Telling you what to think

I am sure all of us have our own classic movie favourites. Or at least, movies that we consider to be good movies, can-watch-again-sometime movies. How many times have you taken home the subtle message embedded in the movies? The inevitable summary of these messages is to tell you abour the good, the bad and the ugly.

Just after the Second World War, Germany became the bad guys on all movies. The Dirty Dozen, the Bridge over the River Kwai, The Longest Day, The Guns of Navarone: some of the best movies I've seen. You have to see them to experience the passion, fear and the joys of those times. Even at home, we had the attrocities of the British on our movies, books and plays for a long time before and after our independence. I'm not talking about the more recent movies though. Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line or Schindler's List: they were a different class of movies. These were re-takes of the horrors of the wars, because better technology permitted bringing them to more life than earlier. The ones I'm talking about are about finding the bad guys and telling people why or what made them so bad.

It is interesting to see how popular entertainment mechanisms can be used to subvert public opinion. Remember the Vietnam War. And now try to remember the movies made during that period. The bad guys were inevitably the Vietnamese. Rambo First Blood (II), Chuck Norris movies -- it was always a one-man-army who went in and took out whole regiments all by himself. And that too, in their own territory. You will see that the villians shudder at the sight of Mr. America. And as remnants of the Cold War, there would always be a Russian villian who would be in cohorts with the bad guys. I don't think I need to name the movies where the "Reds" were the bad guys. Heck they even made movies when the USA beat Russia in chess or at ice hockey!

And that brings me to the more interesting parts of the story. Rambo III, James Bond movies (such as The Living Daylights) -- remember them? The Afghans were the repressed bunch struggling against Russia, where the "freedom fighters" were helped by the US or the UK in their struggle. Guess what: the ghosts from there have come back to haunt them in real life. Suddenly the friendly Afghans or Arabs aren't so friendly any more. Think True Lies, think Iron Man. They are trying to make them the new laughing stock: the outwardly gun-toting brave men who suddenly become cowards when faced with the real tough guy. Or you need to score brownie points ahead of time for upcoming problems. North Korea creates the Icarus in the Die Another Day ("... trust me, if our radar can't see them, North Korean radar can't..."), or Batman just kidnaps the biggest business tycoon in a jiffy from China because the US government does not have jurisdiction there. Allies are formed (the US and the UK in James Bond movies), villains are made (Russia in the Cold War movies), and you get to prove that you're the best (for example, watch Van Damme's Kickboxer). Guess what, China is getting better at the game as well. Huo Yuan Jia (or Fearless, under which name it was released to the western audiences) shows a Chinese gentleman kicking a huge white man's butt.

Of late, I've become more and more sceptical of what I read and see. The media will always remain a propaganda machine, and it is up to you to find out what part of it is true. Don't you sometimes get that feeling when you read a newspaper article? Something that tells you that this seems biased or seems to be covering up some stuff. Trust that instinct; for all you know, it might just be another of those media stories planted by some government which wants to tell you what to think.