Since the narrative takes place in the fall of 1941, the Americans weren’t even in the war yet.
Norfolk in the book, Essex was the real ship.
Billy Bob Thornton as the US Pres in Love Actually is the film’s only bad guy
Gorkiy Park cast Americans as bad guys against a Soviet Russian cop as the hero…
Star Wars
You have all the English actors aboard the death star, doing their best to make the universe a safe and stable place.
Then you have this terrorist group of American actors trying to destablise the universe and murder Imperial Officers in large numbers.
If the Empire had called it the Star against Terrorism instead of the Death Star, then the film would have been viewed totally differently.
Salvador
Missing
There are of course many stories in Germany dealing with WWII from a German perspective, but none that I can think of portrays the Americans as villains. Even direct confrontation is rarely shown. I think Das Boot makes it entirely clear that the British forces depicted did nothing wrong at all. However the question of the morality of the German Crew’s actions and their orders is a constant theme.
Yeah, but admirable, “just and honest” enemy… Very flattering comments by Admiral Yamamoto and not a single attempt at demonizing them as is so often the case in the reverse.
I’m sorry, but I’ve seen quite a number of these movies and I don’t see “The Americans” as being portrayed as evil… And for those with an historical basis, how are they “invented” exactly??
See also The Third Man and I think Graham Greene has a few other Americans cast as “bad guys”, often the CIA.
jdbeatty writes:
> Platoon
> Apocalypse Now
> Hiroshima (TV miniseries)
> Little Big Man
> The China Syndrome
> Rules of Engagement
> The Rock
> Fall of Saigon (Vietnamese ca 1990)
> JFK
>
> Get the picture? Since the 1960’s it has been fashionable for Hollywood to
> make films depicting America as the villain, which explains their political bent.
> They will make a dig at their own country at the drop of a hat, inventing all
> sorts of evils, directly or indirectly.
But note that in each case (I believe), the hero or heroes of these films are also Americans. This is in fact one of the standard templates for American movies, and it’s been standard since long before the 1960’s. There is a group (a corporation, a government agency, a corrupt politician and his cronies, etc.) who have caused some evil, and a lone hero has to save the U.S. This group is never shown as truly representing all Americans. It’s always implied that the “real Americans” are shocked when they discover the evil done by the group of bad people. And, furthermore, the evil group is at least as often shown as being liberals as being conservatives and the values of the lone hero are shown as conservative as much as being liberal. (Although in pretty much every case, the liberalism and/or conservatism of the bad guys is pretty much a hopeless parody. Nobody apparently wants to believe that the philosophy of one’s enemies could be honest if misguided. They would much rather believe that their enemies are simply evil people who don’t even believe in their stated philosophies.)
These movies fit an American template of the lone American hero against a group that’s corrupting America. The lone hero, whether he eventually triumphs or not, is always shown as representing “real America” against the corrupting group. I can’t think of any American film in which it’s claimed that the U.S. is simply hopelessly evil. It’s always implied that “real Americans” don’t agree with the bad guys who are temporarily in control.
I think 3 days of the Condor counts.
Poul Anderson protrayed in his novel The Corridors of Time and his novella “Sam Hall” rather nasty dictatorships in future USA’s. The Corridors of Time, unfortunately, seems to be almost unknown to SF fans, but “Sam Hall” is rather well-known, at least I’ve seen it in several anthologies.
I also want to say that several other well-known sci-fi works portray villainous Americas, but the only ones that spring immediately to my mind are Alfred Bester’s “Disappearing Act” and possibly Phillip K. Dick’s “Faith of our Fathers.” Tom Sherred’s portrayal of our leaders & society in “E for Effort” is another possibility.
The novels, Sarkhan and The Ugly American, both by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, offer an extremely unflattering view of the U.S. government’s efforts to win friends and influence people in Asia, but the authors seem to blame incompetence and stupidity as much as villainy.
I recall a Russian novel that appeared in the late '70’s or early '80’s and became a bestseller in this country. It offered the CIA and the American government as the bad guys and KGB agents as the heroes. I bought it, but cannot recall the title or author, as I found the book a crashing bore and sold it.
jdbeatty: It would not be impossible for Americans to be the villains of Das Boot. The German and U.S. navies were shooting at each other’s ships during the summer and fall of 1941. In fact, on Oct. 31, 1941, the USS Reuben James became the first American ship to be sunk in WW2 when the Germans torpedoed it.
Poul Anderson protrayed in his novel The Corridors of Time and his novella “Sam Hall” rather nasty dictatorships in future USA’s. The Corridors of Time, unfortunately, seems to be almost unknown to SF fans, but “Sam Hall” is rather well-known, at least I’ve seen it in several anthologies.
I also want to say that several other well-known sci-fi works portray villainous Americas, but the only ones that spring immediately to my mind are Alfred Bester’s “Disappearing Act” and possibly Phillip K. Dick’s “Faith of our Fathers.” Tom Sherred’s portrayal of our leaders & society in “E for Effort” is another possibility.
The novels, Sarkhan and The Ugly American, both by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, offer an extremely unflattering view of the U.S. government’s efforts to win friends and influence people in Asia, but the authors seem to blame incompetence and stupidity as much as villainy.
I recall a Russian novel that appeared in the late '70’s or early '80’s and became a bestseller in this country. It offered the CIA and the American government as the bad guys and KGB agents as the heroes. I bought it, but cannot recall the title or author, as I found the book a crashing bore and sold it.
jdbeatty: It would not be impossible for Americans to be the villains of Das Boot. The German and U.S. navies were shooting at each other’s ships during the summer and fall of 1941. In fact, on Oct. 31, 1941, the USS Reuben James became the first American ship to be sunk in WW2 when the Germans torpedoed it.
Poul Anderson protrayed in his novel The Corridors of Time and his novella “Sam Hall” rather nasty dictatorships in future USA’s. The Corridors of Time, unfortunately, seems to be almost unknown to SF fans, but “Sam Hall” is rather well-known, at least I’ve seen it in several anthologies.
I also want to say that several other well-known sci-fi works portray villainous Americas, but the only ones that spring immediately to my mind are Alfred Bester’s “Disappearing Act” and possibly Phillip K. Dick’s “Faith of our Fathers.” Tom Sherred’s portrayal of our leaders & society in “E for Effort” is another possibility.
The novels, Sarkhan and The Ugly American, both by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, offer an extremely unflattering view of the U.S. government’s efforts to win friends and influence people in Asia, but the authors seem to blame incompetence and stupidity as much as villainy.
I recall a Russian novel that appeared in the late '70’s or early '80’s and became a bestseller in this country. It offered the CIA and the American government as the bad guys and KGB agents as the heroes. I bought it, but cannot recall the title or author, as I found the book a crashing bore and sold it.
jdbeatty: It would not be impossible for Americans to be the villains of Das Boot. The German and U.S. navies were shooting at each other’s ships during the summer and fall of 1941. In fact, on Oct. 31, 1941, the USS Reuben James became the first American ship to be sunk in WW2 when the Germans torpedoed it.
Ooops, I don’t know what I did, but I’m sorry about it.
A particular episode of The Twilight Zone comes to mind, where a woman is terrorized by these miniature spacemen from an invading flying saucer. After many traumatic turns-of-events, she finally gets the better of them, only for Serling to pull the reveal: the flying saucer has USA printed on it.
You’ve greatly oversimplified the story of X-Men 2 to fit it into this scheme. Shame on you.
Interestingly, a number of episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation went out of their way to bash us 20th-century types, including a bit in the first episode in which Picard describes Q as representing a savage period in human history, when the latter had clothed himself in an American WW2 uniform.
However, US destoryers were escorting convoys across the Atlantic and while they weren’t in the war yet, didn’t hestitate to fire back at any subs they detected near the convoy they were protecting.
I tend to agree - the Americans are the enemy, but not villians. If that movie has a villian it’s the boy and girl’s aunt, who was Japanese.