Originally, diplomatic persuasion placed powers in the hands of emissaries and needful proclamations; in today’s world, this happens on-screen.
Countries, unhappy with the silent calculations of alliances and treaties, have taken to the big screen to manipulate perceptions, stoke animosities, and build consensus against their opponents. This transfer from statecraft to stagecraft has created a cinematic gray zone in which influence is exercised less through confrontation than through the management of emotive imagery aimed at winning hearts, undermining legitimacy, and sustaining conflict narratives.
Such a phenomenon is not simply cultural; rather, it is strategic. The 20th-century vehicles of psychological warfare were propaganda leaflets and psychological radio broadcasts; now, for the 21st century, the attackers are blockbuster movies, soap operas, and viral videos.
The borderline between entertainment and geopolitical messaging has disappeared, creating a vast world where great powers wage narrative wars with as much seriousness as they do economic or military warfare.
Hollywood’s relations with the foreign policy of the homeland itself go as much back as World War II, when the Roosevelt administration would cooperate with the studios on producing films that would propel the Allied cause across America.
However, during the Cold War, American cinema would really go into the central medium of ideologization against the Soviet Union. Movies like “Red Dawn,” which was made in 1984, expressed a very American opinion that one day Soviet paratroopers would pour down on small-town America. Because in “Rocky IV,” a magnum opus made in 1985, we had the boxing ring as the arena where the struggle between systems was being conducted-the Rocky Balboa of Sylvester Stallone whipping the hulking Soviet boxer Ivan Drago-in what was to be a thinly veiled triumph of American grit over communist menace.
Even children’s films like The Living Daylights had this Soviet-antagonism undertone. The US presented the USSR not only as an existential threat but almost like a cartoon villain not worthy of moral equivalence via these cultural exports. Such narratives served entertainment purposes but not alone. They mobilized public opinion toward support for arms race, for defense spending, and containment policies. Millions of viewers around the globe soaked in the notion that freedom was always under siege by Soviet totalitarianism. The end of the Cold War did not extinguish this impulse; it simply changed its target.
After the fall of the USSR, Russia remained for a short time the primary antagonist to Hollywood. By the early 2000s, following Vladimir Putin’s rise to power and his intervention in Georgia and Ukraine, Russian opposition returned to the screen. Movies such as Salt (2010), Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011), and John Wick revived the stereotype of ruthless Russian agents, oligarchs, and mobsters.
These portrayals were not mere accident; rather, they resonated in a time where policymakers and audiences saw a resurgent Russia challenging the liberal world order. This public narrative stoked public suspicion so that it became politically easier for governments to impose sanctions, make military posturing, and conduct intelligence operations. This is the latest form of cinematic statecraft – building consent for real-life policies on the back of fictionalized accounts of geopolitical struggle.
More recently, China has become the quintessential counter-position in American cinema. While Hollywood studios are increasingly careful not to offend Chinese censors (due to the lucrative box office revenues in China), there is still a fair amount of output that plays into dystopian visions of select Chinese allowing communities to be isolated.
Films like The Great Wall (2016) carefully nudge audiences toward seeing China as a monolithic, insular civilization. Action-laden dramas like Red Sparrow (2018) and Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) supply denials and ambivalence when they portray contemporary Chinese power. These films contribute to a denigrating stance towards Chinese characters in an imaginary landscape that can be easily subverted by American-listed entertainment products.
Even in the James Bond and Marvel franchises, Chinese figures in these imaginary landscapes were curiously portrayed as opaque, untrustworthy partners, or masked enemies. For the rest of the entertainment ecosystem, and with a focus on streaming platforms, documentaries and series heighten melodramatic narratives about Chinese cyber-warfare, the hand of economic coercion, and human rights violators with respect to its frequent hundred-year vendetta against modernity. Such a cumulative force of Asia films afford historical interpretive work that informs an understanding of China that emphasizes its collective capacity to transform both articulating it as all-powerful and morally alien, as the enemy to contain in its ascendancy.
Many of China’s immediate responses to the preceding narratives have, even amidst the stringent domestic limits placed on its entertainment sector, invested heavily in substantial domestic productions that valorize its achievements and victimization of its history.
Films like Wolf Warrior 2 (2017) serve as a revelatory act to engender an appreciation of Chinese military heroism beyond its borders, and unapologetically frame China as the defender of the global South and moral alternative to the American empire. This transnational competitive image-making—Western cinematic messages villainizing China, Chinese filmmaker messages valorizing the strength of the nation—evidences how cinematic gray zones are now ancillary to traditional forms of deterrents and competition.
There are few other rivalries in the world like that of India and Pakistan based on duration and emotional attachment. Bollywood has represented this struggle for a long time in history by producing an almost assembly line type manufacture of films depicting Pakistan as an enemy to India’s unity and progress.
Border (1997), Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001), and Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019), along with other mass popular blockbuster films, typically exaggerated India’s militarized confrontations with Pakistan. The films strengthened an overtly patriotic position with a grievance type based historical narrative similar to the position being articulated by combat veteran active duty Lieutenant Colonel.
For example, Uri celebrates India’s recent cross-border military operation against Pakistan supported militants with the result being a huge surge in the countries’ moral and public support for Prime Minister Modi’s public security and foreign policy posture. The result is also not simply local. Bollywood operates in a global media environment that ensures the dissemination of these films beyond India’s borders that reinforce Pakistan’s tag as an exporting state of terrorism and India’s self-perception as a beleaguered democracy necessitating a defence.
Pakistan’s film industry has had some film projects produced in direct response to these narratives. However, as the film industry relies on India’s means of production for its production values, limited distributors and the global reach of Bollywood, the dominant version of events remains unchecked. In this respect, cinema does not simply reflect the conflict, it prolongs and legitimizes the conflict and sustains public support for hyper-nationalist and right wing policies that may be more opaque to the average citizen if not for the context supplied through film.
There is no shortage of cinematic gray zones in the Middle East. Israel has consistently presented Iran as the existential threat in feature films and documentaries alike, while Iran continues to produce media narratives that portray Israel as a cruel, unjustified regime.
Although international (especially Hollywood) productions provide numerous depictions of Israel’s perspective, other productions have reinforced the Israeli view of Iran as fanatical and unpredictable in films like Argo (2012). Films like these can help frame public sentiment in the United States and in Europe.
Documentaries about Iran’s nuclear ambitions and about its sponsorship of proxy groups to do its bidding also add to the budget of videos that help build consensus for some kind of containment if not confrontation. Israel itself has produced high-quality versions of its own television dramas (Fauda, Tehran) that both signal the sophistication of Israeli security services and publicize the horrible dilemmas faced by a society under constant threat. Most appropriately, while these series have gained praise for their nuance, the important grievance of Israel’s eternal primary security concern is nevertheless used to justify irrational aggression policy.
The Iranian film industry remains relatively developed but suffers from censorship and restricted access to international distribution. Attempted counter narratives of Israeli and western aerial depictions cannot typically garner international appeal outside of the region, resulting in asymmetrical narrative semiotics.
Some may dismiss these stories as just harmless fun. But the cumulative effects are a disturbing reality. If global audiences continue to receive the same messages about certain countries as threats or as villains, the burden of political actors around the world to embody the film narrative in the form of hostile policies or sanctions, or even legitimizing military realignments, is considerably lessened.
There is an effective but insidious power in this cinematic grey area – it removes the space for nuance, that is it renders complicated geo-political realities into moral binaries – good vs evil, freedom vs tyranny – which naturally closes the door on diplomacy or mutual comprehension. Additionally, the overwhelming deluge of narrative warfare is then furthering a culture of mistrust. Each film starts to become a possible weapon of influence, each narrative starts to contain strong geo-political insinuations, which raises red flags. Citizens will question not only entertainment, but journalism and public information, and the boundary between reality and propaganda blurs.
What to do in what must be said is an era in which statecraft and stagecraft are entirely enmeshed? For starters we must recognize that cinematic narratives are substantive. They are political assets. Strategy makers should view them with the same regard they offer traditional intelligence assessments. Secondly we need to make improving media literacy a national imperative.
Individuals need instruments for dreams—to help them assess narratives, whether from Hollywood, Bollywood, Beijing, or Tehran. Societies can only help defend themselves from nasty seduction of simple narratives if we encourage doubt and critical thought. Lastly, diplomats and leaders have to focus on opening opportunities to exchange data and discussing everyday life that moves beyond and outside of the narratives created by movies.
In the end this cinematic gray zone is both an opportunity and a challenge; while our ever-present craving for stories is a human phenomena, surely this it also true that in the space of geopolitics, the narratives we tell—and the narratives we believe—are consequential in the shaping of nation states. Ultimately, the cinematic gray zone ends up being a sort of dilemma and a possibility. It reveals a continuing human appetite for narrative. But it also serves as a reminder that in our geopolitical universe, the stories we tell—and the stories we accept—actually help drive the fate of nations.
Author: Rana Danish Nisar – Independent international analyst of security, defense, military, contemporary warfare and digital-international relations.
(The views expressed in this article belong only to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of World Geostrategic Insights).