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.