One of the most pervasive trends in 21st century western culture has become somewhat of an obsession in America

By Patrick Henningsen | 21st Century Wire

It’s called “Hollywood history”, where the corporate studio machines in Los Angeles spend hundreds of millions of dollars in order to craft and precisely tailor historical events to suit the prevailing political paradigm.

‘Hollywood history’ is very much in fashion these days. From Lincoln to Dubya, and from Blackhawk Down to The Iron Lady, they constitute a significant portion of today’s major releases. That list keeps growing every year. There’s only one problem however, with tailoring a story to fit neatly into a prevailing political paradigm… and over the last 100 years, the Germans and the Soviets did this too – with devastating effect, but back then they just called it propaganda. These highly scripted narratives are what passes for official history these days.

No film embodies the Hollywood historical treatment more than the much celebrated cinema release of Zero Dark Thirty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, and one of the favourites to grab an armful of Academy Awards this weekend in LA including Best Picture, Bigelow for best director, Mark Boal for best screenplay, and Jessica Chastain for Best Actress.

The film’s main premise is constructed around a female CIA officer, played by Chastain, and her dogged determination to find the highly elusive mastermind of 9/11 and the al Qaeda’s ‘MVP’, Osama bin Laden. Chastain’s performance, critics claim, has also ‘empowered women’ by showing how her film character caught bin Laden, but it didn’t actually happen that way. We’ll get to that later…

Read Entire Article