The Hollywood War Machine: U.S. Militarism and Popular Culture
Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard
"The Hollywood War Machine is about the aspects of the industry, the Hollywood movie industry, and what are the market forces that have certain films made more than others, and what types of themes get put into films because they're profitable and because they tend to draw larger audiences even though they may not be in the best interest of the viewers.
There were a number of examples in the book about why these themes come up. The more recent ones were a lot about the sort of world in chaos and that common things like hypermasculinity, sort of this technophilic use of technology to wage war came up a lot more in a fear space in that post-9/11, the same sort of characters that came up in war movies - The Other, which used to be the Japanese, and sometimes it was before that it was the Indians as we were moving across the continent - now became the Arab other. They become even more dangerous because they strike anywhere, and this continual othering of another group is another one of the themes that comes up and is getting replayed a lot right now in film. I think the sense of the book was that the more it becomes normalized, the more we see these themes and don't have to think about them, that they just kind of come up, it becomes the narrative. It becomes the national narrative.
I would definitely recommend the book to anyone that's maybe a mass-communications major or someone that's interested in how the media really operates to support war and to support what is the general policy of the United States, even - or whatever country, I mean. It wasn't all American movies. I would also recommend it to people that are just interested in what are the machinations that allow movies to be made. I mean a lot of it's about the industry and how the industry plays a part, even subconsciously in producing these films that do over the same narratives of America first and unchallenged authority. I would rate the book three out of five stars."
RSS feed 
