Doing media criticism is always
wrought with the most obvious question -- if films are ideological, who is
really making them? The easy way around this question is to take a sort of
Althusserian approach to ideology, arguing that many simply reproduce the
dominant ideas because they themselves grew up with them, or their class
position pushes them to offer those perspectives. Sometimes, however, evidence
emerges of a more insidious relationship between media and ideology. One
obvious example is Fox News, whose CEO is an avid conservative and actively
promotes his political agenda. This is also true of News Corp and Rupert
Murdoch and arguably a number of other outlets from the Wall Street Journal to
Washington Post, New York Times and even MSNBC (from the opposite end of the
perspective). But we also know of the politics that have always influenced the
purportedly liberal Hollywood. The latest example is an interesting one.
It turns out that Katherine
Bigelow and her team took advice from the CIA, who requested a rewrite of parts
of the script for the torture advertising Zero Dark Thirty (Guardian). In
January of this year, the Senate intelligence committee launched an
investigation into whether Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal were granted
"inappropriate access" to classified CIA material following concern from
high-profile members over the film's depiction of torture in the search for bin
Laden. The probe was dropped in February after the film earned a single Oscar;
for sound editing. However, according to Gawker.com, the CIA did successfully
pressure Boal to remove certain scenes from the script, including several that
would have cast the agency in a negative light. A memo released under the
Freedom of Information Act found that five conference calls were held in late
2011 with staff of the agency's Office of Public Affairs "to help promote
an appropriate portrayal of the agency and the Bin Laden operation."
Given that I found the film to
largely be an advertisement for torture, though many disagree with me, this a
troubling revelation that puts a damaging light on a Hollywood already under
pressure for its love affair with eroticizing violence. Apparently, sometimes
the ideological chain from the powerful to the audience is more obvious than we
could have ever imagined …
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