The Military-Cinematic Complex may be thought of as an extension of the “Military/Entertainment Complex”, an elaborately organized system of information dispersal through encoded propaganda and symbolism. Its tentacles are numerous, involving sectors of the film, music, television, print media systems. Military-Cinematic extensions of the Media-Industrial complex specifically refers to Hollywood’s well-documented collusion with various governmental systems, parties, think tanks, lobbyist groups, and other high-power organizations. At the highest levels the differences between media mogul and political leader often are evaporated (consider Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi or former President Ronald Ray-Gun).
"Law and Order" starring Ronald Ray-Gun
During the 1980′s (the Ray-Gun presidency), military and cinema relations intensified. The 1986 film “Top Gun” is shining example of military and entertainment collaboration. Never before had a film company been given access to aircraft carriers, F-14 jets, bases, and tactical expertise. The result was a film astonishing in its military splendor. Paramount was never charged for any of the fuel or usage of this property. In exchange, the Department of Defense had revision and addition authority in the script writing, editing, and tone of this picture. The true executive producer of this film was the United States Air Force. The film’s impact on the perception of American war culture cannot be underestimated. As filmgoers poured into the theater to be swept away by fast jets, rock and roll, and sexy bodies, many were also swept into military service! Recruiting stations were placed outside many of the more high-trafficed theaters, luring dreamers into fighting “Migs” during the day, and crooning at the bar with their hot buddies at night. In part 2 of this essay, I will explore the continued phenomena of Top Gun and its its relationship to military-industrial media, the ever-presence of “Maverick”, and the invisible enemy.
The Evolution of the Military-Entertainment
Shared technologies, both real and imagined, tie the media industries to the Pentagon in what has become the military/entertainment complex. During the 1990s, the best and the brightest researchers who produce and design new-media platforms joined with engineers from the Department of Defense to trade expertise in pursuit of cutting-edge, computer-based digital technologies. These multipurpose protocols are quite versatile, and are used to create fields of entertainment, news, graphics, videogames, and deadly weapons of war. The most profitable sector of the entertainment industry — computer games — use the same technology essential to advanced weapons systems. Computer games have also become key training and recruiting tools. The characters that inhabit virtual game worlds locked in endless battles between good and evil, double as “warfighters” and kill targets for military training.
Consider the connections articulated by the National Research Council after a conference in Irvine, California, at the height of the military/media technology surge of the 1990s:
Modeling and simulation technology has become increasingly important to both the entertainment industry and the US Department of Defense (DOD). In the entertainment industry, such technology lies at the heart of video games, theme park attractions and entertainment centers, and special effects for film production. For DOD, modeling and simulation technology provides a low-cost means of conducting joint training exercises, evaluating new doctrine and tactics, and studying the effectiveness of new weapons systems. … These common interests suggest that the entertainment industry and DOD may be able to more efficiently achieve their individual goals by working together to advance the technology base for modeling and simulation.
And work together they have. Their mission: to boldly design the future technologies of fantasy entertainment and war weaponry alike. At Irvine, members from DOD’s Defense Modeling and Simulations Office (DMSO), and from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), together with Navy and Air Force representatives, met with industry people from Pixar, Disney, Paramount, and George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic. Joining this group were other computer industry executives and academic researchers in computer science, art and design. Flight Simulation and Video Games The image generator designed initially for military flight simulation is at the heart of any computer based visual system. Computerized flight simulation modeling was a crucial point in the history of digital interactive electronic gaming. Popular video games are direct descendants of military research and represent the passage of military-driven technological innovations into the heart of entertainment culture. As a graphic style, simulation dominates the visual imaging of war and its weapons, and across the media landscape, from films to the nightly news. Entertainment companies excelled at turning the military’s computer research into popular entertainment and handsome profits, and video games brought about an “entertainment revolution.” The pace of R&D picked up, and a company like Electronic Arts, the maker of one in four videogames, now has twice as many in-house game developers as Disney has animators. The flow of networking and software innovations evened out, and in some cases reversed direction. Important advances made by commercial researchers were then appropriated by the military. Cyberlife Technology’s Creatures 2.0 offered the cutting edge of artificial life simulation and helped realize the dream of smart weapons systems such as pilotless fighter aircraft. Another essential technological advance useful to the military, particularly for recruitment and training, is interactive first-person shooter technology developed by id Software in 1994. The U.S. Marine Corps adapted their game Doom 1.9, for tactical combat training exercises. This trans-sector reciprocity is now a stable, on-going mutually beneficial industrial relationship. Military funding remains essential to entertainment technologies with millions of dollars in grants awarded to academic research facilities such as the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technology, which enlists the resources and talents of theme park innovators and special effects designers among others, to advance the state of military immersive training simulation, and other applications.
Hollywood has now become a full partner in new weapons training and development. At the ICT the management skills of former media executives from NBC, Paramount and Disney can direct designers from Silicon Valley to help adapt the same digital effects used for movies, amusement parks and video games to military platforms. When synthetic characters, becoming known as “synthespians” can act and react in realistic ways to numerous stimuli, they make video games more challenging. In military training, synthespians make better “warfighters.” Both benefit from the others expertise. The video game America’s Army boasts the most authentic rendering of combat, because real soldiers help create the synthespians. Orlando, Florida is another site of this trans-industrial formation. The well-known home of Disney’s teams of R&D imagineers, the DOD’s Simulation Training and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM) is also headquartered there. In addition, the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Simulation and Training, together with other virtual reality designers, create a formidable node of the military entertainment establishment that STRICOM’s own website calls “Team Orlando.” Another major player in Orlando is the complex across the street from STRICOM that houses the nation’s largest military contractor, Lockheed Martin.
Cyborg Soldiers on Virtual Battlefields
The fantasy battlefields of the future are digitalized and “Net-ready” with complex communications systems for all aspects of war. Soldiers participating in futuristic war games are networked with wireless computer helmets that receive signals from the Global Positioning Satellite that maps enemy terrain. Data from numerous sources are integrated into a central command system monitored by computers. Robot scouts send surveillance imagery to commanders instantaneously. The twenty-first century land warriors carry video cameras and computers in their rucksacks, with 1-inch helmet-mounted LED screens. War games combine real-time airborne and satellite surveillance, all connected by radio communication to a battle command vehicle coordinating the attack though a customized Windows program. Using SIPE (Soldier Integrated Protection Ensemble), the physical state of the soldier can be monitored in the same way video games register the breathing and movement of players. The New Militarized Cultural Milieu It should come as no surprise that the convergence between the media and the military, as both pursue the economies of war, would have alarming consequences. We might ask under this new confabulation, how the media could possibly adopt an independent stance toward an enterprise with which they are so integrally connected. As weapons technology merges with entertainments that thrill gamers, moviegoers and TV audiences alike, militarism becomes the order of the day. The boundaries between war and peace begin to lose distinction in an age when so many resources, technologies, creative talents and cultural practices are enlisted in the celebration of weapons of mass destruction. This new culture of permanent war has entered the home and is held close to a new American hearth, the digital entertainment center where recruitment, training, planning and preparations for war are carried out.
To read more, read Robin Anderrsen’s book, “A Century of Media, A Century of War”.
