In Foreign Policy, Joshua E. Keating asked an interesting, and I think important, question: does Hollywood have a foreign policy? Based on the movies of the last half-century, he argues that Hollywood’s deeply skeptical of the rest of the world and very ready to acknowledge security threats to the United States, but deeply skeptical of the United States’ response to everything from the rise of Communism to terrorism:

But it’s fair to say that the kind of prestige films that get nominated for Oscars tend to come from one side of the political spectrum. From Vietnam-era dramas like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket to the growing number of Iraq movies like Green Zone and 2009 Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker, the most celebrated movies have tended to take a critical look at America’s wars, often questioning the motives of senior officials and examining the psychological effects on the men who fight them. From Jack Nicholson’s sneering colonel in A Few Good Men to the cynical incompetence of the officers in Three Kings, the military tends not to get too positive a portrayal when the movie is about an actual war, rather than an alien invasion. (World War II movies are a possible exception, but even films like Saving Private Ryan are more about how the war affected individuals than military achievement.)

Not that the civilians fare much better. Whether they’re colluding with the communists (The Manchurian Candidate), whacking their own people (The Parallax View), concocting a war to cover up a president’s improprieties (Wag the Dog) or standing idly and incompetently by in the midst of a genocide (The Killing Fields), Hollywood has taken a dim view of U.S. policymakers and diplomats. (Steven Soderbergh’s virus thriller Contagion, entirely ignored by the Academy, is a notable exception.) They get off easy compared to global corporations, invariably the villains in films like Syriana and The Constant Gardener.

This skepticism has carried over into the depictions of terrorism in post-9/11 films. Steven Spielberg’s Munich, for instance, certainly can’t be accused of sympathy for jihadists, but took a tone of ambivalence about the ethics of counterterrorism that led critics like the New Republic’s Leon Weiseltier to accuse it of “the sin of equivalence” between the Israeli spies and the Palestinian terrorists they were hunting. Questions of accuracy and the torture debate aside, Zero Dark Thirty probably belongs in the same category: a movie with no hesitation about the evil of terrorism that also asks what a society loses by bending its own moral code to prevent it.

It’s worth noting that Hollywood’s vision of foreign policy is entirely conflict-oriented. Movies are all over wars, or the lead-up to wars. There are plenty of portrayals of soldiers on the way to a battlefield, at said battlefield, or recovering from the effects of their time in a war zone, though the latter normally focus more on soldiers’ personal reactions than any of the institutions set up to support them or the failure of those institutions. If we’re not talking about wars, movies are often exploring the lead-ups to them, particularly in the form of espionage. Argo was the rare movie that portrayed diplomats as well as members of the Central Intelligence Agency. There’s very little conversation about trade, or cultural exchange—The Sapphires, about Australian singers who perform in USO tours during Vietnam, is a rare exception—banking, immigration (except in documentaries), technology, or trans-state actors like the United Nations. The fact that Game of Thrones takes on so many of these soft-power issues, at least in the novels, is one of the reasons it’s so unusual. This focus on the military and on security issues makes a certain amount of sense: war is among the highest stakes that any set of characters can face, and ticking time bomb scenarios or climactic battles make for strong three-act structures. But focusing on those issues alone means that Hollywood is leaving lots of kinds of stories on the table, and picking ones that are more likely to present other countries as dangerous, inhospitable places.

And that’s a bias that runs contrary to Hollywood’s own interests. Beyond what it shows on its screens, the biggest factor driving Hollywood’s actual foreign policy as an industry is trade barriers, whether it’s China’s limits on the number of movies produced by other countries that can air legally on Chinese screens in a given year, or the need to accomodate content restrictions in countries with state-run ratings and censorship systems. Keating mentions China’s leverage to get movies cut to meet its standards before they air in the United States, but it’s an issue worth exploring further, especially on issues like Middle Eastern funders’ comfort with higher levels of violence than sexuality. Hollywood’s foreign policy might have initially been driven by the preferences and contradictions of American audiences’ feelings about our country’s foreign entanglements. But other audiences’ preferences, and the preferences of their governments, will matter more and more as the international audiences account for more and more of box office receipts.

Cable news gets a bad rap for being truncated and sound-bitey, but the kind people at Al Jazeera was nice enough to ask me and a couple of other critics to come on and discuss the results of the Academy Awards—for 25 minutes:

For all the talk about the billion people who theoretically tune into the Academy Awards, there’s very little conversation about the overall international reaction to the results, unless a win sparks off a very particular reaction, as was the case with Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s Best Foreign Film statuette for A Separation. I don’t agree with everything my fellow panelists said, but it was fascinating to hear how Argo and Zero Dark Thirty are playing outside the United States.

Yesterday, Deadline ran a piece considering the impact of politics on the 2013 Oscar race, assessing factors from Congressional scrutiny of Zero Dark Thirty to various historical quibbles over Lincoln. Argo, the piece suggests, has one of the strongest campaigns linking the film to real-world events, and to real-world endorsers (though it’s sparked some quibbles by Canadians):

For Argo’s end credits former President Jimmy Carter turns up in an audio interview basically confirming the facts of the CIA mission he approved to get six American hostages out of the Canadian Embassy in Iran by creating a fake movie production. It was a very effective way of validating the events of the film set in 1979 and giving it added gravitas. It also didn’t hurt the film’s awards chances to have Tony Mendez, the real life CIA operative who hatched the scheme (and played by director Ben Affleck) appearing everywhere in praise of the film.

Even more than this roster of praise, the consensus seems to be that Argo, a relatively slight but definitely entertaining picture, racked up a string of awards season victories and became the leading contender for Best Picture at the Academy Awards because it’s the kind of movie that makes Hollywood feel good about itself. The ability to create fantasies compelling enough to make an audience suspend disbelief isn’t just a source of joy, the movie argues. It can be a service to the Republic!

But I think Argo has emerged as the consensus contender for Best Picture for even stronger reasons than that. In a pool of strongly politically themed-movies, Argo is at the intersection of two important trend lines. It has a gloss of relevance, but the movie exists at a safe distance from actual events, and from shameful, damaging policies, that remain the subject of heated political debate. For all that we talk about Hollywood liberalism, the Academy appears to be converging around a movie that allows us to feel as good as possible about the way the United States handles the blowback of our foreign policy.

The contrast between Argo and Zero Dark Thirty is the most obvious point of comparison between Argo and its other competitors, but it’s important. Where Tony Mendez, the CIA analyst who is the main character in Argo is safely a historical figure, an inventive hero by consensus before he became a Hollywood story, the CIA analyst who is the basis for Maya’s (Jessica Chastain) still works at the agency. More to the point, though, is that the tactics Mendez employed—convincing the Iranian government that he was shooting a wacky science fiction picture and smuggling out escapees from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran under the cover of that project—is amusing and anodyne, tradecraft that is only impeachable if you think that it’s wrong to lie to people in the name of espionage, which would be an awfully confusing position. The tactics Maya uses, on the other hand, include torture. It’s not fun to watch her watch a man be waterboarded, sexually humiliated, and beaten in the same way it’s fun to watch Tony jauntily fake a table read for his Trojan Horse of a movie. It requires a great deal more work to dig out what Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal want you to think about those horrendously uncomfortable scenes than it does to sit back, relax, and enjoy Affleck, Alan Arkin, and John Goodman engage in wacky, ethically clear hijinks. And where Argo gives us permission to revel in its finale, in which a commercial airliner races jeeps full of Iranian intelligence officers off a Tehran tarmac, Zero Dark Thirty withholds permission to enjoy an event that gave a lot of people a lot of pride in real life, the killing of Osama bin Laden, by turning that sequence into a tense, workmanlike effort that traumatizes a great many children.
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If there’s a movie that’s arrived in theaters aided more by the tailwinds of current events than Ben Affleck’s Argo, an espionage thriller about the Canadian caper, in which the Central Intelligence Agency faked a Hollywood movie production to spirit six Americans out of Iran after they slipped out of the embassy as it came under siege by hardline students. A handsome, sophisticated, if exceedingly overstuffed caper movie, Argo should also get credit for being exceptionally nuanced about America’s role in Iran. But ultimately, Argo has too much to handle to make its characters as engaging as its geopolitics, and even then, it falters in its willingness to treat its audience like intelligent adults.

In the introduction to Argo, Affleck, from a script by Chris Terrio, briskly introduces the issues at stake—Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh’s nationalization of Iran’s oil industry, the American support of Shah Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Iranian Revolution, the decision to give the Shah access to medical treatment in the United States, and rising tensions at the embassy—while drawing a clear line between those national policy decisions and the views of the people who would shortly be imprisoned there or in hiding in Canada’s embassy in Iran.”What do you expect? We let the guy torture and deball an entire nation,” one diplomat says of the crowd growing outside the embassy. “So great, we’ll take in any punk as long as he’s got cancer?” another complains of the Shah’s arrival in the U.S.

As it becomes clear that embassy security may be breached—in a frightening echo of recent events in Libya, two diplomats watch the crowds mass while wondering “The windows are supposed to be bullet-proof, right?” and reflect that they’ve “Never been tested.”—the people who will shortly become hostages show off an array of complicated emotions. Bob Anders (Tate Donovan) warns his staff about what will happen to the Iranians waiting in line “If they get caught applying for visas to the U.S.” The head of security warns his men “Don’t fucking shoot anybody. You don’t want to be the assholes who started a war.” They burn and shred documents, concerned for themselves and their country, however conflicted they feel about it.

But once the embassy has been taken and the six members of the staff have ensconced themselves with the Canadian ambassador (Victor Garber), the movie doesn’t have much more time to spend with them, exploring their ideas about what’s happening in the country where they once represented their own. “She begged for us to leave. She packed our bags. And I told her, just a little bit longer,” Mark (Christopher Denham) reflects of his wife’s concern for their safety prior to the takeover, which he tamped down in favor of trying to advance his foreign service career. But the movie is more concerned with the men trying to get them out of the country than their captivity.
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I’ve felt for a while like Ben Affleck’s real promise was going to end up in directing rather than acting, and the first trailer for Argo, his movie about a C.I.A. operation to free some of the people being held hostage in Iran by pretending to film a science-fiction flick, confirms that suspicion:

I do wish Affleck had been able to resist playing the lead role, and not only because, as Arturo Garcia pointed out, the point man on the real Argo operation was Latino, not a white dude from Boston. But the rest of the cast is stacked, whether it’s Bryan Cranston playing a similar government honcho role to the one he had in Contagion, Alan Arkin and John Goodman as mischievous Hollywood players, or Tate Donovan and Clea Duvall as hostages. And a story that’s about the importance of narrative to real-world success is just catnip for me.

But I’m curious to see how Argo will portray ordinary Iranians. Will the movie acknowledge the U.S.’s role in restoring the Shah to power? What about the spectrum of public opinion in Iran at the time? One of the real virtues of a movie like Persepolis, the adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s memoirs about growing up inside and beyond the borders of Iran, is that it’s a reminder that there’s a difference between a nation’s leadership and it’s people. Given that Argo‘s coming out at a time when American policy rhetoric around Iran has gotten heated, that’s a worthwhile thing to emphasize, and I hope the movie is smart enough to do that.

I’ve always liked the story about two boys who grew up in Boston, wrote a movie about a sensitive working-class genius, and won an Academy Award for it. After they won that prize, the boy who played the sensitive genius went on to play a bunch of quirky roles, while the guy who played his laborer pal tried to parlay his not insubstantial jaw into an action career. But overtime, something strange happened: the sensitive boy became a superstar when he started taking roles where he hit people very hard and shot them with great precision, while the boy with the jaw sort of flamed out, and then started reinventing himself as a thoughtful director of movies about his home town. In other words, I have hopes for Ben Affleck.

And I’m particularly interested to see him step away from Boston with his next project. Argo‘s interesting for a lot of reasons. A big prestige movie about the U.S.’s tetchy relationship with Iran in the 1970s and 1980s coming at this particular moment is bound to provoke comment, especially since this is a story about the CIA pretending they’re shooting a sci-fi movie as a ruse to get diplomats out of the American embassy during the hostage crisis (something that actually happened). Rather than being a story about how the U.S. used overwhelming force to impose its will on an enemy, it’s a story about the efficacy of American cleverness, it’s foreign policy as heist flick. The film adaptation of Charlie Wilson’s War did this to a certain extent, there was an element of getting the gang together in that assemblage of Congressman, Texan do-gooder, and CIA operative. But the line between Wilson’s actions and our current involvement in Afghanistan, and the moralism of Wilson’s conviction meant the movie could never quite swagger.

But there’s an interesting space for stories about people who do the weirdest work in government because they need to accomplish things that can’t happen through the normal practice of diplomacy, intelligence, or defense. I’m amazed, for example, that no one’s optioned Ben McIntyre’s Operation Mincemeat, his book about the eccentric group of British spies who spent months cooking up a plan to plant false plans about the Allied invasion of Italy on the body of a dead man on the off chance the plans might get back to Hitler. The story is, as Malcolm Gladwell’s pointed out, a good case study for why intelligence operations might be more trouble than they’re worth. But it’s also a valuable illustration of the fact that in addition to the big heroic stories, the assault on Normandy, the conference at Yalta, there are all these messy little bits of any nation’s interests that can’t be wrapped up through conventional means and channels. They’re not the majority of our foreign policy, or our defense policy, whichever category you prefer to put them in, by any means.

But they’re there—spare diplomats and CIA contractors, cloistered terrorists and non-existent men—and they’re rich dramatic and comedic territory. We don’t have a lot of upliftingly eccentric public servants on our screens. If you’re off a bit, you’re depressing or dangerous, Bobby Goren or John Luther (and if you’re a woman, the most eccentricity you’re allowed is crankiness). Or perhaps more to the point, we don’t have genuinely innovative and creative public servants in our popular culture. Whimsy shades over so easily into wastefulness, and we’re used to a small set of mostly stolid ways for people to do their duty. I’m not saying all of our foreign policy movies should be about wacky hijinks. But there’s room for stories that tell us more about the limitations of conventional foreign policy tools, and that government is more than men in gray flannel suits.