A sturdy corollary emerges in the wake of the graphic artist Frank Miller's recent diatribe against the Occupy Wall Street movement ("A pack of louts, thieves, and rapists … Wake up, pond scum, America is at war against a ruthless enemy"), available for perusal at frankmillerink.com). That corollary, of which we should be reminded from time to time, is this: popular entertainment from Hollywood is – to greater or lesser extent – propaganda. And Miller has his part in that, thanks to films such as 300 and Sin City. 
 
 Perhaps you have had this thought before. Perhaps you have had it often. I can remember politics dawning on me while watching a Steven Seagal vehicle, Under Siege, in 1992. I was in my early 30s. The film was without redeeming merit – there's no other way to put it – and it was about a "ruthless enemy" and the reimposition of the American social order through violence and rugged individualism. Why had I paid hard-earned money for it? Good question. Before Under Siege, I had a tendency to think action films were funny. I had a sort of Brechtian relationship to their awfulness. And I was amused when films themselves recognised the level to which they stooped, as Under Siege assuredly did. 
 
 The moment of revelation could have come at any time. It could have come earlier, and it did among my more astute friends. Had I watched any of the later Rocky pictures, for example, or had I watched Rambo, I might have registered that there was little depicted in these frames but feel-good, reactionary message-deployment. But there were, apparently, films too embarrassing for me to see, Rocky IV and Rambo among them. I remember thinking True Lies, the abominable 1994 James Cameron film (featuring Republican governor-to-be Arnold Schwarzenegger), with its big, concluding nuclear blast – the nuclear blast we were meant to want to see – was, well, more than suspect. (I could never again watch a Cameron film without disgust. And that includes the racist, New Age blather of Avatar.) Or what about the expensive and aesthetically pretentious Gladiator (2000), which I still contend is an allegory about George W Bush's candidacy for president, despite the fact that director and principal actor were not US citizens. Is it possible to think of a film such as Gladiator outside of its political subtext? Are Ridley Scott's falling petals, which he seems to like so much that he puts them in his films over and over again, anything more than a way to gussy up the triumph of oligarchy, corporate capital and globalisation? 
 
 The types of men (almost always men) who have historically favoured the action film genre, it's safe to say, are often, if not always, politically conservative: Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Mel Gibson, even Clint Eastwood (former Republican mayor of Carmel, California), all proud defenders of a conservative agenda, and/or justifiers of vigilantism. With some of these celebrities, the kneejerk qualities of their politics are self-evident, and in other cases (Eastwood), the reactionary part of their world view is more nuanced. But the brand of politics is the same. 
 
 And yet with action films, the moral and political ideas in play are surpassingly easy to spot. What about the entertainment films that came later, during the era of CGI – the big-budget films primarily generated from more imaginary fare, such as the apparently numberless comic book franchises of Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Daredevil, Fantastic Four, X-Men, Captain America, et al? In these cases, the moral framework of the product is just as simplistic as in action films, if not more so, and the triumph of the social order is just as violent, and just as relentless, though the films are couched in a sugary glaze of graphics and "wow" moments that distract from ideological branding. The CGI sheen is seductive enough that it's sometimes difficult to divine the message at first. You are too busy being bludgeoned by the sounds and lights. Nevertheless, the message is there. Might is right, the global economy will be restored, America is exceptional, homely people deserve political disenfranchisement, and so on. It bears mentioning that these are films that are in many cases being marketed to children. When I was a kid, you could not gain admission to a film such as Dirty Harry or The French Connection. But an American adolescent can now see Batman in The Dark Knight, rated PG-13, without much difficulty. 
 
 The film 300, directed by Zack Snyder, based on a Frank Miller graphic novel of the same name, is just what you would expect from the heavily freighted right-wing filmic propaganda of the post-9/11 period: the Greeks, from which our own putative democracies are descended, must fight to the death against a vast but incompetent army of Persians (those hordes of the Middle East), who are considered here unworthy of characterisation – in fact, every character in the film is unworthy of characterisation – and the noble Spartans (the Greeks in question) achieve heroism despite their glorious deaths on the field at Thermopylae, by virtue of the moral superiority of their belief system and their unmatched courage. Ruthless enemy! From the Middle East! Heroic, rugged individualists! A big, sentimental score! Lots and lots of blue-screen! Endless amounts of body parts spewing theatrical blood! 
 
 It's a barely watchable film, but what from Hollywood these days is not similarly unwatchable, when so many high-profile releases are based on a medium, the comic book, made expressly to engage the attentions of pre- and just post-pubescent boys. At least comic books themselves are so politically dim-witted, so pie-in-the-sky idealistic as to be hard to take seriously. But in the films of this era, the Marvel and DC era of Hollywood, even when the work is not self-evidently shilling for large corporations (with product placement) or militating for a libertarian and oligarchical political status quo (which makes a fine environment for large, multinational corporations), the work is doing nothing at all to oppose these things. Paying your $12.50, these days, is not unlike doing a few lines of cocaine and pretending you don't know about the headless bodies in Juarez. 
 
 With this in mind, an honest recognition of cinematic propaganda, we shouldn't be shocked by Frank Miller's comments about Occupy Wall Street. It is naive to be shocked by them. But let's evaluate the particulars of his remarks just the same. Miller tries to repel the OWS message ("Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty titbits of narcissism you've been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you've heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism") by reminding us that we are at war. This despite the fact that OWS is focused primarily on income inequality, and thus mainly taken up with domestic politics, such that OWS doesn't really take a position on the "ruthless enemy" and doesn't need to. Miller's particular approach, the warmongering approach, is self-evidently reminiscent of the Bush/Cheney years, in which any domestic reversal was followed by an elevated level on the colour-coded risk-assessment wheel. But in this post-Iraq war moment – when the most aggravated conspiracies we seem to have in New York City involve, for example, a lone Dominican guy who advertises his hatred of the government on Facebook and who may have been entrapped by local police – our "ruthless enemy" just doesn't seem quite as numerous as Miller's Persian hordes. 
 
 Beyond Bush-Cheney fear-mongering, Miller's further complaint seems to be that people who camped outdoors in Zuccotti Park for two months were not terribly clean. (The Spartans were no doubt tidier in Thermopylae.) But if the crowd of 32,000 who turned up to march in NYC last Thursday – after the "pond scum" had been ejected from the park – are any indication, this hygiene issue is no longer a reliable talking point for Miller (or for Newt Gingrich, the rightwing posterboy of the late 80s who has now entered the race for the Republican presidential noimination). The 32,000 included some professional types, at least one retired police officer and lots of elderly people, many of whom had recently showered. Same thing at UC Davis, and at Berkeley. Those college kids usually have showers in their dorms. 
 
 Miller also accuses the OWS protesters of being too technologically savvy. For example, he accuses them of playing Lords of Warcraft. Now, I admit it, I know nothing of multiplayer online role-playing games, nor do I own an iPhone nor an iPad. Nevertheless, I maintain I am correct in imagining that what Miller actually means here is World of Warcraft. This superficial mistake (suggests what should be plain: that Miller wrote his jeremiad quickly, perhaps late at night, when a lack of restraint is often linked with the onset of unconsciousness. He didn't bother to reread it. He therefore overlooks at least one obvious point. Namely, no one is more likely to play World of Warcraft than the kind of adolescent boy who also thinks 300 is quality cinematic product. 
 
 Miller's hard-right, pro-military point of view is not only accounted for in his own work, but in the larger project of mainstream Hollywood cinema. American movies, in the main, often agree with Frank Miller, that endless war against a ruthless enemy is good, and military service is good, that killing makes you a man, that capitalism must prevail, that if you would just get a job (preferably a corporate job, for all honest work is corporate) you would quit complaining. American movies say these things, but they are more polite about it, lest they should offend. The kind of comic-book-oriented cinema that has afflicted Hollywood for 10 years now, since Spider-Man, has degraded the cinematic art, and has varnished over what was once a humanist form, so Hollywood can do little but repeat the platitudes of the 1%. And yet Hollywood tries still not to offend. 
 
 Does that make American cinema cryptofascist? Is "cryptofascist" a word that you can use in an essay like this? I keep trying to find a space somewhere between "propagandistic" and "cryptofascist" to describe my feelings about Miller's screed. But perhaps it's more accurate to say the following: whatever mainstream Hollywood cinema is now, Frank Miller is part of it. And Frank Miller has done Occupy Wall Street a service by reminding us that our allegedly democratic political system, which increases inequality and decreases class mobility, which is mostly interested in keeping the disenfranchised where they are, requires a mindless, propagandistic (or "cryptofascist") storytelling medium to distract its citizenry. We should be grateful for the reminder. And we might repay the favor by avoiding purchase of tickets to Miller's films. ||||| For too long, the media has ignored the relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon. Knowing this, I figured my Washington Post piece would vanish into the ether. However, to my surprise, it came out in the same week that the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal provided stunning new details about how the shadowy relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon is setting new standards for government-subsidized propaganda. 
 
 Hollywood As Complicit As Ever 
 
 First and foremost, both the Times and Journal tells us that collusion between the military and Hollywood - including allowing Pentagon officials to line edit scripts - is once again on the rise, with new television programs and movies slated to celebrate the Navy SEALs. They also give us up-to-date proof that major Hollywood directors remain more than happy to ideologically slant their films in precisely the pro-war, pro-militarist direction that the Pentagon demands in exchange for taxpayer-subsidized access to military hardware. 
 
 The Journal, for instance, quotes director Peter Berg saying that his upcoming cinematic tribute to the SEALs was approved by Pentagon-compliant studio execs specifically because the project avoids any nuanced take on the politics of war. "The idea of a good old-fashioned combat yarn, in which the politics are very clear - we support these men - was more appealing to them," he said, noting that his film will be "an unabashed tribute to the courage of (the SEALs)." 
 
 Likewise, the Times reports that after facing questions about inappropriate Hollywood-government collusion on a film to glorify the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, director Kathyrn Bigelow issued a defensive statement reiterating that her film will not dare raise any thorny questions the Pentagon doesn’t want raised - questions such as whether the mission was "kill only" and whether bin Laden could have been captured. "(The mission) was an American triumph, both heroic and nonpartisan, and there is no basis to suggest that our film will represent this enormous victory otherwise," she said, no doubt deliberately reassuring the Pentagon officials that she plans to produce exactly what they want. 
 
 This, of course, is the Top Gun Effect in action. With taxpayer-subsidized access to Pentagon hardware so crucial for filmmakers, and with the Pentagon so aggressively permitting and denying such access on the basis of a filmmakers’ loyalty to a pro-militarist message, directors like Berg, Bigelow and others know that they still must "get the cooperation of the [military] or forget about making the picture," as one director described it during the "Top Gun" era. "Getting cooperation," means being willing to make seemingly apolitical entertainment products into highly ideological vehicles for pro-war, pro-militarist propaganda. 
 
 Pentagon Now Soliciting Movies On Its Own 
 
 Of course, this Top Gun Effect has been the norm for a long time, and word that it is stronger than ever is not nearly as big a revelation as the other part of the Journal dispatch - the news that the Pentagon is now reverse engineering the propaganda process. That’s right, instead of simply waiting for Hollywood studios to pitch collaboration projects as they have in the past, military brass are now actively soliciting bids for studios to make recruitment ads camouflaged as apolitical feature films. In order to do this, the Pentagon is now using active-duty taxpayer-funded special forces soldiers as actors. As the Journal reports: 
 
 In 2008, Navy Special Warfare invited a handful of production companies to submit proposals for a film project (that) would flesh out the role of the SEALs. The goals: bolster recruiting efforts...The project offered filmmakers access to SEALs as well as military assets... The Los Angeles-based Bandito Brothers began shuttling back and forth to Coronado, Calif., the SEALs training base near San Diego, to conduct on-camera interviews. They initially planned to work the research into a script, then hire actors to play the lead SEALs...(But) as the SEALs' stories unfolded on camera and over beers, the filmmakers began to question the idea of casting actors to play the sailors. After they made a group decision to participate, deciding the project served the SEALs' greater good, the Navy made the film a formal task for the sailors... 
 
 So not only are compliant filmmakers getting taxpayer-subsidized access to military hardware, they are now getting an additional subsidy in the form of taxpayer-paid real-life soldiers ordered to also be actors. And again, we can infer that Hollywood filmmakers only get this subsidy as long as they are willing to produce films that serve the goal of "bolstering recruiting efforts" - and do not question war or militarism. 
 
 Military Calls War a "Product" to Be Sold 
 
 The intensifying Military-Entertainment Complex, as described by the Times and Journal, raise again the big question: Why is the Pentagon so focused on using Hollywood as a propaganda machine? The answer is simple: At a time when more and more Americans are questioning the fundamental tenets of militarism (ie. budget-busting defense expenditures, never-ending wars/occupations, etc.), military officials are desperate to turn the public opinion tide back in a pro-militarist direction - and they know pop culture is the most effective tool to achieve that goal. Why pop culture? Because audiences don’t see movies and TV shows as ideological at all. That means movie and TV audience’s psychological filter guarding against propaganda is turned off - making the militarist propaganda in these mediums that much more persuasive. 
 
 This is why (as I previously reported) the Pentagon sponsored the new "X-Men" movie and then used it to produce recruitment ads that portray the soldier’s life as just as fun, exciting and safe as being an superhero. As the Journal notes, it is incredibly effective: 
 
 The spots played in cinemas, and exit polls of 17- to 24-year-olds leaving the movie theater found that those who saw the ad were 25% more likely to say they would consider joining the Army than those who didn’t, according to U.S. Army Accessions Command Chief Marketing Officer Bruce Jasurda. "We get asked all the time, ‘Why do you market?’" said Jasurda. "We’re a nation at war going on 11 years, which is … the longest period of consistent conflict that the U.S. Army’s ever been involved in, that the nation’s ever been involved in, longer than any war we’ve been in...That’s why we market. We want to make sure people understand the full nature of this product. The Army is the ultimate considered purchase." 
 
 This is exactly how the Pentagon sees militarism - it’s a "product" to be sold via pop culture products that sanitize war and, in the process, boost recruitment numbers. 
 
 The Military-Entertainment Complex’s Threat to the First Amendment 
 
 No doubt, the Pentagon and its apologists would have us believe that military officials have every right to use publicly owned hardware as a means of suffusing our pop culture with militarist propaganda. As the argument goes, it’s in the Pentagon’s institutional prerogative to defend its image, mission and "product." And this line of logic might work if the Pentagon was a private corporation. But (all jokes about Halliburton and private security contractors aside) the Defense Department is not a private corporation. 
 
 Indeed, as taboo as it might be to say it out loud, as much as often as you will get called an unpatriotic traitor for even mentioning it, it remains an indisputable fact that all those military planes and tanks and warships are funded by your and my taxpayer dollars. That makes them not the private assets of some military spinmeister - it makes them all of our property. Thus, when the government decides to grant and deny the public access to that property on the basis of a citizen’s particular political/ideological bent, it is inherently abridging that citizen’s First Amendment rights. 
 
 Journalist David Robb, author of "Operation Hollywood," explained this very real First Amendment issue succinctly in a previous interview with Mother Jones: 
 
 "The First Amendment doesn’t just give people the right to free speech; fundamentally, it prevents the government from favoring one form of speech over another. There’s a great 1995 Supreme Court case called Rosenberger v. University of Virginia that says, "Discrimination against speech because of its message is presumed to be unconstitutional. It is axiomatic that the government may not regulate speech based on the substantive content of the message it conveys. In the realm of private speech or expression, government regulation may not favor one speaker over another." And yet that’s what (The Pentagon) is doing every day." 
 
 The way to really understand why this is so unacceptable is to consider comparable examples. Imagine if, say, the Obama administration didn’t let a reporter from Fox News attend a White House press briefing. Or imagine if, say, the Bush administration didn’t let a reporter from MSNBC be part of the press pool on Air Force One. In both cases, the outrage would be obvious, and those being persecuted would rightly insist that the government has no right to grant or deny access to public property on the basis of a citizen’s particular political principles. 
 
 This isn’t to say the Pentagon can’t or shouldn’t be involved in filmmaking. But it is to echo what New York University’s J. Hoberman told the Boston Globe in 2004: "If the Pentagon wants to go into business of leasing to the movies it should be open to whomever wants to lease and can afford to. It's our Army. If you can afford the rates you should be able to rent" regardless of your political ideology or partisan affiliation. 
 
 Because this isn’t the standard - because the military so aggressively uses our public property to preference saber-rattling propaganda - entertainment industry economics are unduly tilted toward projects that glorify militarism. That, in turn, tilts our entire culture toward war. Only when we fundamentally change this Military-Entertainment Complex and recognize the deep connections between pop culture and militarism can we hope to have a more pragmatic, less bellicose national security politics and posture.
– They say Hollywood is liberal, but in fact it's more of a right-wing propaganda machine, writes Rick Moody in the Guardian. From Schwarzenegger to Spider-Man, “the message is there: Might is right, the global economy will be restored, America is exceptional, homely people deserve political disenfranchisement, and so on.” As a result, no one should be surprised by Batman scribe Frank Miller’s recent attacks on Occupy Wall Street, writes Moody. Miller called Occupiers “a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists,” telling them to “wake up” because “America is at war against a ruthless enemy.” Many were shocked, but really, it’s in line with Hollywood’s message. Look at the film 300, based on a Miller graphic novel. It features the Greeks, American stand-ins, who must destroy a “ruthless enemy” from the Middle East “by virtue of the moral superiority of their belief system and their unmatched courage.” In fact, Miller’s comments benefit Occupiers, because it shows that our political system “requires a mindless, propagandistic (or 'cryptofascist') storytelling medium to distract its citizenry.”