The Pentagon Spends Millions Invading Christmas Movies
Love boats, Oedipus complexes, and pants suits on a desert island – a pair of new schmaltzy films, courtesy of the US Department of Defense, are the Christmas present we could all do without.
You know how it goes, you spend half your life waiting for the US military to help make a sentimental, Christmas-themed romantic comedy and then two come along at once: Hallmark’s ‘USS Christmas’ and Netflix’s ‘Operation Christmas Drop’.
Neither film could have been made without military support – nearly half of ‘USS Christmas’ takes place on board an aircraft carrier, and the scenes were filmed aboard the Battleship North Carolina and the USS Yorktown, courtesy of the US Navy. The plot of ‘Operation Christmas Drop’ revolves around Andersen Air Force Base in the Western Pacific island of Guam, with full access provided by the US Air Force.
Christmas rom-coms might seem an odd choice for the Pentagon’s entertainment liaison offices to support – neither film depicts war or violence of any kind, after all. But if we unwrap them, what we find beneath the enticing shiny paper and ribbons is not merely the disappointment of the same gift they got you three years ago, but the nagging anxiety and sense of betrayal that comes with an unwelcome present. However, we cannot simply re-gift ‘USS Christmas’ and ‘Operation Christmas Drop’ and wash our hands of responsibility for the bad choices of others.
Hallmark, the Pentagon, and a partridge in a pear tree
Why a giant of cinema such as Hallmark would want to work with the Department
of Defense (DOD) is difficult to pin down, but the relationship goes back
at least a decade. Hundreds of pages of reports
from the US military’s Hollywood offices, especially those of the Army,
detail numerous collaborations with Hallmark since 2010.................
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Matthew HOH
There’s a sickness that comes with the certainty of those who view the world in so black and white, so good and bad, so us versus them terms, that killing is often a morally defensible act. More so, such killing often goes beyond just simple self defense, to a level of retributive necessity, a preventive act that makes the act of killing practically an act of altruism. “If I hadn’t killed the bad guy, the bad guy would have killed other people” so the reasoning goes. The myth of redemptive violence, is clearly espoused and expressed in our explanations of American history: we had to kill the British to be free; in America’s majority Christian religion: Jesus had to die in the most painful way possible, on the cross, for mankind to be saved; and in the United State’s greatest popular culture: Luke had to destroy the Death Star to save the galaxy…
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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/03/holl-m14.html
Military interference in American film production
Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon shapes and censors the movies by David L. Robb
Mile Klindo, Richard Phillips
14 March 2005
Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon shapes and censors the movies by David L. Robb, a former journalist for Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, is a timely work. Published in 2004, a year after the US-led occupation of Iraq, it exposes one of the dark secrets of American movies—military interference in film production and Hollywood’s acquiescence to it.
While collaboration between the US military and Hollywood, of course, is not a new phenomenon, few moviegoers realise how much control the Pentagon has over the American film industry. Citing letters, internal memos and interviews with producers, writers and directors, Robb’s book contains valuable information about its insidious and destructive influence on American cinema............
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https://www.openculture.com/2020/09/the-pentagon-created-a-plan-to-defend-the-us-against-a-zombie-apocalypse.html
The Pentagon Created a Plan to Defend the US Against a Zombie Apocalypse: Read It Online
in Film, Life, Television | September 16th, 2020
For keen observers of pop culture, the floodtide of zombie films and television series over the past several years has seemed like an especially ominous development. As social unrest spreads and increasing numbers of people are uprooted from their homes by war, climate catastrophe, and, now, COVID-related eviction, one wonders how advisable it might have been to prime the public with so many scenarios in which heroes must fight off hordes of infectious disease carriers? Zombie movies seem intent, after all, on turning not only the dead but also other living humans into objects of terror.............
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