6. Hollywood at War

Symbols, Myth and TV in Hawai'i

6. Hollywood at War
To contextualize the rhetoric of the first cycle and the aesthetic and corporate traditions and philosophies the series were influenced by, we must consider the culture and legacy of Hollywood’s nationalist efforts during World War Two. The narrative drive of shows like Hawaiian Eye, Five-0 and Magnum resonate with the timbre of the war years films and postwar expectations. Hollywood studios set a precedent by voluntarily contributing to “the good war.” It was one of the few national industries that Franklin D. Roosevelt did not completely convert to the war effort. Instead, the titular heads of the movie studios were inducted into the military and told to carry on with filmmaking. David O. Selznick was commissioned as a Colonel, and Jack L. Warner was commissioned as a Lieutenant Colonel, one rank above his brother Major Abe Warner. Experiments in TV broadcasting were suspended during the war, thus while broadcasting executive Colonel David Sarnoff of NBC was attached to the Signal Corps and saw action oversees in Paris, and Colonel William S. Paley of CBS saw action with the Psychological Warfare Department, the movie moguls took responsibility for churning out propaganda in the form of informational shorts and patriotic war pictures.

Not only the heads of movie studios and broadcast networks, but other executives, actors, directors and cinematographers were assigned to propaganda units, or consigned by studios to work on war films. A quarter of the men at Warner Bros. studios joined the Armed Forces. Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, roughly one third of the pictures churned out by Hollywood depicted combat situations. As Michael Renov and Dana Polan have pointed out, “the war years can reveal...one of the intense examples of an attempt to make ideology into state ideology.” Much as TV became the great contextualizing mechanism in the colonial conflicts of the sixties and seventies, cinema in the forties was the medium more than any other that reflexively propagated, and thus exposed, state ideology. Here, where the boundaries between truth and the real, entertainment and propaganda, blur, the metaphysics and iconicity of nationalism were laid most bare.

During the Second World War most of the wartime combat dramas produced in Hollywood depict conflict in the Pacific arena. Though this was not exactly true of Warner Bros., the industry’s intense mapping and simulated militarization of the region inform the political and aesthetic dynamics of the films and TV shows that followed. In 1945, Harry Warner, then President of Warner Bros., made clear the studio’s post-war objectives when he said: “The essence of the task can be stated in a single phrase, ‘To interpret the American Way.’” The aestheticaztion of this “American Way” then becomes a mission in post-war Hollywood, a call to arms during the extension of the Cold War.

Warner Bros. television production was profoundly influenced by the experience and capabilities of studio feature film production. Sound stages, equipment, crew and established business practices ensured a smooth launch in 1954 into the new medium. While many early fictional TV programs were derivative of the skits and comedy of vaudeville, Warner Bros.’ heralded telefilms—Cheyenne, Sugarfoot, Bronco, Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye, Bourbon Street Beat, SurfSide 6, Colt .45 and Lawman—initially drew most directly from established paramilitary genres such as the western, gangster and private eye for inspiration.

In an era of ideological uncertainty and economic prosperity, Warner Bros. TV in collaboration with the ABC network presented a violent and conservative depiction of frontier expansionism and urban authoritarian vigor. Like the phenomenon of television itself, Hawai`i was perceived by the mainland as both an extension of the American frontier, and a developing space for cosmopolitan adventure. As such, it was a paradoxical site where agrarian myth and urban sprawl became televisually “fixed” by the pedagogic and propaganda techniques institutionalized by Hollywood during the war years. In this sense, the myth and conventions of the war film, private eye, gangster, and American western inform TV’s discursive incursion into Hawai`i space. These conventions include the racialization of the “ideal” U.S. citizen as embodied later by the first cycle heroes, and the disappearance, marginalization or demonization of the ethnic and indigenous other.