Movies are the Ultimate Medium of Propaganda

Movies are the ultimate medium of propaganda. The visceral audiovisual experience transfixes the audience on every perceptual level of sight and sound. Movies stimulate the senses and manipulate emotions with music and charismatic actors. Great actors furthermore create a sort of parasocial relationship with the audience. The best actors, directors, musicians, and special effects artists combine their talents to deliver the final product of a film. Propagandists choose (or influence the choice of) the filmmaking talent to ensure a certain message is conveyed to the audience.

Beyond the mere medium of film is the business aspect and the fact that it costs millions of dollars to create a movie (or television series).¹ That is actually good for propagandists because it presents a natural gatekeeping mechanism. Once an ideological group attains the wealth and power to influence the filmmaking gatekeepers (or they fund them or become the gatekeepers themselves), they can ensure that their ideology is included in every film produced while ensuring any movie containing a contrary message does not get produced.

Actors are the perfect blank slates to parrot any propaganda given to them and sell it convincingly. They literally play pretend and read others’ words for a living. Writers and directors are supposed to be the more intellectual pieces of the filmmaking process, who should be more aware of the propaganda in movies. They either willingly include the propaganda because they believe it, or they are not intellectually sophisticated and do not recognize the propaganda that their films are selling (or they don’t care). With writers, it may be more a case that they’re rewritten by producers or other writers, which happens often in the film industry. Screenwriters are continually treated like second-class citizens in Hollywood where the director is king—and the top actors are practically worshiped like gods.

Directors are supposedly the true auteurs in the filmmaking process. So if Hollywood movies contain propaganda, are directors the master propagandists? In most cases, no. The director is ultimately a tool. Think about what it takes to become a movie director at the highest level: a lifetime spent studying films. Therefore, most directors do not have great knowledge in other areas of intellectual pursuit such as philosophy, politics, and history. At least auteur directors in the past had to study books to find the material for their films (because no films yet existed). But most modern directors don’t read anything other than movie scripts—and some don’t even read the scripts. Directors spend most of their time watching movies, so they’ve spent their entire lives consuming the propaganda that they themselves now get to create. Though the message of the propaganda can change over time, depending on the current taste of the gatekeepers.

Directors, writers, actors, and all artists in the Hollywood movie-making process are essentially tools used to sell propaganda to the public. But they are hired to sell it in such an entertaining and emotionally manipulative way that the audience doesn’t recognize it is propaganda. They don’t realize they’re being sold anything at all. They enjoy the product so much, they’re willing to pay to receive the message—over and over again.

While movies are the ultimate medium of propaganda, that doesn’t mean all movies are propagandistic. There have been films that are pure art, but they are usually made independently. To break free from Hollywood propaganda you must make better movies outside of the system. But the problem is the gatekeepers and their tight control over the movies that are allowed to be made. The current gatekeepers won’t produce any movie contrary to their ideology, and because of the high cost required to make a movie of high quality, gatekeepers are needed.

However, there is hope for the future. AI video generation tools will be key to dismantling the filmmaking gatekeepers in Hollywood. Once anyone can use AI to create movies, that will democratize the filmmaking process so that ordinary people can create a movie on the technical level of Hollywood but for little to no budget. This will even the playing field in the propaganda wars. Finally, counter-cultural movies can be made and spread to the masses.

Movies will always be used to create propaganda, which isn’t even necessarily a bad thing. It is only bad when only one ideological group is able to make movies. AI will make it so all ideologies are represented. Then audiences will have the freedom to choose which propaganda they want to consume.