The U.S. Military Industrial Complex Has Weaponized Hollywood. Arab Filmmakers Must Fight Back.

The one takeaway regarding the online debate on whether the latest Superman film is a veiled “pro-Palestine” allegory is that audiences worldwide are becoming more mindful of the fact that Hollywood films contain agenda-driven messages.

Superman, according to its writer/director James Gunn, was written and greenlit before October 7, 2023, rendering it almost impossible for it to be an intentional allegory for Palestine. 

Regardless, the irony that Superman, the lone midwestern American superhero, would be the one to save the colonized seems to have been lost on most people who engage in the debate. It’s one thing to be aware that there is no such thing as mindless entertainment coming out of the United States, and another to truly understand the intentionality behind Hollywood’s role in pushing imperialist propaganda from the U.S..

We hear more and more about the nefariousness of the military industrial complex, but little is said about the Armed Forces Entertainment. It is a branch of the US department of defense entrenched in the Hollywood system, that barters its access to military knowledge, equipment, and funds for the studios’ favorable representation of the U.S. government and military. 

Movies we consume “mindlessly”, such as Transformers, Iron Man and Captain Marvel, have all been tweaked in some shape, way or form to help indoctrinate our views on the U.S. military, its foreign policy, and the U.S. government’s imperialism.  

Not only do Hollywood blockbusters serve to numb our minds and boost our apathy in the face of an American regime that grows more rabid with each passing administration, but they also intend to condition us to see the world through the American establishment’s lens. Arabs are depicted as terrorists, Russians as blood-thirsty oligarchs, Africans as corrupt dictators, Asians as villainous masterminds. But Americans are consistently portrayed as the protagonist heroes.

By means of incessant repetition of said stereotypes, Hollywood is shamelessly propagating  that America is the most noble and moral state in the world, and anyone who dares oppose them is on the wrong side of history. So where does that leave us, the avid Arab filmgoers? 

Hollywood’s historical revisionism has been prevalent since its inception. Fueled by its archetypal portrayal of “good versus evil”, the entertainment goliath has often pushed an imperialist agenda by reframing the colonizers as the underdog heroes and the resistance fighters as primitive blood-thirsty villains. 

Hollywood Westerns, one of the most lucrative film genres in Hollywood prior to the 1960s, rebranded white settlers as civilized lone cowboys constantly living under the threat of annihilation from Native American savages. John Ford and John Wayne built their entire careers on dehumanizing Native American populations. So much so that an entire generation of Hollywood enthusiasts from around the world grew up dressing up as cowboys and shooting imaginary “Indians” with toy guns.

The Military Entertainment Complex started with World War II when the United States created an agency called the Office of War Information Bureau of Motion Pictures. Its main mandate was to control any narrative regarding the U.S. government and the war. Its director, Elmer Davis, is famously quoted saying, “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go in through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized”.

Soon enough, the Military Industrial Complex embedded itself deep within Hollywood with the right to veto any script or production that went against their agenda. By 1943, Hollywood productions submitted their scripts to the Bureau for approval.  

Sadly, this didn’t end in 1946 when the bureau was shut down. The Department of Defense and Hollywood studios still collaborated but only under the table. In fact, many Hollywood films remain sponsored by the U.S. government and have had to modify their scripts in accordance to the government’s specifications. 

Top Gun (1986) and its sequel (2022)are among this partnership’s most successful outputs. Both films served as extremely effective recruitment campaigns for the U.S. military. Between 1986 when Top Gun first aired and the First Gulf War in 1991, enrollment in the U.S. military increased considerably, namely naval aviators.  It has been reported that between the first film in 1986 and the gulf war in 1991, enrollment in the US military increased by 8%. John Davis, Top Gun’s producer, flat out labeled his film as a military recruitment project for the navy.  The second film generated just under 1.5 billion dollars at the box office, and in the U.S., akin to 1986, army recruitment booths were set up in many cinemas where the film was screened. 

Following Top Gun’s initial success, many studios were encouraged to seek the Department of Defense’s stamp of approval. As a result, Hollywood films critical of the U.S. government became much harder to finance and increasingly rare. What is particularly insidious is the lack of public disclosure considering the US establishment’s self-label of being a liberal democracy that encourages free speech. If it were truly so, Hollywood would at least make it overtly clear that those films, branded as entertainment goliaths, were sponsored by the military entertainment complex.  

Hollywood has been degrading the Arab population for decades, particularly in the post 9/11 era. A myriad of blockbuster films have intentionally dehumanized Arabs, most notably Muslim Arabs, a distinction Hollywood intentionally refuses to showcase. By homogenizing Arabs, they effectively deny us of our theological, political and cultural diversity. 

Jack Shaheen’s 2003 book Reel Bad Arabs, along with its 2006 documentary film adaptation directed by Sut Jhally, do a staggering job at compiling such films which are not limited to war movies: Back to the Future, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Aladdin are just a few examples of how insidious the output can be. 

Ridley Scott’s wildly revisionist Black Hawk Down portrays U.S. soldiers as heroic underdogs, completely omitting the U.S. military’s illegal and oil-driven invasion of Somalia from its plot. 

Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar award winning Zero Dark Thirty portrays the illegal use of torture of Arab hostages as a necessary security measure. The intent behind the film is particularly vile considering the Abu Ghraib scandal. Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, Paul Greengrass’ Green Zone, all serve to heroize the very same soldiers responsible for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths in what is essentially a war waged by the American government which, according to Human Rights Watch, was in non-conformity with the UN Charter. 

We need not look this far back, however, as even the latest Captain America boasts a black widow from the Mossad with a highly inflammatory zionist name. The examples are plenty, but what truly needs to be retained is the underlying normalization of Arab civilian murder, the homogenic portrayal of the Arab population as being fully and only Islamist, the legitimization of the US imperialist invasion of Arab territory and the nefarious casting choices of certain Arab characters. 

As for the burgeoning Arab film industry, it needs to be diligent in not adopting Hollywood’s most damaging and imperialistic tropes. Our most commercial outputs often emulate Hollywood archetypes including our own versions of the all-American action hero against all odds, which is intrinsically imperialistic, but also romantic comedies in which the youth overcome the “burden” of traditional values.  

As more films directed by Arab filmmakers make it into the prestigious international film festival circuit, upon closer examination, many of them seem to tackle sensitive topics through the prism of Western ideology. The 2023 Tunisian documentary film Four Daughters, directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, which tells the story of two daughters abandoning their families to join Daesh, was selected to compete at the 76th Cannes film festival. Feathers, an Egyptian satire depicting the emancipation of a repressed housewife dominated by her backward husband, won the critics’ choice award at Cannes in 2021. Jahar Panahi, a filmmaker relentlessly critical of the Iranian regime, was given the Palm D’Or this year for It Was Just an Accident, just a few weeks before the Iran war. 

The point is not to discredit any of these films, all of which challenge the status quo and rightfully tackle sensitive issues about our own plight. However, we need to pay careful attention to which Arab films are highlighted by the West and why. 

Arab filmmakers’ voices are important. They have a responsibility to tell stories about our circumstances in the face of oppression, whether from our own governments or from expansionist colonialism. They also hold the power to repossess our sense of identity, to expose the world to our cultures and traditions in a different light, and to build on our rich heritage which once had a major influence across the world. Much like Hollywood, our filmmakers hold the power to help reclaim our humanity, legacy, and history and to reignite a sense of pride and unity within the Arab world.