Hollywood hates America

SOON AFTER THE BOMBS DROPPED on Pearl, Harbor, Hollywood began making movies to bolster the nation s morale and dramatize its cause. The industry was, as cinematic historian Neil Gabler put it, "turning out film after film about the Nazis' cruelty, the sedition of Nazi sympathizers here, the bravery of our soldiers, the steadfastness of our people and the righteousness of our mission, and they were no less zealous against the Japanese." For those of us old enough to have seen those pictures when they first were released, we remember how they reassured us that America eventually would prevail against a sinister enemy in what could be a long and difficult war. Even movies about the darkest days of World War II--such as "Wake Island" (1942) and "Bataan" (1943)--ended on a note of hope and gratitude. Themes of national unity pervaded the culture. Popular music rang out with song after song that unabashedly was patriotic ("He Wears a Pair of Silver Wings," "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition"). Journalists were reluctant to divulge any information that could compromise the war effort or be of value to the enemy. Even the comic strip heroes got into the act as Joe Palooka, Mickey Finn, and Buzz Sawyer joined the military. No doubt Superman and Captain Marvel were involved as well. Certainly, no American film, comic strip, or popular song portrayed our military and its civilian leaders in anything but a favorable light.

Slowly at first, all of that was to change. There were few songs about the Korean War. The few movies that were made about it during the war were forgettable. With the possible exception of Steve Canyon, most of the comic strip heroes stayed home, and it is hard to think of a popular song about that war. One could say that the popular culture was mildly indifferent to the conflict in Asia, but far from hostile.

In the 1960s, the change was far more dramatic. Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (1964) brought a fiercely suspicious attitude toward the military and the whole idea of nuclear deterrence. In that film, the Pentagon command center resembled, as one critic put it, "a tour through a Hollywood insane asylum." The same year, the movie "Seven Days in May" projected a sinister underside to the American military. Butt Lancaster as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is involved in a plot to overthrow the president who has just signed a nuclear disarmament treaty.

During the Vietnam War, only John Wayne's "The Green Berets" (1968) was an openly pro-American, anti-Vietcong film. The Hollywood establishment was so hostile to Wayne's movie that he had to provide his own financing. Later efforts about Vietnam--such as "Apocalypse Now" (1979), "Platoon" (1986) and "Full Metal Jacket" (1987)--portray the American military effort as hopeless, if not absurd. In the final monologue in "Platoon," the narrator concludes that, "... We did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves--and the enemy was within us."

The Watergate scandal allowed Hollywood to indulge in its full-fledged paranoia about an American government filled with conspirators and sinister schemers. In Oliver Stone's "JFK" (1991) the FBI, CIA, Pentagon, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon Johnson all are implicated in the assassination of John E Kennedy. From "Three Days of the Condor" (1975) to "The Bourne Ultimatum" (2007), film after film tells of evil at the center of the CIA.

Our victory in the Cold War had little effect upon Hollywood. Despite all we have learned about the Gulag in the Soviet Union, the Stasi in East Germany, the atrocities of Mao Tse-Tung's Cultural Revolution, the boat people of Vietnam, the extensive penetration of Soviet agents into the highest reaches of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, where are the Hollywood movies dramatizing these extraordinary events? For example, where is the film about the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers affair, a story filled with high drama and communist duplicity? Better to produce make-believe films about the CIA or evil multinational corporations.

Did 9/11 change all that? It seems not. The two major cinema works about the incident, "United 93" and "World Trade Center" (both 2006), while admirable, make no mention of Al Qaeda, and we have yet to see a major Hollywood work about the ruthlessness of the jihadists or the bravery of our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What explains this lack of anger and determination in Hollywood against one of the most sinister enemies free people ever have faced? It appears the cynicism and doubt that slipped into American culture during Vietnam and Watergate have not been ameliorated, but rather have metastasized. In A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, Andrew Roberts writes, "It says much about how far post-Watergate paranoia about the motivations and honesty of public servants had gone that very many people genuinely believed that an American administration and a British government deliberately lied about the level of threat Saddam posed in order to send U.S. and British troops to fight and die in Iraq." Roberts goes on to remind us that such a conspiracy would require the collusion of large numbers of unprincipled people in the highest reaches of government. Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911," which suggests such a thing, won plaudits all over the world.