Hollywood as a weapon to implement US ideology
The power of a State can be measured through different parameters according to the optics from which it is analyzed, but in general terms a country is considered powerful when it has a large population and territory, a strong economy, natural resources, social stability and social stability and military capacity. At this point it is worth clarifying that having these resources is not enough to be powerful, since resources alone, without a strategy and leadership, can be useless.
In the modern world, every day the use of the media to issue all kinds of persuasive messages for commercial, cultural and ideological purposes, the use of the soft power that can be defined as a power based on intangible or indirect influences is more usual As culture, values and ideologies, you can get the support of others just projecting an attractive image of itself. In this way, the observer states that are attracted or seduced by the achievements, characteristics and/or qualities of that state will begin to act in the same way by adopting their behaviors. During the last century the American film industry in Hollywood has dominated the global entertainment industry, American films today appear in more than 150 countries, which gives the US.UU. To spread your identity and ideology, in addition to serving in terms of persuasion, suggestion and power. This is the case of the classic American Dream literally the American dream, which projects an image of the United States such as the land of opportunities, a place where the dreams of any individual- without importing their creed or nationality race- can come true only with Effort and work, this is what attracts other actors to admire a dominant state and which leads them to align with this and share their values, the aspiration to share that stability and prosperity.
Hays Code or Hollywood self-Speaker
The Hays Code was a regulation that governed American films from 1934 to 1966, created by the first president of the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) and a member of the Republican Party William Hays, the Catholic editor Martin Quigley and the Jesuit priest Daniel to. Lord. The code was prepared to preserve the moral of the films, a huge list of surveillance guidelines were drawn. Nudes were prohibited, alcohol intake excessively, interracial couples, adultery and all illicit sexual behavior. Casablanca’s end is a concession to the code, with Ingrid Bergman disconsolate after her disagreement with Humphrey Bogart. The films produced during this period of censorship demonstrate the protagonists as children in which the actions that went against the moral of the time were punished with death or jail, they showed an ideal in which each man and woman should aspire , demonstrating that there were no happy endings if he left against what was considered correct.
World War II and Racism
During the first years of World War II, the United States remained isolated from the conflict and faithful to its so -called neutrality rules, at the end of 1939 a survey showed that less than 30% of Americans were in favor of the country to enter the country The war, since they considered that the intervention in the first war had been a mistake and was largely the cause of the great depression. The United States remained in this position until 1940 ignoring the fast progress of Germany in Europe and Japanese expansionism in Asia. On December 7, 1941 Japan attacks the US military base in Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt the next day signs the declaration of war against Japan, as a consequence, the declaration of war of Germany and Italy to the United States. It is here where American cine offenses to your country, but to save the freedom of the world. In this context, the United States War Department through the War Information Office (OWI) summons prominent Hollywood filmmakers to participate in this task, a commitment they assume achieving a very important production of documentaries that are effective and cinematographically valuable , to fulfill its objective. So much so that in the fifteenth delivery of the Oscar, the category is created to the best documentary, in 1943. In addition, during this period there are fiction feature films, some with a very aseptic look of the war .
The film scripts of this period revolved according to three themes: the sacrifice as a moral generator, the enemy as a motivating axis of the struggle and the justification of a political-social and ideological model. According to the war criteria (Yardstick for War Winkler), the images must show the people the effort to be made in the rear (women working alone or children collecting scrap) and emphasizing the exemplarity of citizenship: it is a war popular where "we succeed or die". These include a series of Frank Capra documentaries that manages to convey the ideas of a solid country willing to the greatest sacrifices. EE. UU. Aspires to lead a more democratic world with known ideas of strength: what is good for Americans is good for the world, allies fight a "good war" of free man in the face of the brutality of the slave man. He accurately states: "Let the enemy prove the justice of our cause … that our youth see the German screams and the Japanese exaltation to know that he is fighting for freedom" .
Great producing houses such as Disney and Warner Bros also helped this cause with animated shorts with the aim of instilling a series of anti -fascist content ideas, and, in this case, specifically related to Japanese ultranationalism, their films did show images of their own Japanese, associated with the idea of "Yellow Peril" (a metaphor associated with the race, which represented all Asians, and that was associated with Japan in the S.XX). They showed the "Japanese individual" in a completely stereotyped and negative way. For example, the historian Artur Mardem mentioned about his "aim meshed by the shape of his eyelids"; And references to his size and his brain slowness were frequent. These elements, part of a clearly orientalist and racist speech.
Cold war and the Soviet threat
After the war, the American government identifies the Soviet as its new enemies, allies until that moment and determinants in the course that took the war. It would definitely be installed from this period in American society an unprecedented anti -communist hyster. From 1947, with the help of Hollywood studies, the US government raises the existence of a historical complicity between what calls the two "totalitarianism of the twentieth century": fascism and communism.
On November 25, 1947, ten writers, directors and producers were summoned by contempt to Congress, after refusing to testify before the Committee of Antiestadouniden Activities. Copying at the opinions of the United States Cinematographic Association, the great studies fired those artists, who were called “the ten of Hollywood’, emphasizing that they would not be hired again until they agreed to swear that they were not communists. That list was made up of scriptwriters Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Dalton Trumbo; The screenwriter and director Herbert J. Biberman; the screenwriter and producer Adrian Scott; And director Edward Dmytryk would be prosecuted for contempt and sentenced to sentences between six months and one year in jail.
During these years science fiction films have the “other ‘to the aliens, identified with the communists as in the thieves of bodies (Don Siegel, 1956) where this phrase stands out:“ Are the thieves of bodies similar to the communists similar to the communists eager to end individual freedom?”, A social and traditional cinema that praises American life in turn denigrating the Soviet way of life, the cinema of the fifties and sixties portrays handsome citizens, with elegant costumes, with the family as a axis of life and a more life healthy, is the generation after World War II that accesses university and with it the discovery of new cultural forms that will lead to social changes. The most effective way to create that anti-orsS climate was through the insertion of subtle messages in the film productions that served as propaganda of the “American Way of Life’. The film industry therefore contributed to the objective of the State Department that the rest of the world would like to "live as US citizens live".
Spy cinema becomes a subgenre in the US that triumphs between the masses. There, the James Bond saga feels its bases where in most films, ‘The Malo’ is a Soviet or an oriental in allusion to the growing power of Mao. It is also observed in death in the heels (1959) where James Mason’s character is a Soviet agent. These films were full of the traits of the Soviet personality and the communist ideology that is wanted to stereotyp, the suspension of individual freedoms, that is to say authoritarianism; The prohibition of the use of religious images, that is to say atheism. Of course insensitivity, evil, cruelty and proclivity to alcohol consumption. Additionally, veiled and explicit sessions of anti -American indoctrination and propaganda are seen. There are still contemporary films that fall into these same stereotypes such as K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), directed by Kathryn Bigelow.
During the seventies the Vietnam War was an event that changed the American landscape newly created country in South Asia fell into the hands of the communist guerrillas, little by little it was charging prominence to the point of conditioning the social and political life of the United States. The number of soldiers sent to fight to a country thousands of kilometers was increasing, and it was not seen that the results were expected. Rather the complete opposite. This caused the protest movement against the war to begin to grow from a few “antibelicist radicals” to form a phenomenon in which the majority of the young people in the country, and practically all those who had higher studies or were in the university He was mobilized against war, wondering why they had to go fight to another country, and if they were going to free a country from communist aggression or continue to keep a corrupt dictator, an example of this vision is the film Forrest Gump (1994 ) .Hollywood remained with few films in which the main theme was the Vietnam War, only films such as Boina Greens (1968), starring John Wayne could be released during the sixties, with an argument and aesthetics similar to those made during the World War II, with a unidirectional message that did not admit nuances.
If in the seventies the criticism is aimed at participation in the war, the “why were we?"It becomes the following decade in a" Why did we go and we don’t finish the task?”, APPROACH THAT RECEASES WITH THE NEOCONERVATOR GOVERNMENT OF REAGAN, such is the case of the Rambo Film Saga where there is a criticism of civil society that denied the war and its heroic combatants. It is worth highlighting the representation of the masculinity that Rambo makes, such as other action films of the eighties that will be remarkably influenced by it, characterized by muscle hypertrophy and the continuous use of effective and diverse weapons – as Schwarzenegger also showed it, Chuck Norris, Jeanclaude Van Damme, Bruce Willis, etc., as well as an exaltation of military and brutality power.
Rocky IV (1985) is another film to highlight since it can be qualified as the most propaganda Years of the Cold War. Apart from supposing a resurgence of the Soviet threat, in Rocky IV the end of hostilities occurs before, after beating Rocky to the boxer product of Soviet planning in Moscow territory. Top Gun (1986), marked a milestone as far as Hollywood-Pentagon collaboration is concerned. Specifically, it was in this case the Navy that collaborated more closely in the production of the film, due to an interest in putting an end to the recruitment crisis that suffered from Vietnam. They lent a aircraft carrier, airplanes and pilots, as well as their support in the various aerial choreographies. Although as a condition, the takeoffs and landings of the fighters always from the aircraft car be registered, as well as that the combat scenes are surrounded by the ocean, in order to highlight the aspects of the Navy.
The war against terrorism
With the end of the Cold War, the character of super power of the United States is re-affirmed that after forty years of conflict with the Soviet Union had ended the communist threat. Now the United States had the best and most modern army in the world, it was the first country to reach Luna, it was an economic, technological and media giant, and no threat was seen on the horizon to the US status quo. He had not been beaten in his continental territory for a century when Francisco (Pancho) Villa attacked Colombus (border town) on March 9, 1916. American expansionism continued to make its way on all continents and cardinal points until almost twelve years after the fall of the wall in Berlin, on September 11, 2001, an unprecedented event happens that would change US history forever. Two kidnapped commercial aircraft crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, a third against the Pentagon facilities in Virginia and a quarter and last that did not reach its goal crashed in an uninhabited area in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The attack on the twin towers in 2001 and others inside and outside the United States such as Ántrax attacks in 2003, Balí Bombas (2002), Spain (2003) and Great Britain (2004) end up unleashing the so -called war against Terrorism through Operation Libertad Durade.
After this tragic event and the support of President George W. Bush (son), in the 2000s and 2010s there are films in which his main plot revolves around terrorism, flight 93 (2006) Based on real events tells the story of one of the four aircraft kidnapped on 11 September 2001 by Islamic extremists of Al-Qaeda in order to carry out terrorist attacks throughout this film enemies are represented as religious fans, the characteristic assigned to these characters in this production is their bloodthirsty and cruel, At the time of the kidnapping of the plane they use knives, they stab the passengers and crew members who do not exercise any type of resistance.
conclusion
It is evident that the media, in this case cinema, in the same way as many other factors, has the ability to generate such feelings of attraction and admiration in citizens of some state towards a third party. The millions of spectators in the movie theaters exposed again and again to an American altruistic and heroic image or a satanized of Islam will end sooner or later for assimilating this vision and creating ties of admiration and affinity or repudiation and rejection of that society. Cinema creates tensions between nations. Approaches or distance. Generates support or rejection reactions. With arguments founded or without them, rulers make statements of principle aimed at generating reactions between public opinion.
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