Something strange is happening in American media entertainment: Patriotism appears increasingly back in vogue.
Recent years have seen the soaring box office success of Top Gun: Maverick (another movie is in the works) and streaming conquest of Amazon‘s violent but unashamedly patriotic series Reacher. But new patriotic additions hint that this isn’t just a blip on the radar.
Take Apple TV’s The Agency. Its star-studded cast includes Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, and Richard Gere as CIA officers working out of the CIA station at the U.S. Embassy in London. But rather than engage in a conspiracy of corruption, these CIA officers work patriotically to rescue one of their own. The series shows the personal challenge and required skill of effective espionage, as well as an unashamed celebration of Delta Force’s quiet lethality. The show has just been renewed for a second season.
Similarly patriotic is a new console and PC game, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Game developer MachineGames did a generally excellent job, hitting all the right marks in terms of impressive graphics, gameplay, humor, an anti-Nazi moral cause, and, yes, Indiana Jones’s adventurous American spirit. Voice actor Troy Baker even provided an uncanny replication of Harrison Ford’s voice. Indeed, my only lament is that the game’s puzzles were insufficiently intuitive at points, and its otherwise excellent soundtrack made far too little use of John Williams’s defining theme.
Skepticism about patriotism remains strong in the entertainment industry. Being publicly patriotic is not something that is seen to appeal to the professional gatekeepers in the media and Hollywood. And studio executives and writers rarely miss an opportunity to virtue-signal where patriotic pride would earn better viewer dividends. Netflix destroyed Designated Survivor, for example, by turning the supposedly centrist president into a limp lefty of identity politics.
Even landmark American franchises have found themselves denied their defining patriotic identity in recent years. In 2021, DC Comics changed Superman’s motto from “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” to “Truth, Justice and a Better Tomorrow.” We’ll have to wait until July to see what the Superman movie does with the motto.
Similarly, too many actors also seem skeptical of broadcasting patriotic virtue. We just got a striking example of this dynamic from Anthony Mackie. Title star in the Disney movie Captain America: Brave New World, Mackie recently told an audience in Rome, “To me, Captain America represents a lot of different things and I don’t think the term ‘America’ should be one of those representations.” Instead, Mackie believes Captain America is “about a man who keeps his word, who has honor, dignity, and integrity, someone who is trustworthy and dependable.”
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The notion of “Captain America” not actually being associated with “America” is patently absurd on its face. Still, his agent presumably having fielded apoplectic calls from Disney executives, Mackie has now backtracked to claim, “I’m a proud American.” There is a belatedly positive recognition from Disney here that patriotic pride will matter if Captain America is to sell.
Let’s hope the trend line continues.
