How Hollywood Projects Foreign Policy

Despite the old injunction to ‘never judge a book by its cover’ one cannot really pick up a book without beginning to form an impression of what lies within.  Publishers hire designers for exactly this reason. On picking up Sally Totman’s book “How Hollywood Projects Foreign Policy,” this reader immediately felt a nagging sense of foreboding.  First there was the suspiciously open title.  Would the book examine foreign policy in general or specifically the foreign policy of the United States?  Would it focus on recent years or go back to the roots of the old alliance between the US government and the American film industry?  Would it look at all aspects of US foreign policy or focus narrowly on one aspect?  Then the author’s name was preceded with the word ‘by’ unusual for the cover of an academic monograph.  The illustration was a further red flag.  It shows dramatic incidents from recent Hollywood films dealing with the Middle East (George Clooney in “Syriana” is readily identifiable).  They are arranged in horizontal strips with sprockets running along the top and bottom edge.  Oddly this suggests images on still film, carried through the camera horizontally, rather than motion picture film which in camera and projector is carried vertically and hence has sprockets on either side.  One turns the book over and finds glowing endorsements of the work, but a brief comparison with the author bio finds these come from colleagues at Australia’s Deakin University—experts in international relations theory and Korean foreign policy respectively.  Handling the volume I had the sinking feeling that despite the Palgrave imprint I was slipping into vanity press territory.  I repressed these forebodings and plunged into the text.  Sadly, in this case my forebodings were correct.

Totman’s book is really misnamed—a better title would have been: “Not Without My Stereotypes: Hollywood and US foreign policy towards rogue states from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush.”  That is the boundary of this enquiry.  It is a worthy subject which cuts to the heart of the White House spin around the Global War on Terror and its antecedents.  Logically enough, Totman sets out to trace US foreign policy towards six rogue states—specifically Cuba, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Sudan and North Korea, and makes it clear that she is looking to tell a story of state private collusion and Hollywood’s role in the wider propaganda apparatus of the USA.  Her research fails to find any hard and fast connection.  With the possible exception of Libya most rogue states don’t seem to have been identified that often explicitly in Hollywood scripts and for every outrageous stereotyped piece of hate/scare mongery—like the anti-Iranian “Not Without My Daughter” (1991) there seems to be a thoughtful or well researched counter balance like “House of Sand and Fog” (2004).  It a surprise just how few films she is able to study, and how obscure they are.  Her anti-Cuban texts include the sea monster flick “Octopus” (2000), and her anti-Iraq movies include “Human Shield” (1991) and others which did little box office.  Among the few films she claims as a box office success is “Not Without My Daughter” but this made only $15 million in the year that Terminator II hit nearly $200 million in the US alone.  Her book was presumably completed too soon to include “300” (2007) a film which has quite rightly angered Iran more than any other in recent years and grossed over $450 million worldwide.

The book is sloppily written.  Foot noting is sporadic with vast swathes of text describing the history of the rogue states and their relations with the US in sub-Wikipedia generalizations supported by only occasional footnotes.  Errors abound.  The author appears to think that Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was a Communist (p.2) and her narrative of the Carter years (p. 19) implies that he won his Nobel Peace Prize at that time rather than several decades later.  There are extraordinary errors regarding the content of films cited.  The author makes repeated reference to the anti-Russian bias of Cold War James Bond films whereas in reality the Bond villains were usually international criminal organizations and more likely ‘legacy’ German villains than Russian.  The Bond flim cliche is that the superspy would cooperate with the Russian (as in “From Russia with Love” or “The Spy Who Loved Me” ), or work to avoid a Cold War calamity brought by misunderstanding as in You Only Live Twice.  James Chapman’s study “Licensed to Thrill” is the text to read on these themes of Bondage.  For each of the sins of commission there are twice as many sins of omission: movies which deal with the rogues which she omits.  Cuba is especially poorly served, with many Cuban themes and characters ignored and an absurd focus on “Scarface” (1983), which was about someone expelled by Castro in any case.

One of the most frustrating elements of this book is its failure to actually get to grips even with the main filmic texts invoked.  Totman pays no attention to the process by which films are made or to the fact that film is a visual medium.  She merely summarizes plots, quotes a few lines, speculates and moves on. This book would have been so much more worthwhile if Totman had attempted to investigate how the films were made: to look at the transformations from source novels or events through script drafts to the final screenplay.  Other scholars have been able to speak to directors, script writers and cultural or technical advisers and document the reasons why a film reached its final shape.  She is—for example—unaware that one of the reasons her sympathetic-to-Iraqis film “Three Kings” took the position that it did and showed such sensitivity and accuracy was because of the number of Iraqi cultural advisers on the film.  This is not privileged information.  They are clearly acknowledged in the film’s credits and explored in the producer/director interviews which come as a bonus on the DVD.  Totman doesn’t even both to identity the director/writer of that film—David O. Russell—by name.

In the midst of—and partly because of—all this chaos Totman does outline an interesting anomaly.  It is plainly hard to prove the case that Hollywood is in lock-step with Washington in its vilification of specific rogue states.  Hollywood prefers to cast the net as broadly as possible, vilifying general groups like Arabs (as Jack Shaheen has shown) or in other eras Eastern Europeans or Germans.  The absence of specific enemy states is striking.  Totman would have had more grist for her mill if she had examined the generic convention of the fictional rogue state in popular culture like Berzerkistan in the Doonesbury cartoon strip, Kreplachistan in “Austin Powers: The Spy who Shagged Me” or the troublesome state of Qumar in the TV show “The West Wing,” to say nothing of the rouge states which proliferate in video games.  As for Hollywood, when it isn’t poking fun at Rogue-stateism, it is routinely invoking rogue state scenarios to show the value of American hard power and provide a stage for the bank-able spectacle of that hard power in action.  There may be a commercial reason why this is so.  Identifying villains with real places means alienating a portion of your potential market, and Hollywood is above all an industry.  The anti-German films of the 1930s came only after the German market closed its door to US film exports.  Hollywood, like Voltaire, when asked to renounce the Devil on his deathbed, never makes an unnecessary enemy.  Hollywood is more restrained in this than the US government.

In conclusion this is a truly abysmal book, which in its strongest passages merely reaches the level of an average bachelor’s thesis.  It falls short as both film scholarship and international relations, and through its legion deficiencies gives interdisciplinarity a bad name.  Its publication opens questions about the quality control mechanisms at Palgrave.  This book is of value only as a reminder of the some of the more obscure films that have been made on rogue state themes and as an example of how not to write a book on this subject.

How Hollywood Projects Foreign Policy
By Sally Totman with a foreword by Gary Scudder

Palgrave Macmillan, October 2009
ISBN: 978-0-230-61869-5, ISBN10: 0-230-61869-3,
5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches, 240 pages