Weaponising of Cinema

With its controversial depiction of an assassination attempt on the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, The Interview (2014) triggered outrage in North Korea as well as retaliatory bomb threats against movie theatres that agree showed the film and the hacking of email accounts at Sony Pictures Entertainment, the parent company of Columbia Pictures, which made the film. While the backlash against The Interview was unprecedented, the film itself it part of a long-standing tradition in which Hollywood plays out the political and ideological conflicts that exist between the United States and other countries such as North Korea (Team America: World Police), Russia (Die Hard 5), China (World War Z), Vietnam (Apocalypse Now), and Somalia (Black Hawk Down) using negative stereotypes to demonize or ridicule anyone considered an enemy of the state. Regardless of whether this engagement is explicit or masked as seemingly harmless comedy, and regardless of any stated intention on the part of the filmmakers, the fact that these stories are being produced and consumed underscores cinema’s status as a powerful cultural and ideological weapon. Because Hollywood can tell a story in a multitude of ways, it matters when a story is set in a particular place and time, when the villain is coded as a particular nationality and when the resolution of the story affirms a particular set of values or codes of behaviour. It matters when the portrayal of so-called enemies, as in The Interview, gives voice to the view. "They hate us 'cause they ain't us!" But even where there is agreement that such content does matter, questions arise over the implications and meaning of such content, particularly over whether the presentation of a negative stereotype constitutes an endorsement or a critique of the stereotype.

Questions also arise around not only what it means to be an enemy but how that status might be portrayed. Whilst actual conflict, such as World War II for example, may provide some justification for propaganda and the vilification of the enemy, the continued use of such ideologically focused media and stereotypes in peacetime is questionable at best, and even more so when enemies of the past are now the friends of the present; Germany and the continued use of Nazis within films such as Inglorious Bastards. The somewhat conflicted nature within this, where enemies are now friends, is continued in more recent representations of the War on Terror and the fight against fundamentalism and radicalisation. Here the enemy is not always situated "over there" but takes root inside the home nation itself.

Of course, the influence of these stories is no longer limited to the cinema, thanks to the financial and cross-media entanglements that have given Hollywood’s key corporate players stakes in merchandising, gaming, smart phones, tablets, internet television, music and beyond. In this way, Hollywood plays an important role in the creation of a convergent digital reality that enables audiences to immerse themselves in cultural products. These developments implicitly and explicitly rely on advancing the ideologies of consumerism and consumption, which raises the stakes on telling stories with a different sort of propagandistic aim, where the "baddie" isn't an enemy of the state, but rather an opponent of consumerism.