Top Gun Revisited
David Sirota wastes the opportunity to say something interesting about Hollywood and the military:
Americans are souring on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military budget is under siege as Congress looks for spending to cut. And the Army is reporting record suicide rates among soldiers. So who does the Pentagon enlist for help in such painful circumstances?
Hollywood.
In June, the Army negotiated a first-of-its-kind sponsorship deal with the producers of “X-Men: First Class,” backing it up with ads telling potential recruits that they could live out superhero fantasies on real-life battlefields. Then, in recent days, word leaked that the White House has been working with Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow on an election-year film chronicling the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.
A country questioning its overall military posture, and a military establishment engaging in a counter-campaign for hearts and minds — if this feels like deja vu, that’s because it’s taking place on the 25th anniversary of the release of “Top Gun.”
That Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster, made in collaboration with the Pentagon, came out in the mid-1980s, when polls showed many Americans expressing doubts about the post-Vietnam military and about the constant saber rattling from the White House. But the movie’s celebration of sweat-shined martial machismo generated $344 million at the box office and proved to be a major force in resuscitating the military’s image.
There’s quite a bit of interesting stuff going on here, although Sirota leans too heavily on Top Gun, which is notable more for its box office success than for its production relationship with the Navy. The Pentagon has worked with Hollywood a lot over the years; the influence over Top Gun wasn’t particularly notable in terms of effect on script or on production. The much worse, much less successful, but if anything more flag-waving Iron Eagle was released six months earlier, and made without Pentagon cooperation, because the plot turned on the theft of an aircraft. Top Gun surely did have a strong impact on Navy recruiting numbers (lots and lots of young men soon figured out that you didn’t get to fly F-14s just by enlisting), but I think it’s a touch of a stretch for Sirota to accord as much cultural impact as he does.
Sirota is half-right on the points about Pentagon influence over scripts. Indeed, the Pentagon is loathe to lend its equipment to any production that reflects badly on the military, a posture which is hardly surprising for a federal department. However, Pentagon influence can also serve to increase realism; believe it or not, many war films scripted in Hollywood demonstrate not the faintest familiarity with military life, military equipment, etc. But then again, the Pentagon certainly was of no help to Transformers script…
Sirota also dances a bit on the question of Hurt Locker and the new Kathryn Bigelow Osama bin Laden film. Sirota more or less describes the former as anti-war, which makes me wonder whether he’s ever seen the movie; whatever you can say about Hurt Locker, it’s not an anti-war film. More problematic, in the next paragraph Sirota essentially describes the bin Laden project as the product of “ideologically compliant filmmakers,” which is interesting given that the Kathryn Bigelow who directed the “successful and critical” Hurt Locker is the same Kathryn Bigelow who is associated with the Bin Laden project.
Sirota ends badly. I’m not such a fan of his work, which I think combines a commitment to populist left rhetoric with a belief that people are, by and large, quite stupid. This makes his writing unappealing calculated, as if he approaches each paragraph with the thought “has this been sufficiently dumbed down for people to understand it?” And we get this:
Why does the Pentagon treat public hardware as private property? Why does the government grant and deny access to that hardware based on a filmmaker’s willingness to let the Pentagon influence the script? And doesn’t such a practice violate the First Amendment’s prohibition against government abridging freedom of speech?
Let’s take a crack:
1. It doesn’t. The Pentagon is a federal department that lends its assets to filmmakers based on its own particular understanding of the public interest. By definition, “government propaganda” is not “private.”
2. This is the interesting question of the bunch; a blanket policy of acceptance to all filmmaker requests for using military hardware is impractical, so the real alternative would presumably be a policy of blanket denial filmmaker access to military equipment. This hardly seems ideal, although I can appreciate the logic. The Pentagon is not the only government agency to collaborate with filmmakers in an effort to improve its image, but the effects of Pentagon collaboration are at least arguably the most negative.
3. I’m going to be extraordinarily charitable and say that I’d like to see the constitutional theory behind the idea that anything Sirota has described represents government abridgement of free speech. Until then, my provisional answer to this question will be “No, you idiot.”
UPDATE: Sirota responds on point 3:
RE: The First Amendment question – it’s not a theory, it’s rooted in precedent. Here’s David Robb, author of “Operation Hollywood,” laying it out in Mother Jones (he’s backed up by GW law prof Jonathan Turley in other places, too):
http://motherjones.com/politics/2004/09/operation-hollywood
”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.”
Next time, maybe you could do a bit of research without just resorting to name calling
I can do both! In the case cited, a Virginia student group sued and won after being denied funding for the production of a film with a specifically Christian point of view. I don’t find the logic particularly applicable to this case, but at least it’s something, and mileage may vary.
“David Sirota wastes the opportunity to say something interesting”
There’s a fairly untenable implied premise here, which is that David Sirota is, in fact, capable of saying something interesting if he chooses to do so.
I, for one, would have no objection to frequent Sirota-bashing here.
I find it amusing that the last question he asked was answered by the next to last. Apparently even David Sirota doesn’t like to read David Sirota.
Off topic, but here’s one for the historic warships of history buffs:
Hope yet for African Queen gunboat on Lake Tanganyika
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-14677418)
Ships don’t come with much more historical ballast than the MV Liemba. The steamer still shudders and belches its way across Lake Tanganyika every Wednesday and Friday, a century after it was built as a warship in Germany.
In its time it’s been a pawn in the colonial scramble for Africa. It’s been scuttled and then raised again from the deep. It was the model for the warship sunk by The African Queen, a steam-powered launch in the film of the same name, starring Katharine Hepburn as a prim spinster and Humphrey Bogart as the rough captain.
…
The Liemba started life as the Graf Goetzen in 1913 when she was built as a warship in Papenburg on the River Ems in northern Germany. It is said that the Kaiser himself ordered the construction to further his imperial ambitions.
a belief that people are, by and large, quite stupid
Get out of that Ivory Tower& & take a good look around.
Most people are complete idiots.
While I like to make fun of people who hold that idea, I find myself thinking it more and more these days.
Barnum said it best: No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average American.
What amazes me is how highly functional people are, despite being so dumb. What it really goes to show you is that our brain is not adapted for higher reason. But it still robustly meets most people’s needs.
Sirota is using the wrong standard, or at least citing an easily distinguishable case. Military grounds (and, by extension, military hardware and personnel) are clearly not “public fora” in the First Amendment sense. (This is in contrast to public universities, which are usually “limited public fora”, because of their role in education and in supporting public debate.) As non-public fora environments, the standard for any regulation/policy would be reasonableness (rationale basis) A military regulation permitting access only to works that support the military mission would probably qualify as reasonable. It certainly is more difficult to make a war movie without access to military hardware, but the First Amendment never promised to make speech easy. (A cartoon, perhaps? “Iron Giant 2″?)
Can we also note that, constitution notwithstanding, the supreme court has a tendency to give the Pentagon what it wants?
This is exactly what I was thinking. The government has to provide opportunities for speech. If groups can’t get access to basic public space, that’s a pretty severe restriction on speech. But how restrictive is it if you can’t get access to military hardware to make your movie? Well, not good for your box office potential, but it hardly matters in terms of the quality of political speech available to you.
What a lot of people don’t recognize is that underlying the edifice of constitutional law, there is a lot of very basic common sense stuff. Because otherwise, these sorts of issues would be intractable. Just about anything can be routed back to speech if you go through enough logical twists and turns. What we have instead is a legal doctrine that has some basic premises about what constitutes protected speech based on some basic assumptions about what kinds of things are necessary to support a robust right to political speech.
Which is why it is easy for a court to undermine the whole thing if it really wants to. By systematically denying basic logic in the process, you can eventually explain how limiting the speech of corporations (who have a legal obligation to pursue the financial interests of their shareholders – even at the cost of those shareholder’s other interests) cannot be legally restricted in their political speech, ie their bribing of politicians.
There is no general structure of principles that cannot be undermined by the willfully obtuse and malicious.
But how restrictive is it if you can’t get access to military hardware to make your movie?
If GHWB has bneen able to borrow a tank like the Dukakis campaign, the result of the 1988 election might have been a lot different.
As a lawyer, I find this to be true of every Big Trial movie, including ones that are based on real Big Trials. Reality? Reality can’t open a movie.
Or in possibly the most egregious modification by hollywood, computer hacking. You know, sexy people doing sexy things on a computer, dramatically typing in the right command just in the nick of time? Not smelly people sitting in the dark while a computer works for two weeks or trying to find an employee with the password “password.”
NCIS did that to gamers: http://youtu.be/FRhGPVYRsOY
WTF is a 10 meg pipe?
Thanks so much. I’ll never be able to un-watch that.
Courtroom movies are generally fantasies, even allowing for the necessity of compressing the action for narrative purposes, but there are exceptions (the cross-examination in “My Cousin Vinny” is very nearly textbook stuff, for example). That said, it is surprising how often and how well Hollywood accurately depicts the practice of law. Even more interesting, I think, is the fact that movies treat law as a noble and honorable profession. This belies the popularly held idea that lawyers are held in disfavor by the general public, I think. Although there are certainly counter-examples, movie lawyers tend to be more like Atticus Finch than you might think.
I think the Prosecutor’s opening in My Cousin Vinny was recommended viewing in my trial skills class.
Vinny’s opening statement is the greatest of all time.
Sirota is the most annoying tool in the whole of the blogosphere, even in the realm of more-progressive-than-thou voices. At least someone like Greenwald has genuinely important things to say in his area of expertise, and is interested in more than just attention whoring and self-promotion.
I think my favorite Sirota column was his recent column about baseball payrolls, and how the lack of success of teams with a few really highly paid players was proof that baseball had succumbed to “a cult of individualism from Reagan’s America” or something like that. Of course, it ignored a whole bunch of context (namely the effect Jim Hendry and Omar Minaya had on the sample), but most amusingly it ignored the effect that the reserve and arbitration system has on keeping wages down for very good players without six years of service time. When I pointed out to him on Twitter that he has wrapped his arms around such an anti-labor policy so forcefully…he blocked me.
The Pentagon’s participation in films is the exact equivalent of advertising for the service branches, no? Why would you advertise in a movie that is going to portray your product or service badly? The F-22s in Transformers are an ad for the Air Force. The F-14s in Top Gun are an ad for the Navy. Hot Shots! uses Folland Gnats instead of Tomahawks because Lloyd Bridges saying “What I wouldn’t give to be 20 years younger… and a woman” doesn’t help with recruiting.
I went to see my Navy recruiter in HS after seeing Top Gun so, for me at least, the recruiting worked. I wore glasses and the recruiter was honest and told me I could be Goose but not Maverick. Goose gets Meg Ryan but he also dies. I also knew jet pilots were officers and I was a screwing up being a HS junior. I never joined the Navy.
YVAN EHT NIOJ
If you thought this was horrible, you should see the review he did of Big Trouble in Little China a couple of years ago. Sirota keeps it up, and his editor will have to take away his DVD player.
“Negative Ghostrider, the pattern is full.”
So, what Maverick did was a wildly irresponsible safety violation, right? Sure, bravado is bravado, but I feel naive at how willing the Navy was willing to present its pilots.
As we have discovered in the last decade [like we didn't know already], a significant element of the military culture revolves around breaking pesky rules when you have to get the job done.
I love the act that Sirota cites a case from the Scalia/Renquist faction of the court.
talk about idiots
Tune in next week when Sirota questions the motives of the Federal Reserve for not issuing a new personal series of $100 bills with his likeness on them.
Should’ve stamped this on a trillion dollar coin.
“David Sirota wastes the opportunity to say something interesting about Hollywood and the military”
OK, I’ll bite — I’m sure there is a lot to say that is interesting about the military. At this late date, what is interesting about Hollywood?
In fairness to Sirota, they are.
Wait, what? Oh, he means this:
X-Men First Class Go Army by teasertrailer
Not exactly “liv[ing] out superhero fantasies”, but pointing out some of the similarities (uniforms, using an SR-71 for transport (albeit one that performed nothing like the real ones did)).
I started a graduate program in 1994 with a bunch of just-out-of-Annapolis graduates of the Naval Academy. They said that about half their class indicated an interest in flying fighter planes (most were DQed because of vision), and they estimated three quarters were inspired to apply to Annapolis because of Top Gun. I have no doubt of that movie’s influence on recruiting in the late eighties/early nineties.
I get that Sirota is a firebagger and we should all hate him but now are we supposed to like the fact that the Pentagon lends out our hardware only to movies that they like?
I assume this is like the Energy department promoting recycling or some such?
This is not a new development.
[...] in part by Alyssa Rosenberg’s work at the Center for American Progress, but also by a recent David Sirota column attacking my beloved Top Gun and by the imminent arrival of this horror, Seapower in Culture will investigate (unsurprisingly) [...]