In this article, we are sharing the show notes and the full transcript of the Fourth Episode of our Mobilising Men for Feminist Peace podcast.

Welcome to Mobilising Men for Feminist Peace, a podcast from WILPF, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, in which we uncover the transformative power of feminist peace and explore how men can be active proponents of achieving gender equality and peace.

In this clip, Dr. Roger Stahl shares a few tips on how to tell if a film has received military support. 

Show Notes

The military uses a variety of tactics to spread its ideals and messages – one effective way is through the entertainment industry. From films to video games to ads, war will creep into your everyday life, whether you like it or not.

In this episode we discuss how the very opaque relationship between the military, weapons manufacturers and the entertainment industry works, how both parties benefit immensely from this connection, how it impacts society’s ideas of masculinity, and what we can all do to fight against it.

Our guest is Professor Roger Stahl, a renowned scholar specialising in the intersection of media, war, and politics.

Our Sources

Updated ‘Complete’ List Of DOD Films

Propaganda and how it is framed

Militainment, Inc.: Militarism & Pop Culture

Episode Full Script

Reem Abbas: [00:00:00] Would you watch a movie whose script was vetted and edited by the U. S. military? You most likely already have. Iron Man, Avatar, Transformers, and even Pitch Perfect 3. The military and its ideals have a way to creep into our homes, even for those of us who live thousands of kilometers away from the nearest war zone. Through films, TV shows, video games and ads, war will find you wherever you are. 

Dean Peacock: And this has a name militainment, or the military entertainment complex, where militaries and entertainment companies cooperate for their mutual benefit. In this episode, we’re joined by Roger Stahl, a professor, writer, and filmmaker who’s been at the forefront of research and advocacy into militainment for the past 20 years.

Welcome to the Mobilising Men [00:01:00] for Feminist Peace podcast, where we journey into the intersections of masculinities, violence, and feminist solutions. I’m Dean Peacock, project director of the Mobilising Men for Feminist Peace programme at the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the oldest women’s peace organisation in the world.

Reem Abbas: And I am Reem Abbas, Communications Coordinator of the MMFP programme.

Roger Stahl is the reference when examining militainment. In 2007, he released his first documentary, Militainment Inc.: Militarism and Pop Culture. It examines the militarisation process of American pop culture. And how war is glamorised in the media and by the entertainment industry. A few years later, he published a book of the same name.

Dean Peacock: Roger is professor of communication studies at the University of Georgia. And in his latest film titled Theaters of War, [00:02:00] he examines the influence of the Pentagon and the CIA in shaping Hollywood and television scripts. This is exactly what we’re going to talk about today. Welcome, Roger. It’s great to have you here with us.

Reem Abbas: So, Roger, in our research, we saw that militainment was initially coined by President Richard Nixon. Can you describe the context of how this term came to be? You are known for your own work on militainment, how do you define it and what drew you to do this kind of work? 

Roger Stahl: Yeah, I’ve been looking at the term and also the phenomenon of militainment, since about 2002, 2003. You know, there was the big wave of military activity with regard to Afghanistan and Iraq in that period of time that really captured my imagination. And I started working on it in an academic context, pretty intently. And this is when I stumbled upon this term that had already been in circulation. And, you know, people were looking for a [00:03:00] word at that point to describe what seemed like a massive confluence between the kind of buildup of the military industrial complex as the invasions got underway,

and what seemed to be a kind of excitability on the part of the media to get into these operations and to cast them as a miniseries or a reality TV series. Specifically, people were noticing that video game manufacturers were capitalising on the conflict itself and the excitement and the conflict to sell games.

So between, you know, dispatches from Iraq, you would see dispatches from video game companies in the form of advertisements sandwiched in between the news. And I thought this was such a curious and weird phenomenon, at the time, horrifying that I started looking into the connections between, you know, video game manufacturers,

and there’s a long history there that, you know, stretches all the way back to at least [00:04:00] the 1991 Gulf War when a lot of that kind of activity got underway. But it really took off right around 2003. So it was this explosion of this kind of mutual activity or consequent activity, contemporaneous activity, things that were happening at the same time.

And I, I wanted to find out if there were connections between these institutions and lo and behold, there were. The US military was benefiting from sort of its advertisement in the, in the entertainment sector in the form of video games and other things. And of course the games were benefiting from this as well.

They were reaping all kinds of authenticity from their ability to capture with some verisimilitude the weapons of war and the actual operations. Circling back to this term, militainment, I did not know, your research is deeper than mine on this count, apparently, I did not know that this [00:05:00] arose from the Nixon administration way back in the, I imagine the 70s, maybe late 60s, who knows?

But what I saw was that dictionaries were kind of scrambling, online dictionaries mostly, scrambling to define this term, right around 2002, 2003. They defined it as a kind of, you know, broad interest in military affairs, but also the capitalisation of military conflict in the entertainment industries.

So you could see militainment style activities on the news. You could see them in traditional entertainment platforms like video games, reality TV, toys even, certainly movies. 

Dean Peacock: I wanted to ask you a little bit about the genesis of military video games because I seem to remember reading in your work, or perhaps someone else’s work, that in fact, the Pentagon was very involved in designing some of the first video games, and that that kind of accuracy in terms of their [00:06:00] depiction, that hyper reality that they convey, comes in part from the fact that they were initially used by the Pentagon as simulations and that it’s, it’s more than coincidence or kind of, you know, mutual benefit between the entertainment industry and the military.

I don’t know that history very well. So I was hoping you could correct me if I’m wrong or fill in some of the details. 

Roger Stahl: Yeah. Well, this is a long and complex history. You know, you could go all the way back to the first video game, which was called Space War. And that had input, monetary input, from the Department of Defence.

So it was an applied research endeavor. You know, that was extremely rudimentary, as you might imagine. We weren’t talking anything about simulating actual conflict with that game. So it was more, you know, war game scenarios and kind of game theory type of applications. But as you move through the [00:07:00] decades,

especially when you get to the 1990s, with what they call the Atari war or the first Nintendo war, then you have the opportunity for a lot of game manufacturers to start working very closely with the Department of Defence to manufacture simulation training applications. So there were, there were a couple of, you know, commercial games to come out of

this situation. So there’s one called LHX Attack Helicopter, which was based on the Apache helicopter, which was made famous by the first Gulf war. It was first a training simulator, but then it was released after the first Gulf war as a hyper realistic opportunity to fly the celebrity attack helicopter.

 There was another one called Super Battle Tank, that operated in the same way. It was a tank simulator used by the military, that then, you know, they, they saw commercial opportunities and they created a commercial version for it. That [00:08:00] trend really sustained throughout the 1990s. Where you have game manufacturers working closely with the military, sometimes even loaning game hardware, which was more advanced in the civilian sector, in exchange for the development of training software and the use of training software that was used by the military that then could be applied and used in commercial settings.

Famously SEGA, you know, had this very advanced gaming chip in their SEGA Genesis platform, which I played on as a kid. And, the military found that very useful to develop targeting systems, targeting and control systems. And so SEGA benefited from that relationship because they were able to import training simulators and sell them on the commercial market.

Dean Peacock: And was any of this transparent? Did the people playing the games or purchasing the games for their children have any sense that this was the case? 

Roger Stahl: No, no. And certainly, [00:09:00] I was not as sophisticated at 12 years old when I was playing these things as I am now. You know, even at that age, you know, I could tell that these were being marketed in accordance with the Gulf War, which I had seen and I’d been familiar with, and all my friends were talking about how realistic and authentic they were.

There might’ve been some connection with the military and that things were designed with military help. I don’t think that was part of the marketing campaign though. And as I look back and research back on these games, nothing about them was transparent. You know, these days, video game manufacturers sometimes go out of their way to say, we worked with the military and look how authentic our games are.

But back then they didn’t do that. Probably because it was rightfully viewed as, you know, potentially damaging to the brand. 

Dean Peacock: How do you think that shifted? How have we ended up at a place where instead of hiding that, games celebrate it? 

Roger Stahl: So there’s a big difference between the way the military approaches games and [00:10:00] how they approach films.

So, video game manufacturers, you know, they, they hire celebrity generals and other spokespeople that, you know, are constantly talking about how closely they worked with the military and how authentic the game is. With feature films, it’s the exact opposite. You know, they do their best to hide this relationship.

They talk about it in only oblique ways. They never give details. You know, there are a couple of exceptions to this, you know, Active Valor in 2012, I think it was a big exception. But video games, you know, they, they seem to have a kind of immunity to the charge of propaganda that films don’t. And I think that has something to do with our kind of sensibility about

how the medium works. It’s a lot easier to make the charge of propaganda against something that is, seems like a monologue. And that’s what a film is. It’s a monologue. But there’s a sense in video games that you as a player are defining the story. And because there’s so much [00:11:00] interactivity involved, I think people are, even though there’s cinematics and there’s storylines, I think they believe that video games are largely immune from, you know, acting as a hypodermic needle that contains an official message. 

Reem Abbas: I want to reflect on this a little bit before we go into films. When it comes to video games, also a lot of it is about how users kind of recreate experiences.

I mean, there was this article about how Minecraft, World of Tanks, and games like that, users have been able to recreate, for example, some of the battles that are happening during the ongoing Russian aggression on Ukraine. So the games are depending on the players who play to recreate such experiences.

And the players could actually be, you know, soldiers, officers, and so on. Is this something that can be controlled or it’s supposed to not be controlled? 

Roger Stahl: Well, I think there’s a couple of different categories of games. Some are the kind of sandbox games that, you know, Minecraft would fall into. [00:12:00] And so there’s, there’s kind of infinite possibilities for users and there’s huge user base to create things, you know, different maps and worlds.

And, invariably, a lot of the things that people are seeing on the news are going to leak into that, especially if they involve conflict. And especially if they involve like an intense kind of nationalism, which the Ukraine Russian war has provoked in the United States. So people are taking sides and they want to participate in that somehow.

Maybe they feel a kind of empathy for one side or another, and they’re going to start you know, from the ground up creating these maps. So that’s, that’s one, I think, category. The other category is officially sponsored stuff. And so, you know, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Medal of Honor, all of these games have been subject to official oversight, official contributions and cooperation.

And, you know, when that kind of interaction happens, the official entity, in this case, the Department of Defence, or it could be another agency, they want to [00:13:00] get things right. And so you get the official version with all the, all the talking points and in the case of, you know, weapons manufacturers, they want to make sure that the machine is being used in the right scenario,

that’s going to sell it in the right way to the right people. In the case of private arms manufacturers, they’re going to you know, use it to product place. So, you know, as we’re working through video games, it’s, I think it’s important to make that distinction. 

Dean Peacock: Roger, I’m glad you’ve raised the question of product placement.

I think it’s something that not very many people know much about. Certainly, I was very surprised as I read about how that happens. And you know, the financial transactions that happen between arms manufacturers and video games. Can you tell us, just sort of fill us in a little bit on what that looks like, the extent of it.

And if you, you know, don’t mind also sharing your thoughts on the impact that you think it has. 

Roger Stahl: Yeah, [00:14:00] there’s a couple of different kinds of what we might call product placement when it comes to military goods or commercial small arms. The first is, you know, big weapons manufacturers who want to get in on the game and they want to sell weapons to the American public. You know, the whole idea here is to form a kind of nationalistic or an emotional connection to these weapons systems. So you see this in toy manufacturers, like model toys, weapons manufacturers are intimately involved in that thing, in that business. And the toy manufacturers commercially benefited from that. And the same thing is true with films. You know, Lockheed wants to get the F 35 into as many films as possible.

It has that interest on a commercial level, but it’s also working through the Department of Defence in order to make that happen. So this is the official product placement where we haven’t talked about this yet, but the Department of Defence has a, an office called the entertainment liaison office. It’s official title’s the Entertainment Media Office. [00:15:00] But there are these liaisons that work on the part of the Department of Defence that then appoint people for the entertainment industry, if, you know, a film producer wants to represent the military in any way in a film. That could be a war movie. It could be sci fi or a monster movie. It doesn’t matter. And, if they want, you know, that kind of big bang in their films, they want the fighter jets, the aircraft carriers or whatever, they go to the Department of Defence, talk to this point person.

And, that person sets them up with the goods in exchange for script oversight. So they say, give us your script first. We’re going to go through it. And give you a three or four pages of changes that we want. And if you make the changes, then we can write up a contract and you can have the stuff in your, in your movie.

And through this process, the goods, and it could be something that a weapons company wants to push appear here in the [00:16:00] film. And, there’s a kind of forward pressure on the Department of Defence to secure money for the next greatest, latest weapon system by engaging in this public relations process. So they often say, you know, put an F 22 in there, put an F 35 in there, see what you can do.

Dean Peacock: Is that true also of video games that they’re placing big weapon systems in video games? 

Roger Stahl: Well, the documentation we have on video games is pretty slim. We have lots of thick files on films and the, and the, the process they went through, the kinds of things that the military asked for in terms of script rewriting. But what we have on video games are mentions and what they call weekly activities reports.

So they’ll say we worked on Call of Duty this week, or the people from Medal of Honor came out, which is EA Arts, came out to such and such a base and they recorded Marines doing [00:17:00] grenade throwing practice, you know. And they got authentic sounds of people like pulling pins out of grenades and the different kinds of explosions they make in different situations.

We don’t have a lot of documentation where the military says, okay, we want you to put this very large and expensive weapon system, or try it out in a game scenario. Those things show up though. What comes to mind, are all the drones. I mean, almost every single U S drone system, you know, from the roving land based drones to the fixed wing to the helicopter drones, I mean, they’re all represented in various games, Medal of Honor and Call of Duty. And, maybe they’re working directly with arms manufacturers for that. Maybe the Department of Defence is specifically suggesting those. We just don’t have the documentation at this point to show what’s happening there. I can speculate, and I think accurately that, you know, it’s the same kind of dynamic that [00:18:00] happens in films.

There’s pressure from arms manufacturers and the military entertainment liaison offices are kind of forwarding those requests to game designers, and that’s how those weapon systems show up. 

Dean Peacock: Just so insidious and so behind the scenes, right? You’ve started talking a little bit about film. And, you know, I first encountered your writing in a piece where you, you start your chapter by looking at Avatar, if I remember correctly, and some of the behind the scenes processes that informed the representations of the US military. And so can we open that up and, you know, just sort of tell the story, if you would, about how this plays itself out in terms of Hollywood blockbusters. 

Reem Abbas: And if I can just also add something, Professor Roger about military assets, you know, [00:19:00] how can film producers get access to military assets?

Also, how do editorial changes occur? And if the changes are sometimes geared towards changing our perspective when it comes to historical events? So please tell us the story of the entertainment media office, you know, that is part of the Pentagon. 

Roger Stahl: Yeah, let’s walk through that. It’s an interesting one and a weird one.

The Department of Defence houses an entertainment media office. It’s a part of the Undersecretary of Public Affairs. So it’s a public affairs entity. And it’s designed to, as they say in the Air Force, Protect and project the image of the military in entertainment media. Which is not usually where you would expect to find this kind of public relations effort.

You know, they’re in the news, maybe propaganda posters. I don’t know, but, but not entertainment media. But this is their bread and butter. And the office is formally charged [00:20:00] with promoting recruiting and retention, first and foremost. But also what they call public understanding. If you are a producer in Hollywood and you want to represent the military in any way, and it could be just having military personnel in your film or shooting on a base or having access to military equipment, submarines, fighter jets, aircraft carriers, or historical military uniforms.

If you want military advice, then you come to this office and they will straighten you out at a price. So there’s strings attached to this relationship. So they first say, hand over your script and we’ll go through it and get back to you. And as they go through the script, they usually come back with you know, it’s usually two to five pages of line by line, page by page edits.

You know, we want you to change this here. And I would say about 80 percent of those are technical in nature because the military does, if they’re going to help [00:21:00] out with something, they want it to be technically correct. So this badge goes here and that’s not how that subordinate would talk to their superior.

 But about 20 percent is the kind of PR pay dirt that they’re really interested in. And that’s the reason why the office exists is to make sure that the military is represented in the most favorable way possible. And so, you know, they’re interested in the military looking competent. That military force usually works out for the best.

That they don’t engage in all kinds of unsavory activities like war crimes or torture, killing civilians. They want to make their weapon systems look cool. They want the heroes of the film to be military and have military backgrounds. They want to airbrush historical episodes, especially episodes that make the military look bad.

So, you know, they, they often take entire subplots out or say that if [00:22:00] you, if you leave this in, we’re not going to support you at all. So there’s a list of what the military calls showstoppers that are going to get you rejected right off the bat. But they’re willing to work with you if you, if you are willing to massage and to change aspects of your script.

So if, if the military is satisfied, then they will give you the stuff and they go into the contract phase. It’s called a production assistance agreement, both sides sign it. And it’s, uh, it’s about what the military will offer when they will do it on what schedule and what the obligations of the film production company are in return.

And that usually includes the fact that the Entertainment Liaison Office gets a final review of the film, so they send it in for a screening before it can be even released. Sometimes after that, in the documentation, we see, you know, after the release that there’s cooperation, even during the promotional stages of things.

So the military will, you know, stage a [00:23:00] gala or a special screening or something like that, invite military personnel. And sometimes that will be more public in, in nature. Captain Marvel had a very, you know, public, what they called a blue carpet event. It was part of the film’s publicity. For the most part that that’s where the, the relationship ends.

Dean Peacock: Give us a sense of the scale of this, Roger. Is this happening just to a few select films or, you know, how long has it been going on? 

Roger Stahl: Up until about five years ago, the consensus was that there was maybe a couple hundred films and we, we really didn’t know which ones had collaborative work done on them.

 There was some kind of scant scholarship on this. It wasn’t critical at all. In fact, the kind of scholarship that was being done on it was, we found out later was being done in cooperation with the U S military as well. So we, we didn’t know. And, about 2017, [00:24:00] there was a series of successful freedom of information act requests that yielded a few thousand pages of documentation, plus the Entertainment Liaison Office’s own internal database of films that they worked on. And it was about 900 films, which still doesn’t capture how many films and television shows that they’ve worked on, but it was, that was an incomplete database, but it really opened up our ability to sense the scale of what was going on.

 And since then we’ve collected about 60, 000 pages of internal documentation from FOIA requests and other archives that have opened up. And now we’ve been able to count around 2, 500 or just over 2, 500 DOD and CIA collaborative projects that stretch back to World War II, and then a few that stretch back all the way to the birth of cinema and all the way back to The Birth of a Nation, 1917, which was a collaboration between [00:25:00] Griffith and the U S army at the time.

Dean Peacock: It’s just remarkable. And you know, it’s sort of mind blowing. Give us some examples of major blockbusters where this is particularly evident. Yeah, I’m sure listeners would be really interested to know what films they’ve watched have been produced in this way. 

Roger Stahl: Well, it’s a long list. 

Reem Abbas: And if I may add, after looking at this long list, are you able to tell based on some characteristics or something in the storyline that gives it away?

Roger Stahl: You really can’t. At the end of the day, you, you can’t know for sure if the military has been working on a film formally. I’ll give you an example of, you know, something that I thought must surely be a military product, but was not. And that’s American Sniper. We, uh, I had my suspicions about this film. It includes, you know, some big ticket military items like a C4 transport plane in the background, on the tarmac in one of the scenes and they’re riding in [00:26:00] it in another scene.

And I thought certainly, this must’ve been sponsored by the Navy or the, or the army. But, uh, they, they, you know, the documentation suggests that they turn it down. They don’t suggest the reasons that they turned it down. My suspicion there is that it seemed like a political hot potato to them and they just didn’t want to out themselves to that extent and, subject themselves to a public controversy.

My suspicion too, is that, that the filmmakers, this is Clint Eastwood, who’s worked with the military before, worked behind the scenes through some private arms suppliers that probably had backdoor access to military hardware. But formally the military did not work on that one. And that was surprising to me.

So you can’t tell, but you know, if you see military hardware in a film, if you detect plots that seem awfully favorable to a military version of historical [00:27:00] events, your suspicions and your flags can go up, as well. And, you know, just know that this is widespread. You know, we’re talking about maybe a third to a half of all films of this nature have received military support.

I mean, it’s a big chunk. We haven’t quite quantified it yet. Dean, you asked, what, what big franchises? If you, if you look at superhero movies and fantasy movies, a good portion of the Marvel cinematic universe is military supported, from Iron Man to Captain Marvel. Transformers was also supported almost end to end.

There’s… the first four Transformers franchise had formal military support. And with regard to the first two, they were significant because all four branches of the military participated and that had not happened before. Those films could rightly be kind of looked at as a kind of military parade.

There’s so much equipment from all four branches and each of the branches’ like fighting [00:28:00] to get front stage exposure in those films. But then you have like other films that you wouldn’t expect like, you know, Pitch Perfect 3 is always a fun one. There’s like a, that’s, you know, where the, the singing group goes on tour with the USO.

There’s, you know, not just films, but you know, talk shows and reality TV shows, a lot of cooking shows, cake shows go into business with the military. So you have all this mundane activity that’s happening in reality TV land as well. 

Dean Peacock: So why would they collaborate on a cooking show?

Roger Stahl: There’s a sense, I think among producers that there’s a kind of military story that sells really well.

So homecomings, you know, like people returning from the front and embracing their families and their wives. You see a lot of that on talk shows and those are arranged quite willingly by the military, and producers have found that they sell really well. So, you know, Ellen DeGeneres or Rachel Ray will do this over and over again.

 [00:29:00] That’s a formal setup, the military handpicks the soldier that’s going to be appearing on that show. The same thing happens on game shows quite a bit. Talk shows, especially the late night talk shows where they’ll fill up an audience with military personnel. That’s an audience draw for the show, so it’s like getting your hands on fighter jet or an aircraft carrier. So it’s good for the show, but it’s also good for the military and they, they will supply military personnel for certain kinds of events and certain kinds of stories. So homecomings, military shout outs, you know, if they’re going to celebrate a memorial day or something like that, they fill up the audience with service members on a game show or a talk show, that kind of stuff is rampant as well.

Dean Peacock: And I know you’ve written about Top Gun and the ways in which that film represented an important moment for the military in the wake of the humiliation of U. S. defeat in [00:30:00] Vietnam, and trying to recast the story of the U. S. military. Can you tell us just a little bit about that? 

Roger Stahl: Yeah, Top Gun is a watershed, you know, that’s 1986.

Up until that point, you watch a war movie and it’s all about soldiers slogging through the muck and getting shot and ambushed. And Top Gun is not that, you know, it’s, it is a, nominally a war movie, that’s supposedly about war fighting, even though, you know, you’d be hard pressed to identify who the enemy is exactly.

 It’s another fighter jet, a mig with a, you know, a red star emblem on the helmet. That’s all we know. But, you know, Top Gun occupies this place, you know, scholars have documented this quite extensively, even before we knew much about the military’s involvement in Top Gun. But, you know, it’s this moment where you emerge from the image of the US military that is intimately associated with Vietnam, protesters, the big money, all of [00:31:00] that. And you, you have a new image of war that’s high tech, and it’s about these sort of clean fly boys who are high fiving and having a great time. And they’re winning the war as well, to the extent that it’s being fought.

 But it’s a new version of the military and, you know, military planners frequently talked about Top Gun as having a huge impact on morale, on recruitment and on public sentiment with regard to conflict, you know. It made it much more televisible, gave it a new storyline, especially for the first Gulf War.

Reem Abbas: You just said something that is very interesting to us, which was recruitment and how a lot of the films really want to recruit, you know, they want people to join the army. And it seems that in some cases, like the case that you just said it does work. So how do you avoid… because you just said that it’s really difficult to tell if this movie has been, you know, supported or has been editorially supported by the [00:32:00] Entertainment Media Office,

but how do you kind of avoid, you know, this kind of entertainment or even propaganda? So what’s the way out basically? 

Roger Stahl: Yeah, you know, it takes a kind of sophisticated critical media literacy in order to, to approach this issue. Because you can’t know whether something was supported, and even if you do know, you might not know what kinds of individual changes were made to the film, what kind of story was being pushed, what kinds of messages they wanted to get into the heads of audience members.

You just don’t know until you have the documentation. But what you do know and what we have very detailed and high resolution picture of now with, you know, our 60, 000 pages of documentation is that the military is working on a vast scale and they’re not only working in film, they’re working in cake shows and game shows and reality TV and video games and, and things that might [00:33:00] escape our attention if we didn’t have the documents.

So what viewers can do is understand that certain kinds of messages are being pushed through a huge variety of entertainment media. And those include cleaning up the history of us military operations. So understanding US history and, and the dark side of US interventions overseas might be a key to sort of like battling the pervasive, you know, whitewashing of that through this process. Understand that they want to make it look like the military is effectual when often, you know, it does not work out for the best and makes problems worse. Understand that weapons are constantly being pushed. So whenever you see a representation of a high tech weapon system, that is an advertisement. And there are very few deviations from that formula. So if you understand, broadly speaking, [00:34:00] that these pressures are being put on Hollywood and TV and video games, then at least your defences can go up a little bit.

You know, take something like Black Hawk Down, which many people call an anti war film, right? The soldiers go in, they get shot up. It’s gruesome. It doesn’t make me want to sign up for, you know, the military. It doesn’t seem like a very good recruiting device. And yet the military supported that. Well, why did they do that?

Not because they wanted to, you know, use it as a recruiting poster, but because that episode in Mogadishu in 1993 was highly embarrassing, right? When it happened, Clinton had to go on the news and explain why we were there and why U. S. soldiers were dying. And it was a very difficult job. You know, fast forward a decade and the military has an opportunity to work intimately with Ridley Scott and the producers of Black Hawk Down to kind of rewrite history, to rewrite that story.

So yeah, it’s bloody. And it’s hard to watch. But it goes from a story about an embarrassing [00:35:00] episode where we screwed up. We were in a part of the world where we shouldn’t have been. And, we were conducting counterinsurgency exercises on a clandestine scale. It goes from that story, an embarrassing little secret, to we were there to make sure that starving Somalis didn’t starve and to fight off warlords.

And, you know, essentially turns that story into a military success. Because it… before it’s, we lost a bunch of soldiers, but in Black Hawk Down, you come away with this idea that U. S. forces were doing the right thing. They’re handing out rice and they got ambushed and we sent in some more heroic US soldiers and they saved them. And so, you know, the rescue narrative has been deployed like that over and over again with regard to historical narratives. So that’s, that’s an example of something to say, well, clearly the military, you know, didn’t have a hand in that, because what would they get out of it?

And, once you know, the kind of playbook that has been used over and over again in [00:36:00] various films, then, you know, you might have some critical perspective on why they might get involved with the film like that. And I’ll just say to finish that up, the, uh, the level of involvement in Black Hawk Down was really astonishing.

It was something like 15 or 16 different helicopters, the upper brass, and also some folks at the State Department entered into a, what they call a status of forces agreement with the government of Jordan, where the film was shot, so that they could transport military helicopters and military equipment onto Jordanian soil.

So it was a kind of diplomatic effort that was involved there in order to shoot the film. That’s how much they cared about this. It was a huge enterprise and really paid off for them, I think, in the end. 

Reem Abbas: I’m interested to know if there is a pushback in the industry. So is there a pushback in the industry against meddling, and editorial control by the military?

So do you feel that Hollywood itself, is it after more freedom of [00:37:00] expression or are there voices that are aware of this war economy that they’re sustaining and they’re okay with that? 

Roger Stahl: To make the documentary, Theaters of War, we approached so many directors and producers and even actors. And very few, if any wanted to talk to us. There were a few that were, you know, getting out of the business or retiring, and maybe it had a run in with the Defence Department, but you know, the big name that we were able to capture was Oliver Stone, who had both Born on the 4th of July and Platoon rejected by this office.

They almost were never made because of that. So there, there, there are some figures like that. They’re few and far between. When this issue does come up, nobody wants to talk about it. Because they understand that part of what makes a good career is having a lot of options open. So if, if, if you shut down a relationship with the U S military as a producer, as a [00:38:00] director, or is it even as an actor, then, you’re going to put your production in jeopardy.

Like a film like The Hunt for Red October, we found out that it was in the contract, that that producer, his name is Mace Neufeld, he produced all the Jack Ryan movies, his producer at Paramount said, you, you have to have DOD support. You have to have them sign on and approve the script or else we’re not going to fund your movie and it won’t get made.

And there’s anecdotal evidence that suggests that a lot of projects are put into jeopardy or maybe even not made if they don’t do business with the DOD. So nobody wants to, nobody wants to raise a stink or rock the boat because you know, their careers are on the line and every little bit counts when you’re talking about 120 scripts getting an option for every movie that’s made.

So. I wanted to tell a story about, you know, when this issue does come, I want us to tell the story about James Gunn, who directed in 2021, this movie called the Suicide Squad. [00:39:00] And it’s a superhero movie. It’s about this kind of like off brand group of superheroes that gets hired by the DOD, in the film to do a beach landing and overthrow a fictional Latin American government.

And it looks a lot like the Bay of Pigs landing. And they accomplished their mission. Everybody’s happy. There’s a lot of blood shed. But, you know, this was sponsored by the DOD. We know from the documentation, they provided some aircraft and they formally, you know, sponsored it. People online suspected this and they asked James Gunn about this, on a Twitter feed. And James Gunn hopped on and he said, “I know the military does this. It’s innocuous and it doesn’t happen very often. And when they do change scripts, it’s for technical reasons and they don’t change… they don’t compromise the artistic integrity of the product. So don’t worry about it.”

And he said, you know, “I’ve never had a project where I’ve cooperated with the military.” It flat [00:40:00] out says this, and we’ve got documentation in front of us that say he went through a series of meetings with the DOD and exchanged military hardware for changes in the script. So, you know, there’s a willingness, I think, on the part of Hollywood folks to defend this kind of activity.

 One of the things that’s interesting about this relationship is that it’s very brittle. In the 1990s, as they were going through the kind of post Cold War peace dividend arms reduction talks, they thought about cutting this office. And, it was on the shopping block. Jack Valenti, who was head of the MPAA, that’s the Motion Picture Association of America, which is a trade organisation representing the big players, the big production houses. He went to Washington, DC and lobbied that they keep the office open because it’s so valuable to the industry to have this kind of stuff available for free or for cut price. And they were, they were able to keep it open.

 So, you know, the, [00:41:00] the existence of this office is not a given, even though it’s been around for a hundred years. It’s vulnerable. And I think it’s vulnerable to public pressure. So, you know, there could be an abolitionist kind of movement. You know, let’s get rid of it. And that, that could do some good, but I, I, I think that, uh, if we’re going to put efforts into something, it would be full transparency.

So putting a notice. You know, the FCC mandates this for commercial products and commercial sponsorship, so why can’t they mandate it for official sponsorship? It would be easy to do, a notice up front that this was influenced and sponsored by the DOD or the CIA. That could be one thing that would be easily implemented.

Make all the documents public, all of them. There’s 20, 000 pages of Top Gun Maverick documentation that we’re, we’re waiting on right now that they’re loathe to relinquish. I can’t wait till I get my hands on it, but they don’t, they really don’t want [00:42:00] to jeopardise their own office and also future relationships of that kind.

So that’s, that’s another place to put pressure. But right now there isn’t a formal campaign. There aren’t laws on the books or any sponsored legislation of this variety. There has been in the past, sporadically, but there isn’t anything right now. 

Dean Peacock: And, and tell us a little bit about that previous legislation, I’m very curious. 

Roger Stahl: There have been controversies in the past regarding mainly military funding of subsidising of Hollywood. So, people don’t want their taxpayer money going to Hollywood subsidies, essentially. And that’s, that’s kind of where the rubber hits the road for a lot of these controversies.

 But then secondarily, they, they, they’re, there are laws against using public funds to propagandise the population domestically. So they find all these other ways around it. One of the ways around it is of course, is to subvert those laws and not, not [00:43:00] participate in propaganda that you can recognise qua propaganda, but to participate in the editorialising in feature films and television.

So I’ll give you an example of some of this legislation. You know, in 1969, a film came out during the kind of most controversial peak of the Vietnam war called the Green Berets. And it was a John Wayne film. He didn’t like the kind of war movie fare that was coming out at the time. And he wanted something a little bit more jingoistic and nationalistic and directly supported our boys in Vietnam, as he said.

 Yeah, he approached the Johnson administration directly and wrote a letter that said, uh, I want to do this. And they passed that on to the Entertainment Media Office. It was called the Motion Picture Production Office at that time. And they got the project going and they gave him unfettered access for almost nine, ten months to what’s was called at the time,

Roger Stahl: and the name has changed now, Fort Benning, Georgia, and all the helicopters. [00:44:00] It was just a ton of personnel, helicopters, explosives, live fire scenarios. They basically turned Fort Benning into a movie set. And they charged him 18, 000 dollars for this, 18, 000. It was a huge controversy about the money spent, but also secondarily, like, what are we doing?

You know, this is obviously a propaganda poster. And so, you know, uh, some representatives got together some legislation to cut all funding to this office and these kinds of endeavors. There would be no more subsidising of Hollywood. And that legislation fell through. There’ve been kind of several attempts, kind of driven by flare ups, controversies about mainly money, that have led to attempts to do this.

They’ve never worked out, fully. I mean, the best that they were able to accomplish was in 1961, after The Longest Day, they were able to cajole the [00:45:00] office into charging filmmakers for access to stuff. Before then, they just gave the stuff away for free. But there was a controversy about the Berlin crisis and, you know, all these troops that had been taken from Germany to stage these beach landings because it was a D day landing movie, The Longest Day, they were all in, you know, Normandy and they weren’t able to address the crisis that was unfolding by the Berlin wall in Germany. This was a big controversy that led to the demand that at the very least filmmakers have to pay for this stuff.

And so they implemented a nominal fee, which really, isn’t a fee at all. And they found all kinds of ways to go around those fees. So, there’ve been controversies like this sporadically over time. 

Dean Peacock: Let’s pivot to the question of the influence that this has on kind of construction of gender identities and the sort of [00:46:00] gender stereotypes that get peddled through these relationships.

So if there’s anything you can say about constructions of masculinities, manhood and the ways in which these films with this influence shape that. 

Roger Stahl: What we are seeing in terms of gender is the kind of weaponisation of feminism. And that might seem like a really incendiary term, but think about Captain Marvel, for example. They’re trying to add women, recruit young girls into the ranks, open up the air force to them because enlistment numbers are falling off and they see this as a valuable demographic that can replenish the ranks. So Captain Marvel is a recruiting device that’s designed to go after that demographic. And how do they do it? They do it by proffering a version of feminism that is very much geared around violence.

So, you know, not the feminism of [00:47:00] we, and not the feminism of let’s, we’re all in this together and let’s equalise the playing field, but the feminism of I can fly a fighter jet too, and kill with the best of them. And, so that’s, that’s what you get, you know, even though the air force still calls their flyers airmen, that’s what you get from something like Captain Marvel, where you get this military air force backstory of this person who is actualising their feminism and their sense of self advocacy through this highly militarised character.

 So that’s one gender component that they’re really pushing hard. And then we all, we have all these leftovers from the eighties. Susan Jeffords, a wonderful scholar wrote a book called Hard Bodies. And it was about military movies in the 1980s in the wake of Vietnam. So this is where you get your, you get, you get your Rambos and you get your commandos, your Schwarzeneggers and your Stallones. You get all these characters who are these vein popped, hard bodies, spectacular [00:48:00] bodies that are designed to counter the emasculation that happened after Vietnam. So we lost this war and America was feeling low. Hollywood responds with these stories where, you know, you have these like lone rangers going out that are completely with sheer bodily force, overpowering the enemy, mowing down hundreds of them, by themselves. They’re sort of going it alone and kind of cleaning up the mess and, and reestablishing America as a strong force and capturing that sense of masculinity again.

So that happens after Vietnam. And, you know, that was kind of a reclamation of American masculinity that was happening as kind of part of a larger cycle. And that kind of persists to the present day, I would say. I mean, I think we’re going to see another hard bodies era, and we’ve probably already seen parts of it in the wake of Afghanistan and Iraq, these two losing conflicts, right?

There’s going to be a kind of reclamation [00:49:00] cycle, and that’s going to happen through Hollywood. Maybe American Sniper was part of that, but, it’s all about going through a kind of rescue narrative or a series of rescue narratives that are designed to tell the story of how we win in the end. 

Reem Abbas: I want to just close by just giving you just a minute to reflect on just all the research and work that you have done.

Do you feel that the arguments that you’re making are becoming mainstream? And, if so, if you can just share maybe a story that you’ve come across, you know, where people are discussing this. If not, what are your hopes, you know, and, and what drives you to kind of just continue doing this work? 

Roger Stahl: I get a ton of interest in interview requests.

There’s a swell of media interest. I think in the post Top Gun Maverick era, where people saw this kind of massive influence in an obviously military supported production, and they saw how seductive it could be. [00:50:00] There was a kind of like wave starting in 2002 of interest in the subject. As this subject gets more and more attention, which I think it does, the narrative that seems to be settling in is that, okay, we know everything there is to know about this particular relationship, now, it’s all been disclosed. Everything is quite transparent. There’s nothing to see here. And I worry about that, because that is a kind of narrative that the DOD has been running for a long time.

So as it gets more exposure, I think we all need to keep our eye on the real stakes, which is, you know, the actual transparency and the actual availability of documents and the availability of information about whether a particular project was sponsored. I want to end with a good anecdote. You know, I, I get a lot of emails from people that run into my documentary just haphasardly. And they say, okay, yeah, my son, you know, came back from Afghanistan or Iraq [00:51:00] and everybody knows that those were losing games and everybody knows they were being held hostage there and recommissioned for tour after tour and everybody knows all about the rampant psychological effects, not just the PTSD and not just the traumatic brain injury, but the kind of moral injury that comes when you are subjected and being made to do morally unconscionable things day in and day out.

And so a lot of mothers will contact me after having seen the documentary and say, you know, I, I grew up with my son and I saw him watch these movies and I saw how seductive they were. And I saw that play directly into his idea to enlist. And now he’s home from the war. And now he wants to reflect on that.

And it really drives home to me how important this work is up front, because, you know, it’s preventative. When it comes down to it, it’s preventative. And it also kind of drives [00:52:00] home how psychological the military industrial complex really is. I mean, it starts with an idea, Sam Keane, one of the writers that I really liked from the 1980s that said, you know, before we kill someone with a ballistic missile or a battle ax, we invent the idea of the enemy.

And, you know, Hollywood is all about, it’s a dream factory, dream machine. And so is military public relations. You know, they want to get in, into our dreams and create the conditions by which those dreams lead to a healthy military apparatus. You know, one that can be used over and over again in all these foreign conflicts.

And so, you know, really fighting that is a psyop. It’s a psychological operation that has to be fought by the people like you and I.

Reem Abbas: Thank you again to Roger Stahl for joining us for this episode. 

Dean Peacock: Today we learned [00:53:00] that the Us. Department of Defence has a whole office responsible for liaising with the entertainment industry. One which is in charge of public understanding. In other words, they make sure the military is represented in a good light, in any entertainment through deals and script supervision.

Reem Abbas: That the U S military infiltrates all kinds of entertainment and pop culture from the obvious war based video games and superhero films to much more surprising content, like cooking shows and talk shows. 

Dean Peacock: And we also learned that the military. is now trying to recruit women by weaponising feminism in films.

Reem Abbas: Thank you for listening to another episode of the Mobilising Men for Feminist Peace podcast. You can find all the resources and bibliography for this episode on our website and in the show notes. Next time, our focus will be on the sinister world of mercenaries, their backers, and their steadily [00:54:00] growing role in conflicts around the world.

If you would like to support the work of WILPF, consider reading our publications and following our social media channels @WILPF. I am Reem Abbas. 

Dean Peacock: And I’m Dean Peacock. You’ve been listening to the Mobilising Men for Feminist Peace podcast from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. See you next time.

This podcast is produced by OG Podcasts. Find out more at ogpodcasts dot co dot uk