War is cinema, and cinema is war.
—Paul Virilio
The “conservative 1950s” is a myth, only made possible by the complete victory of left liberalism in media and academia. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ranks of post-war cinema, which was filled with World War II psywar operators. Much of the innovation in cinema was merely the application of wartime technique, and the progressive ideas only a residue of the machinic eye.
After the dissolution of the Office of War Information and the various armed forces Film Units, many translated their skills and experiences into the public and private spheres. These men’s personalities had been fundamentally altered by their exposure to cinematic technique, warped by the power to create reality.
From 1945 to 1980, liberal ideals about government, society, and anti-racism predominated among the elite in the United States, including politicians, CEOs, journalists, academics and, of course, the Hollywood culture elite. This was the height of contemporary American liberalism, which emphasized the state's role in progress and declared "rugged individualism" outmoded. Despite conservative criticism at the margins, major pushback to these viewpoints only gained traction by 1980 (Delton 2013).
As the anti-racist position first began as counter-propaganda in a contest with the Nazis, during the Cold War it gained new life as a tactical counter to Soviet propaganda. The Soviets and Chinese countered US propaganda with their own, pointing out every example of “prejudice and discrimination,” using the liberal American press as their information source (Lentz 2010). Throughout the Cold War, social reform and anti-racist “social coaching” in the press was explicitly couched in terms to remind Americans of WW2 and a possible communist invasion, thereby conscripting the public into a propaganda war (Lentz 2010). [Such feedback loops of strategic communication with no fixed position form an ecology of the abyss, this is the Order of the Screen. Beings within the ecology of the abyss are defined by their hollowness, always ready to adapt to the next strategic communication, in a constant state of monstrous becoming. Only the Screen offers an axis of bio-social order. A being of pure media, the hollow man can only be “progressive,” and can only move to the next scene of communication.]
Racism endured among the broader population, but the 1950s were defined by influential white Americans resisting it via an array of policies. The Cold War and anti-communism, ironically, boosted liberal reforms, especially civil rights, as America strove to demonstrate capitalism's superiority over communism; anti-racism especially was consciously framed by Hollywood executives and Pentagon entertainment liaisons as a means to combat Soviet propaganda, which painted the US as a racist dystopia. These attitudes dominated the newly formed intelligence apparatus throughout the Cold War, being staffed with former OSS and OWI New Dealers. As Aldrich Ames, the notorious counter-intelligence CIA officer convicted of espionage, states “I came into the Agency with a set of ideas and attitudes that were quite typical of people coming into the Agency at that time. You could call it liberal anti-communism.”
Most anti-communism was an act of self-interest, liberal organizations and unions were well aware of the communist propensity to infiltrate and take over, their overblown sloganeering and rhetoric was irritating and ran counter to the progressive mind-state (Delton 2013). The historiography of 1950s anti-communism has been distorted by the New Left’s revisionism, McCarthy was in reality a marginal figure, and recent disclosures have proven that there was indeed a Soviet/KGB presence in the American Left and Hollywood (Haynes 2010). Far from being an episode of right wing hysteria, there was a simple confluence of rational goals between Washington and Hollywood liberals, with most of the purges in Hollywood coming from within:
It was liberal Hollywood executives who adopted the blacklist, effectively forcing Communists out of the movie business…. those conducting the purges were private citizens, liberal Hollywood executives, who cooperated and worked with HUAC [House Un-American Activities Committee]. [L]iberal leaders in Hollywood were no longer willing to defend the Communists in their midst – not because they (liberal leaders) feared them, or because they were hysterical, but because liberal principles were more effectively furthered by purging Communists than by defending their rights.
(Delton 2013)
This geopolitical backdrop provided the strategic justification for government intrusion in societal reform, and repositioned the federal government as a moral actor, a defender of liberty and democracy against communism. It also justified the continued use of film as a tool of propaganda and social control. At the center of liberalism is the belief in total and totalizing control; the “beast” of the free market need not be demonized because it too can be tamed. The fundamental tenet of liberalism is that a centralized state, or the federal government, could act as a progressive, compassionate, and unifying force in a democratic society. Liberalism, put simply, is the rejection of “acts of God,” the marketplace, poverty, or natural forces as having deterministic control over mass man. “Progress” is contingent upon the systematic deployment of state authority to surmount all adversaries, internal or external. Progressives align themselves with technological rupture itself, framing it as inevitable, and ultimately an engine for positive societal change. Even during the Great Depression, liberals sought governmental intervention to regulate the market—an initiative supported by certain oligarchs within the business community—culminating in the implementation of the New Deal.
With this refusal to surrender control, it should be no surprise that the machinic eye (cinema) fell under the control of so-called “liberals,” as the progressive mind is the ghost-image of mental death caused by technic shock. With a history spanning from The Birth of a Nation to Hell's Angels, from The Man Who Knew Too Much to the Bond series, the war/spy movie genre had a crucial role in controlling public opinion. According to the philosopher Paul Virilio, cinema is a medium meant to construct events. The ability to construct events, or pseudo-events, is necessary for creating para-reality, such as transmedia alternate reality games, in order to engender screen-related dysphoria, without which liberal imperium is impossible. Constant war, psychophysical mutation and total instrumentalization of the flesh substrate is impossible if people can see their own monstrous becoming directly.
Virilio's War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception argues that military breakthroughs in surveillance and vision technologies have coevolved with cinematic technique and representations of war. The "logistics of perception" (perception management) extends from the technology of vision, to narrative frameworks, to strategies of cinematic framing or representation of events. According to Virilio, cinema's use of military optical techniques contributes to the militarization of vision itself, altering society's perception of reality. Cinema follows a military logic, with great directors acting as dictators of cinematic spectacle.
For soldiers in combat, "the function of the weapon is the function of the eye," there is an intrinsic link between sight and armament, to be seen is to be dead. Consequently, the dramatic upheaval brought about by aerial warfare after 1914, along with the swift progression of military technology, "literally exploded the old homogeneity of vision," leveling the way for a new "heterogeneity of perceptual fields." Filmmakers, who had weathered the horrors of war—their own vision liberated from classic Euclidian space by the machinic eye—seamlessly transitioned "from the battlefield to the production of newsreels or propaganda features," eventually venturing into the domain of 'art films'(Virilio 1989).
Over the past century of this technic gyre, this “cycle of light,” the media learned how to define and redefine its audience, explain to them who they were and why they were born into this world, and also explain the nature of perception and human experience. This “vision machine” is a potent worldwide weapon for sociotechnical control, as it creates experience that shapes subjectivity and the larger symbolic environment, as Gilles Deleuze names it, the nexus of ‘prehensions.’
Film as a medium destabilizes organic vision and overwrites it with machinic vision. As the revolutionary Soviet documentary-maker Dziga Vertov put it:
“I'm the Cine-Eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I'm in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse's mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations.
Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.”