The Relationship Between Politics and Films in the U S

¶ … Cinema and American Politics

The modern politics of the U.S. and their imperialistic manifestations within the global political economy (GPE) have often been reflected in the mainstream Hollywood films of the era yet simultaneously criticized and satirized by auteur and/or independent filmmakers, such as Kubrick with his 1964 Dr. Strangelove or Oliver Stone's JFK. While political science is a field in which the dynamics of political discourse may be examined more directly, an analysis of the cinematic representation of American politics as depicted in film can provide an alternative assessment of the life of U.S. political forces, how they are perceived to operate in popular film, and how popular political beliefs are shaped and communicated to citizens as a result. For instance, Spielberg's Lincoln and his recent Bridge of Spies are two films that celebrate some aspect of the American political ideal (such as freedom, unity, integrity, and democracy). Yet other filmmakers use film to reflect some aspect of the political scene that is troubling (Stone's upcoming Snowden picture, for instance, which focuses on the overreach of government agencies or the upcoming documentary Weiner, which focuses on the maligned candidacy of Timothy Weiner). This paper proposes to assess the manner in which Hollywood/independent films support and/or undermine the American political scene, depending on their depictions and their popular reception. Film is an important medium for advancing beliefs, whether they be about religion, history, the economy or politics. The global political economy, as a result, is highly impacted by and highly impactful on the medium of film.

Films are responsible for teaching generations about what happened in WW2 or what life was like in the risk management department of Lehman Brothers prior to the firm's collapse. Thus identifying the role that cinema plays in influencing ideas about American politics and the global political economy can benefit the field of political science by showing how thoughts, beliefs, ideals and criticisms are manifested, communicated, reinforced and rejected over time. Moreover, the expression of American imperialism is also something that can be studied to better understand this dimension of American politics within the GPE. How, for example did Hollywood portray the political consequences of the Cold War from its inception in the early post-War years up through the 1980s? The imperialism of the U.S. and its impact on the GPE during this era had many different representations in film. This was, moreover, a time that saw the rise of the intelligence agencies around the world -- the KGB, the CIA, MI6, the Mossad. Spy films in the 1960s reflected the urgent manner in which the public was groomed to accept such agencies: the gentleman spy in the U.S. was a favorite of Kennedy, who admired the James Bond stories and even gave filmmaker John Frankenheimer permission to film in D.C. for his Seven Days in May, a movie about a coup in America, led by the Joint Chiefs of Command. It was a realistic story that struck at the heart of American politics in the 1960s -- the tension mounting between the rising War Party and the more diplomatic Democratic Party under Kennedy, who narrowly escaped nuclear war with the Soviets by practicing detente.[footnoteRef:1] [1: Arthur M. Schlesigner, Robbert Kennedy and His times, (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 450; John Frankenheimer, Seven Days in May DVD Commentary (LA: Warner Home Video, 2000). Film.]

Frankenheimer's film may have been resented by the hawks in the Joint Chiefs but it resonated among critics of American foreign policy -- especially in the wake of the Bay of Pigs incident and, later, the assassination of Kennedy himself. With Oswald's arrest -- and then execution days later -- the public caught its first whiff of just how deep the "deep state" that Peter Dale Scott would later come to define actually went. With mob men like Ruby and CIA operatives like Oswald involved in the murder of a U.S. president -- while foreign countries like Israel were negotiating with the U.S. over nuclear proliferation -- the entire, complex nature of the GPE suddenly resonated with a cacophony of sound and fury that signified something -- but what?[footnoteRef:2] Benoit discusses how Oliver Stone had to defend his controversial and conspiracy-oriented film JFK against backlash and how the film guided public opinion which led to Congress passing the JFK Records Act -- but, of course, that was 30 years after the event, and American politics had essentially taken an entirely new course, shape and trajectory over those three decades.[footnoteRef:3] The fact that Stone had to defend his critique of the political establishment from accusations of exaggeration and inaccuracy, however, suggests just how impactful film could still be on the political discourse, the shaping of public opinion (it was the overwhelming public response to the film that moved Congress to pass the Act), and the reaction of the established "deep state" to a challenge to its authority in terms of the "official" narrative of what transpired on November 22, 1963. [2: Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State (MD: Rowman, Littlefield, 2015), 13.] [3: Benoit, William; Nill, Dawn. "Oliver Stone's Defense of JFK." CommunicationQuarterly, vol. 46, no. 2 (1998): 127.]

This "authority" would be depicted in Zero Dark Thirty, which showed moviegoers the behind-the-scenes processes that went into tracking down U.S. public enemy no. 1 Osama Bin Laden (and which raised controversial questions about the efficacy of torture). And recently 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi painted the American mercenary forces in the Middle East in a positive light, though critics of these same forces have pointed to videos released via WikiLeaks as evidence of mercenary mayhem. At the same time, the legacy of Hillary Clinton is intertwined with the Benghazi attack and as she is firmly supported by the political Establishment, this film received rather limited exposure in the mainstream press -- much less than other films, such as The Big Short, which depicted the collapse of the economy due to shoddy banking practices (bad loans and the monetization of those loans) leading up to 2008. In other words, 13 Hours could have drawn unwanted attention to Clinton during her campaign for the presidency -- and she already has more than enough of that, considering the FBI's case against her use of private email servers in contravention of national security protocol. From this one could conclude, as Elliott and Schenck-Hamlin do, that the release of major films that touch on highly charged geopolitical topics are not always welcome events for politicians, especially if they dredge up painful memories of the past in a way that could bring unwelcome attention to the politicians connected to those events. As Boston's Mayor Kevin White noted in connection to the 1976 film All the President's Men, "That film is going to have an effect on the election" -- and the same could certainly be said of any film today that packs as big a critical punch as that one. In other words, the relationship between film and politics and the GPE is an unsteady one.[footnoteRef:4] [4: Elliott, William; Schenck-Hamlin, William. "Film, Politics and the Press: The Influenceof 'All the President's Men'." Journalism Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 3 (Fall 1979): 546.]

Thus, some films have been received more strongly than others; some have been roundly condemned by the political establishment; and some have been largely ignored by the mainstream press and by moviegoers as well -- while still others have been so controversial and caused so much uproar that American policy has changed as a result (Stone's JFK for instance essentially brought the significance of the Kennedy assassination before an entirely new generation that had grown up without actually ever having witnessed Kennedy or known what the man represented). JFK, in fact, re-opened the files on Kennedy -- and was simultaneously upheld as a landmark work and criticized for spreading paranoia and conspiracy theory -- even though it led to the establishment of the Assassination Archives and Research Center.[footnoteRef:5] For this reason perhaps more than any other, however, politics and cinema go together like hand and glove, as Professor Funderburk noted in 1978.[footnoteRef:6] Likewise, Noel King has acknowledged that there is a complex relationship between film and politics that requires extensive study in order to more fully appreciate the landscape of GPE, film, and the modern American political impetus towards imperialism, as demonstrated in the post-World War 2 years of the Cold War, the CIA's infiltration of various countries around the world, and the contradictory tones coming from Hollywood regarding the spreading tentacles of empire (James Bond glorified it, while Frankenheimer deplored it).[footnoteRef:7] [5: Grenier, Richard. "On the Trail of America's Paranoid Class: Oliver Stone's JFK." TheNational Interest, no. 27 (Spring 1992): 76.] [6: Funderburk, Charles. "Politics and the Movie." Teaching Political Science, vol. 6, no. 1(1978): 111.] [7: King, Noel. "Reconsidering the film-politics relation." Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 6, no. 1 (1992): 228.]

The GPE as a result has been shaped by a film-political discourse, with American cinema both reflecting the political ideology of the nation and attacking it at alternate intervals. Thus there is a tendency for the political establishment to reach out to and use Hollywood and a tendency for Hollywood to be both receptive to the embrace and resistant to it. In short, there is an uneven relationship between the political field and cinema -- but a two-way flow can be perceived in the way film impacts the discourse and the way politics impacts film. On the GPE level, this two-way flow has helped shape the face of administrations both domestic and foreign. The appearance of the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction, for example, altered the discourse between the Soviets and the Americans -- and Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove targeted this discourse in its satirical send-up of the farce that the Cold War had become.

As the imperialism of the U.S. increased over the 20th century, beginning with the Spanish-American War, which brought the Philippines under the control of the U.S. and its interests and continuing to today with the wars in the Middle East, cinema acted as both a force for calling out and criticizing American politics and the devastation politicians were having on the GPE, and as a force for supporting these same policies. Documentaries like The Atomic Cafe, for instance, showed how the War Party set about blowing up Bikini Atoll and even showed the representatives of the Party explaining to the natives there just how lucky they were to be able to be a part of the U.S.'s grand experiment in nuclear destruction. Action films, however, like Top Gun, Rambo, and Red Dawn in the 1980s conveyed a message to mainstream America as well as to the rest of the world that strong arms were necessary in a geopolitical climate that was rife with tension -- even if the tension was primarily the result of America's own devastating foreign policy and total commitment to undermining the electoral process in other countries.[footnoteRef:8] These films conveyed a sense of American supremacy and the need for the American Empire to flex its muscles so as to demonstrate to the rest of the world its unquestionable hegemony. Such films obviously reached more of an audience than the independent, small-budget documentary The Atomic Cafe reached in the same decade -- but the fact that the documentary was produced and put forward into the public consciousness at all indicates that films could go both ways, acting as voices of the Empire and voices of, say, the Fool (the conscience of the King in Shakespeare's Lear, for instance). [8: Stone, Oliver; Kuznick, Peter. The Untold History of the United States. (NY: Gallery Books, 2012).]