Hello and welcome to reverb everyone. I am Calvin Pollak and I'm joined on the mic as always by my co host and CO producer Alex Helberg. Alex, how's it going?
I'm pretty good there. Calvin, how are you?
Doing? Good. We are so excited today to be joined by Dr. Roger Stahl, who is a professor of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia. Roger studies rhetoric, media and culture. But in large part, his work has focused on understanding propaganda and public relations as they relate to state violence, conflict, and security. He's written two books, his most recent book is through the crosshairs war, visual culture and the weaponized gaze. Before that he wrote Millitainment, Inc. in 2010. And he's published in a bunch of amazing rhetoric journals. And in a more public capacity, he has produced documentary films, including theatres of war from last year Through the Crosshairs (2018), Returning Fire (2011), and Millitainment, Inc, from 2007. All of which are distributed by the MEDIA EDUCATION FOUNDATION. Roger and his work has been featured in such venues as NPR is all things considered the Guardian, AlJazeera. And now re:verb. We're so excited to have you, Roger. Thanks for joining us.
Great to be with you, Calvin and Alex.
Yeah, so thank you so much for being here. We, you know, we were really excited to invite you on the show because Alex and I both saw the wonderful 2022 film, Top Gun Maverick. I remember when Top Gun first came out, Alex, I think you saw it pretty early after its release. Right? I did.
Yeah. In a very, sort of the kind of environment that you imagine your everyday American goes to see it in a hometown movie theater, you know, that only charges five bucks for admission? $1.50 for a bucket of popcorn. And, you know, I'm right now. Oh, wait, sorry, I have to put down my Pentagon script for what I was supposed to read about my viewing of that. Viewing of that. Yeah, it was. Yeah, but I think I saw it before you and you saw it shortly after?
Well, no, actually. So I just saw it. So amazingly, amazingly, this tells you about how giant Topcon Maverick was, it's still playing here in Logan, Utah. At the cheap theater. I saw it like two weeks ago for the first time. And after seeing it. I was of course, because I'm a rhetoric nerd. And a culture nerd. I was doing a lot of research about it. And I came across Roger stalls article in the LA Times about the movie and about how it's part of this larger context of military influence and censorship in some cases of war related movies. And that led both me and Alex to watch the documentary theatres of war. And we realized that we need to do a much broader episode than just an episode about Top Gun Maverick. But staying on top gun Maverick for a second. Did you like the movie? Roger? Like, what did you think of it as a pure movie,
I gotta confess that I didn't see the film in the theater, I knew that God had supported it. And I wasn't too excited about financially supporting it myself. But luckily, a friend of mine had a, shall we say less than legitimate copy that I was able to review. So to preface this, I really didn't get the full theatrical experience with the screaming jets and the thunderclaps. And people cheering and yelling back at the screen, and I take it you know, from people that really enjoyed the film, they saw it in the theater and they had that visceral experience I didn't, I can only appreciate the film on a formal level. And on that level, I gotta say it was completely underwhelming contained no surprises was absolutely derivative and artless. The guys in my research group all got back from watching the movie all at the same time and agreed that this is just a version of Star Wars, where the the fighter jets have to go through some really daring maneuvers and fly sideways under bridges and through a tunnel to make a precise head on the Death Star. In this case, the facility the the uranium enrichment facility that needs to be destroyed. And along the way, the guy that's supposed to make the head has his instrument panel go out. So he's temporarily blinded as to sort of fly by feeling and also also target by feeling. One of the other pilots literally says to him, Don't think just Do you know, like, use the force. So I don't think that making an artistic statement or making something new or pushing the boundaries in any way was the point of this film. I think I think a couple of things were the point though, it's a response to certain kinds of anxieties. I mean, it's part of the whole wave of 80s nostalgia that we're currently going through with shows like Stranger Things, we're projecting fantasies back into an earlier, more pure, better, more comfortable period of American life. And it's also a kind of antidote for all the anxiety and isolation that we felt during COVID. I mean, it represented the before times what it was like to go to the movie theater in the presence of others, and cheer together at the screen. And not only that, it was an opportunity to experience something that we haven't experienced for a long time, which is its momentary sense of national unity, of being able to transcend the political divide and rally around a fundamental American institution like Hollywood and Tom Cruise and American military strength and an imagined common enemy. I mean, as ridiculous as it was the first Top Gun movie has become something of a touchstone for American popular culture and, and something of a Rosetta Stone for understanding American militarism.
Yeah, I appreciate that. You said that because I think it's important a lot of times to judge a piece of culture on its own terms, right, like what it is what it has clearly set out to do. Just out of curiosity, even though you had the potentially a little sub Rosa version. Did you ever still have the shot of Tom Cruise at the beginning, welcoming us back to the movies,
everybody, and welcome to Top Gun Maverick. Thank you all for being here. decades in the making, and so many people, our incredible cast and crew worked very hard to bring you the most immersive and authentic film experience. We could there's real estate teams real cheese, real speed. So we're so happy you're here in this theater, and seeing it on the big screen. So please enjoy. As we all made a free you.
Did yours include that?
No, I haven't seen that part. I've heard I've heard. That's right. It was Yeah, I heard that was part of the Hollywood pitch once again. Yeah, all the AMC movie theaters had closed by this point and 2020. So they really needed that, that pitch.
They did. And it was it was kind of fascinating as not only a way of you know, as you were kind of alluding to welcoming us back to the movies after this long period of not having this you know, communal get together of sitting down in a dark box with great sound. One of the things I thought was so fascinating about that intro was that it also was Tom Cruise saying, you know, these are real F-18s, these are real G's that you're seeing on all of our actors' faces, real reactions to getting, you know, sort of pummeled with this, the real force that all of our you know, military heroes are have to endure. But I guess to kind of zoom out a little bit away from just the aesthetics of Top Gun Maverick specifically, in your research, you uncovered a great deal about the partnership between the Top Gun production team. So folks like Jerry Bruckheimer, Don Simpson, and, of course, Tony Scott's in the original version. So if you could tell us a little bit about how you learned about just how involved the military has been in the Top Gun franchise, and how both of the Top Gun films helped the military achieve its propaganda goals.
Well, we didn't know too much about the military's involvement in the original Top Gun movie until about three years ago. But now we have the file and it's about 30 pages of script review notes, requests for changes, notes back and forth between the producers and the military. So if you look through those script change requests, you find that the Navy wanted to take out all references to alcohol and alcoholism on the base. They also changed Kelly McGillis character from Navy to civilian. They wanted to avoid any image of what they call fraternization, or romantic relationships among officers. And then there was gooses death, which was touchy because they don't ever want to suggest that their machines, their fighter planes are failing and killing people. So the changes that are part of the script to suggest that maybe goose did something wrong, then there's the issue of the enemy. I mean, everyone wonders why they didn't bother to name the enemy in that first film. And the reason for that is because the DoD sent part of the early script or an early scenario to the State Department for approval. And they looked at it and said, well, we can't have the enemy be North Korea, like you want it here, because we're trying to draw down tensions between North and South Korea at the moment. And it can't be Libya, because we don't want to give Qaddafi any ideas. So we recommend that you just keep it unsaid. Top Gun is not unique in this respect. I mean, when you go through the documents, you find that a lot of films are subject to these geopolitical interests and considerations and in the end become direct reflections of them. I would say it's a little bit of an outlier. In most cases, the military has no problem naming and demonizing official enemies. But in this case, I think the film was less about demonization, really and more about celebrating and glorifying the military machine.
That's extra fascinating too. I mean, just in light of the focus on the equipment more than the sort of flashiness of it all, versus the sort of explicit conflict, I mean not only because stripping that context away allows you to map it on to you know, just about any conflict you want, right? Like pick your enemy and sure it works. But also of the I think this was directly from your documentary, how there was a direct line in one of the documents that you found where somebody from the Navy or some Department of Defense higher up had essentially said, this movie succeeded in rehabilitating the Navy's and the US military's, basically, credibility after Vietnam, isn't that right?
Yeah, that was in the database, the official database that the military keeps that lists many of the projects they have cooperated on over the years. And there's a few sentences next to each entry and the one next to Top Gun says that the film completed rehabilitation of the military's image after it had been savaged by the Vietnam War. So yeah, that was that was one of the main functions of the film, scholars have been pointing out for years, that Top Gun represented this kind of watershed moment, where aesthetically, at least as appeared on the screen, the United States emerged from the Vietnam War emerged from the quagmire of Vietnam, the jungle in the muck, and instead, kind of set up shop in the sky, and clean, sleek, F 14. So it completely changed the dominant image of the military and allowed for a kind of selective forgetting of the past of Vietnam in particular, I mean, for a couple of decades after Vietnam, Americans didn't want to do it. Again, they were extremely reticent to authorize military force. So it required a an aesthetic intervention to remake the image of the military and pave the way for the first Gulf War, which happened just a few years later for getting Vietnam was one of the functions but another function was just completely D politicizing conflict, right, you'd have to justify the war, don't have to even name the enemy. I mean, it's an implicit message of American exceptionalism, we can just do what we want to do in the world of no questions asked. That's, of course, the implicit message of Top Gun Maverick to that the United States has every right to bomb anywhere else in the world that it wants doesn't even have to justify it, or again, name the country, that it just has the exceptional right to conduct operations like that. You could try a thought experiment and reverse the roles. What if the Iranian government had a hand in making a very popular movie about bombing uranium facilities in some unnamed superpower, we'd be freaking out about it. We'd say they're condoning war crimes, which they wouldn't be. But when we make the movie, nobody bats an eye. So so that's one function of the film, which is that normalization of that story of American exceptionalism. Then on top of that, you have the function of the film as a kind of weapons advertisement for forging emotional connections between the American public and in this case, the F 14. And these kinds of emotional connections accumulate so that next time there's a defense appropriations bill in front of Congress, it sails right through. And then of course, the most obvious function of a film like this is recruiting, the Air Force really made out, much to the chagrin of the Navy, the Navy actually commissioned a study to figure out exactly how well Top Gun worked for them, and whether people thought it was about the Air Force instead. And they found really predictably, that yeah, people thought it was the Air Force about 40% of the audience, that this was an Air Force movie, the Navy went to work on initiating projects that were top gun like, but were obviously about the Navy. And so they initiated a television show in 1988, called super carrier because I knew that aircraft carriers and nobody would mistake that for the Air Force. And they could still have planes. So very top gun like television show went online during the late 80s. That was designed to glorify the Navy and kind of fix this problem that they have with associating Top Gun with the Air Force.
Yeah, that seems to be something that comes up a little bit in this research is some of the weird, like, intra military, institutional bickering like across navy, air force and other branches.
Yeah, you're picking up on the potential for territorial disputes, which are all over the place and the documentation. The process is pretty centralized. But each branch maintains their own office in California near Hollywood. So the potential for these kinds of disputes is pretty high. Everybody's kind of envious of the Air Force because they have all the shiny toys. One example that that comes to mind is Zero Dark 30 from 2012. So at the beginning, the both the CIA and the DoD were involved in the script negotiation process, but eventually the CIA got the upper hand and kind of elbowed the DoD out ultimately, that became a story about the CIA using torture techniques to extract information and find Osama bin Laden, which was complete BS but that was the goal. Ultimate story. And the DoD didn't want to play second fiddle to that. So they stepped away. But there are a lot of other movies where the branches work well together, Transformers was the first franchise to utilize all four branches, or lone survivor in 2013. That movie was about Navy SEALs, but the army was heavily involved in that as well.
Right? Yeah, we want to get to some some other films and TV shows that you've examined in your research, just staying on top gun. There were a few things that jumped out at us as like, Okay, this content choice is very rhetorical, and was clearly approved by the military. Right. So we've we've discussed the the non identified enemy, but very clearly seems to be Iran, because it's about uranium and uranium enrichment and the threat of nuclear weapons. But a couple other things. We mentioned the objective of increasing recruitment for pilots. But the movie like takes a very direct shot at drones to which is kind of fascinating Top Gun to does at least right? Because drones weren't around back in the 80s. Why do you think that choice was in there?
Yeah, the denigration of drones and Top Gun Maverick kind of surprised me as well. The Navy has drones, in addition to fighter planes, but they're in a super prominent feature of, of the Navy profile, they certainly are in the Air Force. So what we could be saying is interagency competition, you know, the the denigration of the Air Force in relation to Navy hardware, but my suspicion is that the and you see this a lot that the military is quite willing to acknowledge a limitation or downside or criticism in order to gain a little bit of credibility to make a larger point. And the larger point really is about featuring the fighter planes and positioning those as emblematic of what it means to join the Navy.
Yeah, I wonder, I wonder, too, if it might be a way of almost like incorporating a critique that they know is out there and like neutralizing it by acknowledging it?
Yeah, I would say there's a certain willingness to engage topics or to acknowledge topics that have received public criticism in the past. And that serves as an inoculation function, might call it a limited Hangout, you know, admit a little to hide a lot.
One last thing on planes, and then we can move away from the move away from the gear and into some of the more pressing social issues that are kind of raised in the tropes of this movie. But the other one that I also noticed was the conspicuous lack of the F 35. Instead, we had f A teens as the sort of primary jet fighter, and then, of course, the heroic Return of the old F 14 that, for some reason is being kept on a Iranian Air Force Base. But But why? You know, like, because this is one of the things that I think you also brought up in your, at least one of your documentaries. Why no f 30 fives like why are we not? Why is this maybe not something that the military wants to put publicly on display in a cinema context?
But it's a very leading question. I think you know, the answer to it.
Yeah, I thought it would sound better coming from you than from me, so.
Well, yeah, I think you're hitting on something really important there. You know, people ask, why not the F 35? Why the f 18? Why not the most recent Cutting Edge platform? One of the answers is that the F 35 is still so controversial. I mean, it's the biggest boondoggle in military history. I think the price tag goes up to $1.5 trillion dollars now. And then they still can't, they still don't have a simulator for training people in this thing. And there's still all kinds of problems like if one of these gets hit by a lightning bolt and the fuel tanks explode. So they're 35 is still hugely controversial and kind of a black eye for the military. In the past, we know that they've been successful inserting the F 35 into various productions in a kind of low profile way. But perhaps they're wary of featuring it in something like Top Gun Maverick because they don't want to bait the public into an extended discussion. And that's one answer. They just don't want to stir up debate. Another answer is maybe more interesting. And that's the fact that the F 18 is right now for sale. So just as Top Gun Maverick came out, the series of articles revealed that India is looking to buy a whole suite of FAA teams from the US government and by extension from McDonnell Douglas who manufactures it. So in as much as Top Gun is an international blockbuster, it's also an international advertisement for certain kinds of weapons.
Wow, that is fascinating. So a couple other tropes that jumped out in this movie, clearly approved by the military. One of the weirdest ones, the one that I was really excited to ask you about. There's almost no sex in this movie. It's it's like the most unsexy movie of all time, despite there being a kind of weird flirtation between Tom Cruise and Jennifer Connelly's character, the bartender on base. Their relationship, I mean, it's very G rated. There's one scene where they seem to have had sex. But the only way you can tell that is because Tom Cruise is shirtless and laughing like, that's the that's the indication that same sex was had. So how do you understand that in the context of military propaganda? Why would they want to strip all of the sex from Top Gun 2?
Yeah, you'd think they'd want to sex it up as much as possible and make the military look as appealing as possible for potential recruits. But what you actually find in the documentation is that they're constantly wanting to draw down the sex and also draw down the language in order to get a reading more suitable to the demographic that they want to reach in terms of recruitment. So it's very likely that simple, they want to reach not only young recruits, but also their families who are often involved in that decision. And I would say that the second film is kind of dealing with the legacy of the first which was really heavy as everybody knows, on the homoerotic imagery. The director Tony Scott talked about drawing a lot of his aesthetic inspiration from men's fashion magazines, greased up bodies, etc. So it could be that the legacy of all that temper the heterosexual love interest dimension of the second film,
that was that was actually what I was going to ask about. I mean, first of all, I just have to say that we are a professional academic podcast, but we are not above piping in Kenny Loggins's "Playing with the Boys" in the background of what you just said about the homoeroticism and greased up men. However, I will, I will also I want to, on a serious note actually address the legacy of that first one, because I didn't know about the implication, like the direct implication of the first Top Gun movie in the tailhook scandal, which you detail a little bit more in your documentary about having kind of fostered this culture of basically like, like sexual assault or rape culture in the military. Could you talk a little bit about that part of Top Guns legacy? Just because I think I mean, I can't imagine that it wouldn't have played at least some role in trying to tamp down the reading, or at least the steam Enos of it in the second film.
Yeah, I would say that's, that's part of the mix as well. I mean, in some ways, the military had a really bad experience in the wake of Top Gun. So in 1991, we had what was called the tailhook scandal, which was tailhook was an annual convention of Navy aviators in Las Vegas. So on one of the nights, hundreds of Navy service men engaged in this mass sexual assault of more than 80 service women just a truly horrific scene, the Navy tried to cover it up at first, but then some very brave women spoke out and there was a congressional investigation. And in that report, they specifically cited Top Gun for creating the mentality or the conditions for this. So if you've ever asked yourself, why did it take so long for a sequel to come out? And part of the answer is that the Navy wanted to distance itself from top gun for a long time because of the bad publicity that came out of tailhook. This is a case where they just didn't want to stir up the debate about sexual assault again.
Wow. Yeah. So you know, that legacy definitely reverberated and influenced the content of the film. I think the last trope that we definitely wanted to touch on was this kind of superficial cosmetic diversity in the film, like on the, you know, the team of top gun pilots, and the, the commanding officers of the mission in this film, you know, it's not an all white cast by any means. But there's no acknowledgement of that diversity like among the characters, which that kind of jumped out at me like, I feel like in these kinds of outfits, it would be much more realistic for there to be some kind of jawing about, about racial issues, like among the forces, and that never happens. It's like, there's kind of this perfect racial harmony. So I wondered what you thought of that. In the second film?
Well, if you look at the numbers of Air Force and Navy pilots, you'll find that about 90% of them are white men. But if you look at Top Gun maverick in the spectrum of folks that are represented there, it's pretty striking. I mean, you think they'd say something about it in the movie, like, Maverick has put together the most diverse fighting squad in the history of the Navy, but they don't say that. They want to give the impression that this is sort of a natural and Representative slice of Navy pilots. And that's just simply not I mean, maybe you want to pat the film on the bags, a nice job with representation. But really, this is just a form of of tokenism. And its worst form, it's, it's an act of covering up the big race and gender problems that the Navy continues to have, especially in their elite fighter units. So it's less of an attempt to rectify the situation than covered up. You got to remember that this is a recruitment vehicle. target of a lot of military recruitment, as everybody knows is low income community. Isn't that includes a lot of communities of color. So they're working really hard to make sure that the military isn't portrayed as a hostile place for people of color. We see this going all the way back into the 1950s, where the office is getting rid of entire characters to make sure that there's no ethnic tension in the film, by the 1980s, you see kind of pattern of tokenism where the military is inserting characters of color into all kinds of Officer roles and whatnot. This doesn't mean that the military is averse to representations of racism in general, it just don't want to make the military look bad. A good example of the difference is this film that came out in 2000, called rules of engagement. This is the one that the film historian Jack Shaheen called the most racist film in recent memory. It's just full of anti Arab and Islamophobic stereotypes of the most vicious kind. It centers on this terrorist attack where hundreds of Arabs open fire out an American embassy in Yemen. First, they're protesting something, and then they all pull up guns and start shooting at the same time. And there's even images of young children pulling guns out of their robes and naming them straight at the camera. So the DOD has no problem with racist depictions per se. They just don't want it to reflect badly on them.
Yeah, that's I mean, that's, that's horrendous. And, and it's it's important, I think, to, at this juncture, not only focus on the the types of films and other cultural products that the military has thrown its weight behind, as you say. But also, I mean, just just for the listener, who maybe hasn't picked up on this yet, what we're talking about here, in this whole show is kind of a massive influence operation, it's hard to even call it a singular operation, just because it has seemingly, I mean, if I'm understanding your research correctly, Roger, it has become more of an apparatus, like a sub arm of just about every branch of the US military is that they have public relations offices that are literally sending script notes to, to filmmakers, to television producers, and particularly one of the concepts that really kind of jumped out at me. And I think that this correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this was actually taken from their documents is what they call showstoppers, the kinds of things that will explicitly cause a script to be rejected that will potentially, you know, disallow it from getting funding from various other sources or just the necessary funding that it needs, which could only come from the Department of Defense or, or other part of the US Defense state. Could you talk a little bit about that concept of a showstopper and how this has indeed led to some instances of even censorship, like movies that never saw the light of day? Because they had too many showstoppers?
Yeah, that's a term that you see a lot in the documentation and refers to anything that the military might deem as a deal breaker. They don't keep a formalized list of showstoppers. But if you look through the documents, you can start to see patterns. This includes depictions of racism and the rank sexism, the military's unwillingness to deal with its sexual assault problem. Anything that has to do with insubordination, PTSD, or problems with suicide accidents that kill soldiers like friendly fire aircraft that malfunction and crash. Sometimes they'll allow these problems to show up, but only if the problem is isolated. And the military plays a central role in solving it. And then there are showstoppers that have to do with our militaries used. So war crimes, assassinations, torture, overthrowing foreign governments, and so on. They're really sensitive about the portrayal of the use of questionable weapons like chemical and biological weapons, they're profoundly interested in maintaining public support for our nuclear arsenal. So anything that questions the wisdom of our nuclear policy, or the security of our huge stockpiles is out. So that's where you get the rejection of films like Crimson Tide and broken arrow. I mean, you asked if there are instances where a military rejection led to the stoppage of a show, if you scan the military's own database, you find that there are dozens of films that got rejected and simply didn't get made. We can't definitively say that any rejection caused the film to go under, but it looks like it's a huge factor. We also have a lot of anecdotal evidence from producers and directors, Jerry Bruckheimer said that Top Gun and Pearl Harbor would never have been made without military support. A really dramatic examples of film that was never made called fields of fire. It's kind of a platoon like movie was based on a book by Jim Webb, who had served in the Marines in Vietnam. The book at the time was on the commandant reading list for the Marines. This is a signed reading for marine officers, and Jim Webb himself had just come off a term as Secretary of the Navy. So Webb in the film, and the book had a lot of cloud going into the script negotiation process, but the Pentagon rejected in any way. They didn't care. They didn't like the fact that the script had soldiers using drugs fragging, burning villages, executing prisoners. So that was it for fields of fire, it just didn't get made. I want to give you one other really dramatic example. And this is what I really liked from the documentation. So I'm guessing neither of you have heard of the US military liaison missions from the Cold War. I hadn't heard of them. I had to look them up. This is a program where the US in the Soviet Union essentially traded spies. So Soviet spies would come over to the west and vice versa. It was a diplomatic gesture. I mean, there were times when the US MLMs were the only real line of communication during some of the tensest moments of the Cold War. So in the early 80s, someone tried to make a film about it called recovery. And they asked for military help. And if you look at the military's database entry on this film, it just says, the US military does not want to assist in a film that glorifies the military liaison missions. So the US public just didn't learn about this program that was designed to thaw relations between these two superpowers. So you haven't heard of that movie, but I'm guessing you've heard of Red Dawn from about the same time, the Pentagon was more than happy to support that one. If you remember the opening scene, it was Russian paratroopers descending into a schoolyard and then proceeding to murder all the kids in the school. I mean, it gives you a pretty good sense of the priorities of the entertainment office, they're much more interested in elevating the sense of threat. And even if that means sacrificing history,
goodness, that thank you so much for sharing that example. That's so eye opening. It's like the specificity of some of these examples, I think is part of what's so fascinating about this research. I mean, just you get a real window into that these institutions are being run by humans with very specific biases. So one that jumped out at me I was like, I have to ask Roger Stoll about this is the CIA's involvement in Beat the Parents, The Ben Stiller comedy, or what? Like, what did they say they watered down a scene in that movie,
or we don't have documents about Meet the Parents from the CIA, but we do have testimony from CIA personnel. This is all coming via Tricia Jenkins and her great book, the CIA and Hollywood. So meet the parents is an interesting case because it's a comedy. It's about Ben Stiller meeting his girlfriend's parents and Robert De Niro and the father being an especially intimidating guy. So at one point, Ben Stiller's character wanders into the basement and discovers Robert De Niro's character to be a CIA agent. He's got all kinds of memorabilia around, and a lie detector and all kinds of scary equipment. And in the original script, there was supposed to be torture manuals on the desk to be extra scary. But the CIA happened to be consulting in this film, and they asked for all those torture manuals to be taken out and replaced with photos of Robert De Niro's character with dignitaries and presidents and things like that seems like a trivial change. But you take all these trivial changes and add them up hundreds and hundreds of them. And you get this kind of generalized whitewashing of the security state. At that time, the CIA was very interested in hiding the fact that they engaged in torture. And that's very different from the CIA's approach to depictions of torture now in post 911 period, where they will often even feature torture, but within the context of a story that seeks to justify the practice. So shows like 24, Zero Dark 30 would be examples of that.
Absolutely. No, it really like it's it's difficult through sort of audio auditory medium, which is why I'm glad you have the documentary, and I will encourage our listeners at multiple points to go and watch it because it truly, you need to see the visuals in order to be able to, I think, fully understand the scale of this, like, I mean, we're talking about 1000s of films and television productions, not to, you know, to say nothing of individual TV episodes that have undergone this kind of treatment. But we've touched on this a couple of points in our conversation, but I thought it would be pertinent to talk directly about it now, which is the sort of go to framing for a lot of the script notes or denials, showstoppers and what have you, or even the sort of raison d'etre for the existence of these apparatuses in the US military is always talked about in terms of accuracy, right, we are just there to ensure verisimilitude you know, it makes sure that this is all you know, accurate to the way that it actually works in the military or in the intelligence community, which I think again in the in the film, it really gets explored the whole kind of like ridiculousness of looking at the accuracy of whether or not the aliens and Independence Day would really blow up the Pentagon or die they could just they could take the White House but don't touch the Pentagon or or you know why we have our battleships need to be accurately portrayed fighting off alien invaders so I guess you know, with those are some kind of ridiculous As examples, but from your research and your team's research, why do you think that accuracy? Is that kind of go to framing? Is it just because it's a bulletproof defense that no one can really argue with? Or is there some other reason for it?
Yeah, I think this is where the rubber really hits the road. I mean, the office claims that it's in the business to promote accuracy. And often they're doing the opposite. I mean, you have to acknowledge that they do care about accuracy with regard to a lot of things. So you get your typical two or three pages of script notes and, and request for script changes back from the Pentagon. And I would say about 80% of those are truly about technical accuracy. You know how fast a plane can fly from Washington, DC to Florida, or where the badges go on uniforms, or how certain ranks would address another rank and what military lingo would be used. But then you get about 20% of the comments that are ideological in nature, they're politically motivated, they have to do with the values or representations of the military. And really, this is the reason why the office exists. I mean, it's a public relations operation that's designed to influence public opinion about the military. And it's these hot button issues, the ones that we're debating constantly in society, the use of the military, how the military treats its own personnel that the public relations entity is constantly trying to deal with through popular culture. So I think you're right, that accuracy, it's in their charge, it's in the documents. It's an every press statement that they make. But it's you know, in many cases, it is an alibi. It is a way of justifying the operation, so they can continue to make these ideological changes to popular cultural products. We take take a show like Jack Ryan, which is in its third season right now a very popular show on Amazon Prime. Both the CIA and the DoD are involved in this series. So maybe it shouldn't surprise us that the second season was this scare story about the Russians giving nukes to Venezuela. And the idea is that the CIA has to go in and Stoke a coup in order to prevent the president of Venezuela from using the nukes against the US. I mean, accuracy is a completely ludicrous scenario.
I did want to bring up Jack Ryan at some point, just because that, to me, was the most conspicuous example of a sort of direct mapping on to
current events, current events at the time, at the time that that second season was running, there was a coup basically being fomented, presumably by the US intelligence community. Propping up Juan guaido. Right.
Yeah, I mean, this is one of the most egregious examples of the CIA or DOD using popular culture in real time to affect public opinion about an ongoing political situation.
Yeah. So I think I mean, that's a great place to transition to the final question that we have for you. Which, you know, when I was reading your LA Times article and watching the documentary, I was reminded of an article that you wrote a few years back, that I found really interesting, because it's relevant to some of my own research on mass surveillance, rhetoric and leaks, you wrote this article called weaponizing speech, where you really tracing how in post 911 War on Terror discourse, there developed this conceptual metaphor of information warfare, that really started to be circulated more and more by the military and the intelligence community and their political allies. And I think, you know, one of the ways that you conclude that piece, I mean, it's, it's largely, you know, a really rich rhetorical analysis of this phenomenon. But I think one of the pitches you end that piece with is that we should decouple this metaphor, like we should maintain a really strong division between information on the one hand and warfare on the other. Because when these two things become imbricated, it allows for things like journalism, like leaking, like even things that are clearly non violent crimes, but we wouldn't want to call warfare, we start to use a warframe to talk about them, and prosecute them, and then that that leads to bad policy. But I was thinking about that article, when I was thinking about all of this information, Operation work that the military and the intelligence community does in entertainment. And it struck me like, this stuff really does feel like information warfare, because in this case, we have explicitly overtly violent institutions, influencing our information space, in a way that's that's designed to increase support for war, right? It's very difficult for me, like analytically to disentangle all of this stuff we've been talking about, from the broader war about actives of the military. And I mean, just really quick point I, I got so mad, because I was thinking about how we kind of funded Top Gun Maverick through our military. And then they sell it back to us at the end, we have to pay $12 for a ticket. How is that fair? Like I'm, I'm picking up the tab on both ends of that transaction
finished in question, how much exactly did you pay for that ticket in total?
Well, that's no, no, I did want to mention that. I'm really glad I saw it in the cheap theater like six months late, because it was like $4, which was awesome. I guess, just generally, the, you know, to, to wrap this up, the question I'm trying to ask is, do you see this as, as more? You know, is it more accurate to call something like this information warfare? Or is that misguided analytically?
Well, I'm so pleased that somebody found some of that earlier work of mine, useful. That was all about the ongoing redefinition of cyberspace as an object of military control the militarization of these spaces of expression. So because of this, I'm personally a little bit suspicious of the creeping metaphors of information warfare, at the same time, I think it's perfectly natural to ask is what the military is doing through the entertainment media office, a form of information warfare, and I guess I would urge us to think about different ways of considering it. I mean, the military has always been involved in some sort of persuasive activity. But for most of history, we've called that propaganda. And that's a that's a handy word. Although it comes with a lot of baggage. I think the most productive way of thinking about what the entertainment office is doing is just considering it military public relations. I mean, that's what it is. It's an information campaign that's designed to serve the institution and affect the political sphere affect public opinion. It's analogous to some of the information operations we saw during the Iraq War, the the embedded reporting system or sending out retired generals to comment on the Sunday morning talk shows without disclosing by the way that some of them are on the boards of weapons manufacturers, in fact, sponsored by official Pentagon public relations. And we know a lot about the manipulation of journalism, but it's only relatively recently that we've learned about the true scope of the pipeline between Washington and Hollywood. Yeah, I
mean, I mean, to the degree that this is, you know, partially like, we don't want to make it out to be like, we are just academics that are kind of nitpicking pedantically over these terms. Because I mean, one of the things I did love most about your documentary, you and your team really laid out the stakes of this very, very nicely towards the end. I mean, we're extrapolating a little bit here. But like a lot of the military interventions, things that lead to misguided escalations of violence in different parts of the world, will happen by razor thin margins, right? Like if you know, and I'm no electoral list, but you know, it's the it's the notion that if you have just like a few more people in Congress who are going to vote down this authorization of force, you know, that does make an appreciable difference, to the degree that we have, you know, elected officials that have, you know, anti war, or that reflect an anti war sentiments or anti militarization, anti interventionist sentiment within the public. So I mean, I guess we kind of wanted to round it out here asking a little bit about, if you have any ideas for it, like, you know, you mentioned a couple of policy changes, or at least suggestions for what we could do some things that would make a small but still appreciable difference, such as putting a disclaimer at the front of any movie that accepts that accepts any form of support from the military industrial complex, or the Department of Defense or getting specific with it. Are there any others or any other? Or did you want to extrapolate a little bit from a policy or a sort of public standpoint? What can we do in order to create a sort of more educated media consumer base?
Yeah, it's a good question. What do we do about it? Well, we're dealing with an institution that has been around formally since 1949. And informally all the way back to 1914 1915 with the birth of a nation which was formally supported by the army. So we're dealing with a really well established public relations entity here, we've been able to document and confirm that the military and CIA have cooperated on about 2500 films and television shows, that's about 10 times the number that scholars had previously assumed. So it's huge. It's pervasive. How do you deal as a democratic society with something like this? Well, in making the documentary, we hope that that people would consider what it would be like to abolish this office. I think we can easily imagine a world without it. And there's a lot of evidence to suggest the movies would be qualitatively better, shorter that it would be great if we could pass legislation that would mandate the automatic release of document It's regarding these cooperative ventures. Recently, my colleagues and I, specifically Tom Secker, and tried to get our hands on all of the Top Gun Maverick documentation. This was through a Freedom of Information Act request. And they came back and said, we have 20,000 pages. But to photocopy those and send those two, were going to require a payment of $10,000, which is money that we can't really justify spending on that tranche of documents, at least not now. Now, without a serious benefactor. It would just take us a long way, if the military and CIA were transparent about their operations. You know, one other thing we could do is mount a legal challenge. There are provisions on the books that prohibit the military and the government in general from engaging in propagandistic activity and also censorship, we could challenge the office based on those provisions. And the last thing we could do, and I think this is the easiest is to mandate that producers inform the public that their show had been sponsored by the CIA, the military or some other governmental agency by putting a title screen at the beginning that discloses this as being an easy thing to do. The FCC already mandates that commercial entities disclose their sponsorship, and this has been on the books since the 1930s. So that's been one of the really satisfying things about this, this project, this documentary, and in the book project that we're working on is that the solutions are available to us. So now it's just a matter of generating public awareness about the scope and power of this office, and then and then generating the political will to follow through some of these measures to limit that power.
I think it should be mandated on the posters and in the trailers for these things, too. Because if you just put it in the opening credits, then I've already spent my $12 not realizing I'm about to get straight propaganda for two hours, right. Yeah.
Jerry Bruckheimer should be forced to wear a jumpsuit like they do in NASCAR with all the corporate and government sponsors on it.
Yes, that's amazing.
Yeah, put brookheimer in the jumpsuit. That's the policy. Sorry.
That's our policies. Oh, boy. Yeah, no, no way that that could be misconstrued at all. So I'm just thinking now, not again, to make light out of a very serious situation. But you know, those old FBI warnings that I have are on the green screen of the week, we need a DOD warning, we need a CIA warning we need we need all the three letter agencies warning, except this time not for criminal punishment of certain acts that may have been referenced at the beginning here.
I wasn't involved. I just I just wandered in the room having to watch what goes on. I had no idea. That's,
that's right. That's right. Totally an unwitting bystander. Absolutely.
I can see the spot at the beginning of the film, you know, like, you wouldn't allow the CIA to hack your brain. So why are you allowing them to hack your movies? Black and white and grainy? Yes, yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. Yeah, it needs to take the tone and aesthetics of the, you wouldn't pirate a car, you wouldn't pirate it? Or what were the
you got it? You nailed it. Yeah. That it needs to
be gritty. It needs to be shot in that like early 2000s. style. Honestly, we wish we could we could do much with this.
All right. Well, Roger stole thank you so much for being with us. I think this research is super important. And I'm really excited to just get the word out more about it. And it's been a delight to speak with you. We wanted to just ask if there's anything that you want to plug at the end of the show here.
Gosh, thank you for the opportunity to talk about this. Well, you've done a lot of very nice plugging for us so far. But I wanted to again, say that we're really excited about our documentary theatres of war, which came out in May of last year. It represents the cutting edge of this research. I mean, in the last six years, we've been able to amass 50,000 pages of internal documents that give us a high resolution look into the internal workings of this extremely powerful public relations operation. And of everything, the documentary right now tells that story the best and the most digestible manner. We're also working on a book, it might be called theatres of war, although we're looking at other titles too. That's obviously going to be a much more detailed treatment of the issue and hopefully the definitive, critical scholarly statement. That's if we can keep it under 700 pages x. That's
amazing. That's I mean, and I did want to ask, is there any plan to make some of the documents available for like for people to search through themselves? Or
yeah, we're looking to build a digital searchable archive that assembles all the documents we've been able to collect over the years and, and make them available to journalists, scholars and the general public. For now, I would urge listeners who are interested in looking at primary documents to check out spy culture.com One of my collaborators Tom Secker has worked on this site for a number of years, and has done the majority of our Freedom of Information Act requests So typically, when he gets documents via FOIA, he goes through them with a fine tooth comb and just does a bang up analysis. And the great thing is at the bottom of each article, you'll find links to the primary documents so you can download them. If you're intensely curious about it, that's where to go.
Amazing. Got it. And it's fantastic. And for those of you just who are curious about where you can see theatres of war, I know we have a lot of academic listeners, but those of you who either your university library or public library if you have access to canopy, it is available on that streaming platform as well. Just wanted to throw that little plug in there, too.
Yeah, like you said, it's on canopy now for the educational market. But we're currently preparing the film for commercial distribution. And that involves an exquisitely detailed and time consuming legal review for fair use, as you can imagine, 350 possible fair use items, film, and a lot of clips and those a lot of clips. But once we're done with that, that'll be in this year 2023. It should be going out on the usual streaming channels and services.
Amazing. So hopefully that comes out soon. And we can share the information about that. But we just want to thank you one more time, Roger Stahl for taking the time and being with us today on reverb. And to all our listeners. We will speak with you again soon. Thanks for tuning in. And enjoy the winter doldrums.
Oh, thanks for having me on. It's such a pleasure to talk to you too.
Thank you. All right. See you later.
Bye bye. Our show today was produced by Alex Helberg and Calvin Pollock with editing work by Alex reverbs. CO producers at large or Sophie was Zack and Ben willing. You can subscribe to reverb and leave us a review on Apple podcasts Stitcher, Android or wherever you listen to podcasts, check out our website at WWW dot reverb cast.com. You can also like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter where our handle is at reverb cast. That's r e v e r b underscore C A S T. If you've enjoyed our show and want to help amplify more of our public scholarship work, please consider leaving us a five star review on your podcast platform of choice and tell a friend about us. We sincerely appreciate the support of our listeners. Thanks so much for tuning in.
