Thinking Mythologically: Black Hawk Down, the “Platoon Movie,” and the War of Choice in Iraq

Abstract

While preparing the 2003 invasion of Iraq, President Bush invited his advisors to screenings of Black Hawk Down (2002). “Bush . . . told his aides that America’s hasty exit from Somalia after 18 soldiers died in the 1993 raid made famous in the movie . . . emboldened America’s terrorist enemies” to attack us on September 11. This study explains the ideological force of Black Hawk Down by framing it as the culmination of developments in American national mythology, and the mass culture genres that carry it. The “Platoon Movie” developed during WW II propagated a new myth of multi-ethnic American nationality, and a “war imaginary” which figures WW II as the “Good War.” That myth was discredited by defeat in Vietnam; but starting in 1980, American war films, and war-themed science fiction films, seconded the work of neo-conservative policy makers to recuperate the “war imaginary.” This entailed a sharpening of racialist interpretations of international conflict, and tension between the multicultural symbolism of the “platoon” and the idealization of Whites as “real Americans.”