This week the subject is post-truth ... nice word, right? Yes, it is one of those neologisms that are invented to avoid using the word that really defines what is meant. In this case, post-truth would mean, at least, manipulation or propaganda and in many extremes, directly refers to lies with the appearance of truthfulness.
The audiovisual world is conceived by the general population as a mere entertainment, but it is much more than that, it is a very remarkable reinforcement of historical post-truths situations ... that is, they lie to us in movies and series telling us that what they say is the truth, in short, they manipulate us ... we're going to talk a little bit about that.
Despite the novelty of the term and its lately vinculation to Brexit and Trump, manipulation and lies are as old as the human being. What is happening now is that we are living a new era of neo-language that is delighting the manipulators and is causing several strokes to language scholars and specialists from different fields, such as mathematics and science.
We can see how in Spain, for example, ministers of economy tell us that "the economy is entering a cycle of negative growth" not that the economy is decreasing, god forbids the “Docile Nation” realizes it’s going to ruin. I’m using an economic example because it is one of the fields where post-truth is making profit to feed mouths of great economists and politicians of all fashions; But we better get to what concerns us in this section, the audiovisual world, where we also have many examples.
Cinema is a relatively recent industry, its origins date back to the last decade of the 19th century in France, but we are going to skip the first years and go directly to the period between the great world wars, when it had its explosion of popularity and began to be something that all citizens wanted to enjoy. Of course, as soon as the public began to have a craving for cinema, there was a "clever mind" who saw the potential perverse to technology and realized the incredible instrument of manipulation that was awakening. People entered the rooms and saw the projections as if it were magic, everything that came out on that screen was true, nobody conceived the special effects. It was logical, just as now it is logical that when a small child meets an animal he speaks to them as if they could talk ... it is what they see on TV!
The potential was immense and the first proof of it, although in another area, radio, was given by Orson Welles in 1938 with his radio address "The War of the Worlds." That was an unprecedented shocker in the US. And I'm sure he ended up convincing those who were in charge to start using mass media to "reprogram" the minds of the citizens.
And so, we arrive at the first and clearest great example of post-truth and mass manipulation of history, without counting religions, a thorny issue in which I will not enter out of respect. I mean the Second World War.
To begin, I recommend watching a very good documentary, "Five Came Back" it’s on Netflix and narrates the adventures and misadventures of the best directors of the time, who were recruited by the US government to document what soldiers were doing on the different war fronts.
Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens and William Wyler were selected for this mission, not because of their journalistic skills but because of their ability to present the people whatever they wanted with the point of view the government wanted. It was pure propaganda, with tints of reality and a lot of manipulation. The experiment was a success on this occasion, mainly because the allies won the war, although in the Vietnam campaign the manipulation did not help much since the actual results of the campaign were obvious, bags and bags of corpses returning from a place that the Americans did not even know how to place on the map.
During the battle, post-truth did not have a main role, but later it did. There is a famous phrase that says "History is told by the victors" and that is always the case. Post-truth is used to enhance successes and minimize failures. There is a graphic hat have been circulating on the Internet for a long time and expresses in a simple image all the potential that the manipulation of public opinion has.
There we can see how, over the years, the French were losing the notion of reality and replacing it with a post-truth manufactured to empower one contestant to the detriment of another. In this case, the USA and Russia.
All of us who have a certain age remember how we experienced "bombing" of US war films. Where they told us the kind of heroes they were and how useless everyone else seemed. It is true that, from Europe, we have to thank the USA for helping us get rid of Nazism ... in Spain we would have also been grateful if they ended the only fascist regime that was left "alive" in Europe, that of Franco, but that is another subject …
One of the most relevant and most manipulated episodes in history was the D-Day, the Normandy landings. We all know that it was an incredible feat and involved the sacrifice of thousands of valiant soldiers from different parts of the world, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom ... We all know the Utah and Omaha beach areas, but few people know of the existence of Gold , Juno and Sword. This is due to the cinema and the war films that the Hollywood post-reality factory keeps running in an almost chain fashion. Well, now it's time to educate ourselves a little and for that I recommend a National Geographic documentary about what happened that day on the beaches of northern France.
I discovered many things while watching it and, in a certain way, it changed my perception based on the data that cinema and television were giving me about what that war was and made me realize the immense manipulative power of the audiovisual media. And that happened in a time when special effects were primitive and "Easy" to spot. Today, the power is infinite, if tomorrow they plan to make us believe that the earth is flat and they teach us some images retouched by computer, it would be impossible to detect the falsehood with the naked eye and in a couple of generations at most, the earth would be flat without remedy ... to this day there are still some that say it on youtube, but we just ignore them and that’s it.
I have focused on, what I think is, one of the clearest examples of post-truth in the audiovisual world that exists today, and I don’t want to overextend myself. As always, I invite you to discuss the topic and provide examples that you know of movies or series that, clearly, serve to make a parallel reality based on post-truth or manipulation.
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