
Hollywood’s role in shaping public views on mass surveillance - pavs
http://www.slashgeek.net/2013/06/29/hollywoods-role-in-shaping-public-views-on-mass-surveillance/
======
dobbsbob
Mainstream cable dramas enforces fear and stereotypes to shape public view
much more than hollywood I'd say, just because more people watch those shows
and every single one of them is the same theme.

For instance take any cop drama. The kid who uses drugs for the first time
ends up raped at a rave or overdoses, the couple who has a pansexual
relationship with other people ends up killed because of their "shady"
lifestyle, anything that is out of the bounds of religious morality is
demonized and will always lead to doom.

Cops who beat up suspects in interrogation are shown in the best light because
they never beat up the wrong suspect, all animal rights protesters or eco
activists are portrayed as total loons, national security always trumps
individual rights and turns out for the good.

Propaganda like Red Dawn, Olympus Has Fallen or Zero Dark Thirty which showed
torture lite and even tried to justify it isn't watched nearly as much. The
articles slamming Zero Dark Thirty weren't as numerous as the criticism that
show "24" created with justifying torture and pandering to the imaginary
ticking bomb interrogation scenario where the intrepid hero must use torture
to save the world.

I can't remember how many cop dramas on TV I've seen where they could catch
the evil criminal if only they weren't blocked by annoying restrictions like
warrants. Message: cops are always good, judges are out of touch with reality,
defence lawyers are evil unethical parasites and warrantless spying or
searches should be the norm. Watch this scenario a hundred times and when the
media finally starts promoting some new "necessary" warrantless spying the
government is trying to pass you're likely to allow it after being inundated
with constant pro state propaganda, and a chorus of media pundits who use
fictional TV scenarios to compare to real life situations like the CNN anchor
I witnessed who was constantly bringing up that stupid 24 morality play about
the evil bad guy in the good guy's captivity and only torture is the solution
while interviewing a lawyer who was trying to laugh off the questions as
nonsense and tell the public what is really going on.

Whatever that lawyer was trying to say was drowned out by bringing in decades
worth of reinforced stereotypes. The guy had a ton of stuff to say but his
interview was sidetracked by this ridiculous fiction and "that's all the time
we have today stay with us after the commercial break for our Paula Deen
exclusive"

~~~
afriesh123
Next thing you know, they'll tell me that hollywood actively collaborates with
the government on portrayals of the military.

"The major exception here is the Department of Defense, which has an ‘open’
but barely publicized relationship with Tinsel Town, whereby, in exchange for
advice, men and invaluable equipment, such as aircraft carriers and
helicopters, the Pentagon routinely demands flattering script alterations."

[http://www.globalresearch.ca/lights-camera-covert-action-
the...](http://www.globalresearch.ca/lights-camera-covert-action-the-deep-
politics-of-hollywood/11921)

[http://original.antiwar.com/sean-a-
mcelwee/2013/04/28/propag...](http://original.antiwar.com/sean-a-
mcelwee/2013/04/28/propaganda-and-censorship-the-hollywood-industrial-
complex/)

It can't be a conspiracy if it is not a secret, right?

~~~
mpyne
> It can't be a conspiracy if it is not a secret, right?

Well, basically.

The Navy even managed to make Paramount Pictures _pay for the privilege_ of
taking footage of aircraft carriers and their fighters in action.

Paramount tried to renegotiate the payment by offering to let the Navy play a
recruiting video or something silly in theaters, but the Navy quite wisely
opted out of that, as the movie is already a recruiter's dream all by itself.

~~~
TrevorJ
That's par for the course in the film industry really. Nothing's ever free.

------
simmons
This has been on my mind a lot lately, too. I'm glad I'm not the only one who
has noticed this. I don't think there's any grand conspiracy, here --
Hollywood caricatures and over-simplifies pretty much everything. But it's
disturbing to see how much of people's world view is shaped by such things.

Access to personal information isn't the only Hollywood idea that seems to
have penetrated everyday thinking. People also seem to have an exaggerated
sense of the capabilities of the government (and other large organizations),
and see technological security issues as a sort of simplified arms race, where
victory goes to whoever has the biggest force.

------
kephra
I think its interesting to compare how law enforcement movies differ in
various countries:

\- French is imho the most realistic: Police is corrupt and lazy, and they
solve crime because they participate in crime.

\- Western Germany (Tatort): The police is your friend and helper. Police
officers are always acting correct, and they solve crimes mostly because the
criminal does an error.

\- Eastern Germany (Polizeiruf): The police is a working class hero, but most
crimes are solved by denunciation. It was fairly common in communist German
Polizeiruf that mothers and wifes denunciate their own child or man.

imho, TV is a propaganda machine, invented in WW2. Watching TV, should only be
done in a reflecting context, regardless if you watch a Nazi movie like Jud-
Suess, or an US crime movie.

~~~
hindsightbias
\- BBC: complex characters that often do bad to do good, must fight against
their peers/superiors, societal/gender prejudices, make big mistakes,
uncompromising but ultimately win out (Prime Suspect, Inspector series,
Luther).

Now, what I've seen of their intel shows (Spooks, MI-5) not sure how nuanced
they are.

------
pasbesoin
I don't know its backstory, but from my relatively superficial perspective, I
view the TV show "24" as one of the most successful instances of propaganda
ever created.

I don't care what its individual participants may have to say about its role.
"Everyone" seemed to be watching it, and it seems to at least correlate with
an increasing public attitude in the U.S. that "the [t-word] could be / are
everywhere". And with the attitude that "anything is justified" if it "stops
them".

Seriously, if non-U.S. participants here want some insight into the recent
U.S. psyche -- on a general level -- one good starting point would be to watch
"24".

~~~
smacktoward
You're not wrong. _24_ 's influence on public opinion on the question of
torture was profound and significant -- especially among young people who were
most likely to be attracted to careers in the military.

It got so bad that the dean of the US Military Academy at West Point begged
them to stop, because he was distressed at the opinions about torture he was
seeing among his cadets
([http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/19/070219fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/19/070219fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all)):

 _U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States
Military Academy at West Point, flew to Southern California to meet with the
creative team behind “24.”...

Finnegan and the others had come to voice their concern that the show’s
central political premise—that the letter of American law must be sacrificed
for the country’s security—was having a toxic effect. In their view, the show
promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the
training and performance of real American soldiers. “I’d like them to stop,”
Finnegan said of the show’s producers. “They should do a show where torture
backfires.” ...

Finnegan told the producers that “24,” by suggesting that the U.S. government
perpetrates myriad forms of torture, hurts the country’s image
internationally. Finnegan, who is a lawyer, has for a number of years taught a
course on the laws of war to West Point seniors—cadets who would soon be
commanders in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. He always tries, he
said, to get his students to sort out not just what is legal but what is
right. However, it had become increasingly hard to convince some cadets that
America had to respect the rule of law and human rights, even when terrorists
did not. One reason for the growing resistance, he suggested, was
misperceptions spread by “24,” which was exceptionally popular with his
students. As he told me, “The kids see it, and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what
about “24”?’ ”_

They didn't stop, of course, but star Kiefer Sutherland did agree to speak at
West Point to remind cadets that the show was fiction
([http://www.hollywood.com/news/tv/3662740/u-s-army-invites-
ki...](http://www.hollywood.com/news/tv/3662740/u-s-army-invites-kiefer-
sutherland-to-give-anti-torture-speech)).

------
stephengillie
In this scenario, Hollywood glamorizes law enforcement by not only portraying
LEOs as basically paladins who are working hard to "catch bad guys", but also
by portraying all criminals as despicable villains who only seek to hurt
others. This glamorization makes us _want_ to be spied upon, as the narrative
tells us that this allows the "good guys" to catch those who are trying to
harm us.

(edited)

~~~
tkahn6
Except, you know, all the movies where the antagonist is actually given a
backstory or character development.

Example: Safe House where eventually the audience is shown that the reason
Denzel Washington's character defects and turns on the CIA is because the CIA
was doing clearly immoral things.

I know this narrative is attractive because it makes 'the masses' out to be
sheep with you as the one that can see through it all, but it's the height of
arrogance and you happen to be wrong.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>Except, you know, all the movies where the antagonist is actually given a
backstory or character development.

The problem is that it's still oversimplifying. In movies like that the
government agents become the wooden bad guys who can do no right, and then the
general rule is that by the end of the movie they'll either be killed or
arrested and everything will be right with the world once again.

In reality the world is not so black and white. Government agents invading
privacy or otherwise breaking the law can have led long and distinguished
careers and have caught legitimate bad guys. They may or not be corrupt or
have illegitimate motives -- no doubt there are government officials who
sincerely believe that dragnet surveillance is a good thing. You can have
normal people who do bad things for good reasons, and it's still wrong and has
to be stopped.

The Dark Knight kind of exemplifies the problem. Even when they're trying to
give a justifiable treatment to the surveillance issue, at the end of the day
the hero builds and uses the unreasonably invasive tools to save the day and
is never brought to account for it by anyone. Because it allows them to be
mealy mouthed pandering marketing trolls: The gung ho surveillance advocates
get to see their arguments justified in fiction because the surveillance is
necessary for the good guys to win while the anti-surveillance crowd gets to
see the machine destroyed at the end. So Hollywood gets to avoid alienating
any of the viewers by taking any kind of a real stand rather than making the
hero face the hard choice and then do the right thing and catch the bad guys
the right way instead of breaking the rules for expediency.

~~~
tkahn6
> uses the unreasonably invasive tools to save the day and is never brought to
> account for it by anyone.

Except that no one knows about it besides he and Fox, so how can he be brought
to account for it by anyone?

Except that he tells Fox to destroy it precisely because it is so powerful and
invasive.

> The problem is that it's still oversimplifying.

Except that in the exact movie I gave as an example, in the end the CIA
explicitly is shown to be covering up the events of the movie and it is
indicated that they will continue to do immoral things.

See my original comment about the reason why you find this theory so
attractive.

------
georgemcbay
To be honest, I think what the author is seeing is more about pacing than it
is some grand conspiracy to make law enforcement look better.

To apply the same basic logic to another topic, consider hacking (the system
intrusion kind). Hackers in movies generally slam right through the security
system of new-to-them supposedly ultra-secure systems using software they
wrote previously and just had sitting on their hard drives. Is Hollywood
conspiring to show hackers as evil geniuses who don't need to work hard to
break into the securest of systems? Nah, it is just that nobody wants to see
all the mundane and time consuming shit that goes into the real activity. It
is easier to just flash a screenshot of some program like nmap doing some
scanning followed by a successful login prompt to the CIA supercomputer.
Likewise it is easier for cops to just have easy access to whatever
information because that moves things along faster than seeing them fill in
paperwork in triplicate and bring it before a judge or whatever else it is
they have to do IRL.

------
jmanamj
I kind of like how the entire 5 seasons of "The Wire" exist as counter to the
oversimplifying many commenters are examining in cable shows.

------
ilaksh
You guys will probably think this site is "a little over the top" heh, but I
think its very interesting:
[http://vigilantcitizen.com/category/moviesandtv/](http://vigilantcitizen.com/category/moviesandtv/)

"“Of course, many serial murders are nothing more than the work of a single
individual acting out a graphic horror movie he saw, or responding to powerful
“psychotic” impulses for aggression and predation. But many other serial
murders involve a cult protected by the U.S. government and the corporate
media, with strong ties to the police. These murders are actually intricately
choreographed rituals; performed first on a very intimate and secret scale,
among the initiates themselves in order to program them, them on a grand
scale, amplified incalculably by the electronic media. In the end what we have
is a highly symbolic, ritual working broadcast to millions of people, a
Satanic inversion; a Black mass, where the “pews” are filled by the entire
nation and through which humanity is paganized, brutalized and debased in
this, the “Nigredo” phase of the alchemical process.

The French adept Antonin Artaud, architect of the theory of the “Theater of
Cruelty” with its transformative power, and the inspiration for the extreme
sex-and-death media of our time, had this to say about the processing of the
Group Mind: ‘Aside from trifling witchcraft of country sorcerers, there are
tricks of global hoodoo in which all alerted consciousnesses participate
periodically… That is how strange forces are aroused and transported to the
astral vault, to that dark dome which is composed above all of… the poisonous
aggressiveness of the evil minds of most people… the formidable tentacular
oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon appear undisguised.’

The issue of controlling humanity with esoteric words and symbols encoded
within a play, a media spectacular or a ritual is one of the most difficult
for people to comprehend. That is why most people are viewed with utter
contempt as “cowans,” “the profane,” the “gentiles” and the “goyim” (cattle)
by secret society initiates. “I think we are farmed,” Charles Fort said of
humanity. It was Fort who also suggested that man deliberately invented the
dogma of materialism in order to shield himself from the evidence of what was
being done to him by means of psycho- spiritual warfare methods hyped by
“coincidence,” symbolism and ritual.”

\- Michael A. Hoffman, Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare

[http://www.amazon.com/Societies-Psychological-Warfare-
Michae...](http://www.amazon.com/Societies-Psychological-Warfare-Michael-
Hoffman/dp/0970378416)

I'm sure there is no truth to any of that though. Just ramblings of paranoid
psychotics.

------
tkahn6
So.. do you have any examples of this?

Because I have a counter example: A large part of the drama in shows like Law
and Order on the legal side comes from the process of acquiring a warrant or
prosecuting a case where it turns out that the evidence was acquired
unlawfully.

~~~
beachstartup
"enemy of the state" the will smith movie.

~~~
pyre
How was surveillance promoted with that movie? If anything it showed the
downsides of such surveillance (rogue operatives hijacking it for personal
gain).

