Hollywood and the American sickness

Express Tribune

4 days ago

Due to being housed in California, Hollywood always likes to paint its image of not only democratic leaning but also all for human rights and other goodies. Truth be told, Hollywood is responsible for much of the American sickness, especially the kinds that manifests itself in society as well as in politics.
A growing number of Americans grew up watching Hollywood movies where a certain group of foreign countries are portrayed as enemies and villains. Iran, Iraq, Syria, Venezuela, China, Russia, and sometimes Pakistan are talked about and portrayed as the bad actors that are up to no good. America is always depicted as this great player on the world stage, which is capable of doing nothing wrong and is always out and about on foreign soil, occupying their lands, doing killings and so forth — all for a good cause. As far as Hollywood is concerned, America has invaded foreign countries, which Americans may not even be able to find on a map, only because the people in those countries needed to be rescued and helped from their own fellow citizens.
This not only justifies the evil act of aggression, which America commits instinctively, but also sanitises it. It also creates a moral bankruptcy because Americans think that invading foreign countries is somehow a good cause and the only worthy purpose in those invasions is to get upset over American deaths. Clint Eastwood produced a movie named American Sniper, which is one such illustration of what Chomsky called a dehumanised mentality.
Adrien Brody, who won an Oscar for acting in The Pianist, is quite a contrast to American Sniper in one regard: this movie highlights the miserable conditions under which Brody's character lives and survives the Holocaust as a Jew. In American Sniper, a Muslim woman on a street in her own country, which is occupied and invaded by the American Sniper's nation, is shot and killed by the American Sniper who describes her as a terrorist and a savage. These two movies are just samples representing a myriad of movies through the decades confirming the concern that Edward Said had expressed that what these movies do is create a tendency in the minds of the American people to rationalise the slaughter of one kind of people and protection of another kind. In Said's time, he was pointing to the movie Lawrence of Arabia, where the white man was civilised and peaceful and the Arab man was wild and savage. Quite honestly, the reverse is the truth if we only look at actions. The clean shaven smiling faces with blonde hair are some of the most dangerous sapiens that ever walked this planet.
Just like the TV shows from the 1950s and 1960s were responsible for creating a generation of serial killers because the main themes of those shows was murder and guns, the movies of our time, which bend backwards in their attempt to sanitise American and Israeli war crimes, will create a generation of Americans who will see every global problem as a nail to be hit with the American moral hammer. To lose the ability to know that we could be wrong as a society and as a nation is a sickness, which Hollywood is very happy to turn into a national pandemic. Because the biggest problem is not the ability to find problems but the inability to see the hammer method as problematic.
Humans kill more than a 100 million sharks every year just so that some people can enjoy delicious soup. Sharks kill about 5 to 10 humans per year. We, humans, might actually make them go extinct soon. Yet, Hollywood would like us to think that sharks are dangerous by depicting such in popular movies like Jaws and Jaws 2, and many others. Hollywood created a generation of psycho-serial killers and then made true crime movies from the crimes of those very killers, profiting on the back end as well. Hollywood makes fiction, literally.