EWAN TELFORD.

Terror Drama

Action! At a Southern California film studio once known for B-grade action movies starring Burt Reynolds, producers and directors use the tools of their trade - scripts, sets, actors, special effects, pyrotechnics - to create an immersive, fictional world for the US military to tactically train for the War on Terror. What is the relationship between entertainment and the War on Terror? That much US film and television is vetted in close collaboration with the CIA and State Department to shape public opinion is well-documented. Public narratives take on the quality of Hollywood films. But what of the reverse? Do media conglomerates espousing a simplistic version of history in turn contribute to the cowboy mindset in foreign policy and servicemen and women? In theory, exercises at the film studio simulate potential real-world scenarios but trainees, suspending disbelief, are participating in, and are in turn shaped by, the tropes of the flattened, circumscribed world of screen drama and images. Homeland, Hurt Locker or Zero Dark Thirty perhaps.