The US military has long cooperated in the production of movies with military settings. And, for good or ill, it has had a more than marginal influence on how the military is portrayed in these movies.
But now the Department of Defense has instituted a formal rule committing itself to refrain from helping moviemakers whose movies are altered or likely will be altered in order to appease the Chinese government.
As the Daily Mail reports, a great many movies have been edited in order to submit to the demands of Chinese censors. The makers of 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick also initially agreed to Chinese censorship — notwithstanding the very subject of the movie, a mission to thwart a dictatorship.
When the trailer to Top Gun: Maverick dropped in 2019, many were quick to notice that Tom Cruise’s character, Captain Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell’s signature jacket was missing something.
It turns out, patches of Japanese and Taiwanese flags had been removed from his well-known leather ensemble — a move that was said to have been made to appease China. . . .
Despite being removed in the trailer, when the movie actually premiered in 2022, the flags were back on the jacket.
So the Top Gun: Maverick people get credit for reversing a bad decision. But it is better not to appease China to begin with.
According to Betsy Swan of Politico, the congressional response to the controversy over the Maverick censorship is the proximate reason for the military’s new rule. She writes:
The Pentagon updated its rules for working with filmmakers after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) inserted language into the fiscal 2023 defense policy bill. . . .
According to a new Defense Department document obtained by POLITICO, filmmakers who want the U.S. military to help with their projects must now pledge that they won’t let Beijing alter those films.
The DOD “will not provide production assistance when there is demonstrable evidence that the production has complied or is likely to comply with a demand from the Government of the People’s Republic of China . . . to censor the content of the project in a material manner to advance the national interest of the People’s Republic of China,” the document reads.
As worded, this rule seems to say that a purpose to “advance the national interest” of China must be discernible as a rationale for censorship in order for DOD to refrain from assisting a production run by people who would likely submit to a Chinese demand for censorship. Presumably, though, the rule would still be applied if the Chinese censors were motivated by personal distaste or something else that cannot reasonably be understood as a desire to advance China’s national interest.
