| "Early Cold War Combat Films and the Religion of Empire" by Sara Harrison Dougherty (2012) is a historical study of the ideology, or religion, of empire promulgated by Hollywood combat films made during the early Cold War. Combat films set in the Korean War are central to the study. The Korean War was "forgotten," in part, because it revealed some of the more demoralizing aspects of fighting an imperial war, which made Americans distrust themselves and their own G.I.s. Postwar Hollywood combat films conveyed an anti-Communist ideology which furthered the ends of empire. At the same time, the films exploited the demoralizing aspects of land war in Asia---America's inability to win a World War II-style victory, the attritive nature of fighting a "limited war," and tendency of American intervention in civil wars to blur both the enemy and moral judgment---which ultimately sabotaged the government's imperial polity. By stressing the need to confront Communism and by embodying weaker "client nations" as children in need of U.S. military protection, Hollywood films combat promoted military interventionism abroad in the wake of the Truman Doctrine. Hollywood films from Sergeant York (1941) through the 1960s also discredited religious opposition to war by equating masculinity with a man's willingness to use lethal force, promoting a muscular, quasi-Christianity as a sort of state religion. At the same time, Hollywood combat films and films depicting veterans made during and after the Korean War steadily discredited and undermined the idea of the citizen-soldier, contributing to a culture of distaste for wartime service to the imperial state which predated major American combat operations in Vietnam by several years. |
