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The project examines the relationship between the longstanding claim that America is not an empire, and the shifting portrayals of cinematic action heroes. The examination runs along two lines: the hero's motivation and the hero's action. Regarding the former, there is a strong tendency to portray action heroes as motivated by personal concerns--protecting one's family, helping a child they befriended, etc. Regarding the latter, the action hero almost invariably stands outside official institutions (e.g., a former special forces soldier who stumbles into trouble) or they part of an institution but must go rogue. The project aims to map the historical emergence of these tropes (completely foreign to the early James Bond or the television series Mission Impossible) and the political forces that gave endorse them. The working hypothesis is that the depiction of the action hero is tied to a rejection of the notion that the United States is an empire, a claim reflected in the repeated cultural claims that American heroes do not work in the service of a national-institutional framework.
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