American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy The Fragmented Kaleidoscope 1St Ed Edition Thomas J Cobb Full Chapter PDF

American Cinema and Cultural
Diplomacy: The Fragmented

Kaleidoscope 1st ed. Edition Thomas J.
Cobb
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/american-cinema-and-cultural-diplomacy-the-fragmen
ted-kaleidoscope-1st-ed-edition-thomas-j-cobb/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Cultural Diplomacy in Europe: Between the Domestic and

the International 1st ed. Edition Caterina Carta
https://ebookmass.com/product/cultural-diplomacy-in-europe-
between-the-domestic-and-the-international-1st-ed-edition-
caterina-carta/
The Migration and Politics of Monsters in Latin

American Cinema 1st ed. Edition Gabriel Eljaiek-
Rodríguez
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-migration-and-politics-of-
monsters-in-latin-american-cinema-1st-ed-edition-gabriel-eljaiek-
rodriguez/
American Cinema/American Culture 5th Edition, (Ebook

PDF)
https://ebookmass.com/product/american-cinema-american-
culture-5th-edition-ebook-pdf/
Globalization and Latin American Cinema: Toward a New

Critical Paradigm 1st ed. Edition Sophia A. Mcclennen
https://ebookmass.com/product/globalization-and-latin-american-
cinema-toward-a-new-critical-paradigm-1st-ed-edition-sophia-a-
mcclennen/
The Palgrave Handbook of International Cybercrime and
Cyberdeviance 1st ed. Edition Thomas J. Holt
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-palgrave-handbook-of-
international-cybercrime-and-cyberdeviance-1st-ed-edition-thomas-
j-holt/
Big Brother Naija and Popular Culture in Nigeria: A

Critique of the Country's Cultural and Economic
Diplomacy 1st ed. 2023 Edition Christopher Isike
https://ebookmass.com/product/big-brother-naija-and-popular-
culture-in-nigeria-a-critique-of-the-countrys-cultural-and-
economic-diplomacy-1st-ed-2023-edition-christopher-isike/
Public Diplomacy and the Politics of Uncertainty 1st

ed. Edition Pawel Surowiec
https://ebookmass.com/product/public-diplomacy-and-the-politics-
of-uncertainty-1st-ed-edition-pawel-surowiec/
Chinese Diplomacy and the Paris Peace Conference 1st

ed. Edition Qi-Hua Tang
https://ebookmass.com/product/chinese-diplomacy-and-the-paris-
peace-conference-1st-ed-edition-qi-hua-tang/
The Fragmented Mind Cristina Borgoni
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-fragmented-mind-cristina-
borgoni/
American Cinema and
Cultural Diplomacy
The Fragmented Kaleidoscope
Thomas J. Cobb
American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy
“The course of American foreign policy is never smooth—including in the movies.

Thomas Cobb deftly takes us inside the films to show the tension between
America’s ideals and its quests for power, between the national and the interna-
tional, and between American exceptionalism and a declaration of the universal for
all of us.”
—Professor Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham
Thomas J. Cobb
American Cinema and

Cultural Diplomacy
The Fragmented Kaleidoscope
Thomas J. Cobb
Stourbridge, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-42677-4 ISBN 978-3-030-42678-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42678-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Matty Anderson / EyeEm, Getty Images

Cover design: eStudioCalamar
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface
This book intends to offer reflections on American film’s allegorisation of

US foreign policy. It is designed for Film Studies, American Studies and
International Relations scholars and is written with the purpose of address-
ing how examples of Hollywood cinema capture schismatic patterns of
American statecraft. The “cultural diplomacy” of the title, a reference to
Hollywood’s role in furthering US hegemony and attracting overseas
audiences, frequently hinges on films which purvey multifaceted represen-
tations of American power.
I contend that films as various as Spaghetti Westerns and War pictures
have framed the elastic quality of the US national narrative and elicited an
almost synesthetic approach to culture and politics. Much of my analysis is
influenced by the elucidation of political allegory presented in Richard
Slotkin’s 1992 book Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in
Twentieth Century America and contains similar observations on the syn-
ergetic aspects of Hollywood productions. My argument diverges from
Slotkin’s approach in its evaluation of the political dynamics of American
film based on a combination of Film Studies and International Relations
methodologies.
Ranging from the triangulations of the Clinton era to the identitarian
nationalism of Trump’s presidency, this exploration claims that Hollywood
productions possess affinity with the International Relations theorist
Walter Mead’s idea of a ‘kaleidoscopic’ American foreign policy. It further
argues that allegory has grown in importance when it comes to translating
contradictions in American statecraft to the screen. This process became
v
vi PREFACE
catalysed by the trauma of the 9/11 attacks and the onset of the War
on Terror.
All chapters focus on Hollywood films which evidence contradictory
allegories of a key International Relations concept. From the challenges
facing Joseph Nye Jr.’s theory of soft power in a cycle of post-9/11 pro-
ductions to the vitiation of Wilsonianism in two late 2000s blockbusters,
disjunction and changing reflections consistently manifest in US foreign
policy’s allegorisation. Although in some films these disjunctions and
evolving representations are resolved and rationalised, in others they cul-
minate in a dysphoric reflection of American statecraft and US society.
Hence, allegories of diplomatic contradiction are tonally variable, differing
in their response to the contemporary political scene.
Moreover, this book intends to foreground the kaleidoscopic nature of
American society and politics through insight into the political chemistry
contained in numerous examples of American film since the 1990s. It is
written with the hope of engaging Film Studies, American Studies and
International Relations scholars through showcasing how US cinema can
be employed as a tool for understanding the mercurial facets of US
diplomacy.
Acknowledgements
I feel privileged to have benefitted from the encouragement and inspira-

tion of many throughout the development of this project. I am particu-
larly appreciative of Professor James Chapman, Dr James Walters and
Professor Scott Lucas for their time and energy in engaging with and chal-
lenging my ideas and for the sharing of their enthusiasm for film’s political
resonance. I thank my employers and colleagues at Coventry University
for facilitating a positive environment for the tutoring of novice academic
writers. I am further grateful to my employers and colleagues at the
University of Birmingham, who have given me the opportunity of teach-
ing on modules that synergise with my research interests.
I would also like to thank Edward Jackson; our meetups during the
writing process generated direction and inspiration. A special mention
must go to the ‘old boys’ I know from the University of Leicester whose
humour continually lends perspective. I am grateful to my godfather,
Edward Neve, who has always taken a keen interest in my intellectual
pursuits.
I thank my mother, Jane; my father, Jeremy; and my sister, Ellen, who
continue to be the best immediate family support network possible.
Finally, I express gratitude to the three dogs, whose barks and howls pro-
vided the mood music for my writing.
vii
Contents
1 Shifting Kaleidoscopes: The Presence of Diplomatic

Contradiction in Political and Allegorical American Film 1
The Common Fallacy of Hyperpartisanship: Dispelling the
Ubiquity of Hollywood’s ‘liberal’ Animus 4
The Competing Schools of Methodology Regarding Allegory 18
References 29
2 Triangulation: Unilateral Idealism in the 1990s Cinematic

Presidency 35
The Restyling of American Liberalism: Clintonian Triangulation
in The American President 36
The Wilsonian/Jacksonian Fusion in Independence Day 48
Presidential Renditions of Triangulation in Clinton’s
Second Term 56
References 61
3 Equilibrium: The Turn of the Twenty-First-Century War

Film and the Millenarian Remaking of Global Meliorism 65
Three Kings: Escalations of Unilateral Idealism 66
Three Kings and the Centrist Adaptation of Global Meliorism 76
Alternate Reifications of Equilibrium: The Global Meliorism of
Behind Enemy Lines and Black Hawk Down 83
Tears of the Sun: The Outer Limits of the New Global Meliorism 94
References 101
ix
x Contents
4 Reconfiguration: Hard and Soft Power Rivalries in

Cinematic Engagements With the War on Terror107
Skewed Power: The Disjunctive Americas of 25th Hour
and Fahrenheit 9/11 109
Team America and the Malleability of Soft Power 120
Harbingers of the Hamiltonian: Failures of Soft Power
Exemplarism in Batman Begins and Syriana 133
References 143
5 Fragmentation: The Deconstruction of Neoliberal

Occupation in No Country for Old Men and There Will be
Blood149
No Country for Old Men and the Anarchy of Exporting
Neoliberalism 151
There Will be Blood and the Schisms of Neoconservative
Intervention 165
References 181
6 Collision: The Dark Knight and Avatar’s Eulogies to

Liberal Internationalist Failure187
The Dereliction of Wilsonianism in The Dark Knight 188
Avatar and the Consummate Contradiction of Foreign
Occupation 206
References 222
7 Stasis: The Continuation of Contradiction in the Age

of Malaise and Populism229
The Normalisation of Malaise: The Late Obama Era 232
Trump’s Presidency: The Continuation or End of Kaleidoscopic
Diplomacy in American Cinema? 239
References 249
Index255
List of Figures
Fig. 5.1 The botched drug deal in No Country for Old Men
(IMDCB n.d.) 157
Fig. 5.2 Plainview’s collapsing oil derrick in There Will be Blood
(Dix 2016) 177
Fig. 6.1 The Dark Knight’s ‘Ground Zero’ (Shortlist 2019) 200
xi
CHAPTER 1
Shifting Kaleidoscopes: The Presence

of Diplomatic Contradiction in Political
and Allegorical American Film
Over the course of two feverish days in January 2017, a set of contrasting
events in Washington D.C. encapsulate the divides of contemporary
American political life. On January 20, at the traditional setting at the
West Front of the United States Capitol Building, President-elect Donald
J. Trump delivers a fiery inauguration speech, wrought with the vein of
transgressive populism that had been central to the tenor of his presiden-
tial campaign. Despite having trailed Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by
almost three million votes in the popular vote in the November 2016
presidential election, Trump (2017) asserts the mantle of majority rule,
propounding that “we are transferring power from Washington, D.C.,
and giving it back to you, the American People”. In additional grandiose
remarks, he portrays disconnects between the experience of America’s
patriotic citizenry and its decadent elite. Trump blames a Washington that
“flourished” while “the factories closed”, a dissonance protracted by an
establishment which “protected itself, but not the citizens of our country”
(ibid.).
Seguing from the rhetoric of provincial resentment to language of
blood and soil nationalism, the new Republican standard-bearer promises
to halt an “American carnage” (ibid.). He substantiates this agenda with
“an oath of allegiance to all Americans” before bemoaning a litany of poli-
cies maintained by Washington’s implicitly erstwhile governing class: in
protectionist overtones, Trump laments “enriched foreign industry at the
expense of American industry”; how American taxpayers have “subsidized
© The Author(s) 2020 1

T. J. Cobb, American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42678-1_1
2 T. J. COBB
the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of
our military”; finally, and perhaps most important to the anti-immigration
dimension of Trump’s campaign, he cites the “ravages of other countries
making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs”
(ibid.) as chief causes for vituperation.
The subsequent day of January 21 in Washington D.C. sees opposition
to this message. A ‘Women’s March’ pugnaciously repudiates President
Trump, an animus of indignation echoed by emulative protests in capitals
across the West. Whilst the march foregrounds anger over the 45th presi-
dent’s attitude to women, it encompasses a broader fear of white national-
ism. The manifesto of the Women’s March expresses belief in the
importance of “immigrant and refugee rights regardless of origin” by
rejecting “mass deportation, family detention” and “violations of due pro-
cess” (San Diego Free Press 2017). Speeches delivered by major Hollywood
celebrities signal this sense of cosmopolitan solidarity absent from Trump’s
address.
Film actress Ashley Judd (quoted in Sanchez 2017) chastises a plethora
of attitudes given social license by Trump’s presidential campaign, listing
“racism, fraud, conflict of interest, homophobia, sexual assault, transpho-
bia, white supremacy, misogyny, ignorance, white privilege” as flagrant
signs of the new president’s bigotry. Star of The Avengers Scarlett Johansson
(quoted in Ruiz 2017) elicits fears of “a country that is moving backwards
and not forwards”. The documentary maker and political activist Michael
Moore (quoted in Ruiz 2017) claims “here’s the majority of America,
right here. … We are here to vow to end the Trump campaign.” The
speeches by Hollywood icons are supplemented and substantiated by the
civil rights activist Angela Davis (quoted in Reilly 2017), who reminds of
a country “anchored in slavery and colonialism”, containing a dual legacy
of “immigration and enslavement”. Elected politicians such as the liberal
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts vaunt the battle against this
dimension of American history, which has been romanticised by the
Trump-supporting movement of the Alt-right. Warren (quoted in Reilly
2017) champions a “vision to make sure that we fight harder, we fight
tougher, and we fight more passionately than ever”.
The two political scenes described might be said to underline a conven-
tional polarity in the United States’ perception of itself in the world, signi-
fying a country divided between parochial Republican reaction and
internationalist Democratic progressivism. Indeed, their hyperpartisanship
might be seen as contrary to the earlier writing of International Relations
1 SHIFTING KALEIDOSCOPES: THE PRESENCE OF DIPLOMATIC… 3
theorist Walter Russell Mead and his more multifaceted understandings of

US political dynamics.
Mead’s 2001 book Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and
How It Changed the World foregrounds foreign policy as connected to the
diverse nature of the United States’ pluralist democracy by putting for-
ward four ‘schools’ which have dominated the schema of American diplo-
macy. It cites the ‘Hamiltonian’, a school orientated around the interests
of the business class which takes its name from the 1790s Secretary of the
Treasury Alexander Hamilton; the idealism of the ‘Wilsonian’, a philoso-
phy of spreading democracy descended from a “missionary” tradition in
the nineteenth century (Mead 2001, 151) and honed in World War One
by President Woodrow Wilson; the ‘Jeffersonian’, a principled disinterest
in global affairs based on the statecraft of the author of the Declaration of
Independence, founding father and president, Thomas Jefferson; finally,
the ‘Jacksonian’, a realism named after the populist antebellum president
Andrew Jackson that caters to the nationalist sensibilities of America’s
heartlands.1
Foreign policy matched the “representative nature of American soci-
ety”, forging an equivalence “between the political strength of the given
schools and their weight in the nation” (ibid., 95). In an interview with
The Economist, Mead (quoted in The Economist editorial 2010) specified
that “some of our greatest presidents—FDR for example—were able to
move freely within all four of the foreign policy schools”, illuminating the
reductive tendencies behind hyperpartisan understandings of US diplo-
macy. In contrast to a rival nineteenth-century tradition of European
“continental realism”, American foreign policy has historically been “more
like a kaleidoscope, whose images, patterns, and colors alter rapidly and
apparently at random” (Mead 2001, 36).
The first premise of American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy: The
Fragmented Kaleidoscope is that examples of American film from the 1990s
to the 2010s convey similarly contradictory foreign policy dynamics,
encompassing genres as various as the Western, war film and science fic-
tion blockbuster. Analyses give primacy to the role of International
Relations theories in Hollywood film, from the relevance of Bacevich’s
‘new American militarism’ for a cycle of post-9/11 action pictures to the
resonance of Niebuhr’s warnings against idealism in the Revisionist
Western No Country for Old Men (2007). By utilising this interdisciplinary
methodology, American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy demonstrates
that US film presents treatments of foreign policy analogous to the
4 T. J. COBB
concepts of Mead, illustrating sites of both political intersection and ideo-

logical friction.
The second premise of this book is that incidences of popular political
allegory have encapsulated the spirit of Mead’s theories by spearheading
variegated approaches to ideology, juxtaposing clashes and arbitrating
compromises between different philosophies and beliefs. From the eclectic
war satire of Three Kings (1999) to the outrageous puppet comedy of
Team America: World Police (2004), American filmmakers have evinced
bold and unconventional ways of illuminating interplay of International
Relations concepts. As will be evidenced in this book’s third and fourth
chapters, discussion surrounding realism and idealism is very much pres-
ent in the former film while rivalries between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power are
abundant in the latter.
The altering and fluid paradigms of this allegorical symbolism, testified
in recent blockbusters like Black Panther (2018), indicate the mercurial
role Mead’s shifting kaleidoscope plays in American cinema, with musings
on foreign policy finding new forms of expression. Beginning with the
centrism of the Clinton era before moving to the changed political climate
of the post-9/11 years and the sense of malaise fostered by the Great
Recession, American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy traces how film-
makers have regularly recalibrated modes of political commentary in order
to allegorise corresponding ‘collisions’ within International Relations.
Examining and deconstructing Hollywood’s ‘liberalist’ reputation reveals
this level of nuance, a quality I elicit in the next section.
The Common Fallacy of Hyperpartisanship:

Dispelling the Ubiquity of Hollywood’s
‘liberal’ Animus
A broad spectrum of political opinion has frequently emphasised the liber-
alist outlook as central to modern Hollywood filmmaking, attributing a
spirit of progressive dissent to America’s most culturally potent industry.
A clear foundation for this understanding is provided by the right-wing
film critic Michael Medved. His 1993 book Hollywood VS. America:
Popular Culture And The War On Traditional Values casts doubt on
Hollywood’s ability to reflect the ideological victories of the Reagan and
George H.W. Bush years, excoriating a countercultural infiltration of the
film industry that had become inherent from the late 1960s and
manifesting in work “separate from the domestic mainstream” (Medved

1993, 235).
Medved’s analysis encompasses moody biographical dramas like Oliver
Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Spike Lee’s Malcolm X
(1992), films which exceed in influence comparative to patriotic block-
busters like Top Gun (1986) and Die Hard (1988). Prevailing shibboleths
of modern American filmmaking are said to include “antipathy to the mili-
tary” and “association of capitalists with criminality” (ibid., 219–221). Yet
Medved, in an effort to avert accusations of indiscriminate extrapolation,
emphasises positive exceptions in “Hollywood’s Golden Age in the 1930s
and ‘40s” such as Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and the 1933
George Cukor picture Dinner at Eight, which, in a stark aversion to the
leftist bent inherent in modern productions, portrayed businessmen “in a
highly sympathetic light” (ibid., 221).
The centrist political scientist Joseph Nye Jr., who originated the the-
ory of ‘soft power’ in 2004, contrastingly highlights that liberalism in
Hollywood films has functioned as a disseminator for democratic values,
rarely framed in partisan hues. He also judges it as essential in currying
favourability of America abroad, an appeal achieved through illustrations
of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance. Rather than bemoaning the absence
of a patriotic identity like Medved, Nye (2004, 17) praises the internation-
alist role of American cinema, tangible in productions which purvey a
“harsh portrait of American institutions”. Nye uses the cynical courtroom
drama 12 Angry Men (1957) as a case study which signifies the potency of
a “liberal society”, where “government cannot and should not control the
culture” (ibid.). The acquiescence of the Czech Communist government
to the film, which was ostensibly allowed distribution because of anti-
American content, backfired, fostering emulation amongst Czech dissi-
dents of the United States’ vibrant democracy. Nye quotes the Czech
director Milos Forman (quoted in Nye Jr. 2004, 17), who observed “if
that country can make this kind of thing, films about itself … that country
must have a pride and must have an inner strength, and must be strong
enough and must be free”.
Nye admits how (2004, 15) Hollywood filmmakers can contravene
these internationalist appeals in “movies that show scantily clad women
with libertine attitudes or fundamentalist Christian groups that castigate
Islam as an evil religion”. Yet American pictures are also capable of pro-
moting qualities “that are open, mobile, individualistic, anti-establishment,
pluralistic, voluntaristic, populist, and free” (ibid., 47). Ultimately, films
6 T. J. COBB
with these maxims could signal the virtues and vices of American society,
an openness which deflected stigmatisations of cultural propaganda or
brazen radicalism.
Examples of allegory in iconographic genres, such as the Western, sug-
gest that Hollywood filmmakers have garnered recognition by scholars for
spreading distinct critiques of America’s institutions and political maladies
with oblique methods, a sensibility which can transcend production con-
text and the exigencies of catering to certain audience demographics.
George Stevens’s Giant (1956), a Classical Hollywood Western which
delineates the arc of a wealthy Texan family over the twentieth century,
exemplifies this richness of subtext. On the surface, Giant is an epic por-
trayal of the American West, suffused with dramatic conventions of
romance and generational conflict. The film’s protagonist of Texan patri-
arch, Jordan Benedict, is forced to overcome a petty rivalry with local
nouveau riche oil baron and former employee, Jett Rink, all the while fac-
ing problems and tragedies confronting his immediate family.
Giant’s greater resonance, however, is in its allusions to a Texas plagued
by contests between the expansionist dispositions of a historic white settle-
ment and a newer, progressive standpoint. The former shibboleth is
expounded upon in a brief scene where Benedict’s East Coast wife, Leslie
Lynton, refers to the nineteenth-century annexation of Texas as a theft
while the latter outlook recurs in subplots involving the state’s non-white
citizens. Implicitly countering the Jim Crow racism prevalent in both the
diegesis of Texas and the contemporaneous 1950s of Giant’s release,
Stevens draws attention to Lynton’s efforts to educate impoverished
Mexican children and an interracial relationship forged between a Latino
woman and Benedict’s son, Jordy. Monique James Baxter (2005, 161)
notes Giant’s significance in being “the first major motion picture to
explore the effects of Jim Crow legislation on Mexicans in Texas”. Its
subtle political encoding, and a dramatic epilogue in which Benedict’s
interracial family are rejected from a diner, signals its “studies of miscege-
nation, paternalism and racism” (ibid., 171).
A different Western perhaps attests to the power of coded divides
between a reactionary realism and a benevolent, anti-establishment ideal-
ism in regard to production context and cultural milieu. Produced under
the freewheeling artistic ethos wrought by the “New Hollywood” studio
system of the late 1960s, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) pur-
veys a sensibility tonally oppositional to the grandeur of Giant’s Manifest
Destiny themes. George Roy Hill’s picture presents a comparatively
bathetic portrait of two roguish bank robbers who eventually perish in

Bolivia, an off-kilter journey heightened by a somewhat incongruous Burt
Bacharach soundtrack. The late 1960 thaw in Hollywood filmmaking,
begotten by the scrapping of the socially conservative 1930 Hayes Code,
pervades a more radical subtext than the offbeat rhythm suggests. In being
a product of an environment cited by Geoff King (2002, 41) as widening
“the bounds of possible expression” and celebrating “moral ambiguity
and complexity”, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid quietly comports
several anti-Vietnam and anti-corporate allusions within its narrative, indi-
cating an anti-establishment spirit.
The iconoclasm of the Revisionist Western, a sub-genre which emerged
in Lyndon Johnson’s second term and offered “critical reflections on the
Western’s status and relationship to contemporary culture” (Nelson 2015,
67), infuses this animus. Michael Coyne (1997, 148) interprets the popu-
lism of Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s robberies as symbolic of a revolt
against the “increasing corporatism of American society”. In foreign pol-
icy terms, the gaucheness of their deaths in Bolivia cemented an anti-
imperialist critique of Vietnam’s dubious foundations, encapsulating
“adventurism in an alien culture Americans were ill-equipped to compre-
hend” (ibid., 148). In the duo’s invocation of the anti-war/anti-
establishment attitudes of the New Left and the sacrifice of American
troops in Vietnam, they “formed innocents abroad, non-conformists,
dropouts and casualties of military violence” (ibid., 148).
Yet despite these notable case studies, Nye’s idea of a Hollywood which
serves to underline American democratic openness discords with inci-
dences of multifaceted political dynamics in films. Tony Shaw’s Hollywood’s
Cold War (2009), which delineates the proximity between the ideological
goals of American governments and popular Hollywood film, captures this
diffuseness. Foreshadowing a scope which encompasses deceptively frivo-
lous comedies with Cold War subject matter like Ninotchka (1939) and
the overtly jingoistic blockbuster, Red Dawn (1984), the introduction to
Hollywood’s Cold War observes how “certain films sought bluntly to instill
hatred of the enemy among the American people, while others tried in a
more measured fashion to persuade Third World audiences of the virtues
of Western-style democracy” (Shaw 2009, 5).
It is a plausible argument that several landmark Hollywood films mani-
fest both these qualities of the Jacksonian and Wilsonian, revealing pat-
terns which exclude simple interplays of racial and social liberalism with
internationalism. D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), a
8 T. J. COBB
production which both elicited the contradictory progressivism of

Woodrow Wilson and sparked a revival of the Klu Klux Klan, relates to a
context illustrative of this ‘kaleidoscopic’ nature.
Wilson is a president widely recognised as the progenitor of an American
idealism in foreign policy. His outline of a democratic future for a post-war
Europe in 1917 seemingly aimed to harness what Peter Wilson (2011,
332) defines as “an optimistic doctrine which seeks to transcend the inter-
national anarchy” in order to “create a more cosmopolitan and harmoni-
ous world order”. Nonetheless, the idealist Wilson found affinity with the
overtly white supremacist vision of The Birth of a Nation. Barely over two
years before the president promised to “make the world safe for democ-
racy” on the cusp of America’s entry into the First World War, he became
enthralled by a revisionist history which rhapsodised his own country’s
democracy at its most iniquitous. The narrative of The Birth of a Nation,
which revolves around the relationship between a Northern and Southern
family initially riven but eventually reconciled by the tumult of the Civil
War and reconstruction, galvanised the Virginia-born Wilson. A possible
reason for this galvanisation was its provoking of the ‘Jacksonian’ aspects
of his persona, a nativism unveiled in Wilson’s book A History of the
American People (1902). Griffith’s film borrows admiringly from this tell-
ing political text, using Wilson’s language of vituperation against the “ver-
itable overthrow of civilization in the South” and his stress on the need for
“the Klu Klux Klan to redeem the South” (Ambrosius 2007, 690). Lloyd
E. Ambrosius considers this mythology in light of Wilson’s own legacy as
a diplomatic idealist, an admixture that created a “nexus between liberal-
ism and racism” (ibid., 689).
This blend was licensed by Wilson’s own enthusiastic response to the
screen dramatisation of his writing and the ‘collisions’ of his subsequent
policy agenda. Mark E. Benbow corroborates Wilson’s (quoted in Benbow
2010, 509) reaction to The Birth of a Nation’s parodies of black enfran-
chisement during the 1870s and its explicit glorification of white national-
ism, authenticating a remark by the president that the cinematic rendition
of his earlier writing was “like writing history with lightning” and “terribly
true”. Against the fallout of the First World War and the arbitration of the
Treaty of Versailles, the president pursued a combination of policies which
expressed discord between this deep-seated emphasis on racial hierarchy
and his lofty idealism. Peter Wilson (2011, 332) describes a “campaign to
put national self-determination at the heart of the 1919 peace settlement”,
bound “by a common morality with its bedrock in basic human rights”.
President Wilson exposed the selectiveness of this liberal internationalism,

however, when he nullified independence requests from the colonial satrap
of Vietnam, attesting to an idealism which sought democracy for white
Europeans only.2
Despite the salience of this example, one does not need to solely exam-
ine connections between Hollywood films and the contradictions of politi-
cal icons like Wilson to understand that veins of ideological dissonance
have featured as a significant staple of American cinema. Even without
reference to their surrounding political milieus, Hollywood productions
have frequently displayed fissures analogous to those revealed by The Birth
of a Nation’s distribution. The author of the seminal cultural history
Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America
(1992), Richard Slotkin, explicates these tropes. His research on the ‘com-
bat’ and ‘platoon’ films released over the course of the Second World War
arguably demonstrates a variation on the nexus of liberalism and racism so
marked in Wilson.
Slotkin cites the complex dynamics of Bataan (1943), a war picture set
on the titular province of the Philippines where US prisoners were forced
on to a death march by the Japanese imperial army in 1943. The ethnic
difference of the platoon showcased in Bataan, which encompasses both
white and African American troops, meaningfully coincides with contem-
poraneous political developments at home and abroad. Slotkin (1992,
320) connects the integrationist ethos with the “emergence of a new
African-American political movement which took a more militant stance
on civil rights” and the “fundamental contradiction between racialism and
the values of democracy” brought to light by the Axis powers.
He further writes of other discrepancies which speak to a concurrent
relationship between America’s progress on civil rights and scorched earth
militarism abroad. Bataan claims a “moral victory for a melting pot
America” and an “idealized America” (ibid., 326). But the evils of Japan’s
imperial army, who prove a “moral and ideological problem” and neces-
sitate an America where “democracy is virile, not effete” (ibid., 326), jux-
tapose this solidarity with something more akin to Mead’s idea of the
Jacksonian, the hard-nosed realist school in Special Providence’s schema of
foreign policy philosophies.
Bataan both incorporates the provocative symbolism of ‘Yankee
Salazar’, a Filipino scout who is lynched by the Japanese in an interpreta-
ble allegory of the American South’s Jim Crow laws, together with a pas-
sionate endorsement of total war against the Axis Powers. This latter
10 T. J. COBB
perspective is conspicuous in the implied martyrdom of Bataan’s climax,

where Sergeant Bill Dane digs his own marked grave and engages Japanese
troops in a battle to the death. Subsequent to a final shot of Dane firing
and laughing directly at the camera, an onscreen coda eulogises “the
heroes of Bataan”, whose “sacrifice made possible our victories in the
Coral and Bismarck Seas”.
Perhaps Bataan’s greatest novelty for the war genre, not to mention
the spectre of political contradiction in American film, is in how it purveys
this message alongside a subtle critique of US domestic bigotry. The som-
bre undercutting of the Jim Crow South implicit in Salazar’s death and the
progressive normalisation of black military integration fuses with a
Jacksonian message of patriotism, offering a civic nationalist rendition of
Mead’s school which signifies the collective unity fostered by “honor, con-
cern for reputation, and faith in military institutions” (Mead 2001,
244–245). Slotkin’s 2001 article ‘Ethnic Platoons and the Myths of
American Nationality’ stresses the reciprocity between a multiracial
America and conservative values of Jacksonian nationalism in the war
genre. He detects a synthesis tangible in platoon films as individually dis-
tinctive as “Bataan (1943), A Walk in the Sun (1946), Fixed Bayonets
(1951), All the Young Men (1960), The Dirty Dozen (1965), Platoon
(1986) and Saving Private Ryan (1998)” (Slotkin 2001, 469). Summating
the motifs of these pictures, Slotkin notes how the “melting pot” invokes
“the idealized self-image of a multiethnic, multiracial democracy, hospi-
table to difference but united by a common sense of national belonging”
(ibid., 469).
Slotkin’s list of platoon films, which sets the allusive war commentary
of The Dirty Dozen and the bitter Vietnam drama Platoon alongside the
reverential ‘man on a mission’ narrative of Saving Private Ryan, conveys
that cognitively dissonant blends of interracial cooperation and Jacksonian
realism have manifested in ways far from uniformly propagandistic. The
ambivalence of allegory has been especially indicative in this regard, ren-
dering political contradiction in a provocative and compellingly elliptical
fashion. Problematic and unwieldy dichotomies have been connoted by
allegorical pictures where partisan leanings and open standpoints are hard
to identify, leading to narratives conditioned by ideological incoherence
rather than reconciliation. A cycle of films which emerged from the
‘Mexico Western’ phenomenon of the late 1960s, a subcategory of
Revisionist Western also explored thoroughly by Slotkin, display this
ambiguity. In drawing on the chaos resultant from US involvement in
Vietnam and the multi-ethnic fraternity foregrounded by the platoon film,

Mexico Westerns such as Major Dundee (1965) and The Wild Bunch
(1969) purveyed a “disillusioned” mood, translating “the political and
ideological paradoxes of the Vietnam War into mythic terms” (Slotkin
1992, 561).
Major Dundee follows the misadventures of a Union Calvary officer
lured into Mexico by a rogue Apache leader, a revenge mission narrative
which engenders alternations between the demands of savage war and the
compulsions of Wilsonian idealism. Despite being set during the late
stages of the American Civil War in 1864, director Sam Peckinpah renders
this literal context peripheral through employment of several Vietnam
alluding motifs. Dundee, who is initially stationed as the head of a POW
camp for a tactical error at the Battle of Gettysburg, assembles an army
redolent of the 1960s culture wars to hunt down the Apache leader
Charriba. His cavalry is composed of white Confederate prisoners and
manumitted African American slaves, an incongruity evocative of the
nativist Alabama governor George Wallace and the dissent borne from the
disproportionate conscription of African Americans in the US army.
The most salient ‘collisions’ of Major Dundee’s storyline, however,
come to light when the titular protagonist supports Mexico’s citizenry
against the colonialist designs of the French empire. This context refer-
ences a real life historical backdrop marginal to the American Civil War,
where French Emperor Napoleon III aided the proxy Mexican monarch
Emperor Maximilian I in exchange for imperial influence. Yet this period
milieu is less central than the interpretable allegory behind Dundee’s deci-
sion to raid a village populated by rebels who recognise the exiled presi-
dent Benito Juarez as Mexico’s true leader, underlining imagery symbolic
of America’s conflicted role as modern hegemon. Dundee’s sympathy for
the rebels, further, elicits parallels with the United States’ attempts at cur-
rying favour with nationalist movements over the course of the Cold War.
Shortly following the platoon’s arrival in the village, Dundee’s men
cancel their raid and instead opt to share their dwindling rations with the
Juarists in a fashion suggesting American benevolence in the third world.
Trooper Tim Ryan, who sporadically narrates in voiceover, remarks, “We
entered the village to take away their horses. … But instead gave away our
own. … And they were never more thankful.” The welfarist outlook cel-
ebrated here resonates with the foreign policy historian Walter McDougall’s
notion of “Global Meliorism”. To McDougall (1997, 173), the Kennedy
and Johnson administrations viewed the impoverished theatre of Southeast
12 T. J. COBB
Asia as a liberal opportunity to “feed the hungry and promote democracy

abroad”. The progressive agenda of the latter leader had its corollary in a
statecraft which aimed to leave Vietnam with “schools and hospitals and
dams” and “the international version of our domestic Great Society pro-
grams”, ambitions nullified by the military violence of “pacified villages
and body counts” (ibid., 190).
The instability of this combination, which recalls the aforementioned
synthesis of the Wilsonian and Jacksonian schools, pervades several devel-
opments in Dundee’s odyssey through Mexico. Dundee’s welfarist
approach to the Mexican rebels clashes with his identity as American sol-
dier and chief obligation to kill Charriba, a tension heightened through
his relationship with an Austrian widow formerly married to a Juarist doc-
tor. Shortly after Dundee meets the widowed Teresa Santiago at a fiesta
commemorating the American aid, former West Point rival and Confederate
POW Benjamin Tyreen reminds Dundee of the discrepancy between his
flirtation with liberal internationalism and the violence necessitated by his
mission. Referencing earlier dialogue which mocked Dundee as a “tyrant”
and “jailer”, Tyreen interposes the euphoria of the Mexican village’s
emancipation with the judgement that Dundee lacks the “temperament to
be a liberator”.
This wrestling with the Wilsonian/Jacksonian dichotomy, encapsulated
in mise en scene which shifts from the asceticism of Dundee’s POW camp
to the comparative Jeffersonian utopia of the Mexican village, speaks to a
dilemma of American self-image replicated in the Vietnam conflict. In a
false apotheosis foregrounded in the Austrian Teresa, Dundee’s dalliance
with the Mexican cause attempts to promote nation-building at its most
ideal through aiding a group of villagers who happen to praise American
hegemonic might. These mores, however, do not apply to the Apache,
who instead meet the hypocrisy of savage war.
The dysphoric conclusion of Major Dundee evidences the failure of this
flawed triangulation. Although Dundee’s cavalry eventually succeeds in
executing Charriba, French forces repel his army from Mexico, eliciting a
configuration where the principles of Wilsonian self-determination and
American empire are denied co-existence. If the prospect of defeat by
French troops nullifies Dundee’s efforts at disseminating Global Meliorist
tenets to Mexico, the siren song of a captured American flag exhibits the
humiliation of the tough-minded Jacksonianism which incurred his puni-
tive expedition. Moved and appalled by the sight of an American flag pos-
sessed by France’s army, Tyreen forgoes his Confederate allegiances by
wresting this patriotic symbol from the enemy, only to be shot in the
stomach and forced to distract French troops in a final gesture of martyr-
dom. Fittingly, Dundee’s return to an America grieving the assassinated
Lincoln renders his revenge mission and support for Mexican indepen-
dence bathetic, an anti-climax connotative of Vietnam’s political
incoherence.
Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), a narrative deemed in a 1999 arti-
cle by the Film Studies theorist David Cook (quoted in Matheson 2013,
225) as expressive of the “issues of violence in American society and
American foreign policy”, fragments Mead’s kaleidoscope further. Like
Major Dundee, the first scenes of Peckinpah’s iconic Mexico Western elu-
cidate the spectre of a culture war. Peckinpah opens his picture in the
vanishing desert spaces of 1911, introducing a landscape which bears the
homogenising imprimatur of industrialisation and the forces of moral and
cultural reaction. He additionally couples this subtext with coded refer-
ences to an indiscriminate violence relevant to The Wild Bunch’s 1969
release year. One of gang leader Pike Bishop’s first sights upon his arrival
in a small Texas frontier town is of a group of children enthralled by a
battle between a scorpion and ant nest, a grotesque spectacle depicted in
unflinching close-up shots. The fight between the ants and scorpion,
which is later capped with a shot of the ant nest being immolated, invokes
an aura of desensitisation deriving from American violence at home and
abroad. The atmosphere of division resulting from this desensitised aura
manifests in Bishop’s robbery of a railroad office.
Bishop’s robbery occurs against the backdrop of a temperance parade,
a mise en scene which sees lawlessness quintessential of the late 1960s
refracted by a conservative backlash synergetic with Middle America and
Nixon’s silent majority. This battle between agitation and authority mate-
rialises cathartically in a subsequent shootout, where the deaths of numer-
ous civilians and various members of Bishop’s own gang invite allegorical
interpretation. Slotkin (1992, 598), who applies the resonance of the
shootout on a holistic basis to US foreign and domestic policy, judges the
carnage as emblematic of “the urban battles of Tet, and of Detroit and
Newark”.
The relevance of ‘Tet’, or more broadly the backdrop of Vietnam,
increases throughout Peckinpah’s film at the expense of its domestic alle-
gory. Its narrative employment of Mexico returns to and heightens the
collisions of foreign policy introduced by Major Dundee, playing on imag-
ery symbolic of America’s diplomatic schizophrenia. This is above all
14 T. J. COBB
foregrounded in the bunch’s perceived affinity with the peasant family of

Mexican gang member Angel. Bishop and his men come to sympathise
with Angel’s family and their village’s plight at the hands of vicious
Mexican general Mapache. Yet Angel’s jealous killing of Mapache’s girl-
friend Teresa, a woman formerly romantically involved with him, pre-
cludes deliverance from this tyranny. This murder confines Bishop to a
political triangulation analogous with Dundee’s alternating military goals.
His gang is compelled to steal American armaments for Mapache as com-
pensation for the murder of Teresa, a Faustian pact which torments and
depresses Angel. In an exchange of dialogue which follows a series of
hedonistic rituals at Mapache’s palace, Bishop contemplates using the
money gained from the robberies as compensation for Mexico’s benighted
peasants, a compromise solution which bears resemblance to America’s
political contortions in Vietnam. Angel, who wholly rejects the idea,
invokes the Viet Cong’s repudiation of what Slotkin conceives as “a clas-
sically liberal solution, akin to the peace process offered by Lyndon
Johnson in his Johns Hopkins address of April 1965, in which the North
Vietnamese and VC were to give over their revolution in exchange for a
massive program of American economic aid” (ibid., 602).
Johnson’s flawed synthesis of Global Meliorist methodology alongside
Jacksonian militarism has been interpreted in The Wild Bunch’s climax,
which, as in its opening sequence, deconstructs the caprice of American
political life through a mass shootout. Peckinpah prefaces the allegorical
power of this shootout with a plot development which emphasises the
unwieldy synthesis of realism and idealism prevalent from the early stages
of the Vietnam conflict, a cognitive dissonance which specifically applies to
the United States’ collusion with South Vietnam’s pro-American dictator-
ship. After the completion of the weapons theft, Bishop and his men
return to find Angel tortured and humiliated by Mapache as punishment
for securing ammunition for his townspeople. A rapid succession of events
associable with American diplomacy in Southeast Asia emerges when
Angel has his throat cut by Mapache. In a perceivable allusion to the
American-sponsored assassination of President Diem in 1963, the South
Vietnamese dictator long supported by the Kennedy and Eisenhower
administrations, Bishop shoots Mapache to avenge Angel and atone for
the de facto dictator’s abuses.
The fin de regime connotations of Mapache’s death are not celebrated
by the impoverished peasantry so familiar to Angel, reflecting a Viet Cong
political sensibility which treasured sovereignty over Global Meliorism.
This repudiation of a paternalistic internationalism manifests in the vil-

lage’s acquiescence with the deaths of almost all of Bishop’s gang, a trag-
edy allegoric of the false American belief that reform could coexist with
militarism. Slotkin writes on the myopic thinking and naiveté implicit in
the bunch’s wipeout, an encapsulation of “the failure to understand the
power and complexity of the political culture in the South no less than in
the North” (ibid., 610). There is also a broader emphasis on a schizo-
phrenic unity of Jacksonian violence and reformist Wilsonianism, ill-
conceived and ill-applied by American policymakers abroad.
The films in American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy could be said
to variously reinforce, observe and scrutinise the complex patterns of
diplomacy cited in these case studies from the Classical and New Hollywood
eras, alternately synchronising and disassembling relationships between
Mead’s schools. Much of this configuration of foreign policy, I argue, is
dependent on the period of release.
The second chapter of this book, for example, assesses satirical and
action-orientated films from the Clinton years, an epoch underpinned by
a presidential administration which vaunted the fruits of American globali-
sation and political moderation. Films explored in this chapter tend to
adhere to this outlook, finding attractive fashions of reconciliation and
rapprochement. A decade later, select pictures encompass comparatively
schismatic renditions of American statecraft, allegorising the imperial
overstretch incurred as a result of American military expenditure in Iraq
and Afghanistan. Chapter 5 evaluates this contrasting mise en scene by
using two Revisionist Westerns to gauge implications of ‘collapsing scen-
ery’ surrounding the George W. Bush administration.
Much of these analyses are undergirded with contextualisation on cor-
responding developments within Hollywood’s production context, touch-
ing on the accords and fallouts which occurred between studio heads and
the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. In this regard, American
Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy functions as a chronicle of the cultural
and industrial changes that political tumult has wrought on American
filmmakers over the past twenty-five years.
It is the interrogation of an amassing trend of political allegory, how-
ever, which forms the central part of my examination of this recent history.
Spanning from the explicitness of gritty war pictures to the nebulous cod-
ing of independent productions, American Cinema and Cultural
Diplomacy posits that the increasing presence of allegory has anchored a
cinematic discourse adjusting to and broaching critique of American
16 T. J. COBB
foreign policy contradiction. The impact of the 9/11 attacks and subse-
quent War on Terror has commonly been attributed as a source of this
acceleration of allegory, a shift explicated by a plethora of Film Studies
academics.
To Frances Pheasant-Kelly (2013, 2–3), the hauntingly, seemingly ahis-
torical memory of the pre-9/11 world encouraged alternatively “oblique
meditations of 9/11”, with gradual commentary on “environmental
catastrophes, and economic recession becoming discernible across a range
of genres”. Pheasant-Kelly substantiates this claim through detailed analy-
sis of fantasy and comic book franchises such as The Lord of the Rings tril-
ogy (2001–2003) and Christopher Nolan’s cycle of Batman ‘reboots’,
films which could be termed “dark and nihilistic and invariably espouse a
subtext of death” (ibid., 7.) In a fashion similar to how “the noir films of
the 1940s and 1950s emerged from the political instabilities of the Second
World War and the Cold War”, “the darkness of post-9/11 cinema …
encapsulates the contemporary zeitgeist” (ibid., 7).
Terence McSweeney exemplifies this expansive reading of post-9/11
allegory’s potential by comparing symbolic pictures from the 2000s with
more literal-minded apprehensions of the War on Terror. Listing genre
archetypes which range from the ‘torture porn’ horror of Hostel (2005) to
historical drama in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005), he stresses
allegory’s ability to “function as a site of sustained and interrogative dis-
course on the era” and underline “vivid encapsulations of the prevailing
ideological debates of the decade” (McSweeney 2014, 20–21). The
achievements of allegorical filmmaking surpassed reverential dramatisa-
tions of recent history such as Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006)
and the Jonathan Franzen adaptation Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
(2011). These films’ sole focus on the immediate drama of the September
11 attacks eliminated the imagination borne by political allusion through
their attempt to “reify 9/11 as an almost ahistorical moment”, “providing
an elaborate erasure of political and historical context” (ibid., 20–21).
Douglas Kellner, like McSweeney, expresses approval of the possibilities
of allegorical cinema, but he differs in viewing the encoding of political
disquisition as a comprehensive phenomenon, capable of transcending
confines of explicit narrative and subject matter. In Cinema Wars:
Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era, Kellner (2010, 27)
interprets a “transcoding” of “the political discourses of the era” across a
range of genres, including conservative films that echoed “Bush and
Cheney discourses on foreign policy and militarism”, liberal productions
that were “critical of Bush-Cheney foreign policy”, and pictures that were
noticeably unpartisan. Kellner views the third type as typified by more
symbolic fare such as the Revisionist Western and literary adaptation No
Country for Old Men (explored in Chap. 5), which formed an example of
a picture “multilayered, and open to multiple readings” (ibid., 27).
It is in this space, one implicitly of ambivalence, where meaning and
political debate proves most rife. Yet this novel category ranks lower in
importance than Kellner’s emphasis on an American cinema where con-
temporaneous partisan rivalries are reified, updating his and Michael
Ryan’s 1988 work Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of
Contemporary Hollywood Film. In that collaboration, the authors posit
that films of the Reagan era as different as E.T. (1982) and Salvador
(1986) act as “cultural forces at work in contradiction to the hegemonic
conservative bloc” (Kellner and Ryan 1988, 12). Likewise, the overall
picture painted by Kellner in Cinema Wars is one of a Hollywood environ-
ment consisting of a constructive hyperpartisanship. He describes a “con-
tested terrain that reproduces existing social struggles” (Kellner 2010, 2).
He also praises 2000s Hollywood cinema as “comparable to the so-called
Hollywood Renaissance of the late 1960s and 1970s” (the New Hollywood
period), owing to the “surprisingly many critical films that engage with
the issues of the day” (ibid., 2).
Other scholars of cinematic allegory during the post-9/11 era, how-
ever, have been sceptical about its ideological intentions and the healthy
combativeness Kellner purports as part of its cultural content. David
Holloway posits that mainstream American films which address the War
on Terror subordinate politics to the primacy of spectacle, resulting in a
shallowness which merely rationalises American intervention abroad.
Evaluating pictures as individually distinctive as Jonathan Demme’s
remake of The Manchurian Candidate (2004) and Steven Spielberg’s War
of the Worlds (2005), he cites the prevalence of “an allegory lite”, where
“controversial issues can be safely addressed because they can be ‘read off’
stories by the viewer … the other attractions on offer are sufficiently com-
pelling or diverse, that the viewer can enjoy the film without needing to
engage at all” (Holloway 2008, 90). The allegorical quality therefore
becomes nullified by the requisite spectacle provided by Hollywood film-
makers, neutralising dissent in favour of a marketable centrism.
Guy Westwell also perceives this centrism, but instead views it as inte-
gral to all forms of mainstream Hollywood engagement, irrespective of
spectacle. Popular American film, whether allegorical or literal, seeks
18 T. J. COBB
“hegemonic reconciliation between politically irreconcilable positions”

(Westwell 2014, 94). A picture such as Extremely Loud and Incredibly
Close, where the traumatised state of post-9/11 New York is juxtaposed
with an American grandfather’s painful memories of bombing Dresden,
builds on “folklore that allows 9/11 to be phrased in a redemptive way”,
showing how the “allegorical dimension may license an aggressive and
expansive foreign policy” (ibid., 95).
The Competing Schools of Methodology

Regarding Allegory
What typifies my approach to allegory? Do Hollywood films which serve
this function portray and encode partisanships which engender helpful
political catharsis, as Pheasant-Kelly, McSweeney and Kellner hypothesise?
Or are they, as Holloway and Westwell imply, just pragmatic brokers of
political disputation, hollow fig leaves of soft power which shield militarist
neoconservative agendas? There are merits and shortcomings to both
these schools of thought. The former model deftly considers the amor-
phous dimension of allegory, gauging its presence in a variety of genres
and popular cinema franchises. I fundamentally agree with Kellner’s
understanding that allegorical meaning lies beyond the ambit of science
fiction and fantasy films, becoming something of indeterminate character.
Yet Pheasant-Kelly, McSweeney and Kellner dwell less on the possibility
that allegory can ratify, as well as critique, dominant hegemonic ideas sur-
rounding American statecraft, largely focusing on films which perform as
‘counter-narratives’. Holloway and Westwell’s arguments, on the other
hand, while perceptive, foreclose the chance that any form of allegory can
serve a subversive role, painting as centrist swathes of American cinema
that can be seen by others to deliver critique.
The position of American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy is that the
allegorical phenomenon is variable in its political purpose, sometimes
favouring Westwell’s label of “hegemonic reconciliation”, on other occa-
sions championing images more critical. The dramatic shift from the pro-
American war films released in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to the
hard-bitten political tastes of a cycle of late 2000s blockbuster and inde-
pendent films reveals a diverse cinematic landscape. Behind Enemy Lines
and Black Hawk Down (both 2001), which are the subject of analysis in
the latter half of Chap. 3, illustrate a different outlook to late Bush and
early Obama era allegorical pictures that include There Will be Blood
(2007), The Dark Knight (2008) and Avatar (2009).
Invoking a key case study exposes the limits of the hyperpartisan frame-
work for deciphering coded political meaning. Three Kings, a film which
explores the fallout from the end of the First Gulf War, displays political
inflections which go beyond a mere critique of George H.W. Bush’s for-
eign policy. The early scenes of David O. Russell’s film evidence a social
liberalism and scrutiny of American hegemonic might redolent of the
countercultural comedy M*A*S*H* (1970), showcased in vulgar, satirical
vignettes where US troops celebrate the end of a war fought for stability
over human rights. Withstanding this commentary, Three Kings’s second
act presents problems more ‘Clintonian’ in manifestation, depicting an
intervention by four US troops which possesses synergy with the liberal
interventions of the late 1990s. Tropes of American-led globalisation fur-
ther cement the film’s relevance for both Bush’s Realpolitik and the
Clinton era’s Pax Americana, providing a comprehensive glance at prob-
lems concomitant with realism, idealism and the neoliberalism rationalised
in the wake of America’s post-Cold War windfall.
A methodological approach orientated around alternating dichoto-
mies, pioneered by Film Studies scholars who detect political meaning in
Hollywood films, influences and inflects the analyses in this book. Ian
Scott (2011, 20–21) interprets Hollywood political films as likelier to con-
sider “the key ideological tensions at the heart of the republic” alongside
endorsements of “liberalism and democracy”. This dichotomous vision is
encompassed within the work of the Film Studies academic Michael
Coyne, who uses juxtapositions originally fashioned by the historian
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to frame his research field. Conditioned by a series
of “paradoxes” listed by Schlesinger, American films with political content
assimilate conflicting dynamics that were “at the heart of American his-
tory, society and culture” (Coyne 2008, 12). Schlesinger’s list (quoted in
Coyne 2008, 12) is cited below:
1. Experiment versus Ideology

2. Equality versus Tolerance of Inequality
3. Order versus Violence
4. Conformity versus Diversity
5. Materialism versus Idealism
6. America as ‘Redeemer Nation’ versus America as One Nation
Among Many.
20 T. J. COBB
Coyne (2008, 9) briefly mentions the existence of these dichotomies in

films “expressly political in content without being chiefly set in the realm
of US politics”, including Casablanca (1942) and 12 Angry Men (1957).
Yet both his and Scott’s methodology is heavily diegetic in its predomi-
nant discussion of pictures containing only explicit political content and
set within the mainland United States. Scott (2011, 16) draws attention
to representations with “very direct settings, characters and/or references
to politicians, political institutions and political history”, while Coyne
(2008, 9) stipulates that films with “political subtexts” are “of only tangen-
tial pertinence” compared to the prioritisation of “film narratives chiefly
about American politics”.
Both Coyne’s employment of Schlesinger’s dichotomies and Scott’s
perception of a multifarious political landscape parallel a list of conflicting
American principles delineated by Samuel Huntingdon. Echoing Scott’s
view of a divide between America’s democratic ideals and the bathos of its
political shortcomings, Huntingdon (2014, 297) specifies a discrepancy
between “American ideals” and “American institutions”. He further high-
lights a gap between what he called the American populace’s “liberal,
democratic individualistic, and egalitarian values” and states of “national
cognitive dissonance, which they have attempted to relieve through vari-
ous combinations of moralism, cynicism, complacency and hypocrisy”
(ibid., 297). The list below eventually extends these societal divisions into
the realm of America’s foreign policy, illuminating rivalries analogous to
the postulations of Schlesinger (ibid., 311):
Self-interest versus ideals

Power versus morality
Realism versus utopianism
Pragmatism versus principle
Historical realism versus rationalist idealism
Washington versus Wilson
Much of the films in American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy mirror

Huntingdon’s blurring of the line between foreign and domestic policy,
encapsulating interplays applicable to both America’s domestic mise en
scene and the International Relations landscape. The American President
(1995), a satirical drama which opens the analysis of this book’s second
chapter, introduces a Clintonian figure attempting to square the liberal
and conservative divides of Congress through a crime bill which appeals to
both Republicans and Democrats. Later scenes bring this trope of triangu-
lation into the realm of foreign policy, exuding an oddly portentous com-
mentary on the more febrile scenarios of the Clinton presidency. This
rendering of both the foreign and domestic dimension is most symboli-
cally reflected in the Coen Brothers’ Revisionist Western No Country for
Old Men. A film I deem central in accelerating the role of allegory in
mainstream American cinema, No Country for Old Men’s nihilistic getaway
narrative is set in the West Texas of 1980, a conservative milieu which can
be read as a condemnation of the neoliberalism incarnated in Reagan’s
presidency. But numerous scenes also broach a foreign policy subtext,
namely through images of gang violence which appear proximate to the
scenes of sectarian carnage plaguing Iraq during Bush’s second term.
Conventional separations between the foreign and domestic in the politics
of American cinema are therefore hard to underline, catering to broad and
allusive interpretations.
Hollywood film has moreover portrayed Huntingdon’s gulfs within
American statecraft, connoting intra-administration rivalries and a cogni-
tive dissonance within contemporaneous US governments. Major Dundee
and The Wild Bunch serve this allegorical purpose, showcasing disconnects
between the Jacksonian sphere of America’s conduct in the Vietnam War
(principally foregrounded in figures such as United States Air Force Chief
of Staff Curtis LeMay and General William Westmoreland) and the adher-
ence to a Global Meliorist outlook (evinced in the various token gestures
of Lyndon Johnson towards the Hanoi government).
Casablanca (1942), a film released soon after America’s entry into the
Second World War, illustrates the limitations of confining the attribution
of political symbolism in motion pictures to broad, societal rivalries, rather
than intra-administration ones. The divergence between the views of film
critic Richard Corliss and film historian Richard Raskin conveys the alle-
gorical fluidity of Michael Curtiz’s classic romantic drama. Casablanca
follows the exploits of Casablanca nightclub owner and American expatri-
ate Rick Blaine, a narrative arc which signals a sense of comity with the
United States’ very recent entry into the war against fascism. Blaine’s pro-
prietorship of an upscale gambling den hides a past of gunrunning to
forces opposed to the revanchist ambitions of fascist Italy and Spain in the
1930s. The drama of Blaine’s chance meeting with former lover, Ilsa
Lund, and the eventual protection of Ilsa and Czech fugitive husband
Victor Laszlo from Vichy French forces, were viewed in a 1973 article by
22 T. J. COBB
Corliss (quoted in Raskin 1990, 157) as allegoric of America’s journey

from isolationism to internationalism:
President Roosevelt (‘casa blanca’ is Spanish for ‘white house’), a man who
gambles on the odds of going to war until circumstance and his own submerged
nobility force him to do so (read: partisan politics) and commit himself—first
by financing the Side of Right and then by fighting for it. The time of the film’s
actions (December 1941) adds credence to this view, as does the irrelevant fact
that, two months after Casablanca opened, Roosevelt (Rick) and Prime
Minister Winston Churchill (Lazlo) met for a war conference in Casablanca.
Raskin responds to this broad interpretation with research based on the

American government’s conflicted policies towards Vichy France. The set-
ting of Casablanca, which of course belonged to Vichy France’s empire,
augurs a symbolism which stresses clashes of realism/idealism occurring
within the Roosevelt administration, conveying an allegorical meaning less
heroic than Corliss’s reading of a triumph over partisan self-interest and
provincial isolationism. Raskin (1990, 153) points out that the United
States maintained relations with Vichy France until 1942, a decision of
Realpolitik testified when Roosevelt “strengthened US ties to Vichy by
elevating American representation to the full ambassadorial level”. Raskin
goes on to describe “the withholding of official recognition by the State
Department and White House” of the Free French forces, along with the
administration “denying De Gaulle’s organization the slightest moral
prestige”, factors which meant that the film’s political resonance stemmed
more from “the central role of the Vichy/Free French polarity” than the
“isolationalism/involvement interpretation” (ibid., 157).
The case studies in American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy allego-
rise similar elements of intra-administration contradiction, a friction justi-
fied by literature from International Relations theorists and historians of
diplomacy who have covered the vicissitudes of America’s post-Cold War
hegemony. Andrew Bacevich, whose analyses are invoked throughout this
book, acerbically remarks on the mercurialness of President Clinton’s for-
eign policies, typified in the 1999 military intervention in Kosovo.
Deriding the left’s anti-war stances during the Vietnam War and the muted
reaction by progressives inside and outside the Clinton administration, he
perceives how the “reflexive anti-militarism of the 1960s has given way to
a more nuanced view … progressives have come to appreciate the poten-
tial for using the armed services to advance their own agenda” (Bacevich
2005, 25). This shift in political configuration is well encapsulated by

Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke (2004, 97), who comment on Clinton’s
“migration from idealism to Realpolitik”.
Chapter 2 of this book, which explores the subtext of Clintonian trian-
gulation in mainstream Hollywood cinema, draws on this shifting kaleido-
scope of foreign policy disposition. The majority of subsequent chapters
evaluate films released during George W. Bush’s presidency, a period con-
ditioned by emphases on the virtues of preemptive war, democracy pro-
motion and American economic preponderance. The first two of these
facets were characterised in the National Security Strategy of 2002 (George
W. Bush Whitehouse archives n.d.), which promised synthetic aims to
“champion aspirations for human dignity” and “prevent our enemies from
threatening us, our allies, and our friends with weapons of mass destruc-
tion”. The concepts of theorists as distinct as the ‘end of history’ prognos-
ticator Francis Fukuyama and the foreign policy analyst Anne-Marie
Slaughter are applied to American films which premise this unwieldy
dichotomy of human rights and preemptive warfare, encompassing the
pictures No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood and The Dark Knight.
For all the cognitive dissonance of the liberal interventionist and neo-
conservative tenets which drove American foreign policy in the post-Cold
War era, the text which has so far most aligned US statecraft with
Hollywood cinema adopts an approach based largely on singularity.
Cynthia Weber’s International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction
(2013, 2) employs Hollywood case studies as illustrations of “IR myths”
and the “building blocks of IR theory”. The Science Fiction blockbuster
Independence Day (1996) is defined as a “neo-idealist tale of international
cooperation in the post-Cold War era” (ibid., 51). It is a fitting categorisa-
tion in a book which presents a cinema which reifies ideology rather than
deconstructs it—various chapters deal with material besides IR philoso-
phies, such as realism, idealism and constructivism, comprising consider-
ation of ‘gender’ and ‘environmentalism’ as integral cinematic subtexts. It
is the normalisation of IR theory and myths, however, which forms the
crux of Weber’s thematic engagement. Weber posits that examples of
Hollywood cinema make IR theories and myths “appear to be true” (ibid.,
2). Cinema plays a role in turning diplomatic ideas into a widely accepted
reality, because “IR theory relies upon IR myths in order to transform its
culturally produced stories about the world into common sense about the
world that we take for granted” (ibid., 4).
24 T. J. COBB
Readers of Weber’s book are thus taught that cinema texts ratify under-
standings of ideologies such as globalisation and anarchism, disseminating
easily accessible messages for mainstream American viewers. Although
intended primarily as an educational tool and not a polemic against what
Weber perceives as a homogenous ideological grounding in Hollywood,
International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction has much in com-
mon with Weber’s 2006 book Imagining America at War: Morality,
Politics and Film. This text explores a series of films spanning the early
2000s, focusing on militaristic depictions in Behind Enemy Lines and Black
Hawk Down (both 2001), but also the surveillance culture in the science
fiction thriller Minority Report (2002). Weber (2006, 6–8) argues that this
cycle of films provides both “episodes of humanitarian intervention” and
“justified vengeance”, collectively informing “how a moral America casts
its character and constructs its interpretative code for understanding
itself”.
Despite the cognitive dissonance implied in the combination of
“humanitarian intervention” and “justified vengeance”, Weber critiques a
Hollywood output of rehabilitative character, portending Westwell’s theo-
risation of a “hegemonic reconciliation”. Weber notes how trauma incul-
cates a championing of US hegemonic might in multiple films released in
the wake of 9/11; yet I would contend that even the most propagandistic
pictures, which in many cases fall under Weber’s scope of analysis, can
purvey tropes of political contradiction.
Tears of the Sun (2003), an action picture which concludes the analysis
of this book’s third chapter, is a picture underpinned by the melding of
political fissures. Antoine Fuqua’s film revolves around a U.S. Navy SEAL
team’s rescue mission in Nigeria, a mission catalysed in importance by the
endangerment of Dr Lena Fiore Kendricks, a US citizen and widowed
daughter-in-law of an American senator. The Global Meliorist connota-
tions of American rapport with the developing world fuse with the War on
Terror inflected depiction of the Muslim villains, who are engaged in an
insurrection against Nigeria’s Christian rulers. Ideas of American benevo-
lence alternate with subtexts of a Manichean war against all, signalling
contrived reciprocities between a neoconservative mentality of Wilsonian
liberation and a parochial perception of the post-9/11 world order.
The films to be explored express these discrepancies, a heterogeneity of
political complexion matched by my multifarious understanding of what con-
stitutes allegorical meaning. So far, I have introduced a milieu which encom-
passes fully allegorical films (No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood)
from the late 2000s and ‘literal-minded’ pictures from the 1990s and early
2000s (Three Kings, Behind Enemy Lines). Although I posit that the political
facets of American film have become increasingly allegorical in response to
events such as 9/11 and the Iraq War, I also propose the caveat that binary
separations of ‘literal’ and ‘allegorical’ film (a dichotomy hinted at by Scott
and Coyne) deprive us of nuanced ways of underlining political symbolism.
Definite ‘markers’ which separate allegorical, subtly inflected films from pic-
tures which deal with literal political diegesis are hard to establish when mul-
tiple films straddle both these categories.
Syriana (2005), a picture focalised in Chap. 4 of this book, evinces such
fluidity. Stephen Gaghan’s geopolitical thriller follows the politics of oil
through interwoven narrative strands featuring stories of terrorism, corpo-
rate greed and gestures of political reform. On the surface, these arcs con-
cern American predations for oil and its corruption of policies at home and
abroad. Yet they purvey a coded meaning for contemporaneous US policy
during the Iraq War, invoking clashing interpretations of Hamiltonian
mercantilism and soft power. The competing aims of Bryan Woodman, an
energy analyst who urges an Arab kingdom to adopt progressive reform,
and the Realpolitik of the CIA, present a fragmenting of Mead’s kaleido-
scope synergetic with the George W. Bush administration’s contradictory
diplomacy.
Film Studies methodologists who have studied allegory nevertheless
champion an approach which values marriage between the ‘volume’ of
political content contained in a film and the subtle associations that can
made by the viewer. Christensen and Haas typify this by championing bal-
ance between categories of political content and intent. They argue that
“audiences may understandably recoil from movies that combine heavy
doses of both political context and ideological cant” but also posit that
peripheral films which use politics “as a convenient ploy to invoke other
themes” seem “marginal at best” (Haas and Christensen 2005, 8–9).
Ernst Giglio contests this system through a hierarchy which favours the
“political message” over content. Giglio (2004, 53–54) queries how
“audiences would be able to sort out the more significant messages from
the less important ones” and contemplates the “significance of the politi-
cal message among other material in the film”. Deriding a focus on a
“quantity standard for the political material in a film”, Giglio instead pro-
poses dividing films into categories of “intent” and “effect”.
In the former category belongs patently non-allegorical pictures such as
Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016:
26 T. J. COBB
Obama’s America (2012). The latter bracket of ‘effect’ involves a broader

array of pictures, alternating between transparent and ambiguous mes-
sages. Transparent pictures include Brokeback Mountain (2005), Milk
(2008) and The Kids Are Alright (2010). Giglio views the comedy-drama
Forrest Gump (1994) and Charlie Chapman’s A King in New York (1957)
as films which elicit “ambiguous interpretations” (ibid., 58). Although
Giglio notes that “the political rests in the eye of the beholder rather than
any textbook definition” (ibid., 65), his methodology still gives weight to
the quality of explicitness—the detection of effect requires assessing a
film’s level of politicisation on the basis of how much it provokes audi-
ences and critics, a measurement which favours literal political diegesis.
It is his gauging of viewer and audience response, rather than his out-
look on narrative and mise en scene, which betrays Giglio’s emphasis on a
symbolic cinema which somehow retains non-allegorical characteristics. I
judge the allegorical phenomenon to have more sources of causation than
political intention and audience reaction, a sensibility corroborated by
James Combs and Adam Lowenstein. Combs (1993, 7) cites the impor-
tance of analysing films whether for “overt or covert political meaning”
and argues that the viewing experience entails “the unobservable process
of political learning, the acquisition of ideas and images which in diffuse,
long-term, and often unconscious ways affect people’s attitude towards
politics”.
Lowenstein’s 2005 book Shocking Representations: Historical Trauma,
National Cinema and the Modern Horror Film (quoted in McSweeney
2014, 21) echoes this almost synesthetic perspective by stressing the
salience of “allegorical moments”, which entail “a shocking collision of
film, spectator and history where registers of bodily space and historical
time are disrupted, confronted and intertwined”. From the symbols of
American soft power in Team America: World Police to the immolated oil
derrick in There Will be Blood, this is the understanding of allegory which
underpins my analysis. The chapter structure below underlines allegory’s
increasing emergence and indicates that each chapter is framed either by
the opinion of a political scientist, foreign policy historian or International
Relations theorist, contextualising the thematic orientation of the films to
be examined.
Chapter 2, ‘Triangulation: Unilateral Idealism in the 1990s Cinematic
Presidency’, stresses mainstream Hollywood’s role in coming to terms
with the political manoeuvrings of the Clinton presidency. Beginning with
a quote on the Clinton administration’s synthetic governing style by
political theorist Stephen Skowronek, this chapter postulates that the

Hollywood of the 1990s adopted tropes which translated the Clinton
administration’s tactics of ‘triangulation’ into the diplomatic realm. It
achieves this through focalising a series of films which in some way draw
attention to necessary adaptations in the American presidency, encompass-
ing The American President, Independence Day, Air Force One (1997) and
Wag the Dog (1997). It posits that a unilateral idealism is central to the
politics of these productions and their purveyance of foreign policy ‘corol-
laries’ to the Clinton administration’s domestic preemptions of American
conservatism.
Chapter 3, ‘Equilibrium: The Turn of the Twenty-First-Century War
Film and the Millenarian Remaking of Global Meliorism’, foregrounds the
role of David O. Russell’s 1999 satire Three Kings in implying an updating
of the welfarist internationalism applied under the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations. The second half of this chapter features analyses of the
post-9/11 war pictures Behind Enemy Lines and Black Hawk Down, which
both look back on the liberal interventions of the 1990s as symptomatic
of an intersection of Global Meliorism and unilateralism. I contend that
the rushed releases of these films refracted memories of the 1990s in a way
which facilitated the dramatic departures of George W. Bush’s neoconser-
vative agenda, licensing volatile shifts with notions of bipartisan precedent.
This chapter finishes with the proposition that this semblance of consensus
was spoiled by 2003’s Tears of the Sun, a picture with celebrations of mili-
tarised Global Meliorism affinitive with the Bush administration’s electoral
coalition.
Chapter 4, ‘Reconfiguration: Hard and Soft Power Rivalries in
Cinematic Engagements With the War on Terror’, examines productions
which muddy Joseph Nye Jr.’s dichotomy of hard and soft power and
demonstrate the challenges facing a centrist alternative to the Bush admin-
istration’s War on Terror. The failure of ‘soft power’ values is underlined
in productions such as the urban drama 25th Hour (2002) and the docu-
mentary Fahrenheit 9/11. Team America: World Police, however, forms
the centrepiece of this synergy through its allusions to the contrivances
involved in attaining a palatable variant of Nye’s idea of ‘smart power’.
Batman Begins and Syriana (both 2005) reinforce stronger feelings of dis-
sensus surrounding the cultivation of smart power, broaching schisms
raised by American diplomacy and, in the case of the former film, height-
ening the potential of allegory as a way of delineating foreign policy
contradiction.
28 T. J. COBB
Chapter 5, ‘Fragmentation: The Deconstruction of Neoliberal

Occupation in No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood’, juxta-
poses criticism on the nation-building dimension of neoconservatism by
Francis Fukuyama with the contrasting allegories of two Revisionist
Westerns. I argue that the Coen Brothers and Paul Thomas Anderson,
who respectively directed No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood,
reify neoconservatism’s pernicious relationship with neoliberalism.
Ultimately, this chapter emphasises how the return of the Revisionist
Western in the late 2000s serves to mirror a toxic fragmentation of Mead’s
kaleidoscope and speaks to the failed diffusion of free markets evident in
the War on Terror.
Chapter 6, ‘Collision: The Dark Knight and Avatar’s Eulogies to
Liberal Internationalist Failure’, evaluates two late 2000s blockbusters
which typify the arrival of allegorical critique in mainstream Hollywood
cinema and present colliding diplomatic interests. Central to this analysis
is the spectre of a backlash against the Wilsonian and Global Meliorist
ideologies exploited by neoconservatives, a subject explored by the for-
eign policy analyst Anne-Marie Slaughter and the historian Walter
McDougall. The Dark Knight and Avatar portray collisions of hard and
soft power, as well as realism and idealism, which match the cognitive dis-
sonance illustrated in the late stages of George W. Bush’s presidency. The
limits of a militarised liberal internationalism manifest in each of these
films, resonating with the multilateral realism championed in Barack
Obama’s 2008 election victory.
Finally, Chapter 7, ‘Stasis: the Continuation of Contradiction in the
Age of Malaise and Populism’, looks back on the findings of the earlier
chapters and concludes that fragmentation and collision have been main-
tained, a stance corroborated by a cycle of independent and mainstream
films released in the 2010s. These pictures, which appeared during the late
stages of Obama’s presidency, echo remarks by Andrew Bacevich on the
interminability of American militarism and reinforce states of diplomatic
incompatibility. Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014) normalises a foreign
policy cognitive dissonance through the viewpoint of a child growing up
in the 2000s, while Captain America: Civil War (2016) comments on
disjunctions relatable to the Obama era. Contrastingly, the comic book
adaptations Black Panther (2018) and Joker (2019) signal how evocations
of contradiction have become entwined with the racial tensions and socio-
economic rivalries provoked by Trump, portending more ideologically
charged cinematic incarnations of International Relations dichotomies.
Notes
1. Out of all of Mead’s schools, only the Jacksonian has been systematically
applied to Hollywood cinema in research. In ‘The Frustrations of Geopolitics
and the Pleasures of War: Behind Enemy Lines and American Geopolitical
Culture’, Gearóid Ó Tuathail discusses the prevalence of the Jacksonian in
Behind Enemy Lines, a 2001 war film concerned with a unilateral interven-
tion in Bosnia. He cites the film as a “Jacksonian storyline”, due to tropes
which emphasise “remasculinisation through the transcendence of trial and
tribulation” (Ó Tuathail 2005, 358–359). Engagements with the Jacksonian
are further evident in Carter and Dodd’s 2011 article ‘Hollywood and the
“War on Terror”: Genre-Geopolitics and “Jacksonianism” in The Kingdom’,
which builds on Ó Tuathail’s readings. The two authors judge Peter Berg’s
war film as part of a cinematic milieu “that closely adhered to the Jacksonian
perspective on international affairs” (Carter and Dodd 2011, 110). Ó
Tuathail’s observations return in the second half of Chap. 3.
2. Robert Joseph Gowen (1973, 133) writes on the refusal of Ho Chi Minh’s
request for Vietnamese independence, a sobering result for the nationalist
leader’s “first significant foray into the international arena”. Ho’s appeals,
although “couched in Wilsonian language”, failed to forestall Wilson’s
capitulation to the empires of Britain and France (ibid., 133).
References
Ambrosius, Lloyd E. 2007. Woodrow Wilson and The Birth of a Nation: American
Democracy and International Relations. Diplomacy & Statecraft 18
(4): 689–718.
Bacevich, Andrew. 2005. The New American Militarism: How Americans are
Seduced by War. New York: Oxford University Press.
Baxter, Monique James. 2005. Giant Helps America Recognize the Costs of
Discrimination: A Lesson of World War II. In Hollywood’s West: The American
Frontier in Film, Television, and History, ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’
Connor, 160–172. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky.
Benbow, Mark E. 2010. Birth of a Quotation: Woodrow Wilson and ‘Like Writing
History with Lightning’. The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 9
(4): 509–533.
Carter, Sean, and Klaus Dodds. 2011. Hollywood and the ‘War on Terror’: Genre-
geopolitics and ‘Jacksonianism’ in The Kingdom. Environment and Planning
D: Society and Space 29 (1): 98–113.
Christensen, Terry, and Peter J. Haas. 2005. Projecting Politics: Political Messages
in American Films. Armonk, North Castle, New York: M.E. Sharpe Inc.
30 T. J. COBB
Combs, James. 1993. Introduction: Understanding the Politics of Movies. In

Movies and Politics: The Dynamic Relationship, ed. James Combs, 3–26.
New York City and London: Garland Publishing.
Coyne, Michael. 1997. The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the
Hollywood Western. London and New York City: I.B. Tauris.
———. 2008. Hollywood Goes to Washington: American Politics on Screen. London:
Reaktion Books.
George W. Bush Whitehouse archives. n.d. The National Security Strategy of the
United States of America. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/
nsc/nssall.html. Accessed 16 July 2019.
Giglio, Ernst. 2004. Searching for the Political Film. In Hollywood Raises Political
Consciousness: Political Messages in Feature Films, ed. Michael Haas, 47–66.
New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
Gowen, Robert Joseph. 1973. Ho Chi Minh in the Paris Peace Conference of
1919: A Documentary Footnote. International Studies 12 (1): 133–137.
Halper, Stefan, and Jonathan Clarke. 2004. America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives
and the Global Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Holloway, David. 2008. 9/11 and the War on Terror. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Huntingdon, Samuel. 2014. American Ideals versus American Institutions. In
American Foreign Policy: Theoretical Essays, ed. G. John Ikenberry and Peter
L. Trubowitz, 7th ed., 297–322. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kellner, Douglas. 2010. Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-
Cheney Era. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
King, Geoff. 2002. New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. New York City:
I.B. Tauris.
Matheson, Sue. 2013. When You Side With a Man, You Stay With Him! – Philia
and the Military Mind in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969). In Love in
Western Film and Television: Lonely Hearts and Happy Trails, ed. Sue Matheson,
235–257. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
McDougall, Walter A. 1997. Promised Land, Crusader State: The American
Encounter With The World Since 1776. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.
McSweeney, Terence. 2014. The ‘War on Terror’ and American Film: 9/11 Frames
Per Second. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Mead, Walter. 2001. Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It
Changed the World. Abingdon: Routledge.
Medved, Michael. 1993. Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on
Traditional Values. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
Nelson, Andrew Patrick. 2015. Still In the Saddle: The Hollywood Western,
1969–1980. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press.
Nye, Joseph S., Jr. 2004. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics.
New York: Public Affairs.
Ó Tuathail, Gearóid. 2005. Frustrations of Geopolitics and the Pleasures of War:

Behind Enemy Lines and American Geopolitical Culture. Geopolitics 10
(2): 356–377.
Pheasant-Kelly, Frances. 2013. Fantasy Film Post-9/11. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Raskin, Richard. 1990. Casablanca and United States Foreign Policy. Film History
4 (2): 153–164.
Reilly, Kaitlin. 2017. These Are The Most Extraordinary Speeches From The
Women’s March. Last modified January 22, 2017. https://www.refinery29.
com/en-gb/2017/01/137289/best-womens-march-speeches-quotes.
Ruiz, Michelle. 2017. The Most Inspiring Moments From the Speeches at the
Women’s March on Washington. Vogue, January 21, 2017. https://www.
vogue.com/article/best-moments-speeches-womens-march.
Ryan, Michael, and Douglas Kellner. 1988. Camera Politica: The Politics and
Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana
University Press.
San Diego Free Press. 2017. From the Women’s March on Washington: Guiding
Vision and Definition of Principles. Last modified January 17. https://sandi-
egofreepress.org/2017/01/womens-march-washington-guiding-vision-defi-
nition-principles/#.XXJjgyhKjIU.
Sanchez, Ray. 2017. Here’s What Celebrities and Activists Said in Fiery Women’s
March Speeches. CNN, January 21. https://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/21/
politics/womens-march-speeches/index.html.
Scott, Ian. 2011. American Politics in Hollywood Film. 2nd ed. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Shaw, Tony. 2009. Hollywood’s Cold War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Slotkin, Richard. 1992. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth
Century America. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press.
———. 2001. Ethnic Platoons and the Myths of American Nationality. American
Literary History 13 (3): 469–498.
The Economist editorial. 2010. Seven Questions for Walter Russell Mead, January
16. https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2010/01/16/
seven-questions-for-walter-russell-mead.
Trump, Donald. 2017. The Inaugural Address. Whitehouse.gov. Last modified
January 20. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/the-
inaugural-address/.
Weber, Cynthia. 2006. Imagining America at War: Morality, Politics and Film.
Abingdon: Routledge.
———. 2013. International Relations Theory: An Introduction. 4th ed. Hove:
Psychology Press.
Westwell, Guy. 2014. Parallel Lines: Post 9/11 American Cinema. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Wilson, Peter. 2011. Idealism in International Relations. In Encyclopedia of Power,
ed. Keith Dowding, 3–26. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications.
32 T. J. COBB
Filmography
Air Force One. 1997. Directed by Wolfgang Peterson. USA: Columbia Pictures.
All the Young Men. 1960. Directed by Hall Bartlett. USA: Columbia Pictures.
The American President. 1995. Directed by Rob Reiner. USA: Sony Pictures.
Avatar. 2009. Directed by James Cameron. USA: 20th Century Fox.
Bataan. 1943. Directed by Tay Garnett. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Batman Begins. 2005. Directed by Christopher Nolan. USA: Warner Bros.
Behind Enemy Lines. 2001. Directed by John Moore. USA: 20th Century Fox.
The Birth of a Nation. 1915. Directed by D.W. Griffith. USA: Epoch Producing Co.
Black Hawk Down. 2001. Directed by Ridley Scott. USA: Columbia Pictures.
Black Panther. 2018. Directed by Ryan Coogler. USA: Walt Disney Studios.
Born on the Fourth of July. 1989. Directed by Oliver Stone. USA: Universal
Pictures.
Boyhood. 2014. Directed by Richard Linklater. USA: IFC Films.
Brokeback Mountain. 2005. Directed by Ang Lee. USA: Focus Features.
Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid. 1969. Directed by George Roy Hill. USA:
20th Century Fox.
Captain America: Civil War. 2016. Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo. USA:
Walt Disney Studios.
Casablanca. 1942. Directed by Michael Curtiz. USA: Warner Bros.
The Dark Knight. 2008. Directed by Christopher Nolan. USA: Warner Bros.
Die Hard. 1988. Directed by John McTiernan. USA: 20th Century Fox.
Dinner at Eight. 1933. Directed by George Cukor. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
The Dirty Dozen. 1967. Directed by Robert Aldrich. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. 2011. Directed by Stephen Daldry. USA:
Warner Bros.
Fahrenheit 9/11. 2004. Directed by Michael Moore. USA: Lionsgate films.
Fixed Bayonets. 1951. Directed by Samuel Fuller. USA: Twentieth Century Fox.
Forrest Gump. 1994. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. USA: Paramount Pictures.
Giant. 1956. Directed by George Stevens. USA: Warner Bros.
Independence Day. 1996. Directed by Roland Emmerich. USA: 20th Century Fox.
It’s a Wonderful Life. 1946. Directed by Frank Capra. USA: RKO Radio Pictures.
Joker. 2019. Directed by Todd Phillips. USA: Warner Bros.
The Kids Are Alright. 2010. Directed by Lisa Cholodenko. USA: Focus Features.
A King in New York. 1957. Directed by Charlie Chaplin. USA: Archway Film
Distributors.
Kingdom of Heaven. 2005. Directed by Ridley Scott. United Kingdom/Germany/
USA: 20th Century Fox.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. 2001. Directed by Peter Jackson.
New Zealand/USA: New Line Cinema.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. 2003. Directed by Peter Jackson.
New Zealand/USA: New Line Cinema.
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. 2002. Directed by Peter Jackson. New
Zealand/USA: New Line Cinemas.
Major Dundee. 1965. Directed by Sam Peckinpah. USA: Columbia Pictures.
Malcolm X. 1992. Directed by Spike Lee. USA: Warner Bros.
M*A*S*H*. 1970. Directed by Robert Altman. USA: 20th Century Fox.
The Manchurian Candidate. 2004. Directed by Jonathan Demme. USA:
Paramount Pictures.
Milk. 2005. Directed by Gus Van Sant. USA: Focus Features.
Minority Report. 2002. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: 20th Century Fox.
Ninotchka. 1939. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
No Country for Old Men. 2007. Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. USA: Miramax.
Platoon. 1986. Directed by Oliver Stone. USA: Orion Pictures.
Red Dawn. 1984. Directed by John Milius. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Saving Private Ryan. 1998. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA. DreamWorks
Pictures.
Syriana. 2005. Directed by Stephen Gaghan. USA: Warner Bros.
Team America: World Police. 2004. Directed by Matt Stone and Trey Parker. USA:
Paramount Pictures.
Tears of the Sun. 2003. Directed by Antoine Fuqua. USA: Sony Pictures.
There Will be Blood. 2007. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. USA: Paramount
Vantage.
Three Kings. 1999. Directed by David O. Russell. USA: Warner Bros.
Top Gun. 1986. Directed by Tony Scott. USA. Paramount Pictures.
12 Angry Men. 1957. Directed by Sidney Lumet. USA: United Artists.
25th Hour. 2002. Directed by Spike Lee. USA: Buena Vista Pictures.
2016: Obama’s America. 2012. Directed by Dinesh D’Souza. USA: Rocky
Mountain Pictures.
Wag the Dog. 1997. Directed by Barry Levinson. USA: New Line Cinema.
A Walk in the Sun. 1945. Directed by Lewis Milestone. USA: 20th Century Fox.
War of the Worlds. 2005. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: Paramount Pictures.
The Wild Bunch. 1969. Directed by Sam Peckinpah. USA: Warner Bros./
Seven Arts.
World Trade Center. 2006. Directed by Oliver Stone. USA: Paramount Pictures.
CHAPTER 2
Triangulation: Unilateral Idealism

in the 1990s Cinematic Presidency
In the afterword to the 1997 edition of his redefining study The Politics
Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton, the political
theorist Stephen Skowronek was explicit about the heterodoxy he viewed
as central to the Clinton presidency’s functioning. Skowronek (1997,
453) argued that Clinton was a “preemptive president” and belonged to a
club of leaders who could thrive on “brazenness”, “maneuver around the
ideological spectrum” and “confound the standard labels”.
Mainstream Hollywood cinema reflected the corollaries of this position
in American foreign policy through an uneven concert of cosmopolitan
internationalism and Jacksonian unilateralism, chiming in with the centrist
‘triangulation’ of Clinton’s presidency. A spate of productions, frequently
with an American president at their centre, variously delineated escapes
from the stigmatised memory of the 1960s counterculture, a foreign pol-
icy philosophy which synchronised unilateralism and multilateralism and
an America capable of delivering military heroics alongside democracy
promotion.
I begin highlighting this allegorical process with an application of
Skowronek’s ‘theories of presidential leadership’ to The American President
(1995), an interplay I consider foundational in the creation of a cinematic
animus revolving around Clintonian triangulation and its implications for
American statecraft. I follow this with an assessment of the ‘unilateral ide-
alism’ in Independence Day (1996), a blockbuster which purveys centrist
combinations of Wilsonianism and Jacksonian militarism. I conclude with
© The Author(s) 2020 35

T. J. Cobb, American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42678-1_2
36 T. J. COBB
brief examinations of the synergetic, but tonally oppositional, qualities of

presidential drama in Air Force One and Wag the Dog (both 1997).
This chapter therefore charts the shifting kaleidoscope of Clintonism in
1990s American cinema, gauging collisions of Wilsonianism, Jacksonianism
and free-market globalisation. Such interactions, although screened
against the relatively benign backdrop of a peacetime America adjusting to
its post-Cold War windfall, portended saliences which would materialise
more palpably in the post-9/11 era. Thus, the nucleus of contemporary
foreign policy allegory could be said to have emerged in the second half of
the 1990s, a precedence which belied the ‘holiday from history’ reputa-
tion of the Clinton years.1
The Restyling of American Liberalism: Clintonian

Triangulation in The American President
The American President opens with a series of shots which portray the
traditional iconography of the stars and stripes, most memorably juxtapos-
ing a bust of the American eagle and a painting of George Washington
with the genteel strains of an orchestral soundtrack. Yet the camera also
hovers over portraits of more polarising American heads of state, ranging
from the one-term President Taft to the pugnacious Andrew Jackson.
Director Rob Reiner subsequently proceeds to disaffirm the holistic praise
of American leadership through scenes of political posturing. This is dis-
played in the portrayal of Democratic president Andrew Shepard, a leader
who lost his wife to cancer the previous year. Entering the oval office in
angst over his bid for re-election, Shepard confronts and encodes a world
in which the progressive ideals of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society must
adapt to a milieu of neoliberal globalisation and right-wing resurgence.
This political reality unfolds as Shepard treks from the Oval Office to the
White House press corps with his personal aide Basdin.
In a rapid exchange of dialogue, Shepard promises attendance at an
event scheduled with American fisheries to Basdin and dismisses concerns
that he gave a speech upsetting his own Assistant to the President for
Domestic Policy, Lewis Rothschild. Rothschild, who next confronts the
president, expresses frustrations which hint at a liberal animus and indicate
exasperation at a concessionary part of a proposed address on a crime bill
aimed at placating the president’s conservative opponents. Critiquing ora-
tory which seems portentous of Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union address
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free

distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or
any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and

Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree
to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be
bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from
the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in
paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be

used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people
who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a
few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic
works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.
See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with
Project Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the
collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the
individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the
United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in
the United States and you are located in the United States, we do
not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing,
performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the
work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of
course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg™
mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely
sharing Project Gutenberg™ works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name
associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of
this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its
attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it without
charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the
United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms
of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying,
performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this
work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes
no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in
any country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must
appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™
work (any work on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or
with which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is
accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is derived

from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not contain a
notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the copyright
holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in the
United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must
comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through
1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted

with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works posted
with the permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of
this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project

Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files containing a
part of this work or any other work associated with Project
Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this

electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form,
including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you
provide access to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work
in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in
the official version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing

access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the
method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The
fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty
payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on
which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your
periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked
as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information
about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who

notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that
s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and
discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of Project
Gutenberg™ works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in
the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90
days of receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™

electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend

considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe
and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating
the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the medium on which they may
be stored, may contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to,
incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a
copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or
damaged disk or other medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except

for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph
1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner
of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party
distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work under this
agreement, disclaim all liability to you for damages, costs and
expenses, including legal fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO
REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF
WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE
FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY
DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE
TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL,
PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE
NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you

discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it,
you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by
sending a written explanation to the person you received the work
from. If you received the work on a physical medium, you must
return the medium with your written explanation. The person or entity
that provided you with the defective work may elect to provide a
replacement copy in lieu of a refund. If you received the work
electronically, the person or entity providing it to you may choose to
give you a second opportunity to receive the work electronically in
lieu of a refund. If the second copy is also defective, you may
demand a refund in writing without further opportunities to fix the
problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in
paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted
by the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the
Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the
Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any
volunteers associated with the production, promotion and distribution
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless from all liability,
costs and expenses, including legal fees, that arise directly or
indirectly from any of the following which you do or cause to occur:
(a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b)
alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any Project
Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of

Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.
It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and
donations from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the

assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a
secure and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help,
see Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project

Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,

Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to

the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without
widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can
be freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the
widest array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small
donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax
exempt status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating

charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and
keep up with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in
locations where we have not received written confirmation of
compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of
compliance for any particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where

we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no
prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in
such states who approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make

any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of
other ways including checks, online payments and credit card
donations. To donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project

Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed

editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,

including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how
to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.

American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy The Fragmented Kaleidoscope 1St Ed Edition Thomas J Cobb Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy The Fragmented Kaleidoscope 1St Ed Edition Thomas J Cobb Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

American Cinema and Cultural

Diplomacy: The Fragmented

Cultural Diplomacy in Europe: Between the Domestic and

The Migration and Politics of Monsters in Latin

American Cinema/American Culture 5th Edition, (Ebook

Globalization and Latin American Cinema: Toward a New

Big Brother Naija and Popular Culture in Nigeria: A

Public Diplomacy and the Politics of Uncertainty 1st

Chinese Diplomacy and the Paris Peace Conference 1st

The Fragmented Mind Cristina Borgoni

“The course of American foreign policy is never smooth—including in the movies.

American Cinema and

ISBN 978-3-030-42677-4 ISBN 978-3-030-42678-1 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Matty Anderson / EyeEm, Getty Images

This book intends to offer reflections on American film’s allegorisation of

I feel privileged to have benefitted from the encouragement and inspira-

1 Shifting Kaleidoscopes: The Presence of Diplomatic

2 Triangulation: Unilateral Idealism in the 1990s Cinematic

3 Equilibrium: The Turn of the Twenty-First-­Century War

4 Reconfiguration: Hard and Soft Power Rivalries in

5 Fragmentation: The Deconstruction of Neoliberal

6 Collision: The Dark Knight and Avatar’s Eulogies to

7 Stasis: The Continuation of Contradiction in the Age

Shifting Kaleidoscopes: The Presence

© The Author(s) 2020 1

theorist Walter Russell Mead and his more multifaceted understandings of

concepts of Mead, illustrating sites of both political intersection and ideo-

The Common Fallacy of Hyperpartisanship:

manifesting in work “separate from the domestic mainstream” (Medved

bathetic portrait of two roguish bank robbers who eventually perish in

production which both elicited the contradictory progressivism of

President Wilson exposed the selectiveness of this liberal internationalism,

perspective is conspicuous in the implied martyrdom of Bataan’s climax,

Vietnam and the multi-ethnic fraternity foregrounded by the platoon film,

Asia as a liberal opportunity to “feed the hungry and promote democracy

foregrounded in the bunch’s perceived affinity with the peasant family of

This repudiation of a paternalistic internationalism manifests in the vil-

“hegemonic reconciliation between politically irreconcilable positions”

The Competing Schools of Methodology

1. Experiment versus Ideology

Coyne (2008, 9) briefly mentions the existence of these dichotomies in

Self-interest versus ideals

Much of the films in American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy mirror

Corliss (quoted in Raskin 1990, 157) as allegoric of America’s journey

Raskin responds to this broad interpretation with research based on the

2005, 25). This shift in political configuration is well encapsulated by

Obama’s America (2012). The latter bracket of ‘effect’ involves a broader

political theorist Stephen Skowronek, this chapter postulates that the

Chapter 5, ‘Fragmentation: The Deconstruction of Neoliberal

Combs, James. 1993. Introduction: Understanding the Politics of Movies. In

Ó Tuathail, Gearóid. 2005. Frustrations of Geopolitics and the Pleasures of War:

Triangulation: Unilateral Idealism

© The Author(s) 2020 35

brief examinations of the synergetic, but tonally oppositional, qualities of

The Restyling of American Liberalism: Clintonian

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free

Section 1. General Terms of Use and

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is derived

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project

1 Shifting Kaleidoscopes: The Presence of Diplomatic

2 Triangulation: Unilateral Idealism in the 1990s Cinematic

3 Equilibrium: The Turn of the Twenty-First-Century War

4 Reconfiguration: Hard and Soft Power Rivalries in

5 Fragmentation: The Deconstruction of Neoliberal

6 Collision: The Dark Knight and Avatar’s Eulogies to

7 Stasis: The Continuation of Contradiction in the Age