood in The
Omega Man (1971).
361
threatens to reveal that the government has resorted to collaboration with Soylent Corpora-
tion in harvesting its own people to make Soylent Green. In Earthquake (1974), Heston
plays a Los Angeles engineer stuck in a miserable marriage when disaster strikes. Since he
has just cheated on his wife, he rescues many but must sacrifice himself to try to save her.
Both die when Mulholland Dam bursts, and an extended long shot surveys the detritus that
was once Los Angeles. A resonant closing line announces, “This used to be a helluva town.”
Taken together, Heston’s 1970s disaster and apocalyptic films champion the individual
savior. They imply that overreaching government control is evil—what but a government–
corporate alliance would devise something as horrific and devious as Soylent Green?
Captured by the ghoulish Family in The Omega Man, Neville quips, “Are you fellas really
with the Internal Revenue Service?” But the actions of one man vested with precataclysmic
institutional power will ultimately prove valiant and essential. His characters stand for the
post-1960s restoration of familiar cultural and political norms, the justification for a return
of the right, white, “heroic,” and “noble” man to power. Jon Towelton estimates the politi-
cal goal of rehabilitating authority figures in 1970s disaster films more pointedly: “Charlton
Heston in Earthquake (1974) and The Omega Man (1971), sacrifices himself Christ-like to
prove to the younger generation that, like Nixon, he was firing off the big guns just to keep
us safe.”30
For a time, 1970s disaster films enjoyed enormous box office success and cultural rel-
evance by combining the genre’s spectacular visual effects, often involving failing and
neglected infrastructure, with suspenseful, action-packed storylines. Eventually, however,
declining Hollywood fortunes, recycled plotlines, and emphasis on spectacle at the cost
of character development overtook the cycle. The genre began to look cheap, its effects
“cheesy,” the very definition of camp: “So bad it’s good.” Audiences responded with dis-
missive laughter; the 1970s disaster cycle faded.
Charlton Heston’s career is again instructive. In a famous 1993 television send-up on Sat-
urday Night Live, John Goodman plays a movie producer being interviewed about his sci-fi
dystopian film, the actual Soylent Green, and its chilling climax when Charlton Heston’s
character reveals that the government-sanctioned food substitute feeding an overpopulated,
starving nation is really made from people. With a clip from the film rear-projected on set,
SNL cast member Phil Hartman, dressed as Heston in the movie—replete with a neck-
scarf that signals camp even before he utters a word—staggers across the screen to emote,
“Soylent Green is made out of peee-pulll,” as he throws his hands in the air and falls to his
knees. The skit continues with John Goodman announcing the film’s sequels and, facing
financial failure, finally a return to the franchise’s “roots” with “Soylent Green II.” For each
sequel, Hartman reprises the same moment from the original film, substituting only the
change in color as he yells and clutches at the air. In one he reveals the truth to two office
workers typing away on typewriters surrounded by endless stacks of white paper made pos-
sible by “Soylent White.”
If “keep the faith” in traditional, racially divisive patriarchy as represented in the char-
acters played by Charlton Heston, American political institutions like the military, and
locations like city hall is indeed the political message of 1970s apocalyptic films like Soylent
Green and The Omega Man, then the end of the broader disaster cycle and the decade that
produced it signaled the victory of this point of view. By the 1980s and the ascendance
of Republican conservative Ronald Reagan, the genre had effectively disappeared from
the screen, remade into an action–disaster amalgam epitomized by the Die Hard franchise
362
(latest installment: 2015). The 1990s disaster films returned to their 1970s roots not with
more “original sequels” but with nature-gone-berserk films featuring pronounced self-aware
camp as their selling point (Arachnophobia, 1990; Anaconda, 1997; Lake Placid, 1999).
Ironically, while former actor and union leader President Reagan championed science on
behalf of big budget military development and a defense system inspired by the movies—
the so-called Star Wars missile defense space shield—he catapulted into office on the
complaint that government was “not the solution” but the “problem.” Fellow Republican
Charlton Heston was an outspoken supporter of Reagan and other like-minded conserva-
tives. By the time such politicians fell most conspicuously out of favor in 2006–2008 and in
the Republican presidential loss in 2012, however, they supported an antiscience platform
skeptical of both evolution and global climate change. They militantly supported the indi-
vidual right to bear arms in a political message inseparable from a siege mentality that lost
them favor even with former allies from the Reagan years: police forces across the country.
Like the genre that faded into high-camp fakery, risible dialogue, and easily mocked perfor-
mances, those election losses signified that the ideologies underpinning them—restoration
of a nostalgic political order by violence if necessary, natural superiority of the individual
over the government-reliant herd, women’s bodies fixed as symbols of national identity and
procreation—had overshot their target.
This correlated rise-and-fall trajectory found apt expression in a short Youtube.com
video posted anonymously during the 2012 presidential election with Republican nomi-
nee Mitt Romney’s exchange with a voter on the campaign trail (“Corporations are people,
my friend”) dubbed over Phil Hartman in his parody of former Republican standard-bearer
Heston’s Soylent Green crie de coeur: “Corporations are peee-pulll!” At the same time as
American voters rejected Romney’s candidacy and its alliance with corporate power, how-
ever, the majority of the Supreme Court moved further in the opposite direction. Its 2010
A 1993 Saturday Night Live (NBC) skit featuring Phil Hartman as Charlton Heston in a parody of
Soylent Green (1973) turned into an anti-Romney Youtube parody-of-a-parody.
363
Citizens United decision on campaign finance laws and 2014 Hobby Lobby ruling regarding
the Affordable Care Act and employer-sponsored health insurance reinforced the definition
of corporations as “associations of citizens.” These decisions in effect declared that, legally,
“corporations are peeee-pulll” and as such are entitled to certain freedoms of speech and
religion. Chronologically wedged between the Citizens United and Hobby Lobby decisions,
the Youtube.com parody-of-a-parody perpetuated beyond the 2012 presidential election the
relevance of disaster film tropes like Soylent Green’s crises over authority, the relationship
between private and public interests, and government–corporate conspiracy.
Twenty-First-Century Disaster and Apocalyptic Films

The American twenty-first century has been marked by natural, economic, and political dis-
asters, including the unprecedented 9/11 terrorist attacks and the launching of two foreign
wars in response. Natural disasters include Hurricane Katrina and the Deep Horizon oil spill
in the Gulf of Mexico. The collapse of the world economy in 2008 led to failing banks and
skyrocketing unemployment as loss of wealth across all classes cascaded into the worst
economic conditions since the Great Depression. Political disasters included the disputed
presidential election of 2000, which was finally settled in an unmatched intervention by the
Supreme Court, later disavowed by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who supported it at the
time, and legislative gridlock following the 2008 and 2012 election cycles that culminated in
a 2013 Republican-led shutdown of the federal government at a price to Americans of billions
of dollars. Meanwhile, the Mayan calendar was said to predict a definite doomsday even as
self-proclaimed prophets declared revelations of yet other apocalyptic dates—rhetoric that
trickled into the nation’s political discourse. In 2013, former presidential contender Rep-
resentative Michelle Bachmann accused President Obama of secretly arming terrorists in
Syria: “U.S. taxpayers are now paying to give arms to terrorists including Al-Qaeda. We are
to understand where we are in God’s End Times history, and we need to rejoice, Maranatha
Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand.”31 Although mystical apocalyptic dates came and went
and Bachmann’s accusations came to nothing, dread about the future and ill-defined fears of
the terror-tinged present lingered.
Amid alarmist political rhetoric and shattering events, Hollywood returned to disaster
and apocalyptic storylines. Designed and displayed with digital technologies well suited to
pervasive images of destruction and “persuasive images of death,” the genre fluently trans-
lated the political anxieties and widespread calamities marking the new century. As nuclear
disaster and brainwashing movies had for the 1950s and 1960s, disaster, apocalyptic, and
postdisaster dystopian films like Battle Los Angeles (2011), The Road, The Dark Knight
Rises, Contagion, World War Z, The Day After Tomorrow, Ender’s Game (2012), Battle-
ship (2013), and Dredd expressed this era’s “imagination of disaster.”32 Many emphasized
government in jeopardy and featured wide-reaching militarism with armed might decoupled
from government control. In World War Z (2013), the Z stands for zombies. Although its
hero, Gerry Lane, hails from New York, he works for the United Nations. In order to keep
his family safe aboard a ship in the middle of the ocean, he must travel the globe in search
of the answer to ending the zombie-apocalypse. As in Pacific Rim and Elysium, several lan-
guages are spoken in World War Z, as many of these films shift to a global mise-en-scène.
These films question both the U.S. government’s sustainability and the world’s ability not
to self-annihilate.
364
Politically, such films reflect, perhaps even verify and perpetuate, widespread suspicion
that what as recently as the 1990s was proclaimed “the end of history” has instead turned
out to be the end of the “American experiment,” with the United States unable and/or unwill-
ing to play its World War II and postwar superhero role on the world stage. Caught off guard
by Russia’s seizure of Crimea in Ukraine; teetering on debt default in 2011 and 2013; losing
or allowing to end in stalemate two wars on foreign soil, while ensnared in an intractable yet
amorphous war on terror; stymied by a gap between the rich and everyone else at an all-time
high and also by a dysfunctional federal legislature that undermines even the idea of Ameri-
can governability—such bad news defines the times and has summoned in film fantasy an
even greater political disaster: demolition of the American political system to begin it again
from completely deracinated ground.

Destruction directly targeting the Capitol building begins the genre’s march toward oblit-
eration before taking a brief step back from the precipice in White House Down and Olympus
Has Fallen. Both films stage their disasters in the seat of government with plots that incrimi-
nate Washington politicians, political maneuvering, and the functions of government. Their
imagery’s logic suggests a fantasized completion of the presumed mission of 9/11’s downed
plane, United 93, as both climaxes stage the explosion of the Capitol in a fiery display.
The relevance of White House Down (2013) begins with President Sawyer, played by
African-American actor Jamie Foxx. Treachery within Sawyer’s security team forces him
into a desperate alliance with a former soldier named Cale, a chest-baring Channing Tatum,
just turned down for a Secret Service job—an early indication of bureaucratic failure. When
together they win the day, the film’s story proves Cale should have been hired. The odd
couple prevails against a paramilitary convoy of tinted-window black SUVs ordered into
action by the treasonous Walker, retiring head of the president’s security, played by James
Woods, his hair in a military-style brush cut. He is distraught over both the death of his son
in combat and news that Sawyer champions global peace, an objective Walker thinks would
erase his son’s sacrifice. The film concludes with Cale’s daughter waving a giant American
flag on the White House lawn to signal the victory of the officially elected Sawyer over the
rogue, pro-war Walker. Earning back roughly half its $150 million price tag, White House
Down rendered Capitol Hill partisan tensions and public dissatisfaction with government
literally explosive.
By contrast, in the similarly imagined Olympus Has Fallen (2012), foreigners take over
the White House. An Asian-identified mercenary wreaks havoc on the Capitol and its work-
ers. It is an outside job, but the imagery and barely sublimated fantasy are the same: tear
the political system down. Both films project a giddy glee about the possibility of destroy-
ing the functioning monument to American democracy. Both provide a hyper-real, visually
diverting, transcoded image of the economically devastating federal government shutdown
like the one spurred by Tea Party Republicans, including junior senators Ted Cruz and Rand
Paul, in the fall of 2013 and the lawsuit filed by the United States House of Representatives
under Republican Speaker John Boehner against Democratic President Obama in summer
2014. Unleashing destruction and firepower within the Capitol’s dome suggested at best that
politically the United States should turn away from foreign matters and mind the home front,
an isolationist tendency also embraced by libertarians and extended to the continuing tumult
in Iraq and Syria.
Closer to the dream of a razed government, Oblivion (2013) presents a decimated
postapocalyptic earth, untethered from any remnants of a past political system or governing
365
In post apocalyptic Oblivion (2013), crumbled signs of the old political system suffuse the film and its
hero (Tom Cruise) with nostalgia.
body, a point underscored by images of a bombed-out Pentagon and a staggering Washing-

ton Monument. Hero Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) cannot quite shake the vague feeling that
something is amiss in his perfect if bland and barren world. Stationed with a stereotypically
beautiful woman partner in a sleek window-lined home just above the scarred earth left after
a war with aliens, Jack spends his days patrolling the planet’s remaining rubble in an egg-
shaped ship. Constantly in defensive mode against powerful but largely unseen enemies,
Jack asks the central question, “We won the war. Why are we still fighting?” As he suspects,
it turns out that humans did not win the war against the alien Scavs but are hiding out from
them in former cultural outposts like a library. Haunted by sensations of former American
icons like the Empire State Building, and Super Bowl games, Jack is not a soldier for his
species but a stooge for the victorious aliens. Jack’s urge to uncover the truth translates to
a political wistfulness, a longing not only for a lost culture and its monuments but for the
political system that gave order to it.
Jack’s question of why the supposed victors still fight also resonates with entrenched
American fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite President George W. Bush’s declared
end to combat operations under the famous banner, “Mission Accomplished,” the United
States fought on with No End in Sight—the memorable title of a 2007 documentary about
the Bush administration and the Iraq war. Further, Jack’s plaintive question recalls the war
on terror’s mission creep into other nations like Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was cap-
tured and American drones have killed civilians. Jack’s portrayal by an aging movie hero
like Cruise, his lack of sophisticated body armor, his signature baseball cap, and his private
Eden of green grasses beside a rushing stream where he hides out from the ongoing Scav war
all attest to the film’s overriding nostalgia for the political, ecological, and cultural order of
the past. Even the film’s poster emphasizes loss and nostalgia as a ruined Brooklyn bridge
teeters in a cloudy mist behind Jack.
Prosthetic-equipped heroes anchor another subset of recent apocalyptic films (Iron Man
franchise, Transformers franchise; Pacific Rim, Elysium, 2013; Robocop, Edge of Tomor-
row, 2014). These technologically engineered, super-bodied heroes recall familiar disaster
film tropes in their “rehabilitation of Daddy,” as Towelton describes the 1970s Charlton
366
Heston disaster subgenre. In the case of Iron Man 3, Tony Stark’s girlfriend, Pepper, finds
herself inside his Iron Man suit and equipped with superhuman abilities. By film’s end,
however, it is Tony who proves it is “the man who makes the suit,” while Pepper must be
rescued, stripped of her iron, and “cured” of her new capabilities. Despite futurist bodies as
much computer generated metal as analog flesh, these heroes connote a familiar masculinity
as certainly as does bare-chested Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes.
In her review of the Matt Damon postapocalyptic thriller Elysium (2013), New York Times
reviewer Manohla Dargis makes the comparison explicit: “Not since Charlton Heston strug-
gled to save humanity from itself have movies looked this grimly, resolutely fatalistic.”33
Director of the sleeper hit District 9 (2009), Australian Neill Blomkamp sets Elysium in
a dystopian future earth reminiscent of Soylent Green: overpopulated, resource-depleted,

dehumanized. In 2154, the wealthy live above earth on a floating, Eden-like space ship
where no one suffers illness and the built environment is as pristine as a Hollywood man-
sion. Working-class former criminal Max, played by Matt Damon, is one of the permanently
unlucky, stuck on earth in a soulless job where he gets radiation poisoning and has only a
few days to live. Desperate to get to Elysium where all disease is curable, he agrees to be
outfitted by a renegade crew with prosthetics that give him super strength and will allow him
to download information that will allow earth’s desperate masses in to Elysium’s perfected
world in a chip implanted in his brain. Literally heartless robots play low-level bureau-
crats and law enforcers incapable of empathy or even sympathy. Unlike in most of the
prosthetic-driven films of this subgenre (Robocop, 2014; Battleship, 2013, etc.), a panicked
Max receives his exoskeleton prosthetics in a dirty, makeshift setting more chop-shop than
hospital, operated on by bulked-up men more indicative of street fighting than surgical skill.
His poor man’s prostheses are bulky and painful, and the computer drive drilled into his
head is far from sleek. Yet these cyborg-like technologies allow him to dissolve the barriers
between the Elysium space station and the ragged earth below so that the impoverished and
ill populace from earth can enjoy the bounty and physical healing available in Elysium. Not
long after “Daddy” or Heston-like Max sacrifices himself for the sake of his childhood love
In Elysium (2013), Max (Matt Damon) is outfitted with crude, painfully implanted “poor man’s”
prosthetics.
367
and her daughter. Criticized for its blunt political message about the increasing economic
gap between the top one percent and everyone else, Elysium performed modestly during a
summer of many techno-bodied action star disaster films.
Like their predecessors, current fictional disaster films often begin with historical
precedent—nuclear testing, spreading Communist influence, space travel, viral outbreaks,
and dwindling natural resources—and then ask, “What if?” What if the 2003 explosion of
the space shuttle Columbia spread an alien virus (The Invasion, 2007)? What if declining
birth rates turned into the sterility of the entire world (Children of Men)? What if the H1N1
virus transmitted from animal to human and from human to human caused, instead of a
debilitating flu, rapid but painful death (Contagion)? What if the wealth gap between the one
percent and the rest of the United States led the wealthy to live in a luxurious, trouble-free
space station while everyone else was stuck on a crumbling earth (Elysium)? The invariably
ugly answer paints a bleak picture of humans stripped bare of creature comforts and civiliz-
ing social cues, driven by fear and need.
Hollywood genres tend toward the politically conservative by stressing individualism
over any competing value. And films writ large privilege individual effort over communal
or government action, with the possible exception of war or sports team films that depend
on scenes of group-orchestrated action to provide context for individual acts of courage
or talent. As Douglas Kellner summarizes, “conservatism has advocated individualism and
freedom over equality and justice, and supports traditional values like the heterosexual patri-
archal family.”34 Disaster films emphasize that same ideology of individualism, heterosexual
norms, and patriarchy in genre conventions that include depictions of inept government
response, mass misbehavior like large-scale looting, and restored traditional family con-
figurations. In World War Z, the United States and NATO both are helpless without the
leadership and brains of Gerry Lane. At the end of The Birds and Contagion, both Mitch
characters find their way back to the role of uncontested head of family. In contrast, socially
unconventional Melanie survives the birds’ physical assault but is rendered nearly comatose,
and Mitch’s cheating spouse not only dies but is an important link in the contagion’s chain
of infection, responsible for bringing it to the United States.
The disaster film’s crystal ball effect often substitutes for immediate political influence.
The most potent political message of such films? Government fails us or even authors our
destruction and cannot or, when either the self-interest of bureaucrats or their soulless calcu-
lus of social costs and benefits trumps any other consideration, will not save us. Only brave
individuals can perhaps save themselves and, if the public is lucky, one of them, by bucking
government safeguards that look more like senseless obstacles, will single-handedly find the
solution and save the public despite its having foolishly trusted “the system.”
Notes
1. “These Days the End Is Always Near: Disaster Films Plague the Box Office,” New York Times,
www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/movies/disaster-films-plague-the-box office.html?hpw&_r=0.
2. Such contextual analysis and translation or “transcoding” of political culture into “specifically cin-
ematic terms” derives in part from the methodology of Douglas Kellner, especially as outlined in
his essay “Film, Politics, and Ideology: Reflections on Hollywood Film in the Age of Reagan,”
Velvet Light Trap, Spring 1991, p. 9, http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/31127819/film-
politics-ideology-reflections-hollywood-film-age-reagan. See also Douglas Kellner, Cinema Wars:
Hollywood’s Films and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
368
3. Library of Congress, Motion Picture & Television Reading Room, www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/

miggen.html#Disaster.
4. Maurice Yacowar, “Bug in the Rug,” Film Genre Reader II, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: Uni-
versity of Texas Press), p. 261.
5. Ibid., p. 268.
6. Several critics have noted Gothic tropes in The Birds. For example, see Kyle William Bishop,
“The Threat of the Gothic Patriarchy in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds,” Rocky Mountain Review
62, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 135.
7. Yacowar, p. 270.
8. Ibid., p. 273.
9. Roger Ebert, “The Core,” www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-core-2003.
10. Ibid.
11. This point is also made by Terence McSweeney in his essay “‘Each Night Is Darker—Beyond
Darkness’: The Environmental and Spiritual Apocalypse of The Road,” Journal of Film and
Video 65, no. 4 (2013): 45.
12. Director John Hillcoat talks about his intentions to create realism in Charles McGrath, “At
World’s End, Honing a Father-Son Dynamic,” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/
movies/27road.html?pagewanted=all.
13. Sarah Schwartzman, “Children of Men and a Plural Messianism,” Journal of Religion & Film 13,
no. 1 (2009): 3.
14. Sika Alaine Dagbovie, “Star-Light, Star-Bright, Star Damn Near White: Mixed Race Superstars,”
Journal of Popular Culture 40, no. 2 (2007): 11.
15. Ibid., p. 9.
16. For example, see David Rosen, “King Kong: Race, Sex, and Rebellion,” Jump Cut, www.ejump-
cut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC06folder/KingKong.html.
17. “LeBron James ‘Vogue’ Cover Called Racially Insensitive,” USA Today, http://usatoday30.usato-
day.com/life/people/2008-03-24-vogue-controversy_N.htm.
18. “Review, ‘Lifeboat,’” Variety, http://variety.com/1943/film/reviews/lifeboat-1200414278/.
19. Bosley Crowther, “Lifeboat,” New York Times, http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9C
0CE0D91238E33BBC4B52DFB766838F659EDE.
20. Ibid.
21. “Nor Was There a Stock Comedy Negro,” Letters of Note: Correspondence of Letters Deserving
a Wider Audience, www.lettersofnote.com/2012/02/nor-was-there-stock-comedy-negro.html.
22. Ibid.
23. Crowther.
24. Quoted in Robert E. Morseberger, “Adrift in Steinbeck’s Lifeboat,” Film Quarterly 4, no. 4
(1976): 135.
25. “Experiments for Hydrogen Bomb Held Successfully,” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/
learning/general/onthisday/big/1101.html#article.
26. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, “Fifties Hysteria Returns: Doomsday Prepping in a Culture of Fear,
Death, and Automatic Weapons,” Film International, http://filmint.nu/?p=6638.
27. Raffi Katchadourian, “Operation Delirium,” The New Yorker, www.newyorker.com/
reporting/2012/12/17/121217fa_fact_khatchadourian.
28. Stephen Keane, The Cinema of Catastrophe (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), p. 10.
29. Roger Ebert, “The Hindenburg,” www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-hindenburg-1975.
30. Jon Towelton, “Rehabilitating Daddy,” Paracinema, http://paracinema.net/wp-content/uploads/
2012/08/Rehabilitating-Daddy.pdf, p. 114.
31. “Bachmann: Obama Funding Al-Qaeda Proves We Are at End Times,” Crooks & Liars, Video Café,
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/bachmann-obama-funding-al-qaeda-proves-we-ar.
32. Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” Commentary, http://americanfuturesiup.files.word-
press.com/2013/01/sontag-the-imagination-of-disaster.pdf.
33. Manohla Dargis, “The Worst Is Yet to Come,” www.nytimes.com/2013/08/09/movies/elysium-
sends-matt-damon-into-a-dystopian-future.html.
34. Kellner, p. 3.
369

Appendix
Closing Credits
A Political Filmography
APPENDIX
Title Year Director Screenwriter Additional writers

Abe Lincoln in Illinois 1940 John Cromwell Grover Jones
Abraham Lincoln 1930 D.W. Griffith D.W. Griffith
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire 2012 Timur Seth
Hunter Bekmambetov Grahame-Smith
Absence of Malice 1981 Sydney Pollack Kurt Luedtke
Absolute Power 1997 Clint Eastwood William Goldman
Accepted 2006 Steve Pink Adam Cooper Bill Collage et al.
Accused, The 1988 Jonathan Kaplan Tom Toptor
Across the Universe 2007 Julie Taymor Dick Clement Ian La Frenais et al.
Act of Valor 2012 Mike McCoy, Kurt Johnstad
Scott Waugh
Adjustment Bureau, The 2011 George Nolfi George Nolfi Phillip K. Dick
Advise and Consent 1962 Otto Preminger Wendell Mayes
Aeon Flux 2006 Karyn Kusama Phil Hay Matt Manfredi et al.
After Earth 2013 M. Night Gary Whitta M. Night Shyamalan et al.
Shyamalan
After the Wizard 2011 Hugh Gross Hugh Gross
Against All Odds 1984 Taylor Hackford Eric Hughes
Air America 1990 Roger John Eskow Richard Rush
Spottiswoode
Air Force One 1997 Wolfgang Andrew W. Marlowe
Peterson
Alamo Bay 1985 Louis Malle Louis Malle
Alice Doesn’t Live Here 1975 Martin Scorsese Robert Getchell
Anymore
Alice in Wonderland 2010 Tim Burton Linda Woolverton Lewis Carroll
All Quiet on the Western 1930 Lewis Milestone Lewis Milestone
Front et al.
All the King’s Men 1949 Robert Rossen Robert Rossen Robert Penn Warren
All the President’s Men 1976 Alan Pakula William Goldman
America 1924 D.W. Griffith D.W. Griffith
American Gangster 2007 Ridley Scott Steven Zaillian Mark Jacobson
American Graffiti 1973 George Lucas George Lucas Gloria Katz, Willard Huyck
American Madness 1932 Frank Capra Robert Riskin
American President, 1995 Rob Reiner Aaron Sorkin
The
American Way, The 1986 Maurice Phillips Scott Roberts
Amistad 1997 Steven Spielberg David Franzoni
And Justice for All 1979 Norman Jewison Valerie Curtin Barry Levinson
Annie Hall 1977 Woody Allen Woody Allen Marshall Brickman
Apocalypse Now 1979 Francis Ford Francis Ford John Milius
Coppola Coppola
Apocalypto 2006 Mel Gibson Mel Gibson Farhad Safinia
Arbitrage 2012 Nicholas Jarecki Nicholas Jarecki
Argo 2012 Ben Affleck Chris Terrio Tony Mendez et al.
Arlington Road 1999 Mark Pellington Ehren Kruger
Arrowsmith 1931 John Ford Sidney Howard
Atlas Shrugged: Part I 2011 Paul Johansson John Aglialoro Brian Patrick O’Toole et al.
Atlas Shrugged II: The 2012 John Putch Duke Sandefur Brian Patrick O’Toole et al.
Strike
Atomic Cafe, The 1982 Jayne Loader Jayne Loader Kevin and Pierce Rafferty
372
CLOSING CREDITS: A POLITICAL FILMOGRAPHY

Attack of the 50 Foot 1958 Nathan Juran Mark Hanna
Woman
Australia 2008 Baz Luhrmann Stuart Beattie Baz Luhrmann et al.
Avatar 2009 James Cameron James Cameron
Avengers, The 2012 Joss Whedon Joss Whedon
AVP: Aliens vs. Predator 2004 Paul W.S. Dan O’Bannon Ronald Shusett et al.
Anderson
AVPR: Aliens vs. 2007 Colin Strause, Shane Salerno Dan O’Bannon et al.
Predator—Requiem Greg Strause
Babel 2006 Alejandro Guillermo Arriaga Alejandro Gonzalez
Gonzalez Inarritu Inarritu

Baby Boom 1987 Charles Shyer Nancy Meyers Charles Shyer
Back to Bataan 1945 Edward Dmytryk Ben Barzman Richard H. Landau
Bait 2000 Antoine Fuqua Adam Scheinman Andrew Scheinman,
T. Gilroy
Bamboozled 2000 Spike Lee Spike Lee
Bananas 1971 Woody Allen Woody Allen
Barbershop 2002 Tim Story Mark Brown Don D. Scott, Marshall
Todd
Basic Instinct 1992 Paul Verhoeven Joe Esterhaz
Batman Begins 2005 Christopher Christopher Nolan David S. Goyer et al.
Nolan
Battle Los Angeles 2011 Jonathan Christopher
Liebesman Bertolini
Battleship 2012 Peter Berg Jon Hoeber Erich Hoeber
Beasts of the Southern 2012 Benh Zeitlin Lucy Alibar Benh Zeitlin
Wild
Beau James 1957 Melville Melville Shavelson Jack Rose
Shavelson
Being There 1979 Hal Ashby Jerzy Kosinski
Beloved 1998 Jonathan Akosua Busia Richard LaGravenese,
Demme Adam Brooks
Best Man, The 1964 Franklin Shaffner Gore Vidal
Best Years of Our Lives, 1946 William Wyler Robert Sherwood
The
Betrayed 1988 Costa-Gavras Joe Eszterhas
Better Life, A 2011 Chris Weitz Eric Eason Roger L. Simon
Between the Lines 1977 Joan Micklin Joan Micklin Silver
Silver
Beverly Hills Cop 1984 Martin Brest Danilo Bach Daniel Petrie Jr.
Big Chill, The 1983 Lawrence Lawrence Kasdan Barbara Benedeck
Kasdan
Big Jim McLain 1952 Edward Ludwig James Edward
Grant
Big Miracle 2012 Ken Kwapis Jack Amiel Michael Begler et al.
Big Parade, The 1925 King Vidor Lawrence Stallings Harry Behn
Big Uneasy, The 2010 Harry Shearer Harry Shearer
Big Wednesday 1978 John Milius John Milius Dennis Aberg
Birth of a Nation, The 1915 D.W. Griffith D.W. Griffith Frank E. Woods
Black Hawk Down 2001 Ridley Scott Ken Nolan
Black Legion 1937 Archie Mayor Abem Finkel William Wister Haines
Blaze 1989 Ron Shelton Ron Shelton
373
APPENDIX

Blindness 2008 Fernando Don McKellar Jose Saramago
Meirelles
Blindside, The 2009 John Lee John Lee Hancock Michael Lewis
Hancock
Blockade 1938 William Dieterle John Howard
Lawson
Blood Diamond 2006 Edward Zwick Charles Leavitt
Blow Out 1981 Brian de Palma Brian de Palma
Blue Collar 1978 Paul Schraeder Paul Schraeder Leonard Schraeder
Bob Roberts 1992 Tim Robbins Tim Robbins
Body Heat 1981 Lawrence Lawrence Kasdan

Kasdan
Borat: Cultural Learnings 2006 Larry Charles Sacha Baron Anthony Hines et al.
of America for Make Cohen
Benefit Glorious Nation of
Kazakhstan
Border, The 1982 Tony Richardson Deric Washburn Walon Green, David
Freeman
Born on the Fourth 1989 Oliver Stone Oliver Stone Ron Kovic
of July
Born Yesterday 1950 George Cukor Albert Mannheimer
Born Yesterday 1993 Luis Madoki Leslie Dixon
Bound for Glory 1976 Hal Ashby Robert Getchell
Bourne Legacy, The 2012 Tony Gilroy Tony Gilroy Dan Gilroy
Bourne Supremacy, The 2004 Paul Greengrass Tony Gilroy Robert Ludlum
Bourne Ultimatum, The 2007 Paul Greengrass Tony Gilroy Scott Z. Burns et al.
Bowling for Columbine 2003 Michael Moore Michael Moore
Boys in Company C, The 1978 Sidney J. Furie Sidney J. Furie Rick Natkin
Boyz N the Hood 1991 John Singleton John Singleton
Breach 2007 Billy Ray Adam Mazer William Rotko et al.
Bread and Roses 2000 Ken Loach Paul Laverty
Bringing Down the House 1992 Adam Shankman Jason Filardi
Brokeback Mountain 2005 Ang Lee Larry McMurtry Diana Ossana et al.
Broken Arrow 1950 Delmer Daves Michael Blankfort
(Albert Maltz)
Broken City 2013 Allen Hughes Brian Tucker
Brooklyn’s Finest 2009 Antoine Fuqua Michael C. Martin
Brubaker 1980 Stuart W.D. Richter
Rosenberg
Bullet to the Head 2012 Walter Hill Alessandro Camon Alexis Nolent et al.
Bulworth 1998 Warren Beatty Jeremy Pikser
Butter 2012 Jim Field Smith Jason Micallef
Campaign, The 2012 Jay Roach Chris Henchy Shawn Harwell et al.
Candidate, The 1972 Michael Ritchie Jeremy Larner
Capitalism: A Love Story 2009 Michael Moore Michael Moore
Capote 2005 Bennett Miller Dan Futterman Gerald Clarke
Captain America: The 2011 Joe Johnston Christopher Markus Stephen McFeely et al.
First Avenger
Carriers 2009 David Pastor, Alex Pastor David Pastor
Alex Pastor
Casa de Las Babys 2003 John Sayles John Sayles
Casablanca 1942 Michael Curtiz Howard Koch
374

Casino Jack 2010 George Norman Snider
Hickenlooper
Casualties of War 1989 Brian de Palma David Rabe
Catch 22 1970 Mike Nichols Buck Henry
Changeling 2008 Clint Eastwood J. Michael
Straczynski
Charlie and the Chocolate 2005 Tim Burton John August
Factory
Charlie Wilson’s War 2007 Mike Nichols Aaron Sorkin George Crile
Che! 1969 Richard Fleischer Michael Wilson Sy Bartlett
Cheyenne Autumn 1964 John Ford James R. Webb

Children of Men 2006 Alfonso Cuaron Alfonso Cuaron Timothy J. Sexton et al.
China Heavyweight 2012 Yung Chang Yung Chang
China Syndrome, The 1979 James Bridges James Bridges T.S. Bridges, Mike Gray
Chinatown 1974 Roman Polansky Robert Towne
Chronicles of Narnia, The: 2008 Andrew Andrew Adamson Christopher Markus et al.
Prince Caspian Adamson
Chronicles of Narnia, The: 2005 Andrew Ann Peacock Andrew Adamson et al.
The Lion, the Witch and Adamson
the Wardrobe
Chronicles of Narnia, 2010 Michael Apted Christopher Markus Stephen McFeely et al.
The: The Voyage of the
Dawn Treader
Chronicles of Riddick 2004 David Twohy David Twohy Jim Wheat et al.
Citizen Kane 1941 Orson Welles Herman Orson Welles
Mankiewicz
Citizen Ruth 1996 Alexander Payne Alexander Payne Jim Taylor
City of Hope 1991 John Sayles John Sayles
Civil Action, A 1998 Steven Zaillian Steven Zaillian
Clear and Present Danger 1994 Phillip Noyce Donald Stewart John Milius, Steven Zaillian
Cleopatra 1912 Charles L. Gaskill
Close Encounters of the 1977 Steven Spielberg Steven Spielberg
Third Kind
Cloudy with a Chance of 2009 Phil Lord, Chris Phil Lord Chris Miller et al.
Meatballs Miller
Coffy 1973 Jack Hill Jack Hill
Collateral Damage 2002 Andrew Davis David Griffiths Peter Griffiths
Color Purple, The 1985 Steven Spielberg Menno Meyjes
Columbiana 2011 Oliver Megaton Luc Besson Robert Mark Kamen
Coming Home 1978 Hal Ashby Waldo Salt Robert C. Jones
Company Men 2010 John Wells John Wells
Company You Keep, The 2013 Robert Redford Lem Dobbs Neil Gordon
Compliance 2012 Craig Zobel Craig Zobel
Confessions of a Nazi 1939 Anatole Litvak Milton Krims John Wexley
Spy
Conspiracy Theory 1997 Richard Donner Brian Helgeland
Constant Gardener, The 2005 Fernando Jeffrey Caine
Meirelles
Contagion 2011 Steven Scott Z. Burns
Soderbergh
Contender, The 2000 Rod Lurie Rod Lurie
Control Room 2004 Jehane Noujame Jehane Noujame Julia Bacha
375
APPENDIX

Conversation, The 1974 Francis Ford Francis Ford
Coppola Coppola
Core, The 2003 Jon Amiel Cooper Layne John Rogers
Corporation, The 2003 Jennifer Abbot, Joel Bakan Harold Crooks et al.
Mark Achbar
Country 1984 Richard Pearce Richard Pearce
Crack: The Big Lie 1987 Mark Jean Mark Jean
Cradle Will Rock 1999 Tim Robbins Tim Robbins
Crash 2004 Paul Haggis Paul Haggis
Creature from the Black 1954 Jack Arnold Harry Essex
Lagoon, The
Crimson Tide 1995 Tony Scott Michael Schiffer
Crisis 1950 Richard Brooks Richard Brooks
Crossfire 1947 Edward Dmytryk John Paxton
Crowd, The 1928 King Vidor King Vidor John V.A. Weaver
Crush, The 1993 Alan Shapiro Alan Shapiro
Cry Freedom 1987 Richard John Briley
Attenborough
Da Vinci Code, The 2006 Ron Howard Akiva Goldsman
Dance, Fools, Dance 1931 Harry Beaumont Aurania Rouverol Richard Shayer
Dances with Wolves 1990 Kevin Costner Michael Blake
Daniel 1983 Sidney Lumet E.L. Doctorow
Dark City 1998 Alex Proyas Alex Proyas
Dark Horse, The 1932 Alfred E. Green Joseph Jackson Wilson Mizner
Dark Knight 2008 Christopher Jonathan Nolan Christopher Nolan et al.
Nolan
Dark Knight Rises 2012 Christopher Jonathan Nolan Christopher Nolan et al.
Nolan
Dark Truth, A 2012 Damian Lee Damian Lee
Dave 1993 Ivan Reitman Gary Ross
Day After Tomorrow 2004 Roland Roland Emmerich Jeffrey Nachmanoff
Emmerich
Daybreakers 2009 Michael Spierig, Michael Spierig Peter Spierig
Peter Spierig
Days of Glory 1944 Jacques Casey Robinson
Tourneur
Days of Heaven 1978 Terrence Malick Terrence Malick
Dead Man Walking 1995 Tim Robbins Tim Robbins
Dead Zone 1983 David Jeffrey Boam
Cronenberg
Death Wish 1974 Michael Winner Wendell Mayes
Debt, The 2010 John Madden Matthew Vaughn Jane Goldman et al.
Deer Hunter, The 1978 Michael Cimino Deric Washburn
Defiant Ones, The 1958 Stanley Kramer Nathan E. Douglas H.J. Smith
Deliverance 1972 John Boorman James Dickey
Departed, The 2006 Martin Scorsese William Monahan
Deterrence 2000 Rod Lurie Rod Lurie
Devil’s Daughter, The 1915 Frank Powell Garfield Thompson
Dick 1999 Andrew Fleming Sheryl Longin
Dictator, The 2012 Larry Charles Sacha Baron Alec Berg et al.
Cohen
376

Dirty Harry 1971 Don Siegel John Milius
Disclosure 1994 Barry Levinson Michael Crichton Paul Attanasio
Distinguished Gentleman, 1992 Jonathan Jonathan Reynolds
The Reynolds
District 9 2009 Neill Blomkamp Neill Blomkamp Terri Tatchell
Django Unchained 2012 Quentin Tarantino Quentin Tarantino
Do the Right Thing 1989 Spike Lee Spike Lee
Doctor Zhivago 1965 David Lean Robert Bolt
Dog Day Afternoon 1975 Sidney Lumet Frank Pierson
Double Indemnity 1944 Billy Wilder Billy Wilder
Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears 2008 Jimmy Hayward, Ken Daurio Cinco Paul et al.
a Who! Steve Martino
Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax 2012 Kyle Balda, Chris Cinco Paul Ken Daurio et al.
Renaud
Dr. Strangelove 1964 Stanley Kubrick Stanley Kubrick Terry Southern, Peter
George
Dramatic Life of Abraham 1924 Phil Rosen Frances Marion
Lincoln, The
Driving Miss Daisy 1989 Steven Spielberg Alfred Uhry
Dry White Season, A 1989 Colin Welland Euzhan Palcy
Duck Soup 1933 Leo McCarey Bert Kalmar et al.
Eagle Eye 2008 D.J. Caruso John Glenn Travis Wright et al.
Earth 2007 Alastair Alastair Fothergill Mark Linfield
Fothergill, Mark
Linfield
Easy Rider 1969 Dennis Hopper Dennis Hopper Terry Southern
El Norte 1983 Gregory Nava Gregory Nava Anna Thomas
Election 1999 Alexander Payne Alexander Payne Jim Taylor
Eleni 1985 Peter Yates Steve Tesich
Elysium 2013 Neill Blomkamp Neill Blomkamp
Emperor 2012 Peter Weber Vera Blasi David Klass et al.
End of Watch 2012 David Ayer David Ayer
Endangered Species 1982 Alan Rudolph Alan Rudolph John Binder
Enemy of the State 1998 Tony Scott David Marconi
Enforcer, The 1976 James Fargo Stirling Silliphant Dean Riesner
Enron: The Smartest 2005 Alex Gibney Peter Enkind Alex Gibney et al.
Guys in the Room
Erin Brockovich 2000 Steven Susannah Grant
Soderbergh
Escape from Planet Earth 2013 Cal Brunker Bob Barlen Carl Brunker et al.
Executive Action 1973 David Miller Dalton Trumbo
Executive Decision 1996 Stuart Baird Jim Thomas John Thomas
Executive Suite 1954 Robert Wise Ernest Lehman
Exodus 1960 Otto Preminger Dalton Trumbo
Extremely Loud and 2011 Stephen Daldry Eric Roth Jonathan Safran Foer
Incredibly Close
Extremities 1986 Robert M. Young William
Mastrosimone
F.I.S.T. 1978 Norman Jewison Joe Eszterhas Sylvester Stallone
Face in the Crowd, A 1957 Elia Kazan Budd Schulberg
Fahrenheit 9/11 2004 Michael Moore Michael Moore
377
APPENDIX

Fail Safe 1964 Sidney Lumet Walter Bernstein
Falcon and the Snowman, 1985 John Schlesinger Steven Zaillian
The
Falling Down 1993 Joel Schumacher Ebbe Roe Smith
Fantastic Four 2005 Tim Story Mark Frost Michael France et al.
Fantastic Four: Rise of 2007 Tim Story Don Payne Mark Frost et al.
the Silver Surfer
Far From Heaven 2002 Todd Haynes Todd Haynes
Farmer’s Daughter, The 1947 H.C. Potter Allen Rivkin Laura Kerr
Fat Man and Little Boy 1989 Roland Joffe Bruce Robinson
Fatal Attraction 1987 Adrian Lyne James Dearden Nicholas Meyer

First Blood 1982 Ted Kotcheff Michael Kozoll William Seckheirn
First Family 1980 Buck Henry Buck Henry
First Lady 1937 Stanley Logan Rowland Leigh
First Monday in October 1981 Ronald Neame Jerome Lawrence Robert E. Lee
Flags of Our Fathers 2006 Clint Eastwood William Broyles Jr. Paul Haggis et al.
Flight 2012 Robert Zemeckis John Gatins
Flightplan 2005 Robert Peter A. Dowling Billy Ray
Schwentke
Fog of War, The 2003 Errol Morris Errol Morris
Fool There Was, A 1915 Frank Powell Porter Emerson
Browne
Footloose 2011 Craig Brewer Dean Pitchford Craig Brewer et al.
For Greater Glory 2012 Dean Wright Michael Love
For Whom the Bell Tolls 1943 Sam Wood Dudley Nicholls
Forbidden 1932 Frank Capra Frank Capra
Foreign Affair 1948 Billy Wilder Billy Wilder Charles Brackett
Formula, The 1980 John Avildsen Steven Shagan
Forrest Gump 1994 Robert Zemeckis Eric Roth
48 Hrs 1982 Walter Hill Roger Larry Gross et al.
Spottiswoode
42 2013 Brian Helgeland Brian Helgeland
Four Brothers 2005 John Singleton David Elliot Paul Lovett
Freedom Writers 2007 Richard Richard
LaGravenese LaGravenese
Friday Night Lights 2004 Peter Berg David Aaron Cohen Peter Berg
Front, The 1976 Martin Ritt Walter Bernstein
Frost/Nixon 2008 Ron Howard Peter Morgan
Fruitvale Station 2013 Ryan Coogler Ryan Coogler
Full Metal Jacket 1987 Stanley Kubrick Stanley Kubrick Gustav Hasford
Fun with Dick and Jane 2005 Dean Parisot Judd Apatow Nicholas Stoller
Fury 1936 Fritz Lang Fritz Lang Bartlett Cormack
G.I. Joe: Retaliation 2013 Jon M. Chu Rhett Reese Paul Wernick
G.I. Joe: The Rise of 2009 Stephen Stuart Beattie David Elliot et al.
Cobra Sommers
Gabriel Over the White 1933 Gregory La Cava Carey Wilson Bertram Bloch
House
Game Change 2012 Jay Roach Danny Strong Mark Halperin et al.
Gandhi 1982 Richard John Briley
Attenborough
Gangs of New York 2002 Martin Scorsese Jay Cocks
378

Gangster Squad 2013 Ruben Fleischer Will Beall Paul Lieberman
Gardens of Stone 1987 Francis Ford Ron Bass
Coppola
Gasland 2010 Josh Fox Josh Fox
Gasland Part II 2013 Josh Fox Josh Fox
General Died at Dawn, 1936 Lewis Milestone Clifford Odets
The
General Idi Amin Dada 1974 Barbet Schroeder Barbet Schroeder
Generation P 2011 Victor Ginzburg Djina Ginzburg Victor Ginzburg et al.
Gentleman’s Agreement 1947 Elia Kazan Moss Hart
Gentlemen Prefer 1953 Howard Hawks Charles Lederer

Blondes
Getting Straight 1970 Richard Rush Robert Kaufman
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib 2007 Rory Kennedy Mark Bailey Jack Youngelson
Ghosts of Mississippi 1996 Rob Reiner Lewis Colick John Seale
Giant 1956 George Stevens Fred Guiol Ivan Moffatt
Girl with the Dragon 2011 David Fincher Steven Zaillian
Tattoo
Glass Key, The 1942 Stuart Heisler Jonathan Lattimer
Glory 1989 Edward Zwick Kevin Jarre
Go Tell the Spartans 1978 Ted Post Wendell Mayes
Godfather, The 1972 Francis Ford Francis Ford
Coppola Coppola
Godfather, The, Part II 1974 Francis Ford Mario Puzo
Coppola
Golden Compass, The 2007 Chris Weitz Chris Weitz
Gone Baby Gone 2007 Ben Affleck Ben Affleck Aaron Stockard
Gone With the Wind 1939 Victor Fleming Sidney Howard
Good Day to Die Hard, A 2013 John Moore Skip Woods Roderick Thorp
Good Morning Vietnam 1987 Barry Levinson Mitch Markowitz
Good Night and Good 2005 George Clooney George Clooney Grant Heslov
Luck
Good Shepherd, The 2006 Robert De Niro Eric Roth
Graduate, The 1967 Mike Nichols Buck Henry Calder Willingham
Gran Torino 2008 Nick Schenk
Grand Canyon 1991 Lawrence Meg Kasdan Lawrence Kasdan
Kasdan
Grapes of Wrath, The 1940 John Ford Nunnally Johnson
Grassroots 2012 Stephen Stephen Gyllenhaal Justin Rhodes
Gyllenhaal
Great Debaters, The 2007 Denzel Robert Eisele
Washington
Great Dictator, The 1940 Charlie Chaplin Charlie Chaplin
Great Gatsby, The 2013 Baz Luhrmann Baz Luhrmann Craig Pearce
Great McGinty, The 1940 Preston Sturges Preston Sturges
Great White Hope, The 1970 Martin Ritt Howard Sackler
Greed 1923 Erich von Erich von Stroheim
Stroheim
Green Berets, The 1968 John Wayne, Ray James Lee Barrett
Kellogg
Green Zone 2010 Paul Greengrass Brian Helgeland Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Greetings 1968 Brian de Palma Brian de Palma
379
APPENDIX

Group, The 1966 Sidney Lumet Sidney Buchman
Guess Who’s Coming to 1967 Stanley Kramer William Rose
Dinner
Hail the Conquering Hero 1944 Preston Sturges Preston Sturges
Hair 1979 Milos Forman Michael Weller
Hairspray 2007 Adam Shankman Leslie Dixon
Hand That Rocks the 1992 Curtis Hanson Amanda Silver
Cradle, The
Hanna 2011 Joe Wright Seth Lochead David Farr
Harlan County USA 1977 Barbara Kopple Barbara Kopple
Harold and Kumar 2008 John Hurwitz, John Hurwitz Hayden Schlossberg
Escape from Hayden
Guantanamo Bay Schlossberg
Harriet Craig 1950 Vincent Sherman James Gunn Anne Froelich
Head of State 2003 Chris Rock Chris Rock Ali LeRoi
Heartbreak Ridge 1986 Clint Eastwood James Carbatsos
Hearts and Minds 1974 Peter Davis Peter Davis
Heaven and Earth 1987 Ulli Lommell Ulli Lommell
Heaven’s Gate 1980 Michael Cimino Michael Cimino
Her Honor the Governor 1926 Chet Withey Doris Anderson
Hi Mom! 1969 Brian de Palma Brian de Palma
High Noon 1952 Fred Zinnemann Carl Foreman
High School 1968 Frederick Frederick Wiseman
Wiseman
Hillary: The Movie 2008 Alan Peterson Alan Peterson Lee Troxler et al.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the 2005 Garth Jennings Douglas Adams Karey Kirkpatrick
Galaxy
Hitler Gang, The 1944 John Farrow Frances Goodrich Albert Hackett
Hitler’s Children 1943 Edward Dmytryk Emmett Lavery
Hitler’s Madman 1943 Douglas Sirk Melvin Levy, Peretz Doris Molloy
Hirshbein
Hobbit, The: An 2012 Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens et al.
Unexpected Journey
Hoffa 1992 Danny DeVito David Mamet
Hollywood on Trial 1976 David Helpern Arnie Reisman
Home of the Brave 1949 Mark Robson Carl Foreman
Honorary Consul, The 1983 John MacKenzie Christopher
Hampton
Hospital 1970 Frederick Frederick Wiseman
Wiseman
Hostage 2005 Florent-Emilio Doug Richardson
Siri
Hotel Rwanda 2004 Terry George Keir Pearson Terry George
How to Marry a Millionaire 1953 Jean Negulesco Nunnally Johnson
Human Stain, The 2003 Robert Benton Nicholas Meyer
Hunger Games, The 2012 Gary Ross Gary Ross Suzanne Collins et al.
Hunger Games, The: 2013 Francis Lawrence Simon Beaufoy Michael Arndt et al.
Catching Fire
Hunt for Red October, 1990 John McTiernan Donald Stewart Larry Ferguson
The
Hunting of the President, 2004 Nickolas Perry, Nickolas Perry Harry Thomason
The Harry Thomason
380

Hurt Locker, The 2008 Kathryn Bigelow Mark Boal
Hustle and Flow 2005 Craig Brewer Craig Brewer
I Am a Fugitive from a 1932 Mervyn LeRoy Sheridan Gibney Brown Holmes, Robert E.
Chain Gang Burns
I Am Legend 2007 Francis Lawrence Mark Protosevich Akiva Goldsman et al.
I Married a Communist 1949 Robert Charles Grayson Robert Hardy Andrews
Stevenson
I Now Pronounce You 2007 Dennis Dugan Barry Fanaro Alexander Payne et al.
Chuck and Larry
I, Robot 2004 Alex Proyas Jeff Vintar Akiva Goldsman
I Spit on Your Grave (Day 1978 Meir Zarchi Meir Zarchi

of the Woman)
I Was a Communist for 1951 Gordon Douglas Crane Wilbur Matt Cvetic
the FBI
Ides of March, The 2011 George Clooney George Clooney Grant Heslov et al.
Idiocracy 2006 Mike Judge Mike Judge Etan Cohen
Idiot’s Delight 1939 Clarence Brown Robert E.
Sherwood
Imitation of Life 1959 Douglas Sirk Eleanore Griffin
In the Heat of the Night 1967 Norman Jewison Sterling Silliphant
In the Line of Fire 1993 Wolfgang Jeff McGuire
Petersen
In the Valley of Elah 2007 Paul Haggis Paul Haggis
In the Year of the Pig 1968 Emile de Antonio
In This Our Life 1942 John Huston Howard Koch
Inception 2010 Christopher Christopher Nolan
Nolan
Incredible Hulk, The 2008 Louis Leterrier Zak Penn
Independence Day 1996 Roland Roland Emmerich
Emmerich
Informant!, The 2009 Steven Scott Z. Burns
Soderbergh
Informer, The 1935 John Ford Dudley Nichols
Inglourious Basterds 2009 Quentin Tarantino Quentin Tarantino
Inherit the Wind 1960 Stanley Kramer Nathan E. Douglas Harold J. Smith
Inside Job 2010 Charles Charles Ferguson Chad Beck et al.
Ferguson
Insider, The 1999 Michael Mann Eric Roth Michael Mann
Internship, The 2013 Shawn Levy Vince Vaughn Jared Stern
Interpreter 2005 Sydney Pollack Charles Randolph Scott Frank et al.
Intolerance 1916 D.W. Griffith D.W. Griffith
Intruder in the Dust 1949 Clarence Brown Ben Maddow
Invasion of the Body 1956 Don Siegal Richard Collins Jack Finney, Daniel
Snatchers Mainwaring
Invasion U.S.A. 1985 Joseph Zito James Bruner
Invictus 2009 Clint Eastwood Anthony Peckham John Carlin
Iron Curtain 1948 William Wellman Milton Krims
Iron Eagle 1986 Sidney J. Furie Sidney J. Furie Kevin Elders
Iron Lady, The 2011 Phyllida Lloyd Abi Morgan
Iron Man 2008 Jon Favreau Mark Fergus Hawk Ostby
Iron Man 2 2010 Jon Favreau Justin Theroux
Iron Man 3 2013 Shane Black Drew Pearce Shane Black et al.
381
APPENDIX

It 1927 Clarence G. Elinor Glyn Hope Loring
Badger
J. Edgar 2011 Clint Eastwood Dustin Lance Black
Jack Reacher 2012 Christopher Christopher
McQuarrie McQuarrie
Jack the Giant Slayer 2013 Bryan Singer Darren Lemke Christopher McQuarrie
et al.
Jarhead 2005 Sam Mendes William Broyles Jr.
JFK 1991 Oliver Stone Oliver Stone Zachary Sklar
Jobs 2013 Joshua Michael Matt Whiteley
Stern
Joe 1970 John G. Avildson Norman Wexler
Johnny Got His Gun 1971 Dalton Trumbo Dalton Trumbo
Juarez 1939 William Dieterle John Huston et al.
Judgment at Nuremburg 1961 Stanley Kramer Abby Mann
Julia 1977 Fred Zinnemann Alvin Sargent
Kelly’s Heroes 1970 Brian G. Hutton Troy Kennedy
Martin
Kids Are All Right, The 2010 Lisa Cholodenko Lisa Cholodenko Stuart Blumberg
Killing Fields, The 1984 Roland Joffe Bruce Robinson
King in New York, A 1956 Charles Chaplin Charlie Chaplin
King Kong 1933 Merian C. Cooper Merian C. Cooper Edgar Wallace
King Kong 2005 Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Philippa Boyens et al.
Kingdom, The 2007 Peter Berg Matthew Michael
Carnahan
Kingdom of Heaven 2005 Ridley Scott William Monahan
Kiss of the Spider Woman 1985 Hector Babenco Leonard Schrader
Knife Fight 2012 Bill Guttentag Bill Guttentag Chris Lehane
Knowing 2009 Alex Proyas Ryne Douglas Juliet Snowden et al.
Pearson
Kramer vs. Kramer 1979 Robert Benton Robert Benton
Ladder 49 2004 Jay Russell Lewis Colick
Lara Croft Tomb Raider: 2003 Jan de Bont Dean Georgaris
Cradle of Life
Larry Crowne 2011 Tom Hanks Tom Hanks Nia Vardalos
Last Hurrah, The 1958 John Ford Frank Nugent
Last Samurai, The 2003 Edward Zwick John Logan Edward Zwick et al.
Last Seduction, The 1994 John Dahl Steve Barancik
Last Stand, The 2013 Kim Jee-Woon Andrew Knauer
Latino 1985 Haskell Wexler Haskell Wexler
Laura 1944 Otto Preminger Vera Caspary Jay Dratler
Law and Order 1969 Frederick Frederick Wiseman
Wiseman
Lee Daniels’ The Butler 2013 Lee Daniels Danny Strong
Legally Blonde 2: Red, 2003 Charles Herman- Kate Kondell
White & Blonde Wurmfeld
Legend of Zorro, The 2005 Martin Campbell Roberto Orci Alex Kurtzman
Leonie 2010 Hisako Matsui Hisako Matsui David Wiener et al.
Les Misérables 2012 Tom Hooper William Nicholson Alain Boublil et al.
Lethal Weapon 1987 Richard Donner Shane Black
Letters from Iwo Jima 2006 Clint Eastwood Iris Yamashita
382

Lifeboat 1944 Alfred Hitchcock John Steinbeck
Limbo 1999 John Sayles John Sayles
Limitless 2011 Neil Burger Leslie Dixon
Lincoln 2012 Steven Spielberg Tony Kushner Doris Kearns Goodwin
Lion Is in the Streets, A 1953 Raoul Walsh Luther Davis
Lions for Lambs 2007 Robert Redford Matthew Michael
Carnahan
Little Big Man 1970 Arthur Penn Calder Willingham
Little Drummer Girl, The 1984 George Roy Hill Loring Madel
Live Free or Die Hard 2007 Len Wiseman Mark Bomback David Marconi et al.
Lone Ranger, The 2013 Gore Verbinski Justin Haythe Ted Elliott et al.
Lone Star 1996 John Sayles John Sayles
Lord of the Rings: The 2003 Peter Jackson Fran Walsh Phillippa Boynes et al.
Return of the King
Love Actually 2003 Richard Curtis Richard Curtis
Malcolm X 1992 Spike Lee Arnold Perl
Man, The 1972 Joseph Sargent Joseph Sargent
Man of Steel 2013 Zack Snyder David S. Goyer Christopher Nolan et al.
Man of the Year 2006 Barry Levinson Barry Levinson
Man on a Tightrope 1953 Elia Kazan Robert Sherwood
Man on Fire 2004 Tony Scott Brian Helgeland
Man with the Golden Arm, 1955 Otto Preminger Walter Newman Lewis Meltzer
The
Manchurian Candidate, 1962 John John George Axelrod
The Frankenheimer Frankenheimer
Manchurian Candidate, 2004 Jonathan Daniel Pyne Dean Gougaris
The Demme
Manhattan Project, The 1986 Marshall Marshall Brickman Thomas Baum
Brickman
March of the Penguins 2005 Luc Jacquet Luc Jacquet
Margin Call 2011 J.C. Chandor J.C. Chandor
Maria Full of Grace 2004 Joshua Marston Joshua Marston
Marie 1985 Roger Donaldson John Briley
Mars Attacks! 1996 Tim Burton Jonathan Gems
M*A*S*H 1970 Robert Altman Ring Lardner Jr.
Master, The 2012 Paul Thomas Paul Thomas
Anderson Anderson
Matewan 1987 John Sayles John Sayles
Matrix, The 1999 Andy and Lana Andy and Lana
Wachowski Wachowski
Matrix Reloaded, The 2003 Andy and Lana Andy and Lana
Wachowski Wachowski
Matrix Reloaded, The 2003 Andy Wachowski, Andy Wachowski Lana Wachowski
Lana Wachowski
Matrix Revolutions, The 2003 Andy Wachowski Larry Wachowski Andy Wachowski
Matrix Revolutions, The 2003 Andy Wachowski, Andy Wachowski Lana Wachowski
Lana Wachowski
Max Payne 2008 Beau Thorne
Medium Cool 1969 Haskell Wexler Haskell Wexler
Meet John Doe 1941 Frank Capra Robert Riskin
Men in Black 1997 Barry Sonnenfield Ed Solomon
383
APPENDIX

Men Who Stare at Goats, 2009 Grant Heslov Peter Straughan
The
Men with Guns 1997 John Sayles John Sayles
Menace II Society 1993 Albert and Allen Albert and Allen Tyger Williams
Hughes Hughes
Michael Clayton 2007 Tony Gilroy Tony Gilroy
Milagro Beanfield War, 1988 Robert Redford John Nichols David Ward
The
Mildred Pierce 1945 Michael Curtiz James M. Cain Ranald MacDougall
Milhouse 1971 Emile de Antonio
Milk 2008 Gus Van Sant Dustin Lance Black

Missing 1982 Costa-Gavras Costa-Gavras Donald Stewart
Missing in Action 1984 Joseph Zito Joseph Zito
Mission, The 1986 Roland Joffee Robert Bolt
Mission: Impossible— 2011 Brad Bird Josh Appelbaum Andre Nemec
Ghost Protocol
Mission: Impossible III 2006 J.J. Abrams Alex Kurtzman Roberto Orci et al.
Mission to Moscow 1943 Michael Curtiz Howard Koch
Mississippi Burning 1988 Alan Parker Chris Gerolmo
Moneyball 2011 Bennett Miller Steven Zaillian Aaron Sorkin
Monkey Business 1952 Howard Hawks Harry Segall Ben Hecht
Monsieur Verdoux 1947 Charles Chaplin Charlie Chaplin
Moon Over Parador 1988 Paul Mazursky Paul Mazursky Leon Capetanos
Mr. and Mrs. Smith 2005 Doug Liman Simon Kinberg
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town 1936 Frank Capra Robert Riskin
Mr. Mom 1983 Stan Dragoti John Hughes
Mr. Smith Goes to 1939 Frank Capra Sidney Buchman
Washington
Mrs. Miniver 1942 William Wyler George Froeschel James Hilton, Jan Struther
Ms. 45 1981 Abel Ferrara Nicholas St. John
Mulberry Child 2011 Susan Morgan Susan Morgan
Cooper Cooper
Munich 2005 Steven Spielberg Tony Kushner Eric Roth
Murder at 1600 1997 Dwight H. Little Wayne Beach David Hodgin
Music Box 1989 Costa-Gavras Joe Eszterhas
My Fellow Americans 1994 Peter Segal E. Jack Kaplan Richard Chapman, Peter
Tolan
My Man Godfrey 1936 Gregory La Cava Gregory La Cava Morrie Riskind et al.
My Son John 1952 Leo McCarey Myles Connelly
Mystic River 2003 Clint Eastwood Brian Helgeland
Nanook of the North 1922 Robert J. Robert J. Flaherty
Flaherty
Nashville 1975 Robert Altman Joan Tewkesbury
National Treasure 2004 Jon Turteltaub Jim Kouf Cormac Wibberley et al.
National Treasure: Book 2007 Jon Turteltaub Marianne Cormac Wibberley
of Secrets Wibberley
Natural Born Killers 1994 Oliver Stone Oliver Stone David Veloz, Richard
Rutowski
Navy SEALs 1990 Lewis Teague Chuck Pfarrer Gary Goldman
Network 1976 Sidney Lumet Paddy Chayefsky
New Jack City 1991 Mario Van Thomas Lee Wright Barry Michael Cooper
Peebles
384

9 to 5 1980 Colin Higgins Colin Higgins
1969
Nixon 1995 Oliver Stone Oliver Stone Stephen J. Rivele
No Country for Old Men 2007 Ethan Coen, Joel Joel Coen Ethan Coen
Coen
No Way Out 1987 Roger Donaldson Robert Garland
Norma Rae 1979 Martin Ritt Irving Ravetch Frank Harriet Jr.
North Star, The 1943 Lewis Milestone Lillian Hellman
Now You See Me 2013 Louis Leterrier Ed Solomon Boaz Yakin et al.
Obama Effect, The 2012 Charles S. Dutton Charles S. Dutton Barry Hankerson et al.
Oblivion 2013 Joseph Kosinski Karl Gajdusek Michael Arndt et al.

Old Gringo 1989 Luis Puenzo Alda Bortnik Luis Puenzo
Olympus Has Fallen 2013 Antoine Fuqua Creighton Katrin Benedikt
Rothenberger
On the Beach 1959 Stanley Kramer John Paxton James Lee Barrett
On the Waterfront 1954 Elia Kazan Budd Schulberg
One, Two, Three 1961 Billy Wilder Billy Wilder
Orphans of the Storm 1921 D.W. Griffith D.W. Griffith
Our Blushing Brides 1930 Bess Meredyth John Howard
Lawson
Our Daily Bread 1934 King Vidor King Vidor Elizabeth Hill
Our Dancing Daughters 1928 Harry Beaumont Josephine Lovitt
Our Modern Maidens 1929 Jack Conway Marian Ainslee Ruth Cummings
Outfoxed: Rupert 2004 Robert
Murdoch’s War on Greenwald
Journalism
Oz: The Great and 2013 Sam Raimi Mitchell Kapner David Lindsay-Abaire et al.
Powerful
Pacific Rim 2013 Guillermo del Travis Beacham Guillermo del Toro
Toro
Paid 1930 Sam Wood Bayard Veiller Lucien Hubbard
Parallax View, The 1974 Alan J. Pakula David Giler Lorenzo Semple Jr.
Passion of the Christ, The 2004 Mel Gibson Benedict Fitzgerald Mel Gibson
Paths of Glory 1957 Stanley Kubrick Stanley Kubrick Calder Willingham, Jim
Thompson
Patriot Games 1992 Phillip Noyce W. Peter Illif Donald Stewart
Patton 1969 Franklin Francis Ford Edmund H. North
Schaffner Coppola
Pawnbroker, The 1965 Sidney Lumet David Friedkin Morton Fine
People vs. Larry Flynt, 1996 Milos Forman Scott Alexander Larry Karaszewski
The
Phantom President, The 1932 Norman Taurog Walter de Leon Harlan Thompson
Pineapple Express 2008 David Gordon Seth Rogen Evan Goldberg
Green
Pinky 1949 Elia Kazan Phillip Dunne Dudley Nichols
Place Beyond the Pines 2012 Derek Cianfrance Derek Cianfrance Ben Coccio et al.
Places in the Heart 1984 Robert Benton Robert Benton
Plainsman, The 1936 Cecile B. DeMille Waldemar Young Waldemar Young
et al. Harold Lamb
Lynn Riggs
Planet 51 2009 Javier Abad, Joe Stillman
Jorge Blanco
et al.
385
APPENDIX

Planet of the Apes 1968 Franklin J. Michael Wilson Rod Serling
Schaffner
Platoon 1986 Oliver Stone Oliver Stone
Point of Order 1964 Emile de Antonio Emile de Antonio Robert Duncan
Politics 1931 Charles Reiner Wells Root
Possessed 1931 Clarence Brown Edgar Selwyn
Possessed 1947 Curtis Bernhardt Ranald MacDougall Lawrence Menkin
Power 1986 Sidney Lumet David Himmelstein
Precious 2009 Lee Daniels Geoffery Fletcher Sapphire
President Vanishes, The 1934 William Wellman Cary Wilson Cedric Worth
Primary Colors 1998 Mike Nichols Elaine May

Princess and the Frog, 2009 Ron Clements, Ron Clements John Musker et al.
The John Musker
Private Files of J. Edgar 1978 Larry Cohen Larry Cohen
Hoover, The
Promised Land 2012 Gus Van Sant John Krasinski Matt Damon et al.
Protocol 1984 Herbert Ross Buck Henry
P.T. 109 1963 Leslie Martinson Richard L. Breen
Public Enemies 2009 Michael Mann Ronan Bennett Michael Mann et al.
Public Enemy, The 1931 William A. Kubec Glasman John Bright
Wellman
Public Housing 1997 Frederick Frederick Wiseman
Wiseman
Pull Down the Curtains, 1904 American
Suzie Mutoscope &
Biograph
Company
Pulp Fiction 1994 Quentin Tarantino Quentin Tarantino
Purge, The 2013 James DeMonaco James DeMonaco
Pursuit of Happyness, The 2006 Gabriele Muccino Steve Conrad
Quarantine 2008 John Erick John Erick Dowdle Drew Dowdle
Dowdle
Queen Bee 1955 Ranald Edna L. Lee Ranald MacDougall
MacDougall
Quiet American, The 1958 Joseph L. Joseph L.
Mankiewicz Mankiewicz
Quiet American, The 2002 Phillip Noyce Robert Schenkkan
Ragtime 1981 Milos Forman Michael Weller
Rally Round the Flag, 1958 Leo McCarey Leo McCarey Claude Binyon
Boys
Rambo 2008 Sylvester Art Monterastelli Sylvester Stallone
Stallone
Rambo: First Blood, 1985 George Pan James Cameron Sylvester Stallone
Part II Cosmatos
Rambo III 1988 Peter Macdonald Sylvester Stallone
Rebel Without a Cause 1955 Nicholas Ray Nicholas Ray Irving Shulman, Stewart
Stern
Recount 2010 Jay Roach Danny Strong
Recruit, The 2003 Roger Donaldson Roger Towne Kurt Wimmer et al.
Red Dawn 1984 John Milius John Milius Kevin Reynolds
Red Dawn 2012 Dan Bradley Carl Ellsworth Jeremy Passmore et al.
Red Tails 2012 Anthony John Ridley Aaron McGruder
Hemingway
386

RedEye 2005 Wes Craven Carl Ellsworth
Reds 1981 Warren Beatty Warren Beatty Trevor Griffiths
Reefer Madness 1938 Louis Gasnier Arthur Hoerl
Rendition 2007 Gavin Hood Kelley Sane
Rent 2005 Chris Columbus Stephen Chbosky
Restrepo 2010 Tim Tim Hetherington Sebastian Junger
Hetherington,
Sebastian Junger
Return of the Secaucus 1980 John Sayles John Sayles
Seven
Revolution 1985 Hugh Hudson Hugh Hudson

Right Stuff, The 1983 Phillip Kaufman Phillip Kaufman
Rise of the Planet of the 2011 Rupert Wyatt Rick Jaffa Amanda Silver
Apes
River, The 1984 Mark Rydell Robert Dillon Julian Barry
Road, The 2009 John Hilllcoat Joe Penhall Cormac McCarthy
Robin Hood 2010 Ridley Scott Brian Helgeland
Rocky 1976 Sylvester Sylvester Stallone
Stallone
Rocky IV 1985 Sylvester Sylvester Stallone
Stallone
Roger & Me 1989 Michael Moore Michael Moore
Rolling Thunder 1977 John Flynn Paul Schrader Heywood Gould
Rollover 1981 Alan J. Pakula David Shaber
Romero 1989 John Duigan John Sacret Young
Runaway Jury 2003 Gary Fleder Brian Koppelman David Levien et al.
Running on Empty 1988 Sidney Lumet Naomi Foner
Russia House 1990 Fred Schepisi Tom Stoppard
Russians Are Coming!, 1966 Norman Jewison William Rose
The
Sacrifice 2011 Damian Lee Damian Lee
Salome 1908 J. Stuart Blackton Oscar Wilde (play) Theodore A. Liebler Jr.
(scenario)
Salt 2010 Phillip Noyce Kurt Wimmer
Salt of the Earth 1954 Herbert Michael Wilson
Biberman
Salvador 1986 Oliver Stone Oliver Stone Richard Boyle
Saving Lincoln 2013 Salvador Litvak Nina Davidovich Salvador Litvak
Saving Private Ryan 1998 Steven Spielberg Robert Rodat
Schindler’s List 1993 Steven Spielberg Karl Luedtke Steven Zaillian
Sea Hawk, The 1940 Michael Curtiz Howard Koch
Secret Honor 1994 Robert Altman Donald Freed Arnold Stone
Seduction of Joe Tynan, 1979 Jerry Schatzberg Alan Alda
The
Seeking a Friend for the 2012 Lorene Scafaria Lorene Scafaria
End of the World
Senator Was Indiscreet, 1947 George Kaufman Charles MacArthur
The
Sentinel, The 2006 Clark Johnson George Nolfi
Serenity 2005 Joss Whedon Joss Whedon
Sergeant York 1941 Howard Hawks Ben Finkel Harry Chandler
Seven Days in May 1964 John Rod Serling
Frankenheimer
387
APPENDIX

Seven Year Itch, The 1955 Billy Wilder Billy Wilder George Axlerod
Shaft 1971 Gordon Parks Jr. John D.F. Black Ernest Tidyman
Shaft in Africa 1973 John Guillermin Stirling Silliphant
Shaft’s Big Score 1972 Gordon Parks Jr. Ernest Tidyman
Shampoo 1975 Hal Ashby Robert Towne Warren Beatty
She Devil, The 1918 J. Gordon George James
Edwards Hopkins
Ship of Fools 1965 Stanley Kramer Abby Mann
Shooter 2007 Antoine Fuqua Jonathan Lemkin
Short Circuit 1986 John Badham S.S. Wilson Brent Maddock
Sicko 2007 Michael Moore Michael Moore

Side Effects 2013 Steven Scott Z. Burns
Soderbergh
Siege, The 1998 Edward Zwick Lawrence Wright
Silkwood 1983 Mike Nichols Nora Ephron Alice Arle
Silver Linings Playbook 2012 David O. Russell David O. Russell Matthew Quick
Simpsons Movie, The 2007 David Silverman James L. Brooks Matt Groening et al.
Sin 1915 Herbert Brenon Herbert Brenon
Sin City 2005 Frank Miller, Frank Miller
Robert
Rodrigues et al.
Single White Female 1992 Barbet Schroeder Don Roos
Siren of Hell 1915 Raoul Walsh
Sky Captain and the 2004 Kerry Conran Kerry Conran
World of Tomorrow
Skyfall 2012 Sam Mendes Neal Purvis Robert Wade et al.
Slumdog Millionaire 2008 Danny Boyle, Simon Beaufoy
Loveleen Tandan
Small Circle of Friends 1980 Rob Cohen Ezra Sacks
Snakes on a Plane 2006 David R. Ellis John Heffernan Sebastian Gutierrez
Social Network, The 2010 David Fincher Aaron Sorkin
Soul Food 1997 George Tilman George Tilman Jr.
Jr.
Soul Man 1986 Steve Miner Carol Black
Source Code 2011 Duncan Jones Ben Ripley
Spy Who Came In from 1966 Martin Ritt Paul Deb
the Cold, The
Star Chamber, The 1983 Peter Hyams Peter Hyams
Star Wars 1977 George Lucas George Lucas
Star Wars: Episode III— 2005 George Lucas George Lucas
Revenge of the Sith
State of Play 2009 Kevin Macdonald Matthew Michael Tony Gilroy et al.
Carnahan
State of Siege 1973 Costa-Gavras Costa-Gavras Franco Solinas
State of the Union 1948 Frank Capra Anthony Veiller Miles Connelly
Stealth 2005 Rob Cohen W.D. Richter
Steelyard Blues 1972 Alan Myerson David S. Ward
Stepford Wives, The 2004 Frank Oz Paul Rudnick
Stop Loss 2008 Kimberly Peirce Mark Richard Kimberly Peirce
Storm Center 1956 Daniel Taradash Daniel Taradash
Storm Warning 1950 Stuart Heisler Daniel Fuchs Richard Brooks
388

Strategic Air Command 1955 Anthony Mann Valentine Davies Beirne Lay Jr.
Strawberry Statement, 1970 Stuart Hagmann Israel Horovitz
The
Sullivan’s Travels 1941 Preston Sturges Preston Sturges
Sum of All Fears, The 2002 Phil Alden Paul Attanasio Daniel Pyne
Robinson
Sunrise 1927 F.W. Murnau Carl Mayer
Sunrise at Campobello 1960 Vincent J. Dore Schary
Donohue
Sunshine State 2003 John Sayles John Sayles
Super Size Me 2004 Morgan Spurlock Morgan Spurlock

Superfly 1972 Gordon Parks Jr. Phillip Fenty
Superman Returns 2006 Bryan Singer Michael Dougherty Dan Harris
Sweeney Todd: The 2007 Tim Burton John Logan
Demon Barber of Fleet
Street
Sweet Sweetback’s 1971 Melvin Van Melvin Van Peebles
Baadassss Song Peebles
Swimfan 2002 John Polson Charles F. Bohl Phillip Schneider
Syriana 2005 Stephen Gaghan Stephen Gaghan Robert Baer
Taking of Pelham 123, 2009 Tony Scott Brian Helgeland
The
Taxi Driver 1976 Martin Scorsese Paul Schrader
Team America World 2004 Trey Parker Trey Parker Matt Stone et al.
Police
Tell Them Willie Boy Is 1969 Abraham Abraham Polonsky
Here Polonsky
Tender Comrade 1943 Edward Dmytryk Dalton Trumbo
Terminator Salvation 2009 McG John D. Brancato Michael Ferris
Terminator 3: Rise of the 2003 Jonathan Mostow John D. Brancato Michael Ferris et al.
Machines
Testament 1983 Lynne Littman John Sacret Young
Thelma and Louise 1991 Ridley Scott Callie Khouri
There Will Be Blood 2007 Paul Thomas Paul Thomas
Anderson Anderson
There’s Always Tomorrow 1956 Douglas Sirk Ursula Parrott Bernard C. Shoenfeld
They Won’t Forget 1937 Mervyn LeRoy Robert Rossen Aben Kandel
Thin Blue Line, The 1988 Errol Morris Errol Morris
Thirteen Days 2000 Roger Donaldson David Self
This Is The End 2013 Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogen Evan Goldberg
Seth Rogen
Three Days of the Condor 1975 Sydney Pollack Lorenzo Semple Jr. David Rayfiel
300 2006 Zack Snyder Zack Snyder Kurt Johnstad et al.
Three Kings 1999 David O. Russell David O. Russell John Ridley
3:10 to Yuma 2007 James Mangold Halsted Welles Michael Brandt et al.
Titicut Follies 1967 Frederick Frederick Wiseman
Wiseman
To Be or Not to Be 1942 Ernest Lubitsch Edwin Justus
Mayer
To Kill a Mockingbird 1962 Robert Mulligan Horton Foote
Tootsie 1982 Sydney Pollack Don Maguire Larry Gelbart
Top Gun 1986 Tony Scott Jim Cash Jack Epps Jr.
389
APPENDIX

Total Recall 2012 Len Wiseman Kurt Wimmer Mark Bomback
Tower Heist 2011 Brett Ratner Ted Griffin Jeff Nathanson
Traffic 2000 Steven Stephen Gaghan
Soderbergh
Transformers 2007 Michael Bay Roberto Orci Alex Kurtzman et al.
Transformers: Dark of the 2011 Michael Bay Ehren Kruger
Moon
Transformers: Revenge of 2009 Michael Bay Ehren Kruger Roberto Orci et al.
the Fallen
Tron Legacy 2010 Joseph Kosinski Edward Kitsis Adam Horowitz
Tropic Thunder 2008 Ben Stiller Justin Theroux Etan Cohen et al.
Troy 2004 Wolfgang David Benioff
Peterson
True Lies 1994 James Cameron James Cameron
Truman Show, The 1998 Peter Weir Andrew Nichol
Turning Point, The 1977 Herbert Ross Arthur Laurents
Twelve Angry Men 1957 Sidney Lumet Reginald Rose
2016 Obama’s America 2012 Dinesh D’Souza, Dinesh D’Souza John Sullivan
John Sullivan
2012 2009 Roland Roland Emmerich Harald Kloser
Emmerich
Twilight’s Last Gleaming 1977 Robert Aldrich Ronald Cohen Edward Huebsh
2 Guns 2013 Baltasar Blake Masters Steven Grant
Kormakur
Ugly American, The 1963 George Englund Stewart Stern
Under Fire 1983 Roger Ron Shelton Clayton Frohman
Spottiswoode
Union Pacific 1939 Cecil B. DeMille Walter de Leon
et al.
United 93 2006 Paul Greengrass Paul Greengrass
Unmarried Woman, An 1978 Paul Mazursky Paul Mazursky
Up in the Air 2009 Jason Reitman Jason Reitman Sheldon Turner
Valkyrie 2008 Bryan Singer Christopher Nathan Alexander
McQuarrie
Vanishing American, The 1926 George Seitz Ethel Doherty
Verdict, The 1982 Sidney Lumet Sidney Lumet
Viva Villa 1934 Jack Conway Ben Hecht
Viva Zapata! 1952 Elia Kazan John Steinbeck
Vixen, The 1916 J. Gordon Mary Murillo
Edwards
W. 2008 Oliver Stone Stanley Weiser
Wag the Dog 1997 Barry Levinson Hilary Henkin David Mamet
Waiting for Superman 2010 Davis Davis Guggenheim Billy Kimball
Guggenheim
Walker 1987 Alex Cox Rudy Wurlitzer
Wall Street 1987 Oliver Stone Dorothy Tristan John Hancock
Wall Street: Money Never 2010 Oliver Stone Alan Loeb Stephen Schiff et al.
Sleeps
WALL-E 2008 Andrew Stanton Andrew Stanton Jim Reardon et al.
Walmart: The High Cost 2005 Robert
of Low Prices Greenwald
War Horse 2011 Steven Spielberg Lee Hall Richard Curtis
390

War of the Worlds 2005 Steven Spielberg Josh Friedman David Koepp
WarGames 1983 John Badham Lawrence Lesker Walter Parkes
Washington Masquerade 1932 Charles Brabin John Meehan Samuel Blythe
Washington Merry-Go- 1932 James Cruze Jo Swerling
Round, The
Washington Story, The 1952 Robert Pirosh Robert Pirosh
Wasp Woman, The 1959 Roger Corman Leo Gordon
Watch on the Rhine 1942 Herman Shumlin Dashiell Hammett
Watchmen 2009 Zack Snyder David Hayter Alex Tse
Way Down East 1920 D.W. Griffith Anthony Paul Kelly
Way We Were, The 1973 Sydney Pollack Arthur Laurents

We Are Marshall 2006 McG Jamie Linden
West of Memphis 2012 Amy Berg Amy Berg Billy McMillin
West of Thunder 2012 Jody Marriott Jody Marriott Dan Davies
Bar-Lev, Steve Bar-Lev
Russell
What Every Woman 1921 William C. de Olga Printzlau J.M. Barrie
Knows Mille
What Happened on 1901 George S.
Twenty-Third Street, New Fleming and
York City Edwin S. Porter
When a Woman Sins 1918 J. Gordon Betta Breuil
Edwards
When the Levees Broke 2006 Spike Lee
White House Down 2013 Roland James Vanderbilt
Emmerich
White Nights 1985 Taylor Hackford James Goldman Eric Hughes
Who’ll Stop the Rain 1978 Karl Reisz Judith Rascoe
Wild in the Streets 1968 Barry Shear Robert Thom
Wild River 1960 Elia Kazan Paul Osborn
Wilson 1944 Henry King Lamar Trotti
Windtalkers 2002 John Woo John Rice Joe Batteer
Winter Kills 1979 William Richert William Richert
Won’t Back Down 2012 Daniel Barnz Brin Hill Daniel Barnz
Working Girl 1988 Mike Nichols Kevin Wade
World Trade Center 2006 Oliver Stone Andrea Berloff John McLoughlin et al.
World War Z 2013 Marc Forster Matthew Michael Drew Goddard et al.
Carnahan
WUSA 1970 Stuart Stuart Rosenberg
Rosenberg
xXx: State of the Union 2005 Lee Tamahori Simon Kinberg
Young Mr. Lincoln 1939 John Ford Lamar Trotti
Z 1968 Costa-Gavras Costa-Gavras Jorge Sampron
Zero Dark Thirty 2012 Kathryn Bigelow Mark Boal
Zoot Suit 1981 Luis Valdez Luis Valdez
391

Index
Page numbers in bold refer to images; page numbers in italics refer to notes.
Abe Lincoln in Illinois, 79, 117, 372 Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, 331
abortion, 34, 67, 75, 147, 172, 232, 244, 258, 315, AIDS, 5, 47, 258, 258–260
325, 334–335, 339 Air Force Entertainment Liaison Office, 83, 90
Absolute Power, 17, 18, 44, 230, 235, 372 Air Force One, 19, 44, 231, 223, 227–228, 351,
Abu Ghraib, 286, 349, 379 372
Academy Awards, 16, 30, 63, 66, 106, 119, 132, Airport, 359
156, 178, 183, 187, 189, 199, 200, 201, 207, Alamo Bay, 200–201, 372
210, 214, 271, 294, 295, 297, 304 Alda, Alan, 174, 175
Accused, The, 330, 332, 372 Aldrich, Robert, 185, 390
ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), 72, 226 Alien, 12
action hero (action movies), viii, 13, 28, 31, 32, 44, Alienation, 38, 103, 166–167, 189, 233–234, 323
47, 72, 78, 80–81, 83, 87, 154, 222, 224, 228, Aliens, 29
240, 351 Aliens (space), 15, 16, 26, 44, 62, 147, 148, 227,
activist, vii, 30, 43, 46, 62, 74, 123, 124, 157, 164, 234, 261, 287, 352, 357, 359, 366, 368, 373
173, 179, 180, 182, 187, 199, 208, 211, 232, All Quiet on the Western Front, 12, 104, 106, 124,
280, 284, 285, 288, 294, 297, 304, 306, 331, 372
344 All The President’s Men, 4, 31, 37, 38, 42, 43, 169,
activism, 63, 77, 113, 154, 165, 170, 199, 207, 208, 176–178, 180, 182, 191, 244, 253, 259, 372
215, 270, 293, 306 All The King’s Men, 121, 135, 146, 175, 372
actors and acting, 45–48 allegory, 7, 13, 66, 139, 140, 142, 147, 165, 346–
actualities, 270 349, 356
adaptation, 10, 26, 117, 142, 159, 212, 234, 299, Allen, Woody, 35, 181–182, 372, 373
341, 355 al-Qaeda, 240, 242, 280, 364, 369
adultery, 42, 69, 319, 320 Altman, Robert, 37–38, 43–44, 155, 167, 183, 218,
Advise and Consent, 154, 157–160, 175, 176, 372 238–239, 263, 383, 384, 387
advocacy documentaries, 277, 278, 283 AFI (American Film Institute), 102, 104, 156
Aeneid, The, 347 ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), 72, 226
Affleck, Ben 8, 23, 35, 74, 238, 251–253, 308, 372, Allen, Joan, 313, 334
379 American Graffiti, 170, 185, 372
Affordable Care Act, 4, 265 American Legion, 141, 144
Afghanistan, 8, 243, 244, 250, 286 American President, The, 13, 34, 44, 226–227
African-American, (See Chapter 14), 46, 49, 97, Amistad, 10, 299, 312, 372
98, 102, 133, 145, 165, 220, 244, 245, 270, 280, amputee, 15–16, 131
287, 292, 293, 296, 297, 299, 301–305, 307, Anaconda, 363
309–11, 338, 353, 365 anarchy, 37, 270
Afro, 361 androgynous, 318, 324
393
INDEX
…And Justice For All, 31 Barbershop, 300–301, 373

Angel Eyes, 16 Barthes, Roland, 23
Annapolis, 82 Basic Instinct, 325, 327–328, 373
Anschutz Corporation, 86, 90 Bataan, 129, 241
Anticapitalism, (See Chapter 9) Batista, Fulgencio, 254
antifascism, 111, 122–129, 182 Batman, 73
antirevolutionary, 146, 211–212 Battle for Haditha, 243–244
antiwar, 103, 106, 154, 164–167, 170–171, 180, Battle Los Angeles, 364, 373
182, 185–188, 206–208, 224, 225, 238, 241, Battleship, 15, 16, 367, 373
244 Baudrillard, Jean, 238, 263
apathy (political), 38, 170, 188, 200, 221, 244, 284 Beatty, Warren, 43, 183, 205, 204–207, 220, 374,
Apocalypse Now, 36, 38, 82, 187–189, 196, 214, 387, 388
241, 372 Beetlejuice, 227

apocalypse, 161–163, 203, 347–349, 364, 369 Being There, 190–191, 373
apocalyptic, viii, 56, 73, 253, 258, 261, 263, Beloved, 299, 373
306, 308, 344, 345, 347, 348, 356, 359, 362, Berg, Peter, 250, 373, 378, 382
364–367 Best Man, The, 159–160, 373
apocalyptic films of the twenty-first century, 344, Best Years of Our Lives, The, 23, 131–133, 242,
364–368 187, 373
apocalyptic films and camp, 346–349 Betrayed, 30, 295–296, 373
apocalyptic films and allegory, 346–349 Beverly Hills Cop, 298, 373
Apocalypto, 372 Bible, 141, 258, 263
apolitical films, 7, 14, 127, 138, 147 Biden, Joe, 57
apolitical, 150, 207, 212 Biel, Jessica, 242
Arab, 46, 203, 204, 216, 223–224, 234, 238, 275, Big Chill, The, 208–209, 373
287 Big Jim McLain, 141, 189, 373
Arachnophobia, 363 Big Parade, The, 30, 103–104, 106, 111, 140, 373
Arbitrage, 20, 260, 372 Big Wednesday, 185, 373
Argo, 3, 5, 7, 8, 23, 30, 87, 253–256, 264, 276, 372 Bigelow, Kathryn, 35–38, 58, 84, 90, 245–249,
Aryan, 100 263–264, 381, 391
Ashby, Hal, 189, 373, 375, 375, 388 biopic (political), 4, 22, 146, 157, 254–258, 336–
Ashitey, Clare-Hope, 348 340, 337
assassination, 30, 38, 41, 43, 56, 166, 176, 212, biopic (social-political), 258–261
359 biopic, 16, 268, 270, 349
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, 324, 358, 373 Birds, The, 345–346, 346, 368, 369
Atlas Shrugged, 10, 372 Birth of a Nation, The, 11, 30, 53, 67, 68, 95,
Atomic Café, 271–274, 372 97–102, 99, 102, 106, 114, 117, 126, 165, 292–
Auteur, 11–12, 14, 35, 58 293, 300, 305, 316–317, 373
Avatar, vii, 30, 32, 58, 373 Blackboard Jungle, The, 145
Avengers, The, 62 Black Hawk Down, 238, 373
Avenging angels, 330–333 Biskind, Peter, 58, 70, 147–148, 151, 192
blackface, 99, 100, 312, blacks-in-burnt-cork, 292
baby boom, 122, 218, 325, 334 Black Fury, 112–114, 351
Baby Boom, 328–329, 341, 373 Black Legion, 113, 373
Bachmann, Michelle, 364, 369 blacklist, 28, 64–66, 69, 88, 115, 142, 143, 150,
Back to Bataan, 129, 241, 373 151, 155, 162, 165, 167, 180–182, 350
backlash logic, 330 Blaxploitation, 297, 303
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Blindside, The, 309, 374
Women, 24, 326 Blockade, 110, 123, 374
Bait, 301, 373 blockbuster, 100, 154, 327, 344
Baldwin, Alec, 74, 222, 238 Blomkamp, Neill, 349, 367, 377
Ballad of Little Jo, The, 33 Blow Out, 14, 374
Bamboozled, 12, 291, 299–300, 372 blue-collar, 167, 179, 180, 189, 198, 199, 322, 330,
Bara, Theda, 45, 315, 317 345, 350
394
INDEX
Blue Collar, 189, 374 Capra, Frank, 115–117, 119, 134, 160, 286, 322,
Blue Steel, 16, 37 372, 378, 383, 384, 388
Boal, Mark, 249, 264, 381, 391 CARA (Classification and Ratings Administration),
Bob Roberts, 221, 374 71–72
Bobby, 254 Cars 2, 29
Bodyguard, The, 301 Carter, Jimmy, (See Chapter 9), 170, 178, 183,
Boehner, John, 251 194, 209, 354
Bogart, Humphrey, 113, 127 cartoon (animation), 12, 31, 46, 65, 80, 221, 273,
Border, The, 209, 374 300
Born Yesterday, 145–146, 374 cartoon (print), 232
Born On the Fourth of July, 224, 374 Casablanca, 13, 35, 127–128, 374
Bound for Glory, 189, 374 Casualties of War, 214, 243, 375
Bourne Identity, The, 7, 62, 374 Catch 22, 167, 375

Bourne Supremacy, The, 248, 374 Catholics (censorship), 68, 70
Bowling for Columbine, 270, 272–274, 374 Catholics (onscreen), 39, 141
Boys in Company C, The, 185–188, 374 Catholic church, 213, 279
Boyz N the Hood, 297, 374 celebrity (celebrities), 74–78, 184
Brain Eaters, The, 357 censorship (censor, censors), 66–73, 88, 90, 124,
Brain That Wouldn’t Die, The, 357 131, 155, 292
Brain from Planet Arous, The, 357, 358 centralization of film industry, 84–86
Brain, The, 357 Cesar Chavez, 260, 264
brainwashing, 155, 161, 357, 364 CGI (computer generated imagery), 50, 72, 234,
Brando, Marlon, 62–63, 143–146, 157, 187–188 257, 297
Breen, Joseph, 70 Chandler, Raymond, 387
Brokeback Mountain, 6, 374 Chaplin, Charlie, 124,
Broken Arrow, 145, 165, 374 Charlie Wilson’s War, 8, 9, 260, 375
Broken Barriers, 102 Chastain, Jessica, 41
Broken Blossoms, 67 Chayefsky, Paddy, 184, 384
Brubaker, 12, 201, 374 Chavez, Cesar, 260, 261
Bulworth, 21, 26, 41, 49, 218, 220–221, 374 Che!, 170, 375
bundlers (Hollywood), 75 Che: Part One and Che: Part Two, 254–255
bureaucracy, 174, 200–204, 230, 365, Cheney, Richard, (See Chapter 12), 242, 248, 256,
bureaucrats, 34, 197, 203, 204, 210, 368, 241, 301, 261, 280, 286–287, 368
367–368 Chandler, Raymond, 323
Bush, George H.W., (See Chapter 10), 78, 194, Cheyenne Autumn, 165, 375
206, 218, 219, 229, 340 Children of Men, 348–349, 348, 349, 368, 369, 375
Bush, George W., (See Chapter 12), vii, 20, 62, Chinatown, 176, 184, 375
89, 222, 225, 238–244, 248–250, 252, 254, China Syndrome, The, 12, 43, 53, 55, 56, 178–180,
256–258, 261, 264–265, 274–275, 279–281, 191, 198–199, 201, 375
284–286, 301, 336, 339–340, 366, 368 CIA, 41, 161, 176, 211, 238, 249, 250, 253–254,
359
Camelot, 150 cinematic language, viii, 308, 344
camp, 140, 327, 346–349, 354, 362, 363 Citizen Kane, 42–43, 118, 125–127, 130, 232, 375
campaigns (electoral), 11, 12, 23, 28, 29, 36, 38, Citizen Ruth, 34, 232, 375
48, 55, 62, 73–77, 80, 88, 89, 109, 125, 130, Citizens United, 75–77, 76, 89, 279, 364
133, 149, 171–178, 183, 203, 204, 220–222, Citizenship, 69, 252
229, 281, 283, 319, 320, 333, 337–340, 345, Civil Action, A, 10, 232, 375
359, 363, 364 Civil rights, 75, 138, 154, 165, 166, 180, 182, 202,
Campaign, The, 7, 12, 36, 77, 77, 374 224, 263, 293–296, 301, 306, 308, 325, 346
Candidate, The, 7, 12, 38, 171–176, 172, 180, 182, Civil War (American), 46, 64, 98, 101, 114, 255–
183, 191, 244, 374 256, 256, 299
Capitalism: A Love Story, 281, 283, 374 Civil War (Spanish), 113, 122–123, 127
capitalist, 354 civilian, 131, 132, 213, 243
Capitol Hill, 365 civilization, 6, 360
395
INDEX
Civilization, 81 Contagion, 42, 53, 349, 352, 364, 368, 387

Clansman, The, 98 Contraband, 102
Clean Air Act, 354 Contender, The, 325, 333–336, 345, 375
Clean Water Act, 284, 354 Cooper, Bradley, 57
Clear and Present Danger, 222, 230, 375 Cooper, Chris, 200, 222
Cleopatra, 314–315, 375 Cooper, Gary, 115, 139, 140, 142–143, 322
climate change, 62–63, 261, 261–262 Cooper, Merian C., 352, 382
Clinton, Bill, 74, 194, 218–220, 226, 227, 229, Core, The, 347, 349, 369, 376
276, 279, 333–335, 340 Country, 55, 199–201, 376
Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 76, 76, 276, 288, 290, Coogler, Ryan, 378
327, 335–336 Cooper, Gary, 115, 139, 140, 142, 322, 372
Clooney, George, 30, 35, 51–52, 59, 74, 87, 225, Coppola, Francis Ford, 170, 187, 242, 372, 376,
379, 381 379, 385

Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 14, 170, 375 corporate power, 183, 188–192, 336, 363
Clover, Carol, 17 corporate raiding, 201
Coffy, 294, 375 corporate citizenship, 75–76, 279, 289, 363–364,
Cold War, (See Chapters 7, 10), 82–84, 131, 138, 363
142, 150, 154, 147, 161–164, 166, 195–198, corporate ownership (films), 85–86
222–225, 311, 323, 336, 351, 356–359, 388 Corporation, The, 279–280
Collateral Damage, 28, 238, 375 corporations, 184, 279–281, 363, 363
Color Purple, The, 299, 375 Cosmopolis, 20
combat films, 33, 79, 129, 185, 225, 238, 264 Costa-Gavras, 30, 56, 60, 167, 171, 210, 211, 295,
Combs, James, 8, 11, 13–15, 23, 24, 57, 60, 80–82, 373, 384, 388, 391
89, 271, 289 Costner, Kevin, 32, 83, 228, 376
Combs, Sara, 11, 80–82, 89, 271, 289 counterculture, (See Chapter 8), 208, 334, 360
Coming Home, 186–190, 325, 375 coup, 161–162, 166, 203, 210–211
community (communal), 62, 111–113, 112, 305, courtroom scenes, 31, 140, 232, 273, 299
306 covert spectacle, 252–253
communism (communist), (See Chapters 3 and 7), cowboy, 6, 20, 32, 46, 48, 163, 258, 258, 350,
63–66, 113, 138, 140–146, 150, 204–207, 205, 351
356–359, 358 Crawford, Broderick, 135, 145
Company Men, The, 252–253 Crawford, Joan, 33, 55, 69, 319–320, 324
comrade (See also Tender Comrade), 206, 243 Creature from the Black Lagoon, 15, 148, 324, 376
Confessions of a Nazi Spy, 123, 375 Crimson Tide, 46, 222–223, 376
conformity, (See Chapter 7), 166, 203, 233 Crisis, 376
conglomerates (media), 29, 49–52, 59, 84–86 Crisis, AIDS, 5, 259
Congress, 17, 64, 73, 76, 109–110, 204, 231, crisis, energy, 354
277–279, 278 crisis, Iran hostage, 170, 253
Congressional films of the 1990s, 231 crises, 364
Congressman, 9 Crossfire, 132–133, 376
Conservative (conservatives), 5, 21, 27–30, 36, Crowd, The, 30, 103
55, 62, 64–65, 70–71, 74–77, 79, 84, 86, 102, Crucible, The, 12–13
106, 116–117, 138, 140, 145–147, 149, 163, Cruise, Tom, 44, 82, 193, 198, 224, 244, 366, 366
170–171, 174, 198, 201–202, 204, 210, 213, crusade, anti-communist, 140–142
221–222, 227, 230, 232, 234, 245, 248, 255, crusade (and George W. Bush), 257–258
257, 262, 285, 287, 288, 325–328, 336, 338– crusade (crusading), 43, 67, 115, 122, 130, 259
340, 345, 346, 362, 368 Cruz, Ted, 78, 89, 365
Conspiracy Theory, 34, 375 Cuba, 125, 161, 170, 196, 254–255
conspiracy, 43, 228, 231, Cuban missile crisis, 83, 154, 196
conspirators, 43 Cukor, George, 145–146, 374
Constitutional Amendments, First, 67, 75, 124, Curtiz, Michael, 127–128, 374, 384, 387
232, Equal Rights, 201, 325, Thirteenth, 255, cynicism, social, 106–109
256, Nineteenth, 318, Colorado Amendment cynicism, political, (See Chapter 9), 122, 135, 184,
Two, 86 204, 209, 221, 328
396
INDEX
Dallas Buyers Club, 258–260, 258, 259 Doherty, Thomas, 124

Damon, Matt, 62–63, 74, 247–248, 262, 282, 308, Double Indemnity, 322–324, 377
367, 367–368, 369, 386 Douglas, Melvin, 171, 174, 191, 320
Dances with Wolves, 32, 318, 376 Douglas, Michael, 13, 42, 52, 179, 201, 202, 226–
Daniel, 207–209, 215 227, 326–328, 359,
Daniels, Lee, 35, 304, 306, 309, 312, 382, 386 Dr. Strangelove (or: How I Learned to Stop
Dargis, Manohla, 50, 59, 263, 367, 369 Worrying and Love the Bomb), 153, 160–163,
Dark City, 233, 234, 376 219, 347, 377
Dark Horse, The, 7, 376 Dr. Zhivago, 163, 377
Dark Knight, The, 73, 376 Dracula, 107, 352
Dark Knight Rises, The, 73, 344, 364, 376 Dragnet, 274
Darwin, Charles (Darwinian), 156, 344, 360 Dredd, 344, 364
Dash, Julie, 302–303 D’Souza, Dinesh, 287–288, 390

Daughters of the Dust, 302, 302–303 Dunaway, Faye, 165, 184
Dave, 34, 226–227, 376 Dunham, Lena, 74
Day After Tomorrow, The, 53, 261, 364, 376 Dystopian, (See Chapter 16), 12, 261, 345, 362,
Death of a President, 256–257 364, 367, 369
debt ceiling debate, 62, 251
debt, national, 253, 287 Earthquake, 359, 362
Debt, The, 376 Eastwood, Clint, 17, 28, 75, 78, 171, 198, 215,
Deer Hunter, The, 34, 56, 186–187, 191, 209, 214, 218, 230, 372, 375, 378, 380, 381, 382, 384
241, 376 Easy Rider, 155, 166–167, 170, 377
Defiant Ones, The, 145, 156, 165, 293, 376 Ebert, Roger, 10, 58, 232, 263, 282, 301, 303, 360
Deliverance, 332, 376 Ejiofor, Chiwetel, 309–311, 310
democracy, 65, 70, 111, 116, 117, 123–124, 128, Elba, Idris, 49, 309
146–147, 178, 197, 232, 263, 289, 351, 355– Election, 7, 87, 232–233, 377
356, 358, 365 elections, viii, 6, 11, 20–21, 24, 28–30, 42, 48, 55,
democratic, 8, 21, 64, 72–77, 80, 113, 134, 154, 58, 62, 72–81, 89, 112, 125–126, 130–133, 148,
166, 170, 194, 203, 226, 227, 231, 276, 279, 149, 154, 164, 170–174, 178, 182, 183, 185,
289, 334–335, 338, 341 194–195, 200 218–222, 226, 229, 233, 238,
detention, 55, 349 248–249, 273–275, 280, 288, 287–289, 307,
Devil’s Daughter, The, 317, 376 333, 337, 340, 363–364
DiCaprio, Leonardo, 62–63, 260, 264 El Norte, 209–210, 377
Dick, 7, 23, 44, 229, 376 Eisenhower, Dwight D., (See Chapter 7), 138, 150,
dictator (dictatorship), 71, 78, 110, 111, 116, 211, 286, 306
240, 254, 270 El Salvador, 194, 209–215
Diesel, Vin, 351–352 Elysium, 50, 308, 311, 344, 349, 364, 366–369,
digital cinematic technology, 44, 86–87, 91, 364 367, 377
Dirty Harry, 17, 49, 55, 75, 78, 171, 218, 230, 377 Enemy of the State, 34, 301, 377
disaster, (See Chapter 16), 283–285 Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, 279–280,
disaster films of the 1970s, 359–363 377
disaster films of the 1990s, 363 Equalizer, The, 46
disaster films of the 2000s–2010s, 364–368 Erickson, Hal, 271, 289
Disclosure, 327–328, 377 Erin Brockovich, 5, 12, 48, 377
disillusionment, 103, 109, 170, 182–185, 188, Ethnicity, 49, 69, 90, 97, 106–107, 134, 253, 254,
204–207, 212, 213, 220, 240, 243, 286, 322 262, 351–352
Disney, 29, 49, 51, 65, 84–86, 123, 273–274 evildoers, 257
Distinguished Gentleman, The, 231, 377 evolution, 156–157, 157
Dixon, Thomas, Jr., 98 Executive Decision, 223, 377
Dixon, Winston Wheeler, 86, 91, 241, 263 Executive Suite, 323–324, 377
Django Unchained, 32–33, 38–39, 298, 311, 377 externalities (corporate), 279–281
Dmytryk, Edward, 373, 376, 380, 389 extraordinary rendition, 55
Do The Right Thing, 34, 296–299, 377 Extraordinary Rendition, 244
documentaries, (See Chapter 13), 12, 76, 269, 288 Extremities, 330–332, 377
397
INDEX
Face In The Crowd, A, 12, 149, 150, 156, 377 Fruitvale Station, 307–309, 308, 378
Fahrenheit 9/11, vii, viii, 20–21, 29, 87–88, 262, Fury, 112, 114, 378
269, 273–275, 285, 287, 288, 289, 377
Fail Safe, 162–163, 185, 207, 378 Game Change, 28, 51, 306, 337–341, 338, 378
Fair Game, 248 Gabriel Over The White House, 69, 110–111, 114,
Faludi, Susan, 24, 326 119, 378
Far From Heaven, 37, 378 Gadson, Col. Gregory D., 16
farmers, 198–201 gangster films, 12, 106–109
Farmer’s Daughter, The, 321, 378 Gangster Squad, 73, 379
fascism, 111, 254, 308, 308–309, 351 Gandhi, 54, 272, 378
Fatal Attraction, 325–328, 330, 341, 378 Gasland (Gasland II), 53, 277, 284–285, 379
FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 16, 65, 123, gender, (See Chapter 15), viii, 8, 15–17, 24, 38, 81,
141, 144, 187, 197, 208, 239, 295, 381 330, 339, 345
FDA (Federal Drug Administration), 258–259 genre, vii, ix, 5–7, 11–13, 17, 22, 23, 32–34, 46,
FEC (Federal Election Commission), 75–76 147–148, 241, 283, 303, 349, 355, 359, 367,
feminism, (See Chapter 15), 13, 109, 144, 175, 369
201, 207, 263 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 324, 379
femme fatale, 318, 325–328 Gentlemen’s Agreement, 12, 132–133, 379
Ferguson, Charles, 286, 288, 381 Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, The, 286, 379
Ferguson, Miriam “Ma,” 317 Gianos, Phillip, 4, 14, 22, 23, 28, 31, 33, 34, 49,
Field, Sally, 48, 190, 199, 231 52, 57, 58, 59
First Blood, 195–197 Gibson, Mel, 199, 262, 372, 385
First Blood II, 241, 263 Gingrich, Newt, 76, 79, 89
First Monday in October, 202 Gish, Lillian, 95, 99
F.I.S.T., 189, 195, 377 Glory, 46, 296–297, 379
Five Came Back, 349–352 Godfather, The, 7, 12, 39, 176, 184, 187, 379
Fog of War, The, 275 Goldman, William, 36, 58, 178, 192, 230, 372
Fonda, Henry, 79, 117–119, 123, 148, 158–162 Goldwyn, Samuel, 7, 129, 132
Fonda, Jane, 21, 28, 43, 167, 178–180, 182, 187, Good Night and Good Luck, 12, 30, 52, 61, 66, 87,
191–192, 192, 213, 306, 328 318, 322, 379
Fonda, Peter, 166 Gone With The Wind, 12, 48, 114–115, 206, 292,
Fonda, Jane, 21, 28, 43, 167, 178–180, 182, 187, 300, 349, 379
191–192, 192, 213, 306, 328 Gordon-Levitt, Joseph, 246
Fool There Was, A, 46, 317, 322, 327, 378 Gore, Al, 62, 73
Ford, Harrison, 46, 218, 222, 228, 230, 235, 238, Gorgeous Hussy, The, 12, 320–321
330, 351 Grace Is Gone, 244
Ford, Gerald, (See Chapter 9), 170, 178, 182 Graduate, The, 155, 165, 229, 379
Ford, John, 6, 36, 82, 117–119, 148, 165, 350, 373, Grant, Oscar, 307–309
375, 379, 381, 382, 391 Grapes of Wrath, The, 117–119, 125, 145, 165,
Formalism, 36–43 189, 379
Forman, Milos, 208, 232, 295, 380, 385, 386 Grassroots, 379
Forrest Gump, 218, 224–225, 378 grassroots organizing, 190
Fox Network, 275, 276 Great Dictator, The, 124
42, 309 The Great McGinty, 130
48 Hrs, 298, 378 Greed, 103, 379
Fountainhead, The, 140–141 Green Berets, The, 82, 164, 185, 241, 379
fracking, 21, 260, 262, 284–285 Green Zone, The, 6, 240, 247–248, 286, 379
FrackNation, 284–285, 290 Griffith, D.W., 11, 30, 67, 68, 96, 97–102, 292–
Frailty, 257–258 293, 316, 372, 373, 381, 385, 391
Frankenheimer, John, 29, 58, 155, 161, 383, 387 guerrilla warfare, 78, 146, 164, 209–210, 280
Frankenstein, 69, 71, 107, 340 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 34, 156, 165, 294,
Front, The, 181–182, 372 380
Frost, David, 255 Gunner Palace, 285
Frost/Nixon, 6–7, 18–19, 255, 378 Guthrie, Woody, 189
398
INDEX
Hackman, Gene, 211, 223, 230, 295, 344 Human Stain, The, 298–299, 380
Hair, 208, 380 Hunger Games, The, 344, 345, 380
Hallelujah, 293 Hunt for Red October, The, 222, 380
Hand That Rocks The Cradle, The, 326, 388 Hurricane Katrina, 283–284, 364
Hanks, Tom, 5, 8, 9, 23, 28, 46, 47, 74, 224–225, Hurt Locker, The, 12, 25–26, 30, 34, 36, 84, 245–
382 249, 263, 264, 381
Hays, William H., (Hays Office, Hays Code), Hussein, Saddam, 218, 219, 240–241, 248, 252,
68–72, 88, 102, 104, 110, 113–114, 319 285, 287, 339
Harlan County USA, 270, 380 Huston, John, 82, 381, 382
Harriet Craig, 323–324, 380 hydraulic fracturing (see also “fracking”), 285
Hartman, Phil, 362, 363
Head of State, 301, 380 I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, 108, 381
Hearst, William Randolph, 110, 125 I Married a Communist, 65, 381

Heartbreak Ridge, 198, 380 I Was a Communist for the FBI, 65, 381
Hearts and Minds, 263, 270–271, 289, 380 Iconoclast, The, 96, 97
Heaven’s Gate, 191, 380 iconography, vii, 7, 32, 81, 345, 360
Heath, Stephen, 341 idealistic, 125, 211
Hellman, Lillian, 23, 65, 127–129, 147, 180–182, ideology (ideological), 5–6, 22, 23, 33, 36, 45, 167,
385 168, 202, 220, 241, 328
Hepburn, Katharine, 134, 159, 202, 294 Illicit, 69
Her Honor The Governor, 317, 380 Illusions, 302
Heston, Charlton 75, 273, 359–364, 361, 363, Imitation of Life, 145, 293, 381
366–367 immigration, 97, 119, 125, 209, 213, 261, 316
High Noon, 66, 139, 142–143, 156, 380 In The Heat of the Night, 293–294, 381
Hill, Anita, 300, 327–328 In The Line of Fire, 230, 381
Hillary: The Movie, 76, 380 In The Valley of Elah, 243–244, 381
Hinson, Hal, 213, 234, 296 Inarritu, Alejandro Gonzalez, 239
Hitchcock, Alfred, 40–41, 70, 88, 345, 347, 355– Independence Day, 12, 13, 19, 34, 62, 227–228,
356, 369, 383 381
Hitler, Adolf, 59, 83, 124–128, 136, 380 independents, 21, 28–29, 51–52, 71, 85–88, 91,
Hitler’s Children, 127 139, 154–155, 166, 170, 178, 189, 194, 200,
Hitler Gang, The, 127 210, 215, 218, 221, 232, 234, 257, 274, 285,
Hitler’s Madman, 127 292–296, 303, 304, 332
Hobby Lobby (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Supreme Indians (American), 32, 62–63, 102, 109, 145,
Court decision), 265, 279, 364 164–165, 350
Hoffman, Dustin, 177, 217, 219, 329 Indiewood, 29
Holden, Stephen, 31, 58, 263, 300, 312 Individualism, 19, 30, 114, 138, 196, 206, 233,
Hollywood, (See Chapter 6), 23, 29, 36, 47, 58–59, 309, 346, 360, 368
63–69, 74–78, 80, 84–85, 88–91, 106, 114, Individualized (films), 43, 51
121–136, 139, 140–144, 145, 151, 161, 164, Inglourious Basterds, 393
167, 170, 171, 180, 185–188, 189, 192, 205, Inherit the Wind, 156, 157, 381
206, 217, 218, 229, 234, 238, 247, 253, 254, Inside Job, 277, 281, 282, 283, 286, 290, 381
262–263, 264, 270, 292, 293–294, 296, 299, Insider, The, 19, 232, 381
301, 309, 310, 334, 355, 356, 368, 368, 380 international, vii, 8, 46, 49–51, 85, 127, 130, 138,
Hollywood studios, 21, 47, 49–51, 69, 71, 85, 87, 144, 161, 194, 197, 205, 209, 215, 218, 221,
90, 103, 124, 138, 166, 167, 170, 189, 218 223, 225, 233–234, 239, 247, 264, 310–31, 369
Hollywood on Trial, 270, 380 internationalism, 122–125
holocaust, 163 Internet, 4, 28, 52, 53, 85, 87, 243
Home of the Brave (1949), 133, 156, 293 Interrogation (and interrogation techniques), 55,
Home of the Brave (2004), 242, 245 249, 254, 286
HUAC (See Chapters 3, 7), 63–66, 74, 117, 123– interrotron, 275
124, 138–146, 180–182, 270 interventionism, 122–123, 142, 154, 161, 194, 209
Hughes Brothers (Allen and Albert), 35, 297, 384 intervention, by courts, 364
Hughes, Howard, 131, 140 intervention, filmic, 228
399
INDEX
Intolerance, 30, 68, 101, 381 Kisses for My President, 160

Intruder in the Dust, 133, 293, 381 Klute, 48
Invaders from Mars, 357 Kohner, Susan, 145
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 7, 12, 15, 139, Korean War, 17, 138, 161, 183
148, 381 Kramer, Stanley, 139, 142, 154–157, 165, 294,
Invasion, The, 368 376, 380, 381, 385, 388
Invasion U.S.A., 54, 196–197, 357, 381 Kramer vs. Kramer, 325, 382
invasion (military), 8, 242, 357 Ku Klux Klan, 100, 114, 117, 293
Invisible War, The, 277–279, 277–278, 289
Iraq (Iraqis, Iraq War), 6, 15, 16, 26, 30, 34, 55, labor unions, 65, 75, 76, 96–97, 102, 106, 113,
62, 78, 88, 194, 219, 225, 238–248, 246, 250, 118–119, 123, 140, 143–144, 173, 188–192,
252, 254, 256, 257, 263, 264, 274, 275, 280, 198–200, 260, 270, 280, 336, 363
285–287, 290, 335–338, 349, 349, 365, 366 Lara Croft Tomb Raider, 73, 382
Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers, 285 Last Hurrah, The, 138, 148–150, 156, 382
Iraq in Fragments, 285 Last Samurai, The, 32, 382
Iran, 8, 170, 194, 209, 230, 244, 253–254, 287 Latina, 307
Iron Curtain, 140, 381 Latino, 212, 382
Iron Eagle, 198, 203, 381 Latino, 80, 145, 200, 211–212, 382
Iron Lady, 12, 50, 336–339, 337, 341, 381 Lee, Spike, 34–35, 37, 46, 74, 283, 296–299, 311
Iron Man, 31, 49, 83, 367 Lemmons, Kasi, 303–306, 311
Islam (Islamic), 223–224, 239, 241, 287 Lenin, Vladimir (Leninist), 64, 88
isolationism, 70, 103, 122, 124, 127, 128, 209 Lethal Weapon, 298, 382
isolationists, 130 Letty Lynton, 55
isolation (social), 345–346 Lewinsky, Monica, 231, 335
I Spit On Your Grave, 332, 381 Lewis, Daniel Day, 48, 79, 256
It, 318 liberal, 5, 21, 36–37, 117, 138, 141, 145, 148, 159,
163, 202, 220
Jackson, Andrew, 320–321 liberators, 287
Jackson, Jesse, 301 libertarian, 10, 346
Jackson, Samuel, 74, 242, 298, 303 Library of Congress, 6, 10, 11, 23, 177, 293, 302,
JFK, 4, 228–229, 235, 256, 382 341, 344, 369
Joe, 167, 189, 382 Lieberman, Joe, 72
Johnny Got His Gun, 167, 382 Lifeboat, 355–356, 369, 383
Johnson, Dwayne, 242 Lincoln, 5, 7, 12, 17, 28, 30, 44, 54, 87, 255, 256,
journalist (reporter), 11, 43, 115, 164, 179, 204, 260, 383
205, 211, 212, 242, 253–254, 359 Lincoln, Abraham, 17, 18, 79, 98, 101, 102, 109–
Juarez, 123, 209, 382 111, 121, 130, 255, 256
Judgment at Nuremburg, 156, 382 Lincoln Memorial, 115–116, 141
Julia, 182 Linney, Laura, 62
just war, 242 Lions for Lambs, 244–245, 286, 383
justice, 6, 31 Littlefeather, Sacheen, 62–63
Loeb, David, 51–52
Kael, Pauline 163, 167, 212 Lonestar, 221, 383
Kellner, Douglas, 4, 22, 359, 368, 368 Lone Survivor, 250, 264
Kennedy, John F., (See Chapter 8), 41, 56, 71, 83, Long, Walter, 99
84, 117, 150, 154, 159, 161, 171, 176, 226, 228, L.A. Rebellion, 302–304
230, 306, 339 lynching, 112, 114, 133, 293
Kennedy, Robert F., 41, 166, 254 Lynch, Jessica, 252
Kill a Mockingbird, To, 293, 389 Lyne, Adrian, 315, 366
Killing Fields, The, 29, 214, 382
King Kong, 69, 319, 352–354, 358, 382 MacMurray, Fred, 160, 322, 324
King, Jr., Martin Luther, 159, 166 mafia, 159, 176
Kingdom, The, 35, 58, 382 Maid in Manhattan, 30
Kiss of the Spiderwoman, 212, 392 Malcolm X, 5, 46, 299, 383
400
INDEX
Malcolm X, 296–297 Mississippi Burning, 295–296, 384
Manchurian Candidate, The, 29, 154–155, 161, Mo’Nique, 304
301, 335–336, 383 montage, 97, 111, 115, 116, 174, 203, 245
Mandela, Nelson, 49, 309 montage editing, 39–40
Manhattan Project, The, 202, 383 Moore, Juanita, 145
Mann Act, 354 Moore, Julianne, 337, 338–341
Marine Corps, 83, 250 Moore, Michael, 62, 67, 239, 269, 270, 271, 276,
Mars Attacks!, 44, 227, 383 281, 285, 374, 377, 387, 388
Marsh, Mae, 95, 99 Mothra, 346
Marx Brothers, 107, 113 Mount Rushmore, 70, 88
Marx, Karl (Marxist), 88, 146, 210, 249 moviegoing, 52–54, 139
Masculinity, 6, 47, 75, 258, 315, 323, 324, 326, MPAA, 65, 70–72, 88
367 MPPDA, 67–70, 88, 110, 113

M*A*S*H, 167, 183, 238, 383 Mr. Mom, 329–330, 384
Mass media, 4, 14, 20, 24, 53, 78, 85, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, 12, 14, 15, 34, 43,
Matewan, 200–201, 295, 383 49, 104, 115–117, 126, 134, 135, 154, 158–160,
Matrix, The, 233–234, 235, 383 174, 178, 180, 203, 231, 345, 349, 384
Matrix Reloaded, The, 233, 235, 383 Mrs. Miniver, 123, 127, 396
Matrix Revolutions, The, 233, 383 Ms. 45, 331–333, 372
matriarchy, 358 Murder at 1600, 230, 384
McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 183 music, 36–39, 54–55, 58, 96, 143, 162, 173, 176–
McCain, John, 20, 24, 74, 241, 249, 264, 281, 286, 177, 183, 214, 245, 271, 308
337–341 Music Box, 30, 384
McCarey, Leo, 140–141, 377, 384, 386 musicals (genre), 6, 107–109, 112, 114, 119, 131,
McCarthy, Cormac, 347, 387 208, 209, 293, 304, 319, 324
McCarthy, Joseph, 63–66, 138, 142, 161, 197 Muslim, 219, 223, 234
McCarthy, Kevin, 251 My Fellow Americans, 227, 384
McCarthyism, 63–66, 138, 144, 146, 154, 156, 270 My Son John, 141–142, 384
McConaughey, Matthew, 258–260, 259
McNamara, Robert, 275 Nair, Mira, 239
mediated politics, 14–15, 23, 63, 335, Nama, Adilifu, 16–17
Medium Cool, 166–167, 170, 212, 383 Nanook of the North, 270, 384
Medved, Michael, 58 Nashville, 37–38, 58, 183–185, 384
Meet John Doe, 12, 322, 359 National Film Registry, 293, 302
Mellen, Joan, 138, 150, 167 National Legion of Decency, 69
Men in Black, 234, 383 National Rifle Association (NRA), 73, 272, 273
Metropolis, 234 Natural Born Killers, 12, 30, 43, 59, 221, 234, 384
MIAs, 196–197 Navy Seals, 223, 384
Michael Clayton, 10, 52, 384 Navy SEALs, 41, 250
Micheaux, Oscar, 102, 114, 292–293, 323 Nazi, 33, 40, 64, 83, 117, 123–124, 127–129, 140,
Mildred Pierce, 323, 329, 384 163, 182, 225, 241, 355–356, 375
military, 29, 41, 46, 50, 81–84, 122, 123, 127, 142, Neale, Steve, 6, 23
147, 148, 154, 162, 163, 167, 183, 187, 194, negro, 292, 293, 355, 369
197, 203, 210, 222, 223, 225, 227, 228, 239, Network, 12, 184, 191, 204, 384
240–242, 247–253, 262, 271, 277–279, 285– New Deal, 64, 106–109, 113, 118–119
287, 289, 325, 344, 347, 352, 357, 360–363, Nichols, Mike, 155, 165, 167, 198, 229, 375, 379,
365 386, 388, 391
Milk, 30, 255, 262, 384 Nichols, James, 272
minority, (See Chapter 14) Nicholson, Jack, 29, 44, 209
minstrel, 299 Nickelodeons, 67, 316
miscegenation, 69, 147, 292, 353 Nimmo, Dan, 13–15, 23, 24
Missing, 29, 30, 37, 56, 210–215, 384 Nine Eleven (9/11), (See Chapter 12), 28, 38, 73,
Missing in Action, 196–197, 384 83, 286, 335, 339, 354, 364, 365
Mission to Moscow, 65, 128–130, 136, 176, 384 Nine to Five, 191, 328, 385
401
INDEX
Nixon, 6–7, 44, 229, 235, 256, 385 Paul, Ron, 346
Nixon, Richard, 64, 149, 159, 166, 170, 176–177, Paulist Pictures, 213
182–183, 226, 228–229, 235, 255, 270, 286, Paulson, Sarah, 310, 338, 339
306, 334, 362 PCA (Production Code Administration), 70, 122,
Noah, 263 126, 138, 147
Non-Stop, 240 Pearce, Richard, 200, 376
Norma Rae, 12, 48, 189–190, 198–201, 325, 385 Peck, Gregory, 132, 156, 213, 293
Northup, Solomon, 309–310 Peirce, Kimberly, 245–246, 263, 388
nostalgia, 204, 206, 208, 363, 366, Pentagon, the U.S., 82–84, 90, 167, 238, 248, 359,
Notorious, 40, 70 366,
nuclear (power, weapons), 43, 54–56, 62, 138, 154, pharmaceutical industry (“big pharma”), 8, 34,
156, 161–163, 165, 167, 178–180, 198, 203, 258–259
207, 223, 238, 248, 271, 283, 324, 329, 356, Phantom President, The, 109
358, 360, 364, 368 Philadelphia, 5, 46
nuclear age, 15, 324, 356–359 Phillippe, Ryan, 245, 246
Nyong’o, Lupita, 310, 311 Photoplay, 110, 119, 317
Pinky, 133, 293, 385
Obama, Barack, vii, viii, 20–21, 29, 62, 74–75, Places in the Heart, 199, 201, 385
77–78, 80, 84, 87, 89, 240, 248–249, 252, 254, Planet of the Apes, 167, 360–361, 367, 386, 387
260, 281, 283, 287–289, 288, 290, 305, 306– Plan of Attack, 257
307, 338–339, 352, 364, 365, 369 Platoon, 30, 36, 82, 213–215, 224–225, 386
Obama Effect, The, 385 Point of Order, 270, 27
Oblivion, 344, 360, 365–366, 385 Poitier, Sidney, 34, 56, 145, 165, 294–295
O’Connor, Sandra Day, 202, 364 Political Action Committees (Hollywood), 76
Occupy Wall Street, 254 political fantasy, 15, 32, 305, 365
Olympus Has Fallen, 44, 344, 365, 385 political images, 6, 12, 18, 20, 48, 62, 70, 74,
Omega Man, The, 359–361, 362 78–79, 82, 101, 104, 161, 222, 238, 239, 252,
On the Beach, 156, 163, 385 316, 341, 349, 354, 365
On the Waterfront, 143, 149, 189, 385 political theory and films, 9–10
Osama bin Laden, 20, 38, 41, 73, 84, 220, 248– political socialization, 17–19, 53–55
249, 258, 264, 366 politician(s), 11, 17–20, 22, 31, 34, 43, 48–49,
Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, 54–55, 57, 65, 67, 69, 73, 77–81, 88, 97–99,
276, 385 101–103, 109, 111, 114–117, 130–135, 138,
149, 157, 159, 162–163, 172–178, 183–184,
PACs (Political Action Committees), 75–76, 231 191, 196, 203–204, 214, 220, 245, 253, 274,
Palin, Sarah, 55, 62, 337–341; 338 281, 286, 324–325, 328, 335, 337, 346, 359,
Parallax View, The, 43, 176–178, 184, 301, 359, 363, 365
385 Politician, The, 97
paranoia, (See Chapter 9), 81, 207, 301–302, 336, Pollack, Sidney, 180, 372, 381, 389, 391
358 Polonsky, Abraham, 131, 155, 165, 389
Participant Media, 260–261 populism (populist), 43, 101, 114–117, 123, 125,
partisan, 8, 218, 251, 276, 365 134–135, 143, 149, 183, 184, 220, 322, 340
Passion of the Christ, The, 21, 262, 385 Poseidon Adventure, The, 344–345, 359
patriarchy (patriarchal), (See Chapter 15), 6, 258, Possessed, 319–320, 323, 386
333, 345, 358, 361 postapocalyptic, (See Chapter 16)
patriot (patriotic, patriotism), (See Chapter 10), 29, poverty, 68, 96, 154, 172, 207, 283, 290, 296
38, 40, 46, 49, 65, 70, 115, 122, 127, 128, 141, Powell, Colin, 242, 248, 252
158, 164, 173, 193–198, 203, 204, 213–215, Precious, 16, 304–306, 305, 312, 386
222–223, 225, 235, 240, 247, 250, 275, 322, prejudice, (See Chapter 14) 132–133, 186, 202,
334, 338, 341, 351 292, 296, 305, 307
Patriot Act, 251–252 Preminger, Otto, 146, 157–158, 372, 377, 382, 383
Patriot Games, 222–223, 235, 385 Presidency (American), 154, 226, 229, 352, 359
Patton, 167, 385 President Vanishes, The, 110–111
Paul, Rand, 346, 365 Presidential candidacy, 75, 80, 229, 281, 337–340
402
INDEX
Presidential characters, 18, 80, 109, 159–160, 224, Recount, 51, 386
226–229, 337–340 Redacted, 243–244
Presidential election, 28 Red Dawn, 34, 54, 196, 386
Presidential image, 20, 154, 159, 228, 255, 256– Redford, Robert, 35, 43, 165, 171–177, 180–181,
258, 200, 201, 244, 253, 375, 383–384
Pride of the Marines, 132 Reds, 29, 204, 205, 204–209, 215, 387
Primary Colors, 218, 229, 335, 386 Reds, political, (See Chapters 7 and 10)
Production Code, The, 67–72, 88–89, 114, 117, Reed, John, 204–205
122, 131, 138, 140, 146–147, 155, 160, 292, Reefer Madness, 271, 274, 387
315, 319, 321 regulations (of film industry), 64–73
profit motive, 28, 30 Reiner, Rob, 335, 372, 379, 386
progressive, 66, 70, 88, 96–97, 125, 135, 140, 214, religion (religious), 29, 64, 67–69, 71, 141, 180,
263, 321 239, 255, 257–258, 262–265, 279, 289, 348,

Promised Land, 21, 56, 260, 262, 285, 386 360–361, 364, 369
propaganda, 12, 22, 23, 29, 56, 62, 64, 65, 81–84, Religulous, 262
88, 89–90, 107, 117–119, 123–124, l28–130, remediation, 239, 254, 338
129, 133, 144–145, 205, 228, 238, 241, 243, rendition, 244
250, 264, 271, 272, 274, 286, 289, 322, 333, Rendition, 34, 55, 244, 387
356, 357 Renner, Jeremy, 246, 251
prosthetics, 15–16, 131–132, 242, 366–367 Republican(s), 8, 15, 21, 30, 34, 62, 68, 74–75,
prostitutes (prostitution), 48, 69, 147, 183, 282, 77–79, 89, 109–110, 113, 123, 129–130, 134,
315, 330, 350, 353 163, 178, 194, 202, 218, 226, 227, 229, 242,
Psycho, 324 244, 248–249, 251–252, 274, 279, 289, 325,
Public Enemy, 319, 386 334, 337–339, 338, 362–365
Pulp Fiction, 86, 298, 386 Resident Evil, 73
pure political films, 11–12, 157–160, 253–254, Restrepo, 286, 387
320–321347 Return of the Secaucus Seven, 208, 234, 387
revenge, 171, 183, 286, 295, 304, 319, 327, 328,
Quart, Leonard, 24, 132, 136 332
Quayle, Dan, 227, 334 revenge fantasy, 33, 215, 331
Quiet American, The, 142, 164, 238 revenge of the Blacklist, 180–182
revisionist (revisionism), 33, 39, 165, 191, 195,
race, (See Chapter 14) viii, 15–17, 24, 69, 145, 240–241, 253, 298, 314
156, 329, 291–312, 317, 352, 353–354, 362 revolution, 56, 64, 88, 96, 101, 102, 111, 113,
radiation, 147–148, 271, 358–359, 367 139, 142, 144, 146, 163, 166, 170, 182, 194,
Ragtime, 295, 386 204–209, 211–213, 233, 254, 294, 306
Rains, Claude, 114, 123 Rice, Condoleeza, 336
Rambo, 34, 54, 55, 195, 195–197, 204, 212–214, Riddick, 351–352, 375
240–241, 263, 386 Right Stuff, The, 202, 203, 387
Rand, Ayn, 10, 65, 140–141, 365 Risky Business, 44, 48
rape, 31, 68, 243, 276, 277–279, 289, 293, 303, Ritt, Martin, 43, 155, 189, 378, 379, 385, 388
317, 325, 331–333 River, The, 55, 199–201, 391
Reagan, 286 Road, The, 347–349, 387
Reagan, Ronald, (See Chapter 10), 20, 46, 48, 55, Road to Perdition, The, 47
56, 65, 78–82, 89, 145, 170, 178, 184, 218, 222, Roberts, Julia, 9, 28, 47–48
230, 251, 257, 282, 305, 306–307, 325, 336, Robertson, Cliff, 154, 159, 176
339, 357, 362–363, 368 Robinson, Jackie, 309
realism, 36, 43–44, 103, 157, 200, 225, 227, 245, Robocop, 366–367
348, 355, 369 Rocky, 171, 178, 194–195, 197, 387
reality television, 233, 275 Roger & Me, 271–272, 387
rebel (rebels, rebellion), 9, 113, 165–166, 211, 333, Rogers, Ginger, 65, 107, 128, 145
344, 361 Rogin, Michael, 79–80, 89, 252, 264
Rebel Without a Cause, 138, 145 Rogue, 187, 248, 253–254, 264, 338, 351, 352,
recession (economic), 194, 200, 218, 252, 279–283 359, 365
403
INDEX
Romero, Archbishop Oscar, 212–213 Senators, U.S., 18, 20, 24, 30, 62, 71, 75, 76, 78,
Romero, 213, 387 84, 98–100, 109, 115–117, 133, 136, 138, 158–
Romney, Mitt, 21, 29, 75, 89, 363, 363 159, 171, 172, 174–175, 196, 203, 220, 221,
Rooney, Andy, 18, 24 244, 245, 249, 263, 279, 283, 286, 320, 327,
Roosevelt, Franklin D., (See Chapters 5 and 6), 334, 335, 337, 346, 365, 367
17, 82, 106, 107, 110, 112, 113, 118, 122, 124, Senator Was Indiscreet, The, 133–134, 387
127–131, 135, 157, 282 September 11, 239
Roosevelt, Theodore, 65, 81, 109 Serpico, 207
Ruffalo, Mark, 62, 285 Seven Days in May, 161–163, 387
Russell, Jane, 131, 324 Seven Year Itch, The, 324, 388
Russia House, 222–223, 387 sexual harassment, 300, 327–328
Russian Revolution, 9, 102, 163, 204–206 sexuality, 6, 16, 17, 46–48, 69–72, 74, 101, 113,
Russians, 162–164, 223, 387 140, 147, 158–160, 174, 175, 182, 183, 207,
Russians Are Coming!, The, 163, 387 212, 253, 277–279, 293, 300, 304, 314–318,
Ryan, Paul, 55 322–335, 339–341, 345, 253, 354, 358, 360,
368
Saboteur, 70 Shaft, 294, 297, 388
Salome, 314–315, 387 Shampoo, 183–184, 388
Salt, 16 She Devil, The, 317, 388
Salt of the Earth, 143–144, 189, 387 Sheen, Charlie, 201, 214, 231
Salvador, 30, 212–215, 387 Sheen, Martin, 187, 201, 255
Samurai, 32, 382 Ship of Fools, 156, 388
Sanders, Bernie, 62 ship of fools (scenario), 345, 350, 355
Sandler, Adam, 47 Shoedsack, Earnest B., 352
Sankofa, 303, 312 Short Circuit, 203, 388
Sarandon, Susan, 6, 332 Sidibe, Gabourey, 305
Sarris, Andrew, 174, 192, 206, 208 Siege, The, 46, 223–224, 234, 388
satire, 7, 22, 26, 36, 37, 134, 157, 191, 219, 220, Silence of the Lambs, The, 16
229, 233, 234, 238, 271, 281, 299, 300, 301, silent films (See Chapter 4)
328, 347, 349 Silkwood, 12, 55, 179, 198–201, 210, 215, 388
Saving Private Ryan, 36, 225, 241, 387 Silkwood, Karen, 179, 198–200
Sayles, John, 35, 200, 208, 221–222, 234, 295, Single White Female, 326, 388
374, 375, 383, 384, 387, 389 Silverman, Sarah, 74
scandal, 4, 31, 37, 55, 64, 67, 68, 71, 74, 147, 170, Silver Linings Playbook, The, 8, 57, 60, 388
203, 217, 219, 226, 227, 229, 231, 233, 242, Silver State, 222
333, 345, 359 Sinatra, Frank, 29, 271
Schindler’s List, 225, 387 Siren of Hell, 317, 388
Schlafly, Phyllis, 325 Sklar, Robert, 68, 88
Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 28, 47, 48, 78, 80, 81, Skyfall, 45, 388
89, 238 slavery, 10, 32, 33, 98, 225, 256, 298, 303, 310,
science fiction, 6, 13, 15, 16, 24, 32, 42, 81, 83, 320, 353
139, 147, 148, 156, 163, 233–234, 351, Small Circle of Friends, A, 208, 388
356–359, 360, 362 Smith, Will, 48, 234, 262, 308,
Scorsese, Martin, 35, 44, 183, 260, 264, 372, 376, Smith-Mundt Act, 83–84
378, 389 socialism, 96, 207, 290
Scott, A. O., 35, 58, 263, 264, 270, 277, 289, 305, socialist, 11, 113, 206
306, 312 socially reflective films, 11–14, 97, 131–133, 143,
Sea Hawk, The, 123, 127, 387 147, 165, 316–317
SEALs, 41, 223, 250, 384 sociocultural, 262,
Seduction of Joe Tynan, The, 174–175, 387 socioeconomic, 12, 30, 320, 322, 332, 345, 355
Sellers, Peter, 162, 163, 190, 191, sociopolitical, 29, 256, 300–301, 317,
Senate, the U.S., 115–116, 124, 131, 158, 159, Soderbergh, Steven, 8, 42, 254, 349, 375, 377, 381,
173, 174, 177, 249, 264, 300, 327, 334, 388, 390
335 Sony Corporation, 49, 51–52, 59, 84, 85, 249
404
INDEX
Sorkin, Aaron, 13, 80, 372, 375, 388 suburban, 21, 138, 196, 324, 352
Soul Food, 300, 388 subversion (subversive), 64–65, 68, 70, 108, 161,
Soviet Union, 8–9, 13, 39, 54, 64–66, 88, 122, 162, 182, 262, 308, 325, 327, 361,
128–129, 138, 154, 160–164, 194–198, 206– sugarcoating, 34
209, 222–224, 356 Sullivan’s Travels, 130, 389
Soylent Green, 359–367 Sum of All Fears, 238–239, 389
Spacek, Sissy, 199, 210, 228 Sundance film festival, 51–52, 86, 284, 286
Spartacus, 139 Sunrise, 318, 322, 389
Spiderman, 43 Sunrise at Campobello, 79, 157, 389
Spielberg, Steven, 17, 28, 35–36, 44, 51, 59, 74, Sunshine State, 222, 234, 389
170, 224, 225, 241, 255–256, 299, 372, 375, Superfly, 294, 389
377, 383, 384, 387, 390, 391 Super Size Me, 276, 389
Spurlock, Morgan, 276, 389 Supreme Court, 67, 75–76, 133, 138, 174, 202,
Sputnik, 138 230, 232, 265, 279, 300, 307, 327, 339, 363–
spy (spies), 37, 40, 70, 82, 122, 123, 127, 141, 145, 364
161, 181, 207, 230, Sutherland, Donald, 167, 228
Stagecoach, 48, 350 Sutherland, Keifer, 208
Stallone, Sylvester, 171, 177–178, 189, 194–197, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, 294, 389
215, 377, 386, 387 Swimfan, 326, 389
Stanwyck, Barbara, 131, 322, 324 Syriana, 14, 31, 34, 35, 56, 389
Star Chamber, The, 202, 388
star image, 28, 45–48, 59, 62, 68, 74, 78, 107–108, Talk to Me, 304
117, 225, 321, 324, 351, Tarantino, Quentin, 32–33, 38–39, 58, 298, 377,
Star Wars, 12, 78, 79, 170, 192, 194, 218, 227, 381, 386
233, 363, 388 Taxi Driver, 56, 183–185, 389
State of Play, 253, 388 Tea Party, 62, 365
State of Siege, 210, 388 technology, 15, 28, 44, 53, 59, 86, 87, 147, 163,
State of the Union, 79, 134–135, 150, 159–160, 203, 204, 217, 301, 352, 360
175, 388 television, 4, 22, 28, 44, 47–48, 50–54, 56, 63, 73,
Steelyard Blues, 167, 388 76, 78, 80, 85, 90, 135, 138–139, 149–150, 154,
Steinbeck, John, 117, 119, 146, 189, 355–356, 369, 164, 172–174, 178–180, 184, 189–191, 207,
383, 390 215, 221, 233
Stereotype(s) (stereotyping), 16, 33, 46–49, 59, 62, television and violence, 196
97, 101, 116, 196, 209, 223, 225, 230, 293296, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, 165, 389
298–304, 316, 355, 366 Tender Comrade, 65, 128, 389
Stewart, James, 115–117, 145, 147 Terminator, The, 15, 48, 80, 81, 83, 389
Stone, Oliver, 4, 6, 30, 35, 36, 43, 56, 82, 89, terror (terrorism) vii, 28, 34, 35, 38, 55, 73, 78, 83,
212, 213, 221, 224, 228, 235, 256, 374, 382, 131, 142, 179, 184, 185, 194, 197, 219, 223,
384–387 224, 228, 238–250, 257–258, 263, 264, 265,
Stop-Loss, 12, 245–247, 263, 286, 388 280, 302, 324, 328, 354, 358–359, 364–366
Storm Center, 144, 388 Thatcher, Margaret, 50, 336–337, 341
Storm Warning, 145, 388 Them!, 15, 148, 358–359
Strategic Air Command, 185 Thelma and Louise, 6, 41, 300, 330–333, 341, 389
Strategic Air Command, 82, 147, 162, 198, 389 There’s Always Tomorrow, 324, 389
Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”), 79 Thin Blue Line, The, 20, 271, 275, 389
Streep, Meryl, 29, 48, 50, 59, 174, 198, 244, 336– Thirteen Days, 83, 389
337, 340, 341 Three Days of the Condor, 12, 176, 177, 244, 253,
Stroheim, Erich von, 103, 129, 379 301, 359, 389
structuralists, 55 Three Kings, 223, 225, 235, 238, 389
structured absence, 16–17 thrillers (legal, political, conspiracy), 10, 12, 13,
Sturges, Preston, 130, 379, 380, 389 14, 34, 44, 161, 180, 182, 253, 301, 355, 359
subgenre, 283, 301, 358, 367 Tillman, Pat, 252
sublimated politics, 15–17, 22 Titicut Follies, 270, 389
sublimated fantasy, 238, 365 Tootsie, 329–330, 389
405
INDEX
Top Gun, 82, 193, 198, 203–204, 213, 214, 389 Viva Zapata, 143, 145–146, 175, 209, 390
torture, 20, 24, 32, 33, 38, 55, 73, 84, 90, 197, Vixen, The, 317, 390
243–245, 248–250, 256, 262, 264, 286, 295,
349, 361 Wag the Dog, 4, 20, 217, 218–221, 390
Town, The, 251–253 Wahlberg, Mark, 225, 250
Towne, Robert, 183, 375, 386, 388 Walking Tall, 242
Toy Story, 46, 220, 270 Wall Street, 20, 68, 201, 254, 260, 264, 281–283,
Tracy, Spencer, 79, 134, 147, 157, 294 290
Traffic, 42, 390 Wall Street, 30, 201, 212, 390
transcoding, 256, 257, 365, 368 Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, 20, 390
Transformers, 31, 83, 261, 366, 390 war, (See Chapters 6, 9, 10 and 12)
troops, 78, 98, 134, 143, 187, 194, 214, 228, 241, War Games, 203, 391
243, 244, 247, 250, 251, 286, 296, 297, 359 Warner Bros., 51, 72, 73, 84, 85, 90, 108, 122, 123,
True Lies, 223, 390 126, 127
Truman, Harry, (See Chapter 6 and 7), 133–134, war-nography, 198, 250
150, 159, 356, Warren Commission, 176
Truman Show, The, 233, 390 Warren, Elizabeth, 283
Trumbo, Dalton, 64, 65, 128, 147, 155, 157, 167, Washington, Denzel, 5, 29, 44, 46, 223, 296, 297,
176, 180, 350, 377, 382, 389 301, 379
Turning Point, The, 325, 390 Washington, Denzel, filmography, 46
Twelve Angry Men, 148, 207, 390 Washington Masquerade, 109, 391
Twelve Years A Slave, 309, 310, 311–312 Washing Merry-Go-Round, The, 110, 391
2016: Obama’s America, viii, 20, 21, 87, 287, 288, WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant), 127, 180,
288, 390 181
Twilight’s Last Gleaming, 185, 390 wasp (figure, insect), 324, 358, 391
typology (political film), 7, 10–14, 22, 97, 253, Wasp Woman, The, 324, 358, 391
258, 316 Watch on the Rhine, 127–128, 391
Way Down East, 316, 391
Ugly American, The, 157, 164, 390 Way We Were, The, 180–182
Under Fire, 46, 211–213, 390 Wayans, Damon, 299
Under Siege, 223 Wayne, John, 20, 46, 74, 75, 79, 82, 89, 129, 141,
Union Pacific, 114, 390 164, 185, 379
United 93, 365 WMD (weapons of mass destruction), 6, 219, 239,
United 93, 83, 239–240, 247, 263, 390 240, 242, 247, 248, 336
urban, 21, 46, 67, 80, 103, 104, 111, 138, 149, 154, welfare, 273, 283, 304
171, 182, 297, 305, 316, 327, 352 Welles, Orson, 42, 125–127, 132, 375, 389
West, Mae, 69, 107, 113, 324
Valenti, Jack, 71, 88 Western (genre), 6, 12, 17, 20, 32–33, 39, 48, 66,
Vanishing American, The, 102, 390 75, 81, 102, 139, 142, 164, 218, 258, 298, 333,
Verdict, The, 202, 390 345, 350
veterans, 15, 16, 17, 107, 122, 132–133, 156, 161, What Every Woman Knows, 103, 391
167, 185, 195, 224, 225, 240–246, 264, 278, When A Woman Sins, 317, 391
viacom, 49, 85 Where Are My Children?, 67
Vidal, Gore, 159–160, 373 whistleblower, 37, 359
video games, 57, 73, 233, 351 Whitaker, Forest, 50, 300, 301, 304, 306, 309, 312
Vidor, King, 30, 103, 111, 140, 293, 373, 376, 385 White, Armond, 305
Vietnam, (See Chapters 9 and 10), 21, 55, 142, White House Down, 261, 343–345, 365
154, 189, 192, 200, 209 whiteness, 16–17, 32, 75, 100, 112, 200, 247, 259,
Vietnam War, (See Chapters 9 and 10), 33, 36, 38, 260, 292, 293, 299, 302–303, 306, 307–309,
82, 164, 165, 183, 185–188, 189, 195–197, 200, 316, 351–352, 354, 361, 362
213–214, 224–225, 228, 238, 240–245, 249, white supremacy, 17, 32, 292
254, 270, 275, 293, 303, 325, 335, 337, 346, Wilson, Woodrow, 11, 23, 81, 98, 130
359 Windtalkers, 83, 241, 391
Viva Villa, 111, 390 Winfrey, Oprah, 74, 299, 306
406
INDEX
Wings of Eagles, The, 241 Civil Rights workers, 295, domestic workers,
Wings of Eagles, The, 241 145, 260, film workers, 30, 65–66, 113,
Working Girl, 330, 391 migrant workers, 119, social worker, 304, white
Wolf of Wall Street, The, 62, 260, 264, workers, 119
Wolf, Naomi, 38, 58, 84, 90 working women, 321–322, 328–330
women, (See Chapter 15), 14, 16, 17, 48, 50, World War Z, 364, 368, 391
67, 69, 74, 99, 101, 103, 109, 122, 131–132,
143–145, 160, 175, 182, 198–199, 201, 245, Young Mr. Lincoln, 117
277–279, 280, 300, 304–305, 353–354, 358–
359, 361, 363 Zanuck, Darryl F., 117, 118, 130, 140
Woods, James, 212, 365 Zapata, Emiliano, 146
Woodward, Bob, 31, 55, 176–177, 257 Zero Dark Thirty, viii, 4, 7, 20, 24, 34, 38, 41, 41,
workers, 96–97, 107, 113, 114, 125 140, 143–144, 58, 73, 84, 87, 88, 90, 237, 248–249, 264, 391
145, 173, 177–180, 183, 189–190, 198–201, Žižek, Slavoj, 246–249, 363, 264
205, 252–253, 260–261, 270, 280, 283, 318, Zoot Suit, 209, 391
322, 341, 362, blue-collar worker, 167, 180, Zwick, Edward, 224, 234, 296, 374, 379, 382, 388
407

About the Authors
Elizabeth Haas, sole author of this second edition, earned her BA from the University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and her PhD from the University of Michigan. A recipient of
a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in the Humanities and published in numerous journals, she
teaches film and literature at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut.
Terry Christensen is a specialist on state and local politics and an emeritus professor at San
Jose State University. His many books include a second edition of Local Politics: Governing
at the Grassroots, a text reflecting his years of teaching and participation in local politics.
Christensen holds a BA from Stanford and a PhD from the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. In 1998 he was named SJSU’s Outstanding Professor. In addition to his schol-
arship, teaching, and university service, Christensen has been active in San Jose politics,
advising on many political campaigns and serving on numerous boards and commissions.
Peter J. Haas is a professor in the School of Global Innovation and Leadership at San Jose
State University and also serves as the education director for the Mineta Transportation
Institute there. The author of numerous articles and research monographs and coauthor of
the textbook Applied Policy Research: Concepts and Cases, he received a Fulbright Founda-
tion Senior Specialist grant in 2003 to teach and study in Latvia. He earned his BA in politi-
cal science at Valparaiso University, his MA in political science at Kent State University, and
his PhD in political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Peter J. Haas, recipient of a Fulbright Foundation Senior Specialist grant, is education

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

The right of Elizabeth Haas, Terry Christensen, and Peter J. Haas to be

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

First edition published 2005 by M. E. Sharpe

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: 978-0-7656-3596-9 (hbk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

I. Studying Political Films

1. Setting the Scene: A Theory of Film and Politics 3

II. Political Films by Decade

4. Politics in the Silent Movies 95

III. Political Films by Topic

13. True Lies? The Rise of Political Documentaries 269

Closing Credits: A Political Filmography 371

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—Dedicated to Ruth Miller Haas and the memory of Harold Haas—

Above all: Manyul.

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Studying Political Films

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Setting the Scene

Sending Political Messages

Political Film as Political Theories

actors—rare as they may be—may help audiences to understand political phenomena.

A Basic Typology of Political Films

Examples of Film Types

Politically reflective films Pure (overt) political films

Socially reflective films Auteur political films

Pretty Woman The Godfather

Analyzing the Unpolitical Political Film

Sublimated Politics in the Movies

Portrayals of Race and Gender

Types of Political Messages

The Impact of Political Films

Movies Contribute to General Social and Political Learning,

Movies Provide Information About and/or Orientation to

Movies Affect Specific Political Behavior, Such as Voting in Elections

Movies Affect the Knowledge and Behavior of Specific Groups,

Movies Spark Public Debate and/or Media Interest in Specific Issues

The Making of a Message

Film Production and Techniques,

The Hurt Locker (2008)

The Filmmaking Process

stars, and so forth).

Screenplay and Story

“The Unlabeled Bottle”

Sound and Dialogue

Thelma’s careless housekeeping will eventually blow up in her face.

Photography in movies (frequently referred to as cinematography) entails a number of

Lighting and Color

Camera Angles and Placement

Sets, Props, and Special Effects

Actors and Acting

Certain types of characters—some frequently associated with certain film genres—tend

Distribution and Promotion

those tipping the other way.

a Century of Cinema Reveals How Movies Have Evolved,” www.wired.com/2014/09/cinema-

Causes and Special Effects