Hooray for Hollywood, Our Secret Weapon

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America’s most potent nonmilitary weapon is Hollywood.

No one knows this better than the world’s entire population, which for 100 years has been exposed to the powerful impact of the themes, subtle messages, and agenda-setting parameters of American movies.

One wonders if Karen Hughes, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, has asked for, or received, the “Hollywood memo” from her strategic planning staff. It goes something like this: “Madame Undersecretary, We’ve got an underused weapon here that possesses all the infrastructure one can hope for: billions of human beings around the globe forming a ready, eager audience; millions of movie theaters around the world; user-friendly software that includes the gray matter behind those movies, and legions of talented writers, master directors, superstars, and innovative producers. All of them are under American control, one way or another, and all are the product of American culture.”

To be sure, there is French cinema, British cinema, and of course India’s Bollywood cinema, but nothing comes close to America’s Hollywood in reach and impact.

In our movie strategy, moving the Hollywood product along, helping it – indeed, subsidizing it by creating even more outlets for it – is a mission. American ambassadors must include Hollywood movie facilitation in their annual reports, just as they do human rights violations. Why? Let me cite a few examples among the tens of thousands that show the enormous impact of the American movie.

A couple of months ago, I sat in a movie theater in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, watching Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” surrounded by a lot of men in long, white robes and women with their ubiquitous cell phones.

One test of the impact on those young Arabs of the movie, which retells the story of the Palestinian Arab terrorists who killed Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics of 1972, is that not a single cell phone rang. The spoiled brats at two showings I went to had turned their phones off, not out of respect for the rest of the audience – they have none – but because a movie about Israelis sent to exact revenge on the Palestinian Arabs who killed their athletes really got their attention, educating them subtly about the evil of terror.

Some people in America had qualms about Mr. Spielberg’s “Munich,” suggesting it sets some kind of moral equivalence between terrorist killers and the Israeli avengers and victims. That is nonsense. From an Arab perspective – the perspective of those who need to rethink the whole notion of terrorism as a tool of diplomacy in the Arab-Israeli conflict – there were only the good guys (the Israelis) and the bad guys (the Palestinian Arabs). No moral equivalence at all.

Here a vast audience of Arabs was allowed to see events that happened before many of them were born, in a well done action movie with the subtle and effective message that terror does not pay, that it reduces those perpetrating it to savages and subjects them to unrelenting punishment and contempt.

The struggle with a movie like “Munich” is to make sure it is shown. The UAE censors hesitated before allowing “Munich” to be shown, but finally did.

In the future the mission of public diplomacy will be to take away the hesitation about such American movies. For instance, “Schindler’s List,” Mr. Spielberg’s monumental black-and-white 1993 film about the Holocaust, a story many Muslims still believe to be untrue, was never shown in the Arab world because it didn’t pass the censors. Back then, the State Department slept. That film would have been prime material for the facilitation of public diplomacy.

During and after World War II, scores of movies produced in Hollywood swung world opinion firmly in favor of the Allies and against Germany and Japan, burying Nazi and Japanese chauvinism. Now we are beginning to see a number of Hollywood movies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, with “United 93” still in theaters and Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center” about to open.

If the State Department has one job to do now in public diplomacy, it is to make sure these films are shown in the Arab and Muslim world. One such movie is worth $1 billion in its impact on hearts and minds. Many are already in Hollywood’s pipeline.


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