hollywood hasbara. not just about 'movies'

'Black Hawk Down' and'Zero Dark Thirty' are films that follow a certain pattern of Hollywood Hasbara.

Black Hawk  Down rewrote  an American defeat and made it a virtual victory. The latest Hasbara Holly gram follows the right wing  Fox TV's " 24"  to justify torture by the American state. No one should be surprised. That "Avatar" lost out in the  Oscars to a pro-war film about the Iraq war says a lot about
Hollywood's ties with the  American War Machine.

 The reactions to a film that is still to be released are fascinating. Definitely worth following. Here are a couple of links

That this film would depict CIA interrogation programs as crucial in capturing America's most hated public enemy, and uncritically herald CIA officials as dramatic heroes, is anything but surprising. A large Hollywood studio would never dare make a film about the episode which is America's greatest source of collective self-esteem and jingoistic pride without clinging tightly to patriotic orthodoxies. The events that led to bullets being pumped into Osama bin Laden's skull and his corpse being dumped into the ocean have taken on sacred status in American lore, and Big Hollywood will inevitably validate rather than challenge that mythology.

Moreover, the controversy earlier this year was grounded in the concern that by working so closely with government officials - "considerable cooperation from the CIA and the Defense Department", wrote Bruni - the filmmakers would be captured by their viewpoints and agenda. And so it is: by all accounts, the film's supreme hero is a CIA agent; the CIA's most controversial - illegal - interrogation tactics are hailed as indispensable; and while Obama is not featured much, any film that glorifies the bin Laden raid necessarily reminds the country of what he and his followers obviously consider to be one of his crowning achievements.

All of that is just ordinary propaganda and orthodoxy-boostering that, standing alone, would be too commonplace and inevitable to merit much comment. But what makes all of this so remarkable is that the film's glorifying claims about torture are demonstrably, factually false. That waterboarding and other torture techniques were effective in finding bin Laden is a fabrication.

About the film's depiction of torture as helpful in finding bin Laden, Bruni writes with extreme understatement that "that's hardly a universally accepted version of events". Filkens' reaction - though also weirdly tepid - is much closer to the truth. Here's the crux of this matter [emphasis added]:

"Bigelow maintains that everything in the film is based on first-hand accounts, but the waterboarding scene, which is likely to stir up controversy, appears to have strayed from real life. According to several official sources, including Dianne Feinstein, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the identity of bin Laden's courier, whose trail led the CIA to the hideout in Pakistan, was not discovered through waterboarding. 'It's a movie, not a documentary,' [screenwriter Mark] Boal said. 'We're trying to make the point that waterboarding and other harsh tactics were part of the CIA program.' Still, Bigelow said, 'the film doesn't have an agenda, and it doesn't judge. I wanted a boots-on-the-ground experience."

Bigelow and Boal are speaking out of both sides of their mouths here. As noted, she is going around praising herself for taking "almost a journalistic approach to film". But when confronted by factual falsehoods she propagates on critical questions, her screenwriting partner resorts to the excuse that "it's a movie, not a documentary."

Over the last decade, nothing has produced more positive feelings among Americans about themselves than the killing of bin Laden. That's why it was a centerpiece of Obama's re-election campaign and multiple chanting sessions at the Democrats' convention.

When it comes to "the hunt for bin Laden", few people want their nationalistic pride to be diluted by criticisms of the agencies responsible or reminders of the war crimes their country committed (or the fake child vaccine programs on which it relied). Any film that powerfully and adeptly leads Americans to view their government and its intelligence and military actors as noble heroes is one that is going to produce gratitude and glee no matter what else it does.

Those who ordered and implemented torture were never prosecuted. They were actively shielded from all forms of legal accountability by the current president. They thus went on to write books, get even richer, and live the lives of honored American statesmen. Torture was thus transformed from what it had been - a universally recognized war crime - into just another pedestrian, partisan political debate that Americans have.

That's the critical context in which a film can simultaneously be said to glorify torture using outright fabrications and be praised as the year's greatest film. The normalization of torture - and of all crimes committed by the US government in the name of war - is both a cause and effect of this film's success. That normalization is what enables a film like this to be so widely admired, and it will be bolstered even further as the film gathers more accolades and box office riches.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/10/zero-dark-thirty-torture-awards

The Hollywood epic, Zero Dark Thirty, which will hit US movie theaters just in time for Christmas is being lambasted by journalists and critics for its attempt to whitewash history by presenting torture techniques used by the CIA during the Bush years as a key feature of the investigation that led to the discovery of Osama bin Laden's whereabouts in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal, the film—which is already causing Oscar buzz, receiving award nominations and critical acclaim—claims to be a methodically-researched exploration of the hunt for bin Laden by US intelligence and military operatives that culminated in his death in early 2011.

While film critics are busy heaping praise on the film, it is human rights advocates, anti-torture campaigners, and historians calling it out for a brazen—and many say repulsive—misrepresentation of facts.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/12/10-7

Defenders of Bush-era enhanced interrogation waged a fierce public relations campaign to rehabilitate torture in the aftermath of the bin Laden killing, in part to award Bush credit for the raid. But the facts kept getting in the way. Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA official responsible for the destruction of videos recording the (ineffectual) torture of detainee Abu Zubayda, went on 60 Minutes and was unable to rebut the fact that alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed lied when questioned about bin Laden's courier, despite being tortured. The CIA inspector general found that "you could not in good conscience reach a definitive conclusion about whether any specific technique was especially effective, or [whether] the enhanced techniques in the aggregate really worked." Republicans are currently attempting to block a Senate intelligence committee investigation of the efficacy of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Someone attempting to make a "journalistic" feature film on the hunt for Osama bin Laden could be expected to be aware of all this. When Filkins asked Boal about the portrayal of torture departing from the known facts, he replied, "It's a movie, not a documentary." Bigelow and Boal want their film to be seen as a contribution to the historical record, not as mere entertainment. So far they are winning over influential film critics. If you're thinking of giving them an award, Zero Dark Thirty is "history"; if you're a journalist asking a question about a factual error in the film, it's just a movie

http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2012/12/zero-dark-thirty-osama-bin-laden-torture