Imagineering empire: how Hollywood and the US national security state ‘operationalize narrative’

Abstract

<jats:p> While the Pentagon has long enlisted Hollywood to make films that show the United States in a favorable light for the public, this article examines how and why US military agencies hire entertainment professionals for national security purposes such as imagining defense strategy against possible threats. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles, I argue that the application of entertainment media and creative expertise for internal military purposes articulates the totalizing resourcefulness of a national security state which after 9/11 increasingly identifies the capacity to imagine as its greatest weapon. I suggest that ‘Imagineering’, the Disney method for storytelling and developing scenarios that has become emblematic of the US entertainment industry, is a fitting concept with which to understand the state’s harnessing of creative labor for its project of empire. Tracing the relationship between Hollywood narrative and national security illuminates the imaginings of US empire at its domestic source. </jats:p>

The Culture of Censorship: State Intervention and Complicit Creativity in Global Film Production

“…The state's role in cultural production in democratic societies is generally seen as implicit, whereas the intervention of authoritarian regimes is explicit, and sometimes considered appropriate and necessary (Alexander and Rueschemeyer 2005;Darnton 2014;Lena 2012). But even in democratic societies such as the United States, state intervention in the arts has occurred throughout history: the Production Code from 1934 to 1968 (Baumann 2007); the CIA, the State Department, and cultural diplomats' propaganda in U.S. art and literature during the Cold War (Barnhisel 2015); the CIA's post-Cold War and post-9/11 engagement with the film industry (Jenkins 2012); and the ongoing collaboration between Hollywood and the Department of Defense (Martin 2020;Secker and Alford 2019).…”