Introduction

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones, as they are commonly known, for surveillance purposes and for lethal operations against suspected terrorist targets was at the centre of United States counterterrorism policy during Barack Obama's two- term presidency, and is now being continued by Donald Trump's administration. While the US use of drones, especially for so- called targeted killings, has been the most discussed and controversial use of drone technology, their use for non- military purposes is becoming increasingly commonplace. Drones in all shapes and sizes are entering our skies, raising serious questions about how they are being used, by whom, for what purposes and with what consequences.

For journalists, drones pose a range of challenging questions. At the lethal end of official government drone usage, how can journalists verify what has or has not been executed with a weaponised drone when their deployment is still largely shrouded in secrecy and their effects often too remote geographically for reliable accounting after the fact? How might journalists themselves use drone technology to access visuals or sound recordings that they would otherwise not be able to reach? What does this technology do to privacy, to public safety and to civil rights whether being used by government, by journalists or by private companies? How might journalists themselves be targeted with drones to expose their work and potentially undermine their freedom to gather information and investigate government or private sector practices?

This chapter will engage with the wide range of drone technology applications by the military, police, government agencies, private sector companies and individuals to ask what will happen as drones become more ubiquitous over the skies of the United States, Britain, Australia and other countries.

World War II holds a celebrated position in the benign meta-narrative of American foreign relations. This narrative holds that the United States is a benevolent nation whose foreign policy is based not on pure self-interest but rather on the greater good of all humankind. As H. W. Brands suggests: ‘If a single theme pervades the history of American thinking about the world, it is that the United States has a peculiar obligation to better the lot of humanity… Americans have commonly spoken and acted as though the salvation of the world depended on them.’ According to this meta-narrative, the US has only ever engaged in foreign policy that, while it may have advanced the national interest, also served some higher purpose in the history of human progress: the Spanish–American War was fought to free the Cuban people and others from domination by imperial Spain; World War I was fought to ‘make the world safe for democracy’; World War II was designed to defeat the evils of Nazism and Japanese expansionism whilst establishing the ‘Four Freedoms’ for all peoples; the Cold War was pursued in order to defend the rights of free peoples everywhere against totalitarian aggression and subversion; and the New World Order and more recently the ‘War on Terror’ were established to defend civilised peoples the world over against the uncertainties and dangers of the post-Cold War era.

In the early stages of planning for this book, we were struck by a number of related circumstances. First, working as we both did then in American Studies departments in the United Kingdom, we had noticed a growing preference for using films to ‘teach’ American history and were both excited and concerned by such a development. From our own experiences, we knew that films which featured episodes and events from American history engaged the interest of students and potentially raised some intriguing questions about historical truth, realism, genre, Hollywood and ideology. The assumption that Hollywood films constituted unambiguous and unproblematic historical texts, however, needed to be well and truly resisted. About the same time, we started to notice the sheer number of contemporary Hollywood films being made that focused on American history as their subject. Indeed, a steady flow of new releases throughout the late 1980s and 1990s suggested a growing interest both on the part of filmmakers and audiences in questions of public history, nation and national identity. Glory, Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven and Earth, Malcolm X and JFK were followed in quick succession by Saving Private Ryan, Nixon, The Thin Red Line, Three Kings, Amistad, Ride with the Devil, U-571, The Patriot, Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down. The initial impetus for this book, therefore, came from a desire to explore Hollywood's renewed interest in American history and analyse these films in pedagogical terms.

In the giddy optimism that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the attendant disintegration of the Cold War, commentators, particularly from the American right, looked to a rose-tinted future in which the United States bestrode the world as its only superpower. Most famously, or notoriously, Francis Fukuyama, then the Deputy Director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, argued that the ‘triumph of the West’ was evidenced ‘in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism’ and that the end of the Cold War marked ‘the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the ultimate form of human government'. Fukuyama's predictions about the hegemonic global dominance of a form of Western liberal democracy coded as American may have come to pass, but the implicit global stability and order that he might have expected to result from such a situation has not materialised. Rather, the post-Cold War era has done much to justify the fears of other commentators who believed the world would be a far more dangerous and unpredictable place following the end of the ideological struggle between East and West. International stability, far from being assured by the unfettered spread of liberal democracy and market capitalism, has been threatened by the forces of ethnic nationalism, religious fundamentalism, international terrorism and other emergent threats to security.

There are a number of points of departure for this chapter, and this book as a whole. The first relates to the vexed question of historical accuracy and the now familiar complaint that Hollywood films deliberately falsify the historical record, as though that record itself is somehow inviolate and unchanging. As we argued in the Introduction, we begin from the assumption that what should concern us when considering how the past is represented is not so much the issue of how accurately films represent history but rather what they can reveal to us about the ways in which history is told and how film's engagement with history has been shaped by the material conditions under which filmmakers construct their narratives and audiences watch and make sense of them. We are interested primarily in the ways in which filmmakers have used, and are using, American history as a way of engaging with the question of what ‘America’ stands for, culturally and politically, in the post-Cold War world. In this particular chapter, what interests us, therefore, is how an event as sanctified as the American Revolution – one that continues to occupy a privileged position in the benign meta-narrative of American history – is used and transformed by filmmakers both to reveal something about the event itself and to shed some light on our own cultural and political moment. What is at stake here is not only the question of how or indeed whether Hollywood's role as public historian has changed.

Hollywood has not typically enjoyed a good reputation as a purveyor of history. American filmmakers are frequently condemned for rewriting history, for providing an ‘arrogant distortion of the historical record’ or even for the ‘rape of US history’. Films made about particular episodes or events from America's past are often accused of providing a disturbingly falsified picture of ‘what really happened’; they consistently privilege action and drama over historical accuracy; they simplify the complexities and contingencies of the past by attempting to impose clear-cut resolutions on the ‘mess’ of history; and their aim is to entertain audiences and make money for their producers rather than to represent the past in a fresh light or encourage audiences to critically reflect on this past in new ways. As Robert Brent Toplin puts it, critics of historical feature films would seem to hold the unshakeable view that: ‘To learn about history, go to a book, not to a movie’.

Since at least the 1970s, however, many historians have been increasingly willing to recognise the value of Hollywood films as both tools for teaching and as resources for helping to interpret American history. A small library of books on the subject of historical films and regular articles and forums in major journals such as American Historical Review and the Journal of American History attest to the seriousness with which many historians now treat feature films that focus on historical events or characters.

The unpopularity of slavery as a subject for Hollywood is underlined by the significantly larger proportion of films made about the American Civil War. The Civil War has traditionally occupied a hallowed place in the benign meta-narrative of American history, one in which the bloody divisions between North and South are incorporated into a larger story of nation in which the sacrifice, suffering and bravery of both sides are equally celebrated. As such, Hollywood, one of the key ‘players’ in shaping the nature and ideological content of American public history, has played an important role in transforming the Civil War, to use David Thelen's words, from a ‘story of bitter, irreconcilable conflict between two societies and between two sets of values’ into one of ‘human courage and bravery exhibited by all’. This chapter focuses on the ways in which a range of post-Cold War films about the Civil War – Glory (1989), Gettsyburg (1993), Ride with the Devil (1999) and Cold Mountain (2003) – have engaged with this benign meta-narrative; that is, whether or to what extent they have challenged or reinforced an affirmative notion of national identity and how their engagement with such concerns speaks about the numerous, complex ways in which ‘America’ is being re-constituted domestically and internationally in the post-Cold War world.

If contemporary filmmakers have felt compelled to do away with the explicit racism of pre-Civil Rights Hollywood movie-making and make African-Americans the subjects rather than the objects of their gaze, then the vexed question of how successfully have their ambitions been realised needs to be addressed. For while there has long been a slow trickle of ‘worthy’ films made by white liberal directors whose integrationist politics usually requires initially hostile black and white protagonists to put aside their differences and prejudices and join forces to tackle some kind of ‘outside’ threat (that is, In the Heat of the Night, Mississippi Burning and The Hurricane), there has also been a small but growing number of films made by African-American directors (that is, Spike Lee, Mario Van Peebles) whose focus is predominantly African-American subjects and which tend to privilege conflict and confrontation rather than reconciliation and assimilation. Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, Panther and Dead Presidents would be examples of this type of film.

Such a distinction has provoked scholars like Manthia Diawara and Ed Guerrero to differentiate between what they refer to as ‘Black independent cinema’ or ‘a new black film wave’ and mainstream Hollywood cinema, although Diawara in particular is careful to draw attention to the multiple ways in which ‘mainstream cinema … feeds on independent cinema and appropriates its themes and narrative forms’. Nonetheless, despite such cross-fertilisation, the appropriateness of such a distinction, for Guerrero at least, remains. The lines of demarcation are clear.

More than any other American film director in recent years, Oliver Stone has looked to American history for his inspiration and subject matter. In doing so, he has also attracted greater controversy and passionate criticism than any of his contemporaries. The plaudits and condemnations come almost in equal measure. Stone is praised by some historians for advocating ‘a strong thesis about the meaning of the past’ and presenting a ‘powerful interpretation of contemporary American history’. Some have even claimed that he is ‘the most influential historian of America's role in Vietnam’. Yet other historians deem Stone's renderings of historical subjects ‘disgraceful’ or a ‘disaster’. As such, he has been accused of an ‘arrogant distortion of the historical record’ that amounts to the ‘rape of US history’.

Stone has gone to great lengths to try to answer his critics by writing articles, op-ed pieces and letters, conducting interviews with historians, appearing at academic conferences, publishing referenced film scripts and contributing to an academic book assessing his work. In recent years he has insisted that he is not a historian. Nor, despite the beliefs of some critics, has he ever claimed to be one. Instead, Stone sees himself as a ‘historical dramatist’ in the tradition of the Greeks and William Shakespeare. He argues that he mixes fact and fiction in his work in attempts to reveal larger ‘truths’ about recent American history and to challenge the often comfortable narratives and conclusions of traditional American historians.

If the American Revolution is a brilliant mirror for the nation's dominant ideologies, an event whose image encapsulates all that its boosters imagine or desire ‘America’ to be, then slavery is its unpalatable alter ego; an indelible stain on the collective consciousness, a system or institution whose impact is both invisible and yet impossible to ignore and, like a ghost in the machine, whose presence continues to be felt in all areas of American life. Nowhere, one might add, is this ambivalence felt more acutely than in Hollywood. The cultural moment for Gone with the Wind-style representations of slavery as domestic idyll and ‘Uncle Toms’ contentedly serving their white ‘massas’ has long since passed but what, if anything, to replace them with remains a contentious subject. The dilemma, at least, is a simple one. Portray the slave plantation as anything less than a blood-soaked prison camp, a regime founded upon the systematic brutalisation of African descendents, and a multitude of protesting voices are all but guaranteed. But represent the slave plantation in its full, unremitting grimness and you run the risk of alienating audiences – black and white - who are either unwilling or unable to deal with such images, though for different reasons. If silence and obfuscation mark contemporary attitudes towards slavery across the racial spectrum, Tara Mack makes a useful distinction: whereas white Americans have used this silence ‘to distance themselves from the guilt and responsibility’, black Americans have used it ‘to distance themselves from the shame’.