You Are What You Watch

0:01 this is 99% invisible I'm Roman Mars in January of 1981 Ronald Reagan took office as the 40th President of the United States his first day like most presidential first days began with a tour of the White House it said that while Reagan was being escorted around the grounds he had one particular request he wanted to see the War Room you can probably conjure up an image of the war room in your head an underground

0:32 bunker with ominous overhead lighting a large circular table and a baked map of the world hung up on the wall but here's the thing that war room simply does not exist it's not in the white house it's not in the capital building not one room in the Pentagon remotely resembles the War Room Reagan had in mind but Reagan believed it must have existed because he had seen it somewhere and that somewhere was the 196 64 Stanley kubri film Doctor

1:02 Strange Love and I don't understand the Russian ambassadors to be admitted entrance to the the War Room are you aware of what a serious breach of security that would be I mean you'll see everything you'll see the big board the design was so iconic that it's become our mental image of where we think important decisions should be made Airbnb and the soccer organization FIFA have since built their own replica War rooms modeled after the film which is

1:28 ironic given that Dr Strange Love is a farce about the destructive Insanity of the nuclear arms race but that is the power of a good movie what we see on the screen has this way of influencing our perception of the world which makes sense because the average American spends 2 hours and 51 minutes watching movies and TV each day that's a whopping 19% of our waking hours we conceive media as sometimes just a thing that's just kind of rolling

1:58 or or the ambient noise of Our Lives things that we do to distract ourselves or turn our brains off and what I contend and what the evidence kind of largely backs up is that this stuff is actually really meaningful this is Walt hickey data journalist and author of a new book called you are what you watch Walt makes the case for how much film and television shape us as individuals and as a society far beyond what we give

2:21 them credit for I say that you are what you watch because obviously it's alluding to the idea that you are where you eat but I was just kind of consistently struck how often I found people whose lives were meaningfully or permanently Changed by a thing that they watched or people who encountered an idea that ended up changing the course of their lives today Walt is here to talk about the delightful surprising dark and sometimes counterintuitive Ways

2:45 movies and TV shape the world around us and how the world we live in influences the movie world right back take for example the Space Race immediately after World War II most most people were really skeptical of space travel and Rockets they were mostly known as deadly weapons that leveled cities during wartime the notion that we might strap a human to one and send them to space was pretty out there but that all changed thanks to a popular magazine

3:17 and the Disney Corporation it took essentially Collier's magazine at the time had a massive circulation it was one of those popular magazines in America and a journalist from kers had the opportunity to meet wner V BR at a confence War Ron Bron was one of Nazi Germany's top aerospace engineers after the war ended Bon Bron along with over a thousand German scientists and Engineers were secretly brought to the United States to lead our space race Mission

3:44 and so you know over the course of a number of conversations this becomes a series within Collier's magazine that is read by millions that is essentially detailing hey not only is it possible to get to space with rockets it's also possible to get to the moon and and explore further beyond that the series was ambitiously titled man will conquer space soon and ran between 1952 and 1954 and among its many readers was the pioneering animator and media mogal Mr

4:14 Walt Disney and then Disney is obsessed with this and then all of a sudden on his nationally broadcast Disneyland television show has three different episodes you know featuring Von braa as as well as a number of other scientists but adapting here's what could get us to space Here's how we can use Rockets to get there here's what it would be like an orbit here's what it means to be in orbit and here's how one could hypothetically get to the moon and back

4:39 if we were to start today on an organized and well supported Space Program I believe a practical passenger rocket could be built and tested within 10 years and these have a remarkable effect because if you look at by the end of the decade all of a sudden Americans now fully believe oh yeah we can get to the moon and then over the course of the 60s they really start to you know obviously believe that'll happen within their

5:03 lifetimes and within potentially by the 1980s and and then very soon very imminently but it really took persuasion because it took kind of a fundamental Rebrand of what rocketry and physics could accomplish and that was done through these big magazine features and and you know these Disney television programs that were watched by lots and lots of people pop culture's contribution to space exploration didn't end with Walt Disney decades later in the 1990s not one but two different

5:33 movies came out about the Earth being hit by a giant asteroid and these two movies changed everything about how we think about space what is this thing it's an asteroid sir how big are we talking sir our best estimate is 97.6 billion it's the size of Texas Mr President yes sir yeah I love these stories because it's like Hollywood being influenced by science and then science being influenced by Hollywood because if you look at Armageddon and

5:59 impact those movies happened at the same time and the reason that they happened at the same time was you know shortly before that there was an astronomical event called schuma Levy and essentially what happened was there was a comet that entered the solar system it looked like it was going to crash into Jupiter and so we pointed the Hubble at it and then we literally watched a comet crash into Jupiter and we got pictures of the Comet

6:21 crashing into Jupiter we had never done that before we had never seen that happen in real time and so this was a sensation because we actually got footage like oh stuff crashes into things all the time this is also shortly after this original idea that an asteroid is the thing that killed the dinosaurs emerges and so you have these two things kind of in The Ether right kind of just floating in the air at the time and then that's what genuinely

6:42 inspires two films about asteroids potentially coming to hit Earth or or in deep impacts case of comet and so you have that happened and then it's years later it's in 1999 and there's this Congressional hearing about this program called neowise and neowise is a near Earth Observatory and the idea is that they NASA wants money so it can count the stuff that's in our neighborhood that's very small and could potentially hit us and what gets mentioned during

7:06 this Congressional testimony but deep impact in Armageddon and so you have a situation where these films emerged because of science being done and then they went to inform what eventually became funded through NASA of this neear object detection facility media you know non-fiction and fiction can have a deep impact part of the pun accidentally could have a significant effect how about that on how you know leaders actually genuinely proceed of the world but sometimes film and TV can give

7:37 people the wrong idea about how things work in real life think of bank heist films in movies Bank heists are usually portrayed as elaborate almost military style tactical assaults but in reality bank robberies don't look anything like inside man or heat Ben are really truly a declining art and essentially Hollywood had very specific idea of what bank heists were they were very informed by Bank heists of the 1930s and and kind of this like prototypical Bonnie and

8:06 Clyde style of a takeover right where a bunch of people go in they brandish guns they secure the room and then they empty the safe and then carry things out it involves a lot of coordination and you know that was a type of crime that happened in that era that's a kind of a professional style of bank robbery that is just no longer as common typically what you're going to see now is you get like a note pass and it's a note that

8:28 says something threatening like I I have a firearm I have a bomb something like that give me the money and then look at the money and now typically the main question of whether or not a crime gets solved is is that person able to leave the parking lot before the cops arrive and so the FBI kept rather detailed statistics on Bank crimes over time and realistically the idea of a bank takeover was completely out of fashion even in the late '90s but we

8:52 still have this idea of like you know if you think about bank robbery films they show lots of different ways to rob a bank stay down we want to hurt no one we're here for the bank's money not your money your money is insured by the federal government you're not going to lose a DME think of your families don't risk your life don't try and be a hero but if a bank robber's normal tactic is passing a threatening note to a teller

9:17 there isn't really a great high-tech security system to thwart that but you write that Banks and insurance companies still invest in these sophisticated security systems to stop these takeover Style Bank heists even though they don't really happen in the real world like why is that you know the fantasy of a bank robbery for a very long time informed what people wanted in security out of a bank not because it kept the money safer in the bank but because people wanted to

9:43 see oh they've got cameras Oh they've got this safe oh they've got this time release Mech like they were actually you know in order just to assure their customers who were so accustomed to seeing this elaborate style robbery that they had to do these somewhat relatively performative things for a given bank that is isn't going to actually get this kind of a crime yeah people have these completely bogus Notions about what a bank robbery looks like because now

10:05 Financial crime is done you know on the computer which you know it doesn't exactly make for a compelling movie absolutely and like just the efficiency of doing it through crypto or the efficiency of doing it online or any of these kinds of scams that are related to person person persuasion are vastly higher Roi than just a an implied stickup right the Romantic idea of a daring bank robbery is is kind of confined to history at this

10:34 point government agencies know how powerful pop culture can be in shaping public opinion at large so they've learned a way to leverage the film industry to serve their purpose the US military in particular has a long and stored relationship with the movie industry the military has been collaborating with Hollywood or the film industry in general since really kind of the beginning you can go all the way back to Wings which is the first Academy award-winning film was made with support

11:00 you know there you need planes you're going to call the military and so over the course of the early 20th century it's very much hand in hand obviously during World War II there's an immense collaboration between the motion picture industry and the Pentagon or the the then under construction Pentagon I should say and then you basically saw propaganda films made by Walt Disney animation and so on and so forth by the time that you kind of get postwar

11:23 there's still an eagerness to collaborate between the pairs but it actually gets a little controversial for the military because they collaborated on a film called the longest day which was about the D-Day Landings your assignment tonight is strategic you can't give the enemy a break send them to hell but unfortunately they were committing a lot of men and resources to this film at the same time that the Berlin crisis was going on and that ticked off Congress to no end and so

11:48 that kind of put the kaios on on Direct collaboration between the military and Hollywood for quite some time then you get through the Vietnam era where Hollywood's not really interested in collaborating with the Pentagon like all the Vietnam movies all the filmmakers who were making critical films of of the US foreign policy establishment Pentagon wanted nothing to do with them and so as a result you really saw limited engagement and then enter Tom Cruz I'm going to send you up against

12:13 the best yes sir you two characters are going to Top Gun I feel the need the Need for Speed and essentially you have this idea for Top Gun and very early on in the Top Gun process they basically reach out to the and they're like well here's our script and we'd like to make this film we think that you guys are going to like this film because it's you know it's it's a swashbuckling story of a of a daring

12:38 fighter pilot and you know and they basically like let us know what you think and the Navy goes over it and they're like actually we think that there's quite a bit of room for collaboration here we do have some notes though and so you know very early on they weigh in and they're like okay so the love interest for Tom Cruz currently in the script she works in the Navy she's a subordinate officer we do not

12:56 want to show that that's a thing that we're trying to play down that that you know inter troop relation so to speak so make her a contractor right the other thing is I saw these documents that were essentially the memos that were sent around the Pentagon saying okay we're weighing in on on the bad guys and Top Gun and so the first memo is typed up and it's from the Korea desk at the Pentagon and it's like hey we seen

13:18 the Top Gun script we would really strongly prefer if actually the North Koreans were not the bad guys in Top Gun we think that things are going okay on the peninsula right now don't want to mess things up why don't you just make him Gaddafi in Libya and then scrolled in pencil on the top of that type memo is hey it's the Libya desk don't do that just make it a random country that is not named in the film because they were

13:39 seeing that there was an opportunity here to directly influence perceptions of American foreign policy in the relationships that we have even with adversarial countries in this kind of film and so the film is a Smash Head they play koi about exactly the impact that it had on retention and recruitment but nevertheless the Navy and even the Air Force which was not involved with the film saw an incre increase in interest in in in basically becoming a

14:00 pilot significant increase in you know not only how often people wanted to join but just the perception of the competence within the these units and in these ranks and as a result it fundamentally changed the way that the military perceived Hollywood all of a sudden it went from being the Vietnam era we don't mess with those guys they don't mess with us to yeah sure you can borrow the USS Abraham Lincoln for a few weeks you'll have to cut us a little

14:22 token check but like yeah no we love that and it really does pay off because it was funny when the second Top Gun came out in the last couple years there was a lot more joking about the idea you know that that this was a weirdly fictional country with a large mountain range and a coast and you know like whatever we're all trying to find the country that did this but at the time I don't think I

14:44 even registered it you you know like back in the ' 80s of course I was younger and Dumber then but but still this is the negotiation it's like we will lend you an aircraft carrier or even just like men in uniform right for your film we just get to approve the script and that amount of Leverage is for a filmmaker that's a deal that you'll take because I can't build an aircraft carrier James Cameron might be

15:08 able to but most directors can't like and then at the same time it's just like well like okay so they'll get their notes on the script they'll get to tweak it so that you don't mention potentially PTSD or any of the sexual assault problems that go on in the military and they'll get theirs and then you'll get yours you'll get to borrow you know a multi-billion dollar aircraft carrier for a few days but again like you know

15:26 it does affect the film that does get made absolutely and you also mentioned that it goes the other way that people in the government agencies they watch these movies and they get ideas from you know fictional government agencies yeah so my my favorite there was this guy who retired from the CIA named Robert Wallace who who was in the office of technical service and he basically relayed that like once a spy movie would come out into Cinemas and be a hit

15:51 sometimes the the guy who was running the C at the time would come to him and be like how far along are we on that by the way when do I get that how long will it take to make it like some facial recognition BL that contains something yeah it was so they like it was within the realm of possibility because it was on screen and because the use case was demonstrated they want to know when you

16:10 can 3D print a face and put it on Tom Cruz that's right I mean even pretty recently I read that President Biden watched Mission Impossible 7 and he got a little spooked and he actually signed an executive order with new security measures around AI yes and like I saw that I was like like yeah that tracks like like it's again like and part of it is that you specifically with that kind of action in geopolitical action movies are not only

16:37 you know an interesting film series in their own right but they're also very much a continual reflection of national anxieties because it can just kind of show what people get worried about over time and and accurately demonstrate you know here's what people and governments in particular should be worrying about next and often times they try to stay just a little bit ahead of the headlines yeah I'm a huge fan of what I would call competence porn like I love you know

17:07 watching people good at things do things like if there's a movie of George Clooney like disassembling and reassembling a rifle like I could watch that for 3 hours yeah so you know these agencies have this incentive to present the public at large you know these incredibly capable unimpeachable fantastic fighter pilots who cannot be shot down like these are the people that work for the military and I'm really intrigued by this in terms of police and cop shows they're extremely popular I

17:35 think they have a huge part in shaping people's perception of crime and policing and I think it's one of those things that when we had the sort of national convulsion over policing during George Floyd there's a whole group of people that saw cops in a new way and other people were like this is how we've always seen cops and one of the things that are fighting against is people's perception of policing because of their buddies Stabler and Benson 100% there's

17:59 this idea that the things that we watch are accurate depictions because they show competent and and very talented individuals succeeding at what they do reliably broadly speaking that is kind of by Design so if you look at cop shows on TV they're made with the assistance of you know leaon from the police department even historically the earliest applications of of mass culture and mass media when it comes to cop shows was the glorification of the police and what they accomplished and so

18:25 like just to talk about Law and Order for a bit Law and Order first came out in 1990 homicides in New York City between then and now have gone down 75% and so you know we have seen over the past several decades because of a number of things not simply just policing homicides go down very distinctly in most North American cities and crime go down just in general right however Americans think that crime goes up every year Gallup

18:51 runs a survey every single year where they asked is crime up or down or the same as it was last year and majorities time and time again say that crimes up and I think that there's something here because I think the first thing that I I noticed is that in 1990 there was one Law and Order on television for 23 episodes a year and now if I turn on television there are three Law and Orders and let's even set aside all the

19:11 Law and Order clones the FBI the Chicagos what have you there are three times as much Law and Order and there is three times as much crime in New York City on television as there was when crime was for times higher than it was today and then the second thing that I noticed is that most of the time they win the the the s find the bad guys and if they don't find the bad guys well

19:30 they get off because the justice system just can't handle it and that is not the case 56% of homicides were cleared in New York City last year right the the clearance rate the solving crime rate in New York City for for homicide is about 5050 now and that's not abnormal in the United States to be clear part of that crime is down but clearance rates are down too is because police agencies in this country have more shifted to a

19:57 deterrence model the decision was made basically it makes more sense to have a lot more cops out in every Silo subway station on street corners to deter the possibility of crime happening in the first place than it does to have a lot of cops sitting at HQ who then get called when a crime happens to figure out who did it and then remove people from the population by imprisoning them after solving the fact that they've done

20:18 a crime that is not represented on television that is not how these shows operate because part of it is that they focus on elite units right and so they're focusing on the people who are still hanging out at HQ for the phone to call but as a result I think you know we have a fundamental misunderstanding of what and how policing Works in this country because it is completely unrecognizable with the format that we see displayed on televisions not not

20:42 just once a week three times a night yeah you know there was a reaction specifically following the death of George Floyd but like wow like before that happened the year before that happened 60% of dramas on the major networks were police procedurals cop shows and legal dramas and that that is a lot for many Americans it's their most reliable look not just at policing but at cities right if you think like you know I live in Queens I live in New York

21:10 but like if I turn on a television from the suburbs New York's representation on the screen is a crime infested hellhole that requires you know the special the dedicate detectives of the special victims units Services one time a week and like you know that is just out of step with actually what has gone on in the city over the past 20 30 years in your book I was fascinated by this strange connection between violence in the movies and violence in the real

21:40 world I grew up in an era where there was this notion that violent movies you know get people riled up and then they go out and commit crimes and I was actually surprised to know that you know there's a little konel of Truth in that I always thought it was just complete nonsense but you also say that violent movies can actually bring Crime down can you tell me that story 100% I'm like I'm obsessed with this story because I think

22:02 it it has genuinely changed the way that I see what the media can do so in a laboratory setting if we show people violent imagery violent videos they will become more agitative they will become more likely in lab tests to react violently or react more aggressively to various different things after being primed like this has known this has been repeated so these two researchers Stefano DEA and Gordon D they're economists and they were basically just like okay there's ample laboratory

22:29 evidence that showing people aggressive imagery can make them more aggressive and so one would think that if you as we do in this country release violent films that are seen by hundreds of thousands to millions of people that if you are having these Nationwide violence priming events you should be able to detect that in actual statistics of assaults that if you are if you are having this Mass exposure to violence and we know that violence causes potentially more

23:00 aggressive reactions that ought to manifest within the data and so they pulled crime data for major American cities for which it was available on every single weekend over the course of several years and they pulled also you know weather which is obviously something of a of an antagonistic Factor sometimes depending on the heat and then essentially they realized that they had an actually rather interesting natural experiment which is that they realized that you know we don't have released

23:25 national violent movies day here there's no spefic spefic day in America that we release violent films and so as a result violent films can be compared Apples to Apples to non-violent films that are released in the same weekend of a given year so what effect do these violent movies have on crime data not only did they not find evidence that it increased assaults they actually found evidence that it decreased assaults and their explanation for this is that if I am

23:50 let's just say a man between the ages of 16 and 23 which from a public health perspective those are the people who behave irrationally violent in public most of the time you have an interesting cocktail of hormones going on it's a complicated time in life brains aren't fully developed but bodies are and as a result that's a lot of folks who are going to impetuously do these kinds of assaults so if I'm that kind of guy and

24:11 I go see a violent film in a cinema for 2 hours you know get there half an hour early leave half an hour after drink soda eat popcorn that 3 hours is three hours that I am not spending outside I'm not spending doing risky behaviors and more importantly I'm not spending a drinking and the single largest cor related factor to behaving violently is alcohol and so what you're doing is essentially is you're turning down all the other risks you're having this self

24:35 sequestration of people who are instead of potentially being dangerous areas potentially getting up to no good instead they're seeing something violent and the priming effect whatever it may be is overwhelmingly drowned out by what they would have been doing in Li of that that is amazing to me and it's so much so that ultraviolent things are more effective in this than mildly violent movies because the ultraviolent movies attract the young men yeah ideally you'd be able to sequester

25:05 people in cinemas and you would just show them Barbie right but like in reality if you want to get people into the cinema you have to have it be Joker you have to have it be saw you have to have it be something like that yeah yeah but it also means that if I want to go see Deadpool on a Friday night I'm surrounded by 17-year-old Knuckleheads who want to punch me any one of these men would kill you

25:26 Roman after the break Walt comes back to tell us a surprising story about how the American film industry was completely changed by tax codes so we've talked a lot about how movies influence the world but there was one story in your book that I love it's about how the world specifically text

25:59 codes of all things influenced how movies are made can you tell us that story yeah I was doing a big lit review and I found this one footnote that basically suggested that there's this prevailing theory that you know Jaws didn't invent the Blockbuster Gerald Ford did and I was like what and so like I like went back and and to the tape and figured out like what on Earth is is this referring to and there was

26:20 basically a tax reform that was passed in 1976 that directly changed the way that movies could be funded where from 1970 to 1976 a very popular form of funding of film happened you have to remember that at the time the top marginal tax rate was 80 90% so if you were like a wealthy dentist that last dollar that you make is mostly going to Uncle Sam and so there became this kind of scheme there was an article in business week

26:47 that was called how to make money and move and it like talked to these folks like there was articles like hey yeah I'm you know here's I'm in tax magazine here's how you should do this stuff here's all that you got to do and like Bloomberg Business Week had an entire subsection of a feature in the early 70s basically saying here's how to make money by investing in movies basically you would get a bunch of wealthy people

27:04 who would put money into a project they would take out a big loan invest all the loan into developing the film and then that would come off to the IRS as a very significant loss on your taxes even though you only put in a little bit so you saved a bunch of money and then that movie would get made get released and then you get the proceeds of it and sometimes it would make money sometimes it wouldn't sometimes you make a lot of

27:23 money right sometimes you would get a one flu Over the Cuckoo's Nest or shamp po or Dog Day Afternoon and that was very popular for a number of years and then the IRS got wise to it and we like we don't want this to happen anymore please stop this Congress and so in 1976 they passed this tax reform act and so typically people understand Jaws came out it was a huge Blockbuster changed everything after Jaws came out

27:45 everyone else just started making Jaws and that's when the era of the Blockbuster movie started yeah and what this Illustrated was that that's not wrong Jaws was a huge hit and people made a lot of movies that looked like Jaws Studio funded Studio director Studio cast Studio this kind of stuff all kind of internally funded but that's not the whole picture it's it's like an extinction level event happened for every other kind of movie out there that

28:05 they couldn't make anymore because of this this tax cleverness that was no longer permitted and so a whole kind of class of film could no longer get made and so the only kind of film that could get made was these Studio back Productions that's so interesting because that whole idea of a bunch of dentists giving you the money to do a movie is like such a thing that I didn't understand what people were talking about when they said it but but like

28:29 I've heard of that before sometimes they're being quite literal like James Cameron made xenogenesis I think was he was like his first feature ended up being a short but he basically just went to the dentist in town and I think two dentists put up some checks for him and then the movie was good enough with the special effects that Roger Corman was like all right you're with me Jimmy and and then got him into the industry as

28:48 a result you can see a lot of directors kind of got their star to making that kind of film like they got people to take a risk on them to make that kind of film and you know structurally is the industry succeeding at that anymore there is some of that in the independent space but like you did kind of have a situation where like the IRS was vaguely subsidizing the generation that that would become new Hollywood in a lot of

29:10 different ways and and then you know when that went away it significantly changed the entire market for how you could make a movie yeah yeah this is this is great the book is so much fun people are going to have so much fun reading it thank you so much for talking with me I appreciate it thank you for having me I I really dig the show this was a real treat Walt hickey's book is out now it's

29:32 called you are what you watch how movies and TV affect everything it's got cool charts it's got pictures it's got short stories that you'll love probably one touching on your favorite movie franchise you should definitely check it out 99% invisible was produced this week by Sarah bake with assistance and mixing by Martin Gonzalez music music by Swan roale Kathy 2 is our executive producer Kurt colad is the digital director Delaney Hall is our senior editor the

30:03 rest of the team includes Chris baru Jason DeLeon EMT Fitzgerald Gabriela gladney Christopher Johnson Vivian Le L madon Jacob Maldonado Medina Nina poto Kelly Prime Joe Rosenberg and me Roman Mars the 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence we are part of the stitcher and serus XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building and beautiful Uptown Oakland California home of the Oakland Roots soccer club of which I'm a proud

30:34 Community owner other teams may come and go but the roots are Oakland first always you can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our newly launched Discord server we're on there talking about the power broker and our favorite architecture there's even like a movie channel we can talk about what you're watching and you can find a link to that as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi i.org