Imagineering empire: how Hollywood and the US national security state ‘operationalize narrative’

Abstract

While the Pentagon has long enlisted Hollywood to make films that show the United States in a favorable light for the public, this article examines how and why US military agencies hire entertainment professionals for national security purposes such as imagining defense strategy against possible threats. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles, I argue that the application of entertainment media and creative expertise for internal military purposes articulates the totalizing resourcefulness of a national security state which after 9/11 increasingly identifies the capacity to imagine as its greatest weapon. I suggest that ‘Imagineering’, the Disney method for storytelling and developing scenarios that has become emblematic of the US entertainment industry, is a fitting concept with which to understand the state’s harnessing of creative labor for its project of empire. Tracing the relationship between Hollywood narrative and national security illuminates the imaginings of US empire at its domestic source.