Popular Culture as Propaganda: Reading Homeland and American Sniper as Propaganda through The Propaganda Model
When we think of the word “propaganda”, what springs to mind is usually old German, pro-Nazi movies, or Stalinist propaganda, not television series or movies made in the 2010’s. The definition of propaganda is: the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person; ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause; also : a public action having such an effect. Thus, propaganda can encompass anything which spreads political ideas to further a cause or oppose a cause. Propaganda can come in many shapes and forms, including cultural texts, not just those made officially by a government. I have chosen one television series, Homeland (2011–present) and the film American Sniper (2014) as they are political texts which, whether intended or not, create a statement about the ongoing War on Terror. Both Homeland and American Sniper are American, and both are based around the waging of the war on the Middle East after 9/11. Using the concept of propaganda and watching this television series and this film with the knowledge of the U.S.A’s political climate during the time in which these were set and made, I will investigate how these texts reinforce the cause of the War on Terror, thus defining themselves as propaganda.
The use of propaganda in American politics can be traced back to World War II.
Figure one is an example of anti-Japanese propaganda used to encourage American men to join the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. This is an early example of racist dehumanising (literally turning the human into an ape) tactics to allow for an ‘us’ versus ‘Other’ dichotomy. Another example of propaganda can be found during the Cold War (1945–1991). After the end of World War II, America and the Soviet Union were no longer united against fighting Nazi Germany. The ideological tensions that pre-existed this war continued and became what is known as the Cold War. America (and the United Kingdom) generally represented democracy and capitalism whilst the Soviet Union embodied communism which was read by America as embodying totalitarianism. Tensions during this time were presented through multiple conflicts, but generally existed as a battle of Imperialism.
Figure two depicts an example of anti-Soviet propaganda, embodying communism as evil, aggressive and a threat to America (the threat seen as a ‘rape’ of the American people). This kind of propaganda was used to deter Americans from sympathising with communist ideology.
In more recent years, more subtle propaganda has been used in popular culture. Steven Prince points out that ‘shortly after 9/11’ U.S. President, George Bush’s Administration, ‘persuade[d] members of the entertainment industry to tailor media depictions of terrorism in ways that would benefit the new “war on terror” [which] seems to have found its greatest success in television programming’. Several academic articles use the programme 24 (2001–2010 with a revival in 2014) as an example of popular media that ‘advocates hard-line political views about the best strategies for confronting terrorism’. The show portrays torture as a necessary and useful tool for receiving information from terrorists and dehumanised terrorist groups, reiterating the notion that ‘Bush administration claimed that these prisoners fell outside the Geneva conventions, the public believed it’. Thus, through dehumanising the victim of torture by portraying them as evil terrorists, the viewers of 24 ‘made to believe that it was okay to torture someone under certain circumstances’. Whilst this fictional use of torture was suggesting the need for harsh interrogation to the public, the Bush administration was using real torture methods to gain information about al Qaeda. Therefore, the messages disseminated through popular culture have shown to be worthy of study and suggests the need for critical reflection on how we consume popular cultural texts.
24 was extremely successful, but had come under criticism for promoting torture when interrogating terrorists and encouraging Islamophobia through continual use of Muslim terrorists. The use of torture on the show, though controversial:
Thus, how terrorists are presented to the viewer through popular culture helps to shape opinions and beliefs about foreign policy and what terrorist’s agendas are. Shows like 24 oversimplify the narrative to America is good and Middle East is bad, but in hindsight, these narratives gloss over America’s faults and oversimplify other countries motives and overemphasise their potential threat to America.
Now with the proliferation of modern technology, propaganda can be more easily disseminated by political figures directly to the public. Social media has played a significant role in recent conflicts and political campaigns. The current American president, Donald Trump, has been known to use the social media platform Twitter to relate his views to the world.
Figure three depicts a ‘tweet’ from Trump’s Twitter account directed towards the British Prime Minister. Trump uses his social media to disseminate anti-Islamic messages in the context of attacks from terrorist group Islamic State (ISIS), a group who at the time of this message had successfully attacked the United Kingdom three times (two attacks in London and one in Manchester). Trump has been known to tweet other racist and Islamophobic material, and is not hesitant in implying his Islamophobic view that all Muslims are terrorists. This is a radical departure from previous presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who both refrained from outright radical statements. Bush made it clear that the war in Iraq would be against al Qaeda, not Muslims, and Obama reiterated that same sentiment. It is clear, however, that Bush used other persuasive measures to ensure the support of the American public, such as the press backing him on the belief of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (although later criticising him for this lie), and shows like 24 which reiterated his political stance on the War on Terror. I will, later in this paper, show that the Obama administration is not as innocent as it would like to be seen, and also uses some propaganda measures through popular culture as well. However, my point here is that Trump is the new extreme, for he states in black and white terms how he sees the Muslim community, whilst previous presidents used more subtle and indirect ways to disseminate their ideas. I will now look at Homeland season 1 and American Sniper to conduct an in-depth analysis about how it portrays political agendas and justifies the War on Terror using propaganda methods.
Homeland is a television thriller series developed by Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa. Homeland is a political thriller about the Central Intelligence Agency preventing future terrorist attacks on post-9/11 America. The series central characters are Carrie Mathison, a CIA officer who works in Counterterrorism, and U.S. Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody, who has been rescued from Iraq after being held prisoner for eight years by al Qaeda. American Sniper is a biographical war film written by Jason Hall and directed by Clint Eastwood. It is based on the memoir American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (2012) by Chris Kyle. The film follows Kyle on his tours of Iraq where he was celebrated for being a highly accomplished marksman, but also portrays the strains on his personal life as a result of his military career.
Whilst some review Homeland to critical acclaim, others review the show as Islamophobic, one such critic being James Castonguay, who additionally calls the show ‘a “quality” propaganda arm for the Obama administration’s continued waging of “dirty wars” around the globe’. American Sniper is also highly acclaimed, particularly for it’s realistic depiction of post-traumatic stress. However, one reviewer calls the film ‘bland patriotism’, and the film has also been called ‘anti-Muslim and anti-[Middle Eastern and North African] propaganda”’. Using propaganda as a concept to analyse and compare these two texts (I use the term texts which encompasses film and television texts that I will analyse), I will investigate how these texts defend the continuing War on Terror. The texts contribute to anti-Islamic propaganda, provide simplistic narratives on the motives of terrorists and highlights the U.S. as victims of terrorist violence. American Sniper uses imperialist and colonial language to assert U.S. authority over Iraqi terrorists, whist Homeland attempts to weave more progressive narratives, yet only reinforces American’s need to wage the War on Terror.
To define propaganda, I will use aspects of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model. This model is used to critique the news media and how it ‘serve[s] the ends of a dominant elite’. I will apply the appropriate ‘filters’ to Homeland and American Sniper, though they are fictional texts, but will demonstrate how they reflect dominant ideologies expressed in real world propaganda. I will articulate that both texts reflect how the media perpetuates dominant ideologies of U.S. mainstream media or government, which is filter three; the ways that the texts deal with inconvenient stories, known as ‘flak’, filter four; but, most importantly, how both texts use the common enemy of the Muslim terrorist, filter five. I should note that Filter 3 is explicitly about how the government is a main source for news media and how such main sources shape the dominant narratives. Thus, in this paper, I will investigate how fiction texts can perpetuate the narratives set by government and media through Chomsky’s filter 3. Additionally, filter 5 is known as the anti-communist filter which creates the common enemy of communist states against the democratic states, such as the U.S. and the U.K. This has been re-appropriated here as the anti-Islamic filter. Simon Enoch points out that the fifth filter was manifested ‘as “anti-communism” during the Cold War period when Manufacturing Consent was originally published, [but] this filter still operates, particularly in the post-9/11 political climate. This filter mobilizes the population against a common enemy (terrorism, energy insecurity, Iran…) while demonizing opponents of state policy as insufficiently patriotic or in league with the enemy’. Thus, I will use this propaganda model to show how Homeland and American Sniper support the War on Terror.
Homeland’s episodes begin with a title sequence that places the series historically, including images and audio from several historical moments in American modern history, along with content from the series. Historical content includes: images of 9/11; Ronald Reagan in 1986 announcing air strikes against terrorist facilities in Libya; former U.S. President, George W. Bush, announcing military steps against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait; former U.S. President, Bill Clinton’s, statements on the USS Cole in 2000; Colin Powell in the UN Security Council and an excerpt from former U.S. President, Barack Obama’s speech where he announces the death of Osama bin Laden. Along with these historical moments, the series introduces Mathison as a child growing up within the media’s proliferation of terrorist news stories. The sequence additionally uses imagery of a maze.
Figure four shows the child Mathison in a maze wearing a Minotaur mask, suggestive of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. This is juxtaposed with the adult Mathison in the maze with Brody.
The imagery of Mathison in the maze looking for Brody questions whether Mathison ‘is […] to play the righteous pursuer of a covert terrorist […]? Or, is she in fact more akin to the monstrous Minotaur, […] who figuratively hunts — illegally spies on — the innocent without reason, Brody and his family?’ At first, the answer is ambiguous. Mathison is initially introduced as paranoid, she has bipolar disorder which she hides from her colleagues, and her suspicion that Brody might be a ‘turned’ terrorist is unlikely. The opening sequence contains a voiceover of Mathison exclaiming that she cannot let 9/11 happen again, which establishes her ‘permanent state of paranoia that mirrors America’s post-attack collective psyche’. She becomes obsessed in her suspicions of Brody, but the viewer is presented with Brody as an all-American war hero, an unlikely terrorist suspect. However, the viewer is shown that Mathison has received word from inside Abu Nazir’s (the fictional terrorist working for al Qaeda) inner circle that a former American will be ‘turned’. Nevertheless, the viewer is uncomfortable when Mathison installs secret security cameras, and other than seeing personal moments which are uncomfortable to watch, Mathison discovers nothing.
Joshua Clover defines these intimate scenes that are being secretly filmed as ‘metareflection’ as they are tales which ‘highlights US institutional fragility’. The series begins to critique U.S. security through showing ‘surveillance as voyeurism’ and attempts to critique the post-9/11 Patriot Act. This act was implemented by the Bush administration in 2001 which allowed unrestricted access to surveil the American public, amongst other new rights. Many aspects of this law are still in place after Obama re-signed the bill in 2011, and not without critique. Congressman Sensenbrenner, an author of the Patriot Act, stated in 2013 after misuse of the Act by the FBI, that he is ‘extremely troubled by the FBI’s interpretation of this legislation. […] Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American’. This critique of the Act’s invasive surveillance is not the only one to have been voiced since the Act’s conception. These critiques are reflected in Mathison’s excessive surveillance of Brody, especially as he appears innocent. Thus, Homeland acknowledges critiques of national security. In fact, Herman and Chomsky’s notion of the ‘inconvenient’ story, or ‘flak’, is actually highlighted rather than forced out or ignored. Mathison’s surveillance is removed in episode four against Mathison’s will, but the viewer then learns that Mathison is correct to suspect him.
Brody is confirmed as a terrorist in episode eight. The opening sequence’s posed question, who the Minotaur is, is solidified as Brody, and it is Mathison who is to capture him. Through the narrative construct of dramatic irony, Mathison’s paranoid suspicions are confirmed to the viewer. Whilst the series presents surveillance as invasive at first, it is then suggested such measures are needed. The U.S., like Mathison, is justified in her paranoia as her suspicions are proved correct. She is an example of a post-9/11 ‘rogue [hero, who] “are the only ones that can act sufficiently,” and that even though they might prefer to think things through and follow the rules, the circumstances of modern risk societies do not allow for it’. Her sense of urgency means that she cannot delay action, suggesting that such parallel narratives of real world rushed foreign policy should be read as similarly justified, such as the Patriot Act. Even though the Act has aided in the identification of a very small number of terrorists (here I am providing one other news story stating a similar contempt of the use of the Patriot Act and generally post-9/11 surveillance), Homeland attempts to reinforce the dominant ideology, exemplified by a 2014 New York Times headline, that the Act is a ‘Vital Weapon in Fighting Terrorism’. Thus, the inconvenient narratives have been undermined and actively used to prove the dominant ideology, a method used in propaganda media when ‘inconvenient facts […] within the proper framework of assumptions, […] makes for a propaganda system that is far more credible and effective in putting over a patriotic agenda than one with official censorship’. Homeland portrays the critiques and mistakes of U.S. government to create the illusion of an objective picture of foreign policy. It reworks those critiques to align with the dominant ideology that the War on Terror must be waged to protect America. Though surveillance is invasive, Brody must be caught.
The first season of Homeland additionally reflects on the U.S. use of drone strikes. Brody’s motivation for becoming a terrorist is to avenge the children killed by a U.S. drone that was targeted at Nazir. Brody was looking after Nazir’s son, Issa, at the time of the bombing, and was still technically a prisoner of war. Brody grows close to Issa and comes to befriend, or be brainwashed by, Nazir. Brody states in a suicide tape, intended to be played after he suicide bombs members of the U.S. government, that:
‘My action this day is against […] domestic enemies. The Vice President and members of his national security team who I know to be liars and war criminals, responsible for atrocities they were never held accountable for. This is about justice for eighty-two children whose deaths were never acknowledged and whose murder is a stain on the soul of this nation.’
Brody’s suicide tape provides a critique of the often-hidden measures of U.S. foreign policy at a time when the Bush Administration’s harsh policies were well known to the public. Additionally, this aired one year before Obama admitted to, and defended, carrying out extensive drone attacks in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen (click here for more information on drone warfare during the Obama administration). In later seasons, the issue of drone warfare is covered more widely. During this drone attack, however, Brody witnesses first-hand the destruction of the bomb.
Figures six and seven depict the chaos of the drone strike. This scene subverts Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model which compares the worthy victims, those who are victims of enemy attacks, to unworthy victims, those who are victims of the U.S. Here we see a small boy die from U.S. military violence, a victim normally hidden from view. To Nazir’s and Brody’s disgust, the Vice President, on international television, denies the strike was implemented by the U.S. and states that the strike was ‘created by the terrorists for propaganda purposes’. Nazir angrily replies to the screen: ‘and they call us terrorists’. This subverting of roles, who the terrorist is, is a transgressive moment as a usual ‘unworthy victim’ is given screen time and is shown as a ‘worthy victim’. This scene provides a harrowing critique of U.S. foreign policy and drone use, especially at a time when drone warfare was on the rise in the real world.
However, Brody as Nazir’s, and Issa’s, avenging angel ‘may be a retelling of the “White Man is needed to protect Brown Feminized Muslim”-narrative that is so painfully familiar from the majority of dominant “9/11” texts’. Brody is outraged by the murder of Issa, whilst Nazir is quietly disgusted and, very significantly, uses Issa’s death as leverage to gain Brody’s loyalty. It is Brody, not Nazir, who we are invited to sympathise with. And it is only through Brody that Issa is a worthy victim, as without the narrative function of Issa’s death, this moment would not be shown. Apart from Brody, ‘the Muslim characters, […] are mediated to us via externals, by social circumstances and actions, not through any kind of emotional life we are invited to identify with’. It is telling that Brody cries over Issa’s body in figure seven and not Nazir. Generally, the show’s portrayal of Muslims is reductive as ‘although not all of the Muslims in Homeland are terrorists, all of the terrorists are Muslims’. Additionally, Brody’s ‘Islamic “turn” is […] a prerequisite to becoming a terrorist’. The show constantly reiterates the dominant Western ideology of Muslims as the common enemy, similar to how Herman and Chomsky argue that propaganda media must ‘mobilize the populace against an enemy’. Importantly, Brody is given a revengeful purpose to kill the Vice President, whilst Nazir’s motives remain unclear, as he was a terrorist before Issa’s death. Nazir’s backstory remains elusive and his reasons for joining al Qaeda are are implied simply as Islamic Fundamentalism and hatred of America as his critiques of America and his Muslim faith are the only two characteristics ever presented to the viewer. Homeland provides simplistic motives to terrorists and equates Islam to terrorism, contributing to anti-Islamic propaganda.
A transgressive moment in the series is when the drone attack is defended by CIA agents themselves. David Estes, the director of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center, defends the attack to Saul Berenson, Mathison’s mentor, as: ‘we’re about projecting American power now. Degrading al Qaeda militarily’. Berenson threatens to report the strike to The New York Times to which Estes replies that he will not:
‘because telling the world we killed eighty-two kids would endanger every one of your case officers in the field. Not to mention every American soldier on the ground. You would essentially be handing the enemy the biggest recruitment tool since Abu Ghraib’.
Homeland is drawing on critical mistakes made by U.S. officials, presenting the viewer with a direct reference to the torture inflicted by U.S. soldiers on Iraqi prisoners of war in Abu Ghraib, and showing U.S. officials defend a drone strike on a school. The series acknowledges that the U.S. government is not innocent players in the War on Terror, and does not ‘shy from showing its savagery’. By providing critiques of the U.S., Homeland is able to market itself as politically aware and as a nuanced depiction of foreign affairs. However, these critiques continually are used to defend the U.S.
Castonguay writes of Homeland’s self-reflection as, whilst it ‘does suggest that US policy and actions are partly to blame for the terrorists’ reprisals, […] it does so to reinforce the need for increased homeland security and the use of force in counterterrorism operations’. The series continually uses of images of 9/11 in the opening sequence, and depicts other scenes of destruction on American soil, such as in episode ten when a terrorist bomb detonates in Washington. These images work to reinforce the need to continue the War on Terror to protect American citizens.
The bomb in episode ten causes masses of carnage, such as in figure eight depicting a man having lost his arm, similar to figure six. This direct mirror imagery suggests that whilst severe injuries and death occur from U.S. drones, the same can happen in America when terrorists bomb U.S. civilians. Again, Herman and Chomsky’s ‘worthy’ or ‘unworthy’ victims are implemented. American victims of violence by an enemy of the U.S. are highlighted here as worthy victims, and shows an equal weighing of victims of both U.S. violence and victims of enemy violence. Scenes such as in figure eight highlight the need to project ‘American power’ as revenge for violence against Americans. This impending threat that Homeland proposes will happen to America is exaggerated, as since ‘2001, […], “nearly twice as many people [in the United States] have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics, and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims”’. In fact, ‘from 1975 through 2015, the average chance of dying in an attack by a foreign-born terrorist on U.S. soil was 1 in 3,609,709 a year’. Therefore, the threat of this terrorist bomb as depicted in episode ten is small and Homeland itself becomes as paranoid as Mathison.
Whilst the use of drones is critiqued in the show, drone use is an ‘open secret’, and the inclusion of drone warfare in popular culture ‘have set many of the terms by which we understand this new, highly indiscriminate form of warfare’. By juxtaposing the scenes of drone violence abroad to terrorist bomb explosions in the U.S., audiences must weigh up how justified attacks against enemy states are, and it is suggested that many of these means are necessary. Herman and Chomsky state that ‘inconvenient facts’, like drone use, can be used and turned on its head to create ‘a propaganda system that is far more credible and effective in putting over a patriotic agenda than one with official censorship’. Thus, the show engages with U.S. violence so it is able to justify it, and Homeland creates a threat to America to perform this justification. Most worrying is that Homeland uses ‘an actual CIA liaison, running story lines by the agency’. This directly correlates to Chomsky’s notion that ‘propaganda campaigns may be instituted either by the government or by one or more of the top media firms’, meaning that Homeland as propaganda becomes a direct tool for government institutions to disseminate their messages. In fact, in 2012, Obama said his favourite television series was Homeland. Thus, it is unsurprising that this text works to support the War on Terror and encourage the American public to support it as well.
American Sniper’s huge success is largely down to the emotional portrayal of Kyle’s struggle with post-traumatic stress which the director, Clint Eastwood, argues ‘adds up to kind of an anti-war [message]’. Former First Lady, Michelle Obama, said the film portrayed the ‘complicated moral decisions [soldiers] are tasked with every day. The stresses of balancing love of family with a love of country’. The film conveys how Kyle struggles to re-adjust to civilian life and shows how domestic violence often links to post-traumatic stress as the film includes the fact that Kyle was shot by a fellow veteran. For this reason, Eastwood argues this focus of the psychological strain on veterans is ‘the biggest antiwar statement any film’ can make. However, its reductive portrayal of Muslims and its biased portrayal of the war has sparked outrage. Protests were made to ban screenings at universities and several reviews slander the film as Islamophobic, and too-patriotic to allow for critical reflection of the war. Whilst the film was not intended to be pro-war propaganda, Sean Heuston points out that ‘authorial intent and reader reception’ complicates propaganda images as ‘a fundamentally open text [is] susceptible to interpretations far beyond authorial intent’. This paper reads the film as propaganda as, like Homeland, it draws a simplistic picture of terrorist motives, contains anti-Islamic propaganda, portrays the U.S. as victims of violence, and portrays the War on Terror as necessary.
Very early in the film, it is established that Kyle is a Texas ‘cowboy’ with no real sense of purpose. However, Kyle gains a patriotic motive when he sees the American Embassy buildings being bombed in Kenya and Tanzania on his television, inspiring him to sign up for the Navy. However, Kyle’s memoir states that ‘he was getting bored with his life as a ranch hand in Texas and decided to explore several military recruitment options over an extended period’. This use of a political motive which was invented for the film to give him a sense of patriotic purpose is a way to paint Kyle as a crusader in Bush’s ‘war to save civilisation itself’. Kyle watches the destruction on his television and says, ‘look what they did to us’, showing images of violence against America and feeling a patriotic sense of community and need for revenge. Essentially, it depicts ‘war as something that happens to the United States and its military’. Herman and Chomsky note that in the case of the Indochina War (1954–75), the U.S. invasion of Vietnam is commonly painted by ‘U.S. officials and the mainstream media […] to view the U.S. role in the war as creditable, the United States as the victim’. U.S. victimisation is common in propaganda texts, and this links to Homeland’s episode ten, where the U.S. are equally victims of violence as the Iraqi’s are.
Another scene which politicises Kyle is how the camera focuses on Kyle’s reaction to 9/11. The camera moves between Kyle’s reaction and a zoom in on the television.
The camera cuts between shots of figures nine and ten to immediately cut to Kyle behind a rifle.
The fast cut editing implies 9/11 fueled his patriotism and further highlights the U.S. as victims to be protected. Such editing implies that Kyle becomes the avenger of America in a similar way to Mathison being motivated to protect America after 9/11 by any means necessary. America as a victim to be protected is reinforced by both Homeland and American Sniper.
Immediately after Kyle’s wedding, he goes to war in Fallujah, Iraq, which is described to Kyle as ‘the new Wild West of the old Middle East’. The film uses the genre of the Western to portray the dichotomy of the U.S. versus the Iraqi’s, fully endorsing ‘the durable legacy of US colonial violence and conquest, visible in Westerns, combat movies, […] and related fare. The recent cycle of terrorist-action films is simply another extension (and refinement) of this legacy’. The film was intentionally framed as a Western as co-producer Bradley Cooper describes how Kyle goes ‘into a town and there’s his equivalent on the other side, another sharpshooter. He’s a sharpshooter, and [it ends in] tumbleweeds, a dust storm, there’s a showdown’. The enemy shooter is called Mustafa, who is Kyle’s rival.
If we compare figure eleven to figure twelve, we see Cooper’s idea of two ‘equivalents’ against each other, represented in the mirroring Kyle and Mustafa shots. Mustafa becomes Kyle’s colonial Other, using Edward Said’s notion of how the ‘Orient’ and the Western man, the ‘Occident’, in fact ‘reflect’ each other. However, the Occident has ‘authority over the Orient’, thus, Kyle must defeat his Oriental Other to assert American authority over the Orient, which he does. The film reinforces a colonial dichotomy, and perpetuates the need for America to project its authority, just as Estes states in Homeland.
Moreover, whilst Kyle gets an entire history, a story of his childhood, meeting his wife and his political motivations for fighting in Iraq, Mustafa gets no such backstory or even more than a few sentences of dialogue. All we know is that he is one of the ‘bad guys’, as soldiers constantly refer to the Iraqi’s, and was a former Olympic champion (noted in Kyle’s memoir as a passing comment and is mentioned in the film in a similar manner). Why an athlete becomes a terrorist, gets no explanation. Inconvenient narratives, such as terrorist motives, are filtered out. To ‘exclude inconvenient facts’ which complicate dominant ideologies (or, as articulated by Homeland, are reworked to serve dominant ideology) is a function of propagandist media. To provide background of the enemy is to humanise them, which is an inconvenient narrative to be ignored. The media also needs to ‘convince the public of enemy evil’. Another enemy in the film is ‘The Butcher’, whose only screen time portrays him murdering a child with a screwdriver.
Again, The Butcher is not given political motivation, backstory, or even a secure name (possibly Amid Khalaf Fanus, but it is not confirmed). All we know are his ties to al Qaeda. Kyle’s commander wants The Butcher and Mustafa dead, and for Kyle to ‘put the fear of God into these savages’. Iraqi’s are referred to as ‘savages’ throughout the film, and with the only main Iraqi characters being Mustafa and The Butcher, the film only depicts Iraqi’s as ‘savage Others bringing death and destruction to innocent populations for no reason beyond their own pathological disorders’. The film only makes the simple dichotomy of good versus evil, or civilised American versus savage Iraqi’s, and portrays terrorists as having no political motive, only bloodlust.
This representation of terrorists in Iraq is oversimplified and works in a similar way to how the enemy is portrayed in Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model, where they describe the ‘cultural process’ where ‘the victims [… are] turned into the villains’. They use the example of how the Vietnamese in the Indochina War were turned into the instigators of violence and the U.S. were the victims. Films about the conflict used this ‘myth’ to ‘turn […] history on its head’. How popular culture perpetuated this victimisation of the U.S., and the creation of the evil Vietnamese, is reproduced in American Sniper. The U.S. is presented as the good force, wiping out the terrorists, whilst all Iraqi’s are represented as evil. Kyle’s first kills, a woman and a child, are evil, despite being victims of living in a country ruled by a dictator and suffering at the hands of America’s invasion.
Kyle sees a woman and a boy carrying a bomb and makes the difficult decision to kill them. This scene is mainly shot from the point of view of the sniper rifle, highlighting that they are targets, or savages, to be exterminated and are not humans worthy of understanding. At no point does Kyle question why a woman and a child feel such strong negative feelings towards U.S. soldiers that they would risk death to attack them, he simply states ‘that was evil like I never seen before’. Thus, it is not only terrorists like Mustafa and The Butcher who are demonised, but even Iraqi civilians go through the cultural process of victimhood to villainy.
Marc Lee is the only character to question U.S. actions. He says to Kyle, ‘I just wanna [sic] believe in what we’re doing here’ to which Chris responds ‘oh, there’s evil here. We’ve seen it’. To any criticism of the war, Kyle argues against using the dichotomy of good versus evil. Lee, however, dies in battle and at his funeral his wife reads a letter he wrote: ‘my question is when does glory fade away and become a wrongful crusade?’. The use of the word ‘crusade’ alludes to imperialist crusading and provides the only real criticism of American imperialism in this film. Kyle, in response to this letter, tells Tanya ‘that letter killed Marc. He let go and he paid the price for it’ suggesting ‘he was shot […] because he lost his will to believe in the war’. Kyle does not question the war and believes that criticism of the war is an inconvenient narrative to be ignored. This line of critique inserted into the film acts as an example of when ‘facts that […] undermine the government line, […] can be found, usually on the back pages of the newspapers’. This one critique is similarly found in the ‘back pages’ of the film, an unimportant gesture disregarded by Kyle as a sign of weakness.
In conclusion, Homeland attempts to create a nuanced picture of the War on Terror by providing critiques of American foreign policy, yet falls short in its attempt to provide transgressive narratives. Homeland still reiterates the notion of Islam equating to terrorism, provides a simplistic portrayal of terrorist motives, defends invasive surveillance mechanisms and, whilst acknowledging the use of drones in warfare, reiterates the paranoid threat to America as defence. American Sniper reiterates American imperialist values through colonial language and imagery. Scott Birdwise argues that ‘the stories we tell ourselves no longer make sense in the ruthless simplification of complex global conflicts into simplified tales of good and evil’. However, American Sniper appears to reduce the Iraq war into such a simplified tale, and Homeland tries to argue that whilst America is not innocent, the terrorists are worse. How popular culture writes of conflict and history is important. Not long after American Sniper’s release, a poll ‘showed 57 percent of Americans now favor sending troops back into Iraq (and Syria) to combat the Islamic State’ as U.S. public grow concerned about the rise of terror. Thus, how media portrays conflict can influence how the public understands such conflict. American Sniper and Homeland can be read as propaganda through Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model and how both texts respond to, and reinforce, the dominant ideologies of real world propaganda.
It is important to use this model to see the ways that popular culture can be used to influence the masses. Here, I have used two political texts, but we can apply this to a wide range of films, books and television. For example, the popular film World War Z (2013), which is based on the 2006 novel of the same name, is predominantly an action-packed zombie movie. Yet, certain images in the film, and settings such as Jerusalem, inspire images of real world Middle East conflicts. The use of bio-terrorism and deadly diseases in warfare — think of Children of Men (2006) here as well — all contribute to an ever-expanding list of post-9/11 texts. And what does it mean to link zombies to Middle Eastern conflicts? What images and metaphors are being drawn there? Who are portrayed as heroes and who are the bad guys? These questions deserve its own article, but I think it’s important to remember that all texts have a political motivation, have been made in a particular political climate by people who have a view of the world. Thus, we should not blindly consume texts, but think about what it is saying and who it is being said by.
