Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

While analysts may agree that Hollywood movies have always both mirrored and helped to shape the tenor of their times, the question remains: Just how do they do it? And how do we identify the underlying political/ideological content of a film? Movies, Myth, and the National Security State answers these questions, exploring how Hollywood movies have served to propagate, or to debate, or sometimes to challenge the evolving US national security state since 1945. Drawing on more than a thousand films—and focusing in detail on 48 films that address key issues confronting the US and its sense of self and role in the world—the authors provide insights into US political life as it has developed across some seven decades.

Motion pictures --- National security in motion pictures. --- History.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This book analyzes Hollywood storytelling that features an American crimefighter—whether cop, detective, or agent—who must safeguard society and the nation by any means necessary. That often means going “rogue” and breaking the rules, even deploying ugly violence, but excused as self-defense or to serve the greater good. This ends-justifies-means approach dates back to gunfighters taming the western frontier to urban cowboy cops battling urban savagery—first personified by “Dirty” Harry Callahan—and later dispatched in global interventions to vanquish threats to national security. America as the world’s “policeman often means controlling the Other at home and abroad, which also extends American hegemony from the Cold War through the War on Terror. This book also examines pioneering portrayals by males of color and female crimefighters to embody such a social or national defender, which are frustrated by their existence as threats the white knight exists to defeat. .

Police films --- Television cop shows --- Crime films --- Motion pictures --- National security in motion pictures. --- Criminal films --- Caper films --- Thrillers (Motion pictures) --- Cop shows --- Cop television shows --- Police shows (Television programs) --- Police television shows --- Television police shows --- Television crime shows --- Cop films --- Detective and mystery films --- History and criticism. --- History. --- Motion pictures—United States. --- Film genres. --- United States—Study and teaching. --- Critical criminology. --- Popular Culture. --- American Cinema and TV. --- Genre. --- American Culture. --- Ethnicity, Class, Gender and Crime. --- Popular Culture . --- Culture, Popular --- Mass culture --- Pop culture --- Popular arts --- Communication --- Intellectual life --- Mass society --- Recreation --- Culture --- Radical criminology --- Criminology --- Genre films --- Genres, Film --- Motion picture genres --- Plots, themes, etc.