Abstract
This chapter lays out the book’s key arguments, defines terms used, outlines theoretical approaches, and explains the synthesis of several fields of study that help locate meaningful patterns across the many characters under review. Also discussed here is the interplay between politics and popular culture, a type of soft power, with characters such as Dirty Harry or Jack Bauer often leveraged for their cultural clout. The rogue is soaked in American myths, underwritten by whiteness and hypermasculinity, and epitomizing rugged individualism. Whether western lawman, lone urban detective, or clandestine CIA agent, he acts alone to work outside the system (to save the system), using any means necessary that is justified if “noble” ends are achieved, especially in policing the Other, real and imagined, at home and abroad.
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Notes
- 1.
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 236.
- 2.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1976), 92.
- 3.
Robert Alun Jones, “The Rules of Sociological Method,” in Émile Durkheim: An Introduction to Four Major Works (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1986), 60–81. Available online at durkheim.uchicago.edu.
- 4.
Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).
- 5.
Ben Zimmer, “Did Stalin Really Coin ‘American Exceptionalism’?” Slate, September 27, 2013.
- 6.
Greg Jaffe, “Obama’s New Patriotism,” The Washington Post, June 3, 2015 and also see Zachary Stepp, “President Obama’s Reclaiming of American Exceptionalism,” Huffington Post, January 11, 2017. Available online.
- 7.
Mark Harrison, The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparisons (Studies in Macroeconomic History) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Also see Charles K. Hyde, Arsenal of Democracy: The American Automobile Industry in World War II (Great Lakes Books Series) (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2013).
- 8.
See Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents of American Thought, Volume One (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987).
- 9.
See Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996).
- 10.
See David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
- 11.
For a description of the American Adam as described by Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, and others and See R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).
- 12.
Howard Husock, “Uplifting the ‘Dangerous Classes,’” City Journal (Manhattan Institute, 2007). Available online.
- 13.
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 35. Turner based his conclusion on the 1890 Census report that noted two people had come to occupy every square mile of non-public lands (the basis for calling an area settled).
- 14.
Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987), 26.
- 15.
Limerick, 26.
- 16.
Ibid., 26. Limerick belongs to the 1960s academic ruptures that challenge consensus approaches and critique grand theories as monocausal, uncritical, and blind to alternatives. In light of my interdisciplinary training, I see these approaches not as mutually exclusive nor singularly reliable as models, but which collectively contribute insights worth revisiting. See also Gregory H. Nobles, American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest (HarperCollins Canada, 1997).
- 17.
Ibid., 27–28.
- 18.
Turner, Frontier, 37.
- 19.
As quoted in Bliss Perry, The American Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912). Available online at gutenberg.org.
- 20.
Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in the Twentieth-Century America (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1998), 12.
- 21.
See Tom Englehardt, “Racism in the Media,” Bulletin of Concerned Scholars, 3, no. 1 (1971).
- 22.
Robert J. Bresler, Us vs. Them: American Political and Cultural Conflict from WWII to Watergate (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000).
- 23.
Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, American Terminator: Myths, Movies and Global Power (New York: Disinformation, 2004), 252.
- 24.
Naomi R. Rockler, “‘It’s Just Entertainment’ Perspective by Incongruity as Strategy for Media Literacy,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, 30, no. 1 (April 2, 2010).
- 25.
The Rambo character, although another favorite character whom Reagan was fond of quoting, shares more in common with Hollywood’s rogue cops than he does with military characters, as, first, he is an ex-soldier, and second, because he acts alone and becomes the reluctant hero and defender of fellow soldiers (and MIAs left behind in Vietnam) rather than to serve out specific military orders issued by the government.
- 26.
Much of my understanding of the interplay between official state proclamations and popular culture—and their interdependence—is derived from Louis Althusser’s concept of the Repressive State Apparatus, consisting of the state’s coercive measures versus the Ideological State Apparatus, in which ideology is encoded into cultural products and practices that are often more user friendly to the nation and which do not advertise their agenda. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Reading Popular Narrative: A Source Book, ed. Bob Ashley (London: Leicester University Press, 1997).
- 27.
Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995).
- 28.
Bethany Bemis, “How Disney Came to Define What Constitutes the American Experience,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 3, 2017. Available online. Matthew Fraser, Weapons of Mass Distraction: Soft Power and American Empire (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2014).
- 29.
- 30.
Hollywood history as a whole testifies to its reluctance to seriously critique the system in more significant ways, starting with its adoption of the Production Code to avoid government interference or the blacklisting during the McCarthy—even the naked patriotism of films and documentaries during World War II (e.g., Why We Fight? films), among other examples, run counter to assumptions about Hollywood liberalism. Also see Mary McNamara, “The Notion of a Liberal Agenda in Hollywood is Absurd,” Los Angeles Times, January 5, 2017.
- 31.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991).
- 32.
James O. Young and Conrad G. Brunk, eds., The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), Kindle.
- 33.
Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1.
- 34.
For further reading on the concept of whiteness and its impact on class, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso, 1991. Roediger builds on W.E.B. Du Bois’s description of a privilege or “wage” accorded white workers following Reconstruction, which Roediger asserts firmly rooted their developing class consciousness in racism and that blinded them to the possibility of joining forces with black laborers to collectively agitate for better wages and conditions for all workers.
- 35.
Stephen Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980), 19.
- 36.
Ibid., 22–23. Also see Stuart M. Kaminsky, American Film Genres (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1985), 8.
- 37.
Thomas Leitch, Crime Films (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 15–17.
- 38.
Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay, eds., Television Studies After TV: Understanding Television in the Post-broadcast Era (New York: Routledge, 2009).
- 39.
“Push and Pull: Hollywood, Netflix and the Future of the Entertainment Business,” November 8, 2017, Martin J. Whitman School of Management, Syracuse University. Available online at onlinebusiness.syr.edu.
- 40.
Mareike Jenner, Netflix and the Reinvention of Television (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
- 41.
See James Warren, “How Mega-Media Deals Further Erode the Myth of a ‘Liberal’ Media,” The Poynter Institute, November 20, 2017.
- 42.
Nicholas DiFonso, The Watercooler Effect: An Indispensable Guide to Understanding and Harnessing the Power of Rumors (New York: Avery, 2008).
- 43.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002).
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Yaquinto, M. (2019). Introduction. In: Policing the World on Screen. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24805-5_1
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