What’s the difference between a US movie producer and a US secretary of state? The one dreams of winning an Oscar, the other makes sure the awards go to the right global players.

US foreign policy has long been committed to flooding the world with Hollywood films. Inseparable from this open market ideology is the recognition of the moving image’s literal projection of US power and the universal rightness of the US Way.

Winston Churchill paid homage to these forces when he described Mrs Miniver, that silly Little Olde England wartime MGM melodrama of 1942, as “propaganda worth a hundred battleships.”  

A year later in 1943 Roosevelt’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull dispatched former ambassador to the Soviet Union Joseph E Davies to the Kremlin with a print of Warner Brothers’ just-released movie adaptation of Davies’s own memoir, Mission to Moscow. 

Directed by Michael Curtiz, who’d done Casablanca the year before, the movie began with an appearance by the ambassador himself assuring viewers that “no leaders of a nation have been so misrepresented and misunderstood as those in the Soviet government.” 

What follows is a fawning view of US-Soviet friendship. Davies’s memorandum to Hull reported that Stalin watched the film with “glum curiosity.” Uncle Joe far preferred US Westerns.

The current leading man at the State Department fits snugly into these traditions of cinematic statecraft. 

Aside from being a pitch man for Israel and the Saudis, arms manufacturers and Silicon Valley, Antony Blinken’s main qualification for his current job is that he was an associate producer of The Addiction, an arty 1994 vampire flick set at NYU, in which the bloodsucking depredations are interleaved with archival footage of the Holocaust. 

Blinken would soon be addicted to power.

Not coincidentally, 1994 was also the year Blinken took up his first governmental post in Clinton’s National Security Council, where he became senior director for speechwriting — what in Hollywood would be called screenplay development. Mastery of the cinematic and political arts and sciences requires the mixing of selective truths with large quantities of vote-winning/ticket-selling fiction.

A decade on from his arrival in East Coast Babylon, Blinken was beating the drum for the invasion of Iraq, knocking out speeches and strategy papers for Biden when the future president was chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee. 

Biden was still in bad need of a script doctor and would have to spend a couple of decades doing bit parts before landing, improbably, the role of a lifetime as US commander in chief. “Props, get me another pair of Top Gun Aviators®!”

Having hitched his cart to the right horse, the resourceful Blinken rose up through the Democrat studio system, specialising in disaster features like the Islamic State and intervention tragi-comedies like Destroying Libya, which bombed in the Middle East but were hits on US home screens in 2011. 

2011 was a huge year for the studio that also saw the release of the critically acclaimed Operation Neptune Spear: The Killing of Osama bin Laden. Blinken watched the premiere in the White House Situation — ie, Screening — Room.

By the end of the Obama years Blinken had risen to become deputy secretary of state.

With Trump’s screwball antics hogging the frame, Blinken took a role as creative “consultant” (ie, lobbyist) at his firm, WestExec, and kept the faith that his interventionist brand of US exceptionalism would find favour again. 

From his off-screen vantagepoint he surely welcomed the Best Picture for Parasite at the Oscars in the election year of 2020. It was a signal to communist North Korea that they would never reap the financial rewards or aesthetic prestige of their freedom-loving neighbours to the south and a preview of The Return to the Asia Pivot to be produced by Blinken once he was back at State.

More than two years into his current contract as Big Boy of Diplomacy, Blinken must have smiled all through the recent Academy Awards ceremony as foreign policy movie objectives were met one after another.

Everything Everywhere All at Once hauled in seven statuettes. Good, law-abiding, small-business-owning immigrants, having fled the communist oppression, are continually portalled into the multi-metaverse, where only the Democratic values of inclusion and love, abetted by martial arts, can repel the totalitarian threat. It’s Facebook versus TikTok, and no coincidence that, with the Academy Awards now done and delivered, the US can move against the dangerous social media menace from the PRC.

Even while American attentions and resources turn towards Asia, the venerable Nato alliances must be safeguarded. Germany’s All Quiet on the Western Front won four Oscars. Nominally an anti-war movie, this All Quiet rewrites Remarque’s novel so that the protagonist Paul is bayonetted from behind by a French soldier in a literal enactment of the pernicious Stab-in-the-Back myth that helped Hitler march Germany into World War Two. 

Many Germans were incensed at this disfiguration of the book’s message, but the message from Hollywood was clear: Deutschland, hold the line in the Ukraine! 

And, obviously, the documentary Navalny had to win in that category.

But even a canny movie man like the Secretary of State has his blind spots. The thing the movies are lethally efficient at allowing, and indeed encouraging, is escape from reality. Even as Blinken and his cinematic operatives dole out the goodies in his Movie Marshall Plan, they don’t seem to know that the closing credits of the US Empire’s blockbuster are already rolling.

The main character in The Addiction, an infected philosophy student who is rampaging through the faculty, utters prophetic words, perhaps even written with uncanny foresight by Blinken himself. 

“It makes no difference what I do. Whether I draw blood or not.  It’s the violence of my will against theirs.”

This is an abridged version of a review first published by counterpunch.org. David Yearsley’s latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. He can be reached at [email protected]