Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema And American Supremacy

So this book's revelations that the makers of the gung-ho-like Top Gun, True Lies and Independence Day all colluded with the Department of Defence is unsurprising. But some of the details are fascinating. The Pentagon's suggestion that the makers of the latter "eliminate 'any government connection' to Roswell and Area 51" should set conspiracy theorists aquiver.

More subtly in the CIA thriller Clear And Present Danger's original script the president is in despair at Colombian drug lords.

"Those sons-of-bitches... I swear, sometimes I would like to level that whole damn country and Peru and Ecuador while we're at it," he says.

Thanks to Pentagon pressure the offending line was removed.

But more importantly no version of the script ever mentioned the real-life web of weapons and money that underpin the US-Colombian relationship. In the movie there are a few bad eggs - but the system will catch them. The system works.

Alford has a problem with irony. The beauty and satire of Team America: World Police lies in its mastery of the absurd. "Don't worry, everything is bon," says a member of the team to stunned Parisians who have just seen their city reduced to collateral rubble in the process of killing some Arab terrorists.

Yet to Alford the film's closing "dicks fuck assholes" justification speech for US military misadventures "ignores the fact ... the US provides support to assholes ... including Saudi Arabia, Angola, Chad, Colombia."

This misses the point that the makers of Team America revel in equal-opportunity profanity and offensiveness. They probably just found the speech funny.

The book is most convincing when it deals with films traditionally considred nuanced or critical of US foreign policy such as Three Kings or Hotel Rwanda.

Alford highlights their adherence to the idea that US military intervention is generally correct, the problem being when and for how long to implement it.

And the argument that only big-budget films made by eccentric mavericks such as Paul Verhoeven - responsible for Total Recall's futureworld of corporations owning the very air we breathe - are able to escape tacit censorship rings true.

Alford's conclusions that Hollywood wishes to entertain and not upset the powers that be are hardly earth-shattering.

But his book is an engaging look at the innards of the dream factory process.

It's easy to see why a film like Independence Day was made and why it received these words of recommendation from none other than former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole. "We won, the end. Leadership. America. Good over evil. It's a good movie. Bring your family, too."