What happens when "propaganda" is deeply human?
Note: This article was originally posted under “Monday Musings” on my Patreon, over a month ago.
It can make a person pretty defensive to be told that one of their favorite movies is “actually propaganda.” At least, that’s been my experience as the person instinctively conjuring the defensiveness.
There are so many elements that muddy the media we consume. Sometimes these elements have to do with the sins or corruption of the artist who made it, or the poor treatment of people involved. Other times, the muddiness is ideological.
In the last few months, ideological discourse has raged (well, on Twitter anyway) about subtle antisemitism in the new Hogwarts Legacy videogame, military worship in Top Gun: Maverick, complicated suggestions about police in The Batman, the usual accusations of CIA advertising in Marvel movies, and intense right-wing nationalism in RRR. Granted, most of these examples are problems more eagerly perceived by left-leaning viewers, but the accusations of “Hollywood propaganda” from the right-wing are just as profuse and plentiful, especially on the internet; the “XYZ has GONE WOKE!” YouTube industrial complex is a topic for another day.
Whether these labels of propaganda from both ends of the aisle are reasonable is beyond the point; sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. I was inspired to write about this after pondering the discourse around RRR, but as a white guy from America, I’m hardly the person to proclaim the “correct” way to view it. Suffice to say, RRR has been wildly successful and beloved by many in India and around the world…but some Indian writers also argue that the film is violently nationalist in a way that goes beyond its historical context and intentionally calls forth imagery associated with far-right causes in the modern-day state. Others, within India and outside it, push back against these criticisms—either by ignoring the political element altogether and saying it’s just entertainment, agreeing with the right-wing causes wholesale, or critically interpreting the film and its imagery in a very different way. No matter how you feel about RRR, its political nature is hard to deny on some level; the film ends with a dance sequence featuring dozens of enshrined portraits of Indian revolutionaries appearing behind the characters and a song lyric that translates as “if your blood boils, lift up the flag,” repeated over and over.
Regardless of all of that complexity, RRR is probably my favorite movie I’ve seen in years. It’s coming back to theaters soon, and I’m so excited to watch it for the 7th time. When describing it to friends, I’ve often found myself saying, “it’s not the best movie of all time, but it is the most movie of all time." And full disclosure: sometimes I also think it might be the best movie of all time. My wife and I play the music at full volume on the way to work several times per week.
Two of my other recent favs have been Top Gun: Maverick and The Batman. So with that in mind, what do I do with the notion that three of my favorite movies of the year could also be interpreted by some as politically right-wing texts?
RRR is, almost inarguably, intensely nationalist. Top Gun: Maverick is, allegedly, a commercial for the military. The Batman, according to many, tries to be about systemic police corruption and then flips in the third act to argue that the corruption was just a few bad apples.
And yet, all three movies moved me in a uniquely human way. There’s a touching male vulnerability and sense of brotherhood in all three of them that feels almost subversive. Ram and Bheem’s friendship in RRR is so pure and earnest and sincere that it becomes a thing of transcendence. Bruce Wayne’s journey from vengeful omen of fear to symbol of hope is downright beautiful. And when Maverick hugs Rooster and says “thank you for saving my life,” it reduces me to puddle status every time—maybe, in part, because I want to experience that same kind of embrace from my own mentors.
I’ve got my own little arguments against the accusations of propaganda for many of my favorite movies; after all, I'd want to retort, my main takeaway from Top Gun: Maverick was not “wow, the military is great!” but rather “wow, Maverick is great!” RRR repudiates its own gun-centric nationalism by showing that Ram’s obsession with revolution has caused him to betray his closest friend. And even Marvel movies, often accused of being military propaganda, frequently depict the military in opposition to the heroes! You could go in circles for hours justifying yourself and your purportedly unproblematic favs.
For the purposes of this discussion, though: let’s just fold here and concede that these movies all have some level of what some might call "propaganda" to them. I’m more interested in what we mean when we use the words we use. How do we identify or define “propaganda”?
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The dictionary describes propaganda as “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.”
The phrase “of a biased or misleading nature” might be the most subjective part of that definition; after all, critics of Top Gun: Maverick would argue that its depiction of the US military is biased and misleading in its reverence and worship for an ultimately harmful and imperialist institution. Many defenders might argue that the US military is, in fact, worthy of reverence and worship—and thus it wasn’t misleading at all, and the bias is in the correct direction.
It seems to me, then, that "propaganda" carries with it something more sinister than the innocent act of publicly promoting a cause. The accusation of making propaganda is also an accusation of intentionally distorting reality itself, often in a somewhat subliminal or covert way that flies under the radar for the average viewer. Propaganda, then, is a word that exists in relationship to what we believe to be true about the reality we live in. Distortion of that reality, especially distortion framed as fact or left unaddressed entirely, is viewed as propaganda.
2014's God's Not Dead might be a great example of a modern work that distorts reality in a semi-subliminal way; every character in God's Not Dead outside the heroic protagonist is an ethnic or political stereotype, every religion outside Christianity is depicted as abusive, and the film even sets up a sinister strawman atheist antagonist for the hero to demolish with convincing apologetics. For the target audience of youth group Christians, though, this intense reduction of reality may register as gospel truth, and indeed, it's meant to do just that—which is exactly what makes it propaganda. It seeks, through reduction and stereotype and fallacy, to alter the audience's perception of the world they live in.
But then again, couldn't James Cameron's Avatar just as easily be lumped into this category, even after that clarification? Avatar is a movie that uses heightened archetypes (some might say stereotypes) and storytelling formulas to convince an audience that the environment is worth saving, industrialization and militaristic colonialism are destructive, and native people are worthy of a voice and land. The only difference is that I agree with this message, and thus, I don't find that it distorts reality.
Part of me wants to ask if what one side calls “propaganda” is what the other side would simply call “a message.” Is a piece of art worthy of the label “propaganda” simply because it has something clear to say about reality that might be controversial to a particular group? Sure, you could say that one identifying feature of true propaganda would be its subliminal nature, but then again—far-right pundits are often the first to cry "subliminal brainwashing" at the simple act of including minorities in a piece of media, so even what is "subliminal" might be up for debate.
I don't know if there's a way out of this circle of reasoning beyond deciding what you believe aligns with reality and what doesn't. And that means engaging honestly with both reality and the stories that imperfectly encapsulate it.
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I distinctly remember a childhood surrounded by other conservative Christian homeschooler parents who were gravely concerned about “Hollywood propaganda” influencing their children. There were kids in my homeschool co-op who had never even heard of Harry Potter because their parents had sought to shield them from the witchcraft it supposedly promoted. Then there were all the Disney conspiracy theories: Disney wants to brainwash kids with happy endings, Disney is indoctrinating kids with atheism, Disney is trying to usher in the death of the classical nuclear family, all the usual nonsense. There was a mom of one of my friends who said she would never let her kids watch Tangled because it, like all Disney movies apparently, promoted “rebelling against your parents.” No comment on the fact that Rapunzel’s abusive mother isn’t even her mother in the first place.
Despite that extreme and laughable example, I think what the “propaganda-accusers” on both sides of the aisle get right is that we should have a more thoughtful engagement with the intricacies and assumptions of the media that we consume. Though I think her takeaway from Tangled was wildly misguided at best, my childhood friend's mother was right to acknowledge that Disney movies (and especially Disney Channel shows) can sometimes paint a portrait of parents that is reductionistic and cartoonish.
It’s no secret that media shapes our understanding of larger structures and cultural ideas if we always take it at face value. The notion of a crossdressing man attempting to murder innocent young girls by lurking in the women’s bathroom is one that still has a vocal place in political discourse today, seen as a very real threat by some—but it was perpetuated primarily by patterns in popular fiction, not by fact. Clearly, the tropes and ideas that we convey in our media can have an influence on us, even subconsciously, and that fact should be engaged and discussed openly and with a critical eye.
What I think the "propaganda-accusers" get wrong is the belief that any work of art is wholesale irredeemable or singularly responsible for the tropes or ideas that it perpetuates. The military industrial complex is a complicated problem in the US, but Top Gun: Maverick did not originate it. Even RRR, an explicitly political text, is a reflection of a larger cultural context and movement—a symptom, not a source. Just as that homeschool mom needed to help her kids learn how to engage with media in good-faith rather than writing it off entirely, we need to learn how to identify the "problematic" assumptions in the stories we tell without using the label of "problematic" as a way to dismiss the story on every level of its existence. The political dimension of reality is a very real one, but it is not the only dimension worthy of value or power.
At the end of the day, sometimes a movie that reduces reality in major ways can also be in touch with much deeper realities in others.
There’s an argument that the majority of superhero movies are semi-fascist in their treatment of criminals, not to mention a hundred different war movies and every spy movie ever made…and most of them are excellent films that speak to the human experience as long as you don’t make them your sole political manifesto. Hell, Saving Mr. Banks is a corporately-sanctioned origin myth for Walt Disney's Mary Poppins movie, full of glaring half-truths—but it also makes me cry like a baby because it expresses something intimately real about fathers and daughters and how our art can help us understand the wounded parts of our souls.
You know we've always gotta get theological in this joint at some point, so I'll put it this way: just as every broken human being still carries some reflection of divine glory, every broken or distorted work of art also carries some reflection of real humanness. There is nationalism in RRR, but that is only one dimension of its existence. There is another dimension, about a shepherd pursuing a lost sheep to the ends of the earth, about a man sacrificing his entire life's mission to save his friend, and about two dapper dudes showing those stuffy Brits how to really dance. That's not the only dimension that matters, but it's certainly the one that resonates with my heart.