Hollywood: Mere Amusement or a Hidden Tool

For this bachelor thesis, I have done research on the subject of the role of Hollywood in US soft power in relation to the fight against Islamic extremist terrorism. The research question I have posed is: ‘Has Hollywood been a tool for North American soft power by contributing to the creation of a Western imagined community against Islamic extremist terrorism since 9/11? If so, how?’. In order to answer this question, I have done qualitative research using a scene from the movie American Sniper and a scene from the movie Lone Survivor which served as case studies. To provide a guiding tool, for each scene I have posed the questions ‘How is the ‘westerner’ portrayed?’, ‘How is the ‘Arab portrayed?’, and ‘Does the scene accord to the biographic book?’. In order to provide answers to these questions, I have used the handbook ‘Film Narratology’ by Peter Verstraten to examine the implicit content of the scenes, the scripts of the movies to support analysis of the explicit content of the...Show moreFor this bachelor thesis, I have done research on the subject of the role of Hollywood in US soft power in relation to the fight against Islamic extremist terrorism. The research question I have posed is: ‘Has Hollywood been a tool for North American soft power by contributing to the creation of a Western imagined community against Islamic extremist terrorism since 9/11? If so, how?’. In order to answer this question, I have done qualitative research using a scene from the movie American Sniper and a scene from the movie Lone Survivor which served as case studies. To provide a guiding tool, for each scene I have posed the questions ‘How is the ‘westerner’ portrayed?’, ‘How is the ‘Arab portrayed?’, and ‘Does the scene accord to the biographic book?’. In order to provide answers to these questions, I have used the handbook ‘Film Narratology’ by Peter Verstraten to examine the implicit content of the scenes, the scripts of the movies to support analysis of the explicit content of the scenes, and the biographic books on which the movies were based to check whether the scenes accord to these books. Subsequently, used the concepts of culture and cultural hegemony, soft power, and orientalism to ascribe meaning to the outcomes of the analyses. As a result from these analyses and the application of the concepts, I have found that in both scenes the ‘westerner’ is portrayed as heroic and righteous, while the ‘Arab’ is mostly portrayed as savage, hostile and rogue which is showing that both movies have an Orientalist character. Also, resulting from these analyses I can state that the scenes culturally manipulate and influence the viewers perceptions of the ‘Arab’ and the ‘westerner’, which means that it is contributing to US’ story which is projected to the rest of the world to ‘sell itself’ with the goal to attract other people and states to be on the same page with the US. With these results I have provided with an answer to the research question, which reads that Hollywood has been a tool for US soft power by contributing to the creation of a Western community against Islamic extremist terrorism, albeit unwittingly. This is done by employing Hollywood’s prominent and influential status which makes it possible to manipulate the movies’ watchers into developing a perception of Islamic terrorists as rogue and savage as opposed to heroic and righteous US soldiers. Still, what could be considered as shortcomings of this research are its sensitiveness to time, place and interpretation, and the small amount of analyzed scenes. In order to resolve this in a more extensive research, I firstly recommend to do a comparison with results of analyses on movies within another time frame or from another country. Secondly, I recommend to use diverse means of interpretation. Lastly, I recommend to analyze more scenes or even entire movies to be able to make a more solid argument.Show less

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Hollywood: Mere Amusement or a Hidden Tool