highpriestessoferis:

lord-armitage:

womanwithaknife:

fromacomrade:

me

So I actually wrote my dissertation about this and it’s not just that the Department of Defence (there’s an office in the Pentagon dedicated to liaising with Hollywood productions), but they effectively have a strangle-hold on how Hollywood portrays the US military since the DoD give permission for producers to use military hardware, without that permission the cost of filming sharply goes up and films end up extremely over-budget. So the producers can either drop any critical elements at the DoD’s discretion, or continue with a film which will barely be released at all and will never make its budget back. 

Any American film which involves the military, know that the DoD probably signed off on it, or were directly involved with. Films like American Sniper and Zero Dark Thirty had a heavy government influence, the latter to falsely justify the methods the CIA used in finding and killing Osama bin Laden, which included torture.  

It’s why the military figures are always the heros and there will never be a Hollywood film which is critical of the US military because of this. Just remember, whenever you see the US military in a Hollywood movie, it’s exactly what the Department of Defence want you to see. It’s not being hyperbolic when these types of films are called propaganda. 

I highly recommend looking over the lists of each branch’s media liason office to see how many films and television shows they have influence over. It’s almost every popular show and movie, whether it’s about the military or not. They control so much of what we see.

I’d be very interested to know how this works for police. Uniforms and cop cars are a loooot cheaper to get than tanks and helicopters so they don’t have the financial hold of ‘you NEED us because you need our stuff’ yet every single show that features the police in any way is super obvious cop propaganda. Control over what gets made is usually more subtle than “do what we want or we sue you” so I wonder how exactly the police manage to establish such levels of control over that. Is it because you need cooperation from the police to get the road blocks needed to shoot movies in crowded cities? Do they have a grasp on who gets funding? What is it?