You Can't Unsee It: Propaganda and Popular Culture

Remember Knight Rider?

Well, one of the lesser tentacles of NBC/Universal--G4--picked up the rebroadcast rights and began airing it very late at night this week.

The reason I mention it is that, as it began its run in 1982 and was one of the many TV productions by Glen A. Larson (this, if you remember, for NBC), and as such featured a now-common-knowledge aspect of Hollywood: a very cosy relationship with the military.

The United States military, since World War II, have had a very good relationship with Hollywood and the media establishment. This is an outgrowth of the World War I efforts to create and shape pro-Allied propaganda, which would take Edward Bernays and Walter Lippman forward into co-creating the disciplines of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations as we know them today. (Bernays lays out the hows and whys in his Propaganda.)

The reason for why the U.S. military--and, by extension, the U.S. government--maintains this relationship is because it wants to actively control how others (That would be we, the people, American and otherwise.) see them and respond as they want of us. In other words, they want to actively control what our perception of their identity is; it's the same phenomenon as the girls making YouTube videos of themselves writ large, with fancy effects and ridiculous resources to consume doing so.

The second episode of Knight Rider used a very old formula for military relations after Vietnam, when the military needed rehabilitation from the image it fell into due to that war. The Damsel in Distress, despite being an Army officer, is just as helpless in the face of violence as her civilian counterparts; Michael Knight has to do his namesake's job and rescue her. The villain and his henchmen are shown to be rogue operatives, and not at all displaying the norms of the Army.

This is, in effect, a virtual scapegoating: the Army is good, but afflicted with bad influences, so once all of these rotten people are thrown out the Army will only do good thereafter. It's the same old Evil Vizier/Good King narrative that's been used for millenia to whitewash troublesome institutions and rehabilitate their image for the public. Because this is now a 30-year-old TV episode, you can easily see the propaganda for what it is. (Believe it or not, The A-Team was used for very similar ends.)

You won't unsee this anymore, now that you know it's there and you can detect it. That's one of the reasons for why both NCIS shows are on the air: it excuses the institutions by making virtual scapegoats out of politically-acceptable targets, manifested in characters that conform to one or more targets on the Establishment's policy hit list. The long-running Law & Order franchise may be winding down, as it's reduced to Special Victims Unit, but cop shows like those excuse the police as the pro-military/intelligence shows excuse those institutions.

This is the United States government, collaborating with Hollywood, projecting unreal illusions about themselves that they want us to accept and internalize, thus making it part of our own identities. It's no different in form and theory than the marketing of cars or food- we're told to identify with a brand, and make our identity incorporate it, regardless of the reality of the thing sold to us. Hell, they've been at it so long that some folks are trying to program our responses to possible events- this is called Predictive Programming.

But what is different are the consequences: when the government sells us on wars we don't need against people that don't threaten us, being sold on Brand USA results in millions of people getting killed and millions more turning against us because of what the government does in our name. Keep that in mind the next time that Jerry Bruckheimer puts out another Transformers film.