MISSING THE POINT SLIGHTLY In response to Ezra's assessment that Transformers is "a movie about GIANT ROBOTS some of whom want to DESTROY THE EARTH," not "a commentary on the righteousness of Operation Iraqi Freedom," I just want to say that wasn't my point exactly. I really don't care about Transformers. Rather, I care about how Hollywood cooperates with the Pentagon on many other movies as well, and the obvious creative control issues inherent in this. As a comment on my original post noted, the military's sole interest in dealing with filmmakers is to make the military look good. In Transformers, this isn't a huge deal, because it is indeed, as Ezra aptly noted, a movie about giant robots. But the military more commonly gets involved with movies about real issues: war, terrorism, etc. In these cases, the relationship between the Pentagon and Hollywood has obvious implications for the political assumptions in the movies (increased glorification of the U.S. military, for example). Transformers is just the latest example of Pentagon-Hollywood cooperation, so I thought I'd try making the broader point that this cooperation is probably a bad thing. Though if you want to read an argument that Transformers actually is politically relevant in some ways, check out this post from Matt Yglesias.
--Steven White
