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Comment by crate_barre | Hacker News Reader

The other country that is doing this at Hollywood scale is China, and it’s not just their ‘only popular in China’ movies like Wolf Warrior (1 and 2).

Some scenes:

https://youtu.be/g7y36UIRAjo

IP Man 4, which is more well known to western audiences:

https://youtu.be/OlW2VphUNd4

https://youtu.be/JFmaPK0JyVQ

You get the idea. Americans make movies where America good, everyone bad. China is now making movies where China good, everyone bad, specially white Americans.

Anyways, along with the glorification of US might and power by the pentagon, their recruiting tactics have also used video game stylization to attract young people:

https://youtu.be/N0f_ZUgqvxE

^ That is a fucking video game ad as far as I’m concerned. No mature person should be turned on by that.

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Regarding China, most Hollywood studios seem to be kowtowing Chinese line these days. I have noticed a clear trend in Hollywood movies where they don't portray anything negative about China, and usually project things in positive light. This same trend can be observed in most mainstream media's projection of China. Worldwide, China is definitely reaching proportions that were only possible for the US earlier in influencing, or arm-twisting influencers like media, and movie makers.

> most Hollywood studios seem to be kowtowing Chinese line these days.

This is because the same movies are also distributed in China, which is a huge market.

Shit, China influences US film too. Many films avoid showing LGBTQ main characters or China in a bad light so they can sell into the Chinese market. A good example is the recent remake of Red Dawn. It was supposed to have the Chinese as bad guys but instead they used the extremely implausible North Koreans as antagonists.

Or the fact that Dr. Strange trains in Nepal, instead of Tibet. Just mentioning Tibet is verboten.

Another country that comes to mind is India - but I've never been enough of a Bollywood fan to be able to make any assessment on this topic.

But it's a very effective tool to shape public opinion. I'm fairly certain without the overwhelmingly heroic portrait of (members of) the military, the public would be more inclined to question the huge investments that go into warfare. Particularly the display of highly achieved individuals in the military leads to both public respect of military members, and enlistings to service.

Pretty much. It’s no different that glorifying Gordon Gekko in Wallstreet.

Michael Douglas on why he doesn’t get why Gekko was an inspiration:

https://youtu.be/I8ruk8wjhuQ

We’re all vulnerable to this. Just here in tech we’ve deified the guy in a t-shirt/hoodie (zucks of the world) or mythical 10x programmers, built up and tore down people like Adam Neumann, all caricatures.

Propaganda works sadly.

With respect to war, it takes observing a war play out to realize how stupid it actually is. It took Americans 20 years of just watching Iraq/Afghanistan to conclude all that nationalism stuff is just not worth it at all. I don’t know how it’s all going to play out in the next 50 years, but I’m pretty sure in the aftermath of any American/Chinese conflict the conclusion of america-bad by the Chinese and China-bad by the Americans will just seem quite silly also.

>Another country that comes to mind is India - but I've never been enough of a Bollywood fan to be able to make any assessment on this topic.

Curious why India came to mind especially if you are not able to make an assessment of this topic as you put it.

Haider is the only Indian movie that I can think of that doesn't take the establishment position when it comes to the portrayal of the armed forces.

More recently, a certain Canadian national has carved out a niche for himself by staring in ultra patriotic movies that are very popular with the Indian audience.

And the dude in question peddles ceramic tiles made with “desh ki mitti” aka “soil of this country”. The hypocrisy rankles.

Still, it is clearly working because he’s ubiquitous while the erstwhile big 3 of Indian cinema have all but disappeared from ads.

FWIW, I hear he’s applying to become an Indian citizen again.

> FWIW, I hear he’s applying to become an Indian citizen again.

He claimed to have applied for an Indian passport in 2019. But then again he claimed he was an honorary citizen of Canada in the past. He's not exactly a reliable source.

one difference is that authoritarian regimes have been known to infuse everything with state propaganda, whereas almost nobody expects this from western democracies, showing just how much more subtle and even effective the latter can be.

>whereas almost nobody expects this from western democracies

Are you joking? Ever since 9/11 the US has been pumping out propaganda disguised as entertainment like gangbusters! It's really obvious when you go and watch reruns of old copaganda shows from 03 to 06, and then there's "24". Of course there's also blatant ra-ra Military propaganda like J.A.G. and NCIS

It's not surprising to see outright propaganda from the US, it's surprising how many decades it's taken for people to begin to call it what it is. Surprising and depressing.

What you wrote is true, but it's astonishing how people tolerate having an industrial production of propaganda (since WW2) in what should be a democracy.

Democracy and propaganda aren't mutually exclusive. Plus, the US isn't a democracy. In fact, most countries banging the democracy-propaganda-horn aren't actually democracies. Austria, for example, is a Republic. Democracy is just a smokescreen.

> ... aren't actually democracies. Austria, for example, is a Republic

"republic" and "democracy" are in no way mutually exclusive terms.

On the contrary, the overlap very often. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic for a definition.

Also Russia is doing it, also because it has a problem with numbers and/of soldiers… “Russia Doesn’t Have the Demographics for War” https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/03/russia-demography-birth...

Russia has been doing it since the dawn of cinema. e.g. Battleship Potemkin. Mosfilm, soviet propaganda, and amazing advances in movie-making have all marched together from the very start. You'd be surprised at how many of the tropes and techniques that form a part of modern movie language have their origin in soviet propaganda.

The thing is, everybody expects a Mosfilm flick to toe the party line. What the U.S. has done was sneakier.

You can definitely notice when a Hollywood film has decided to suck up to the Chinese audience, such as with Pacific Rim 2 or Iron Man 3.

> suck up to the Chinese audience

Less the Chinese audience and more the CCP State Censors.

And whichever organization selects which films get to be shown in China. Some films do much, much better in China than in the US thanks to this; some examples are the Transformers films, the Warhammer film, and someone else already mentioned Pacific Rim and Iron Man.

Basically, if there's a Chinese secondary actor and / or a Chinese location and they're not the definitive bad guys, it's been tweaked for and co-developed with China.

Now I don't say that's a bad thing per se, I kinda like there being a propaganda force in blockbuster films to compete with that of the US. I would much prefer no propaganda, but at the same time I feel like high budget action blockbusters can't do without.

Also take the word 'propaganda' with a grain of salt, it's usually nothing over the top, or limited to "this country or these people are not put in a bad light"

I for one would love to see more films where the Americans aren't considered the heroes.

> The other country that is doing this at Hollywood scale is China

The difference being that while state propaganda has infected Hollywood it does not wholly control Hollywood. You’d be hard pressed to find any rough equivalent to Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, All the President’s Men, or The Post etc in China.

Those movies are between 35 years and half a century old.

and could not have been made since 9/11

> Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, All the President’s Men, or The Post

Those movies are also propaganda, but in a more subtle and effective way; The message of these movies being that while america sometimes makes mistakes, in the end the american has a good heart and conscience and should be forgiven.

You don’t see in these movies american soldiers raping civilans, laughing about it, and suffering no ill consequences

> You don’t see in these movies american soldiers raping civilans, laughing about it, and suffering no ill consequences

Have you watched Apocalypse Now Redux? Because I can remember a scene that is very similar to that description. In this movie, the American military or government has no good heart, no conscience and breeds madness and senseless death.

When I joined the (Canadian) military in the mid 90s, many of the guys there cited anti-war films such as 'Apocalypse Now', 'Full Metal Jacket' and 'Platoon' as inspirations for signing up.

Nobody cited 'Rambo' or 'Top Gun'

Those three films are very attractive to teenage boys and young men.

This is true, but the way these movies were propaganda is actually a lot more interesting: One big thing they do is cover up the fact that the Vietnam war ended up in basically a huge mutiny in the US forces, and a de facto truce with the Vietnamese.

Here is a twitter thread about it: https://twitter.com/mmabeuf/status/1433597396613832706

This is something the US really doesn't want to admit happened.

> in the end the american has a good heart and conscience and should be forgiven.

Nothing about Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket says that at all. Have you even watched them? They’re both about how war and the military machine are devastating and dehumanizing to the soldier, and to the enemy. All words seem like egregious understatements for them so I recommend seeing them (or seeing them again).

To my horror I did find out that the first half of Full Metal Jacket was attractive to enough teenage boys in the late 80s to eventually cause Jarhead to be produced [1]. I guess they stopped watching after the first half, or the idea of murdering teenage girls was attractive to them? Either way it is anything but propaganda.

As for the other movies that do involve righting a wrong or at least exposing them, that’s not state propaganda. Primarily because the state is the villain in them and they encourage suspicion of the state, neither of which promotes state power. A movie which gives the feels about being an American doesn’t make something propaganda it makes it a movie that wants to sell to Americans.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/magazine/full-metal-jacke...

To be fair almost every country does this, for obvious reasons;The main aspects to analyze considering that everyone does this are: how big is your industry and how this directly affects the efficacy of your exported pictures: the reach & perceived reality of your presented truth; and secondly: the degree you distort truth to positively assert yourself.

The second aspect is vastly more important, but then again some people believe in the concept of a 'white lie' or lying for the greater good, which is very dangerous, especially in a world where you cannot be certain that you're the only one who knows a piece of information.And on top of that people who seek to hide the truth or lie by omission often do a lot of worse things than merely not presenting the whole facts.

Yeah, I find it ironic that the commenters in the ad whine about the "Netflix Original Trailer" looking "Emma" ad in favor of the "Video Game" ad. "No, give me back the old propaganda for an imperialist death machine that will grind up my life and spit on my retired body if I survive once I'm too old and helpless to do anything about it, this one is going to appeal to my political enemiiiieeeeeees and then they'll get ground up in higher numbers instead of people like meeeeee T_T".

That ad is the equivalent of showing college applicants a glorified video of a Film Studies major buying a ticket straight to Hollywood after graduation and winning an Oscar for best director.

It’s false advertising at best, predatory at worst. Do you know who are selling a bag of dreams to? Do you care? You’ll take their time, money and lives, and it won’t matter to you in the least, will it?

You're right. They need lives and bodies to serve big picture grand strategy agendas, they'll pander to the "excitable gamer" or the "marginalized underdog" alike as soon as they understand which demo to reach out to when, what style to emulate, and what emotional buttons to push.

I mean, if one country does it, everyone else is forced to do it to level the playing field. Hollywood churns out higher quality propaganda because huge budgets and USA global hegemony, but it won't stay like that forever as we move to a multipolar world. The same is happening with online news outlets that churn out cherry-picked propaganda to counter propaganda from another country - information warfare.

Ehh, this has been standard fare for China for decades.

It is always comically obvious (like in the videos you posted above). Pick any movie and you're likely to see something similar.

On the other hand, consider the last time you saw an Asian male in a Hollywood production that wasn't:

a) a kung-fu caricature b) the joke

Western propaganda is more subtle and effective.

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