Hollywood Runs—and Ruins—U.S. Foreign Policy

The United States is exceptional in many ways—size, wealth, openness, isolation from other major powers—and one of them is a cultural predilection for the “Hollywood ending.” You know what I’m talking about: the climactic moment in a movie when the outnumbered and outgunned heroes turn the tables on their wicked foes and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The good guys win, the bad guys lose (ideally in a humiliating and painful fashion), and all is right with the world. Oppenheimer notwithstanding, this is the kind of plotline that American audiences lap up like cold beer on a hot afternoon.

Examples of this trope are too numerous to count, and I’ll freely confess that I’m a sucker for them. I want to see Frodo destroy the One Ring and watch the Tower of Sauron come crashing down. I beam when Harry and his fellow wizards kill Lord Voldemort, when Indiana Jones outwits the Nazis, and when the Rebel Alliance blows up the newest version of the Death Star that the latest edition of the Empire chooses to deploy. I’ll choke up when Rocky rises from the canvas in the 15th round, when Inigo Montoya avenges his father’s death at the hands of cruel Count Rugen, or when the Guardians of the Galaxy or the Avengers thwart some world-destroying foe, and I’ll chuckle as the Men in Black agents somehow save Earth at the last minute (again!). And who doesn’t cheer when Andy Dufresne escapes from Shawshank Penitentiary and the evil warden and thuggish prison guard who have tormented him get what they deserve? When I watch a rom-com, I count on the star-crossed lovers to overcome every mishap and misunderstanding in the script and end up blissfully entangled at the closing credits. Rick doesn’t get Ilsa back in Casablanca, but Maj. Strasser gets a bullet and the movie closes on “the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

As the name implies, the Hollywood ending is a predominantly American invention, although William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen were on to it long before movies were invented, and one can find similar endings in other cinematic traditions. As a rule, however, I’d argue that films made outside the United States tend to be darker, more ambivalent in their portrayals of right and wrong, less triumphant in tone, and more willing to end on a note of ambiguity. To be sure, there are American films with these features (e.g., The Searchers, Chinatown, The Graduate, No Way Out, Million Dollar Baby), but they are exceptions rather than the box office rule.

America’s fondness for the happy ending isn’t that surprising when you consider the remarkably fortunate course of U.S. history and the way it is typically recounted. In our collective memory, the plucky rebels defeat the British Empire at Yorktown (see under: The Patriot) and then go on to establish a new nation based on lofty ideals. The ever-expanding republic decimates and subdues the Indigenous population, whose resistance to Manifest Destiny is typically portrayed in Hollywood as both cruel and unjustified. The virtuous North defeats the slaveholding South in the Civil War, supposedly ending a deep stain in the fabric of the country. Then the United States rides off to save the world in both world wars, helping defeat imperial Germany in the first conflict and compelling Nazi Germany and Japan to surrender unconditionally in the second. Small wonder that we love to look back on these “good wars” and assume that this sort of outcome is the norm rather than the exception.

Hollywood endings have been in rather short supply since 1945, however. The Korean War ended in a draw, and the Vietnam War was a defeat, as movies such as Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and The Killing Fields make clear. The Cold War ended favorably for the United States and its allies, but the Soviet Union’s slow death-from-exhaustion wasn’t the kind of stirring victory that Hollywood likes. The Gulf War was a triumph, but the war on terror and the costly failures in Afghanistan and Iraq were not. Director Clint Eastwood tried to turn the invasion of Grenada into a rousing war film (Heartbreak Ridge), but even he couldn’t turn the outmatched Cuban and Grenadian forces into a sufficiently daunting foe. Ditto the war in Kosovo, which took longer and cost more than expected and didn’t yield an especially satisfying outcome. The less said about our ill-fated meddling in Libya or Venezuela the better.

Yet despite these repeated reminders that real-world politics is rarely black and white and that conflicts often end not in a triumph of good over evil but in a muddled and messy compromise, our culture keeps telling us something different. If your mental universe has been too heavily influenced by what you’ve seen on screen, you’ll be ill-equipped to deal with the complicated morality of many international situations and the impossibility of achieving a Hollywood ending in most of them.

You can see this tendency in America’s typical response to authoritarians with whom we find ourselves at odds. After first convincing itself that they are the embodiment of evil and a mortal danger, Washington issues a set of non-negotiable demands, imposes sanctions, and reminds everyone that “all options are on the table.” If the target does not comply fully with our ultimatum—they almost never do—we ratchet up the pressure in the hope that they will cave. Our goal is their complete capitulation—a Hollywood ending—one that we can portray as an undiluted diplomatic achievement and a further demonstration of our own virtue. In some cases, such as the embargo on Cuba, we’ll stick with this approach for five decades despite a conspicuous lack of success.

This same tendency is apparent whenever U.S. diplomats achieve a highly favorable outcome that somehow falls short of the celebratory triumph that Hollywood has conditioned us to expect. The 2015 nuclear deal with Iran was a major achievement for the United States and its European allies and gave us most of what we wanted. But like most negotiations, it did require a degree of compromise, because Iran was never going to accept a deal that offered it no benefits whatsoever. Denied Tehran’s unconditional surrender, many Americans felt cheated and wrongly concluded that diplomacy had failed.

I fear the same impulse is going to hamstring U.S. efforts to help Ukraine survive the current war. We might all like to see this conflict end in proper Hollywood fashion—Russia withdrawing, Russian President Vladimir Putin getting discredited (or worse), and Ukraine rebuilding rapidly—but what if that outcome simply cannot be achieved at an acceptable level of cost and risk? What if this otherwise desirable result is just not in the script? If the best possible outcome for Ukraine is a messy compromise that keeps the country from being destroyed but is unsatisfactory on many other levels, then clinging to the hope of a Hollywood ending is just going to get a lot more Ukrainians killed and even more of the country destroyed. I take no pleasure in pointing this out, but refusing to acknowledge this possibility is irresponsible and may well not be in Ukraine’s long-term interest.

The broader lesson is that while the morality plays dished out by Hollywood are abundantly entertaining—as I said, I’m a sucker for them—they are a highly unreliable guide to the real world of politics. So the next time you’re munching your popcorn, hearing the soundtrack swell into a triumphant crescendo and watching the hero(es) vanquish their adversaries, remind yourself of the sage words from the ad campaign for Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972): “It’s only a movie.”