Public Enemy Number One? A Phenomenology in Propaganda Cultivation

Richard Birch
Media Profile Assignment
Media and Culture 2 SOCI 3077
February 28, 2005
This work Copyright (C) 2005 Richard Birch

The advent of the propaganda film is certainly one of the most profound phenomenons in Western society. To fully understand the scope of importance of which the propaganda film is as a medium, one must engage in asking of certain aspects of the very nature of the message in propaganda as structured phenomena of ideological codification. All ideologies are codified. All codification is subjective, and of which this subjectivity is intrinsic to the medium of propaganda film as the purveyor of knowledge, as well as a propagator connected to textual realities of ruling. For the purposes of tying this notion of propaganda to ideology of ruling relations, textual realities, and social synergies of power and oppression one must experience film as not merely a medium, not merely as a component of mass media, not only as an element of a mass mediated agent of socialization, but I project that film, in essence, is a sociology in itself. Film, television, radio, internet, print, and all other media possess the capacity to embody what is crucial for master narratives of social ruling. The propaganda film as medium is designed as such to be experienced, taken in, absorbed, processed, and realized for it’s political and social rationale. By using the sociological method of phenomenology one can engage in the discovery of the very nature, the very impact such a medium, such a sociology can have especially when placed contextually as problematic to social milieux. Furthermore, the medium of propaganda film can be compared and explored in its direct relationship to contemporary issues of objectivity and the press.
In this essay I have chosen to make a phenomenological account of two important films in pop culture and in the cult feature film genre, Reefer Madness and The Atomic Cafe. Both of these films embody the phenomenon of propaganda film as a medium and exemplify how the medium can be utilized through a process of cultivating social attitudes based on master narrative principles and textual realities of ruling.

Reefer Madness
The film Reefer Madness, originally titled Tell Your Children is very much a phenomenology in itself. There is a strong tendency to supply accounts of what happens to those experiencing the phenomenon of marijuana use, or more importantly, accounts already socially constructed by master narratives of power and control. The film originally released in 1938 was designed to be a film intended to frighten the youth of America to not use the “dreaded scourge” marijuana (Reefer Madness [Motion Picture], 1938). The very essence of the film draws and plays on the social attitudes already in place during the time of its release. This is an important characteristic to propaganda film as a medium. For example, what the propaganda films of World War Two proved was that they would be successful when narratives were based on already pre-existing opinions, and of course, fears in society (Jowett & O’Donnell, 1986). During the 1930’s America was on the verge of social and political paralysis from its fear of drugs, alcohol, and other ‘deviant’ behaviour depicted in the media. Hollywood as a model of deviant social discourse had been viewed as for some time to be the embodiment of cultural decay, ethical disorder and the indoctrination of anti-conservative principles which would fuel the creation of the Hollywood Production Code or otherwise known as the Hays Code, a set of strict narrative and production content guidelines that would control the face of the Hollywood screen for approximately three decades (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/beyond/hollywood.html).

The film from the first frame projects itself as an instruction of the sociological issues of marijuana use by giving accounts of so-called actual experiences and actual knowledge. However what the film sets out to achieve is a creation of notions of deviancy, delinquency and behaviour correlated to the antithesis of American values. What the film does in this respect is begin to socially construct what sociologist Dorothy Smith terms an ‘ideological code’, a “constant generator of procedures for selecting syntax, categories, and vocabulary in the writing of texts” (Smith, 1999). In this case, a codified structure of ideology can be utilized, as structural to permeate textual realities. Texts of which the film concretes are what I call performative essences of deviancy. These essences, or structural texts to the master narrative of the film’s purpose as propaganda, are aligned with specific notions of social discourses and behaviour on which alienation is positioned on female sexuality and homoeroticism. The film utilizes such performative essences of deviancy and associates their contextual derogatory meanings attributed to the use of marijuana and narcotics in general.

From the beginning of the film female sexual imagery is automatically associated with drug use. A woman, Mae Colman, who embodies sexual disenfranchisement and slavery, manages the environment where the drug pushers operate their business. She is unwillingly controlled by her male business partner, Jack Perry, to supply and fulfill her obligation to the ideological codification of social deviancy in the narrative. The audience is exposed to exceedingly long shots of her dressing, pulling up her stockings, putting on phallic shaped stiletto shoes, constantly lighting cigarettes, which are another phallic symbol of male sexuality and femininity in masquerade. Another female character that is strategically placed in the narrative is Blanche (no surname is ever given for this character) who embodies the sexual enticement of marijuana. She is the seductive siren of destructive forces to which the story’s teenage male protagonist, Bill Harper, will eventually succumb to in his acquired addition to the weed.

The use of homoeroticism in the film is also equally rampant and strategic in cultivating deviancy through association. The main ‘victims’ in the film are young men, teen boys who are lured onto the ‘siren’s’ rocky shore of addictive seduction not merely by elemental female sexuality but through their own homoerotic association. Their hidden desire, a desire to know the weed, the desire to experience the phenomenological essence of social deviancy is paralleled to the female sexual discourse they are trapped by in the story. Their ‘gayness’ is in short their entry into female seduction. Their homoerotic tendencies are the passport to their social destruction. The homoerotic performative nature of the male characters is directed by the male antagonist, Ralph, the male friend to all who brings the young men into Mae’s and Blanche’s den of addiction.

Critical Phenomenological Review
In viewing and experiencing this film as a format of sociological sensory exploration, subjective interpretation of the film puts light on the performed female sexuality and homoeroticism as socializing acts on which relations of ruling in relation to attitudes of deviancy and control are cultivated. It is here where George Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory can be utilized to show how the associative interplay of sexual misjudgement is aligned with the time period’s universal fears of drug use. The film creates a constructed world of deviancy on which to posit its mandate on knowledge. For, “this created version of the world entices [viewers] to make assumptions about violence, people, places, and other fictionalized events which do not hold true to real life events” (Greunke, 2000). The film produces associative synergies between sexual deviancy, social attitudes towards femininity, patriarchal relations of ruling, and drug use. Knowledge is a construction, and even more so in the medium of propaganda film. Cultivation of knowledge is achieved through bringing the viewer into the subjectivity of the narrative and constantly fostering notions of social deviancy and behavioural misjudgement, both of which can impact on the viewer’s subjective Dasein (See Appendix One).

When watching this film, the viewer obtains a sense that what is shown on screen is not necessarily the essence of the fear of drug addiction. Analyzed deconstructively what is crucially at stake in the narrative if the film is that the deviant behaviour depicted, whether through the introduction and on screen utilization of narcotics, or of the sexual deviancy of the connected characterizations, is in actuality the notion of deviancy against capitalist productive order.
Propaganda is a social construction. Propaganda as a filmic medium provides textual realities of ruling under the guise of objectivity. As Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann point out, “the reality of everyday life appears already objectified, that is, constituted by an order of objects that have been designated as objects before [their] appearance on the scene.” (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) The viewer receives information on the screen and is absorbed under the assumption that the texts supplied are realities. However, what Berger and Luckmann wish to say is that knowledge is not based on objective realities, but on subjective facticities of socially produced legitimations. As a viewer of film, I wish to believe what I see on film is of real context as it were, for my desire for such knowledge is in my mind, justified. Yet what we only receive in such a display of mediated texts is the knowledge produced through power relations. The on screen texts that the audience are exposed to, textual in the form of the characterizations and their performative social deviancies serve hierarchies of oppression and the symbolic productive order and master narrative. Marijuana is not the deviant player. The weed does not act onto itself. The addiction portrayed by the socially skewed characters is not that of social misconduct. It is the misconduct of their actions against capitalist production, which is deviant. Their addiction textually makes them stray from their connectivity to the symbolic, and thus if they are not of the symbolic, they do not have desire to be of productive ordered society. The use of marijuana is irrelevant. Their social acts however show their activity in denouncing their place as oppressed and subordinate to capitalist power in American society.

The Atomic Cafe
The Atomic Cafe is a documentary originally released in 1982. It was produced and directed by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty. The film is powerful through its use of various Cold War newsreel footage acquired from government archives of the 1940s and 1950’s. It highlights the propaganda newsreel footage of the period in its depiction of the dark side of the Cold War. The documentary’s purpose is to embody the social currents of fear and paranoia typical of the period in American social and political history and blends this with dark humour constructed through editorial satire. It creates a ‘nuclear Reefer Madness’ in a way. The documentary shows how military and government propaganda enticed the American public into believing, for a time, that possessing the bomb was a good thing for aggregate democratic freedom and liberty. The threat of Communist invasion could be thwarted if possession of the bomb was in the hands of those who had God’s approval. This is a strong characteristic in many of the government educational propaganda films that encapsulates the political construct of nuclear militarism of the period. The documentary shows several scenes in which policy makers and public opinion exemplified the belief that the Americans believed they had God’s approval to use the bomb. In a traditional Calvinistic sense, the American public were coerced into accepting the notion that World War Two ended because the bomb was “God’s answer to their prayers; ” (The Atomic Cafe, [Motion Picture] 1982).
Further atomic testing throughout the 1940’s and 1950’s was sold to the American public on the basis that this “destructive force” would be something good for mankind. Propaganda films were utilized for the purpose of constructing a campaign to implement the nuclear militarism of the period. The government had to create consent within in the American public for such militaristic achievement. But in order to do so, a balance of fear of nuclear devastation with commercial pragmatism intrinsic to American culture had to be achieved. The Atomic Cafe is a composite montage of the media campaign Hollywood and television was enlisted to help socially construct. It was a campaign designed to posit social knowledge of the benefits of possessing nuclear militarism. By possessing the bomb, they were not only protecting the American public from the ‘commies’ and the international threats of God Sanctioned democratic ideology, but they were also protecting American culture from itself. This is the phenomenological account of the film. When experiencing it as a filmic sociology, the underlying tone of the propaganda footage of the period was not that the Russians, or the Chinese, or North Koreans, or any other international entities were the real threat to American social order. The threat that such films engaged in trying to avert was any potential internal menace to capitalist ideology that could be remotely existent in the US. The ‘reefer-ed madness’ of communism was the primary component to American social unrest of which consent to codify as deviant was obtained from the public through the utilization of propaganda imagery.
The film raises important questions as to if this was ultimately achieved in the public landscape. Private ownership vs. Communist ideology is a debate never fully answered or carried through in the genre of Cold War propaganda. Both concepts are interlaced with social constructive methodology. The films of the period had to construct the social ‘truth’ that to betray the democratic commercial ideology and way of life is to face death. Not just death in the literal, nuclear annihilation sense, but death in the capitalist ordered sense. A phenomenological experience of this film enlightens the viewer that fear, consent, and the desire to maintain the status quo by the ruling relations was paramount in the formation of such a filmic sociological method of solving the social problem of convergent capitalist and Marxist ideologies in the first half of the twentieth century.

Overview
In 1941 a prominent Hollywood producer, Walter Wanger saw the potential for motion pictures as a propaganda tool for the upcoming involvement in World War Two. He believed films should be used ‘to clarify, to inspire and to entertain’. This platform of legitimation was a highly successful selling strategy, a notion presented to policy makers in Washington that the medium of film can be utilized to make significant contributions to national morale” (Jowett & O’Donnell, 1986). From 1947 to 1965 “the American film industry was actively solicited by the U.S. government to make commercial films that pointed out the dangers of communism.” (Jowett & O’Donnell, 1986) Again we see the motion picture as a highly effective form of information dissemination in the performative sense. What the producers of Cold War propaganda films came to master, especially those aired in television during the 1950’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, utilized ideologized messages through constant exploitation of the fact that people no longer “entertained the naive concept that global conflict could be won or lost by conventional means, for now the frightening power of nuclear destruction loomed menacingly over the international scene” (Jowett & O’Donnell, 1986).

It is theorized that by regularly showing messages and socially constructing information about divergent political, cultural, theological, and institutional values in other cultures, this phenomenologically can produce feelings of hostility toward the ‘opposite’ divergent culture and nation (Jowett & O’Donnell, 1986). The performative nature of the drop and cover films of the period were more to do with the propagation and development of divergent Communist Russian images on American media. Through constant reinforcement of negative and derogatory mediated images of Communist Russia, China and other nations the public become active players in this performance of ideology. Socially constructed beliefs on what divergent political and cultural identities are grounded and thus override the actual political and basic definitions of such political paradigms and theoretical frameworks.

Distortion of social framework through distortion of performative variables in visual media is fundamentally the basis for both The Atomic Cafe and Reefer Madness because they are of performed social frameworks in themselves. The Atomic Cafe depicts the antithesis of American conservatism and democratic ideological platforms of domination as evil, derelict, and debase in the performative socially constructed sense. Reefer Madness performs adolescent drug culture as the antithesis of American values, goodness, and righteousness. The underlying thread between both films as is that both performative cultures depicted as derogatory, communism as culture, and marijuana as culture, is that both upset capitalist productive symbolic orders in American society. Is it false to claim that the intention of preventing drug use and addiction among the youth of America is the primary or sole purpose of Reefer Madness? Does the film in itself have the values of ‘goodness’ and ‘social harmony’ and American prosperity in its true narrative? Or, is there another element to the master narrative of this film? Is there an underlying and systemic fear of the loss of something else in the foreground?

Textual relations of ruling have as much to do with the medium of film as does directing, producing, writing and acting. Films are in essence knowledge. Films are also in essence stand-alone subjective sociologies. Sociology as a thing, a unit of analysis, a basis of knowledge is what is at question in relating propaganda film as problematic in the social milieux. Textually we are all of the relations of ruling and these relations rule us all. Knowledge is of the ruling relations of social synergies that cross the emotional and political ideological pathways that create social facts. Film is the perfect visual and ideological metaphor of the social fact. But what is a social fact? Are social facts based on knowledge? What is then, in essence, knowledge? Is knowledge that which is propagated to us by the textual relations of ruling? If it is so, then could not all propaganda films arguably be fact? It could be measured as fact – as knowledge if the objective account of ideological discourse in film could be quantitatively empirical.

However, film is neither objective nor is it based on empiricism. For film and media at large is purely of the subjective. All media are sociologically subjective in nature. One cannot experience the medium of film without being in the subjective. Objectivity in the press as parallel to the phenomenon of propaganda is also as such impossible, for the creation and creators of such a media are never able to remove themselves from their own subjective commercial interests which rule their textual realities. To engage in the production of filmic propaganda is to engage in the subjective of ruling knowledge and accounts. The production of such phenomena as propaganda can never be a labour of objectification for the means to create such cultural productions is also inherent to capitalist relations of ruling and oppressive structures of power. Too view and experience film, as is to experience propaganda film is akin to experiencing the world. As Dorothy Smith writes, “The only way of knowing a socially constructed world is knowing it from within.” (Smith, 1990) But since a socially constructed world is culturally produced textual realities of ruling, so are the methods of control maintained by such ruling relations. A propaganda film is a sociological concept controlled, cultivated, fostered, and subjugated by those in power and who desire to maintain control of knowledge. “To control concepts, theories, and ideology and their dissemination in public text-mediated discourse is an important source of power in a society largely organized by text-mediated relations” (Smith, 1999).

Appendix 1. Dasein: A German term for “being there”, or “being” in the subjective sense. A concept important to the sociology of phenomenology. Originally developed by German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his study of the unique self-conscious existential lives human beings possess. Dasein is a component of the phenomenological alysis method originally conceived by philosopher Edmoind Husserl who claimed there is a “pre-predicative stratum of our experience, within which the intentional objects and their qualities are not at all well circumscribed” (Schultz, 1970).

References:
Berger, P. L. & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in The Sociology of Knowledge. New York, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Greunke, L. (November 2000). The Cultivation Theory: George Gerbner. Fort Collins, CO: Colorado State University. Retrieved February 20, from http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/Speech/rccs/theory06.htm
Hirliman, G. (Producer) & Gasnier, L. (Director). (1938). Reefer Madness aka: Tell Your Children [Motion Picture]. San Diego, CA: Off Color Films.
Jowett, G. S. & O’Donnell, V. (1986). Propaganda and Persuasion. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications Inc.
Loader, J. (Producer & Director), Rafferty, K. (Producer & Director) & Rafferty, P. (Producer & Director). (1982). The Atomic Café [Motion Picture]. Hollywood, CA: The Archives Project, Inc.
Schultz, A. (1970). Alfred Schutz on Phenomenology and Social Relations. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Public Broadcasting Service. (n.d.). Hollywood Censored: The Production Code. Retrieved February 20, 2005, from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/beyond/hollywood.html
Smith, D. (1990). The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.
Smith, D. (1999). Writing the Social: Critique, Theory, and Investigations. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.