In World War II, Hollywood actively supported the fight to preserve our political freedoms. Since Vietnam, Hollywood has made clear its loathing of the United States and our armed forces.
For an extnsive and perceptive analysis of the tranfromation, read Andrew Klavan’s The Lost Art of War on the City Journal website.
Some excerpts:
... Hollywood war films past and present reflect the political philosophy not just of a small lotusland enclave, but of a large segment of our culture-making classes. The changing ways that these films portray the internal experience of the warrior, along with the change in their overall depiction of the nation and its guardians, are signs of deeper developments with unnerving ramifications.
Movies about the inner experience of war frequently revolve around the relationship of a young soldier to a battle-hardened father figure. Such films underwent a violent transformation between World War II and the aftermath of Vietnam…
Whether through Stone’s tortured paranoia or Kubrick’s cultural self-hatred, the Vietnam films’ bitter vision of the warrior’s initiation went hand in hand with Hollywood’s increasingly negative depiction of America. That depiction depended partly on the filmmakers’ specific rejection of Vietnam-era policies. But it was shaped, informed, and encouraged by a larger phenomenon: the intellectuals’ turning away from nationalism itself.
...Nationalism had caused the war; therefore cosmopolitanism, and a stateless commitment to the People, would end war altogether.
The trouble with cosmopolitanism, as George Orwell pointed out, is that no one is willing to fight and die for it. When warlike racial nationalism resurged in the thirties, only an answering “atavistic emotion of patriotism,” as Orwell wrote, could embolden people to stand against it…
And as respect for America as a worthy nation waned among the elite, so, too, did respect for America’s guardians. Instead of a movie hero, the warrior became the self-serious militaristic buffoon of such antiwar films as Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964)...
It’s a nightmare vision. American warriors are the extension of a clueless, violent, and imperialist culture. A rain of napalm burns away pristine jungles so that indigenous primitives can be replaced by Yank thugs drooling over Playboy bunnies in spangled cowboy suits. The supreme manifestation of this fantasy is Duvall’s aptly named Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, a madman who wipes out an entire village merely to clear the beach for a famous surfer likewise aptly named L. B. Johnson. In a film that denigrates the nation and its culture, the patriot warrior can only appear absurd…
Liberals often argue that in criticizing American actions and culture, artists are actually defending American principles by holding the nation to its own standards. That argument would make sense in an atmosphere of contending visions that showed both America’s greatness and its imperfections. But when the arts purvey only a consistently anti-patriotic and anti-military message, it seems clear that they have in fact detached the ethos from the country that embodies it. In doing so, American artists are adopting European-style cosmopolitanism, which leaves them virtually incapable of depicting warriors as heroes. “International society has ideas to defend—ideas of universal justice—but little actual ground,” the political thinker Robert Kaplan wrote recently. “And without ground to defend, it has little need of heroes.”
...With 9/11 violently awaking us to the fact of ongoing global jihad, real war came again. And not merely war, but a war that made nonsense out of cherished cosmopolitan left-wing doctrines like multiculturalism and moral relativism. Rather than face the obvious failures of their philosophy, intellectual and creative elites retreated into their present high-sounding but secretly selfish antinational moralizing.
...In Redacted, Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, and Lions for Lambs—as in more successful thrillers like Shooter and The Bourne Ultimatum—virtually every act of the American administration is corrupt or sinister, and every patriot is a cynically misused fool. Every warrior, therefore, is either evil himself or, more often, a victim of evil, destined for meaningless destruction or soul-death and insanity.
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