Embassy cinema: What Wikileaks reveals about US state support for Hollywood

Abstract

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, several detractors sought to distinguish, in the words of former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, ‘real Americans’ from ‘celluloid Americans’ (Gingrich and Schweizer, 2003), arguing that the attacks on the World Trade Center were emblematic of a reaction to the pervasive Hollywood construct of America. Yet despite these reservations, Hollywood’s relationship with Washington has, in recent decades, strengthened to such a degree that the epithet ‘Washwood’ is now frequently used to describe the industry (Lewis et al, 2002: 130), which, it is argued, regularly functions as a tub-thumper for the American military industrial complex. While there have been a number of significant recent studies that place this relationship in a fuller socioeconomic context (Robb, 2004; Miller et al, 2007; Kellner 2010; Jenkins 2012; Jenkins & Alford, 2012), the importance of the global network of US embassies in this system, and their role in Hollywood’s cultural hegemony, is often overlooked. Until recently, this involvement has been examined only in a handful of articles, which focus on the years immediately following the Second World War (Jarvie, 1990; Swann, 1991; Trumpbour, 2007; Lee, 2008; Colman, 2009). Yet the release by Wikileaks in 2011 of a tranche of over 250,000 US embassy cables has provided an opportunity to explore how this process operates in the 21st-century.