Superheroes, Movies, and the State

How the U.S. Government Shapes Cinematic Universes

Tricia Jenkins, Tom Secker

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780700632763
• eBook ISBN: 9780700632770
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Tricia Jenkins and Tom Secker deliver a highly original exploration of how the government-entertainment complex has influenced the world’s most popular movie genre—superhero films. Superheroes, Movies, and the State sets a new standard for exploring the government-Hollywood relationship as it persuasively documents the critical role different government agencies have played in shaping characters, stories, and even the ideas behind the hottest entertainment products. Jenkins and Secker cover a wide range of US government and quasi-governmental agencies who act to influence the content of superhero movies, including the Department of Defense, the National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange and, to a lesser extent, the FBI and the CIA.

Superheroes, Movies, and the State deploys a thematic framework to analyze how five of the key themes of our time—militarism, political radicalism and subversion, the exploration of space, the role of science and technology, and representation and identity—manifest in the superhero genre, and the role of the government in molding narratives around these topics. The book includes interviews with both producers and influencer insiders and covers a wide range of superhero products, from 1970s TV shows up to the most recent movie and TV releases, including the first major analysis of the hit Amazon show The Boys. In addition, it is the first deep exploration of NASA’s Hollywood office and the first detailed account of the role of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, which has worked on thousands of products since its creation in 2008 but is little known outside of the industry. Superheroes, Movies, and the State offers an innovative blend of research methods and interpretive frameworks, combining both production histories and deep readings of superhero texts to clearly reveal how the government-entertainment complex works in the world of blockbuster cinema to shape public perceptions of the United States, war, science, and much, much more.

“if you get killed, walk it off”

how the dod promotes clean wars and us benevolence

1

As early as D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), the Pentagon has actively engaged with the film industry, providing producers access to unique locations and expensive war equipment in exchange for favorable military or political images.¹ This symbiotic relationship has grown significantly over the last century because, as David Robb summarizes, “The Pentagon has what Hollywood wants—access to billions of dollars’ worth of sophisticated military hardware to put into movies; and Hollywood has what the Pentagon wants—access to the eyeballs of millions of viewers and potential recruits.”² Indeed, since the turn of the twentieth century, the military has supported close to a thousand major movies and well over a thousand TV episodes, with a notable increase in activity since the arrival of digital and on-demand platforms and the change in the Department of Defense’s regulations, which now allow them to support reality television programs.³

The military’s entertainment program offers either full cooperation to producers seeking locations, personnel, and hardware (such as helicopters, planes, tanks, and ships) at minimal cost, or limited cooperation for those only seeking technical advice, stock footage, and installation visits. In order to receive full cooperation from the DOD, producers must submit a script and an outline of the types of support they are seeking, as well as proof that cinematic distribution has been secured. Producers seeking full cooperation must also meet four main criteria before their application will be approved. The work must depict a “feasible interpretation of military life, operations, and policies,” and it must also be “considered to be in the best interest of public understanding of the U.S. Armed Forces and the Department of Defense.” The script “may” also enhance recruiting and retention programs, and, finally, it must not contain material that “appears to condone or endorse activities by private citizens that are contrary to U.S. Government policy.”⁴ These guidelines suggest that if a script meets these criteria then full cooperation will be granted, but usually the approval process involves significant negotiations between the Pentagon and the film’s producers, with the military leveraging or withholding its assets in order to secure either minor and/or major script rewrites to make it appear more favorable on screen. In its production assistance agreements, the DOD also secures final review and approval rights for those scenes with which it has assisted before a film can be released to the public.

As Alford writes, filmmakers dealing with combat story lines regularly cooperate with the DOD to achieve their cinematic goals with reduced overhead, and thus routinely promote “the dubious notion that the United States is a benevolent force in world affairs and that unleashing its military strength overseas has positive results for humanity.”⁵ Likewise, Roger Stahl argues in Militainment, Inc. that because of this production system, the notion of “clean war”—a term that refers to the manner of presenting war in a way “that maximizes viewer alienation from the fact of death in order to maximize [a] war’s capacity to be consumed”—has grown increasingly prevalent in DOD-assisted films. The concept of clean war, he argues, was a direct reaction to the Vietnam era, when “conventional wisdom among policy elites held that unsupervised roving reporters” and nightly displays of the increasing American body count “had corrupted the will of the body politic and lost the war.” As such, the military has since worked in multiple entertainment and news mediums to render soldiers’ deaths, and even their serious injuries, invisible. This is partly evidenced by President George H. W. Bush’s 1991 policy to disallow press access at Dover and Andrews Air Force Bases: “the entry points for returning caskets.”⁶ Other common issues that the DOD seeks to either mitigate or eradicate from scripts include the depiction of service members committing war crimes and sexual assaults, current troops and veterans suffering from mental illness or committing suicide as a result of their service, the military’s use of chemical or nuclear weapons, and military personnel’s use of alcohol and drugs.⁷ Films that depict any of these subjects are likely to be denied Pentagon cooperation or to be the object of heavy rewrites spearheaded by the military’s entertainment liaison offices. As stated in Tanner Mirrlees’s Hearts and Mines, the geopolitical goals of the US military and the state do not always “march in lock-step” with the profit-maximization goals of the US entertainment industry, but because the DOD often helps moviemakers lower their overhead expenses, “the US Empire’s cultural industry points to a more collusive relationship than is often recognized,” resulting in the Pentagon’s ability to manage public awareness and opinion on a variety of issues.⁸

The specific results of the Pentagon’s negotiations with any particular filmmaker are not always clear because script development is a closed rather than public process, and because the documentation generated and released by the DOD regarding its work in Hollywood is often sparse or nonexistent. However, a significant amount of documentation about the Pentagon’s work on Universal Studio’s Hulk is available to scholars, and this film, especially when contrasted with the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s The Incredible Hulk—explored in chapter 2—provides an excellent case study of how DOD-assisted films vastly differ in their ideologies from those that do not rely on the military for production assistance. A cultural and textual analysis of Hulk also reveals how the Pentagon’s assistance helps it offer fictional arguments or images that counter the news media’s more factual and damaging ones. This chapter begins, then, by examining the Pentagon’s influence on Hulk, but several other superhero films have likewise sought and obtained the military’s full cooperation over the years, including Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), The Avengers, Man of Steel, Suicide Squad, and Captain Marvel. In general, these films support scholars’ assertions that DOD-assisted films circulate the concept of “clean wars” and promote images of a righteous and benevolent armed force, but as we illustrate, they also helped build consensus for US foreign policy and/or worked to reinforce the concept of the military-state’s sovereignty, especially when faced with the threat that superheroes present to their power. As chapter 2 reveals, superhero films that do not receive military production assistance are far more apt to explore the dangers of centralized military power, especially when it is left unchecked by an equally powerful entity, like a superhero. While this chapter does not have the space to analyze every DOD-assisted superhero movie, we have chosen to explore Hulk, Iron Man, and Iron Man 2 in detail to illuminate how the Pentagon’s influence helped circulate several favorable cultural ideologies about the US state, especially during the early stages of the War on Terror.

Hulk (2003)

Ang Lee’s Hulk opens in the 1960s with David Banner, a military contractor, secretly working to create an American super-soldier by infusing various animals’ DNA with the human genome. When the military’s General Ross forbids such experimentation because it is dangerous and unethical, Banner surreptitiously conducts the experiments on himself, inadvertently passing his modified DNA to Bruce, his newborn son. Years later, Bruce is shown working as a geneticist with his former girlfriend, Betty Ross (also the daughter of General Ross), using radiation to cure human diseases. When a gamma ray machine misfires in their lab, Bruce throws himself in front of a colleague to absorb the radiation himself. Because of his mutated DNA, Banner survives the blast, but it also causes him to grow into a giant green monster when stressed or provoked, and the Hulk’s anger and destruction are beyond the bounds of Bruce’s self-control. The military is then tasked with containing the national security threat that the Hulk now poses, while the character of Talbot (Josh Lucas), who works for a modern-day defense contractor, Atheon, attempts to thwart those efforts in order to study the Hulk and profit off of the super-soldier science that Bruce embodies.

Lee’s Hulk received full cooperation from the Pentagon after the film’s coproducer, Larry Franco, approached it for numerous pieces of military hardware, including a variety of weapons, bases, Comanche helicopters, and F-22s that appear in the film’s final cut. The film’s screenwriter and producer, James Schamus, recalls that he and Lee also toured Holloman AFB because Lee was interested in learning more about how certain weapons worked and might be employed in the movie.⁹ After reading the initial script, however, the DOD’s head entertainment liaison officer, Phil Strub, had several reservations. He offered up five pages of notes, telling Franco that “in the past, we’ve usually been able to offer suggestions within the context of existing plot and characters. These, however, are pretty radical. I hope they don’t have the effect of aggravating everyone, because we certainly aren’t trying to intrude on the creative process. It’s just that I see no other practical, straightforward way of communicating our concerns.”¹⁰ Based on these notes, it is clear that Strub was concerned about how the military attempted to neutralize the Hulk throughout the film, arguing that the Pentagon appeared too aggressive in its treatment of the character, and that, at times, the military seemed too cowardly as well. He also wished to distance the DOD from the private contractors that were working on the super-soldier experiments, ensuring that the military would not be seen as dabbling in unethical, human genetic manipulation.

Undoubtedly, Strub had better luck shaping the image of the military’s performance and benevolence than he did distancing the outfit from the contractors. While General Ross’s character explicitly states in the movie that manipulating human DNA is off limits and orders Banner Sr.’s experiments shut down, Strub also requested that the desert base used by Banner be clearly marked as a former military base now in civilian hands and that all military uniforms present at the base be eliminated. He also wanted Ross removed as head of the lab and replaced with a civilian contractor, noting that he does not want the audience to think “that the military was responsible for what later . . . happened to Banner senior and junior.”¹¹ None of these changes were actually made in the final cut, which almost always shows Ross in military uniform and in charge of the bases used by its contractors, although one line was inserted near the start of the film stating that the president’s national science advisor had final control of the base used by Banner Sr. One reason why Strub may have been unsuccessful in securing these changes is that Schamus saw the film, from “the very first draft,” as a criticism of the entire military-industry complex (MIC). “I was quite interested,” he said, “in how the military is in many ways a gigantic grift—a revolving door of generals-lobbyists-contractors—producing their own ‘blow back’ to generate more demand for their endlessly proliferating production of destruction.” “The imbrication of for-profit ‘civilians’ in every aspect of military life,” he stated, “is . . . not in my book a positive.” Schamus believes Hulk is far more critical of the MIC than the DOD understood, but because the contractors and not the military are the film’s villains, the Pentagon seems to have taken little umbrage with these plot elements.

As to the depiction of the military’s competence, benevolence, and bravery, Strub was much more successful in improving its image. For instance, when the Hulk is destroying the Atheon lab in the original script, Strub wanted it made clear that Ross has a tactical plan to mitigate the Hulk’s damage. “He doesn’t think they can stop him, but maybe they can slow him down and tire him out. Then when the military engages the Hulk, they’re . . . luring him from one place to another, hoping to exhaust him. So when his team retreats, it’s part of the plan, not a panicked ‘run for your lives’ scenario as originally written.”¹² In the same sequence, Strub also objected to Talbot grabbing “a super-huge kick-ass automatic weapon” to destroy the Hulk, only to have the bullets bounce back at him, riddling Talbot to the ground. Either Strub or Matt Morgan, Strub’s equivalent at the Marine Corps’ Los Angeles public affairs office, circled the very next line on the script in protest: “The troops: witnessing it all, turn tail and run for it.”¹³ In the film’s final cut, the military performs more positively. Ross tactically leads the Hulk out of the Atheon lab so that the military can more effectively pursue him in the desert, and the scenes of retreat (and potentially, cowardice) are revised. When Talbot is about to unleash a grenade launcher at the Hulk, the military personnel run before and as the blast occurs. They run not out of fear but out of foresight of Talbot’s stupidity, as the blast bounces off the Hulk and destroys Talbot instead. Their choice, in other words, is depicted as smart, not cowardly.

In his most interesting to notes to Franco, Strub also requested that the writers dramatically temper the direct action taken against the Hulk and that outside of the deadly military strike at the end to obliterate the Absorbing Man (formerly Banner Sr.), all other military operations should focus on “nonlethal” means. One scene in the original script, for instance, featured the Hulk running through the Sierra Nevada mountains with the military in hot pursuit. When the Hulk is shown jeopardizing the life of a rock climber, Strub recommended revising the scene from one where his helicopters fire on the “Angry Man” with a civilian in the area to one where the military merely distracts the green giant while the climber makes it to safety. Instead of launching a B-52 strike at the Hulk in another part of the sequence, Strub further suggested that the military drop “cave bunker busters to knock down rock formations,” si...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Holy Box Office, Batman: Understanding the Rise of the Superhero Genre and Its Ties to the Government-Entertainment Complex
• 1 “If You Get Killed, Walk It Off”: How the DOD Promotes Clean Wars and US Benevolence
• 2 “I Told You, I Don’t Want to Join Your Super-Secret Boy Band”: Superheroes and the Anti-Establishment Narrative
• 3 “Hi. I’m from the Military. Space Is the Next Frontier”: NASA, Space Force, and the Future of the Galaxy
• 4 You Can’t Just Fall Off a Planet: Assembling the Science and Entertainment Exchange
• 5 All New, but Not That Different?: Diversity, Politics, and the Superhero
• Conclusion The American Way, The Boys, and the Wrong Message?
• Appendix
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover