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Screwtape’s Screening Room
Welcome to the first in a sporadic series of posts about how films and TV shows use dramatic tools to provoke or suppress reactions to manufactured truth. The word Propaganda has such a negative connotation, doesn’t it? We’re going to take the mystery out of it. It’s a word innocently derived from The Society for the Propagation of the Faith. Uncountable publicists, propagandists, and PR men over the centuries have sympathy with the avaricious French poet who sarcastically declared “Here lies the Cardinal Richelieu. And—more’s the pity—my pension died with him.”
From time to time our clinical dissection of an ‘admirable’ bit of craftsman-like deceit is going to seem cynical, even amoral. It’s the old showbiz switcheroo: in Screwtape’s Screening Room, the Ricochet virtuous will pay a limited degree of ironic tribute to vice.
After all, if we’re going to study cultural persuasion, the experts in influencing mass opinion, the masters of technique, we’re going to pay grudging acknowledgment to skills of agenda setting and image making from wherever they come. When you do the job well—really, really, well—a writer makes an eager audience complicit in filling in the blanks of a biased story. Get them to congratulate their own cleverness when they “uncover” for themselves the clues you planted. The Screwtape Letters, the C.S. Lewis creation whose name this post echoes and honors, is a wise guide, and a wise guy’s guide, in how to use a reader’s vanity and conceit to lead them astray.
But first, one special case to be set aside: outright, up-front propaganda by anyone’s definition, not necessarily even sinister ones: a Chinese history of their space program. A federally funded television series about the U.S. Constitution. RT on the cultural distinctiveness of Donetsk. At least you know what you’re getting and can take that into account.
There’s another special category that falls on the border of what most people casually mean by “propaganda”: privately funded films of clear political intention, like Michael Moore’s and Dinesh D’Souza’s films. They are open attempts at persuasion. Nothing wrong with that. They are a special category of our subject that deserves its own look, but for the purpose of the Screwtape posts, we’re less concerned about honest, clearly labeled political wing-ery of any sort, than we are with examining background attempts to influence the culture in mainstream scripted entertainment.
Oliver Stone’s time at the NYU film school overlapped mine. Oliver has had an interesting career, to say the least. JFK is a smartly crafted movie made to sell a viewpoint, like almost every other Stone film. He takes advantage of the Texas and Louisiana accents of many of the major characters to tacitly encourage you to see them as real Americans, traditionalists, and patriots who, far from being left wing nut jobs, are the kinds of people an audience trusts. When examining the history of Lee Harvey Oswald’s return to the USA after defecting to the Soviet Union, D.A. Jim Garrison and their staff sound all the more authoritative “speaking in Southern”.
Even supporting characters chime in to say, “Why, that traitor Oswald should have been clapped in irons the second he got home from Russia!” in the style of 1953 anti-Communist spy dramas like I Led 3 Lives, but now enlisted in the causes of the Left.
Outright lies are risky; they can be caught and refuted. That’s a risk that a crafty storyteller doesn’t have to take if he’s got the alternatives of innuendo, omission, and sly misdirection in the toolbox. Be prepared! One standard technique is, take a reasonable-sounding fact and exaggerate its flaws, or use it where it doesn’t really apply.
For example, here’s a fact: Plenty of Americans do worry about medical bills and the limits of insurance. Overseas audiences are particularly prone to believe that grandmas are being tossed out in the snow by hospitals all over the country. T’ain’t exactly true. But “medical expenses”, though they can absolutely be an element in a real story, are more usually a lazy Get Out of Jail Free card for any screenwriter. It provides a progressive-approved, can’t-be-questioned motivation for just about anything—a citywide graffiti campaign (Turk 182), pressuring a falsely accused spy to “confess” (Mission Impossible 1, 1996), or turning from the classroom to being a vicious drug lord (Breaking Bad).
In other words, when you come down to it, if we don’t have national health care, can we say we, as a society (man, I hate that phrase) aren’t the reason why people mess up the city, brutalize suspects, or cook meth? Well, er, yes we can. But it’s a righteous convenience for writers.
One of the central plot motivators in Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Cape Fear is the dubious notion, not seriously questioned, that Robert De Niro’s character is understandably vengeful towards his former lawyer over his rape conviction, because “everyone knows” (supposedly) after all, that back in 1977, it’s hardly as if rape was even treated as a crime yet. So, if you believe that, the problem with the Seventies wasn’t that it was a slack time of libertine moral confusion about sex–OK, far from the only possible interpretation, but I’ll put it up against theirs—but that feminism wasn’t strong enough yet to put De Niro’s character away for life.
One of the central assumptions of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown is that “everyone knows” that the rich and powerful are always above the law. Sure, there’s some truth to that, and there’s been some truth to it since before the Pharaohs, but there isn’t total truth in that, as Polanski himself would soon discover for himself, as would, eventually, Harvey Weinstein. Even the cynical miscalculate.
An important part of propaganda is making things and people more palatable. It’s like being a defense attorney. You re-frame issues. You make an unsympathetic client acceptable to audiences who walk in ready to dislike them. Don’t expect much on-the-spot corrective righteousness in this OP. That’s the job of the Comments Section.
Sometimes an image rehab takes more than spackle and paint. Jane Fonda’s early Seventies work, like 1972’s live tour film F.T.A., (a slurring reference to the U.S. Army) was so blatantly, repellently political that it made lousy, ineffective propaganda. She realized she was never going to outlive her ‘Hanoi Jane’ image for many people, but by the middle of the decade, Fonda retooled her approach.
She started choosing her films more shrewdly, featuring her new constant role: a normal-sounding, fairly naïve woman, someone of no particular political beliefs, at least at first. But then she encounters a recession and wave of unemployment (Fun with Dick and Jane). Or her tyrannical boss is also a lecher (Nine to Five). Those were played for laughs. No heavy-handed propaganda there. On the contrary: they were light-handed propaganda, with a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. Fonda’s dramas Coming Home and The China Syndrome also featured this kind of character, seemingly too direct and too gosh darn goodhearted to be clubbing you over the head with politics.
Sometimes, the image manipulators do fail. In the words of a Mad Men-era cliché, the dogs just won’t eat the dog food. For instance, I’ll give feminist writer Gloria Steinem rare approval here in Ricochet, for saying, accurately, that The People Versus Larry Flynt, Milos Forman’s 1996 flop, told lies of omission, leaving out the seamy and disgusting stuff that would turn off the sophisticated, progressive target market. Another writer dryly compared it to a version of Gone with the Wind that made slavery look like mere sashaying role playing. This stung because it was coming from the left; the Larry Flynt filmmakers expected only criticism from the right.
Propaganda points are like neighborhoods. Over a long period of time, the original groups who live there sometimes slowly die off. Most of their children move away. Eventually, a new crowd moves in. Like castle keeps, rhetoric can change hands. Concern about overbearing police and FBI surveillance shifted from left to right. So did willingness to use tariffs to defend the interests of industrial workers, and caution about getting involved with overseas wars. Two years ago, we saw a sardonic meme from a young German with a long, droll memory: “So: you want us to form and equip a large army, march it across Poland, and fight Russians. Just writing this down so there’s no misunderstanding later.” You never really know what might change.
As for humanity’s prospects in the long run, every outfit with messianic ambitions, holy or unholy, tends to have a taste for propaganda, and successful ones have a real, if regrettable talent for it. I’m reminded of the ad campaign for Alien vs Predator: Whichever One Wins, We Lose.
Published in Entertainment
It’s all how you set up a situation. The women in TV in Bombshell who work for Fox News are victimized because conservatives are hypocrites about sex. The women in film in She Said who work for progressive Miramax are victimized because…men are such animals.
Tragg was a less infuriated version of Inspector Cramer from the Nero Wolfe novels. Tragg figured that Mason was up to something. Cramer knew Wolfe was, and knew he’d never prove it.
(There’s a dry inside joke for R> insiders like all of us: It’s the closest one to Jim’s home, that’s why it’s the best located. @clavius, in nearby Del Rey, is another R> member who is crafty and in-demand enough to have worked for two major studios within ten minutes of home.
To illustrate what the OP is about: In The West Wing, Josiah Bartlett is America’s second Catholic president. From time to time he has friendly talks with a priest, generally in the Residence with a fireplace going, and brandy or whiskey on hand. (Protestants, don’t faint; across the Tiber, we’re allowed such things.) I recall one episode where his pal, the priest, was gently pushing the idea of outlawing the death penalty, and Bartlett put up such a weak defense of it that the two men laughed; okay, you won, but I am the leader of a country that is not ready to do away with the death penalty. Bartlett hadn’t budged, but we in the audience know what side his heart is really on.
OK, cut. Hold your places. Give ’em revision R> and start again. Same priest, same friendly persuasive Catholic reasoning. Almost the same lines of dialog, except now the subject the priest is pushing is…ending abortion. How would Aaron Sorkin like it now? Same reluctant chummy tacit agreement. All right, you have the better of me, but this party and this country is not ready. As with the earlier script, there’s the clear implication that Bartlett may “evolve” on the issue, even if his public posture is the same.
You wouldn’t have had a chance to judge that episode. But in literal terms, the “Catholic content” would have been about the same. So how come one and not the other? We all know why.
He was like an amiable gargoyle that clambered down from a cathedral.
In the early eps – the very early ones, first season – Burger was portrayed as being ethically suspect, somewhat. They backed off this quickly. In a few post-trial pre-credit sequences, he actually gets together with Perry to chew over the case, eat a little crow, ask a question, and you’re always gladdened by the collegiality, somehow. Burger would always have that moment where he saw the case slip away, and would sit down, almost open-mouthed, as Perry bore in and revealed the truth. He might have been secretly grateful: this wasn’t the real trial, the one with a jury, but a prelim, and all the flaws in his case were exposed before they went to trial.
In the beginning, Perry played a little faster and looser, staying just-this-side of the line. Burger was frequently reduced to sputtering threats to have Mason disbarred.
But by a few years into the show, they were opponents, not enemies. To tie back into the OP (and you have to know I’d try to do that…bwahaha!), it became necessary for a hit show to toe the line a little more. When Perry was rather improbably hired to assist Air Force lawyers defending a court martial, he had a little speech about how the men on both sides of the case honored the law as much as they honored the uniforms they wore. Back in those days, you eventually had to show you were on the team.
JFK is a great piece of filmmaking. Superb cast, great acting, heady pell-mell pace that caught you up in a mad, daft story that felt true. What bothers me most is John Williams’ score. He shouldn’t have taken the job. There’s an urgent insistency to the score, a particular low chord he uses when the good guys are piecing things together, and it’s alarmingly effective. Somehow using the John Williams tonalities legitimizes the whole farrago, like having Norman Rockwell paint a picture of the moon landing being faked in a studio.
I’ve told this story here before, but I saw JFK at a special press event at the Janus in Washington DC, and afterwards I hit the head, only to find myself between Stone and Sam Donaldson at the wall. Two alpha dogs in a small kennel.
IIRC, in 1991, at a fast bathroom break when we were hosting a taped tribute to the Bill of Rights, I was standing next to Stanley Kramer, a great old time liberal director, tons of famous movies. He was about as old then as I am now, and he stood there streaming longer than Netflix does now.
I was half-tempted to enunciate a parody of “Glory of Love”, the Oscar nominated hit song from his Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: …”
“You’ve got to pee a little...piss a little…aim at your shoes and miss, a little…”
Actually the Google sound stages in Playa Vista are much closer. The Sony lot is probably a quicker drive straight across Culver too. But Manhattan Beach is the primo West Side venue, and the studio is steps from Il Fornaio for lunch.
Didn’t know @clavius was also close by, @GaryMcVey. We three should do lunch sometime, maybe discuss the Super Tuesday results!
We could combine our power rings, like the ones on Captain Planet!
“Calvin Coolidge, he’s our hero,
Taking wokeness down to zero…”
There should be some advantage to living in California.
Its the great failing of The West Wing, that they didnt have Arnold Vinick win the election. I would like to have seen Hollywood’s projection of what a “Moderate” republican administration and agenda looked like. Maybe they would have to switch rolls, and Jimmy Smits would have played the republican candidate…
The West Wing, like 24, didn’t claim to be actual reality, but both of them drew a fair amount of their popularity from people who believed they were pretty close to the backstage truth of reality.
Casting IRL goodhearted liberal Alan Alda as goodhearted conservative Arnold Vinik was stunt-casting of a sort. It’s a Hollywood megaproducer waving, hey, folks! I gave you your Dole/McCain clone! To some degree he did, and it’s more than some would have given.
…”More than some” who would have given? Propagandists, of course.
Which reminds me of a Cheech and Chong bit…
White Collar Executive: Why is your splash so much louder than mine?
Stoner: Easy, man. I’m pissing on your briefcase.
It was a stunt, and from the casting I knew that Alan Alda would not become a main cast character – thus was going to lose.
I never saw John McCain as the goodhearted conservative, he was a more bomb them all, god can sort them out, kind of conservative. I saw Arnold Vinik as being more like a blue state republican moderate, like Chris Christie or Youngkin… Who’s great being electable in a democrat state… But likely has no future as a republican presidential candidate.
I wished there was a West Wing now… Maybe people could look at it, and notice that there is no political debate any more… One side makes a policy proposal and the other side starts throwing insults rather than debate the merits of the proposal.
Timing and luck always play a part. The China Syndrome opened right before Three Mile Island, and every news report seemed to have a promo clip on hand: “If this melts down, it could destroy an area the size of Pennsylvania!” It was a key factor in the film’s success. To some audiences, it seemed to make the film’s premises irrefutable.
To be fair, that kind of thing sometimes has nothing to do with ideology. Marooned was still in theaters when Apollo 13 nearly didn’t make it back. When it did, Columbia hastily revised the movie’s ad campaign to take advantage of the country’s feel-good vibes.
But a film that’s actually about the making of propaganda might have had the best coincidental luck of all. Wag the Dog opened in 1997, fully a year before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. And yet, if you look closely enough at the television control room in the film, you see a freeze frame of Lewinsky herself as one of the people at a rope line. It’s an amazing coincidence.
Do we? I can’t speak to West Wing and Sorkin. The same question could apply to Blue Bloods or Law & Order. There are several reasons why.
StateNetwork. Interest groups no longer have powerful Standards and Practices execs to intimidate, but few companies want to carry water for (or anger) any religion.Law & Order dealt with both. They tiptoed around abortion even while engaging it. They campaigned ardently against capital punishment, but used the threat to elicit confessions. Writers probably think they helped get it banned in New York.
But now Dobbs has so upset the status quo that perhaps we (who differ on the issue) can agree on this: abortion is now magnitudes more radioactive as narrative subject matter for a legacy mass audience medium. Really, Oppenheimer level radioactive.
As for how Catholicism is treated, and its internal priorities portrayed, that’s a long discussion.
A fine breakdown, Jim. Indeed, since Maude‘s abortion, fifty years ago, TV comedy has avoided the subject. My mention of it in connection to The West Wing was less about the subject of abortion than it was about the tendency of scriptwriters to use only the parts of a religion that are helpful to the writer’s chosen cause. Catholicism is just dandy when it comes to increasing immigration, casting a dubious eye at the death penalty, or helping the poor. Those are actual Catholic positions. So are the ones that TV doesn’t like to endorse.
If conservatives magically took over the culture, would we also do this pick-and-choose routine to make persuasion easier? Oh, sure we would. The Right adores Elon’s reign at X. They generally prefer to ignore Tesla. We pretend that Russia is socially conservative because they fight gays, but we ignore their hookup culture, no different from ours, or their low rates of churchgoing, because it’s not a simple picture.
Wow!
Coincidence? I think not!
Cafeteria Catholicism, liberal style. Not giving notes here, but if religions offered an à la carte menu, secularism would have to up its game.
On TV we do see priests shielding illegals from the law. It’s an easy, honest plot beat since the “sanctuary” concept has religious origins.
The scene we don’t get is the clergyman’s confession, getting grilled over the validity of national borders. (sketch for Rev. Guido Sarducci, Jr.?)
Didn’t Biden cast a dubious eye on killing Bin Laden? For some reason it’s never mentioned in leap years.
As for helping the poor, it’s a question of how, isn’t it? Script me clergy talking incentives, dependency, and birth control, I’d watch. But a character’s journey on the road to Hayek is a cold narrative. After all, messages are for
Western UnionWhat’s App.This just seemed wrong to me, because I saw Marooned first on TV, long after Apollo 13’s trials, and so I associate it with 1972, 73. But you’re right. Marooned was released at the end of 1969. Apollo 13 was launched four months later. A search of the newspaper archives doesn’t show any revised ads – by then it was a one-liner in the listings – but there were a spate of articles about the movie and its realism, which suggests the industrious work of a good PR team.
Yep.
I am no EV booster but I am interested in Tesla and wish them the best. There’s a cool factor that has some cultural cachet no one else in the market seems to have matched.
It’s a cultural garbage heap – garish, tawdry, boastful, huffing the faint fumes of past accomplishments. Never thought I’d see the delusional projection of some on the right match the delusional projection of some on the left.
The revised ad art featured Gregory Peck (the head of NASA) standing tall, with a big thumb’s-up and a thunderous launch of a Saturn V behind him. “Now MAROONED is more than a great movie!” As part of this thrill-of-victory photo illustration, the three wives of the astronauts are pictured as ecstatic with joy, including the one whose husband is dead.
The problem EVs have, is going from early adopters to wide spread adoption… The early adopters are only too happy to have a quirky car, that they have to adapt to, more than the car can adapt to them… Wide spread adopters are not like this, they expect the car to work as they need, when they – no matter how cold it is outside… This is why Chicago Tesla owners got stalled at charging stations for days, when it was cold outside. They expected the car to work like normal, re charge like normal – even when its cold out… They dont actually work that way, so many users are looking to go back to a gas car, that won’t leave them stranded on the coldest day of the year…
I get the impression that Russia is catching up from the cold war stagnation… They’re still enjoying the 70s… Men are men, women put out, and gays keep it on the down low… Church going will probably never match America’s as it was officially taboo there for so long, the cultural hang over from the soviet era must be quite significant. As we’ve experienced in the lock downs, its easy to break a tradition… Russia has had generations of heavy handed effort to break the religious traditions of the Russian peoples.
One thing Russia has under Putin is a really tight relationship between church and state. Patriarch Kirill essentially acts as Putin’s lapdog and gets some bones thrown to him in exchange — such as suppression of competing religions. It doesn’t make for the kind of religion that a lot of people want to participate in too heavily.
Russia, Hungary, and eastern Europe generally have found that harsh Marxist anti-religious measures were less effective than the seductive lure of secularism.
That’s a great find. This isn’t much different than a Big Mac and a conveyor belt.
Ingest, America. Ingest.
I’m crafty enough to live near a Del Taco. So it’s like we’re all twins.
It’s possible that Marooned was the first film I ever saw in a theater; certainly it must have been the first “grown-up” film for which I was in attendance. I would have been four years old, but already a space geek, which is probably why my parents took me along. One of my earliest memories is of the sequence in which one of the astronauts, his spacesuit pierced, drifts off into space to his doom. It haunted me as a preschooler, and for decades it was the only thing I remembered about the film.
Finally, sometime in my fifties, I watched Marooned again. I was pleasantly surprised at its realism and its commitment to technical accuracy. It’s no Apollo 13, mind you, but for its time it’s quite impressive.