Please check out Stargate SG-1's wiki. According to it, the U.S. military supplied the series with a considerable amount of equipment over the years, including jet fighters. The show was even awarded a medal for positive portrayals of U.S. Air Force personnel.
Now pardon me, but it's bad enough the military is recruiting poor city kids and evangelical kids in the churches. Now the military-industrial complex is invading the sci-fi television screen and I am royally pissed. Not that I can do much about it. I suspect such links have always existed. One can't get equipment in Hollywood without the military censoring one's portrayals, to make sure they conform to the military's definition of true combat heroism. Any contextualization of war's costs, or what our "enemies" may feel or experience, is left permanently out of American war rhetoric. Seeing Stargate SG-1, I have that very rare wish that we were actually more, rather than less, like France (I can't stand France normally. Derrida, ugh!). At least French civvies no better than to trust their government, and understand that nation states play by the rules of realpolitik, not patriotism. So long as the American right does not realize this, we are going to be in big trouble.
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They received a medal after the fact. I don't see as how the airforce coerced or sensored any of the programming. It would something really sinister and facist if they gave them an award for positive reflection after they censored the show down to positive reflection themselves.
ReplyDeleteObviously, the Airforce allowing use of equipment is going to make them seem friendly to the producers who will therefore see them as friends and want to portray them nicely, but that is different than being coersive. Reading scripts for any factual errors is completely different than censorship. I am not denying that they didn't see it as great PR.
I also disagree with your assumption that the military is made up of inner city kids and religous fanatics. The military has a wide range of applicants from varied back grounds. It also provides people with few other options a way to escape their current environment. The Airforce, especially, is very difficult to get into. They get more inquiries every year than they have slots, so they take smartest people with the cleanest records.
While I love SG-1 precisely for being a sort of throwback to the action-adventure pseudo-sci-fi of pulpier times, I wouldn’t discount SG-1 as entirely popcorn filler sci-fi. The series often did bring up the issue of the military-industrial complex and corruption in the military. They had long-running arcs with the NID, a group formed by industrialists and politicians with the goal of exploiting the technology and knowledge of the Stargate program for economic, military and political gain.
ReplyDeleteThey basically wanted to use alien technology to promote the dominance of the U.S. while getting filthy rich at the same time and they didn’t care how they accomplished that goal. NID took in a wealthy industrialist who cloned a Goa’uld hoping to use it to cure his cancer, it ended up taking over the host. Several recurring characters included a traitorous air force officer or two (Maybourne or Makepeace?) and a US senator (Kelsey?) who eventually became vice president. There was a period where this faction gained mainstream political influence and they forced General Hammond to step down as administrator of the SG program (by underhandedly threatening his grandchildren no less). Then they implemented changes in the SG program to weaponize or exploit anything and everything they could. That problem had to be overcome by the main characters who are at times presented to be morally ideal military characters.
There was one episode where they encounter a civilization with more advanced technology than Earth. All SG-1 had to do in order to gain complete access to that technology was to provide heavy water to fuel this faction’s fusion reactors. However, it turns out they need the fuel to maintain their defenses in a genocidal war (the conflict was modeled on the racial supremacist theme). There is no doubt that if the real military was in charge, they would have made the swap (I recall the military in the show indeed wanting to go through with it). In real life, we’ve done similar deals propping up dictators with blatantly flawed human rights records.
In another episode, the military used the media to smear and discredit a genius scientist turned billionaire tech industrialist who cloned a grey Asgard alien using DNA he obtained from his contracts with the military. He wanted to expose the military conspiracy, with the alien clone as proof positive. They ended up making his “disappear.” The SG team made him a deal to start a new life working for the SG program.
There were several different episodes that dealt with the Stargate secret getting out. Some of them serious, a few of them humorous and self-referential (the show within a show: Wormhole eXtreme). They poked fun that they were supported with official consultation by the air force, with the main characters playing the part of the consultants.
Henry,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the information. At least SG-1 was slightly less complicit than I thought, though I think ultimately the series still gives a very positive view of the military.
John
There's no doubt about that. When the military characters of SG-1 are good, they're GOOD, few questionable ambiguities, no ego, all competent and upright. As I said before, the main characters are paragons of ideal military characters. The show does at least contrast them to less sterling examples of military personnel (and a few typical smug politician and greedy businessmen archetypes) corrupted by the military-industrial complex. They also had a few ex-military mercenary types hired by NID as antagonists at one point.
ReplyDeleteThat's why I liked the show. The characters were throwbacks to the heroic pulp sci-fi stories. It made sense that a team of elite military backed explorers would be composed of mostly functional, competent, ethical people. I'm not too surprised that through their professionalism they survived and triumphed in their various world-saving endeavors.
This is where SG Universe lost me. I saw too much dysfunction. The characters were too flawed, anger issues, insubordination, etc. Some I wonder how they got assigned to a top-secret, highly sensitive project like the SG program. While I understand these sorts of problems do exist amongst military personnel, that the entire cast of characters has these problems really stretched my suspension of disbelief. The entire group would have died a few episodes into the series, if they didn't kill themselves or each other first. In real life, a troubled member of the military might get many people killed, they probably will get disciplined for it and it will be a tragedy for all parties involved, but in these world saving (or at least ship saving) sorts of sci-fi situation, if someone makes a mistake there is no world/ship/setting left to court martial them. It's game over (show over in this case).
BSG at least had the excuse of being comprised of the ragtag dregs of a civilization on the brink of extinction. There is a hopelessness, a fatalism, in their remaining societal mindset. I can understand why the people would snap from the stress.
Even then, towards the end of BSG when most of the characters were showing severe problems (psychological, interpersonal) I wondered why their mistakes didn't get the whole fleet nuked into a floating debris field. I think the thought did occur to the writers and they had half the Cylons pull some ambiguous pseudo-religious deus ex shenanigans so the humans wouldn't be annihilated.
Farscape and B5 had better portrayals flawed characters. Many were at least functionally dysfunctional. I could see why despite their troubles, they could work their way out of their situations.