American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy

The Fragmented Kaleidoscope

Thomas J. Cobb

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030426774
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030426781
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book contends that Hollywood films help illuminate the incongruities of various periods in American diplomacy. From the war film Bataan to the Revisionist Western The Wild Bunch, cinema has long reflected US foreign policy's divisiveness both directly and allegorically. Beginning with the 1990s presidential drama The American President and concluding with Joker's allegorical treatment of the Trump era, this book posits that the paradigms for political reflection are shifting in American film, from explicit subtexts surrounding US statecraft to covert representations of diplomatic disarray. It further argues that the International Relations theorist Walter Mead's concept of a US polity dominated by contesting beliefs, or a 'kaleidoscope', permeates these changing paradigms. This synergy reveals a cultural milieu where foreign policy fissures are increasingly encoded by cinematic representation. The interdisciplinarity of this focus renders this book pertinent reading for scholars and students of American Studies, Film Studies and International Relations, along with those generally interested in Hollywood filmmakers and foreign policy.

© The Author(s) 2020

T. J. CobbAmerican Cinema and Cultural Diplomacyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42678-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Shifting Kaleidoscopes: The Presence of Diplomatic Contradiction in Political and Allegorical American Film

Thomas J. Cobb¹

(1)

Stourbridge, UK

Thomas J. Cobb

Keywords

International RelationsInterdisciplinaryNeoconservatismLiberal internationalism AllegoryHollywood

End Abstract

Over the course of two feverish days in January 2017, a set of contrasting events in Washington D.C. encapsulate the divides of contemporary American political life. On January 20, at the traditional setting at the West Front of the United States Capitol Building, President-elect Donald J. Trump delivers a fiery inauguration speech, wrought with the vein of transgressive populism that had been central to the tenor of his presidential campaign. Despite having trailed Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by almost three million votes in the popular vote in the November 2016 presidential election, Trump (2017) asserts the mantle of majority rule, propounding that “we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the American People”. In additional grandiose remarks, he portrays disconnects between the experience of America’s patriotic citizenry and its decadent elite. Trump blames a Washington that “flourished” while “the factories closed”, a dissonance protracted by an establishment which “protected itself, but not the citizens of our country” (ibid.).

Seguing from the rhetoric of provincial resentment to language of blood and soil nationalism, the new Republican standard-bearer promises to halt an “American carnage” (ibid.). He substantiates this agenda with “an oath of allegiance to all Americans” before bemoaning a litany of policies maintained by Washington’s implicitly erstwhile governing class: in protectionist overtones, Trump laments “enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry”; how American taxpayers have “subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military”; finally, and perhaps most important to the anti-immigration dimension of Trump’s campaign, he cites the “ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs” (ibid.) as chief causes for vituperation.

The subsequent day of January 21 in Washington D.C. sees opposition to this message. A ‘Women’s March’ pugnaciously repudiates President Trump, an animus of indignation echoed by emulative protests in capitals across the West. Whilst the march foregrounds anger over the 45th president’s attitude to women, it encompasses a broader fear of white nationalism. The manifesto of the Women’s March expresses belief in the importance of “immigrant and refugee rights regardless of origin” by rejecting “mass deportation, family detention” and “violations of due process” (San Diego Free Press 2017). Speeches delivered by major Hollywood celebrities signal this sense of cosmopolitan solidarity absent from Trump’s address.

Film actress Ashley Judd (quoted in Sanchez 2017) chastises a plethora of attitudes given social license by Trump’s presidential campaign, listing “racism, fraud, conflict of interest, homophobia, sexual assault, transphobia, white supremacy, misogyny, ignorance, white privilege” as flagrant signs of the new president’s bigotry. Star of The Avengers Scarlett Johansson (quoted in Ruiz 2017) elicits fears of “a country that is moving backwards and not forwards”. The documentary maker and political activist Michael Moore (quoted in Ruiz 2017) claims “here’s the majority of America, right here. … We are here to vow to end the Trump campaign.” The speeches by Hollywood icons are supplemented and substantiated by the civil rights activist Angela Davis (quoted in Reilly 2017), who reminds of a country “anchored in slavery and colonialism”, containing a dual legacy of “immigration and enslavement”. Elected politicians such as the liberal Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts vaunt the battle against this dimension of American history, which has been romanticised by the Trump-supporting movement of the Alt-right. Warren (quoted in Reilly 2017) champions a “vision to make sure that we fight harder, we fight tougher, and we fight more passionately than ever”.

The two political scenes described might be said to underline a conventional polarity in the United States’ perception of itself in the world, signifying a country divided between parochial Republican reaction and internationalist Democratic progressivism. Indeed, their hyperpartisanship might be seen as contrary to the earlier writing of International Relations theorist Walter Russell Mead and his more multifaceted understandings of US political dynamics.

Mead’s 2001 book Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World foregrounds foreign policy as connected to the diverse nature of the United States’ pluralist democracy by putting forward four ‘schools’ which have dominated the schema of American diplomacy. It cites the ‘Hamiltonian’, a school orientated around the interests of the business class which takes its name from the 1790s Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton; the idealism of the ‘Wilsonian’, a philosophy of spreading democracy descended from a “missionary” tradition in the nineteenth century (Mead 2001, 151) and honed in World War One by President Woodrow Wilson; the ‘Jeffersonian’, a principled disinterest in global affairs based on the statecraft of the author of the Declaration of Independence, founding father and president, Thomas Jefferson; finally, the ‘Jacksonian’, a realism named after the populist antebellum president Andrew Jackson that caters to the nationalist sensibilities of America’s heartlands.¹

Foreign policy matched the “representative nature of American society”, forging an equivalence “between the political strength of the given schools and their weight in the nation” (ibid., 95). In an interview with The Economist, Mead (quoted in The Economist editorial 2010) specified that “some of our greatest presidents—FDR for example—were able to move freely within all four of the foreign policy schools”, illuminating the reductive tendencies behind hyperpartisan understandings of US diplomacy. In contrast to a rival nineteenth-century tradition of European “continental realism”, American foreign policy has historically been “more like a kaleidoscope, whose images, patterns, and colors alter rapidly and apparently at random” (Mead 2001, 36).

The first premise of American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy: The Fragmented Kaleidoscope is that examples of American film from the 1990s to the 2010s convey similarly contradictory foreign policy dynamics, encompassing genres as various as the Western, war film and science fiction blockbuster. Analyses give primacy to the role of International Relations theories in Hollywood film, from the relevance of Bacevich’s ‘new American militarism’ for a cycle of post-9/11 action pictures to the resonance of Niebuhr’s warnings against idealism in the Revisionist Western No Country for Old Men (2007). By utilising this interdisciplinary methodology, American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy demonstrates that US film presents treatments of foreign policy analogous to the concepts of Mead, illustrating sites of both political intersection and ideological friction.

The second premise of this book is that incidences of popular political allegory have encapsulated the spirit of Mead’s theories by spearheading variegated approaches to ideology, juxtaposing clashes and arbitrating compromises between different philosophies and beliefs. From the eclectic war satire of Three Kings (1999) to the outrageous puppet comedy of Team America: World Police (2004), American filmmakers have evinced bold and unconventional ways of illuminating interplay of International Relations concepts. As will be evidenced in this book’s third and fourth chapters, discussion surrounding realism and idealism is very much present in the former film while rivalries between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power are abundant in the latter.

The altering and fluid paradigms of this allegorical symbolism, testified in recent blockbusters like Black Panther (2018), indicate the mercurial role Mead’s shifting kaleidoscope plays in American cinema, with musings on foreign policy finding new forms of expression. Beginning with the centrism of the Clinton era before moving to the changed political climate of the post-9/11 years and the sense of malaise fostered by the Great Recession, American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy traces how filmmakers have reg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Shifting Kaleidoscopes: The Presence of Diplomatic Contradiction in Political and Allegorical American Film
• 2. Triangulation: Unilateral Idealism in the 1990s Cinematic Presidency
• 3. Equilibrium: The Turn of the Twenty-First-Century War Film and the Millenarian Remaking of Global Meliorism
• 4. Reconfiguration: Hard and Soft Power Rivalries in Cinematic Engagements With the War on Terror
• 5. Fragmentation: The Deconstruction of Neoliberal Occupation in No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood
• 6. Collision: The Dark Knight and Avatar’s Eulogies to Liberal Internationalist Failure
• 7. Stasis: The Continuation of Contradiction in the Age of Malaise and Populism
• Back Matter