American Politics in Hollywood Film

Although most Hollywood cinema may appear apolitical, along the lines of that famous quote ‘leave the messages to Western Union', the relationship between American politics and Hollywood film is a long and rich one.

During Hollywood's heyday in the 30s and 40s, American cinema was arguably the most powerful ideological force the world had ever known. Millions, both in the USA and abroad, were told what it meant to be an American and what America stood for.

The 1930s brought Warner Bros endorsement of Roosevelt's New Deal in their pictures and Frank Capra's fanfares to the common man and small-town American values. The 1940s brought war propaganda like the ‘why we fight' series and then, when WWII had ended and the Cold War begun, a wave of cynical and disillusioned film noir. This, in turn, reflected the mood of the McCarthy witch-hunts of the late 40s and early 50s when Hollywood figures denounced each other as communists. Some, like the Hollywood Ten, were persecuted for their political beliefs; others left America for good, others responded powerfully using the cinematic medium itself. In the 1960s and 70s, the politics and attitudes of the counterculture found a reflection in films like Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, before a new wave of disillusionment in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate led to a resurgence of film noir in the likes of Chinatown and Taxi Driver. In the 80s, the conservative reaction (and let us not forget that in RReagan the USA had a former cowboy actor as President) was exemplified by the triumph of Spielberg-style fantasies that allowed a retreat from real politics; this trend perhaps reaching its apotheosis in Rambo: First Blood Part II. Here Stallone responds to his Vietnam mission with the question ‘Do we get to win this time?' The answer, of course, was yes.

While it's perhaps too early to write the political history of the 1990s through Hollywood film, the decade has seen a steady stream of satires on the Bush and Clinton era - Bob Roberts, Dave, Wag the Dog, Bulworth.