The “distorted” TV shows Oliver Stone hated with a passion: “It’s disgusting”
Unlike many other figures in Hollywood, filmmaker Oliver Stone has never attempted to hide his political opinions.
In fact, they tend to be at the centre of his films, if not their driving forces. From his overt criticism of the Vietnam War in Platoon to his inside-job retelling of John F Kennedy’s assassination in JFK, he’s never one to pussyfoot around a controversial topic.
So it’s no surprise that he keeps his political beliefs, specifically his criticism of US foreign policy, at the heart of his wider tastes, too. He is not one to just let people enjoy popular media without critique. With this in mind, there are a few TV shows that he has been known to criticise and outright hate with a deep-seated passion.
“The CIA is all over Hollywood. They got the series 24, they got Homeland. You always see the CIA as heroes; it’s disgusting,” he told WIRED. These shows might be considered some of the best American television shows of all time, but Stone isn’t likely to agree. The former stars Kiefer Sutherland as the now legendary Jack Bauer, a federal counter-terrorist agent who will stop at nothing to prevent terror attacks. The latter follows a bipolar CIA agent as she attempts to prove that a ‘war hero’ was turned by Al-Qaeda.
Stone claims to have “seen the documentation and the [Freedom of Information Act]” of the CIA’s involvement. Regardless of your belief in this, both shows were subject to criticism of their handling of specific issues like torture and Islamic culture. In fact, both were criticised for being Islamophobic and for normalising US heavy-handedness and surveillance to its own ends.
Stone’s comments came in response to an interviewer’s question on Snowden and whether the director was worried about possible criticisms on his dramatisation of events, “You’re asking me if there are distortions. Let’s take some examples of how American history gets distorted in movies.” Along with the two TV shows, he also mentioned Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. A film dramatisation of the hunt for Osama Bin-Laden, it was even more heavily criticised for its justifications of torture, use of recordings of 9/11 victims and classified information.
Feel how you want about Stone’s claims that the CIA was influencing the script, but it’s no big secret that the CIA has had its fingers deep in many Hollywood pies, and Stone is not happy to just let this slide. He’s been overtly critical of the CIA with films like Snowden, which covered the story of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, and the aforementioned JFK suggested that the Intelligence Agency was involved in the president’s murder.
As of this year, Stone has even testified in the ongoing JFK Task Force hearing after a number of documents were declassified by the Trump administration. So, clearly, he doesn’t take it lightly when it’s even slightly hinted that he himself might distort the truth in his films. He might believe in some questionable conspiracy theories, but to him, that is the truth, and he will always try to find it in his movies, even to his own detriment.
