Tinseltown’s Potshots Backfire

One of the great ironies of contemporary electoral politics is that Hollywood, the moviemaking community that so desperately wants to elect Democrats to high office, probably does more to ensure Republican control of the federal government than any other special interest.

That may sound strange in view of the millions of dollars that the movie industry donates to Democratic candidates, but consider the product that Hollywood brings to market and its profound influence on the way Americans view their government.

Year after year, movie audiences are treated to a continuous assault on federal government and its motives. No agency or institution is spared. For Democrats, the cumulative value of anti-government messages amounts to a devastating repudiation of the party's core belief in harnessing the power of government to effect progressive change for ordinary citizens. Simply put, the Democrats are the party that places its trust in government. Their putative allies in Hollywood, on the other hand, are actively engaged in the business of undermining that trust. The inevitable result is an electorate that is suspicious of government, skeptical of its competence and inclined to elect candidates of similar mind.

It's almost impossible to come up with an agency that has escaped Hollywood's unflattering portrayal over the past two decades. In the movie Enemy of the State, for example, a lawyer is targeted by a National Security Agency death squad when he unwittingly stumbles across evidence of its serious crimes. In Article 99, Veterans Affairs doctors are forced to defy an uncaring and heartless bureaucracy in order to save patients' lives. No Way Out presents the secretary of Defense as a murderer who uses his aides to cover up his crime. The popular cable television series The Sopranos recently featured a plot line revolving around a Housing and Urban Development Department scam. The list goes on and on.

This isn't exactly a new development. Tinseltown began taking occasional potshots at government not long after Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy was waging an offensive on Capitol Hill to root out communist sympathizers in the movie industry. By the late 1970s, following the Watergate scandal, the movie industry discovered that it had a convenient foil right under its nose. Conspiracy theory flicks flourished. Witness 1978's Capricorn One, a film based on the premise that NASA faked a Mars landing and murdered its astronauts to keep the secret under wraps.

The end of the Cold War-and the resulting demand by screenwriters for new villains-served to exacerbate an already troubling trend. The CIA, in particular, proved an especially good fit. The agency now is so regularly portrayed as a nest of rogue killers that it hardly merits notice anymore. Its domestic counterpart, the FBI, tends to receive more favorable treatment on the silver screen, but it's not the bureau itself that plays the hero-the more common narrative is that of the maverick agent bucking the secretive and often malevolent establishment.

If you think these are just screenplays-nothing more than mindless, ephemeral distractions-then you are overlooking the persuasive power of their implicit and explicit messages. Sociologists have filled vast archives with conclusive research on the issue of their efficacy.

All of this dovetails with the themes promoted by Republican candidates. Back in the mid-1990s, conservative Republicans often railed about the "jack-booted thugs" of the federal government, a claim that didn't seem so far-fetched in a popular movie culture accustomed to murderous Cabinet secretaries, federal government death squads and federally trained professional assassins. The GOP believes in the power of individuals to determine their own destiny, unfettered by an intrusive, meddling, sometimes malicious and typically incompetent federal bureaucracy; Hollywood validates this notion of government on a regular basis.