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

The other country that is doing this at Hollywood scale is China, and it’s not just their ‘only popular in China’ movies like Wolf Warrior (1 and 2). Some scenes: https://youtu.be/g7y36UIRAjo https://youtu.be/g7y36UIRAjo IP Man 4, which is more well known to western audiences: https://youtu.be/OlW2VphUNd4 https://youtu.be/OlW2VphUNd4 https://youtu.be/JFmaPK0JyVQ https://youtu.be/JFmaPK0JyVQ You get the idea. Americans make movies where America good, everyone bad. China is now making movies where China good, everyone bad, specially white Americans. Anyways, along with the glorification of US might and power by the pentagon, their recruiting tactics have also used video game stylization to attract young people: https://youtu.be/N0f_ZUgqvxE https://youtu.be/N0f_ZUgqvxE ^ That is a fucking video game ad as far as I’m concerned. No mature person should be turned on by that.

rocknor 5y ago
I mean, if one country does it, everyone else is forced to do it to level the playing field. Hollywood churns out higher quality propaganda because huge budgets and USA global hegemony, but it won't stay like that forever as we move to a multipolar world. The same is happening with online news outlets that churn out cherry-picked propaganda to counter propaganda from another country - information warfare.
giuliomagnifico 5y ago
Also Russia is doing it, also because it has a problem with numbers and/of soldiers… “Russia Doesn’t Have the Demographics for War” https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/03/russia-demography-birthrate-decline-ukraine/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/03/russia-demography-birth...
- beloch 5y ago
  Russia has been doing it since the dawn of cinema. e.g. Battleship Potemkin. Mosfilm, soviet propaganda, and amazing advances in movie-making have all marched together from the very start. You'd be surprised at how many of the tropes and techniques that form a part of modern movie language have their origin in soviet propaganda. The thing is, everybody expects a Mosfilm flick to toe the party line. What the U.S. has done was sneakier.
mikejb 5y ago
Another country that comes to mind is India - but I've never been enough of a Bollywood fan to be able to make any assessment on this topic. But it's a very effective tool to shape public opinion. I'm fairly certain without the overwhelmingly heroic portrait of (members of) the military, the public would be more inclined to question the huge investments that go into warfare. Particularly the display of highly achieved individuals in the military leads to both public respect of military members, and enlistings to service.
- crate_barre 5y ago
  Pretty much. It’s no different that glorifying Gordon Gekko in Wallstreet. Michael Douglas on why he doesn’t get why Gekko was an inspiration: https://youtu.be/I8ruk8wjhuQ https://youtu.be/I8ruk8wjhuQ We’re all vulnerable to this. Just here in tech we’ve deified the guy in a t-shirt/hoodie (zucks of the world) or mythical 10x programmers, built up and tore down people like Adam Neumann, all caricatures. Propaganda works sadly. With respect to war, it takes observing a war play out to realize how stupid it actually is. It took Americans 20 years of just watching Iraq/Afghanistan to conclude all that nationalism stuff is just not worth it at all. I don’t know how it’s all going to play out in the next 50 years, but I’m pretty sure in the aftermath of any American/Chinese conflict the conclusion of america-bad by the Chinese and China-bad by the Americans will just seem quite silly also.
- metb 5y ago
  >Another country that comes to mind is India - but I've never been enough of a Bollywood fan to be able to make any assessment on this topic. Curious why India came to mind especially if you are not able to make an assessment of this topic as you put it.
- unmole 5y ago
  Haider is the only Indian movie that I can think of that doesn't take the establishment position when it comes to the portrayal of the armed forces. More recently, a certain Canadian national has carved out a niche for himself by staring in ultra patriotic movies that are very popular with the Indian audience.
janimo 5y ago
one difference is that authoritarian regimes have been known to infuse everything with state propaganda, whereas almost nobody expects this from western democracies, showing just how much more subtle and even effective the latter can be.
- rnd0 5y ago
  >whereas almost nobody expects this from western democracies Are you joking? Ever since 9/11 the US has been pumping out propaganda disguised as entertainment like gangbusters! It's really obvious when you go and watch reruns of old copaganda shows from 03 to 06, and then there's "24". Of course there's also blatant ra-ra Military propaganda like J.A.G. and NCIS It's not surprising to see outright propaganda from the US, it's surprising how many decades it's taken for people to begin to call it what it is. Surprising and depressing.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    What you wrote is true, but it's astonishing how people tolerate having an industrial production of propaganda (since WW2) in what should be a democracy.
    - MrYellowP 5y ago
      Democracy and propaganda aren't mutually exclusive. Plus, the US isn't a democracy. In fact, most countries banging the democracy-propaganda-horn aren't actually democracies. Austria, for example, is a Republic. Democracy is just a smokescreen.
      - goodpoint 5y ago
        > ... aren't actually democracies. Austria, for example, is a Republic "republic" and "democracy" are in no way mutually exclusive terms. On the contrary, the overlap very often. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic for a definition.
causi 5y ago
You can definitely notice when a Hollywood film has decided to suck up to the Chinese audience, such as with Pacific Rim 2 or Iron Man 3.
- nyokodo 5y ago
  > suck up to the Chinese audience Less the Chinese audience and more the CCP State Censors.
  - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    And whichever organization selects which films get to be shown in China. Some films do much, much better in China than in the US thanks to this; some examples are the Transformers films, the Warhammer film, and someone else already mentioned Pacific Rim and Iron Man. Basically, if there's a Chinese secondary actor and / or a Chinese location and they're not the definitive bad guys, it's been tweaked for and co-developed with China. Now I don't say that's a bad thing per se, I kinda like there being a propaganda force in blockbuster films to compete with that of the US. I would much prefer no propaganda, but at the same time I feel like high budget action blockbusters can't do without. Also take the word 'propaganda' with a grain of salt, it's usually nothing over the top, or limited to "this country or these people are not put in a bad light" I for one would love to see more films where the Americans aren't considered the heroes.
sebow 5y ago
To be fair almost every country does this, for obvious reasons;The main aspects to analyze considering that everyone does this are: how big is your industry and how this directly affects the efficacy of your exported pictures: the reach & perceived reality of your presented truth; and secondly: the degree you distort truth to positively assert yourself. The second aspect is vastly more important, but then again some people believe in the concept of a 'white lie' or lying for the greater good, which is very dangerous, especially in a world where you cannot be certain that you're the only one who knows a piece of information.And on top of that people who seek to hide the truth or lie by omission often do a lot of worse things than merely not presenting the whole facts.
nyokodo 5y ago
> The other country that is doing this at Hollywood scale is China The difference being that while state propaganda has infected Hollywood it does not wholly control Hollywood. You’d be hard pressed to find any rough equivalent to Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, All the President’s Men, or The Post etc in China.
- markdown 5y ago
  Those movies are between 35 years and half a century old.
  - rnd0 5y ago
    and could not have been made since 9/11
- fvdessen 5y ago
  > Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, All the President’s Men, or The Post Those movies are also propaganda, but in a more subtle and effective way; The message of these movies being that while america sometimes makes mistakes, in the end the american has a good heart and conscience and should be forgiven. You don’t see in these movies american soldiers raping civilans, laughing about it, and suffering no ill consequences
  - nyokodo 5y ago
    > in the end the american has a good heart and conscience and should be forgiven. Nothing about Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket says that at all. Have you even watched them? They’re both about how war and the military machine are devastating and dehumanizing to the soldier, and to the enemy. All words seem like egregious understatements for them so I recommend seeing them (or seeing them again). To my horror I did find out that the first half of Full Metal Jacket was attractive to enough teenage boys in the late 80s to eventually cause Jarhead to be produced [1]. I guess they stopped watching after the first half, or the idea of murdering teenage girls was attractive to them? Either way it is anything but propaganda. As for the other movies that do involve righting a wrong or at least exposing them, that’s not state propaganda. Primarily because the state is the villain in them and they encourage suspicion of the state, neither of which promotes state power. A movie which gives the feels about being an American doesn’t make something propaganda it makes it a movie that wants to sell to Americans. 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/magazine/full-metal-jacket-ermey-marine-corps.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/magazine/full-metal-jacke...
MaxHoppersGhost 5y ago
Shit, China influences US film too. Many films avoid showing LGBTQ main characters or China in a bad light so they can sell into the Chinese market. A good example is the recent remake of Red Dawn. It was supposed to have the Chinese as bad guys but instead they used the extremely implausible North Koreans as antagonists.
- random314 5y ago
  Or the fact that Dr. Strange trains in Nepal, instead of Tibet. Just mentioning Tibet is verboten.
metb 5y ago
Regarding China, most Hollywood studios seem to be kowtowing Chinese line these days. I have noticed a clear trend in Hollywood movies where they don't portray anything negative about China, and usually project things in positive light. This same trend can be observed in most mainstream media's projection of China. Worldwide, China is definitely reaching proportions that were only possible for the US earlier in influencing, or arm-twisting influencers like media, and movie makers.
- ihalip 5y ago
  > most Hollywood studios seem to be kowtowing Chinese line these days. This is because the same movies are also distributed in China, which is a huge market.
JetAlone 5y ago
Yeah, I find it ironic that the commenters in the ad whine about the "Netflix Original Trailer" looking "Emma" ad in favor of the "Video Game" ad. "No, give me back the old propaganda for an imperialist death machine that will grind up my life and spit on my retired body if I survive once I'm too old and helpless to do anything about it, this one is going to appeal to my political enemiiiieeeeeees and then they'll get ground up in higher numbers instead of people like meeeeee T_T".
- crate_barre 5y ago
  That ad is the equivalent of showing college applicants a glorified video of a Film Studies major buying a ticket straight to Hollywood after graduation and winning an Oscar for best director. It’s false advertising at best, predatory at worst. Do you know who are selling a bag of dreams to? Do you care? You’ll take their time, money and lives, and it won’t matter to you in the least, will it?
  - JetAlone 5y ago
    You're right. They need lives and bodies to serve big picture grand strategy agendas, they'll pander to the "excitable gamer" or the "marginalized underdog" alike as soon as they understand which demo to reach out to when, what style to emulate, and what emotional buttons to push.
windsignaling 5y ago
Ehh, this has been standard fare for China for decades. It is always comically obvious (like in the videos you posted above). Pick any movie and you're likely to see something similar. On the other hand, consider the last time you saw an Asian male in a Hollywood production that wasn't: a) a kung-fu caricature b) the joke Western propaganda is more subtle and effective.

rocknor 5y ago

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

giuliomagnifico 5y ago

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

beloch 5y ago
Russia has been doing it since the dawn of cinema. e.g. Battleship Potemkin. Mosfilm, soviet propaganda, and amazing advances in movie-making have all marched together from the very start. You'd be surprised at how many of the tropes and techniques that form a part of modern movie language have their origin in soviet propaganda. The thing is, everybody expects a Mosfilm flick to toe the party line. What the U.S. has done was sneakier.

mikejb 5y ago

Another country that comes to mind is India - but I've never been enough of a Bollywood fan to be able to make any assessment on this topic. But it's a very effective tool to shape public opinion. I'm fairly certain without the overwhelmingly heroic portrait of (members of) the military, the public would be more inclined to question the huge investments that go into warfare. Particularly the display of highly achieved individuals in the military leads to both public respect of military members, and enlistings to service.

crate_barre 5y ago
Pretty much. It’s no different that glorifying Gordon Gekko in Wallstreet. Michael Douglas on why he doesn’t get why Gekko was an inspiration: https://youtu.be/I8ruk8wjhuQ https://youtu.be/I8ruk8wjhuQ We’re all vulnerable to this. Just here in tech we’ve deified the guy in a t-shirt/hoodie (zucks of the world) or mythical 10x programmers, built up and tore down people like Adam Neumann, all caricatures. Propaganda works sadly. With respect to war, it takes observing a war play out to realize how stupid it actually is. It took Americans 20 years of just watching Iraq/Afghanistan to conclude all that nationalism stuff is just not worth it at all. I don’t know how it’s all going to play out in the next 50 years, but I’m pretty sure in the aftermath of any American/Chinese conflict the conclusion of america-bad by the Chinese and China-bad by the Americans will just seem quite silly also.
metb 5y ago
>Another country that comes to mind is India - but I've never been enough of a Bollywood fan to be able to make any assessment on this topic. Curious why India came to mind especially if you are not able to make an assessment of this topic as you put it.
unmole 5y ago
Haider is the only Indian movie that I can think of that doesn't take the establishment position when it comes to the portrayal of the armed forces. More recently, a certain Canadian national has carved out a niche for himself by staring in ultra patriotic movies that are very popular with the Indian audience.

janimo 5y ago

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

rnd0 5y ago
>whereas almost nobody expects this from western democracies Are you joking? Ever since 9/11 the US has been pumping out propaganda disguised as entertainment like gangbusters! It's really obvious when you go and watch reruns of old copaganda shows from 03 to 06, and then there's "24". Of course there's also blatant ra-ra Military propaganda like J.A.G. and NCIS It's not surprising to see outright propaganda from the US, it's surprising how many decades it's taken for people to begin to call it what it is. Surprising and depressing.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  What you wrote is true, but it's astonishing how people tolerate having an industrial production of propaganda (since WW2) in what should be a democracy.
  - MrYellowP 5y ago
    Democracy and propaganda aren't mutually exclusive. Plus, the US isn't a democracy. In fact, most countries banging the democracy-propaganda-horn aren't actually democracies. Austria, for example, is a Republic. Democracy is just a smokescreen.
    - goodpoint 5y ago
      > ... aren't actually democracies. Austria, for example, is a Republic "republic" and "democracy" are in no way mutually exclusive terms. On the contrary, the overlap very often. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic for a definition.

causi 5y ago

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

nyokodo 5y ago
> suck up to the Chinese audience Less the Chinese audience and more the CCP State Censors.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  And whichever organization selects which films get to be shown in China. Some films do much, much better in China than in the US thanks to this; some examples are the Transformers films, the Warhammer film, and someone else already mentioned Pacific Rim and Iron Man. Basically, if there's a Chinese secondary actor and / or a Chinese location and they're not the definitive bad guys, it's been tweaked for and co-developed with China. Now I don't say that's a bad thing per se, I kinda like there being a propaganda force in blockbuster films to compete with that of the US. I would much prefer no propaganda, but at the same time I feel like high budget action blockbusters can't do without. Also take the word 'propaganda' with a grain of salt, it's usually nothing over the top, or limited to "this country or these people are not put in a bad light" I for one would love to see more films where the Americans aren't considered the heroes.

sebow 5y ago

To be fair almost every country does this, for obvious reasons;The main aspects to analyze considering that everyone does this are: how big is your industry and how this directly affects the efficacy of your exported pictures: the reach & perceived reality of your presented truth; and secondly: the degree you distort truth to positively assert yourself. The second aspect is vastly more important, but then again some people believe in the concept of a 'white lie' or lying for the greater good, which is very dangerous, especially in a world where you cannot be certain that you're the only one who knows a piece of information.And on top of that people who seek to hide the truth or lie by omission often do a lot of worse things than merely not presenting the whole facts.

nyokodo 5y ago

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

markdown 5y ago
Those movies are between 35 years and half a century old.
- rnd0 5y ago
  and could not have been made since 9/11
fvdessen 5y ago
> Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, All the President’s Men, or The Post Those movies are also propaganda, but in a more subtle and effective way; The message of these movies being that while america sometimes makes mistakes, in the end the american has a good heart and conscience and should be forgiven. You don’t see in these movies american soldiers raping civilans, laughing about it, and suffering no ill consequences
- nyokodo 5y ago
  > in the end the american has a good heart and conscience and should be forgiven. Nothing about Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket says that at all. Have you even watched them? They’re both about how war and the military machine are devastating and dehumanizing to the soldier, and to the enemy. All words seem like egregious understatements for them so I recommend seeing them (or seeing them again). To my horror I did find out that the first half of Full Metal Jacket was attractive to enough teenage boys in the late 80s to eventually cause Jarhead to be produced [1]. I guess they stopped watching after the first half, or the idea of murdering teenage girls was attractive to them? Either way it is anything but propaganda. As for the other movies that do involve righting a wrong or at least exposing them, that’s not state propaganda. Primarily because the state is the villain in them and they encourage suspicion of the state, neither of which promotes state power. A movie which gives the feels about being an American doesn’t make something propaganda it makes it a movie that wants to sell to Americans. 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/magazine/full-metal-jacket-ermey-marine-corps.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/magazine/full-metal-jacke...

MaxHoppersGhost 5y ago

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

random314 5y ago
Or the fact that Dr. Strange trains in Nepal, instead of Tibet. Just mentioning Tibet is verboten.

metb 5y ago

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

ihalip 5y ago
> most Hollywood studios seem to be kowtowing Chinese line these days. This is because the same movies are also distributed in China, which is a huge market.

JetAlone 5y ago

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

crate_barre 5y ago
That ad is the equivalent of showing college applicants a glorified video of a Film Studies major buying a ticket straight to Hollywood after graduation and winning an Oscar for best director. It’s false advertising at best, predatory at worst. Do you know who are selling a bag of dreams to? Do you care? You’ll take their time, money and lives, and it won’t matter to you in the least, will it?
- JetAlone 5y ago
  You're right. They need lives and bodies to serve big picture grand strategy agendas, they'll pander to the "excitable gamer" or the "marginalized underdog" alike as soon as they understand which demo to reach out to when, what style to emulate, and what emotional buttons to push.

windsignaling 5y ago

Ehh, this has been standard fare for China for decades. It is always comically obvious (like in the videos you posted above). Pick any movie and you're likely to see something similar. On the other hand, consider the last time you saw an Asian male in a Hollywood production that wasn't: a) a kung-fu caricature b) the joke Western propaganda is more subtle and effective.