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Landau suggests that to acquire an accurate record of ‘how US policy … has led to barbarous military acts’ in the Reagan era, it is worth reading William Blum’s book Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. Blum shares Landau’s self-proclaimed ‘quest to represent the true picture of our country’,22 is a former foreign service officer in the State Department, was in Chile working as a journalist when Landau visited the country, and attempted to make it as screenwriter in Hollywood during the 1980s.

These alternate resolutions of liberal films suggests that the ‘basic social message’, as Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler calls it, of the liberal American myth was reversed in the late twentieth century. Twelve Angry Men was the fruit of a confident post-war liberalism. Ronald Reagan’s love of the free market, the failed war of Bush Snr and the ensuing social crisis led perhaps to the fatal liberal hero in JFK, who fights for ideals but cannot overturn the conspiracy of the American right who are supposed to have organised the killing of John F.

When Business Week demanded a ‘Universal Health Care System’ to relieve pressure on business coffers Clinton quickly made this a central pillar of his platform. Yet, when his wife Hilary shouted ‘we want our healthcare system back’ at a 1992 election rally she was directly appealing to the poorest sections of American society, for whom healthcare based on private health insurance had been a failure. In this way, Bill Clinton appeared to be like Pullman’s president – a man for all America. Clinton’s doctrine of the international community and belief in humanitarian intervention also added to this image.