MEDIA LENS (UK): Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

AN INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW ALFORD, AUTHOR OF REEL POWER

Where They Have Holes In Their Souls

We bask in a certain reflected glory from the newspapers we read. To “take” The Times is to be far more intellectual, far more highbrow, than someone who takes the Mail. To read the Mail is to be far more responsible than someone who gawks in the Mirror. A Guardian reader is highbrow with a human face: intellectual, aware, like other “broadsheet” readers, but with a much greater commitment to making the world a better, fairer place. Independent readers share the same commitment, perhaps a little less earnestly. 

     Because we locate some of our identity in what we read – some sense of who we are as intelligent, caring people – we may react with rage when the newspapers we take are criticised. To suggest that “my” newspaper is biased and superficial can seem to imply the same of “me” and “my” beliefs about the world. 

A similar glow of pride reflects on us from cinema screens. How we love to declare our appreciation for the latest thoughtful, sensitive, challenging movie. Again, we may reinforce a sense of ourselves as smart and caring from the films we watch. Of course we don’t like the gung-ho rubbish, but we do believe there is a certain satisfying stream of liberal, even leftist, movies challenging power: think George Clooney, Oliver Stone, Tim Robbins and a few others. Matthew Alford, author of ‘Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy’ (Pluto Books, 2010) does not agree. 

     In his book, Alford sets the charges for a controlled demolition of the myth that there is any kind of serious challenge to US foreign policy coming out of Hollywood. By the end of the book, not just Stallone, not just Schwarzenegger and Willis, but the entire edifice of liberal credibility has collapsed into its own footprint. Alford writes: 

     “One of the recurrent themes of the body of films in Reel Power is that even many of the most politically sophisticated of them assume the essential benevolence of US foreign policy, even when they express tactical concerns over using force. To suggest that foreign policy is the result of deeper, more unseemly economic and political interests is virtually unsayable.” 

     Over the last couple of weeks we have been e-chatting with Alford about his book. 

David Edwards (DE): Life was awful in the old days – cinema-goers were subjected to propaganda masquerading as entertainment. We all know how German filmmakers boosted Hitler’s fortunes in the 1930s and 1940s. And between 1948 and 1954, Hollywood made more than forty anti-communist films with titles like I Married A Communist and I Was A Communist For The FBI. Happily, today, we can all go to the cinema relaxed in the knowledge that we are watching completely open, independent, uncompromised versions of the world. We’re not propagandised to believe anything in particular – it‘s just entertainment. That’s right, isn’t it?  ABOVE LEFT: Still from Starship Troopers, a far more daring anti-Pentagon film than Avatar.

Matthew Alford (MA): It’s curious that we can easily accept there was propaganda in the distant past, under dictatorships and during former wars, but we shy away from the idea that there are parallels with our own modern societies. Still, these days – and especially prevalent since the 1980s – there is a sizable body of national security cinema that glorifies US power systems and the use of extreme force against official enemies across the world. Imbued with a blinkered sense of fear and American victim-hood, products like Rules of Engagement, Amerika, and 24 are frequently not ‘just’, even if they are, ‘entertainment’. More liberal products like Hotel Rwanda, Charlie Wilson’s War and Munich are more subtle but at least as dangerous, as the book details.

DE: So why, in our time, +do+ the big corporate studios consistently make films that glorify the US war machine? Many people may find this counter-intuitive, thinking, ‘Well, a movie studio just wants to make movies that are popular with huge numbers of people – they couldn’t care less about the politics of the message’. Can you succinctly spell out for our readers why a US corporate movie system would produce such a biased, pro-military result?

So, for instance, the Pentagon provided Black Hawk Down with eight helicopters and 100 soldiers. The film rewrites a controversial history of US intervention in Somalia, providing a depiction of American suffering and innocence that is extreme even by Hollywood standards, juxtaposed with an evil or otherwise worthless enemy population. One of the specific changes the Pentagon requested was the identity of one of the US soldiers because in real life he had been sentenced to fifteen years in jail for statutory rape. Not good PR.

DE: I loved the quotes from the big stars in your book. Bruce Willis made a public offer at a concert for US troops in Iraq to give a million dollars to anyone who captured Saddam Hussein and allowed him “four seconds” with the Iraqi leader. Willis had to back-pedal when Saddam was actually captured! When Arnold Schwarzenegger visited Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany in 2004, he told US troops: “Do you know how they translate ‘Ramstein’ in the English language? It means ‘We’re gonna kick some ass’.” Have you get any more gems like these?