Reel Power

The Hollywood myth is that its films are just `entertainment'. Far from it. Alford shows that American industrial cinema propagates ideas favourable to its right-wing establishment. Read this book before you see the next blockbuster.---Ken Loach, filmmaker

American society has seen the increasing convergence of politics and culture. Taking up the crucial role of Hollywood cinema, Matthew Alford makes an outstanding contribution to the literature on media and popular culture.---Carl Boggs, co-author of The Hollywood War Machine (2006)

A powerful indictment of Hollywood's hidden foreign policy. [This book] was a real eye-opener, even for me.---David Robb, investigative journalist and author of Operation Hollywood (2004)

Alford puts the Hollywood menu under the microscope. He finds that at best Hollywood serves up comfort food: narrative construction fail to throw light on the systemic abuses of power so prevalent under western orthodoxy. A must-read for film buff and scholar alike---Alison Edgley, author of The social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky (2000)

Hollywood has long been labelled subversive, left-wing and anti-American. The labels are wrong.

Reel Power exposes the entertainment industry's intimate links with-the US Department of Defense, the CIA and major weaposn contractors. Examining over a hundred major recent films across a wide range of genres, Alford demonstrates how apparently liberal movies like Three Kings, Avatar and Hotel Rwanda are often just as conformist and misleading as the US military's projects like Black Hawk Down, GI Joe and Transformers.

In a system dominated by reactionary moguls, despite the progressive impulses of a few individual players, Hollywood is hard-wired to support the national security state and the use of all-American violence overseas.