Come you Masters of War ... I'm just want you to know I can't see through your masks

The Peter Jackson edited Get Back Beatles documentary is a fascinating insight into the way the most famous band in the world worked together a year before splitting up for good. It forces a revision of the idea that their rehearsals were marked by a simmering acrimony as suggested by the contemporary – and now suppressed – film Let It Be, which was based on the same footage. The much longer Jackson compiled film suggests they actually got on quite well, despite George Harrison flouncing off at one point. We see the Beatles working as a group on songs – such as Harrison’s 'All Things Must Pass' and Lennon’s 'Gimme Some Truth' – that would later become some of their authors’ most famous solo efforts.

It’s easy to forget you are watching fly on the wall footage that is over half a century old. And some of the most innocuous scenes, on closer inspection, reveal their age. Take the debate in the film over the idea ؘ– proposed by original filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg – that the Beatles should hire a ship to take them to Libya where they would perform in a Roman amphitheatre on the coast (the Get Back sessions were meant to prepare for a TV performance which would eventually morph into the rooftop concert). “How are you going to get a ship in a couple of days?” asks Ringo Starr. “We got the American Navy for How I Won the War” says John Lennon, a reference to a 1967 film he acted in. To which Starr responds, “Yes but they were passing by and you only got them for a few hours”. Cue images from the film of the actors disembarking from a D-Day style landing craft.

Toy Story

To utilize a popular phrase, that could never happen nowadays. Something that is made painfully evident from the documentary Theaters of War which shows how the US military now meticulously controls the content of films and TV programmes, to the extent of insisting on line by line script changes to make sure they appear in a desirable light. In 2023, the PR savvy U.S. Navy would never allow their ‘toys’ to be used in a film as subversive as How I Won the War. Director Richard Lester said the film was an “anti-anti-war film” in that it portrayed war as intrinsically hostile to humanity itself rather than just being against the war crimes of the other side. The plot shows the battalion coming to the conclusion they have to kill their commanding officer as his incompetence is leading them to their deaths (unfortunately they don’t and it does). The effect is rather muted by the fact that he is played by Michael Crawford, later to become famous as Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em (although to be fair people wanted to kill him too).

According to Theaters of War, thanks to incredibly persistent Freedom of Information requests, it’s clear that “thousands upon thousands” of films and TV shows have been “rewritten at script level” by the Pentagon and the CIA. If the filmmakers want military cooperation – access to all those aircraft carriers, fighter jets and troop extras – they have to hand over their entire script for vetting. If they don’t, they don’t get to use the military equipment, which is usually essential for box office success. If they do agree, they have to sign a contract and the Pentagon “are effectively like another producer”.

This ‘help’ is most obvious in blockbuster movies like Top Gun (which according to the Pentagon “completed rehabilitation of the military’s image which had been savaged by the Vietnam War”) and its 2021 sequel, Pearl Harbor, or The Hunt for Red October. And it’s evident in TV series like 24 and Homeland which bear the hallmarks of the CIA’s decision to follow the Pentagon’s lead and open an office to liaise with television and cinema in 1996.

The Pentagon Universe

The national security state is also integral to the greatest ‘cinematic’ innovation of this century – super hero movies. The original script for Iron Man, for example, had its hero, Tony Stark, battling against the arms industry. But by the time the film went into production this had entirely flipped. In the actual 2008 film, he inherits his father’s arms business and the subsequent franchise is “an outright celebration of the arms industry”.

In fact, super hero movies like Man of Steel or Captain Marvel are the perfect advertisement for new military ‘toys’. And the Transformers franchise is little more than a showcase for new weapons. Until 1988, rules stated that the Department of Defense should only help films achieve “authenticity” and “dignity”. Subsequently, however, these were enlarged to allow promotion of “public understanding”, help with recruitment and support of government policy.

And this mission creep has had tangible effects. Captain Marvel was “a recruiting bonanza, a vehicle for the Air Force to reach young women”, channelling, according to its star, Brie Larson, “the spirit of the Air Force”. 2021’s The Suicide Squad has an assortment of super-hero bad asses overthrow a fictional anti-American government in Latin America. Any similarity to actual events is strictly coincidental.

These are just stupid films for kids, you might object, and besides anti-war films do get made. Both demurrals have some validity but don’t erase the basic problem. Super-hero films have a cultural impact way beyond their immediate fan base. Apart from being some of the highest grossing movies of all time, they reach a far wider audience by being constantly repeated on prime time TV. Critical war films – for example Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July or possibly 2005’s Jarhead – do get produced but they are swimming against the current. Oliver Stone’s Vietnam films were delayed for years because of their “unacceptable themes”.

Rehabilitating Nukes

We are talking about a gradual cultural seepage. According to one interviewee, filmmakers are well aware their films are going to get vetted, so “they write their scripts in ways they know will ultimately please the Pentagon …. People self-censor and tone down any potential critical view.”  Much like journalists, you might say.

This process of cultural acclimation can be sent in a frankly scary (pun intended) segment about what happened to Godzilla. In the original 1954 Japanese film, Godzilla was literally created by hydrogen bomb testing and survivors of the monster’s attacks had radiation poisoning. Godzilla was “an allegory for the U.S. nuclear bombing of Japan”. This association survived in the 1998 Roland Emmerich version but by the 2014 iteration the U.S. Department of Defense was involved. A passage in the original script where a character recalls how their father survived the Hiroshima bomb was replaced by musings about the “arrogance of man”. And far from being the source of the mutation, nuclear weapons were the solution. Nuclear tests in the 1950s were actually attempts to kill Godzilla.

Revealingly, the 2019 reboot Godzilla: King of the Monsters was made without Pentagon assistance but stuck with the “nukes as heroes theme”. The filmmakers conclude: “It’s hard to imagine a more complete reversal. This long time warning about the dangers of proliferation is now an extension of the U.S. military and something of an advertisement for the bomb”.

Essentially, and terrifyingly for the future of humanity, nuclear weapons are being ‘rehabilitated’ and Hollywood is integral to that redemption. The subdued reaction to the possibility that nuclear weapons may be used in Ukraine may be evidence that it is having the desired effect.

That’s Entertainment

What Theaters of War unmasks is just how PR-saturated our popular culture is. With all due respect to Noam Chomsky, this is not about manufacturing consent through news and current affairs coverage. It is a form of propaganda that works through the slow accretion of subconscious associations and acquiescence with outwardly fictional, often absurd, depictions. “This is more insidious than state control and state-produced propaganda,” one interviewee notes, “because it passes off as just entertainment.”

As one internal Pentagon document observes, “Features films reach far greater audiences than any single news media story about the actual events. Audiences will voluntarily sit through a two hour ‘infomercial’ [about an army operation]”.

The contrast with the 1960s and How I Won the War could not be starker. That decade and the following one were laden with overtly critical, and fundamentally subversive, films about war. Paths of Glory, Dr Strangelove, The Hill, The Battle of Algiers, The Bed Sitting Room, Oh! What a Lovely War, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Catch-22, M*A*S*H and Apocalypse Now all reached large audiences. Sure, they were outnumbered by celebratory depictions of war (invariably involving daring exploits against nefarious Nazis), but the point is they existed and competed with standard fare. Nowadays, in an era when PR has hugely extended its tentacles, if they ever got made in the first place they’d be shunted off to the art house sector and only seen by people who attend film festivals.

This affects TV as well. In the 1980s the BBC could produce the nuclear war docu-drama Threads and the basically seditious Monocled Mutineer. Whereas now we are treated to The SAS: Rogue Heroes. For assorted cranks and weirdoes, the former are available on DVD.

It might seem strange to say in the aftermath of the Corbyn and Sanders insurgencies but, as Theaters of War demonstrates, the long march of PR is making our societies more and more conservative and averse to change. If the Left cannot find a way to counteract this tendency and reach mass audiences, it – and maybe humanity as a whole – will not have a future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To boast when we should be ashamed. The mind binding of capitalism in Catch 22

“Can’t you see it from my point of view?” pleads Milo Minderbinder, the irrepressible capitalist, in the novel Catch 22.

He is hurt that Yossarian, the Second World War airman who has this insane desire not to be killed, can’t appreciate the intricacies of capitalism. Milo’s M & M Enterprises has a contract with the Americans to bomb a bridge from the air and a contract with Germans to shoot down the aircraft.

Contracts have to be honoured even if people get killed.  Like the dead man, whose belongings lie untouched in Yossarian’s tent, shot down over the bridge the day he arrived.

I didn’t kill him, insists Milo adamantly. I wasn’t even there. Can’t you see it from my point of view?

“ ‘No,’ Yossarian rebuffed him harshly”

Catch 22, the blackly comic story of an American bomber squadron on the Italian island of Pianosa in 1944, has entered everyday consciousness. In the novel, Yossarian fakes insanity to get out of combat, but his desire to avoid combat is taken as proof of his sanity. Catch 22 is being trapped in an inescapable paradox. At the end of the novel, it is revealed that Catch 22 does not really exist, but everyone acts as though it does, so its non-existence doesn’t make any difference.

Published in 1962, and written during the 1950s, Catch 22 was seen as a wonderful satire of inhuman bureaucracy. But like all great novels, different features stand out depending on the age in which it is read. Now what shines through is Joseph Heller’s treatment of the contortions of capitalism, and its seductive accomplice, public relations. Heller worked in advertising while he was writing the novel and it shows.

Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn, who run the squadron and keep raising the number of missions the men have to fly, are obsessed, above all, with how they will be perceived. They congratulate themselves on dealing with the embarrassment of Yossarian missing the target on one mission, by awarding him a medal and making him a captain.

“You know that might be the answer – to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That’s a trick that never seems to fail,” Korn says.

The trick is still not failing. Alastair Campbell storms into a news studio to register his outrage of the BBC’s exposure of the government’s sexed-up dossier on non-existent Iraqi WMD. The Conservatives resolutely pledge to fix a “broken society” with tougher prison sentences demands that the unemployed look for work 23 hours a day to get £60 a week. Society is indeed broke, and we know who broke it.

The figure of Milo Minderbinder and his wounded bemusement that his beneficence is not understood, embodies today’s capitalists’ shameless refusal to see the terrible consequences of what they do. Milo boasts when he should be ashamed. Worse, he simply cannot see why he should be ashamed.

Milo becomes the mess officer for the squadron and forms a syndicate to buy fresh food through the black market. But M & M Enterprises grows and grows until Milo signs a contract with the Germans to bomb his own sides’ planes and men.

At first, the public in the US in outraged but they are turned around when they realise just how profitable M & M Enterprises is. “Everybody has a share,” is Milo’s constant refrain about the syndicate, a metaphor for how post-World War Two capitalism justified itself. Forget about how wealth is produced, just look at the money.

But “everybody has a share” no longer works as a trump card, a way to silence misgivings. Everybody plainly doesn’t have a share. The American middle class, for example, is rapidly disappearing

John Yossarian is the “hero” of Catch 22, the reluctant subversive, who finally refuses to fly any more missions. Yossarian doesn’t understand Milo, but his refusal is not heroic, simply human. While figures like Milo and Colonel Cathcart embrace malignant social roles and others like Major Danby know better but don't resist, Yossarian follows his instincts into eventual rebellion.

Late in the novel he is psycho- analysed by an army doctor, Major Sanderson. “You don’t like bigots, bullies, snobs or hypocrites,” concludes Sanderson. “You’re antagonistic to the idea of being robbed, exploited, humiliated or deceived ... Don’t try to deny it.”

“I’m not denying it, sir”, says Yossarian. “I agree with all you’ve said.”

That’s why Yossarian doesn’t understand Milo, because he retains human reactions and is not indoctrinated.

“Can’t you see it from my point of view?” plead banksters, hedge fund managers, private equity investors and food speculators.

No.