Living In Action Movie Culture
Do we learn about important events? Or do we just learn about historical events that are the most entertaining?
The modern action movie is something a great many people seem to love, or at least don’t mind sitting through. Maybe only second to pop music, the action blockbuster is one of the most widely consumed form of media in the last 50 years — this is pretty significant if you ask me.
This begs the question: “What is it that is so appealing about action movies?”
To fully answer that question you’d probably have to write more than a few very long books, with a lot of chapters called something like “Explosions are cool,” but nonetheless I think there are a few reasons for the sensational appeal of action movies that can serve as salient insights about the current political and cultural murkiness we find ourselves in.
History and politics, in some form or another, are often the subject of action movies. However, constantly engaging with history and politics through a medium that’s goal is to be as entertaining as possible can have dangerous consequences.
Even though the vast majority of us know that action movies set in the context of history and politics are not accurate representations of history in terms of details (i.e. the specific people and events that actually existed and took place), these accounts of history still influence our conception of the history they’re dealing with. They deal not with the specific facts but rather the emotional, overarching facts—who were the good guys, who were the bad guys, why were they fighting, etc—the really broad themes.
We know in Saving Private Ryan (1998) that there wasn’t a guy who looked like Tom Hanks who went and had to save a Private Ryan, but we accept the setting in which it is presented. This depiction of the historical setting, around the fictional narratives, is what really becomes distorted. And this distortion of historical setting, I think, has had a profound impact on our political culture.
“Are you not entertained!” is the frustrated shout of Maximus, the hero of Gladiator (2000).
Maximus is not frustrated at the slave owners and the elites they serve for making him fight. Rather, he is frustrated at the crowd for wanting to be entertained by what he thinks is such crude and senseless violence.
Nonetheless, they are entertained.
Gladiator is a film about what happens when we mistake history and politics for entertainment.
The villain of the film—the power hungry, cruel and murderous Commodus—is the newly crowded Caesar. As he returns to Rome, he addresses the democratically elected Senate for the first time and begins to give us a hint to what the film is really about.
One of the Senators raises the issues of improving “basic sanitation for the Greek quarter to combat the plague which is already springing up there.”
Commodus replies with the criticism that his father, the previous Caesar, was too preoccupied with philosophy and reading scrolls from the Senate, and that the people were forgotten by him. Senator Gracchus, who is framed in opposition to the new Caesar, retorts by suggesting that Commodus does not understand the people like the Senate does. Commodus disagrees and is upset by this.
Later on, talking to his sister Lucilla, Commodus suggests that he could dissolve the Senate, and rule all on his own — i.e. get rid of democracy make Rome a dictatorship. The dialogue follows:
Lucilla: “Don’t even think about it. There’s always been a Senate.”
Commodus: “Rome has changed. It takes an emperor to rule an empire.”
Lucilla: “Of course, but leave the people their—”
Commodus: “Illusions?”
Lucilla: “… Traditions.”
Here, Commodus touches on his philosophy of ruling the people—illusions. The scene continues:
Commodus: “My father’s war against the barbarians—he said it himself, it achieved nothing. But the people loved him.”
Lucilla: “The people always love victories.”
Commodus: “Why? They didn’t see the battles. What do they care about Germania?”
Lucilla: “They care about the greatness of Rome.”
Commodus: “The greatness of Rome… Well, what is that?”
Lucilla: “It’s an idea. Greatness… Greatness is a vision.”
Commodus: “Exactly—a vision. Do you not see Lucilla? I will give the people a vision of Rome and they’ll love me for it. And they’ll soon forget the tedious sermonising of a few dry, old men… I will give the people the greatest vision of their lives.”
Commodus then places two small figurines of soldiers in a model Colosseum, looking over it like an ominous God.
So what is this vision that Commodus will give to the people? What is this stunning vision that he will provide for the people of Rome that will make them love him?
Senator Gaius, who we previously see in opposition to Commodus—let’s just put it simply; Gaius represents Democracy and Commodus represents Dictatorship. Anyway, Gaius finds a poster announcing a new series of gladiatorial fights and games to be put on in the Colosseum by Commodus. Gaius brings it to his similarly pro-democracy, anti-Commodus ally Senator Gracchus:
Gaius: “Games. One hundred and fifty days of games.”
Gracchus: “He’s cleverer than I thought.”
Gaius: “Oh, clever. The whole of Rome would be laughing at him if they weren’t so afraid of his Praetorians.”
Gracchus: “Fear and wonder—a powerful combination.”
Gaius: “You really think the people are going to be seduced by that?”
Gracchus: “I think he knows what Rome is. Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for them, and they’ll be distracted. Take away their freedom and still they’ll roar. The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the Senate. It’s the sand of the Colosseum. He’ll bring them death, and they will love him for it.”
Commodus’s philosophy for ruling is not to try and fix the material problems of his subjects. It is to entertain them — for Proximus, the slave owner and the man who Commodus employs to supply him with gladiators, proudly tells Maximus that he is, above all, “an entertainer.”
It is true, both back in Rome and today in the 21st century, that entertainment is a welcome distraction.
Entertainment lets us escape the reality of our lives into the reality of some other place and some other time. For a brief moment it seems to take away our problems and replace them with the problems of imaginary, far away people.
A mistake you could make watching Gladiator is to think that the people are entertained primarily by the violence, blood and gore of the fights in the Colosseum. This is not so. They are entertained ultimately by the narrative in the arena, rather than just the violence, because it provides them with an escape from the depressing narrative of their real lives, just like Commodus knew it would.
Maximus’s first fight in the Colosseum is arranged as a bloody pantomime. He and he fellow gladiators play the part of the enemy “barbarians” of the famed Battle of Carthage — they fight against men dressed as noble and civilised Roman soldiers. Commodus gives his subjects in the Colosseum a dramatic staging of the Greatest Hits of Roman History, reminding them of the glory of when Rome overcame its greatest historical enemy.
The people are given a vision of the greatness of Rome, and they cheer him and love him for it, just like Commodus said they would.
When a nation seeks to remind itself of its own greatness, it rarely appeals to the present or to the future. It picks our the best stories of its history and conveniently omits the darker moments.
Saving Private Ryan (1998), The Thin Red Line (1998), Band of Brothers (2001), Valkyrie (2008), Inglourious Basterds (2009), Fury (2014), The Imitation Game (2014), Allied (2016), Hacksaw Ridge (2016), Darkest Hour (2017), Dunkirk (2017), Midway (2019) and Greyhound (2020).
All hugely commercially successful, directed by some of the most critically acclaimed directors of our time and packed with award-winning stars. They all revive the glory of what some call “the good war”—World War II; where America were indisputably the good guys and the Nazis were the bad guys.
In contrast, in the same time period (1998 to 2020), only two dramatic action movies about the war in Vietnam have been released by Hollywood — Rescue Dawn (2006) and We Were Soldiers (2002), neither of which I had seen or ever even heard about until I just looked them up.
Just as the mob of poor spectators are seduced by the vision of Rome’s past glory, we too, those of us on the side of western (American) culture, seem to have quite the appetite for continuously reliving our past glory while much less regularly remembering the wars that were far less virtuous and far more morally dubious. We love to talking about World War II. We do not love talking about Vietnam.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism (first published in 1951), Hannah Arendt wrote:
“We can no longer afford to take which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion.
The subterranean stream of Western History has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live.
And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.”
It is ironic and perhaps a little sad that, despite this post-WWII warning about the danger of retreating into nationalist myths of past greatness, we regularly mythologise (i.e. make movies about) the very war that was fought in the name of defeating the fascism and ultra-nationalism of Mussolini and Hitler’s regimes. The war created by blind nationalism is now used to foster even more nationalism.
WWII veteran and writer of A People’s History of the United States Howard Zinn said in an interview:
“I was an enthusiastic bombardier. I was imbued with all the enthusiasm that people in this country [the U.S.A.] had about fighting against fascism, and indeed, fascism needed to be, in some way, defeated. And yet I came out of that experience with a very complicated view of World War Two — that it wasn’t simple. It wasn’t simply that they were the bad guys and we were the good guys. It quickly became apparent to me that the fact that fighting against bad guys doesn’t necessarily mean that you are the good guys.”
What Zinn hits at here is how the morality of war is not always as simple or as clear as it is commonly presented to be. The problem is that action movies present history in a way that does not allow for nuance or moral complexity. While we understand that war-based action movies do not have to be factually correct, they make no attempt to accurately portray the moral history of war. They present it as goodies vs baddies, and that simply is not reality. And as much as we may say that it’s not the case, and as much as we may not want this to be the case, much of our historical understanding comes from movies.
But why do movies present history as such a morally simple matter?
Because it has to be entertaining.
Much of history is gruesome, depressing and demoralising. Much of history is difficult to pin down, and is really much more subjective and biased than we’re bought up to believe. And frankly, much of history is boring. You have to pick out the entertaining parts.
What we think history is, is not really history, but the very very few entertaining parts of history that have been stitched together for us.
When we expect history and politics to be entertainment, they become something else; a type of new mythology in which all the parts of history that are not entertaining are stripped away, leaving us with a retelling of history that omits every detail that is boring, difficult and confronting. It leaves us with a hollow husk of pseudo-history, only showing us the bits of our past that make us feel good about ourselves.
We love to watch a movie about the glory of a gritty unit of American soldiers pushing back Hitler into Germany, but there are no major Hollywood films made about the Allied fire bombing of Dresden, only one about the dropping of atom bombs in Japan1 (although it is pretty bad and was not popular), and none made about any of the other needless Allied bombings of WWII that are so conveniently forgotten.
History told through action movies is almost always a dangerous distortion of the reality, pulling focus onto the very few things about war that we could ever be proud about and thus letting us avoid dealing with the reality.
The expectation of politics and history to be entertaining is not just a problem they grappled with in Ancient Rome, or that we must grapple with in Hollywood blockbusters.
Donald Trump was nothing if not entertaining, and his view of American history was, like Commodus’s presentation of Roman history, an masterclass of cherry picking. Even if you despise him or love him, he is undoubtedly entertaining. To his fans and those who voted for him, his crude insults and verbal sparing matches with his opponents were entertaining, and to those that didn’t like him, he still played his part of the supreme villain in the political theatre.
To those who didn’t want to see him succeed, Trump still played the part of the heel; the bully; the bad guy that we’d love to see fall, for you can’t have a hero without a villain; there is no Luke Skywalker without Darth Vader, there is no Maximus without Commodus, and there couldn’t have been President Donald Trump without Hillary Clinton, and there very likely wouldn’t have been President Joe Biden without Donald Trump — let’s not forget, the most appealing and certainly most marketed aspect of Biden’s campaign was emphasising how bad Trump was and then simply reminding people that Biden was not Trump.
Author, lecturer and story consultant Robert McKee wrote in 1999:
“a protagonist and [their] story can only be as intellectual fascinating and emotionally compelling as the forces of antagonism make them”
We’ve become so used to having everything presented to us in a neat little narrative, with good guys and bad guys. These action movie narratives are always much more simple than reality — and that’s why we like them. But we can’t continue to expect that choosing who not to vote for, as well as why not to vote for them, is as easy as figuring out who are the bad guys in the next James Bond movie and why they want to blow up the world. Reality is more complicated and ambiguous.
Remember, as Howard Zinn said, “fighting against bad guys doesn’t necessarily mean you are the good guys.”
But still, politicians try so hard every election to present their opponents as ‘the bad guys’. Politics is not entertainment, but it is advantageous for politicians to present it as an action movie because it makes them look like ‘the good guys.’
Never before had there been such a vivid example of the action movie-ification of politics until when, in 2020, David Crenshaw, a republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, released an action movie style trailer to rally support for the Georgia runoff elections in December.
The ad is steeped in action movie cliche and language. He is contacted by an anonymous briefing call which has the phrase “Your mission, if you choose to accept it,” and he even goes as far to say that if the democrats win the elections, that “all will be lost.”
Crenshaw even copied the most iconic sequence from the last Mission Impossible movie, running towards the camera as both the camera operator and he jump out of the back of a plane in one continuous shot.
But no politician has utilised the power of becoming entertainment more so than Trump. Even those of us who were perplexed at his ascendency to the highest political office in America, we couldn’t look away — he demanded our attention. And his appeal, both to his fans, and as a villain to those who voted for his opponents, was based on his outrageousness, or maybe, his entertainment value.
In 2015, a man who said he would definitely vote for Trump in the upcoming 2016 election was interviewed by The Daily Show and said in a mildly bewildered state:
“For some reason, Trump — the more bizarre he gets, the more people like him.”
Clearly there was something about the man that we couldn’t look away from, much like a horrific car crash on the highway. He simply demanded our attention, not matter what side you were on.
If the Presidents of America were each a daily soap opera, the Trump Show had the highest ratings. The transformation of politics into pure entertainment reached its final stage when Trump entered the political Colosseum. To see the confirmation of the soap opera that politics has become, all one has to do is compare the post-show commentating that accompanies both televised sports and the presidential primary debates.
After the debates the commentators and pundits can’t help but scramble to declare a “winner.” They talk about who gave good “performances,” who “played well” to the audience. They give their hot takes on who came out on top in the various verbal squabbles and perform post-match interviews with the politicians themselves. Any substantial discussion of difference in policy is given a token amount of attention in order to maintain the ever-thinning guise that the program is actually about politics, not sport.
The CEO of CBS, Les Moonves, said in 2016 about Trump’s entry into politics, “I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us… It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
What did Moonves mean by this? Well, simply put, more people were watching CBS because of Trump, and so they could sell their ads in between the news for more money. In fact, all the cable news networks in America during both the Trump campaign and presidency had higher viewership and made more money that they ever did when Obama was president.
Is this a surprise? Not really. While Trump started out as a real estate tycoon and casino owner (aka profiting off exploiting gambling addiction), he transitioned away from that business in the 1990s. Having cultivated the public persona of an amazing businessman and supreme maker of great deals, Trump pivoted his work from being an actual businessman to simply maintaining the appearance of being a great businessman. His image became more important than his real business dealings. Trump in the 90s became a simulation of what he was in the 80s.
Cultivating the Trump “brand” became Trump’s real business, slapping his name on everything; towers, steaks, board games, books and universities. Trump transitioned from real estate guy to a vice president in charge of marketing and branding — marketing his own brand: TRUMP. He started making money not off shrewd investments but rather crude promotions; selling the idea of being a great dealmaker rather than actually being one; trading off the image of ‘Trump’ that the public had in their minds, rather than making deals behind closed doors.
A big part of this process was him maintaining his celebrity status. People always complain about the Kardashians and others like them for being famous simply for being famous, but they miss the point. They’re famous for being entertaining, just not in the way we’re used to. They may not entertain us in movies or tv shows, they may not be actors, hosts or comedians — rather they entertain us through the news; as a novelty; as a topic of conversation in the office kitchen; as something for the hosts of the morning news to complain about in the background for seven and a half minutes while you eat cereal and scroll through your phone.
Trump was one of the first celebrities to really take this idea and run with it. Even though CBS only saw their profits grow when he ran for President, Trump was in the entertainment business long before that. He was a regular on talk shows and often weighed in on the celebrity gossip of the day in trashy magazines. The WWE let him make an appearance in the wrestling ring, he hosted SNL and, of course, hosted his own reality TV show for fourteen years, which we all know consists of anything but reality.
Trump was an entertainer before politics, and he was an entertainer when he was in politics. Trump was not himself really a politician — he sold us a “Trump” branded president, just the next thing in a long line of slapping his dumb name on more useless shit. It was ‘Politics, bought to you by Trump.’ And make no mistake, politics is a product, we consume like a product, and (most importantly) it makes us feel good, like a product does. So what we’ve had since 2015 is not just politics. It is Trump-branded politics. Politics as we know it, but now infused with the values of the Trump brand, and supported by a version of Trump-branded history too.
Trump was by far the most entertaining candidate in the Republican primary and he was infinitely more entertaining than Hillary Clinton. This had nothing to do with his ability to actually improve the lives of Americans or to be a responsible world leader, but nonetheless, he won.
And it wasn’t just the conservatives who have stooped so low as to make politics indistinguishable from entertainment. In 2009 Obama’s presidential campaign "made history at the world's biggest ad competition where his election campaign won one of the most coveted Cannes awards." The 'Obama for America' campaign won both 'Integrated' & 'Titanium' awards at the 2009 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, with a jury of top executives from the most prestigious advertising agencies from all over the world.
And Obama's advertising campaign wasn't going up against just other political campaigns - this award is usually won by the advertising campaigns for the world's most recognisable brands; Coca-Cola, Volkswagen, Burger King, Sony, etc, etc. Ad campaigns are essentially one part deceptive persuasion, one part entertainment, and the fact that the world's top advertising industry experts recognised Obama's presidential campaign as the best example of that for the year, is more than mildly concerning.
Chris Hedges wrote in Empire of Illusion: The end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle:
“Today cinematic, political and journalistic celebrities distract us with their personal foibles and scandals. They create our public mythology. Acting, politics and sports have become, as they were in Nero’s reign, interchangeable. In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable of unwilling to handle its confusion. We ask to be indulged and comforted by cliches, stereotypes, and inspirational messages…”
Have we really progressed much further than when we were 11 years old and we voted for our primary school captains? Which is more of a fantasy; that we can continue to believe that combating the climate catastrophe won't require a serious examination of capitalism's inherent contradiction of infinite growth in a finite world, or that we can finally put Coca-Cola in the school bubblers?
Commodus entertained the people of Rome until the very end, dying in the Colosseum in front of the people. Trump entertained the people of America even after being voted out of office, sticking to the story that really he won the election, ensuring that the world would always be able to entertainingly argue over the validity of the election long after he dies.
Commodus gave the people a vision of the past glories of Rome. Trump convinced the people that they could "Make America Great Again." And they loved them for it.
Just because we love action movies so much, that doesn’t mean we should try to make everything like an action movie.
Sources, Inspiration & Further Reading:
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
Empire of Illusion: The end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle by Chris Hedges
War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
The Image: A guide to psuedo-events in America by Daniel Boorstin
Gladiator (2000) directed by Ridley Scott
Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018) directed by Christopher McQuarrie
The Dollop | Episodes 300A & 300B | Donald Trump Part 1 & 2 by Dave Anthony & Gareth Reynolds
Trump: An American Dream (2017) produced by David Glover & Mark Raphael
The Power of Nightmares (2004) & HyperNormalization (2016) by Adam Curtis
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/Politics/story?id=7947528&page=1
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/les-moonves-donald-trump_n_56d52ce8e4b03260bf780275
To my knowledge, Fat Man and Little Boy, released in 1989, is the only significantly funded & Hollywood produced film made about the development and deployment of Atomic weapons by the U.S. in WWII. It stars more than a few significant actors, with Paul Newman in the leading role. The film was not at all commercially successful, making back just over a tenth of its budget at the box office, and was panned by Roger Ebert, noting that the film “reduces their debates to the childish level of Hollywood stereotyping.” If anything, the lack of box office returns could indicate the lack of desire of the public to engage with such a morally ambiguous subject of our military past, but also, it’s just a bit of a boring and not very original movie, so I’m not surprised it wasn’t popular. In any case, it spends more time dealing with Dr Oppenheimer’s love story rather than the ethics of dropping two nuclear weapons and killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians.