Politics Within Hollywood Films

To piggyback off of the upcoming and ongoing political debates here is my attempt to dissect the age-old question: Why is Hollywood so liberal?

My family and I went to a sold out showing of 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. The movie follows a trend of war films released in January that appeal to conservative-minded audiences. It’s a film produced by Michael Bay that is about the 2012 terrorist attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya and the CIA mercenaries. In the film, they protect innocent American lives in their compound for 13 hours straight with no government approved assistance.

Then a preview for an upcoming film produced by Academy Award winner Jonás Cuarón called Desierto came on. The film is about Mexican migrant workers crossing the border into the U.S. seeking a better life only for them to be hunted down by a merciless rifle-toting vigilante. Once the trailer ended, people in the audience began to boo and jeer at the movie preview. With majority of the audience being conservative, the film itself got a standing ovation at the end.

In 2015, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, the biopic of U.S. Navy S.E.A.L. sniper Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), faced controversy after leftists claimed it was pro-war propaganda. People said it was xenophobic for being the first film in a while that featured no positive portrayals of Muslims of Islam. The movie that people around the world called utterly cowardly and morally low, went on to gross more than half a billion dollars worldwide with more than 60% of it made here in the U.S. A lot of that money was made from conservative-minded people who felt they had a movie made for them.

The film Lone Survivor that came out in 2014 was similarly conservative, telling the story of Operation Red Wings. The group was a four-man SEAL reconnaissance and surveillance team tasked to track down and kill Taliban leader Ahmad Shah. However, the task goes horribly wrong and only one of the four SEAL’s makes it back alive. The film was a success and many believe it increased the demand by conservative and right-wing audiences.

But is there truly a demand for more conservative minded films? Well it’s how you define what is conservative. If you believe in God and are a hardcore Bible-thumping Christian, there are plenty of religious movies that were released over the past few years, many of which have been successful. Most of these films are mid-to-low budget and are primarily made to appeal to certain audiences.

But one of the biggest types of movies are action and adventure blockbuster films that you would see in the summer. Those films cannot be labeled because they are meant to appeal to all audiences. You wouldn’t find any political messages in Jurassic World or Transformers. Though some superhero films have political leanings, you would have to try hard to find them.

So is Hollywood liberal? Yes. Film is a liberal art after all. But unlike other parts of the world, Hollywood is liberal enough to make whatever you want as long as there is an audience. It is liberal enough to make films that pander to left-wingers or right wing conservatives and sometimes both. No one can or should force you to watch anything. And if you have a problem with a film’s existence, just do what everyone else does, don’t go watch it.