by Mickey Huff
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. See especially “John Pilger: Global Support for WikiLeaks is ‘Rebellion’ Against U.S. Militarism, Secrecy,” Democracy Now!, December 15, 2010, http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/15/john_pilger_journalists_must_support_julian. See also “John Pilger Calls UK National Health Service a Treasure, Blasts US Lawmakers for Being ‘in Bed with Powerful Interests’ and Neglecting ‘Their Own People’s Basic Human Rights,’” Democracy Now!, July 2, 2009, http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/2/john_pilger_blasts_us_lawmakers_on; “John Pilger on Honduras, Iran, Gaza, the Corporate Media, Obama’s Wars, and Resisting the American Empire,” Democracy Now!, July 6, 2009, http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/6/filmmaker_journalist_john_pilger_on_honduras; and “John Pilger: There Is a War on Journalism,” Democracy Now!, June 29, 2010, http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/29/john_pilger_there_is_a_war.
11. See Bob Feldman, “‘Democracy Now!’ Program Underwriter, Lannan Foundation, Censors Anti-War Journalist John Pilger,” Educate-Yourself, July 9, 2011, http://educate-yourself.org/ag/feldmanlannanfoundation09jul1.shtml; “‘Democracy Now!’ Show Funder Censors Anti-War Journalist John Pilger,” Where’s the Change?, July 9, 2011, http://wherechangeobama.blogspot.com/2011/07/democracy-now-show-funder-censors-anti.html; and Bob Feldman, “Lannan Foundation’s Tactical Air Defense Services/Nation Magazine Link?” February 10, 2010, Where’s the Change?, http://wherechangeobama.blogspot.com/2010/02/lannan-foundations-tactical-air-defense.html. Amy Goodman and Lannan connections are further elaborated here: http://www.lannan.org/bios/amy-goodman.
12. Chris Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class (New York: Nation Books, 2010), 215.
13. Robert M. Christie, “Purging Pilger Damages Public Interest,” Santa Fe New Mexican, July 4, 2011, http://www.sfnewmexican.com/Opinion/Looking-In--Robert-M--Christie-Purging-Pilger-damages-public-in.
CHAPTER 8
Screening the Homeland
How Hollywood Fantasy Mediates State
Fascism in the US of Empire
Rob Williams
Every day . . . our children learn to open their imaginations, to dream just a little bigger . . . I want to thank all of you tonight for being part of that vitally important work.
—First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama on Argo, via White House satellite feed to the Academy Awards television audience, 20131
Interested in livening up a sleepy cocktail party in the Homeland? Here’s one way—suggest to your fellow guests that Hollywood plays a deep and abiding role as popular propaganda provider for an ever-expanding United States of Empire bent on “full-spectrum dominance” of the planet and the demonization of all things Muslim. I know what you’re thinking. Most American moviegoers cannot be bothered with so-called “conspiracy theories” about how US film projects advance a larger imperial agenda. Filmmakers and their audiences often argue that movies are just mindless eye candy for purely entertainment purposes. However, if ever a single year of popular film culture were to prove them wrong, it would have to be this past one, which featured some of the most sophisticated propaganda of our post-9/11 era, in-cluding two this essay will explore in more detail—Argo and Zero Dark Thirty. Unless you have killed your television dead (not a bad idea) and stopped watching movies, you’ve no doubt heard of these two films, which have received mountains of critical acclaim (and a bit of controversy) in the US popular press.
A few points of clarification: I use the word “screening” in this chapter title as a double entendre, to describe both the technique of the narrative process—propaganda disseminated 24/7/365 via ubiquitous screens, including movie theaters, TV, and all manner of mobile devices—and the political process by which the Hollywood industry “frames” audiences’ understandings of vital issues of import, filtering and censoring our cultural understanding of what we might call “real life.” When Hollywood filmmakers insist that certain of their films are “based on actual events” (a claim made by the production crews of both Argo and Zero Dark Thirty), discriminating audiences ought to reach for their collective cultural crap detectors.2
According to popular mythology and rabid pit bull pundits of the Faux News variety, Hollywood “liberals” and the Washington DC Beltway crowd are locked in a perpetual ideological war. The truth is exactly the opposite—Hollywood and DC not only need each other, they are sleeping together in serial multiplex fashion. As former president Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House aide and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) CEO Jack Valenti once tellingly explained, “Washington and Hollywood spring from the same DNA.”3 It is here, at the intersection of realpolitik and art, where Hollywood pop culture plays a critically significant political role—producing and deploying powerful image-driven stories designed to legitimize US imperialism abroad. In other words, if we apply to US foreign policy the radical cultural critiques of scholar bell hooks—that Hollywood “fantasy” continually mediates US state “fascism”—what can we conclude?4 That via the silver screen, Hollywood’s job is to prepare American hearts and minds for embracing the collective actions of the state— both domestically and globally—on behalf of advancing US hegemony in the Middle East and around the world.5
A few words about the “fascism”: let’s start with some basics about the United States—“facts submitted to a candid world,” as Thomas Jefferson famously stated in 1776. The twenty-first century US is no longer a self-governing republic, but an out-of-control empire that is essentially ungovernable, unreformable, and unsustainable. Easily accessible federal government documents, such as the vision articulated by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC),6 make clear that the chief goal of the twenty-first century US is nothing less than world domination in the name of waging a sequential, global war for the planet’s remaining fossil fuel energy resources. Looking back over the decade since the 9/11 tragedy,7 the US has quickly morphed into a military–industrial–surveillance state that is obsessed with homeland security and marked by a rapid reorganization and centralization of federal agencies, the curtailing of constitutional rights and liberties under the USA PATRIOT Act and related legislation, and the expansion of corporate commercial power, wedded to an expanding state bureaucracy.8 None of this is news to longtime Project Censored readers, who aren’t afraid to call this “new normal” by its real name—“fascism,” which Benito “Il Duce” Mussolini in the 1930s defined as the marrying of corporate and state power. And Fascism, Mussolini said, ought more rightly be called corporatism.
Looking globally, two-thirds of the planet’s recoverable oil reserves are located in the greater Middle East, a region hotly contested by the US, Russia, and China, featuring repressively governed “client states” propped up with loans from the “international community” (read: International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the US), which are currently experiencing a series of turbulent economic and political upheavals—Tunisia, Bahrain, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and now Syria—simplistically dubbed the “Arab Spring.” A complex and highly misunderstood region of the world, the Middle East is home to the modern Jewish state of Israel—which, since its creation in 1948, has been an intimate ally of the US—as well as the majority of the world’s Arab peoples (most, but not all, of whom are Muslim), who trace Bedouin tribal lineage back thousands of years. To control this strategically vital region, the US has historically blended diplomacy’s “hard power” with “soft power”—sticks and carrots—as well as relying on domestic popular propaganda like Hollywood films and television shows, as researcher Jack Shaheen explains in his book Reel Bad Arabs, to create enduring regional and cultural stereotypes for Western moviegoing audiences. The result? “Islamophobia,” a deeply rooted media-induced fear of the Arab “Other.”9 Not surprisingly, then, do our highly visible Hollywood movies focus audience attention on the relationship between the US and the greater Middle East.
ARGO: “REEL BAD ARABS” REDUX
Consider the seven Acad
emy Award nominations received by the hugely popular film Argo, Hollywood’s 2013 Oscar winner for Best Picture, as well as Best Film Editing and Best Adapted Screenplay (#irony?), directed by Ben Affleck—who credits the film’s popularity with reviving his Hollywood career. In case you missed Argo (spoiler alert), the story revolves around Central Intelligence Agency operative Tony Mendez (played by Affleck), who convinces the Agency to build a fake movie production agency from scratch, slip into post–Revolutionary Iran, and liberate six Americans stranded in hiding at the Canadian embassy under siege in Tehran.10°
Regarding Argo, Affleck himself went public on many occasions with the “truthful” nature of his film. “It’s okay to embellish, it’s okay to compress, as long as you don’t fundamentally change the nature of the story and of what happened,” Affleck explained to Fresh Air radio host Terry Gross. And to the London Evening Standard: “This movie is about this story that took place, and it’s true, and I go to pains to contextualize it and to try to be evenhanded in a way that just means we’re taking a cold, hard look at the facts.”11 Given the long history of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Hollywood connections, and the subject matter at hand, this seems to be a tall order.12
So, what’s the story? Argo recounts a tiny footnote to the drama of the 1979 US/Iranian hostage crisis, and does lend itself to a Hollywood retelling based on sheer creative audacity alone. Adoring American moviegoing audiences and critics turned out in force, and were subjected to the film’s remarkable flaws: the almost complete lack of historical context and/or misrepresenting of the decades-long US/Iranian political relationship, the odd downplaying of the Canadian embassy’s central role in rescuing US hostages (real-life former Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor was outspoken in his criticism of Argo, noting that the film portrayed the Canadians as being just along for the ride), and major moments from Argo that Affleck’s production team invented whole cloth, including Argo’s climax, featuring machine gun–toting Iranian soldiers pursuing the hostage’s departing airplane down a Tehran runway in a high-speed Jeep chase that ends badly (for the Iranians) and triumphantly (for the Americans).
Note: According to everyone involved in the real-life escape, the sheer lack of drama and ease of exit proved to be their escape’s most defining feature.13 But, in the world of American cinematic triumphalism, such details are easily replaced by more Hollywood-esque endings, complete with obligatory national high-fiving, scorekeeping, and nose-thumbing toward Tehran; the film’s final few intoxicatingly nationalistic minutes would make any pro-American public relations professional sit up and cheer.
American film critics’ collective adoration of Argo, particularly by progressive and liberal observers occasionally critical of US imperial policy and propaganda, is perhaps best captured in Manohla Dargis’s celebratory New York Times column. Calling Argo a “smart jittery thriller,” Dargis concludes that “in the end, this is a story about outwitting rather than killing the enemy, making it a homage to actual intelligence and an example of the same.” Indeed, perhaps what won over Argo audiences is this time-honored trope of proven Hollywood hokum—the “good guys” (Americans and Canadians) outmaneuver the “bad guys” (Iranians) with smarts and creativity instead of smart bombs and shock troops.14 Most disturbing, however, is how this fictitious framing of 1979 events—“white hats” versus “black hats”—papers over Argo’s Islamophobic tendencies, at a time when real-life US/Iranian relations, including mutual saber-rattling and the US government’s “all options are on the table” approach, are edgy, at best. Devoid of any mention of the US-backed Shah’s autocratic government or the Iranian people’s genuine grievances (remember, Persians, not Arabs, for anyone who is keeping track of such cultural differences), Argo paints a stereotype of Middle Eastern people that reeks of the worst cultural clichés. A few mainstream US critics picked up on this disturbing stereotype. “Instead of keeping its eye on the big picture of Revolutionary Iran, Argo settles into a retrograde ‘white Americans in peril’ storyline, recasting the oppressed Iranians as a raging, zombie-like horde,” observed Slate’s Kevin B. Lee, who called Argo the year’s “worst Best Picture Nominee.”15 But Lee’s critical voice was drowned out by the film’s Hollywood hype, culminating in the Best Picture award being given to Argo on Oscar night by none other than First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama via live video feed from the White House, surrounded by US military men and women in their uniformed finest. Citing “movies that lift our spirits, broaden our minds, and transport us to places we have never imagined,” Ms. Obama went on to note that “these movies made us laugh, they made us weep, and they made us grip our armrest just a little tighter.” (Full disclosure—I did all three while watching Argo, but not for the reasons Michelle Obama mentioned above). Here’s Affleck’s tortured rationalizing about accuracy in another interview about Argo:
I tried to make a movie that is absolutely just factual. And that’s another reason why I tried to be as true to the story as possible—because I didn’t want it to be used by either side. I didn’t want it to be politicized internationally or domestically in a partisan way. I just wanted to tell a story that was about the facts as I understood them.”16
“I didn’t want [Argo] to be politicized,” insisted Affleck.17 But, as Affleck himself must know, all movies are political, using powerful image-driven media to entertain, educate, and inspire (as Argo certainly does) with narratives that shape our hearts and minds. In the final analysis, we can thank Argo for perpetuating destructive Middle Eastern stereotypes, distorting history, and eroding cross-cultural understandings among peoples. The envelope, please . . .18
ZDT: REVEALING BLACK OPS, FEMINIZING IMPERIALISM,
CONDONING TORTURE AND EXTRAJUDICIAL KILLING
If Argo was the big winner on 2013 Oscars night, Kathryn Bigelow’s acclaimed film Zero Dark Thirty (ZDT) proved the big loser. Or was it? As a director, the talented Bigelow has crafted a deserved reputation for gritty realistic depictions of war—think Jeremy Renner as an emotionally detached bomb squad leader in The Hurt Locker. Zero Dark Thirty, which garnered multiple Oscar nominations, emerged as a gripping story—“witness the greatest manhunt in history”—based on Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal’s recasting of facts garnered from “unusual access to senior officials at the Pentagon and CIA who were deeply involved in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.”19 (More on this in a moment.)
Critics initially praised the film on release for its “realistic” depiction of the search for Osama bin Laden (OBL), including the famous raid on the Abbottabad compound that resulted in his alleged death (a story that, like 9/11, leaves us with a number of unanswered questions). But the film subsequently came under fire for claiming to be historically accurate, particularly with regard to the film’s opening scenes in which an actor/CIA agent tortures another actor/al-Qaeda detainee to unearth a crucial piece of information that leads CIA investigators to discover bin Laden’s whereabouts.
The resulting firestorm of criticism of the film from congressional leaders, drawing on Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigations from the previous year, attacked the ZDT team for misrepresenting (sort of) the facts in the OBL hunt—“the US may torture alleged terror suspects, but the US did not torture terror suspects to find Osama bin Laden”20—and sank the film’s chances for an Oscar. “Since [Bigelow and Boal] presented their film as a form of history it has been judged on historical grounds and it has been found wanting,” explains noted terrorism researcher Peter Bergen in a Time magazine cover story on Bigelow. “Zero Dark Thirty is a great piece of filmmaking; it’s a far weaker work of history.”21
True enough, Mr. Bergen, but the film’s function as an imperial propaganda piece has proved far more useful to the US of Empire, legitimating a whole host of US post-9/11 policies and directives. Begin with Zero Dark Thirty’s opening sequence, featuring 9/11 audio footage of dying victims (used by Bigelow’s production team without permission from 9/11 victims’ families),22 set against a b
lack screen followed by an immediate “jump cut” to a CIA Middle Eastern black ops site. This explicit edit from the destruction of the World Trade Center building to Middle East torture sites reinforces the dominant popular US political narrative that “19 box cutter–wielding Muslim fanatics acting alone” carried out the 9/11 attacks, and reminds American filmgoers that, whatever nasty business the US may do in the Middle East, it is being done as a response to that “horrific” 9/11 attack on US soil.23 Zero Dark Thirty also reveals to American audiences (because US newspapers of record seem unable to consistently report on CIA activities worldwide) that the US has crafted a network of “black sites” around the world, beyond public scrutiny, where the dirty business of the empire’s maintenance is routinely handled. The presence of this so-called “secret government” may come as a surprise to many popcorn-snorting Americans in their comfy theater seats, but, after all, in real life, the guys deemed “bad” by said secret government must be apprehended and brought to justice—or, better yet in our brave new post-9/11 world, broken, abused, and/or assassinated if they’ve already been deemed guilty as charged. ZDT’s main character, a CIA agent named Maya (played by Jessica Chastain) functions as an audience surrogate in this role.
The flame-haired Chastain—playing a “lone-wolf female” in a man’s world—winces on first witnessing the torture of an al-Qaeda detainee. In short order, though, Maya steels herself to the task, single-mindedly devoting herself to capturing bin Laden and facing down numerous more-powerful male higher-ups along the CIA chain of command. Some critics have followed female director Bigelow in interpreting Maya as a “feminist folk hero”—tenacious, scrappy, and determined to succeed in a man’s world.24 Others, including this writer, see Maya’s constructed composite character as an unconvincing bone thrown to would-be feminists who are happy to see Maya kick some chauvinistic white male ass (while brown male asses get the life beaten out of them). “Do not now cleanse the wars of/on terror with the face of a white blonde female. Do not detract from the heinous aspects of the terror war by making it look gender neutral,” declared Al Jazeera’s Zillah Eisenstein.25 Referring to “imperial feminism” in her column, Eisenstein well articulated my own feelings about Maya as a constructed composite Hollywood character who is more imperial cliché than real life:
