They don't make war films like they used to

It is not simply antipathy to the military that permeates Hollywood today. There is a broader anti-Americanism--an alienation from everything American--that runs very, very deep them. Listen to Sean Penn, speaking at a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991 when asked a question about his film "Indian Runner": "I don't think it scratches the surface of the rage that is felt, if not acted upon, by most of the people in the country where I live. I was brought up in a country that relished fear-based religion, corrupt government, and an entire white population living on stolen property that they murdered for and that is passed on from generation to generation."

Likewise, listen to Oliver Stone in 1987 upon receiving the Torch of Liberty Award from the American Civil Liberties Union: "Our own country has become a military industrial monolith, dedicated to the Cold War--in many ways, as rigid and corrupt at the top as our rivals, the Soviets. We have become the enemy with a security state now second to none. Today we have come to live in total hatred, fear, and the desire to destroy. Bravo. Fear and conformity have triumphed. This Darth-Vadian Empire of the United States must pay for its many sins in the future. I think America has to bleed. I think the corpses have to pile up. I think American boys have to die again. Let the mothers weep and mourn."

Is it any wonder that people who deliver statements like that also feel the need to trash the U.S. in film after film?

Let me make one final point--this one about the economics of the movie business today, which also is critical in understanding what has changed in the relationship between Hollywood and America. In 1970, more than 70% of all revenues for the major studios in Hollywood came from the U.S. Today, less than 30%. Hollywood has conquered the world. It sells huge amounts of movies and DVDs in France, Germany, italy, Japan and, increasingly, in China and India. While this has been occurring, the audience has collapsed here in the U.S. In 1965, 45,000,000 Americans attended the movies every week. Our population nearly has doubled since then, and yet the number of moviegoers per week is barely 20,000,000. In other words, the American film industry has become conspicuously less American. So, when war movies are produced at all, there is much less reflexive sympathy and support for the U.S. point of view.

The Black Book of Communism computed the number of corpses that communism had accumulated since the Russian Revolution in 1917. The total adds up to more than 100,000,000. The U.S. fought a life-and-death struggle against world communism between the end of WWII and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. We won that war, thank God. Yet, Hollywood's continuing insistence on portraying the Vietnam War--which, along with the Korean War, was an integral part of that life-and-death struggle--as having taught us that all war is pointless is a way of ignoring the fact not only that Hollywood did not engage in that struggle against world communism, but that most people in the entertainment elite were on the wrong side of it. I say this with respect and with caution. I am not suggesting that most people in Hollywood were active communists, but I am suggesting that the anti-anti-communism that became so typical of Hollywood during the Cold War has led to its ongoing denial that the Cold War meant anything.