The love triangle between Hollywood, White House, and Pentagon: RS
6 Min Read
Responsible Statecraft's Hekmat AbouKhater breaks down the process of how the Pentagon controls much of the scriptwriting in Hollywood to project its messages of love for war.
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Kirsten Dunst poses for photographers on arrival at the special screening of the film "Civil War" in London, on Tuesday, March 26, 2024. (AP)
Hollywood is the tool of propaganda through which the White House and the Pentagon transfer their ideologies to be projected onto the audience and into society – as if to manufacture consent during times of war.
Responsible Statecraft's Hekmat AbouKhater breaks down the process.
Elmer Davis, a famous CBS broadcaster, who had just been named director of the Office of War Information (OWI), a Pentagon program created in 1942 after Pearl Harbor, said, “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized."
During the Cold War of 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower commented on Hollywood-Pentagon ties, saying, "The hand of government must be carefully concealed and […] wholly eliminated," adding that it should "be done through arrangements with all sorts of privately operated enterprises in the field of entertainment, dramatics, music and so on."
And so, one of the first prominent supporters of the concept that would come to be known as the military entertainment complex, or the militainment industry, was the president who first used the term "military-industrial complex."
The Sony Archive - a trove of emails disclosed by #WikiLeaks - reveals how #Hollywood's magnates attempted to whitewash Israeli crimes against #Palestinians. pic.twitter.com/vfN98WyAIH
— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) October 7, 2022
Over 2,500 films and television series have had their stories influenced by the Pentagon, including Top Gun, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and even programs like Extreme Makeover. Nobody is more knowledgeable about this than Roger Stahl, the University of Georgia’s Communications Studies Department Head, and author of Militainment Inc.
Investigative journalist Tom Secker, University of Bath lecturer and Workers Party candidate Matthew Alford, and others collaborated with Stahl to make "Theaters of War," an 87-minute documentary in which he carefully analyzes our contemporary military entertainment business.
Read more: WikiLeaks reveals Hollywood producers help conceal Israeli war crimes
Pentagon, a co-writer
Contacted by RS, when asked about the financial strain that the typical American taxpayer experiences when a studio borrows a weapon system, Stahl said, “A set of images and stories in front of an American audience are going to displace any kind of calculation regarding taxpayer expense,” adding, “The question of cost gets buried under [...] emotional connections. And the entertainment industry is there to foster these emotional connections.”
In the movie, Stahl clarified that the Department of Defense requires full access to the studio's script for a new film before lending weapons systems through the Entertainment Liaison Office, the OWI's successor. The studio will either have to accept the revisions in their entirety or risk losing access to the military's toys once the script has been reviewed and returned with remarks, script tweaks, or even significant storyline alterations.
The film "Theaters of War" appears to have an in-film advertisement halfway through. Rapper and actor Ludacris appears in the eighth Fast & Furious film, "The Fate of the Furious," where he reads out a thirty-word infomercial promoting Textron Systems' remote-operated Ripsaw tank.
It turns out that the Entertainment Liaison Office, not a screenwriter, wrote the words.
Hundreds of successful blockbuster films have hidden commercial sequences, ranging from the Marvel films to the Transformers trilogy, in which one of the characters, Starscream, is an F-22 fighter plane. In certain instances, the Pentagon is pushing defective and pointless products, in addition to the blatant sales pitches that are made to the audience.
Tom Secker, the investigative journalist who's called a "vexatious requester" by the Pentagon for his relentless FOIA requests, revealed the Production Assistance Agreement Contract for "Mission Impossible 7: Dead Reckoning," which had not been released before.
The contract calls for the Defense Department to lend the production team a Boeing-built V-22 Osprey for use in at least two scenes in which the aircraft would be filmed both inside and outside, in addition to allowing the Mission Impossible crew to film on US military locations in the United Arab Emirates.
Cushioning the blow
These are purposefully created to "create an emotional bond between the audience and the weapon systems," Stahl claims. A link that might cushion the blow in a scenario far in the future when the audience discovers just how costly and ineffective the F-35, Osprey, and other systems, such as the LCS program, have proved to be. This helps to "normalize these huge expenditures," he continued.
Creating scenes like these means, according to Alford, “that they [the Pentagon] are able to show how sexy, how wonderful, how useful and how targeted their new products are.”
The implied goal is to "be a bit more confident about how great military engagements are" and that they are effective.
These covert military interventions have, for the most part, been successful. Examples include Ben Afleck's "Argo", which whitewashes the CIA's role in overthrowing Iran's democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953; "Black Hawk Down," which puts a brave face on the disastrous debacle in Somalia; and 1986's "Top Gun," which restored the military's reputation after two decades of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam.
The "American People's perceived interests" are the root of the problem, according to Stahl, who also noted that while they concentrate on welfare and state subsidies. They are "oblivious to the costs of our militaristic engagement with the world" — a cost that was briefly summarized at the end of the documentary as having reached $8 trillion in the period after 9/11 alone.
The impact of the military entertainment business is undeniably nefarious and more prevalent than ever, with a sixth failed audit, a military budget that is quickly approaching $1 trillion, and a new nuclear ICBM system in the works.
