The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of Education FILM AS PUBLIC PEDAGOGY IN THE U.S. CULTURE OF MILITARISM A Thesis in Curriculum and Instruction by Douglas S. Morris Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2006 The thesis of Douglas S. Morris was reviewed and approved* by the following: Patrick Shannon Professor of Education Thesis Advisor Chair of Committee Coordinator of Graduate Studies Jacqueline Edmondson Associate Professor of Education Paul Youngquist Professor of English Jeanne Hall Associate Professor of Communications *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School ABSTRACT The following study examines the relationship between militarized Hollywood cinema, the US culture of militarism, the systemic nature of US aggression, and the possibilities for creating a pedagogy of hope that will work to overcome militarism’s abominations. By recognizing film as a powerful form of public pedagogy that shapes beliefs, attitudes, and values, constructs identities and identifications, and directs allegiances and actions (or inactions), the study investigates ways in which Hollywood films work to convey and inculcate circumscribed notions of history through regularized patterns of film images and narratives in pursuit of the indirect or direct goal of distracting public attention, along with conditioning the public mind, engineering public consent, and mobilizing public support for a US culture of militarism dedicated to aggression in the pursuit of global domination. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………….1 Chapter 2. THE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK…..…………………………………….37 Chapter 3. A SHORT HISTORY OF MILITARIZED FILMS…………………………….63 Chapter 4. RULES OF ENGAGEMENT: WASTE THE MOTHERFUCKERS…………..99 Chapter 5. BLACK HAWK DOWN: NO MAN LEFT BEHIND…………………………118 Chapter 6. TEARS OF THE SUN AND COLONIAL TEARS…………...……………….137 Chapter 7. MAN ON FIRE: “KILL ‘EM ALL”…………………………………………...157 Chapter 8. MYSTIC RIVER: THE BLOOD-DIMMED TIDE ……………………………180 Chapter 9. THE PUBLIC PEDAGOGY OF PRESENCE AND ABSENCE……….……...199 Chapter 10. CONCLUSION: THE END OF MILITARISM OR THE END………………237 Appendix: Militarism and Militarization………………………………………………...…269 WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………………..282 ENDNOTES…………………………………………………………………………………295 iv And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry speak of dreams and leaves and the great volcanoes of his native land. Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets! -- Pablo Neruda, “I’m Explaining a Few Things” Interviewer: ANTONIO GRAMSCI, who helped popularize the term "hegemony," wrote in 1925, "A main obstacle to change is the reproduction by the dominating forces of elements of the hegemonic ideology. It’s an important and urgent task to develop alternative interpretations of reality." How does someone develop "alternative interpretations of reality," as Gramsci suggests? I RESPECT Gramsci a lot, but I think it’s possible to paraphrase that comment, namely, just tell the truth. Instead of repeating ideological fanaticism, dismantle it, try to find out the truth, and tell the truth. Does that say anything different? It’s something any one of us can do. Remember, intellectuals internalize the conception that they have to make things look complicated, otherwise what are they around for? But it is worth asking yourself, how much of it really is complicated? --Noam Chomsky, interviewed by David Barsamian, 2003 CHAPTER 1: Introduction “Was it Heraclitus who said war is humanity's natural state? Are those who imagine peace as the ground of a new condition guilty of an irresponsible wishful thinking”? -- James Carroll, “The Grip of War” “Of all the enemies of public liberty war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other…No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” -- James Madison, “Political Observations” 1795 The absence of critical discussion of the overwhelming presence of militarism in US culture, how it circulates in public spaces, how it educates us publicly and privately, how it works to construct social realities and values and individual identities and allegiances, how it works ideologically in league with the material militarization of US society, how it disappears its bloody legacy, how “dangers loom because of American militarism,”1 the extensive risks, costs and consequences that accompany a militarized society, and how it assumes the “right” of the US to employ violence and destroy lives in international affairs, suggests an immorally foreboding, and potentially catastrophic, gap in the way we understand ourselves as a society and the way we engage the rest of the world. Robert McNamara warns of an “apocalypse soon,” given the “immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous…weapons policy [and culture of militarism] of the United States.”2 The increasing presence of US militarism and aggression as a way of life within conditions in which the possibilities for maintaining self-defense are evaporating suggest an urgent need to critically engage and transform these matters, ideologically, morally and materially.3 How we understand ourselves as a society and how we engage the rest of the world is constructed and conditioned, in important ways, by popular culture. One of the crucial producers of self and global understanding within popular culture is film, “a veritable obsession with American society.”4 Across the history of popular film production in the United States there has been an emphasis on film narratives that draw on and glorify war, militarism and aggression helping to produce and shape a US culture of militarism. While it cannot be suggested that militarized and militarizing films are key components in shaping what is generally elite driven US military policies, it can be suggested that film, aside from its distracting role, shapes public perceptions, directs public allegiances, produces codes, and forms public commitments, about those policies, while constructing public identification with and support for US actions. Codes Shaping Attitudes: This powerful conditioning effect is related to what one might call “assumptions of representation,” wherein film audiences, because of the repeated catapulting of similar militarized narratives (inside and outside cinema) assume the representations are true depictions of both US military endeavors and the reasons for those endeavors which correspond with general audience attitudes and opinions about “war,” for example, that self-defense, but not unilateral aggression, is legitimate. Because films play such a vital role in popular culture as mechanisms of influence that condition the public, films therefore provide an opening for not only critical reflections, discussions and dialogues about the US culture of militarism and its contradictions, but they provide a vehicle for stimulating action-oriented popular mobilizations to challenge and overcome the growing US culture of militarism which now carries with it “an appreciable risk of ultimate doom.”5 A project that examines the US culture of militarism through film, is an attempt to make visible what is too often absent in public pedagogy and to challenge audience assumptions about what is and is not represented, what is and is not known, what is and what is not understood, what is and what ought to be. In short, such a project should work to recognize the political and moral of cinematic public pedagogies. If audiences believe that the standard view in the culture is to respond to challenge and conflict aggressively then violence becomes normalized; in a militarized culture rooted in aggression as part of foreign and domestic policy, military violence is normalized. At the cultural level of attitude and opinion the normalization can compel a move from the descriptive level of what is into a prescriptive level of what should be. Consequently, audiences start to believe not only that aggression is the best way but the only way to respond to 2 conflict and challenge. A cultural attitude develops in which not only is it true that the United States responds aggressively to challenge and conflict, but this is what the United States ought to do. With this coupling of descriptive and prescriptive a self-reproducing ideological and material feedback mechanism is engendered and inscribed, i.e. “the cycle of violence,” which not only produces cultural codes that maintain, engrain and extend the US culture of militarism, but worse it portends increasing cycles of human disaster and suffering. These cultural patterns of what is and what ought to be are internalized as codes, attitudes, scripts, opinions, and habits that frequently remain below the radar of conscious understanding, interrogation and questioning, and if they are critiqued and questioned they are refuted only with great energy and difficulty given the lack of cultural alternatives to the internalized codes and habits.6 Furthermore, because militarized films rarely explore with patience the possibility of peaceful negotiation to conflict and challenge, an attitude of impulsivity and immediate gratification develops in the culture. A culture of impulsivity tends to discount the future because “the temptation for immediate gratification rules [the culture].” Negotiation, politics and diplomacy require patience, critical reflection and time; violence is immediate and impulsive. It