Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 40 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
Marooned had some fairly unique features. There’s no music, but a Nolan-esque set of ominous ambient sounds. Each spacecraft gets its own odd sound–the Tiros weather satellite sounds like a fax machine scanning, which is what its telemetry really sounds like.
The black and white monitors that allow one-way video conversation are “real”, real video, not matted-in film. That’s unusual in a Hollywood movie. It’s one of those touches that make Marooned a little more realistic.
The Ironman mission that puts the men up there would take place in slightly different form as Skylab, four years later.
Actually this is the only scene I’ve remembered. Yes, it was haunting alright.
I haven’t watched it yet. Waiting to hear the buzz.
Marooned did suffer from some ordinary, late Sixties special effects work. The blue screen makes the composite shots look cheesier than they should. The “wire work” (actors in space suits “floating” in space) is not smooth. To be fair to the film, it was already in production when 2001 abruptly raised the bar for outer space special visual effects.
From what I’ve read, the actual astronauts liked Marooned and 2001 as well, for different reasons. Marooned was a straightforward Hollywood production that respected their interests. The hardware and the mission were a little off, but it had the NASA spirit. The more mystical side of 2001: A Space Odyssey didn’t bother them; what they saw in Kubrick’s film was the most realistic near-future of space ever presented.
I would have thought NASA as well as the astronauts would find the plot of Marooned, all about astronauts losing their marbles, insulting. And implausible: nothing of the kind occurred during Apollo 13, or any other mission.
There’s a reason why astronauts were selected from the ranks of test pilots. All of them had faced death before, and lived to tell the tale.
There is an old joke that if soft drink companies discovered negative advertising, nobody would ever drink a soda again. We would be inundated with “Put a nail in Coke and in 3 days it will be dissolved. Imagine what it is doing to your stomach! (next to nothing of course, since your stomach is highly acidic anyway and protected by mucus membranes that do really good job, but we are talking MARKETING here). Similarly, “Pepsi is so loaded with sugar 90% of Pepsi drinkers die of diabetes” … you get the picture.
The Democrats hated Nixon, and although shady break-ins and using the Hoover FBI/CIA to dig dirt on political opponents was common and as old as Jefferson vs Adams, it rarely went to weaponizing the justice department against political opponents, and if it did, it didn’t have TV hearings. The Democrats used the same ploy in Iran-Contra, and the Republicans caught up with the program against Bill Clinton, then the Democrats weakly tried to make “Scooter” Libby into Satan during W (their marketing department must have been on too much cocaine, “Scooter” isn’t a great villain name)
Obama was immune because he was the first black president. If anyone had just bothered to quote some of the stuff from “Dreams“, Hillary would have won in 2008 (so it is better nobody did).
Then the “Full Monty+” returned with Trump. Not to be undone when the propaganda turned positive on Biden, we are now faced with a president too senile to stand trial, but perfectly suited for a 2nd term.
“The Wizard of Oz” is where we live, it is just that we see the man behind the curtain, and like “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, the masses are too sacred to admit reality.
They didn’t take the plot too literally. In Marooned, the astronauts don’t lose their marbles; we see one of the three start to show alarmingly ragged, unstable behavior; the other two performed heroically. It’s not so much implausible as it’s fiction. If the retros don’t fire, they don’t come home.
EDIT: The core situation in both cases, the movie and the flight: the machinery messed up in an unpredicted way that threatened the lives of the astronauts.
Its not a joke, I think its true. Which is why its not allowed, industry after industry would self destruct if they ran negative ads on competitive products.
There is no evidence – none – that Nixon knew, organized or in any way participated in the break ins. That was the CIA doing that, purposefully getting caught, then hanging it on the white house… Granted he panicked and acted poorly once the trap was sprung. The CIA did this, because Nixon had talked to the CIA director about Kennedy.
I’m a Nixon man through and through, but even the Old Man himself admitted he ordered actions that broke the law. Impeachment is a political, not a legal matter, so if Nixon had retained his enormous post-’72 election popularity in the country, he would have been criticized by Congress and that would have been that. But he lost that popularity. The oil crisis of October 1973 was one of the few times in that era where the outside world slapped us upside the head, and it lingered. The postwar stock market finally crashed.
Nixon did what the public craved so much in 1968: he got us out of Vietnam. His policies about Russia and China were popular. But as we’ve seen, the public will forgive a lot if the economy is booming, and it gets pretty sour pretty quick when the economy does.
Silent Coup is the book that I’d guess comes closest to Occupant’s point of view. I buy that the deep state feared and resented Nixon; I don’t buy that the CIA did it or made him do it.
To get back to the subject of the OP, if you want to see intelligent, as opposed to stupid, anti-Nixon propaganda, take a gander at The White House Plumbers. Made with probably one-twentieth of the inflation-adjusted resources of All the President’s Men, this HBO mini-series is satirical but unusually accurate in locations and historical detail. The series, for all its sardonic humor, has a degree of respect for Nixon’s achievements and a real sense of regret, even tragedy at seeing it set itself up for destruction. People who should know say that the portrayal of Gordon Liddy is dead-on, capturing some of the good side of someone who was tough to like.
Watergate on screen might be worth a Screwtape propaganda post.
The Watergate hearings had been going on all summer. (I remember because I watched every minute of them that I could. Yes, I was glued to the television.) I admit that I lost my concentration in the fall, because we did a move from Illinois to Minnesota then, after the school year had already started. Are you saying the oil crisis in the fall suddenly tipped the scales against Nixon, and it wasn’t the issue with the missing minutes on the tapes? That’s not the way I remember it, but like I say, I lost my concentration for a while there.
Yep, that’s my assertion. The hearings were entertaining, but the public didn’t turn against Nixon until the economy tanked, removing his Teflon.
Nixon screwed up by turning the process into a striptease. He could have disclosed everything early. It would have hurt a little, but he would certainly have survived. Once things got to the point where the tapes were revealed, he could have burned the tapes and gotten away with it. He was convinced he could ride it out.
When he fired the special prosecutor in October (“Nixon is a Cox Sacker!”) he miscalculated. The public was no longer willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
I didnt know that.
Nixon admitted to the break ins in a memoir according to the NY Times.
“All the Presidents Men” was always a huge propaganda movie… Its really started the ball rolling in creating our modern partisan democrat corporate press that is nearly useless.
Thank you for reminding me of the firing of the special prosecutor. Yeah, I can see that the oil crisis had been going long enough by the time he resigned to put some wear on the situation. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms then.
At the end of March 1973, two months after his second inauguration, after the biggest reelection victory in history, Nixon had already had to fire John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, as well as a lesser couple of officials. He’d taken on some damage. People already knew the outline of what happened at the Watergate and re-elected him anyway. But he had also just got the POWs home at last, a time of national celebration. There was nothing, nothing to suggest that he’d be gone in a year and a half.
If and when this becomes re-worked as a post, there’ll definitely be a link to the first Lifetime Achievement Award broadcast of the American Film Institute, honoring director John Ford. This took place at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, the very place where Nixon famously said “Gentlemen, you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore”. That was, at the time, only a little more than ten years ago. Now, what a difference. Former POWs in full dress uniform had the best tables as John Ford gave a speech about the power of movies, the responsibilities of Hollywood, the honor of having had the co-workers that he’d had over a half century. Then, the climax of his speech, he said,
“Each night I go to bed with a prayer shared with countless other Americans. God bless President Nixon.”
And Hollywood rose to its feet in a long standing ovation.
Can you imagine that moment really happened?
Yeah, I already turned against Nixon before his re-election because of Watergate, and was amazed afterwards at how well the media treated his new administration. For a while. But you’ve helped clarify the situation about “a while.”
I was a lowly student non-union assistant cameraman on Mean Streets, which filmed at the San Gennaro street festival in the fall of 1972. We weren’t the “sync” crew shooting dialog scenes. We were on rooftops and in the street with hand-held cameras. Many of those shots are in the film. One of them that isn’t was of George McGovern doing the ritual Democratic party observance of the day: pinning a $20 to the statue of the saint that’s carried through the streets. Here’s the thing. Everyone booed him.
I’m generally in agreement with Gary. Nixon was his own worst enemy. His usually reliable political instincts failed him. It’s funny in retrospect to see how ar almost every critical point his choice was the one most likely to be easily depicted as dishonest and shady.
I do give him a bit of credit. He was very conscious his actions were setting a precedent. I think it meant a great deal to him to defend the prerogatives of the presidency.
What’s sad is the defense “everyone does it” was true. Illegal acts committed by Nixon’s predecessors were far worse and more frequent. Nixon did not realize it wasn’t a fair fight. The only effective defense would have been if he had a (D) after his name.
Yes. I always saw Nixon as a tragic figure, even to Shakespearean dimensions. His own insecurities and paranoia driving him deeper and deeper over his head.
I think Nixon thought the game was fair – and maybe it was until Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers really changed the perspective and aggressiveness of the press.
The Left had been out to get Nixon ever since he revealed their man at the State Department, Alger Hiss, was a Soviet agent.
Nixon can have had few illusions about the press, given that in 1960 Newsweek had JFK’s close personal friend, Ben Bradlee, “report” on JFK’s campaign. By 1972, Bradlee was Woodward and Bernstein’s boss at the Washington Post.
Out of political necessity Democrats had at least pretended to be anti-communists, for about 20 years after Truman bungled away China. However, once Nixon was elected in 1968 the Democrats swiftly rebranded Vietnam as “Mr. Nixon’s war”, conveniently forgetting that Nixon was just trying to clean up their mess, and went back to their traditional pro-communist policy.
To the Democrats, that overthrowing Nixon would lead to millions of people falling under Communism was not an unfortunate side effect of taking down Nixon, but a desirable outcome in itself. Conventional wisdom said that Communism was popular, successful, the wave of the future. After all, Communists were just “liberals in a hurry”.
The three astronauts flounder as they can’t agree on a course of action. The commander (Richard Crenna) unilaterally space walks. But this lets out all the air in the cabin, as well as eliminating his air tanks, so it doesn’t save much for the others.
Not the way it happens. He sacrifices himself to save the air for the other two. (One of the two knows it; the irrational guy is in denial.) They’re all wearing helmets by then, and there’s no breathable air left in the cabin.
Exactly. The left’s hatred of Nixon knew no bounds. Whittaker Chambers “Witness” casts a lot of light on the Hiss case. The lefts narrative was that Hiss was an innocent victim of “McCarthyism”, and they stuck (and to some degree still stick) to that narrative although the Verona papers proved Hiss was in fact a spy for the USSR.
Moose Tracks: Witness (bilber99.blogspot.com)
Yep, it’s beginning to look like we’ve got the next Screwtape subject in the on-deck circle.
Chambers’ Witness was ‘lies all lies’ right up until the Venona transcripts proved Hiss was always a liar and a Commie. Hugh Hewitt used to ask some of his Leftist interviewees whether Hiss was a perjurer to establish if they were on the same planet as the rest of us.
Mean Streets was one of my most memorable early moviegoing experiences. With its small-time mafiosi, I’ve always thought it’s more realistic than The Godfather.
One ironic/poignant memory is that everyone in the streets and everyone on the crew was intoxicated with The Godfather in October 1972, but nobody guessed that within a year and a half, Harvey Keitel’s unknown sidekick would be Don Corleone.
I’ve always had a much higher opinion of Harvey Keitel‘s subtle performance, compared to the young Robert De Niro’s scenery chewing.