An interesting read

Here you'll find a new LA Times article on the fascinating connection between Hollywood and the US Army.



In essence, it's one man's job -- Lt. Col. J. Todd Breasseale -- to decide which major-studio scripts receive Army assistance and which ones do not. Often, with big-budget blockbusters and war films, filmmakers cannot push projects into production without the Army providing access to jets, planes, ships, etc.

Put bluntly, the army can ostensibly kill a film because of something Breasseale finds objectionable in a script.

As a progressive film-lover, I'm immediately off-put by the idea of a military man making ideological judgments on which films merit help and which ones don't. Yet, at the same time, Breasseale comes off as pretty reasonable in the piece. He's no artless ideologue. The writer pits Breasseale against Crash mega-hack Paul Haggis, and it's debatable which figure is more convincing.

To call this censorship would be knee-jerk liberalism, which is what I think Haggis is guilty of here. Still, the situation is troubling. Now, I understand it would be against the Army's greater interest to help Oliver Stone shoot his latest hit-piece on the US government. Clearly the Army can't help every production that needs a tank in scene 12, so it hires someone to act as a filter, to decide which projects get assistance and which ones don't. There is no set of objective criteria used in this process, so there's certainly room for Breasseale to make PR-driven value judgments in the name of "fairness" and "accuracy."

The problem I have is with Breasseale seemingly believing that filmmakers have an obligation to portray the military in a balanced, "nuanced" way. They don't. American filmmakers are artists in a country that values freedom of expression, and as such they have no obligation to any outside entity. It's OK for the the Army to avoid helping a film it doesn't like, just as it's OK for a corporation to not play ball with a film that mocks corporate America. It only makes sense. But Breasseale's goals are clearly propagandistic -- it's his job, essentially, to make it so the Iraq War doesn't become culturally defined by a series of scathing films (i.e. Vietnam = Born on the Fourth of July, Apocalypse Now).

Thus far he's gotten lucky: Every major Iraq-related fiction film has failed commercially and critically. In the article, he disingenuously exploits this fact and claims the films failed because of their one-sidedness. Nice try. The implicit argument here is that people don't like anti-war films, and they'd much rather watch balanced, more neutral accounts of war. I'm not sure too many people saw the trailer for Rendition and thought "Now, I would go see an even-handed film on America's use of torture, but this I'll pass." I'd argue it's not anti-war films that critics and audiences don't like, but rather it's bad anti-war films.

(Brief digression: The flat-out failure of Iraq War films to resonate with critics/audiences has given false ammo to those on the left and right. Liberals say critics pan Iraq films because of the status-quo bias inherent in the corporate media, while conservatives relish every box-office failure as another example of Hollywood's out-of-touch liberalism. Both sides are wrong here: Liberal film critics blasted Rendition, Redacted, Lions for Lambs, etc. because they were poorly made on the level of cinematic craft, not because of any ideological dispute; while audiences rejected the films simply because they were bad and not because of their deep-down support of the Iraq War. Most Americans are against the war, obviously, so it doesn't make any sense to argue that these films' financial failure suggests otherwise).

In Breasseale's view, it seems, the perfect war film makes no polemical claims; rather, it presents a neutral depiction of the US Army at work.

It's no wonder the story's accompanied by a photo of Breasseale holding a framed poster for Black Hawk Down, the Jerry Bruckheimer war-porn fantasy from 2001.

I'd be interested to know what others thought of this story and the Army program it discusses. I'm not outright against it, but, at the very least, I'd be interested in learning how precisely Breasseale determines a "good" film from a "bad" one. Is it just accuracy? What if a filmmaker is accurate in his negative depiction of the Army? Is he required to show a differing viewpoint? Must Iraq War films be made with a bizarre incarnation of the Fairness Doctrine in place?

All questions I'd like to research and answer soon.