Captain Marvel atrocious US military propaganda

[RocketMan]

They're getting pretty blatant about it again... The Gray Zone seems like a legit outfit to me. Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton etc.

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/03/12/holl ... rZ27uBrjss

The superhero blockbuster Captain Marvel is a perfect case study for how the United States military uses Hollywood to spread propaganda.

The US military is at the center of the plot of Captain Marvel. The film’s protagonist, Carol Danvers, is a former US Air Force pilot who becomes a superhero after absorbing the powers of an advanced technology created by another US military scientist. (That scientist happens to be a member of the advanced alien race known as the Kree, who for unexplained reasons decided to do groundbreaking military research for, of all the myriad places in the universe, the US of A).

As soon as the film opens, it bombards viewers with two hours of non-stop US military propaganda. And it is not even subtle; at the plot’s climax, Captain Marvel changes the colors of her suit to match those of the American flag.

But the US military is not only part of the story of Captain Marvel; as The Grayzone details below, the Pentagon was deeply involved in the production of the film itself.

The cast and directors of Captain Marvel worked closely with the United States military, relying on US military officers as consultants and advisers, employing dozens of active-duty US soldiers as extras. Several scenes were shot on a US military base. And since its release, the US Department of Defense has promoted the film relentlessly on its website and social media accounts.

AND I loved their aside about Black Panther, whose success and cultural impact I've been feeling vaguely uneasy about for a while now...

Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Studios, who produced and distributed Captain Marvel, respectively, had a similar marketing strategy with their 2018 opus Black Panther, which was also sold as a progressive anti-racist film with a majority-Black cast — and which just so happened to feature as a sidekick a white CIA agent who helped save the hero T’challa’s reactionary absolute monarchy from a revolution led by the anti-imperialist internationalist villain Killmonger. (There is good reason Black Panther was aggressively promoted by the CIA on social media.)

[Belligerent Savant]

.

This model has been in place since they started making movies out of "comic book" characters; one can argue that comic books themselves were part of the program from the onset.

Govt agencies as 'consultants/advisors/investors/producers' of Hollywood films, especially films like this, has been par for the course for some time, alas.


Imagine if HMW was still here to opine...

Behold, a sampling:

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence ... 433107c307

EXCLUSIVE: Documents expose how Hollywood promotes war on behalf of the Pentagon, CIA and NSA
US military intelligence agencies have influenced over 1,800 movies and TV shows

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/ho ... 18191.html

Washington DC’s role behind the scenes in Hollywood goes deeper than you think

On television, we found more than 1,100 titles received Pentagon backing – 900 of them since 2005, from ‘Flight 93’ to ‘Ice Road Truckers’ and ‘Army Wives’

https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-cia-a ... on/5319262

The CIA and Other Government Agencies Dominate Movies and Television
The Winners of the Academy Award and Golden Globe Are … Government Propagandists

[streeb]

And the winner is... Argo. What a perfect closed system.

[JackRiddler]

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Carol Danvers, the Ms. Marvel of the 1970s: Editor of a feminist magazine.*

As Captain Marvel, 2019: USAF pilot.

As I think creator Roy Thomas used to sign off on the Letters Page, 'Nuff said!

* I loved this comic, of course, because I was a 13-year-old boy and her costumes were so friggin' hot. I know the multitudes of young readers here (ha ha) will not remember a time when images of hot humans were not thrust at you with every click, and it's boring. (Actually the comic was pretty bad, you'll be equally surprised to learn today.) But I was also inspired by the woman being in charge, a total rarity for the superhero comics of the time, as many will also remember. She had, like, real city-people problems, she was even fired from her job for missing days due to Skrull attacks and such. Anyway, if there is another change to observe here, it's how the costumed women of comics and movies have ever since tended to be far more violent, relentless and bloodthirsty soldiers than they were then, or than most of the guy heroes. They're often like Rohrschach or DK-Batman in female form, except at the same time always looking both rad and hot. This is sold as a neoliberal or militarist form of "feminism."

There's a flip side to this, a shadow side or a projection. I haven't seen CM nor do I plan to, but apparently she discovers her empire is really the bad guys historically oppressing the enemy. You can see similar in some of the most bloodthirsty militarist propaganda blockbusters of the 1990s already, like Independence Day and Stargate (both Emmerich products, I think). In both of those, the action of the alien empire was a handbook of a Euro-Atlantic primitive-accumulation rampage (see the president's speech in Independence Day after the alien briefly takes over his mind and he sees what their empire does to planets they conquer). The aliens bomb the indigenes from the air/space while the US military personnel (usually isolated and self-organized) play the heroic guerilla resistance or liberation movement from the ground. Hell, this goes back to the idea of Star Wars as a recruitment movie echoing the "be all you can be" theme of military service as self-actualization against the drones of the Empire. (The Nuremberg Rally medal ceremony gives it away at the end.) In Thor Ragnarok, Thor learns the secret history of Asgard as evil empire, and sort-of the same turns out to be true of Wakanda. (Those two movies followed the exact same formula and plot, by the way.) Think of the speech by Killmonger's father in Black Panther. Or the slogan, Killmonger Was Right!

Projection or confusionism? Take your pick.

.

[Agent Orange Cooper]

As propaganda goes this movie is pretty f'n tepid compared to something like Top Gun or Black Hawk Down. I enjoyed it, but I enjoy all the Marvel movies so that shouldn't mean much.

I just wanted to chime in to say that I did find it amusing from a conspiratorial perspective that the shape-shifting lizard people are presented here as the good guys. Or, at least, the oppressed party in the galactic civil war, if not entirely good.

[conniption]

...that the shape-shifting lizard people are presented here as the good guys.
...

[Cordelia]

Not about movies, but I dug up a link a friend sent awhile back to a thesis written by a Georgetown University student in 2011. Since it's 91 pages and I'm not into comics/super heroes, I didn't read it but may be of interest here. fwiw....

TARGET AUDIENCE CHILDREN: AN ANALYSIS OF U.S. PROPAGANDA THROUGH THE COMIC BOOK MEDIUM

https://repository.library.georgetown.e ... sequence=1

[Wombaticus Rex]

It's nothing new. If you read old Marvel stuff, the CIA and DOD messaging is beautifully ham-fisted. I wonder why.

Lee, known for working with the company that became Marvel Comics and artist Jack Kirby, co-created comic book characters such as Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Thor, X-Men and Doctor Strange. But he also served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II from 1942 to 1945.

Lee enlisted in 1942, shortly after hearing of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was a lineman for the Signal Corps before the Army realized his writing skills and moved him into technical writing and doing posters, said Army Sgt.1st Class Nicholas Jones, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington.

Other known writers who started out in the Army with Lee included novelist William Saroyan and TV writers Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, who Lee met while working at the Army Training Division in Astoria, Queens, New York.

Service members from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, including Jones, inducted Lee into the Signal Corps Regimental Association and gave him an honorary membership into the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, during a comic convention in March.

Via: http://www.dodlive.mil/2017/06/28/stan- ... r-serving/