Hollywood S Imperial Wars

When the Vietnam War punctured the myth of American military invincibility, Hollywood needed a new kind of war movie. The familiar triumphal narrative was relegated to history and, with it, the heroic legacy that had passed from one generation to the next for more than two hundred years. How Hollywood helped create and instill the American myth of heroic continuity, and how films revised that myth after the Vietnam War, is what Armando José Prats explores in Hollywood’s Imperial Wars. The book offers a new way of understanding the cultural and historical significance of Vietnam in relation to Hollywood’s earlier representations of Americans at war, from the mythic heroism of a film like Sands of Iwo Jima to the rupture of that myth in films such as The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and Platoon. As early as the mid-1940s, Prats suggests, fears aroused by the Cold War were stirring anxieties about sustaining the heroic myth—anxieties reflected in the insistent, aggressive patriotism in films of the period. In this context, Prats considers the immeasurable cultural importance of John Wayne, the cinematic apotheosis of wartime valor and righteousness, whose patriotism was nonetheless deeply compromised by his not having served in World War II. Prats reveals how historical and cultural anxieties emerge in well-known Vietnam movies, in which characters inspired by the heroes of the Second World War are denied the heroic legacy of their fathers. American war movies, in Prats’s analysis, were forever altered by the loss in Vietnam. Even movies like American Sniper that exalt war heroes are marked as much by the failure of the heroic tropes of old Hollywood war movies as by the tragic turn of actual historical events. Tracing what Prats calls the “anxiety of legacy” through the films of the World War II and post–Vietnam War periods, this book offers a new way of looking at both the Hollywood war movie and the profound cultural shifts it reflects and refracts.

When the Vietnam War punctured the myth of American military invincibility, Hollywood needed a new kind of war movie. The familiar triumphal narrative was relegated to history and, with it, the heroic legacy that had passed from one generation to the next for more than two hundred years. How Hollywood helped create and instill the American myth of heroic continuity, and how films revised that myth after the Vietnam War, is what Armando José Prats explores in Hollywood's Imperial Wars. The book offers a new way of understanding the cultural and historical significance of Vietnam in relation to Hollywood's earlier representations of Americans at war, from the mythic heroism of a film like Sands of Iwo Jima to the rupture of that myth in films such as The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and Platoon. As early as the mid-1940s, Prats suggests, fears aroused by the Cold War were stirring anxieties about sustaining the heroic myth--anxieties reflected in the insistent, aggressive patriotism in films of the period. In this context, Prats considers the immeasurable cultural importance of John Wayne, the cinematic apotheosis of wartime valor and righteousness, whose patriotism was nonetheless deeply compromised by his not having served in World War II. Prats reveals how historical and cultural anxieties emerge in well-known Vietnam movies, in which characters inspired by the heroes of the Second World War are denied the heroic legacy of their fathers. American war movies, in Prats's analysis, were forever altered by the loss in Vietnam. Even movies like American Sniper that exalt war heroes are marked as much by the failure of the heroic tropes of old Hollywood war movies as by the tragic turn of actual historical events. Tracing what Prats calls the "anxiety of legacy" through the films of the World War II and post-Vietnam War periods, this book offers a new way of looking at both the Hollywood war movie and the profound cultural shifts it reflects and refracts.

Discussing such classic films as Sergeant York, Air Force, and All Quiet on the Western Front, as well as more modern blockbusters like Apocalypse Now and Saving Private Ryan, this outstanding volume focuses on Hollywood and its production of war films. Topics covered include: the early formation of war cinema the apotheosis of the Hollywood war film the ascendancy of ambivalence Hollywood and the war since Vietnam war as a way of seeing. For any student of film studies or American cultural studies, this is a valuable companion.

'War Cinema' presents an introduction to and overview of films that take war as their main theme. Framing the era with 'Apocalypse Now' and 'Apocalypse Now Redux', the author initially focuses on Vietnam on film in the 1970s and 1980s and how this divisive war was represented.

This book explores the expectations, experiences, and reactions of Allied servicemen and women who served in the wartime Pacific and viewed the South Pacific through the lens of Hollywood's South Seas. Based on extensive archival research, it explores the intersections between military experiences and cultural history.

The newly expanded and revised edition of The Hollywood War Machine includes wide-ranging exploration of numerous popular military-themed films that have appeared in the close to a decade since the first edition was published. Within the Hollywood movie community, there has not been even the slightest decline in well-financed pictures focusing on warfare and closely-related motifs. The second edition includes a new chapter on recent popular films and another that analyzes the relationship between these movies and the bourgeoning gun culture in the United States, marked in recent years by a dramatic increase in episodes of mass killings.

The figure of the vampire serves as both object and mode of analysis for more than a century of Hollywood filmmaking. Never dying, shifting shape and moving at unnatural speed, as the vampire renews itself by drinking victims' blood, so too does Hollywood renew itself by consuming foreign styles and talent, moving to overseas locations, and proliferating in new guises. In Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods, Dale Hudson explores the movement of transnational Hollywood's vampires, between low-budget quickies and high-budget franchises, as it appropriates visual styles from German, Mexican and Hong Kong cinemas and off-shores to Canada, Philippines, and South Africa. As the vampire's popularity has swelled, vampire film and television has engaged with changing discourses around race and identity not always addressed in realist modes. Here, teen vampires comfort misunderstood youth, chador-wearing skateboarder vampires promote transnational feminism, African American and Mexican American vampires recover their repressed histories. Looking at contemporary hits like True Blood, Twilight, Underworld and The Strain, classics such as Universal's Dracula and Dracula, and miscegenation melodramas like The Cheat and The Sheik, the book reconfigures Hollywood historiography and tradition as fundamentally transnational, offering fresh interpretations of vampire media as trans-genre sites for political contestation.

Whether presented as exotic fantasy, a strategic location during World War II, or a site combining postwar leisure with military culture, Hawaii and the South Pacific figure prominently in the U.S. national imagination. Hollywood’s Hawaii is the first full-length study of the film industry’s intense engagement with the Pacific region from 1898 to the present. Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett highlights films that mirror the cultural and political climate of the country over more than a century—from the era of U.S. imperialism on through Jim Crow racial segregation, the attack on Pearl Harbor and WWII, the civil rights movement, the contemporary articulation of consumer and leisure culture, as well as the buildup of the modern military industrial complex. Focusing on important cultural questions pertaining to race, nationhood, and war, Konzett offers a unique view of Hollywood film history produced about the national periphery for mainland U.S. audiences. Hollywood’s Hawaii presents a history of cinema that examines Hawaii and the Pacific and its representations in film in the context of colonialism, war, Orientalism, occupation, military buildup, and entertainment.