I don’t see Hollywood changing their stereotype of military veterans any time soon even with this film festival:
My stepbrother is in the military, and he always wishes that the movies would be a better advocate for the American soldier,” actor Ethan Hawke said during an interview to promote “Good Kill,” a new drama about drone warfare. “Hollywood has a bad habit of either being so nationalistic and flag-waving that it kind of dehumanizes everybody and makes it a recruitment tool, or being so left-wing with conspiracy theories that project all of this negativity. Of course, the truth is somewhere in the middle.”
The GI Film Festival opens in Washington this week in its ninth year as a corrective to the one-dimensional portrayals that many observers fear have influenced how the public sees the military. The festival runs May 18 through May 24 and features 60 movies, including shorts, documentaries, comedies and dramas. All are either made by veterans or feature military characters.
At a time when only 0.5 percent of the population is on active duty, many in the military community argue that even the cinema offerings that attempt to give a sympathetic portrayal of soldiers and veterans — such as the acclaimed “American Sniper” — end up breeding harmful stereotypes.
Recent films have also portrayed vets as murderers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (“In the Valley of Elah,” “Redacted”); as deserters suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (“Stop-Loss”); and as mavericks so addicted to combat that they can’t reintegrate into American society (“The Hurt Locker”).
“People believe what they see in the movies,” said Laura Law-Millett, a veteran who founded the GI Film Festival with her civilian husband, Brandon Millett. “If someone had seen some of these films who had never met anyone in the military, prior to about 2007, they would say, ‘Oh, so everyone who joins the Army becomes a drug dealer or a rapist or a murderer?'” [Washington Post]
You can read more at the link, but with Bush out of office the amount of movies and documentaries depicting troops as murderers and rapists seems to have decreased. It seems now they focus more on veterans being heroic or broken from PTSD.