By: KEVIN JOLLY
Staff Writer
The United States military has an annual advertising budget of $3 billion dollars. As you may know, this money goes towards television advertising such as commercials and online video ads, sporting event flyovers, or even towards recruitment stands in high schools. But this money also goes towards Hollywood. The military has a very deep and complex connection to the film industry that’s been developing since the beginning of film. This connection is called the “Military-Entertainment Complex”, a term coined to describe any entertainment industry collaborating with the military for the mutual benefit of each other. This stretches into the realm of other mediums like video games, books, news, and music, but for this article, I’m focusing specifically on the film industry.
The film Wings released in 1927, a movie about a fighter pilot in WW1, had all its aircraft provided by the US military. Wings received not only an academy award, the very first Best Picture award ever, and this was where a lot of military cooperation began in film; where the military realized the potential in funding films, and films realized the critical success of the military collaboration.
You’d be very hard-pressed to find a war film from the 1930s to the 60s from America that has any negative portrayal of the military. Of course, there are exceptions like Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, but anti-war films were rare and usually banned from most theaters. This is because it was pretty much a necessity to work with the pentagon if you were making a war movie. No matter what budget a movie has, the pentagon is always willing to provide more in soldier uniforms, weapons, vehicles, and special effects, if you would be willing to sacrifice your script. When the pentagon agrees to work with a film, they require the filmmaker to send them the script so that various edits and revisions can be made. The edited script will be designed to portray the military in the most positive light possible. One example of this would be many death scenes in Top Gun being revised to plane crashes with seat ejections and pilots surviving, so as to not scare away any potential volunteers. This was an era where ultra-conservative, patriotic actors like John Wayne thrived within Hollywood, and filmmakers like Dalton Trumbo were imprisoned simply for believing in certain political beliefs deemed “Un-American”. This era is the birthplace of many of the modern forms of conservative patriotic and even nationalistic ideals we see today. It’s very interesting just to see how stark a difference there is between Hollywood in the 30s to 60s compared to the Hollywood we know now and how the military largely played a part in it.
Still from ‘The Green Berets’, starring John Wayne
Around the 1970s was when access to military equipment and vehicles became more commonly available to filmmakers, as other countries began renting out their gear. Apocalypse Now, for example, had all of its many helicopters provided by the Philippine government. When this transition began, there was a sudden shift in the tone of war films. With the Vietnam war sparking outrage across the nation, many Americans for the first time were heavily opposed to the war, and this was reflected in the films. Films like Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, and Jacob’s Ladder are all films the Pentagon refused to work with and were what dominated the war film narrative over the 70s and somewhat the 80s.
But this just meant the pentagon no longer had a monopoly, they were still working deeply within Hollywood. The late 70s and 80s saw a renaissance in action films. Such examples could be Commando, Rambo, Top Gun, Under Siege, and Predator which were all pretty explicitly pro-military and pro-war. These films portrayed warfare and life in general as very black-and-white and shallow, with the good guy shooting the bad guy and saving the world. The “Bad Guys” were almost always Russian or communist, and this played into the Cold War Red Scare hysteria of the time. Top Gun is probably the best example of a Military-backed film. Every aircraft and aircraft carrier in the film was provided for just under 2 million dollars by the pentagon. After the film was released, Navy inscriptions jumped up by 400%.
In the modern day, the military is still a huge force in the film industry. Black hawk Down, American Sniper, The Hurt Locker, and even a new Top Gun prove this so. But we’re also seeing a bit of a decline in anti-war films, which was probably caused by the new wave of patriotism post-9/11. But with the recent news about the pulling out of Afghanistan, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, new debate over Israel, and China’s aggressive posturing over our allies, it’s unclear what the future of the Military Entertainment Complex will look like. We may see the relationship relax, we may see the military taking a more active role in film, or maybe the military will switch up their optics and try something completely new like trying to appeal more to less hawkish Americans.
